The thing that really set me off - and I'm working from memory here - was when Ravitch pointed out that our upper middle class kids do very well but that our 33% (again, memory...) childhood poverty rate is infinitely more to blame for low test scores than teachers, Stewart nevertheless responded by saying that giving poor parents a choice between (large,) scary, chaotic and lousy urban schools and smaller, more regimented and nicer charters couldn't be a bad thing. I think she then missed a chance to say 1) that charter's don't on average get better results from equivalent groups of kids and 2) "choice" means busting unions, cutting salaries, privatizing services and perpetual 3-5 year burn out ratios... though I'd have preferred it if she'd just said that schools are being scapegoated for the consequences of neoliberalim's exacerbation of social inequality and that no "education" program is going to solve the problems with education if education's problems aren't primiarly rooted in education.
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I agree completely. We must make all those arguments. But you are still thinking and talking like an observer, a disinterested seeker after truth. You need to think politically, as you did when you joined the picket line. But writing for other radicals you have to take a political perspective.
First, realize that the people will never hear all these good arguments. During the various campaigns of the '60s at our rallies we had nature knowledgeable speakers get up and make careful arguments. No one but the demonstrators ever hear of those arguments. They never reached TV. They never reached the newspapers or the news magazines. They might as well have been hiding in a corner whispering to themselvesd. Only those who agreed ever got to hear the arguments. And those who agreed agreed before they heard the arguments. The arguments came later. And they were important because they built up the morale and the determination of those who did hear or read them. But they were of _no_ use in "persuading" people because they never reached "people."
Your arguments, in other words, are important for the morale of teachers. But arguments don't make a movement. Principles of solidarity make a movement. And to start off with arguments such as you give here confuse the fighters. First: An injury to one (even if she's fucking incompetent) is an injury to all. Teachers are important human beings. They have to go out and fight superior forces. How are we to help them do that? How are we to join into that battle. It is a crucial one.
Carrol