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The Myth of the “Bad Teacher”

In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against “big government.” In a remarkable slight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public’s justifiable anger away from them, and towards teachers.

This anti-teacher rage is focused on the mythical cartoon character – the “Bad Teacher” – which according to recent explosion in press on education generated by the documentary “Waiting for Superman”, plagues our public schools. The “Bad Teacher” is no one in specific, but rather, a sort of free-floating, ill-defined stereotype: he is an inept, uncaring, self-interested bureaucrat waiting for his pension, not only disinterested in students, but actively engaged in standing in the way of student achievement, rather than encouraging it. I imagine the “Bad Teacher” as slovenly dressed, with stains on his shirt, showing up to class late, and once he gets to school, reading the newspaper while his students throw paper airplanes at each other. He looks up at the clock occasionally waiting for his time to be up in order get out of school as fast as possible, so he can get home and watch “Glee” on his plump faux-leather couch. That, or he could be a really “Bad Teacher,” such as that soon to be depicted in a 2011 movie of the same name, which is focused on a “foul-mouthed, junior high teacher who, after being dumped by her sugar daddy, begins to woo a colleague — a move that pits her against a well-loved teacher.” (In fact, it could be the same guy!)

By himself, the “Bad Teacher” is single-handily, with one lazy bound, destroying a generation.

The corporate media has, unabashedly, promoted this myth as fact. According to Oprah, the “Bad Teacher” is everywhere, royally screwing up classrooms across America. In “The Shocking State of Our Schools,” a promotional piece on Oprah’s website for the documentary, she claims that the students featured in the film are “eager to get an education,” but have to fight their way through a “system riddled with ineffective teachers.” NBC stalwart Tom Brokaw echoes Oprah, though broadens the “Bad Teacher” to a sort of systematic educational conspiracy to ensure students don’t learn, in a recent report for Education Nation. Doing his best impression of Glenn Beck, he asks a new teacher if she has met resistance from “the teacher establishment,” confirming authoritatively to any naysayers that “there is one,” consisting of “unions” and veteran teachers. In Brokaw’s “balanced” view, the “teacher establishment” is set firmly against students, not there to serve them.

Bill Gates, interviewed applaudingly by Brokaw in that report, expresses the same message in his speech to the American Federation of Teachers, though far less explicitly. He notes that public schools have been “struggling for decades,” and then a few paragraphs later, claims that “the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching.” In other words, the “single most decisive factor” for public schools’ failures is the teachers. Gates has committed 500 million of his own money, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to more definitively define what the precise ingredients of a good teacher are – and thus, by contrast, the “Bad Teacher” – and then fix him, as if he’s an annoying bug to be rooted out in the latest edition of Windows.

“In the past five years, that attack on public education has ratcheted up to dimensions that were unthinkable 30 years ago,” observes educator Bill Ayers (yes, the same Bill Ayers vilified by the right wing media to prove Obama was really a “terrorist” in the 2008 elections). “And so people talk about the public schools in a way that is disingenuous and dishonest – and also frightening in its characterization: they say the schools are run by a group of self-interested, selfish, undertrained, undercommitted teachers, who have a union that protects them.” This misguided characterization, as Brokaw, Gates, and Oprah show us, is no longer a far right argument, but an accepted fact, a commonplace not worthy of dispute.

The myth is now the truth.

Read more:
http://dailycensored.com/2010/10/08/the-myth-of-the-bad-teacher/