Wednesday, January 20, 2016

When in Doubt, Double Down

I am always amazed by those who exclaim we're in crisis, that our teachers suck, that our schools suck, and that we must act now. In New Jersey, because everything sucks, because the reading scores are too low for the pols' comfort level, they've decided that the suckiness must end now. In their particular case, they've decided the conclusive way to end it is to blanket the state in even more suckiness by extending the school day.

That way, surely poverty will end, and by the time these kids get home they will have forgotten that no one paid the electric or heat bill. After all, what with mom and dad working 200 hours a week each at minimum wage, there's no one they can tell about it anyway.

So the kids will sit in the cold and the dark, forget absolutely that the last good meal they had was hours ago in school, and do their homework via telepathy, which they will have acquired via those extra hours in school. This, of course, also applies to the kindergarteners, who will magically learn to read via those two and a half extra hours sitting in that terrible school with the terrible teacher who caused all those problems in the first place.

The important thing to note is it isn't the fault of the people who administrate said schools. From the hyper-local level up, they are blameless. After all, haven't they come out every single year with a new program to lessen the influence of those awful teachers who caused poverty the problem in the first place? And from the state right down to the school, each and every administrator has worked hard to enforce every new policy, every year, and they've worked just as hard to bury last year's failed policies, the ones that were indispensable at the time.

So basically, it's a WIN-WIN. We've done the charter schools, the school closings, the Common Core, the mayoral control, the new evaluation system, the newer evaluation system, the newest evaluation system, and you betcha we're gonna do the one after that as well. We've done just about everything we've been asked, and we've made sure not to engage the rank and file teachers at all, since they suck.

And now, right here in New York, there's some new committee that Andrew Cuomo started, and folks like Mulgrew are kvelling about what great work they do, even though the changes are decidedly superficial, unlikely to change anything, and certain not to discourage opt-out as intended. Now Mulgrew's got street cred, because he endorsed and approved absolutely every piece of crap reform cited in the last paragraph. And after all, why should school administrators listen to teachers when the most powerful union president in the country can't be bothered?

This is a top-down mistake that's passed from the national level, where Mulgrew's AFT endorsed the reformiest President in history for re-election, to the state level, where we couldn't even be bothered to oppose a governor who ran on a platform of going after unions, to a local level, where alleged commie Bill de Blasio managed the lowest pattern bargain in my living memory (with the explicit help of Punchy Mike Mulgrew).

And, of course, this attitude trickles down to your school and mine, where teacher voice is roundly ignored. It's unfortunate that no one thinks to consult with us, the people who actually spend time with kids each and every day, but I understand the phenomenon. There's the widely accepted premise that teachers and students are somehow in opposition, that our goals are somehow antithetical to theirs, and that teachers care only about themselves. That's absurd, of course. Our teaching conditions are their learning conditions, and what we gain or lose is what our kids will have when they grow up.

It's important for us to reverse the reformy canard, but it's an uphill battle to turn around such a widely accepted myth. What we want is for our kids to be happy. It's bizarre that it's so important for so many people on so many levels to spend so much time ensuring that we (and they) are not.

And if we aren't, what the hell sort of role models do they expect us to be? It's a shame our voices are neglected in favor of those of reformies. Between us, reformies are pretty much the worst role models for children I can imagine.
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