The Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance is led by Professor Paul Peterson, an advocate for school choice. It would not be off the mark to say that PEPG exists to promote the DeVos agenda. Soon after she was confirmed, PEPG invited her to speak, and her speech was disrupted by Harvard students not affiliated with PEPG. Peterson has been the mentor for a generation of pro-school choice academics, including Jay Greene (University of Arkansas, Department of Education Reform), Patrick Wolf (same, also served as “independent evaluator” of Milwaukee and DC voucher prigrams), and Martin West (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Peterson recently appeared at the White House to support Trump’s call to reopen schools and co-wrote an oped with Dr. Scott Atlas (both are senior fellows at the rightwing Hoover Institution). Dr. Atlas supports Trump’s views that mask-wearing should not be mandatory, that children and adolescents don’t get the virus, th ast schools should reopen without delay, and that lockdowns are unnecessary. In many articles about Dr. Atlas, Peterson is his reliable defender.
The event today asks whether teachers unions can be part of the solution. Michelle Rhee and George Parker. Parker was head of the Washington Teachers Union when Rhee was chancellor. When he stepped down, he went to work for Rhee. He now works for a charter school lobbying group. More than 90% of charters are non-union.
Fall 2020 Colloquium Series: Can Teachers Unions Be Part of the Solution?
The PEPG Colloquium series continues Thursday, Sept. 24, with “Can Teachers Unions Be Part of the Solution?,” a talk by Michelle Rhee, Founder and CEO, StudentsFirst, former Chancellor for District of Columbia Public Schools, and George Parker, Senior Advisor, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, former President, District of Columbia Teachers Union.
Thursday, Sept. 24
12-1:15 p.m.
Register to attend the Zoom webinar
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hopefully a recording of it will be available afterwards for people that would like to hear what was said, but aren’t able to log on in real time.
LOL. This is the same type of “balance” that has dominated any discussion on privatization in the past decade. They invite like minded folks that take turns bashing public schools and teachers unions. The discussion should be titled, “Dispatches from the Charter Bubble.” They could run workshops in how to crush democracy, disseminate propaganda, steal public dollars for fun and profit, hire aggressive charter lobbyists, bust unions, deprofessionalize teaching and attract billionaire bucks, etc.
this reality must be stated over and over: this is exactly what “discussion” on charters has looked like for so many long years
A balanced discussion between a hyena and a jackal how best to dismember the body of teacher unionism in the USA.
Well said.
Concise. Accurate.
Superb.
VERY nicely said.
Here’s a “balanced” discussion of how to decide whether someone like Rhee is really a witch of just pretending to be.
https://images.app.goo.gl/ds4AcLTrhPTKcNBaA
In the end, they use an actual balance to decide.
Thanks for the link.
Thank you for today’s much needed laugh out loud!
🙂
Now what’s this called again? Oh, yes: an echo chamber.
Also: why does a shred of credibility remain to Michelle Rhee?
Maybe this is the beginning of the Deformers’ Rheehabilitation of her.
Lay low until the heat clears. It’s a time-honored tactic among crooks.
She probably sees a way to make more easy money. She hopes all her scandalous lying and cheating will be forgotten. She’s an opportunist through and through. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/michelle-rhee-is-she-merely-a-liar-or-is-she-just-stupid-you-decide/
The coming attractions are equally biased against public schools, unions, and teachers.
Where is Randi in all of this?
Harvard’s Peterson is a piece of work. He, like Hanushek, has a 30+ page c.v. but, I can’t find the grant sources and dollars. For 15 years, Peterson was Editor-in-Chief at Education Next. Is that a paid position ? Who funds Education Next?
Peterson’s got something important in common with Patrick Wolfe, Peterson co-wrote, “Catholic Schools Excel”. Wolfe was the subject of a 9-26-2017 article, “University of Arkansas Professor Advocates for Catholic Education”. Oh- and, the Walton’s gave Peterson a prize in 2016.
btw- After the conservative SCOTUS decision in Biel v, St. James Catholic school, the issue about Catholic school teacher unionization became close to moot.
Thirty page CV
Thirty plus pages of bullshit
Thirty plus pages of gunk
Thirty plus pages of gull spit
Thirty plus pages of bunk
Thirty plus pages in CV
Thirty plus pages to brag
Thirty plus pages to “be me!”
Thirty plus, oh what a drag.
“thirty plus”- poetry gold in your hands,
The threat to Main Street’s common goods- directly from economic libertarians and authoritarian theocrats with indirect help from a few university faculty?
The co-author of “Catholic Schools Excel” was Herbert J Wahlberg. Was (is) he with the Cato Institute? An article attributed to a Herbert J Wahlberg claimed an increasing number of Americans want school choice. (Would polls based on valid and reliable methodology confirm it?) Wahlberg’s statement concluded with, school choice advocates are hesitant to defend the economics of school choice.
Is the logical inference, an expectation of a Walmart type of situation where corporations take profits out of Main Street communities?
Should state Catholic Conferences that promote school choice in the state capitols be viewed benignly?
Wahlberg is Heartland Institute, libertarian groupthink tank
The Center for Media and Democracy reported today that the 4th largest donor to the State Policy Network (Heartland and SPN are Koch) is the Waltons.
Can teachers’ unions be part of the solution? Can they be bought off with billionaire bucks? Convinced to support depersonalized learning, TFA replacements, VAM, school grading, 3rd-grade retention, the Common [sic] Core [sic], testing kids until they bleed, all test prep all the time, virtual academies, mayoral and state takeovers, vouchers, charters, ending tenure, spreading the plague, the Empire of the Dark Lord? Exciting question, isn’t it? Could unions of the future be not representatives of teachers but of the Masters of the Universe?
Tune it! Who knows, perhaps Dr. Evil himself will join us!
Learn how to replace unions with onions! Peel back the layers and what do you find? Gates and the Waltons!!!! Make kids and experienced teachers and parents who care about humane education cry and cry! See Rhee eat a bee!!!
Some winning article titles from author Jay Greene’s portfolio, “The Imaginary Teacher Shortage”, “The Union War on Charter Schools” (no bias reflected in that title), “The Hidden Research Consensus for School Choice” (my subtitle would be, Wall Street finds research methodology to support rip off of Main Street), five articles in 2004 against Kerry’s education plans and, saving the best for last, “Truth Telling is Academia’s Privilege (and, obligation)”. Greene co-wrote with Frederick Hess, “Buckets into the Sea: Why Philanthropy Isn’t Changing Schools and How It Could”. Hess’ companion piece in Philanthropy Roundtable, “Don’t Surrender the Academy”, described for readers that ed reformers wanted to, “blow up the ed schools”, but, he and his co-author, a manager of a Gates-funded organization, advised a financial approach instead.
btw- Greene started as aa contributing editor at Education Next in 2001.
Well this is awkward –
Media reports, “Hoover Fellow and WH Advisor, Scott Atlas, Threatens Defamation Suit Over Stanford Open Letter ” (signed by 100 physicians and researchers)
“These people getting the infection is not really a problem, and in fact, as we said months ago, when you isolate everyone, including all the healthy people, you’re prolonging the problem because you’re preventing population immunity.” — Scott Atlas
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas shrugged
“It’s how I feel:
The millions bugged?
It’s no big deal”
Atlas shrugged
“The herd is grand”
Atlas hugged
The Book of Rand
Ayn Rand- a hero to Herman Cain and other Trump supporters.
Libertarians with Covid, consistent with their ideology, should be left to die like feral dogs in the gutter.
The Hoover Institution is a monestary for the acolytes of Ayn Rand.
It’s also a stain on the reputation of an otherwise good university.
Martin West
Executive Editor of Education Next
Holds a Michael Bloomberg endowed chair
Martin West, also one of four members of the Massachusetts State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education who have Walton connections.
They’re appointed by the governor, currently Charlie Baker, who this week endorsed Susan Collins for re-election. Baker plays a nice man on the TV, but his donors are the Waltons and the Kochs.
There’s a good opportunity, at Axios, to see harvard through clear eyes. Axios posted an interview with the head of the harvard Center for Ethics- a quote from the article, “We’ve spent so much time for the last few decades (focused on) how we can privatize solutions that we literally don’t know how to think about good public good commitments and investments any longer.”
The interviewee omitted as example, harvard’s leadership in K-12 privatization and how there were financial benefits attached. The second university school of education in the privatization hierarchy is the University of Arkansas. That shared company has got to sting a capital H Ivy League school.
I attended (virtually) PEPG’s events on “closing the achievement gap” about a week ago. I was shocked to see that almost the entire speaker roster was a Who’s Who of privatization advocates. (The only public school representative was Miami’s superintendent.) They included: Eric Hanushek, Chester Finn, Michelle Rhee Michael Petrilli, Chris Cerf, Nina Rees and leaders of @SummitPS. Oddly, about half the questions that were addressed in Q&As following the meeting came from me; this means either I asked brilliant questions or not a lot of people were watching! I had a conversation with Caroline Hoxby of Stanford following the event; when I asked her whether she was surprised by the lopsided speaking roster she IDed Macky Raymond of CREDO as being pro-public schools(!) She also said that there were no credible academics who represented the other side…I tweeted extensively about what I heard/saw; unfortunately, few retweets…
Andrea,
Caroline Hoxby is pro-school choice. She was on the Koret Task Force at Hoover along with Checker Finn, John Chubb, Terry Moe, Herb Walberg, Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek, Bill Evers, ED Hirsch, me, and a few others. A rogues gallery that I left.
There are more PEPG events scheduled, and they are all one-sided discussions among people who agree.
harvard’s academic schools/departments, faculty, administrators, board – any with socially redeeming value?