Accountability

There is a type of person who gets off on being brought in to either restore or impose a new level of order upon things, and I have endured the onslaught of this type of person in many settings. Of all the nonprofit organizations and “community efforts” I’ve volunteered for there has not been one that has not, sooner or later, been subjected to a savior, usually someone who (though white) really “gets” one ethnic group or another and is here to raise a little awareness among the Caucasians. In my family, one of my brothers engineered and executed a hostile takeover after our father died, claiming all along that he was acting in “everyone’s best interests.” And at the PR agency where I used to work, even though I had the good fortune to leave before being able to type on Facebook and Twitter became more valued than fluency in a language other than English, every eight months or so someone would be introduced who was really, really going guide us all down a new path that would lead to a new level of glory – one we’d never even imagined. We’d never imagined it because, as it turned out each and every time, it didn’t exist, and that was always the theme of the after-work gatherings organized for the sole purpose of celebrating the quiet termination of the once rising star’s employment.

In my experience there is only one thing at which these people truly excel, and that is damage.

I recently read an article by the former chancellor of the public schools in New York City. Not long ago he resigned and went to work for some corporation, which warranted an interview on the PBS Newshour, which didn’t make much of an impression on me one way or the other. What the article promised, though, was an insider’s view of what’s wrong with public education in this country, so I was interested. After many years at the helm, he left the schools pretty much as he found them, which is to say not good. It had nothing to do with his leadership, though. The biggest problem crippling the public schools in New York? The teachers, of course, and their damn union. The whining in the article was kind of funny, actually. Those union people got together and caused someone they didn’t like to lose an election. Sometimes they met with legislators to influence votes on specific bills. When they sensed that someone like the former chancellor was trying to undermine them one concession at a time, they refused to budge. Worst of all, they expected their seniority to be factored into their salary. The nerve, I thought.

While I believe education (not training) is as important as healthcare and a livable environment, I do not worship at the altar of teacherhood. I don’t know many teachers, but I wouldn’t trust either of the two I do know to correctly sign the pets in for their annual checkups down at the veterinary clinic, never mind run a classroom. I also think I’ve had the “it’s for the children!” card thrown in my face a few times too many by our friends at the Portland Public Schools. At the same time, the louder the anti-union drum beats in this country, and the more often it’s recited in any number of venues as a matter of fact, the more I doubt it. You do not have to take in too many pages from the history books to realize that we do not like it when people who earn working class wages organize. And thanks to some amazing marketing campaigns, even people who earn working class wages don’t like it when people who earn working class wages organize.

So, now that we’ve shipped millions of jobs to countries that do not have unions, even though corporate profits are soaring – and soaring they are, in spite of the recession - our main focus is government employees. And there is no group of public employees we seem to enjoy bashing and blaming more than teachers. For those who prefer easy targets over substance, public school teachers are a bonanza: They’re lazy. They cannot get a real job. They get the summers off. And they have pensions.

It’s the pensions, of course. Isn’t it funny how a pension used to be a pretty much standard part of job, kind of like health insurance and paid holidays? It an amazing testament to the power of marketing, it’s not just the pensions that have disappeared; logical conversations about them have disappeared as well as people who do have pensions have been cast as borderline criminals. Why? Because the rest of us allowed ourselves to be spoken for by people who were either too gullible or greedy (or both) to acknowledge that handing the country’s retirement affairs over to the stock market was and is a profoundly bad idea. If we think pensions are expensive, just wait until people my age start retiring on funds long gone in the name of extending shareholder value.

And it’s all the union’s fault, of course. The former chancellor has such a low opinion of unions, in fact, that he prefaced a quote from a member by saying it was “… surprisingly enough the best case for greater accountability …” There were two words that caught my attention, the first being “surprisingly.” Because the union folks are stupid? Because they’re hiding something? Because union people aren’t capable, usually, of making a “best case”?

On my scorecard, that’s zero points for the former chancellor and two points for the teachers and their union, the first for having the sense and stamina to fight the horrifically short-sighted idea of abolishing pensions, the second for perceiving and receiving the former chancellor as exactly what he is: a condescending, confrontational bully. Like my brother who was shocked when one of my sisters retaliated after he said he was “very surprised” that she knew the answer to a trivia question about the largest country in Africa, the former chancellor, in spite of the fact that he basically called the teachers and the union not quite a bright as himself, seemed surprised that relations between them and him weren’t so great. The fact that many people do not respond positively to authoritarian condescension seems to be a challenging concept for aspiring saviors.

The second word is accountability. In addition to accountability, his article was laced with enough corporate non-language language to banish a person not only from the position of chancellor but from ever setting foot in a classroom. There was talk about measurement and metrics, teacher value-add, standards (lots of standards, a term so vague and prone to distortion that new sheriffs cannot help falling in love with it), test data, evaluation criteria and so on and so forth. There was also a ton of boilerplate rhetoric that appears in nearly every one of these articles where someone – anyone, really, including billionaire software tycoons – tries to position himself as having the secret combination to unlock “education reform”: Our schools are failing! Our students are falling behind! Our students will not be able to compete in an increasingly global economy!

Just for the hell of it, here’s my boilerplate rhetoric: Throw the standardized testing bullshit into the fire pit. Teach the little ones the parts of speech and use the classics to teach them to read and write. Force the youngsters to master Latin. Terminate, immediately and irrevocably, the employment of anyone who uses words like “metrics” and “measurement” in buildings leased, owned or otherwise occupied by a public school district or entity. I know there’s no way to cancel the option to major in education (it’s too late for that) but I think that rather than hiring a person with an education degree to teach math, a mathematics major would be a better bet. Get as many brutal, middle-aged women in front of the classrooms as possible, and reward them for scaring the living hell out of the children as often as possible. Though not popular, fear works.

But that’s just my opinion, so back to the former chancellor. He went in to save the schools from themselves and the evil forces undermining them, namely the teachers union. For eight years he was a glorified bat boy, working for those who think it’s a good idea to teach youngsters not to think critically but to pass tests, for those who make sure the national focus remains on teachers’ pensions rather than the fact that enormous corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes, and even at the rank of bat boy this guy failed. I suppose his quitting to take a corporate job where he doesn’t have to endure the horrors of employees organized in order to protect themselves from him is a form of accountability. But why does he get a few thousand words in The Atlantic to blame everyone else for his failure?