Their argument rests on three pillars. One is that the collective voice of teachers is either irrelevant or toxic. A second pillar is that an educated person can be known by a single metric, like his or her scores on a standardized test. And the third is that education is a product — like a laptop or a refrigerator — that should be part of the marketplace. And we reject all that strongly. You admit in the book that teaching can be an exhausting profession.
You absolutely can, but you can't do it arbitrarily. There has to be some process. And before that was true, not only were communists and socialists kept out of the classroom, but also black people and women. At the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where I sent my kids, where Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel send their kids, they have teachers who are unionized and well-respected.
I went and met with the heads of the Lab School. But the people who are under the lash of school reform don't have that privilege. And that's a shame. You argue that public schools are most highly-regarded in places where the teachers' unions are most powerful, including Massachusetts. But you also give so much credit to social context in education. You have to admit that Massachusetts has some certain economic advantages over, say, Alabama. But corporate-reform advocates would like us to believe that the unions are the reason schools are failing.
They happen to have the lowest standardized-test scores, which is the measure they prefer. One is that the collective voice of teachers is necessary to improve education. We would be foolish to discount that. Our main message to kids has to be, you have the agency to learn everything.
But you can reach out, exercising your agency, and become a learned, wise, skilled citizen. You can all do it. Good working conditions make good teaching conditions, and good teaching conditions make good learning conditions.
I want high standards that are set, frankly, close to the ground by the people who are impacted by education. And I want to keep high standards for legislatures, too: to fund education equitably and fairly. Kids come to us with amazing assets that are often discounted in schools. Use it as an inspiration to go further. My own view, as a lifelong teacher, is that our main message to kids has to be, you have the agency to learn everything.
I came of age, as a teacher, in the '60s. What do we hope to accomplish? They encouraged cooperation rather than competition, wanting to create a good model for an integrated school. The mission of SDS was to influence the U. In domestic matters, it sought to eliminate racial discrimination and economic inequality, and to increase the power and prominence of trade unions. In , Ayers and others created underground collectives in major cities throughout the country and became known as The Weather Underground.
They planned and carried out several bombings, including one on the Capitol Building in Washington, D. As fugitive members of The Weather Underground, Ayers and fellow activist Bernardine Dohrn married and began having children.
Not wanting their kids to grow up in hiding, they eventually decided to turn themselves in. By the time their case would have gone to trial, government attorneys requested that all charges be dropped due to the illegal tactics used by the FBI to gather evidence against them.
The Weather Underground has been accused of being a terrorist group, but Ayers disagrees, making a distinction between terrorism and vandalism. Terrorism was what was being practiced by the United States in the countryside of Vietnam where thousands of people were being killed every week.
He joined the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago in and became Distinguished Professor of Education in , a position he held through
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