John is definitely onto something about the fact that police are real Murkins because they carry guns. The military analogy goes even farther: Joe Klein’s dick gets hard when Michelle Rhee gives him tours of inner-city “war zone” schools, the same way it does when David Petraeus tells him stories about fighting bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. The teachers’ unions stand in for Al Qaeda in this parable, so it’s important to ignore all the facts and just go with the gut feeling that we’re fighting for freedom when we shit on teachers’ unions.
There’s other reasons to target teachers and janitors. I would argue that people like Megan McArdle, Charles Lane, and David Brooks are hostile to the entire modern educational project. Between the three of them, they’ve hit every Republican cliche about higher education, from the evils of teh liberal bias to dangers of wild relativism. Their hatred of public high-school education comes from the same place.
Until educators at every level move away from the evils of science and literature and start force-feeding their students a Rand, Burke, and Reagan based diet of right-wing propaganda, they deserve the wrath of all good American people.
Comrade Jake
I wonder if the hostility comes from an inability to add, subtract, multiply and divide, never mind calculate percentages.
kdaug
Not James Burke, though. James Burke is cool.
morzer
If you think Edmund Burke even gets a walk-on part in McArdle’s vision of education, I think you need to seriously step back and consider what Burke actually had to say about politics and society.
DougJ®
@morzer:
What does what anyone actually said have to do with anything?
Bill White
A minor nit. I tend to think Edmund Burke would find Ayn Rand abhorrent.
Burke has his own flaws (IMHO) but he also would firmly reject the Tea Party. Again IMHO.
Violet
It all boils down to IGMGY. That’s the basis of all actions by modern Republicans, Libertarians and conservatives. Think of that first, and everything else falls into place.
Morbo
Indeed, we need to get rid of that liberal bias in education. I mean, what does it take to get some Austrians into our Economics departments?
morzer
@DougJ®:
Well, in an old-fashioned way, I kinda sorta assume that even the dumbest libertarian realizes that Burke isn’t going to fit very well with crony capitalism and the attempt to deprive people of their liberties by our modern day oligarchs. There’s a reason why the glibertarians just don’t cite him very often, if at all. Anyway, your trinity is wrong:
Rand, Hayek and Reagan are much more likely to be the bases of the curriculum. Well, assuming that dear old crazy uncle Cleon hasn’t been officially pantheonized by then.
Cat Lady
My daughter is an elementary school teacher, who is beloved by her students and their parents. She spends hundreds of dollars every year of her own scant money on her classroom supplies, and she hasn’t had a raise in two years. The parents, to their credit, see what teachers do every day, the challenges they have, and what they accomplish every year with their kids in spite of it all. What fucking world do these people live in that they see my daughter as a problem? I fucking hate them with the passion of a million burning suns.
Uloborus
@morzer:
Yes, I’m with Doug. They misrepresent Ronald Reagan, for pity’s sake. A politician hundreds of years ago whose interests were almost entirely based on local issues of the time? They treat him like the bible. Grab a sentence that sounds like what they want to hear and run with it.
pragmatism
teh stoopid is bleeding over to baseball. steinbrenner jr. sez: “At some point, if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Steinbrenner said. “Soshulism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is never the answer.”
jeebus.
Legalize
What’s the best way to guarantee that folks who were born into a lower station, get to someday possibly sit at the same table with our Galtian betters? Access to quality education. What’s the easiest way to make sure the unwashed masses DON’T get an education? Make it economically untenable to be a teacher in a public school. This actually serves another purpose, i.e. making sure that quality teachers get drafted into the private school business if they are going to teach anywhere – thereby ensuring a doubling of the pace of educational and economic disparity.
It’s just rape-and-plunder at the micro level. Wars not bringing in the spoils that we hoped for? Let’s invade teachers.
Pooh
@pragmatism: Yeah I saw that.
Hey Hank, you need teams to, you know, play against.
morzer
@Uloborus:
Local issues? Burke? Are you serious?
geg6
From the first and greatest Republican president:
eric
I think the answer is simpler…the Press fears the GOP mantra that it is liberal, so it goes the extra mile to disprove it (reducing objective facts to ‘he said-she said’ opinions). Similarly, the Press knows that of the Unions, the teachers are perceived by the right as the most liberal; ergo, the Press goes out of its way to show no favoritism, if not outright hostility. I think that you can add the “hard labor” unions as well, given the perception that they are predominantly black and hispanic, two other “liberal” groups.
It is all about the worked-over refs.
stuckinred
DETROIT (AP) — State education officials have ordered the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools to immediately implement a plan that balances the district’s books by closing half its schools.
The Detroit News says the financial restructuring plan will increase high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidate operations.
Corner Stone
@Violet:
I Got Mine Gonk You?
I Got Mine Grok You?
I Got Mine Ghey You?
Stillwater
But apparently we do need thought control. It’s an economic sector with growth rates way out of the norm.
Edited to reduce eventual ridicule
eric
@stuckinred: we will kick china’s a$$ in class size..bring it on!
General Stuck
Of course they are/wingnut. It is not hard to figure out the reason, that when real American politicians returns America to it’s realness, there will need to be some well armed real Americans to keep the pointy head commie rabble in line and off the streets doing their commie shit. It is the mindset of a tyrant in waiting, either conscious or unconscious from these people. They are on a mission from little baby jeevus to restore order from “guest” citizens and hippies of all stripes foisting collective thinking on pull up by boot strap real Americans, and it is almost a coincidence most of those are white. And heads will need breaking for the new order, and you don’t exempt candlestick makers to fill that bill.
pragmatism
@Pooh: they also need other teams to develop talent so the stankees can buy them. i hope lil’ stein gets delivered a poisoned calzone by costanza today.
Violet
@Cat Lady:
They don’t “see” your daughter at all. She’s not an individual teacher doing a great job. She’s part of the “evil teachers union.” They probably largely think their kids’ teachers are pretty good, some even great. But it’s not their kids’ teachers that are the problem. It’s the “evil teachers union.”
Brachiator
In California, the idea is to break ALL public employee unions. People approach police and firefighters more cautiously, but they are still on the list.
The favorite whipping boys and girls are teachers, janitors, office workers and prison guards. The prison guard thing is fascinating since a weird conservative dogma is that prisoners should be treated like crap and guards are little more than glorified baby sitters who should be paid minimum wage. Some California liberals would shift money from prison guards to teacher pensions.
There are cops and firefighters (and of course teachers and nurses) who cannot afford to live in some of the upper scale communities in which they serve. The residents there don’t give a rat’s ass about their salaries, and they care even less about their pensions.
However, there is an element of pitting the middle class against itself here. You cannot easily ask people who are losing their jobs or whose wages are stagnant, and who have seen their own retirement plans shrivel to subsidize public workers at the same level as when times were rosy. Not even if you raise marginal tax rates on the rich to 1050%.
Nutella
@Legalize:
They’re trying to get back to those fine old days in the South when only the children of the rich were educated at all. Public schools were forced on them by Reconstruction and they’ve been itching to get rid of them ever since. An educated, or even just literate, population is dangerous to an oligarchy.
morzer
Edmund Burke.
(Final Speech at the Trial of Warren Hastings, May 28, 1794)
I mean, I am sure the GOP will happily introduce this vision of sharia law into America’s schools and all, but….
Superluminar
“Until educators at every level move away from the evils of science and literature and start force-feeding their students a Rand, Burke, and Reagan based diet of right-wing propaganda, they deserve the wrath of all good American people.”
You may ‘snark’ about this, Mr J, but whilst these writers may be looked down upon by some liberals, I am convinced that those teaching and learning in the academy need to hear these countervailing voices in order to be aware of the faults within the ideologies their leftwing professors are indoctrinating them. As a conservative I feel it is incumbant upon me to explain that despite the lack of empirical evidence for my assertions, in a broader “cultural” sense I am surely correct.
morzer
@Corner Stone:
“I got mine, Gucci yourself”
Nicole
They’ll have to toss out Rand, too. Atheist, half her villains were crony capitalists and there’s the problem of lots of sex without anyone ever getting punished by getting pregnant.
Maybe they’ll just rewrite her, a la Twain. Roark can be an architect for God. And Galt can be Jesus the Engineer.
Basilisc
The wingers are terrified by the idea of people getting together to accomplish any goal that doesn’t involve shooting, arresting or imprisoning people they don’t like.
They’re also terrified at being asked to pay for something that doesn’t give them, personally, an immediate benefit. Education? Do it at home, or send your kids to private school. Don’t ask me to pay to educate them, since I don’t get anything out of it. Healthcare? I got it from my employer – don’t bother me. The iconic McArdle analysis for me is from way at the beginning of the healthcare debate where she said that health insurance is a transfer from the healthy to the sick. Oh – I get it. You’re not sick, so you view paying to help sick people (even if it’s an insurance arrangement that may help you some day) as theft. Wait, Megan – don’t you have health insurance from the Atlantic? That’s different, since I earned it.
It all fits in with the Republican base being skewed more and more towards the elderly:
– Education? We don’t care – our kids are grown up.
– Health care? We don’t care – we have Medicare (yeah but isn’t Medicare … never mind).
– Housing crisis? We don’t care – we paid off our mortgage.
– Mass transit? We don’t care – we’re retired, don’t need to go to work, and we can afford cars anyway.
– Highways? We just need to drive to the nearest Applebees for lunch and the nearest Walgreens for drugs.
– Climate change? Yeah, maybe it’s happening, but by the time it has any big impact we’ll be dead.
… and on and on. You’d like to think that this means declining Repub support as these folks die off – but meanwhile another new cohort of elderly, maybe more tolerant of teh gays & coloreds but just as unwilling to give back some of what society gave them – will take their place.
Violet
@Corner Stone:
Heh. Typo. IGMFY. And FTFY while we’re at it.
morzer
@Nicole:
And she got her some soc.ialist medicine when she was old and cancer-ridden. Not a good model for the America we need to build.
Loneoak
@Brachiator:
I really do think the prison union is a malignant force in CA politics. Yes, they should be unionized, but they are obscenely powerful and lobby for tougher sentencing and less paroling. Their political power is spent not on making prisons safer and saner, but in putting more people into a wasteful unconstitutionally overcrowded system at a time when all of CA’s educational infrastructure is being dismantled.
Nutella
@Superluminar:
Snark, right? At least I hope so.
Mike E
@Corner Stone: Git Yers!
Violet
@Superluminar:
The artist formerly known as DougJ, is that you?
Stillwater
@Brachiator:
These two sentences address, and express a view about, two very different things. The first implies that outside forces are manipulating an otherwise monolithic middle class in order to undermine its (their?) solidarity. The second sentence appeals to a resentment that may not exist if not for the ideologically motivated manipulations expressed by the first.
US voters are infrequently rational when supporting one policy over its alternative. And certainly people often vote against their own economic self interest. So the presumption that people would vote against union CB agreements without encouragement from well funded special interests is pure speculation.
Marmot
All situations can be reduced to Us versus Them.
Us is everything that Them is not.
Al Queda is clearly Them, while Us is real Americans.
Police protect real Americans, so they are Us.
Inner-city “war zones” aren’t populated by real Americans, and must therefore be home to Them.
Teachers’ unions get the blame for retaining bad teachers, and besides, how many real Americans are in unions?
Therefore, teachers’ unions are Al Queda, police are tax cuts.
morzer
@Violet:
I thought DougJ could spell incumbent.. but it might just be a wily ruse.
Anya
How’s education in all the places that does not allow unions? Big fail. Maybe they can start by supporting this Tennessee teabagger inisitiave “Tennessee Tea Party Wants Slavery Removed From History Textbooks”
Napoleon
@Superluminar:
This is how these baffons think and it is why things like birthers and global warming denialist have so much traction on the right.
Facts? It doesn’t matter if I can not come up with facts.
Mike E
DougJ, I’m pretty sure JokeLine gets wood thinking about his pecker being referred to as solid. Or at all. Too.
Hawes
It’s official, the GOP needs to keep you stupid.
http://zombieland-nowbrainfree.blogspot.com/2011/02/they-hate-learning.html
Citizen Alan
Sixty per class. Why even bother to have schools at that point? It’s not like it’s even possible to teach anything of substance with classes that big.
jwb
@eric: The simpler solution to the equation is to follow the money: look at the ownership of the media and it will tell you exactly why they report the way they do. The liberal tag: they repeat it themselves to give them justification for doing what the corporate overlords demand they do anyway.
schtum
I Got Mine, Gimme Yours!
JPL
@stuckinred: The link just brings me back to your post. How much did the Michigan governor cut taxes by? OMG…60 to a class…
Brachiator
@Stillwater:
I don’t see the middle class as a monolith. I’m quickly looking at a group of people in a similar income range. And in Southern California, at least, there are talk show hosts and others who continually talk about ALL public workers as parasites who are draining the livelihood of private sector workers.
Sorry. This seems to me to be common sense. You can’t ask someone who has lost his or her job to keep things nice and easy for
public workers.
Odd that you appear to be denying outside forces with respect to my first statement, but wanting to refer to them with respect to my second statement.
But I see your point.
Citizen_X
@morzer: BURKE was a Mooslin TERRORIST?!? O_o
[head-‘splodening]
/conservatard
Mike in NC
@Nutella:
That’s elegant in its simplicity. I was going to make the case that Republican hostility to public education dates from the 1960s when the activist judges came in and started all the damned desegregation and banning the Baby Jesus from recess. The teachers became villains by virtue of agreeing to go along with these outrages.
Throughout the South, at least, they’ve opened scores of private academies since the 1970s to return to the good old days.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Fixie.
Marmot
@Superluminar:
Eh, sic.
I also favor teaching from Ayn Rand, Burke, and Reagan. But it’s because the slightest critical glance reveals they’re self-serving and short-sighted approaches to economics and governance. Unless you’re already on top, that is.
Marmot
@morzer:
Arg. If this is you DougJ! Arg!
Cris
@kdaug: Not James Lee Burke either.
Tonal Crow
I don’t understand why Republicans are not Going Galt (sm) en masse to live in the newly-established territory of AynRandLand.
Where is AynRandLand, do you ask? On the horn of Africa, with bee-autiful ocean frontage on both the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. And what’s the government in AynRandLand? Well, none. It’s a purely entrepreneurial state, in which there is truly zero business regulation. Thus, while other states unjustifiably use the force of law to prevent their citizens from operating, for example, abduction-for-ransom businesses, in AynRandLand, they operate freely.
And while other states wrongly take their citizens’ guns, in AynRandLand, everyone has a gun.
AynRandLand is truly a paradise.
I don’t understand why Republicans aren’t moving there.
batgirl
@Citizen Alan: Eh, teaching is easy. We can just pull in some high school dropout from the street, pay him/her minimum wage and give him/her a script to follow. Better yet, why not outsource. We have the technology. Put a computer in front of the classroom and pay some poor Indian on the other side a dollar a day to follow the script. After all, we shouldn’t waste taxpayers money on all that highfalutin education stuff.
Is our children learning?
Suffern ACE
Or maybe McCardle, Lane and Brooks never attended public schools and would never think of sending their children to them, being that they are part of the Northeast Establishment that hates public schools and has since, well, forever.
Also, why bother to continue to spend funds on these things when India does a fine job educating lower level office functionaries for 1/10 the cost. There will be no headway within the Northeast Corridor establishment in terms of the rhetoric until Aruna Singh is named news anchor for CNN out of Delhi and the punditry must deal with these issues directly.
Fang
Two things.
One, McArdle, Lane, and Brooks are basically disconnected from reality (yes, it’s obvious). They essentially do not GET how the world works. They don’t have to. So their recommendations have absolutely no basis in reality, they have no rational, traceable path to explain their value.
Secondly, these three and those like them are in a bubble anyway. They figure other people should be in the same bubble. That bubble, in their figuring, must be right.
It’s a case of stupid myopia – and as far as I’m concerned, deliberately stupid myopia. They don’t want to peak out from under their right-wing rocks because they’ll have to confront their own lies an untruth, and they’re too weak to do it – they’d rather collect that paycheck.
They deserve contempt.
Nicole
@morzer: Oh, no no no. That wasn’t Ayn Rand. That was Ann O’Connor. Totally different name, don’t you get it? Keep moving along; nothing to see here.
Stillwater
@Brachiator: Odd that you appear to be denying outside forces with respect to my first statement, but wanting to refer to them with respect to my second statement.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. All I was trying to say is that middle class resentment against union workers who haven’t seen their pay/benefits reduced may, and in fact most likely is, insofar as it actually exists, the result of succumbing to massive propaganda and disinformation. In other words, I see no reason to think that US citizens support punishing their neighbor for having a more secure work environment without that being the result of propaganda. Certainly rationality means nothing here, since according to one view of rationality, the amount of money being saved per person by eliminating CB rights is so negligible as to not warrant consideration. That means its a matter of principle.
By and large, US citizens aren’t rational when it comes to policy issues. Policy preferences are heavily influenced by the propaganda machine.
Nutella
@Mike in NC:
Yep, so now the rich got to private schools (many of them called Christian Academies) and the public schools are used to provide spectacles for the lower classes, usually football games.
Not only the South is gunning for public schools, of course. John has a story up top about New Hampshire trying to get rid of public kindergarten. And Wisconsin, Ohio, etc.
Sigh. I have always thought the public school system is one of the finest features of this country.
morzer
@Marmot:
No, me not DougJ, me not love you long time either.
morzer
@Tonal Crow:
Indeed. Until you’ve seen David Brooks on a huge black stallion with his rocket-launcher in his hands, you just haven’t grasped what poetry in motion means.
Yutsano
@Tonal Crow:
Too many brown folk. Make the population white as apartheid South Africa and they’d flock over there in droves.
Mike G
Rand, Burke, and Reagan based diet of right-wing propaganda
You forgot creationism. Conditioning kids to believe in magical stories, feel-good American-exceptionalism to feed xenophobia and provincialism, and that “faith” in the absence of evidence is a virtue, conditions them to obedience and to swallowing whatever horseshit the authoritarians want them to believe.
Having found their dream low-cost educated labor force in China and India, the Repig elites now apparently want Americans to be nothing but stupid, docile consumerist cows.
Tonal Crow
@Yutsano: You mean to tell me that Republicans would let a little thing like skin color get in the way of moving to AynRandLand? That’s like a starving man refusing a slice of bread because it’s not a steaming-hot 12-course meal from the French Laundry, isn’t it?
Brachiator
@Stillwater:
Thanks very much for your clarification.
I don’t know whether many people look at this as a matter of punishing their neighbor. And it isn’t that public sector workers just “have” a more secure work environment. Taxpayers maintain the public sector. And if the larger economy is weak, and if the middle class is contracting because of layoffs and wage stagnation, the question becomes how you maintain the public sector at a sustainable level.
It is one thing to say that public sector workers “deserve” some degree of job security. But how do you pay for it and maintain it?
Stillwater
@Brachiator:
One answer is to decrease the cost breadth of state services. Another answer is to increase the taxes on the wealthy to fund state services at current levels.
One reason to reject the first alternative is that this codifies (so to speak) the race to the bottom wrt wages and benefits by breaking out the lower support of middle class compensation. It entails that the US will be an actual, in practice, competitor with China and India for job creating businesses. That means even lower wages for non-unionized labor, etc, etc.
What’s wrong with increasing taxes on the wealthy? They’re currently at the lowest rates in history (I think, at least the top percentiles), and their income is being subsidized by the wage loss of the middle class.
Brachiator
@Stillwater:
Increasing taxes on the wealthy dances around another problem. If you increase taxes on the wealthy to maintain a public sector employee’s standard of living, how does this benefit private sector workers who have lost their jobs? Or, how do you effectively allocate dollars between maintaining pensions and benefits for public sector employees and investments in infrastructure and job creating projects?
By they way, I support higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy. I just do not see it as the answer to all our problems.
Nancy Irving
It’s also notable that the unions Walker is exempting (police, firefighters, inspectors) are mostly white and male. By contrast, the unions he’s targeting (teachers, nurses, janitors) are mostly female or more heavily non-white.