If we fire 10s of thousands of teachers and many neighborhood schools crater, who will care if charters, some special ed programs, and others get a gold plated order of their ultimate wish list?

I’ve seen both sides of the equation, and many policy analysts “don’t know what they don’t know” about recessions. The cutbacks of educators and programs is not the largest part of the problem. As the economy wrecks families, schools will be overwhelmed by more traumatized kids. The challenges on the adult side will be dwarfed by the challenges on the students side. And the collapse of a system causes far more harm than the good that can be created by building a new system. Just as the financial crisis was made worse by the short memories on Wall Street, the new generation of reformers will be getting more of an education than they realize.

The prime purpose of the Stimulus Package is stimulus. Don’t we all sympathize with Sen. Grassley’s concerns about mission creep? We in education want the Stimulus money to be spent as promised except in education where we each have an agenda which would be transformative. In the Health sector, I bet, they want educators to play by the rules of the Stimulus game, but they each want their agenda to be the exception. During the Depression, my mentors wanted land reform, not the propping up of the horrible cotton agricultural sector, but FDR wasn’t in a situation where he could gamble on social enginneering. Had we not survived the depression and WWII, FDR’s pragmatism wouldn’t look too good. And the land reformers had been “right” and it would have been better if we had wiped the slate clean – as long as we didn’t screw it up like the Soviet Five Year Plans ….

I have also seen what happened when my school was flooded with hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital expenditures to meet NCLB while teacher cutbacks brought the school to its knees – turning us from a historically challenged school into “The Wire.”

If we can’t use Stimulus to “supplant,” we are gambling with fire. Imagine the ammunition we’d give the Right Wing if we doubled federal spending and schools collapsed because veteran teachers were fired in mass as we hired newly minted special ed teachers and we tried out “the reformers” theories.

From my perspective in the nosebleed seats in the bleachers, I want my union to be a team player also. I’d like to restore the Senate’s funding of charters in return for language that gives unions a fair shake in those schools. – as well as for earning some good will.

From my outsiders perspective, that seems to be the issue with many data-driven reformers. Their righteousness is unquestioned, but will they be “team players?”

Now is the time for problem solving. For once, I’d like the field of education to pay more attention to heading off problems than cleaning them up afterwards.

And what can we who work in “the status quo” offer to the new generation of reformers? Those of us who have witnessed the effects of recessions on poor kids have some practical experience. You should see what has been happening to my students in the last few months, and its barely hit here. I suspect that NYC schools may soon see what we faced in the recession/depression of 1983.