Why Do Americans Love to Blame Teachers? [View all]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/the-war-on-teachers/379403/

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America hates teachers.

That's not exactly the thesis of Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, but her account of 200 years of education policy provides plenty of evidence for it. "The history of education reform," she notes, "shows … recurring attacks on veteran educators." In the early 1800s, reformer Caroline Beecher argued that young women with a missionary calling should replace male teachers who were "intemperate … coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy or stupid" to teach; she suggested those men should be sent into the mills instead. Two centuries later, Goldstein notes, programs like Teach for America are promoted as a kind of missionary calling, in which young fresh-faced college graduates replace lazy, stubborn, unionized teachers.

In between those two endpoints, Goldstein recounts the United States' dishonorable McCarthy-era assault on left-wing teachers—and its even more dishonorable record following Brown v. Board of Education, in which black teachers were systematically fired or pushed out of their jobs in order to prevent them from teaching white students. As Goldstein shows, the main result of Brown was not to integrate schools—which desegregated only haltingly before resegregating more recently—but to force out black educators. Education reform, as so often before, seemed to be less about aiding students than about targeting teachers.

Goldstein argues that discussions of education in the U.S. have repeatedly been framed in terms of moral panics. A moral panic, she says, occurs when "policymakers and the media focus on a single class of people … as emblems of a large, complex social problem." That single class of people is then systematically demonized, as politicians and pundits present "worst of the worst" cases as emblematic of the whole.