In an effort to inoculate myself against withering criticism from one of two raging factions, I'd like to make something clear at the outset: I love teachers. My dear old dad was a teacher. Some of my best friends are teachers. As a parent, I rejoice at seeing my daughter blossom under the patient guidance of her teachers. Yes, teachers are great.
I'm talking about public school teachers. Private school teachers—a largely non-unionized cohort and, as a consequence, often not as well paid as their public school counterparts—will have to find some other media wag to advocate for them. As a product of the Massachusetts public school system (most of elementary school, anyway) and the father of a child in public school, I hold public school teachers dear—dearer than any other public sector employee subgroup, dearer than police officers, firefighters and DPW workers; dearer, even, than the brave men and women who serve in our armed forces.
I love teachers, but that doesn't mean I think the schools are perfect, or that all teachers are perfect, or that every policy intended to support teachers is perfect. Indeed, as a parent and a taxpayer, I have deep concerns about the public schools and the political culture of which they are a part. But I find myself tempering my criticism of the schools.
I heard a story the other day from a parent—someone I'd consider a liberal—who had been complaining about the number of days public schools close so teachers can use them for training and professional development, what they call in-service days. She was speaking to some other mothers, most of whom seemed equally irritated by the school policy. One of the women, however, objected to her criticism, demanding to know how and when, with classrooms filled with students, the teachers were supposed to do the planning and training they needed to do.
"I wanted to say, 'How about during summer vacation? Or at night or on the weekends, when most other professional people are investing time on their careers?' But I didn't say it," the woman told me. "I didn't want to make trouble, particularly for my kid."
As a parent, but even as a political columnist, I feel like that woman a lot.
It is true that I have a skeptical view of government—not in the abstract, but government (if that's what we want to call it) as it is practiced by elected politicians, their appointees and the career public employees who do most of the heavy lifting—but my skepticism is rarely aimed at government workers. I reserve my ire for politicians and partisans—the folks who care more about winning and losing political games than they care about solving problems or serving the public interest. Together, politicians and partisans make a toxic combination, in which cynical calculation meets naive true belief.
Unfortunately, teachers have little direct say over the politics that shape public education. In politics, teachers are reduced to symbols, exploited by politicians and partisans in an effort to win a political game, not to improve the schools, to better educate children, to better reward and develop teachers.
At the local level, funding for public schools is often the biggest and most contentious issue for a city or town. Invariably, there is a faction that claims to represent the schools' interests—schools being defined broadly as a community, including students, teachers and parents—and another faction that claims to represent the taxpayers. Both factions usually include a number of people who, with goodwill in their hearts, truly hope to make a positive difference for the whole of their communities. Sadly, the factions are most often dominated by people who view politics as a zero-sum game.
As a left-leaning person who, broadly speaking, believes that public education is inadequately funded, I nevertheless oppose the tactics that are usually employed by pro-school factions in their endless battle for increased funding. In my view, pro-school factions who recoil from the idea of "reform before resources" (to borrow the notorious slogan from the statewide debate about transportation funding), are trading an opportunity to truly support public education for the cheap thrill of winning a political battle.
The suggestion that "resources" and "reform" are mutually exclusive, even contradictory ideas, is the kind of polarizing poppycock that serves only those who care about winning political contests and enjoying the spoils. For those of us who care about education for its own sake, particularly those of us whose loyalty to the schools comes mainly from having our own children in them, our goal should be to energize the schools by every means possible, to look for long-term improvements rather than short-term budget band-aids. We should demand both adequate resources and necessary reform.
We may well be surprised to see how interrelated the two issues really are.
