Peter Greene fell for EduShyster, as everyone does. She can interview anyone, and she interviewed Peter Cunningham. Here’s Peter’s take.
He writes, for starters:
“I have now met Jennifer “Edushyster” Berkshire, and I totally get it. I don’t believe there is a human being on the planet who, upon sitting down with her, would not want to answer every question just to prolong the conversation and once you’re talking, well, lying to the woman would be like kicking a puppy.
“So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.
“She’s just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I’d moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).
“I don’t imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I’m going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.
“There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says
“There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side.
“Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I’m pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I’ve seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with.
“In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas– we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed.
“It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform– the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they’ve been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.”
Money can’t buy you love.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please read all the comments and Peter should too.
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My wife has a nice way of describing what could be called the “Peter Cunningham Effect.” The 1% and their enablers, suck ups and hangers-on like to talk about “grit” and “no excuses”. However,their tough talking, hard core capitalism jive belies the fact that they are just grown up babies. As my wife says, they are constantly claiming they are victimized. That’s the word she uses. They continually whine, “Poor us….boo, hoo, hoo.” Meanwhile, they’re the ones who are controlling the levers of power in this country. You see this all the time on Fox News but the attitude is evident everywhere these days. It’s really this “kiss up and kick down” mentality. They’re good at talking tough….that is when it’s a teacher or student who is under their demented control.
Note to Peter Cunningham and your fellow whiners: the United States Of America was created by people who had backbones. They were able to speak truth to power and do it in a way that has inspired people for centuries.
Too bad your wack job reforms are destroying this country.
Meanwhile you keep trying to bamboozle the people into believing that you’re noble patriots of some sort who care oh-so-much for the downtrodden. Not.
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The mythical free market. I thought Cunningham was going to start channeling Joe McCarthy and begin rooting out communists. Most people who follow the free market religion never really had to compete in one nor have felt its effects. The free markets of St. Ronnie today are simply cronyism, chaos, inequality, and corruption. For Reformers, it is the free market of THEIR ideas. What never crosses their mind is the fact a couple of the tried and true ideas that are evolved from past free markets is, in fact, public schools and teacher lead classrooms.
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By the way, Robert Reich has a great article in Salon about the reality of today’s “free markets”. They are neither free nor markets. Free markets require transparency, morality, parity, and collective goals. Far, far from the markets of today which are essentially rigged against true working Americans.
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“the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success”
The ability to distinguish between two similar entities (things or ideas) is fundamental to critical thinking. Ostensibly, that is the real purpose of education.
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True. To Reformers, it is all about a few digits on a page from a test.
The Bar exam has never prevented bad lawyers, but it most certainly has denied good lawyers. Yet, it continues. That is the future of K12 testing. Just keep doing something because, well, we have been doing it.
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Ah! Andrew Cuomo!
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Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result?
Reform is so well financed, politically connected, and the potential rewards of looting the tax structure so great, they will never go away.
Until you drive a stake through their heart. Good luck finding a heart.
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Money can’t buy love…but it can put you in touch with people who’ll be real fond of you.
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I much appreciate the interview by Edushyster, the piece by Peter Greene, and the comments accompanying the above two postings and on the thread of this posting.
I do not want to repeat what others have so eloquently written so let me confine myself to the following.
Three of the things that struck me about Peter Cunningham’s remarks:
1), A disorienting lack of very recent historical perspective. Let me suggest he pony up a few dollars and buy just the following 2004 paperback: MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: HOW THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IS DAMAGING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR SCHOOLS, Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds. Ignorance is not bliss or benign. He is willfully uninformed and misinformed.
2), His disingenuous call for civil dialogue when, just to take ONE EXAMPLE, there are a lot of teachers (many of whom are all parents themselves!) that are being ordered to shut up about all aspects of high-stakes standardized testing. He’s a “choice” guy, right? Then he should be on the front lines calling for teachers to be able to have the choice of using their firsthand expertise and knowledge to inform and educate the parents of their students—and others in the community—about the misuses and abuses of the tools of the rheephorm measure-and-punish approach. With all due respect, his silence on this issue gives the lie to his call for civility.
3), His sense of entitlement—and his bewilderment that he and his rheephorm peers are entitled to, er, entitlement—is stunning but, by this point in the ed debates, a predictable cliché. How can he make a point about unfair treatment when he uses as his exemplars Kevin Huffman, John King, John Deasy and Michelle Rhee? John Deasy and Michelle Rhee—sorry about the gender bias in my ordering—or rather, with Michelle Rhee and John Deasy among his top victims—
Are literally the definition of edubullies. And I mean in the sense that Sandy Banks, all in for John Deasy when he was LAUSD Supt., meant when she wrote about the NFL and Richie Incognito. *Actually, even worse.*
I don’t for moment think that Peter Cunningham isn’t speaking his mind. It’s just that the bubble he lives in—and the astonishingly ill-thought out premises that he takes for granted—don’t permit him to do anything but put his own foot in his mouth.
Frankly, it reminds me of the NJ Commissioner of Education. I am going to paraphrase (google this blog for the reference) but all the remarks of Mr. Cunningham boil down to this:
The need to double down on whatevers. With this proviso: double down but in a kinder gentler way. *Meaning, the fundamentals are sound it’s just that the implementation is bad bad bad. Need to get my subordinates to come up with some technical tweak or technocratic fix that will fix what is already irreparably broken.*
And I can’t end without giving the most insanely krazy props to Edushyster.
That interview should win some kind of award. I don’t know which one, or if it exists, but it is a cage busting achievement gap crushing example of a 21st creatively innovative piece that lays to rest the idea that the soft bigotry of low expectations has all but wiped out the self-skewering interview.
Rheeally! And its merits are, in every Johnsonally sort of way, more betterer than anything coming out of those big gubmint monopoly schools aka factories of failure aka dropout factories.
Edushyster, I see you a 13th percentile and raise you a 90th!
Really!
😎
P.S. To the shills and trolls: the last part is parody and satire (except for the praise for Edushyster). Please check with David Coleman unless he’s in one of his don’t-give-a-*#?! moments.
😏
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From
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-cunningham/ravitch-redux_b_3768887.html
CUNNINGHAM ON RAVITCH:
“During the Obama administration’s first term, I served as Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach in the U.S. Department of Education, where one of my jobs was to monitor criticism of our policies and develop our responses. One of my jobs was to monitor criticism of our policies and develop our responses. One of the people I monitored pretty closely was Diane Ravitch…
“Over the years, her criticism of the administration became more and more strident. It was increasingly clear that she was not interested in a genuine conversation with us, but rather was interested in driving her anti-administration message, even if it meant resorting to tactics that are beneath someone of her stature: ad hominem attacks on the secretary, cherry-picking data, setting up straw man arguments, taking language out of context and distorting its meaning, and ignoring sound evidence that conflicts with her point of view.
“At a certain point, I made the decision that, rather than engage with her, we would ignore her and, for the most part, we did.”
——–
Great, Pete. You spend taxpayers dollars “pretty closely monitoring” someone, but it’s all just a waste as you refuse to approach any arguments or evidence she presents with an open mind.
You list a series of her “tactics that are beneath someone of her stature”, yet refuse (read the piece at the above link) to give even one example of her actually engaging in one of these “tactics.” The reader of this should just take your word for it that what you claim is absolutely true.
Whatever.
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That’s some bullet-point for a resume job description:
•Monitored Dr Diane Ravitch’s criticism of department policy.
What’s the Career-Ready Indicator for this task? Are batteries for closet reading required?
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“It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn’t change much at all.”
CAREFUL! Don’t give them any ideas.
I know that there are already hedge fund billionaires out there who want to take away teacher retirements and cut pay to poverty levels for teachers who are still working, but let’s not help them achieve their goals to turn us into homeless beggars.
We still have to have money to pay for the domain names of our Blogs/Websites, and, for me, that money comes out of my monthly teacher retirement check. Oh, and when I retired from teaching in 2005, I took a 40% cut in pay and left with no medical just like most teachers who retire.
I bet that bag lunch wasn’t free either. If our meager pay checks vanish, how can we eat and keep up our energy to support the pro-public ed movement. Last I looked, we have to pay for water too. So far, no one has figured out how to cut off our air supply, but the Koch brothers are doing all they can to pollute both our air and water so we come down with terminal diseases faster, have shorter more miserable life spans, and die off.
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Jack: I remembered that too.
Thank you for bringing it up.
I doubt that he feels the inescapable and heavy moral responsibility he has placed on himself, but I would like Mr. Cunningham to mention one—JUST ONE!—specific instance involving something important where the owner of this blog has done what he describes as:
“she was not interested in a genuine conversation with us, but rather was interested in driving her anti-administration message, even if it meant resorting to tactics that are beneath someone of her stature.”
Let me mention the mighty beam placed in his eye by his very own bad self. I seem to recall a posting on this blog of 10-24-2012 called “I Will Vote for Obama”—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/24/i-will-vote-for-obama/
So let me get this straight… by Cunningham’s logic, the above obviously shows that the owner of this blog is so rabidly anti-administration that she urged a vote for someone with whom (as she put it on the above posting) she “strongly oppose[s] what he is doing to our nation’s education system.” [brackets mine]
😱
So after refusing to engage in dialogue with her, and ignoring her, and by extension all those who might share some of her ideas, now you are all tingly with the aim of spreading good will and love so that John Deasy and Michelle Rhee and John King and Kevin Huffman will once again get get the almost unanimously good press they used to enjoy?
Whilst others may criticize Mr. Cunningham for his word salad fundamentalism and cognitive dissonance zealotry, I think the problem lies in his undying adherence to a certain philosophical orientation:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
And like his former boss Arne Duncan, Mr. Cunningham never ever strays from the narrow path of Marxist correctness.
😳
Because once embarked on Rheephorm Road one can dispense such pearls of Marxian wisdom as:
“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”
And at the end of that path is Groucho.
Beaming in approval.
Rheeally!
😎
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When you defend yourself against the attacks of a sociopath, they claim victimhood and project their pathology on to you, which is precisely the process at work here.
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