Our beloved commenter KrazyTA offered this response to the post about the ethics complaint filed by the Néw Jersey Charter Schools Association against Professor Julia Sass Rubin for identifying herself as a Rutgers professor when speaking or publishing research about charters.
#je suis julia
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am going to go out on a limb and set myself up for possible ridicule, in order to make what I consider to be an important point, a point expressed so much more movingly and deeply than I am capable of doing—
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
[John Donne, “No Man is an Island”]
The following is taken from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website:
“Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.”
He is best remembered for the following profound bit of wisdom, gained at great personal sacrifice:
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Link: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392
Je Suis Julia.
😎
While I fully support Rubin, I don’t think any riff on Je suis Charlie is called for. I think we need to honor Charlie.
Rubin may be being stifle, but Charlie is about murder.
I take absolutely no offense from what you wrote.
I do not dispute what you wrote.
Different sensibilities. And I assume different life experiences.
That’s just the way I see and feel it now.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Love it KTA:) Moi, je suis Charlie, et je suis Julia aussi.
Krazy TA…unlike much more detailed information I have left elsewhere….I want to offer just the bare bones story as presented in the St. Louis Post Dispatch…..and no response will just about seal the deal for me….whatever I see wrong probably is not….my complaint is tilting at windmills. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/second-kipp-school-to-open-in-st-louis/article_6762d8f0-648c-5817-8246-6d65c1380904.html
St. Louis schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams announced they’d forged a partnership, indicating a thaw between the district and charter schools.
The agreement gives KIPP free access to the Mitchell building, and possibly other vacant buildings for future schools. In return, all attendance, enrollment and test score data for KIPP Victory will be reflected in the data of the district, potentially strengthening its struggling performance. To continue using the buildings, KIPP schools would need to meet certain performance standards.
KIPP will continue to operate autonomously of the school system, as all tuition-free public charter schools do. Washington University is the sponsor.
David Brooks wrote a very pertinent comment about ‘free speech’ in a university setting, supposing that the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ cartoons that caused this tragedy were put in a campus setting: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/david-brooks-i-am-not-charlie-hebdo.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fdavid-brooks
Says Brooks: “Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.
“Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.
Brooks continues: “So this might be a teachable moment. As we are mortified by the slaughter of those writers and editors in Paris, it’s a good time to come up with a less hypocritical approach to our own controversial figures, provocateurs and satirists.”
And there was another interesting opinion piece by Ross Douthat who writes:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/
“If I devoted my next blog post to a scabrous, profanity-laced satire of the Buddha, I would not expect Chait or anyone else to immediately leap to my defense if the Times decided to delete the post and dismiss me from its ranks of columnists. If I ran a reactionary website that devoted itself to recycling pre-modern calumnies against Jewish law and ritual, my rights as an American would not be traduced if people picketed my offices and other journalists told me I had a moral obligation to desist. And similarly, in a cultural and political vacuum, it would be okay to think that some of the images (anti-Islamic and otherwise) that Charlie Hebdo regularly published, especially those chosen entirely for their shock value, contributed little enough to public discussion that the world would not suffer from their absence.
“But we are not in a vacuum. We are in a situation where my third point applies, because the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.”
As for me, Freedom of Speech’ is guaranteed my the Bill of Rights, and I had no opportunity to speak in my own defense when principals who are NOT SWORN UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY, were free to say anything the wished to remove me from my practice despite all the evidence that proved they were blatant liars.
Forgive me for always bringing you , dear reader, back to this point, because, you see, THIS is the crux of the evaluation/testing debacle, and until the truth of this template for destruction is exposed in the media, nothing will change, and all the chatter about VAM will not give teachers the freedom to speak either in their own practice or in their own defense.
Me suis Julia, tambien….Public educators and parents of Queens and Nassau counties stand by your side…as do many tens of thousands more!
Merci beaucoup!
Julia Sass Rubin: no, thank YOU.
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Real change won’t come as long as everyone quietly suffers and complains in private. As Jim Hightower has observed:
“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.” [Jim Hightower]
Someone has to be the nail that sticks up, the person on the bus that refuses to give up her seat even under duress and advice from all quarters to not make a fuss.
Silence is not an option now; it is peddled by the “education reform” establishment as consent. But the actions of the many start with the voices of a few:
“If you don’t speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?” [Jim Hightower]
By standing up to the edubullies, you stand with a genuine American hero:
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” [Frederick Douglass]
Again, thank you/muchas gracias/domo arigatoo gozaimasu.
😎
To all conscientious Americans and immigrants who appreciate freedom with respect to humanity and Public Education Autonomy:
If we choose to live with freedom of expression and to be respect for our human rights, then we MUST FIGHT back any oppression, any looting public assets, and any intentional killing innocent people regardless reasons.
If we accept the law in the hand of the savage, barbarous, and manipulative power, then we are truthfully ignorant, weak, and cowardice.
If we are educated, civilized, and willing to choose how to live with freedom of expression, how to strengthen our children generation’s public education with creativity, sport, music, languages, arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), then we MUST UNITE to BRING BACK what has worked well and what will move forward to the best of body, mind, and spirit; in other word, to the best of economy for all people of working class and middle class, the best Public Education for K-12, and the most profound and respectful human rights.
People, who abuse their power to harm others or society, must be exiled along with their loved ones and their relatives without any chance to come back to America for good, and for life. it is an exception for any of their loved one and any of relatives who can stay back if they declare to abandon their abusive people in advanced before these abusive people commit their crimes that are related to intentionally kill innocent people, or that are related to intentionally destroy the economy in organization, or in society.
In conclusion, mafia, gangsters, drug lords/dealers, bad bankers, corrupted government officials including military and research scholars of any fields will be eliminated for good and for life. We do not care nor need investment money from all bad people from any countries around the world who have destroyed their own countries and their people in order to come to North America to enjoy their freedom that they do not deserve, nor their loves ones deserve.
In conclusion, it is time for the conscientious and intelligent people to take back our control and our meaningful lives. It is worth to FIGHT BACK in order to live without fear and without manipulation from all infested + corrupted money hunger intelligent people who do not have conscience. Back2basic
When a charter school in the college town where our state’s flagship campus is located proposed to expand (k-12) a few years ago, several university professors spoke in favor of this expansion at public hearings. At least one offered a litany of (irrelevant) university-related titles when providing spoken and published support for the school, which his children attend. Another faculty member whose children attend the school offered astonishingly shoddy data analysis to refute the already well-substantiated (and now, thanks to subsequent research, irrefutable) claim that this charter disproportionately enrolled privileged children (e.g. those from faculty families) by constructing barriers to enrollment for poorer kids (e.g. the 2/3 of students in our district who qualify for federal in-school meal subsidies–at the time, DE charters were not required to participate in those meal programs).
As a fellow faculty member at the state university, and vocal opponent of the charter’s expansion, due to evidence of its demographic skimming & corresponding harm to our public school district (the charter is state-authorized), I was deeply troubled by my colleagues’ willingness to deploy their academic credentials for such obvious personal gain, and to use dubious analytical methods to support their position when available data proved unfavorable to the argument they wished to make in the school’s favor [for ex., the professor’s demographic analysis relied heavily on private school enrollment data, which includes students from several neighboring states and others who do not reside in this district–all in order to increase his calculation of the % of white, non-poor kids in the area]. I wondered whether there were grounds for bringing ethics charges against these men through the university, but the case seemed too nebulous to pursue–they were somewhat careful about the contexts in which they did and did not provide academic credentials when advocating for the school.
Surely if academics can use their credentials to advocate shamelessly for their children’s charter schools, using methods that would never withstand peer review, others can cite their professional training when critiquing charters on the basis of considered research and analysis.
UG!