NJ Education Report

Here’s NJEA’s most recent memo to its constituents relating how “members of the NJEA leadership are already in Wisconsin lending their assistance and support to this struggle, and NJEA is awaiting word from NEA for how we can amplify our involvement.” Readers are also asked “to “‘Wear Red for Ed’ to support public education beginning Tuesday, February 22nd , and every Tuesday this spring.”

The memo describes Gov. Christie’s support of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s “efforts to smash the rights of unionized teachers” and, in its urgency and outrage, summons up the spirit of the ‘60’s. Think Woody Guthrie and odes to union maids who never were afraid of goons and ginks and company finks or Mahalia Jackson urging that we shall overcome the shackles of racism in Jim Crow south.

NJEA seizes that glorious mantle of the civil rights movement for their own cause, playing the part of the valiant union maid and the persecuted minority; Govs. Walker and Christie are cast as Bull Connor, Police Chief of Birmingham Police Department, who notoriously turned high-pressure water hoses on children and college students during a particularly nasty Civil Rights battle. We shall overcome!

Of course, NJEA’s memo-writers are in good company. The civil rights evocation is a constant trope of the education reform movement too. This past September, when Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to Newark, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan toasted this “Rosa Parks moment.” Education reform activists (guilty as charged) often channel that same zeitgeist: morals, music, righteousness, the rights of the disenfranchised and underserved.

But NJEA’s persecuted minorities are employed teachers whom, unlike their colleagues in Wisconsin, face no challenges to their rights to collective bargaining. Would it be rude to point out that the persecuted minorities addressed by ed reformers are impoverished children?

It’s worth noting that NJEA’s umbrage is incited by relatively mild attempts to insert a degree of accountability into job security. So forgive us if its evocation of the holy images of American civil rights archetypes seems a bit emotive, a trifle overdone, a tad histrionic. Let’s have a little respect for Pete Seeger, please.