President Barack Obama announced in March his administration’s plan for the failing U.S. system of public education. Underneath a thin layer of funding for early childhood education and higher education student aid lay a plan to continue decades of school privatization and anti-union measures.
|
Merit pay systems are misleading. There is no concrete definition for a “better teacher.” The government and school administrations often use test scores, which are dependent on a range of factors, the least of which is the teacher. The tests used are also heavily biased against children of working-class and oppressed communities.
Students from such communities are more likely to attend underperforming schools. These are usually starved of funds which translates into large classroom sizes and a lack of resources. The difficult conditions also lead to high teacher turnover and a disproportionate number of less experienced teachers among the staff.
These factors all contribute to a situation where overworked teachers must work even harder to give students the attention they need. In order to accommodate more students and overcome a lack of support and resources, teachers must work extra hours, most of which are unpaid. Teachers often pay for class supplies out of their own pockets because the school cannot provide them.
Education inequality is fundamentally tied to how schools are funded. Students from affluent neighborhoods go to well-funded schools and have access to the resources necessary to succeed: personal tutoring, smaller classroom sizes, after-school programs and more.
Teachers at better funded, high-performing schools will be rewarded, while the educators who have the greater challenge of giving quality education to students who come from struggling working-class families will be labeled “bad teachers.” In other words, merit pay punishes some of the most self-sacrificing educators for the adverse impact of the government’s deliberate underfunding of public schools in working-class communities.
At the heart of the merit pay drive is a demonization effort against teachers’ unions. Merit pay seeks to replace hard-earned union wages and contracts. An education system without unions leaves teachers and students vulnerable in the hands of a deteriorating capitalist economy. Public school teachers are already underpaid, and their benefits are under attack.
Obama’s speech also praised charter schools as the answer to our lagging education system. Arne Duncan, Obama’s hand-picked secretary of education, was a key figure behind Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 program, which favors private and charter schools at the expense of quality public education.
Charter schools are an attempt to privatize public education, as they are often corporately sponsored. Most charter schools function without teachers’ unions. Studies have shown that by selective outreach, specialized curriculum and marketing, charters accept a disproportionate number of white students in comparison to students of color.
Obama gained a lot of support from teachers’ unions during his election campaign by promising to scrap the much despised No Child Left Behind Act, one of the Bush administration’s many disgraceful legacies. But Obama hardly mentioned this during his March speech on education.
Instead, he touted merit pay and charter schools, going against everything unions have fought for: better working conditions for teachers and quality education for students. The time is now for educators, students and parents to take the struggle for justice to the streets. Now more than ever we must organize, mobilize—and unionize.
