TOO MUCH: Chronicles of Inequality [Sept. 17, 2012]

One reason: The conventional wisdom can be unconventionally profitable for the corporate execs who run the rapidly expanding chains of charter schools. At campaign time, these execs love to show their appreciation.

But support for the teacher-bashing conventional wisdom goes well beyond the ranks of those who stand to profit directly from public education’s privatization. In affluent cocktail party circles, as the New Yorker magazine noted last week, “a certain casual demonization of teachers has become sufficiently culturally prevalent that it passes for uncontroversial.”

The well-heeled today, adds the New Yorker analysis, talk about breaking teacher unions “with the same kind of social enthusiasm” usually reserved for recommending “a new Zumba class.”

This teacher bashing has been spreading for several decades now, ever since the United States first began growing much more unequal in the 1980s. This linkage should surprise no one. These two basic phenomena — a rich growing richer and a rich growing more hostile to public services and the people who provide them — have always gone hand in hand.

Wealthy people, after all, don’t typically use much in the way of public services. They don’t partake of public parks or public education. They belong to private country clubs and send their kids to private schools, and they royally resent having to pay taxes to support public services they don’t use.

These well-to-do need rationalizations for this resentment, and teacher bashing makes for an ideal one. We don’t need to “throw money” at troubled schools, the argument goes. We just have to find and fire all those lousy teachers.

Interestingly, back in the much more equal United States of the 1950s, we did “throw money” at schools — and plenty of it.

In 1958, after the shock of the Soviet Sputnik launch, lawmakers didn’t bash teachers. They appropriated billions, through the National Defense Education Act, to strengthen schools. A half-dozen years later, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act vastly expanded funding for low-income students.

In today’s deeply unequal United States, by contrast, our political elites don’t fund, they bash. That bashing, educationally, makes no sense. “Blaming teachers for the failure of schools,” as the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead puts it, has to be about as absurd as “blaming doctors for the diseases they are seeking to treat.”

But bashing makes sense to the rich. And in a plutocracy, the rich drive the debate — until the rest of us rise up and change the conversation. In Chicago, teachers have now done just that.

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New Wisdom on Wealth

James Ledbetter, 

What exactly do we mean by ‘inequality’? Reuters, September 11, 2012. In recent decades, we’ve forgotten how to grow the economy except by increasing inequality. The result: a series of bubbles, and bubbles always do damage when they pop.David Korten, Growth or Equality: Two Competing Visions for America’s Future, Yes! September 13, 2012. On how closing the wealth gap can open the way to a fairer, more prosperous economy.Salvatore Babones, How to End Hard Times? Reduce Inequality, Inequality.Org, September 13, 2012. A new United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report details how equality promotes economic growth.Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, What Krugman & Stiglitz Can Tell Us, New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012. That CEOs could cause so much damage and suffer no paycheck pain “suggests an extraordinary culture of self-justification.”