by Laura Clawson. Daily Kos/Labor
The
campaign against teachers is special, and worth paying attention to. It's not
like workers in general get much respect in our culture, at least not beyond
vague lip service that only ever applies to the individual, powerless worker
not asking for anything. And janitors, hotel housekeepers, cashiers, and a host
of others could fill books with the daily substance of working in low-status
professions, I'm sure. But right now, teachers are the subject of a campaign
heavily funded and driven from the top down to take a profession that has long
been respected by the public at large and make the people in the profession
villains and pariahs, en route to undercutting the prestige, the
decision-making ability, the working conditions, and, of course, the wages and
benefits of the profession as a whole. What we're watching right now is a
specific front in the war on workers, and one with immense reach through our
culture—and coming soon to a movie theater near you if it's not already there,
in the form of the poorly reviewed parent trigger drama Won't Back Down.
(That
it's a war not just on teachers but on the workers of the future and on the
government just sweetens the pot for many of the people waging the war.)
Teachers
face a catch-22. Those in poor districts are expected to be superhuman, to by
themselves counteract the effects of poverty—even though we know that while
teachers are the most important factor in educational achievement inside
the school, factors outside the school, like poverty, are far more important.
But while teachers of poor students are supposed to be superhuman, teachers of
well-to-do students are frequently treated by doctor and lawyer parents as
idiot failures, teaching because they can't be doctors or lawyers. Policy and
funding decisions are used against teachers in poor districts; the
condescension of parents serves the same purpose in wealthier ones. But in both
cases the professionalism of teachers is undermined.
I've
written a lot about how corporate education policy targets teachers (and the
concept of education as a
public good that should be available to all kids). But this
upper-middle-class condescension toward teachers is a potent weapon in that
campaign against teachers and education. One of the foundations of the
corporate drive to "reform" education to corporate preferences is the
idea that billionaires
know better, that hedge fund managers and Walmart heirs and Bill
Gates, by virtue of having made a lot of money, must know more than education
professionals about how education should function. And that translates
downward—if Bill Gates is supposed to know how schools should work in general,
an engineer or executive at least gets to boss his kid's teacher around.
