The National Education Association wasted no time today endorsing the re-election of President Obama, a decision that came as no surprise to anyone. After all, it doesn’t matter which candidate the Republican Party fields next year, that candidate is going to be pushing vouchers, charter schools, and standardized tests, and will undoubtedly have a stance against any type of collective bargaining for educators.
The endorsement, 16 months before the election, was predictable, but it was a mistake and I offer two words to justify that rationale: Arne Duncan.
I have been listening, as have educators across the United States, and there have been no rumblings that Arne Duncan is on his way out as Secretary of Education. Yet there can be no doubt that the president knows Duncan’s policies, which also have to be considered, are poison to the nation’s teachers.
What else would explain the dispatching of Vice President Biden to speak at the NEA meeting over the weekend rather than Duncan?
Where was President Obama when Duncan showered lavish praise on a Rhode Island school board that fired the entire faculty at a high school? He said the board was “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.”
Under Duncan’s prescription, and by proxy also the president’s, that option is one of the few available to schools when they run afoul of the flawed standards that label one school a “winner” and another a “loser.”
How can the word “courage” possibly be twisted to describe the arbitrary firing of an entire faculty? It is impossible to believe that every single member of the faculty was worthy of a pink slip.
With Arne Duncan as his secretary of education, President Obama and Race to the Top have shown no more respect for classroom teachers than President Bush and No Child Left Behind.
In a much-criticized open letter to the teachers of America a couple of months ago, Duncan wrote, “I know that most teachers did not enter the profession for the money. You became teachers to make a difference in the lives of children, and for the hard work you do each day, you deserve to be respected, valued, and supported.”
He is right, but his actions do not come close to agreeing with his words.
In the same letter, he used the buzz words used over and over by the so-called educational reformers- data and accountability.
Duncan says we need to have data that is “honest” and can be “trusted,” but he has already been willing to stake our nation’s education and the awarding of federal funds on data that is less than honest and cannot be trusted.
This is the charlatan whose bag of tricks appears to be the same one being used by the educational gurus of the Republican Party- more charter schools, merit pay based on standardized tests, and the devaluing and eventual elimination of veteran teachers, to be replaced with “superior” teachers who have gone through six weeks of training with Teach for America.
Despite one study after another that stresses the role of poverty in educational failure, the problem is being pushed to the side in favor of the type of privatization of education that has long been the goal of the far right wing of the Republican Party.
These policies are what NEA endorsed today. Sure, it’s the lesser of two evils. With the Obama Administration, there is always the hope that there will be a change in thinking, the kind of change that would be highly unlikely in the administration of a Mitt Romney, a Michele Bachmann, or any of the other Republican candidates.
American classroom teachers are under siege. It would have been nice if NEA would have developed a backbone and held off on its endorsement until we could see some actual evidence that the Obama Administration does not plan to contribute to the destruction of public education, the most successful experiment in our nation’s history.
Then again, if NEA had held its endorsement that long, it would probably already be time for the 2016 election.