My mother is a terrorist. Or she would be if she was still teaching public school.

Last week, Secretary of Education Rod Paige referred to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, as ”a terrorist organization“ during a private meeting with governors.

Yes, it seems we are getting to the point where the number of people deemed prospective ”terrorists“ (a.k.a. enemies of the Bush administration) exceeds the number of Americans (since terrorism, we are told, is anti-American).

The rationale for equating teachers with terrorists goes something like this: Bush hails himself as a staunch advocate of education reform a la his (sparsely funded) No Child Left Behind legislation, but many of the 2.7 million members of the NEA have vocalized their opposition to the law, which penalizes schools and teachers if, for instance, test scores don’t improve in the course of a year … hence the teachers must be anti-American/terrorists.

Is Bush the only one immune from the ”terrorism“ label (along with Joseph McCarthy’s ghost)? Has Senator Joseph McCarthy come back from the dead to play puppeteer for the Bush administration?  

Previously, Paige has compared opponents of Bush’s education law to segregationist Southerners who stood in schoolhouse doors to prevent black students from attending desegregated schools. But is that what teachers opposing Bush’s law are doing?

Keep in mind that the teachers voicing their opposition probably aren’t the ones in wealthier suburban schools (since those teachers probably don’t fear losing funding given that achievement rates tend to remain above average). No, the teachers that Paige is demonizing are those who are most intimately impacted by No Child Left Behind. They are the ones who know how difficult it can be to raise test scores, to get parents involved, to get students to attend school and do their homework on a daily basis even though many have to work full-time to support their families. And they also know that Bush’s intiative doesn’t provide the funding necessary to meet the goals put forth by the law. But these teachers, whom have a much better sense of the barriers to education reform than representatives in Washington, D.C., are treated as the new enemy of the state because — gasp! — they aren’t afraid to voice their opinions.

Is it possible that the state has become the enemy of the education system as it siphons off money from teachers’ salaries and education programs to support national security? Or is this poorly funded education initiative merely a means of securing the nation against the latest enemy — teachers — along with the naive belief that the government is actually doing something about the public education crisis?

Laura Nathan-Garner