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Lassoing The Rain

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I generally hate political labels like liberal or conservative. I think they tend to categorize and limit rather than define and clarify, and they are often misnomers. How otherwise do you explain calling an environmental conservationist a liberal? Doesn’t wanting to conserve nature make one a conservative?

That said, I acknowledge that for me becoming more conservative with age has meant changing my voter registration from Green to Democrat, and if I were a politician and one were to look at my voting record I would probably look more liberal than Ted Kennedy.

On yet the other hand, I enjoy reading both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ political columns. My two favorite columnists are Molly Ivins and George Will, a most unlikely pair of bedfellows. I miss Molly Ivins, who died in 2007. She knew how to make smart writing funny, which isn’t easy. What I like about George Will is that, even though he’s rarely funny, he writes well and is reasonable. I rarely agree with him, but he always strikes me as someone I could civilly disagree with, someone who, unlike say Charles Krauthammer or—God forbid—Rush Limbaugh, would not jump to the mistaken conclusion that name-calling, dishonesty, and volume are valid rhetorical devices.

On Friday the Willimantic Chronicle, that bastion of journalistic excellence (OK, that’s name calling, which is why I’m not syndicated), jumped on the current anti-teacher bandwagon and ran an editorial that attacked teachers and teachers unions, arguing, among other things, that teachers in Windham whose students did not show adequate yearly progress under the definitions of No Child Left Behind “should eventually be terminated,” and concluded by advocating that school systems be allowed to bring suit against teachers unions “on behalf of any students who fail to meet the minimum test levels, seeking damages for the lives ruined by incompetence.” Notice that the emphasis is on “minimum test levels” and not on learning, progress, or education. Test levels.

In today’s Hartford Courant (and in every other Connecticut paper, I assume) the headline on the front page proclaimed that the Connecticut Supreme Court has declared that the Connecticut Constitution guarantees “not just a public education, but one that can prepare [students] for employment, higher education and civic responsibilities like voting and jury duty.” To which every public school teacher should probably say, No shit. But this is being hailed as a groundbreaking decision. And I understand that this decision will drive reform-minded educational legislation, but in truth the Supreme Court isn’t deciding anything that public school teachers haven’t been striving for day in and day out since forever. We don’t need a condemnatory editorial in a second rate newspaper or a self-evident conclusion from a court of law. We need a lot of funding and even more social justice. Which brings me back to George Will, believe it or not.

In his most recent column, Will criticizes Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (and liberalism in general) for a myopic vision of education. Now I agree with Will on his criticism of Duncan but not of liberalism on this one, and in part because Will places his critique in the context of the Civil Rights movement. What Will writes is that Duncan and Obama’s education policies ignore two essential facts: that the greatest predictors for educational success are family and income. He writes that “the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance.” Kids from reasonably well-off, well-educated, two-parent families, kids whose parents are involved in their children’s education and go over their homework with them and meet the teachers and so forth succeed far better than those kids whose parents are poor, under- or unemployed, under-educated, and working too much and/or lacking the education to be involved or to help with homework. Likewise, Will writes that “the best predictor” of individual student performance is “family income.” High SAT scores, AP course enrollment, graduation rates, and college acceptance and enrollment rates all rise as family income levels rise. Teachers have always known this.

But this is where I disagree with Will, because if these aren’t civil rights or social justice issues, I don’t know what a civil right is. I don’t know if Will intends to attack families or social classes. I doubt he does. More likely he means to attack liberal economic and social programs like welfare as being causal factors in the failure of urban or impoverished family structures. Now I know there is dead wood in the teaching profession, as there is in every profession, and I know there are great teachers who defy the odds, but I wish someone would please tell me how teachers are supposed to effect large-scale changes in student success rates when the social and economic realities of so many of their students are dismal and dismally beyond their control.

Teachers are just an easy sasaran in this debate. We generally enjoy stable and good if not great salaries, and our unions and our tenure give us enviable job security that few outside of the profession perceive as a function of academic freedom. For these we are envied, and in a poor economy envied all the more. At the same time, broad, ill-defined, faceless factors like racism, classism, generational poverty and the like seem impossible to attack because they are amorphous, overwhelming, mercurial, and daunting. When the ancients couldn’t make the rains come they slaughtered a goat because it was easier to lasso the goat than lasso the rain. The same principle seems at play here, just a different duduk perkara and a different target.

My last question for all the pundits who think firing teachers will solve the problem: since just about every certifiable content area is in critical shortage, once you fire all these teachers, where do you think you’re going to get anyone to replace them, never mind anyone of any quality whatsoever? And if you think anyone with content knowledge can do the job and we’ll be easy to replace, you really have another think coming.

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