Paul Horton, a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, wrote this letter to the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune:
Dear Tribune Editorial Board,
You will have us all (teachers) drinking Hemlock very soon with the absurd editorials on Education that you publish.
You should interview Nobel Laureate Gary Becker. He spoke for our students yesterday, and he fully supports all of your editorial positions. He is really smart because everything comes out perfectly in his mathematical models. Nothing can exist outside the market. Forget “externalities”!
Will you publish teacher VAM scores?
Everything on your editorial page is right out of George Saunders fiction: we will have robocops who shoot innocents here instead of in Yemen, we will have roboteachers and robograding, robofiremen, and we will have no public sector. Most importantly, we will have no public sector unions. Everyone except the Ivy educated (plus Chicago and Stanford) will make $12 an hour because we (union members) are all too lazy, good for nothing, and shiftless: definitely inferior genetic material.
Your readers on the North Shore are eating your stuff up: teachers are the new PWT (I can say it because this is who I am–Lincoln was too, read Honor’s Voice).
We need Common Core scripted lessons so that the inferior genetic material we are can not mess up learning. This is all eugenics in a different form: science is truth, statistics are truth, the Illinois Policy Institute, the Broad Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation are truth. Truth is privatization, if it is not digital, it has no worth, and rational choice for the one percent is freedom. Nothing else we get comes close.
How did your pages report Mandela and the ANC in 1962? MLK in 56? The big picture pattern that you present has an impact over time. The Rauner-Rahm jingo eats it up almost as much as your future owners who are making you beg for crumbs (Broad or Murdoch?).
You need a good Swiftian kick in the ass every day!
“Serendipity”?
Happy Holidays!
Paul Horton
Chicago History teacher, AFT Local 2063
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is happening in New Mexico.
Teachers Fleeing New Mexico Districts | @ The Chalk Face
http://atthechalkface.com/2013/12/12/teachers-fleeing-new-mexico-districts/
@philaken… you state… “it is happening in New Mexico”.. sadly, it is truly happening everywhere. I know 4 teachers off the bat in my state (and that is just in my few schools) who left (one just recently mid year). Thanks for sharing the link to the “chalkface” article. It is horrific that the “corporate ed reform” strategy is working. But I wonder who in their crazy right minds will step in to these teaching jobs?
The reason why I never buy and don’t like to read the Chicago Tribune is precisely because that paper has long been a voice for right-wing politics. So, the only problem with this letter to the Trib Editorial Board is that the Trib no doubt likes hearing that their corporate “reform” propaganda messages are getting through to conservative economist Gary Becker and wealthy North Shore parents.
The irony is that the parents who live on the lakeshore in suburbs like Winnetka pay up to $100K in property taxes each year, the average annual pay of teachers there, to send their kids to schools with Progressive Education –which is nothing like what is promoted by the Common Core (CC). If Arne Duncan thinks “white suburban moms” are upset now, wait until the CC and CC aligned tests roll out in Illinois and those moms get a look at how their $100K is being misspent and undermines the Progressive Education they want and pay so much for every year. With any luck, they just may remember how the Trib tried to sell them on CC, too.
Progressive education in the suburbs. Hah! The erosion is obvious, and when the tests hit full blown… Data is king!
This is a letter I wrote to the Chicago Tribune. Obviously it will never get published but might be of interest to some people on this blog.
The opening front page phrases of today’s Tribune “What do students, teachers really say” intimate the all too prevalent myopic, strictured thinking of the media. “Does your teacher ask difficult questions in class? What about tests? Their answers were an eye-opener … disclosing that they never or seldom are asked hard questions in their main academic classes.”
The assumption being of course that children are not being “taught” as they should be. It seems never to have occurred to these people that if teachers are doing an extraordinary job the children may not perceive that questions are difficult. It would seem that that would be an encouraging sign of good teaching in that context.
In my, yes, choir classes, music was made an academic subject, students learning to read music and identify melodic and harmonic sequences. In a North Central evaluation the evaluators, one from Indiana State University stated that my students showed proficiencies and skills far superior to anything seen in Indiana at that time. Taking the choir to Ball State U. to demonstrate those skills the department head came out to the bus afterward and said that many of the college students would have difficulties doing what my students had just done, academically. When a former student of mine at the university was asked by a fellow student, did you really do that? My former student replied that yes, they did not think anything about it. Often my students thought that everybody did that.
Interesting that when the school board approved my dismissal from the high school, the choral program numbers dropped from 5 and 6 sections for years to 2 sections the next year.
People relying on test scores, statistical data, without in depth critical examination of what the data really means destroy creative productivity, even academic achievement although that is too often not understood.
The Common Core mentioned later in the article, when utilized in New York showed that 70% of the children fail. Do you wish that children be taught at such an early age they are failures? Parents, child psychologists, teachers are screaming but of course politicians know more than educators working in the field, who have studied their field intensively for years.
Many of our best teachers are leaving the field because of the nonsensical, overburdens perpetrated upon them, and strictured educational goals depriving children of an “education”.
Public schools become convenient whipping boys. Because of political ineptitude in solving societal problems teachers and schools are blamed for poor academic productivity.
23% of our children live in poverty. Many children believe they will not live beyond their 21st birthday etc etc and “schools” are supposed to solve politicians ineptitude. “Passing the buck” exemplified.
The goals stated in Common Core, and No Child left behind are goals with which most educators would share. HOW those goals are reached as mandated by political ignorance is abominable and like Japan, whose schools we were told we absolutely must emulate, we may well see that our children will have learned two things when graduating from high school: how to pass tests – not even learning the substance of what was thought to have been learned – often just parroting “facts” foisted upon them without understanding even the “facts” and to hate school and learning. The latter is one of the most important goals of real educators.
Much of this of course will be familiar to readers of the blog, it is just venting.
” Do you wish that children be taught at such an early age they are failures?”
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, give that man a Kewpie doll!!!
http://rt.com/in-motion/teachers-mexico-protest-police-252/
Chi Town Res above–When it hits the North Shore, we will see one of two things–
-People fleeing to the privates (such as North Shore Country Day School). OR-
-Outraged “white suburban Moms” (& Dads, too, I would hope), fighting back like all those Texas Moms and the NYS/Long Island meeting attendees.
Of course, I would hope for the latter.
BTW–Bruce Rauner, billionaire IL gubernatorial candidate (who wears an $18 watch to show us how down-home he is) whose main residence is Winnetka (North Shore), sent his daughter to Walter Payton Magnet H.S. (causing a truly worthy CPS resident to lose his/her space), claimed Chicago residency (he has much more than a pied a terre there!), getting his daughter in with the help of his pal, none other than Arne Duncan!
Imagine, that poor child would have had to attend their local school–New Trier H.S.!
Also–to artsegal & Gordon–in answer to your question, “But I wonder…who will step in to these teaching jobs?” & comment: “Many of our best teachers are leaving the field…” The perpetrators do NOT care and, in fact, are celebrating this. For, who do they have at the ready to teach? TFAers, of course. In fact, very soon (as reported in either Mike Klonsky’s “Small Talk” blog or his “Schooling in the Ownership Society,”),
Duncan will be in Chicago, and will be meeting with Wendy Kopp, as well as other ed.
business people.
So, fear not guys, the schools WILL be manned. With dilettantes, but why worry?
They will serve the purpose for other people’s children.
I too think that the Trib is out of line in their jabs at unions – look at the “fixed” AFCSmE dog in its cartoon section. I do however like what one of their reporters, Jason Grotto, has to say about the financial irresponsibilities of our former mayor.