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.