Some excellent points.

Seemingly there will be action on Rhee’s Red/Green proposal sometime in the (very) near future. Precisely when the plan goes to a vote remains to be seen. News at eleven.

There’s a good piece by Colbert I. King in this morning’s WaPo if anyone hasn’t read it yet regarding Rhee’s celebrity. He does not sound like a fan of the Chancellor’s.

And why is there so often an assumption that administrators have the best interests of children at heart, while teachers don’t?

In our district I see too many issues turn into shoving matches between employee groups, but no one group consistently puts children first.

And in the end, it’s up to the voters to make sure that the school board and the superintendent keep the focus on kids — when that accountability becomes ineffective, its really hard to stop the organization focusing on the needs of adults rather than students.

This reminds me of the generational divide in this debate. The NYC Teachers Strike, to me, is the black and white footage on TV as desegregation down here was getting violent. (when I a grad student in the NYC area in the 70s, it was still too raw and you could not discuss it in polite society) And the message to me was that we should never cultivate racial divisions for political advantage.

As Neil Howe just reminded us in the Washington Post, the generation that came of public school age during the 70s did not have the same joyous experience in schools and colleges as Baby Boomers did. Remember when baby boomers were told the purpose of school was so we could have meaningful lives after technology reduced the workweek down to just a few hours a week?

Educators ought to be able to have conversations across generations. I must say frankly that many of the ideas of “reformers” sound like desecration of the liberal arts principles that are holy to me. I don’t know if they understand why. (The distinctions made by my teachers between the non-communist left and the anti-communist left were still so important to them, but just intellectual history to me.)

I don’t have to take the bait and over-react, but I must say honestly that what I hear and feel from Rhee and many others is that they are calling us racists. Maybe the younger teachers don’t fully understand why a baby boomer would hear them that way. But I believe they are playing the race card for political advantage. (and I do believe that Rhee believes the worst of her opponents)

Similarly, as I’ve written I think they are being coopted by the unchecked corporate, market forces that gave them such opportunities but without realizing the harm they did to most Americans. But if they don’t know the history of the 70s, its because we haven’t taught them.

Worst, why did the kids born in the early 60s have such divided and uneven and often cheapened experiences? I believe its because the baby boomers have taken a “do what I say not what I do approach.” We had been taught the values of delayed gratification in our two-parent families. But when the Energy Crisis hit, we didn’t tighten our belts, reinvent the car, and invest in education for the 21st century. We went with the quick fix of easy credit.

So now, as the financial engineering that produced the economic bust is discredited, we are facing an educational bubble in jacked up test scores produced by the same tools that gave us the recession. On Wall Street, people who didn’t even remember the 1987 bust, programmed computers without considering the possiblity of a downturn. “Reformers” are pushing theories that are so new that they don’t even factor in the downside of their educational approaches.

Lastly, there is no reason to fight someone who you aren’t afraid of, so I should be more clear of why I’m afraid of Rhee. I read and hear of teachers saying, “I do my job. I trust my principal” so the two-tiered contract would be good for me. But what about other teachers who do their jobs but have abusive principles? It can’t just be about “me.”

If the younger generation doesn’t understand why so many the baby boomers are afraid of Rhee, then we need more conversation – not guilt-tripping.

I don’t mind making typos or other mistakes, but I don’t want to be guilt-tripping a new generation of reformers when they may not even understand why I feel like they’ve been guilt-tripping us.

Supposedly the Shanker quote appeared in the Meridian Star (Mississippi) on August 13, 1985. I can’t find any context for it beyond that.

I can’t find the quote in Kahlenberg’s bio, but there’s a similar quote on p. 125, at the start of chapter 7 (he was speaking at Oberlin during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis): “Listen, I don’t represent children. I represent the teachers.”

A few thoughts here. First, a quote can easily be misinterpreted out of context. Second, there’s a big difference between not representing children and not caring about their education. He fought on many fronts to improve the schools. Third, it seems he was quite complex; I imagine most people would disagree with at least something he said or did over his career. Fourth, he was right. The union is there to represent the teachers. I see nothing wrong with that.

Take all that into account, and yes, it’s a controversial statement, but by no means does it show that Shanker or the union opposed the interests of the children, not even when he said the words.

People whose #1 public education improvement strategy is “take down the teacher unions” are operating under a kind of reverse silver-bullet fantasy. In right-to-work states where the teacher unions are weakest–say, Mississippi–have all the problems that people try to blame on the unions been solved? Have they figured out how to swiftly get rid of ineffective or immoral teachers? Have their achievement scores steadily risen? Do they have the right teacher in the right classroom? Are they using their available resources to best effect? Exactly.

And–Shanker truly was one of the good guys. He ran afoul of his own union most frequently when he was aiming at teacher professionalism (which necessitates accountability and asks teachers to be entrepreneurial, collaborative, innovative and self-motivated).

BTW, I love what Diana had to say about teachers as curious scholars and community intellectual resources. I also think Rachel is right–it’s likely that Rhee will get her incentive through and a purging of low performers will be followed by the exit of the most accomplished and creative teachers who will what hate what they have to do to make more money.