Thursday, November 13, 2008 - Posts
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Here’s Sarah Palin at today’s press conference at the Republican Governor's Association in Miami. It’s Palin minus the sass. But plus the gravitas. Minus the “betchas” and “atchas” and “gotchas.” But plus the edgy new slouch. But also minus the wink (Thank God).
If anything, Palin looks like she’s playing Tina Fey at a mob funeral in New Jersey.
Putting aside the absurdity that she’s finally giving her first national press conference because “the campaign is over,” I find her almost totally unrecognizable. I have one foot in the Sara Mosle camp (brilliant post!) and am desperate to put her behind us. My other foot is in the Andrew Sullivan/Anonymous Liberal/Kevin Drum camp: Covering her as though she is a serious politician with serious things to say is folly. But whatever you think of Sarah Palin, her performance today had none of the “charm” of the last two months, but weirdly, held none of the terror. Turns out Palin playing Palin isn’t very interesting at all.
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Did I say Palin in '12? Correction: Palin in '09. And did I say she'd be back? Wrong-o; she shows no sign of going away.
As for Michelle Obama, my beef with that Rebecca Traister piece about the "momification" of the next first lady is that Traister supposes Obama is in mourning for her career in hospital administration. But based on what? She likewise assumes that Obama's emphasis on her duties as mom-in-chief were hoked up only to help her hubby get elected. In her view, the only reason Obama hasn't dropped the whole schtick now that the coast is clear is that she can't risk looking like a Hillary Clinton as first lady.
Only, Michelle Obama isn't Hillary Clinton; for one thing, I believe her when she says she has no political ambitions. Not that there would be anything wrong with it if she did have, and if she changes her mind later, she's got my vote. But why is a focus on her role as a wife and mother assumed to be just for show? Is she required to regard being a hands-on mom and first spouse as small potatoes just because she's in every way an equal partner to the president-elect and attended schmantzy schools?
As satisfying as running PR and community outreach and volunteer programs for the University of Chicago Hospitals no doubt was, like Emily I have a hard time seeing the White House as a step down. Is there a woman (or man) alive who wouldn't gladly take a few years off to advise and support the president?
Can smart, strong women not choose traditional roles? Everything I know about Michelle Obama tells me that this really is her choice, not her consolation prize. And if we're not OK with that (can you say projection?) I'm not sure it's her problem.
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I'm intrigued by today's story in the New York Times about Washington, D.C.'s, reform-minded superintendent, Michelle Rhee, wanting to end tenure for public school teachers in the district. Let me begin by saying that I've always been a skeptic of the ever-popular scapegoating of teachers' unions as the sole cause of poor performance in inner-city schools. That's not to say that unions, or at least some of their members, aren't occasionally a big problem. (Even Albert Shanker, the late head of the United Federation of Teachers, used to concede as much.) But they aren't the only problem, or even, always, the main problem.
At the impoverished, inner-city public school where I taught third grade in the early 1990s, there were indisputably some bad actors who desperately needed to be shown the door. But the same could be said of a lot of workplaces where unions don't exist. (Were this not the case, a TV show like The Office would have no resonance.) These few unproductive or inefficient teachers typically paled against the other problems the school faced: gross overcrowding, no supplies (I had to buy my own chalk), an endless stream of incoherent educational fads foisted on teachers from district headquarters, and students who couldn't be sweeter (third graders still want to hold your hand) but who were desperately poor and often saddled, through no fault of their own, with dysfunctional or absentee parents.
The union, in fact, was often one of the few forces maintaining minimal conditions at my school. I have no doubt but that for the union, my already overcrowded, third-grade class—it had 34 kids, the legal limit at the time under the teachers' contract—would have had dozens more students. And we all know of superb suburban public schools that manage to succeed despite the presence of organized labor. Obviously, labor, alone, isn't the crucial difference.
Indeed, one of the biggest problems in poor districts is that a school is often the only decent employer. Given that school board members are typically elected and the high turnover rate among superintendents, it's easy for such schools, over time, to become patronage mills. In such an environment, job protection really is a legitimate concern. There's no guarantee that those who’ll be fired will be the right ones or that they will be replaced by anyone better. One district head tried to fire me because I'd written an article that he found embarrassing to the school system; what saved my job was the union contract. Then again, the person who apparently urged him to give me the ax was the likewise-offended union rep at my school. In sum, unions aren't all good or all bad; like most institutions in American life, they're typically something of a mixed bag but one teachers have tended to prefer rather than not.
I'm also impatient with Rhee's charge that teachers' unions are only about adults and their concerns, not the kids. So what? This could be said about the compensation package at almost any job. Few people, for example, expect pilots to forgo their union just to help out the frequent flier in Seat 3A (even if that passenger is an innocent, chubby-cheeked child). Or for the UPS driver to give up his union contract just because the packages he delivers are for a kid's birthday. Why, then, are teachers, alone among the nation’s professionals, expected to labor selflessly with no regard for their own self-interests? (After all, self-interest is "market forces" at work—something many school reformers are forever touting.) The attitude that teachers should labor solely for love, not money, strikes me as a carryover from a time when teaching was seen as "women’s work"—and thus not really worthy of pay. One of the many reforms Shanker ushered in was to equalize pay between women, who were typically given the lowest-paying jobs in elementary schools (as the assignment was regarded as akin to motherhood), and men, who were disproportionately awarded higher school positions because these were regarded as "real" jobs.
The above said, unions' complaint that Rhee doesn't properly regard teaching as a lifelong profession strikes me as outdated. This idea might have made sense 50 years ago (when schools benefited from a captive employment pool of talented women and blacks, who had few other professional options). Nowadays, the labor force is far more mobile. Few people stay in one job their entire careers. Today’s selfless community organizer might be tomorrow’s president of the United States. In this environment, Rhee is right, I think, to insist that schools must be able to look beyond career educators to train and attract talent.
What's potentially promising about Rhee’s approach, I think, is that she is at least offering teachers a carrot instead of just a stick. She wants to significantly boost salaries (by as much as $30,000 a year) for all those (not just the few in "combat" positions) who are willing to voluntarily forgo tenure. To foot this bill, Rhee isn’t relying on taxes but on charitable donations. That brings up the question of whether these pay increases will be permanent or just an elaborate bait and switch. (Unions have reasons to worry: Rhee's eventual successor might have entirely different priorities.) But given that many school system heads want to abolish tenure without offering teachers anything in return, this at least seems like a step toward a more genuine compromise. In the meantime, Rhee would do well to remember that teachers unions are powerful not because they're inherently malign but because, in many ways, they continue to represent teachers' interests. I, for one, don’t begrudge these teachers, like any other workers, negotiating for the best contract.
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