Now when I say I am a teacher, people talk shit about tenure, seniority, and "bad teachers" - usually topics they have been "educated" about on Oprah, The Today Show or some other corporate media with a teacher and union-bashing agenda.
The Times takes a look at that phenomena today:
Obama and Gates and the other ed deform shills talk a lot about the importance of the teacher in the classroom.
The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.
“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.
Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class.
“I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt,” she said. “I’m 30 years old, and I can’t save up enough for a down payment” for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.
Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.
Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.
Republican lawmakers in half a dozen states are pressing to unwind tenure and seniority protections in place for more than 50 years. Gov. Chris Christie’s dressing down of New Jersey teachers in town-hall-style meetings, accusing them of greed, has touched a populist vein and made him a national star.
Mayors are threatening mass layoffs, including in New York City and in Providence, R.I., where all 1,926 teachers were told last week they would lose their jobs — a largely symbolic gesture since most will be hired back.
Some experts question whether teaching, with its already high attrition rate — more than 25 percent leave in the first three years — will attract high-quality recruits in the future.
“It’s hard to feel good about yourself when your governor and other people are telling you you’re doing a lousy job,” said Steve Derion, 32, who teaches American history in Manahawkin, N.J. “I’m sure there were worse times to be a teacher in our history — I know they had very little rights — but it feels like we’re going back toward that direction.”
...
There are signs of a backlash in favor of teachers. A New York Times poll taken last week found that by nearly two to one — 60 to 33 percent — Americans opposed restricting collective bargaining for public employees. A similar majority — including more than half of Republicans — said the salaries and benefits of most public employees were “about right” or “too low.”
As for teachers’ mood, an annual poll sponsored by the MetLife Foundation found in 2009, before this year’s blast of opprobrium, that 59 percent were “very satisfied,” up from 40 percent in 1984. In interviews this week, even teachers facing layoffs or pay cuts said they felt a calling to be in the classroom.
“I put my heart and soul into teaching,” said Lindsay Vlachakis, 25, a high school math teacher in Madison. “When people attack teachers, they’re attacking me.”
Although crushing state budget deficits are the proximate cause of lawmakers’ pressure, a further justification for many of the proposed measures comes from the broad accountability movement, which aims to raise student achievement and sees teachers’ unions as often blocking the way.
Accountability, particularly as measured by student test scores, has brought sweeping changes to education and promises more, but many teachers feel the changes are imposed with scant input from classroom-level educators. Nearly 70 percent said in the MetLife survey that their voices were not heard in education debates.
Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, said the decline in teachers’ status traced to the success of unions in paying teachers and granting job security based on their years of service, not ability.
“They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn’t individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear,” Mr. Finn said.
Those who oppose the gathering momentum to evaluate teachers based in significant part on student test scores argue that it will drive good teachers from the neediest schools.
Anthony Cody, who taught middle-school science for 18 years and now mentors new teachers in the Oakland, Calif., school district, said many leave at the three-year mark for higher salaries and easier conditions elsewhere.
Oakland has many poor students and schools at the bottom on standardized tests — schools the federal Education Department identifies as candidates to be sweepingly overhauled by removing half their staffs.
“What we need in these schools is stability,” said Mr. Cody, 52, who writes a blog about teaching. “We need to convince people that if they invest their career in working with these challenging students, then we will reward them and appreciate them. We will not subject them to arbitrary humiliation in the newspaper. We will not require they be evaluated and paid based on test scores that often fluctuate greatly beyond the teacher’s control.”
Mr. Cody acknowledged that many of his younger colleagues, who have come of age in the era of test scores used to gauge progress and accountability — first for schools, and now increasingly for teachers — are not as resistant to the concept.
“I’m not too concerned or worried about that,” said Kevin Tougher, 31, who teaches third grade in Lake Grove, N.Y., where a new statewide evaluation system will rate teachers based 40 percent on their students’ test scores or comparable measures.
Last month Mr. Tougher was notified that because of his lack of seniority, he will be laid off, or “excessed,” this year under the state’s proposed cuts to school aid. A union activist, he believes seniority-based layoffs are fair.
“The seniority part, I get that,” said Mr. Tougher, who is single. “While it would be a bummer if I were excessed for next year, that’s just how things go sometimes.”
They also talk a LOT of shit about teachers.
Obama called for a national policy to fire teachers during his SOTU address.
His Race to the Top program gave incentives to states to fire "bad teachers" and close "bad schools."
His NCLB Jr. blueprint will take that program to every state in the nation and add standardized testing and value-added assessments of teachers as well, so that even more teachers will be "held accountable" and fired.
Never mind that most "bad teachers" teach children who live in horrendous conditions of poverty and most "bad schools" serve the communities that those children come from.
Obama doesn't care about any of that - he calls them drop-out factories and says it's the teachers' fault and they MUST be fired for the mess.
As for Gates, the guy who said small schools were the saving grace of the reform movement for years, then decided they weren't, now says the ONLY thing that matters in a classroom is the "quality of the teacher."
As such, he also wants to fire tons of teachers, but in addition, he wants to raise class sizes, cut teacher pay, tie teacher pay to test scores and otherwise make teaching into a BLAME TEACHERS/PAY THEM NOTHING career.
I think these men - and the other corporate and political reformers who are pushing the same themes - will reap the poisonous harvest of what they are sowing.
I tell my seniors who talk about perhaps majoring in education and going into teaching that they should think long and hard about that - especially if they want to teach something like music or art or gym.
Those teachers will be treated like Burger King fry boys - fired at will when the budgets are tight.
And even the rest of the subject teachers will be treated like pieces of shit by the economic and political elites, by the media, and ultimately by the public who uncritically listen to what the corporate media sells them.
I have seen this first-hand with Oprah and her anti-teacher message and how people who once thought teachers were noble now say there are too many "bad teachers."
Who wants a career of opprobrium and penury?
Who wants to be publicly vilified by politicians, listed in the newspapers with a value-added assessment rating that has a 12%-35% MOE and derided by "celebrities" like Orpah, Alec "Pig" Baldwin and John "Only In His Own Mind" Legend?
Seriously - who?
Ultimately, the goal of the reform movement is NOT to increase the quality of teachers or schools.
The goal is to so deride and denigrate public education that people no longer care if the whole thing is privatized and run by for-profit charter operators.
That's what Bloomberg,Rhee, Klein, Murdoch, Zuckerman, Obama, Duncan, Gastes, Borad, et al. want and that's what they are working toward.
I haven't seen THAT message in these stories about teachers in the mainstream press just yet.
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