It is becoming increasingly clear that the Obama administration intends to destroy the careers of dedicated teachers across America. President Obama signaled this personally by endorsing the firing of all the teachers in Rhode Island’s poorest school. A school where transient low-income minority children, two-thirds of whom were Hispanic, made education extremely difficult.
Rather than recognizing their problems and providing resources and assistance to support this school, Obama chose to attack the teachers. It is his intent, announced in his education policies, to repeat this across the country, over and over, bashing teachers.
At the same time, Obama mandates that states increase the number of charter schools despite the fact that the most credible research on charter schools using matched students found that twice as many charter schools performed worse than scored better than matched public schools, and less than half scored about the same. The true purpose of charter schools is to destroy teacher unions. But both teachers and teacher unions can fight back.
There is something that teachers can do to radically change the educational environment in America while at the same time improving children’s chances to learn and thrive in public education. Something that echoes the famous American quotation, "I have just begun to fight!" It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but it will reinvent the great Freedom Rider protest movement of the 1960s that crushed Jim Crow. Just as Black protestors rode buses into the deep South to attack segregation, teachers now need to register and vote Republican in primary elections across America.
There are two unassailable facts surrounding the recent attacks on public education. First, the primary source of attacks on public school teachers comes from the Republican party. They have attacked public school teachers on almost every front, from alleging they are grossly incompetent to impugning the training of teachers as unnecessary and suggesting anyone should be allowed to be a teacher.
Second, teachers’ unions have been the backbone of the Democratic party in recent years. From organizing to funding, teacher unions have emerged as the inheritors of the great tradition of organized labor as the major pillar of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, as a consequence, Republicans view any money provided to teaches the same as money to fund the Democratic party.
Derivative of these two unassailable truths is a more fundamental truth: the Democratic party sees that teachers have no place else to go. The Obama administration sees that to broaden its political position it needs to appeal to marginal Republican voters and independents. To do that it adopts the clothing of Republicans on issues. Their fundamental belief is that the teachers, and several other core Democratic party constituencies, have no place else to go. So by acting Republican the Democrats can appeal to marginal Republicans.
However, teachers do have somewhere else to go. They can go to Republican primaries. As long as teachers continue to be stalwart Democrats, the Republicans will be free to attack public education as nothing more than funding for the Democratic party. In essence, teachers have replaced Black Americans as the objects of Republican scorn. The new Jim Crow is discrimination against teachers.
Ironically, after the George W. Bush debacle, the Republican party is ripe for a new Freedom Ride crusade. The reality is that too many political races in the United States are not competitive. The primary election almost completely determines the outcome. The teachers and their unions almost always participate in the Democratic primaries and the result is that Republican primaries are populated by default by anti-teacher candidates.
The new Freedom Ride against the new Jim Crow means that teachers and teacher unions have to start going into Republican primaries. This will cause two massive changes in the political landscape. First, it will mean that Republican challengers in Republican primaries can begin supporting public education in order to attract the votes of teachers. Second, the Democratic party can no longer afford to join the bashing of teachers and teacher unions because they will lose their votes in close races.
At one time, not long ago, the teachers and teacher unions were necessarily Democratic largely because of the Jim Crow South. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education integrated schools and triggered the desegregation of the United States. Thus the battleground for Civil Rights began in the public schools and teachers and teacher unions supported Civil Rights.
But it is no secret that the Republicans pursued their "Southern Strategy" under Ronald Reagan to appeal to the racists among the Dixiecrats who formed the core of "The Solid South" that once always voted Democratic. The concept of vouchers and school "choice" arose in the Republican party to create "White academies" to avoid integration. But teachers, for the most part, supported integration and teaching all children. Thus teachers became pariahs in the Republican party and replaced the Dixiecrats as the core of the Democratic party.
The landscape today is a consequence. Teachers and teacher unions must recognize the political reality. The new Jim Crow is the anti-public school Republican party, and the Obama administration is essentially the new Dixiecrats. The old Dixiecrats were Democrats who opposed Civil Rights, the new Dixiecrats are Democrats who oppose teachers and teacher unions.
The key to the future is a new movement of Freedom Rides and Sit Ins. But this time teachers have to go where they are equally unwanted and discriminated against as were Black Americans in the Jim Crow South: the Republican party. The more teachers and teacher unions start joining and funding Republican primaries, the more teachers and teacher unions will have a voice again in democracy.
This movement into the Republican primaries may be necessary to save the Democratic party as well. In recent years, epitomized by the Obama administration, the Democratic party has become a "me too" shadow of the Republican party. Look at nearly every major issue of the Dubya debacle and instead of the strident opposition we are now seeing from the Republicans, we saw "me too" from the Democrats.
The Dubya administration became possible partly because the Nader party siphoned off enough votes in protest that the Republicans became credible. But it also showed that a third party effort is essentially meaningless. Instead, teachers and teacher unions, and maybe even Naderites, need to consider the tactics of the great American naval leader John Paul Jones. When his own ship became destroyed in battle, he captured the enemy ship.
The enemy ship, in this case, is the Republican party, controlled currently by the remnants of the Dixiecrats from nearly a half-century ago. Now is the time to liberate the remnants of the moderate Republicans to regain control of their party under an alliance with the teachers and teacher unions who essentially have more in common with each other than their respective party leaders.
What they have most in common is a belief in public education and neighborhood schools controlled through democratic (little "d") locally elected governing boards. The fundamental policy difference is whether children are to be raised in accordance with the democratic principles of being their own masters, or with the Obama and Bush belief that children are little more than labor inputs for corporations.
But it won’t be done by staying put in their respective parties. It will take the equivalent of Freedom Riders, groups of both Black and White Americans who challenged the Jim Crow status quo, and by Sit Ins that prevented the status quo from functioning. Teachers and teacher unions need to show up like John Paul Jones' marines at hostile Republican party functions and sit in on decisions to fight to take over the enemy ship. Their old ship is failing them anyway.