One of Glover's top clients is the United Federation of Teachers, and Wolfson's move to Bloomberg may be a signal that the union's retreat on the term-limits bill in October will be repeated in the mayoral election, with union president Randi Weingarten, who's often railed against Bloomberg education policies, neutralized or even backing Bloomberg.
The most beloved films of Christmas are about redemption, often set against a backdrop of banking, real estate and commercialism. After the financial troubles of 2008, favorites like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street” probably will be seen in a whole new light this holiday season.
Hollywood isn’t always content to let the audience do the re-imagining, however. Producers might want to create their own remakes, tinkering with the originals to frame them more appropriately for the current era. So we have imagined how five of the most popular holiday classics might be storyboarded to reflect the credit crisis.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
This time around it’s Henry Potter who is suicidal on the eve of Christmas 2006 because his stingy banking has cost him immeasurable fees and sent his customers to mortgage lender George Bailey, who loved giving cheap loans to poor people. The angel Clarence Oddbody visits to show him that if Henry had never existed, Bedford Falls would have been called Baileyville, a boom-and-bust town ravaged by excessive leverage. With his newfound appreciation for what he has contributed to society, he returns home to find modest-living friends and family members, thankful to Mr. Potter for saving them from themselves.
t brother of yours to spend for me.
But Ms. Weingarten’s defense of her members was not the most important part of the speech. The key point was her assertion that with schools in trouble and the economy in a state of near-collapse, she was willing to consider reforms that until now have been anathema to the union, including the way in which tenure is awarded, the manner in which teachers are assigned and merit pay.
I think Arne Duncan has the potential to be a good Secretary of Education, and I
think he has some real positives going for him.
So, first of all, I think we’re—it’s not two sides. It’s sort of a—it’s different views about the purpose of education, and there are different views about how human beings learn well. And I think there’s a very predominant view right now that gets—has been called by the name of reform and that has nothing to do with red and blue. It’s a kind of market view of education, though. And I
think there are a lot of people on the red side who are more close to my views and a lot of people of the blue side who are more close to Arne Duncan’s views. And that part does worry me, maybe even more than it does Klonsky, my friend Mike Klonsky, because it’s—I think we need a different discussion about what the point of education is.
[O]nce you’ve posed the issue as being union lackeys or reformers—and the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, a variety of magazines, as you mentioned earlier, have said there are two sides: unions lackeys, people who want to—who are worrying—you know, who are dependent upon the union, and on the other side are real reformers. I think it made it hard for the union to speak for its own membership on this question. And the history of reform has almost nothing to do—I shouldn’t say that. There has always been a struggle between these two wings in reform. But they have posed me as an anti-reformer, as though there are—since I’m not for market-style reforms, this testing mania, this narrow focus on prepping kids for a small selection of skills, that makes me a dupe of the union and an anti-reformer and someone who doesn’t care for the future of the economy or democracy. I think it’s been posed that way for so many years now.
A slickly-coordinated string of editorials and columns in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere has poured forth recently, all decrying the possible appointment of Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. Obviously responding to the same talking points, the pieces paint Darling-Hammond a status quo, incrementalist and anoint a new group of pro-merit pay/pro-testing/pro-charter school advocates as the hard-charging "reformers."So I have borrowed WFAN's Steve Somers' FEARLESS FORECASTER to predict the fate of D-H. Unfortunately, I don't agree with the view that Obama will turn out to be the kind of politician who will pick D-H. He seems to look at how easy it will be to get a person confirmed. And with both Republicans and many Democrats taking a view that D-H is easy on teachers, we can expect quite a battle if Obama chooses her. On the other hand, if he chooses Duncan or Klein or Rhee, there will be screams of protest from educators but not from politicians.
Darling-Hammond has spent 30 years pushing for a radical restructuring of public schools and the systems that serve them so that all students will have high-quality teachers and rich learning opportunities, not just well-off, predominantly white kids. To call her a defender of the status quo is like calling Lincoln a defender of slavery because he wasn't as absolute in opposition as were some on his team of rivals.
By drawing so heavily from the old playbook, the hard-chargers may have just charged off the cliff--virtually ensuring Obama will be less receptive to their pleas.
Want to get a bead on why teachers are in a losing two front war where the enemy is within? Instead of castigating David Brooks for his outrageous column, Weingarten says:
The educational improvements that have occurred during Joel I. Klein’s tenure as chancellor of New York City’s public schools are the result of hard work and collaboration with the United Federation of Teachers and the teachers we represent.
Improvements? Every teacher knows this is a crock.
OK, stop gagging. Susan Ohanian's comment:
This "cover your backside no matter who gets chosen" letter shows how morally bankrupt union leadership is.
Letter in New York Times
To the Editor:
2008-12-13
The three very different candidates David Brooks (column, Dec. 5) names as possible choices for secretary of education share a common denominator — they all have worked with teacher unions, to great effect.
The educational improvements that have occurred during Joel I. Klein’s tenure as chancellor of
New York City’s public schools are the result of hard work and collaboration with the United
Federation of Teachers and the teachers we represent.
In Chicago, Arne Duncan has partnered with the local affiliate of the American Federation of
Teachers to restructure struggling schools and adopt promising innovations.
Linda Darling-Hammond has worked with the A.F.T. on projects going back decades to implement lessons from the best research and real-life experience for the benefit of students and teachers in America’s classrooms.
We agree that the choice of a secretary of education is a crucial one. But we disagree that distance from and disdain for teachers’ unions are positive credentials. Demonizing teachers’ unions might win favor in certain quarters, but it won’t do anything to help kids or advance school improvement.
Randi Weingarten
President
American Federation of Teachers and United Federation of Teachers
A solid majority of B.C. Teachers' Federation members voted this week in favour of a controversial plan for a province-wide boycott of the tests - known as the Foundation Skills Assessment and delivered in Grades 4 and 7 - unless the government agrees to stop testing every student and introduces random sampling instead.
"It's clear that teachers are ready to take a strong stance," BCTF president Irene Lanzinger said in an interview as her union announced that 85 per cent of teachers who voted were in favour of the boycott plan. Slightly more than half of the 41,000 members cast ballot
.....at The Chancellor's New Clothes
Quite frankly, I’ve never met anyone who works in the system for a few years, who does not eventually see the truth.
Perhaps this is the real genius of Teach for America and of Michelle Rhee who is a product of it; get the teachers out of the schools before they question the corruption and label those who stay and begin to question it as “burned out.”
Joel Klein is being considered for secretary of education, which would make as much sense for our schools as Michael Brown did for disaster relief.
Has Barack Obama forgotten, Michael "Way to go, Brownie" Brown? Brown was that guy from the Arabian Horse Association appointed by President George W. Bush to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownie, not knowing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain from the south end of a horse, let New Orleans drown. Bush's response was to give his buddy Brownie a thumbs up.
We thought Obama would go a very different way. You'd think the studious senator from Illinois would avoid repeating the Bush regime's horror show of unqualified appointments, of picking politicos over professionals. But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as secretary of education. If not Klein, then draft choice No. 2 is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.
It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials that scare me: It's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such prepackaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote, low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and -- voila! -- millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.
For Republicans education "reform" typically includes support for vouchers and other forms of privatization. But groups with names like Democrats for Education Reform--along with many mainstream publications--are disconcertingly allied with conservatives in just about every other respect.
Sadly, all but one of the people reportedly being considered for Education secretary are reformers only in this Orwellian sense of the word.
Duncan and Klein, along with virulently antiprogressive DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, are celebrated by politicians and pundits. Darling-Hammond, meanwhile, tends to be the choice of people who understand how children learn. Consider her wry comment that introduces this article: it's impossible to imagine a comparable insight coming from any of the spreadsheet-oriented, pump-up-the-scores "reformers" (or, for that matter, from any previous Education secretary). Darling-Hammond knows how all the talk of "rigor" and "raising the bar" has produced sterile, scripted curriculums that have been imposed disproportionately on children of color. Her viewpoint is that of an educator, not a corporate manager.
Imagine--an educator running the Education Department.
Gov. Patterson is expected to enjoy his food at UFT Ex. Bd meetings along with his (free) copy of Ed. Notes in exchange for giving Randi the Clinton Senate seat.
Trevor Cobbold of Save Our Schools has been in touch. They have followed up on Klein's recent visit. Leonie Haimson sent out this excerpt of their report. (See below for links to full document.)Check out the latest report from the Australian organization Save Our Schools. Here is an excerpt from "Klein Lied to the National Press Club":
New York City Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, was exposed as a dissembler at his National Press Club address in Canberra last week. Under forensic questioning from The Canberra Times’ education reporter, Emma Macdonald, Klein resorted to lies and deceptions to justify his claims of increases in student achievement in New York City schools.
Macdonald challenged Klein on his claims by citing national reading and mathematics assessments which show that there has been no improvement in student achievement in NYC since 2003, except for 4th grade mathematics. She questioned him on whether the grades given to schools in this year’s school progress reports had been manipulated by reducing the cut-off scores to achieve an A or B.
Klein denied both charges. He said that Macdonald was wrong on both facts. His response was to falsely assert that the cut-off scores for school grades had not been reduced, falsely claim that New York State tests were a better measure of student achievement than the independent national assessments, and to selectively cite evidence about the success of African-American students.
Check out the entire document, complete with bibliography.
By the way, it was our own Steve Koss who first figured out the cut-off scores had been manipulated in this way:Don’t Like the Results? Change the Scale!
