Who’s afraid of teacher voice?
Education entrepreneurs and self-styled venture capitalists and philanthropists, it would appear.
Take a look at the agenda for an invitation only conference this weekend put together by the New Schools Venture Fund. [The fund describes itself as “a venture philanthropy firm working to transform public education through powerful ideas and passionate entrepreneurs so that all children – especially those underserved – have the opportunity to succeed in the 21st century.”]
It features a session of the “Rethinking Teacher Unions for the 21st Century” that manages to avoid having a single teacher union leader on the panel of discussants. There was no difficulty finding representatives of school district management, including the stridently anti-union Executive Director of Labor Policy at the New York City Department of Education. In fact, there was such a glut of management spokespersons, one ended up “moderating” the panel.
The New Schools Venture Fund seems so afraid of collective teacher voice that it can’t allow a single teacher unionist voice into their discussion of teacher unionism.
Exactly how “powerful” could the ideas of the New School Venture Fund on teacher unionism be, if they can not engage at least one flesh and blood teacher unionist? Maybe it’s time for them to “venture” out into the “open market of ideas,” where they hear something else besides the echoes of their own formulations.
UPDATE:
Eduwonk says, what’s the problem? Discussant Brad Jupp is a decent chap, with good ideas, and before he worked for the Denver school district, he was a consultant for the NEA local in Denver. A similar argument could have been made for Erskine, who — many years ago — was a teacher unionist.
That may all be true, but it is also all irrelevant to the point we made.
We do not object to having Brad Jupp or Roger Erskine on the panel. Both could very well have interesting and important things, teacher positive things, to say about the future of teacher unionism.
But Jupp is now a paid employee and thus a representative of the Denver school district. Erskine now heads up an education advocacy group unconnected to teacher unions. Neither are active teacher unionists, democratically elected by teachers to represent their interests and their concerns. They are not substitutes for a teacher unionist in a discussion of the future of teacher unionism.
The New Schools Venture Fund is acting as if it were a collection of fin-de-siécle anthropologists discussing restless natives that they had decided were too inarticulate to speak for themselves.
Eduwonk doesn’t get that because he doesn’t get the larger problem. This is a conference on education, and like many a conference put on by self-styled venture capitalists, venture philanthropists and educational entrepreneurs, there is not a single classroom teacher on a single panel. Not one.
Venture capitalists and venture philanthropists have brought with them to American education a noblesse oblige, and an arrogance of the wealthy and powerful that they know what is best for others. They have the “powerful ideas,” and it is the position of those who actually labor in schools to listen to those ideas. In their worldview, we are the objects, not the subjects, of education policy.
But we can, and we will, speak for ourselves.
1 Comment:
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· May 8, 2006 at 3:17 pm
In this series of discussions, I do not find the running analogy between government and schooling to be completely persuasive. (The analogy which is suggested by “democracy,” “House of Commons,” etc.) I.e. probably more people would agree that the main goal of government is to provide justice, peace, security (health, opportunity… etc.) to its citizens, than that the main goal of a school is to provide those things to its workers. Do you claim that the success of a school should be judged by the degree to which its policies express the democratically ratified views of its workers? Or would you judge the success of a hospital, library, museum, recreation center… by this standard?