Nancy F. Chewning, an assistant principal in Roanoke, Virginia, eviscerated TIME magazine for its cover story about teachers who are allegedly “Rotten Apples.” This impassioned article went viral.
“Have you characterized doctors or nurses on your cover as Rotten Apples? You have not. Is the government setting impossible benchmarks for doctors and nurses to make to correct this problem? No, they are not. Why? Because money talks in this country. The American Medical Association spent $18,250,000 in 2013 and $15,070,000 so far in 2014 lobbying our government; in fact, they rank number 8 in terms of organizations lobbying our government for influence. The NEA isn’t even in the ball park with the AMA, as they rank 221st.
“As Senator Elizabeth Warren has so aptly stated, “The system is rigged,” and it is definitely rigged against public education. In the latest Gallup poll, 75% of American parents said they were satisfied with the quality of education their child was receiving in public schools. However, the latest Gallup poll showed that only 14% of Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job. Have you done a cover calling Congress Rotten Apples? Why no, you have not. In fact, I checked your covers for the last two years and not once have you said a disparaging word about Congress on your cover. Yet, the approval rating for teachers is 75%, and you have chosen to go after them. Why is that? Is it because as Gawker revealed earlier this year that your writers and editorial staff are required to “produce content that is beneficial to advertiser relationship”? So, was this attack on teachers really about pleasing advertisers and perhaps a billionaire from Silicon Valley with deep pockets as well?”
She notes that no teachers were interviewed for the story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“No teachers were jnterviewed for the Time story”…BUT,
MILLIONS of teachers were HARMED by this story!
Just the way they intended it.
Lousy human beings!
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Bravo.
I know that there are sites that have told the truth about the war on teachers for a decade, but nothing has gone viral… too bad.
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/02/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
The public needs to know about the bullies who run the schools — into the ground and blame the practitioners who have no voice, and no choice but to follow their mandates.
http://bravery-bullies-blowhards.com
This needs to go viral, because this is what has happened to teachers
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
as the unions have looked the other way… http://www.perdaily.com/2014/07/former-ctc-attorney-kathleen-carroll-lays-out-unholy-alliance-between-union-and-public-education-pri.html
Nothing changes until the public knows about the war on teachers.
ttp://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/The_Insane_War_on_Teachers_and_Democracy.html
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Thank you Diane and thank you Nancy F. Chewning for highlighting the disparity in spending between the AMA, for example, and the NEA. In NJ, Christie and the teacher union bashers are always screaming about the money that the NJEA spends lobbying and advocating for public school teachers and the real public schools. Christie slams the NJEA for lobbying and portrays it as some sort of scandal. The NJEA has to spend a fortune combating all the vile negative propaganda of Christie, the compliant corporate media, Fox News, NJ101.5 and the rest of hate wing radio which is rabidly anti-union. Christie has the bully pulpit and he has free access to all the right wing media and even the main stream media which is not a friend of the NJEA. The Star Ledger once portrayed the NJEA as a vicious giant ape. The NJSpotlight web site regularly has some article on the millions that the NJEA spends lobbying against all the crap that Christie spews. Whatever the NJEA spends on advocacy and lobbying is chump change compared to the massive spending of the anti public school billionaires and hedge fund managers.
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Shills are all over the place. I got a Google alert for a story that I thought was in Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper. It was a blog for “Get Schooled” funded by the Gates Foundation. You can find many other hired hands–individuals and groups whom Gates and other of the usual suspects are paying to churn out anti-teacher and anti-union and anti-teacher education programs. Newsweek is a favored voice for the ratings of education that Gates gives to higher education programs based on his view of “comply or else” training (not education). He is expanding this with a “Consumer Reports” for rating curriculum materials, based on the compliance of publishers with the CCSS. This work is engaging teachers as raters–great for PR but the teachers have not created the criteria for the evaluations.
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Cross posted http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Roanoke-Educator-Excoriate-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Impossible_Influence-141113-550.html#comment519905
with a commentary I have posted here before, with all the links that make a lie of the Time Magazine piece, and exposes the propaganda that has become the national narrative,
subverting the conversation about LEARNING, and what it takes to support and ENABLE THE TEACHER-PRACTITIONER to do the job
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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A side note: in the 1960s, the AMA lobbied hard and long to derail Medicare. Their paid shill, Ronald Reagan, toured the country portraying Medicare as socialism and saying that Medicare would lead to a loss of freedom. The AMA and the GOP also lobbied hard against Truman’s efforts to enact a national health care system in the late 1940s. The AMA and the GOP did succeed in quashing Truman’s national health care but thankfully they were not successful in destroying Medicare.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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I think that the author might want to include all political spending, not just spending on lobbyists. According to this 2010 article in Education Week
(http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2010/10/nea_puts_muscle_and_money_behi.html), the NEA planned to spend $40,000,000 supporting candidates and causes. Does anyone know if the NEA succeeded in spending all $40 million that year?
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Oh, look over there – a shiny pebble!
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LOL!!!!!
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Dienne: I am shocked! Shock and amazed! Even shocked and awed while so many thoughts are invading my brain…
You don’t recognize that pebble as being the ‘Michael Jordan’ of all pebbles? You realize, I hope, that we must endlessly examine that “highly effective” pebble that adds so much value while we discard all the “grossly ineffective” pebbles that are subtracting value.
Ya know, just like VAM and stack ranking/forced ranking/burn-and-churn/rank-and-yank. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget “large data sets” that avoid the all-too-human tendency to focus on “outliers.” Otherwise we might end up being ‘outliars.’ And Dr. Raj Chetty and his fans certainly wouldn’t want that, now would they?
¿? Michael Jordan is an outlier among outliers? So the above…
Oh my, I think I can hear a edupreneurial version of Jimi Hendrix dancing in my noggin:
Cognitive dissonance all in my brain
Lately pebbles and VAM just don’t seem the same,
actin’ disconnected but I don’t know why
‘scuse me while I go outlie.
Outliers and outliars all around
Don’t know if I’m coming up or down.
Am I slap happy or in cage busting misery?
Whatever it is, “ed reform” has put a spell on me.
Okay, I think I’ll take a break now and lie down for a while and try to clear my mind of small hard objects…
😎
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Now that was extremely funny, Dienne. Thank you.
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Dienne,
The post here argues that Time magazine has not criticized some doctors and nurses in the country for poor job performance “Because money talks in this country. The American Medical Association spent $18,250,000 in 2013 and $15,070,000 so far in 2014 lobbying our government; in fact”.
If the $18 million dollars the AMA spends “talks”, why was the $40 million dollars that the NEA spent on politicians (not to mention the 59,000 volunteer workers) in 2010 so silent?
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How much did the AMA spend on politicians?
We’d need the answer to this question in order to have a fair discussion.
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Hm? Wonder where does that pebble come from. China?
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Good one. You just compared the spending of teachers and the organizations representing them with that of physicians and the organizations them, and with a straight (electronic) face actually implied that the two are comparable. I work in healthcare and you made me chuckle. Perhaps you should consider a new career in comedy?
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PJL,
The claim in the post is that money talks. Apparently teachers money does not talk.
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TE,
It’s the Golden Rule. He who has the gold rules. Teacher spending in politics is chump change compared to what physicians and their allies spend. There are other reasons why the money teachers spend isn’t is resonating all that much these days, but if they had MD type money to throw around teachers would have more influence.
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How much do physicians and their allies spend in politics?
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FLERP, we now have a new phenomenon in which billionaires spend politically through their foundations. Their annual spending to promote charters–and often vouchers–dwarfs anything spent by the NEA and the AFT. It is difficult to differentiate their spending on “advocacy” from old-fashioned lobbying.
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FLERP,
Good question, but not an easy one to put a precise number on. In 2013 – 2014 ~$68 million has been spent on lobbying by “health professionals”. The overwhelming majority of that money is lobbying on behalf of physicians. Then there is the $177 million spent on lobbying in Pharma/Health Products. There are many intricate financial relationships between MDs and pharma and device companies. Obviously portions of that 177 million are not promoting the interests of physicians, but a non-trivial portion of it is. Hospitals and nursing homes have spent $65 million on lobbying in this cycle. Again, at times the interests of the AHA and other organizations are aligned with MDs at other times they aren’t. Guess which organization spends the most by far on lobbying in education, the Association of American Medical Colleges. (The NEA and AFT are categorized under “labor”). The same pattern is repeated in campaign contributions.
By comparison the NEA and AFT combined spent $2.7 million on lobbying in 2013-2014. And neither they nor teachers as citizens spend anywhere near what physicians and their organizations do.
When it comes to buying influence physicians are the US Navy and teachers are McHale’s Navy. I do consulting in healthcare and know far too much about the political activities to fall for the fallacy that teachers and physicians have comparable political clout.
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According to opensecrets.org:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000064
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000068
In 2014:
NEA spent:
CONTRIBUTIONS:
$24,713,076
(ranked 3rd of 16,411)
LOBBYING
$1,833,925
(ranked 221st of 4,244)
OUTSIDE SPENDING
$6,222,289
(ranked 17th of 152)
AMA spent:
CONTRIBUTIONS
$1,890,571
(ranked 128th of 16,411)
LOBBYING
$15,070,000
(ranked 8th of 4,244 in 2014)
OUTSIDE SPENDING
$0
So, it would seem that the NEA did indeed spend more money on politics than the AMA, although it is true that the AMA spent a lot more on lobbying.
Which would be more likely to influence Time magazine?
Or is it more likely that the owners of Time, or the people who buy advertising in Time, have their own reasons for wanting to portray America’s public school teachers in a negative light?
I’ve wondered about Time’s political and investment ties in education might be ever since 2010 or 2011, when the magazine declared RI’s Deborah Gist to be one of the 100 most influential people in the country. It seemed rather out of the blue, almost like Eli Broad, Jeb Bush, or one of Gist’s other patrons might have had a hand in it.
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TE is offering a canard with the NEA to AMA comparison because it’s not remotely close to the entire story. Teachers have two professional organizations (AFT and NEA) through which they provide campaign contributions and fund lobbying and as we know teachers do not have incomes that allow them to make large personal contributions.
Physicians have well in excess of 30 professional organizations engaged lobbying and contributing. Every medical, surgical and dental professional association engages in in both lobbying and campaign finance. Physicians also share common interest in regard to compensation and regulation with numerous other entities that also spend considerable sums on lobbying and campaign finance. For example, med mal carriers spend quite a lot of money garnering political influence and most of their effort is aligned with physician desires to increase compensation and decrease regulatory burdens. And there are numerous other deep-pocketed groups who are lobbying in unison with physicians. Then there’s the tiny difference in physician and teacher income. Maybe, just maybe, MDs have more personal money to spend on buying influence than teachers do.
Physicians far outspend teachers in politics. It’s one, though certainly not the only, reason why they have so much more political influence than teachers do. Equating what is spent on behalf of physicians with what’s spent on behalf of teachers is complete nonsense.
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Perhaps we should add AFT.
AFT
Contributions
$9,205,638
ranks 9 of 16,411
LOBBYING
$870,842 (2014)
$1,412,195 (2013)
ranks 352 of 4,244 in 2014
OUTSIDE SPENDING
$502,146
ranks 46 of 152
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The spending of the NEA and AFT pales in comparison to the spending of the Gates Foundation, the WAlton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, and dozens of others, which spend hundreds of millions annually to propagandize for high-stakes testing, charters, vouchers, and the Common Core.
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Dr. Ravitch,
None of those organizations was mentioned in the original post. The thesis of the original was that doctors and nurses have been treated better by Time magazine because of the lobbying expenditures of the AMA.
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Perhaps, TE, but we should really then add ALL of the physician organizations too, shouldn’t we?
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werebat73,
I certainly agree that all should be added together, but I think it has very little if anything to do with the editorial decisions at Time.
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werebat73,
Yes we should add all physician organizations. I assume TE knows that, but doing so doesn’t assist him in trolling this website.
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PJL,
Would you trust the numbers I came up with?
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TE,
Presumably, I would believe your numbers. Spending aside, the fundamental difference in the public sphere, not just politically, between teachers and physicians is status. Partly that status is derived from physician’s high median income. But even the physician working at an urgent care facility (who probably isn’t making that much more than a PA) still has the broader status conferred by the letters MD.
Female-dominated professions are pretty uniformly low-status and teaching is a female-dominated profession. People who lack status as much easier to bully politically or otherwise. As my kids would say, “it is what it is”.
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PJL,
I have a good deal of sympathy for the idea that female dominated professions are low status, but that was not the argument used in the post. It would also be difficult to make that argument about nursing, which is specifically mentioned in the post as one of the “protected” professions.
The good news is that since 2004 at least 47% of the graduating class from medical school have been women. It is only a matter of time before there will be rough equity between the number of male and female physicians.
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Bill Gates is one man and an oligarch. He pays nothing to support the schools in my community. Worker associations like the NEA reflect the opinions of hundreds of thousands of middle income workers, who build our cities and towns by living in them, buying houses, spending in the local stores, supporting cultural and community activities and paying taxes.
If the Gates family were not U.S. citizens and they stopped selling their products, in the U.S., a competitor would fill the void. Americans could hope for better products, as a result of the free enterprise system working, as promised. Company profits spent on product improvement, not implementation of a rigged system to garner greater profits for oligarchs, would be a novel experiment for our nation.
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I hope this meets with her approval, but I reproduce in full [link included] of a comment by Laura H. Chapman on this blog, 10-23-14, on a thread under the posting “TIME Magazine Attacks America’s Teachers: Write a Letter to Time”—
[start comment]
Time Magazine’s circulation is declining.
It has a new policy that stack ranks writers.
One of the rating scores is on writing “content that is beneficial to advertisers.”
The longstanding principal of keeping editorial separate from ads is gone.
Experiments with direct advertising on the cover of Time are underway (also for Sports Illustrated). Given the cover pitch is: the “bad teacher problem” may be solved by “silicon valley,” I would not be surprised it the cover is not functioning as an ad paid for by a foundation or cluster of corporations eager to remain out of view but also eager to rush forward with tech-in-the-answer- for education– so just hand over your taxes for education and let us do the job.
The stack rating for Time writers, including the 2-20 point scale on “content beneficial to advertiser” was revealed in memos set to the newspaper writers union. Those documents included some of management’s ratings of Time writers… (Shades of the teacher ratings published in the LA newspapers for individual teachers.)
One of the commenters on the blog that exposed this policy noted that one writer who scored high on “content of benefit to advertisers” scored low on “quality of writing.”
So there you have what’s really happening at Time, thanks to this website and…. a member of a union.
http://gawker.com/time-inc-rates-writers-on-how-beneficial-they-are-to-1623253026
[end comment]
Reminds me of a cartoon I saw many years ago. “You’ve heard of the Golden Rule?” A quizzical look from the person being queried. “He who has the gold, rules.”
Or as Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Follow the money.
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee(-Johnson)]
How did I know she would say that? Because to her it makes a lot of ₵ent¢…
😎
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I e-mailed the editor of a Time magazine competitor to ask if his publication has credibility. I referenced the Gawker article about Time Inc., and its writer-ranking, based on the criteria, “Beneficial to advertisers”. The editor replied that his magazine doesn’t follow the practice and he said he “laughed”. Time magazine, within the industry and society at-large, as a joke footnote, is a sad legacy for a once-venerable publication.
If our local libraries fail to reject or clearly identify which magazines allow plutocratic interests to influence what appears in the publications, they are missing an opportunity to strengthen our communities. Readers require highly visible information about the lack of journalistic firewalls, when we have reason to believe investigative reports are valid.
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What a great post. Last week, I was prepared for the adrenaline rush when I would finally lay my eyes on an actual copy of TIME Magazine at the check-out line. Guess what? In all my visits to all the grocery stores and pharmacies I regularly frequent in the city of Los Angeles last week, I never saw one single copy! I think that says something about the magazine’s relevance–which was also mentioned on a post here last week. I’d say that with our excellent pro-active response, twitter and facebook campaigns and blog posts, we supporters of public education got more out of that cover than TIME or the deformers did. Congratulations to all of us.
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