My column photo has changed over the years. I look a bit gaunt and haunted, unlike the early days, when I had a cheery, confident look of some kind of newspaper publisher or something.
Well, what would you expect? I live a pressure-filled, tortured life. It’s not like I’m some sort of public school teacher, with job tenure and a business model that tells customers they must send their kids to school or go to jail.
No, each day, when I walk in the newsroom door and the editor says, “you still here?” is another day of doubt and terror. There is no law that says the citizenry has to read the Hartford Business Journal from kindergarten through high school graduation.
Why do you think I write about sex and actuarial science and sex all the time? We have to attract readers, based on something other than labeling the non-readers felonious truants.
I’ve tried to protect myself. I taught at college and universities in Connecticut for 33 years, because I heard that professors can get tenure. Little did I know that I was labeled “adjunct,” which is even worse than being labeled “freelance” by the Business Journal. I didn’t have job protection; I only taught when there were really hard, complicated classes that the real professors didn’t like.
At the public school, K-12 level, the environment is Heaven on Earth. You teach and teach and teach, with job tenure almost assured; the customers show up, as a matter of law.
The pressure is on in Connecticut to mandate “pre-school” from the time the kids are three years old and there are campaigns to prohibit kids from dropping out of high school until they are 38 years old, or have a note from their mom.
This is the business model of which I want to be a part. I’m tired of having to wash the publisher’s car on weekends, just to build a little good will.
Even the public school bosses are becoming a bit embarrassed by it all. A new proposal from the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents would replace teacher tenure with five-year renewable contracts. That has about as much chance of being approved by the General Assembly as the bill to make Cohen the Columnist’s birthday a state holiday.
The superintendents got back into their self-interested groove with proposals to launch state-wide pre-school for all kids starting at age 3 — and enough of this half-day kindergarten stuff. Keep the toddlers in school all day, the superintendents suggest, as God intended.
This long-standing national effort to begin snatching kids from the womb and enrolling them in school has been a broad-based conspiracy involving colleges of education, teacher unions, and shadowy non-profit foundations.
The timing is good; parents are looking for somewhere “free” to dump the young kids, as mom and dad wander the neighborhood, looking for jobs. In fact, one of the key strategies of the conspirators has been to discourage calling the program “babysitting” or “nursery school.”
No, the eventual goal is to professionalize what had been the job of volunteers, modestly-credentialed aides and private enterprises.
In a state such as Connecticut, the final objective will be to require every pre-school employee to have unnecessary college credentials; to open the door for teacher unions to organize the pre-school staff army; and, of course, to demand massive increases in educational spending, to achieve murky objectives for which no one will be held accountable.
And everyone involved will have tenure and constipated union work rules on their side.
Columnists? Blood, sweat and tears. That’s all.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
