Perhaps you have been confused by the proliferation of organizations that claim to be all about fixing schools and teachers. Perhaps you can’t figure out who is who in the galaxy of billionaire-funded world of fake reformers.
Buy this reference book! It names names! It is the glossary you have been waiting for!
EDSPEAK AND DOUBLETALK: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling.
It was written by Nancy Bailey and me. It is published by Teachers College Press. Not only does it have a definitive deconstruction of reform blarney and baloney, but it will be continuously updated online as the billionaires spin out new AstroTurf groups and impose new fads and terrible ideas on the schools and the teaching profession.
Confession: Nancy and I have never met face to face. We met by reading each other’s commentaries about the fraudulent language now current in education. We emailed. I invited her to help me rewrite “Edspeak,” a now dated and obsolete glossary that I had published in 2006. She threw herself and her deep classroom experience into the task. I was the beneficiary of her wisdom and her keen eye for phoniness.
All of the royalties from the sale of the book will be donated to the Network for Public Education. Nancy and I look forward to meeting at the NPE conference in Philadelphia in late March.
WONDERFUL! The first edition of this was great. Very much looking forward to this one!
And here, a little glossary of what I call “Reformish”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/from-the-reformish-lexicon/
What a wonderful resource! I hope this will find its way into a lot of education school classrooms and onto a lot of teacher desks!
Congrats, Nancy and Diane!!!! xoxoxoxox
Here’s the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/EdSpeak-Doubletalk-Glossary-Hypocrisy-Schooling/dp/0807763276
Wow, Amazon lists the hardcover for $90. The paperback is almost $30.
I hope there is a kindle edition that is less.
Authors have no control over the price of books.
In this case, we have both pledged our royalties to NPE, so there is no profit to us in having a high price.
I wish it were available for $5.
I didn’t see an e-book listed on Amazon – the listing says only 2 formats and editions: the hardcover and the paperback.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807763276/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
It is an amazing book. Nancy did most of the work. She is remarkable. It identifies every phony “reform” group and funder and calls them out for the trouble they make and the damage they do.
However, the book’s overall Amazon bestseller rank is currently at #19,896 and it takes lots of sales to earn that rank.
“Amazon currently lists 32.8 million books for sale comprising: Paperbacks 22.9m. Hardcover 8.1M.”
The book with the worst rank would be # 32,800,000. That means “EdSpeak and Doubletalk” was ranked in the top 0.06 percent today.
Diane – I look forward to reading this book. I recently began following Nancy.
Another great new book closely connected to the topic of the phony reform movement is Let the Children Play by Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle. The book is compelling, frightening, hopeful and profoundly important. Superintendents and school principals are the very first people who should read this book. They have the power in their hands to stop harmful practices today – like stressful, anxiety-producing over-testing that measures nothing and forcing concepts on young children that are developmentally inappropriate and only cause them to feel they don’t measure up – at five years old! It’s an unbearably stressful world out there for students and teachers.
I usually give my principal a little something at the end of the year, but this can’t wait. I’ll give her a copy of Let the Children Play as a New Year’s gift next week!
As always, so grateful for all you continue to do.
P.S. Your New Years resolutions looked strangely familiar. They are almost exactly the same as mine!
What a great resource and it is perfectly titled. I clicked on the table of contents and was delighted to see “The Arts.” But I was surprised to see only one entry. Even so, it was a good one. I was directed to “Turnaround Arts Schools,” a program still offered through The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The hype is typical.
This federal program began as an Obama-era venture in 2011 with Michelle Obama the marketer, along with sixty-six high profile artists were to be paired with 79 schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia, reaching about 57,000 students over a three-year period. Most but not all funding came from School Improvement Grants available in the Race to the Top program.
The identified “Turnaround Artists… acclaimed, creative professionals” would partner with Turnaround Arts schools over the length of the program, “working directly with students and teachers, engaging parents and the school community, and highlighting the positive impact of the arts on their school’s transformation.”
The website for Turnaround Arts leads you to believe that the selected Turnaround Artists would be available to “adopt schools” and plan their professional schedules (as high-profile creative artists) for extended work with students, parents, and teachers in 79 schools. Some of these artists were not surprising They had already been enlisted for Kennedy Center activities or service in connection with the National Endowment for the Arts. Here are the names of the “Turnaround Artists.” Brief bios are at the website.
Kerry Washington, Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Jessica Parker, Smokey Robinson, Paula Abdul, Bernie Williams, Misty Copeland, Marc Anthony, Damian Woetzel, Tracy Reese, Edward Norton, Cameron Diaz, Jake Shimabukuro, Thom Mayne, Elizabeth Banks, Jack Johnson, Carla Canales, Silk Road Ensemble, Citizen Cope, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Frank Gehry, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Elton John, Nigel Lythgoe, Kerry James Marshall, Jason Mraz, Kal Penn, Tim Robbins, Doc Shaw, Trombone Shorty, Chad Smith, Larisa Martinez, Forest Whitaker, Alfre Woodard, John Lloyd Young, Jacqueline Suskin, Keb’ Mo, Esperanza Spalding, Usher, Valerie June, Ledisi, Joshua Bell, Taylor Hawkins, Autumn de Forest, IZ Avila, Dave Matthews, Jane Fonda, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, David Brooks, Paula Fuga, Lil Buck, Mic Jordan, David Garibaldi, Pia Toscano, Black Violin, Dan and Claudia Zanes, Ben Folds, Taboo, John Cruz, Ozomatli, Amanda Lucidon, Speech, Mike Arturi, Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.
This 2011 Turnaround Arts program is still in operation and evidently with no change in the numbers of students, schools, or number of states “impacted.” There has been no change in the list of Turnaround Artists.
I looked at the 2015 evaluation of this program. The evaluation was funded by the National Association of Music Merchants. The data for the final evaluation came from only eight schools and footnotes illustrate the many problems with missing data from surveys, interviews, and administrative reports (including discipline). Test score increments are noted in most but not all schools, but it turns out that most of these eight schools were not only arts-rich but had many other supports as well.
For example, The Lame Deer Middle School is located on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana. Lame Deer is tribal headquarters and the site of the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is also home of the Northern Cheyenne Annual Powwow which take place every July 4th, with competitive Indian dancing, contests, parades, etc. Page three of the student newspaper gives a report on “a visiting artist program” that brought a ballerina to the school. https://lamedeerschools.org/montana/uploads/2018/05/MST-march-2018_redux.pdf
The Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School in Boston has an established programs in vocal and instrumental music, visual art, theater, dance, and a library media program. The school also has multiple extended day programs, a guidance counselor and student support coordinator, and family coordinators who facilitate access to additional services, all in “a state of the art building” new in 2003.
Although the “Cultural Arts Academy” at Live Oak Elementary School in New Orleans, LA no longer exists, Ron Gubitz, the former principal of that charter school is now a turnaround specialist for the national Turnaround Arts program.
Noel Community Arts School, Denver, CO offers instrumental and vocal music, dance, drama/theater, visual arts, and media art entrepreneur. In other words, the “turnaround schools” selected for the arts-integrated programing already had above average arts and wraparound programs.
The current version of this Turnaround Arts program is not free. It requires one or more local agencies to apply for support from the Kennedy Center “to implement Turnaround Arts in clusters of eligible local schools” which means low performing and high poverty schools.
The “local partners” are required to support each high-poverty school with at least one arts specialist, and a “teaching artist,” instructional resources, professional development, leadership support, and more. The national Turnaround Arts program office will offer expertise in structuring a program, including baseline evaluations, training, and schemes for peer-to-peer learning.
The national program also provides resources directly to selected schools, including arts supplies, musical instruments, licensing rights and kits for school musicals, and Turnaround Artists who work with students and teachers. Unfortunately the links to more detail about those supplies, rights-clearances and fees for artists are not active. Neither is the “application” website.” i judge that there are tiers of “Turnaround Artists” some of these not celebrities but in the loop of state and local arts councils.
And so it goes. There is more, but I was around in 1965 when the federal arts and humanities programs were founded. Since then, almost all federal funds for arts education in schools have been passed through state arts councils. These councils, in turn, have required district and school grants to pay stipends for supplies and to secure gigs from one or more “teaching artists.” Programs are still evaluated on the degree to which they produce higher test scores, higher rates of attendance, reduced discipline problems, and so on. There is not much interest in what students are learning in and about each of the arts or whether students have developed some affinities for any of the arts they encounter in and out of school.
Since scams and hoaxes and frauds take up a lot of the book, that meant less space for the arts. There is not enough money there for the edupreneurs to rip off.
I am looking forward to meeting Nancy Baily in Philadelphia this March. And I need a new 2020 picture with you. I ordered the book yesterday.
I look forward to meeting you too!
Diane is very gracious! The amazing thing is that she put quality time into this book too, with her in-depth understanding and research abilities. And she did this along with working on her book, Slaying Goliath, and bolstering other writers with her blog!
EDSPEAK DOUBLESPEAK is almost sold out on amazon. They are down to 13 copies.
But the editor at TC press informed me that
tcpress.com has unlimited stock, and that the e-book is available at tcpress.com for a discounted $23.95.
I know I’ll get disagreements, but the point is to encourage thinking for yourself, which is what education should encourage. There’s a story about a restaurant owner doing very well. A friend asked, I wan’t to own my own restaurant. What advice can you tell me to get started. Well, the friend explained. If you have to ask, you’re not going to succeed. * Who understand this? In education, if you’re still wondering what education should be, it’s possible one has been educated out of their common sense. I’ve had this discussion with young people who still have their common sense.