Category: <span>Union</span>

The New Teacher Proletariat

February 16, 2011 9:03 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

A long time ago (well, not really so long at all) leftists loved to use the language of the old communism as a kind of shock rhetoric. Most of us in the progressive community weren’t really working class or proletarian any more, with certain exceptions, but we just loved that Marxist vocabulary. I still love the word proletarian and I love the art that the feeling it represented often inspired.

I don’t think of things in such severe binary opposites anymore, although I do still believe that the tension (dialectic) between capital and labor is the driving force behind any capitalist economy, including command economies like China. In just about every important way I am middle class. Yet, culturally, I retain important traces of my dad’s working class childhood.

Over the last 30 years though, this rhetoric has steadily become reality as the ongoing redistribution of wealth from working and middle class people to the rich has gained momentum. It’s not a myth; even so-called progressive tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the wealthy. Now that we are in full deficit hunting season, the calls for more redistribution is reaching a fever pitch.

The Obama administration support for unions is tepid at best (“Role for Teachers Is Seen in Solving Schools’ Crises“) but unions are the only institution that might get back our wealth. Capital is organized; if labor isn’t, the redistribution continues. The right wants to make collective bargaining in the public schools illegal again. If that happens, we are very close to being real proletarians.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Professional, Union

Pot, Meet Kettle

February 14, 2011 9:33 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

When I was a kid and I tried to get one of my three sisters’ in trouble, usually by complaining about something that I had just done myself, my mom would always say, “That’s the pot calling the kettle black!” I have to say that whenever I read about the for profit education industry, where I work, that’s my first reaction each time. Pot, meet kettle.

I shouldn’t complain about investigative journalism, of course, and a piece like, “On For-Profit College Boards, Knowledgeable Insiders” ought to help to keep management and the administration honest. Sunshine, as the cliche goes, is the best disinfectant. On the other hand, the tone of the piece is a little too breathless and shocked, as if these practices were a surprise or innovative.

OMG! There’s a revolving door between industry and the government agencies that regulate them! Academia likes to think that it can keep its hands clean by burying its head in the sand. So the trustee system, long dominated by corporate power, is only rarely discussed. The for-profit sector is only responding as the higher education system has always responded to the threat of regulation.

This sort of investigative journalism should be extended into a broader exploration of the way education works in the U..S. I’d like to see the Chronicle investigate how traditional schools have used their own revolving doors to avoid regulations that would curb the use of contingent labor or that would slow down inflation in tuition or control administrative salaries or…

Posted in: Autobiographical, Professional, Union

Reading Over Writing

February 9, 2011 11:21 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

Sometimes when I listen to NPR’s Morning Edition in the mornings I get very frustrated. It’s a neo-commercial format, for one thing, rather than a true public service. (Another gift of Reaganomics.) The “sponsorships” (aka commercials) bug me most days; other days, its the weirdly self-congratulatory begging called “fund raising.” We are great! We are running out of money! You have to help!

In my case, it’s particularly galling that the University of Illinois, an organization with a budget in the hundreds of millions, has historically refused to fund its own public radio station. I find it galling when such an organization asks me, as a “member of the community” to give them money. This too is part of the routine irritations and ironies of our conservative age. Failure is success.

The real problem, though, is that they are a Jack of all Trades, Master of None sort of show. That means that when you hear a story about something you know about you often feel they missed the point entirely. This morning’s piece on recent research into college education, “A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ In College,” was a very welcome exception.

It’s an exception becuase it emphasized two of the dirty little secrets of college: students are not being challenged to learn to think critically, mostly becuase they are not asked to write much, and their educations are undermined by the use of consumer surveys (usually called student evaluations) in teacher assessment. Students do not have to do much work because you can’t upset your customers.

A more informed reporter would have also asked about the exploitation of teachers, which has done profound damage. I also think that these problems are rooted in the perennial focus on ‘the basics’ which is inevitably framed in terms of reading rather than writing. That’s easy to explain: writing and critical thinking can’t be taught on the cheap or graded with multiple choice tests.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Language, Professional, Union

Education in a Conservative Age

February 7, 2011 9:44 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

It’s an open debate about the relatively liberality of the U.S. citizenry, although it’s become almost a cliche that the media sees us as a center-right culture when most surveys would probably define us as center-left. We’ve always has a very dramatic conservative cadre, and the progressives are probably a little too Gandhian and bookish to sell much soap.

Especially in recent years, then, with all of their talk of guns and violence and the caliphate— backed by policies that encourage and spread gun ownership if not violence– the right has had a high profile. It can be difficult to recall, amidst all of this sturm ang drang, just how much damage the conservative movement has really done, especially since Reagan. We’ve not reached the end of it, either.

Among all the talk of Reagan’s 100th birthday, I was surprised to see so little written about the legacy of his corrosive impact on education: the attack on organized labor; the attack on public funding; the shifting of costs from the collective to the individual. We get paid less than we should; our schools are broke; when we finish college we are more in debt than ever before.

It seems to harder and harder to even imagine something different. All of these things existed before Reagan and the modern conservative movement, of course, but his great legacy is that he made anti-democratic, small-minded ideas about education seem necessary if not heroic. This transmogrification has reached full fruition in the so-called Tea party’s call for “smaller government.”