New York Times and Washington Post columnists praise and defend teachers
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0270
To what extent, if any, does recent criticism of teachers unions sometimes become outright disrespect for teachers themselves? As evidenced by columns appearing over the Labor Day weekend, a writer at the New York Times and another at the Washington Post have apparently decided that the answer is too much.
Neither columnist likely read an advance copy of the politically focused comic strip “ Mallard Fillmore ” for Saturday, 3 September. But judging by anecdotal evidence that I gathered among friends from across the political spectrum, the strip can serve as a Rorschach test on the question. It criticized the schoolteacher-seniority system by concocting and mocking a strawman senior teacher. “I’ve been here so long, I remember when we had high standards,” says the blue-haired, bespectacled, overweight teacher. “Thank goodness those dark days are over.”
At the Times, Charles M. Blow’s column “ In honor of teachers ” began, “Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers. Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed the direction of my life, and to whom I’m forever indebted.”
Blow stipulated that school reform is necessary and that not “all teachers are great teachers.” But in the process of telling about Mrs. Thomas, the teacher who changed his life, Blow asked, “How do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure.” He closed this way: So to all of the Mrs. Thomases out there, all the teachers struggling to reach lost children like I was once, I just want to say thank you. You deserve our admiration, not our contempt.
At the Post, Robert McCartney’s column carried the headline “ Budget cuts, falling prestige beset teachers .” It began almost as Blow’s did: “As a new academic year begins, there’s reason to worry that cutting budgets and scapegoating teachers have started to take their toll in the classroom.” McCartney warned that “the national push for education reform has made teachers feel defensive and less respected.”
But maybe most notably, the Post column drew a caustic letter to the editor from Kathy Megyeri of Washington, apparently a retired teacher. She wrote, in part:
To hell with notes of praise in my school mailbox, lunches sponsored by local business partners and trinkets that proclaim that teachers are loved. They will never take the place of a pay raise or, in my case, a cost-of-living increase in my retirement check. Why is it that these little, meaningless feel-good symbols in lieu of good paychecks are always proposed for teachers and not for lawmakers, information technology executives or other business people?
An even better morale-builder for teachers is the supportive parent who reads daily to his child, who comes to a PTA meeting and asks, “What can I do to help my child learn more in your class?” and a principal who takes a disruptive student out of class without blaming the teacher for the problem.
(Disclosure: I have close family connections to two dedicated elementary school teachers.)
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.