Nearly a year ago, I noted how 2010 had been “a very bad year” for defenders of the education status quo, or as I may have called them, “antediluvian, retrograde, establishment-defending hacks.” So far, 2011 isn’t pretty either.
Across the country, defenders of the education establishment have been busily shouting down the heresies of tenure reform, merit pay, charter schools, online learning and yes, even vouchers. These ideas, while considered radical or extreme as recently as 2009 when I was finishing my documentary The Cartel, are now the subjects of serious consideration in many states, if not actual legislation.
And it’s been ugly.
We all watched Wisconsin union supporters direct their rage and indignation toward Governor Scott Walker last March. They told us there is only one legitimate way to determine the benefit packages of public employees — collective bargaining — and that if any state were to foolishly take any other approach, it would quickly devolve into a collection of desperate, miserable Hoovervilles. In essence, they were asking us to believe that the benighted, ninety-nine percenter populations of Florida and Texas must be living in some dystopian hell on earth at the hands of their right-to-work-advocating, collective-bargaining-denying overlords. (If only the public employees of Tallahassee and Austin weren’t so inured to their own piteous suffering, they’d be rising up too, presumably.)
All this was amid the backdrop of soaring unemployment in early 2011. You can imagine the sympathy the Wisconsin unions must have elicited from some recently unemployed Racine guy, sitting home all day, watching the shrill speeches from his Lay-z-Boy, and hearing how desperately the workers with the guaranteed government jobs need their platinum benefit packages collectively bargained. His eyes drifting down to his unpaid property tax bill …
Then in June, at a rally co-sponsored by the main New Jersey teachers’ union, one of the booked speakers (from a different union) found important parallels between Governor Chris Christie and Adolf Hitler. And this wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill inappropriate Hitler reference, where a modern-day connection to the Third Reich is simply implied. The opening sentence of his speech was literally, “Welcome to Nazi Germany.” His actual term for the governor was “Adolf Christie.”
Fast-forward to last week. New York City’s teachers’ union marched with the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators in opposition to Mayor Bloomberg’s shocking 2% cuts in education spending — cuts that had no effect on teachers, but put some 800 school aides at risk for layoffs. Protesters chanted and screamed. TV cameras rolled. This draconian, nightmarish 2% gutting of services for our children must not stand, we were told. Otherwise, and this is a direct quote, “We’re going to shut this city down.”
Notably absent from the stem-winder speeches in New York City: the minor detail that last spring the mayor asked the union representing the school aides to give the city access to its health care fund so layoffs could be averted. The union’s answer, to paraphrase: Drop dead.
These were some of the 2011 education stories that I’ve seen covered by the major media.
As I watched the events unfold, I found myself wondering more and more about education’s place in the culture of the major news media. In my view, education is usually the single most under-reported aspect of American life, relative to its importance. But when it does receive attention, like in the previous examples, the stories are generally the ones with a certain, “Murderer Loose in the Streets, Stay Tuned for Our Live Report” tenor, rarely engaging the systemic dysfunctions that underpin the ephemeral crises.
NBC’s “Education Nation” is commendable, but in a way, its very existence proves the point. They can dedicate one week of education programming per year precisely because it’s so scarce the other 51 weeks. Can anyone imagine “Stocks Nation”? “Politics Nation”? How about “Sports Nation”? Subjects covered year-round don’t need a special week.
These are the reasons we’ve launched ChoiceMedia.TV, a non-profit, vertical news service devoted to covering all facets of education quality and reform nationwide. It’s to give these issues more of the attention they deserve.
ChoiceMedia.TV aims to serve as the nation’s education reform homepage. We will provide original investigative news videos, in-depth, on-camera interviews with prominent Ed Reformers, webcam testimonials from whistleblowers and “regular people,” education headlines, legislative updates from around the country, and well … a store.
Though we don’t try to hide our pro-reform advocacy (the name “Choice Media” refers to “school choice”), the site will deliver thorough and accurate reporting on American education. In fact, we also feature op-eds from the education establishment and a “Diss of the Week.” Long-form passages from detractors aren’t exactly common on the education establishment websites.
We also seek to become a destination for whistleblowers. For too long, a fear of reprisals has silenced voices of dissent when it comes to problems with American schools. (I’ve been hearing these stories since I first began working on The Cartel.) That’s why we feature webcam testimonials from parents, teachers and students — anyone with a compelling personal experience — in the hope they’ll send a powerful message to reformers and would-be reformers that “you are not alone.”
The bigger message here is that everyone reading these words should be involved in the education reform movement, whether via the ChoiceMedia.TV portal, or in some other way. More people should follow the issues; more voices must be heard. This way, 2011 has the potential to become the worst year yet for establishment-defending hacks.
Bob Bowdon is the director of The Cartel, an award-winning documentary film about corruption in public education. He also appears regularly on the Onion News Network.