Teacher-Bashing

After a grade- and test score-inflation scandal, eleven black teachers in the Atlanta public school system were convicted of racketeering.  Racketeering!  A conservative white Fulton County judge refused to release them on bond and threw them in jail immediately, pending sentencing.  He called them "convicted felons."

Isn't this just a bit extreme?  Racketeering charges are normally reserved for serious organized crime and RICO offenses, like extortion, bribery, money laundering, etc.  But now a school teacher can go to Leavenworth for changing a grade?  WTF?

For over 25 years, University of North Carolina professors engaged in academic fraud for the benefit of the basketball team.  No one is in jail.  Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and the rest of the Wall Street wizards tanked the economy and caused the worst loss of personal wealth in history, and no one is in jail.  But a teacher changed a D into a B?  Toss him in the slammer and throw away the key.

Let's not excuse the behavior, but before we start filling our prisons with teachers, let's also think about why it happened, and almost certainly will again.  It's not an incident exclusive to Atlanta.

Conservative political forces want education to be a free-market business opportunity, and have therefore long been opposed to public schools in general.  They never hesitate to point out the "failures" of public education.

Toward that end, they've set up a high-stakes game of near-constant student testing and achievement measurements, designed to show us the winners and the losers.  The kids take the tests, but it's the teachers who're under pressure to "perform" by having their kids hit the magic numbers.  Then they take a page from the corporate playbook and incentivize the whole damn thing:  Paying bonuses to teachers whose students exceed the "standards."  Making job security dependent on children's test scores.  Threatening the very existence of "under-performing" districts.  (Gosh, which ones might those be?)  It turns the teacher's job into a perverse contest, ala Glengarry Glen Ross:  First place, a new Cadillac.  Second place, a set of steak knives.  Third place, you're fired!

That some teachers succumb to the pressure and resort to unethical shortcuts is not really a surprise, is it?

When conservatives get all misty about the good old days that were so much better than today, I hope they appreciate that their favorite school teachers of the golden yesteryear never had to put up with today's level of shit.  Not that long ago, parents yelled at the kid who brought home a bad report card.  Today, they yell at the teacher and blame the school district.

I worked in adult education in the business world for many years -- job training, sales training, product training, etc.  You can lecture and test and demonstrate and theorize and show videos till the cows come home, but the biggest variable, the most important factor in determining success on the job is the person whose fanny occupies the chair.  Teachers are essential, but it's ultimately up to the individuals being taught.

This isn't Lake Woebegone, and we can't all be above average.