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Thursday, November 13, 2008
Iraq War Ends--Bush Indicted For Treason
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
College tuition is free; and executive salaries capped at 15 times the minimum wage.
The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of the New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.
It captures the gap between what is needed--what we hope and long for--and what we’re likely to get with a pragmatic Chicago pol at the helm, and the NYT filling his sails.
The lead story narrates our exit from Iraq and inquiries into war crimes. Other stories note the passage of universal health coverage, not Obama’s fake plan, and Adolph Reed’s proposals for free higher education, which I’ve discussed in this space before, including a great video interview with Reed, recorded about a year ago.
Of additional interest to Chronicle of Higher Ed readers, since its annual “Executive Compensation” issue is in press, is a spoof story announcing passage of a new maximum wage law that caps all executive salaries at 15 times the minimum wage. This means that in a society paying a floor of $10/hour, executives could still earn $300,000.
As I point out in my forthcoming column in the compensation issue, though, public interest pay grades (military and civil service, eg) tend to keep the pay maximum closer to a multiple of 5.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and most state governors earn only about 5 times of the lowest-paid college graduate in their service, generally not more than 8 times more the lowest-paid 18-year old without any college at all.
In Reality, However
Meanwhile the real NY Times pimps one of the sleaziest Sophie’s Choice deals ever concocted by quality management (you know, the same people who have sold you the idea that you’re “participating” in management by getting to decide whether to take on more work or accept less pay).
Obama’s favorite schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, is trying to break the union and teacher tenure in the public schools by offering a $40,000 raise to any teacher who will give up tenure. What they’re proposing is a dual compensation scheme: a $40,000 raise for those on the new “green” track, and squat for those on the tenured “red” track.
So the same people who turned teaching into a crap job--a job that qualified, motivated people can’t accept because of the low pay, low workplace autonomy, and continuous, compulsory teaching to high-stakes tests, now can find money and space for creativity?
Sure, that’s just what we need. School administrators with even more control of teachers than they have now. Because they’ve done such a great job with the curriculum--no music, no art, no sports, no thinking, no citizenship.
Rhee (and her fans) don’t think of teaching as a profession at all. It’s something that wealthy and privileged people do as volunteerism, as the NYT eventually, reluctantly, gets around to observing:
Ms. Rhee’s attitudes about teaching were forged in the 1990s in Baltimore, where she taught in an elementary school as a member of Teach for America, the nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach for two years in hard-to-staff schools, after which many leave for jobs in other professions.
“Michelle does not view teaching as a career,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “She sees it as temporary, something a lot of newbies will work very hard at for a couple of years, and then if they leave, they leave, as opposed to professionals who get more seasoned.” Teachers first won tenure rights across much of the United States early in the 20th century as a safeguard against patronage firings in big cities and interference by narrow-minded school boards in small towns, said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan. “And the historical rationale remains good,” Dr. Mirel said, pointing to the case of a renowned high school biology teacher in Kansas who was forced to retire nine years ago because he refused to teach creationism. “Without tenure,” Dr. Mirel said, “teachers can still face arbitrary firing because of religious views, or simply because of the highly politicized nature of American society.”
The Contingent Majority
Speaking of management getting exactly what they want and crushing tenure, we already have that in higher education as Gwen Bradley, lead AAUP staffer on contingent faculty issues, has long been pointing out.
She’s just released a special issue of Academe devoted entirely to the problem of nontenurable appointments in higher education, including an article by Audrey Jaeger, whose recent series of studies has added to the mounting evidence that management’s victory over tenure has harmed students.
And Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has just released a special issue on the problem of mental labor: why do smart people do dumb things?
Comments
Won’t it be tremendous to see the next great novels that draw all this and more together, really powerful works, novels and stories that go out to all the high schools and community colleges and universities across the land, you know, the floods of hard hitting Hurricane Katrina novels and Conquest of Iraq novels and other sweeping novels of economic, corporate, and state viciousness? Won’t it be great to see these stories thriving in the commercial magazines and overspilling the literary journals? I mean there’s just a tremendous track record of it all these past many decades - the utter flood of vital stories that any healthy culture and society let alone educational institutions would be immersed in and excited about, powered and instructed by. Will it not be great? Has it not been? Is it? And no prank.
As a teacher at a private high school (having taught both at universities and public middle and high schools), I don’t see the need for something like tenure at the k-12 level.
There are better ways to protect teaching positions from the dangers of easily offended school boards and parents, or of patronage firings. Tenure, for one thing, doesn’t protect job applicants from being turned away due to pressure from boards, administrators, PTAs, or patronage pressure. And once the teachers at a school are happily tenured and happily obeying the demands of parents, administrators, school boards, and so on, there’s no chance the school could effect any real change.
All jobs should have crystal-clear standards for hiring and firing. If a budget crunch occurs, the school should have a clear set of criteria for who is laid-off first (those already eligible for early retirement, those hired in the past year or two, those with no clear evidence of success in the classroom.)
But let’s also remember that tenure is important to the administration, even if means negotiating with unions. The turn over among first year teachers is dizzying. A teacher who is deemed worthy of something like tenure is often wooed by the administrators to keep him/her around for as long as possible. Schools with high turnover are rarely stable, successful schools.
Rhees is absolutely correct that, for many first year teachers, the profession is “temporary, something a lot of newbies will work very hard at for a couple of years, and then if they leave, they leave, as opposed to professionals who get more seasoned.”
Job security is essential to public education in a way that doesn’t hold for other jobs, like commodity traders or middle managers. Constant turnover means a fragmentation of the curriculum, a lack of any dedication to the institution as a whole or its overarching goals and vision for education.
So let tenure in public school teaching be a matter of an increasing level of job security and raises in salary. Let it not be a cloak of invisibility to protect all and sundry from doing their jobs poorly. Another way of thinking about this is to contract teachers for longer periods of time after a three to five year probationary period. A successful young teacher might then be offered more job security and salary by committing to that school and its particular demands and goals for ten years at a time.
I am lucky to have great students and to be supervised by only three excellent administrators, all of whom teach at the same time. No one interferes with my teaching unless a problem comes to light (so far, no such problems). They’re assuming I’m returning next year, and I deeply want to. But at no time will I earn tenure to assure me of a job. At the same time, teachers who are doing well always stay. We can’t be wooed away from our school because we’re treated with dignity as professionals who know what’s best for our students.
As an alumnus of the Chicago public schools, I see the case both for and against teacher tenure.
For: protects teachers from machine politics. Teachers should not have to worry about their jobs if their brother fails to bring out the vote for the precinct captain or anything like that.
Against: It was flat out impossible to fire a bad teacher in Chicago in my day. THe union infamously said “there are no bad teachers in Chicago.” I could name a few, however.
But tenure isn’t black and white. It should be easy to come up with terms of tenure that cover both sides of the issue.