At the Network for Public Education conference in Raleigh last week, one of the best-attended events was a conversation between Peter Cunningham of Education Post (and former communications director for Arne Duncan at the Department of Education) and Jennifer Berkshire (who blogs as EduShyster).
You can watch their conversation here. This event was one of the high points of the conference. This is your chance to watch without leaving the comfort of your home.
Mercedes Schneider was in the audience, and she reports on what she saw and heard.
Evidently many people enjoyed this session, and it was livestreamed and will be archived.
At that time, I was sitting in another session, one about turnarounds and their devastating effects on schools and communities. It turns out that 96% of the students in closing schools are African American. Almost every turnaround is handed off to a charter with no connection to the community. When a school closes, the neighborhood begins to die. The police station closes. The grocery store closes. The community dies. That’s what Peter Cunningham has to defend.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“When a school closes, the neighborhood begins to die.”
It’s the Walmartization of Schools.
LikeLike
“The Walmart Way”
Walmart schools
Are charter chains
Walmart rules
And Walmart gains
Walmart teachers
Walmart pay
Walmart leechers
Walmart way
Walmart towns and
Walmart holdings
Shop-shut-downs and
And home fore-closings
Walmart this
And Walmart that
Walmart kiss
Of death, in fact
LikeLike
Walmart towns
And Walmart holdings
Shop-shut-downs
And home fore-closings
LikeLiked by 1 person
YES. First they viciously target the old-school career-dedicated anchor teachers. Then, once these dedicated, student-protective teacher voices have been shut out and silenced, the neighborhood becomes vulnerable. Clashes begin, arguments ensue; soon everyone takes sides and chaos reigns . It’s the Walmartization recipe for invading and destabilizing neighborhoods.
LikeLike
I think it’s unseemly that the US Department of Education has no qualms about so clearly limiting their advocacy and policy to the goals and priorities of this “movement”.
They have a duty to listen to everyone.
There’s a word for when this happens in government and it isn’t “agreement” or “consent”, it’s “capture”. The Obama Administration priorities of “choice” and “assessments” are not universal. Many, many people disagree with this agenda. Those people should be represented in DC.
LikeLike
This is what I mean:
“The one topic she didn’t want to talk about was Common Core, the learning standards currently in place in all but a handful of states. I agreed. Why gloat?”
I mean, what the hell IS that? Why would a former public employee be so weirdly adversarial about a program that was applied to tens of millions of public school children with virtually no public debate?
Winners and losers. It’s all in this insane adversarial frame. I don’t know who the “enemy” was in Common Core. Public schools? Teachers? Parents? How nuts is that?
LikeLike
There is no sense in talking the details anymore. The only message worth getting out is the goal of privatization. The time spent debating common core, tests, evaluation, etc. is like a giant side-circus the reform movement benefits from. It benefits because months pass while these debates rage on- and during those months policy is made that gets closer and closer to irreversibility:
Irreversible privately run, publicly funded education.
Opt out and start owning the “P” word.
Choice means privatize.
Scream it from the mountain tops.
LikeLike
What if they opened a charter chain (in a neighborhood near you), and not one single parent applied?
The privitizers, the market-based edufakers, and the corporate reformer failure crowd, all have one thing in common. They all peddle snake oil solutions. They are playing a short game and will eventually fall to poor ROI, scandal, and the losing battle between intensity and duration.
LikeLike
If they open a charter chain (in a neighborhood near you), and not one single parent applies, does it make a dollar?
LikeLike
Distill so-called reform down to its essence, Chiara, and what you’re left with is class warfare.
Thus the axiomatic antagonism to teachers and their unions, and the efforts to “Uberize” teaching, and turn it into temporary, at-will, semi-skilled labor.
Thus the takeover of public facilities and their being turned over to private interests.
Thus the authoritarian will-to-power that seeks to use the schools for social engineering purposes, in order to reinforce and even more deeply embed their blinkered worldview, a worldview that, economically, socially and environmentally has failed everyone but them.
Who’s the “enemy” to these people?
Anyone who’s not a member of that tiny, incestuous club of obsessive-compulsive greed heads.
LikeLike
Pirate-izers. Aaargh!!! Their days are numbered.
LikeLike
Jennifer Berkshirehas exposed Peter Cunningham for what he is, a paid shill, not an advocate. Seems like T.S.Eliot made Peter’s acquaintance somewhere, sometime.
(Excerpt)
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree. The spirited discussion came from Jennifer Berkshire. As for Cunningham, he looked like he was there begrudgingly. He mostly presented opinion on reforms, not facts. His views were mostly shaped by the corporate, Obama view that wears blinders to all the unpleasantness of disruption. It appears the government is willing to give up its responsibility to neighborhood schools in favor of charters because they can’t be bothered to address the funding disparity issues in urban schools. Separate and unequal seems not to be an issue for them. I believe a future lawsuit will have to address this problem. As for destroying the surrounding neighborhood, the government is happy to be of assistance to developers eager to destroy housing for the poor in order to garner more tax dollars from gentrified housing.
LikeLike
RT – I would have loved to meet you in real life at the conference!
LikeLike
retired teacher: you have artfully pointed out one of the default rheephorm strategies.
Very often they do everything possible to turn the conversation to “explaining” themselves rather than address facts, logic, decency and consistency in promises/results.
That’s why when so many of them flame out and are no longer of much use to the heavyweights of corporate education reform, they keep repeating the same lines like “I was misunderstood” and “I guess we weren’t proactive enough in getting out the Good News” and “I’m a parent too so [blahblahblah]” and the like.
In other words, it’s all about THEM. The kids? Their parents? School staffs? Entire communities gutted by rheephorm policies?
No, they see themselves as the real victims. And just like all the other frontmen/women for the self-styled “new civil rights movement of our time” they claim to have no peers in suffering terrible trauma and pain.
Pity poor John Deasy, for example, being forced out of his LAUSD “job” [consisting more than anything else of years of very expensive meals with lobbyists and salespeople], taking a miserable $60,000 in severance pay, and now at the Broad Academy. Even his former BFFs at the LATIMES have abandoned him. Or to quote the editorial board: “Neener neener.”
Rheeally! And he’s living under a most Johnsonally sort of cloud too…
But, in all honesty, he really deserves every brickbat he used to throw at others. *Please google “Patrena Shankling” and “John Deasy” for the value of his true contribution to genuine teaching and learning.*
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. Christine Langhoff: thanks so so much for the poem!
LikeLike
As long as the self-anointed reformers could maintain their reputations (while destroying communities), the job of defending “backpacks for cash” was easy. Now that they are called out for what they are, self-serving traitors of American democracy, it’s harder to be chipper, while selling fraud.
LikeLike
Great. Because there aren’t enough politicians and pundits with huge microphones pushing “market based reform”:
“Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has joined the Brookings Institution, a think tank, as a nonresident senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brown Center on Education Policy.
That means he’ll be participating in education-related events—and yes, blogging! Duncan’s analysis and opinion pieces will appear on the Brown Center Chalkboard”
Let me guess- charters are super-fabulous, public schools suck and submitting to any and all experiments the Best and The brightest dream up is the duty of all Americans.
LikeLike
Chiara,
I was surprised to see that Arne Duncan was invited to be a Senior Fellow for Brookings. I was at Brookings from 1993-2012, when I was summarily fired by Russ Whitehurst, former George W. Bush education director; at the time, Whitehurst was advising Mitt Romney and I was fired on the same day that I published an article criticizing Romney.
Brookings used to be considered a “liberal” think tank. Now it leans to the right on education. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/04/duncan-finds-new-platform.html
LikeLike
If you guys want to reach your elected reps in DC you should secure an executive position at Google:
“As the interactive charts accompanying this article show, Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.”
Once a WEEK. That is one clout-heavy corporation, I must say.
LikeLike
Perhaps one reason Google has the political juice it does is because of early funding from the CIA. You didn’t really think it’s surveillance and data mining of our online activity was solely for commercial purposes (though it doesn’t hurt), did you?
The CIA, like the so-called education reformers, has it’s own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, which funds companies developing technologies deemed helpful to spying, er, intelligence.
In-Q-Tel was an early investor in Google, especially it’s GPS technology, which eventually became Google Earth.
So much for “Don’t Be Evil.”
As a self-satirizing aside, In-Q-Tel is also an investor in Palantir, the data analysis company partially owned by (and don’t laugh now) self-proclaimed “libertarian” Peter Thiel, who, along with Mark Zuckerberg (surprise, surprise) is an investor in AltSchool, a technology company seeking to chain kids (not their own, naturally) to computers and monetize the resulting data.
LikeLike
I think Larry page actually said “Don’t be medieval”
In other words, “Don’t use the rack. Use the hack”
LikeLike
Apparently NYC has a new strategy for “turnarounds”. Instead of closing “failing” schools they designate them as “renewal schools”, or something like that, and all their teachers must apply to be hired for the new term. This policy was enacted with the approval of the UFT. I’m told there will be an increase in ATR’s, no doubt most will be high cost veterans. The refusal of the NEA & UFT/AFT to fight against all the disastrous policy initiatives of the last 15 years or so is due to the guarantee of survival in my opinion. The union leaders must have danced like crazy in their nice offices when Scalia died. I am firmly convinced that the leaders of the major teacher unions couldn’t care less about what their members think knowing dues payments are guaranteed (agency fees). I should point out that prior to Scalia’s death I was receiving emails asking for help to fight for the agency fees. That stopped after is death. It was pointed out on this blog that Wisconsin saw a big drop in union membership/dues after it became a right-to-work state. Obviously many of the union rank-and-file in Wisconsin felt that union membership wasn’t worth paying for. Virtually every teacher I speak to in NYC feels the UFT is not responsive to teachers. It’s too bad in my opinion that more about this issue isn’t discussed on this blog.
LikeLike
Michael, in CA most teachers have only a dim idea of what the union has done for them. All the laws that make their jobs good –collective bargaining, due process, pension –were earned and are maintained only through union muscle. We’d be Walmart teachers without the union.
LikeLike
Most of the advancements the UFT made in NYC, pensions, etc., occurred before the advent of agency fees. Since agency fees were enacted the union basically ignored its members and whatever gains were made in the past were slowly taken away. Today tenure is on the ropes, seniority rights are gone, and teachers resort to hiring their own lawyers against serious charges. One teacher I knew was accused of misconduct with a student. She was removed and placed into the infamous “rubber room” without being told who made the accusations or what the charges were. The union of course agreed to this policy. The accused teacher was lucky because she had an uncle who was a well known lawyer who threatened the NYC DOE with a lawsuit claiming her legal rights were violated. She was immediately released from rubber room hell and sent back to the school. Most teachers aren’t that fortunate to have a high powered lawyer take on their case without high lawyer fees.
LikeLike
Michael Mulgrew’s silence is deafening. Worst “leader” in AFT/NEA history.
LikeLike
By the way, I’m working up a Cunningham-as-Carnac routine… here’s some spitballing… (they’re not all winners, so show mercy)
CUNNINGHAM: “Frosted flakes.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“What do you get when you lock Teacher for America teachers in a meat freezer?”
CUNNINGHAM: (Carnac voice) “A Few Good Men”
—(opens an envelope)
“How many people would it take to do all the REIGN OF ERROR research that Diane Ravitch did all by herself?”
CUNNINGHAM: “Twelve Years as a Slave.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“What does Carrie Walton-Penner desire for all present and future public school teachers’ careers?”
CUNNINGHAM: “House of Cards.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“Upon what foundation does value-added measurement theory rest?”
CUNNINGHAM: “Billions and billions.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“To date, how much has Michelle Rhee made bashing teachers?”
CUNNINGHAM: “Big Ben, Tom Brady, and Campbell Brown’s defense for not revealing her donors.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“Name a clock, a jock, and a crock.”
CUNNINGHAM: “Criminal Minds.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“To be admitted, what must all potential Broad Academy candidates possess?”
CUNNINGHAM: “A teaching credential, a pair of urine-free underpants, and a special ed student.”
—(opens the envelope and reads it)
“Name three things you won’t find in an Eva Moskowitz’ SUCCESS ACADEMY.”
ED McMAHON: “YOU ARE CORRECT, SIR!!!”
LikeLike