Earlier in the week, I'll admit: I doubted the Chicago teachers strike was going to make any difference.
Now on Morning Four, the cars honking their support for the picketing teachers at the school across the street are starting to get my attention.
Okay, teachers, as long as none of us are working, let's talk. What do you think would happen if the whole nation agreed with me that:
• Class sizes should be cut from 30-ish to 15-ish.
• Teachers should be evaluated—and the best should be richly rewarded—by a core of thoughtful, mentoring managers that doesn't exist at all in the schools right now.
• Made unnecessary by actual teacher supervision, standardized testing should be eliminated as a means of evaluating individual teachers and their performance.
• And air conditioning should be as standard in classrooms as it is in corporate headquarters.
What would happen if the whole nation agreed with me on those issues?
To the extent that your strike helps promote these commonsense but financially radical solutions in Chicago and nationally, I support it—just as I would patriotically pay the huge tax hikes required to build many more schools, double the American teaching corps, hire a whole new class of administrators and install Federal Fucking Central Air.
To the extent that your strike is just another hand in the game of liar's poker that we've been playing in this city and this country on education for the last half a century, I wish you'd get your ass off my street corner and my kid back in your hot, overcrowded classroom so you can get on with teaching her what you can in such conditions, and I can get on with teaching her the rest. Like we've been doing all along.
The revolutionary rhetoric of this strike — while completely beside the point of what’s at issue — is refreshing, as you point out. But the end game will not be revolution, it will be watering down a teacher eval system and giving teachers a much better raise than anyone’s getting in the private sector.
Don’t teachers see the irony of fighting tooth and nail against being graded, when what they do for a living is giving out (often completely subjective and arbitrary) grades to kids? Where do you think the idiotic grading and testing system started? In schools. It filtered out to the corporate world, then came roaring back. Payback is a bitch.
Ah yes, ACD: You’ve identified Education Hypocrisy #376. Of 10 million.
For one year in my twenties, I edited a magazine for teachers and administrators, called Curriculum Review. I read everything there was to read in the field, went to all the educators’ conferences my publisher would pay me to attend.
It was like arriving at a fraternity party at 1:00 a.m. and looking for a good conversation. Throw-up everywhere, people passed out in the stairwell, screeching maniacs setting fire to furniture in the back yard.
Those who could still speak clearly were using what was left of their mental faculties trying to get others in the sack.
In disgust I left that job to take over a trade publication covering the public relations industry, which I found to be infinitely more honest in every way.