A group of internationally renowned educators are meeting in Rotterdam starting today, and they are building an organization of educators to resist the test-driven, compliance-driven culture that has enveloped many nations. They are resisting the movement to privatize schooling and to turn children into data points.
It is an international rebellion against corporate reform.
Join.
They call themselves “We the Educators.”
You can join the conversation at wetheeducators.com
Here is the link to their Facebook page.
I will occasionally post material they produce.
You can download the report here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please use the links to track back to the original articles
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/1/1658054/-Arizona-legislator-One-thing-I-would-like-to-repeal-is-the-law-on-compulsory-education
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/5/2/1658152/-Trump-s-Secretary-of-Agriculture-rolls-back-nutrition-regulations-on-school-lunches
Compliance does seem to be the sole goal of education policy lately.
Let’s add the “We the Educators” report to the NPE toolkit in order to educate the public. It doesn’t do any good to keep the discussion here. We have to reach out to the public through letters to the editor, public forums, PTA meetings and discussions with legislators in order to counter the destruction caused by privatization, standardization and datafication.
We should ask Fordham how they get the media to quote them in almost all of the published education articles…. wait…did the Deutsch 29 blog provide us with he answer when it listed all of Fordham’s wealthy “philanthropists”?
You are right, rbeckley. This report needs a wider dissemination. Letting it die on this blog would be a mistake. I lost my job six years ago in a climate that devalued my specialized training in working with struggling students. Standardization and datafication turned them into widgets being machined on a production line. Despite the administration’s own failure to provide the program according to the publishers standards or to select students that met the criteria for participation, administrators only paid attention to whether the model was presented with fidelity as they with their limited, snapshot understanding surmised. The “garbage in-garbage out” data was king. The unique needs of each student, the dynamics of individual classes, and my professional judgement played no role in their assessment.
So sorry you lost your job over speaking out. You might share your story with your legislator, newspaper, Parents Across America, BATs, etc.
I didn’t lose my job for speaking out. I lost my job for mistakenly believing that I was a professional whose judgement was respected. I lost my job for doing it as a professional in spite of administrative fumbling over which I had no control. After the department chair retired, my immediate supervisor had no real authority to run the department by design. Instead, decisions were in the hands of people who knew next to nothing about special education or the programs. The key one of those individuals has moved on to a management role in educational planning for a major educational publisher after making his way through the administrative ranks. He was a master at number crunching without actually knowing what the numbers meant. I just hope that someone recognizes him for the aggressive climber he is; after initially playing nice, when he realized I wasn’t tenured, he went after me behind the scenes. He even used a goal I set for myself in an ongoing training program I was involved in as a mark against me. I know another teacher who set a similar goal in this area. She was tenured and kept her job. She also worked at another campus that supported the program much better. Sleazy.
I’ve been out for almost six years now, and my story is only really painful to me. Too many people have suffered far worse indignities. I miss teaching, but the climate now is toxic; I am too old, and I would get myself fired in short order. I am too angry at what has been done to the profession.
Off topic
L. L. Bean sent me a catalog. I mailed the catalogue’s first page back to L. L. Bean, P.O. Box 1205, Albany, N.Y. 12201-1205 with the comment that I wouldn’t buy anything until Trump supporter Linda Bean is off the Board.
Thank you, Linda. I have been a catalogue shopper of LL Bean for decades. I called and asked to be removed from their mailing list. They put me through to a supervisor who tried to explain that it was just one person and I should reconsider.
I said that L.L Bean must learn that actions have consequences. I got off their list and no longer shop there.
Thanks for making the call.
Then I hope you refuse to take use Uber.
Refusing to use Uber is one of the few things I do that could qualify as consumer activism. Difficult to think of a company that better exemplifies the principle that efficiency is the straightest path to hell.
Uber and AirBnB created an opportunity for peasants to rent out the cars and homes they couldn’t afford otherwise. It’s a sign of a society in decline. I hope I am never so poor that I have to shop at Walmart or deny people jobs as taxi drivers. If I can’t afford accommodations, without using AirBnB, I won’t travel.
YES, Linda. VOTE with YOUR $$$$$. There are places where I refuse to shop. Support local.
The only currency that matters to those, who enable others to take advantage of the vulnerable, is dollars. Ideology supports their false sense of superiority. With less money, they aren’t so smug.
I hope someday teachers will rise up against the education school orthodoxy. I see the professors’ baleful dogma encroaching on all sides: no more teacher talk. No more transmitting knowledge. Hand kids texts and computers and have them “construct” knowledge through “inquiry” and “sacred” (yes that word was used in a recent indoctrination session) peer-to-peer conversations. (Note to the professors: peer-to-peer talk is the anti-Christ to this teacher). The result of all this muddled wrestling with opaque texts? Zero clear knowledge but –allegedly –advanced reading, writing, thinking, science and history SKILLS. WTF does this mean? No one really knows. But it sure sounds good. Following these bogus “best practices” is a recipe for even deeper ignorance for any kid who doesn’t have pedantic parents. Sadly it is the rare teacher who has the critical thinking skills to question this dogma. American schools are suffering from deep confusion about what they can do. They CAN indubitably impart knowledge and that is good. They CANNOT impart raw intelligence, which is what they are pretending to do. Every parent and employer wants their kids to have more raw intelligence; today’s educators tell them they can give that, but it is a lie. We have no idea how to do that. The methods we claim do that, don’t. The education profession, in its current state, is a profession of (unwitting) snake-oil salesmen. This needs to change. The change begins with a revolt against the education school professors.
This is fascinating stuff to me as I have zero experience with schools of ed. I tend to react in their favor only because dissing them is such a common talking-point for the anti-public-ed crowd. The incursion of stdzn/data-mongering has definitely affected my little PreK enrichment world, but it seemed a direct result of fed & state BofEd mandates promulgated by pols influenced by the corporate ed industry.
I’d had the rosy idea that ed schools were the last bastion for a century’s worth of fine devpt & research on child devpt/ ed. In my field of world languages, there actually have been pedagogical advances based on research, but that may be only w/n the academic specialty.
Is it basically a matter of ed schools selling out to/ incorporating political trends?
The ed school professors I’ve encountered are (with a few exceptions) the worst of the Left: narrow-minded, doctrinaire, intellectually mediocre. Easily threatened by unorthodox ideas because they haven’t established strong foundations for their own ideas. They quickly turn into Inquisitors who’d rather burn the heretic than engage in Socratic discussion with him. The field is not a vibrant free-for-all of idea exchange; it is a intellectual police state where enforcers blackball heretics and shut out threatening ideas. Empiricism has little place in the field; fidelity to doctrine, masked by faux-empiricism, has pride of place. They love all diversity except the most important kind: intellectual diversity. Heterodox thinkers will not be hired. I’m friends with a former ed school professor: she suspects her colleagues refused to hire a talented applicant because she was too smart. I suspect and hope that there are a few exceptions to this general description. I suspect Brown U. school of education is different. Harvard’s seems to have a little intellectual diversity. From my remove in the middle school classroom, Berkeley seems chief citadel of Inquisitors; Stanford not far behind.
Wait a moment, Ponderosa, your first comment was about pedagogy as taught in ed schools, but your follow-up was a gratuitous smear on the Left, and was a non-sequitur.
Surely you know, or should, that the push for technology in education schools has nothing whatsoever to do with the Left (if there even is such a thing in this country anymore), and everything to do with the colonization of “the education space” (to use a B-school term) by corporate America. Most academics, being herd-like, see which way the wind is blowing, and adjust accordingly.
Your criticism of education schools is fair – I happen to agree with most of it – but to use that as a bludgeon against political opponents is fallacious.
Michael, I consider myself part of the Left. I want Walton wealth to be slashed and their workers’ wealth to be tripled. What I find noxious is a lot of campus Leftism that militates against free speech and free thought. I believe in the Enlightenment and reason. I believe that objective truth can be discovered through reasoned discourse. I am not a post-modernist. I think the attitudes of many campus Leftists are inimical to these values. They shout down opponents rather than rebut their arguments. They adhere to doctrines rather than seek out truth. Many of the education professors I’ve encountered seem to be this stripe of Leftist: intellectually cowardly, dogmatic, close-minded.
Ponderosa’s argument ignores the power imbalance between the opportunities that the wealthy have to make their voices heard and, the blackout on opportunity for the 90%.
Campus silencing of speech is the manifestation of people robbed of all power.
Many faculty are sacrificing to protect university independence from oligarchs. Many are not. Generalizing the whole is inaccurate.
Ponderosa, in your 2:26 reply to Michael Fiorello, this makes sense to me tho broad-brush. The very same thing was happening on my campus in the late ’60’s. We were in the midst of massive student demonstrations supporting the [armed!] student-union takeover by blacks demanding Afro-American Studies & student representation in curriculum policy. I remember feeling betrayed (yet secretly concerned) when a small handful of our finest history & poli-sci professors turned on their heel & quit the uni mid-semester, citing lack of academic freedom.
In retrospect, the driver of all that was I think really the polarized political climate around the VN War, & the panicky, helpless feeling of students as grad day/ draft approached.
Easy enough to address the idiocy of DeVos……which is more or less ok with republican politicians and that part of the media which caters to them…..but……is anyone showing enough courage to talk about Gates, and Duncan, and Obama and the significant part they have played in furthering unsupervised charter schools,serving the party which should be more likely to express respect for public school teachers?
Done. Great quote by Chomsky on their Facebook page.
It may sound off-topic, but I would like to voice “10 rules for success” according to George Carlin.
1) Find your place
2) Train yourself
3) Be restless
4) Organize yourself
5) Cooperate
6) Have plans
7) Don’t take no for an answer
8) Give up things that hurt
9) Follow your dreams
10) Speak from the heart
If all educators can teach students through their actions as per this 10 rules, we do not face the current US presidency and its administration.
Rules #1, #4, #7 and #10 are essential to my thinking.
1) Find your place = Identify your strength and weakness
4) Organize yourself = Be well-versed with time and money management
7) Don’t take no for an answer = do the right thing, the dawn will come
10) Speak from the heart = be genuine and altruistic
Please do not OVERemphasize the role or title of presidency with respect and dignified in a person who did not TRANSPARENTLY earn IT, or represent for IT, or entitle to IT.
In short, those authorities or professors in School Ed, who are in their positions through business connection, are not trustworthy because they are just puppets to ruin American national educational system to many upcoming American generations. Back2basic
We the Educators posted a number of articles to Medium…in several different languages. I was appalled by their lack of understanding of the meaning of personalized instruction, as well as their “defense” of standards…but not standardization. Diane–they repeated the defense of standards (air, water, food, etc) that were part of the rationale for NCLB. And claimed that “standards” protected children and raised expectations. NOT!
http://learninginmind.com/standards-expectations.php
They may be “resisting the test-drive, compliance-driven culture” but they need to think a lot more deeply about why!
View at Medium.com