Educational “establishment” and “reformers”

One of the big cabinet positions Obama has yet to name is Education Secretary. Naturally, people are asking who it will be. Journalists are beginning to mention names, and they're defining the two educational "camps" Obama's pick might represent.

The people on one side of the equation, usually thought of as a coalition of unions and ed profs, are being called either the "establishment" or the "status quo." Those on the other side who want to make it easier to fire teachers, to differentiate teacher salaries based on their definition of merit and want to move toward more "school choice" are being called "reformers" or "disrupters."

"Establishment" is a 60s term, synonymous with "The Man." It refers to the bosses and their company men in gray flannel suits who want to oppress us and turn us all into mindless conformists. "Status quo" is pretty much the same thing.

"Reformer" sounds like someone from the outside who is itching to get in there and make things better with bold new ideas. "Disrupter" is a positive term brought over from the business world meaning an innovator who comes up with a bold new way of doing things that disrupts the old, archaic order and brings in a new and better paradigm.

But let's step back from the terms and look at who these people are. 

The "reformers" and "disrupters" include the Bush administration, John McCain, Bill Bennett, the Goldwater Institute, the School Choice (read: Vouchers) movement and assorted others. Outsiders? Rebels? Hardly. (The Republican success at painting themselves as the beleaguered minority, even when they're in power, never fails to amaze me.)

The "establishment" and "status quo" are the unionized teachers, the NEA and AFT that represent them and liberal education profs.

Those "reformers," backed by conservative big business interests, have spent gazillions of dollars creating an almost invisible substructure which has been trying to undermine public schools for years. It goes back at least to the Reagan years when Bill Bennett was Education Secretary. Their mission is to privatize schools as much as possible, preferably with unregulated, for-profit schools, since everyone knows that the invisible hand of the market place, unfettered by regulation, is vastly superior to anything the government comes up with. Well, everyone knew that until the economy collapsed under the weight of insane decisions made by under-regulated, greed-crazed companies.

The "establishment" is made up of those who have been in the trenches working with students. Granted, the results have been mixed, to say the least. But (modest) pay raises and protections for teachers as well as pushes by unions to keep class sizes low and bring more money into the schools have been a positive force. There's no way to say what education would look like if the post WWII teachers were at the mercy of their administrators and school boards without union protections, but my guess is that it would be a whole lot worse.

The conservatives are great at creating language that slants the discussion in their direction. Liberals haven't figured out how it's done. The terms defining the educational camps being thrown around right now are conservative creations, kind of like "death tax" instead of "estate tax." They slant the discussion in a conservative direction. Unfortunately, lazy journalists adopt the conservative language because it's repeated so many times that it begins to sound like the conservative labels are the only ones out there.

Note: Obama's pick for Ed Sec will be neither a died-in-the-wool union supporter nor a Bill Bennett-style voucher advocate. Obama himself isn't squarely in either camp. But the argument is slanted in a way that, if he picks someone who advocates similar ideas as teachers and their unions, that person will be "in the pocket of the unions" and an "establishment educator." If the choice leans toward the side that wants to limit the power of the unions and allow more deregulated education, that person will be labeled a "reformer."