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!
Which brings us back to Michelle Rhee. Who's marketing her, and why?COMING SOON: Ed NOTES' EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE RHEE
Rhee is part of a broad push by America's true "old guard" to ensure that education doesn't really change. The same folks at Harvard and Penn who offer our minorities the lowest educational expectations possible through Teach for America and KIPP Academies, are selling you Rhee, and lowered expectations for all schools - except of course, for the schools attended by the children of those elites.
There is a reason the television networks and New York Times and Time-Warner love TFA and Rhee. These organizations are run by people with power, and by people who would rather not share power.
So they have adopted the ultimate in reductionist standards. "If we had even decent education - or even enough teachers of any kind - in most of the places it places its students, then [TFA] would be a step down," a commenter on this blog said yesterday. Right, so here's the standard: Teach for America, or Michelle Rhee's DC school system, is better than not having schools at all.
Rhee's own words: '"People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job."'
No, she doesn't give a crap. She wants her African-American students prepared for the lowest possible jobs on the economic ladder. That way (perhaps, in her unconscious thinking) they will not threaten the success of her small minority group - a group which has found itself accepted by the powers-that-be because it isn't big enough to be threatening.
Of course I have a different view of reading than Rhee, and of language itself. First, I know that there are lots of ways "to read," and second, I know that when children are inspired to learn about things, they tend to want to learn to read (in one form or another). As opposed to the Joel Klein-Michelle Rhee-KIPP Academy-George W. Bush notion that reading is a skill which should be learned outside of the context of interest-based education.
But then, my goal is opportunity, and my belief system - not being market-capitalist in nature - doesn't think an underclass is a good idea (to hold down upward pressure on wages).
Rhee is not important, of course. She's racist in her expectations and racist in her strategies, she's not an educator at all in the real meaning of that term, she talks a great deal but has little actual impact in her job. But Rhee being hailed as the educational messiah is important.
Like those who favor TFA solutions - the Rhee idea is to NOT change US society. Yes, we'll make impoverished minority groups marginally more competent - thus improving profits at the top and reducing the cost of the dole. But no, we will not empower those groups by empowering their children. Teaching them to be creative 'will have to wait' (forever). Teaching them to find their own learning styles - thus accepting cultural change instead of social reproduction - is dangerous (as it always is for those at the top).
We lower expectations. We test meaningless things (Time: "The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher. But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few. And in schools where kids are struggling to read and subtract, it is a prerequisite for getting anything else done." Really? Anything? You can't teach the physics of a bouncing ball to a non-reader, or the love of literature?). We strip time away from what is precious to children and force them into chanting. We enforce white majority cultural norms and deny identity. We argue that teachers should be paid according to the "short term gain" rules that worked so well for traders at Citigroup and AIG.
And this is all brought to you by the wealthiest people, and the largest old-line corporations in the country. Because, I'll say it again, they have no incentive to allow those below them to succeed.
I have yet to meet, or read any commentary by, a "Skinner-type" who has been a classroom teacher for more than a few years.
People with that mentality seem to leave the classroom about the time that the Truth is starting to dawn on them.
Sometimes they leave it before that point because their two-year commitment has come to an end. Then they slink off and wash the challenges of those "nasty" children off their hands, feeling superior as they proceed into law school, educational-reform management, or administration.
It's too bad the usual TFA-type commitment for baby teachers isn't seven years because great insights would be gained. Of course, the organizationa probably know that few of those somewhat arrogant, but disillusioned, youngsters would be able to hack it.