Former Obama Press Secretary Leading PR Drive Against K-12 Teacher Tenure

Robert Gibbs
(Image: politico.com)

One of the Obama presidency's curiosities is its hostility to K-12 teachers unions. Key administration figures, including Education Secretary (and 44's basketball bud) Arne Duncan, have expressed their opposition to teacher tenure. The anti-tenure mob asserts that tenure encourages ineffective teachers to remain on the job, while implicitly denying better instructors an opportunity to practice their trade. Powerful forces from all political spectra have embraced part or all of this perspective.

A recent addition to this unseemly alliance is an enterprise created by former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and former BO campaign spokesperson Ben Labolt. According to a Politico story, the pair's Insight Agency "will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have protected ferociously. LaBold and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones -- the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign -- will take the lead in the public relations initiative."

While the movement to dismantle the existing K-12 instructional force gathers momentum, one wonders what bright future these champions of meritocracy envision. Looming large in many of these brave new worlds is data accumulation and analysis. The nearly religious belief in data's "truth" masks data's considerable flaws as an educational tool. Meanwhile, what of the teachers themselves?  Media stories, think-tank white papers, and political speeches rarely bother to present the thoughts and feelings of tenured teachers. There's little that's fair and balanced from the right or from the left on the tenure issue. Minds have been made up in the anti-tenure kangaroo court. Human sacrifice, in the form of the dismissal of an entire professional class, appears to be demanded.

Replacing a generation of experienced instructors will be cannon fodder from organizations such as Teach for America, whose sixteen-hour work days virtually guarantee its well-intended adherents will promptly drop out of the teaching biz. That phenomenon, coincidentally, pushes salaries down and effectively keeps curricular direction and performance appraisal in the hands of "management" rather than trained, seasoned professional instructors.

Cultural Revolution
(Image: bbc.co.uk)

Many years ago, I taught English to adult Chinese immigrants. I listened to stories about the Cultural Revolution, whose incidents included forcing teachers to parade through their town while wearing humiliating signs. The tagging of an entire generation of American K-12 teachers as deadbeats, deserving of the punishment of tenure elimination, is not far away from the mass insanity China experienced a half-century ago.

Be careful what you wish for.