"You Can't Fire the Bad Ones!": And 18 Other Myths about Teachers, Teachers Unions, and Public Education

by William Ayers, Crystal Laura, Rick Ayers

Overview

Overturns common misconceptions about charter schools, school "choice," standardized tests, common core curriculum, and teacher evaluations.

Three distinguished educators, scholars, and activists flip the script on many enduring and popular myths about teachers, teachers' unions, and education that permeate our culture. By unpacking these myths, and underscoring the necessity of strong and vital public schools as a common good, the authors challenge readers—whether parents, community members, policy makers, union activists, or educators themselves—to rethink their assumptions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807036662
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	01/16/2018
Series:	Myths Made in America , #7
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

William Ayers is an author, activist, and educator whose previous books include To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom.

Crystal Laura is an educator and the author of Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

Rick Ayers is an educator and the author of An Empty Seat in Class: Teaching and Learning After the Death of a Student, and, with William Ayers, Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: “Rotten Apples”

MYTH 1: Teachers’ Unions Are the Biggest Obstacle to Improving Education Today.”

MYTH 2: You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones.”

MYTH 3: “Teachers’ Unions Represent a Flock of ‘Go Slow/Status Quo’ Sheep.”

MYTH 4: “Good Teaching Is Entirely Color-Blind.”

MYTH 5: “Teachers Have It Easy.”

MYTH 6: “High-Stakes Standardized Tests Improve Student Achievement and Effectively Detect Inferior Teachers.”

MYTH 7: “While Teachers and Their Unions Use Poverty as a Convenient Smokescreen for Their Own Failures, It’s Become Obvious That Grit and Merit Can Overcome Every Disadvantage.”

MYTH 8: “Teachers Are Made More Visible and Accountable in Charter Schools, More Competitive Through Voucher Programs, and Irrelevant with the Advent of Teacher-Proof Cyber Schools.”

MYTH 9: “Anyone Can Be a Teacher.”

MYTH 10: “Teachers Follow Popular Fads and Political Correctness Rather Than Teaching the Basics.”

MYTH 11: “Teacher Activists Are Troublemakers.”

MYTH 12: “Discipline Is the First Priority for Every Teacher, and It Is Especially Essential for Teachers in Urban Schools with Large Numbers of Black Students.”

MYTH 13: “Teachers Need to Set High Standards and Drive Kids Hard.”

MYTH 14: “Teachers Are Poorly Served by the Universally Dreadful Teacher-Education Programs Currently Available.”

MYTH 15: “Too Many Bad Teachers Have Created a Public School System That Is Utterly Broken, and the Only Solution Is to Wipe the Slate Clean and Start Over.”

MYTH 16: “Teachers Are Unable to Deal Adequately with the Disciplinary Challenges Posed By Today’s Youth, and We Need More Police in Our Public School Buildings to Do the Job and Maintain Law and Order.”

MYTH 17: “Teachers Need to Stick with Teaching the Great Lessons of Western Civilization in Order to Civilize Youth and Mold Them into the Good Citizens of the Future.”

MYTH 18: “Teachers Need to Focus Less on the Arts, More on STEM.”

MYTH 19: “The Truly Great Teachers Are Heroes.”

Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

The format works well and provides powerful ammunition for concerned parents, educators, and legislators working to bring about true and beneficial school improvements.”
—Booklist

“A methodical dismantling of the coordinated tenets of the free market assault on public education. . . A valuable compendium of responses to the shallow, classist hostility to public education.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Recommended for academic libraries serving teachers-in-training.”
—Library Journal

“For some time now, it has been fashionable for so-called reformers to attack teachers and teacher unions. This important new book debunks those attacks by drawing attention to the actual work that teachers do every day to support children, even as they carry out their duties under constraints that our policy makers steadfastly ignore.”
—Pedro A. Noguera, author of The Trouble with Black Boys

“A fundamental question I have asked in recent years is ‘When did teachers become the enemy?’ Ayers, Laura, and Ayers detail the pernicious lies that have invaded the public psyche to create enmity between teachers and the wider community. This text breaks open the myths and helps us take a hard and sober look at what we are doing to teachers and by default our children and our future. It is a must-read.”
—Gloria Ladson-Billings, author of The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children

“An artful and meticulous dissection of the interlocking web of myths and lies about our public schools that have been aggressively promoted by private-sector forces, right-wing politicians, and collusive neoliberals over the most recent fifteen years. I hope it will be widely read by everyone who loves and treasures children.”
—Jonathan Kozol, author of Rachel and Her Children, Savage Inequalities, and Amazing Grace

From the Publisher

2017-12-04
A methodical dismantling of the coordinated tenets of the free market assault on public education. Education professors William Ayers (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, 2010, etc.), Laura (Chicago State Univ.; Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, 2014), and Rick Ayers (Univ. of San Francisco; An Empty Seat in Class: Teaching and Learning after the Death of a Student, 2014, etc.) bring formidable progressive rhetoric to the reform debate. They argue against the conservative refrain that "unruly students, lazy and incompetent teachers, and apathetic administrators together destroy an adequate academic environment." They view this outlook as specious and so multilayered that it demands a fully structured response. Consequently, they debunk 19 "myths" contributing to this free-wheeling scorn toward public education. The authors touch on many aspects of this discussion, including controversies around charter schools, privatization initiatives, and inequitable allocation of resources. In each chapter, the authors point out the slick bombast of figures like Michelle Rhee and Donald Trump—e.g., the assertion of "the disastrous consequences of allowing the teachers' unions and their special interest bosses to hold sway over future generations." They rebut these conceits with a "Reality Check," evidence-based narratives contradicting each purported reactionary viewpoint. It's an effective approach, as when they argue that high-pressure standardized testing does not give education a high-priced corporatized sheen but confers advantages to the privileged and amplifies stress for all students. Furthermore, the myth that "Good Teaching is Entirely Color-Blind" is alluring because it "fails to take aim at the institutional and societal structures of privilege and oppression based on race." The authors also attack the pernicious idea that "Teachers Have It Easy" by explaining how experienced, compassionate instructors "are being driven out of the profession in record numbers." The authors render their arguments with strong rhetoric, but in emphasizing multicultural awareness and unorthodox teaching methods as solutions, they may not sway the mainstream conservatives whose views they ably counter. A valuable compendium of responses to the shallow, classist hostility to public education.

Kirkus Reviews