The "Pottervillization" of Educaction

It has been many Christmases now that I have watched "It's a Wonderful Life" with a tear in the eye.  It usually comes at the point when Clarence tells George Bailey that "every man on that transport died!  Harry wasn't there to save them, because you weren't there to save Harry.  You see George you really had a wonderful life."  I have even watched that movie in the dead of summer to remind me that Christmas is always coming.

I think many teachers are the George Baileys of the world. Many have sacrificed potentially higher salaries and greater prestige to try to work some good in this world.  Instead of favoring personal advancement, many try to help kids learn their strengths and overcome their weaknesses.  There are no dramatic rewards by society's standards or expectations of fame, just a sense of personal satisfaction.

Within the past decade, it seems the world of education has been rapidly transforming into a Pottersville.  The forces of corporate greed seek to destroy the Bailey Parks of the world. They reach in with their tentacles and attempt to privatize, largely for spectacular salaries and profit-making opportunities, a public trust, public education.  

Some "reformers" may actually try to convince themselves that they are working good and justify their own salary of a half a million dollars.  They wear blinders.  Some may disregard the fact that segregation is only growing.  Some may never want to know "how the other half lives."  Some may avert their gaze from the over-packed, essentially underfunded classrooms and trailers of the City's public-school system.  Others may gloat over it.

The privatization of public education is coming at great costs to society.  Communities are usually cemented around their public-school system.  When public-schools are closed and children forcibly moved, sometimes across gun-infested territories to new schools, as in Chicago, communities are victimized.  Major U.S. cities have witnessed the tractors of educational reform raze their local schools.  The means may be different, but the ends remind one of Robert Moses' "revitalization" plans that sought to raze entire neighborhoods.    

This "Pottervillization" of  education is merely symptomatic of a larger problem.  Teachers are replaced by cheap labor. Teaching now loses the status of a dignified profession or career choice.  It is seen as something any fool can master with a few good scripts.  TFA supplies a steady stream of scabs who work for minimal salary and few protections.  They move on before earning any pension.  In the name of cutting costs, work in the United States is being wholly transformed into temp. work.  I am sure this is the way that Mr. Potter would have wanted it.  From behind his great desk, with an elevated chair, he is looking down at the rest of us and gloating.