We coddle bad cops, vilify good teachers

 Paul Rosenberg
Wednesday, Sep 10, 2014 12:39 PM EST
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We defer to cops even when they kill, and scapegoat schools for the ills America has given up on. This must change
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The killing of Michael Brown brought a great many things into focus - so many that it can be hard to keep track of them all. One important point was the dramatic contrast between elite treatment of police - routinely deferred to, even when they kill - and the routine scapegoating of teachers, who are demonized for all the ills that America's elites have given up on.  Of course, this has nothing to do with police officers and teachers themselves. It has everything to do with the roles they play - or can play - in either strengthening and defending the status quo, or in empowering possibilities of change.
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Darren Wilson not only typifies how dangerous bad police can be in America, but also how heavily protected they are.  Shortly after he was publicly identified, the Washington Post revealed that his first police job had been in Jennings, Missouri, a rare example of a police department shut down because it was so broken (primarily with regards to race relations) that the city council thought it was impossible to fix.  But Wilson carried no stain of that with him.
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Teachers, in contrast, have grown all too familiar with mass firings in recent years, as schools are routinely closed with little or no relationship to actual teacher competency or conduct. Indeed, President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have been enthusiastic supporters of this trend. In Chicago, where Duncan ran the school system before his Cabinet appointment, successive rounds of "school reform" firings have reduced the percentage of black teachers from about 40 percent to just under 30 percent, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed in late 2012. In New Orleans, more than 7,000 teachers were fired without due process after Hurricane Katrina, and won a civil lawsuit providing back pay earlier this year. Yet, in 2010, Duncan said, "The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina." Both Duncan and President Obama strongly supported the Central Falls, Rhode Island, school board when it fired all its high school teachers without due process in February 2010. These are but the most high-profile examples of how mass-firing purportedly "bad teachers" without cause has become a routine part of "school reform."  In light of such examples, Chicago educator Paul Horton has argued that "The Attack on Teacher Tenure Is an Attack on the Black Middle Class," despite the fact that the corporate-driven "education reform" movement has branded itself as "the civil rights struggle of our time."
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