Erich Martel, an award-winning social studies teacher who retired after teaching for many years in the D.C. Public schools, here explains how unrealistic expectations set up the schools for failure and a hostile takeover. In doing so, he quotes my words back to me:
Martel writes:
How the Bipartisan Education Reform Party (forget right-wing vs left-wing; it’s a distraction) hijacked the social justice movement.
Here are just a few and their statutory icons:
Barack Obama & Arne Duncan & George Bush & Michelle Rhee & Joel Klein & Jeb Bush & the Broad Foundation & the Walmart Foundation & the Walton Family Foundation & the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Gov. Christie & Gov. Cuomo & Gov. Walker & Al Sharpton & Mitt Romney & NCLB & ESEA & RttT & Common Core, etc. & et al. (i.e. the bipartisan consensus)
In your “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” (2000), you wrote:
“Throughout the twentieth century, progressives claimed that the schools had the power and responsibility to reconstruct society. They took their cue from John Dewey, who in 1897 had proclaimed that the school was the primary means of social reform …”
“This messianic belief (more recently, “the social justice movement”) in the school and the teacher actually worked to the disadvantage of both, because it raised unrealistic expectations. It also put the schools squarely into the political arena, thereby encouraging ideologues of every stripe to try to impose their social, religious, cultural and political agendas on the schools. What was sacrificed over the decades … was a clear definition of what schools can realistically and appropriately accomplish for children and for society.” (p. 459)
If teachers’ decades-long claim that every up-from-poverty success “can thank a teacher,” then persistent school failure, the reformers say, must be teachers’ fault. This simple message reversal was available for any politician in need of a campaign slogan couched in civil rights language.
Deregulation, the new cyber-wealth, hostile takeovers, restructuring, leveraged buy-outs, etc. created concentrated super-wealth in search of investment that would appear socially progressive and a class of managers and politicians eager to adapt the business model to restructure public education. The siren song of Reform immobilized normal caution.
