No one earns as much love during elections as babies and teachers. The former gets hoisted in the air by candidates at campaign stops; the latter gets hoisted onto a pedestal.
However, while politicians continue to hold up babies after the votes are counted, teachers often find themselves booted from their pedestals. Flattered as selfless and dedicated during campaigns, teachers are recast as selfish and inept during legislative hearings on school funding and tenure.
Last week, Time magazine set off a firestorm with its “Rotten Apples” cover that declared, “It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher.” Although the Time article is more nuanced than the cover illustration, it didn’t stop 100,000 teachers and parents from signing an American Federation of Teachers petition demanding an apology from the news magazine.
In her new book, “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession,” Dana Goldstein attempts to answer why America both idealizes and resents its teachers. She concludes teachers perform a job that’s political and personal, caring for and educating our children and shaping the next generation of U.S. citizens and workers.
Despite the demands placed on teachers, Goldstein says, “Every new era of education reform has been characterized by a political and media war on the existing teachers upon whom we rely to do this difficult work, often in the absence of the social supports for families that make teaching and learning most effective for kids, like stable jobs and affordable housing, child care and health care.”
America historically seeks out convenient scapegoats during moral panics, writes Goldstein. Fretful over the widening socioeconomic gap, we have made teachers the emblem of the problem. And proof of their culpability is provided by the steady stream of news reports on feckless teachers who abuse the system and sometimes their students. The end result is a public perception of a broadly failed profession.
While there are weak teachers, Goldstein says there are fewer than politicians and the media would suggest, quoting research that estimates between 2 and 15 percent of teachers each year cannot improve their practice to an acceptable level and ought to be replaced.
She also dispels the notion that teachers are never terminated, pointing out that 2.1 percent of public school teachers are fired for cause, compared to federal employees fired at an annual rate of only .02 percent. In 2012, 2 percent of employees at private companies with more than a thousand employees lost their jobs due to the combined toll of firings, resignations and layoffs. “In short,” concludes Goldstein, “teachers are more, not less, likely than many other workers to get fired.”
Over the last decade, the Georgia Legislature has attempted to weight teachers with more responsibility for under-performing students and schools. In doing so, it has ignored the reality that most failing schools reflect failing communities — neighborhoods depleted by poverty, crime and drugs. In those communities, schools provide one of the few bright spots where children can find safety, a hot meal and hope.
So, why do we pin all the blame for struggling schools and all our hopes for better schools on teachers who earn on average $52,880 a year?
Because it remains easier for lawmakers to pass laws tying 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to student test scores than to solve joblessness, poverty and homelessness.
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