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ReTired Tucson Teacher

After hanging up my classroom teaching spurs, so to speak, I want to spend some time discussing important educational issues and I want to know what you think.

A Republican in Name Only, Is a Shamed Educator.

by on Jul. 17, 2012, under Education

Teachers love the big bucks!

Yes, like most teachers, I’ve been greedy all my life. The Republican candidate for President was just doing his civic duty when he pointed it out.

To quote Mitt Romney:“He ( President Obama) says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”1

He was of course speaking about Obama calling for more teachers and other public servants to be hired or those to be rehired who had been laid off. Romney points out that in his belief more government jobs do not help the American people.  To me it’s as if he is saying, “Haven’t teachers acquired enough wealth already off the backs of the American middle class?”

Granted I was using Barack Obama as my proxy in thinking this, asking the president to proselytize for the retention of public employees. I admit that in this I am culpable. But someone has to make sure we teachers stay among the moneyed elite.

Of course, I am being absurdly ironic. But I have also been a registered Republican most of my adult life. Many people who know me find this hard to believe. I answer that there has to be one progressive in the GOP so I volunteered. Yes, it’s a dirty job (filthy, actually) but I do get to look at the absurdities of what has become the Republican Party and point them out to anyone I please. Most days I lose count, there are so many.

The growth of that list is one of my worries and I worry about many things.

I also fear the Republican Party is about to commit political suicide. I believe that a government by the people cannot exist without viable choices being offered to those people and what the GOP is offering leaves me wondering what they are thinking. Without the Republican party we lose the two-party system and a surprising number of teachers identify themselves as Republicans. At least it is a surprise to me because most teachers are also members of the middle class.

Traditionally we have had highs and lows in our economy and this current phase represents one of those lows. Also traditionally people have sought education to help them rise up out of economic distress. Education is what drives growth. It also drives democratic and republican principles (as opposed to Democratic and Republican principles which may be an oxymoron in duality). Education is critical to growth and prosperity. Without an informed, active constituency, freedom has no chance. To say that fewer teachers is ever a good thing is patently counter-intuitive. It is also really a bad idea in an economy already reeling from unemployment.

But I believe there is a greater danger here than simply people being out of work.

Though retired in name, I can’t stop teaching, it’s been part of my life too long. Let me begin this lesson in politics with a calculated truism. The basis of our economy is the free enterprise system. As a Republican I have always believed in the premise that supply and demand will drive economics. But that is in an ideal model. What we currently possess is considerably less than ideal. When wealth seeks to control what is available rather than allow free enterprise, we no longer are operating in a Free Market system.

Representative government is also a hallmark of Republicanism. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Government’s first duty is to protect the people not, run their lives.” I was never a big fan of the ‘Gipper’; he was too conservative for me, I’m more of a Bull-Moose Republican, but even he would have a very hard time measuring up (down?) to the standards set by the GOP these days. Most Republicans have completely departed from Reagan’s stated principle. They seek to put massive government controls on personal freedoms and greatly restrict the ability of the middle class to exist while at the same time ignoring the pressing needs of the very source of their legitimacy: that middle class.

It is easy to draw allusions from economics back to education.

As a teacher I have seen the disasters wrought on education by interference where it is not needed and the casual disregard of glaring necessities. And I want you to recognize that in this I am not just indicting the GOP. Under Arne Duncan, Obama’s hand-picked education czar, the lot of public education has not significantly improved. While NCLB was a disaster, ESEA offers little in the way of substantive growth of educational policy and only seeks to justify its own existence through punitive action. The number of states now requesting waivers from the mandate continues to increase almost daily.2)

I give kudos to Vice President Biden for the inspirational aspect of his speech to the NEA but it is still just words unless actions follow.

Education is too important to be a political pawn. We risk our future by such malfeasance. It is time Washington recognizes that their perceived short term political and financial gains will destroy our country’s continued growth and significantly alter the future.

A future that is another of those nightmarish worries.

 

1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/03/joe-biden-teachers-mitt-romney-selfish-education_n_1646582.html

2) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2012/06/five_more_states_get_nclb_waiv.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 at 12:10 am and is filed under Education. Tags for this post: , , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1174704433 Walt Bennett

    I’m a die-hard independent and although my retired special ed teacher is a life-long Dem, I have to agree that we’ve been basking in the wealth she made – with two Master’s and over twenty years of experience. 

    More seriously, I’m really hard pressed to understand how or why the GOP has self-destructed as badly as it has to this point.  There’s been next to no moral leadership – those that had any opted to retire.  For a party that is all about traditional marriage and against gays, they’ve got a (presumed) Pres. candidate with the nick name of ‘Mittens’!  It appears things are going very badly – poor Rep. Bohner had to even donate $4.1M of his own hard earned money to try to keep his leadership position.

    Politics is never nice, but it would be really great to have a for-real, two-party system again.

  • professor_fantasy

    I agree that fixing the economy and providing jobs for working families will go a long way to fixing a lot of what ails our social fabric…including public education.

    BTW, No Child Left Behind is the current iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA.) ESEA was orignally passed in the 1960s, and was reauthorized every five years from then until 2001. Each reauthorization had a new name. NCLB was the reauthorization that passed in 2001. From the first authorization the point of ESEA was to inject federal money into school systems primarily to serve the needs of poor children. Title I, the funding source for the federal aid that specifically helps poor children, derives its name from being the first section of the ESEA.

    Several aspects of NCLB set it apart from prior iterations of the ESEA. Most significantly, there are real consequences for failing to meet the academic targets set out in the law. Secondly, the law focuses on the failure of many school systems to educate the hardest to educate students, particularly minority students, ELL students, students who live in poverty and special education students. Schools must not only meet their overall goals but each of these subgroups must meet the same goals or the entire schools does not meet its goals. Many schools have only one sub-group at a single grade level fail to make the goal, and that means the entire school has failed to make it. Finally, the law recognizes that teachers are the main ingredient that schools provide to help students learn. Hence the requirement in law that students be taught basic skills by highly qualified teachers. There are no requirements for highly qualified principals or superintendents or a high quality curriculum because none of them make a statistically significant difference for kids.

    The real problem with NCLB is not the goals it sets, but the way it measured achievement. So long as schools could fail to make adequate yearly progress because one subgroup failed to make it then the system was bound to fail more and more successful schools every year. That is, indeed, what has happened. In the district where I worked most of the schools that did not make AYP failed because special education students could not make their goals. Heck, that’s why they were in special ed in the first place.

    Until this part of ESEA is fixed in the next reauthorization, the credibility of the law is at risk. The fact that Duncan has abused NCLB even more than the secretaries of education under Bush is a sign that screwing public education and public school educators has become a bi-partisan sport.

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