Sunday, October 10, 2010
Bloomberg Scapegoating the Education System
On the USA Today website, there is an article called NYC takes aim at teacher’ ‘tenure for breathing’ The claim had been made by a charter school leader in an educational documentary called Waiting for Superman, which places much of the blame for bad schools nationwide on union rules “tenure” that protect unskilled teachers. New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg is taking the stand to raise the bar for students through higher standards for teachers and for principles to allow teachers to be tenured. It is apparent that the documentary and Bloomberg are scapegoating tenure and turning it into a negative thing in all cases and one that takes all of the blame for the faults in the education system. According to our textbook, “scapegoating becomes responsible for all that’s wrong, and the rhetor and the audience unite against this scapegoat and achieve a kind of redemption by purging the scapegoat from their midst”. In this case the rhetor is the school leader from the educational documentary and partially Michael Bloomberg because he helps to push all the blame to tenure. And all the inattentive public who read this believe that tenure will be the worst possible thing for education and have a negative outlook on it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This article mentions Waiting for Superman that, according to the article is a documentary, “which places much of the blame for bad schools nationwide on union rules that protect incompetent teachers.” The film has been produced to gain the attention of the inattentive public that may otherwise not be aware of the problems in the education system. Film, as type of medium is effective in reaching a large audience as it can be reproduced on different channels, released to DVD etc unlike newspapers or magazine articles which only run once in a specific paper or magazine once. The film is designed to reach a mass audience and has been proclaimed by Oprah which will help gain the attention of the innattentive audience as well.
ReplyDeleteThis article really questions the attentive or inattentive audience. First does the USA Today have most mostly inattentive or attentive audience? I believe that mostly people reading newspapers would be more attentive than inattentive audience. Even though the USA Today might be easier reading this article questions what most tenured teachers would have to say about the awareness of protest. I believe this article is aiming at the attentive audience to tell them to be aware about this documentary coming out and how many inattentive audiences members are going to perceive the word tenure. I will agree that this documentary is denying the real problem at hand.
ReplyDelete