If power is going to corrupt, it stands to reason that it will flatter first. Which is to say that one might start out wanting to do good, and even actually doing it. But gradually the good that you were doing becomes a secondary priority. And thanks to a kind of tunnel vision you don't even notice it.
In a recent profile, Cecily Myart-Cruz shows signs of being in the advanced stages. She's the head of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a powerful teacher's union in California. And one of her current top priorities is justifying the school closures that have kept so many children out of in-person learning for the past year.
Today, however, on a sunny May afternoon, Myart-Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum—or at least inside a glass-paneled conference room down the hall from her eleventh-floor office. And right away, she lives up to her reputation: after settling into in a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics. Like this one: “There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.
When an educator thinks it's a winning argument to say, "Maybe the kids don't know their ABCs but they know to think what we tell them to think," well, you can't lose the plot much more badly than that.
Of course the article mentions that Myart-Cruz barely ever speaks to the press. Maybe she would have been better advised to stick with that avoidance.
2 comments:
This woman is a piece of work, isn't she? Wow. After reading through the link you posted I just had to see how Myart-Cruz presents herself in public. I went in search of a recent video. Having found the 45 minute long 'state of the union' diatribe she made in early August I was more than a little horrified at how excruciating it was to watch her speak. Skipping through the sections of the video I was appalled to see in every bit how her mouth contorted around every phrase showing too many scary teeth. But perhaps I'm being unkind. Maybe she was always the soul of sweetness and light in her classrooms.. How could I imagine Ms. Myart-Cruz as a hectoring scold?
Somehow I was reminded of Eric Hoffer's statement: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." Schoolboards as platforms for radical political appointees was never the original intention. There are some good arguments for dismantling a number of agencies that have outlived their original objectives.
On another, but related, subject I enjoyed reading a lecture by Michael Crichton at Caltech in 2003 called Aliens Cause Global Warming. I think it might interest you.
Too many scary teeth indeed. Myart-Cruz, if she ever worked inside the classroom, seems to have quickly gotten herself promoted away from it. In and of itself that might be for the best. The problem is that she and others allied with her don't understand what education and schools are for, yet believe themselves wise enough to decide its fate.
I read Hoffer's The True Believers some time ago and found some passages that made good sense to me. It might make even more sense now. Institutions are going to run aground when cabals of the self-interested take them over. When you throw ideology into the mix the situation gets even worse.
Interesting talk by Crichton. He seems somewhat prophetic on the way the scientific establishment was being corrupted. Quite critical of Carl Sagan, which may be valid. "This is not the way science is conducted; it is the way products are sold." Good line. I'll have to read this again.
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