Ah, the good old days! That was when conservatives everywhere resorted speaking in only sentences that consisted of a noun, verb, and “Greece.” Every conservative policy under the sun had to be enacted or: “We’ll turn into Greece!” Well my friends, now United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron is back with a shocking bit of noun, verb, and “Greece” propaganda. While in Brussels to discuss matters related to the Ukraine, he took a moment to talk about domestic matters, because he’s afraid that the conservatives might not win the upcoming election. And so he lied in a very big way, claiming, “When I first came here as prime minister five years ago, Britain and Greece were virtually in the same boat, we had similar sized budget deficits. The reason we are in a different position is we took long-term difficult decisions and we had all of the hard work and effort of the British people. I am determined we do not go backwards.”

Translation: we screwed our people and claimed it was for their own good; those lazy Greeks didn’t do it and look at what a mess their country is today; and vote conservative because we are doing everything right! Except that isn’t at all the case. Luckily, Simon Wren-Lewis is around to strike back, Controlling the Past. But before I get to what he wrote, I want to talk about something he barely mentioned, because he’s a real economist writing for other real economists and so assumes everyone knows: currency.

The United Kingdom, like the United States, has its own currency. So it is much easier for it to bounce back after a crisis, because other currencies will simply rise relative to it. But for a country like Greece that shares the euro with most of its trading partners, there can be no currency devaluation. Thus there is far more disruption as wages have to go down. Basically, Greece is stuck with using Germany’s valuable currency. So this made it infinitely easier for the UK to weather the 2008 financial crisis. And it is the reason that Greece should never have been used as a scare tactic for the UK and the United States. What happened to Greece simply couldn’t happen to the UK and US.

But let’s get to the bulk of Wren-Lewis’ article. It focused on the claim that “Britain and Greece were virtually in the same boat.” Is that true? Not even close:

So in addition to not having its own currency, Greece enacted more than five times as much austerity as the United Kingdom did. But it is those noble pasty white Brits who did the hard work. This is very clearly meant to both stroke the ego of the British public and to make them feel that the very real pain they’ve been put through was for a reason (it wasn’t). The point of all this is to change the narrative of the past so that the current government looks good. And they want to push the idea that the same old conservative policies that they are always for are what we should thank for the better economic times. It’s ridiculous.

I don’t write as much as I should about education. The reason is that it greatly depresses me. The education “reform” movement is so pernicious and so powerful that it is hard not to think that all is lost. Here in the United States, this movement seems focused on destroying teacher unionization more than anything else. And as always when there is an attack on worker rights, the quality of jobs goes down. Even the most idealistic of those in the “reform” movement seem only interested focusing on test scores because that is something that is easy and quantifiable. It’s the old story of the drunk looking for her keys far away from where she lost them because “the light’s better here.”

Last week, Stephen Mucher, the director of Bard College’s “master of arts in teaching” program, wrote an important article, The Teaching Crisis That Unions and School Districts Won’t Address. It contains some amazing information in it. For example, “Since 2008, enrollment in teacher education programs in California is down 53%, and other bellwether states report a similar trend.” This trend is — Oh, what is the word?! — predictable. Let’s think about this for a moment.

The nation as a whole wants better teachers for our children. Everyone at least gives lip service to the idea that great teachers have a huge effect on our children. And the solution that we’ve come up with is: test the children more, over-structure classroom time, and vilify teachers. Oh, and don’t forget: get rid of their unions, decrease worker protections, and lower their salaries. That’s clearly not the way to get better teachers working in our schools. In fact, it is a recipe for destroying good teachers that are already working.

So what is it like to be a teacher?

It is hard to see the whole of the education “reform” movement as having any philosophy other than, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Now Mucher isn’t specifically talking about the “reform” movement. But the focus on testing and the vilification of teacher unions is all coming from the “reform” movement. And the “reform” movement goes where the money pushes it. And the money comes from the same people who moved our manufacturing jobs overseas. They want to do for education what they’ve done for the rest of the economy: turn teachers into low paid cogs, who can be plugged into any educational machine.

Mucher is clear as to what needs to be done. In addition to “competitive salaries, benefits and better working conditions” teachers need their jobs to be fulfilling:

No surprisingly, Diane Ravitch had a few choice words to say about all this. She noted something that is telling, “I doubt that most critics would know how to teach a classroom of 30 children of any age, but they feel emboldened to complain about those who do it every day.” I think that is part of the problem with the way that Americans look at teaching: they think it is something that anyone could do — very much the way that they think about politics. I’m not sure where they get this idea, except that Americans just have a tendency to devalue the work done by anyone. To me, the kind of teachers that the “reform” movement is crying out for practice the easiest kind of teaching.

What we end up with is a system that claims it wants Alfie Kohn acolytes in the classroom to stimulate and broaden the minds of children, but it wants to check in every two months to make sure that all the children have learned how to spell certain words and know the dictated parts of the multiplication table. That doesn’t work. But as I’ve said before, education “reform” has little or nothing to do with improving education, What Is the Goal of Education Reform? Since the real problems in our educational system are not being dealt with, it isn’t too surprising that the “reform” movement is only managing to make things worse.