There was a time—there was a long time—during both the Clinton and Obama administrations when the Democratic neoliberal establishment did not much care for the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, regarding them, correctly, as enemies of educational reform, more interested in protecting bad teachers than helping struggling students.
Well, that was then. Neolib has given way to “woke”. It was Bernie Sanders who broke the neolib’s grip on the party, reviving the old paleolib romanticization/deification of labor unions. Of course, the old blue collar unions had long been in terminal decline, but the white collar unions, consisting almost entirely of government employees, and teachers in particular, were still very much alive and kicking, and understandably responded to the revived mantra that, basically, unions can do no wrong with a hearty “Right On!”
The rise of “woke” ideology of systemic racism turbocharged the teachers’ political potency. Back in the day, idealistic Ivy Leaguers eagerly signed up for “Teach for America” and flocked to urban schools to bring the light of learning to low-income black students. But the new generation of woke folk nobly refused to do so, lest they take jobs away from “experienced” black teachers, some of whom were mostly experienced at phoning it in.
But there was more. The “theory” that “middle class values”, “hard work”, and “academic excellence” were all racist was music to many educators’ ears, who had long been infuriated by the whole notion of holding teachers responsible for their students’ performance, pushed egregiously by the neolibs for decades. And, in yet another turn of the screw, the “woke” obsession with the “oppressed”—the more obscure the better—led to a frenzied embrace of the cause of the transsexuals, a cause seemed to grow both ever more convoluted and ever more rigid with each passing day. The woke folks were discovering whole new worlds of oppression to analyze and deplore, and whole new oceans of guilt to pour on the damnable white patriarchy.
Unfortunately, parents objected. They didn’t want their children to be evaluated, not on how much they learned, but rather on how guilty they felt about their white privilege.
And now Terry McAuliffe, the once and hopefully future governor of Virginia, is caught in the cross fire, having continued to zig when he should have zagged. Yes, much of the assault on “woke” education has been narrow-minded, and, yes, sometimes racist and hysterical. But the notion that teachers, being “experts”, should be exempt from criticism, even when it is arguably “unfair”, is absurd, as are the companion notions that the latest liberal cliché is somehow “science”, and that “science” always tells us exactly what we need to know.
The Democrats don’t deserve to escape punishment for their uncritical acceptance of woke niaiserie. But I hope they do.
Afterwords
If you would like an empirical validation of this virtually content-free prose rant, check out Journalist Butchery of School Board Protests Upending Politics in Virginia and Elsewhere by Reason’s Matt Welch.
