It is getting to be a dizzying experience to read about the Common Core on the Néw York Times. When Motoko Rich reported from Tennessee, she found an unlikely left-right alliance questioning the standards. A few days later, and the familiar script is back in place: only the far right opposes this fine experiment.
Once again, Mike Petrilli is trotted out to defend them. This seems to be his job now.
No mention of the early childhood experts who oppose them or the critics of high stakes testing or computer graded tests or standardization or the Chicago Teachers Union or Carol Burris or Anthony Cody or any number of credible, non-Tea Party critics.
It would be refreshing to learn in the Times which groups have received millions from the Gates Foundation to support the CCSS.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There simply is less depth in terms of reporting. I have taught English for 34 years,
including a sixteen year stint as Journalism teacher and advisor of the school newspaper from 1983 to 2000. When I began I could still use journalists like John Howard Griffin,
Edward R.Murrow, Theodore White, Studs Terkel, John Hersey, David Brinkley,
Walter Cronkite, David Halberstam, Joan Didion, and Diane Ravitch in her superb
essay about history majors in college not knowing basic events. What the above writer’s
had in common had to do with integrity. They were sincere, they were brave and they were not politically correct. Unlike Tom Friedman, they did not have a vested interest in Teach for America–as just one example. Perhaps we need more journalists like
Bill Moyers is and like Terkel was–listeners who can see the complexity of events without stereotypes of the left or the right. If Friedman and others knew who
a writer/teacher , for example, like Mike Rose is and had read Lives on
the Boundary–they would understand the opposition to the Common Core can
not be written off as a right wing fantasy. Bog media problem is not laziness but
lack of curiosity and the feeling to quote Liebling that the goal of journalism is
to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. They have bought (Big Media)
the Bill Gates and Arnie Duncan scenario without giving full credence to the other side.
The only weapon of the progressive democratic resistance is facts, the truth, the Internet and word of mouth. And then there are still phones and the United States Postal Service. The last resort will be our feet.
If we lose the Internet because of the end of Net Neutrality, then we use e-mail newsletters to everyone we know. When they take away e-mails, we have the old fashioned phone. If they take that away, we have traditional post office snail mail.
The last resort, walking door to door. If Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons can walk door to door, then we can too. But I suggest we all wear the same shirt that identifies us as the democratic resistance to the fake education reformers who are owned by Bill Gates and those other billionaire oligarchs who want to buy the government and then rule an impoverished United States where 1% has 99.9% of the wealth and the other 99% has the other 0.1% as they starve and/or spend decades locked up in the Charter prison industry that will replace the state and federal prisons.
Charter schools will surely spawn Charter prisons all owned by the same billionaires, and to pay for all this, taxes for everyone but the 1% will skyrocket.
How do we make the shirts?
There’s businesses that will put whatever we want on t-shirts. All we need is a consensus on what should go on those shirts. We can get mugs, hats, jackets ….
For instance: Vistaprint:
http://www.vistaprint.com/custom-tshirts.aspx?couponAutoload=1&GP=5%2f31%2f2014+10%3a44%3a15+AM&GPS=3197998465&GNF=1
Staples even does it (but it costs more than Vistaprint):
http://www.staples.com/sbd/content/copyandprint/tshirts.html
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Discover how the traditional media is doing all it can to cover up the truth about Obama’s Machiavellian Common Core and discredit the democratic resistance, and is there a link between Bill Gates billions and this propaganda?
I have idly wondered if Glenn Beck might not have been paid by the usual billionaires and hedge funders to start trashing Common Core. It benefits them.
The resolution approved by the Chicago Teachers Union’s 800-member House of Delegates had been discussed and worked on within the union and within CORE (the Caucus Of Rank and file Educators, the union’s leading political party) for nearly six months before it came before the House at the April meeting. As most people know, the CTU (Local 1, AFT) is the second largest pre-K through 12 local in the AFT (only the New York City United Federation of Teachers, UFT, Local 2 is larger).
After debate, I moved to close the debate (I’m a delegate representing retired teachers), and President Karen Lewis asked, as is required, whether anyone wanted to speak against the motion. No one did, so we voted to end debate on the motion, which was in everyone’s hands as well as on the jumbo screen on the wall.
When Karen called for the vote, by voice vote there were no “No” votes.
She asked whether we had approved the motion by acclamation and people shouted “Yes.”
And so she reported that the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates, representing the union’s 30,000 active duty and retired members, had approved the motion opposing Common Core unanimously. The New York Times has been spinning this story for far too long. Randi should have mentioned this to The New York Times, since we in the Chicago Teachers Union are far from a “tea party” or right wing outfit. And she must have heard that we want our resolution debated by the entire union at the July 2014 convention.
Our resolution against Common Core has been submitted to the AFT convention, which is being held in Los Angeles in July. We expect a full and democratic debate on the resolution, both in committee and then on the floor of the whole convention, which should have about 3,000 delegates.
Good work!
Would you like to write this up as a guest post for my Blog? I will then promote your guest post on Twitter.
Well done and Godspeed in July here in sunny California. You have our support!
Keep pushing, George, bring it to the floor of the convention, force the debate out into the open, CTU has a big responsibility to show teachers how a union should fight.
I fully welcome the horror of the “far right” about the Common Core. Beck has been attacking the centralization and regimentation of our educational system. He is right to attack this. He is right to say that this is an unacceptable encroachment on our liberties, that we do not need in the Land of the Free a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
This is something people left, right, and center should be able to take Common Cause on: Common Cause against the Common Core.
I am grateful that Mr. Beck has taken this on.
George Will may be a “Bob Dole Republican” but he’s no Tea Partier. Dismissing opposition to CC as a fringe movement won’t work anymore. It is being judged for the first time on its own merits (of which there are few).
GEORGE WILL: The advocates of the Common Core say, if you like local control of your schools, you can keep it, period. If you like your local curriculum you can keep it, period, and people don’t believe them for very good reasons. This is a thin end of an enormous wedge of federal power that will be wielded for the constant progressive purpose of concentrating power in Washington so that it can impose continental solutions to problems nationwide. You say it’s voluntary.
It has been driven by the use of bribes and coercion in the form of waivers from No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top money to buy the compliance of these 45 states, two of which, Indiana and I believe Oklahoma have already backed out, and they will not be the last. Watch the verb align in this argument. They are going to align the SAT and ACT tests with the curriculum. They are going to align the textbooks with the tests. And sooner or later you inevitably have a national curriculum that disregards the creativity of federalism. What are the chances, Juan, that we’re going to have five or six creative governors experimenting with different curricula or one creative constant permanent Washington bureaucracy overlooking our education? We’ve had 50 years now of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 50 years of federal involvement that has coincided with stagnation in test scores across the country.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/05/06/george_will_common_core_disregards_the_creativity_of_federalism.html
Are the deformers going to call GEORGE WILL a Tea Partier?
Give me a break.
Amen, Bob.
“…George Will a Tea Partier?” -Shepherd
April 2014, at the Tea Party News Network, George Will in an interview, “The Tea Party is an Enormous Benefit to both the GOP and the country.” The interviewer summarized, “George Will is very pro-tea Party.”
It’s crazy to attack a position JUST because it happens to be held by someone whom you oppose on other issues.
Hitler liked puppies. Nazi Germany had the strictest animal welfare laws in Europe at the same time that it was carrying out genocide against whole populations.
The fact that Hitler opposed cruelty to puppies doesn’t mean that opposing cruelty to puppies is wrong. And it doesn’t mean that he must have had some evil ulterior motive for opposing cruelty to puppies.
It means that one can be a homicidal, genocidal lunatic AND have an occasional notion that is not sickening and insane.
I am mentioning this extreme example to make the more general point: Again, divorce the issue from the person.
There is no question but what it is unacceptable in a democratic republic to set up a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat to empower someone like David Coleman to make the decisions for every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country about what should be taught to whom, when, and how. Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. The imposition of an invariant monoculture violates fundamental liberties. Teachers deal in IDEAS. Are we to have a central committee telling us what IDEAS are acceptable to teach and learn at each grade level?
Mr. Beck says that he is absolutely opposed to that.
And he has reason to be.
After hearing about this, I did a little research. He recently had on his program a woman who described herself as a leftist and rattled off her leftist bona fides. They then discussed how, coming from polar ends of the political spectrum, they could agree on this issue–that the Common Coring of the United States is a violation of fundamental liberties.
Kudos to him for airing that bit of political theater, for its message was spot on.
Bob, is that Beck interview available online anywhere (even in transcript form)? I’d be interested in checking it out. And you’re right, it’s good that he is speaking out — but the deformers are using his doing so to fit their agenda.
Couldn’t find it. Here’s something interesting:
Now, Beck says silly stuff like, “The Common Core teaches that Capitalism is bad,” but he also is one of the few people in the country with a wide audience who is drawing people’s attention to the USDE’s funding and issuing reports on new surveillance systems for the classroom, its revision of FERPA regs, and the like. And all that is just great.
Search YouTube for “Glenn Beck on Common Core” and you will hit a bonanza of his broadcasts. Beck is obsessively opposed to Common Core.
I think, werebat, that these people (the Deformers) are in complete denial. They travel back and forth to various echo chambers (e.g., Camp Philos). They listen only to themselves talking. And so they really haven’t a clue how strong the anti-deform feeling is in the country, especially since their reign of terror and error has effectively silenced a lot of teachers and administrators who HATE this stuff. But we are in a phase transition. This stuff is getting ready to boil over. And the Beck phenomenon is part of that. I welcome it. It will become clear enough, very soon, that opposition to deform comes from left, right, and center, from populists, from demagogues, from parents, from scholars and researchers, from independent curriculum developers, from MILLIONS of teachers and administrators who have been terrorized into keeping quiet.
It’s no wonder that Petrelli did the “Class size doesn’t matter” video. He and Chester Finn must bore themselves to death writing about outgritting the Singaporeans and how David Coleman’s puerile bullet list constitutes a “higher standard.”
Mike Petrilli? Why he’s an “award-winning writer and one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts.” Don’t you know??? (Of course the award is from his employer.) Ed credentials? None. “He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Honors Political Science from the University of Michigan.” “His most recent publication is The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent’s Guide to Socioeconomically Mixed Public Schools (Thomas B. Fordham Institute 2012).”
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…..
ROTFLMAO.
Mike Petrelli seems to me too bright a guy to be peddling what he is peddling. It’s a sad thing when a good mind is put to such damaging use.
I can’t resist noting a historical fact about Checker Finn and his relation to Chicago’s corporate “school reform.” Back when Diane was still close to the administration she had served as assistant secretary of education, in the early 1990s, Chicago shifted from a “School Finance Authority” (which had overseen finances since the 1979 “financial crisis” at Chicago Public Schools) to a “School Reform Authority.” The shift coincided with the onset of mayoral control under Mayor Richard M. Daley. The new “School Reform Authority” still had some major budget powers, but also got to “approve” any “school reform” initiatives. Its chairman was the multi-millionaire venture capitalist Martin Koldyke (yes, that Martin Koldyke). I covered the meetings of the “Authority” back in those days, when they usually me at the Sears Tower law offices of the law firm of Schiff Harden and Waite (one of Chicago’s most powerful corporate law firms).
The “School Reform Authority” paid a “consultant” to vet each school reform initiative. The consultant was paid a quarter million dollars a year, but usually he didn’t even bother to fly to Chicago from Nashville for the Authority’s meetings, and Koldyke allowed the guy to come in via speaker phone.
Who was the expert on “school reform” that got to approve or veto every move by the Chicago Board of Education during those early days of mayoral control.
Vanderbilt University professor Chester Finn.
The inadequacy of a standardized test in determining whether a citizen is qualified for state execution seems not at all unlike the inadequacy of a standardized test in determining other important outcomes, like whether a citizen is qualified for a high school diploma or whether that citizen’s teacher is qualified for a positive evaluation, a raise, or a job.
Ira Fader
After a ruling that says states can no longer rely on a fixed I.Q. cutoff to decide intellectual competency, the likelihood increased that some inmates will have a chance to avoid execution.
Sent from my iPad
excellent point, Ira!
The same applies to our victories in Oklahoma.
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2014/05/thompson-2.html
And they also trot out Mike Petrilli saying Oklahoma should break from the reform ranks.
Some Democrats must have voted with the Republicans.
There are 36 Republicans and 12 Democrats in the State Senate
In the State House there are 72 Republicans and 29 Democrats
The overall vote was 124 to 21 but there are only 108 Republicans so they don’t get all the credit. There had to be at least 16 Democrats that voted with the GOP majority—that almost 40% of the Democrats.
LA LA LA LA LA!!!
It is all fine and dandy that the far right opposes common core, however, they do not oppose for-profit, paid-for-with-public-taxes, charters schools.
I don’t know who to vote for; will have to seriously do my homework on this issue. I am in NJ; definitely opposed to Chris Christie, who has cost our state $millions in losses due to paying for the bogus one-sided “investigation” that cleared him of Bridgegate, and the tax breaks he gives to corporations, and the 30% raises he has given to those who work to fix his image, and his use of Sandy funds to put his families into commercials.
No one in her party backed Buono last election, and I have a feeling even if the tally proved she had won, the status quo would have said Christie was the winner and forced him on us anyhow.
However, Cory Booker, a democrat with a republican heart, brought the 1%er charter monies into Newark, and will be a horrible Senator.
Independent?
“Once again, Mike Petrilli is trotted out to defend them. This seems to be his job now. ” You make no mention of Randi Weigarten’s position. I have been troubled by her position ever since I heard her speak out in defense of CCSS.
Opposition to the Common Core, 5/30/14 states that not only Mike Petrilli but also Randi Weingarten supports Common Core.
This is understandable in light of a report done by Mercedes Scheider about Bill Gates’ influence. “As of September 22, 2013, Gates has spent $173.5 million expressly for CCSS according to the Gates grants search engine.” “Gates CCSS funding to state departments of education and school districts….that have accepted Gates money in order to promote CCSS.”…
“NEA and AFT’s acceptance of millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support implementation of Common Core Standards and to support the controversial teacher assessment programs is proving detrimental to the integrity of the profession,” states Andrew Palmer | November 25, 2013
“Here are the state and local boards (and a single independent school)* that have accepted Gates payouts specifically for CCSS as noted on the Gates grants search engine:… “The first post includes CCSS background and Gates funding for key players at the CCSS planning table, including the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and also both teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).”
Thomas B. Fordham Institute was given $1,961,116 by Bill Gates. (A Brief Audit of Bill Gates’ Common Core Spending) “Gates Buys Select Major Ed Organizations and Think Tanks”
At this web site Mercedes Schneider states: “Third is the Gates purchase of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT):
Date: June 2012 Purpose: to support the AFT Innovation Fund and work on teacher development and Common Core State Standards Amount: $4,400,000
National Education Association: $3,982,597.”
In the article, Common Core School Standards Face a New Wave of Opposition the following excerpts were included:
“The Tea Party is using the frustration with the implementation as the guise to eliminate standards in schools and to destabilize public education,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. Its executive council recently passed a resolution supporting “the promise and potential of the Common Core State Standards.”
“Supporters of the Common Core say that most states remain committed. “Even with all the noise and bombast,” said Michael J. Petrilli, an education analyst at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank that supports the standards, “40-plus states are still standing with the Common Core.”…
Not surprising that both the AFT and the Fordham Institute would support the Common Core. With major institutions supporting the Common Core it is not surprising that the governors are hesitant to sign a law to withdraw from the CC.
Mercedes Scheider’s report ends with, “Can Bill Gates buy a foundational democratic institution? Will America allow it? The fate of CCSS will provide crucial answers to those looming questions.”
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.
A question then: why does the mainstream media give so much more time
to the ideas of Gates, Coleman, Friedman and Duncan and so little in proportion
to Diane Ravitch, Jon Kozol, Mike Rose? Why do we not see investigative reports
on education that are equivalient to Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame?
We supposedly, in American History and American Literature–teach our students
about the dangers of McCarthyism…Is it not a McCarthy like tactic to
avoid the real issue and to brand contrary opinions as being demonic.
Those of us opposed to the Common Core are from the right as well
as the left but the most cogent critics are in my view–idealistic
realists like Ravitch, Kozol, Rose, Moyers. The real issue is how to help public schools with smaller classes, more humanities , arts and music programs and attention
to poverty schools. Gates, Coleman, Friedman and Duncan have made publicity
by hyperbole and insult. Let those of us on the other side make our case
through experience and reason. We are not in it for the media attention or the
money. We simply want to be heard and the big media should be obligated
to be not a mouthpiece for the position of those currently in power.
The golden age of journalism ended after the Vietnam War and the traditional media today is owned by six corporations. For instance, Newsweek magazine is part of a small media empire owned by a real estate tycoon who supports Jeb Bush’s ideas about charter school education. And Media Corp, the 2nd largest in the world, is owned by Rupert Murdock who partnered with Bill Gates in launching InBloom.
If you are interested, you may want to read, or listen to, “The Bully Pulpit” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I listened to an audio version.
She points out that before the golden age of journalism that started about the time Teddy Roosevelt was climbing his way up through politics to the White House pushing his progressive agendas, the media—newspapers and magazines—in the US was mostly controlled by two political parties: either the Democrats or the GOP and those two parties were controlled by the robber barons of the industrial revolution.
Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive politics, the golden age of journalism and labor unions stopped the spread of that cancer—-for a time.
It would appear that the United States media has come full circle back to the era when the media was the voice of a few who used the media to profit and the truth wasn’t important if it did not lead to more wealth and power.
I’m not sure there ever was a “golden age of journalism” in the USA, and I prefer to talk about reporting the news rather than “journalism.”
Edward Snowden, as Daniel Elsberg has pointed out, was right to go to Glenn Greenwald and not to The New York Times (which would have turned Snowden in to the Obama administration for the same treatment as Bradley Manning and other whistle blowers have received). The stuff we reported during the Vietnam War was usually covered up by the corporate media back then, during that “Golden Age.” The mutiny of soldiers at Firebase Pace in Vietnam has to be reported in our media. And I still have that 1967 photograph of Gis sitting smiling with the decapitated bodies of four “Viet Cong” that Esquire refused to publish — “in the national interest.” And that was before My Lai…
To me, “journalism” is story writing taught by expensive professors to privileged children who then get $100,000 MA degrees but can’t slog across a police line during a midnight fire to learn the facts and get them to an editor in time for publication. In Chicago, prior to the age of the “J Schools”, the boot camp for reporters was an outfit called City News Bureau. Reporters like Kurt Vonnegut and Mike Royko showed up there and were sent out to “cover stories”, first on the night shift, and were brutally taught to get the facts straight, not to puffery everything behind some mask of punditry. One story my classes heard from one of Chicago’s best reporters (I taught “journalism” to public school kids in two general high schools before Paul Vallas fired and blacklisted me) was how he slogged through freezing slush to a big fire in the old stockyards area during his time at City News. He had to slog back a couple of blocks to get to a “pay phone” (back in those days you always had a pocket full of dimes — or nickles etc.) to call in the story to the Copy Desk at City News. He had most of the facts, but the night city editor asked him “How many stories was the building before the first started?” and our friend didn’t know.
He was told to go back, find out, and call in “the rest of your story…”
That’s better for the facts — and that first rough draft of history — than all of the nonsense kids learn today about “establishing the narrative point of view…” etc.
When AARP interviewed Barbara Walters for the April/May 2014 issue, one of the questions was: How has TV news changed?
Her answer: “There’s no privacy. There’s nothing that’s sacred. And that’s something that we all talk about and deplore, but it’s the way our life is and the way we have created it. It also used to be that news was holy, and you did not give opinions. I mean, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted and the most famous, but you didn’t know how Walter thought. Today, in order to be successful, you have to be opinionated, and that’s what people want to hear.”
I think the decline of any trustworthy media happened during the Reagan era when he vetoed the Fairness Doctrine.
Today, most of the media is an opinionated rumor mill that panders to a select, identified audience that’s fed what they want to hear regardless of the facts that are out there. The tea party people may be the perfect example.
During the Golden Age of t.v. reporting, Edward R Murrow was not popular with CBS
big shots after he exposed Joe McCarthy. On the entertainment side, Rod Serling’s attempt to memorialize Emmet Till was disembowled by CBS Brass: these being just two
examples . Yet these great writers fought back, took chances with their own career to
advance the common good. Bob Shepherd and lloyd, in fact, all the writers are
making valid points. A limited focus I think is needed…remembering Halberstam covering
the segregated South and then Vietnam, thinking of John Howard Griffin passing
as a Black man in New Orleans and then Mississippi, thinking later of Woodward
and Bernstein: something is very wrong when the media–has become a servant for the
politically and patriotically correct…I do not get the feeling that Big media cares about the kids they claim they are helping and I think the alliance between the computer giants
and the mass media is not precedented…maybe I’m missing something but it seems
like we are caught in a situation stripped of any idealism…I hope this isn’t the humanists last stand. From my vantage point of 34 years teaching English, the obsession with
grades, and Ivy League schools and the trashing of the humanities has led us into
a diaster of teen suicide and attempted suicide and a lack of compassion for those
suffering in our country–Ms. Rhee and Jeb Bush join forces…
I cut myself off here…Rhee and Jeb Bush and Gates and Coleman and
Duncan are part of an unholy alliance. Are they sincere. Are they reading anything
Diane has recently written about Finland, for example. Can those in power admit error and modify. To go back to the media: Both Cronkite and Steinbeck initially supported
the War in Vietnam. They publicly changed their views when they perceived the facts on the ground. Gates, Coleman and the rest can still modify and change. But I doubht they will ever do so. Do they really believe in what they have created? It seems so and
that Big media gets away with their non reporting, reporting is now depressing and
obvious and a huge distraction from what is needed in education. Despite our
pessimism, however–Diane Ravitch and forums like this one do make an impact,
however small.