Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Follow the Money

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Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system–i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.

“Public Schools: Make Them Private” Milton Friedman

Emanuel in fact has built a strong base of donors outside the labor movement, including corporate and cultural icons and even some prominent Republicans. He received a $50,000 donation from real estate magnate Donald Trump, who flirted with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a disclosure to the elections board showed.

“Wealthy base helps Emanuel take on Chicago teachers union,” Nick Carey

“The new vision, championed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who used to run Chicago’s schools, calls for a laser focus on standardized tests meant to gauge student skills in reading, writing and math. Teachers who fail to raise student scores may be fired. Schools that fail to boost scores may be shut down.

And the monopoly that the public sector once held on public schools will be broken with a proliferation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run— and typically non-union.”

“Chicago Teachers Striking Out on Education” Jayne Matthews-Hopson

I’ve been reading pieces by Doug Henwood, Corey Rubin, and then Jane Van Galen on why, despite the Chicago Teacher’s Unions’ strong progressive record and detailed, reasonable agenda for the Chicago public schools, so many liberals seem to echo the traditional conservative hatred for both teachers and for teachers’ unions. This liberal mistrust seems to have deep roots in class bias as much as in economic and political opportunism.

Mayor Emanuel, and Jayne Matthews-Hopson, one of his many allies at the Democrats for Education Reform, seems to sit right at the crossroads of several important currents in U.S. culture. Van Galen and Rubin both suggest that many upper middle class or wealthy Americans have long felt a powerful disdain towards teachers, people who have in their view “opted out” of the race for wealth and so are either failures or simply mediocre.

Friedman offers intellectual cover for these attitudes and hints in a not so subtle fashion that an enormous amount of money could be made if the economic potential of the public education system were “unlocked.” Buried down there somewhere is that freakish worship of markets and private enterprise, a religious fanaticism that, after the collapse of so many countries and businesses, ought to be transparently grotesque but somehow isn’t yet.

The teachers, and the teachers unions, are scapegoats, stand ins for the larger issues of the concentration of wealth and the rise in poverty. This is the story, as Corey Rubin reminded me, of Diane Ravitch’s description of the strange love some have for the reactionary documentary, “Waiting for ‘Superman'”. Mayor Emanuel, and the DER, want us to forget that we can’t fix education unless we are willing to try to ameliorate poverty.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Rahm Emanuel to Teachers Everywhere: Drop Dead!

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The Chicago teachers strike is, arguably, the most important labor action to occur in a decade if not longer. At bottom, the issue is simple. Who will pay for the gross mismanagement represented by 30 years of pro-business economics?  The Democrats are certainly the lesser of the two evils, but as the major’s intransigence shows, too many conservative Democratic are too willing to try to force teachers to pay for the sins of the fathers, in this case, ironically, that means, among other things, the Chicago school of economics. This is a test of raw political power against sheer ideological pigheadedness.

The theories advocated by Milton Friedman and his gang, with its freakish worship of so-called free markets and its irrational theory of rational choice,  brought us to the verge of a second great depression. Thanks to Friedman’s policy grandchildren, now in power in the House, efforts to remedy the economic downturn through stimulus have been stymied. School districts, dependent on property taxes (and other federal, state, and local funding) have been doubly hit, first with the collapse of housing prices and then again with budget balancing economic policies cutting jobs and services.

Emanuel is using contact negotiations to quash union power and push reforms that would link teacher salaries to student evaluation scores. This “value-added” approach has been denounced in a public letter signed by 18 Chicago education researchers. (In such a system, teachers are rewarded for the “value” they add to student learning, whatever that might mean.)  The researchers suggest  that such a system is “in its infancy” at best, hardly ready for large-scale implementation.  The union has a very different set of priorities, all focused on problems and not ideological dreams of privatization.

The teachers’ demands all center around making a start towards correcting the damage created by conservative economic policies and austerity-based budgeting, both in the schools themselves and in the neighborhoods around the schools. “We’ve seen public housing shut down,” union President Karen Lewis says, “public health clinics, public libraries and now public schools.  There is an attack on public institutions, many of which serve low-income and working-class families.”  I hope that President Obama is reelected but I also hope that the union wins and that, come spring, more unions begin to fight and win these sorts of battles.

 

Posted in: Writing

What is a Phillip Roth?

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I’m not sure why I find this so entertaining, but I just found an article by Phillip Roth, “AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA” in which he complains that he cannot control his own Wikipedia article. “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”  I think the Foucault of  “What is  an Author”? is spinning in his grave somewhere.

Wikipedia falsely claims, Roth says, that  the Human Stain is “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” In fact, Roth says, the novel is based on “an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton…”  The Wikipedia article, to make this debate even more post-modern, has already been changed, neatly folding the debate into the text, like egg white in a souffle.  Here’s the new entry:

Roth was motivated to explain the inspiration for the book after noticing what he referred to as a “serious misstatement” in the Wikipedia entry on The Human Stain. His request to have the entry amended was prevented by Wikipedia policy because he did not have a secondary source for his inspiration. Roth was responding to comments in the article referring to reviews by Michiko Kakutani, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, and Brent Staples, who had all stated in their reviews that the book was “partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard”, a writer and New York Times literary critic.

It’s a battle between the literary (print) and the collective (digital) forms of authorship and I think Roth is the looser. In traditional terms, the Wikipedia people have good evidence. Even if Roth didn’t consciously draw on Broyard,  a handful of smart people see a  strong connection that Ross himself could have missed. Ross’s argument is a little silly; he says, roughly, “I knew Tumin much better than I knew Broyard. Since I didn’t know Broyard well, I couldn’t write about him.”  That hardly seems conclusive, much less persuasive.

What Roth seems to miss is that Wikipedia has a different model of authority and author. A Wikipedia entry, Foucault might say, “is valorized without any questions about the identity of [its] author.”  Unlike a folk-tale or a myth, though, the validity of the entry rests on a institutional rather than historical process. In part, Ross is confusing apples and oranges. “The same types of texts have not always required authors,” Foucault notes, although “literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author.” Not so much, now.

Posted in: Language, Writing