them with privately run charter schools.In affluent cocktail party circles, a certain casual demonization of teachers has become culturally prevalent.The Chicago school chief who initially led this charter surge now serves as the U.S. secretary of education, and his test-heavy, charter-leaning approach has become the conventional education reform wisdom within both Republican and Democratic Party elite policy circles despite a clear absence of evidence that this conventional wisdom actually works for kids.If we really wanted to improve schools, as analyst Melinda Henneberger quipped last week in theWashington Post, wed do what education powerhouse Finland does fund schools equally, value teachers more, and administer standardized testing almost never.So why does the conventional education reform wisdom get tough on teachers and the unions that protect them have such broad support among Americas political elites?One reason: The conventional wisdom can be unconventionally profitable for the corporate execs who run the rapidly expanding chains of charter schools. At campaign time, these execs love to show their appreciation.But support for the teacher-bashing conventional wisdom goes well beyond the ranks of those who stand to profit directly from public educations privatization. In affluent cocktail party circles, as the New Yorker magazine noted last week, a certain casual demonization of teachers has become sufficiently culturally prevalent that it passes for uncontroversial.The well-heeled today, adds the New Yorker analysis, talk about breaking teacher unions with the same kind of social enthusiasm usually reserved for recommending a new Zumba class. Wealthy people royally resent having to pay taxes to support public services they dont use.This teacher bashing has been spreading for several decades now, ever since the United States first began growing much more unequal in the 1980s. This linkage should surprise no one. These two basic phenomena a rich growing richer and a rich growing more hostile to public services and the people who provide them have always gone hand in hand.Wealthy people, after all, dont typically use much in the way of public services. They dont partake of public parks or public education. They belong to private country clubs and send their kids to private schools, and they royally resent having to pay taxes to support public services they dont use.These well-to-do need rationalizations for this resentment, and teacher bashing makes for an ideal one. We dont need to throw money at troubled schools, the argument goes. We just have to find and fire all those lousy teachers.Interestingly, back in the much more equal United States of the 1950s, we did throw money at schools and plenty of it.In 1958, after the shock of the Soviet Sputnik launch, lawmakers didnt bash teachers. They appropriated billions, through the National Defense Education Act, to strengthen schools. A half-dozen years later, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act vastly expanded funding for low-income students.In todays deeply unequal United States, by contrast, our political elites dont fund, they bash. That bashing, educationally, makes no sense. Blaming teachers for the failure of schools, as the New Yorkers Rebecca Mead puts it, has to be about as absurd as blaming doctors for the diseases they are