Why Charter Schools are Sexist.

There are a lot of reasons to believe that we need school reform, but there are a lot more reasons to be resistant to charter schools. One of those reasons is that charter schools are sexist.

Charter schools are often pitted against the public schools because of the new-found belief that teachers are getting a sweet gig.

1. First of all "what?" Teachers used to be thought of, appropriately, as people who had way too much education to be making the pittances that they were making. These teachers aren't making a heck of a lot more than they were two decades ago, neither are their jobs more secure. They are simply public servants. Sure, they need to live, eat, and have health care, and even be rewarded for bringing their experience back to their school districts year after year as opposed to going off to a private school, but they aren't being paid nearly what private sector professionals with similar education, experience and skill are being paid. The only reason teachers do what they do is because they care. They are not out to get our kids. Teachers are spending everyday in the classrooms looking our children in the eye and telling them how to become better people.
2. If there is a reason that this particular union of professionals is being attacked, I suggest that it is because it is the most successful, and one of the earliest, jobs that women could do professionally. Even before women were entering the so-called 'worlds oldest profession,' women were staying home with the children from the tribe and teaching. Is it not a little suspect that at the same time that women are losing seats in the house of representatives for the first time since 1930 we are scape goating a union that is overwhelmingly women for the downturn of our education system, and therefore the downturn of our economy, our morality, and our status as a nation.
3. Similarly, we have trumpeted the successes of "Teaching for America," an organization that turns teaching into a therapeutic job, like working the cash register at Target or the grill at McDonalds. The fact that charter schools are hiring teachers that are not certified speaks to an ideology that believes that pedagogy is meaningless. Charter school advocates are essentially saying, "Teaching isn't a profession that takes years of training to know how to do well. Teaching is something that anyone with an education can do." The education that they are speaking about is an education in the traditionally male academic realm, as opposed to the traditionally female realm of pedagogy.
   

None of this would matter if charter schools were outperforming public schools, but the numbers repeatedly show that they are not. The results are mixed when looked at from the up and down numbers, but when one takes socioeconomic status into account, it is clear that charter schools are getting people with a higher SES and doing more poorly with them than public schools would have, and that more and more often, children in difficult SES are getting lost in the schools where the children of people who are too busy dealing with their own difficulties to advocate for their children go. The only reason that we ignore the facts that charter school are a complete and total failure is to perpetuate the myth to which all of us try so desperately to cling. Charter schools perpetuate the myth that traditional feminine knowledge, such as teaching, is unimportant, intuitive, and easily picked up along the way. By not valuing this knowledge, we condemn it to being left out of the public dialogue and the oeuvre of things that we value as a society.