Opportunities await in slow demise of nation’s administrative utopias
Opportunities await in slow demise of nation’s administrative utopias
On April 18 the Times Free Press ran a front-page story about teacher tenure in the area’s compulsory school systems. After three years teaching, a state-trained professional on a county school payroll can receive tenure, essentially a job for life if said teacher avoids certain distruptive offenses. A teacher might be fired for incompetence, insubordination, immorality and “any other good and sufficient cause,” but only after prolonged administrative tribulation to remove him. Tenured teachers are rarely fired because of the hassle imposed by due process and procedural requirements. It is “very, very difficult” to fire a lousy, dead-handed employee, one observer told the newspaper.
Repeated stories about malfeasance in the state-run school monopoly make little impression among its clientele, that host of local families who insist on the school freebie and who believe that while problems exist in other schools, the school they know personally (where their children are enrolled) is either good or not that bad. A measure of wishful thinking and fantasy keeps these tax-funded heirarchies from crashing to the ground in flames. This sort of intellectual and emotional subjection Tennesseans and Georgians have before the thrones of these school corporations with their public authority will last even after they have fallen and the smoke and dust cleared.
Tenure has little to do with school quality, caring for children or making sure students can read, write and cypher. It has everything to do with the power of unions to secure easy livings for the leisure class that is the public school establishment.
Tenure is part of the surveillance and day-care apparatus of state employees. In The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto explains why administrative utopias are so appealing and so hard to get rid of.
“Administrative utopias are a pecular kind of dreaming by those in power, driven by an urge to arrange the lives of others, organizing them for production, combat, or detention. The operating principles of administrative utopia are hierarchy, discipline, regimentation, strict order, rational planning, a geometrical environment, a production line, a cellblock, and a form of welfarism. Government schools and some private schools pass such parameters with flying colors. In one sense, administrative utopias are laboratories for exploring the technology of subjection and as such belong to a precise subdivision of pornographic art: total surveillance and total control of the helpless. The aim and mode of administrative utopia is to bestow order and assistance on an unwilling populaton, to provide its clothing and food. To schedule it” (Page 142).
The utopia of public schooling is evident in tenure, which isolates the functionaries from the demands of the marketplace. Tenure is a roadblock of old cars, tires and construction trash intended to keep the mob away from the seat of power, to prevent an angry people from despoiling the privileges of the school elite, their guaranteed incomes and staffs. Tenure makes it impossible for there to be quick, prompt firings that make the daily press. It slows the pace of a teacher’s removal so that it is so dull a procedure and so dryly administrative no one would care about it either way.
In 2008 began the first signs of an extended national financial collapse, with the fireball in the night that of the meltdown of the Bear Sterns trading house, followed by other notable corporate crackups, Lehman, Fannie, AIG, etc.
As the collapse ripples outward for the next several years, the cost of maintaining luxurious taxpayer-funded school systems will rise, as will the pressure to scale them back. It is happening already. California districts have given pink slips to 22,000 teachers; 17,000 layoffs are predicted in Millinois; New York has started by trimming 15,000. The feds’ Arne Duncan says up to 300,000 public school jobs face elimination.
Utopian idealism, the worship of the state, the great confidence people have in administrators and functionaries are wilting. This reversal in the status quo will provide great opportunity for Christians and free market educators such as you and me. As these systems collapse, without any help from us, we should reconsider some of our precious educational shibboleths about the necessity and benevolence of public schools, and press forward to encourage others to a more godly existence based on free enterprise, personal relationship and local economies.