If you were irked by Checker Finn’s article calling for an end to teacher tenure, you will enjoy Mercedes Schneider’s biting commentary on “tenure” at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. She opens up the tax returns of TBF and reveals executive salaries. Working for a think tank in D.C. pays far more than teaching.
I was a founding board member of TBF, back when it started. Checker’s father was chairman of the board, and Checker was chosen to be executive director. Mr. Thomas B. Fordham was an executive in Dayton, Ohio, and Mr. Finn, Sr., was his lawyer. When Fordham’s widow died, Mr. Finn Sr. created the foundation in accordance with the will. Mr. Fordham had invested in blue chip stocks many years ago and never sold them, so he left a considerable estate.
As TBF became increasingly ideological and rightwing, and as I turned against the rightwing agenda of privatization and high-stakes testing, I left the board. That was 2009. I opposed TBF becoming an authorizer of charter schools in Ohio. I lost. I opposed seeking funding from Gates, on the grounds that it would compromise our freedom to criticize Gates. I lost. There comes a time when you realize it is time to part ways.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There comes a time when you realize it is time to part ways.
or, as Mollie Ivins said, “If you are in a hole, stop digging.”
I saw a PBS program that showed Chester Finn visit a public school in LA, predominantly Latino. It was excruciating to see how out of place he was and also blind to the energy and talent of students.
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Is it really legal to start a 501c3 foundation with your client’s money in which you install your son in a very highly paid position, including an overpaid retirement?
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Thank you Diane for adhering to your principles and parting ways with TBF and its ideology. It all amounts to a war against public schools and their teachers. It’s not enough that the “reform” crowd wants to promote charter schools, vouchers and school privatization. Oh no, they must also destroy tenure, seniority, LIFO, teacher defined benefit pensions and health benefits. Here in NJ, Christie has spent almost 8 years yowling and screeching against those so called Cadillac pension plans, golden plated health benefits, sick leave payouts, LIFO, tenure, seniority, the unions, etc. He has nothing but praise for charters and vouchers and nothing but swift boating for the real public schools.
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Joe,
You nailed. The privatizers want to destroy unions, because they stand in the way. They want to replace teachers with technology and call it “personalized” without a person teaching. They want to eliminate tenure, seniority, defined benefit pensions. The end goal is to cut costs while privatizing for profit. The money that once went to teachers will go instead to investors.
To call this “reform” is cynical, get typical. Just like calling it “putting students first” by demonizing their teachers. Or saying that a machine “personalizes” learning.
This is Alice in Wonderland, where words are the opposite of their meaning.
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The privatizers want a “race to the bottom” with right to work laws for the entire country. If people keep voting against their own self interests, the oligarchs will crush everyone’s chance at a decent life. The beacon of upward mobility is public education.
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Of course, to hear the leading ‘splainers and defenders of corporate education reform tell it, they’re not in it for the swelling of the bank account and ego…
Rheeally!
🙃
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Money that flows from those in power tends to corrupt everyone that dips their fingers in that river of greed.
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On a tangent, but in the “in over their heads, but think they know what they’re talking about” department, I was reading my newest issue of National Geographic today. The quality of this publication has REALLY gone down since Rupert Murdoch bought it. Exhibit A: As I’m reading this article on genius, here comes a discussion of how genius “requires grit,” quoting Angela Duckworth. I was so sick to my stomach that I had to stop reading. I’ve been a member of National Geographic since my first year in university. I may have to cancel.
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I thought NG was a magazine about places and people, not about pseudoscientific claptrap.
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Not anymore. Not since Rupert Murdoch took over. It’s tragic, really.
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“Not since Rupert Murdoch took over.”
TOW, as an Australian can I please apologise for this most embarrassing “export”? I’m also sorry to say that his mother lived until 102 (although she was a nice lady), so even his genes are against us!
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The New Yorker magazine ran this story on experienced workers being turned out of their jobs and the connection to the infatuation with Trumpism. Tenure (really just due process!) for teachers might not be the first thing that comes to mind, as mostly the reference is to “working-class work”. But it’s obvious that what Finn would like to do is consign reliable wages and protections for teachers to the dustbin.
“The return to experience is a way to describe what you get in return for aging. It describes the increase in wages that workers normally see throughout their careers. The return to experience tends to be higher for more skilled jobs: a doctor might expect the line between what she earns in her first year and what she earns in her fifties to rise in a satisfyingly steady upward trajectory; a coal miner might find it depressingly flat. But even workers with less education and skills grow more efficient the longer they hold a job, and so paying them more makes sense. Unions, in arguing for pay that rises with seniority, invoke a belief in the return to experience. It comes close to measuring what we might otherwise call wisdom.”
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-despair-of-learning-that-experience-no-longer-matters
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A man I know who was formerly employed in a very large well known corporation as an engineer shared with me that what I described as happening in my career is the same as what is going on in corporate America. They are picking off the higher paid more experienced employees. He was laid off and now teaches at two colleges, one of which is Ivy League.
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Tenure B. Forthem institute?
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“Tenure B. Forthem”
At Tenure B. Forthem
A DC Institute
The tenure we afford ’em
And pay em lots to boot
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I can picture the political cartoon above your words.
Chester Finn is the perfect example of a man who should experience the Christmas night that Scrooge did.
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The REAL agenda of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/michael-petrilli-charter-schools-aren-article-1.2418153
“The real moral duty of charter schools: The goal should be to create orderly and challenging environments where strivers from poor families can learn”
It is now MORAL to abandon the kids who are not strivers. I mean, so much for school “reform” because the TBF Institute now knows that some kids’ are not worth it and they are delighted to support charters who can separate the worthy from the unworthy. The fact that the “worthy” just happen to be much cheaper to educate is something we are supposed to ignore because how else can people get rich in the new “education” marketplace that TBF Institute believes will save the kids who are worth saving!
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^^And the fact that Petrilli received a nice $314,000 in compensation in 2015 has nothing to do with his strong beliefs that only some kids are worthy. As Petrilli abases himself to the .001% who provide his comfortable lifestyle I wonder if there is anything he won’t defend.
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Public schools!
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Separating children into strivers and non-strivers goes against everything that is known in education. Some children who initially appeared to show the least promise have metamorphocized into shining stars. After not uttering a word for months, ELLs emerge from their cacoons spouting full sentence discourse. It is a travesty to give up on a child. In a discussion last week about a page in a biography of Jesse Owens stating that his family did not have enough money for a doctor, one of my students raised his hand to say, “Sometimes my parents do not have enough money to buy food.” Who am I to judge his readiness, or lack of readiness to learn? His family suffers from food insecurity. Do I have any way of knowing what is passing through his mind as I attempt to infuse his brain with English vocabulary and syntax?
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cocoons
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Another former Fordham board member, Craig Kennedy, was quoted in an interview saying there was a shortage of good ideas in the U.S. to absorb the amount of philanthropic dollars.
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Chester (Checker) Finn is one of the great educational charlatans.
Finn calls himself an “education expert.” And he’s been doing it for quite some time. But to be an “expert” means that a person has, uses and readily displays “special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience.” Finn, however, admits that he was a terrible teacher during his very brief stint at it, and the “knowledge” that Finn imparts to others is more than a little specious.
Finn has shamelessly peddled the false claim made in A Nation at Risk — the Reagan-era polemic — that announced “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, concluded quite the opposite:
“..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
“youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
“business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Finn paid no attention.
Finn has spread the nonsense that “we downplay excellence at great cost, not only to our economic competitiveness but also perhaps to reform of the education system itself.” Say what?
The U.S. already IS internationally competitive. The U.S. is usually in the top five of the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings. When it drops, the WEF doesn’t cite education, but stupid economic decisions and policies.
For example, when the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
In 2011-12, the WEF cited “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.”
People like Chester Finn and his corporate-”reform” allies don’t care. They just keep making things up as they go.
Finn writes that “Local control in a democratic system is only as good as the means whereby it is exercised, ultimately by thoroughly informed voters.” Sadly and perversely, Finn has done his level best to misinform the public, to distort facts, and to muddy rather than to clarify discussions on public schooling.
And he gets a handsome paycheck for doing it.
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