Let me preface this commentary with a confession: I have lived my entire life in South Carolina, a non-union state, and I have always felt a tug toward a Henry David Thoreau-Groucho Marx-Woody Allen-esque recalcitrance to join anything. That said, I have come to see a powerful and often unspoken distinction between organizations, about which I remain deeply skeptical, and community, about which I remain loyal.
The National Education Association (NEA) has received criticism for publishing an Op-Ed with Teach for America (TFA). Ken Bernstein found the piece to be "unbelievable," while raising the possibility that union members felt betrayed. Anthony Cody first responded with "I just don't get it," and then raised this question:
"I wonder how it is possible to fight vigorously for a minimum one-year residency program and simultaneously praise someone whose recruitment model features a five week summer training course, and targets people who do not even wish to become teachers?"
While this rising concern that NEA is failing its mission has received relatively strong coverage in the new media of blogs and twitter, Susan Ohanian has been raising a similar (but nearly ignored) concern about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)—the largest professional organization for teachers of English. I too have challenged NCTE's role in supporting national standards and partnering with National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) for teacher certification standards. But my voice like Ohanian's has been essentially shouting down an empty well, it seems.
Organizations Codify, Communities Grow
In Room for Debate (New York Times, January 8, 2012), Smeeding suggests that Canada has a greater sense of democracy, especially in their national concern for middle-class, working-class, and impoverished citizens, than the U.S.
Charles Blow has confronted during 2012's primary season the stunted upward mobility that refutes our American claim to meritocracy, the disturbing (and effective) "antiblack rhetoric" running through the Republican candidates for president, and the Right's agenda to mask inequity as "envy."
While these facts have been true likely since the founding of the country by the idealized Founding Father's who spoke for democracy but protected their own privilege, the rising evidence may be forcing Americans to set aside our rose-colored glasses and see that our commitments as a people are the rugged individualism myth and a corrosive faith in authority, hierarchy, and Social Darwinism/capitalism—not democracy and community.
Have NEA and professional organizations like NCTE, then, failed its members? Yes, but we should not be surprised.
Our governments, state and federal, and the agencies spawned by government (public education, the judicial system, etc.) are failing us also—and all for the same reason: Organizations codify.
All types of organizations seek guiding structures that accomplish two things—the compliance of its members and the preservation of the organization itself (Foucault, 1984). Organizations are by the fact of their existence conservative. Government's lifeblood is law and law enforcement, and those laws are the arm of the privileged, always.
NEA and NCTE, for example, are victims of that same process—creating rules and standards that ensure the compliance of its members and the existence of the organization.
Organization is the anti-thesis of democracy because democracy is the result of community, an organic and evolutionary way of being that is guided by principles but not bound by principles. Faith in an organization will always be broken, just as political leaders from all parties prove themselves not worthy of anyone's faith once they step inside the organization.
Obama ran on hope and change, but there was never any hope for change: Organizations cannot tolerate change.
Some surface details appear to change, however, and the allure of that appearance is carefully crafted by those in power who seek to maintain their power. America in 2012 is in many ways different than America before women we allowed to vote and America before African Americans were allowed to be equal people under the law. But let's not forget that both of these came about by marginal and technical paternalism. [1] Those in power bestowed upon people what was rightfully theirs as humans, simply by their birth: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
We are much closer as a people to the ideal of democracy with the historic civil rights accomplishments of women and African Americans, but we will fail them if we continue to pretend that we are finished. Making gains in the rights of some is not necessarily gaining the rights of all; much is left to be done. Privilege survives by masking, but it also thrives on complacency.
America, in fact, is the land of the privileged whereby those in power evoke as reality those ideals we should be pursuing. The candidates in the Republican primary are not unique (we can say the same for the Democrats), but they are personifications of making claims that mask that the opposite is true.
Out of their privileged mouths come pearls of meritocracy and rugged individualism, and they perform as if there is some sort of great debate among them as well as between any one of them and Obama (there isn't). But the appearance of argument is essential to keep all eyes and ears focused on them and their bromides.
While in the background, reality is quite different:
• Poverty is growing, particularly in the lives of American children.
• Economic mobility has stagnated in the U.S., which is exceptional when compared to the rest of the world (but not as we claim).
• American prisons are filled with more than 10 men to each woman, and while there are 5 times as many white males than African American males in the U.S., American prisons house 6 times as many African American males than white males.
• African American boys are suspended from school three times more often than white males, again despite there being far more white males.
• In 2010, women earned about .77 to every dollar for a man.
And the list is much longer, a list that confronts the self-serving dishonesty coming in the form of political stumping.
Whether it is the election of the next president or the behavior of NEA, expect only that those in power will keep the rules clear and tight, rules and enforcement of those rules that will maintain the status quo, even as those in power say they are challenging the status quo.
National standards, increased testing, and calls for greater teacher accountability are not about education, but about control, about maintaining the culture of privilege that is the United States of America.
"No excuses" mantras about educating children in poverty and charter schools re-segregating education are not about education—and these slogans and commitments are coming from people with privilege, people above accountability.
The lifeblood of democracy is community, and on that we have only a deafening silence.
These words, "In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike," appear to be a measured refuting of claims made by Republicans in the 2012 primary, but this is in fact Martin Luther King Jr. from 1967.
In the coming days, King's name and words will be invoked often—from the Left and the Right. But few, possibly none, I suspect will note that King called for a national minimum salary to alleviate poverty (a cost similar to the U.S.'s commitment to Vietnam). But few, possibly none, I suspect will note that King blamed our market economy, not people in poverty:
"We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty."
But few, possibly none, I suspect will note that King recognized that "[e]ven semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading."
But few, possibly none, I suspect will note that King offered the challenges still facing democracy:
"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty....Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice."
America has failed democracy and chosen instead "the blind operation of our economic system." To paraphrase Matthew Henry, none are so blind as those who will not see.
[1] Here, I am making a judgmental commentary on those in power during the key moments in U.S. history when women gained the vote and African Americans succeeded in driving civil rights legislation. The empowerment of women and African Americans was demanded by many powerful women, African Americans, and people who acknowledged their rights, but the power elites were always seeking to concede as little as possible and often held the initial, although arbitrary, power.
Reference
Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. Ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.