Jersey Jazzman calls out the conservative pundits who, in an effort to embarrass Chicago teachers,try to show how awful student perormance is in that district and paint it in the worst possible light.
If they are casting stones, you kinda wonder why they don’t throw them at Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley, whose policies determined what happened in the schools.
What they do is akin to blaming the war in Iraq on the soldiers, not the policymakers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great anology. Maybe they “edreformer” can get it with this. Hopeful, but pragmatic.
And as Jazzman points out, some the statistics they’re using to back up their cases against the teachers are as phony as the “evidence” they used during the lead-up to the Iraq war.
Everybody needs a Jersey Jazzman! He is one of my heroes.
And then there are these kinds of comments, this one from Steve Sailer. I’m not sure how you are going to square it all, but it deserves to be heard (or maybe not):
“The racism of peanut butter and jelly
In education reform circles, it’s an article of faith that America needs higher quality people as public school teachers. (I like to point out that it would also help for America to have higher quality people as parents and students, but never mind for now.) One hurdle to getting people with options in life and a sense of self-respect to be public school teachers is the political indoctrination sessions they are forced to sit through, like Winston Smith at a Two-Minutes Hate.
From the Portland Tribune:
Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day.
Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.
“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
“Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”
Guitierrez, along with all of Portland Public Schools’ principals, will start the new school year off this week by drilling in on the language of “Courageous Conversations,” the district-wide equity training being implemented in every building in phases during the past few years.
Through intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives, the premise is that if educators can understand their own “white privilege,” then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance.
Last Wednesday, the first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation — to examine a news article and discuss the “white privilege” it conveys.
Theodore Dalrymple has famously noted:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.”
My take? Diversity is a challenge.
Isn’t that what happened during the Viet Nam war???
Some excellent comments and data on the phone “parent petition” game and the high failure rate of charters:
And a nice follow up to LePage’s counterattacks to the expose that showed administration’s corruption:
http://thetippingpoint.bangordailynews.com/2012/09/11/state-politics/corporate-influence-and-political-payback/
I watched some ABC national coverage of the strike and it gets some facts right, but most wrong which then leads to some appaulingly ignorant pro-corporate reform “analysis.” The charters are said to “routinely outperform public schools.” From there, we’re told this superior performance is due to the lack of unions at the charters.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/chicago-public-school-teachers-highlight-perennial-debate-teacher/story?id=17202417#.UFBf844YG1E
I would put quotation marks around “wrong”, becuase these days we can’t be sure what’s an honest error, what’s deliberate lying, and what’s just incompetent journalism. How a reporter can make such a ridiculous statement when the evidenice about the failure rate of charters is so easily found is just shocking. But it’s shocking only if you believe the reporter and editor are really interestd in the truth.
I hope you’ll challenge this story with letters to the editor and Web posts. We need to fight each falsehood and misleaading statement. I’ve written quite a few letters to the editor, and I have found that people do read and comment on them. That’s why Diane and her blog are so important: Her comments and links to reliable sources are the ammunition that we need to fire back at the corporatists who want to hijack our public schools.
And I recommend readling Walter Lippmann’s “Liberty and the News” to get some perspective on the games journalists play (and just their honest limitations). The book is relatively short and a reasonably priced copy is published by Dover.
If I have time I’ll write a response. I do that on occasion.
Regarding Lippmann, I don’t doubt the book you mention would be an interesting read, but having read Chomsky’s critique of his positions in _Manufacturing Consent_ and some Lipmann excerpts, I tend to think of him as an elitist technocrat (with good intentions). The idea that the masses need to be guided by a core of intellectual specialists strikes me as Leninist (I agree with Chomsky), and also smacks of a kind of “mainstream Enlightenment” view (as opposed to Radical Enlightenment–see Jonathan Israel), where true knowledge is good for elites, but the masses must be allowed to cling to prejudice and mysticism which serve them better.
I probably won’t comment again as I don’t want to hijack this thread about the Chicago teachers’ strike.
I am so angered by the coverage of the strike that I have contacted major news agencies with a link to Jersey Jazzman’s post. The agenda is so anti-teacher and union that the reporting is essentially commentary not news. If it wasn’t for the information on Diane’s blog, I would feel that the entire world had gone mad. Keep demanding the truth.
The entire world HAS gone mad. Well, except for this blog.
🙂