The Badass Teachers Association issued the following press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 14, 2014
More Information Contact:
Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager, BATs
Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. General Manager, BATs
contact.batmanager@gmail.com
“The Badass Teachers Association, an organization that is nearing 50,000 members, is releasing this statement to express our outrage over Resolution #2 (AFT Common Core) that passed on the floor of the AFT Convention this past Sunday. The decision to support the Common Core will further erode the confidence of parents, students, and teachers who have watched the chaos that has unfolded in our schools as a result of standards that were never researched , tested, or piloted.
“The AFT stated that the promise of the Common Core has been corrupted by political manipulation, administrative bungling, corporate profiteering and an invalid scoring system designed to ensure huge numbers of kids fail the new math and language arts exams that will be rolled out next spring.” “Why in the world would they support keeping them?” asks Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager of BATs.
“BAT Asst. General Manager Melissa Tomlinson states, “BATs do not dispute the need for high level standards that will encourage our students to develop and apply higher-order thinking skills. BATs does dispute the standards as the panacea for what is actually wrong with our educational system. The Common Core has become a distractor to veil the real issues of fair funding and access to equal resources that will not be solved as school districts struggle to align curriculum to the standards through purchasing of Common Core materials, mainly from the Pearson monopoly.”
“BATs are dismally disappointed with the results of the convention and will fight to have CCSS disbanded and Arne Duncan removed as Secretary of Education. We will not give up the fight for ALL children”, said BAT Jo Lieb.
“Co-founder Mark Naison states, “The new AFT position on Common Core is going to disappoint many parents and teachers who were looking for relief from uncontrolled testing and intrusive federal mandates.”
“This CCSS “baby” was created by people with NO classroom experience (ELA) and very little classroom experience (Math). They are developmentally inappropriate for the younger grades, for kids with disabilities- they defy every best practice and research we know about how children learn. The CCSS are copyrighted and cemented in place to high stakes testing, VAM, and rigid annual benchmarks. Throw out this toxic baby and the bathwater now!” exclaimed BAT and Special Education advocate, Terry Kalb.
“BATs look forward to continuing our work with parents, students, and education policy makers to take back public education and end the FEDERALLY MANDATED Common Core State Standards! Further, we fully support NEA’s resolution to ask for Secretary Duncan’s resignation. Unions MUST return to the important role of educating the rank and file about specific and significant changes implemented in order to qualify for RttT funding; and most importantly, stand up for a complete and thorough analysis of implementation, specifically as they relate to individual states, localities, and communities manpower decisions.”
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I read that the UFT REQUIRES their delegates to take a loyalty oath to vote the UNITY party line (Randi Weingarten & Michael Mulgrew). The weasels sign it so they can keep their cushy union jobs. Yet the union collects union dues and doesn’t represent us. This mirrors what is happening in ALL of politics — taxation without representation. In all of America, is there not one law firm that could prepare a class action suit for this abuse of our rights as parents, teachers and our students?
PS: The UFT is the largest voting block at the AFT Convention. Randi Weingarten, talks a good game, but she fixes the outcome with Mulgrew…
This UNITY party knows full well they can swagger into conventions, accompanied by hundreds of votes predetermined through this “loyalty oath” to help their privatization benefactors. It assists in neo-liberal endorsements, (get ready Governor Cuomo), and has the ability to coerce union elections, (see NYSUT).
All in all, with union friends/leaders like these, who needs reformy enemies?
Right on, NY ATR and Pogue. We have no representation in New York, just predetermined courses of action and outcomes orchestrated by ever stranger and ever kinkier bedfellows.
“BATs do not dispute the need for high level standards. . . ”
THEY SHOULD!
If they don’t know the difference between standards and curriculum by now then they haven’t learned much have they? Standards are not curriculum.
Standards imply measurement and are the flip side of the coin of standardized testing. Standards are the lingua franca of the edudeformers and those who seek to destroy public education. Note that charters and private schools are exempt from the standards and standardized testing. Does that mean that they can’t succeed without them? No, because most private schools have a well designed curriculum.
If the BATs are serious about counteracting the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing they must quit using the language of the edudeformers. Otherwise the BATs have lost the war before the battle is started.
I know they don’t care, but I still think they would gather more listeners and carry more weight with a different name. They aren’t a rock band. It’s not the same mindset, or it shouldn’t be.
Or maybe they should start rapping. That would be totally bad-ass. I hear the kids love rap.
tago
We DO rap – or rather our co-founder does – Mark Naison aka Notorious PhD. BAT Jeremy Dudley, aka Origin, raps (“Stop This Madness”). And British spoken word artist (“Why I Hate School But Love Education) Suli Breaks is also a BAT.
Strike 1: Accepting money from Gates. Strike 2: Not taking firmer action against Duncan/ C.C./ following CTU lead. Strike 3: NYSUT endorses Cuomo (yet to be determined). That is my last straw people.
The name “Pearl Clutching Teachers Waving Hankies” was already taken. Our public schools and our profession are under attack- K-12 teachers not identifying as “badass” have already been excluded from every aspect of educational decisions, our opinions are ignored. Time to be badass or stay ignored and irrelevant.
There are 49,799 Badass Teachers who have gotten over, around, or into the name. Don’t you all think this argument is getting a bit old? ^o^
NO!
BATs members and administrators have admitted on this site and elsewhere that people’s names are added to the membership list without their knowledge or consent, proving those claims false, and bringing the overall credibility of this faux-macho group into question.
They also play deceptive semantic games: sometimes we read that the membership is “49,799 … teachers,” but when challenged on that one it becomes “almost 50,000 people.” Well, which is it? Yes, all teachers are people – well, except for a subset of Edubots from TFA – but not all people are teachers.
Whatever: it’s all grist for the ego-gratification mill. For all we know, a significant percentage of BATs could be the pets of members: yeah, Fluffy The Badass!!!
I bet that has Gates, Broad and Rhee cowering under their desks.
Given the undisputed fact of bogus membership claims, if people continue to believe that almost fifty thousand active classroom teachers have joined this online pep rally – which is the only place this group truly exists, since they are rarely observed at any real world events defending public education – then they are lying to others as well as themselves, and doing so from a censored echo chamber, since open debate is not allowed on the BATs site.
Gee: lies, willing self-deception and a self-reinforcing echo chamber that excludes heterodox or opposing voices. Take away the Overclass funding, and it mirrors some of the behavior of the so-called reformers, for whom truth is also a minor detail, easily discarded.
Policy-wise, I agree with just about everything BATs says, and know that many good people are involved. Many members have commented about the useful information that is exchanged on the site, which is a good thing, but that’s a far cry from the claims made by the group and it’s leadership. Diane’s blog is also an invaluable clearinghouse for information on this struggle, but you don’t see her making outrageous claims about her influence and toughness.
If you are a classroom teacher, then take back your union from the misleadership that enables the so-called reformers.
If you are a parent, opt-out your children from high stakes tests and take back your parents association so that it can resist so-called reform cant from captive administrators.
If you are a citizen, run for a school board seat, to combat the lies and attacks of the so-called reformers.
But don’t think that by bragging and posing online that you are actually doing anything to defend public education.
By all means, be a BAT, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that this organization is going to do much of anything in the struggle to save public education, despite it’s deluded/deceptive claims of being in the Vanguard.
Badass, Badass, Badass ^0^ ^0^ ^0^
Sigh, where are the “like” buttons on the blog! 😛
” Standards are the lingua franca of the edudeformers and those who seek to destroy public education. Note that charters and private schools are exempt from the standards and standardized testing.”
This is untrue in most jurisdictions. Kids in private and charter schools are both held to high standards AND are in most cases are taking required state-level and other standardized tests and are not universally exempt.
“No, because most private schools have a well designed curriculum.”
While this is true in many cases, it begs the question of why charter schools often can do more with less vs standard public schools, when the state-run schools could often adopt similar curriculum but choose not to. The reality that non-performing private and charter schools will lose their audience keeps them on their toes without top-down standards.
End the monopoly status of state-run schools and you may be able to bottle that magic.
Keep the status quo and they leaders will keep pushing the rope of top-down standards and tests to attempt to measure and enforce good results. Ineffectively. But somehow teachers unions are the last to be in favor of such radical reform as school choice, charters, and real local (aka parental) control.
Patrick M.,
Most studies show that charters and voucher schools do not, on average, get better results than public schools and often get far worse results. One thing they do get is more social, racial, and economic segregation.
Where I teach, the charters generally excel at the expense of the district schools where behavior management and social-emotional coaching take precedence over academic content.
I’ll say it – most of these results-driven charters baldly are not carrying their weight with the most high needs students, so schools like mine must take in more of these cases than our allotted counselors, special ed teachers can effectively handle. Forget about clinicians like psychologists, they are non-existent in our neighborhood schools, though sorely needed.
Charters do need to explain why their original purpose for existing was abandoned. Under the original NY Charter School Law their focus was to be “at-risk” kids. But snakey private interests got the law updated to define “at risk” creatively, instead of objectively.
Clearly, charter movement advocates like Eva Moskowitz tout and flout their high performance, neglecting to mention charters simply have less of these multi-issue families on their rosters.
So to find that charters perform no better than public schools overall makes me wonder what schools like mine would be achieving if we didn’t have to mainstream so many special needs kids because charter schools are filtering them out through an innocent-seeming lottery application process.
A colleague of mine just moved from public school to a charter specially designed for the lowest performing students – that I can get behind. Imagine a NY where Charters were designed to solve problems for the many, and not just a few.
As we know, about 30% of students who take tests that assess CCSS do well on them. But, since most of these successful students were not taught curriculum based on CCSS, it would seem to follow that CCSS are not necessary for students to learn at a high level in public schools across the nation. 30% is a rather large minority of a very large public school population, so it is not likely that this many students could meet CCSS by accident. It would seem to follow, then, that the issue of whether public education rests on high standards is nonsense, since it already does. What is at issue, leaving aside whether CCSS are good or not, is that a large number of students in public schools are not successful, but not because public schools do not adhere to high standards. So we’re back to poverty and the other well-known causes of distress in public schools.
Too many students have prospered in public schools to argue that public school standards are the problem in cases where students do not do well. Inadequate public school financing, especially in large cities, and insufficient student preparedness to learn before coming to school, and while being in school, are, as we all know, much more serious issues.