In a post called “This Is You Brain on TFA,” Jersey Jazzman scrutinizes an article written by Cami Anderson about her moral courage.
He writes:
“I often get the sense that something happens to the brains of people who do their two years or less at Teach For America and then, rather than continue to teach, go on to “stay in education” as “leaders.” Maybe their self-granted halos are a little too tight.”
Cami Anderson is the superintendent of Newark, appointed by Chris Christie. Her “One Newark” plan will lead to the layoff of hundreds of veteran teachers, most of whom will likely be black. They are likely to be replaced by TFA, whose friends at Goldman Sachs are building new housing for them called “Teachers’ Village” so that the young TFA teachers will have good housing in Newark and live with their peers.
Jersey Jazzman wonders describes what Anderson has done in Newark:
“Apparently, the following acts are exemplars of moral courage:
“Requesting that the state overturn a recent tenure law that was negotiated in good faith by the Newark Teachers Union — a law that seems to be working out well across the rest of the state.
“Implementing a school restructuring plan that disproportionately targets teachers of color, even though there is scant little evidence that plan will do a thing to help student achievement.
“Walking out on a mother because you, and you alone, have decided what is and is not appropriate speech for people who are advocating for their children.
“Suspending principals for daring to exercise their first amendment rights.
“Throwing PTO presidents out of schools and suspending staff because you don’t like what they say on the phone when they’re in the bathroom.
“Reneging on teacher compensation deals that were suspicious to begin with.
“Taking a bow at the biggest speech of the year for your boss, who has said explicitly he does not care about the opinions of those citizens of Newark who dare to disagree with him.
“According to them both, not heeding the summons of the chair of the state’s most important legislative committee on schools, and not answering the emails of the elected representative of your school board.
“All of these acts are so selfless, so noble, so righteous indeed that they deserve a public self-lauding — one where the author can tell us all about her lonely, arduous crusade at her extremely elite college to get more money for her crew team so she could fly to her meets rather than drive.”
To follow the links, read the post:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/03/this-is-your-brain-on-tfa.html#sthash.3ooqJtld.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“…an article written by Cami Anderson about her moral courage.”
Is there even a word that describes writing about your own “moral courage”? Chuzpah doesn’t begin to cut it.
Well, as Linda said once…
I can think of lots of words for someone who would write about their own moral courage
but I don’t want Diane to kick me off her blog!
😉
Dienne, I write a lot of words but I can’t imagine how anyone would write about themselves in this way.
No, it’s far beyond chutzpah: it’s two-hundred-proof Narcissism.
According to Wikipedia, narcissism is “a personality disorder in which a person is excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity.”
Other characteristics include:
– Expecting recognition and treatment as superior and special
– Expecting constant attention, admiration and positive
reinforcement
– Envious of others, and believes they are envied by others
– Arrogant in attitudes and behavior
Then of course there’s all the lying…
I imagine there must be a highly quantified, data-driven personality profile and template that TFA, Gates and Broad et. al. use to identify, groom and promote these people, with those whose anti-social qualities are off the charts getting the nod.
It’s yet another absurd paradox of so-called reform, defying satire and to be marveled at by future historians, that the people clawing their way on to pedestals, claiming to represent the interests of schoolchildren, and for the most part being uncritically portrayed as doing so, are such nasty pieces of work.
There is an epidemic of narcissism in our culture.
Michael Fiorillo: with all due respect, the self-styled “eudcation reformers” who are leading the “new civil rights movement of our time” excel at the art of self-parody. Nay, they are achieving new heights of self-caricature and ridicule.
Simply consider what Ms. Anderson says. Back in the day she banded together with likeminded righteous folk to fight the establishment and struggle for truth, justice and the American way when it comes to elite athletes; she earned her street cred the hard way.
Hmmmm…
Okey dokey. Now that she is a member of the education status quo—Thank you very much!—she is convinced beyond any doubt that she is even more courageous in beating down the righteous minded Cami Andersons of today who are struggling for truth, justice and the American way when it comes to letting the vast majority of students aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN have even a semblance of the educational opportunities that the leading charterites/privatizers and their educrat enablers and edubully enforcers ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
Hmmmm…
Keeping in mind the actual dimensions and importance of the situation she describes, over 20 years ago she was on the right side of the rhetorical barricade she erects. Today she’s switched sides.
Her argument is not with us; it’s with herself. The she of today needs to get right with herself of yesteryear.
But I’m not holding my breath waiting for a change of position. An old dead Greek guy described the type long long ago:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
$tudents $ucce$$, anyone?
😎
Indeed, KTA, they are parodies of themselves, but their narcissism is part of what blinds them to their behavior and makes it impossible for them to reflect on their character and its consequences for others. Thus, their grotesque self-regard and lack of empathy.
Narcissism will always be with us. What we need to alter is a political economy that rewards such behavior and unleashes these beasts upon the rest of us, in service of their masters’ avarice and will to power.
This behavior is arrogance at best and at worst can only be compared to the Nazis as they were rising to power in Germany. That doesn’t mean the these fake ed reformers are Nazis—-they just have similar attitudes but different beliefs that brand them as narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths and gives truth to the old saying that birds of a feather flock together.
Lloyd. No Nazi talk. It kills the stream.
But why does it kill the stream, Joanna?
Unchecked narcissism, sociopathy, etc lead to things like Nazi Germany with all of its horrors.
We are supposed to learn from history so that we don’t repeat it. I also see clear parallels to the genocide of Native Americans in this ed-reform push.
If you click on the ad on Jazzman’s article (at least, the ad that was there for me even after refreshing several times) you get this website: http://westcoastconnection.com/community-service-summer-programs-teens/?gclid=CIfQrNuon70CFYFhMgodAGUAfw. Somehow it seems appropo. Very rich white young people spending thousands of dollars to go “help” poor black and brown kids and getting to brush up on their surfing, white water rafting and zip-lining to boot. Why does that remind me of Ms. Anderson?
“They are likely to be replaced by TFA, whose friends at Goldman Sachs are building new housing for them called “Teachers’ Village” so that the young TFA teachers will have good housing in Newark and live with their peers.”
That’s a project brought to you by Alicia Glen, Mayor De Blasio’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development.
My memory is that project was in the works a while ago with Zuck bucks.
Could have been some Zuck bucks in there, for sure.
I just read this from ABC news that was published eight hours ago.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-players-abc-news/reinventing-education–bill-gates-takes-a-controversial-stance-for-school-reform-221244760.html?vp=1
The headline: Reinventing education: Bill Gates takes a controversial stance for school reform.
Read and then leave comments. Flood the comments section
I read the article. Gates is so far out of reality. Where does he get the idea that the curriculum in low-income areas is any different than in wealthy suburbs? I worked in a low-income charter in a state that forces all kids to take Geometry and Algebra II. The kids took the courses but did not perform at grade level. It’s not like you magically create high performers just because the curriculum changes. It is all so dumb.
“It’s not like you magically create high performers just because the curriculum changes. It is all so dumb.”
Exactly. I taught kids in the same class out of a 9th grade English Literature test who read from 2nd grade reading level to 12th grade or beyond. If we suddenly forced the kids reading at a 2nd grade level to start working on material designed for kids reading much higher, they shut down and turn off and often react by either playing passive aggressive or just hard core aggressive by acting out and disrupting the class.
Gates and his allies all the way to President Obama have no clue how kids learn and what happens when you demand that a kid who hardly learns, never reads outside of class and seldom does the work will react to this. What they are demanding demonstrates that they must believe every kid is hungry to learn all the time and willing to cooperate and we just aren’t challenging them enough.
The reality is that kids who are way behind must be challenged inches at a time not by making hundred mile leaps. The frustration level will turn kids off and make them hate learning even more than many already do.
Jazzman, you are right, she is not courageous. She is a coward for not listening to the parents of the district. How can someone be so arrogant? How many times have we heard that same reform mumbo jumbo speech and change and the status quo? It is all so predictable and stale.
When lawyers don’t make their case at hearing, for one reason or another, they try to cram the whole thing into a closing argument, whether the argument is written or spoken.
After you practice for a while it becomes almost a marker of someone who knows they didn’t persuade at hearing, so is desperately trying to make up for that.
That’s what the One Newark site reminds me of. She couldn’t make her case when she had actual, live, real time opposition, so she’s making up for that with long explanations and justifications and conclusory statements after the fact. It always reads and feels really weak because of course it’s much easier to “win” when there’s no one talking on the other side and the hearing is over 🙂
I think if you have to write your “vision” over and over again you probably didn’t do the persuasion job real well.
http://onewark.org/vision-one-newark/
Good analogy.
It’s odd to watch this, because we’re having a public school planning process where I live. We’re building a new school. It took three votes, districtwide, everyone, not just “current parents”, to get the basic plan and bond issue passed. Now that we have that, the plan for the facility and the funding, we’re planning “the school”. In January, they solicited volunteers community-wide to sit on a planning group. We meet beginning April 1st.
It’s pretty exciting, but it was hard work coming to agreement on just the decision to build a new school and how much that should cost. We had to keep going back to the electorate because they didn’t like the first two plans.
I don’t think that was “wasted” time, though, and I don’t think we should stop voting community-wide for funding or dissolve the school board because all of the debate and discussion and disagreement is “regulation” and we can just short circuit it and march on to our “goal”.
The (maddening) democratic process IS the community buy-in. By the time we get this thing finished, whatever it “is”, it will be OURS.
I’m all for equity of distribution of CA education dollars for crew. Question is, why would the state fund crew, or skiing, or whatever? Physical fitness for all students is a worthy goal. Spending large amounts on a select few to produce pinnacle athlete programs seems a little outside the mission of the state constitution.
Please let there be karma….
Self congratulatory tribalism is all they have to offer to keep the “Demons” at bay.
The “Tell” is in ringing their bell. Din of the “Cult”, where its devotees believe that
they alone have access to a truth that others fail to discern. It could be an illusion,
brought on by title or position.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the ILLUSION of
knowledge.” S. Hawking
Political and/or economic stupor is the product of illusion.
Mike Pence in Indiana pretends to fund pre-K pilot, but just takes money out of existing Family and Social Services budget to do it:
“Then, in the waning days of the session, lawmakers revived it. But they put the onus on the governor to come up with the money to pay for it, a difficult proposition given that state revenues are down.
It didn’t take long for Pence to identify $10 million within the Family and Social Services Administration’s existing budget.
“I’m very confident that even in this difficult and uncertain economy that we are managing the state resources in a prudent way and in a manner that is going to preserve our budget surplus as well as our budget reserves and meet the obligations of our programs around the state,” Pence said during a post-legislative session press conference.”
Robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the pre-K vouchers go to Pence’s preferred providers.
I’m sure this will be heavily marketed as a big “win” for children. So much smoke and mirrors and BS.
http://indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact/2014/03/19/indiana-pay-prek-questions-cost-quality-remain/
I would love to see George Carlin back on Earth and watch him take on Cami Anderson.
Wow.
This is all getting harder to watch.
Good piece on Governor Christie’s phony “pension reform”.
Is there anything he did that is AS advertised? It’s like he got a complete pass from any kind of rational scrutiny at all for his first term. Every claim of “success” is falling apart:
“Before it was tarnished by Bridgegate, Christie’s political brand hinged on the governor’s celebrated efforts to reform the public pension system—including his moves to increase the retirement age for some workers, cut benefits, and make adjustments to how much state employees pay into the plan. Less noticed was how, under Christie, the amount of retiree money in the hands of outside managers, such as private equity firms or hedge funds like Singer’s, dramatically increased, while the share going to less risky and more traditional investments like treasury notes or the S&P 500 declined.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/178862/pensiongate-christie-campaign-donors-won-huge-contracts#
will someone please post this under the article on huffpo? They have some kind of bug and I can’t log in. No comments yet, it would be great if this linked article accompanied the first one.