Teachers Without Jobs and Education Without Hope: Beyond Bailouts and the Fetish of the Measurement

In the United States and Europe, thousands of demonstrators have organized to protest government cutbacks and austerity measures being enacted upon the most vulnerable members of society. In the United States, students have poured out into the streets of cities on both coasts. In Berkeley, California; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Montclair, New Jersey, they are protesting massive cuts in educational funding for both public and higher education and the laying off of thousands of teachers. The cuts are serious. According to the National Education Association, there are as many as "26,000 teachers in jeopardy of layoffs in California, 20,000 in Illinois, 13,000 in New York, 8,000 in Michigan and 6,000 in New Jersey." The mainstream media coverage of these projected job losses and even the more critical analyses of these events generally reduce soaring job layoff among public schoolteachers to an unhappy consequence of the economic recession. The logic behind this assumption is not without validity, but the issue is often presented as uncomplicated and straightforward. States with dwindling tax revenues are forced to eliminate basic public services and school budgets have become a major casualty of such cuts. Operating in tandem with this simplistic justification is the view that teachers and teacher unions who oppose such layoffs and further cuts are selfish and indifferent to the needs of students.

This type of bad faith attack has teachers, unions, staff and students around the country demanding that states and the federal government immediately provide emergency funding in order to prevent the elimination of hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs and school personnel. But the reaction against funding cuts is not voiced exclusively by those parties directly invested in schools. It is also a position being advocated by the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who wants to save over 300,000 teacher jobs by getting Congress to appropriate $23 billion in emergency aid. While the call to restore funding is only a temporary solution to the problem of school layoffs, if not school reform itself, it should not be discounted. Even a temporary reprieve is crucial for the many teachers who will lose their jobs and join the ballooning ranks of the unemployed. Yet, what is absent from such analysis is any understanding of how these massive teacher layoffs are related to the larger crisis of neoliberalism and casino capitalism and its ongoing assault on public goods, the social contract and any remaining social protections offered by the social state. While the circumstances in Greece are somewhat different and far more severe than in the United States, there are similar market-driven forces underlying the economic meltdown in both countries. Fortunately, the current financial crisis in Greece and the widespread public response to it offers a different and more critical insight into how to respond to what Frank Rich has rightly called an "international economic meltdown" caused by "the financial sector's runaway casino culture."

In Greece, similar draconian measures are being called for, but the protests emerging in the streets of Athens and other cities operate out of a much more sophisticated level of political literacy. In this instance, the Greek protesters view cuts in public services and education along with the dismantling of the welfare state as part of the harsh disciplinary policies of an international and social order dominated by neoliberal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.<3a> These very same policies glorify deregulated markets, privatization, the gutting of the social state and a society largely organized for the accumulation of capital, and function to serve the interests of an elite cadre of the rich and powerful. This growing tide of opposition in Greece to the neoliberal policies of the IMF, the European Union (EU) and the corporate state rejects the power and market-driven values of financial institutions that privilege the needs of corporations over human rights while unraveling the protections of the social state and disregarding environmental safeguards. The Greek protesters largely refuse the comforting illusion that neoliberal attacks on the social state begin and end with the current recession and can be corrected by slashing social protections through what Chronis Polychroniou calls "the implantation of a structural adjustment program that contains harsh austerity measures which will hurt workers, pensioners and the poor and dismantle an already scant welfare system." Nor do these protesters accept the argument that the voices and actions of those who suffer hardships that extend from being unemployed to having one's pension wiped out can only be framed through a pathologizing and privatizing gaze that reduces such protests to individual irresponsibility, laziness, or another degrading character flaw. Hence, it is not surprising that the marchers have yelled "thieves, thieves," and "burn the parliament down, it is a bordello."

In my view, the reaction of protesters in the United States juxtaposed with the resistance movement in Greece suggests a difference between the two cultures that is not merely incidental, and speaks to an ever widening chasm of political culture and literacy that separates these two societies. Greece reflects a social order in which a vibrant political culture and respect for critical education enable its citizens to think carefully and thoughtfully about both the history of the crisis and the socio-political forces that are causing it. The protests are not simply directed against harsh austerity measures, but also "against a ruling system as the economic and financial crisis has finally brought to the surface all the perversions and deformities of a political culture that thrives on graft and corruption ... and the plundering of the public wealth for the benefit of the domestic economic elite." By contrast, in the United States a good part of the mainstream media and its anti-public intellectuals largely examine the financial crisis through very limited modes of analyses, suggesting not merely a devolution of political insight and critical understanding, but also the refusal to acknowledge the stultifying effects of the decades-long influence of a market-driven cultural apparatus that depoliticizes citizens and robs individuals of opportunities to think critically and to act on their capacities for thoughtful engagement and collective action. In the US, the mainstream media is controlled largely by a few major corporations and lacks the political sophistication one finds in the media in Europe and other parts of the world. In the US, politics spawns a culture of entertainment which trivializes the news and substitutes the spectacle over substance; in the case of "Fox News," certain forms of political illiteracy actually drive what could loosely be called social commentary and reporting. In the US, the only public spheres left where critical analysis and discussion take place are in the alternative media extending from blogs to various online news journals.


http://www.truthout.org/teachers-without-jobs-and-education-without-hope-beyond-bailouts-and-fetish-measurement-trap60146

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Operating in tandem with this simplistic justification is the view that teachers and teacher unions who oppose such layoffs and further cuts are selfish and indifferent to the needs of students.
end quote.

These assertions, that the unionized worker is selfish and indifferent were believed by much of the public after 1947 and were key in disempowering unions.
Teachers managed to stay organized.
Their unions are tarred with the blackest brush, not because of their effectiveness, but because of their longevity.
This is a case of mass hysteria and misrule.
The unionized worker is not responsible for what his manager or administrator does.
He is not responsible in toto for the performance or lack thereof in his students.
Testing is not teaching. If tests are supposed to teach, then teachers may as well stay home in a general strike.
This is a measure whose time has come. Yes?
I'm sick of teachers being made to carry burdens belonging to other people.
And as for teachers "indoctrinating students"?
The real indoctrinators in this society are advertisers and so-called journalists!
All the media figures that, I will add, have been a party to the mass vilification of teachers in America.