This retired district superintendent says that State Commissioner Kevin Huffman has not been alone in his assault on public education on Tennessee. Aside from the support if an extremist governor, he has been able to count on the silence and complicity of the education establishment.
He writes:
“I wish I could share your optimism that a grassroots groundswell will turn the tide against the privatization and corporate takeover of education in Tennessee. Unfortunately, Tennessee is the “perfect storm” for this risky experiment in greed against the children of the state. It goes beyond the culpability of the rubber stamp State Board of Education. Three organizations who should be the caretakers of reason and leaders of school improvement also share in the destruction of public schools here. Through their actions, or often inactions, they, too, should be held accountable at some point.
“First, there are the local school superintendents. I sat in meetings and watched as the cool and calculating Huffman and his TFA State Department ran roughshod over superintendents with their permission. TOSS, the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents (really a weak arm of the State Department rather than a real professional organization) looked very much like the Polish resistance to Germany at the onset of WWII. Better described as the “Kick Dirt and Spit Club”, this organization’s main work revolves around organizing golf tournaments and turkey shoots, rather than seriously vetting educational reforms in any serious manner. Over all, superintendents simply have not spoken out as they should against this onslaught. Frankly, I am no better in that I might have done more myself.
“Second, the Tennessee School Boards Association. This group’s leadership enjoys the thrill of hobnobbing with the powerful and elite of what passes for politics in this very red state. Since most School Boards are well meaning, but lack the knowledge and depth of analysis it takes to deal with reform, they follow the lead of TSBA, which is at best a paper tiger in the fight for public schools. A more vocal and stronger resistance is called for on this front.
“Last, there is TEA, of course- the state teachers’ union. For as long as I can remember, this organization’s main goal is keep the membership numbers up and protect ,through lengthy and costly court battles, the small minority of teachers who represent malpractice. They set the public relations stage for public opinion that the kind of reform being placed upon public schools now is needed and desired.
“This may seem harsh, but I believe this to be true. The victims, however, are the thousands of hard working educators and children who do their best each day. For their sake, I hope my pessimism is unfounded.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Grassroots groundswells can make great strides, but in Ohio with over 1,000,000 signatures to overturn Senate Bill 5, and having it overturned, the governor just put the undesirable components into the budget. So it is very hard to fight monied interests.
I strongly agree with the post. I would really like to see teacher unions going to bat for the children and not just protecting teachers. I certainly agree that unions must protect teachers and their wages, but they should not defend incompetent teachers that are not providing good education for our children.
Al Tate,
While I can’t knowledgeably comment on the actions of the TEA, as a New York City public school teacher and UFT member, I can assure you that our union leadership is not only collaborating with the so-called reformers in their monetization of students, but is selling out the teachers it claims to represent, as well.
Unity Caucus, the political party that controls both the UFT in New York and the AFT in Washington, has enthusiastically signed on to the Common Corporate Standards and the tests they are a vehicle for, as well as teacher evaluation checklists designed to expedite the purging of teachers.
Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT, is n the pocket of Bill Gates and Eli Broad, who boasts of her as one of his “investments.”
Meanwhile, the UFT leadership has done little or nothing to combat charter school expropriation of public school facilities, and has taken a half hearted, legalistic approach to public school closings.
While I largely agree with Diane that opposition to so-called education reform is growing, and that the bad faith and corruption at its heart will bring it down, I also have to say that, because of the intellectual dishonesty of the UFT/AFT, there’s no reason to be optimistic that the destruction caused by the education privateers will be repaired.
Many people do not understand the function of a labor union. The purpose is to protect the rights of the worker.
When teachers started their organizations many years ago, they wanted a professional organization, similar to what doctors and lawyers have. They wanted the right to decide who entered their profession and who stayed. However, legislators would not allow that (because they were mainly women?) and would only allow them to concern themselves with salaries, working conditions and contracts. Thus their organization became a labor union.
Therefore, when a teacher is accused of incompetence, by law the union must speak up on her behalf. If it refuses to do so, the teacher can sue. In the simplest terms, like all union members, she has paid for that protection.
The job of evaluating a teacher, by law, belongs to school administration. It is a well-known fact that over 90% of teachers get high ratings from principals. This is likely the main reason ineffective teachers keep their jobs. In any job, it is difficult to fire the employee with twenty years of “highly effective” ratings. In my 42 years as a teacher, I found that weak teachers were protected by weak administrators or desperate urban districts, and not by unions.
Administrators hire, evaluate and promote teachers. Unions do not. Who protects the rights of the children? That’s easy: children are protected by the parents and teachers who care for them each day.
Al Tate, TEA, the teacher’s union in TN has always been a weak organization due to right-to-work-laws. Historically, TEA had a fairly collegial relationship with school boards & the state lege and were able to negotiate benefits, sick days, personal leave & minimal step raises. Teachers here were accustomed to no raises and minimal resources but traded those things for autonomy & job protections.
It all ended in 2010 when the republicans won a super majority in both state houses. The force behind every regressive law is Lt Gov Ron Ramsey (aka, the dark lord). He instigated a full frontal assault on teachers & TEA. With Ramsey at his back, Huffman, got every ALEC education bill passed. Ramsey and the corporate lobbyists are running TN. Haslam is a hapless figurehead who does what he’s told. If Ramsey wants Huffman, TEA has no influence over that decision.
“I sat in meetings and watched as the cool and calculating Huffman and his TFA State Department ran roughshod over superintendents with their permission. TOSS, the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents (really a weak arm of the State Department rather than a real professional organization) looked very much like the Polish resistance to Germany at the onset of WWII. Better described as the “Kick Dirt and Spit Club”, this organization’s main work revolves around organizing golf tournaments and turkey shoots, rather than seriously vetting educational reforms in any serious manner.”
I’m not following the Nazi Germany analogy in this post. I’m not an expert on WWII history, but I don’t recall Poland giving Germany “permission” to invade it, or that the Polish resistance was not sufficiently “serious,” or that the German invasion was enabled by “collaborators” (presumably the reference to “willing collaborators” was intended to echo Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” although that book was about German civilians, not the Poles). If these points seem frivolous, then that’s all the more reason to be more judicious and sparing with the comparisons of education reformers to Nazis.
All good points with a couple of minor exceptions.
1. A typical TN school has a “director of schools” who is hired by the board. They used to have elected superintendents. Regardless, I’ve seen more than a few directors who are more into politics than education. I agree with the points mentioned about TOSS.
2. School boards do indeed tend to rubber stamp boiler plate policies from the TSBA.
3. TEA consists of good folks, but they are a rather weak organization that is way too concerned with being “nice.” They don’t actually “represent a small minority of teachers who represent malpractice.” I’ve even seen good teachers who were members and were not well represented by TEA when things went wrong. Given TEA’s limited legal budget, they do indeed tend to represent individual cases IF such cases are not very complicated, and more importantly, if pursuing those cases can indeed help to keep their membership numbers up.
My advice would be to learn as much about employment law as possible, and then save what you would pay in TEA dues for a good employment lawyer should the unthinkable ever happen.
TEA represents individuals, if they are members. Period. It doesn’t matter how “complicated” the case is. The teacher is entitled to services, if she is a dues-paying member in good standing, and the legal issue is related to employment. That is not to say that the member automatically receives whatever outcome she wants, regardless of the facts or the applicable law. A person may believe that she is being treated badly or unfairly, but that does not necessarily mean that there is a legal remedy. And since the General Assembly repealed the bargaining law, there are fewer avenures of redress for Tennessee teachers than there used to be.
Just keep telling yourself that. As a former member of TEA, I know better. If the unthinkable happens, TEA legal does not necessarily have the individual’s back even when there is a legal remedy. I know of cases where the individual member sought and won out-of-court settlements after hiring legal representation to do what TEA legal could and would not do.
We in TN are prepared to remove our children from school. And they will not come back until Huffman AND Barbic are gone and Common Core repealed!!
I hope parents are not willing to re-elect Gov. Haslam (if for no other reason) because of Huffman, and I hope the message will get to Gov. Haslam that Huffman is costing him votes.
Parents & teachers will have a tough time NOT re-electing Haslam. He has all of East TN (Bristol, Knoxville, Chattanooga, & all in between) in his pocket and millions in his bank account- Pilot Oil fraud investigation notwithstanding. The Democratic party is invisible and can’t raise a nickle of money in middle & west TN.
Redistricting & the growth of East TN has made the only 2 TN blue cities, Nashville & Memphis, marginal players in the governor’s race.
Parent advocates need to threaten individual legislators on the education committees into primary races if they continue to support Huffman.
Me and my husband family and friends will not vote for Haslam, we are spreading the word. He was stupid for hiring this lieing bad person Huffman.
Its not too late…..reveal yourself ans go public. I manage Tennessee
Against Common Core. http://Www.tnacc.net. please contact me through the website.
I get a bit annoyed when people react prissily to the analogies being drawn with what happened in Germany/Europe under the Nazis …
Fascism wears different colours in different arenas, but is still fascism…
And if you read educational history, you will realise that a lot of what has been done in public schools IS about eugenics – and, arguably, this ed deform agenda STILL is about eugenics…
You’ve convinced me. There’s much we can learn from Poland’s decision to give Germany permission to invade it, and the lack of seriousness shown by the Polish resistance. If we don’t know this history, we’re doomed to repeat it.
Dont waste my time or insult my intelligence with your facetiousness… especially since I didnt say Poland gave permission to Germany to be invaded…. I was pointing out that there is enough similarity in what’s happening (has been happening for decades) in the US to what happened in Nazi Germany to call out the analogy, and that people who get pissy about the use of the term nazi or fascist and refuse to face the similarities, are being (naive) ostriches…
My initial complaint was about the analogy used in this post, which made no sense. I’m sure your Nazi analogies are very instructive.
Sahila, please read as much as you can about the rise of fascism in Germany, the Nuremburg laws, the Wannsee Conference, and the operation of the concentration camps and death camps. What is happening to public schools is horrible and wrong, but using inaccurate and disproportionate historical analogies is not helpful. This is not “prissiness”; it is respect for all those who suffered and died before and during WWII.
I know all that stuff…. my parents were children and teenagers in the Netherlands during WWII – they lost fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles to the German army and to German labour camps…. the validity of the analogies stand….
I am sorry you feel that way. If the analogy stands, who is the current Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Goebbels, Goring, Mengele? What equates to the Hitler youth? To the Nuremburg laws? Kristallnacht? The Reichstag fire? The Einsatzgruppen? The Warsaw ghetto? Treblinka? Auschwitz? All I’m trying to say is this: Analogies are tricky. Facile and inaccurate comparisons are more likely to divide and distract rather than unite and focus.
I dont have the time to find it now, but if you go on line and find Susan DuFresne’s blog called something like Behind the Gates and find the piece that details the history of public education… look at the parallels she draws….
MST — Let me know if you find this blog what groundbreaking historical analysis it contains.
Bill Knaak: Teach the Best and Stomp the Rest. I share “Retired District Superintendent’s” concern about historical “caretakers of reason and leaders of school improvement” not standing up to defend public schools” attempting to provide education for ALL of the children. I label them a RELEUCTANT CONSPIRACY. School boards, never bastions of support for innovative learning for all children, largely controlled by cognitive-elete parents have become increasingly partisan political. Now the local boards are being replaced by privately governed national corporations who manage hundreds of charter schools covering many states.
Superintendents, long since removed tenure laws are very vulnerable in their jobs and are required to be “with” so-called privatization reforms or lose their job. You don’t see superintendent’s names in the Ravitch’ blog. They too, are being replaced by Teach For America graduates who,without public school experience or certification are working as managers in state and federal education agencies and private public-school management companies.
Since the day of the late Al Shanker, teacher unions have not been directly involved in much of anything educational except teacher economic benefits and protection of the teacher in the workplace. Currently they seem to stepping aside from the children learning and educational democracy issues, and focusing on unionizing the charter schools They are having some success in that organizing effort. Not having more involvement in the survival of public schools per se is not really a Union fault. As Linda Johnson writes on this blog, when state legislatures gave union strong economic and job protection bargaining rights, they reserved rights for teacher evaluation and educational policy to themselves and local boards. Teacher unions’ legal and main job is improving compensation of teachers and protecting them in their workplace wherever that may be. Analysts and thinkers in higher education, State Boards of Education, The President, The Congress ,The U.S. Office of Education and the Education Secretary can be added to the RELUCTANT CONSPIRACY “sitting on their hands list ” in defense of public education
Anecdotal evidence in previous blogs indicates that affluent educated cognitive-elete parents who may “own” about a third of the children in schools with most of them doing just fine acing the tests, are generally supportive of testing, vouchers, merit pay for teachers charter schools, etc. The print media regularly extols the virtues of these “reforms”, and unless the educated parent is also a teacher in a minority poor school area, they do not have sufficient information or spend time thinking about the adverse side effects of these reforms.
In brief, it is not easy to be optimistic about the future of American public schooling, but I do share Dr. Ravitch’s .faith in groundswell. In earlier history national awakening moods tended to change slowly, but as we have seen through 2013 current affairs in developing countries in all parts of the world, social media has changed that. Modestly literate citizens of all ages can use social media quite effectively. It does not require knowledge of calculus. Patterns of an emerging historical fourth awakening for American education are well under way.
I did not know a simple military analogy would cause such an upset. This analogy was not meant to reference Nazi atrocities BUT the ease which the powerful German armies had in taking over poorly prepared and .militarily backward countries – sorry this hit a nerve and my important points lost to some readers over a simple analogy. No wonder the corporate reform is working. They stay focused on the main goals and Don’t get sidetracked.
This is one reason to use Nazi analogies sparingly. It’s like dropping a nuclear bomb on a fly. In your defense, you weren’t done any favors by the headline’s comparison of the “silence and complicity of the education establishment” to the actions by the “willing collaborators” of Nazi Germany.
Not all “willing collaborators” are allies of Nazis. There were also “useful idiots” or “useful innocents,” a term allegedly coined by Lenin about people who were apologists for Stalin.
In my blog, except for gratuitous cursing, language is not scrubbed clean; all analogies are acceptable, because free speech does not have rules about which analogies and metaphors are permissible and which are not.
I appreciate your light hand as a moderator. My point re: Nazi analogies isn’t that they’re unacceptable. They can be substantive and illuminating, and they can be frivolous and distracting, depending on the topic and the terms of the analogy. On Internet message boards, my experience has been that these analogies are almost always frivolous, distracting, and ineffective. That’s not a reason to ban them, as you note, but I think it is a good reason for people to consider being more thoughtful and judicious in their use of these analogies/similes/metaphors.
Which director of schools is this? Because he sounds like he doesn’t know diddly about what is actually going on in Tennessee. The TSBA is an active collaborator with the current Republican supermajority. They threw in with the legislature in 2011 to repeal the bargaining law and change the tenure rules. TOSS is less tied to the legislature and has tried to stop some of the worst ideas coming out of the State DOE and BOE, but they’ve been somewhat cowed by the $3.4 million that the State withheld to punish Metro-Nashville for daring to stand up to the Huffman pro-charter agenda last year. Small school systems simply cannot afford to lose that kind of money. As for TEA, a union is only as powerful as the people who belong to it, and Tennessee teachers have been easily intimidated, reluctant to organize or speak up, and uninterested in politics, for literally decades. Plus, they continually vote against their own best interests. If they don’t wake the hell up and start getting involved in the politics that are villifying and undermining their profession, rather than sitting around and ineffectually bitching and moaning about it, they deserve what happens to them and to public schools.
Flerp! Your words are stupd and ignorant period and have nothing to do with TN stupid Governor Bill Haslam and his hired idiot Huffman! Flerp go and stay in Germany if you liked Hitler so much and speak of this murderous man who committed suicide!!
So, do I understand the root feeling underlying the analogies: Republicans=Nazis?
Does that mean Democrats=Stalinists? Where is the USA in this analogical war?
Ravitch=Roosevelt or Churchill?