Several educators came together last week to organize the Badass Teachers Association, to which the group has assigned the three-letter acronym “BAT.” The education field has more acronyms than the military, I think—well, maybe not if you count all the top-secret ones—and so now we have BAT.
The website, here, looks like one from a grassroots group, but don’t let its noncompliance with HTML 5 standards fool you. The group had more than 19,000 likes on their Facebook page as of this writing, and that support seems to be growing. More than 270 people joined the group, which was organized to protest corporate reform in education, on its first day.
“This is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning,” the groups mission statement declares.
At the group’s request, about 1,500 people called the White House Monday to request the replacement of US Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They would prefer the president choose a lifelong educator who understands teachers’ concerns a little better.
The rise of teachers, students, and community members in the last year has been jaw-dropping. Although they are still in scattered groups throughout the country, that’s kind of the way education should be: not centralized, under local control, and responsive to the needs of each local community.
The corporate reform movement, on the other hand, stresses standardization and common learning standards, as put forth in the Common Core State Standards. The standards themselves aren’t the problem, as I see it—they’re really quite good, as standards go—but the way they were produced and hoisted on the schools across America is a problem.
Although the standards don’t prescribe a way of teaching or any specific curriculum a school would need to follow, what schools have to do in order to ensure that students master the objectives of learning in the Common Core is develop a curriculum: How do we teach third graders? How do we teach high school geometry classes? And so on.
The corporate reform movement in education is also marked by a tremendous influx of money that grassroots educators and students don’t have. This is a drawback of local control: a mom-and-pop sandwich shop, despite producing the best sandwiches in town, just doesn’t have the draw of a Subway sandwich shop in the neighborhood.
The question for groups like the Badass Teachers Association is, Since it is in their best interest, as well as the best interest of US students, to remain a mom-and-pop operation, how do they attract support not just on social media but in the classrooms?
I think the answer lies in doing what teachers do best. It will come in showing that we can teach the Common Core without using standardized tests and narrow achievement gaps without charter schools. I only say this because right now, the corporate reformers are winning, and Arne Duncan is not contemplating a resignation letter in his home this evening, a week after teachers requested he be replaced.
All teachers have done is to protest what is wrong with the corporate reform movement. So far, they have put forth nothing tangible to show that this country’s educational objectives—as stated by a whole bunch of state education officers, whether or not their opinions might be incompetent or coerced—can be achieved by the methods being proposed by the teachers.
It’s not enough to declare that corporate reform won’t work, since there are too many people with more money saying it will. It’s not enough to protest; we must work with people who have money to achieve the objectives of improving education and moving toward a higher degree of equality for children no matter what their ZIP code, skin color, national origin, ability to speak English, or family income happens to be.
The corporate reform movement is very much alive, no matter how much brilliant educators—among them, I would count Diane Ravitch, who back in the day made statements in support of George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind law but has since recanted that support—say it’s coming under fire. Like declaring the Republican Party was dead after Barack Obama was reelected, reports of the death of corporate reform are greatly exaggerated, if teacher evaluation plans being pushed on schools for next year, with standardized test scores leading the way, are any indication.
