Democrats: "We Suck Less Than That Other Guy"

Every election and primary cycle brings the same question back around-- do we support the lesser of two evils, or throw support to a non-viable third party candidate?

This used to qualify as not-really-a-question. In 2012, lots of Democrats were super-unhappy with Obama's first term. Teachers were already being pretty open about feeling that Obama had implemented education policies that George Bush would have been proud to call his own ( I was one of those vocalizers). But the Democratic party responded with a fairly clear policy of, "Screw 'em. They're never going to vote for Mitt Romney, so we'll do exactly what we have to do to keep their votes, which is jack squat." And they weren't wrong; I, too, held my nose and voted for Obama.

I'm pretty sure that I'd like to have that vote back.

Democrats have gotten lazy and abusive. Every election we trot out scary pictures of reactionary right-wingers (and a handful of GOP candidates always oblige by acting like cartoons). "You know you're going to vote for us," they barely bother to say. "We're not as bad as those other guys."

If we make noises about voting for an RC Cola candidate (someone not from the two major marketeers), we get a guilt trip about how that will spoil the election for somebody, and we won't end up with our preferred lesser of two evils. Don't throw your vote away on a non-viable candidate.

And then they go back to sucking up to Hoi Polloi Posteriors.

But every cycle, the challenge to the status quo gets a bit more real.

For a while this week, it looked like Working Families Party might actually back somebody other than Andy Cuomo. It looked enough like it that the establishment Dems were required to go cut a deal, and even then the vote came in at 58.66% to 41.34%, which is not exactly a nailbiter, but it's not nothing, either. Meanwhile, de Blasio fished the Cuomo knife out of his own back, cleaned it, and knelt before Cuomo to present it hilt first while saying, "My liege." The result of all this is not good news-- Cuomo is no more a liberal Democrat than a Twinkie is a great source of protein-- but it is certainly one more clear sign of how completely the Democratic establishment has abandoned anything remotely its principles.

Up in Connecticut, Jonathan Pelto is mounting a third-party challenge to pretend-Democrat governor Dannel Malloy, which will inevitably be dismissed in language suggesting a vote for Pelto is just a wasted vote. And hey-- third party challenges work out almost never

And so Democratic voters in those states and in other locations around the country face the same question again-- do we vote for someone who is arguably the lesser of two evils? If you're facing the question, here's a couple of questions to ask yourself.

1) If you are always going to vote Democratic no matter what, what reason does the party have to ever listen to you ever? If you cannot imagine circumstances under which you would deny the Democratic party your vote, then you also cannot imagine circumstances under which the party would listen to you. (Unless you're really rich, in which case they will totally listen to you.)

2) How much worse would the other guy be, really? Yes, he's probably some GOP tool that you don't like, but really honestly truly, how much worse would he be?

Because this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. The Democratic party will not turn on a dime, and it will not turn at all until it perceives that Democrats in general and teachers in particular have really had enough, enough to actually change election results. A third party candidate who loses, but who steals a sizeable chunk of the vote, sends a message. It may well take a bit for the message to sink in, but no message will even be sent if teachers keep going back to the Democratic party, nursing our black eyes and saying, "Well, it was my fault he got upset and punched me, and besides, he's so much better than anyone else who would have me."

Important political pro tip: It does not matter how upset people are with you. As long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to win elections, you don't have to pay it the slightest bit of attention.

The lesser of two evils is still an evil. For Democrat teachers (particularly the ones in NY) it might be time to stop voting for an evil and to start using the vote to make a statement about what is good.

Welcome to Common Core Hospital

Nurse Duncan: Welcome to Common Core Hospital. How may I assist you?

Chris: My name's Chris Wobble. I was just in a car accident. My arm seems to be broken in about three places.

Nurse Duncan: All righty, then. We just need to do some assessments here to see what shape you're in. As a major health care provider, your health data determines our success rate. Now first we're going to take your blood pressure. Let me just put the blood pressure cuff on your arm here...


Chris: Ow! Owwww!! Hey!! Holly mother of God! I told that arm's broken!!

Nurse Duncan: Sir, our standard procedure is to take the blood pressure with the right arm. Stop whining. Show a little grit.

Chris: Aaaaaaiiieeeeeeee!

Nurse Duncan: Goodness. Your blood pressure numbers are quite bad. Quite bad. We are going to have to address that with an immediate treatment plan. Bad blood pressure numbers are a sign of poor health. Often they are related to excess weight. Are you fat?

Chris: Do I look fat? Look, do you want to just weigh me?

Nurse Duncan: Oh, we don't have any scales here. We find that the blood pressure measure is all we need to determine patient health quality. Let's just continue with my questions. Are you suffering from any stress or anxiety over the last few weeks that might have elevated your blood pressure?

Chris: Well, my frickin' arm is broken!! But that only happened today.

Nurse Duncan: I think we must conclude that your blood pressure problems are the result of a sedentary lifestyle. Please answer the following multiple choice question. Which strikes you as the most likely cause of your sedentary lifestyle. A) Your apartment does not have a gym, B) Your apartment is too small to offer room for exercise, C) You only socialize by drinking at bars, or D) Meal selections at your regular restaurant are high caloric content.

Chris: What? What??!! Those don't even make sense. And I live on a farm.

Nurse Duncan: We'll just write down A.

Chris: What hell is wrong with you?!!

Nurse Duncan: Let me consult my individualized treatment options chart. (Fiddles with iPad). According to our individualized treatment chart, your personalized treatment program is a regular series of push-ups to be performed daily. Could you drop and give me ten right now, please?

Chris: Are you insane? Can you not see that my arm has extra bends in it?

Nurse Duncan: The use of my own senses for diagnosis is strictly against hospital policy. By the way, if you could give me your drivers license, credit cards, and on line passwords, we'd like to copy those for our records.

Chris: Why do you need that information for anything? What are you going to do with it, anyway?

Nurse Duncan: Well, that's not really any of your business now, is it? And I must say, Chris, that this is a charter hospital, and if you are going to be difficult to work with or require additional treatment options or indicate that you are likely to yield poor results that would hurt our ratings, I will be counseling you out.

Chris: You mean I won't get any treatment?

Nurse Duncan: Oh no. You will still be able to seek treatment at the public hospital. You passed it on your way in-- that gentleman in the back of the pick-up truck out in the parking lot.

Chris: Man. Will he take my insurance?

Nurse Duncan: Well, he can have what's left of your coverage payment. We'll still be keeping our full fee here. Now, about those pushups...

Chris: Oh look!! Isn't that Mark Zuckerberg in the hall? Is that a check he's holding?

Nurse Duncan: What? Where?? (Runs out of room. Returns shortly, confused and sad). I guess I must have missed him. Now then, about those push-ups...

Chris: Oh, I totally did them while you were in the hall. Can I have a pain pill at least?

Nurse Duncan: We're happy to hand out pills, particularly if it will make you more co-operative. As soon as we've finished our consultation here. I need to give you a final blood pressure check to measure your progress during our visit.

Chris: Here, give me the cuff. I'll put it on myself.

Nurse Duncan: But you've put it on your foot, outside your boot.

Chris: Just get your data.

Nurse Duncan: Very well..........Hmm

Chris: Yes?

Nurse Duncan: (Picks up phone). Maintenance? Yes, the patient I'm seeing is apparently dead. Get someone down here to process the patient out before it counts against us.

Chris: Oh for the love of God.

Quarter Million Served

Some time this week, this blog passed the 250K mark. A quarter million.

I've been up and running since August of last year, but it took me a couple of months to figure out what I was doing, and not till January of this year did my writer's gland really kick in. So I've done a huge amount of business in a short amount of time.

There are several takeaways from this, I think. Because I don't think the story is that I am an awesome writer or a person with an unusually compelling story to tell. I can slap words together okay on a good day, and in the classroom I am neither God's gift to teaching nor a pedagogical disaster. I think I'm a pretty representative sample of American public educatorhood. Nor am I an outstanding example of of educational bloggery-- given my numbers and my reach, I'm maybe one of the C list bloggers. I haven't met anybody in the movement face to face, haven't spoken at any rallies, haven't been offered a seat at any of those tables, haven't done anything to raise the profile of my brand.

So what that tells me is that there is a powerful need out there for the message. There's a powerful need among teachers and parents and the other people who care about public education, a need to know that what looks crazy and wrong really is crazy and wrong, a collective need to stand next to people looking at some incredible disaster unfolding and to turn to the person next to you and say. "You see that, too, right? I'm not crazy, right?"

There's a powerful need for words. What I hear over and over again is some version of, "I knew something was wrong, but it was wrong in such a fundamentally bizarre way that I couldn't even find the words to explain. My gut just knew something was horribly wrong." Followed closely by, "Thank God it's not just me. I was afraid it was just me." There's a powerful need for clarity and understanding and a sense of connection to other people who share a belief in the promise and importance of public education.

I am always struck by the huge contrast between the Reformsters and the Resistance. On the Reformster side we find almost exclusively people who are making a buck from all this mess. We find glossy sites and paid consultant work and huge efforts (and expense) to push the carefully spun and crafted message out there. On the Resistance side, we find...well, we find a herd of cats. A big unpaid volunteer DIY widespread pay-your-own-expenses herd of cats. If Reformsters were working on the Resistance's collective budget, with the Resistance's expectation of monetary reward in their future, the battle would be over today, because they would have about three people left fighting for their cause.

My readership is not about me. It's about a cause that matters. It's about a value for our culture that is important, in which we believe, not because we're paid to believe, but because it really matters. Blogging is funny-- you can't get people to read you except by writing a message that resonates, that speaks to an audience.

So I'm grateful that an audience has found me, and that what I'm saying has some meaning and value to them. I am so thoroughly heartened to discover such a nationwide web of people who care so deeply about public education, an institution that I believe is one of the most important and powerful to ever step forth on the stage of human history.

I'm grateful to Diane Ravitch and the Bad Ass Teachers, both of whom helped an audience find me, and I am grateful to the literally hundreds of other bloggers who keep this fight going, and I am grateful to the fans of this space who have been such big boosters of my writing. It is an amazing world in which people with no resources by a computer and their own spare time can sit down and reach out to others, where a network of people can share their concerns and information and understanding and strength across the miles.

Those of us who love public education are many, and we're committed, and we're connected, and we're not going away, and we're not giving up, and we're not alone, and we're not dependent on the kindness of corporate sponsors. And if a C list blogger can gather a quarter-million reads in a little over six months, let that be a sign of just how huge we are in number. The Reformsters had better check their resources, because they are in for a long hard fight.

North Carolina To Teachers: "F#@! Off"

There are several state legislatures that are working hard to earn the "Worst Legislature in America" medal. Florida, where it's cool to use terminally ill children as political tools and their families as punching bags, has always been a strong contender. New York State staked its claim by taking the extraordinary measure of overruling local government because they didn't like its decision. Several states have worked to promote the teaching profession by stripping it of any professional trappings like decent pay and job security.

But when it comes to suck, North Carolina is a tough state to beat.

The legislature tried to make tenure go away entirely, but was frustrated to discover that they could not legally revoke tenure for people who already had it. But the wily legislators realized that they had a unique piece of leverage in a state where teachers' real-dollar wages have dropped every year for seven years.

The proposal is simple. NC teachers can have a raise, or they can have job security. They cannot have both.

They may have a raise. And who knows. Some day they might get another one. But they can also be fired for being too expensive. Or they can have job security, but Senate Leader Phil Berger warns that they will probably never see another raise again.

The message is as clear as it is simple:

North Carolina legislators do not want teaching to be a career in their state.

If you want to devote your career, your lifetime of work, to teaching, you cannot do it in North Carolina.

If you want to support a family, live like a grown-up, experience a lifetime of success teaching students, you cannot do it in North Carolina.

We often talk about how a state "destroys" or "ruins" teaching as a profession, but often that's a bit of exaggeration and  what we really mean is that they make it very, very hard to stay in teaching. But North Carolina proposes to actually do it-- to actually make teaching untenable as a career for self-supporting grown-ups. This goes past disrespect; this is demolition.

There is no upside in this for North Carolina. None. There is no benefit for a state that drives the most qualified teachers away. There is no benefit for a state system that becomes the system of last resort (Motto: Come see us if nobody else will hire you for a real job). There is no plus in telling new job applicants, "We intend to screw you over as a matter of policy." There is no benefit to students being taught by teachers who are working three jobs to make ends meet ("Sorry, but I won't be grading your papers until I get a night off from Piggly Wiggly"). There is no benefit to school environments when a state tells students, "Nobody needs to treat teachers with respect." There is no benefit for a state to tell its young people, "Hey, if you want to be a teacher when you grow up, y'all are gonna need to get the hell out of here."

There's plenty of benefit for other folks, kind of like the benefit of having one less hungry family show up for buffet night at Pizza Hut. Virginia can continue its teacher recruitment program ("Hey teachers! We're not great, but we sure as hell aren't North Carolina"). And I suppose this makes North Carolina a perfect staging area for TFA bodies

My heart goes out to people in North Carolina. If it were the place I was born and bred, I would be sadder than words can say, sad that my own people wanted  to trash our state, sad that they want to actively discourage good teachers from working there, sad that they had zero interest in trying to get the best possible system in place for their children. Hell, I'm not from NC and it still makes me pretty sad.

So kudos to you, NC legislature. Tomorrow may bring new assaults on education from a different assortment of political twits, but for today, you are, in fact, the worst legislature in all of America.

Transparency For Reals

Reformsters loves them some transparency. However, by "transparency" what they means is "we want to show your school scores and teacher VAM scores and other fun data-ish stuff to the whole world." But if that's transparency, then Phyllis Schlafly is a stripper. "Transparency" means that the man behind the curtain will pass out some numbers and we will treat them as revelation.

Well, bullocks to that. Here's how we could have some real transparency.

Test Transparency

Along with the score, all parents will receive the completed version of their child's test. A complete copy of the test, with their child's answers marked, plus a brief explanation of why the correct answer is correct.

Parents will receive a complete guide to correlating questions to test areas. IOW, "Question 5 measures the student's ability to make inferences from text." Both these and the tests will be available to any member of the public.

Scoring Transparency

If there is any sort of conversion process to turn a raw score into a final score, that process will be made public. Also available in print and on the net will be an explanation of how the cut scores were set. It should be in the kind of English used by actual human beings.

For tests that involve human scorers, that facility will be open to tours by any interested members of the public. The training manual for those scorers will also be published on paper and net. Scorers names and qualifications will also be available upon request. None of those workers will be under any sort of gag order whatsoever-- they can talk to anybody about any aspect of their work at any time. They can write operas about it and perform them on street corners.

If the test is assessed by computer, that will, first of all, not be a secret. Second of all, any documentation necessary to establish that the program is more dependable than a hamster in a box will be readily available.

Validity Transparency

All data supporting the assertion that the test is valid and reliable will be published in their entirety. Honestly, I don't know why these people are scared of this-- there won't be three people in the country who can bear to read through it. Likewise all data about the field testing of tests will be available for anybody who can stand it.

Data Transparency

All federal, state and local school entities will publish clearly and publicly what other entities will be using test data. All of them.

I actually like the idea of a requirement that every time a piece of your child's data changes hands (so to speak) or is used, the parents are emailed a notification. I balk on this only because I suspect everybody's email would quickly become unusable.

Financial Transparency

Every test will come with a clear indication of who is making money for it. The price per unit of the test will be printed on the front cover, just like a magazine. ("Hey Mom! We took a fifty dollar test today!")

All not-for-profit schools will publish in big bold letters how much they pay their various officials. Maybe on numbers across the back of a jersey that said officials must wear to work every day.

VAM Transparency

All VAM systems must publish their computing formulas in full. With a complete explanation. If the explanation cannot be understood by an average college-educated 22-year-old, the system must be thrown out and started over. All VAM systems must also publish any and all studies done to create the impression that VAM works.

In short, stop throwing numbers around an insisting that if they're numbers they must be True. If you want to be transparent, then stop hiding the heart and spine of this bogus data system in a dark black box. 

What Reformy Thing Most Needs To Die?

It's a fun thought experiment. If you could erase one aspect of the Reformy test-driven high-stakes privatizing Core-loving status quo, which would it be. If you had the political power to eliminate one head of the public-education-crushing hydra, which decapitation would lead your list?

Yes, this is like playing "What would you do if you won the lottery," and yes, the various parts of the beast are interdependent. But the debate about priorities often erupts in the Resistance, so it's a thought experiment worth having. So how would I rate the hydra heads on the Evil Bloodsucking Monsters That Must Be Killed Scale.

VAM

It would be less destructive to teachers if we simply divined evaluations with tea leaves. And when your entire labor force is in a state of fear and uncertainty and general beaten-downness because of an evaluation system that is unscientific, invalid, irrational, and just plain crap, that cannot be good for your institution. Sam Walton, of all people, famously said that the way you treat you employees is the way they will treat your customers (Sam is dead now). Public education is seriously damaged by this assault on its own front line troops; public education can't function when every employee and every building always live under the threat or imminent disaster.

EBMTMBK= 10

CHARTERS

It's not that charters as currently practiced don't deserve to die. They do, and they can be relied on, for the most part, to kill themselves. When hedge fund managers and investment dilettantes rushed to this market because they thought they could produce some ROI, they forgot that they wold also have to produce some results. I am truly sad that a whole boatload of students have to be chewed up by these fraud factories for the public to figure things out, but sometimes things have to break before they can be put right. I know it's harsh, but better tens of thousand of students today than millions tomorrow. But charters will mostly die on their own, sooner or later, depending on how much political capital their bought-and-paid for legislators are willing to invest in them.

EBMTMBK= 5

TFA

I look for the day when reality penetrates college campuses fully on this issue. There's a lot of good work being done to help idealistic young college students understand that if they want to be teachers, they should, you know, become teachers, and not under trained temp shock troops in the battle against having to pay professional wages in schools. But time and mission drift are starting to catch up with this decades old group, and people are even getting smart enough to ask "Is that real teaching on your CV, or just some Teach for America bullshit."

Still, they're a blot on the profession, a destabilizing influence in the schools they descend upon, and a work force that unnecessarily prolongs the life of deserve-to-die charter schools.

EBMTMBK= 7

DATA MINING 

This goes beyond being a simple education issue and challenges what we want and what we will accept as a society. It has yielded the odd spectacle of adults trying to protect a generation that, when it comes to data, are making no effort to protect themselves. Its specific threat to education is that it has shaped too much of what we do. Policy and curriculum decisions are made not on educational merit, not even on "hey this is easy to do, anyway," but because we want to structure things for best data generation and collection. But its specific threat to society is that it's horrifyingly invasive and just plain wrong.

EBMTMBK= 9

COMMON CORE STANDARDS

They're the face of the reformy status quo, the name that everyone uses as shorthand for the grand complex of all these other things. But how bad are they really? The answer is pretty damn bad, and the earn a "pretty damn bad" both for content and for the package its in. I swear I will go ballistic on the next CCSS apologist who says, "Well, yeah, it's a work in progress," because it's not a work in progress any more than the Washington Monument is a work in progress. If your claim is that you like them just fine except for a few things that need to be tweaked, then you don't like them just fine, because they will never be tweaked. And the content reads, particularly on the ELA side, as if they were written by overly self-confident amateurs (and we know why).

They are used as an excuse for testing and to bolster the idea that school is just vocational training and teaching is just content delivery. However, we do know how to deal with standards. We did it under NCLB. Close the door, keep an eye on the test, ignore the standards and teach as you know best. But other people learned, too, and they've set this game up so that CCSS and tests cannot be decoupled.

EBMTMBK = 8

THE BIG HIGH STAKES TESTS

Badly designed, badly implemented, poorly executed, and given power way beyond anything that remotely makes educational sense. The Test provides the bad data to be crunched badly for VAM. As with NCLB, The Test is also the true delivery system for dictating curriculum; your curriculum is whatever is on the test.

There is no Test Prep without The Test. There is no loss of weeks of instruction without The Test. And The Test is not so much the teeth of CCSS; it's more like the balls. Cut them off, and the standards become manageable, docile, trainable, less likely to hump your furniture. Okay, maybe not that one, but you get the idea. CCSS apologists like to say that the Standards would be fine if not for the test. No, the standards would still suck. But it would be way easier to ignore them or simply pay paper lip service to them while doing our actual jobs. And there is no arguing simply for a better test. As long as your job is to come up with a standardized test to test the educational status of every single student in the US so that they and their schools can be compared, your result is going to be ann educational abomination, every time.

The other factor here is that the Test is vulnerable, now that every parent in the country is seeing what a ridiculous fiasco it is. It is the factor in the reformy status quo that is most vulnerable, and on which so much of the rest of the worst rests on.

EBMTMBK = 11

What Should Conservatives Be For In Education

Over at the Young Guns network (which--eww-- you guys are politicians, not gunfighters, and you aren't all that young),  Frederick Hess has asked and answered the question, "What should conservatives be for in education?"

It's a good question. Conservatives have let themselves get boxed into a corner on the new test-driven high-stakes privatization status quo in education. On the one hand, the Obama administration has implemented education policies that are like a conservatives Christmas list. On the other hand, lots of conservatives would not accept a bucket of water from the President if they were on fire. The battle for public education has exacerbated the rifts in conservatism in this country, the great divide between small government conservatives, corporate conservatives, and social conservatives. Consequently, conservatives have ended up (and not just in education) as the Big Voice of No.

So what does Hess (who generally hews to a line somewhere between the very-endagered traditional conservative species and corporate conservatism) think that conservatives should be in favor of in the education world? To what should conservatives say Yes?

A Limited Federal Role

Washington doesn’t run schools. All it can do is write rules for schools. Congress can do little more than enact laws that tell federal bureaucrats to write rules for states, which write rules for school districts, which then give directions to schools. Washington can therefore force states and districts to do things, but it cannot make them do those things well. And when it comes to complex enterprises like public schooling (with 50 million students and nealy three and a half million teachers), whether things like teacher evaluation and school “turnarounds” are done matters far less than how they are done. 

I think that's all correct. Conservatives should be for local control with a federal role limited to making local control easy to do.

Yes, some local control situations will result in Poor Choices. Liberals, conservatives, mugwumps, and snapdoodles all have the same problem with freedom-- the nagging certainty that somebody somewhere will use his freedom to make a Poor Choice. But here's the thing. If you're not free to make a Poor Choice, you are not free at all.

Conservatives are supposed to place a high value on personal responsibility. Well, to turn Stan Lee on his head, you can't have great responsibility without having great power. People cannot be responsible for things over which they have no control. Conservatives ought to be saying, "You are smart people. Figure it out," and not "Shut up and do as you're told." Obedience is not supposed to be a traditional conservative value.

So, Conservatives should be in favor of pushing power down to the front lines, to taking the federal foot off the local school board neck.

School Choice

Hess really thinks conservatives should support school choice. I think he's wrong. I used up a bunch of bandwidth explaining why, but the short answer is, school choice is a great imaginary system in the same way that communism is a great imaginary system. But in the real world, it doesn't do any of the things supporters imagine it's going to.

Improving Transparency

I agree that conservatives should support this in the same way that I agree conservatives should support eating and breathing.

Hess thinks we achieve transparency by continuing to release the results of a secret test that nobody is allowed to see, comment on, or offer corrections to. Nope, we should just believe that tests measure exactly what the testmakers say they measure. "You may not look behind the curtain. Just trust the voice of the Wizard of Tests." And there's certainly nothing transparent about the processes used to transform test results into "measures of school quality" such as VAM.

So if conservatives say yes to transparency, let's really say yes. The day after The Test, let's put a copy of the test on line. Let testmakers append an explanation of how the three questions about an armless pineapple determine a child's ability to decode context clues. VAMsters are required to release their special secret formulas to the whole world and then to justify them. And then when it turns out that all of that, from test through data crunch methods, is transparently crap, we can have a transparent conversation about how to do better.

Educational Research

Traditional conservatives have a history of intellectual heft and hardnosed devotion to true facts, so it makes sense for conservatives to support educational research. As long as it's good. Because the problem with educational research is that much of it is bunk, studies that rest on behavior of twenty volunteer sophomores at an ivy league school, or on deep squinty readings of other peoples' research.

But conservatives should be all about getting schools useful data without also telling them how they're supposed to use it.

Constructive Deregulation

Federal and state relationships with educational regulation has always been weird. Representatives who want to plug choice will tout it as a way to escape bad school regulations, but wouldn't another solution be to get rid of the regulations? It's like chaining your dog to the porch and then declaring you need a new dog, because the old one won't run around the yard with you. Just unchain the dog.

So by all means-- conservatives should be at the forefront of opposing and rolling back the giant tide of unfunded mandates that are a-swampin' our schools. (This, sadly, is not what Hess wants to do. Essentially, he advocates restructuring regulation so that it can be used to blackmail states into making choices he likes-- kind of like the current federal administration.)

Teachers and Unions

There are six million adults working in K-12 education in the U.S., and they have an intense, immediate, voting interest in schools. Equally important, teachers are routinely cited as the most reliable source of educational information by parents and voters. Conservatives should not treat
them as simply part of the problem with American education.

And I could quote the rest of this section, too. Clip this puppy and send it to every conservative politician in the country. Teachers are hugely affected by school-related garbage. Teachers really get the frustration of working under fed micromanagement. A great insight here-- teacher participation in unions is driven in large part by a need for protection from a broken system. Teachers are not the enemies of education; they are the front line troops.

Hess does not go so far as to call the union a good thing, but he does recognize that simply attacking it isn't helping anybody. He knows one of the best old anti-union tricks-- people feel far less need for a union when they trust their bosses and feel safe in their jobs.

The Agenda

Hess's conclusion is wrong, but reasoned well, albeit incompletely.

The conservative approach to education should follow the broader pattern of conservative policy thinking: enable the system to experiment with options; enable parents, students, and teachers to choose among those options; and let the failures fall away. 

Here he lets his corporate conservative side get the best of him. First, he argues that DC can create an environment in which businessmen and entrepreneurs can create jobs (which is a pleasant, if as yet unproven, premise), so it can do the same sort of marketty magic for schools. Even if we assume that's not paralleling apples and aardvarks, the market can cheerfully slough of failure; it only results in displaced business leaders and out-of-work laborers who, in a perfect world, will find new jobs. But "let the failures fall away" in education means sloughing off students, and that's just not acceptable.

What Hess Missed

I find Hess's work incomplete. I think there are some other values that traditional conservatives can, and should, also say "Yes" to when it comes to education:

Traditional Institutions

The traditional American public school system took on a task that was unheard of and achieved success that was previously unseen in human history. I know we all have to keep saying that public ed in this country is like a brakeless trackless train driven by a drunken blind elephant, but dang-- we educated more of our people than anyone, whether they were rich or not. We created social mobility. We became one of the first nations to ever rise to global leadership without actually conquering other countries. Conservatives are supposed to love our traditional institutions. When people attack them, conservatives are the ones who stand up with love for tradition. Let's apply some of that love to the American public school tradition of success.

Sacrifice

Thomas Paine told a story in The Crisis about a man who, standing with his son, wished for peace in his own time. Paine takes him to task, arguing that we should take the hit now so that our children don't have to. Some conservatives get this, at least rhetorically (e.g. She Who Must Not Be Named's frequent point that we should not make children pay for adult political squabbles).

But when, for instance, we've got corporate interests salivating at the chance to make a buck from education, it should be conservatives saying, "You will not get a cent until you convince us that the interests of our children will be cared for." And no, that doesn't mean simply talking about parental empowerment, because that's just an invitation for the various interests to bury parents under multiple snow jobs.

Does it not bother you, conservatives, that somehow the liberals got custody of the women and children? Be the group that says, "We will take the hit if it's for the good of the next generation. And we expect every corporation interested in education to do the same."

Patriotism

When the Chinese (and a few decades ago, the Japanese) were buying up every chunk of America not tied down or locked in a bank vault (in which case they just buy the bank), it's conservatives who stand up for America and American interests.

So where are conservatives as a foreign country steadily buys up every chunk of American education? Why are conservatives not raising a fuss about how American education is becoming a fully-owned subsidiary of a British company?


Me? I'm not sure what you'd call me. I don't particularly believe in Big Government, but I think there are some things that can't get done any other way. Some days I feel like a Libertarian, but then I remember that they would let their friends die because if you're poor, that's on you. I think anybody who is successful owes a huge debt of gratitude to God (or the universe, if you prefer) and that you pay it back by taking care of the people around you.

So I don't believe that conservatives are automatically evil and/or stupid. I do believe that they could be a positive part of the battle for public education but for some (cough $$$$ cough) reason mostly choose not to be (course, that's true of politicians across the entire spectrum). This list is not a bad place to start.