But wait! What is meant by “protect teachers?” Are teachers who just sit in class waiting for the day to go by because they can’t stand their jobs actually “protected?” I had one of those teachers who said we didn’t even need to talk to him because our assignments were written on the chalkboard. He would spend the class time reading his newspaper with the soles of his shoes staring at us. Maybe he had his eyes down there because he was definitely sitting on his head.
Are hating kids and feeling miserable about the classrooms and hallways teachers inhabit 5 days a week something to be preserved and protected? No, the real meaning is that their salaries are protected. Or more to the point, their access to a means of living protected. No wonder. In an economy where every person must sell themselves on the labor market as their ONLY means of earning a living (unfortunately, there’s no alternative economy in which people are provided free access to life’s resources in our wonderful FREE market), it only makes sense for them to defend their tenures/salaries/means of living. So, teachers, who have a decent degree of social respect for their professions, and sufficient incomes to fight for their means of life, are able to “protect” their livelihoods. Students, and particularly students of non-wealthy parents, are not able to access a meaningful education. They suffer the consequences of this broken system throughout their lives.
The film tries to end on a high-note with a review of the KIPP school program, which has had undeniable success in producing students with better test scores. I’m not sure how the schools function in terms of student well being, but let me leave that aside for the moment. These KIPP schools are scarce, and because they receive public funding, they must use a lottery system to determine who gets admitted. The film follows five kids and it shows them anxiously waiting to hear if their number gets called. You can also see the other parents and children in the background nail-bitingly attending each utterance from the announcers hoping the next name or number called is theirs. As the number of names called grows and the available seats reduce, the sense of desperation on their young faces makes you want to rush in and rescue them all. You hold on to hope to the last number, because that’s how all movies resolve the climax—at the last minute, and in the favor of the protagonist. Not in this case. It’s real life and most of the featured kids don’t get called. The shattering of hope for the kids makes it difficult to hold back the tears. Then, the realization on the parents’ faces that not only have their children missed an important opportunity to improve their lives been lost, but that they, the parents, have let their kids down. Mommy can’t make it better. She can’t throw money at the problem and make it disappear. Their daily fight with the cruel market world, against which they try to insulate their kids, is a losing battle. The system is king, and they are the pawns. Somehow, they must summon all remaining strength not to let their sense of defeat, worry, and despair spill over onto their kids. They have to console their children because it is their pain that takes priority at that time. Despite every Herculean effort to shield their kids from the continuous battle to provide a better life, their kids know. The kids know that their parents can’t protect them from the harsh world. They know that the impact of this lottery is not just about where to go to school, but a lottery about how their lives will turn out, and it’s looking less and less favorable.
These are the unsparing sacrifices we make to perpetuate our outdated, insufficient, and barely-above-savage social system. All those people who work so hard to critique a resource-based economic model to find any unpleasantry, any objection, any difficult challenge that would be faced in an RBE amaze me in that they seem to overlook all the heartache of our current system. It’s like they measure an RBE against a fictional utopian standard, in which everyone gets everything they want and problems are extinct. They use that to argue against an RBE, without noticing that their measurement should be against our current system. Proponents of an RBE do not expect utopia, just a life and planet a lot better off than what we have now. With all the road kill caused by our current system, it feels like there must be a thousand better options, which is all we need—better! And it sure is time for better, unless we want to continue to watch lives hinge on the outcome of lotteries.
