Teaching Tuesday: Lauren's Rant

Lauren at Feministe is always good for a lot more than just Friday Random Ten instructions. I don't link to her often enough, so today I will rectify that a little.

Last night, soon-to-be-a-teacher Lauren posted a rant about public education, which boils down pretty simply to the statement she starts with: Schools are, from the ground up, primarily controlled by politicians.

I'll quote more Lauren in a minute, but first I will tell you that she writes in response to this post by Amanda at Pandagon, who writes,

[T]here is a fundamental struggle in this country over education, just as there are struggles over things like the estate tax and Social Security. The struggle is a class war and the "conservative" position is that our country's policies should be geared towards creating a permanent aristocracy. And universal education is a huge obstacle on the road towards that end goal. [. . .]

The problem for them is that this is still a democracy and the vast majority of people are reluctant to hand their children over to a school that's purpose is to make your kids dumber, not smarter. In comes the favorite conservative strategy of taking profoundly un-democratic principles and recasting them as populist arguments. [. . . T]he argument is that this [new] type of education is somehow an assault on the traditions of everyday people--"You learned through rote memorization and so should your kids!" It becomes a pride thing and thereby undermines people's desire to make a better life for their children than they had.

I would add a heavy does of anti-tax hysteria and anti-gay crusading, but, yeah, that's a pretty accurate assessment. The fundamental principle involved in all of this, of course, is that the anti-science, anti-gay, anti-tax agenda is driven by politics, and resistance, even in the form of strong teachers' unions, is also inherently political. Which brings us back to Lauren. Here's what's interesting (her emphasis):

Everyone goes to school, thus everyone thinks s/he is an educational expert.

Politicians, concerned with public sway, bloviate on education and educational policies that have no empirical bearing on scholastic research, do not take into account that the United States is, in part, founded on the belief that education is a fundamental human right, and discount proactive, comprehensive learning in favor of learning that will produce a desired test score. I am entirely opposed to any sort of politicization from Democrats and Republicans alike that turns the educational system away from the individual student and teachers there to serve them. Nor do I have sympathy for outsiders critical of the school system or critical of sound educational practice that have no formal training in eduacation. [. . .]

Those on the ground, teachers and in-school administators, are puppets for these politicians, strong-armed into the policies that politicians all over the political spectrum enact for the primary purpose of building reputation and maintaining political power. The solace you have as an educator is that when you step into a classroom, the door closes behind you. It’s you and the students. [. . .]

Education is a political issue--but it shouldn’t be. I am of the firm belief that aside from public support and funding, the public school system should lie at the hands of educators and people trained in sound pedagogical practices.

I had these same feelings when I first started, but I got over them within a few months. In the trenches, the frustrations brought about by outside forces really don't amount to much. Not that the battles aren't worth fighting, of course, and I am glad that there are those who fight them.

The problem Lauren is going to find, sooner rather than later, is that the biggest threats to the quality of her teaching will not come from without, but from within. There will be parents, students, principals, colleagues, board members, and superintendents all working against her. Yes, it upsets me when I hear Bush or Spellings or local yokels like Alberta Darling talk out of their behinds on education. But I wouldn't quit over that. I would quit because my principal played politics or my superintendent tried to multiplex my perfectly good comprehensive high school.

Maybe I'm feeling a little cynical just now--with a handful of days left and a particularly inept superintendent at the helm of my district--but I find the Kansas debate and the challenges of NCLB to be peripheral distractions. I'm focusing on the only struggle I can win, and that's the teacher-student interaction. If I can keep that moving forward for just a few more weeks, I will have been victorious, and that alone is a political victory.

But I do want also to make this pitch for the teachers unions, who, unlike some who think they know, actually do know what makes bad teachers better and good teachers great. Unlike probably any other union you could name, NEA and AFT spend a significant portion of their dues on professional development. They are taking up a lot of the slack being left by states and districts strapped for cash or politically unwilling to make the commitment to continuing quality teacher education. The constant weakening of teachers unions is a danger not, in the end, to the teachers, but to the quality of the education itself.

It is for this reason that public schools supporters must speak out in favor of the teachers unions, despite their bad rap. (Lauren cites the universal constant that parents who think schools are falling apart like their local one just fine, thank you; the same rule applies to people who despise teachers unions but have nothing but praise for the teachers themselves.) Supporting unions is just about the most political thing you can do these days. As much as conservatives have, over the last thirty years, destroyed much that was worth loving about America, one of the severest casualties has been the union. They are so dead-set against unions that, recall, the major sticking point in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was whether employees would be union or not: Conservatives were willing to jeopardize the safety of the nation to score some points destroying another union.

So there's my rant. I can even put it in bold for you: The biggest dangers come from within, not without. The only point that matters is the point of contact between me and my students. The only support I get at that point is through my union. My belonging to and support of a union is, in and of itself, political. The very act of teaching, then, is political.

Your turn.