The Progressive Education Narrative

[phantom power]

Michelle Rhee and Chris Cerf and Joel Klein and Ben Austin and Wendy Kopp and the KIPPsters and the Broadies are selling a story. They don't deal in facts because the facts are not on their side, but that's OK: their tall tales are "truthy" enough to stimulate the nerve endings in the guts of credulous pundits and centrist Democrats.

Their narrative is basically this:

America's students are falling way behind the rest of the world. That's why so many children are in poverty and why our economy is in the tank: if more children got a better eduction, everything would be super. While we all love teachers, their unions are protecting the few bad ones; and it only takes a few bad teachers to ruin the lives of large numbers of kids and send America into a tailspin. The solution to this is to bring market reforms to schools: "choice" will make all schools better, make teachers better, and save our economy.

Regular readers here or of the folks on my blogroll know this is all absolute nonsense. But it is a story: it's cohesive, it's truthy, and it has a pretense of caring about the poor that salves the guilty consciences of the greedy right.

We don't have a story like this - yet. The good news is that we are beginning to create one. Again, I know some of you are getting frustrated with the choir-preaching mode that we seem to be stuck in, but that's how these narratives get built. The reformy right figured this out long ago, but they have to work a lot harder at it than we do. They have to sell nonsense, illogic, and lies; we just have to find the right way to tell the truth.

Again, I'm no politician; I don't have the chops to write the full orchestral score. I can, however, whistle the tune:

In every country in the world, poverty impedes educational success. Our biggest education problem is that more of our kids are in poverty than any other developed nation. When America's public school teachers get kids who are well-fed and healthy and live in stable homes with parents who have good jobs, those kids do better in school than any other children in the world.

But a group of people who do not teach (or taught for a short while and not very well) have decided to blame teachers - teachers! - for all the problems in our country. They say that "choice" will save our schools, but the "choice" they offer is between underfunded, crumbling public schools and corporatized, autocratic charter schools that they admit they will never serve all children. These schools cherry-pick their students and then falsely claim they have the secret for success. Their inability to educate all students proves that public schools are not the problem - poverty is.

Why do these people sell this snake oil? Three reasons:

1) Many of them are looking to make money - a lot of money - off of education. They want to do to our schools what they did to our military, turning them into a bunch of Haliburton Highs.

2) They want to finally and completely break the unions. Once the teachers fall, it's all over for the middle class.

3) They need a scapegoat. Teachers didn't create these problems: the corporate titans of Wall Street did. These plutocrats are now paying a gang of carnival barkers a big bunch of money to blame teachers - teachers! - for the problems they themselves made.

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-progressive-education-narrative.html