Exerpt of an article by NOAH BERLATSKY on The Atlantic
America hates
teachers.
That's not exactly the
thesis of Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, but her account of 200
years of education policy provides plenty of evidence for it. Education reform, as so often
before, seem(s) to be less about aiding students than about targeting teachers.
Goldstein argues that
discussions of education in the U.S. have repeatedly been framed in terms of
moral panics. A moral panic, she says, occurs when "policymakers and the
media focus on a single class of people … as emblems of a large, complex social
problem." That single class of people is then systematically demonized, as
politicians and pundits present "worst of the worst" cases as
emblematic of the whole.
In fact, moral panics do more than
demonize a group of people. They serve in part to create a group of
people—to delimit or describe a particular identity and mark it as deviant. Such as the moral panics around poverty and the "welfare
mother".
The comparison between
welfare mothers and teachers may seem overdone… but again, the good teacher/bad teacher dichotomy is
predicated on the idea that the bad teachers are already in place and must be
driven out by the good teachers. The dream, from Beecher to today, seems to be
that if only our schools could get rid of the career educators and install
angels instead, the millennium would arrive...
Read the entire article on The Atlantic
Read the entire article on The Atlantic
