It’s a tough year to be State Superintendent of Wisconsin public schools, what with your budget ravaged, the workforce profoundly disempowered and demoralized, your constitutional authority challenged, and more and more of your resources being privatized.

However, last week Superintendent Tony Evers tried to put a good face on it when he delivered his State of Education speech in the Capitol rotunda. Praising the success of Wisconsin public schools in “leading the nation in graduation rates,” he noted that there is still improvement to be made. Evers described the work of the Department of Public Instruction in the upcoming year as being focused on four basic questions:

• What and how should kids learn?

• How do we know if they learned it?

• What do we do if they don’t? and

• How do we pay for it?

They seem like good and fair questions on the face of it. But when the proposed answers are delivered in pre-packaged products sold by the high-priced consultants convening Governor Walker’s Read to Lead Task Force and the School and District Accountability Design Team, and when only a small section of society is represented at the table where these questions are being asked, they are not honest ones.

Referring to the massive budget cuts to public education and the dismantling of collective bargaining rights for teachers earlier this year, Evers urged his audience to “move beyond the harsh rhetoric and begin the slow process of rebuilding the trust that was so swiftly shattered.”

Evers explained his collaboration with Governor Walker on accountability issues by saying, “We cannot afford to let conflicts among adults rob our children of the educational opportunities they need to succeed. I am committed to finding common ground and working together to improve education for Wisconsin’s children wherever possible.”

Evers’ exhortations to rebuild trust and work together with Walker’s initiatives are insubstantial and downright insulting to the teachers and kids whose lives have been so deeply affected by Walker’s budget priorities and education policies. Those kinds of statements may be useful for his reelection campaign in 2013 (for which he has already begun fundraising), but Walker and his cronies have not given teachers or the families whose children attend public schools any credible basis on which to rebuild trust.

Any appearance of “working together” under this regime is simply a matter of the powerless trying to keep their jobs, support their families and make their day-to-day work life a little more tolerable by being compliant. Who can blame them? But honestly, how do you talk about building trust with someone whose boot is still firmly planted on your neck?

Working together in a meaningful way will only happen when the extreme power imbalance in this state has shifted. The question then becomes – especially for teachers’ unions - how to shift this balance? WEAC has refused to be a formal part of the Governor’s Accountability Design Team, but it looks like they are contributing and giving credence to it by holding a series of listening sessions around the state that include the participation of Superintendent Evers.

In the announcement for these sessions, the two major teachers unions, WEAC and AFT, state: “We also need to make sure there is accountability for the resources young people need to learn and succeed. That's the piece that has been missing. Society, through its elected officials, has not been accountable for making sure every child in Wisconsin has the opportunities he or she needs to learn and succeed.” I applaud the sentiment, but fear that this will turn out to be a back-door way of being part of the staged discussion they refused to participate in formally.

Evers’ participation in these sessions is just the foil that Walker needs to say that members of the Accountability Design Team sought public input. After having attended dozens and dozens of legislative committee hearings and floor sessions this past year, it is crystal clear to me that the privatization agenda of Walker, the brothers Fitzgerald, and their corporate backers will be rammed through with or without the “input” of those who disagree with it.

The Accountability Design Team will be meeting for a second time on Thursday. After attending the first meeting, my sense is that the American Institute for Research consultants are using the team as a marketing focus group to smoke out objections and issues ahead of the rollout of their largely pre-packaged assessment products. At that meeting, they did a lot of talking about “tweaking” systems used by other states and countries (systems that they had a hand in developing and selling) to meet the needs of Wisconsin.

As this horror show of education reform proceeds apace, public schools advocates were treated to the encouraging words and sage advice of veteran radical educator and theorist Bill Ayers last week. Ayers traveled from Chicago to speak on a panel entitled: “The Attack on Public Education and the Fight Back” at Edgewood College.

His 25 minute talk focused on cutting through reform rhetoric and advancing a positive vision for public education in a democratic society.

“The way the issue has been framed lowers our imaginative horizons dramatically,” he said. For the past twenty years education reform has been set up as a choice between two alternatives: market-based reform or the status quo. “Those of us who believe that there can be a humanistic, progressive, democratic approach to public education - we’re sure to be defeated if that’s the framing.”

Ayers pointed out that public school classrooms are a diagnostic of the kind of society they serve. He noted that in authoritarian societies, classrooms are based on obedience, order and conformity, and they are generally very good at teaching reading, math and other technical, rule-based subjects.

“In a democracy, we start with the premise … that every human being is of incalculable value. What that means is that the fullest development of each individual is the condition for the fullest development of all of us, and conversely, the fullest development of all of us is the condition for the full development of each of us… In a school system based on democratic values, whatever else we teach we must teach creativity, initiative, courage, imagination, and so on. And that means shredding the arts from the schools is a travesty. It’s a frontal assault on democracy, on democratic schooling.”

President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and all of the high-profile education reformers who send their kids to private schools got called out by Ayers: “Another thing we have to say again and again is, if it’s not good enough for your kids, you reformers, then how can it be good enough for somebody else’s kids?” He described conditions in the school that his children and the Obama girls attended while in Chicago, the University of Chicago Lab School. It has “small class sizes (a cap of 15 in the High School), well-resourced classrooms, teachers who were not only respected but, hold your breath, unionized. How do we have a policy that on the west side of Chicago second grade classes can go up to 35 kids? Does that make a difference? You bet it does.”

“We need to get over the idea that somehow, because they put these things on the table, that’s actually what makes sense,” Ayers said. “What makes sense is to say, in a democracy, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents have for their children, we as a community demand as a starting point for all our children: Small class size, a unionized teacher corps that’s well-paid and well-rested and has time to think because it’s a thinking profession and it requires a thoughtful, caring person to do it well. These are the things we need to foreground in this debate.”

How about it, WEAC, AFT, and Superintendent Evers?

Rebecca Kemble is an Anthropologist who studied decolonization in Kenya. She serves on the Board of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and as the President of the Dane County TimeBank.