I haven't written much (and certainly haven't hit publish) in a great while, mainly due to fear. I cannot afford to become embroiled in politics when I don't have a job. With the legislature in my state set to take away tenure, even if I land a teaching position tomorrow I may well never have enough job security to be able to speak my mind in any forum at all, much less a public space like this. But the events in Wisconsin (my childhood home and where I once longed to return) have unsettled me to the point that I feel the need to say something.
That independents (who tend not, alas, to actually be independent) and conservatives backed Walker was not a surprise in any way. Neither was the far too neat analog of the first Barrett-Walker matchup to the latest results. No, what bothers me most is why so many people, Democrats included, have a raging hate-on for public sector workers like teachers, postal workers and the ‘old biddies’ at the DMV.
About those magic asterisks:
* public/government employees
** everyone else (including, for some damn reason, a significant number of public/government employees)
As a teacher (unemployed, yes, but still licensed) and a graduate student, I suppose I identify immediately with the spirit of outrage that infected 100,000 Wisconsinites in the first months of 2011. I had some hope that the attitude of disdain and contempt that had began to wax with the Supreme Court's appointment of Junior was finally starting to wain. I thought that, maybe, the mood of the country was finally moving away from "blame the teachers first" to something more like "what qualifies Bill Gates, Eli Broad or Scott Walker to tell us what to do?" It's apparent, and has been so all along if I'm honest, that a fair few Democrats and a dishearteningly high number of progressives buy into more than just the idea that some reform is necessary in public schools; sadly, they seem set to blame the teachers first, to punish them second, and to finish by crippling public education forever.
Here in North Carolina (oh, how that 'North' is misleading), the GOP controlled general assembly is set to strip teachers of tenure, as well as pay based on experience and education. They want to expand the number of charters which, here at least, means getting rid of bussing and school lunches, social workers and counselors while not spending one more dime on educating the students. Oh, and our charters don't have to respect teacher tenure, pay schedules, or even require teaching licenses.
Yet if I say (I'd rather shout until I'm blue in the face, really) that charter schools represent a clear violation of Brown v. BOE and that, nearly fifty years on, separate is still inherently unequal I get accused by a gaggle of pro-'reform' Kossacks of Charter Derangement Syndrome. I get told (scolded more like) that no sensible person could be opposed to using merit-based pay. Obamabots tell me that I'm foolish or worse for thinking that Race to the Top is a terrible program that represents a bunch of pre-packaged solutions looking for a non-existent problem. I see lie upon lie put forth by people of all political stripes and I fear that, if they can get away with this sort of scheme in a state with strong public sector unions like Wisconsin, they will get away with so much more in a right-to-work (for less) state like North Carolina. Sadly, if they do get rid of tenure here, there won't be 100,000 North Carolingians mobbing Raleigh. There will only be token protests, broken spirits and the smug grins of those** that have hated us* all along.
But why? The only answer I have is resentment. The GOP has been fueling this resentment of teachers since at least Reagan, and likely since 1954 when the federal government first "intruded" into how states ran their schools. The anti-Union fervor goes back at least a half-century more. The Reaganites have been successful at driving a wedge between public and private unions and pitting the one against the other. There is this notion that government workers are somehow overpaid, receive too many benefits, don't work long enough and (at least for teachers) get to have every summer off. Sadly, I've heard this attitude expressed by Kossacks and even some of my fellow educators.
And because nearly everyone in the US has sat in classrooms for a dozen years or so, nearly everyone thinks they know what it is to teach. The same thing happens at the post-office and the DMV. Too many people seem to think that having to stand in line or to wait for a bit too long has granted them insight enough to know what it's like to work there and wisdom enough to know how to make it all run so much more smoothly. Which is why the post office has now been forced into the red by having to cover the retirement benefits of employees that haven't even been born yet.
I suppose I don't really mind that Republicans want to do away with government. That has been part of their philosophy for my lifetime at least. But I cannot feign ambivalence that Democrats and progressives have bought into the bullshit. I cannot abide Mayor Emmanuel's attacks on teachers or Secretary Duncan's undermining of public education. I cannot pretend to be okay with the idea that Walker had the support of 30-some percent of union households. Somewhere along the line, we have allowed Reagan's mantra of the government as the problem to become nearly a parable. I can accept the disdain, the contempt and the hatred of hard-wired conservatives, but I am drained and disheartened by the knowledge that it isn't Us against Them; rather, it is Us against Ourselves.