In the recent cover story from
Time magazine, Rahm Emanuel is depicted as another bold, daring reformer who has come to save the day and fix the broken Chicago schools. Wait, wait, weren't they already fixed in the "Chicago Miracle," that
Time often writes about in glowing terms as they toss around softball questions to Arne Duncan? Apparently not. Apparently what was really needed was another politician to come in with the support of multinational companies and tell the neighborhoods of Chicago what they need. In the process,
Time chastises the people of Chicago for feeling hurt and betrayed by the courageous man who is simply doing his job. (Could it be that the people are also confused by a mayor who claims that they don't have money for schools, but they have money to pay for a private catholic college to get a new basketball arena financed out of the public coffers?) "Why is he mad when he is fighting both crime and failing schools?" Um, I don't know. Perhaps people are angry because of that word 'fight' right there, as if the cherished public institution that once belonged to the neighborhood is a malignant tumor. I've heard of the War on Poverty. I saw the War on Drugs. Is this now the War on Public Education? The magazine contains a map of school closures and crime zones. Here, the narrative of high crime and "bad schools" are placed together; this time implying that bad schools are the cause of high crime. It couldn't possibly be poverty. It couldn't possibly be an issue of low test scores resulting from a context where people are struggling to survive. In the worldview of
Time magazine, a public school is not a beacon of light in a community plagued by darkness. Not in the
Time narrative. Here, the school is both a symptom and a cause of a broken city and the broken lives of poverty. And so again, it takes a wealthy, idealistic politician to come in and sweep out the dirty, lazy, awful teachers and replace it with something more innovative. The crazy part is that I'm angry. I'm just sad. Really sad. And convinced that we, as teachers, need to tell a better, more compelling narrative - one of truth, humility and authenticity. Pretty much everything that
Time misses in this propaganda piece.
As an aside: Note that if the article had been written about closing military bases, we would be reading about how the closures will break the local economy. If these had been fire stations of police precincts, we'd be hearing about how public safety is at risk. Instead, teachers are depicted as selfish and lazy, caring more about union contracts than children because we dare to say that these are places worth fighting to keep.
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