Words&Dirt

“‘Why fool ourselves?  It’s impossible to live with a puppeteer who works with shadows, a moth-tamer.  Someone who spends his time making pictures out of the iridescent rings the oil makes on the Seine is unacceptable.  Me, with my padlocks and keys that I make out of the air, me, writing with smoke.  I’ll save the answer for you because I see it coming up: There is no substance more deadly than the one that can ooze anywhere, that breathes without being aware of it, in words or in love or in friendship.  It’s been a long time now since I should have been left alone to me, myself, and I.'”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 182

“Some union critics hope today’s young teachers will shift the profession away from its strong identification with organized labor.  In 2010 Educators 4 Excellence launched in New York City to give a voice to teachers who support accountability reforms and sometimes oppose traditional union protections.  It quickly attracted funding from the Gates Foundation and expanded to Los Angeles, Connecticut, and Minnesota.  A 2012 survey of ten thousand American teachers showed their opinions have shifted during the era of accountability reform.  Respondents believed tenure should be granted after 5.4 years on the job, an increase from the current national average of 3.1 years.  Other polls show almost half of teachers younger than age thirty-five support charter schools, compared to less than a third of teachers over the age of fifty.  But overall, American educators remain strongly committed to their unions.  Over 80 percent of teachers support collective bargaining, and the majority believe they should have the right to go on strike.

President Obama’s accountability agenda took on the teachers unions.  But was the public as hostile to unions as the political elite was?  In late 2010 D.C. mayor Adrien Fenty lost his reelection bid.  Polls showed Washington’s black middle class had turned against Fenty’s education reform agenda, frustrated by Michelle Rhee’s brash management style, her closure of underperforming schools in black neighborhoods, and her layoffs not only of teachers, but of 121 staffers in the district’s central office.  Student test scores had increased incrementally under Rhee, but it turned out D.C. voters saw their public schools––which had been some of the first in the nation for American Americans––as more than just achievement factories: They were neighborhood meeting places, sources of treasured civil service jobs, and repositories of community history and racial pride.”

––The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, pg. 220