I Support Public School Teachers

Because the Chicago Teachers Union strike is just the beginning of a long fight against public school Deform: against replacing actual teaching with high-stakes testing; against using tax dollars to enrich charter and voucher con artists; against using crumbling schools and impoverished students to punish teachers; against eliminating public employee unions and crippling public education.

Which side are you on?

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money ends a passionate plea with this:

The Chicago Teachers Union deserves the world because they take kids like me out of working-class families and help them fulfill their dreams. Those who attack them place themselves on the other side of the class divide, on the side that promotes social inequality and the side that provides no incentives for good teachers to stay in working-class schools since poor test scores, largely a result of poverty, will cost them their job. They claim to help children but don’t understand poor public schools; they claim to support policies that will improve education but promote ideas that will enrich capitalists at the expense of students.

And these pundits, these people who have never worried about money a single day in their lives, who were born with a silver foot in their mouth to quote Ann Richards, claim to support unions but never actually provide that support when working or middle-class people decide that enough is enough and walk off their jobs for the betterment of themselves, their families, and their community. And that makes me very, very angry. To quote Campos from yesterday’s post on Yglesias’ commentary, “Look, either you support this strike or you don’t. If you don’t support it on the merits then come out and say so, and why. If you do support it, then say so, and why.”

Indeed. You are either on the side of teachers or on the side of those who will crush their union. In the middle of the strike, there is no gray area. Which side are you on? I side with the people who changed my life.

Me, too.  I became a writer because of a hard-ass English teacher who refused to cut me any slack. Maybe ten percent of the students in that rural Kentucky high school went on to college, but every one of us did so because of a teacher who made the difference.

UPDATE: Charles Pierce is on the ground covering the strike and just nailing the anti-teacher deformers to the fucking wall.