Norm Scott, a retired teacher who is a blogger and film producer (“The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman'”), wrote a provocative explanation of the Chicago strike and its political implications.
He says that President Obama can’t support the Chicago teachers because they are striking against his Race to the Top policies. And he can’t oppose the teachers because he needs the votes of teachers in the election. So he supports the kids.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love it. But what does supporting the children mean or entail?
It behooves child-supporters to put a democratic platform under their feet.
Diane- I hope you’ll take a look at our website/blog http://www.teachersspeakup.com . Its purpose is to help teachers find their voice and tell the story of their work, since so much of the public and policy-making world don’t really understand it (from 30,000 feet, as you’ve said). But most teachers aren’t comfortable doing this. So our premise: if teachers don’t explain themselves, then someone else will own the narrative. And then we get confrontations like the one in Chicago now. So I hope you’ll spread the word on this, to help multiply the teacher voices out there. Yours is powerful, but many more are needed.
It sounds like you’re blaming the teachers. You’ve talked with enough teachers to know that they are mainly interested in doing their job and that they don’t have time to do much else, assuming they want to have a life outside of their job. Your website is a great idea, but your comment implies that, instead of the policy kingpins and wealthy “reformers” who are exploiting the average teacher’s tendency to stick to their work and spreading atrocious ideas and practices, it’s that average teacher who bears responsibility for the resulting confrontations. I’m not buying it. And it looks like the CTU, which has apperently transformed itself into a union of, by, and for its members, isn’t either: http://www.thenation.com/article/169859/chicago-teachers-push-back-against-neoliberal-education-reform?rel=emailNation
The CTU has called BS on the Obama administration’s and the Democrats’ claims to honor and support a committment to public service. I expect in the end Obama will follow the money and abandon the teachers, as he already abandoned so many of those who voted for him on his promises of reforms. They’ll use the strike to show the indepedents how “tough” they are against the unions whilw scheming to hasten the arrival of more charters and virtual schools.
But we shouldn’t be suprised. The administration and the Democrats more generally are in the mold of the original “progressives” who worked with busniess leaders to turn our schools into “factories” that “produced” gradautes from student “raw materials” at the juncture of the 19th and 20th centuries. As Raymond Callahan lays out so carefully in his book “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”:
“[W]hen all the strands in the story [of business- and industry-directed education reforms between 1910 and 1929] are woven together, it is clear that the essence of the tragedy was in adopting values and practices [of business and industry] indiscriminately and applying them with little or no considration of the educational values or purposes. . . . the wholesale adoption of the basic values, as well as the techniques, of the business-industiral world was a serious mistake in an institution whose primary puropose was the education of children.” (p.244)
Callahan attributes the major impetus drive for this disaster to four factors:
1. The trumpeting of calls for reforms of government, and the associated attacks on the competence of governmental institutions, by the muckrakers.
2. The rise of the indsutrial efficiency movement with Fredrick Taylor’s mis-labled “scientific management”.
3. The return of prestige to businessmen and industrialists during the Gilded Age.
4. The embryonic state of school administration as a “profession”.
These forces on public opinion, “marshaled by the profit-motivated popular press”, were no match for the “almost pathetic vulnerability of public school administrators”. (p. 245) And the teachers themselves, with some notable but futile exceptions, were largely passive.
I hope we’ll find a silver lining in this strike. By forcing a real debate on the record of the reformers and the real needs of educatiors and American society, perhaps the public will start committing itself to a real education for all of our children and not just cheap job training. As Callahan notes:
“In retrospect, Amercians might bave been better off in the long run if Amercian educators had taken a realistic look at what was expected of them and the means that were being provided and closed the schools. Perhaps in the ensuing crissi anddebate a firm decision would have been reached eiether to make the necessary effort and sacrifice or to abandon our gandiose notions about education. As it was, we wanted to have our cake and eat it [mass education on the cheap] too . . . .” (p.259)
I hope the CTU keeps Callahan in mind.
Listen to Chris Hedges’s take on the strike here:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chicago_teachers_need_support_from_democrats_20120911/?ln
Diane
Thank you for your tireless work on behalf of public education, students, school employees and the middle class. You are a bright beacon on a part of our country that corporate America would like to keep in the shadows
I am the NEA Midwest Regional Director and I have a team of 8 dedicated employees who work with our state affiliates in the MW (IA, IN, IL, MI, MN, MO, ND, SD and WI). We have lost more battles than we have won lately, but we are not quitting or dejected. We know that good public schools helped make America what it is today and that great public schools could make it even better. We love working with our members, because they are the best people in the world? My team has read your book, “The Life and Death of the Great American School System”, and read your blogs frequently.
Keep up your important work. It is making a difference.
Thanks, Dennis, keep everyone’s spirits up. Let’s work diligently to build alliances with parents, civic leaders, the local business community. Bring them into the schools so they understand what teachers do.
Dennis: please help our Illinois Ed. Assn.leaders do a better job for their members. They–& Audrey Soglin, Executive Director–are a large part of the reason Senate Bill 7 (backed by Jonah Edelman–Stand for Children) passed in Illinois, and this is the reason
that the CTU has been made out to seem as if they are only striking for their salary and benefits. Due to SB 7, strike authorization can only be given for issues involving salary & benefits. Collective bargaining has been severely restricted (if not dead) in Illinois.
If only more teachers were in the habit of speaking up to inform the public and policy makers about the complexity of their work and what it takes to create a great classroom. If a great many were doing this, perhaps smarter decisions might be made — and teachers would be more fully part of that decision-making process. At http://www.teachersspeakup.com we’re helping with that by providing tools & strategies & thinking about using our voices thoughtfully and smartly. Otherwise, the narrative is simply owned by others.