Mercedes Schneider, who teaches high school English in Louisiana, saw a photo of an ominous 5-story-high billboard in Times Square, New York City, attacking teachers’ unions. She knew who paid for the ad: the so-called Center for Union Facts. Schneider had already written about this corporate public relations firm, and the billboard got her thinking about who might have funded this particular hit job.
I might add that CUF, which has access to very few actual “facts” but a huge supply of vitriol, is also running radio ads on local stations in New York City, attacking the teachers’ union, blaming the union for low test scores, and calling for merit pay and other non-solutions. Its goal, as I wrote earlier, is to demonize the unions. Its own “solutions” are not research-based. Its goal is to destroy collective bargaining.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This kind of campaign does not help kids.
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You don’t say.
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Spare us the crocodile tears, Joe, and instead speak with your funders (the Gates, Bradley, Walton and Joyce Foundations, among others, all integral to the attacks on teachers and public schools) and ask them to lay off the scapegoating.
Oh, but that would disturb the funding stream, wouldn’t it?
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Michael, I’ve written a variety of columns for places like Education Week, plus major daily newspapers around the country, complimenting teacher unions on various efforts they have made. I continue to do this.
You could verify this by checking with the presidents of, for example, the Minneapolis and St. Paul Federation of Teachers.
Sometimes union leaders and I agree, sometimes we disagree. Funders are very aware of my views.
Here’s a portion of a column I wrote that Education Week published January 8, 2008, “How Cincinnati Turned Its Schools Around” This involved a successful effort to increase overall graduation rates and reduce the graduation gap between white & African American students. Among the reasons for success were:
• Respecting teachers. Both the superintendent and the school board agreed that teachers at the lowest-performing schools would be allowed to select the curriculum and professional development they thought would best help them reach their goals. Maintaining this kind of autonomy was not always easy—for the teachers or for those who advised them.
At one point, a national organization with its own curriculum convinced a senior district official that there should be a districtwide adoption of that curriculum. When some of the faculty members and I questioned this proposal, an officer of the organization bluntly told a Gates Foundation representative, “We want Joe Nathan out of Cincinnati.” The foundation looked into the situation, then promised to stay in Cincinnati so long as the district agreed to continue building-level decision making. Senior district administrators and the school board chair decided to honor the original commitment. And both the foundation and the district asked me to stay, which I did.
Cincinnati teachers were treated like professionals are in other fields. In addition to special off-site workshops, there was recognition for schools showing exceptional progress, along with praise—to the news media and face to face—for educators in buildings with significant signs of growth. Veteran and younger educators alike responded with genuine openness, willingness to learn, and a growing belief that major advances were possible.
• Having leadership and teacher encouragement from union officials. The last two presidents of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers had been high school teachers, and they strongly endorsed the change efforts. This made them effective advocates, offering encouragement, support, and advice for teachers. Any urban district trying similar reform strategies should consider inviting such individuals to meet with people in their district as they try to enlist their own local unions’ help in leading change.
• Fostering partnerships. Partners important to the Cincinnati reform efforts ranged from foundations and universities to corporations, nonprofits, and advocacy groups. They included, in addition to the Gates Foundation, Cincinnati Bell, Xavier University, the local service agency Families Forward, and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation.
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Your response tells me that your efforts – public/private partnerships, a Trojan Horse for privatization, among others – are geared towards getting teachers to participate in their own demise.
No thank you.
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How right you are, Joe. What a distraction from serious matters!
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Is there anybody out there inside schools who does not believe that we are at war? The one percent does not want to pay taxes, so they will destroy public unions and public jobs. The concept of public anything is under assault. It is open season on public pensions and anything else these grifters can get their hands on. Does anyone still believe the rhetoric of this administration that it is concerned about income inequality when the Wall Street and corporate handlers in both major parties support war on public unions?
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Oh, tsk, tsk, this administration is very concerned about income inequality.
Creating it, that is.
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That such was going to be the case was quite clear from the very beginning, when Obama made the Goldman Sachs insider Larry Summers his economic point man. Look at how Barry O dealt with the housing crisis. There were three possibilities: let the banks go under; bail out the banks; or bail out the homeowners so that those bad mortgages would become good ones and the homeowners could stay in their homes. Which did he choose to do? Bail out the banks, of course.
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I’m not sure he was wrong to bail out the banks since we all would have felt the effects of that. I think the mistake was in not bailing out the homeowners and in not backing legislation to prevent the banks from indulging themselves with risky greed again.
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The current vibrations across the country are so regressive we might find ourselves back in the early 1900s. The push back against unions is just one example. Teachers are another victim. It’s as if the public thinks we are back in one room school houses with 16 year old teachers chosen from the ranks. How dare we unionize! How dare we make more than the average unskilled worker! The public have given us the honor of working with their children – that should be payment enough.
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Ellen (and others) You might want to take a look at the 2013 national Gallup/PDK poll. It appears that a vast majority of “the public” has a more positive view of teachers than your comment suggests.
http://pdkintl.org/programs-resources/poll/
Among other questions, question 6 is “”Do you have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools: Yes 72%, No 27%
Question 7 is “Do you have trust and confidence in the men and women who serve as principals in the public schools. Yes, 65%, No 34%
Those are the national totals. They also are broken down for people under and over 40.
Lots of interesting data about the public’s attitude toward Common Core, Testing, charter public schools and other issues.
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People like their teacher, but hate teachers. It is like the “get your hands off my Medicare” mentality. It is a weird dichotomy where people have been convinced government is evil as they turn on their ARPA/Internet iPhones and drink clean water. People are angry and want to blame someone and the Reform movement has redirected the anger from failed trickle down supply-side policies causing massive income inequality to teachers and education. Most of the general public could care less as long as someone is “accountable”.
Regardless of the polls, teachers are no longer respected and instead demonized. We see people like Christie re-elected, Rice assert teachers are a national security risk, Kasich vow to “break the backs” of teachers, and on and on from the far right. The way these people portray teachers in a negative way is hardly a “Like”.
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One of the reasons for the anti teachers union sign in NYC is that the teachers unions in NYS are strong and their rights are spelled out in the NYS Constitution. It would be a coups for the unions to be weakened, the way they have been in other states. The current educational policies and the actions of King and the Board of Regents will be challenged. Watch to see what happens.
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Why do you think FDR opposed collective bargaining rights for public sector unions?
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MS: Do you think teachers are paid too much?
Do you think teacher unions in Korea and Finland need to be busted too?
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Because it put them against the tax payers, by the nature of the thing. Right?
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That is correct Joanna, FDR, the most liberal of liberals, felt that collective bargaining was meant for labor to fight for a share of the profits they create and have equal weight against capital. This is very different in the public sector where the profit is taxpayer money and capital is represented by people they can elect. The fundamental flaw with public sector unions is what we are seeing today, a situation where the union can get the head of ‘capital’ elected so that the interests are effectively negotiating with themselves at the risk of the taxpayer.
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Diane:
What are the facts about the primary issue highlighted on the board? My understanding is that the NYC BOE has sued the UFT because the UFT has not cooperated in the naming of the panel of arbitrators that hear the disciplinary cases.
NY Supreme Court Case 451734/2013
What is the current backlog of NYC teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings?
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If one attacks unions, one is also attacking a free labor market, and thus the free market itself. It’s as simple as that to me.
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In the 1950s, the unionization rate was in the 30% to 35% range now it’s about 11.3%. In the Scandinavian countries unionization ranges from 50% to 74 %. Germany’s unionization rate is close to 20% but unions have a seat and a voice at the table of the board of directors of the large companies. There is no savage war on unions as there is in this country; the libertarians, right wingers and the one per centers are determined to obliterate unions in the USA or to turn them into gutted powerless subservient jokes.
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Perfectly put. . . . We will turn into South America.
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The Nazis assassinated many union leaders in the 30’s. This history has chastened the German Right so it’s not so keen on exterminating unions as the American Right is.
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This group wrote a HORRIBLE “guest column” in my local newspaper (a very pro-charter and anti-union one, I might add). But the paper did not run a similar article refuting all of the accusations that the reason the U.S. is “failing” is because of teacher’s unions. Disgusting.
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Wow… Eva and her “little test-taking machines.”
There’s a line in CITIZEN KANE where the reporter talks to Bernstein about Thatcher, telling him, “He sure made a lot of money.”
Bernstein, “There’s no trick to making a lot of money if all you want to do… is make a lot of money.”
The same can be said for students test scores. “There’s no trick to getting your students to have higher test scores if all you want… is students with higher test scores.”
The most obvious way—as seen the indicted Beverly Hall in Atlanta, and the should-have-been-indicted Michelle Rhee in D.C.—is just out and out cheating, changing the marks on the answer sheets from wrong to right.
The next obvious way is through massive, grueling, mind-numbing test prep, which is to education what taking sterioids is to professional (or non-professional athletics). You increase performance in the short term, but it’s a bogus, manipulated outcome that is far more damaging in the long run.
I’m reminded of this when I read in Schneider’s article that Eva Moskowitz—with no awareness or irony—brags about driving her students to be “little test-taking machines.”
(Could you imagine the administrators or teachers at Sidwell talking to President and Mrs. Obama about Sasha and Malia’s progress and proudly boasting,
“Mr. President and Mrs. First Lady, you can be assured that we’re turning your girls into little test-taking machines” ?)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
FROM THE ARTICLE:
Thus, SA teachers are afforded no personal life. All of the SA teacher’s time belongs to the school–nothing is too much to require of teachers when coveted test scores are at stake:
. . . [regarding high stakes tests,] Moskowitz says her teachers prepped their third-graders a mere ten minutes per day … plus some added time over winter break, she confides upon reflection, when the children had but two days off: Christmas and New Year’s. . . . After some red-flag internal assessments, [Director of Instruction] Paul Fucaloro kept “the bottom 25 percent” an hour past their normal 4:30 p.m. dismissal — four days a week, six weeks before each test. “The real slow ones,” he says, stayed an additional 30 minutes, till six o’clock: a ten-hour-plus day for 8- and 9-year-olds. Meanwhile, much of the class convened on Saturday mornings from September on.
The day before the scheduled math test, the city got socked with eight inches of snow. Of 1,499 schools in the city, 1,498 were closed. But at Harlem Success Academy 1, 50-odd third-graders trudged through 35-mile-per-hour gusts for a four-hour session over Subway sandwiches. As Moskowitz told the Times, “I was ready to come in this morning and crank the heating boilers myself if I had to.”
“We have a gap to close, so I want the kids on edge, constantly,” Fucaloro adds. “By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.” [Emphasis added.]
Teachers and students at the mercy of a woman whose drive is to create “little test-taking machines.”
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The steroids analogy is apt.
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And who allowed the CUF to put the board up in the first place? Ban/Boycott the building and the media company.
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SA:
On what basis could one ban whoever put up the sign?
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In a previous, related post, Mercedes provides a link to The Philanthropy Roundtable’s meeting at the Rainbow Room in NYC (where all public school teachers get to have their 25 minute duty free lunch! – not)
Click to access K-12_NYC_Meeting_Notes_2009.pdf
from which I have quoted the following:
“Richard Berman, founder and executive director of the Center for Union Facts, made the first pitch: separating the brand of teachers’ unions from that of teachers with an advertising campaign. He described a test campaign in Newark, where ads were placed on roving billboards and bus signs. Within 90 days, parents’ opinions of teachers unions dropped dramatically. Not only was it effective, but ‘the teachers’ union tried to sue us to stop us . . . so they obviously felt it was working,’ Berman said.”
So, he’s had five years to refine his pitch, and we get Randi’s face in Times Square.
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Some of us do support both the right of educators to form unions and the right of educators, families and others to create new options within some limits, as part of a state’s public education program.
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Joe:
I used you to make a rhetorical point on a slightly more recent post https://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/15/marc-epstein-the-disaster-of-bloombergs-control-of-the-schools/ in response to Lloyd Lofthouse’s comments. Please feel free to correct anything that I may have misrepresented.
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Bernie, I don’t see you as a “virulent cancer” which is what one person accused you of being. As for my own work, I work with both district and charter public schools. We don’t see either as inherently better or worse. We see some as making considerably more progress than others. We attempt to help educators and families learn from some of the most effective.
We also help encourage adults to listen to young people, who frequently have valuable insights.
Here’s a recent column that encourages adults to remember that strong vocational/technical courses can be very valuable (and that in Minnesota), students who have taken 240 or more hours of vocational technical courses are more likely to graduate in 4 years than those who don’t. That’s true whether the students are African American, American Indian, Asian-Pacific, Hispanic, White, from low income families or students with some form of disability.
The column also includes a picture of a youngster from a district public school student explaining to a US Senator that he has gained enormously from a class that helped him learn how to build a house.
http://hometownsource.com/2014/01/15/joe-nathan-column-good-news-for-minnesota-students-families-and-taxpayers/
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Bottom Line-where is the AFT,NYSUT or any PRO UNION advertising? i sure has heck haven’t seen any here in NY!
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