Teachers- America's New Welfare Mothers...

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