Defending Teachers

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler, as he does frequently, voices the teachers' angle on things - in this case of the massacre - that we've been attacking them for decades, trashing teachers' unions, pretending that public teachers are just lazy and that school vouchers will cure all our ills. Even liberals blasting away at the poor state of education even as minorities make leaps and bounds progress over 2 decades that everyone ignores. Democrats like Rahm Emmanuel and Republicans like Scott Walker blast away at the teachers' unions, one point of sharing in our our rare bipartisan consensus.

But will these voucher schools for the elite & high performers wrap their arms around the kids as they're getting shot at, care enough to make presents for all the kids that never get delivered? Or will they just feed the Kaplan testing approach to robotic standards-focused indoctrination?

20 years ago, schools were a mess with crack gangs and weapons in school. Now these atrocities are a spotty trend, but the everyday occurrence is the lack of resources for schools to do their work, continual budget cuts with sour economic times, but with conscientious teachers still pulling their load.

We'll have a debate on guns and mental health, but teachers deal with borderline mental issues every day, from ADHD to chemical imbalance to anti-social to learning disabilities to plain dumb and challenged. Just part of the job.

Of course Wayne LaPierre and others are willing to take the tough love / just send weapons approach, a soldier in every school. It's worked so well in Afghanistan and Iraq, why not the home front? Why put in normal educational resources when we can sell more guns and tasers?

While teachers don't get attacked with guns every day, they're in the crosshairs for blame on our nation's woes. Isn't it time we pointed the gun somewhere else?