Peter Green reviews a study of the political views of teachers.
You may be surprised to learn how many support Trump. A surprising number have a favorable opinion of Betsy DeVos.
He suggests that you might want to talk more to the teacher in the next room.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Peter’s analysis lines up perfectly with what I experience among teachers, administrators, and parents in my public school district. And all of them claim to value public education, even when the politicians and policies they support undermine it at every turn.
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The ignorance in this nation is what will destroy us!
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Who is responsible for that ignorance? Could it be that 90% of the citizenry has attended publicly-operated schools?
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Seriously? You jerk. How about putting the focus on your favorite standardized tests, which have narrowed the curriculum to just math and reading. Social sciences, history, geography and civics have been all but eliminated.
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Oh, let Chahles insult everyone. He only belittles himself in so doing.
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Charles has a point. The Reformers took their cues from the education establishment which said that skills trump knowledge. Schools have been tragically downplaying the importance of knowledge for decades, long before Reform took over. Were the high-stakes tests to disappear today, we’d still be stuck with a teaching force that denigrates knowledge-transmission, because the ed schools have waged a 100 year campaign to discredit this conception of education (Exhibit A: Paolo Freire –good hearted, but bad at theory). This sickens me. One cannot even begin to cure a Fox News viewer of his errors if he’s completely lacking in a foundation of knowledge about the world. I believe schools should be providing this foundation; very many American teachers think school has other, more important functions.
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I hasten to add that Charles’ insinuation that public schools are inherently inferior to private schools is ridiculous. The problem is educational theory, not school governance. Many public systems in the world get it right.
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What an inane comment! Take any individual ten years out of public or private schools (if not less) and any subject that is no longer of interest to them will have faded from their memory. When I was teaching, especially in the last years, I was working so hard that little from the outside world had much chance of engaging me for long. With work weeks that frequently ran closer to 60 hours not counting the weekend marathon, I had little energy left for anything else. Now I know most people probably don’t have quite as crazy a work schedule, but I know few people who are knowledgeable on a broad range of subjects. We all specialize. Most of us got a bit complacent, too, expecting our government to continue to work for the common good. It will be a cold day in HE “double hockey sticks” before I make that mistake again.
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Ponderosa, I cannot challenge what you say, I am not schooled in ed history (& have even observed some of that change in my own lifetime). I just wonder if the ed-theory change could reflect the influence of popular culture, as US ed gradually shifted from the purview of elite private academies to locally-run public primaries & eventually high-schools for ordinary folks. Was some of this due to underestimating what the unwashed masses were capable of learning? And even more likely, influenced by anti-intellectualism & suspicion of received knowledge?
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Charles very glib. So 90% of the populace is ignorant? And if we buy that, due to their public schooling? And if we buy that I gather from your other posts that this sad state of affairs has a simple remedy: use public funds to support non-public schooling.
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Charles seems to agree with Trump that America is a land of carnage where everything is rotten and falling apart. Never blame those in charge for what is happening that you don’t like. Blame the public schools, the easy punching bag.
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Charles needs to find out who to blame for his inability to use commas properly.
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Ah, Charles, I know I can always count on you for simple analyses of complex problems.
Keep up the good work!
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To my knowledge, I was one of two faculty/staff members in my school building who did not vote for Trump. My colleagues still celebrate the current administration. Or at the very least, do not see “what the big deal is.”
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How any public school teacher could have even a mildly favorable opinion of Betsy DeVos blows the mind. As Michigan voters have made clear, by 2 to 1 in three state referenda, they reject her unhinged campaign to privative public education.
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Diane It raises the question about what’s going on in teacher education schools and classrooms? Or better said, what’s NOT going on. That would be a political education that includes AT LEAST what democracy means, how it can fail and is easily attacked (ala Toqueville’s work “Democracy in America”), and how it relates to other forms of government.
If the greater WE are going to maintain democracy, teachers need to be aware of their central and even essential place in it–FOR OUR STUDENTS and future citizens.
A=apparently, and by this thread, presently a good number ARE NOT so aware.
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I’m not sure it has a lot to do with that. 51% of those surveyed had more than twenty years’ experience. At that point, a few great courses in ed school are just a small part of what has formed he adult.
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bethree5 You may be right in some situations; but a political education commonly strikes at the heart of the way we do things in our own country, raising students’ awareness about comparisons–which tends to stay with us–a couple of courses would make teachers aware of what, before, they took for granted.
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I work in a blue city of a blue state, but I do not have progressive colleagues. Many are registered Republicans. They mostly believe billionaires are a more intelligent, deserving class of people, and our students are a less intelligent class of people, deserving of naught but harsh discipline. I have hit my head against many a wall, trying to convince teachers otherwise. I am up against films, television, and newspapers produced by billionaires.
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Yes! I have always thought that many people think that those who have money are better people and are more intelligent and deserving. I think teachers should have a liberal arts education but alas! That too is going the way of the dodo bird!
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When I read the comments of so many devoted, talented teachers here, I have to keep remind myself that, overwhelmingly, you’re the best of the best. Most teachers are like most people, they see what they are doing as a job, nothing more. As I’ve heard many people in the military (as a dependent) say: It’s good enough for government work. Perhaps they’re best summed up by a lyric by Evan Felker of the Turnpike Troubadours:
The folks were decent people,
they didn’t like their kind,
when the car pulled in the driveway
they were staring through the blinds.
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This is a blog where teachers, parents, policy makers, and just citizens who care about students visit. For those who care about paychecks, there are many other sites. Many. I think Campbell Brown alone has about 74 million websites promoting caring about test-based merit pay instead of caring about students. Most of my colleagues read self help books: how to a¢hieve succes$, how to meditate away your cares about children and the future, and so on. (I mention the meditation thing because Destroyer Nick Melvoin is pushing us (using district funds with his authority as a board member) to use an app called Headspace, which I find disturbing.) I strongly believe that to be a teacher, one just has to believe in ones students.
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Absolutely, InService, and not only do teachers have to believe in students. Administrators, school board members, politicians and citizens have to believe in and invest in teachers AND students…not as dispensable commodities.
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Devastating line: ” I am up against films, television, and newspapers produced by billionaires.” And pretty much NOTHING from the public schools or teachers unions to say otherwise…
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When I was teaching eons ago, I was painfully aware that there were a fair number of very conservative teachers, not to mention the first principal I experienced. The liberals were sotto voce. However, years later when the teachers went on strike, 99% of the teachers supported the strike and just a couple crossed the picket line along with the shipped-in scabs. Nothing happened to the tenured teacher scabs and they reaped the benefits that we on the picket line were fighting for.
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When my district went on strike back in the ’70s, only two teachers refused to join. One teacher was in debt and had a son in college, and the other was the wife of a member of the school board.
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The results may indicate that many teachers are influenced by the area in which they live. We can call it “trickle down brainwashing.” I would like to have seen the results with the blue disaggregated from the red states. Averages do not always provide a clear picture. Years ago when I started teaching in Pennsylvania, many of the teachers were not political at all. When I moved and taught in the New York City suburbs, I noticed the teachers were much better informed and much more engaged in the politics of the day, and how decisions impacted education.
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Oh yes, retired teacher, my first thought when I read this.
I remember as a college student in the tumultuous late ’60’s there was a cadre of my sorority sisters who sat out demonstrations playing bridge back at the house — with a supercilious, holier-than-thou attitude that seemed to be borne less out of conservatism than an ingrained blue-nose culture that deemed political activism, like talking about one’s wealth, about as welcome as a fart in church. I figured their politics were compartmentalized from life experience– their boyfriends/ fiancés could buy their way out of the draft.
And things may well have changed in the Midwest since my 3 yrs there in the ’70’s– but at the time, I was a fish out of water, unable to talk politics or religion in typical loud Northeastern fashion with work colleagues. They kept lips buttoned up on virtually any controversial subject, apparently raised to consider such discussions rude and inappropriate. My saving grace was the San Franciscans who’d been sent there to run our satellite office.
My observation is that a cultural habit of considering political discussion unseemly runs deep, & breeds unchallenged, unchanging views which are compartmentalized from daily life experience.
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It’s really difficult to see who’s behind a lot of this stuff because they essentially pass the donations thru multiple entities:
“Founded in 2012, Innovate has paved the way for privately managed charter school networks, including Rocketship and Navigator, to gain footing in Santa Clara County. Members of its Board of Trustees include the CEO of another charter school advocacy group, a charter school consortium executive, corporate consultants and a Woodside Elementary School District trustee.
Advertisements featured on social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram in recent months invite parents to “See how SFUSD is serving its black students.”
Innovate CEO Matt Hammer confirmed that among the nonprofit’s list of high-profile donors are the Walton Family Foundation — a philanthropic organization launched by Walmart founders Sam and Helen Walton. Since 1997, the foundation has invested more than $407 million to grow charter schools, according to its website.”
It gets more difficult every year for ordinary people to figure out what is going on, even in their own communities. It’s REALLY sophisticated marketing and lobbying.
If you’re in San Francisco and you hear “Innovate” is a local group “trying to improve schools” you would have to work fairly hard to discover they’re yet another Wal Mart entity.
I was at a school committee meeting once frantically googling because I heard ed reform phrases and slogans but the presenter claimed he was independent. He wasn’t. I found a bunch of stuff tying him to High Tech High Schools. Surprise! That’s the model he was pitching.
It’s almost too much to ask that people do all this research. This is a full time job for the salespeople of ed reform. They’re good at it. The public are just interested part timers. They have other jobs.
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In his own words, below, he implies global politics should be based on money. Everything boils down to money, and should. Everything is about the kind of influence money has. What flies, what fails, what one can and can’t do, what people want, what people want to talk about, what people want to hear, and on and on. An insidious narcissism and psychopathology.
“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us,” he told reporters at the White House.
“Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
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Looking at our faculty, I see a group that is generally more conservative than the rest of the country, but somewhat more liberal than their fellow members of the community. Their support for Trump parallels their belief in life at conception and the corresponding important place that has in making their decision at the ballot box. He gave them Gorsuch, so they are happy.
That said, there are also some Bernie people in there and some old line Democrats. So teachers, as the survey pointed out, are a mixed bag of voters.
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“Their support for Trump parallels their belief in life at conception and the corresponding important place that has in making their decision at the ballot box.”
And that Roy is the basis of much of the ignorance of supposedly modern Americans-their firm belief in an unverifiable/metaphysical realm of, usually, xtian origin. “Faith” beliefs serve to soften up the human psyche for all kinds of other “beliefs” that belie rationo-logical thought, that presume primacy of those “faith” beliefs over all other thought–“Well GOD told us this is the way it should be”. Simplistic non-questioning thinking leads to simplistic non-well thought out solutions that are easily digestible to simple minds. Pretty simple, eh!
Until this country breaks out from under the dominance of “faith beliefs” we will continue to have simple political talk and supposed answers that only serve those in power.
Let me put in far more polemical terms: In the realm of the political, religious thought is ignorant thought.
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I voluntarily signed up for Diane’s blog because I knew that most of the people who comment are intelligent and informed. While the information Diane posts can be depressing, reading the comments help me cope with the insanity and stupidity out there.
Duane, I agree: “Until this country breaks out from under the dominance of ‘faith beliefs’ we will continue to have simple political talk and supposed answers that only serve those in power.
“Let me put in far more polemical terms: In the realm of the political, religious thought is ignorant thought.”
Thank you!
We really need to vote everyday with our time and money, not just at the polls or via mail ballots.
And I need to add: African American women in Alabama rock!
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Duane: The need for simplistic postulates to guide political thought is not only the province of those of faith. Irreligion can also be guilty of looking the other way when some fact upsets the simplistic logic. The best example I can think of this is our good friend, Ayn Rand, whose philosophy was decidedly atheistic, or so she claimed. We can see easily that she substituted the capitalistic system for God, and so was an idolatrous thinker rather than an atheistic one.
The unquestionable fact that many Christian thinkers have used the religion to justify horrendous actions in history caused historian JB Bury to suggest that “a theologian on the throne is a public danger.” Still, it is dangerous to commit the logical fallacy of generalization here. While many who call themselves Christian claim their scripture defines life by conception, others bearing the same title disagree. Because they are generally more gentle people, less sure they know absolute truth, they are shouted down by the Falwell crowd. But Christians are as diverse as Muslims and Hindus and Taoists.
I would prefer to suggest that big ideas in history often are frightening to some people. Fright is a powerful motivator in human thought. The reaction to things that science can do is not confined to the one issue of abortion. Life and the definition of it permeates the entirety of the relationship between law, medicine, and privacy. This debate will not shrink. We have engaged here often on the subject of automated learning, the effect of technology on manufacturing, and the use of tech solutions to a wide variety of human problems. The important thing is to engage. We must have dialogue and move it in the direction of the rational. But we must engage, lest we fall into,the same trap as those we oppose.
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something seems askew in this report…..I really like Peter Greene, but something seems……exaggerated.
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I too have more questions than anything else from the Ed Week survey. Goodness, any researcher knows the items in the survey limit getting an accurate response.
How were the questions validated? Also, what kinds of stats were run on the data collected? What are the error measurements and reliability coefficients? How was the teacher sample selected? The results need to be framed. Too many extrapolations are made and I have little reference points.
Could be that like me, the DEMs really let teachers down and thus they felt used? I would like to know today what those same teachers would respond?
And…I did NOT vote for the Dump. And I am still upset with the DEMs for blaming us and using us for political and financial gains. What a mess. The DEMs need to “own” this mess, too. I haven’t heard a whisper of “We are sorry. We were wrong.”
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Well, teachers are people too. And many people do not self-examine/ air out /discuss their politics openly in a way that allows themselves to evolve and connect dots they should be connecting. On the whole it seems to me the respondants showed up rather well in comparison to the general population. Except in the areas of immigration, & equal ed oppty for kids of color, those figures were disturbing. That might come from an utter lack of experience with immigrants & folks of color. Which can easily lead to narrow, out-of-touch views.
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And we are inundated with propaganda at school. I wonder how many times I’ve been told Common Core was the magic potion that would save the world…
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Good lord. More power to you for teaching in a public school. You are doing the work of the public good, which my family benefited greatly from. Even as a college sr I knew myself well enough to get that I couldn’t be politic & button-lipped enough to manage it.
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