The Wall Street Journal, which has a teacher-bashing, union-hating pro-privatization editorial board, published an editorial warning about the dangers of policing the police.
The editorial included these sentences.
“There’s a case for police reforms, in particular more public transparency about offenses by individual officers. Union rules negotiated under collective bargaining make it hard to punish offending officers, much as unions do for bad public school teachers. By all means let’s debate other policies and accountability in using force.”
So, police brutality is the union’s fault. And killer cops are just like those “bad teachers” whose students don’t get high test scores. Clearly, the WSJ didn’t get the memo about the consistent failure of test-based accountability as a means of evaluating teachers.
Do I detect a false equivalency?
Other nations have police unions and a minuscule number of police killings, compared to the U.S. And since when did low test scores become comparable to a brazen act of crushing a man’s windpipe?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The very same people who pushed for and PASSED so many education reforms over the past 10 years after a screening of “Waiting for Superman” or similar (biased) stories want us to do nothing in regard to police. They say that a few bad apples shouldn’t negatively impact the entire profession.
Well, look at what’s changed with teachers and traditional public education as a result of those few bad apples in education:
-Teachers having to put on dog and pony shows during their evaluations (i.e. Marzano, Danielson, etc.)
-Teachers being evaluated based on the performance of students on standardized tests, even if they don’t teach the tested subjects and/or students they don’t teacher. Example: The high school art teacher is graded either on an average of her students’ reading/math scores or a whole school average. Some states even created standardized tests for every single subject, including things like kindergarten music.
-Some teachers have to teach from a scripted-curriculum instead of from a blend of resources of what they feel is best for their students.
-Schools that have significantly more autonomy over how to achieve state test score goals (i.e. charters) or schools whose progress is only determined by the opinions of parents (i.e. private schools using vouchers) are receiving public money and praised as being better.
-Teachers lost long-term contracts.
-In Florida, public employee unions that dip below 50% membership are at risk of losing collective bargaining rights. The exception? POLICE, FIREFIGHTER, and CORRECTIONS OFFICER unions.
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It is most definitely a false equivalency that reveals the WSJ’s elitist opposition to organized labor. Bad police officers kill people which is a dreadful consequence. The fallacy in their statement is that no teachers produce bad test scores. Bad test scores correlate to the socioeconomic level of a student’s family, not the teacher that a student has. Students are not blank slates that arrive at a teacher’s door. Students come to a teacher with “preexisting conditions.” Poverty is the cause of low test scores, and low test scores are not a death sentence. Students with low test scores are not doomed. These low scoring students make have many talents that, when nurtured, will allow them to lead productive lives. Shame on The Wall Street Journal for perpetuating the myth of bad teachers and low test scores. This assertion has been disproven by scholars, and the WSJ should not be printing “fake news” in order to bash the teaching profession.
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cx: may have many talents
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When your are wealth and power protecting hammer, everything looks like a worker protecting nail to be smashed with force.
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Natalie Wexler wrote an article for Forbes in which she makes the same shameful equivalency — comparing ignorant literacy teachers with the Minneapolis militarized police. She also cites a Black literacy scholar, without permission (see Twitter commentary), to support her claim that literacy education is essentially a racist enterprise and we all need more phonics and of course testing. Could you amplify the problems with her argument. It’s teacher bashing 101 and being circulated by top outlets.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2020/06/06/how-reading-instruction-oppresses-black-and-brown-children/#2765147a3705
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OK, took the bait and read it. Now I feel like I stared into a partial eclipse for 5 minutes. Blinded by the asinine corona (virus). What a tool she is!
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Yes, Diane. This is an article that needs to be dissected and all its misinformation pinned down.
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Police unions are definitely part of the problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/nyregion/floyd-protests-police-reform.html and https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/as-protests-grow-big-labor-sides-with-police-unions/
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Planet Money did a short podcast about police unions and police violence, interviewing a researcher that has found that the formation of police unions in the 1950s resulted in increased police killing civilians of color. The causal explanation is that due process structure that the unions negotiated into contracts made violence against citizens less risky, so more violence was used. The podcast is here: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-police-violence
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Thanks for that. I found another article from that perspective here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/i-used-be-police-chief-this-is-why-its-so-hard-fire-bad-cops/. People can deny parallels with teaching, but they exist. I’m not comparing “bad” cops to “bad” teachers, but the job protections have a lot of similarities and for similar reasons.
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I could not access the WSJ editorial, so I must assume that it mentioned test scores as an indicator of bad teachers. I suspect that the image of bad teachers extends to far more than test scores.
There can be no doubt that the WSJ is anti-union and that this crass comparison of police and teacher unions is part of that mindset. We do not, of coure, know why the WSJ did not include in their “bad” the unions of firefighters and nurses and others.
As Patricia Enciso points out, Forbes is no better. It has made a more specific and ugly comparison, clearly racist.
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This seems more than a false equivalency. it seems a false comparison based on false assumptions. it assumes a priori that teachers are incompetent and based its analogy on the assumption that all police are brutes. This is so asinine that it is almost strange.
All the protest in the streets today is not over the fact that police unions protect policemen. It is over the practice of cities keeping the public from knowing when there is a George
Floyd moment. It has to do with trust. Do we trust that our public officials are telling us when there is a case when deadly force was improperly used? Not how has the union kept the police from abstaining from their proper place in society as its protectors?
That said, there are many problem associated with policing and maintenance of order in society. I am sure that the protestors do not all see all the problems associated with their demands. Such are the complications of human interaction. Thus simplistic analogies like the ones made in this editorial are more than irresponsible. These border on criminal suggested like this. No prominent news outlet should be able to make statements this ludicrous without it becoming a national discussion. We should be having a George
Floyd moment on the legitimacy of the WSJ, and its editorial board should be afraid of its job status.
And I did not even get into Fox News.
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“… a false comparison based on false assumptions.” Seven words sums it up.
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Sounds like the standards and testing malpractice regime, eh!
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“a false comparison based on false assumptions.” It seems to me that both are implied by the term “false equivalency,” for it’s difficult to imagine a false comparison that doesn’t depend upon false assumptions. Example: “A business needs one owner or CEO who calls the shots, just as a ship needs a single captain,” I’m making assumptions about businesses that aren’t universally justifiable. However, spelling those assumptions out is useful, as you point out.
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Let’s be fair. Public Schools are not as good as they can be, especially in urban areas. And public school unions have not always had sound educational policy and racial justice at the top of their menu. I taught in urban public schools for over 30 years and constantly fought a system that all too often seemed to serve the professional educator more than the young folks it was intended to serve. I love the ideal of public schooling and my love tells me that I must be open to its flaws. And racism has seeped into our school halls too.
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James,
I don’t agree with you. You are confusing correlation and causation. There an amazing number of urban public schools doing the best they can with the resources they have. I don’t think unions are “the problem.” They might be the answer since they are the only organized force fighting for adequate resources for the schools.
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Never said unions were “the problem”. Did suggest merely that we need to look at ourselves as a whole institution, warts and all, if we are to treat all kids as the thinking and feeling human beings they are. Not all public schools do that and not all public schools did that before the standards and privatization movements.
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Janes, do you think students get better treatment in states and districts that bar unions? Like Mississippi and Alabama?
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What does that mean to look at ourselves as a whole institution? I think we are much better off looking at practices from across the country that have been a positive force in the community rather than as a singular institution, which public schools are not. The same goes for unions. The national organizations are not representative of local affiliates , each of which is molded by its own local constituency. There are certain things we may be able to address better from a more centralized focus. School funding seems to be a perpetual problem. Since education is a state controlled institution, national participation is limited by legitimate more global concerns, excluding such bogus attempts to take charge with reports like “A Nation at Risk.”
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How do you improve schools? Educate them very, very well. Pay them well. Give them the resources they need, including wrap-around services for poor kids. And, importantly, return autonomy to teachers and administrators at the building level. Under such conditions, people rise to the occasion. Also, give teachers time in their schedules for weekly Japanese-style lesson study with other teachers.
No one gets up in the morning and says, “Gosh, I really want to go in and do as bad a job as I can today,” except, perhaps, for Donald Trump, who works for Putin and has that in his job description. Top-down micromanaging of schools of the kind that we’ve seen with the whole testing-based numerology/accountability movement, even when well-intentioned, is incredibly destructive. People don’t do their best work under conditions of low autonomy.
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This is another example of why I don’t get excited the occasional times the WSJ (editorial page) or other ultra-conservative publications–or the Lincoln Project, David Frum or politicians, for that matter–write or say things that give us a sugar high. They will revert to form and, if we get too satisfied or gratified, use it as justification that, hey, they’re not so bad. Confession, contrition, deeds, things like that will change my view. Romney, for example, the other day, might be on the right path.
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It is interesting (appalling and revealing) to think about how the “bad apple” argument gets used differentially. For police a few bad apples should not according to some make us develop rules to control and limit the discretion of all or raise fundamental questions about the role of police in the U.S. A few bad apple charter schools should not cause us to question the charter school concept. Alternatively, a few bad apple teachers is used to raise questions and provide justification for replacing the public school system and enacting control and punish regimes for all teachers. A few bad apple recipients of food stamps or other social support services causes elaborate and punitive control measures.
Message of the already empowered: Control by force if necessary is for THEM not us.
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Just saw this, the Idiot is now trying to smear the man in Buffalo who had his head cracked open by the police. A devout social justice Catholic is now part of the front lines of that dastardly Antifa. Pathetic.
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/06/trump-tweets-conspiracy-theory-about
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I’m NOT defending the police….I’m asking a question because I don’t know. What kind of equipment was that man holding and what was he trying to do with it? Personally, I wouldn’t want to be inserting myself into a group of militarized police to do anything, but I give this man credit for being pretty brave.
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LisaM, I read at one point that he was handing them back a piece of their equipment that he had found. Also, I don’t think he “inserted himself” as they were the ones moving.
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Looked like a cell phone to me. Certainly not a weapon. Certainly not aggressive. You can see it fall out of his hand a few seconds after he hit the ground.
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LisaM,
In his left hand he was holding a police helmet and was walking toward them to return it to them. He had a cell phone in the other.
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Not that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page was ever a bastion of Enlightenment thought, and not that its members and writers were ever exactly hippies, but one can sure see now that the Journal is a Murdoch paper.
Yeesh. I need a shower after thinking about this.
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The WSJ wants the system to keep its foot on the neck of all who are not privileged by birth, wealth or education.
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Isn’t that a metaphorical knee and not a foot? 😉
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Blaming public unions is all over the news again. Would it be any surprise if Wall Street tried to suppress unions and privatize another public service?
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Wall St Journal. The name says it all. WSJ is in business to promote business, stocks and bonds (economy). Of course they will bash anything that hurts the bottom line of big business….those pesky unions that are always bargaining for more $$$$ and more benefits $$$$$ and more, more, more whatever. Doesn’t surprise me at all.
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“WSJ is in business to promote business, stocks and bonds (economy).”
No, not the economy but Wall Street. And contrary to what the WSJ and those with the stocks and bonds, and other investment schemes is only a fraction of what the whole economy is.
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Teachers unions make sure any tenured teacher accused of bad behavior or incompetence receives due process, not a guarantee of continued employment. Before tenure, unions have no role in determining whether a teacher keeps a job. Just as defense attorneys defend accused criminals, unions defend the rights of bad teachers to due process. That’s all.
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Terry, the police unions say exactly the same thing, yet those for reform say that unions have kept laws in place that hide police misconduct, etc.
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And all teachers need that defense as far too many adminimals* over the years have attempted to trash even good teachers. I know from personal experience.
*Adminimal (n): A spineless creature formerly known as an administrator and/or principal who gleefully implements unethical and unjust educational malpractices such as the standards and testing malpractice regime. Adminimals are known by/for their brown-nosing behavior in kissing the arses of those above them in the testucation hierarchy. These sycophantic toadies (not to be confused with cane toads, adminimals are far worse to the environment) are infamous for demanding that those below them in the testucation hierarchy kiss the adminimal’s arse on a daily basis, having the teachers simultaneously telling said adminimals that their arse and its byproducts don’t stink. Adminimals are experts at Eichmanizing their staff through using techniques of fear and compliance inducing mind control. Beware, any interaction with an adminimal will sully one’s soul forever unless one has been properly intellectually vaccinated.
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As I’ve been saying for the last month “Sad, so effin Sad!
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Until all rise up against the dominance of the military industrial complex and demand and end to the death and destruction the USofA has done around the world throughout it’s history we will continue to have a highly militarized society in which might, especially monetary might , dominates. This country appears to finally be getting the karma kickback from those centuries of atrocities.
May karma succeed in it’s business!
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Who owns Fox news? Robert Murdoch
Who owns The Wall Street Journal? Robert Murdoch
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Rupert. Not Robert.
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Thank you for the correction. I thought I typed Rupert. Maybe the auto spell check changed it. :o)
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The New York Daily News wrote an article about “Defund the Police”, DeBlasio cutting police funds and transferring the money to social programs. The two pictures shown are teachers calling to defund the police.
No question they want to make the connection and pit unions against each other.
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When Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics, he promised that it would be editorially independent and that he would be hands off–you know, in the same way that Trump promised that if you sent him 35 grand, he would teach you his secret for making a fortune in real estate. The bizarre thing about all this continued union-bashing and union-busting is that unions have almost completely disappeared in the U.S. under the right-wing onslaught that began with Reagan. As of 2018, only 11.6 percent of U.S. employees were unionized, and almost all of these were in government jobs. We’ve long followed policies that have disempowered workers, and as a result, wealth and income inequality has grown, as have part-time and gig work without benefits. But this is not enough. People like Murdoch and the Waltons won’t feel complete until all workers are serfs again.
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