Ah, just what we needed: A new “reform” group to tell teachers what they should do and when and how and where and etc.
Peter Greene warns his readers to beware of a new group called #TeachStrong.
He points out that among the 40 organizations endorsing this initiative are the usual reformster groups, like Teach for America, the NCTQ, RelayGSE (the “graduate school for charter teachers), and a host of other familiar names, in addition to the anomalous AFT and NEA.
Peter reviews the new group’s goals and writes:
So, mostly the same old stuff. Make life harder for teachers in concrete ways (licensure, tenure) but try to offset it in vague ways (more time, and tools, and PD). And as always– absolutely nothing about giving teachers a strong voice in the direction of their profession.
No, the promise here is that we will ask more of you and do more to you.
And yet there are some odd features here. For instance, much of this is not exactly in tune with the TFA five-weeks, no-real-license plan. But in her WaPo piece, Lyndsey Layton reports that TFA basically has no intention of changing what they do, they just thought this seemed like a cool initiative to join. Really? Why would they sign on to this if they didn’t support the stated goals? Hmmm…
The assumption of this new group is that teachers are the problem. They need to be fixed. Once again, no mention of working conditions or of the conditions that harm children’s opportunity to learn.
He suspects that this foreshadows Hillary Clinton’s education plank.
Peter concludes that having a seat at this table is not good for teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just another acronym and/or fancy name designed to mislead and food easy-to-fool people who prefer to be ignorant and led by the nose ring by someone else, but follow the money and it almost always leads back to the same source.
LikeLike
sometimes when you are invited to the table it’s as a guest.
sometimes when you are invited to the table it’s as the meal.
LikeLike
Don’t say we weren’t warned…
Rod Serling, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, episode 89, 1962. “To Serve Man.”
From a bit of the Wikipedia entry:
[start]
The story is based on the 1950 short story “To Serve Man “, written by Damon Knight. The title is a play on the verb serve, which has a dual meaning of “to assist” and “to provide as a meal.” The episode is one of the few instances in the series wherein an actor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewing audience at the episode’s end. The episode, along with the line, “It’s a cookbook!,” have become elements in pop culture.
[end]
For a synopsis of the entire show, see—
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)
Ah yes, that seat at the table…
😎
LikeLike
If you’re not at the table at all, though, you will almost surely be on the menu. It’s that old thing about keeping your enemies closer…
LikeLike
Sometimes your seat at the table looks like this:
LikeLike
HOW DO YOUPOST A PHOTO , HERE???
LikeLike
1) Type keyword on a Google image search
2) Click on selected photo/image
3) Click “view image”
4) Right click on web address and left click “copy”
5) Right click and paste into comment
LikeLike
NYS Teacher,
I tried to follow your direction, but got stumped on #4. How do I click the web address when the screen has the image on it?
LikeLike
Thank you. CanI ass a photo of my own?
LikeLike
I hate the auto spell. Can i Paste a photo from my desktop…I am so not-tech savvy.
LikeLike
You just need to be grounded 😉
LikeLike
#TeachStrong says it wants to influence policy discussions through the primary and election season. I hereby predict that one candidate is going to be heavily influenced by this initiative and is going to stand up for this important teacher-supporting thing. I hereby predict that #TeachStrong is an organization created to help guard and support Hillary Clinton’s education flank in the run-up to 2016.
I think we’re looking at the eventual education plank of HRC’s platform.”
Hah! I wonder when national Democrats realized their education agenda is identical to that of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich. Sometime after Labor Day, I reckon.
LikeLike
Perceptive again.Thanks.
LikeLike
When they offer teachers their education plank it looks like this:
LikeLike
Replace that water with the bonny brown Atlantic at 31 degrees, and it’s be even more accurate.
LikeLike
Rikers juvenile justice project was closed. “Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit, was the independent evaluator of the program, called Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience, or ABLE. The benchmark was whether the program reduced recidivism among 16-to-18 year-olds who entered Rikers in 2013 by 10% or more. Intervention focused on social skills, personal responsibility and decision-making.
“The program did not reduce recidivism and therefore did not meet the pre-defined threshold of success,” Vera said in a statement.
The program will end on Aug. 31.
LikeLike
http://www.vera.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/adolescent-behavioral-learning-experience-evaluation-rikers-island-summary-2.pdf evaluation of Rikers juvenile justice program
LikeLike
For those interested in the 9 key points, they are available here:
http://teachstrong.org/
The principles include increasing teacher pay, providing more time for teachers to plan and collaborate, retaining tenure, create new pathways giving teachers opportunities to lead & grow.
The former St. Paul Federation of Teachers president, now AFT exec VP spoke at the meeting today.
It will be interesting to see what this group does, along with providing ideas.
LikeLike
I am a critic of the status quo of teacher education programs. However the constellation of corporate logos at the bottom of this TeachStrong page makes me queasy. I look at that and see a well-dressed army of arrogant, meddling, ignorant,, jejune Ivy-educated non-teachers re-engineering our profession. Yet another slick, faux-competent and ill-starred intervention –like so many 3rd World “development” programs, or US military meddling in the Middle East.
LikeLike
Why it’s the bestestest and the brightestest doing their thing all over the world. Aren’t we lucky???
LikeLike
I still have scars and memories of their last best and brightest endeavors. I will join Lloyd in showing what old Marines and Special Forces people do when pushed to far. In some cases violence seems rational….We could use a little bad luck and have them go to the middle east to do good.
LikeLike
Love your description of the charlatans who are offering such wonderful enticements… like tenure… LOL! Like young teachers gets to stay, even if their performance is excellent. The district saves between 40k and 60k by keeping a revolving door…. the devil is in the details! Teachers in training should take a look at the ‘gotcha squad’ in NYC before believing that they will ever be retained.
http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html
Or google Francesco Portelos, http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Portelos.html
and see his epic battle to keep his job. After losing his position in the school where he was a respected educator, and going from pillar to post as a sub, and enduring the humiliation
http://protectportelos.org/does-workplace-bullying-continues-my-33-hrs-behind-bars/that only a corrupt bureaucracy of sociopaths and social dominators can produce, he is now appointed at a school>
I follow I’m on Facebook (and so should YOU) and have seen how the administration at his new school, is subverting him.
So sad… something the usual suspects you describe consider ‘business as usual,’ while promising new teachers the moon!
LikeLike
The #TeachStrong Mascot:
LikeLike
“corrupt bureaucracy of sociopaths” — well-put.
LikeLike
Probationary teacher status has been extended from 3 years to five here in NH. And throughout that time, a teacher is an employee-at-will with a 175-180-day contract. Of course the revolving door is the goal and will remain. Telling teachers that their retention will depend on performance reviews is nonsense when for 5 years the teacher can be non-renewed without cause!
LikeLike
Joe,
Hope your feeling fine these days. See below for my take on those nine principles. As you might suspect not a glowing endorsement-ha ha!
Duane
LikeLike
So do you think most young teachers will be snowed by it, until they get to that five year point? At which point it’s too late? Is it a ploy to win young votes for HRC?
LikeLike
It seems that it could be a democrapic ploy to mollify younger voters and appear to be “modern”, hip, etc. . . .
LikeLike
As usual, Joe Nathan is an echo chamber for the misdirections and half-truths of the so-called reformers: #TeachStrong’s “principles” do not call for “retaining tenure” (sudden, outright elimination of which so-called reformers know might generate opposition) but instead say that we must “Ensure tenure is a meaningful signal of professional accomplishment.”
Translated into real-world practice, that means that ever-weakened tenure laws will exist for a little while longer (until the unions are so weakened/neutralized that they can finally be killed off, like the unions themselves) as mirages for new teachers, always receding into the distance as they approach. This is already the case in NYC, where teachers are having their probationary periods arbitrarily extended for years, in the hope that they will give up and go elsewhere.
More deception from people who appear to be totally incapable of telling the truth.
LikeLike
Agree
LikeLike
Cross posted Peter’s article at OPED with this comment
The problem with ‘teaching’ is the abundance of voices who claim to be pundits but who know little about LEARNING and what must be present to enable any teacher to actually ‘teach.’
An interesting piece by Vicki Cobb
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-cobb/the-demise-of-the-artistt_b_6785328.html author of many children’s books about hands-on science, shows the confusion which is here. She recently spoke at a children’s literature conference in Florida. She was disturbed to meet a new breed of teacher: teachers who had grown up in the era of high-stakes testing and scripted lessons. Too many thought that this is the way school was supposed to be, because it was all they had experienced.
The ignorance about the 30 year war on teachers allows any charlatan to introduce untested ‘ideas and magic elixirs…. no evidence required http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
So easy to confuse novice teachers, while over a hundred thousand teachers were pushed out of our successful public schools so their expertise (and their voices) would be lost and the schools would fail.
The issue that needs to be addressed is how do we end the civil rights abuse of teachers, http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html because you, see, within 3 years of hiring, –as a novice teacher approaches higher salary and benefits — they are sent packing on fabricated charges like this, in LA.
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
LikeLike
So this idea will work, then, to get Hillary elected and move forward with reforms won’t it?
The young folks hold the keys? To the detriment of their future as professionals?
LikeLike
Here is one of the Deans endorsing this nonsense who is from the University of Missouri-St. Louis/UMSL.
Office of the Dean
Carole G. Basile, Dean and Professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL), received her Bachelors (Human Development) and Masters (Counseling Education) degrees from Pennsylvania State University and her doctorate (Curriculum and Instruction) from the University of Houston.
Prior to coming to UMSL, Dr. Basile served as Faculty Chair of Advanced Urban Education. She was the founder and former Director of the Center for Applied Science and Mathematics for Innovation and Competitiveness (CASMIC) at the University of Colorado Denver (UCD), a center established as a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) collaborative between the community and the university writ large. She served as Director and Associate Dean of Teacher Education at UCD for six years leading a successful professional development school model across six school districts.
Her academic career has included numerous grant projects related to math and science education, teacher education, community engagement, and environmental education with funding from the Department of Education, the National Governor’s Association, and the National Science Foundation, the National Education Association, and the National Commission for Teaching and America’s Future.
Her research efforts have been in the area of teacher education and teacher leadership, professional development schools, environmental education, and interdisciplinary learning. She has published numerous articles, books, book chapters, and technical papers. In addition, she has received outstanding teaching awards for her ability to teach using experiential learning techniques.
Her community work is also extensive, as she has actively partnered with many urban school districts, informal and non-profit community education and social service entities, constituents from business and industry, and workforce and economic development. She has served on several community advisory and executive boards. Also to her credit, she has 12 years experience in business and industry in the areas of sales, management, marketing, and corporate training and development.
See any K-12 experience there???
Thought not but I guess she’s a “thought leader”, eh?!?!
LikeLike
Oh yeah… I met many a ‘staff developer’ who got to tell me what i should do, but who never set foot in a room full of divergent learners in any city, let alone enYC>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thought leaders turn into thought police actually, don’t they?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Eventually
LikeLike
Seems so many times.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, it’s not anomalous at all that the AFT and NEA would be on board with these edu-privateers: it’s been obvious for years that the union misleadership is captive, willingly or not, to these monstrous grifters.
LikeLike
Oh, by the way, it’s also typical of the tin ears these people have that the name of their bogus group should echo that of another discredited fraud and liar, Lance Armstrong.
LikeLike
Platitude: plat·i·tude
/ˈpladəˌt(y)o͞od/
noun
1. a remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful “she began uttering liberal platitudes” synonyms: cliché, truism, commonplace, banality, old chestnut, bromide, inanity, banal/trite/hackneyed/stock phrase
I believe that platitude correctly describes these nine statements. They’re not the Ten Commandments, they’re the Nine Platitudes maybe a more hip and modern twist, The Platitudes Nine, eh!!! Here they are:
1. Identify and recruit more diverse teacher candidates with great potential to succeed, with a deliberate emphasis on diversifying the teacher workforce.
2. Reimagine teacher preparation to make it more rooted in classroom practice and a professional knowledge base, with universal high standards for all candidates.
3. Raise the bar for licensure so it is a meaningful measure of readiness to teach.
4. Increase compensation in order to attract and reward teachers as professionals.
5. Provide support for new teachers through induction or residency programs.
6. Ensure tenure is a meaningful signal of professional accomplishment.
7. Provide significantly more time, tools, and support for teachers to succeed, including through planning, collaboration, and development.
8. Design professional learning to better address student and teacher needs, and to foster feedback and improvement.
9. Create career pathways that give teachers opportunities to lead and grow professionally.
I hesitate (just being lazy right now) to go through all nine commenting on the inanities and false suppositions upon which they are based and showing how all are direct products of the edudeformer agenda that has been in place for 15 years and we really don’t need anymore of that shit.
So if all here would pick their favorite platitude and hit it with an attitude I’d greatly appreciate it.
LikeLike
I’ll take a stab at #9. It’s rephormer speak for “get teachers out of the classroom as fast as possible before they have a chance to figure out that rephorm is a steaming pile of —-“. Anyone who’s really teaching is “leading” and “growing professionally” every single day. “Career pathways” are for careers in which the job itself is not intrinsically rewarding or meaningful. No one becomes a Junior Accounts Manager because that’s their dream job. They do it because they hope to become Senior Accounts Manager and then maybe Operations Manager and then maybe Vice President and so on. The job itself never does become intrinsically rewarding or meaningful, but each step on the ladder offers potentially more money and power. Such people find something like teaching to be incomprehensible – who would actually *want* to do the same job for 30 years?! Well, someone who enjoys what they do and finds reward and meaning in it.
LikeLike
Thanks, Dienne! Insightful as always!!
LikeLike
That may be it, Duane, but I believe it’s also a way of heaping more responsibilities (in the guise of power or control) on the best full-time classroom teachers so that they become overwhelmed and then inevitably “under-perform” and are forced out.
LikeLike
Sorry, that comment was in reply to Dienne, not Duane!
LikeLike
So insightful
LikeLike
I’ll take #2:
Computers. Technology.
LikeLike
See ialso iMercedes Schneiders comments on TeachStrong. She has nailed it
LikeLike
Can you stomach some more claptrap and platitudes?
“The Campaign.
Our students are falling behind internationally. In an effort to catch up, we are asking more from our teachers than ever before. Yet we continue to provide our teachers with inadequate preparation, training, and pay.
Teacher preparation programs lack rigor and selectivity. Two-thirds of teacher preparation programs accept more candidates than they reject, and one-quarter accept almost every candidate who applies. Education majors are 50 percent more likely to graduate with honors than undergraduates in other majors.
Only five percent of teacher preparation programs in this country include the basic components of a quality student teaching experience.
The average starting teacher salary is $36,141, and average overall salary is $56,383. U.S. teacher salaries are only 60% of those of other college-educated workers in the country.
But there is a way to improve the system and achieve better outcomes for our teachers and our students. By establishing the conditions for success, we can create a virtuous cycle, making the teaching profession more attractive to talented new entrants and further elevating the profession.
Our goal is to make modernizing and elevating the teaching profession the top education policy issue of our time.”
The BESTESTEST AND THE BRIGHTESTEST have spoken. You all had better listen up, get in line, fly straight because the BESTESTEST AND THE BRIGHTESTEST know exactly what we need.
LikeLike
I love how teachers “graduate in the bottom third of their classes,” and then “educators are 50% more likely to graduate with honors,” and yet BOTH of those somehow “show” that “teachers are stupid.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Modernize” heh. The oldest adult in any of those images is, what, 30?
LikeLike
The TFA buy-in is that ordinary teachers are just that…ordinary. TFA’s teachers of of pure breed and pedigree and heads and shoulders above the average peons. They eat that crap up. They love to paint the picture of the teachers who want to be teachers as less than. Disgusting.
They also want more money, higher salaries, for their elite “teachers” and ultimately, for the organization.
They. Will. Never. Stop. Their. Propaganda.
Reform good. Veteran, traditionally trained, teachers who actually want to be teachers bad.
LikeLike
Many times mutts, curs, mongrels and street dogs have more smarts than pedigrees due to more challenging environments in which they live.
LikeLike
They’re also a lot healthier and live longer. Well, assuming the street itself doesn’t kill them.
LikeLike
Not so much environment as genes– deep gene pool.
LikeLike
In Boston… “Boston Strong” quickly caught fire to rally the nation around the healing of a nation traumatized by senseless local terrorism. So now some group of people with PR “expertise” crassly coins a “new and improved” version of “corporate ed reform” called, TeachStrong! Gee is there the inference that the nation should rally around a “new and improved reform education agenda” against the horrors of all of us public school teachers who clearly have a lot to learn from the likes of the TeachStrong team perhaps funded by Bill Gates or Eli Broad???? Ughhh!
LikeLike
You very well might be right, artsegal.
“Boston Strong” was pushed retroactively to validate the arbitrary imposition of a police state-style shutdown of the entire city, almost as if it was a dry-run for managing future civil disturbances.
Perhaps that’s the hybridized message we should take away from this clot of frauds and privateers: Lance Armstrong-style marketing and lies meet authoritarianism, ultimately backed by militarized cops acting with total impunity.
LikeLike
Michael Fiorillo: I’ve copied out your statement and shared it with several friends on FB.. I hope you don’t mind. I am sitting right here in Greater Boston and I know the myths get created; and I see the myths being created around the Paris situation to justify the governor’s policy in my state etc…. Before he was elected he was a crying (literally) teddy bear on TV and now he is “practicing the art of the possible”…. following the line of least resistance perhaps??? but stabbing us in the back while trying to say he is “Switzerand /neutral”…..
LikeLike
Any time I see the word, “modernize,” attached to an education agenda, I cringe. We in the trenches are so tired of reading the “latest research,” that is some repackaged, new buzzword nonsense that good teachers have already been doing since the dawn of time.
However.
While I by no means agree with the TeachStrong platform in its entirety, some of what they say is true. There is very little quality control over the too many teacher certification programs in the United States. God knows, the programs are full of “modernization” and “new research” but sorely lacking in solid classroom management skills. Many of said programs will take anyone who can pay for them, and no one is charged with saying to a student teacher – “Hey listen, you’re not cut out for this profession.”
It is not acceptable to be a poorly educated educator.
It is also not acceptable to lay the blame for a phalanx of poorly educated educators at the feet of the educators.
And before anyone jumps down my throat, yes – there are plenty of people in the profession with excellent educations. But if we’re going to keep telling the Reformers all about their naked emperors and pink elephants – and they have many – we have to acknowledge our own as well. And then we have to do something about it – preferably not by JOINING the Reformers (Jesus tap-dancing C….) but by proposing our own platform of solutions. So…let’s begin. Let’s begin not with all of it (child poverty, poor parenting, etc), but just with this small step. REALLY building a better teacher: Where do we start to fix this mess?
LikeLike
The danger here is if we force the states to standardize teacher training, then we are back to the federal government calling the shots just like they are with the Common Core Crap, and that is unconstitutional. The states are in charge of education, not the federal government.
There is already plenty of evidence out there showing what the best teacher training programs do and what the worst ones are like.
It is arguable that urban residency teacher training programs are the best in the country and the worst is through TFA, but only TFA is supported by the money funding the corporate education demolition derby and the Obama administration.
LikeLike
Just like in any other “business” there are schlock programs. Just like in any other business, everyone knows which ones are poor and which ones pass the smell test. If I have a degree from Eastern Upper North College, I have a feeling that I may find the job market restricted. I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t be more diligent in which programs meet accreditation standards, but we don’t need a new vision of teacher training designed on the basis of corporate America’s wet dreams.
LikeLike
Good question, Victoria. I know an ex-education school professor from a Cal State school who told me her lame colleagues intentionally would not hire the sharpest candidates for fear of being outshone. It’s hard to imagine how the bar can be raised in such situations. My ideal ed school would have intellectual diversity amongst its professors. That means E.D. Hirsch adherents alongside the Constructivists; disciplinarian-types along side the anti-discipline types. That way students can avoid being brainwashed, which is what happens when schools only present one side of the Big Questions in education.
LikeLike
The lines that give away its intentions, from the About page:
“Our students are falling behind internationally.”
“implement rigorous standards…”
The rhetoric is easy for a general public to buy into. Few people can imagine what could possibly be wrong with “Modernizing and elevating the teaching profession to the top education policy issue of our time.”
What’s hidden is the notion that the purpose of school is to perpetuate an economic and political model based a kind of tremendous inequality that is destroying ourselves and our world.
LikeLike
Randi and AFT will make sure teachers get a seat at the table, since she probably wants to be next Secretary of Education for Clinton. But our seat at the table will be like the kids table at Thanksgiving…
LikeLike
Randi will have a seat at the table where teachers are being carved up, with their pensions as a special treat for the Overclass.
LikeLike
Respectfully disagree. I am in this group. It is a platform about transforming the profession. Teaching should not be a flat profession. That is of no interest to this young generation that want real career opportunities and more responsibility over time. How teachers are prepared and then mentored in this country is mostly a travesty. And there are not enough structures to allow teachers real leadership roles, structured opportunities to learn from each other or work together – all the skills they must impart to children but are not afforded in their jobs. The “reformers” are actually evolving and have realized pure hero worship – the idea of the singular great teacher – without attention to how the entire profession is currently set up was a bust – resulted in a teacher shortage and a demoralized profession. There is much room to rethink the structures and life cycle of the profession to bring it into the modern era. There are some things amoung which people from all sides might agree. And it is worth the effort to look for common ground.
LikeLike