[Cross-posted from Freedom Camp.]
"B, 7."
"You sunk my junior high school!"
"HA HA HA HA HA!!!"
Any time there's even the slimmest hint that a ballot box curtain may part somewhere, anywhere in the near future, the proverbial woodwork produces "Education Republicans" in swarms. They are a subspecies of the "compassionate conservative" who expounds so awkwardly on the humanistic values that most of us don't need explicated, because they come naturally. The Education Republicans coo soothingly: they understand your myriad frustrations with fractious school-boards and smarty-pants administrators and teachers who just don't understand your child's uniqueness and your embarassing resentment of having to pay taxes to support an educational system that seems more rickety with each passing year.
And in their supercilious, "yeah I did a line, but relax, baby, I just took an Ambien, so we're all good here" tones, reminiscent of those favored by Tom Friedman when he's trying to sell you the notion that the good folks of Uttar Pradesh just
adore eating the dirt off of the first world's heels, they assure you that they have all the answers:
school vouchers.
Charter schools.
Rigorous standardized testing.
And none can pull this act off more smoothly than California Republicans -- it comes as second nature to them. You see the earnestness in the dewey eyes of the freshly-hatched-from-the-think-tank Gubernatorial intern: The schools are failing! We just want to help -- we want to secure the nation's future!
No, really.
On November 8th, the waxwork T-100 and his flying monkeys submit for your approval, my fellow Californians, Proposition 74, which increases the probationary period for public school teachers from two to five years, and modifies (i.e., makes easier) the process by which school boards can dismiss a teacher.
Sounds right nice, don't it? A sound, well-reasoned finger-wagging at shiftless, incompetent teachers, because we know it's all their fault; it's a paternalistic, clench-jawed "Harrumph" in legislative form, one some might see as way overdue.
Well pardon me if I find the prospect about appealing as Paul Winfield posthumous scat porn.
How can anyone see this for anything other than what it is? I mean, would you try to cure a case of the clap by having bareback sex in the hope of contracting HIV?
Any time Republicans propose to solve problems with a public institution or social service it's always a Trojan horse: an ostensibly helpful incremental step, which in reality is nothing more than another nail in the coffin of said agency or service. Except when they're more blatantly destructive, as in their outrageous overreaching on Social Security.
Then end game, however, is always the same: obliterate those programs and let the public that relies on them ride the waves of an unfettered free market economy: a warm, bouyant, sweetwater ocean teeming with lollipops and unicorns and puppies and singing fucking flowers and dividends for all.
Prop. 74 is clearly just another well-disguised step towards this aim. Make teaching that much more unattractive to college graduates. Continue to destabilize the system. And when the whole mess -- construction paper purchased on the teachers' own scarce dimes, mimeographed standardized tests that do fuck-all to actually teach students how to think, and Reagan-brand ketchup packets -- comes crashing down, wipe away a tear, mutter that it was a good try, and now it's back to the textile mills with you, my little underage pretties.
Feel free to read the fine print here. But please, after this chimera-and-pony show is finished (one way or another) on November 9th, keep in mind one question: Just where the heck did all those Education Republicans go, anyway?