The War Against Teachers, Chapter 3000

If NYC teachers, once the most organized and vocal group of teachers in the country, have their rights assaulted, not one teacher in the United States of America is safe.

There is a WAR going on, people, and our institutions like public ed are losing because of neoliberal policies pushed by both political parties which in turn are financed by billionaires and other privatizers.

But the politicians have decided to solve our education problems not by looking at root causes but by firing teachers. They feel certain that we can fire our way to the top. In 2010, New York won a Race to the Top award of $700 million. To obtain this money—very little, if any, of which will ever reach any classroom or student—New York said it would devise a teacher evaluation plan that was based in part on student test scores. Although this idea finds little support among testing experts, it is an obsession with the current U.S. Department of Education. The winning New York proposal, in order to get the support of the teachers' unions, said that 20 percent of teachers' evaluations would be tied to student scores.

Next will be the abolition of colleges of education because, after all, people who go into education have low SAT scores which means they are stupider (though SAT/ACT scores measure no such thing but merely indicate preparation for college) than the TFA-types from the Ivy League who are most likely crappy teachers and have no experience in the classroom. Naturally colleges of education were created because teaching was seen as a profession like medicine or law, but the privatizers don't believe it is a profession.