At seventy-five I am still teaching school. My mind still works. I’ve not lost the ability to talk to young people, and I enjoy their company. The enterprise helps to keep me alive; and so I’ve begun another year in the classroom. I could recall a host of good memories, but today I’m thinking about another, one that’s not so good.

I recall hearing an education prof (who should have known better) make the following claim in a lunchtime conversation years ago: ‘There’s no such thing as a good teacher. If a teacher does a good job, it’s because an administrator made her a good teacher.’ Even bracketing the sexism, it’s hard to take such a claim seriously.

But the Chicago public school system, with the tacit support of the Obama administration, has already put into effect a clumsy—some would say mindless—system of teacher evaluation designed to deprofessionalize Chicago teachers and subject them to a Taylorist efficiency scheme in which their performance in their jobs is to be disproportionateloy evaluated on the basis of “student performance” (i.e. according to their students’ scores on standardized tests).

The problems with these tests are many, even with regard to college admissions, and the present use to which they are being put as more and more school systems are being subjected to neoliberal programs of “reform,” is unconscionable. Now the Chicago teachers have struck in the attempt to preserve what professional dignity they have left, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel attempts to use the standardized testing canard to deprofessionalize them still further.

I have been a school teacher for fifty years. Though most of my experience has been as a teacher in colleges and universities, I have also taught in elementary and secondary schools and community colleges. In my time I have seen much good teaching, and I have also seen bad. After fifty years I remain convinced that the only civilized way to establish and maintain standards in the teaching profession is through peer review. Peer review has its problems; it is sometimes self-interested and idiosyncratic, but it is a damn sight better than the sort of administrative dictatorship we are seeing in Chicago. And the irony is that many liberals, who ought to know better, support mindless, top-down management schemes in the public schools

We live in a time when workers of all sorts are being subjected to deprofessionalizing, indeed to dehumanizing “oversight and dumb operant-conditioning gimmickry sold to organizations by snake-oil consultancies,” as my friend Tim Burke has put it, as well as to demands for more and more economic concessions from workers. One consequence of this trend is that the wages and benefits of teachers and other public workers are now sometimes better than those in the private sector; and this has given rise to another canard. No less a pundit than David Brooks claimed just days ago that paying teachers’ salaries and benefits “is becoming a burden that [the private economy] can no longer carry,” having conveniently forgotten that teachers pay taxes like everyone else. Unscrupulous politicians like Scott Walker and careless pundits like Brooks are urging us to believe that support for public workers amounts to support for unearned privilege and excess.

It simply isn’t so. Teachers work hard, often against unspeakable odds and in terrible working conditions. More often than not they buy needed school supplies out of their own pockets. Many are denied Social Security and forced into substandard health care programs. It is true that some teachers still work only nine months of the year, but that is no longer the norm; moreover, a substantial part of the complex of reasons that teachers are on the defensive in today’s anti-union, anti-worker environment is that people dislike teachers. This point has been made forcefully by Corey Robin in a recent blog.

I remember being bullied on the school grounds, and teachers who encouraged the bullying. I remember teachers who were martinets or, worse yet, were bullies themselves; and I remember corporal punishment. I was a kid who loved school from the first grade (I missed kindergarten because of a series of accidents), but I hated junior high school because a crowd of thugs who were being kept in junior high until they were sixteen were allowed to terrorize bookish boys. If I had not been sent to high school in the ninth grade where I found myself back in the midst of civilization, the entire course of my life might have been different.

Still, much antipathy towards teachers would be better directed at schools themselves, towards the role schools play in the socialization of children. There’s an old teacher joke about a kid who flunked “standing in line.” School is where we learn to conform, sometimes to vicious regimes of bahavior. But Robin’s argument is that teachers are disliked because they are public servants and as such do not participate in the suburban “meritocracy.”

“Those who can’t do, teach” goes the old saw. But where that traditionally bespoke a suspicion of fancy ideas that didn’t produce anything concrete, in my fancy suburb, it meant something else. Teachers had opted out of the capitalist game; they weren’t in this world for money. There could be only one reason for that: they were losers. They were dimwitted, unambitious, complacent, unimaginative,
and risk-averse. . . . No one, we were sure, became a teacher because she loved history or literature and wanted to pass that on to the next generation. All of them simply had no other choice. How did we know that? Because they weren’t lawyers or doctors or “businessmen”—one of those words, even in the post-Madmen era, still spoken with veneration and awe.

There’s a good deal to be said for Robin’s argument, though I think it’s too simple. But there are a couple of other arguments, each also too simple in itself, that I believe have strong explanatory power with respect to where we are as a nation with regard to public education. First, when we abolished segregated schools we retained a system of funding based on local property taxes that has continued the disproportionate allocation of resources to affluent, suburban schools and left inner city schools impoverished.

Even within city school systems, resources flow disproportionately to schools that serve affluent, mostly white students and their parents. I live a couple of blocks from Roosevelt High School in St. Louis, once one of the finest public high schools in the nation, now a dump. Roosevelt is being starved for resources. But worse still, Roosevelt is the one school in the city which is not a magnet school, and the consequence is that its student population is disproportionately made up of young people who will never graduate.

Second, the end of segregated public schools ushered in an era which has seen a massive incursion of political demagoguery into public school affairs at almost every level. Ten years ago the St. Louis city school board was so polarized that city schools were in disarray. The system was full of serious corruption and fiduciary malfeasance. The schools ultimately lost accreditation and remain unaccredited. They were taken over by the state some years ago and are slowly improving.

But in the interim Mayor Francis Slay devised a scheme to rig a school board election and install a group of his cronies as members. This cabal hired a turnaround firm to run the St. Louis schools, an action that led directly to their loss of accreditation. People got wise and threw the mayor’s cronies off the school board. But tremendous damage had been done. It is an open secret that the St. Louis Mayor’s office promotes the creation of for-profit charter schools, despite the abysmal record of corruption and miseducation those schools have in this city.

Power hungry mayors like Rahm Emanuel, Francis Slay, and yes Michael Bloomberg, have no business running public school systems.