EduShyster has figured out who were the real winners in the Vergara trial.
First, of course is the public relations firm behind Students Matter, which is now the go-to group for civil rights issues, just as if the Brown decision had a PR firm and was bankrolled by one wealthy guy. Then there are the lawyers, who will clean up as litigation to replicate Vergara moves from state to state. Also the Billionaires who love low-income children more than those who actually work with them every day. Lots of winners. Oh, yes, and students, although it is not so clear what they won.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s never about the children. It’s about teacher unions as a starting point then the privitazation of the police force; the vision is one where there are no public employees ( except for the politicians bankrolled my the rich).
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And maybe teachers will also win because as this horror rolls out courtesy of the Students Matter PR firm, we will fight. Knowing that tenure, public opinion, impoverished students, academic excellence, professionalism, evaluations and salary schedules have nothing to do with this Witch Hunt, teachers will be freed in their spirits to resist. It will be clear that sociopathic, gated globalists believe that less for all is more for them and their intended destruction of democracy won’t be tolerated by the teaching community and beyond.
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David Adkins at Washington Monthly:
“The smarter denizens of the plutonomy know that it’s unwise to court civil unrest. Many on the right seem to believe that economic insecurity will lead people to simply work harder; cynical operatives on the right work to ensure that any anger is directed outward and toward the “others” in society. But that doesn’t always work, and once a racist, populist prairie fire has been ignited, it’s very difficult to stop until it has scorched everything in its path—including the people who set it and thought they could control it.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_06/when_even_lloyd_blankfein_says050778.php
These smartest people in the room, masters of the universe plutocrats will eventually see a lot more pushback than they realize. Right now they seem to believe that they are free to do as they wish; states are not policing them or enforcing existing laws against them and poor parents appear to be gullible and desperate to them and they lack the resources to fight back if their children are underserved or mistreated (see the Heilig Basis story Diane posted yesterday and the posting about FL special ed vouches preceding this post).
What they seem to have overlooked is that their crazed policies are impacting all schools, all teachers, and all students in the public arena and parents who aren’t desperate, gullible, or without resources and recourse are starting to push back hard. It seems to just make the reformy grifters dig their heels in and come up with even more egregious grifts.
Interesting times that will not end prettily, if history is a reliable witness.
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The NYTimes has a piece on the CC core where they actually entered a public school. Reading media accounts and listening to America’s Lawmakers, I was under the impression public schools had disappeared completely or were all horrible places where kids were “stuck” and miserable. Hey, not true! That’s the good news!
Anyway, it makes me sad that they’re working so hard to put in this giant program in public schools while the entire political/media crowd engages in yet another self-indulgent, pontificating orgy of bashing them.
I don’t blame pundits or lobbyists, because they’re doing the job they’re paid to do.
I blame lawmakers. It’s a real betrayal how they’ve put in this huge really difficult task where the real work will fall entirely to individual public schools WHILE rushing to the microphones to bash public schools yet again. I couldn’t be more disgusted with them. It’s so completely cynical and agenda-driven and also clueless as far as incentives and motivation.
They’re the worst managers in the world. Someone should look into what they’re teaching at the Broad Foundation. Maybe Duncan could rate it like a blender.
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That was an interesting article.
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This could be a quick fix without an appeal and another trial. All the legislature would have to do is change the probationary time from 2 years to 3, 4 or 5—that is if the fake education billionaires don’t already own a majority of the state legislature and the governor.
Then the billionaire who funded this court case would have to send his lawyers and paid for plaintiffs back to court to try it all over again.
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But the group is saying that they’re going to do a lawsuit in every state. Most states have longer probationary periods, and those of us in Right to Work states don’t really have “tenure” at all, and yet they’re still going to sue in our states, too. Changing the probationary period wouldn’t have made a difference.
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This tactic is nothing new. The Walton family has been funding school voucher ballot initiatives in most states for a long time. After failing for decades, they are now going through the legislatures and courts
In fact—like the Koch brothers—they now donate hundreds of millions annually to campaign contributions of candidates at the state and local level who will support their agendas, because they now know that the majority of Americans will not agree with what they want so they are going around the people to force this to happen through other methods that are not democratic in nature.
In short, they are buying what they want and ignoring the democratic process, because they can.
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More and more, it seems to be that seeming winners in these situations become losers and seeming losers become winners.
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“Billionaires love low income children”.
Tea Party “economists love low income workers”, which is why they oppose raising the minimum wage.
In truth, if subsistence-wage workers lose their jobs and apply for welfare, it might cut into corporate welfare.
The poor, get a helping hand, for working a substantial portion of their lives. The 1%
get their welfare by bribing politicians
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Some facts about the world of education:
Some kids are so far behind that they become disruptive in the classroom.
Some kids, unlike students of generations past, have the attitude that if they don’t like a class, or a teacher’s style, then they can rightfully choose to either disrupt or self-destruct academically. What happened to the student’s responsibility to take and pass classes that are not always fun or easy?
Teachers don’t give F’s, students often earn them.
The way classes are assigned in K-12 education is not always done equitably, and teachers working in different districts do not all work on a level playing field.
Teachers are experts in knowing what it takes to educate children, yet they are constantly pressured, in fact badgered, to use techniques and modalities that come from sources who do not teach, but whose sole existence is to think and create ideas for the “puppets”, in this case the teachers, to execute.
This decision, when it takes effect, will shift power not to judges and legislators, but to school administrators whose own competence and judgment can most certainly be called into question. So, for those who advocate a real world, business type model of accountability for teachers, they fail to compare apples with apples because they do not know or understand the dynamics of the classroom. In the business world, the upper hand goes to the manager, or should go to the manager, when the worker doesn’t perform. In the education business, the manager IS, or should be, the teacher who strives to make the student “do his or her job.” What happens to the manager in this case when the worker refuses to work? Why is it assumed that the ‘manager’ here has failed? How many people, like Michelle Rhee, actually spent years in the classroom fighting this battle? How many other Michelle Rhees fled the teaching scene knowing that our liberal democracy has produced a ‘rights above responsibility’ mentality and has totally emasculated the teacher in the classroom? Conservative people, and I am in this group, have only looked at the word ‘union’ and have made it the whipping boy in order to re-shape American politics; but while they take on and defeat the monster union, they now nurture an idea that is already ingrained in this country, and that is “stuff is free; we therefore need not work for it.”
In championing the fight against the teachers’ union, the movers and shakers have assumed that children are being victimized. This decision will have people jumping for joy that the union has had its wings clipped, but little do they know that they have further undermined teachers as a group, and that it will become much more difficult to get the student to work. Non-teachers hold the misguided belief that it is the teacher who is the worker; it is the administrator, bureaucrat, or education consultant who is the manager. Where does this place the student? Right where he’s been since the last vestiges of authority in this country were taken down: the student is now in a position of superiority to the teacher.
What teacher, no matter how talented they may be, will want to teach students who are a half a dozen grade levels behind? Why won’t school districts hold students back when they don’t learn? Have they not considered the damage social promotion does to both the students and teachers? Do they assume that the teachers who failed these students–the teachers that THEY hired–failed? When I talk to people and tell them I am a teacher, to a man they all say, “I could not and would not do your job.”
You will see great competition among teachers for the best students. Do you think college football recruiting is bad or corrupt? Wait until you see the jockeying for students on a high school campus.
Teachers will be afraid to give an unmotivated or lazy student a failing grade; and your dream of a better economy with better educated workers will become a nightmare as more uneducated students are simply passed through the ranks and into the workforce.
Lastly, the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution will be argued not just for students who have been wronged, but by future teachers who have been put into an inequitable situation, and have been punished with wrongful termination.
By the way, I agree with the principle behind the decision–to rid education of people who are so inadequate that they don’t really even begin to try to do their jobs. I just think that the decision opens up a big can of worms and now puts teachers into a position where they will not take the toughest, most challenged students, and will not risk challenging a student to uphold their responsibility as learners. If teachers were already hesitant about giving low or failing grades, this will become even more real.
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“Some facts about the world of education:”
Really???
“Teachers don’t give F’s, students often earn them.”
What is an “F”? What does that mean in a factual world?
Please explain our current A-F grading system and it’s relation to reality!
Thanks in advance!
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You asked me to explain the A-F grading system.
What for?
It is policy in my school district. Yours?
If you want to reform the grading system, or if you have a beef against giving grades to students, what does that have to do with my statement, “Teachers don’t give F’s…”
Do you still need an explanation, or are you being coy?
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No, not coy, just being a tad facetious even though that didn’t come through, evidently.
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