David Greene asks a logical question: Does the New York Times know its left from its right?
This is a confused and confusing portrait of the vigorous, noisy, and numerous activists who are fighting Common Core and its testing and scripted modules in New York.
The article leaves out the parent and educator groups across the state: the BATs, the Long Island parent opt-out groups, Leonie Haimson’s Class size Matters, and many more.
.
There is a good quote from Carol Burris, but no mention of the fact that she speaks for about 40% of the state’s principals.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute–beloved source of NY Times’ quotes–is described as a “public policy group” in DC, with no reference to the it pronounced ideological bent, their membership in ALEC, their receipt of Gates’ largesse to promote the Common Core.
This CAN’T be the newspaper of record.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My Dad e-mailed me this article :). I couldn’t believe the characterization of Cuomo as considering delay of CC/PARCC. Nary a mention of who constitutes his review Board or their view points on CC.
Bizarre article that misrepresents the opposition and concerns about the Core Core, testing, anti-unionism, and hedge-fund interests in terms of the left and right. Opposition may have started with the “right” but not includes a broad base of interested and knowledgeable parties — unfortunately not including the Obama administration and Arne Duncan. Great antidote!!
Who proofed and approved this article? Check the higher ups!
I wish we could just consider, and market, opposition to common core as non-partisan.
The left accuses the right of vile motivation in their dislike of CC$$; Conservatives who object are labeled as Tea Party fanatics worried about imprisonment in the collective.
The right pretty much ignores the fact that there exists opposition to CC$$ from the left.
We look like complete idiots when we vilify and dismiss other opponents of common core just because of what political party they identify with.
For those who follow what is going on in media, such as is in the “Columbia Journalism Review”, these kinds of media fiascos should not come as a complete surprise. “Journalism” has morphed into a bottom line of making money, not following the best in journalistic principles. Great reporters lose jobs ad nauseum. Five major corporations provide 80% of the “news” to our populace. So VERY much of our nation’s problems have been caused by inept “reporting”.
Education is only one of the many problems caused by biased reporting which is way too often not even fact checked. Journalism is by Constitutional decree given special attention because of its recognized importance. An argument might even be made that in education, journalism MAY be even more important than public schools. For adults it is vital that quality journalism be implemented.
News media has castigated education beginning with “A Nation at Risk” and has gone downhill ever since. A price, a heavy price is being paid for their ineptitude and not only in education.
Bill Gates money….influences everything….from public policy…..to what universities are willing to research….to what newspapers are willing to print.
Now it is being proposed that Bill Gates should buy the NY Times. It would further the goals of his foundation.
The New York Times Needs Bill Gates And He Needs Something To Do
By Jonathan Yates February 13, 2014 11:35 AM
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/york-times-needs-bill-gates-163533983.html
Independent blogs, internet news outlets and people who publish there own printed materials are the only sources of truth telling. Welcome to the Brave New World.
Diane, I was dismayed to see you quoted in a way that makes it seem that you dismiss the importance of learning content in the early grades (“They’re not going to remember it”). I have seventh graders who do not know the cardinal directions or the difference between an empire, country, state and city. The ones who DO know this stuff got it from their educated parents. I very much wish the elementary schools in my district taught more history content so that the less privileged kids could comprehend more advanced history work. While the implementation of Core Knowledge in NY schools may need fixing, I hope you realize that there’s a real risk that Common Core will be interpreted in a way that banishes the teaching of coherent content in favor of dreary skills drills. Would you rather our kids get Core Knowledge or EngageNY/Learnzillion/TeachingChannel type lessons?
Not to mention that social studies has not been considered “essential” ever since NCLB came along. With the focus on only reading, math, and in some cases, science, in the testing, everything else has gotten short shrift. This year I discovered that many of my 8th graders didn’t know anything about Columbus or the difference between a country and a continent. I’m having to teach a lot of basic concepts that kids should have gotten in the early grades. I’m NOT blaming teachers here–a lot of schools don’t give teachers a chance to teach ANY social studies at all, and so kids don’t get it until they come to middle school.
Bet they didn’t know Luisiana was up for sale too?….Sorry…couldn’t resist the humor. I taught social studies for years and am as dismayed as you about the demise of its importance.
Enjoyed the humor! I’m actually not from Louisiana. I’m referencing a question on a standardized test that asked the students about Jackson purchasing Louisiana, which of course, he didn’t!
Studying social studies/history would better enable participation by masses of future U.S. citizens– not something the deformers want!
Knowledge of what, knowledge of how. I emphatically agree.
BUT NO TOP-DOWN MANDATES!!!
We need an ecology, not a monoculture, in K-12 education.
How odd it is that the Times didn’t write an article pointing out exactly how much outrage there is from both ends of the political spectrum vs the meddling middle.
Would that have really shown the huge opposition that has arisen? Hmmmm!
No, this is Pravda during the height of the Soviet Empire
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
A casual perusal of this blog will make abundantly clear that opposition to the current education deforms comes from every quarter, right, left, and center. Often, discussion on the blog degenerates into petty ideological squabbling among opponents of the Coring of our country who have dramatically differing political views. The Times piece is propaganda. The Times is becoming the official mouthpiece of the Ministry of Truth.
A journalist proposes that Bill Gates may buy the Times:
” He frequently pens op-eds for newspapers. He recently had a huge piece in The Wall Street Journal. Owning The New York Times would allow for Gates to further the goals of his foundation. A major one is education, and a newspaper would be very useful.”
Read more: http://www.benzinga.com/trading-ideas/long-ideas/14/02/4300335/the-new-york-times-needs-bill-gates-and-he-needs-something-to#ixzz2tcgDCQuq
The education deform machine has had some setbacks lately. They can see the brewing storm. And so they are pulling out the PR stops. There will be a flood of this stuff over the coming months. There will be articles and testimonials about the Common Core Cultural Revolution everywhere.
Get your foul weather gear on and your wading boots. We’re going to be knee deep in it for a while.
Bingo. And part of this PR assault will be to paint opponents of CC$$ as radicals of either fringe. Opposition to to the destruction of public schools does not depend on your political alliance; it has only to do with your level of common sense.
Hi, Michael!
There was another interspersing article about education in the NYT today concerning magnet schools. One criticism of magnet schools offered in the article will be very familiar to regular readers of this blog:
” With completely unregulated choice, there are people who choose and those who choose not to choose,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “So the most unmotivated parents will just get assigned to a school, and motivated parents will eyeball a school racially and ethnically to see if their child will ‘fit in.”
It appears that I am not the only one who understands that many of the criticisms of charter schools here are actually criticisms of all choice schools.
Happy you agree with yourself.
Linda,
I am not Richard Kahlenberg.
He is an interesting person, and I would have thought his most recent book “Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice” (with Moshe Marvit) (Century Foundation Press, 2012) would suggest that is views are in broad agreement with the orthodoxy of this blog.
The NYT article goes on to point out that there are more students in magnet schools than in charter schools, and that magnet schools regularly use academic or performance criteria for admission.
Kahelenberg is a brilliant fellow. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s definitely worth reading.
The Times also suffers from amnesia. Last spring it published an Op Ed on the Common Core and testing and received a blizzard of comments that reflected the opinion of many (from all walks – left, right, red and blue and purple) who want to get rid of IT and the obsessive testing around it. As a newspaper, it doesn’t seem to know who it wishes to be accountable to anymore, not even its own past reporting and Op Eds.
The NY Times and the NY Post are just two reasons why NY teachers, parents, and administrators read The Washington Post for articles by New York educators like Carol Burris. Other than LoHud, and, in one instance, the Times Union, only bloggers like Diane Ravitch, Leonie Hamison, perdidostreet, and others publish the real NY education story. I didn’t notice any comments on the NY Times story. Coincidence?
NYT: “All the propaganda that’s fit to print.”
Imagine if or when Bill Gates owns the New York Times…..education will get so much “coverage” between Bill and Rupert who are both so active with the implementation of the Common Core, teacher evaluations and the collection and storage of personal student data.
Rupert Murdoch publishes 175 newspapers, including The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. Rupert also owns the Fox Network and 19 other regional sports channels. He also owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio and 35 Television Stations that broadcast in USA.
Here is another example of the NY Times getting it wrong by leaving things left unsaid. Andrea Gabor critiques a Times article about Rupert and Klein.
http://andreagabor.com/2013/10/08/inbloom-education-technology-and-the-murdoch-klein-connection-a-son-of-frankenstein-b-movie-sequel/
“The story touches, though only obliquely, on important questions about the balance-of-power between commercial vendors and public schools and school districts, which inBloom is supposed to facilitate.
But one of the most intriguing aspects of the story is one that the NYT does not address at all. No where does the NYT mention that the operating system for inBloom is being developed by the Amplify division (formerly Wireless Generation) of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. This is a striking omission given that that the NYT is the paper of record in New York City where the CEO of Amplify/Wireless Generation, Joel Klein, recently served as schools chancellor. And this despite the fact that New York is one of only three states out of an original nine that, according to the article, “continues to pursue the service.”
In a brief phone conversation, Natasha Singer, the author of the article, explained that the aim of her story was to focus on “one small district in Colorado” and how technology and privacy concerns associated with inBloom play out in an area with much fewer resources than New York City. She also noted that, as is often the case, much was cut from her original story during the editing process.”
Since when did the The New York Times motto become,
“All the propaganda that is approved for printing”?
No surprise.
A friend, Alex, used to write the Press Clips column in the Village Voice. On a weekly basis, he documented the NYT’s aversion to facts.
Love this correction at the end of the article. I wonder whether Arne Duncan’s office called to get the correction in place:
“An earlier version of a capsule summary for this article on the home page described the Common Core curriculum incorrectly. As the article correctly explains, Common Core is a bipartisan effort led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. It is not based on “federal learning standards,” and the Obama administration did not play a direct role in writing them.”
This is the paper of record? Are they kidding?
This paper of record has been allowing all kinds of things to go on for years without proper journalistic investigation and reporting. Imagine if they had not allowed the Bilderberg Group to meet in secret all of these years….how many wars could have been prevented? How many of our so called elections wouldn’t actually have been selections predetermined by this secret group? Could the Times have outed our U.S. political leaders who have attended these meetings for breaking the “Logan Act” which prohibits secret meetings of heads of state?
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the NY Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost forty years… It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
– David Rockefeller at a meeting in June of 1991 of the Bilderberg Group in Baden Baden, Germany.
“Competition is a sin.”
– John D. Rockefeller
Dawn, have you attempted to find a source for the quotation from Rockefeller? The ONLY sources for it are various writings by conspiracy theorists. How, it is certainly the case that there ARE conspiracies sometimes. But as scholars, researchers, and teachers, we have a duty to have high standards about sourcing. I wouldn’t accept this attribution in a research paper from a student, not given the dubious sources.
cx: Now, not How, of course
Since the Bilderberg meetings are secret, the only reason we know anything about them is because there have been people (attendees, waiters, body guards) who have reported on the secret meetings anonymously. An anonymous person reported that Rockefeller said this at the annual meeting in Germany in June 1991
“– David Rockefeller at a meeting in June of 1991 of the Bilderberg Group in Baden Baden, Germany.”
There are investigative reporters who have devoted years to studying this annual meeting of the most powerful people on the planet that meets in secret. Daniel Estulin, a Canadian reporter wrote a book that took years of research called The True Story of The Bilderberg Group. I recommend you read it. He follows people around with a long range camera lens and documents who actually attends these meetings. He has sources inside the meetings that trust him that reveal things that are said. He does not print them unless they are corroborated by several sources. He has continued to do this to this day because all of the things that his inside sources have told him were discussed have come true. People that have attended have become presidents and high officials. This is where our presidents are selected although we think they are elected.
Here is a quote from the horses mouth written in his own book titled David Rockefeller, Memoirs. You can find it on page 405:
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
– David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002
Dawn, there is a difference between wanting global cooperation and being the leader of a cabal that is secretly plotting or administering the New World Order.
Yes, powerful people sometimes get together and conspire with one another. They hold meetings to cook up plans for circumventing and subverting democratic processes in order to foist invariant national “standards” and summative assessments on everyone, for example.
But one can easily carry this organized conspiracy stuff way too far–right off the edge of the sanity map. When people start talking about the world’s being secretly run by the Illuminati or the Elders of Zion or Knights Templar or the Masons or reptoids from the Alpha Draconis star system with a space port under the Vatican, I put what they have to say on a mental bookshelf between Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and L. Ron Hubbard’s space opera about Xenu the Galactic Emperor.
You are way too bright to be so closed minded. Read this book. The author was a professor at Georgetown University. Bill Clinton was one of his young students.
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
by Carroll Quigley
When you dismiss the idea that secret societies exist and their members have actually shaped the past, the present and will control the future if we don’t expose them, you are dismissing factual history, not conspiracy theories. I know that I put myself out there for ridicule when I insist on this point. I am willing to take the abuse to get the truth out.
These CCSS-ers are BULLIES, pure and simple. Hey, I’ve been bullied by “names” making $$$$$ off of the backs of kids. It’s disgusting.
And Gates can’t even build a toilet.
I’ve lost tremendous respect for the NY Times as a result of their endorsement of the rollout of school “reform” and CCSS.
The statement that few of us want to completely abandon the standards is false. I know plenty of people (including myself) who want them GONE. Along with everything else that they represent in the school “reform” movement.
The more I see and hear, the more I think that we need to tackle this problem at the source: the billionaires who are funding this movement and swaying the decisions of the politicians. The politicians aren’t the chief cause. They’re the tools. Class action lawsuit? Boycott their products? There are a LOT of teachers and angry parents out there. Maybe enough to make a difference. There was a post on another thread about how Ghandi convinced the people of India to stop buying the Brit’s clothing products and, instead, make their own broadcloth for clothing. This was effective. What if principals refused to buy computers? Or teachers refused to use them? What if parents and teachers refused to buy any computer that’s got Microsoft software, to start? Send a message. Stop buying Apple iPads or any of the tablets.
trust me, there is no real left in mainstream American politics !
What! No quote from the leftist liberal, John McCain?
Organizing grass roots movements to effect a change, especially a change requiring elected officials to act, was easier in the 1960-70s when there actually were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Coalitions and compromises could be established.
Nowadays when one party in a two party system prides itself on its ideologues, deliberately having winnowed its members, leaving itself bereft of members willing to cross aisles, trying to change through legislation is more difficult. It especially has been made more difficult, with the establishment of what amounts to legalized bribery and influence by Big Money.
Any grassroots movement against CC has to shout truth loudly and forcefully, ignoring left-right labels. It is a fight against Big Money for Private Hands, Big Data, Big Testing, and Big Authoritarianism. The resistance must be greater and can be accomplished when working together for the common good of students, parents, and teachers.
The parents are the key, imo. Nobody believes the teachers and the kids don’t have the voice. It’s easy for Arne to shout down teachers. But he disturbed a very large hive when he ridiculed the moms (and dads, for that matter).
Spread the word: don’t buy Microsoft. Don’t shop Walmart.
The decay of the NY Times and liberalism have been developing for decades. The same can be said for The Nation and the pseudo-left in general, with their “humanitarian” wars in Libya and Syria, and perhaps the Ukraine. There are objective reasons in the impossibility of maintaining democratic rights, including the right to education, under such horrific social inequality. There is no longer any constituency for democratic rights in the Democrats as well as the Republicans, and also in the upper middle class layers that once were the “left” protestors, as the growing crisis of capitalism does not allow for that. This is true internationally. For an earlier example of such analysis see “Obama’s “kill list” and the decay of democracy in America” at http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/06/dron-j05.html.