It's Official: Teachers=Scapegoats

A quick note today.  I don't normally like to mix politics with teaching or education because, for me, becoming a teacher and doing my work at school has never come from a political motivation.  I just wanted to help young people learn, grow and become full human beings.

Party affiliation, political beliefs, personal speech--those things happen at schools but don't really change my approach to the job I have to do.

But, I can't help myself this morning.  In Senator McCain's speech last night, there was the unmistakable demonization of teachers and public schools.  Check it out:

Education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.

When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have that choice, and their children will have that opportunity.

Sen. Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucracies. I want schools to answer to parents and students. And when I'm president, they will.

Notice the emphasis on "failing schools" and on "bad teachers".  Now, I've been around education long enough to know that there are better and worse schools and better and worse teachers.

And sure, there are ways to improve teaching and education.  

But, the point is, the GOP and even Democrats are heading down this road where they continue to talk in terms that suggest the only real problem with children is their teacher and their school.

What is Senator McCain proposing to do exactly to improve things?  What policies?  What action will he take?  Does he even have any idea what goes on at school or what teaching is like?

Sadly, if these questions were submitted to McCain as test questions, he would undoubtedly fail.  Miserably fail.

We live in the "richest country on earth" and "the greatest country on earth" according to Senator McCain.  Yet, with all the poverty, drugs, miserable health care, unemployment, homeless people and shabby neighborhoods, the only solution that he can generate is to hold public schools and teachers accountable?

My friends, that is not straight talk.  That is straight bullshit.  We, as a profession, can no longer allow this level of demonization to continue.  We have to stand up and reject the role of being a perpetrator of poor children, and reject the role of being a victim of these vicious attacks.

We are professionals.  We have work to do.  Almost 100% of us put our full selves, including our physical bodies, on the line every day trying to help offset negative inputs in childrens' lives with positive ones.  We work at night, we work weekends, we give of ourselves for others.

And for that, we get hauled off to the public square and humiliated in front of a national television audience.  

I am beyond angry.  I am beyond outraged.  I am calling for national action to stand up to the schoolyard bullies, like McCain, who think they can lay all of America's considerable shortcomings at the feet of teachers and public schools.

Silence in these times is complicity.  Doing nothing is acquiescing to these false premises, a totally fraudulent conception of reality, and a horribly uninformed and mistaken set of policy solutions.