Mercedes Schneider writes here about Campbell Brown and the Vergara case. The lower court decision became an opportunity for the telegenic former TV correspondent to launch a new career as a tenure-fighting, union-busting vigilante.
Riding the Vergara wave, she created an organization called the “Partnership for Educational Justice,” funded by the usual billionaires. PEJ filed a copy-cat Vergara lawsuit in New York and just week filed a similar lawsuit in Minnesota. Bad timing, to say the least.
On a roll, Brown launched a news site, “The 74,” to chronicle the struggle for corporate-style reform of public education. The 74 refers to the 74 million children of school age, many allegedly trapped in schools with unions and tenure. It was reported that the billionaires (Bloomberg, Walton and others) gave her $4 million for The 74).
So what did Campbell say about the overturning of the Vergara by a unanimous three-judge Court of Appeal? Nothing. A deafening silence.
Meanwhile, Mercedes examines a curious incident in the night at the Los Angeles Times, where education coverage is funded by billionaire Eli Broad. The original story about the decision by Howard Blume was mysteriously rewritten. Whole sections were dropped or revised to make them , well, less problematic to the funder. Accidental? Your guess is as good as mine.
Read the post for the details.
And remember to thank the Constitution for checks and balances and an independent judiciary (at least in California).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s what we have to say to Campbell the Clown:
VERGARA = FAIL
BROWN = FAIL
Welcome Campbell to endless parade of ed-reform FAILURES.
Please go very far away – and stay there.
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My guess is that “checks and balances” also played a significant role in the original ruling. More specifically: “checks and bank balances”
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Poet, you are always “right on.” TAGO.
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TARRRGO!!!
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SomeDAM Poet: you got me thinking…
Credit “check” where credit “check” is due. Ms. Brown has built her life around her CCSS close reading of this particular piece of informational text by the famous American writer Dorothy Parker:
“The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed’.”
Although, as par the course for rheephormsters, she—er, uh—doesn’t understand what shaky ground she might be on.
¿😳?
Link: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/28/check-enclosed/
Unfortunately for the Chetty-picking rheephorm crowd, Ms. Brown conveniently forgets the Parker quotes that don’t fit her pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$:
“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
Check it out.
😎
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“So what did Campbell say about the overturning of the Vergara by a unanimous three-judge Court of Appeal? Nothing. A deafening silence.”
In some “circles” silence is concent.
Wilson channeling Foucault:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
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Whole sections were dropped or revised to make them , well, less problematic to the funder.”
This “phenomenon” is actually much more widespread in the mainstream media than most people appreciate.
NPR also does that on their website and doesn’t provide any indication that they have changed things.
Sometimes NPR simply “disappears” articles, swapping in an entirely new “story” for the old one. I have seen cases where the new story contradicted the old one (and where the text of the original link that they are now using for the new story still indicates that!)
It’s highly dishonest and shows that what they are doing has nothing to do with journalism.
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Propaganda has always been one of the primary levers of fascism.
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Yes…keep on Raging, Raging. When we lose a free press, unbiased media, we lose democracy. Judging by Campbell’s new gig at LASR, and by the venomous LA Times (plus the biased NY Times), all is lost.
Today the LA Times follows up on the last few articles on Vergara over the past few days, and distorts the entire matter. I am writing a full on review of this and hope Diane will post it. So won’t go into the many issues here except to say that Howard Blume and his pals follow the Broad line imposed by their Times bosses, even though they do not have the usual disclaimer on today’s front page manipulated article.
They chose once again to interview Ryan Smith, past hatchet man for United Way and now the darling of Edelman fame and fortune, and PRev shyster Ben Austin, former and still hatchet man for Eli Broad and now of Broad/Welch fame and fortune, to be their voices on education issues.
These two men are in the lead in the deception to steal public education in the name of their view of civil rights. These are the two who led the infamous street charade of Oct. 29, 2013 to get the equally infamous John Deasy’s contract renewed…and the pathetic LAUSD BoE dances to their boss, Eli Broad’s tune. They use this important claim of civil rights to privatize schools, fire teachers without due process, and kill unions, but all on public funds on the backs of the taxpayers.
No where do the reporters interview some of the skid row (see San Pedro St. in LA) crack mothers of almost 13,000 of LAUSD students who sleep on the streets. No where do these ace reporters do any in depth investigation of how these inner city kids live lives of desperate poverty, little food or rest, and virtually no parental supervision. Yes, there are poverty parents working three jobs to try to exist, but there are thousands of others who have NO business parenting children.
But how easy it is to blame it all on the teachers. What a load of manure!!
This story is filled with dichotomies…it is a continuum of despair of inner city life vs. the grandest of wealth and excess of WLA, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills. The 40,000 foot mansions which could house a hundred people, but are vacation homes for the billionaires who seek to run the world are what the tour buses show off…not the tents from 1st and San Pedro stretching for miles and miles, showing the degradation and filth of the poverty stricken, a twenty minute drive from Rodeo Drive.
The Times hacks NEVER call any of the local activists you read here nor the highly regarded academics like Professor Rogers at UCLA or Emeritus Professor Kashen from USC, but ALWAYS feature the slimy corporatists from Eli Broad’s United Way, and Eli Broad’s California Endowment. So what the public reads is deeply slanted.
So many of our colleagues from around the country write from the distance, but those of us who are on the ground in LA every day, and see the destruction these uber wealthy demi gods are inflicting in their arrogance, are the true reporters.
Yes, Raging…I too am Raging from the thick of it.
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I didn’t see anything about it on the US Dept of Ed site either although they endorsed the lower court decision:
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/statement-us-secretary-education-arne-duncan-regarding-decision-vergara-v-califo
It’s really disturbing how they seem to be lock-step with these private ed reform lobbying groups. One gets the sense no one else is heard or listened to in the Obama Administration.
I’ve been a public school parent for 25 years and I attended public schools. I have heard a lot of complaints over the years from public school parents on everything from discipline to teachers to taxes to testing, but I have yet to encounter the laser-like focus on gutting labor unions I see in the ed reform “movement”. I heard many, many more complaints on The Third Grade Reading Guarantee and the Common Core than I have ever heard on teachers union contracts and both of those programs were ed reform lobby initiatives.
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This is an interesting analysis of teachers in Ohio:
“One of the signs of a healthy charter school sector is whether teachers want to teach in the schools. Teachers are like the canary in a coal mine; if they flock to the school, it’s probably doing all right, regardless of the test scores; if they don’t, well, perhaps the performance data means more.
So even though charter schools overall perform worse than Ohio’s local public schools, perhaps teachers want to teach in them because of the innovative environments they create, regardless of performance data. And if the schools can attract those kinds of teachers, perhaps the performance data will turn around for these schools.
After all, charter schools were started by teachers who wanted to do their thing without as much bureaucratic intervention.
What’s fascinating is that in about 15% of Ohio’s charter schools, the average teacher experience is 0 years. What’s that mean? It means the typical teacher in these schools have never taught before. That’s just stunning, frankly. How stunning?”
Maybe they should start worrying about why their non-union employees don’t stick around. Since the goal is to charterize everything in sight that might be more productive.
http://www.10thperiod.com/
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Chiara, you may know better than I on this, but my understanding is that the typical charter utilizes TFA to fill much of its teaching staff, and charters have to employ only a percentage of certified/licensed teachers. If that is true, I propose that the certified/licensed teachers are perhaps also TFA who were persuaded to stay an extra year, as certified/licensed, to fulfill that quota, and that, too, is a revolving door of players. The only other reason anyone would teach at a charter school, willingly, my theory is–they could not find a job in a public school, or religious (catholic?) and/or private school either, though may have sent resumes out everywhere.
I know in NJ it is hard to get a teaching job. In Newark, NJ, there is a proliferation of charters, catholic schools in the area have closed in droves – with the premises being rented out to charters with the Arch Diocese more than happy to get the rent monies) and also there are contracts with TFA that have force-fired veteran teachers, or placed them into rubber rooms, to make “vacancies” for TFA – Cami Anderson was very good at obstructing justice in this vein. Hopefully one day she will become accountable for her crimes.
That a traditionally trained, certified/licensed teacher would stick around at a charter for any other reason than the truth that teaching jobs are scarce and its hard to fight the reform machine is a notion I cannot wrap my brain around.
Who moved my cheese? The mouse who runs the maze to find the cheese that is continually moving eventually gets burned out. Just a couple years ago, tenure in NJ was granted after 2 years; now it is 4. Just a couple years ago, after taking the Praxix tests, a Certificate of Eligibility was issued; after one got a teaching job, a Provisional Certificate was issued, and after a full year of teaching, observation scores and mentoring, a Standard Certificate was issued — now, it takes 2 years of teaching for a Standard Certificate to be issued. All of this cheese moving seems in lockstep with the reformers’ desire to get people out of teaching ASAP. However, the TFA doesn’t have to deal with any of this. Not highly qualified per the definition – for TFA they created a loophole and confer the status gratis. Many school districts have stopped tuition assistance for advanced degrees — degrees that one has to actually go to school and put in the hours/work to obtain, but TFA – it has jiffy lube quickie weekend Masters degrees conferred upon its scabs, for free, along with all of the other perks conferred upon those TFA scabs who, by and large, appear to have an absence of conscience and are able to live with their decisions.
Anyhow, sorry for the rant, but i feel that NO ONE chooses to work at a charter school because its a wonderful job. Either they are desperate in this teaching climate/economy to get the experience to move on, or they are TFA and have been bought in more ways than a salary, or they become administrators with a tainted and sick reformer mind$et that is founded in prejudice, power and cash.
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The judiciary will be independent only as long as the oligarchs do not buy the elections for judges that have to compete in an election to become a judge and for judges that are appointed until the oligarchs control enough elected representatives to make sure only judges they approve of are appointed and approved to do their bidding.
22 states use competitive elections. 24 states have bipartisan commissions and use what’s called appointment/retention systems. Both can be bought and the oligarchs have repeatedly, for years and even decades, revealed that they refuse to stop. When faced with expensive defeats, they return again and spend even more the next time. The only factor in our favor is time, because all of these oligarchs are going to die one day of old age unless they can download their memories into an artificial intelligence and live on forever, and science/technology is moving closer to achieving exactly that every year. There are machines/technology being developed now that can read our thoughts.
“Scientists at the University of California were able to pick up several words that subjects thought using a new mind-reading device.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11199031/Mind-reading-device-invented-by-scientists-to-eavesdrop-on-inner-voice.html
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Oiligarchs like Gates don’t even need to download their thoughts into a computer in order for their ideas to live on. They have their foundations to do that for them.
The Gates foundation will probably still be around (and still pushing school reform!) when the sun becomes a red giant star and gobbles up the earth in 5 billion years or so.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a lifespan. They announced that it will spend all of its resources within 20 years after Bill and Melinda’s deaths.
“In October 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was split into two entities: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the endowment assets and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which “… conducts all operations and grantmaking work, and it is the entity from which all grants are made”.[138][139] Also announced was the decision to “… spend all of [the Trust’s] resources within 20[140] years after Bill’s and Melinda’s deaths”.[141][142][143][144] This would close the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and effectively end the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the same announcement it was reiterated that Warren Buffett “… has stipulated that the proceeds from the Berkshire Hathaway shares he still owns at death are to be used for philanthropic purposes within 10 years after his estate has been settled”.[141]
“The plan to close the Foundation Trust is in contrast to most large charitable foundations that have no set closure date. This is intended to lower administrative costs over the years of the Foundation Trust’s life and ensure that the Foundation Trust not fall into a situation where the vast majority of its expenditures are on administrative costs, including salaries, with only token amounts contributed to charitable causes.[142]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
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RE mindreading
Imagine the brain scan of Arne Duncan’s thoughts. It must look just like a Jackson Pollock painting.
A Bill Gates’ brain scan must look like a giant dollar sign $ covering his entire prefrontal lobe.
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Charter shill Brown needs to talk to a few teachers who have been dumped by school districts and find out the truth about those teachers’ “lifetime jobs.” She would shocked at how easy it is for districts to dump teachers.
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Campbell Brown was on MSNBC guest hosting show called On The Other Hand or something like that. Blabbing about the presidential race-did not hear about the tenure case. Scary someone put her back on TV.
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Where does the Campbell Brown case stand?
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Donna
In limbo
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I believe that in Campbell Brown’s case that would actually be “In bimbo”
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TARGO!!!! Man, you’re on a roll.
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I am very grateful to have Jerry Brown as our governor. He believes in public education and its teachers.
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