Karen Lewis spoke up on my behalf when a TFA officer denounced my post “The Hero Teachers of Newtown”) as “reprehensible. Lewis then became the object of attacks from outraged bloggers and tweeters saying that she literally accused TFA of murder. Lewis said no such thing. This was a fine example of the dark art of twisting words. Katie Osgood, who teaches children in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago and has her own blog, here defends Lewis:
“Lewis was not speaking about TFA specifically, but about the Corporate Ed Reform movement as a whole with which TFA is closely aligned. And yes, the corporate education reforms plaguing Chicago for the past 10+ years have cost precious children their lives. The chaos caused by callous school closings, leading to sending children across the city to “choice” schools crossing gang boundaries has indeed led to increases in youth violence and yes, even deaths. The tragic beating death of Derrion Albert in 2009 is one prime example http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/06/chicago-teen-deaths-viole_n_311877.html
“It is the utter ignorance and arrogance of education reformers, including and especially TFA, which allows terrible policies to get passed. Churn in teaching staff after closings and turnarounds is dangerous to kids who need stability. Charter schools do not serve the neediest students and instead these kids are concentrated in schools purposefully underfunded and neglected causing ever more severe behavior issues in schools given fewer resources to help. Our district buys new tests and “data systems” instead of hiring more social workers, counselors, and nurses which my kids desperately need. Ed Reform creates environments of fear and stress with terrible new evaluation systems and sometimes even pay tied to test scores leaving the people who work directly with the children with less emotional energy to devote to them. Ed Reform also pushes more inexperienced, poorly trained teachers-as the war on veteran teachers, tenure, and unions continues-on the children who need experienced, well-trained teachers the most.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Do people really think the spike in violent crime in Chicago is completely unrelated to Mayor Emanuel’s hostile takeover of the public schools on the south and west sides (which two events, btw, started and have increased almost simultaneously)?
Also, btw, off-topic (sorry), but I’m about half-way through a new book that you should check out, Diane (and everyone). It’s called WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO by Gregory Michie (the title is a direct blowback to “Waiting for Superman”). I had my misgivings going in because Michie was the beneficiary of one of those truncated career-change education programs and is active in one currently, but still, he gets it. He gets how teaching is about so much more than just test scores, and especially in urban environments, it’s about all the things that most of us don’t want to talk about – race, class, etc. So far the book doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention (no reviews on Amazon), but it deserves to be read far and wide, especially by middle-class whites involved in education and especially education policy.
I agree. I haven’t finished reading this one yet, but it seems like a great resource. I had the privilege to meet Mr. Michie the other day (I really do feel blessed being in Chicago surrounded by so many wonderful activists, inluding Karen Lewis and so many other Rank-and-Educators, afantastic dedicated professors fighting education reform, and a whole coalition of parent and communty groups united in the pushback to corporate reform). And for the record, he is back in the classroom teaching in a Chicago Public School now. 🙂
Nothing has convinced me of the noxiousness and cluelessness of TFA’s current crop of executives and, ahem, rank-and-file more than this current flap over Diane’s post about the heroic union teachers. These people are so crazy and paranoid, so arrogant and ego-maniacal that they have started acting like Scientologists or members of Synanon.
Their every move in the last couple of days has resembled nothing so much as the behavior of cultists.
Fortunately, I know some TFA teachers personally. They’re almost without exception decent, hard-working, sincere, likable. I doubt any of them would support the attacks on Diane by the higher-ups and drones, if for no other reason than they’re working too damn hard trying teach mathematics to high-needs kids in Detroit or NYC. So please don’t make the mistake of thinking that I believe the entire membership is nuts or evil.
But those who have been participating in this ridiculous attack on Diane Ravitch and her supporters really appear to be a couple of pints short of a quart. They’re their own worst enemies, whether they realize it or not.
The National Review’s willful misrepresentation of Karen’s important argument is an example. They seek to deflect criticism from specific deadly policies like shutting functioning schools in vulnerable communities, gutting social worker support services for those communities, and then sending their children across gang war boundaries to other deliberately under resourced school assignments.
Karen wrote:
“Rosenberg’s “false outrage” needs to be checked. That same false outrage should show itself when policies colleagues support kill and disenfranchise children from schools across this nation.”
Rosenberg and the National Review offended themselves by fabricating things Karen never wrote, and just baldly inserted them, in their own brackets.
Here is their willfully twisted version:
“Rosenberg’s “false outrage” needs to be checked. That same false outrage should show itself when policies [Rosenberg’s] colleagues [at TFA] support kill and disenfranchise children from schools across this nation.”
Thus, their headline screams:
“Chicago Teachers Union Head Karen Lewis: Teach for America Kills Students”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/336034/chicago-teachers-union-head-karen-lewis-teach-america-kills-students-patrick-brennan#
They can’t drown out Karen’s real point, though. The nation isn’t listening to them, and instead is tuning into discussions of exactly the violence issues Chicago’s real teachers face.
Here is MSNBC:
“A lot of young people who are hanging out have been affected by violent incidents that have caused trauma,” said Kerr, who leads UCAN’s Chicagoland Institute for Transforming Youth project (CITY). “Some have been shot, some have witnessed domestic violence or shootings. Go into a classroom and ask how many have been shot, or know someone who has been shot or killed. Almost all of them will raise their hand.”
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/12/20/in-newtowns-shadow-chicagos-bleak-gun-toll-goes-on/
Imo, TFA doesn’t do anything rashly. They execute a plan. The privatizers plan is to drive a wedge between teachers unions and parents.
This tragedy makes that very difficult. This tragedy makes it clear that all the bashing has been a travesty. Help get this message out to the general public.
Carrie, there certainly is a non-random feeling to the responses from TFA to Diane’s and Karen’s posts, as well as to my tweets and other supporting commentary. When several TFA defenders (from what, exactly?) take nearly the identical tack, going so far as to act on the one hand like just random concerned individuals who then don’t understand what I am talking about when I criticize David Rosenberg’s attack on Diane, and on the other hand just coincidentally being TFAers, you know there’s a script.
This implied relationship between CPS policy and a spike in violent crime strikes me as an empirical question. It might be useful for someone to cite or initiate an actual study of this before individuals label certain policies as (literally) murderous.
“murderous” implies intent which would be difficult if not impossible to prove. The fact remains that violent crime started increasing at the same time that school “reform” started closing, “turning around” and charterizing schools, as well as eliminating social workers, psychologists, nurses, and P.E. and arts teachers. Are the two phenomenon directly, causally related? I’m not enough of a researcher/statistician to determine that. But I’m quite confident that these phenomenon are related somehow, perhaps indirectly through other factors. So, yeah, policies that overlook and shortchange (willfully or not) the needs and realities of inner city children and families are certainly going to be “deadly” even if they’re not “murderous”.
Dr. Pauline Lipman out of Univ of Illinois-Chicago has done quite a bit of research on this phenomenon. Here is one study that came out BEFORE the beating death of Derrion Albert in 2009 http://www.uic.edu/educ/ceje/articles/midsouth%20initial%20report%201-31-07.pdf on then Chicago Public School Chief Arne Duncan’s school closure policy dubbed Renaissance 2010. We’ve had this policy in effect for a decade in Chicago with absolutely disasterous effects. Despite the research and public outcry, especially from community and parent groups, it looks like CPS will try and close as many as 100 more schools this coming year (although they refuse to release the exact list until March 31st). The research is there and has been for years. Ed reformers just choose to ignore it. Dangerous and deadly hubris.
Thanks, Katie. I look forward to reading the study.
Thank you, Katie.
Calling in spin doctor Rosenberg and his posse to take the limelight off a tribute to slaughtered babies and their murdered career teachers, principal and staff, in order to turn the attention on themselves and disparage Diane, and then Karen, was truly despicable.
This is an organization whose continued existence is dependent on handouts from corporate “reformers” who seek to profit from privatizing public education and replacing veteran educators with their lower paid teacher temps who have 5 weeks training. It looks like they will resort to metaphorical hair-pulling and ear-biting to get publicity, but good does prevail, eventually, and TFA, and this too, shall pass.
And then the “I’m just a citizen expressing an opinion” afterwards, the lame folks from TFA who, after defending Rosenberg and/or attacking Diane again, suddenly were claiming to have no idea what I was talking about when I joined the fray, and the rest of the nonsense, just sounded way too much of a piece for me not to notice that this was clearly a planned campaign of baloney and disinformation.
RAHM-BO is a better name for HIM. I am so disgusted with Obama’s appointments, esp. Duncan and when he appointed Rahm. Pay back? And the sad thing It would be no different with Romney. Both the REPs and DEMs are corrupt to the core. Never has this country been at such a low point. It started with Reagan…always remember. Then with each POTUS, it has gotten worse.
Well, let’s not forget a fella name of Richard Milhaus Nixon. ;^) I mean, credit where it’s due.
Yeah, but the sad thing is that if we had Nixon back now, he would almost seem like a tree-hugging commie compared to Obama. It’s a good thing the world really isn’t flat because we would have fallen off the right edge of it by now.
True! Agree.
A great resource to learn more about the spikes in violence, neighborhood destabilization, displacement of low-income communities of color, and ties to neoliberal education reform in Chicago is Dr. Pauline Lipman’s (out of Univ of Illinois-Chicago) new book “The New Political Economy of Urban Education” which you can see here: http://books.google.com/books?id=3gqcq_oji2sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=new+urban+economy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=36_UULuANsSXqAGd94CwCA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false I highly highly recommend all the writings by Dr. Lipman who not only researches the effects of corporate education reform, but is a passionate activist on the streets of Chicago fighting against the powerful billionaires and politicians waging this war on public education.
What Karen Lewis said about policies that kill was absolutely accurate. Ms. Lewis is from and taught in one of the areas of Chicago which is experiencing the very worst of these horrid reforms. She knows, personally, children and families being affected by school closures, destabilization, criminal underresourcing and sabotage.
Thank you as always to Diane for shining the light on the truth and exposing the lies and misinformation of the corporate reform elites.
I will say it “TFA and the other astroturf organizations like them are actually killing children only slowly.” With their purposely misguided ideological money making sociopathic intent they just do it slowly. As my friend Richard Arthur has said to me “Why not just put them in jail when they are born? As what we do to many of them is a guarantee of that outcome anyway.” This is a truthful statement. Outcomes is what it is about. What is the outcome of their policies? Well, low income and being involved in the criminal justice system which is like a life long death sentence. Did you know that there is a national Sheriffs organization studying “School to Prison Pipeline?” Did you know that they are very concerned with this problem? When K-12 fails the sheriff’s and police are their next contact. I have personally been robbed 27 times since 1990 and have had guns in my face at least 7 times and not in just poor neighborhoods. This is all because we are not properly educating our youth.
Educators are not responsible for the violence that permeates our society, and teachers do not have control over all of the out-of-school influences on students.
Teachers do not have control over the in school procedures in general. Administrators control the money, curriculum, how curriculum will be taught, who the principal and staff will be and the staff at the school not teachers. Teachers need to get up off of their butt and do something along with the public. The public more than the teachers as teachers can be falsely accused of crimes as I showed in my 1997 audit of LAUSD. Audit is California State Auditor, Oct. 1997, 96121. This audit is about teachers being falsely accused of child abuse for whistleblowing. It is now worse than ever. Retribution against teachers for protecting their children and fraud is rampant across the U.S. and needs to stop.
That’s the problem with centralization, especially in big cities. In some districts, like Chicago, which decentralized during the first of the past three waves of school reform, since the 80s, each school has had an elected local school council (LSC) comprised of parents, teachers, community members, the principal and a student rep at high schools. The LSC selects the principal and the principal does the hiring. Schools selected their own curriculum and had the choice of adopting standards –which were detailed but optional guidelines then.
During the second wave of school reform, in the 90s, the mayor took over control of the school district and was given the powers to appoint his own school board members (though they had never been elected), as well as to select a “CEO” who does not have to be state certified or meet the educational requirements of Superintendents in all other school districts, hence Paul Vallas, Arne Duncan, et al. (In Illinois, the School Code has long had different rules for Chicago than for other districts.)
LSCs were stripped of some of their powers and control over policies then as well, and the mayor was given the power to intervene on low performing schools. So things have been far from ideal for LSCs over the past 17 years of mayoral control. This is still better than centralization in regard to employment though, since prospective employees apply to individual schools rather than a central office that then assigns them to schools, as had been done previously.
Since NCLB, the standards became required and schools were given choices over curriculum. Over time, those choices have become more and more limited.