Peter Greene was offended by the graceless attack on Carol Burris, published by billionaire-funded Edpost, which loudly proclaimed its intention to elevate the tone of the discussion, and now this. Burris is a respected principal in New York, admired by her peers as an inspirational leader. Yet here is a woman who worked at the U.S. Department of Education on Arne Duncan’s team, with nerve enough to call out Burris as misinformed about the Common Core, or even a liar. Let’s just say this embarrassing hit piece did not elevate the tone of the conversation, nor was it informative. If this is what $12 million produces, the billionaires should get their money back.
Greene writes:
“Headliner Ann Whalen wins the Well That Didn’t Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost’s highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it (“When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris”) but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
“And the she tries to refute Burris’s arguements by lying. (Hey– I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Does she need defending? for whom?
When so-called reformers talk about “elevating the tone,” what they are really saying is, “Shut up and get out of the way.”
I wonder how long Edpost will last? I cannot figure out where the tone was elevated. They look like the same old talking points couched in less than courteous tones. I think one of my former principals did a better job when he “questioned my integrity” rather than coming right out and calling me a liar. I can’t say I reacted any differently to his choice of vocabulary. 🙂
2old2teach: EdPost will last until the $12 million runs out. Unlike most of the education bloggers, who write because they want to and have no income from their blogging.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Whelan’s reply was ignorant & full of political sound-bytes. The other two bloggers, both math teachers, both seemed to be saying that they appreciated the pedagogical methods & curriculum assists incorporated into– what are supposed to be– standards.
Gosh…and I keep suggesting that LAUSD needs a new Supt. like Carol Burris…a proven, very well trained, and classy, lifelong educator and administrator.
I posted below in response to Mr. Goldberg but hope some educators can read what worked in the 1930’s in our school district in Math. We are experiencing this Math group work which I know personally was piloted at Sinclair Community college in Dayton Ohio and scrapped. Expecting the high learners to help low learners in a group setting only encourages the low learners to be lazy – the high learners will always do all the work. with common Core, they will not move on at their own pace. Here’s what was written in our school newspaper in 1935 about a new “progressive” math program:
“Olmsted Adopts Progressive Methods – Individualizes Arithmetic.”
In Olmsted Falls Elementary school we have been trying the individualized plan devised by Supt. Washburne of the Winnetka, Illinois schools and used to achieve excellent results in that city…..Educators generally have come to realize forcefully that children vary greatly as individuals and that any one school grade contains children of an astonishingly wide variety of capacity and achievement. Every child should master the essentials. The amount of practice and time that is sufficient for one child may be insufficient for another and it is absurd to expect to achieve uniform results from uniform assignments, made to a class of widely differing individuals. Throughout the educational world there has therefore awakened a desire to find some way of adapting schools to the different individuals who attend them. This desire has resulted in a variety of experiments. One experiment substitutes individual subject promotions for class promotions. Each child, within certain limits, moves forward at his own rate in the mastery of the common essentials of each subject.
It’s only natural that Whalen would twist, spin and lie as that’s the only course of action open to her. To accept the facts of the matter would mean that she would have to agree with Burris and everyone else who puts legitimate criticisms of deform on the table. Whalen would have to agree that deformer policies have always been wrong headed and as a result have never succeeded. I can’t think of any time in the past when efforts such as this to “play nice” were anything other than a shallow and short lived ruse.