EduShyster has done the research and digging on Students for Educational Reform that has thus far eluded mainstream journalists.
(This should not be surprising since few journalists have paid much attention to Democrats for Education Reform, the Wall Street hedge fund managers group, which is able to direct millions of dollars to state and local political elections from a small number of very rich donors. Typically DFER is described in news stories as just another Democratic advocacy group interested in education reform rather than as a small group of billionaires who want to promote privatization of public education.)
EduShyster gives us insight into their $uccess, their board, their ties to the financial elites, and the current focus of their activities (demanding tougher teacher evaluations, a curious preoccupation for university students).
She invites readers to offer a slogan for them. One suggestion she offers: “Pawns of billionaires.”
Maybe you can think of others.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Working together to keep schools from working.
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Students for a Dumb-as-Crap Society
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When I was in college I was protesting against apartheid in South Africa, MNC corps and debt in South America, and Reagan’s Central American policies. I was a poli sci major, had some great profs at Rutgers and felt I had more than a cursory understanding of the issues.
Why do these children need to stick their nose into something they know nothing about? Are they taking courses that might address the topic? Have they ever taught? I know that they attended school. Does that make them an expert on evaluation and evaluative methods? I hope not. Perhaps high-schools should offer electives like: methods of teacher evaluation, ginning up the data, public policy and propaganda, etc. Just a thought.
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Peddlers for philanthropimps!
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SFER: Sandy’s for Educational Reform
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Stooges For Elitist Rule
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Sycophants for Educational Resegregation/Regression
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Actually all of the credit for “digging” goes to Stephanie Rivera, a student at Rutgers. She posts regular updates about SFER on her blog, Teacher Under Construction, and has done an amazing job of reaching out to SFER members and getting them to talk openly about things that don’t seem quite right about a student group.
SFER has been under the radar so far but that’s only because they haven’t done much.
That will soon change though. Students from SFER’s chapter at Whitworth University in Washington state, a private, virtually all white school, lobbied ardently for the state’s new charter law, including going door to door. I suspect that here in Massachusetts, where the charter lobby will file a bill in the coming months to eliminate the cap on charters in our poorest cities, it will be students from Smith and Harvard who provide the ground troops…
I can’t help but admire the evil genius that came up with this concept. Students across the country, who are utterly sincere in their passion and zeal, are being lined up behind the privatizers’ policy agenda. Ask questions and you’re accused of “attacking students.” Yet the students who make up the bulk of SFER’s membership don’t seem to know anything about their national organization’s funders, its positions or of the implications of those positions.
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What puzzles me is why Democrats should want to privatize public education when public school unions are one of the most reliable source of funding for Democrats and public school teachers are one of the most reliable voting blocks for Democrats. Does the greed of the hedge fund managers trump their Democratness?
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I suppose one could say public schools are already private, since no one can join without joining a union. I have yet to hear why if we live in a “free” country, we are forced to join a labor union if we work in a public school. Please don’t tell me schools would quickly rid themselves of teachers on the high end of the automatic pay scales. Im not saying get rid of unions, just give employees of schools a choice to belong and pay dues, which amount to 2% of their salaries. No other “union busting” changes, just choice of membership by those who work in the schools.
I don’t think the rich want anything different than what all teachers want. Good schools, where students learn and are ready for college or a job when they graduate. Yet schools are not graduating 20%+ of its students each year(that’s an entire HS every four years), and this was worse BEFORE testing. Is testing the whole answer? No. But until we cycle through a generation of teachers who think they have no control over how well their students learn, because they believe the Coleman Report from 1960’s, then states must have tools to monitor learning. Better tests like PARCC is a fair place to start and should be only one component.
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I’m sure it’s merely a coincidence that the states targeted on SFER’s “What We Do” webpage are all states that have strong teachers’ unions:
http://www.studentsforedreform.org/what-we-do/#principles
Clearly, states like Mississippi are not in need of reform – schools are doing fine there.
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Diane—have you seen the Test Guides for English Language Arts that were recently made available by NYSED? I believe in challenging students with rigorous, world-class literature and nonfiction in the classroom. However I am deeply concerned at the impenetrability of the vocabulary and syntax of the authentic texts (A story by Leo Tolstoy in Grade 3’s sample test, for example) selected for the sample tests, and presumably selected for the actual tests. What is the politics behind setting up students (and teachers) for failure on a massive scale with texts of such complexity that most students simply cannot read it without support?
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I have not seen them, but wherever the new standards have been tried, there is a big increase in failure rates.
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Do you think the high failure rates that we can expect from these new assessments is a deliberate attempt to drive demand for instructional programs and services that promise to “rescue” failing school districts from the “failure” they will undoubtedly experience this spring?
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I think you are asking Diane, so excuse me for butting in, but I believe one of the purposes is to create an even larger gap and then more schools can be deemed failures and then taken over by privatizers. That is an intended purpose of the Gates/Coleman common core teacher/student assessment plan being pawned off as an education plan.
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As important as core curriculum standards are they should not be the primary mission of public education. We would do well to adopt the four ancient civic virtues of Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Temperance as guidelines for student learning, K-12. Elegant in their simplicity and effective across the curriculum, they are the invaluable virtues of a healthy democracy. Free of religious cant and easy to remember, they are a most effective tool for students to gauge the relevance of what they learn. They are what we need and want from our public schools but are afraid to ask for.
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I believe the first virtue is better translated as “Prudence” rather than Wisdom. The other three are, however, correct.
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