Jeff Bryant attended the Presidential Forum for Democratic candidates in Pittsburgh, and he watched to see how the candidates reacted to the Bush-Obama-Duncan agenda.
Michael Bennett was the only one to endorse it, and he got a tepid reception.
The others spoke of their love for public schools, their desire to raise funding, etc, but barely mentioned charters or testing unless pushed.
Duncan’s name was never mentioned.
Evaluating teachers by test scores never came up.
Everything that Bush and Obama had promoted was absent.
Of course, everything they promoted has failed, and the moderator kept referring to flat NAEP scores to challenge the candidates, without recognizing that the stagnant scores are the results of 20 years of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core.
But Jeff is not convinced that the change is more than cosmetic.
He thinks that the candidates will gravitate to where the money is: Wall Street; hedge fund managers; billionaires.
Warren and Sanders have not.
But he is right about this: Bad habits and bad ideas die slowly. If at all.
Not one candidate said simply and candidly, “everything that the federal government has imposed since passage of NCLB has failed. We need a fresh vision.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The status quo in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education is inequity and segregation. Standards tied to consequential testing and the drive for privatization, if anything, made things worse. That drive, driven by anti-union and anti-government regulation ideology and profit is the status quo. That ideology has insinuated itself into public discourse and thinking. However, people are waking up and pushing back. Some Democrats are listening (especially Sanders and Warren). Expect the privatizers to push harder. Never underestimate the resilience of the status quo or the power of people to change it.
The list of amici briefs filed by religious groups in the Espinosa case is as extensive as the Koch-linked network filings.
The religious privatizers, primarily the Catholic bishops, state Catholic Conferences and, evangelicals have political networks to influence politicians and, presumably, judges. Among public education supporters, there is near uniform reluctance to admit theocracy’s role in school privatization.
The profiteering grifters can be vanquished and there will still be,
listing just one, the Catholic school chain expanding rapidly beyond its current 17 states when government funding fills its coffers.
I agree. I was definitely disappointed that the moderators only wanted progressives (or perhaps just Elizabeth Warren) to defend their views while everyone else could mouth platitudes that could have been said by any Republican candidate because they were so general and inane.
If the goal was a PR effort to show that Democrats strongly supported public schools and teachers, then it succeeded 100%. If the goal was to talk about what “supporting public schools and teachers” really means and illuminate significant policy differences with the chance to explain why those differences were important, it was not helpful.
Thanks Diane. The fact that most Democratic candidates and party officials refuse to take any blame for bad education policies that have been forced on schools over the past two decades is startling and concerning. But what became clear to me during the presidential education forum was that some candidates—especially Warren and Sanders and to some extent Biden—are running away from Arne Duncan and Obama agenda even though they won’t expressly say so. It is telling that the campaign of the candidate with an education agenda that adheres closest to the status quo, Michael Bennet, is flailing (although there are a number of reasons why his candidacy is faltering). Although I share Randi Weingarten’s optimistic view that the forum revealed clear signs of a “shift” in the Democratic party’s education agenda, the lesson I drew from the event was that The Resistance, to use your good word, is making a difference but we have to keep pushing.
Bryant has good reason to be skeptical. Often there is a disparity between what politicians say in a campaign and what they actually do. We have already gone through that disappointment with Obama. The CAP and DFER Democrats are still waiting in the wings with beaucoup bucks to see how election turns out. I am unconvinced that most of the Democratic field of the candidates is embracing a “paradigm shift.” Bennet should get nominated for an acting award, not an education award.
Anyone that really supports change in public education should support Bernie or Warren. They are the only two candidates that have presented an actual plan of what their intentions are. The rest of the field is waffling hoping that promises of teacher pay increases will influence teacher votes. Teachers have good reasons to be skeptics. They have been the nation’s punching bag for the past twenty years.
“Often there is a disparity between what politicians say in a campaign and what they actually do.”
I don’t think this is accurate when it comes to the Democrats. I never heard Obama say that he opposed charter schools or even criticize them – did you? Instead, my recollection is that Obama mouthed the same kind of “I support public education and teachers” platitudes that is part of the DFER agenda. (Please correct me if I am wrong.)
One reason I was disappointed with the forum is that saying “I support public schools” or “I support teachers” says nothing about their policies. But most of the candidates could simply say that and be done.
I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary, but once HRC was the candidate, I felt confident there would be a significant change in education policy if she won because the one time she was pinned down and had to elaborate on her beliefs — in a South Carolina education forum – she made it clear the way SHE viewed “I support public schools and teachers”. And it was one of the strongest statements I have ever heard explaining to Americans everything that was wrong with privatization and ed reform. (I honestly wish Bernie and Warren would listen to what HRC said during that forum and use it as a model for how to talk about public education in this campaign because those statements would help to educate a lot of voters.)
The candidates I don’t trust are those who don’t want to explain more of their beliefs when they are asked. The politicians I trust are the ones who do want to elaborate more on their views. Too many of the others just want to answer follow up questions with more platitudes and I have no idea where they stand. I would certainly like to know more about Amy Klobuchar’s positions, and I was hopeful that she would elaborate and defend her positions at the forum, but I only heard platitudes.
For the record, I absolutely disagree with anyone who would attack Klobuchar as saying one thing and meaning another. But if politicians do not make clear their views and instead use vague platitudes, then even a pro-reform position is possible. That’s what I believe Obama did. There was no real conflict between the platitudes he mouthed and the ed reform agenda and he never had to elaborate on what those platitudes meant.
At this point our public schools deserve a lot more than DFER platitudes. To be fair to all the candidates, the questions in Pittsburgh were not designed to elicit fine distinctions among the candidates. The candidates were allowed to be vague and generic in most of the their comments.
The questions were poorly worded.
Almost every candidate was asked about “terrible” NAEP scores, meant to reinforce the phony “failing schools” narrative.
None had the presence of mind to blame NCLB, RTTT, Common Core, endlesstesting.
“The candidates were allowed to be vague and generic in most of the their comments.”
Yes, you nailed it — that’s why I was so disappointed because I thought the Pittsburgh forum would be the one place where they could not get away with that!
A question that would have made one point clear to the public-
“Do you want religious organizations running school systems with taxpayer money when the community doesn’t even get to elect the board?”
Honesty is the best policy. The president is a compulsive liar. I believe the candidate best positioned to defeat the liar in chief is the one who is known by all to be honest, whose positions have changed extremely little in forty years of public service. That candidate has received a historic five million small donations to date, and is the only candidate whose overall campaign war chest, $96mil, rivals that of the Republican, $102mil. Everyone else makes me extremely nervous for many reasons. They have much less money from far fewer donors, far more dangerously untrustworthy donors. I’m nervous, but also so excited to vote on Super Tuesday. I will vote for the best policy.
I think it is dangerous to use words like “honesty” to imply that someone who had a different position 20 years ago or 10 years ago or 1 year ago and has come to a realization that they were wrong in a thoughtful way and another position is better is “dishonest” or “untrustworthy”. Politicians change and while that kind of attack has not yet been turned on Bernie, you can believe it will be if he is the nominee and the right wing decides that will work to get progressives to vote for Tulsi Gabbard as a 3rd party candidate. She will be portrayed as way more “honest”. Bernie’s views have also changed on some issues, including public education and charters! I certainly take him at his word.
Every one of the Democratic candidates in 2020 is basically honest in the way Barack Obama is basically honest and trustworthy. Now you can mischaracterize Obama as a dishonest, untrustworthy man who should have been defeated by the “honest” and “trustworthy” John McCain, but it would be a mischaracterization that was designed to help the right wing take power. That doesn’t mean that many of Obama’s positions were not wrong, because they were.
I don’t agree with Biden’s views on some issues and Booker’s views on other issues, but they are not lying that they are going to embrace some progressive agenda in health care (for Biden) or public education (for Booker). But Booker is telling the truth when he says he supports Medicare for All and telling the truth when he supports the ed reform agenda.
^^^I should add that I agree with you about Bernie and you have cited excellent reasons about his policies about why he should be the candidate progressives support! Thank you.
One can agree that once a candidate becomes a President the pressures of the Office can distract the person from some of their stated intentions. I like many of the Democratic candidates and can vote for them easily.
It was with a sense of pleasure that I discovered BADASS Teacher Association, and NPE fighting for public education. People can not simply hope that the Democrats will keep their promises when they take over in November 20/January 2021. Those who have been fighting will have to keep their guards up, and still keep demanding the changes we need in public ed.
We need a much expanded role for teachers, so they play a greater role in schools and on advisory panels. The business sector does business well, but it is necessary for us to tell them that their methods do not work well in education.
Do not underestimate the power of information. I have come here to this forum and have had my understanding expanded, when I learn about the extent of fraud in charters, and the privatized schools. The more people know the better so we should try our best to get information to as wide a public as possible.
Please consider reading Laura Chapman’s list of religious organizations who along with the Koch network want privatization. Chapman’s comment is in the thread that follows Diane’s post from a couple of days ago, “The Most Important Case…”.
Theocracy Watch posted Weyrich’s training manual that identifies parallel schools as a strategy to eliminate public schools. Udi Greenberg of Dartmouth describes the new role the Catholic Church has carved out for itself in a 2018 article at the Journal of the History of Ideas. The USCCB self-describes as strong advocates of parental school choice from the beginning.
“One can agree that once a candidate becomes a President the pressures of the Office can distract the person from some of their stated intentions.”
Or maybe they’re just disingenuous to begin with. For instance, Obama told us that he would filibuster any bill the promised immunity to the telecoms for spying on us. However, when the actual vote came up, he not only didn’t filibuster, he voted in favor of the bill that allowed immunity for the telecoms. This was while he was still a Senator, so there were no “pressures of the Office”.
We need to be aware of this kind of mendacity up front and stop making excuses like “Republican obstructionism” or “pressures of the Office” when the veneer of liberalism was a sham all along.
Not one of them said,
The federal high-stakes standardized testing mandate has been an utter failure.
Value-added measurement of teachers based on test scores has been an utter failure.
Closing schools based on test scores has been an utter failure.
Depersonalized education software has been an utter failure.
Big, Orwellian student databases have been an utter failure.
Charters and vouchers have haven’t yielded better educational outcomes and so are failures.
Replacing teachers with pimply, untrained TFAers has been an utter failure.
The puerile, backward Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] have been an utter failure, have trivialized ELA curricula, and have forced math teachers to present material not appropriate to the readiness level of their students.
Third-grade retention has been an utter failure.
Data walls and data chats have been an utter failure.
Merit pay has been an utter failure.
Test prep improves scores initially, as kids learn the question formats, and after that, is an utter failure.
High-stakes admission tests like the SAT are utter failures at predicting success after the first semester of college.
Closing down school media centers so that the computers can be used for test prep and testing has been a failure.
Virtual schools, aside from dubiously enabling credit recovery, have been an utter failure.
The new Cored GED from the plunderers at Pearson is an utter failure.
But the people who have plunged us into this darkness speak of accountability.
How about holding them accountable, for a change, for their failures?
So true, Bob. Well stated! No mention of entire war against public education, but I suppose we can expect as much from corporate owned media.
And no mention of this:
Stealing autonomy from classroom teachers and placing it in the hands of district officials, state and federal bureaucrats, and a handful of oligarchs and their paid Vichy collaborators has been an utter failure.
With relation to a discussion today on another thread, graduation rates as a faux measure of school success has been an utter failure.
I would like to second the comment on teacher autonomy.
Gosh, how did the United States manage to become the most powerful nation in the world, known for its outstanding universities and record of scientific and technical achievement with teachers making their own decisions and without having Gates and Lord Coleman and good ole boy state bureaucrats and Vichy district Deform toadies to micromanage classrooms for teachers? without having districts to mandate Common Coring of curricula and pretests and benchmark tests based on the state tests, data walls, data chats, databases, and [cue music] data do wah do?
Thank you so much for calling out each failure point by point. So many of us teachers are so tired of being gaslighted, and especially of being trapped by the hubris-fueled system, (especially curriculum,) that hurts our kids every day.
The consequences of the Deforms for curricula have been so dramatic and so terrible, but this is something that people not on the ground, working as teachers or as curriculum developers, are completely clueless about. That really needs to change!
I have nothing good to say about the DFERS. They are just big groins.
Forgive CAPITALS but this blog does not permit boldface or italics.
Here’s the fresh vision which they should seek –> FUND PUBLIC EDUCATION — which has been starved by the GOP ever since the Tea Party began their nagging & screaming about reducing the deficit – -that LIE which evaporated when they ended balanced budgets FOREVER, by giving billionaires a 1.3 trillion dollar tax break.
Smaller classes, and good salaries to bring professional educators back to enable and facilitate LEARNING! Authentic educators, using the. teaching methods that WORK –the ones that professional learn about when they study human behavior & learning: methodologies in authentic colleges where education degrees are not manufactured for TFA candidates.
Genuine teachers who use genuine evaluation tools (not merely ‘tests’) to ASSESS what Johnny. Jaunita and Leroy actually have mastered, and wha STILL needs to be presented to them.
Want a vision? Ho about
this: put IN CHARGE OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE, (aka THE CLASSROOM) — genuine, talented, educated professional practitioners of pedagogy (aka TEACHERS). Put another way, the vision is to RETURN the authority and AUTONOMY to THE genuine TEACHER CLASSROOM TEACHER!lLet the teacher meet the challenges for the LEARNING OBJECTIVES for each child who sits in that room for 10 months! Throw gates common core crap out!
FOR IT IS THE TEACHER who KNOWS What Learning Looks Like. (WLLL) ; because the OLD VISION — where LEARNING is what MATTERED– worked for generations! It only needed some cold hard cash. Instead the backpacks full of cash went to the venture capitalists who marketed education and told teachers what to teach, and mandated the use of materials and testing. https://www.backpackfullofcash.com/about/
How easy it was to end AUTHENTIC education in America! When they ended the INSTITUTION OF EDUCATION (aka SCHOOLS) they ended giving to Americans any PRIOR knowledge of history — of what worked and didn’t work in the past.
This week the EPA ended protections for water, because Trump has his own alternative facts… his words tell vastly ignorant citizens what they should think! And as the last words at that link say’ “Time will only tell.” BUT WORDS MATTER. No civilization thrives on lies and misinformation. Iran is going to prove that to us maybe in that NEW place… CYBERSPACE.*
That’s my vision and my 2 cents –as I watch the circus of 2020 erupt in front of the eyes of an increasingly ignorant population; a generation who are fed fake news, but are unable to make real judgments, because they lack the ESSENTIAL for any critical analysis– which is PRIOR KNOWLEDGE.
“Forgive CAPITALS but this blog does not permit boldface or italics.”
You can get italics by putting one asterisk before and after a word or phrase. You can get bold by putting two asterisks before and after.
I never knew that! Thank you for the information.
Thanks, Dienne. Mate Wierdi (creds to you, Mate!) told us this a while back (& I thanked him, too), & I have used the * method ever since, but it’s good that you commented to remind those who might have forgotten or did not see his comment when he posted it.
Why should politicians be expected to bite a hand that could feed them when so many in the public show cowardice on the topic of churches (Catholic, evangelical, LDS) as significant players in privatization? The business grifting goal will be achieved by politicians and judges of American theocracy. William Barr said religion should be introduced at every possible opportunity.
Laura Chapman posted the total list of amici briefs submitted, including those of religious groups and the Koch network. The list can be found in the comment thread following Diane’s post from a couple of days ago, “The Most Important Legal Case…”
Would you STOP putting the LDS church as pushing for privatization? You don’t know what you’re talking about. The Church if Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the preferred title of the LDS, does not support privatization of education and has no private schools outside of a couple of universities. People who claim to represent the Church in that manner are wrong.
From Chapman’s listing posted at this blog-
“Filed by the Center for Law and Religious Freedom on behalf of …USCCB (my abbreviation) …the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints…
If the referenced Center submitted a brief that falsely identifies the religious organizations in a document for a court proceeding, the court and, the attorneys representing the state of Montana have a right to be informed.
If it is a typo or an unintended insertion about which the Center is uninformed, they will want to be advised so as to make a correction.
What is the name of the case in question? I am going to do some research. It would be hugely damaging to students of minority faiths, or no faiths, for a case like this to win, including LDS kids, and so I want to do some digging, and maybe calling, if the LDS church has indeed filed an amicus brief.
Thank you for being open to new information. The case is Espinosa v. Montana which Diane described a couple of days ago as the most important education case SCOTUS is hearing.
Rusty Bowes, the Arizona Speaker of the House also submitted a brief. He is a BYU graduate with 7 kids.
Idaho’s former Superintendent of Schools introduced much of the school deform agenda in the state. He is a member of LDS with 6 kids.
In other news, the Orang-a-tan in the now Whiter House thinks he can make war, on his own, by tweet:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/05/politics/trump-war-tweet-iran/index.html
How well I remember folks, during the run-up to the 2016 election, talking about how limited presidential power actually was. But here we are. This heedless, ignorant child-man is extremely dangerous.
Oops. Spelling. Orange-u-tan
I was there too. I had a question for Biden relating to Duncan, and I pushed very hard to ask it.
“I recall Arne Duncan, who famously said Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans. This resulted, of course, in the charterization of the entire city, the loss of many union jobs, and the displacement of a large number of teachers. Fifteen years after Katrina, most New Orleans charters are graded D or F. Duncan also pushed test-centric initiatives, such as Race to the Top and Common Core; even so, NAEP scores remain flat. What was your position on Duncan’s education initiatives? Has it changed? Why or why not?”
MSNBC rejected it utterly. AFT told them I was a teacher of ELLs and they asked me to write one about them. I did, as they’re important to me. Then I was on a line for Biden, but he spent so much time talking that he answered only two question. How, after serving with Duncan, no one questioned his stated opposition to standardized testing, is a mystery to me.
The woman at MSNBC, what’s her name, seemed obsessed with testing, and felt it necessary to dwell on when questioning Sanders and Warren, neither of whom were ruffled by her at all.
It doesn’t really matter what the candidates say. What matters is who they hire.
If we get the same ed reform echo chamber member hires we have gotten with Bush, Obama and then Trump we will get the same policy.
It’s really time for a change. My youngest son has had a federal government that was anti-public school the entire time he’s been in school. He will graduate with one.
You’re all familiar with the names. If you see those names again you’ll get same-old, same-old because not a one of them has admitted any error of any kind.
Excluding Justice Democrats, Bernie, etc., it is anti-unionism that binds the politicians of the left, CAP for example, and the right. The bulk of the money available to fill candidates’ coffers is from profits taken from consumer dollars. The richest 1% have control of those dollars. They don’t want alternative funding for politicians.
The deform movement is about anti-unionism, racism, Silicon Valley grifting and the strengthening of theocracy to guarantee continued male privilege/entitlement and to preserve civil order, specifically, the churches’ leaders and majority voting blocs of Catholics, evangelicals and the much smaller LDS.
I tend to think it’s more sturdy that that for one simple reason- it didn’t start in DC.
The rejection of the ed reform agenda started in states. Only after it had been happening for 4 or 5 years did any of the national ed reformers or federal candidates notice. They all dismissed it initially- it was all those stupid “suburban moms” who obviously can’t be trusted to evaluate anything.
They said that right up until they started losing state elections because people were electing pro-public education candidates over ed reformers. It went bottom-up. The national folks were the last to know 🙂
I just completed an analysis of the schools in Cincinnati that will benefit from the expansion of EdChoice scholarships (vouchers) in Ohio. Linda is correct in saying that the organized religion is onboard with privatized education. This fact is not only evident in the support for the Montana voucher case, but also the unrelenting effort to oppose the forms of diversity permitted and supported in public schools, including (for example) multicultural studies and sex education.
In Cincinnati Ohio, an overwhelming number of EdChoice scholarships, if used, will go to Catholic and Christian Schools, and three Jewish schools.
In Ohio, privatized education is pursued by the A-F Report Cards rigged to create “failing schools,” the designation of those schools as EdChoice Scholarship Schools, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s unrelenting and deep-pocket lobbying for charter schools and EdChoice vouchers, and the state legislature. The legislature thinks it should micromanage every public school (not charters) and the Department of Public Education.
Thanks Laura-
Both Fordham and Koch-linked associations praise Catholic schools, despite the Figlio study and the heavy disclaimers in the contrived study about self-discipline and Catholic schools, paid for by Fordham.
I view the Catholic church sidling up next to the billionaire education oligarchs as a pact with the devil. It’s a cabal with success enabled by church members, media and public education supporters, all who remain silent, as democracy is stolen by theocrats. Based on the political activities described at Catholic sites, the USCCB, state Catholic Conferences, etc., the church hierarchy provides cover for privatizing politicians by claiming to speak with one voice for the almost 20% of Catholics in the nation.
The 66% of Americans who support separation of church and state don’t have the billions in consumer dollars to spend to fight for minority inclusion, common goods, Main Street and the communities’ right to elect school boards.
Pastors for Texas Children are stewards of God’s word. Shame on evangelicals, Catholics and all of the other faithful who, by silence, endorse what their leaders have done in their names in the Espinosa case.