The rush to expose"Bad Teachers."

 

 

 

 

From the mid 1940's to the mid 1950's, leaders in government, the

media, the trade union movement and the private sector spent an
enormous amount of time and energy trying to expose and root out
alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers. In the process, tens of
thousands of people lost their jobs, many times that number had their
civil rights and civil liberties violated, and a wave of fe...ar swept
through the land that made it difficult to express heterodox ideas or
criticize the government even for good reasons. "Red Hunting" became a
cottage industry and many people built careers exposing the "Communist
Menace" until a critical mass of American realized this crusade was
violating everyone's rights, hurting many innocent people and doing more
harm than good



I can see the same thing about to happen today with the rush to expose
and Root out "Bad Teachers." it is only a matter of time before mass
circulation dailies start going from school to school trying to
identify the bad teachers and demanding that they be fired, appointing
themselves prosecutor, judge and jury. Some papers already did that
when NYC and LA began publishing teacher ratings ( Baedeker on wildly
inaccurate measures) leading to public humiliation of some dedicated
civil servants and one documented suicide. There is every indication
that the BaD Teacher Hunt is about to get even uglier, more intrusive
and more widespread. The damage this will do to teaching and public
education will be difficult to repair. But when hysteria sets in- in
this case hysteria over failing schools in high poverty areas- the
quest for a scapegoat can be very seductive and very difficult to stop