Quizzing the Experts: Welcome Notes from Your Suspicious Edu-Guide

Charter schools are the last best hope for low-income families; Charter schools are Trojan horses poised to pillage, plunder, and raze public education, and ghettoize the least privileged permanently - while the Charter-preneurs pocket millions evermore.

Teachers unions are the enemies of education reform, and non-unionized teachers from such elite ranks as Teach for America are the solution to getting better teachers; Teachers' unions are the bulwark of professionalism and retention of master teachers, and the likes of Teach for America are emperors in new clothes, five-weeks-of-training wonders who serve their two years with intentions to quit immediately afterwards and parlay their "public service" into lucrative careers in think tanks and edu-businesses as "education experts" - an expertise, again, of two-year rookies.

Standardized tests measure the quality teachers and schools; Standardized tests poison the quality of teachers and schools, relegating both to functions of teaching to dumbed-down tests.

You see where I'm going with this - and I could go much, much further. My point in that little exercise above is to establish, here at the outset of this blog, my take on the education policy discourse, interest groups, and players, and my own slants ideological, pedagogical, socio-economic, and more.

Your Guide as an "Expert Skeptic"

1. A Think Tank is an imposing thing. It provides research, amasses data, and shapes that data into influential policy arguments. But a Think Tank is also an ideological machine. It has its vested interests, and too often hides its motives behind that vest, its connections to lobbyists working for private gains. So I'm skeptical when I read Think Tank thinkers. Not closed, mind you; skeptical. They're so well-funded, I always suspect they try to buy us with their bias.

2. A union is also an imposing thing. It protects its members from exploitation and injustice, and provides standards of professionalism to keep out the charlatans and incompetents. That's no small service. But I'm a teacher, and actively read and talk to teachers in cities and towns across America, and that context makes me skeptical of unions too, in many ways. If unions resist innovations in teacher training and development, if they block attempts for superior teachers to receive superior pay, then we may have a problem with unions.

3. Education journalists from top-shelf newspapers - the New York Times or Washington Post, L.A. Times or Atlanta Journal-Constitution - deserve skepticism too. As a radio news-writer myself here in Seoul, I know first-hand how a managing editor, worried about offending big advertisers or those in charge of his/her career ladder (who have their interests too) can control what staff writers do and don't report, and how they report it. But things get weirder with the mainstream presses: they seem to all be writing from the same press releases these days, and in a baldly ideological way. Case in point: for a good three weeks leading up to Obama's pick for secretary of education, almost all the banner papers published reviews of the front-runners using the same slanted frame. They labeled pro-NCLB educational free-marketeers like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan as "reformers," while labeling NCLB opponents who advocated reforms of a more progressive stamp as "traditionalists." The repetition of this meme through most of our most-respected papers was not only bizarre; it was disturbing. It amounted to a propaganda campaign to demonize the anti-NCLB candidate. (And let me pre-empt the predictable commenter by quoting Henry Kissinger's old saw, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong.")

--and most deserving of skepticism of all? How many of our education experts lack a pretty basic prerequisite for that title: experience in the field? How many of them have ever taught 200 kids a week, been an administrator or counselor or nurse or social worker for a school and its community - especially a poor one? Of those who raise their hands and say, "I did," a follow-up: for how long? And how long ago?

The short version? How do any of these experts deeply know whereof they speak? And who pays their rent?

Parting Shot: Your Guide Shows His Hand

I like that Change dot Org calls us subject editor-writers "guides" instead of "experts." Guides are especially useful for expert-filled mazes like public education.

I plan to guide here, as I teach in the classroom, with a heavy mix of Socrates. Rather than play the expert and "teach the truth," it's more profitable to sting the truth-preachers with skeptical questions. Think tanks, unions, wonks, journalists, policy-makers - they all need their gadflies.

And my own bias? I do believe in equal opportunity for all. And I do question whether unregulated business and free market fundamentalism will serve education any better than they've served, um - business and the free market. Anybody want to talk Wall Street?

But maybe I'll learn I'm wrong.

~   ~   ~

And welcome, by the way.

Call me Ishmael Clay. And know I'm bummed right now. I'm excited by this new marriage, but am down with a nasty flu as I write. Talk about an anti-climactic honeymoon.

Photo by phauly