LCLB Reductio teacher bashing

[Csubstance@aol.com]

12/10/06

The Baltimore Sun article about the juvenile detention facility and its clash 
with NCLB reminded me of most of my nearly 30 years of inner city teaching. 

I taught many of those kids and can still list many of those I knew who were 
murdered before they reached voting age. In Chicago at least, the gang problem 
is getting worse, in part because the city is now concentrating the gang kids 
in a smaller and smaller number of schools as magnet schools and selective 
enrollment charter schools skim just about everyone else. We're reporting that 
story, part one of three, in the print edition of Substance, just mailed. 

The difference between now and 30 years ago is that back then those of us who 
chose to teach in the inner city were thanked, not only by the children and 
their families, but generally by the city (at least at time like this, in the 
press). Beginning in the late 1980s, (after "A Nation at Risk", although I 
didn't see it coming) the insidious teacher bashing that was formalized in NCLB 
began its slow creep. 

At this point, for all the silly prattle about getting "better" teachers in 
the inner city, that will not happen. Every prospective teacher knows that the 
best way to be a "good" teacher is to select a school with "good" (i.e., high 
scoring) students. My colleagues who moved into teaching at Chicago high 
schools like Lane Tech and Whitney Young (where my son is graduating in June) now 
longer had to worry about being fired for "poor performance", while those of us 
who continued to teach in the inner city and try and do something for those 
children who had been left behind by society as a whole were eventually blamed 
for those "failures", then fired. 

I had the ability to make some points as they went after me. Most of my 
colleagues who were teaching in schools that were closed didn't know what hit them. 
They thought that if they were doing their job well under the terrible 
circumstances they could describe, they would at least be thanked by someone.

Instead, under corporate "school reform," they've been fired. NCLB is doing 
this across the country now, but these things began as early as 1997 in place 
like Chicago (with the reconstitution of schools like Englewood High School) 
and continued though the Clinton years (with Bill Clinton praising Chicago's 
"reforms" in his State of the Union messages) long before there was a "No Child 
Left Behind."

Let's not forget that coroporate "school reform" is a bipartisan orgy of 
scapegoating teachers and kids. The devil's notes are coming due, because the 
products of those years are, for the most part, still alive. And where we once 
gave some of them a little hope in the inner city schools where we worked and 
taught, under "reform" were are all blamed for problems that no child created and 
no teacher furthered.

When we've ended "No Child Left Behind," it will take a generation to recover 
from the damage that's been done. I don't think the USA has enough time for 
that, so things are going to get very very very nasty. And all the strange 
talking points in the world won't stop those floodgates from crashing open, any 
more than those stupid phrases that ooze out of our President's mouth about 
"democracy" and "victory" in Iraq will pay the butcher's bill for the slaughter 
there. Sadly, of course, those who will pay the bill aren't those who wasted a 
generation. 

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.com