Lift Every Voice

Sitthixay Ditthavong/AP

Rick Perlstein on the Chicago Teachers' Union strike (and in a Sam Seder/Majority Report interview). Perlstein finds the strike the third milestone in events that began with the Spring 2011 Wisconsin statehouse demonstrations, then followed by the Occupy actions starting last September 17. In the MR interview, Perlstein notes the CTU did important groundwork with parents before the strike, and has strong support for its stance against "reform" focused on standardized tests and eliminating "frills," like art, libraries, and physical ed.

Along with the "liberal" political establishment's endorsement of corporation-enriching "reform," there's the "greedy teachers" narrative, and digby notes the media's current promotion of this story line. But that's business as usual, just as most national coverage chose to make Wisconsin only about unions, and to present Occupy as a freak show.

The strike also raises a number of class issues, and digby included this essay from Corey Robin. He writes of his experience attending excellent schools in upper-class professional Chappaqua, NY, schools that introduced him to and encouraged him in the multiple interests that ultimately led to his academic career. Families relocated to the town for schools of this quality, writes Robin, yet many parents looked down on teachers as losers for accepting a low-paid career, and they communicated that attitude to their children. Robin finds in this class snobbery a source of current anti-teacher sentiment.

That may well be a factor prompting elite reaction, including that of the "liberal" elite. In the Majority Report segment, Perlstein notes CTU president Karen Lewis' claim that Mayor Emanuel told her privately that "25 percent of the students in this city are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and that he was never going to throw money at them." Why, after all, should 25 percent of children of people not Our Kind matter?

Along the same lines, MR followed the Perlstein interview with audio of this powerful appearance by Matt Farmer. It's natural for billionaire Penny Pritzker to think music and art are for mine but not thine, when thine need only be educated enough to become the help.

During the decades of war on public education since I was a kid, I've come to see that what I once thought of as middling schools were much closer to an elite education. Imperfect as they were, those schools sometimes suggested possibilities beyond training the young to become a suitably unquestioning drones. Sure, there were mediocre teachers, but there also were those who opened new horizons.

One of the latter was a U.S. history teacher who'd grown up in a coal mining town, worked construction jobs in the summers, and was a civil rights activist in the ongoing work in the '60s for the most basic legal protections. He introduced us to current struggles, and to labor history and the battles lost and hard-won: the history missing from or glossed over in textbooks.

There were other teachers who were influential, but something that's always stayed with me was my experience in H.S. choir—and with a teacher I wasn't all that crazy about. (He wasn't exactly sophisticated in non-musical matters; I remember his referring to a synagogue as "the Jewish church...)

But he gave us the ambitious assignment of learning the choruses of the J.S. Bach "Magnificat," for a concert with professional soloists. It was a revelation to learn our individual sections' choral parts, which were stunning in themselves, and then to hear how the parts transformed into something even greater, when all were combined.

While kids generally were listening to whatever was Top 40 c. 1967, everyone became pretty awed by this process. I remember walking past the gym after a rehearsal, when someone burst into a choral part, then others joined in as we strode (seemingly bounced!) through the empty hall. There was something important we all felt, regardless of musical background (which was limited, for most). It was the combination of a powerful esthetic experience along with the act of individual voices joining to form something greater than the parts, and we responded strongly. Well, there might also be a metaphor in that, about teachers, students, community...

At the very least, the impression this kind of experience made on me also makes it impossible to forget that kids respond to what they are exposed to. Limiting the "finer things" to those with moneyed parents is a form of child abuse that's been pushed to respectability, but needs to be seen for what it really is.