I see The New Republic (TNR) has accepted a conservative frame for the struggle for the life of our nation’s public schools as a contest between so-called “reformers” (the conservatives) and the so-called “establishment” (teachers who want to teach as professionals and who still believe teaching should be a matter of children’s learning). The article is called, “Why Obama Gets an “A” for Choosing Duncan.”

The deception comes from framing the struggle around “the union” which is then labeled as “the establishment.” Meanwhile, the actual conversation among teachers and administrators with knowledge of teaching and concern for it (rather than simply for management of a business or institutional survival in the current test-and-blame culture of public education) revolves around good, effective teaching that engages students in their own learning, meeting them where they are and enabling them to move forward.

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education has heightened the fears and anxieties on the educators’ listserv I read as a silent member. The fear is that the nation’s public schools will be subjected to another wave of the test-and-blame pretense to accountability.

But the situation has been falsely framed by the people seeking to dismantle public education, and the press has accepted the false frame uncritically, thereby setting up the wrong national conversation. The false frame, put forward for example by David Brooks in the New York Times, is set up by labeling the conservatives as “reformers” and the progressives as “reactionaries.” The second step has been to misconstrue the situation as a matter of “the union.”