Politico reports that Hillary Clinton was booed when she spoke of cooperation between public schools and “public charter schools.”
I don’t think she has any idea of the depth of antagonism towards charter schools among teachers.
Maybe she doesn’t know that 90% of charters are non-union.
Maybe she doesn’t know that the far-right Walton Family Foundation (which hates unions) funded one of every four charters in the nation and has pledged to spend at least $200 million annually to create more non-union schools.
Maybe she doesn’t know that ALEC (which hates unions and public schools) is a huge supporter of charter schools.
Maybe she doesn’t know that the same “vast rightwing conspiracy” that hates her loves charter schools.
Maybe she doesn’t know that every Republican governor, as well as Donald Trump, is enthusiastic about charter schools.
Maybe she doesn’t know that charter schools have become the favorite ploy of those who want to privatize and monetize public education.
I have been trying to arrange a meeting with her, face to face, but so far have had no success.
I will keep trying.
I would really like to explain to her what is happening, how it threatens the future of public education, and how far it is from the original idea of charter schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But she said we should listen to teachers and we would finally have a seat at the table.
Sound familiar?
Teachers always seem to get the “seat” under the table, like in the castles of the middle ages.
Linda… a seat at the kids table… not the mahogany dining set but the rickety bridge set with mismatched chairs!
she means the Teach for American teachers whose 1 or 2 years teaching and 4 or 5 years getting highly paid for promoting privatization and charters will have a seat at the table.
I believe she is absolutely telling the truth. But the “teachers” who have a seat are the ones who could not leave teaching fast enough.
It’s kind of like having hundreds of George W. Bush’s claiming that they represent soldiers because he kinda served in the National Guard for a while.
Tell Hillary: School choice– a euphemism for charter schools that undermine democracy and exacerbate divisiveness– are not a healthy choice for children’s education. There are better alternatives: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/memo-to-clinton-and-sande_b_9453824.html
I invite you to visit charter schools in Minnesota. You vilify them in your writings and posts. Most charter schools in MN do great work and have a lot of public support.
JT: Of course there are charter schools that benefit the children that attend, just as there are good public schools. The problem with charter schools is that as public policy, they drain funds from the remaining public schools, remove schools from democratic control, exacerbate divisiveness by making parent compete for entry, and encourage self-concern over social responsibility. Charters appear to be a good choice to some because our society has failed to invest in the well-being of all children and their families. There are better choices for equitable education for all. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/memo-to-clinton-and-sande_b_9453824.html
Most public schools that are don’t have to educate lots of at-risk kids “work” very well. So do the “choice” public schools.
That leaves all the at-risk kids who charters keep using as their reason for existing but who they despise with a passion that knows no bounds. The disdain and disgust with which we all witnessed how the charter school teacher — a MODEL teacher for the system, fyi — treated an at-risk kid who needed extra help was exactly what is wrong with charters.
In the charter world, you are REWARDED the more you treat the at-risk kids who can’t learn easily like the garbage that deep down most of the privatizers believe that they are. It isn’t about race — there are plenty of “good” minority children who are easy to teach. But the ones who are not go out with the trash. Despicable. It turns my stomach that those evil people prefer to BLAME the 5 year olds they can’t teach by pretending they are violent and criminals because they refuse to acknowledge their own failure. If you wonder why I post here about Success Academy, it is because I listened to Eva Moskowitz go on national tv to tell the world that at least 20% of the 5 and 6 year olds in her school are violent children. She’d rather do that and feed into racism than actually say “my school failed”. She knows she can get away with it because those children are minorities. If she was suspending 25% of the white middle class kids at Upper West, Union Square, Cobble Hill, or any of her other schools that are “separate but equal” that have disproportionate numbers of middle class and white children, she couldn’t get away with claiming they were violent, violent, and terrible children who deserved every punishment Success administrators meted out. The press would ask questions. But because she is doing it to the most disadvantaged kids, she gets away with it. Because her overseers have the same casual racism she does.
Not surprising, given who her friends are
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/alice-walton-donated-353400-clintons-victory-fund
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2015/06/eli-broad-and-clintons.html
http://westmipolitics.blogspot.com/2016/05/devos-family-donated-nearly-100k-to.html
Let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton sat on the board of WalMart and was in attendance at meetings where their focused campaign to prevent unions away from their workers was openly discussed. Not a peep out of her as far as anyone can ascertain that should doubt, let alone disgust about the unAmerican anti-labor practices of WalMart. So none of this shocks me. I’m pleased that the rank-and-file had the good sense and courage to make their displeasure clear. Too bad leadership won’t. They should have backed Sanders. They still should.
How was it possible that NEA endorsed this woman a year or so before any of the primaries took place? The NEA leadership is out of step with the “rank and file” of educators. How disgraceful. This anointment of Mrs. Clinton lends credence to the idea of the political system being rigged.
I hope you can get a meeting with Ms. Clinton. Sounds like she needs to be educated about education!
Joyce Hamilton Caufman
Absolutely, Clinton lives in a bubble in which she believes that partnerships are “making money while doing good.” These partnerships are really tax havens for the wealthy and islands of corporate welfare. She fails to understand the consequences to charter proliferation. Most of all there are no miracles or laboratories of innovation. The results of charters are lack luster. In the process, neighborhoods and neighborhood schools have been destroyed. Children have been traumatized, and good teachers have had middle class careers destroyed due to political agenda. Public dollars are being spent to resegregate schools, and the “free market” has been a free for all of waste and fraud. Greed and profit are the hallmarks of the charter movement, and the only positive results occur with cherry picking students and high rates of attrition. If she had done her homework, she would have discovered the significant flaws in widespread charter growth. Most of all it kills public education!
Isn’t she talking about cooperation, though? I would want to dig into what this means.
Let’s keep in mind that she referred to PUBIC charters and spoke vehemently against privatizing. Public charters are, to me, best considered a segment of public education, not routinely lumped in with private charts.
The only charters that are “public” are those run by the same local board of education as public schools and answerable to them.
This notion of a “public” versus “private” charter that the anti-public education folks use is ridiculous and it’s Orwellian that they got the press to follow them. There are for-profit private charters and non-profit private charters. There are a handful of true public charters run by boards of education. But somehow the press and people like Hillary Clinton mean something very different when they say “public” charter.
Regardless of the distinction, the so called public charters make profit, but they just keep it hidden. There is also no reason for charters to expand into middle class areas. Those students are not failing. The only thing these charters do is drain public schools of resources so they are less able to serve the remaining students.
The whole issue is complicated in an extremely messy confused way. ( The moon landing was complicated but not messy or confused. ) Let us rely on a coherent source — Diane Ravitch–to produce coherence. Here in Richmond Virginia we have one public charter elementary school. It answers directly to the school board and answers to the same standards as other schools. I am completely sure there is no big nefarious organization behind it and I am sure no-one is making profit money — assuming of course there is no embezzling of the sort that can happen in any organization.
Here is from today Washington Post article “NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia said some of her members are deeply angry about charter schools because of the way they have siphoned money away from traditional public school systems. But Eskelsen did not take umbrage at Clinton’s remarks: “There are some successful charter schools,” she said. “Let’s look at what makes them work.”
Maybe the charter schools should learn from successful public schools. Why is it always charters teaching publics?
Maybe the lesson is that if charters thrive by deregulation, then deregulate public schools.
But of course charters are not more successful than public schools. In truth, they need regulation and oversight.
JILL STEIN!!!!
My question is why Jill Stein can know about these things, but not Clinton or Sanders or anyone else who has been running for President.
I know Jill Stein is pretty smart (after all, she is a doctor with an MD degree from Harvard Medical school), but is she really that much smarter than all these people?
And really, how smart do you even have to be to discover that Walmart is anti-union and supports charters?
To answer your 1st question,SDP:
YES! (But at the same time, that fact doesn’t necessarily mean much.)
And peacebwu: Concur!
She knows all these things. It’s just that the charter industry and its supporters give her so much more money than teachers so.
Maybe the NPE can donate 25 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Bake sale, anyone?
She knows all about the Waltons. She was on their Walmart Board of Directors for years. http://www.progressivepress.net/hillary-clinton-was-a-wal-mart-director-for-6-years/
I hope that the NEA conference boo’s cause some ripples among Clinton’s advisors and they have the wisdom to seek out Diane.
Not politically connected, but here some of the big players in Clinton’s campaign.
https://ballotpedia.org/Hillary_Clinton_presidential_campaign_key_staff_and_advisors,_2016 This is a list of who’s who in Hillary’s campaign.
https://ballotpedia.org/National_influencers
This has Diane Ravitch at #20, and well ahead of Michelle Rhee.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/07/05/all_women_presidential_cabinet_for_hillary_clinton_from_slate.html
Slate lists the owner of this blog as Secretary of Education if….
She got her photo op. Public educators used again for political expediency and profits.
Exacto.
In fairness, Hillary’s comments about charters were not an endorsement of them but that if they have anything to share on that’s working, let’s share that information.
Later today, the NEA delegates voted to endorse Hillary Clinton by a resounding vote of 85% support.
If you’re trying to get a meeting with Hillary, perhaps the NEA President can arrange it.
Why is it always charters have practices to share? Public schools have nothing to share with charter chains staffed by a churn of TFA interns?
In the real world of public education, teachers share teacher made curriculum, ideas and practices all the time. It’s called collaboration. In addition, traditional public school administration organizes staff and team meetings and encourages this type of sharing.
In California, professional public school teachers are also required to prove they are attending workshops and taking classes in colleges that teach them about the latest methods and ideas and if a teacher doesn’t do it, they could lose their credential and job.
This effort for improvement is ongoing and never stops. It is tied into keeping your credential.
The Southern California districts where I taught for thirty years also has or had it’s own curriculum center with support staff and workshops to introduce teachers to new practices, ideas and curriculum.
I think that the corporate SOBs that keep spreading misleading propaganda that nothing has changed in the public schools for decades or longer should have their tongues torn out, fingers chopped off and be locked up in a maximum security prison for life for all the suffering and damage they are causing with their flood of repeated lies.
Here’s why there won’t be anything going on in typical chain charter schools (and I still think that being part of a charter chain is the most obvious indication of what’s likely occurring with a given charter school): consider the article that I think Diane posted not long ago about how Detroit charter schools are knifing each other as well as the neighborhood public schools to get the warm bodies of kids in the seats (on Count Day, after which, who cares?) I’ve worked with teachers in both DPS and some charter schools in Detroit over the last 25 years. The situation is worse than the article can really convey.
And take a smaller Detroit-area city that has been ravaged by both charter schools of state takeover: Pontiac. I coached grade 4-8 public school teachers there in mathematics a decade ago, before the takeover. I heard stories from teachers, administrators, and parents about the tactics charters were using to get $tudent$ in their doors as long as it took to collect $tate dollar$, after which they were happy to see any difficult, challenging kids return to their neighborhood public school. There was wholesale bribery of kids and parents (though, of course, the bribes were chump change compared with the many thou$and$ put into the coffers of these charters.
As competition for shrinking $$ (state and federal cutbacks, population loss) ramped up, the tactics became more and more cut-throat. So why would any charter share ideas with local public schools? There is no PAYOFF for them to do so. Al Shanker’s lovely idea might work in places where there are true local charters that aren’t interested in cramming as many bodies into chairs as possible and where there is real belief in public education on the part of those working in or running the school. But I can’t think of one that I can cite as an example. I’m open to suggestions. I’ve worked for some good, decent charter schools, but not even those were in the least concerned with connecting to local public schools unless there was some sort of quid pro quo beyond sharing ideas.
Charters have been in existence for over a quarter of a century. Where are all the “success stories” that can be grafted on to public schools (well, ones that don’t involve weeding out difficult students and gaming the tests, anyway)? Can any one point to even one useful idea that can be generalized to all public schools has come out of the charter “movement” in 25 years? How many decades before we decide that hey, maybe the charter game is really all about moving public dollars that go to teacher and employee pay and benefits out of the pockets of teachers, and in to the pockets of private businesses?
Last year, Peter Greene wrote a terrific blog in which his central point was that nothing innovative had come out of the charter industry. Nothing. Not one thing.
The fundamental advantage that charters have cannot be “shared” because the proactive, de-facto selection of students (and engaged parents) to flesh out a cohort is not legal in public schools. No-excuses discipline programs with astronomical suspension rates, ‘Got-to-Go’ lists, mouth bubbles, eye tracking, extreme test prep, unqualified teacher churn, longer school days, etc. are not policies or methodologies that public schools would want to implement. In short, charters have nothing to offer that is legal or desirable.
Another method to gain HRC’s attention would be to organize a social media storm through the all the readers and Bloggers that read your site (Facebook, Goolge+, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). If most or all of them posted the same short post at the same time on hundreds of Blogs and forums and Tweeted about it at least 100x each with a link to the post, maybe, just maybe, Hillary would learn something beyond her limited tunnel vision when it comes to public education.
It this suggestion gets off of the ground, what about a good image that could be attached to every post and Tweet?
That is a great idea. Booing her comment is excellent, unmistakable feedback for her, but it is only a beginning. We have to demand attention! Perhaps we could tweet Diane’s lovely quote which was painted on the billboard, which she recently shared – schools are not businesses, they are a public good.
Don’t give up until you get that meeting, Diane!
Diane, I hope you & NPE will also try to arrange meetings with Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and…gulp…even Trump. Everyone needs to hear your message.
Would also be good for NPE ambassadors to meet with Senate, Congressional, and statehouse candidates.
Green Party is well aware: http://www.gp.org/social_justice/#sjArts
Thank you Diane. We also need Randi Weingarten to talk to her. We have to keep pushing on this issue.
Good luck getting a meeting with Hillary. Randi Weingarten should be able to set that up, unless she already used up her chits after the early endorsement.When Hillary touts charters and accountability we need to demand Randi answer for it,
AFT’s early endorsement was a huge mistake that gets us nothing.
I emailed Hillary Clinton and urged her to meet with you. Included a link to your post about her speech at the convention today. Let’s flood her inbox and tell her to have a sit-down with Diane!
Matto said it for me…Good luck with getting her to stop promoting the privatization agenda. How can you explain that schools do not belong in any marketplace… that capitalism and free markets are for consumer driven product placement, not education or health care.
I, too, knew that she was anti- public education when Randi said “go girl.
I am not sure that Bernie gets it either… is pure tried to tell him, as Diane knows.
Clinton is true to form and shows her “true colors” when push comes to shove. How can she have any unbiased action with such strong connections (public and private) to those companies that are out to charterize and privatize our education system. This is “so not surprising” that she would have the audacity to speak before the NEA and not make herself aware of her audience’s issues! It is tatamount to a “wink and nod” to “ed reformers”. Also… if she were REALLY interested in understanding the “non ed reform” stance, she would have requested to meet with any of the many outspoken and experienced talent out there who research exhaustively on public education issues. That Diane has not heard from her even upon Diane’s request is telling. Frankly, Clinton should have contacted Diane before stepping foot at an NEA event. If this is not telling… couldn’t imagine what would be. The only thing that would force her to politely acknowledge “non ed reformers” would be a fear of not getting elected and she clearly does not feel public school teachers will impact her election. Both unions went way too early in the “endorsement” of her seemingly against the interests of the teachers they serve.
For her part, it is blind arrogance. Why should she bother to understand the realities of public schools when she takes teacher votes for granted? Like what she did with her home server; she didn’t get the consequences of her actions.
How can she not realize? She worked for the Walton’s and Broad! I’m sure she approved of them, out loud,in one of her secret paid speeches just to appease her money backers! She is a liar and wall sitter of epic proportions!
Hillary is and was a neoliberal corporatist. That the NEA endorsed her last year was a travesty. Here is my take on the corporate dream of exploiting human capital (i.e. a child near you, but not near her). https://resseger.wordpress.com/
Great post Sheila!
Yes, how about a concerted effort to get a petition going, with 10s of thousands of teacher signatures, presented by NEA ? might get her attention. She knows teachers talk and vote.
I think HRC is counting on the fact that most teachers will not vote for Trump so she assumes she’s got their vote already. I remember when Anthony Cody organized a letter writing blitz to Obama. I wrote an impassioned letter along with 400 other educators and got in return a form letter that showed no understanding or acknowledgment of the issues I wrote about. I still agree that a petition or a Twitter storm is a good idea; but I am cynical about the effect on Hillary. NEA is not a very good negotiator, endorsing early (to the anger of a large part of its membership) and then presenting its agenda later. Even Bernie Sanders either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the threat to our democracy corporate reform poses. The petition or Twitter storm I think should be a request for HRC to meet with Diane Ravitch.
Robert: I would love that. Tweet, petition, use social media.
Opposing public funding of private schools aka charter schools should have been the cornerstone for endorsing any candidate by either the NEA or the AFT.
Maybe, just maybe, she doesn’t care all that much.
Right on. And the most parsimonious explanation. She has advisers and education people. She can argue every side of the issues.
We can continue to disrespect and attack each other, or get together.
When the time comes, we must listen, speak and act with compassion.
-in blogs, in f2f, snap, skype or youtube –
What is at stake is our humanity. Respect for self and of other.
Shared values are power.
In an age of information, communication and technology; connection energizes
and unites.
Linda Noble
High School Teacher who cannot vacate from the education agenda.
The Shillary really doesn’t give a shit how you NEAers feel.
I was in that room. I heard the boos. She quickly redirected herself.
Anyway, I feel like there is potential there for a lightbulb to go off. Please don’t give up on trying to meet with her. I wish I could meet with her!
The only way you can get a meeting with Clinton is if you are with the FBI.
or the DOJ, if you want to meet with Bill on the tarmac.
Please, keep trying to arrange the meeting with Secretary Clinton, Dr. Ravich. Many of us have great trepidation about her neo-liberal orientation and tendencies regarding many aspects of public policy (and that trepidation is amplified by her demonstrated vulnerability to hamartia and hubris in pursuing her goals), and we fear that her apparent approval of the corporatization of education and the proliferation of charter schools to the detriment of the traditional public school districts is an integral part and parcel of her neo-liberal stance.
This is very personal for me; I regretfully retired after 33 years as a high school Honors/A.P. teacher (British/World and American Lit & Comp) largely because our budget difficulties in CA, combined with the demands and requirements of the Bush-era NCLB and the Obama administration’s subsequent modifications of it, had resulted in the installation of Broad-trained administrators at our D. O. and at our school sites. Our district pimped itself (proudly) for Broad grants and spent money on whiz-bang tech panaceas du jour while “streamlining” instruction via the new standards and application models. As a consequential part of the resultant blow-back, our librarian and her aide were removed from their positions while our school library itself had all of its books jettisoned as it was was converted into a computer lab (the fourth at our school site). The principal at that time made the observation that the elimination of the library was no great loss because “….nobody reads books anymore” (I I had paid for a subscription to The New Yorker and Smithsonian magazine for the library for a number of years so that my students—and the student body at large—would have access to such fine periodicals and their widely-ranging subject matter). Then our Superintendent, the one responsible for establishing and implementing “the new paradigm”, went to work for the Broad Academy and turned the district over to one of his (Broad-influenced) lackeys (who’d been overseeing, among other things, I.T. at the D.O.)
As a veteran teacher in my field, I felt more and more alienated from my job by federal, state, and local diktats that hemmed and hedged me in to such a degree that I could not give my kids the education (and the experience of exploration, joy, and creativity) in my subject that had worked so well for previous classes over the decades—increasingly, I felt like I was being forced into betraying my mission, my field, my subject/the Humanities in general, and my students until I could no longer stomach being a cog in the new system (and forcing my kids to accept their rôles as cogs in a corporatist-infected perversion of what public education should be).
If, as President, Secretary Clinton’s agendae and proposals are in sympathy, concord, and support of the corporatists and their allied privateering privatizers, I (and numberless infinities of my fellows) dread the depredations that may further accrue and become established as public policy in whatever is left of public education during her tenure.
Please, PLEASE keep trying to arrange the meeting with Secretary Clinton, Dr. Ravich.
Bobby Lee,
You can be sure that I will.
I’ve been amazed -but shouldn’t be- by the number of politicians who support charter schools! Either they have no idea what they are about or they support the corporate takeover of education. They are unhappy places for the most part. They’ve reduced teaching to a walk-on profession and regularly defame the profession by instituting poor pay, weak or no pensions, no mentoring system, shoddy classrooms, few supplies, 19th century technology, and a hierarchy that favors the investors. I’ll be surprised if Clinton grants you access – and Trump? forget it. They prefer the Walton’s approach -continued decimation of public education – and they have half-baked ideas about what constitutes an education. Trump, for instance, wants to do away with courses that don’t contribute to a corporate career such as the humanities. My fear is that Ravitch’s rhetorical “Maybe” indicates that public school students and teachers are being betrayed by their ow administrators who ensconce themselves in high paying jobs and dictate the rules to teachers who hardly respect them as educators. This may be the beginning of the end of public schools!
YEP, the Shillary is a har dee harmartian.
You know what I just thought about? I wish she would come spend some time in rural Mississippi. She would see what good a charter school/school choice can do…hello! Segregation by race, class. She would see how well rural, poor Mississippi families can get their children across a county to a charter school. They can’t. At all. That’s my point. The best chance our kids have is the public education system we already have in place. We have to improve it, not start a whole new thing. I bet she is still hung up on the “theory” of charters being experimental schools. I have a lot of friends like that. I think we’ve moved WAY past the point of being able to have conversations about charters as the original theory was intended. We can’t have a conversation about charters without talking about privatization, etc. AND in Mississippi, charters a la school choice mean segregation and continued institutional racism.
So happy to hear that you are attempting to get real face-time with Hillary.
“Many of those same charter advocates welcomed Clinton’s remarks Tuesday. “We were happy to see her specifically affirm her support for high-quality public charter schools,” said Shavar Jeffries, president of the pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform. “Her statements today reiterate her commitment to reform.”
Shame that she didn’t specifically affirm her support for public schools.
I guess any positive affirmation of support for public schools is barred in DC circles.
What is a “high quality” charter school? The one with the highest test scores? Eva?
I can’t find the text of the speech, but I think she said something like, “We need to support and replicate the best practices of public schools and public charter schools.”
I was in the room and can tell you that as soon as the words “charter” escaped her lips, at least 90% of the room instantly booed in unison. It was something akin to a reflex reaction, a visceral response.
There was a group EON-BAMN that earlier on, had committed not to protest during Hilary’s speech … that is… unless and until she voiced any support of privately-managed charter schools, or of anything that promoted the privatization of public education.
Well, she did, and then, and only then did EON-BAMN respond with a loud group of around 30 folks from different states began chanting repeatedly,
“No more Arne Duncan’s!
“No more charter schools!
“No more Arne Duncan’s! (meaning no more “Arne Duncan-type Secretaries of Education)
They did so loud enough that the California delegation and other delegations nearby could not hear Hilary speak, so people began shouting at them to shut up. They raised a Bernie Sanders’ banner, and then a bunch of people surrounded them with Hilary signs. They eventually stopped, but a lot of people were not happy with them.
At the California caucus the next morning, the consensus was that this protest was disrespectful — “We wouldn’t approve of such behavior from our students…’ — and did more harm than good, though there were some defenders of the EON-BAMN crew.
This whole thing triggered my own memory of Obama’s NEA speech eight years earlier promising support for public education and teacher unions and a elimination of “high stakes testing” — “Kids and schools shouldn’t be judged on how they fill in bubbles on a test.” — only to be followed by eight years of backing privatization, union-busting, and a geometric ramping up of the testing that Obama had earlier condemned.
“Oh God, not again,” was my reaction, and it stayed that way for the remainder of her speech.
Hilary also said that she was “opposed to any for-profit business” infiltrating public education. The problem with that statement is that, in making it, she also implicitly said, “But if you’re a non-profit, then hey, you’re just fine with me!”
However, as anyone knows, the fact that charter chains or even individual charter schools are run technically by “non-profit corporations” is a totally moot point, For all intents and purposes —- founders / leaders awarding themselves excessive salary and benefits packages, self-dealing and sub-contracting school services to companies own by those same leaders, or owned by relatives or cronies — they can get away with all the money-motivate corrupt practices that a for-profit corporation can, with the “non-profit” designation being just a distinction without a difference.
Jack, thank you for the clarification on what they were chanting. My state caucus is in front of the stage and couldnt understand what was going on; but it was disruptive and akin to student behavior that we as teachers, would not accept.
On the 3rd day of the convention there have been several issues brought up that has caused lengthy debate, emotional reactions, and several differences of opinion. I didn’t agree with NBI 45 about NEA creating a “job description”, so to speak, for the Pres. of the United States, and Senate, for hiring Sec. of Educ. NEA already has language about this, and, like one person said, this NBI would be overstepping our boundaries.
I am saddened if not disappointed to read the comments and accusations on here, about Hillary, as being possibly involved in businesses, people, neo-liberalism, that would make her unfit as our president. All of you are entitled to your own thoughts, just as Trump continues with his own…which fact checkers have said he has lied, mislead, and denied much of what he says. Teachers on this site should, strike that, shall behave as role models when involved with and representing teaching to the general public. That’s my opinion!
Have you checked out Project Veritas? This is a website where journalists are bashing teachers. There are some of them here, looking and listening to our conversations waiting to take anything and turn it into false allegations towards educators! It’s cruel and feeds into reformer ‘ s rhetoric. We must be aware of these vultures here and not give them the tiniest piece of information or let them hear our conversations which they can toy with to make us look bad. Don’t give them any ammunition!
Utahteacher,
I appreciate your insights. We do want to model civility as teachers and citizens.
Thank-you so much, Diane. I wish you great success in your attempt to speak with the former Secretary. Someone needs to set her straight with regard to what is really happening to our public school children!
Why do they insist on promoting this fiction that they support only “high quality” charter schools?
The Obama Administration just sent 71 million dollars to build more charter schools in Ohio. There’s no “high quality” analysis in this state. Pure baloney.
I know they rarely get out of DC, but surely they’re aware not all charter schools are “high quality”? Surely this has trickled up to leadership by now? It’s been 20 years. How long do you think it might take?
STOP. This hope of turning Clinton around is ridiculous. We heard the same from Obama. She needs votes now. That’s all it is. The 🔪 is back in after the election. Take care of yourself, your colleagues, your family and make a plan on how to survive.
Maybe Hillary — who lives in a county that’s 57% white, 16% black, and 22% Hispanic, and where 27% of the children under 18 live beneath the Federal poverty line, but in a school district with an enrollment that is only 1% black, 5% Hispanic, 3% free- or reduced-price lunch eligible, and 1% ELL — understands better than most how poorly many disadvantaged children are served by a traditional public school structure that determines school assignment by residence, and that this system is a cause of segregation, not an effect of it.
Maybe Hillary, whose non-integrated ultra low-needs district will spend a whopping $30,000 per student in the 2016-2017 school year, is aware of how fiercely her neighbors, predominately liberal Democrats, oppose equity measures that would affect their children, like spending cuts or tax increases. Never mind the furor that would ensue if zoning changes were proposed that would allow black and brown children from nearby Mount Kisco and Bedford into Chappaqua’s schools.
Maybe Hillary has done her research. She knows how her town and others like it massively profit from institutionalized racism, segregation, and exclusionary zoning (https://tcf.org/content/facts/understanding-exclusionary-zoning-impact-concentrated-poverty/). She’s aware of the work done by, among others, Kahlenberg, Rothstein, and Tractenberg, the latter having written so powerfully about how increases in funding levels is a painfully ineffective and inefficient way to improve “separate but equal” schools.
Maybe Hillary is aware of the four major random assignment studies that show clear learning advantages for children who attend charters. Maybe she is familiar with CREDO’s study showing terrific results for charter schools serving at-risk kids in the 40 largest US metropolitan areas. Maybe she is aware of the 2015 PDK/Gallup poll showing 64% of Americans approve of charter schools. Maybe Hillary realizes that the opposition to well-regulated non-profit charter schools, like the ones in New York State, is actually quite narrow and emanates primarily from the special interests. Maybe she has actually talked to the people who operate charter schools, and far more importantly, to the families who send their children to them.
Never again will there be a presidential candidate–not one with a chance of winning, anyway–who will flat-out oppose charter schools. That is excellent news for families who live in hypersegregated urban and suburban areas and who are zoned for traditional public schools that everyone who comments here would never send their own kid to.
zip code zone zip code zone zip code zone… any other arguments?
Shrugging off and trivializing the enormous and deep-seated, rigidly institutionalized forces that make “zip code”–or more specifically, race and parental income–the primary determinant of the quality of a child’s traditional zoned public school K-12 education is sadly par for the course for the people who are on the “winning” side of the dynamic.
Why don’t you live in Newark and send your own kids to NPS? Taxes are way, way lower than they are in the towns west of Irvington, East Orange, etc. Housing is even cheaper still. No excuses!
Donna,
Tim likes to say zip code because it is I the charter hymnal. We could dive TE proble by eliminating all zip codes.
SUBURBAN parents in hyper-segregated SUBURBAN districts would never send their own kids to the very schools that motivated them to choose the communities they live in?
And URBAN parents in hyper-segregated URBAN schools have the option of sending their kids to INTEGRATED charter schools?
Tim,
There was a time when no presidential candidate campaigned against segregation. As the public understands that charters destroy education as they have in Detroit, as they understand that they are parasites on their local public schools, and that they destroy teacher unions and the teaching profession, it will be hard for any presidential candidate to support them, other than the wingnuts on the right.
Segregation is a non-issue. The horse is dead, you can stop beating it.
Affluent, all white school districts like Chappaqua do not seem to be negatively affected by the hyper-segregation of their schools and communities.
“Segregation is a non-issue.”
Yup, Diane, these are your commenters. In 2016. Astonishing.
It’s difficult to get people to understand something when their job status and their children’s privilege depends on their not understanding it.
“how poorly many disadvantaged children are served by a traditional public school structure that determines school assignment by residence, and that this system is a cause of segregation, not an effect of it.”
Yup Diane. And this is your commenter, Still clueless as ever. And in 2016 no less.
And exactly how are charter schools a solution to the segregation problem you see?
Integration, Success Academy style, circa 2015
“It’s difficult to get people to understand something when their job status and their children’s privilege depends on their not understanding it.”
Project much Tim?
Interesting comment considering you know nothing about my job status or my children’ privilege.
Thank you, Tim. Please keep on keeping on. No “major party” presidential candidate, or president, ever has led the movements for justice which have made progress in this country. Those who have spoken on behalf of Justice have been pushed to do so by huge movements of the people, independent of these political parties. This is as true in 2016 as it has been, always. This is why our big job right now is not to beg Clinton, but to push her, as an independent force which we will continue to need for a long time. Your truths, and those Diane and our movement (and the #BlackLivesMatter and other movements of young people, etc.) are our most important weapons, along with a refusal to bow down before this just-another-politician. IMHO
“Well regulated charter school”? Such a thing does not exist.
Desegregation is still the law of the land despite the fact there is little willingness to fight for it. Maybe we need to address inequities back in the courts. With a more progressive Supreme Court, we may get decisions that favor justice and equity. Hyper segregation paid for by public funds in either public or charter schools should be challenged. A more integrated community has benefits for all members. Separate is never equal.
Integrating NYC’s public schools (NYT).
A history lesson on forced desegregation (from Wikipedia)
In a Gallup poll taken in the early 1970s, very low percentages of whites (4 percent) and blacks (9 percent) supported busing outside of local neighborhoods. A 1978 study by the RAND Corporation set out to find why whites were opposed to busing and concluded that it was not because they held racist attitudes, but because they believed it destroyed neighborhood schools and camaraderie and increased discipline problems. It is said that busing eroded the community pride and support that neighborhoods had for their local schools. After busing, 60 percent of Boston parents, both black and white, reported more discipline problems in schools. In the 1968, 1972, and 1976 presidential elections, candidates opposed to busing were elected each time, and Congress voted repeatedly to end court-mandated busing.
Opponents of desegregation busing claim that children were being bused to schools in dangerous neighborhoods, compromising their education and personal safety. Critics point out that children in the Northeast were often bused from integrated schools to less integrated schools. The percentage of Northeastern black children who attended a predominantly black school increased from 67 percent in 1968 to 80 percent in 1980 (a higher percentage than in 1954).[3]
Busing is claimed to have accelerated a trend of middle-class relocation to the suburbs of metropolitan areas. Many opponents of busing claimed the existence of “white flight” based on the court decisions to integrate schools. Such stresses led white middle-class families in many communities to desert the public schools and create a network of private schools.
Ultimately, many black leaders, from Wisconsin State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat, to Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White, have come to the conclusion that it is patronizing to think that minority students need to sit next to a white student to learn, and as such led efforts to end busing.
In 1978, a proponent of busing, Nancy St. John, studied 100 cases of urban busing from the North and did not find what she had been looking for: She found no cases in which significant black academic improvement occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing, as those in forced-integrated schools had worse relations with those of the opposite race than those in non-integrated schools. Researcher David Armour, also looking for hopeful signs, found that busing “heightens racial identity” and “reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races”. A 1992 study led by Harvard University Professor Gary Orfield, who supports busing, found black and Hispanic students lacked “even modest overall improvement” as a result of court-ordered busing.
Another mystery was why Asian students, segregated in some school systems, nevertheless thrived academically.
Segregation is a non-issue for the poor because the alternative, desegregation, does not change their life in any important or substantial way. They are still poor, and still live largely without hope.
So if it makes white saviors like Tim feel better, best re-read the conclusion from Black leaders back in the 1970s.
Rage,
Tim is not sincere when he rants about segregation. He is advocating for Eva’s charters, either openly or covertly, at all times. And they are highly segregated. That is not a problem for him.
“Never mind the furor that would ensue if zoning changes were proposed that would allow black and brown children from nearby Mount Kisco and Bedford into Chappaqua’s schools.”
Do you mean the furor from the Black and Brown parents? The furor that would erupt from being patronized? The furor that would erupt from the disparity of opportunities for the few of their children sent to Chappaqua and the remaining left behind?
The Black and Brown parents of Mount Kisko, Bedford, Poughkeepsie, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and NYC do not want their children sent to white (better) schools, they want the same opportunities that are being denied to them by a political system that benefits from maintaining an underclass.
If the black and brown parents of NYC don’t want their children sent to white(r) schools, then somebody better tell Bill De Blasio and Carmen Farina to put the brakes on the recent push to increase diversity, because it seems like a lot of white parents don’t want it, either.
Thanks
If anyone had any doubt before you kept digging, digging, digging, and digging some more, at least everyone now knows where you stand (ht: Louise Day Hicks).
The excerpt you cut and pasted from Wikipedia ignores the fact that an immense amount of excellent research and study on school and residential segregation has occurred since the 1970s and 1980s!
We now know that more than any other intervention—class size, funding, teacher quality—racial and socioeconomic integration has the biggest and most scalable positive effects on at-risk student subgroups (https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomically-and-racially-integrated-schools-and-classrooms/).
We know that school segregation occurs not because of market forces or self-selection on the part of minorities, but because of longstanding institutionalized racism (see American Apartheid, Massey/Denton, and Crabgrass Frontier, Jackson); we know that it is a cause of residential segregation, not an effect (see “Segregation as Splitting, Segregation as Joining: Schools, Housing, and the Many Modes of Jim Crow,” Highsmith and Erickson, 2015). We know that “[m]oney can buy important things such as good preschool training, strong facilities and educational resources, if it is well targeted, but it does not typically buy the same kind of teachers, curriculum, level of instruction, level of peer group academic support and positive competition, and stability of enrollment of classmates and of faculties that are usually found in white and stably diverse schools” (see “New Jersey’s Apartheid and Intensely Segregated Urban Schools,” Orfield, Tractenberg, Flaxman, 2013).
If you want to take a retrograde position that ignores the best and latest research, that’s your lookout. If you want to set up a strawman and claim that support for integrating schools is the same as saying all-minority schools can’t excel and shouldn’t remain as an option for those who want them, okay, fine. If, in 2016, you actually want to claim that the decision of some minority parents to pursue non-integrated unzoned schooling for their children (which, as Iris Rotberg reminds us, so often happens in the face of an equally non-integrated zoned school) makes it acceptable for white parents to desire the same goal, I certainly can’t stop you!
But I would gently suggest that before lifting the shovel even one more time you crack open your copy of “Reign” and read Chapter 31.
By the way Bedford and Mount Kisco are hardly underfunded segregated schools. They are thriving integrated schools that get good results.
The minority population of Bedford CSD is concentrated into two elementary schools that are in rapid transition and at current rates will have very few white students within a decade or so. The achievement gaps within these schools and especially between others in the district are as large as those for the county as a whole, and the gaps persist through the district-wide middle and high schools.
School integration plans work best when they are intentional and proactive, when they touch the early elementary school grades, and when they require equal sacrifice from all subgroups (e.g., the burden of travel isn’t placed mostly or even exclusively upon minority children).
I should have known better than to use tiny tim as a resource.
Rage. Thanks for the information on the backlash on busing. It is a complex issue. I taught in an integrated school district that worked well for all, and I wish there were an easier way to make that a reality.
How on Earth can you reconcile your unsubstantiated argument for forced desegregation with your unending support for a charter school system that continues to create hyper-segregated schools? Like Success Academy?
And your pipedream of fully segregated city schools is going to happen exactly how when minority populations in our cities run at 75% – 90%?
Segregation is merely a symptom. Have fun trying to treat it.
And ask yourself Tim. if the effects of hyper-segregation are so harmful, why is it working out so well for Chappaqua and every other affluent all white district in the state?
You are barking up the wrong tree. Stop trying to be a the great white hope for populations that don’t want SOME of their kids to be temporarily shuffled off to shiny white schools for 6 hours a day, 180 days a year while forgetting it where they shuffle back to.
Some colleges are also offer segregated graduation ceremonies, but it is up to the individual students if they want to attend. It’s a choice. It’s not mandated.
The WHITE parents in Success Academy schools will only send their kids to schools that have a much lower than average number of at-risk kids.
Success Academy enables this in District 3, Manhattan. Three Success Academy schools. Two are 80 – 85% minority and poor, and one has virtually all the white students AND is less than 25% poor!
And Success Academy ships the kids from the mostly white and middle class school AWAY from the other kids in the mostly poor and minority schools for middle school! Instead of keeping them in the same district and combining the 3 district Success Academy elementary schools, they send the richest kids to another mostly white district for middle school!
Tim, is Eva Moskowitz planning on stopping that practice that keeps the white kids in District 3 “separate but equal”? If not, then charter schools are not the answer except to sending more riches her way (and no doubt your way as well).
^^^it takes a huge amount of chutzpah for Tim to post here advocating the “easy” things that Success Academy has utterly REFUSED to do in their 3 “hyper segregated” District 3 schools.
In fact, in Bedford, the elementary schools combine for middle and high schools. In District 3 — the white and middle class minority kids in Upper West are bused out of district to mostly white District 2 for middle school so they don’t have to mix with the other District 3 Success Academy schools that have mostly minority and low-income students.
Chutzpah. Sometimes I think Tim is Eva Moskowitz herself.
Now Tim, here’s the final word. Time to call you out on your clever BS postings. You my friend have a lot god damned gall railing against segregation out of one side of your mouth and shilling for Eva and her hyper-segregated Success Academy charters out of the other. And to make matters worse, Eva’s brand of segregation is by far the most immoral of them all. Eva’s personal brand of forced segregation is not only willful and of course preventable, but the most heinous aspect is how and why she segregates. Eva Moskowitz brand of segregation is not about separating whites from blacks, it is not about separating rich from poor, Eva’s brand of segregation is all about separating the WANTED from the UNWANTED. We are talking about children here. That my friend is immoral and reprehensible – and that is the brand of segregation you shill for.
As you noted earlier in this blizzard of comments meant to defend your opinion that “segregation is a non-issue,” “minority populations in our cities run at 75% — 90%.” In plenty of hypersegregated neighborhoods, be they in New York City or Rochester, and even in some much smaller communities where the minority population is warehoused in and intentionally confined to a tiny, blighted section of town, the percentages can be even higher than that. (And as you know, the flip side is also true; there are many, many school districts and communities in New York that are nearly 100% white.)
You are engaging in a time-honored practice — setting up a strawman which claims that integration demands that every school be integrated – that’s another common element of the public narrative driving and sustaining school segregation. “Blacks and Latinos live in hypersegregated inner cities because they want to.” “Anyone who has the money can live in my town—this is all just honest-to-God market forces!” “It’s not possible to perfectly integrate every school, darn it, so what is the point.”
Charter schools in New York could be seen as worsening segregation if they were drawing black and Latino children from integrated schools. This, of course, isn’t the case. The vast majority of charter school students in New York are black or Latino and economically disadvantaged (93% and 80%, respectively) and are zoned for highly segregated neighborhood schools. In the words of preeminent school segregation scholar Iris Rotberg, “The primary exceptions to increased student stratification [created by charters] are in communities that are already so highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and income that further increases are virtually impossible . . .”
Your screed about WANTEDNESS would be hilarious if it weren’t so incredibly offensive. For decades and decades the traditional district system had been perfectly content to let New York children living in hypersegregation essentially drop dead, “separate but equal.” It would have gone on that way forever—the net worth and nest eggs of so many whites depend on it, after all. Charter schools gave those disadvantaged families an option—no longer were they confined to a “neighborhood school,” one largely staffed by people from outside the neighborhood who would never in a million years send their own kids to schools like the ones where they work. And suddenly—amazingly!—people suddenly became concerned about WANTEDNESS and fair shares and so on.
“Segregation is a non-issue.” And you want to lecture me about being immoral.
The word, direct from Success Academy
Nope, the word of an NYC DOE traditional public school parent who works in a field wholly unrelated to education and who doesn’t receive a penny or any other benefit from any charter school, network, or supporter of charter schools. This particular libel is getting very tiresome.
64% of Americans support charter schools, remember. Step out of the echo chamber occasionally.
In other words, Tim, what Rage is saying is that you are supporting a cast society — like the one in India that’s still there hanging on in spite of the laws that have been passed to get rid of it. Do you really want to support a return to a world like the Jim Crow South?
I know, Tim, we can call the unwanted the untouchables and ban them from using the same restrooms, restaurants and drinking the same water the wanted use.
Heck, why not just build the prisons (corporate, private sector for profit of course) now and as soon as they are age 5 or 6 and are listed by corporate charters as unwanted, send them straight to a corporate for profit cell for life before they grow up to maybe commit a crime like jaywalking.
How many years did Jean Valjean get for stealing a loaf of bread to help feed his sister’s starving children? Is that the world all the Tims want?
Predictable and ridiculous straw man arguments from another of the dyed-in-the-wool neo-Plessyites. It’s “caste,” by the way.
For many decades New York’s open public schools that serve everyone had nearly sorted and segregated kids almost as efficiently as Jim Crow laws would have. Everyone was fine with it until the possibility of job losses entered the picture. You are barking up the wrong tree.
Click to access Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf
Tim, don’t avoid the issue. Accusing me of straw man or ad hominem is only a way to avoid facing the truth.
I’m not arguing with you. It’s only an observation – my opinion. Last time I looked, the 1st Amendment is still there and hasn’t been removed yet.
Read the report I linked to on the extreme school segregation among traditional public schools in NY State–the most extreme of which occurs in the practical absence of charter schools, on Long Island–and tell me again that charters are creating a caste system. Your theory is easily disproved nonsense.
Tim, your reasoning is fallacious, and I’m not going to look at the evidence you site, because tThere is a huge difference between the alleged segregation in the traditional public schools and the obvious segregation taking place in the corporate charters.
One is deliberate.
The other is organic.
Do you know the difference?
Just because the traditional public schools in New York City have become more segregated by race does not mean the public schools are doing what, for instance, Eva’s Success Academy and KIPP are doing, and that is deliberately targeting children who do not test well and/or conform to the gulag style, autocratic, no-nonsense rules and bully tactics of most if not all corporate charters.
Tim shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or accusing the people of making strawman arguments; or making ad hominem attacks against the people . . .
This comment is not for Tim. Don’t read this one, Tim.
“But schools aren’t creating this segregation this study shows, though they may be contributing to it, they’re largely reflecting the social condition in the larger city. New York’s segregated schools have more to do with real estate, zoning, and the pace and paths of gentrification–than with the structure of choice programs for education.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/31/the-real-reasons-new-york-has-the-country-s-most-segregated-schools.html
Is the answer busing? But we’ve already done that.
Is the answer public housing for the poor planted next to mansions and multi million dollar high rise apartments/condos? But we’ve already done that.
Or should we focus on providing a high quality education for every child with highly educated and supported professional educators and not TFA scabs, and most of the public money goes to the classroom to keep class sizes small, and not into the profit pockets of autocratic, child abusing, opaque, often fraudulent, cherry picking facts/students, and inferior corporate charter schools?
Thank you, Lloyd.
Shout out for…
“Highly educated and supported professional educators.”
When pre-service and in service teachers are stressed out, lacking self-care and efficacy, we have burn out and brain drain of highly passionate role models. This gap is left to predictors leading to the extinction of public education. At first it is the marginalization of the most vulnerable, high risk students.
But, as we have seen with the shrinking middle class, ultimately only those who pay will get.
Alternatively, if we no longer allow education to be a for profit industry but value it as the means for coexistence, then and only then are we building our future.
LBJ’s war on poverty reduced poverty from 20% to 11% and busing helped desegregate schools. Yes, we’ve done those things before and they worked. So why don’t we do them again?
“Many of the war on poverty’s programs — like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, Head Start, Job Corps, VISTA and Title I — are still in place today. The Nixon administration largely dismantled the OEO, distributing its functions to a variety of other federal agencies, and eventually the office was renamed in 1975 and then shuttered for good in 1981.”
Did it reduce poverty?
“It did. A recent study from economists at Columbia broke down changes in poverty before and after the government gets involved in the form of taxes and transfers, and found that, when you take government intervention into account, poverty is down considerably from 1967 to 2012, from 26 percent to 16 percent.”
What could we do today, to reduce poverty?
“We could expand existing working anti-poverty programs like Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit and food stamps, or at least reverse recent cuts to the latter. We could, similarly, cut taxes on the working poor, perhaps by exempting the first $10,000 or so of a worker’s earnings from payroll taxes, or by cutting down on the extremely high effective marginal tax rates which poor Americans face. We could adopt a still more dramatic transfer regime, such as a basic income or low-income wage subsidies. We could be investing in education, such as by scaling up successful pre-K pilots such as the Perry or Abecedarian experiments, or by expanding high-performing charter schools and having traditional public schools adopt their approaches. We could raise the minimum wage, which all researchers find reduces poverty.” (What’s wrong with these suggestions?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-war-on-poverty/
And the GOP has been doing all it can to end it all and return the U.S. to 1900.
Lloyd,
A massive investment in rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure–roads, bridges, tunnels, etc–would create many good jobs and reduce poverty
Yes it would and investing in the nation’s infrastructure is investing in America. In addition, the money earned by the workers would flow right back into the economy supporting other jobs — something billionaires don’t do as they invest and hoard their wealth.
Yes, I was in on the convention floor when it happened. Also a group of teachers from LA were chanting , ” no more Anie Duncan no more charters.” Several teachers were escorted out and their Bernie Sanders banner confiscated.
So much for the NEA being the “largest democratic meeting in the world.” They won’t even allow for free speech. Typical.
I question your comment about NEA being a democratic organization. Here at the RA we are voting yeah or nay according to Robert ‘ s Rules. Google it. Also, we had elections yesterday whether or not to officially support Hillary. We had to check in, sign a form, mark the ballot, and drop it in a secured box. The results were computed electronically, and then presented to the delegates, who voted to accept the final results.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good for the largest group of people carrying out the democratic process as described in policies, rules and regulations, and bylaws. This is not taken lightly here at the RA!
It wasn’t about free speech! It was about being respectful and showing some class. And by the way, the president of that group sent a letter of apology to Lily and she read it to us this morning.
All of you making comments about this…we’re you even there?
Are you that naive that Hillary doesnt know. The people that pay into charters are the same people that donate to her.
Hasn’t Bernie Sanders also said he favors “public charter schools”?
You nailed it, Joanne. As much as I hold Diane Ravitch in high regard, I’m guessing a sit down chat between Ravitch and Clinton would be information in one ear and out the other compared to the $353,000 Alice Walton donated to her campaign this past February. Hillary is bought and paid for.
Yes, Bernie supports “public” charters.
Hillary knows, and doesn’t care.
Her husband enacted so many pieces of legislation that have hurt the working people of this country. Just one of those pieces of legislation is the law that gives all those philanthropic donors to charter schools tax credits for their contributions. That was tax credits not tax deductions, the kind of deduction that working people get. Tax credits represent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hedgiies, bankers, the Walton family.
Diane, don’t try to convince us that you are that unaware, naive, or blind. It doesn’t enhance your credibility.
Hilary didn’t know – occupy commerce – commercial space
Take it to the streets ….
“Le Salon, Park Slope”:
This trying time, a “Reign of Error|Terror” begs for mercy and compassionate action. Revive Le Salon!
Humanity Spaces
You are welcome…
Teachers can go to melt the burnout.
Parents drop in to share problems, co-generating curricula for our children.
The essential question being: How do we want to live?
Not, how can we maintain this status quo.
Folks who choose to co-exist will work on being vulnerable, empathetic, compassionate, taking risks, and creating together.
Can we sit together mindfully in storefronts of our major cities and connect the
teaching|learning network?
If you believe, comment/water the seed- “Le Salon, Park Slope.”
Vive Le Salon!!
Linda Noble
High School Teacher/Teacher Educator/Neighbor
Hillary also said, “Advise me and hold me accountable.”
Diane, if Hillary does not know all the things you’ve rightly listed, then what are the unions, who have been advising her since their early endorsements, advising her on? Are they continuing their own love affair with the privatizers? We all should be advocating for her to have a meeting with you. #MeetWithDiane
C’mon Karen…if Hillary could not be held accountable to follow the vital rules of National Security with her emails, do you really believe that we ordinary parents and teachers will capture her attention when she is not even listening to Diane Ravitch? Is that naivete, or what?
The Clintons have been caught up in lying forever so that they get their way.
I sincerely hope you get to talk with her and that she listens as well. As you said repeatedly “Maybe she doesn’t know”. That sounds very similar to what they said today about her emails. She avoided trouble yet wears the title of incompetent. My fear is that she may become president although she has been deemed incompetent with the emails and she apparently doesn’t know about these huge fights we, as educators, are fighting against charter schools for our students and our professions.
Have you tried talking to Senator Brown from Ohio? He may be able to put you together with Hillary Clinton.
Good! I boo $illary and the DNC daily.
Bottom line: Hillary should be indicted.
The current two party system is corrupt to the core. And we worry about ISIS? Look inside.
Diane, Hillary knows exactly what she’s doing. Her pal Randi wants to be Ed Sec’y, so she delivered the AFT and other unions to Hillary, while selling out public education. Disgusting. I think you need to focus on Randi and start holding HER feet to the fire.
Agree with you dorothy…that makes much more sense.
There was only one cabinet level official in history to come out of the ranks of organized labor and Peter B. the painter from NY was appointed by a Republican, Tricky Dicky. It ain’t happening.
Weingarten will be dispensed with like yesterdays trash, now that nomination is secured,. The Democrats feel we have no choice I say BREXIT go IRISH .
Lily Eskelsen-Garcia hastily endorsed Hillary Clinton against the wishes of many educators.
Garcia has a connection to the Bill Clinton admin.
This was rigged and teachers are rightfully angry about this.
So what is she, another Debbie Wasserman-Shultz ready to move her candidate along?
The NEA does not seem the least concerned about Corperate takeovers or privatization of public schools, nor does Hillary Clinton.
Ginny–That is what I have been asking ,Where are the Unions? Perhaps the media blitz should be to the Union leaders whose salaries are paid for by membership. Garcia and Weingarten should be advocating for a platform that membership wants not Corporate America. Membership should be demanding this.
From Education Reform Now’s website, last Novmber:
“Hillary Clinton’s Concerning Comments on Public Charter Schools”
https://edreformnow.org/hillary-clintons-concerning-comments-on-public-charter-schools/
How can it be that “the most qualified prepared person to seek the White House in history” could be so misinformed ? Did anyone really expect any different.This could be the biggest betrayal since PATCO. Good going Randi .
When the platform committee met a week ago, a statement rejecting the TPP was rejected by the Clinton appointees . The TPP opposed by every major progressive organization in the Nation . Oppose by Organized Labor. Opposed by environmentalists from the Sierra Club to 350.org . Opposed by consumer groups like Food and Water Watch . Opposed by over 1500 organizations. Why Hillary herself told us that she is opposed to the TPP. Of course Tom Donahue of the Chamber of Commerce says Hillary’s with us on the TPP. So who ya gonna believe Hillary or Tom .
The Democratic National Convention should look like DC in November of 69 when hundreds of thousands came out against the war . On every issue from education ,to foreign policy ,to trade this woman, this New Democratic Party is dangerous . What can they possibly say to me to convince me not to vote Green . They haven’t even made it to the convention and they are selling out the base wholesale. At least Obama waited till he was in office.
I was there! Her speech was inspiring! She said that there needs to be a “conversation” between charters and public. She wasn’t expressing that she thought charters were the answer. She spoke against vouchers and privitization, and recognized the travesty of what NCLB has done. Her track record has been nothing but support for our nation’s children, starting right out of law school.
What’s more disturbing is the group of teachers who started chanting something about “no more charters”! There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with her, or that you were shocked, and offended. Thank goodness our Constitution allows free speech; I’m sure Lily would agree. But to be so disruptive that the rest of us were distracted, is not acceptable. Would you allow your students to do the same at an assembly or during a class presentation? If students in your class are having a discussion, friendly debate, or sharing an essay in class, would you allow students to boo each other?
Fortunately, our Constitution gives every individual the right to vote; a form of expression that is more credible while expressing your beliefs. It doesn’t disrupt a hall of over 10,000 people, and, it doesn’t get you escorted out of the convention hall.
Do really think that Lily would be so supportive of Hillary if she believed charters were a great idea? I do not doubt that if that was the case, Lily would call Hillary by speed dial, and have the first conversation with her. Lily would use her eloquent, compassionate and strong willed speaking skills to set her straight.
Can you explain to me what “conversations” charters and public schools have had in Utah in the last 20 years? Because all I see are kids that are literally dumped on my public school’s doorstep after Count Day. My school gets all of the “rejects” from charter schools, but none of the money. All I hear in these conversations is that charters provide a “better education,” (even though they often don’t) and that charters get white kids away from “those kids.”
I am right there with you about getting “those” kids. My school is in the bottom 3% of failing schools in the state. It’s a travesty! We’ve been a turnaround school for the last 2 years, and have 1 year to go. This is funded under NCLB, with School Improvement Grants (SIG). I was hopeful that ESSA would eliminate this, but after some digging, it doesn’t. (Refer to Department of Education’s document “Transition over to Every Student Succeeds Act”, section C-3, 4, 5, and Section I.) Plus, adding salt to our injury, we are also a state turnaround school thanks to Osmond ‘ s bill that passed last year.
My attempt was to correct what has been misunderstood, about what Hillary actually said. I did not offer my opinion of whether or not I agreed with that. I teach my students to be well informed about something before you have your own opinion. Very applicable here too.
I understand your frustration about this. We have state legislation who is so charter happy that it is disgusting. They have it wrong as far as we are concerned. But change doesn’t happen without discussion…coming to the table with anyone, and everyone involved, and as respectfully as possible. You might think I’m speaking out of my back-side rear end, but I’m not! Isn’t it collaboration? Don’t we do the same with our students, and even parents,
An appeal to the wonderful supporters of, and fighters for, our children, our world, our planet:
Hillary Clinton is not, and will not be, our champion, or even our supporter, on education — or on any other major issue facing the people of the USA or the world.
No surprise.
Right now, in November, and after both November and January we need, and history calls on us to continue to build, the movmenot’s for justice, for our children, for our planet, which hold true promise for a world all people deserve.
Let us not give in to, or be derailed by, fights around the elections that could divide our people against one another.
People who vote for Clinton because they oppose Trump’s crude and open racism, xenophobia, etc., etc. are not an enemy of social justice. People who refuse to vote for Clinton because they just can’t stomach voting for more of the same problems we, and the victims of U.S. policies around the world, struggle with — these people also are not enemies of social justice.
Our real work continues.
AND those who don’t hold teachers’ union leaders to a non-bendable support for public education and teacher professionalism are now paying the price—and will continue to pay the price.
Peter Greene:
“We’re going to stick to one point, and the point is this– to pretend that there is a substantive difference between profit and non-profit charter schools is either willfully ignorant or deliberately misleading. I’ve said it many times– a modern non-profit charter school is just a for-profit school with a good money-laundering plan.”
“And that’s just the profit issue. This is before we talk about every anti-democratic, school-destroying, segregation-spreading, education-failing, community-disrupting, and achievement-gap-increasing aspect of charter schools. As readers of this blog know, while charters can (and once were) a good thing, the modern charter movement has turned them into one of the most destructive forces in education today.”
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/07/for-hrc-profit-vs-non-profit-charters.html#comment-form
Thanks for quote which I had read and hadn’t filed in my mind. Greene has a talent for stating the complex clearly and succinctly.
At that point I would have stood up and turned my back toward her. Nothing new from the next administration without regard to which side wins.
Ekelson has the same phrase book that Hillary has:
“After Tuesday’s speech, NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia noted that some delegates in attendance actually work at charter schools. But she said that many charters have strayed from their initial purpose to be incubators of learning.
“‘For us, the anger comes from the growing franchise for-profit charter schools,’ Eskelsen Garcia said. ‘When they move in, they devastate the local school district.'”
I doubt that ANY NEA delegates work in charters. NEA refused to let my husband join NEA when he taught in a charter.
Diane, talking to her would be an exercise in futility. Hillary Clinton is a well paid fully owned subsidiary of Wall Street hedge funders (her son in law is one) and corporations. She is not simply ignorant of the facts; she is a highly informed privatizer. She does not, however, have the Democratic nomination yet. She can’t have that nomination until we all agree on July 25 in Philadelphia.
There is a nominee who has made clear his support of public education, unions, teachers and his opposition to charters and privatization: Bernie Sanders. He walks the walk – she can’t even talk the talk! Bernie Sanders can win the nomination if we all get behind him. He’s also the only contender who can demolish Trump. Hillary will lose to Trump if she is the nominee.
The media want to scare you into supporting a corporate Walmart shill by holding up pics of Trump and saying “Boo!” Are we really all that stupid? Do we really have that little foresight – and hindsight – and memory of scaremongering tactics of corporate shills?
Anti privatizations need to organize and attend Clinton rallies and begin chanting “meet with Ravitch” until they are required to leave. It needs to be a daily feature of every appearance possible.
If one follows her actions rather than her words, you’ll see that she behaves as anti-democratic donors wish her to behave, not as voters want her to behave. And since her donors come largely from Wall Street and the plutocratic set, I do not believe she can be a strong advocate for public education. Just recently, a NYT’s article about a deal between the feds and corporations to retrieve nearly 3 trillion dollars of taxable income held abroad has Hillary singing the praises of a deal that would claw back but a fraction of these taxes in exchange for a permanent reduction of the corporate tax rate. (Add to this deal the fact that she will not go after tax policy that exacerbates income inequality.) These examples of neoliberal inclinations spell the death of the public sphere because it starves the public sphere of needed resources. Because of corporate tax deals like this one, there will not be enough money for schools because military and public debt payments are first in line for fewer and fewer discretionary dollars.
Does anyone believe Clinton is unaware of this simple truth? Soaring rhetoric is really expensive folks. Really expensive. (By the way, this truth is what troubles so many of us about Warren.)
Maybe she used to be on the Walmart Board & just didn’t notice the Walton family’s animosity to the rest of humanity?
Touche
If she hasn’t met with Diane, at this late date, then she doesn’t want to know.
Maybe she doesn’t know that, in NY, public school funding is diverted to fund “public” charter schools- without the regulations for how this funding is used…
I will NEVER vote for Hillary Clinton. I fear her more than Trump. Go Jill Stein!
A while back there was a piece by Joe the Plumber . Remember Joe, the guy who was neither a plumber, nor anything else. Nobody should have to mentioned his name in the same sentence as the word education. He is taking a slap at the teachers unions . Asking them how does it feel to have supported Obama after he declared National Charter School Appreciation Week on Teacher Appreciation Day.
So here we are and she did not even wait for till after the election, and she does it at the NEA.
You just can not make this stuff up. Wait till you see your choice in 2020 .
Edit for out .
Just look to the News Market Tax Credit. Diane, what are your thoughts on the Goals 2000? Do you see them as a predecessor to NCLB?
New Market Tax Credits
Yet you support her as a candidate.
Why support HRC as a candidate and not the other guy, The Donald?
Easy, there are more issue at stake than just education and The Donald would lead to a catastrophe across the board except for him, because the Donald will profit off anything he does.
Until teachers have a choice that supports education, the choice will always be the lesser of two evils and in this case, HRC is obviously far less evil than The Donald.
For instance, Trump just praised Saddam Hussein for his brutality.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-gives-saddam-hussein-a-shout-out/ar-AAi914h?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
What did these two men have in common — Trump and Saddam?
Answer: They have both kept books about Hitler or written by Hitler close by.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/vanity-fair-trump-kept-a-volume-of-hitlers-speeches-by-his-bedside/article/2001343
In addition, Trump has also been endorsed by Russia’s Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
Lloyd they will both be disasters . Lets just stick to foreign policy .
Hillary sees Putin as the greatest threat NATO having already pushed to the old Soviet boarder is pushing towards the Russian boarder .
Are you ready for another cold war. Why is it that there is a new push to create battlefield nuclear weapons and modernize our Nuclear arsenal. You’re worried about Trump! These people are M.A.D.
Jeffery Sachs in a piece on BREXIT recently called for the U.S. to support Assad through cooperation with the Russians in Syria, thus ending a humanitarian disaster. Good piece you should read it, Sachs is a progressive, not a right wing loon .
Yes Hillary is better, but not by enough for me to vote for her here in NY. But NY don’t count.
Measure the difference of these candidates through the ratio of lies: Trump versus Hillary.
Use all the major fact check sites for the score.
Lloyd: One is the Guillotine the other the Noose , pick your poison. But I came back here after reading a good piece in the Nation a minute ago . Stick a fork in me I never should have read “Confessions of an Economic Hitman “.
https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trumps-praise-of-saddam-hussein-in-context/
Please, please, please keep putting pressure on the candidate to update her opinions.
It’s hardly a surprise that Hillary Clinton received a chorus of boos when she spoke about cooperation between genuine public schools and what she called “public charter schools” in her speech to the National Education Association meeting. If she doesn’t know that charter schools are not legitimate public schools, then her ignorance is inexcusable; more likely is that she does know and is just mouthing the pitch of the hedge funds from where she gets significant financial backing. Either way, it disqualifies her from getting the vote from rank-and-file NEA members.
The simple fact is that charter schools are not public schools and only claim to be public schools in order to get their hands on public tax money. The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that charter schools aren’t genuine public schools because they are run by private boards not elected by the public. And charter schools don’t file rigorous public-domain audited financial reports like genuine public schools file. So, the Court ruled, charter schools are not entitled to receive public tax money.
That’s a reasonable ruling and one that should be sought in every state in our nation. So, why aren’t there court cases in every state? Why?
Even though Clinton has the NEA endorsement, that doesn’t mean she will get the votes of the rank-and-file NEA members unless she makes a firm stand that charter schools must become genuine public schools that are run by publicly-elected boards and must file the same rigorous public-domain audited financial statements that genuine public schools file. Otherwise, she is just going to give us more of the same: Non-public charter schools taking public tax money and spending it with virtually no oversight so that much of the public’s tax money ends up in private wallets while most of America’s children get shortchanged on their education.
The Washington case involved a provision in the state constitution that said that money from the state’s “common school fund” could only be applied to “common schools.” There isn’t a constitutional hook like that in every state. (Perhaps some state constitutions have analogous provisions, but I’m not aware of them).
Some state constitutions have analogous provisions (eg, Nevada and Indiana) but the courts chose to ignore their plain meaning
The plain meaning of the constitutional provision doesn’t get you very far in the analysis. The question in the Washington case hinged on what a “common school” is, and the answer to that question is not something that’s clear from the plain language of the constitutional provision. Washington had a hundred-year-old precedent that defined a “common school”as a school that’s under the “complete control” of the voters. If the Nevada and Indiana constitutions say that only “common schools” can receive “common school funds,” their high courts would have to look to Nevada and Indiana case law to define what a “common school” is. And Nevada and Indiana may not have had a precedent on par with the one in Washington.
The definition of “public” charter has been turned upside down by Orwellian privatizers in which words mean whatever the people in power say they mean.
Public schools answer to the public. A publicly elected BOE or Mayor. Charter schools answer to a private board — just like private schools do.
Is there any other “public” institution that claims it is a “public” institution? Or are charter schools and their billionaire backers the only people with enough (financial) influence on politicians to allow them to re-define the term “public”.
^^correction: Is there any other PRIVATE institution that claims it is a “public” one because it is non-profit?
If a non-profit private charter school claims it is “public” because it gets all its funding from the state, then a for-profit charter school is just as much a “public” charter.
No one is asking the people who claim they are “public”charters what makes them “public”. They somehow are claiming that non-profit status makes them public and for-profit status makes them non-public but that is a definition that no one has ever used before. If the definition depends on where they get their money, then every charter is “public”. Even when it makes millions for their “owners”.
Maybe FLERP! can give us some examples of other non-profit organizations controlled by private boards that call themselves “public”. If not, then why would FLERP! defend the use of that word?
The one that comes to mind is the NYPL (and the Queens Public Library, and I assume many other library systems). Diane and I discussed it a few days ago. One can argue (as Diane did) that the NYPL is still “public,” but that argument has to be based on something other than the idea that anything that’s managed by a non-profit corporation controlled by a private board is not “public.”
There’s no question that charter schools are managed by private corporations (except for the outliers that aren’t). Whether that means that charter schools themselves are not “public” depends on arguments about the definitions “public,” “private,” “school,” and probably other things. They certainly aren’t “public schools” in the way that district schools are “public schools,” that much is clear.
In Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that charter assets belong to the operator. The for-profit charter schools in Ohio, refer to themselves as “public”, in T.V. ads.
Ohio’s attorney general and the FTC have a responsibility to investigate allegations of fraudulent advertising.
FLERP!, thank you, the NYPL is a good way to look at the difference between public and private non-profits.
The NYPL is not competing with libraries run directly by the city. It IS the Manhattan library. There is only one system, and it doesn’t “compete” with other non-profits to run libraries. That is why it is not expanding to “compete” with the Queens and Brooklyn libraries. It exists to serve the city. Neither are the Queens and Brooklyn “non-profits” vying to take over the NY Public Library. There is not “choice” and no competition.
It is similar to a PUBLIC utility which serves every neighborhood. Can you imagine if CON ED was told it had to service gas in the places where each customer would cost them the most, while giving another non-profit the right to “compete” for the cheapest to serve customers? Of course, each customer pays the same rate for gas, so CON ED makes nothing while the favored “non-profit” pays its CEO millions.
It would be disgusting if the “non-profit” who was allowed to cherry-pick the cheapest customers and send any customers they found too expensive to service back to CON ED which could not turn them down. It would be especially disgusting if the “non-profit” claimed It was a PUBLIC utility and should be praised for giving such good service to the customers it chose to give good service to.
Except, remember, there is no such thing as a public non-profit. A non-profit can be a “public charity,” but it is a private corporation.
FLERP, are you saying you agree with me that the NYPL – which is the only public library system – is not like a private charter school? Or maybe you agree with the people who want to allow other non-profits with connections in high places to be given free rent in library buildings and NYPL money be given to them instead to offer library patrons with the least expensive needs a “choice”?
Supposedly that competition and forcing to give up resources to someone else can only make the NYPL better. And all those competing groups can claim they too are “public” libraries.
The NYPL is like charter schools in some ways. Both are run by private corporations with boards that are not elected by or directly accountable to the public. Both rely on public funding but devote considerable resources to private fundraising. Both are non-profits. Both (at least if we’re thinking of the large charter networks in NYC) are soaked in “hedge fund” money, stock their boards of directors with Wall Street titans and other white shoe characters, and both pay their CEOs what most people would consider to be a ridiculous amount of money. Both call themselves public and offer their service for free.
The list of ways that the NYPL is unlike charter schools is a lot longer.
NYPL is unlike charter schools, in that its doors are open to all. The city does not pay to open another library to compete with the NYPL. It does not direct the NYPL to give up space for a competing library within its walls.
I was shocked and dismayed as I heard delegates at the NEA RA boo Secretary Clinton. I was there and so disappointed that some delegates assume that all public charters are bad. There are charters that are totally controlled by locally elected school boards and are one of the public schools. Those teachers can be union members. No matter how small the percentage, we should no label all charters as bad no more than a certain students of a certain ethnicity are bad!! I’m tired of broad swipes and it’s time to deal with facts and specifics!!
Meg, the good 10% are there to make the rotten 90% smell good
The very idea of charters is flawed at the core
A dual public system steals from one to fund the other
Mag Gruber, I doubt that Hillary Clinton used “public” to mean a charter that is controlled by locally elected school boards.
But someone should get her on the record. If she claims KIPP or Success Academy is a “public” charter, then you must agree that either Hillary is purposely trying to confuse people or she supports private charters and is doing exactly what her billionaire donors demand by mis-calling them ‘public’ when they certainly are not.
This is the problem with explaining to friends and family about charters. Yes the original concept is fine – a school within a district and under its local control – where new ideas can be tried – for students who are struggling. That was the original concept. What we have now is far from that.
Keep fighting the fight, Diane! I keep hoping you will get a chance to meet with her.
Teachers are between a rock and hard place in this election. While Clinton is the more obvious choice, it would have been a clearer choice if we had not lived through Obama’s toxic test and punish agenda. There is such resentment for neo-liberal garbage to which we have been subjected that she may pay the price. Here’s is Peter Greene’s view on the dilemma. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/07/my-election-position-trump-clinton.html
Why, Retired Teacher, is she obvious choice? Not mine and I’m still teaching at seventy. Bernie Sanders would be a much better choice and many of my colleagues agree with me. Clinton is a corporatist. She is for private over public. I just don’t understand why people don’t get that. She always has been.
Being a woman doesn’t change that.
You can encourage readers to e-mail Hillary to ask her to meet with you. I just did so at: https://forms.hillaryclinton.com/contact
Thank you for fighting for public education and public educators Diane!!
Yes! Now, more than ever, thank you, Diane!
According to her Clinton Foundation website, the number 1 donator of over $25,000,000 was the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.
From the Clinton Foundation webpage (7/7/16):
“The Clinton Foundation’s impact would not be possible without the generous support of our donors and grantors. Their contributions and grants have made a difference in the lives of tens of millions across the world. As part of the Foundation’s commitment to transparency, we publicly disclose those who support our efforts on a quarterly basis. This list is comprised of those who have made contributions or grants to advance the work of any part of the Clinton Foundation, as well as membership, sponsorship, and conference fees for the Clinton Global Initiative. This list indicates cumulative lifetime giving through March 2016.
Their generosity makes our work possible and we thank them.
Donation Amount
Greater than $25,000,000
Displaying 1 – 7 of 7 records.
Donor name
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada)
Fred Eychaner and Alphawood Foundation
Frank Giustra, The Radcliffe Foundation
#1 Financial supporter is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
From their webpage (7/7/2016):
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced a $22 million investment in the NewSchools Venture Fund to increase the number of high-quality charter schools around the country by creating systems of charter schools,,,”
At this very momeny, NEA Pres. Lily Esklson-Garcia has shared her feelings about the crowd that started disruptive chants, during Hillary ‘ s speech. Basically, she was not pleased because educators should be above that kind of behavior. We are the role models that everyone watches! Our conversations can be overheard by anyone! Most important to her is that “this is a safe place to disagree”.
As usual, her eloquent expression and superb command of the English language makes her extremely convincing, and powerfully assertive. No one can doubt that!
For lack of a better phrase, you disrupters just got disciplined.
Oops, I spelled a word incorrectly.
Bow to Lily. Bow to Hillary. Obey and pay your dues minions. Good girl.
Why not ask for a meeting with all the candidates including Gary Johnson?
Carlene, I will certainly seek a meeting with Donald Trump.
MESSAGE MANIPULATION: Just because the NEA’s leaders sign member teachers up to be props for Hillary’s latest pre-orchestrated stump speech doesn’t mean it will be a cakewalk. Especially when Hillary’s handlers try to get teachers on camera swallowing her latest charter school expansion.
The charter controversy is huge. Teachers broadly feel charters hurt the education system but we do not hear about this on TV. It’s hard to get the word out because the richest billionaires in the US – the Gates, Kochs, Waltons, Broads have spent vast sums to manipulate the messages people actually see in the media, buying ads, dispatching PR flacks and creating astroturf organizations. One growing trend is getting celebrities to open charter schools. These same big spenders fund Hillary, candidates at every level as well as the corporate reform networks that amplify pro-charter teacher voices, per John Podesta’s 2012 plan.
Hillary recovered deftly from the booing, immediately pivoting to denounce “for profit” schools, but also promising in that exact moment to “end education wars” by sitting “at one table” and listening, to the teachers who actually work with kids. The boos turned to cheers.
So far, many major articles came out about Hillary’s charter remarks being booed – Diane’s post, two others in WaPo and others in Politico, Common Dreams, DemocracyNow!, The Atlantic, Huffington Post. The right wing is starting to share the gaffe too – Western Journalism, Daily Caller, NewsMax, etc. They are still tweeting links today, days later, loving the headline “Teachers boo Hillary” but my favorite is “Teachers Union Has Nasty Surprise for Hillary When She Gets Up to Speak”.
So this is making the rounds – but if you just saw the NBC feed of the Hillary speech, you only got limited impact. The ‘booing’ portion of the original NBC broadcast is pretty tame from the stage mics, as heard here: https://vimeo.com/173540580
Because you can barely hear them in the NBC feed, one article said “several” teachers “voiced disapproval”. Compare this clip, taken from the audience, and it’s clear the boos and groans were all over the hall: https://vimeo.com/173691853
TOTALLY CENSORED: What no one heard about at all – shortly following Hillary’s charter comments, a small contingent of NEA teachers, reportedly adjacent to the California delegation’s area, began chanting “No Arne Duncan, No charter schools!” during Hillary’s remarks.
I watched this live on Periscope myself. Here is one clip I found later showing the extent of the disruption: https://vimeo.com/173568595
One eyewitness said NEA organizers did remove some protesters and confiscate Bernie signs as well. Representative from the BATs said they did not agree with such disruptive tactics. About a dozen users on twitter asked why the NEA ‘silenced’ the dissenters. Obviously this is a hot issue, so it’s great Hillary will be sitting with actual teachers to discuss it, but will the corporate reformers and lobbyists also be at the table too?
Finally, later in the day, Hillary and Obama were both protested by NC teachers whose students were put in jail by immigration officials. Clips of that are here: http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/clinton-obama-speech-protest-teachers-students-deported-ice/
Seems democracy continues to be messy!
I’m a liberal independent (who switched my registration to dem to vote for Bernie in the PA primaries). I am a supporter of public schools, but my son is not a typical child and after trying for the elementary years to work within the system, I had to try something different, for his sake. His semi-cyber charter school experience has been nothing short of amazing and transformational. He is a happy, successful student and is seen as such by his teachers and school staff. Privately, several of his public school teachers (my daughter attends public) have told me that I made the right choice. I really had no idea how partisan the issue of public charters was until recently. I will fight for public charters and it will now become an issue that influences my political choices. I must do what’s right for the future of our children and our country.
Today is the second official day of our new electoral college selected president; but not his first real work day. As I read over this post and the comments, our current situation is almost surreal. Think about everything that has happened since the annual RA convention. I think it’s fair to say that not a single one of us – regardless of who you voted for – could have ever imagined these types of outcomes. Especially, for educators, the possibility that Betsy Devos could be our Sec. of Ed. With everything that has been reported about her, and I feel confident that it isn’t fake news, intelligent and educated people can see right through her and know she is unfit to be in this office.
This is definately time for all of us to unite, regardless of how you feel about our new POTUS!