The Chicago Tribune says that the public is ready for “reform.”
What they mean by reform is that it is time to blame teachers if kids don’t learn, and punish the teachers, like, fire them.
What they mean by reform is that the editorial board wants the public schools to be put into private hands.
They are positive about merit pay even though it has never succeeded anywhere, including Chicago. The Chicago merit pay plan was funded with $27 million from the US Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund. The evaluation was funded by the Joyce Foundation, which also sponsored the Chicago Tribune’s public opinion poll.
After five years, this is what the evaluators of the Chicago merit pay plan concluded: “The final impact report found that the program did not raise student math or reading scores, but it increased teacher retention in some schools.”
The Joyce Foundation knew this. So did the Chicago Tribune. Why didn’t they so?
The public wants lots of things that have failed again and again.
Shouldn’t the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune tell the public the truth?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thomas Jefferson once said, “He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Dr. Ravitch,
I am curios. About your position on the no confidence vote for John Sexton. Do you find his pay excessive? An example of ineffective merit pay?
Dr. Sexton’s pay is not based on the test scores of the students at New York University. It is based on the judgment of the Board of Trustees. Next question?
Next question,
Is it incentive pay worthless in all institutions? Do universities waste millions of dollars paying full professors more than associate professors? Millions more paying distinguished professors more than full?
I have to say that paying John Sexton $800,000 a year after he retires seems to be a waste of resources. Perhaps you thought so as well and voted no confidence.
Look out NYC! Cuomo, Obama, Bloomberg, Emanuel… and these guys are the Dems and moderates. If parents don’t wake up soon, Walmart CSD will soon teach their kids. Pay to play, flight to private schools, institutionalization of the poor– from school to prison. It’s the party of FRAUD, be it national defense, economic policy, or education. FRAUD.
Parents are awake in Los Angeles! We helped stop the billionaires from buying a school board seat for Kate Anderson, our school board just passed term limits for president putting an end to the reign of Mayor Villaraigosa’s reform puppet Monica Garcia and just Friday we stopped the district from giving away Venice HS to a pilot school backed by the Gates & Ford Foundations and run by Steve Barr. Wide awake!
Agreed, karenwolfe! It CAN be done! STOP complaining about Obama & Arne & WORK–LOCALLY–to affect change. Yes WE can!
“The public wants lots of things that have failed again and again.” True, and it’s because the policy makers intentionally keep the public in the dark. For example, Michelle Rhee’s book, Radical, goes on and on about merit pay … Yet she never mentions that it has been tried before.
She’s a liar and a fraud. What would you expect??
I believe that this whole concept is getting way more attention than it deserves. As a 10 year public system teacher I believe that merit pay fails because education is ‘too big to succeed’. Let me explain. First, let us assume that the vast majority of teachers are doing their best as it is, paying them more for performance – however laudable the performance goal – CANNOT cause them to reach that goal. Assuming this is true then for a performance based system to work we must replace under performing teachers with superstars who are capable of achieving these performance goals and thus earning their merit pay. PROBLEM – there simply aren’t tens of thousands of superstars waiting to teach for any reasonable amount of money.
If you think The Trib. is bad now, the word is that he Koch brothers are attempting to buy The Chicago Tribune. There is a petition going around via The Daily Kos. Sign it!
Definately end your subscription!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Except it is wise to know your enemy.
The media is obviously controlled and should be ignored. I just read that over 60% of the people that were polled by 4 organizations, one being the Tea Party, wanted undocumented to become citizens. Whether you agree or not, I can’t find anyone that was polled by any method. I received Tea Party information and was never polled.
If we don’t fight for the children, no one will. They are children. They can’t fight for themselves. My students told me they would miss me over Spring Break. I believe them.
I believe in them.
The Trib seemed againts this a few weeks ago but I can see someone has gotten to them too.
against….sorry
Rahm must have written that piece.
Koch Brothers are looking to buy the Chicago Tribune and :LA Times. If they are successful, we will see more and more biased articles to support their views of the world which are quite different from ours.
The Trib doesn’t allow comments on that page. They don’t want to hear from the community. I would question how scientific their survey is. I’d be more inclined to trust the Gallop Poll. The Trib has an agenda. They definitely support privatization and charters.
The Trib has long been a conservative, Republican newspaper. The Joyce foundation supports charter schools and Obama used to serve on their board.
When the Trib endorsed Obama’s candidacy for virtually every race he’s ever run in, we should have known something was up Obama is a Republocrat, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and Rahm is in collusion, too.
I just sent Diane the editorial(sorry for the duplication) and opinion page that follows the editorial. The opinion is written by the head of the Joyce foundation. I find the never ending dribble of reform rhetoric exhausting, which is, of course, one of the desired effects beyond brainwashing the general public.
So many lies are promulgated about charter school waiting lists in Chicago. During the strike last fall, when the media complained about kids missing school, charters came forward and said that they had spaces to take more kids, There were charters on the initial “under-utilized” schools list, too. I didn’t see them make it to the final closure list, including some very low performing charters.
That is one of their ploys. They announce that they have a huge waiting list to make it sound like the schools are desirable. It is just a marketing tool. They are businesses and use simple marketing ploys.
Please read this link. It is a retelling of the poll the Tribune and Joyce Foundation did. Pay attention to the questions. We did.
Oops here’s the link.
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=4006
Oh, okay, it was THAT poll. Thanks for the link! I read about it before but didn’t realize this was it. Makes a lot of sense now. .
No wonder that editorial was so obviously propaganda. The Trib and Joyce Foundation are selling “reform,” aka the privatization business plan, and trying to convince the public that everyone else wants it, so they should, too. It’s an attempt to thwart sympathizers and sway public opinion in advance of demonstrations against the school closures. The Trib trashed teachers during the strike, too, but parents supported the teachers, so we shall see…
I just realized who you are! DOUBLE thank you –for this info and for ALL that you are doing!! (and sorry for telling you what you already knew.)
Oh, yes, Diane posted this quite a while back. This would be hilarious if the whole situation wasn’t so sad.
It makes you realize what a thoroughly orchestrated business plan this whole pseudo-“reform” scheme is. They prepared a multi-pronged campaign of attack way in advance. It was probably intentionally timed around Rahm’s scheduled duck and cover maneuver, too, so he could gauge the climate and plan his spin describing how cramming kids into overcrowded classes in schools out of their neighborhoods is “investing in quality education,” as well as script his “schoolyard taunts” quip to teachers.
I don’t think any of that is going to fly in Chicago. .
Tribune company owns the Baltimore Sun, which is openly biased in favor of anything charter. We can’t get a letter to the editor published even questioning the stealth charter takeover of Baltimore City Schools. Now the charters are trying to push legislation through to put Marylanders on the hook for even more money.
These charter chain operators embody a sociopathic corporate mentality, with no remorse for the students and families they disrupt with their ridiculous “reforms”, as long as the money keeps coming in. They want to ruin our system of public education and they want us to pay them handsomely for it. The lie they are couching this in in Maryland now is “You need work, so cannibalize your own school system and replace it with ours” Another cruel irony is the demolition/construction money will likely go to out-of-state companies, because the three sponsors of the bill (at least one a charter school parent herself) rejected an amendment to make the workers be Baltimore City residents. So we lose our schools and jobs.
I continue to be outraged at the lies, at the pain inflicted on innocent families who inadvertently get mixed up in the corporate gamesmanship these charters are employing -dividing communities that never asked for any of it. More wreckage from the Bush administration’s idiotic policies.
We must divest from charter corporations, we’ve learned our lessons. Time to cut our losses and reclaim our heritage – Public schools for the Public good, not just for the few.
So many lies. But no one cares about the Trib’s pro-privatization opinions, do they?
If readers did care, perhaps some of the 30,000 people who came to march during the teachers strike in September might have stayed home. The Trib had written gobs of weakly reported stuff about failing schools for months, but it didn’t matter then.
And it won’t matter now. Except for the Koch brothers or Murdoch, both of whom are rumored to be interested in buying the company.
Bruce Dold and Kristen McQueary usually write the editorials on ed, btw.
Re: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/why-the-rich-dont-give/309254/
Lest anyone be confused by all the (tax deductible) “donations” made by the wealthy and their foundations, such as the Tribune and the Joyce Foundation, to (the corporate business plan known as) education “reform,” the truth is not what you might think, or maybe it’s exactly what you think –read through to the end below…
“Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity: The wealthiest Americans donate 1.3 percent of their income; the poorest, 3.2 percent. What’s up with that?”
“But why? Lower-income Americans are presumably no more intrinsically generous (or ‘prosocial,’ as the sociologists say) than anyone else. However, some experts have speculated that the wealthy may be less generous —that the personal drive to accumulate wealth may be inconsistent with the idea of communal support. Last year, Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, published research that correlated wealth with an increase in unethical behavior: ‘While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,’ Piff later told New York magazine, ‘the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.’ They are, he continued, ‘more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.'”