Maybe Teachers Should Import THIS from Mexico?

It’s hard not to take it personally: the idea that if we can just fire all the "bad" teachers, well, we would be awash in a sea of Rhodes Scholars. Teachers have always been mocked and devalued in the United States, but in the past months the intensity of the attacks have greatly increased. The only "race" in the Race to the Top (which I'm beginning to believe is quite possibly MORE punitive than NCLB ever was), is the "race" to fire more teachers, tie pay and evaluation to student test scores, close or reconstitute more schools (I like to call them "Schools Headed Into Transition), and bust teachers’ unions and destroy teaching as a profession.

What lies behind this unprecedented assault on teachers? And, even more important, what can we do about it? I am convinced that these attacks are part of an effort to dismantle public education and that there needs to be an effective, collaborative strategy to combat it.
Mexico teachers have a different idea of how to combat this sort of treatment, and I often wonder how much bashing American teachers will tolerate before such extremes are used here, too. 

But before I endorse open revolution, let’s start with what ISN'T going on in the U.S. This last weekend, I attended the NEA-NM spring conference and listened to Matt Montano, a surrogate for New Mexico Secretary of Education-Designate Hannah Skandera (she's called "designate" because can't seem to get herself confirmed, what with all of her ZERO years of teaching experience), again trot out his cherry-picked data. You see in New Mexico, and probably other parts of the country too, adminstrators, rheeformers, and other corporate hacks, have latched onto this claim that "research" shows that students who have three-years with an effective teacher make HUGE gains  In virtually the same sentence , and LITERALLY the next slide of his presentation, Matt stated: “But the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists.” It would be nice if politicians and the other policy makers with zero teaching experience were suddenly worried about how race and class affect student success. But then, that would mean that the attacks against teachers would have to be based in a commitment of equity, fairness, and logic.