How we can
Show Teachers the Love
Rick Ayers/ Bill Ayers
Let’s stop the hype and the hypocrisy: a nice note, a
flower, a Starbucks card, and a week when we all go smooshy over Miss Brody or
Mr. Escalante can’t possibly counter 51 weeks of official disdain and a
continuing frontal assault from the powerful. Lots of cynical similes are
filling teachers’ in-boxes this week: Teacher
Appreciation Week feels a lot like Turkey Appreciation Week at
Thanksgiving, or Deer Appreciation Week during hunting season—and we’re the
turkeys!
Teaching involves engaging real students every day, nurturing
and challenging the vast range of people who actually appear before us, solving
problems, making connections, putting in 70 hour weeks and spending our own
money on supplies; and it means listening to every two-bit politician, the
bought media, and big money misrepresent what we do, and attack us shamelessly
every day.
Want to appreciate teachers?
Don’t
allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition:
nation against nations, state against state, school against school, classroom
against classroom, and child against child. Education, like love, is one of the
fundamentals of life—give it away generously and lose nothing—and school is
where we can work out the meaning and the texture of democracy—coming together
to explore the creation of community, pursuing the hard and challenging
questions, and imagining new ways to be in balance with the earth and in
harmony with each other. Good teaching deals with the real—honor teachers
for that.
Reframe the debate: We are insistently encouraged to
think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or
a screw driver—something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other
commodity. The controlling metaphor for the schoolhouse is a business run
by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping
along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their
little up-turned heads; it’s rather easy to think within this model that
“downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and privatizing a space
that was once public is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple
standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but
privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the
“outcomes,” is a rational proxy for learning; that centrally controlled
“standards” for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that “zero
tolerance” for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or
justice is sane; and that “accountability,” that is, a range of sanctions on
students, teachers, and schools—but never on law-makers, foundations,
corporations, or high officials—is logical and level-headed. This is in fact what
a range of wealthy “reformers,” noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits
in the bought media call “school reform.”
Oppose the “reform” policies that will add up to the
end of education in and for democracy: replacing the public schools with some sort
of privately-controlled administration, sorting the winners relentlessly from
the losers—test, test, TEST! (and then
punish), and destroying teachers’ ability to speak with any sustained and
unified voice. The operative image for these moves has by now become quite
familiar: education is an individual consumer good, not a public trust or a
social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs
and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss—the dominant language
of this kind of reform doesn’t leave much room for doubt, or much space to
breathe.
Note that good working conditions are good teaching
conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions, and
that teachers independent and collective voice is essential in determining
these conditions.
Fight for smaller class size, limited standardized
tests, enhanced arts programs at all levels and in every area, equitable
financing, and a strong teachers contract that protects intellectual freedom,
due process of law, benefits (from pensions to health care) negotiated in good
faith, and encourages collegiality and collaboration.
Throw in a note or a flower if you like.
****
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s open letter to
teachers, his idea of a public appreciation, missed the mark badly even as it
regurgitated every silly cliché rehearsed by opportunist politicians
everywhere: my mom wuzza teacher, my sister wuzza teacher, my wife wuzza
teacher—all the wuzzas feel our pain. He went on:
- “I have worked in education for much of my life.” (And some of his best friends are…you know).
- “I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do.” (Thanks, boss).
- “Many of the teachers I have met object to the imposition of curriculum that reduces teaching to little more than a paint-by-numbers exercise. I agree.” (And your “Race to the Top” program is paint-by-the-numbers on steroids).
- “You have told me you believe that ‘No Child Left Behind’ has prompted some schools—especially low-performing ones—to teach to the test, rather than focus on the educational needs of students…[it] has narrowed the curriculum.” (So now you’re telling us what we’ve been telling you?).
- “You deserve to be respected, valued, and supported.” (Just do it!).
Arne Duncan acts like a junior foundation officer dispensing
grants, rather than someone whose responsibility is the education of every
child in a democracy.
On the bright side, Duncan
recently announced that he supports same-sex marriage—perhaps we should all
gay-marry immediately, and hope that at last he’ll show us some love.
