And now I find myself further invoked by the Hold 'Em playing blogger, once directly and once indirectly, neither in a nice way. Throw in Blogger's down-time all day yesterday, and, well, you get the idea. On with the show . . .
It is not surprising to read anti-teacher diatribes from the right, which now are almost as common as anti-union ones anymore. So this DiGaudio post does not come as a shock:
I have a number of problems with government-run education. Not the least of which is the monopoly nature of the government-run schools. [. . .] Jay Bullock over at folkbum's rants and rambles, an MTEA teacher in MPS, tries to make the case that there is open competition between public and private schools, since private schools existed before choice. That's disingenuous, and he knows it. There is no real parental choice unless you are an affluent family. Poor and middle class families have little choice but the slums of government-run education.Finally, people are starting to catch on to the lower-case thing, but how hard is it to get the name right? More seriously, Peter is the one being disingenuous.
One of the most common "liberal" arguments for programs like the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is that the wealthy have always had de facto choice about where to send their children for school. This is true. But the poor and middle class have also had opportunities--moreso in a city like Milwaukee, of a certain size and with strong religious communities. Private schools have long offered scholarship programs, especially religious schools, where it was very important to be sure that children from the community had a chance to attend. Even without those opportunities, I have heard many parents today wonder why this generation should get a Catholic or other private school education handed to them when their parents had to struggle and save to send them.
But beyond that, the right in this country--and in the fight over vouchers--is so flush with cash that they could easily pay for voucher students to attend private schools. Maybe not all $94 million worth this year, but should the cap not get lifted, just the amount that they are spending on the current anti-cap ad campaign would cover all those over the cap next fall--especially given the prediction that that number will be low. Or consider PAVE--Partners Advancing Values in Education--a Milwaukee-based organization that for the better part of a decade provided vouchers to Milwaukee children so they could attend religious schools. They provided vouchers, that is, right up until the moment that they won their multi-million dollar lawsuit forcing the state to subsidize religious education through state vouchers.
There's an irony in all of this: Private groups spending money, and tons of it, designed to force the government to hand over taxpayer money to private groups. This is not the definition of conservative I learned I school. (This is the same irony at work in the case of anti-tax, anti-government Orville Seymour suing Milwaukee County for $1 million of our tax money.)
The more important statistic? Even with the advent of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, private school enrollment continues to decline overall. That's right, boys and girls, there are fewer students in private schools in Milwaukee right now than there were in 1990 when the MPCP began. Much of this is attributable to the overall decline in school-age children in Milwaukee, sure. But it blows the hell out of the right's claims that there has never been competition for Milwaukee's schools before now.
Saying that the public schools have a monopoly is like saying that the police department is a monopoly, the state has a monopoly on highways, or if we only had competing state legislatures, then our taxes would be really, really low. The state is required, in our constitution, to provide a free education. We do that, and, despite whatever the critics may feel, we do it to the best of our ability. A lack of competition--competition that, in fact, we don't lack--is most decidedly not what makes our test scores low.
But DiGaudio, as is his wont, didn't stop there. He had to continue:
I see the products of "gummint skoolz" every damn day in my line of work. These products of the wonderful government system cannot read, write or do math at beyond a first or second grade level. All of these kids are between eighth and 11th grade. That is pathetic, and to hear anyone even defending this as a quality product frosts me. This is a pure end result of a monopoly. These kids and others like them have no real future. At most menial jobs such as fast food workers, but more likely gangs, drugs, crime, prison and death. [. . .]The last part of that--income, benefits, whatnot--will come back to haunt us in a moment, but for now I want to focus on the first part. DiGaudio feels free to judge MPS as a whole--and MPS teachers as a whole--because he works for a tutoring company that provides services to MPS students who need help. When he says he sees "the products of 'gumint skoolz' every damn day," the students he sees are the ones who need the most remedial help, clearly not a representative sample. I, too, can tell the story of the year I spent working for the Sylvan Learning Center, where almost all of the students I tutored (and, how I would love to have that 3-1 student-teacher ratio in my classrooms!) were from well-heeled suburban districts or private and religious schools. This is, I know, in great part because prior to No Child Left Behind, which allows your and my tax dollars to pay people like DiGaudio and his boss, Sylvan and its counterparts were priced such that MPS parents often could not afford it. Until NCLB, in fact, there was no Sylvan franchise anywhere in the city proper.
There is a bit of a personal story here which I have to admit colors my opinion to a certain extent. I am currently working for one of the supplemental service providers for MPS, earning a flat rate of $20 per one hour session to work with the failing products of MTEA members who cannot do their jobs properly. I have 12 clients that I see each week. That is my income. Period. No benefits, no retirement. Nothing. You do the math. I am doing your work for you and not getting compensated as well as you are for not doing your job.
But did I judge, say, the University School of Milwaukee, based in the poor-performing students from there who came to see me at Sylvan? No, of course not. DiGaudio does for MPS, though.
Now, I am not so disingenuous as to dismiss the dismal statistics about MPS that, believe me, I know all too well. We do have too many students who cannot read or do math at grade level. Does DiGuadio think that I don't see these student every damn working day of my life, and that I don't think about how best to teach them on even my days off? Of course I do. Does he think I don't know that many of these kids seem to have no real future? Of course I do, and I have even written here before about how so many of my students seem to have internalized that for themselves, and have "checked-out" mentally, before they even get to me. That's one of the things that makes my job so hard: Students see non-educated members of their own community being successful--and educated ones still going to jail--and therefore do not see the value in an education. With the help of parents--or of themselves, if they get the gumption--they can succeed, and many do. But not all, and to blame, as DiGaudio calls us, "WEAC thugs" for the failure is to absolve the 85% of a student's life he doesn't spend with any of us of all responsibility.
It is easier, in other words, for conservatives to blame teachers for failing urban schools than it is to fix the problems of urban centers in America. It is easier to ask for the "market" to fix schools than it is to do the dirty work of fixing unemployment, poverty, transience, health care, or anything else that makes education a slightly lower priority than, say, trying to stay alive and healthy.
Not content to judge MPS by its worst fruits, DiGaudio continues his story:
I have applied to the local district here and to MPS. As well as virtually every surrounding district in the area. Every year since 1986. Wanna guess how many interviews I have had? None. Not one. In 20 years. So there is a tinge of bitterness on my part. I have to admit that. I see the end effect of lousy teachers and cannot understand why no district around here wants the services of a qualified, highly competent professional. [. . .]At least he's honest about the sour grapes thing. We now know that it isn't just his conservative ideology that makes us all out to be "WEAC thugs"; it's also that fact that no one let him in our club. I don't know what his certification is (he says elsewhere he has an Masters in Education, but not what he's licensed to teach), but I doubt he'll have much luck this year, either; remember, I'm predicting layoffs.
So here I sit. Doing what I can to help fix a broken system. One that I could do a better job of fixing it from within than from without.
All of that, of course, is just foreground for where DiGaudio and friends go next. It begins at the home of Milwaukee-ID10T (his name for himself, not mine), with a post called, Do MPS Teachers Really Have It That Bad? The post is a near-perfect strawman, as nowhere in the arguments for or against vouchers or anywhere else in recent memory has there been a great upswelling of "we teachers have it so rough!" Some of us, famously even, have been saying for some time that more money is not what we need. Digging around for something different recently, I found this old post of mine from a different blog where I take issue with our current superintendent's view that "What young people are looking for is a higher wage." In discussing Anna Qunidlen's "The Wages of Teaching," I noted that the whole idea is one of myth. As I commented below the ID10T's post, the only time I have suggested higher starting salaries is in an attempt to draw better people to the fold.
The ID10T makes several factual errors in his post, still uncorrected, which I also pointed out in the comments. DiGaudio magnifies the errors in his own approving post--things like saying we have paid vacation time over winter and spring break. We do not. The sour grapes of the Hold 'Em-playing one also come through: "All this for doing a job MTEA teachers aren't doing .... how about cutting me in on some of the gravy?" he asks.
But it's the strawman factor that gets me most of all. As the ID10T asks in a comment below mine,
Recent college grads would probably be more willing to get into teaching if [t]hey were not constantly bombarded with msgs by the WEAC/MSM and other sources complaining about how bad it is. Why would any normal person want to go into a profession that all they hear about is negativity. If WEAC and other liberally slanted groups wanted more teachers then they should be out there being positive about such a career choice. Oh wait - Thats right, Supply and demand. The fewer teachers there are in the system the more money they are worth. The more money they are worth, the more money the unions get in dues. (2 hrs a pay period) The more money they get in dues, the more money they can give to other liberal leaning socialist organizations. And then the more powerful they become. Never mind. WEAC will never promote teaching as a profession. They would lose to much power.First, the ID10T misstates the way dues are assessed--they have nothing to do with how much we are paid. I pay as much as someone 20 years my senior, who pays as much as someone who started teaching this year. Second, the ID10T's argument here runs counter to everything his side has been saying about the union's motivations to oppose the voucher program. He says we want an artificially low supply compared to the demand. Aside from seeming to run counter to NEA's dire predictions of teacher shortages, it breaks with the conservative calcualtion that fewer public school students means fewer public school teachers means less in dues, and that's why the union opposes vouchers. The ID10T's side needs to make sure that they all have their stories straight.
Throw in some old-school union bashing, and you have the gist of the argument.
The kicker, of course, is DiGaudio's comments to that post:
I'm probably better than 90% of the clowns on the MPS payroll and in the MTEA. Hiring me would be an upgrade anywhere. I have applied each of the last 4 years and probably 10 times in the past 20 without one single interview. I'll match my recommendations and evaluations with you, Jay, and any damned person on the MPS payroll. Tell me why? Hell, I told HR I'd even move to Milwaukee because it's better than the pissant piece of crap worthless work I am doing now. And, I will bet I can do your job better than you can.No one hired him? Hm.
Fellas, go back to what I wrote about "The Wages of Teaching," if you really want to know why people don't want to become teachers:
If Quindlen is right that the American people should be our biggest advocates, then those same people ought to recognize that it was the teachers who reached them--not the meddling anti-tax forces, the know-it-all politicians, or the privateers who currently run the Department of Education--who deserve the praise and rewards. It was the teachers who helped them "levitate" who created conditions for success, not vouchers or Intelligent Design or corporate America.The reason the best and the brightest don't want to be teachers is because every time we turn around, somebody is calling us "thugs," questioning our intelligence, berating us for failing our students. You can't turn on the radio or read a newspaper without learning how awful we are, how poisonous our union is, how unvalued we are by society. We are told by the Kafka-esque bureaucracies to teach to the test, do these mountains of paperwork, blow with the ever-shifting winds of "reform."
Think back for just a second about your favorite school teacher, one who really did help you levitate, and ask yourself this: Would I meddle now in how that teacher does her job? Would that teacher have been as effective with me then if he'd had to prepare me for a standardized test? Would that teacher agree with me if I'd said to her face that she had an easy job--summers off and weekends free?
You know what the answers are. You know what the solution is: Stop perpetuating myths and start respecting and supporting what we teachers do.
Once in a great while, a parent or student expresses their appreciation, and those days--those days--we stop regretting our decision to be teachers.
Only on those days.
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