Our friend Edward Berger returned from a long period of rest, reading, and reflection, and he is back in fine form.
He wrote a letter to President Obama and the First Lady to warn of the damage their education policies are inflicting on the nation’s children, teachers, and schools.
He writes:
“Prior to your administration, with few exceptions, public schools were not created as sources of investment income or profit. Schools were run by democratically elected boards under state supervision. Schools were accountable for financial management and academic achievement. A proven (if not100%s effective) means of teacher accountability and school effectiveness was in place and functioning well in areas where great poverty and futility were not generated by our failed economic system.
“Prior to your administration, the tax dollars Americans pay for public education could not be accessed by profiteers or religious groups and cults. No taxpayer was forced to support a religion, ideology, or partial school with their education tax dollars.
“Sadly, strengthened by your administration, an unproven and false use of testing replaced the tests used by educators to understand student needs and to teach effectively. Data generated by wrong and unproven means is causing great harm to students and teachers throughout America. The only known beneficiaries of this drive for data are the corporations creating the tests, and the egos of billionaires who use their wealth to force their “hunches” on our schools.
“Your administration supports those who can buy access to schools and thus children’s minds. Your administration accepts the whims of billionaires who have no certification, little or no contact with professional educators, no concept of the history of American education and how education is delivered, and most devastating, they have very little concern for our children. Almost all send their children to separate schools that do not follow the rules your administration is instigating.”
And much more.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Obama has received so many eloquent, brilliant letters.
Too bad he won’t read any.
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Perfect comment.
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No doubt the Obamas will take Ed’s letter to heart and reexamine their views on education. Yeah, right. That and a token will get you on to the the subway. No matter, it is a letter that demands to have been written.
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Similar letter should be sent to every governor in this country.
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Obama: the most successful con ever. Madoff conned investors. Obama became President.
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“Hope and Change”. Ha!! What a joke. He firmly entrenched our plutocracy. He is awful.
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It’s a great letter but I too think it’s hopeless. The Obama Administration continue to promote the “skills gap” with no recognition that the “skills gap” is questionable.
There have been lots and lots of critical study on the (alleged) “skills gap”, yet Duncan repeats it robotically, Obama does too, and now Perez the Sec of Labor, is also promoting it.
They have been doing this FOR YEARS. You know, the “skills gap” is a very convenient answer to stagnant wages and unemployment. It’s very politically useful to politicians and business leaders to claim the “problem” is due to US workers, because it lets the entire political and business sector off the hook. But is it TRUE? Why do they repeat this like it’s fact every single day? A lot of smart people argue that it isn’t fact.
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That’s a great article by Krugman that totally exposes the supposed “skills gap” for what it is, a zombie myth that refuses to die. The truth is that there are hordes of very skilled, very capable, very competent and very educated Americans looking for work in their given technical fields. The CEOs would rather hire H1b visa people who are cheaper and can be fired on a whim.
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It isn’t just Krugman. The fact is people have been disputing this for years.
Arne Duncan continues to promote it as fact, and now the Sec of Labor has joined in.
“But the heart of the real story about employer difficulties in hiring can be seen in the Manpower data showing that only 15% of employers who say they see a skill shortage say that the issue is a lack of candidate knowledge, which is what we’d normally think of as skill. Instead, by far the most important shortfall they see in candidates is a lack of experience doing similar jobs. Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time. That’s certainly understandable, but the only people who can do that are those who have done virtually the same job before, and that often requires a skill set that, in a rapidly changing world, may die out soon after it is perfected.”
Employers are not DUE workers who are ready to fill a specific slot. That’s not the public’s responsibility. Scott Walker likes to insist that there are no welders in Wisconsin, as if it is the public’s job to train welders for a specific company. You know who used to train welders, back in the day? Businesses and labor unions. If Scott Walker can’t find any welders, maybe he could ask employers to train some.
They’re taking the risk and investment required in hiring and training employees and passing it from the private sector to the public sector. When I hire someone, I might have to take a risk and train that person, and my investment may not pay off. That doesn’t justify my passing that risk and investment off on the public.
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And, they’ve moderated it somewhat, because apparently it wasn’t working out politically for them, traveling the country and blaming workers for the “skills gap” with no mention, ever, of the employers role in training.
I suspect we’ll be hearing about the “skills mismatch” here shortly, although Duncan seems wedded to his “skills gap” theory, and I know not to expect anything but digging in from him.
Tom Perez @LaborSec · 18h
We need to find out what jobs need to be filled & make sure people are matched to those jobs. #FindYourPath → http://www.dol.gov/findyourpath/
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Excellent. The purpose of public education is not to be a subsidized labor training camp for businesses. It purpose is to enable students to become functional democratic citizens and to partake of the richness of Western Civilization.
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And Duncan is the absolute last person to be discussing the problem of people who are unskilled and Ill-equipped to do their jobs. Secretary of Education, indeed. Talk about a skills gap!
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I would love to find a well written piece about the fallacy of “closing the achievement gap”. That’s what our schools have swallowed – the idea that teachers can dramatically change the trajectory of the lowest achieves (read “poorest “) so they will “catch up” to Obama’s kids at some point.
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The whole “movement” is contradictory to me.
It may once have been about accountability PLUS quality and choice PLUs equity, but is seems to me the “accountability” and “choice” factions have completely won the day.
They dominate. It’s now “choice” plus “accountability”, and it’s extreme. The whole “equity” argument is gone and so is the “quality” argument.
The conservative elements of ed reform so dominate the “movement” that Duncan is now indistinguishable from Milton Friedman.
Liberals either got played or they wanted to be played. They got nothing in this deal with anti-public school conservatives. Nothing.
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This is what the government does to force blame onto the unemployed rather than government policies. The gov. of Mich has spouted the same garbage.
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A brilliant letter which need be shared as far and wide as possible, regardless if Obama reads it or not. And, yes, with concerned educator, I think it should be send to every governor in the union beginning with our own Andrew Cuomo.
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You need money to get Cuomo’s attention, not letters.
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you need money to dump cuomo.
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But, Mr. President you must be overjoyed that after 5 years of your scorched earth education policy, there remains;
“an educator who believes in you and is filled with hope by both of you.”
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The Obama Administration’s “Scorched Earth Policy” for Urban Schools
By Dr. Mark Naison
The Obama Administration, in the five years it has been in office, has pursued an Education “Scorched Earth” policy in major urban centers, closing public schools en masse and replacing them with charter schools. And for the most part, Democratic Mayors have enthusiastically supported this policy. Only in the last year, there has been finally been some resistance to this policy, by newly elected Mayors in New York and Pittsburgh. That resistance must spread if public education is to survive and be revitalized in Urban America. Electing anti-testing, anti-charter school and pro public school Mayors in big cities should be a major priority of activists in the last three years of the Obama Presidency, along with building the multi-partisan movement against the Common Core Standards. That is the only way we can build public schools into strong community institutions where creative teaching and learning is practiced and honored.
Dr. Mark Naison is one of the Co-founders of BATs with Priscilla Sanstead
http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-obama-administrations-scorched.html
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Very good. Let it be a model for many letters.
I still think Obama sees no harm in his policies because 1. he attended private schools
2. his sister attended schools in Indonesia sponsored by the Ford Foundation, so he sees no harm in Corporate backed schools.
But we aren’t 1960s Indonesia, now are we?
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More like Indochina in 1967.
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I would say ’69 after the TET offensive.
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If these analogies hold, then our tactics must be so driven. What we see, inter alia, is a failure of this administration to ’empathize’ with our position, to decentrate from their own position, (see, for exmple, one of Robert MacNamara’s take-away lessons re Viet Nam, that he describes in Errol Morris’ “The Fog of War”). What we face in the Obama administration is a Rumsfeld pathological approach to education.
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john a: and to that we should ask, “why?”
I always like to understand where an opposing view is coming from; that is, their impetus, their fears, their past experience. . . all of that. Not to meet in the middle, necessarily, but to calm emotion and approach things calmly so as to keep wits about us.
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The “why?” is very, very simple, Joanna. This is ALL about command and control.
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But command and control motivated by what? Control for control’s sake? I don’t think so. I think there is an underlying thing with Obama similar to Kobe Bryant that refuses to acknowledge that poor and/or minority populations need an intentional boost that might need to come from government and this is because they don’t want to be lumped in with poor minorities (being minorities themselves). They are over-compensating so as to not be part of a group they see as less than desirable. (Of course, I am assigning all sorts of thoughts and emotions, here. . .I realize that; but that is how I try to understand other people I can’t understand right away). Kobe is a great person. Obama is a great person. But there’s a limit to how much credit they want to assign to an issue plaguing our society (in this case, poverty particularly among minorities) when it crosses over with their own identities. Sort of like I would never want to establish a scholarship at my alma mater just for preacher’s daughters because that would emphasize that I was a preacher’s daughter who could have used a scholarship. . .it draws attention to something about which I might be self-conscious.
So perhaps Obama is self-conscious about being a minority and therefore refuses to have sympathy or empathy in a situation that, to many of us, is clearly largely about intentional bolstering of opportunities for minorities within a system that is still democratic. Their side of the see-saw might need some weights on it so we can play see-saw smoothly. Obama says, “No! Play see-saw without weights because I would not want anyone to assume that I need weights on my side of the see-saw.”
? Or something like that.
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Kissinger put it this way, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” To sick, sick persons like our oligarchical “leaders,” this is true. Our businesspeople want an obedient, slavish workforce. (Get tough with those kids.) Our politicians want to replace teachers with software because it’s cheaper. Our plutocrats want to make billions in “the 21st-century investment opportunity–the education biz,” and they want to control that.
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Obama is a windup toy for a few financial and military-industrial complex plutocrats. Turn off the sound. Don’t listen to what he SAYS. Look at what he DOES.
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Jonathan Haidt has a well-developed theory of personality based upon the different emphasis that different types of people place on various moral “goods”–Care vs. harm, Fairness vs. cheating, Liberty vs. oppression, Loyalty vs. betrayal, Authority vs. subversion, and Sanctity vs. degradation. Haidt believes that these are very deep in us and that they divide us. The Ed Deformers are folks to whom authority is HUGE. They believe in rules and tests and order. They are also heavily into sanctity and loyalty to one’s tribe, but I won’t go into that.
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Joanna,
The ‘why’ of pathology is deeply embedded in the psyche of the individual and the group. I would direct you to “The Authoritarian Personality”, a study of Fascism, by Theodor Adorno. From a different perspective the failure to empathize is driven, I think, by a narcissistic impulse that maintains the sanctity of one’s belief structures regardless of their consequences on others, who are seen as ‘them’: a different species, not worthy of ‘seeing’ as having legitimate needs, albeit different from theirs, and therefore responsible for their own failures and deserving of the treatment they receive. The failure of extension from self to others, to deny others the rights and privileges you grant yourself and then justifying the denial of same by blaming the ‘other’ group is perhaps contains, at its heart, a sadistic impulse.
I am aware that these are harsh thoughts. I am just attempting to understand without false illusions a kernel of truth that illuminates the ‘deformers’ (a most appropriate appellation). Part and parcel of my understanding is a disavowal of any tendencies that would posit this deforming group group with a basic belief in a collective ‘good’ or general welfare. As for the President, in the education domain ( as well as others) he is a lost cause: He and Duncan wander in the deforming wilderness accompanied by the foundation boys along with their free marketeers.
So yes, write letters and struggle locally with eyes wide open, not wide shut.
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I have long thought so, John. That’s why these Deformers are absolutely impervious to reason. And once the current deforms all blow up in their faces, someone among them, will suggest the next magic potion–one that maintains strict command and control, of course (they loved Behavioral Conditioning; they love standards-and-testing)–and they will be on to that, with equal certainty and fervor.
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And, he is probably not thinking about schools, really. He delegated it. He’ll let his Sec. of Ed take care of it, just as he will let Anthony Foxx take care of the distracted driving issue.
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I don’t think so. Obama prides himself on being a hands-on guy – a policy wonk who knows more about everything than his advisors do. I don’t think Duncan is the driving force – just the lackey hired to do the bidding.
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well, then I hope he starts thinking more about distracted driving. . .
(I read a biography of Obama’s mother, but have not yet read one about him; perhaps it is time). I do love biographies.
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No, Joanna, he’s well aware of what is going on, given that before being elected to the US Senate, he was deeply involved with the Joyce Foundation, which has been active in privatizing education in Chicago.
Every effort this man has ever made was for the purpose of being a Judas to the people who elected him.
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As I wrote earlier: Obama is the most successful con man. Candidate Obama (2008) and President Obama are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
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Very, very well said, Ed!!!
This letter is an indictment, of course.
The Obama Administration is guilty of crimes against public schools and everyone connected with them–administrators, teachers, kids, and parents.
Crimes in the war that the administration declared on public schools.
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Yes, Bob. We must expand our analysis beyond a strictly technocratic lens (the results are ‘in’; frankly, ‘reform’, on its own merits, is a closed case, as far as I am concerned). We should be viewing ‘deform’ through a moral/political lens, which posits a different sort of individual and group responsibility. The shifting of ‘lens’, focuses on the culpability of the deformers in harming (deforming) kids and destroying a central democratic institution for the sake of both financial profit and ideological domination. This is the essence of what takes the ‘deform’ movement beyond toleration.
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I’m a bit confused here. When was public school education “reform” anything but an exercise in greedy profiteering???? I’ve always felt Obama/Duncan were aiding & abetting the further enrichment of the deformers.
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I agree. ‘Reform’ was always about establishing capitalism/business/entrepreneurial hegemony in the public education sphere. My point is that that the continuing dissecting and analyzing ‘reform’, as if it has substantive merit, should no longer be out main objective: it is without pedagogic or moral legitimacy; and has been from the ‘get -go’. Our efforts should focus on a continuing and forceful moral, political-economic analysis that shifts the focus to local organized resistance. Reading the deformer propaganda is akin to listening to a delusional mental patient. The only question is the mechanism, tactics to slow down the deformation and harm to out kids and schools.
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Here’s a treat for you-all:
“Obama’s education secretary is “a market-based person,” his education policy manifests a “market-based philosophy,” and “we continue to starve public schools,” the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus charged in an interview Wednesday afternoon.
The privatization of education “began as driven by ideology, but now [it’s] getting momentum because of the financial aspects,” Rep. Raul Grijalva argued to Salon. The Arizona Democrat called charter schools “a step towards” privatization, called the Chicago teachers’ strike a “necessary pushback” and warned of a “self-fulfilling conflict of interest.” A condensed version of our conversation follows.”
Finally. Push-back in DC. I never thought it would happen. Rep. Grijalva was one of the few Democrats who questioned the latest charter school subsidy in the US House. The rest of them couldn’t rubber stamp it fast enough. They claim they got “regulation” in return, but that’s spin. I read the bill. They can’t dictate state law on charter schools, and they know it. They got zip in return. They got some gentle and unenforceable suggestions that charter schools start taking the same kids public schools take.
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/17/a_self_fulfilling_conflict_of_interest_charter_schools_testing_mania_and_arne_duncan/
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Another charter school advocate who forgets to mention public schools:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/04/17/illinois-charter-schools-education-teachers-column/7710697/
They’re angry that public schools have advocates. Only charter schools should. That’s fair, right?
We’ll have passionate supporters of charter schools, and “agnostics” and relinquishers” on the other side. No one in their right mind would accept this ludicrously skewed playing field.
Why can’t we have public school advocates? God knows we have a huge lobbying effort for charter schools, both inside and outside government. Oh, the humanity. Charter school advocates finally have to deal with public school advocates. Poor babies.
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This is going to sound really stupid, but has anyone ACTUALLY faxed this letter to the White House or mailed it return receipt requested? Or….Is this just an open letter to our president? Wouldn’t hurt to start a change.org or move on.org petition with this letter attached. Eventually, it would annoy enough people to come to the attention of the President.
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Obviously, you do not understand why this president and his basketball buddy are doing these things to students, teachers, and public schools, so I will be succinct. They went to the same private schools themselves and are now sending their own children to these private schools, so they are only interested in public schools if they can find a way to increase their own wealth or the wealth of those who contributed the most to getting them elected or re-elected. Look at who is giving them money and you see why they are destroying public schools. GOOD BUSINESS DEAL!
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