This new blogger dissects Gerald Graff’s defense of the Common Core standards,and his second post says that I can learn a lot from Saul Alinsky.

The writer is a former high school teacher, who taught for many years in the Chicago public s hools.

Among other trenchant comments, he writes about Graff:

“Graff reduces education reform to a set of standards, but he’s not alone in doing so. He’s in good (loathsome?) company. In fact, he can now join the ranks of a long list of so-called education reformers, including our own Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, for whom the idea of actually teaching in our most difficult schools seems absurd. (His claim to his current post rests on the fact that his mother was a teacher.) This brings to mind a quip that made the rounds during the last CPS teacher strike: Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, pass laws (or write essays) about teaching.

“Of course, such a stance begs the question: How might Graff (or Gates or Duncan) feel if a group of folks, say a handful of successful people from outside their institution were to hijack their department or business or institution and tell them how they aught to run things? To take this a step further, why not apply the same logic that Graff deploys in his response to Ravitch to his own English department at UIC? According to Graff, in his own courses at UIC he sees evidence that the American education system has done little for “the great majority of students who are essentially confused about how to do academic work, about how to analyze a text and summarize its argument, or about how to make an argument of one’s own.” Then why doesn’t he simply compel his colleagues to raise their standards? Why doesn’t he just raise his own standards, for that matter?”

And in his advice to me, he knows I despise the “reformers'” efforts to disrupt the schools to impose their ideological and commercial agenda. So he writes:

“When it comes to creative disruption in our schools, though, I disagree with Ravitch. I understand that there’s a place and a time for stability in school; I understand that teachers and students need a space where they can think for themselves about their lives and decide what to learn and what to do. But now is not the time to dutifully follow the mandates in order to preserve some sense of stability and calm. It’s precisely because of the current instability in our schools that we have an opportunity to turn the tables on these reformers. By creating more disruptions, more chaos, and more upheaval, we can reset the reform agenda.

“And, this is the lesson of Alinsky. He reminds us that disorganizing communities can be a powerful tool; it’s exactly what so-called reformers like Arne Duncan, David Coleman, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Kline have been doing to teachers across the country. These people are disorganizing our schools and communities. They are running actions against us in order to make us feel powerless and disorganized. And, what’s worse, it isn’t just another empty exercise: this is real. They’re trying to change education forever. They want to hijack and narrow the curriculum. They want to give away public education to private corporations. They want to debase and deskill the profession of teaching. And, they want to reduce education to a test score.

“We can change this. Now is the time to organize and occupy our schools in order to disrupt and destabilize current reform efforts. We can go on the offensive—one grounded in creative disruptions that we design and produce. We can construct our own chaos and upheaval in ways that compel education reformers to stop what they’re doing and start listening to the people most affected by their decisions. And, as Diane Nash reminds us, we can opt out; we can refuse to participate in our own oppression.

“Only after we create enough disruption can we (students, teachers, parents, and community members) then demand the right to develop our own standards: ones that best address the needs, desires and aspirations of our communities, rather than the desires and aspirations of corporations and private foundations. Only then can we create stable schools that foster creativity and innovation, rather than conformity and obedience. Only then can we create schools that take as their starting point that building great schools and communities are reciprocal projects, not separate ones.”