Lyndsey Layton reports in the Washington Post that Richard Berman of the Center for Union Facts has sent out 125,000 letters attacking Randi Weingarten for ruining American education.
Berman’s usual stock in trade is defending tobacco companies against allegations that smoking causes cancer. He is a hired gun who says whatever corporations want said. As the article says, he has rented billboards in NYC’s Times Square and taken out a full-page ad in the Néw York Times to slander Randi.
Of course, it is not Randi his corporate masters hate: it is unions. They think teachers should be like fast food workers, paid minimum wage.
I once wrote in a post on this blog that I had a personal encounter with Berman. He boasted about his campaign to defame the Néw Jersey NEA for driving up the cost of education. Billboards, ads, etc. I asked him if he knew that the highest performing states were unionized and the lowest performing states were not. He did not know, and he mumbled that he was a PR man, not an education researcher. He was right. He is a mouthpiece for some corporate paymaster. The Koch brothers? ALEC? Some other rightwing zealot? There ought to be a law requiring disclosure of who pays for slander.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I can’t get too worked up about it when their paid stooges attack their paid stooges.
Randi is damaging the labor unioin movement from all directions. How can we defend our own integrity with such a “leader”?
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/teachers-union-big-randi-weingarten-late-robocall-kathy-hochul-blog-entry-1.1932086
Thanks to Randi’s compromises with Broad and Gates many teachers ‘ lives have been devestated. As one of the casualties, I would gladly take mere defamation from a dubious defamer to the foreclosure, unemployability, psychological trauma, uncertain future, lstudent loan default, bad credit and lost hope. And I was luckier than the suicides, early graves, homeless, and otherwise devestated teachers whose lives have been profoundly harmed by the greed and ambition of our judas unions.
I respect and admire Diane but her wanton refusal to address the fates of Randi’s victims is troubling. While she is defending this common core supporting, TURN complicit con woman , even our colleagues are now tenuous about supporting the rubber room , teacher jailed, worongfully terminated factions who will not be made whole much less cleared of false charges and allegations of bad teaching . Tell me how teachers with decades of unstained service are suddenly ineffective perverts ? Notably none of them are ever confronted by police ( even suits know there are laws about trumping up false charges) and no one has asked how much integrity test scores have when 37 states are accused of cheating, the ASA is declaring VAM a scam and the scores are arbitrary.
( funny, I have never heard her address any of this while she thumps CCSS and her thug buddy Mulgrew threatens to thump its critics)
I guess the plan is to pretend we do not exist. Well, I exist and I am not going to shut up until we are heard . With all due respect to Diane, I urge teachers to robo dial everyone they know when Randi runs for office– as she no doubt will– and do to her what she did to our sister Zepher Teachout. Randi is a shameless self-serving shill who serves Bill Gates and Eli Broad. She has nothing but contempt for teachers and we should give her as good as we got.
Well, if it is indeed slander, perhaps the PR man will get sued?
Diane, thanks for the alert re: Richard Berman. It’s important to examine the site: http://www.richardbermanexposed.org to become aware of the breadth of his activities. Most important link on that site is: http://www.charitynavigator.org, a respected watchdog. There you can read of the FIVE Berman front groups, which channel nonprofit funds to Berman’s for-profit entities. The IRS needs to investigate this charlatan’s activities. I hope that Randi will urge the union’s Board of Directors to publicize this malfeasance.
The best part is this:
“Charity Navigator, an independent group that analyzes nonprofit groups, has issued a “donor advisory” regarding the Center for Union Facts and four other Berman groups, saying most of their funds go to Berman’s for-profit company.”
He’s robbing his donors. It isn’t even a good value for anti-labor activists. They’re getting ripped off by one of their own. The anti-labor managers and owners could maybe give every front-line employee a raise if they’d stop paying lobbyists and consultants and political marketing people to bust unions. There’s an unproductive layer of skimmers here and I don’t think it’s teachers.
Truly, none of “those” non-profits, certainly the education non-profits that are backed by the same donors, aren’t rheely non-profit. Everybody knows that. They are non-profits for tax purposes; the donors know exactly how/where the money gets spent. Sadly, the IRS and the government allow this silliness. How black their hearts must be to have so much money and choose to waste on this nonsense in the name of charity and philanthropy.
Berman’s attacks on Weingarten appear to be more ongoing and well-funded than those against Campbell Brown. If reformers legitimately decry personal attacks in the education debate, they will condemn Berman’s site, ads, and mailers as vigorously as they’ve condemned http://realcampbellbrown.com/.
What the conversation on attacks and tone in the education space misses, though, is that there is a difference between personal attacks and legitimate comments about donors, political affiliations, and potential reasons for skepticism. This “political lens” provides valuable information, and a look at these factors helps demonstrate why Weingarten’s description of topics like teacher employment law is more accurate than Brown’s (see http://34justice.com/2014/09/24/the-political-lens-what-global-warming-and-wright-v-new-york-have-in-common/).
“attacking Randi Weingarten for ruining American education.”
That makes me laugh too. When you read one of these screeds, pay attention the the timeline. “American education” is always “ruined” sometime AFTER the writer(s) graduated from public schools. Americans were all brilliant and well-educated in either the 1970’s, the 1980’s or the 1990’s, depending on the age of the respective anti-public school activist, because to say otherwise would be calling the vast majority of the country idiots and they can’t do that. This has to be a relatively RECENT decline, to exempt all the middle aged people writing the screeds, and most of their intended audience 🙂
We were overdue for some breaking news about Randi.
Arthur Goldstein commented on Facebook,
“BS from anti-union think tank. In fairness, Randi has supported Common Core, mayoral control, junk science evaluation, merit pay, RttT, and much of the nonsense inflicted upon American education. They should be praising her.”
Ding Ding Ding! You win! Ya hit the target fair and square.
All those things are ruining education, so its not slander.
Here in NJ, we are also seeing an uptick of activity of paid PR professionals with unclear connections of who is actually paying them. We are seeing astroturfing as well as personal attacks and opposition-research on those who dare to bring evidence forward to show these strategies are not effective. Any criticism at all is said to be “a front for the union”, “controlled by the union”, “union boss tools” when we just have a lot of smart people asking questions based on what they are seeing in their schools.
…but who is believing the nonsense? Not too many; reason for the uptick. I feel that while I may not be able to make a dent, and the odd$ clearly are stacked in the wealthy’s favor, people are waking up and trying to fight back and not believing the lies.
I like when I read a national anti-labor lobby screed that doesn’t make any sense in the state in which is dropped. You can read them in Right To Work states, it doesn’t really matter. Unions are ruining everything even where there aren’t any unions. They must be banished from the earth or none of us are really safe from the mighty power of Big Labor. It’s weirdly nostalgic, like they think we’re in the 1950s.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Chiara, yes, I have noticed anti-union rants in states where unions are banned. Reminds me of hearing anti-Semitic rants in places where there are no Jews, having been killed off long ago.
dianeravitch: what you said.
It bears watching.
😡
Glad to see the Washington Post has shared this information. These attacks are not a good use of anyone’s $.
While these attacks are not a good use of anyone’s money, aren’t you happey when one of these uber-wealthy zealots pounds his money down a rat hole?
I suspect we can think of much better ways to use dollars that spread stupid assertions like these.
“Pseudo reports” issued from an official sounding group is just another ploy from the right “wingnuts” to attack whatever they oppose. This tactic was used against Obamacare. Then, get a front man like this guy or Campbell Brown to hit the media. While it’s unethical and diabolical, it is an effective propaganda tool, since most people don’t scratch the surface of the information they receive, and a common theme is that they won’t reveal their backers. Those in support of public education need to figure out a way to get the truth out to the public without spending millions.
You’d think they’d show some gratitude for support of mayoral control, RttT, Common Core, contractually embedded merit pay schemes, and all the VAM she helped negotiate. But these reformy folks have no gratitude whatsoever. This should be a lesson to us that collaborating to promote junk science is not only unproductive, but engenders no good will whatsoever.
Arthur Goldstein: than you for pointing out that ingratitude is a hallmark of the self-styled “education reform” movement.
With a [Hallmark] card soon to follow?
😎
She stepped an eensy weensy bit out of line defending tenure and calling for a walk back from all the testing.
And they bite her head off.
http://www.nbc4i.com/story/26610426/nbc4-crew-confronted-by-security-during-interview-with-reynoldsburg-parent
Full throttle anti-teacher crusade in the Republican daily Columbus Dispatch over Reynoldsburg teacher strike. Recall the school board and Kasich puppet superintendent tried to take away health care and base raises primarily on test scores. The Huffmaster thugs are now reportedly driving vans through picket lines. Here’s one hired goon trying to muscle a parent and school aged kids along with TV reporter. Clearly, the “security” is trying to provoke a physical confrontation. Also, the police were never called as the goon lied. Shades of River Rouge.
You know this, I think, but Reynoldsburg is a model for ed reformers:
“These two districts illustrate the benefits of sustained results-focused, community-engaged leadership thoughtfully balancing improvement and innovation. The contrast between floundering city schools and flourishing suburban districts is important (but not unusual). Compared to the city schools, the two suburban districts have created a framework–of thinking, dialog, and structure–that more easily incorporates innovation. It makes me wonder if there is a tipping point of challenge, size, and politics that disengages big city schools from their moorings and prevents thoughtful sustained leadership.”
Is that what it looks like from the local angle? 🙂
We’ve now completely left the realm of reality, in “national” ed reformers versus “what is actually happening in these places”
You’d think there’d be some epic, train wreck narrative crash between reality and fantasy at some point in Ohio, but I’m starting to give up hope.
http://gettingsmart.com/2013/03/smart-cities-columbus/
Don’t give up, Chiara, the reformers are floundering.
Locally, Ohio has gone off the rails. We are a 50-50 state completely under Republican rule – all state offices, governor, state school board, legislature, supreme court – even the Republican Central Committee was purged of moderate Republicans starting with Kevin DeWine. Any reasonable Republicans left are bailing politics or cower in fear of the heavy handed tactics of the current regime. The Democrats are wandering in the wilderness. Most major newspapers are terrified of Kasich and reporting is no longer objective. If the states are labs of government, we are experimenting with dictatorship. Kasich stays mainly hidden behind handlers. My hope is he runs for president and can no longer hide behind feigning concern for Ohioans and sarcastic sound bytes. The scrutiny of the national press should be interesting.
As far as experiments in reform, sadly, most parents and many teachers do not see that. It is “whack a mole” reform here with these ideas from the teacher-busting Senate Bill 5 popping up in Springboro, Cleveland, Columbus, and Reynoldsburg. Even though Senate Bill 5 was voted down by a wide margin, the Republicans circumvented democracy and put the reformy provisions in a budget bill.
Although I know nothing about Layton, I can personally testify that Randi is responsible for hammering the final nails into the coffins of the teachers of Newark.
dianeravitch
September 25, 2014 at 9:22 am
Don’t give up, Chiara, the reformers are floundering.
I’m actually (I think) a patient person, but it is tough to read the national narrative and then compare to what is happening in actual states. Reynoldsburg really is an ed reform model. The USDOE has also highlighted the district.
The teachers and schools in Reynoldsburg did everything by the ed reform book. They took the same group of students they always had and raised test scores. They were lauded in ed reform circles. Yay teachers! Good job!
The reward for that? They took away their health insurance, which is a huge pay cut. It’s an absolute betrayal. They dutifully raised test scores, lock-step with the ed reform model, and local ed reformers turned around and IMMEDIATELY screwed them with what amounts to a pay cut. Why would anyone in their right mind trust them on “merit pay”?
I am glad to see the parents of Reynoldsburg stand up. Whereas Cleveland teachers lost the battle, the battle in Reynoldsburg is ongoing. Teachers and parents are up against Goliaths – business, tea party, national republican groups, – the usual suspects.
Unfortunately, parents are short sighted. They stand up for education only when they are personally impacted. How many of these Reynoldsburg parents will turn around and re-elect Kasich? The connection just isn’t being made. My own family is mostly far right tea party members. They go off on big government and teachers yet have several teachers in the family. When I explain what is really going on in Ohio, they are amazed, agree, then after the next episode of Fox News, go back to the Matrix goo pod.
I’m (somewhat) lucky, because we don’t really have an anti-teacher faction, not anything like the nutty national rhetoric anyway. I maintain it’s because many of our Leading Citizens are either married to teachers or have grown children who are teachers. Both of our Common Pleas judges are married to teachers. We don’t have the really vitriolic Chris Christie-type red faced ranters. I think it also matters that it’s solidly working/ middle class, so our teachers “live among us”- they are quite literally our neighbors- there isn’t that snobbiness that I see in a lot of ed reform rhetoric, where the assumption is if teachers had any skills or ambition they would have gone into finance! Obviously! Duh! 🙂
Actually, my Masters was a concentration in finance. Some interesting math and study, but not rocket science. I’ve met many teachers, though, who could teach quite a few execs the finer points of organization, planning, motivation, and group management. Most business people only think they are better than teachers till they step into the classroom. Then they’re heads explode. Humorous Hubris.
I’n no fan of Randi Wiengarten, but Richard Berman is a truly poor excuse for a human being and has about as much credibility as Dick Cheney.
60 Minutes did a piece oh him a while back:
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/meet-dr-evil/
Diane is a fan. Regrettably.
MathVale
September 25, 2014 at 9:40 am
Locally, Ohio has gone off the rails. We are a 50-50 state completely under Republican rule – all state offices, governor, state school board, legislature, supreme court – even the Republican Central Committee was purged of moderate Republicans starting with Kevin DeWine.”
In defense of public school parents, they see a snapshot of public schools as their kids move thru the system. The changes in testing (for example) were gradual. I was only aware of it because I have an unusual situation- I have 4 kids with an older two and a younger two, a gap, so I saw it over time in one school system.
My eldest son was the only kid who went on school field trips. If you’re a parent with a 5 year old entering now, you don’t know that they ever went on field trips, that they ever went to the museum or the symphony or state park (all of which are +/-60 miles away and a lot of the kids here will never go to any of those places if they don’t go in school). Field trips are gone, but we had them, once. If you don’t know what the system looked like with 1.5 million more in funding, you don’t miss it.
They’re not there every day, over decades, like you are.
Good point. Frog in the pan. Still, there is no excuse for being uninformed or ignoring reality. After all, these same parents do vote. But it is tough to break through the high decibels of reform media. Yes, parents just want a good education for their children. Which begs the question of why they ignore the voices of those dedicated individuals in the classroom.
Chiara,
Yesterday, Diane wrote that corporate “reformers, “are NOT winning. Everything they do is a failure.”
So I asked how she explains the explosion of STEM programs in schools across the country. STEM, like the Common Core, is based on the myth that there’s a “crisis” – in science and math education in particular, and in public education in general. STEM and Common Core and the ACT, SAT, and AP are all inextricably linked. And, as the New York Times reported last year, “the number of test takers has grown.”
Students are increasingly not satisfied with taking only one test (or one AP class); “many more choosing to work toward impressive scores on both tests,” and “12 states now require, and pay for, all public high school juniors to take” the ACT test. And there are lots of schools that now give the PSAT and PLAN, “the ACT version, to see which yields a better score and thus which to prep for.” And prepping they are. Their parents and teachers and guidance counselors – not to mention administrators – are urging them on. Meanwhile, in 2007, “almost 50 percent of Harvard seniors (58 percent of the men, 43 percent of the women) took jobs on Wall Street,” and “a full 70 percent of Harvard’s senior class submits résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms, and “among Harvard seniors who had secured employment last spring, a mere 3.5 percent were headed to government and politics, 5 percent to health-related fields, and 8.8 percent to any form of public service.”
See the problem? It’s endemic.
I sort of agree with you, it seems overwhelming to me, but I am somewhat heartened that the political message of “the US workforce are stupid and lazy and that’s why the 99% have lost ground over the last 20 years” isn’t working.
I agree with you about the “skills gap”, my eldest son actually works for a giant tech company and he thinks it’s baloney, BUT, I also don’t think it’s working, as a political message. Politicians are pretty darn unpopular right now. The idea that people want a stern lecture from DC on how they caused income inequality because they are stupid and lazy seems misguided to me, to say the least, especially given how they got hammered in the financial crash.
I don’t believe that working people believe that THEY are responsible for stagnant and falling wages, and underneath all the BS, that is what politicians are telling them. I also don’t believe that the vast majority people loathe their local public schools and can’t wait to “escape” them.
Poor Randi. Poor unions. Poor working people. Poor us. Poor competing factions and duplicitous leaders. Poor apathetic and informed constituents. Poor American culture and society.
The whole gestalt is, well, so sad. . . . . and yet, this whole fight is far from over.
I am gaining more hope, although it is coming in granules, and they went from micron in diameter to about 1 millimeter. Not bad for a horrible pessimistic carmudgeonly, part-time misanthrope like myself.
I sense the shift in the public. People are fed up with local, state, and federal grid lock and a lowered quality of life. People hate the false progressive movements of the Obama adminsitration AND the majority of Democrats who have sold their constituents down the River Styx into Hades. The terms “middle class” and “income/wealth distribution” are now being tossed about with great facility in even the most mainstream of media outlets and certainly in alternative news venues.
Thank goodness for this shift, even if it shows as a seedling for now. Awareness is the only first critical step that opens the flood gate to protests, advocacy, demonstrations, lobbying, vigilance, voicing, voting, organizing, and mobilizing. I hope violence en masse is never included in the tsumani waves that pour forth through those flood gates, but that remains to be seen.
In New Hork City, Francesco Portelos is forming another UFT caucus that like MORE, opposes general UFT policies, which are mostly not good for teachers. Unlike MORE’s social justice platform, Mr. Portelo’s mission is to focus only on teachers and their work conditions and labor issues. I support both caucuses, but understand why Mr. Portelos’s platform is very targeted, specific, and aims at a target audience and their explicit needs with laser-like precision. This is going to be an interesting schism, but I strongly contend that splits like this, as painful as they are (and I am NOT a proponent of internecine fighting), they are part and parcel of the reinvention and democratizing of unions.
Mr. Portelos is a force to contend with. Watch for him in the next 3 years.
He’s not fooling around.
Robert, I have to say that I agree with you. I feel the shift, ever so slight, as well. For the first time in many, many years things are feeling, looking, and sounding different down here in the Sunshine State.
Parents are starting to push back, question, and flex their (weak) political muscles after buying the reformist BS for 13 years.
Politicians are hiding, obfuscating, deflecting, and otherwise avoiding education issues far more than I can recall in living memory.
Teachers are starting to get weary of going along to get along and they are becoming more openly vocal about their disdain, although there is still fear of reprisal younger teachers are taking a more practical approach to challenging the system.
Administrators are becoming more and more defensive even as they increase their micromanagement stranglehold; they are realizing that they can’t possibly do everything they are asked to do regarding the constant walk-through nonsense, the voluminous and ridiculous evaluations of teachers, and maintain all the reformist plates spinning at once.
The state DOE has clearly bit off far more than it can chew with the non-stop passage of ALEC laws that aren’t funded and don’t look past the next 24 hours. Increasing the number of ‘worst’ schools in reading from 100 to 300 resulted in an end to the constant Inquisitional walk-thoughs and intimidation visits — they don’t have the personnel to cover it and they don’t have any more money coming to them to hire more people. They backed off of the FAIR test and that’s the first time they have ever given ground on anything test related, other than changing the cut score when parents rebelled a few times. They are in confusion and chaos since it is an election year and their fear of losing their jobs and things changing drastically is palpable and delicious!
There is a change in the air indeed. How long it will take to manifest real change is beyond my understanding but I feel downright hopeful and energized at times, something I never thought I’d feel again as a teacher.
Roger Williams has a great article, “The Business of High-Stakes Testing”, in the Sept. 24-30 issue of Florida Weekly .
Cx:
” . . . . In New York City . . . . . . . “
This episode perfectly reveals the bankruptcy of Ms. Weingarten’s approach: though having granted the so-called reformers almost everything they want – teacher evaluations based on high stakes exams, VAM, Danielson, mayoral control of the schools and the school closings that inevitably follow, looking the other way during charter school expropriations of public school facilities, etc. – they still call for her head, as a proxy for ours.
It’s just further proof that agreeing with the false premises of your enemies guarantees defeat.
Michael,
You may add merit pay to the list.
qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent
An example of wasteful spending by a corporatist preaching anti-union/teacher sentiment. Perhaps this PR bullfrog can market himself for the future Budweiser advertisement?
With but a small amount of effort and a few calls to the media, this can easily be turned to our advantage since Berman modus operandi is so well known and documented at this point. It’s more than a bit bizarre that as the awareness of the many fatal flaws of deform and it’s corrupt practices continues to grow apace that they would resort to engaging the services of a professional liar for such a flaccid rear guard action.The deformers must truly think that money really can buy anything and that most all citizens are morons. Lets just keep spreading the word about who and what Berman is and about all the ways he has sold ordinary working Americans down the river on so many different issues. At this point who hasn’t he wronged by spreading his disinformation and lies?
Maybe we need someone whose loyalties can’t be questioned, whose people aren’t one pebble away from tipping in disgust for how they’ve been led to slaughter, who would laugh at sniveling weasel lap dogs to the wealthy PR schmoes. Time has passed for the carefully crafted, non threatening union PR agenda items.
“We’ll talk real insistent like about how we will admit our failures as a profession but please stop with all the testing and school closing stuff” is not leadership and instead enables our attackers.
All education is theater at this point. Teacher who speak out are either old and retired and/ or the passionate teacher who gets squashed by powerful administrators and pushed out of education. There are few true soles out there in administrative positions that are willing to be brave and speak the truth.