This is one of the sharpest commentaries I have read about the depredations of the Jindal-White gang in Louisiana, who are intent on destroying public education in the state as well as the teaching profession.
Everyone can pick their favorite line; there are many.
What I appreciate is the writer’s slashing criticism of the silent education professors, who have lost their tongues, unable or unwilling to defend the people they trained, mute in the face of the vandals at the gate.
A progressive website published a “leaked document” that allegedly shows bad blood between Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Connecticut’s Parent Union.
Both are supposed to be working together to promote the parent trigger in Connecticut but it seems they got into a slugfest over money.
Read it for yourself.
Bruce Baker just released a fascinating summary of research on NYC charter schools.
The teachers are younger than district teachers, but not right out of college.
They typically have six years of experience, less than district teachers.
Their salaries are comparable to those of public school teachers.
They mostly have smaller classes than those in the district schools.
The students are less likely to include ELLs and special-ed than the district schools.
The charters do not have the same kids as the district schools.
The test scores vary.
Bottom line: These schools do NOT prove that money and poverty don’t matter.
I posted earlier about Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, who said he could not see the difference between public, private and religious schools.
A teacher asks:
I wonder where these politicians are getting their education from. Did they miss class on the days when the Constitution and First Amendment were discussed?
While there was a fair amount of attention paid to Governor Rick Perry’s choice to be Commission of the Texas Education Agency, almost unnoticed was his selection of the second in command. She is Lizzette Gonzalez-Reynolds.
She worked as a legislative associate for then-Governor George W. Bush and after he became President, she was rewarded with an appointment as the U.S. Department of Education’s regional representative in Texas (that is a political, not an educational, appointment). In 2007, she gained minor notoriety when she worked in an advisory capacity for the Texas Education Agency; she called for the director of the science curriculum to resign because of an email she distributed.
This is the description of the controversy on the wikipedia site:
In October 2007, Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, sent an email to a list of addressees including Christine Comer, then Director of Science in the curriculum division of the Texas Education Agency. It announced a talk in Austin by one of the Center’s directors, Barbara Forrest. Forrest was a key expert witness for the plaintiffs in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, who argued successfully that the concept of Intelligent Design is not scientific, but is a trojan horse for religious teaching in public schools. Comer received the email on October 26, 2007, and forwarded it to some acquaintances, adding only the text “FYI”.
Reynolds received a copy of the email and forwarded it to Comer’s bosses less than two hours after Comer sent it. Reynolds cover text is quoted in part: “This is highly inappropriate. I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities. This is something that the State Board, the Governor’s Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.”[8][9] Comer was subsequently asked to resign her employment.
What is most amazing is that Texas does include evolution in its science curriculum. But apparently Ms. Gonzalez-Reynolds thought it was inappropriate to call attention to that fact.
And now she is the second-in-command at the TEA, serving a man known for his advocacy of vouchers and charters.
Fasten your seat belts, fellow Texans, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
Jersey Jazzman has a few choice words for the KIPP shock troops, who appear unable to tolerate a question, let alone a discussion or a debate without sliming those who dare to question their carefully honed image.
Jersey Jazzman corrects some overstatements and errors.
In case you wondered, I read this in Mrs. Ratliff’s class at San Jacinto High School in Houston, Texas, in 1955.
From Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 3:
KING HENRY V:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
As he was preparing for his historic journey into outer space, Neil Armstrong took the time to write a letter to his favorite teacher.
He wrote to her on the occasion of her retirement to thank her for the part she played in his life.
She taught him math in elementary school.
He never forgot her.
If you teach, you cannot imagine how many people will remember how you changed their life.
The longer you teach, the more there will be.
They may not remember who was mayor or governor or state superintendent.
They will remember you.
How many people have the privilege to work in a profession where they will be remembered with respect and admiration far into the future?
Next time someone makes a nasty crack about teachers, don’t be angry. Feel sorry for them.
You have something they will never have.
| TO: Interested Parties
From: AFT President Randi Weingarten Date: August 28, 2012 RE: “Won’t Back Down” |
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
One can’t help but be moved by the characters and story portrayed in Walden Media’s film “Won’t Back Down.” The film is successful in driving home the sense of urgency parents and educators feel to do everything they can to provide the best possible education for their children. That is abundantly evident in this film—it’s what I hear as I visit schools across the country, and it’s what I heard when I sat down with parent and community groups from across the country last week.
We share that pain and frustration. And we firmly believe that every public school should be a school where every parent would want to send his or her child and where every teacher would want to teach. Unfortunately, using the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen—even worse than those in “Waiting for ‘Superman’”—the film affixes blame on the wrong culprit: America’s teachers unions.
As a former public school teacher and president of the American Federation of Teachers, I have spent my entire adult life working on behalf of children and teachers. After viewing this film, I can tell you that if I had taught at that school, and if I were a member of that union, I would have joined the characters played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis. I would have led the effort to mobilize parents and teachers to turn around that school myself.
I don’t recognize the teachers portrayed in this movie, and I don’t recognize that union. The teachers I know are women and men who have devoted their lives to helping children learn and grow and reach their full potential. These women and men come in early, stay late to mentor and tutor students, coach sports teams, advise the student council, work through lunch breaks, purchase school supplies using money from their own pockets, and spend their evenings planning lessons, grading papers and talking to parents. Yet their efforts, and the care with which they approach their work, are nowhere to be seen in this film.
This movie could have been a great opportunity to bring parents and teachers together to launch a national movement focused on real teacher and parent collaboration to help all children. Instead, this fictional portrayal, which makes the unions the culprit for all of the problems facing our schools, is divisive and demoralizes millions of great teachers. America’s teachers are already being asked to do more with less—budgets have been slashed, 300,000 teachers have been laid off since the start of the recession, class sizes have spiked, and more and more children are falling into poverty. And teachers are being demonized, marginalized and shamed by politicians and elites who want to undermine and dismiss their reform efforts.
Parent engagement is essential to ensuring children thrive in the classroom. The power of partnerships between parents, teachers and the community is at the heart of school change.
But instead of focusing on real parent empowerment and how communities can come together to help all children succeed, “Won’t Back Down” offers parents a false choice—you’re either for students or for teachers, you can either live with a low-performing school or take dramatic, disruptive action to shut a school down.
Real parent engagement means establishing meaningful ways for parents to be real partners in their children’s public education from the beginning—not just when a school is failing. The goal should be to never let a school get to that point. Parents are actually calling for real investments in their neighborhood public schools and that should be our collective focus.
Across the country, AFT teachers and leaders are partnering with parents and community groups to create real parent engagement that strengthens schools and neighborhoods:
Sadly, this film chooses to ignore these success stories and the many others happening across the county. Instead, it promotes the deceptively named “parent trigger” laws, which are marketed as parent-empowerment laws. Actually, these laws deny both parents and teachers a voice in improving schools and helping children, by using parents to give control of our schools over to for-profit corporations. Parent trigger laws are being pushed by organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which Walden Media owner and oil billionaire Philip Anschutz helps fund.
The film advances a policy that in reality limits teacher and parent voices, the very voices that are celebrated and empowered in the movie.
In real life, there have been only two attempts to pull the parent trigger. One never made it to the approval process. In Adelanto, Calif., where the trigger petition is still in progress, many parents report feeling deceived by the for-profit charter-backed organizers who came in to gather petitions. They actually sued to take their signatures back when they found out they were being used to give their school away to a charter company.
Confusing the matter even further, those supporting the parent trigger asked the court to rule that once a signature was on a petition, it could not be rescinded. The court ruled in their favor, stating that the parent trigger law did not allow for rescinded signatures. But just this month, the Adelanto school board rejected the parent trigger proponents’ call for a charter operator and instead instituted numerous reforms including the formation of a community advisory council, an extended school day and improved technology, among other reforms. In both situations, the use of the parent trigger law has been disruptive and divided the school community.
That’s one reason why a Florida parent coalition representing half a million parents joined with the Florida PTA and others to oppose parent trigger legislation when the bill was proposed there last year. They knew from the California parents’ experience that it would put all the power in the hands of for-profit companies, not public school parents.
It must be pointed out that the film contains several egregiously misleading scenes with the sole purpose of undermining people’s confidence in public education, public school teachers and teachers unions.
The film advances the “bad teacher” narrative through the character of Deborah. This teacher barks at students from her desk, uses her cell phone in class, refuses to let students use the restroom, puts children in a closet as a disciplinary measure and resists all reform efforts, yet miraculously remains employed at the school. She tells parents that she refuses to stay after school hours to help her students, and Davis’ character in the film asserts that union rules prohibit teachers from working past 3 p.m., an egregious lie. I know of no contract or local union that would ever prevent a teacher from remaining after school to help a student or do the work necessary to help children.
Let’s be clear—this teacher, or any teacher who engages in such deplorable actions against children, should be fired for this outrageous behavior.
The film features the union leader sharing a quote that anti-public education ideologues and right-wing politicians often attribute to former AFT president Albert Shanker: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Despite the frequency with which corporate interests claim Shanker said this, a review of news reports, speeches, and interviews with Shanker’s aides and biographers, and even an analysis by the Washington Post, failed to find any person or report that could corroborate the statement.
This is not the only time the movie resorts to falsehoods and anti-union stereotypes. Viola Davis’ character tells other teachers that the new school they create cannot be unionized because the union would restrict their ability to implement reforms that help kids. This is a false—unions are democratic organizations made up of individual educators, and collective bargaining is the process by which individuals come together to make things better. Many examples demonstrate that far from blocking reform efforts, unions fight for the things children need to thrive in school, like safe classrooms and smaller class sizes. And unions empower educators to win the tools and voice they need to help children.
Half of all teachers in the United States do not have collective bargaining contracts. The reality is that the states with the highest union density—states such as Maryland, Massachusetts and Minnesota—are the states that lead the nation in student achievement. And a recent Education Sector survey of teachers made clear that America’s teachers—both union and nonunion—recognize the importance of unions in strengthening the teaching profession and our public schools.
Though deeply unfortunate, it is also unsurprising that “Won’t Back Down” is such a false and misleading depiction of teachers and unions. Anschutz’s business partner is on record saying that he intends to use Walden Media (which also produced the equally misleading “Waiting for ‘Superman’”), as way for him to promote their values.
A look at the organizations in which Anschutz invests makes those values crystal clear. He has funded 20 organizations, including ALEC, Americans for Prosperity and the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation. All of these groups operate against the public interest in favor of corporate interests, and all of them actively oppose collective bargaining rights and other benefits for workers. Anschutz has also invested millions in anti-gay and extreme religious-right organizations such as the Promise Keepers, whose founder declared that “homosexuality is an abomination against almighty God,” and organizations affiliated with Focus on the Family.
The last thing that the country and the debate over public education reform needs is another movie that maligns teachers, caricatures teachers unions and misleads the American public about what is happening in public education today. Children deserve great schools. That’s how we build great communities. And real public education reform comes from teachers, parents and communities working together to help all kids thrive.
I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues further. To learn more about what AFT members are doing to help all children succeed, contact Marcus Mrowka at 202-531-0689 or mmrowka@aft.org.
In tough times, it is important to laugh.
Laughter is good for you.
Some people say it extends your life.
If you see any great videos or websites that help educators laugh at the absurdities now piled on their heads, please send them to me and I’ll share them.
The “hero” of this website is a make-belief upper-crust reformer who is totally clueless.
Enjoy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 