Under Pressure

I am seriously thinking about playing the classic Queen/David Bowie collaboration every day in the background at Eisenhower as teachers and administrators and students deal with the new pressures being brought to bear by the No Child Left Behind Act.

My whole team just watched one of our math/science teachers, who is one tough cookie, cry in the middle of our content meeting, dealing with all of the stress and pressure of Annual Yearly Progress. Morale is paradoxically low and the teachers are rallying together. Administrators are simultaneously under pressure to put the screws to teachers and are lightening up, much more immediately aware that the stress is too much for everyone.

And all I know is that the friends of force have made a lot of enemies at my school, where teachers are simultaneously trying to meet the law's demands and resenting the shit out of everyone responsible for this stupid law and its cheerleaders.

And the bigger lesson for me is that people can claim credit all they want for their more forceful themes, but the people they've been abusing are very unlikely to give them credit. Or anyone else for that matter. You can pretend like you've been more responsible for a result than you really have, but the in the end, everyone who knows better will know what a shithead you were for making their jobs harder rather than helping them be more effective.

The funny thing to me is that the policy scholars and makers who debate NCLB can debate it like it's a real debate all they want. Teachers, on the other hand, are almost universally opposed to it. And you can only ignore the people implementing your bidding for a time until it just becomes perfectly clear to everyone that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.

Lots of people in Washington with lots of good intentions, marching everyone down a road to hell.

The most serious consequence of this foolhardy political period: less power in Washington, domestically and internationally.

The heydey of Washington D.C. as the center of power in the world, as Robert Samuelson wrote today in the Washington Post, will soon be behind us, I think.

But whereas Robert seems to lament the passing of Pax Americana, I am thinking, "It's about fuckin' time."

The truth is that is that is not just American power and Washington power that it waning. It is centralized power of all sorts. Old and wrong-headed legacies just die hard. But they die nonetheless.

And the reason why so many Washington insiders fail to see it or lament it's passing is that they aspired to get a piece of the action. But it is action that is losing its real capacity to effect change. And that is the only power that is really worth anything.