David Safier writes a terrific blog about education and politics in Arizona.
He made the trip to Austin to the first annual conference of the Network for Public Education and found he was in an alternate universe, where people care passionately about the preservation of public education.
He attended along with several other Tucson residents, including Robin Hiller, not only executive director of NPE, but director of the parent group called “Voices for Education” in Tucson.
Safier wrote:
“The term “education reform” was disparaged at the conference—not because the attendees are anti-reform, but because the term has been co-opted by the conservative-led school privatization movement.
“We’re not against reform,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, an associate professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas, during his talk that opened the conference. “We want to reform the ‘reformers.'”
“Hiller sat on a panel looking into the “opt out” movement, where parents refuse to let their children take high-stakes tests and teachers defy their districts by refusing to administer the tests. TUSD’s Sanchez participated in a panel with other superintendents discussing the challenges of “leading schools and districts in an era of high-stakes accountability.” (I was on of a panel that looked into charter schools, virtual schools and vouchers.)
“Though a major thrust of the conference was the fight against the “education reform/school choice” agenda, the atmosphere was more upbeat than negative. It felt like a gathering of the progressive education tribes. K-12 teachers and administrators, university scholars and parents from around the country who had heard of one another’s efforts and had read each other’s news articles and blog posts met face to face for the first time. The overriding feeling at the conference was, “We’re not alone.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But, Diane, where were the famous people? Where were the DC lobbyists and pundits?
Where was the celebrity line-up from Morning Joe?
No David Brooks, Richard Cohen, Campbell Brown, Condaleeza Rice, Michelle Rhee or Arne Duncan? Has the NYTimes editorial board weighed in on Austin public schools?
How about the billionaires? I didn’t see Bill Gates, the Netflix guy, the Facebook guy, or Eli Broad.
These are America’s foremost experts on your local public school (not that any of them have been anywhere near your local public school, ever) yet they were not in attendance at this conference. I know because I was there and I looked.
Public schools are unfashionable. No one who is anyone bothers about them anymore. They’re all “failure factories” filled with self-interested greedy teachers who in Ohio are sometimes pulling down 50k! No wonder you couldn’t attract the big marquee names.
Public schools are political orphans. No one even mentions them anymore, unless it’s to crow that they’re “failing” and kids are “stuck” in them, or to mandate The Third Grade reading Guarantee, or The Teacher Measurement Scale or the A-F Grading system for your school, or the latest standardized “miracle” test which will be so much better than the last decade of standardized tests that preceded it is a “gamechanger”.
LikeLike
Chiara Duggan: the civil rights movements, the genuine article, was for many years a political orphan too. So too were other movements for genuine change, starting with the those who called for and led the struggle to make the USA an independent country as well as those to abolish chattel slavery and to secure the vote for women.
Right now the members of the rainbow coalition of those in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ are peering down from the lofty heights of the status quo, defending the current establishment and wondering what all the tumult is about.
As did King George III. He literally led the greatest military and economic forces of his era—what’s to worry about that pitiful ragtag colonial rabble?
Anybody notice today that England seems a lot more like an appendage of the USA than the other way around?
😎
LikeLike
This what DC was up to last week, and it’s what they’ll be up to this week. They can’t get anything done at all for public schools, but the charter bill is flying thru Congress!
Wow. That’s clout. If only there was some public advocate for children who attend public schools.
“NACSA Chair Keegan Testifies before House Ed Committee
Discusses Significant Progress toward One Million Lives
March 12, 2014
The fact that more than 230,000 students are attending better schools in 2013 because of the actions of charter school authorizers across the country was the focus of Congressional testimony today by Lisa Graham Keegan, chair of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA).
Keegan was among those testifying this morning before the House Education and Workforce Committee in a hearing entitled “Raising the Bar: The Role of Charter Schools in K-12 Education.”
Keegan testified, “So we know what is possible, but we are far from the moment that every individual student has access to an exceptional school. Creating and sustaining only excellent schools must be our focus. And much of the knowledge we now possess about how to do that has been gained in two decades of work on public charter schools.”
Was there a single public school advocate invited to this love-fest in DC? Was any consideration given at all to existing public schools, and the effects on the public school SYSTEM of this single-minded focus on opening charter schools? What if I don’t want my local public school turned into a Rocketship or one of the other national chains? Am I just out of luck?
LikeLike
Lisa Graham Keegan opened the charter floodgates in Arizona and destroyed what had been a pretty decent public school system. She is just one of a string of worthless AZ Superintendents of Public Instruction who really didn’t give a rip about public schools. They used the position as a stepping stone to a higher position (like Horne), or to push their personal ideology of privatizing schools and profiting off them (Keegan, Huppenthal).
LikeLike
It’s fun to watch, isn’t it, for a public school parent or teacher?
Let’s see, the DC crowd got two things done this week. They voted to subsidize building charter schools and Duncan traveled to Massachusetts to lobby for charter schools. While he was there he stopped in to look at the charter tutor model, which involves paying people 17k a year to tutor. In other words, they’re reducing class sizes on the cheap. Low wage jobs! Yippee!
Meanwhile, we got another stern, patronizing lecture from the billionaire and his politicians on how we have to “embrace” the Common Core, although there are probably 1 in 100 parents who would recognize THE PHRASE “the Common Core” in this town let alone what it might mean for their kid. Parents have no earthly idea what’s coming, but local schools are ordered to “educate” parents on this, in addition to the 500 other “ed reform” gimmicks they’re putting in at the same time.
When did it become fashionable to treat our schools like garbage, and why are we putting up with it? I don’t know any of these people, and I am damn sure not a one of them has ever been inside my public school.
LikeLike
“DINNER WITH GATES – About 80 senators are expected to attend a dinner discussion at the Capitol tonight with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the NYT’s David Brooks. The 6:45 p.m. dinner, according to an invitation obtained by Huddle, is sponsored by the No Labels Foundation, and one of that group’s honorary co-chairs, Sen. Joe Manchin, will make opening remarks. So what’s the No Labels-Microsoft connection? No Labels co-founder Nancy Jacobson is married to longtime pollster Mark Penn, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at Microsoft, said a source who will be attending the event.”
I hope they were discussing The Declining Middle Class and Our Failing Public Schools. I wonder what they decided? Who knows those subjects better than Bill Gates, David Brooks, Mark Penn and Michael Bloomberg.
This is a club, and we’re not members.
LikeLike
“No Labels.” That’s a hot one.
This little get-together should be called “Gates Feeds His Lapdogs.”
LikeLike
I would argue that this isn’t about reforming today’s fake reformers—that would be a lost cause. Instead, the goal is to expose the false reformers who’ve hijacked a meme made popular by the real reform movements led by Teddy Roosevelt and FDR in the early 20th century.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Teddy and FDR dug their way out of their graves to fight these billionaire oligarchs who have only one goal, subvert the democratic process and cut 99.9% of the America people out of it by any means possible.
LikeLike
As evidence of the corruption of language, intentional misdirection and how upside-down things have become, the “radicals” are in a sense doing something quite conservative: trying to save public education.
Conversely, the Overclass and its hired vandals are engaged in a highly “radical” effort to dismantle one of our country’s core institutions.
LikeLike