Ken Derstine: Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 2 - + Commentary - Collaboration Roots Go Back to Shanker

...what union leaders affiliated with Ms. Weingarten say at a union meeting should not really be taken seriously - it is just red meat to appease the huddled rank and file. This reveals her sleight of hand method – disrespect for the interests of teachers and public schools and respect for corporate education reform interests – or is her sleight of hand to say what she thinks the AEI audience will want to hear? It can’t be both!... Ken Derstine at Defend Public Education blog

Ken continues his exposure of teacher union connection to ed deformers.
http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/randi-weingarten-sleight-of-2/.

I could title this "Randi continues 3-4 decades of AFT/UFT collaboration."

Randi's ties to the ed deform movement is not her innovation, but a continuation of the policies set by Al Shanker - directing the actions of the union toward variations of ed deform: he is the father of the charter school concept - even as they tried to disavow it as not being what he really meant. "Everyone makes a mistake," he glibly said.

I urged Ken to read the Kahlenberg Shanker hagiography, Albert Shanker, Tough Liberal, a book Eli Broad helped finance to celebrate Shanker as one of the key founders of the ed deform movement.

Note the opening of chapter 14: Education Reform, merit pay, peer review, a Nation at Risk - 1983-4. Shanker was still president of the UFT and the AFT at the same time:

As a social Democratic thinker, Albert Shanker took a number of posititions that made his fellow liberals [ed note -should be neo-liberal] uneasy. As an education reformer, he would ruffle many feathers among his fellow advocates of education reform – building alliances with business, acknowledging shortcomings in public education, and proposing innovative ideas on teacher pay and firing of bad teachers – all of which shocked the education establishment.... Shanker became a central figure, arguably the most influential American educator of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

I keep emphasizing this to those who feel things would be so much better if Randi went away. Not so when union policy has been tied up with the corporate and government interests for 40 years. 

When I look at the original standards in the Common Core: the going for deeper knowledge and for applying facts, and not just knowing things, but trying to come up with problem solving and critical thinking, what it took me back to was my teaching at Clara Barton High School …" Randi Weingarten at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), talking about her "six" years of teaching.

Randi lied about her credentials even to the AEI, since she only taught full time for 6 months. The rest of the time she would go in and teach a few periods - and was supposedly the coach of the debate team - and go off to the union. Shanker and Sandy had designated her as the successor in the 80s and she had to get credentials. The found her a safe school near her home in Brooklyn - Leo Casey was the chapter leader there. Her total number of days teaching was miniscule. By never having taught in real conditions like her constituents, Randi never had a sense of what it was really like.

Here is Ken's full piece. Also see my previous posts and commentaries on Ken's previous pieces:

• Ken Derstine, Using AEI Video, Parses Ed ...Apr 08, 2015
• Turning "Collaboration" into a Bad Word ...

 Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 2

April 22, 2015

By Ken Derstine

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is one of the oldest and most influential of the pro-business right-wing think tanks. It promotes the advancement of free enterprise capitalism, and has been extremely successful in placing its people in influential governmental positions, particularly in the Bush Administration. AEI has been described as one of the country's main bastions of neoconservatism. – Right Wing Watch / People for the American Way

Part 1 of this article noted that at a conference of the American Enterprise Institute held on February 5^th, 2015, Randi Weingarten was praised by researchers for corporate education reformers for her collaboration in developing a teacher evaluation system based on standardized tests as part of the Gates Foundation’s “teacher quality” agenda. Part 1 concluded by pointing out that Randi Weingarten’s public labor persona differs from what goes on behind the scenes in her collaboration with corporate education reformers.

A clear picture of Ms. Weingarten’s thinking behind her collaboration with AEI can be seen in a one-hour forum held with AEI researchers on June 18, 2014. For an hour she spoke on “Unions in public education: Problem or solution?” Her speech came three months after the AFT quietly announced that it would no longer take money from The Gates Foundation. 

At this forum she spoke candidly to an AEI audience whose members want to abolish unions or turn them into company unions that are part of management. Weingarten’s sleight of hand method can be seen in her answer to a question by the AEI moderator Frederick Hess who asks Ms. Weingarten (42:07 minutes into the video):

Early last month the New York Post reported that your successor at the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, had told a gathering of the UFT leadership, “We’re at war with the reformers. Their ideas will absolutely destroy, forget about public education, they will destroy education in our country.” He said of slow walking efforts on evaluation, “It was a strategy to gum up the works because we knew what their lawyers were trying to do.”  So curious, when these things get out, how does that speak to this the issue of cooperation, or trust or finding common ground?”

 Ms. Weingarten’s reply:

So I think, number one, let me just say that whatever Michael said was said in the middle of a private union meeting. Now, I know the UFT, you have 3000 people in the room, probably NSA is taping every other word, nothing is private, right? But if you have what is set as a union meeting, just like if you had a board meeting that is a confidential board meeting, you would not expect that anybody would actually use whatever was said in that meeting. 

If it is not to curry favor with her corporate audience why would the President of a national teachers’ union respond in such a way to an AEI audience about a statement from a union official warning that public education is under attack? And to top it off, she says no one would expect that “anyone would actually use what was said in that meeting.” In other words, what union leaders affiliated with Ms. Weingarten say at a union meeting should not really be taken seriously - it is just red meat to appease the huddled rank and file. This reveals her sleight of hand method – disrespect for the interests of teachers and public schools and respect for corporate education reform interests – or is her sleight of hand to say what she thinks the AEI audience will want to hear? It can’t be both!

Immediately after the above exchange, Weingarten says the statements must be seen in the context of “the war” that was going on in New York City, with relentless attacks on teachers by corporate education reformers. This is immediately followed by praise for the recent UFT contract that included agreeing to a career ladder program and state law waivers by schools, along with other concessions.

The first part of the AEI meeting shows Randi Weingarten speaking prepared remarks explaining the AFT to this conservative audience. She informed the audience of three programs that the AFT is involved with. (6:51) In introducing each one, she had a hand vote from the audience to see who knew about the program, and to scold the members of the audience who were not aware of the program. If this was Ms. Weingarten’s method of teaching during her six years as a teacher, this shaming the students is one of the worst methods of instruction. In this case, she was not so much interested in the audience being informed about the particular program as she was interested in demonstrating how the AFT is collaborating with corporate education reform.

The first program (6:58) Weingarten described was the public-private partnerships the AFT is creating in McDowell County, West Virginia, one of West Virginia’s poorest counties. Weingarten said this corporate/labor model is to be expanded to all counties in West Virginia and Mayor deBlasio wants to bring it to New York to forty schools. Not mentioned at this forum, is the collaboration with Teach for America to build a Teacher Village for low income housing for low-income teachers in McDowell County.

The second program (8:40) Weingarten mentions is “one of the fastest growing online education companies in the United States of America called Share My Lesson” created by the AFT. This has thousands of lessons, including “250,000 lessons created by the AFT” and (not mentioned at the forum) The Gates Foundation Innovation Fund, which “are aligned to the Common Core.” Since 2012, AFT’s Share My Lesson has been a collaboration with the United Kingdom digital education company TES Global.

The third program (10:21) is a partnership under the Clinton Global Initiative with other unions to invest $10 billion of public employee pension funds “in a sound fiduciary way to fix crumbling infrastructure, create jobs, and deliver solid returns.” She claims that this has created 30,000 jobs. No mention of wages, benefits, union rights, etc. Weingarten does not mention what gives her the authority to use the pension funds of her members in this risky way.

In her conversation with the AEI’s Frederick Hess, he asked (47:14) about the proposal at that time by the Gates Foundation of a two-year moratorium on the consequences of Common Core assessments. He noted this is what Weingarten had proposed in 2013. He also noted that Weingarten in June, 2010 said Common Core “is essential building blocks for a better educational system”, but in 2012 she said the implementation was far worse than the way Obamacare was implemented. He asked her position on the Common Core. After speaking of what she learned in her six years of teaching Weingarten replied (48:05):

If you think about all those statements, they’re pretty consistent. I’m a big believer in it and I am for the following reasons. I was a lawyer before I was a teacher so I had the opportunity to learn and practice the Socratic method.  I was also a litigator. That tool actually helped me more than virtually any other tool that I had for teacher prep in teaching my kids Civics and the Bill of Rights. When I look at the original standards in the Common Core: the going for deeper knowledge and for applying facts, and not just knowing things, but trying to come up with problem solving and critical thinking, what it took me back to was my teaching at Clara Barton High School …"

After a long monologue about her teaching, Hess interrupted her and asked why in 2013 was she upset by the implementation of Common Core.  She then went on for ten minutes explaining how the Common Core could be better implemented. She concluded that (54:08) “In some ways the Business Roundtable, the Gates Foundation, the Learning First Alliance; have all said a year later, “Wait a second, if you really want this to work, you got to do, not only the adjustments, but you have to give people the time to actually learn what we’re saying is an important new strategy for deeper learning for children.” 

At the beginning of her remarks (4:40), Randi Weingarten told the AEI audience that she engages with AEI because she believes in vigorous debate. As an example (6:20) she said, “We will have a real share of vigorous debate at the our (AFT) Convention this summer. I have promised that we are going to have an hour debate on the Common Core on the floor of our Convention. In New York… we call debate conversation.” The AFT Convention was held one month after Weingarten’s conversation with AEI.
George Schmidt of Chicago’s Substance News documented the “conversation” that happened at the AFT Convention over Common Core: 

It became apparent that it wasn’t going to be a debate about what’s best for the students, but what UFT -- and more broadly the leadership, which has always been centered in New York -- wanted. These “thugs” were not teachers, delegates noted. As the days of struggle unfolded, more and more delegates noted that they were bullies sent to block any attempt by the CTU to have an honest open debate about issues including Common Core, high stakes testing and special education in the context of "education reform" in 2014. The Educational Issues committee managed to shove through every resolution, including one supporting common core state standards for early childhood -- which is Pre-K – 3rd. The only resolution they did not push forward was anti-testing special education which was sent back to the executive council after a maneuver. It appeared to this reporter that the UFT was more interested in knocking down CTU resolutions than listening to the arguments and applying that information to the students they serve.

Also see The UFT’s Michael Mulgrew gets punchy. But only towards union members in the hall. | Fred Klonsky’s blog – August 7, 2014
Even Weingarten allies were outraged at how the AFT leadership stifled debate on the Common Core. After the Convention, Diane Ravitch commented:

Stephen Sawchuck did a good job reporting the heated debate about the Common Core standards at the AFT convention. The Chicago Teachers Union wanted to dump them. The head of the New York City United Federation of Teachers mocked the critics of the standards. One union official said that the critics represented the Tea Party. That’s pretty insulting to the Chicago Teachers Union and one-third of the AFT delegates, as well as people like Anthony Cody, Carol Burris, and me.

For a full description of the dispute over Common Core at the AFT Convention see Stephen Sawchuck’s column in Education Week AFT Common-Core Resolution Calls for Teacher Implementation.

To paraphrase Randi Weingarten’s questioning of her AEI audience about their knowledge of the collaboration of the AFT leadership with corporate education reform, who in the membership of the AFT and the general public knows about the depth of the collaboration of the AFT leadership with corporate education reform? Why don’t you know this?

Also see:
Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 1 | Schools Matter – April 19, 2015
Which Side Are You On? | Defend Public Education – July 14, 2014
Understanding Why the TURN Cancer Has to Be Cut Out of NEA and AFT | Chalkface – July 18, 2014

Video: PUSH BACK ON TESTING- NYC Public School Parents and Teachers Talk About State Testing

This link was just sent to me by a MORE teacher who has a child in this Manhattan progressive school in the east Village.

PUSH BACK ON TESTING


Public School Parents and Teachers Talk About State Testing from John-Carlo Monti on Vimeo.

For more information on opting out of state testing, please view these links below. Opting Haven out of the state-mandated tests is our family’s act of civil disobedience
washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/06/opting-haven-out-of-the-state-mandated-tests-is-our-familys-act-of-civil-disobedience/
NYC
10 Reasons No Child Should Take the NYS Tests.
alternet.org/education/10-reasons-why-no-child-should-take-new-york-states-common-core-tests#.VSqLk1OewGc.mailto

 https://vimeo.com/124916728 

_________________________

RADIO:

Friday's Democracy Now! featured a lively and informative discussion on the increasing trend for schools to opt out of standardized testing.

The segment features testimony from an Earth School staff member, a school system superintendent and offers up both criticism of the current system and what type of testing might be more effective.

Here's the link:

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/17/test_mutiny_tens_of_thousands_of

High stakes testing impact on the black community - so-called civil rights test supporters - ignore at your peril

A 2012 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the same suspicious patterns of radical test score improvement seen in Atlanta could be found in more than 200 school districts across the country, from Philly to Portland, and from Alaska to Alabama.... Black Agenda Report

So desperate to have some policies to promote equity when the country was turning conservative, civil rights leaders forgot their historic opposition to high stakes testing, with tragic results....Stacey Patton, Dame Magazine

The one-percenters need us to believe public education in our communities is some new kind of sewer infested with incompetent teachers who are cheating children and the public every week they draw paychecks. The long, long crisis of public education has been designed, engineered and provoked by powerful bipartisan forces to justify their long game, which is the privatization of public education. That's the Big Plan... Bruce Dixon, BAR

If the black political class and black educators really stood for the interests of their students and communities they would be educating black parents and students across the country about their right to opt out of tests that serve no legitimate educational purpose, as teachers in Chicago and Seattle are already doing.

But that's problematic too. Opposing standardized testing would place the black political class in conflict not with the slippery nebulous demons of institutional racism, but biting some of the very real and easy-to-find hands in corporate America that feed it. Taking issue with standardized testing, Common Core and the drive to privatize education would put black educators in opposition to corporate America, to the Gates, Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Eli Broad and other foundations, and to Republicans and Democrats including President Obama and Arne Duncan, his Secretary of Education. This is not an easy thing to do when national black “civil rights” organizations from the National Action Network and the National Urban League have eagerly accepted corporate-engineered school reform with corporate dollars, and President Obama is deeply beholden to the charter school sugar daddies.... Bruce Dixon

Boy, Dixon lays it out there. Mulgrew used the "civil rights leaders support testing" excuse for opposing the opt out movement. The worm will eventually turn and the so called civil rights leaders who support testing will be repudiated by people in the black community. There are articles popping up out of that radical wing of the black community -

This one at Dame Magazine is very heavy:  http://www.damemagazine.com/2015/04/13/dear-white-people-your-kids-are-getting-screwed-too

Dear White People, Your Kids Are Getting Screwed, Too!
The Atlanta cheating scandal and growing White middle-class anger over the explosion of Common Core tests have more in common than you might think.

From Black teachers being imprisoned for forging answers on tests and Black parents being jailed for “stealing” a better education for their kids, to White middle-class parents organizing a nationwide revolt against standardized testing, we are seeing a repudiation of our failed educational policies. Many might see these as totally separate issues, reflecting the power of race and class, but each represent varied responses to an immoral national strategy that had its major impact on inner-city communities more than a decade ago and has now targeted suburban schools.

The architects of this policy, men with deep pockets like Bill Gates helped by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, decided to use standardized tests to achieve education “equity” despite their racist origins and character.

And even more strangely, many civil rights groups and leaders promoted testing by selling it as the answer to eliminating the notorious achievement gap, and encouraging their constituents to embrace this new form of oppression. So desperate to have some policies to promote equity when the country was turning conservative, civil rights leaders forgot their historic opposition to high stakes testing, with tragic results.

And some groups became poverty pimps and virtue rackets that sold out for corporate money. At the end of the day, the rhetoric of civil rights set the stage for the educational holocaust in communities of color, and for the Atlanta scandal.

Historically, standardized tests have been the basis of narratives claiming the genetic and cultural inferiority of Black children. Throughout the early 20th century, these tests provided the “scientific legitimacy” for segregation, prompting widespread opposition from Black psychologists and sociologists who identified them as a White supremacist scheme.

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision did not result in an abandonment of racially biased testing. Testing data has since rationalized funding disparities, the achievement gap, and policies resulting in the cradle-to-prison pipeline. It would be akin to using Jim Crow to facilitate integration, or the KKK to bring about law and order. Oh, wait …

The article gets pretty tough on white people and some might view it as divisive but it makes some very important and interesting points:

- See more at: http://www.damemagazine.com/2015/04/13/dear-white-people-your-kids-are-getting-screwed-too#sthash.X0MvhCZf.dpuf

Here is one from the Black Agenda Report by Bruce Dixon: excerpts

Demonizing Teachers, Privatizing Schools: The Big Lies and Big Plans Behind the Atlanta School Cheating Scandal

Wed, 04/22/2015 - 14:04

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Should we be wondering if the prosecution of cheating Atlanta teachers for racketeering was racist? Or should black parents and educators be leading a movement against high-stakes standardized testing as the gateway tool to privatizing public education in black and brown communities across the country?

 -----
Since at least 2001, when George W. Bush's conservative Republicans teamed up with Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy's liberal Democrats to pass and implement the No Child Left Behind Act, it's been the policy of both capitalist parties implemented by the federal Department of Education to create, to provoke and to exacerbate a phony educational crisis. This program of crisis-creation has been backed by Wall Street, by banksters and hedge fund types, by giant corporations like Wal-Mart and powerful right wing interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce as well as the so-called philanthropic tentacles of corporate America like the Gates, Broad, Heritage and Walton Family Foundations. The solution to the fake crisis has been the whole industry of testing experts, turnaround consultants, diploma mills for fake principals, lucrative charter school companies and their contractors, and the private but government sanctioned agencies that rate school districts. Even the agencies that rate school districts are staffed by the same “run the school like a business” experts approved by the US Chamber of Commerce who were employed to write President Obama's Race to the Top program, which punishes school districts that don't privatize or implement “run the school like a business 'reforms'” fast enough.

High stakes standardized testing, like the tests educators cheated on in Atlanta, is an essential tool in provoking the crisis, but it's a big lie. These kinds of tests don't reflect student progress or teacher competency. They track to family income, and family income in the US correlates largely to race. So as Glen Ford put it back in 2012

“The standardized tests were bombs, designed to explode the public schools and the teaching profession. Everyone involved knew that inner city kids would fail the tests in huge numbers, setting the infernal machine in motion for the closing of schools and the wholesale firing of teachers...”

The bombs were planted not just in Atlanta, but in thousands of school districts across the nation, with predictable results. A 2012 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the same suspicious patterns of radical test score improvement seen in Atlanta could be found in more than 200 school districts across the country, from Philly to Portland, and from Alaska to Alabama. Clearly, cheating teachers and principals in Georgia were and likely still are doing the same things the same way as their colleagues across the country.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and serves on the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

 Read more at: http://www.blackagendareport.com/big-lies-big-plans-behind-atlanta-cheating-scandal

Parents Rate de Blasio (and Farina) Poorly - and they were being nice - Is Farina making us miss Joel Klein? And Leo Casey goes wild at daring to crit de B

Media outlets that reported on our report card include News 12-TV, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, WCBS radio, and Epoch Times (in Chinese).  Please take a look at the grades we awarded the mayor on education issues below, and leave a comment on the blog.  thanks, Leonie 

Photo by Norm Scott for Ednotesonline

I attended the press conference on Sunday and taped it - but luckily pro Michael Elliott was there to cover and did the video below. One of the fascinating conversations I had with some people was just how bad Farina is in so many ways in relation to parents - even a few words of comparison to Joel Klein. He didn't bother to try to hide his disdain for parents and other voices. She has the de Blasio rhetoric - backed by the UFT.

I'll do a follow up with Leo Casey's attack on Leonie and KidsPAC for daring to be critical of de Blasio --- he and Mikey will punch you in the face. Casey said that by criticizing De Blasio we are supporting Eva and the hedgehogs. It makes you want to punch yourself in the face.

NYC Public School Parents

[VIDEO] NYC KidsPAC Education report card for the Mayor press conference - Video taken by Michael Elliot at our NYC KidsPAC press conference on April 19 where we released our education report card for Mayor de Blasio.

ON the steps of TWEED, NYC KidsPac held a press conference to deliver a report card on Mayor De Blasio's first year in office and how his initiatives stacked up against the promises he made during the election. Lets just say that there's lots of room for improvement!

https://youtu.be/mSq9pMj3J3U

Class Size Matters

Updates on opt out and NYC KidsPAC releases Mayor de Blasio’s education report card - April 20, 2015 Dear Friends, As you may have heard, a huge number of kids opted out of the ELA exams last week throughout NY State; the unofficial count so... 

Chaz thinks the parents marked too easy. I agree

Chaz's School Daze

What The NYC KidsPAC Report Omitted. - With much fanfare and great hopes, the De Blasio Administration would make real change to the NYC public schools. Even our UFT President, M... 

According to the organization Bill de Blasio and his disappointing Chancellor, Carmen Farina, gets an "F" for failing to reduce class sizes, despite promises to do so.  Moreover, they received a "F" for the lack of transparency on funding and contracts that was the hallmark of the Bloomberg years.  Finally, they get another "F" for their failure to allow for the segregation of too many schools in the City without a diversity plan to correct this.

The De Blasio Administration does little better when it comes to parent engagement, receiving a "D" for not providing enough parent outreach.  Further, the De Blasio Administration was given a "D" on how it handled busing and Special Education services.  Finally, their failure to adequately handle the co-location issue deserves another "D" rating.

What was left out of the report was the continuation of other Bloomberg policies that has not been corrected by the De Blasio Administration or his disappointing Chancellor, they are:

Fair Student Funding:  The continuation of fair student funding has resulted in principals selecting "the cheapest and not the best teachers" for their schools, while allowing teaching talent to waste away as glorified babysitters in the ATR pool at a cost of $150 million dollars annually.

Frozen School Budgets:  Despite the increase in the overall DOE budget, Chancellor Carmen Farina froze the school budgets at last year's levels which was 14% below the 2008 level for the schools.

Teachers Teaching A Sixth Class:  Too many schools, trying to meet their unrealistically tight budgets are requiring teachers to pick up a sixth class to save on teachers,  This is especially true in shortage areas where the DOE picks up the tab for the sixth class not the school.

There are other "education on the cheap" issues like Science and AP classes being shortened, teachers not certified to teach in their content specialty, resources like paper and school supplies not being sent to the classroom, and special education students not being given their mandated services.  All of these issues were omitted by the KidsPAC report but are still going on despite the demise of the Bloomberg Administration as the Mayor and his disappointing Chancellor has failed to make the changes necessary for our public schools to succeed.

WSJ Reveals Pearson/NYState Ed Test Follies: Is a State Ed SWAT Team at their door?

To put this kind of burden on kids as young as third grade is a form of child abuse...Ryan Bourke, principal at Manhattan’s P.S. 212 in the WSJ

Mindy Rosier, a special-education teacher at a school in Harlem who teaches science but wasn’t a proctor for this round of testing, heard from peers that the tests were ”ridiculously hard.” By midday after the test, “kids were breaking down, they were crying” from the stress, she said... WSJ

Arne Duncan calls out SWAT to stop test leaks

Go Mindy - this MOREista is all over the place.

Note below how Pearson tries to blame NY State Ed Dept for these junk science tests.

I've wanted to write about type of content on these tests but was worried about a SWAT team coming to my house to arrest me. The Change the Stakes listserve has been buzzing with sample questions and vocabulary lists from last weeks test. Some of them make the famous Pearson Pineapple ('Pineapplegate' Ignites Testing Debate - Teaching Now ...)  story look like a peanut.

Pearson, NY State Ed, etc have made it a crime for teachers to talk about the test in order to hide Pineapplegate stories from the public. 

Martin Daly left this comment on the WSJ article below:

Here is the link to a reading passage on the grade 6 ELA test last week -- appropriate for a high stakes test given to 11 year olds? BTW, there was no footnote or sidebar defining "ephemeral"
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/nimbus-clouds-mysterious-ephemeral-and-now-indoors-166627507/?no-ist

We conspiracy theorists view the entire common core/testing regime is designed to make public schools look so bad that privatized charters seem to be the only option -- turn the nation into New Orleans.

But surprise, surprise -- the Wall Street Journal is willing to go there. Read some of the comments, one of the funniest from someone who said 40% failed a hard test at MIT. I commented:

If 40% failed a test at MIT shouldn't the professor have been fired for being an ineffective teacher? After all that is what these tests are aiming at. Shouldn't MIT be considered a failing school? After all that is how public schools are branded based on these tests. We are talking about 9 year olds. As a 6th grade teacher I gave my kids harder passages to read during normal instruction, but not on tests that they are told will result in holding them back, firing their teachers and closing their schools. Sometimes we have to stop making ridiculous comparisons.

Here is the WSJ article.

New York State Tests for Fourth-Graders Included Passages Taken from Books Meant for Older Students

Excerpts came from ‘The Green Dog: A Mostly True Story,’ ‘Hattie Big Sky,’ and ‘The Clay Marble.’

By Leslie Brody and

Melanie Grayce West

April 20, 2015 9:10 p.m. ET

9 COMMENTS

Some fourth-graders tackling New York state tests in language arts last week examined passages that were taken from books deemed by several independent rating systems to be at a fifth- or sixth-grade reading level, according to a person who saw the exam.
For the past three years of new state exams aligned to the Common Core learning standards, a set of guidelines for skills children should master in each grade, critics have said some questions are too difficult and confusing for many children.
A person who saw one of the four versions of the fourth-grade language-arts test spotted excerpts from three books that are considered at a fifth- or sixth-grade reading level by several widely used rating systems of children’s literature.
The books featured on the test included: “The Green Dog: A Mostly True Story,” “Hattie Big Sky,” and “The Clay Marble.”
“ ‘Hattie Big Sky’ is not for fourth-graders,” said Pat Scales, a retired librarian living in Greenville, S.C., who wrote a teachers’ reading guide for the book, which she described as appropriate for middle-school students.
“Just because a fourth-grader can probably read that book as far as calling the words, they don’t have enough life experience or are mature enough to deal with ‘Hattie Big Sky,’ ” Ms. Scales said.
State education officials declined to confirm which excerpts were used on the exams, but they said teachers were involved in developing and reviewing questions.
“There are, of course, challenging questions on every test,” said Dennis Tompkins, a spokesman for the New York State Education Department.
Mr. Tompkins also pointed out that a specific excerpt used as part of the test could be rated at a different grade level than the book overall.
“Ratings of a whole book are not going to match the text complexity of a selected passage,” he said. “To compare the complexity of an excerpt to an entire book would be akin to saying Bill Buckner was a terrible baseball player based on one play in the 1986 World Series.”
A spokesman for Pearson PLC, the test vendor, said the company works with state officials to write the tests, and all tests meet the standards set by the state Education Department.
“We take steps, in line with these standards, to ensure that the testing material is right for the students taking the test,” the spokesman said.
State rules bar educators and students from disclosing what is on the state tests, but some questions have been leaked at a time of mounting opposition to standardized testing.
Parents and teachers pushing for boycotts of state tests hope airing questions will help discredit the tests. Officials at teachers unions have protested using student gains on these tests as part of teacher evaluations, especially when they believe the tests are poorly designed.
But state officials have said it is crucial for children to take the tests to show how their skills compare to their peers’, identify achievement gaps and guide instruction. The tests are mandated by federal rules.
Lucy Calkins, director of the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project at Columbia University, has reviewed previously released test questions. Having difficult reading passages, she said, wasn't the main concern.

“The biggest problem is the obscurity of the questions and the fact that well educated adults can’t agree on the answers,” she said.
Ms. Calkins said the new tests should have debuted as a pilot project before being used as part of teacher evaluations.
Carl Korn, a spokesman for the New York State United Teachers, a union, said some test questions this year, as in the past, were too hard and complicated, with overly lengthy reading passages.
The third-grade test, for example, had an allusion to the Aurora Borealis, a pattern of different colored lights sometimes seen in the night sky in the northern part of the world, without a definition of the term, he said.
Further, Mr. Korn said, one language-arts question was used on both the third-grade exam and the fifth-grade one.
“Many test questions were inappropriate and served no purpose but to confuse and frustrate students,” he said.

Ryan Bourke, principal at Manhattan’s P.S. 212, said he heard of children crying after the language-arts tests last week. He couldn’t discuss the content of the test or its questions, he said, because the test is “veiled in secrecy.”
In the months and weeks preceding these exams, the anxiety builds in third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students and their parents, who go through lengths to pay for tutors and test prep, said Mr. Bourke.
“To put this kind of burden on kids as young as third grade is a form of child abuse,” he said. “The test is hard and it’s long.”
In August, the department released half of the 2014 test questions to the public, up from 25% the previous year, to help teachers understand the questions and how they aligned to expectations for students.

Mindy Rosier, a special-education teacher at a school in Harlem who teaches science but wasn’t a proctor for this round of testing, heard from peers that the tests were ”ridiculously hard.” By midday after the test, “kids were breaking down, they were crying” from the stress, she said.
Anna Allanbrook, principal at P.S. 146, the Brooklyn New School, said only 5% of students took the test, so it was a normal, anxiety-free day for her school.
“It was interesting not to feel that angst that I think is very common for educators to feel when they see that the test is way too hard for most of their kids. And that does cause kids to collapse,” she said.

Attributing the Opt Out Movement to Union Influence is Just Plain Bad Reporting -- ahem, NY Times

They're (NYT) a disgrace to journalism. Assuming most of the 200,000+ kids opting out have two adults in their household, we are talking about perhaps half a million public school parents, who by definition are not sitting around with time on their hands randomly wondering what trendy cause to get involved in, who are rising up in civil disobedience against the state's education policies -- and the Times yawns... Jeff Nichols, parent activist, Change the Stakes

Ho hum ….NY Times story http://nyti.ms/1JnXatn  buries the lead and finally gets to NYS opt out numbers in paragraph 19. Doesn’t interview a single parent. And doesn’t even really explore the rift between NYSUT and the UFT which is perhaps the only interesting angle to the story. ... Leonie Haimson

I was surprised–and disappointed–by the front page story in The New York Times on Tuesday, April 21, which reports that opting out is union-led and union-driven.  That was not the case in New Jersey, where the union got involved only late in the game.  The national effort led by Peggy Robertson says it has received no support from either teacher union. The Times’ story cites analysts but no parents.↵... John Merrow

This article completely misrepresents the reality. The "opt-out movement" in Nee York State has been parent-led, with ever-increasing involvement by teachers and only very recently some union participation. It is not now and never had been about unions "encouraging parents to opt out." This article could only have been written by someone who has been paying no attention at all or who has done kind of pro-"reform" agenda. It leaves the uninformed reader with the impression that self-promoting unions don't care about "accountability" measures designed to protect the poor. Hundreds of thousands of parents in revolt, leading this movement, and this is what the Times has to say? Unbelievable.... Jeff Nichols

The New York Times Misses the Story: Opt Out Came from Parents, Not Unions....  Diane Ravitch

I emailed with one of the reporters before the story was written and gave her the names of some of the parent leaders of the Opt Out movement, some of whom have spent three years organizing parents in their communities. Jeanette Deutermann, for example, is a parent who created Long Island Opt Out. I gave her the names of the parent leaders in Westchester County, Ulster County, and Dutchess County. I don’t know if any of them got a phone call, but the story is clearly about the union leading the Opt Out movement, with nary a mention of parents. The parents who created and led the movement were overlooked. They were invisible. In fact, this story is the only time that the Times deigned to mention the mass and historic test refusal that cut across the state. So according to the newspaper of record, this was a labor dispute, nothing more. Not surprising that this is the view of Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents, and of everyone else who opposes opting out.

Let's call them out. The bad reporting was done by Kate Taylor and Motoko Rich -- why talk about quality teaching when we can't get quality reporting? Or is it bad NY Times pro ed deform ideology operating here?

There's a segment of the mainstream media that is framing the opt out movement as something spurred by the teacher's union, and as such, claiming that it is due to the fact that we want nothing of a fair evaluation. We need to work on our counter frame, since our leadership will not do it... Newsday will go down in history as being on the wrong side of history. It's no coincidence that articles are incorrectly framing the opt out movement within the teacher's union. The tests are NOT valid. I think he needs a few responses.
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/lane-filler/where-the-opt-out-argument-goes-wrong-1.10310189
Jia Lee, MORE

The bad reporting here is by Lane Filler. His Newsday piece has this little stupid nugget:

NYSUT has 600,000 members. How many of the kids who opted out are the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of those members? How many more are related to the 300,000 Civil Service Employees Association members in New York, or the other public union members (cops, firefighters, postal workers, etc.) who might support NYSUT out of solidarity? So how many of the families whose kids opted out actually had no dog in this fight?

 Jeez. I emailed Lane - feel free to do so too: lane.filler@newsday.com

The largest component of NYSUT is the UFT with 1/3 of the members and the UFT has stood firm in support of common core, testing, rating teachers based on testing and opposing opt out. Just ask Mulgrew.

I have been part of genuine grassroots opt out parent and teacher movements for over 3 years. We are opponents of the people running our union. To claim the opt out movement is union inspired is just plain bad reporting. Karen Magee came so late to the game. The Long Island opt out movement was going strong before Magee uttered a word and her words only seem to resonate with the anti-union press. Parents do not listen to NYSUT. In fact the strongest small local component of NYSUT that favors opt out is the wing that opposed Magee's election as NYSUT president last year. It is pointless to talk about the union at the state of local level when you really know so little about what is going on.

Better coverage is here, on NY1 by the always reliable Lindsay Christ, a former teacher by the way.http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2015/04/21/leaders-of--opt-out--movement-celebrate-as-sentiment-against-high-stakes-testing-grows.html

If you watched the NY1 video, note parent Charmaine Dixon, a PTA president who invited Change the Stakes to address a meeting and I was one of the reps who spoke - and really enjoyed doing it. I owe Charmaine a NYC Opt Out tee shirt.

UPDATE: Also see WPIX TV report: http://pix11.com/2015/04/22/next-up-math-new-york-students-face-2nd-round-of-common-core-testing/

John Merrow chipped in today on the opt out story - he has come a long way since his NY Times op ed years ago attacking the shit out of teachers and their unions.

As we reported on the NewsHour last month, it’s a ‘perfect storm’ that has brought together the left and the right, generally with very different motives but with a common purpose: slow down or stop the testing machine. Sweeping generalization: Most on the right want to get rid of the Common Core State Standards and anything that smacks of federal control; most on the left believe schools test too much, and this is their moment to draw a line in the sand. As one CCSS testing opponent said, “We are not anti-testing; we are against these tests.”

John has a good blog post today:

Dear Friends and other readers,

Who’s behind the opt out movement?  The New York Times says it’s the teacher unions; my eyes and ears suggest otherwise. But, more to the point, something is happening out there, and it’s an opportunity to rethink the path we are on.  The central question: Just what aspect of education do we most care about holding accountable: students, teachers or schools?  Of course they’re connected, but we have to choose the one that matters most.  The feds and many others in the US focus on using student scores to evaluate teachers.  Other countries assess students in order to assess students!  But what would happen if we focused on holding schools accountable? Is there a pathway to ’Trust but Verify’ in education? I hope you will take a look at this short piece. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/1ID1K71

Thanks, and best wishes,

John

John Merrow
President,
Learning Matters, Inc.
212.725.7000 x104

My blog:
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/

The Influence of Teachers:
http://amzn.to/qLS7JT

Eva Raises $9 mil for Success, Half to Go to Buy Pampers

Eva's Nightmare and Eva's Gift to MORE: Mindy at Cipriani Fundraiser

UPDATE: Mindy reports on the demo at the MORE blog. Here's a short excerpt:

I broke out my dressy clothes, some earrings, and my red lipstick for last night’s fundraiser for Eva Moskowitz. I was not a guest. As a mere teacher, I could not afford to attend the Third Annual Spring Benefit that began at 6:30 pm. Cocktails and dinner were served and of course you needed to dress to the nines. Since Cuomo was busy puffing away on cigars in Cuba, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries from Brooklyn took over as the keynote speaker. Other guests included Eli Broad, Campbell Brown, Katie Couric, Daniel S. Loeb, even our ole school  chancellor Joel Klein. Seats started at $1,250.00 and tables began at $15,000.00. I wasn’t there to party, I was there to make some noise.

Hakeem Jeffries -  I remember him working with us to get rid of Cathie Black. What am ed deform slug he has turned out to be.

Eva and the charter movement in general are the gift that keeps on giving - to groups like MORE. Eva's attempt to stamp out the special ed kids in Mindy Rosier's school last year flipped Mindy's activist switch - and she's one of the key people running MORE today. And it so happens that Patrick Walsh

(Raginghorseblog: DFER Illuminates Hidden Dangers of Opting Out) is the Chapter Leader of the other school in the same building. So 2 top-level MORE activists in the same building staring down Eva's "let's make 'em pee in their pants" staff.

I was supposed to go to the big anti-Success/hedge funders rally last night but wasn't feeling up to it. I also missed an anti-charter rally in south Brooklyn and will be missing today's big opt out rally in Prospect Park at 4PM. Is old age catching up? But Mindy was there along with some other MOREs. Mindy will write up a more detailed account later and send more pics --- here is her quick report:

MOREs in the house: Mindy and AJ

Last night's protest outside of Cipriani's is now def one of my favs. Everything from the first plan of action to the protest itself. We were heard loud and clear and we definitely annoyed people. We were allowed to literally protest right in front of the entrance....though after about 20 minutes, the put the "pen" around us so that their guests could enter and not have to walk through us. I post lots of pics last night and NYCC and Hedge Clippers posted lots of pics and videos as well. I did my very first mic check last night.


The hedgeclippers helped organize this and here is some stuff from them on Eva's operation.
This report received this headline at Capital NY

Union-backed report looks at Success Academy donors

Do they ever say that about ed deformer backed reports?

http://hedgeclippers.org/hedgepaper-10-the-double-standard-of-success-academy/#.VTYjGUtTbco.facebook

Hedge Fund Hypocrisy: The Double Standard of Success Academy

Success Academy – the charter-school chain and political launching pad for anticipated mayoral candidate Eva Moskowitz — is a favored charity for many hedge fund managers.

But beneath their rhetoric about fighting poverty and supporting academic achievement is a real double standard. It can be seen in two key ways:

Eva Dearest's Chambers of Horrors

Success Academy achieves its very narrow successes through what can only be called the abuse of children.

How does Success Academy spell success?

·         S – Strict enforcement of a “no excuses” code of behavior

·         U – Underprepared and inexperienced teachers who can be bullied into long hours of work and who are malleable enough to accept a narrowed curriculum and prescriptive discipline policy

·         C - Curriculum that focuses on test preparation to the exclusion of deeper understanding, the arts, and physical education

·         C - Coercive discipline built on shaming students into compliance

·         E – Exclusion of students with learning differences, discipline problems, and English language  learners through repeated suspensions or requiring parents to come to school with the child every day.

·         S – Stressful, competitive, joyless learning environment

·         S – Systematic courting of support of politicians, including closing schools so parents and students can go to Albany to lobby legislators into giving Success Academy more money... 

Russ on Reading: How Do You Spell Success (Academy)?

A strong piece by Russ. What the interviews with Success parents showed - pro and con - is that the kids who sit still and never talk are ideal. Hey, to many public schools they are also ideal. No muss, no fuss. But actually, I wanted my kids to talk to each other. Part of our job is teaching social intercourse.
Excerpts:

Success Academy, the New York City charter school chain run by the education reform darling Eva Moskowitz, has been a hot topic in the news lately, with two lengthy articles in the New York Times, here and here that highlighted Success Academy’s success in raising test scores, but which also raised questions about the methods used by the schools to achieve this success. 

It is clear from even a cursory look at the Success Academy test focused curriculum and draconian discipline policies that this type of “education” would be totally unacceptable to parents sending their children to public school in the suburbs. Is it acceptable to use these methods with inner city (mostly minority) children?

There is no question that children raised in poverty present unique and often intractable challenges to successful learning, but do we really want to say that the only way to make sure these kids do well in school is to submit them to a Dickension model of schooling?

It is a model of schooling deeply imbued with a prejudice against what Michael Harrington called the “Other America.” That is the poor America that we wish to see swept under the rug and where now 25% of America’s children live. Easier to blame the poor for their poverty and to treat their children as inferior beings meant to be driven to compliance through a school model designed by those who consider them inferior beings, than to actually grapple with the issue of poverty. 

Did Cuomo Skip Out to Cuba to Avoid Eva Fundraiser? Today - Protest at 6:15 at Cipriani

The parent of a second grader said his daughter’s name had appeared in the "red zone" in class newsletters so often that she needed therapy to help improve her self-esteem.... We started noticing that our son was coming home soaked in urine in September 2014. We provided the letter to Success Academy, but the incidents continued.... Our daughter, who has a learning disability... receives services, like speech therapy, occupational therapy and additional help. Initially our daughter enjoyed going to school. However, after the first few weeks our daughter’s struggles became obvious. Her name was highlighted in a “red” section of the weekly class newsletter for math.... NY Times interviews Success Academy parents

It is funny that on the day Cuomo was to deliver the keynote at a major Eva Success event, he is off to Cuba. His people are claiming Cuba picked the date. I think it was the reports of urine-soaked abused children as the Times hit that issue on Saturday for the 2nd time. with interviews with parents, pro and con.

Funny how the battered, struggling kids are the ones that will be leaving, while the students who can sit perfectly still and quiet - rigid-like -- are the "successes" in Success. Pretty sad state of affairs that parents put their kids through this.  See New York Times article last week.

Can we equate Success parents with vaccine deniers in terms of harming their own children and society in general?

Here is the facebook posting for the demo later today, where people should

toss underwear at Eva for her urine-soaked kids.

Poor "Evil" Moskowitz! It's that time of the year again where she asks her generous friends for money. So please come out on Monday, April 20th at 6:15 pm for she needs all the help she can get. Moskowitz will probably need some words of encouragement so any offered would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. Don't forget to get dressed up. We need to look good for her friends and cameras. Also, feel free to bring some change of clothes and diapers for her "scholars." It is still testing season and poor Eva needs the money. #DontStealPottyTime

Additional information: Success Academy Charter Schools
Third Annual Spring Benefit. 6:30 pm. Cocktails and dinner. Business attire. Honoring Eli Broad. Chaired by Campbell Brown, Joel Greenblatt, Daniel S. Loeb, John Scully, Regina Scully. Tickets from $1,250.00. Tables from $15,000.00. Cipriani 42nd Street. New York. Contact: Julianna Harder. (212) 245-6570. Event address: 110 East 42nd Street, New York.

The Roots of A Company Union - UFT/AFT Deform Ideology and Randi: Evidence of Collaboration With the Enemy, ie., Eli Broad.

The Broad Foundation is not anti-union. Rather, it seeks to transform unions into a form of company union. A company union is a union located within and run by a company or a national government, and the union bureaucracy is incorporated into the company’s management... Ken Derstine

... the "seat at the table" strategy is not due to bad strategy but in fact that strategy is endemic to the way the union leadership has operated for 50 years - part of the very fabric of their DNA. They can't try to organize the membership or run a democratic union that might threaten this seat - or stool. They are locked in....Ed Notes

As I reported last night - Ken Derstine on Randi after Watching AEI Video: This is a company union -in  re: Randi's tweet to me last night about evidence related to her VAM waffling. Let's look at the bigger picture of evidence of ed deform collaboration. Boy, is there evidence.

In order to mount an effective response to the union complicity, we must study and understand who and what the AFT/UFT really represents, which is not us but the ruling class. [I know for some people "ruling class" connotes a "RC" meeting in some dark rooms to plot - not exactly but when it comes to ed deformers like Eli Broad et al, not totally wrong.]

At Saturday's MORE meeting, Jonathan Lessuck made that very important point. (Jonathan is a member of Progressive Labor, which has been a presence at the AFT and NEA conventions.) He said that without such an analysis people in MORE will think that by certain actions they can get Mulgrew/Unity/Randi to modify their policies instead of engaging them fully.

When an opposition - like New Action - plays the role of lobbying the leadership to change instead of full-scale engagement with the rank and file - it ends up with a mindset of fighting for little crumbs rather than fully engaging the leadership in an all front battle. At times I worry about MORE becoming New Action, light, especially when I see opposition people joining UFT bullshit committees.

[Soon I'll be putting forth my argument for MORE to boycott the UFT election farce next year as a true militant "in your face" act of resistance rather than misleading members that we can win ANYTHING.  And maybe just let New Action have its little crumbs.]

There has been a yin-yang in MORE on this point over the years.

Some caucuses think that getting Randi to say she is now against VAM or supporting opt out is a victory of sorts [Let's celebrate - we got them to react - look how our work is paying off].

I don't agree. I see it as co-optation and when people like Diane Ravitch praise Randi whenever she does something like this I see it as enabling Randi to engage in further co-optation and distraction -- pulling people away from the struggle. Thus, this weekend's big NPE conf in Chicago will enable Randi to play the true reformer. I wasn't able to make it but if I could I don't know if I could be polite.

[Later I'll report on the remarkable attack Leo Casey made on Leonie Haimson and KidsPac for daring to criticize de Blasio on education.]

Without understanding the union obligations to certain interests, Mulgrew and Randi actions do not make sense - like why would the UFT not jump on the opt out and anti-common core case as a way to strike back at the deformers? {"If you fuck our members, we will fight you tooth and nail on every single initiative, even if it has merit - first stop the attacks and then we'll talk."}

I have been making this argument in MORE for years and surprisingly there has been some resistance along the lines of "what difference does their motivation make?" A component of MORE looks at the leadership as  self-interested and often blundering bureaucrats not driven by ideological or entangling alliances with elements of the Ruling Class. Some of us, often the older ICE wing of MORE who have experienced the actions of the UFT since the 60s, see much deeper roots between our union, the government and corporate interests. [We are told that if we present this to the members we will look like nuts - sometimes I think the rank and file is more advanced than the activists].

The George Schmidt 40 year old book on the AFT and the CIA and the Kahlenberg Shanker bio are must reads. (In fact I'm going to run a study group this summer on George's book and invite all of you to join in - we'll hold it a Madison Square Garden.) Some people seem to think that the "seat at the table" strategy is due to bad thinking when in fact that strategy is endemic to the way the union leadership has operated - part of the very fabric of their DNA. They can't try to organize the membership or run a democratic union that might threaten this seat. They are locked in.

Ken Derstine has been relentless in exposing the entanglements, but with a focus on Randi, he makes it look too much like it's her - rather than the 50 years of entangling alliances. If Randi didn't exist, not much would be different and one of my tasks is getting people to see that.

From Defend Public Education

The Broad Foundation and the unions

See also: Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education? 

This is an except from a longer article on this blog originally published on February 24, 2013 and updated numerous times: Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education?

Above: New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein, second right, hugs United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten after winning The Broad Prize Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2007, in Washington. Eli Broad, left, and Bush's U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings look on.
Diane Bondareff/The Broad Foundation/AP

See:  N.Y.C. Wins Prestigious Urban Education Award | Education Week

The Broad Foundation and the unions
The Broad Foundation Mission Statement states that one of its goals is the transformation of labor relations. The Broad Foundation is not anti-union. Rather, it seeks to transform unions into a form of company union. A company union is a union located within and run by a company or a national government, and the union bureaucracy is incorporated into the company’s management. This opens up the workforce to unfettered exploitation for profits of the owners. Many right-wing governments internationally use company unions to suppress worker struggles against low living standards. In 1935, during the labor struggles of the Depression, the National Labor Relations Act was passed which outlawed company unions in the United States.

Broad has found no shortage of former or current union leaders who are willing to be bought and join his venture philanthropy to foster labor/management “collaboration”. Former President of the Service Employees International Union, Andy Stern, is just the most visible on the board. In education, the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) fosters this collaboration.
Outgoing President of the United Teachers - Los Angeles Helen Bernstein was TURN's first head with a grant from the PEW Charitable Trust and  started TURN in 1996. Leadership of TURN was taken over by current AFT Vice President Adam Urbanski, when he was head of the Rochester, New York local in1999. By 2001, TURN had formed a partnership with the Broad Foundation.  According to the Los Angeles Times, on April 5, 2001, Eli Broad announced his Foundation was donating $10 million to TURN to foster labor/management “collaboration”. In 2009, Broad invested $2 million in TURN, “a network of National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers locals”. (Broad's 2009 Annual Report, Page 15) (For more details about TURN's affiliation with corporate education reform see Schools Matter, "Paul Toner and the TURNcoats", July 24, 2012.)

In the early days of this collaboration, labor leaders joined leaders in politics, business and non-profit organizations in staffing the faculty at the Broad Superintendents Academy, training the future Broad Superintendents. According a 2002 Broad press release (Page 2) participants included:
• Rod Paige, U.S. Secretary of Education in the G.W. Bush Administration
• Henry Cisneros, Secretary of HUD in the first Clinton Administration and now CEO of American CityVista
• William Cox, Managing Director of Broad, School Evaluation Services
• Chris Cross, Senior Fellow, Center on Education Policy
• Chester E. Finn, Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
• Frances Hesselbein, Chairman, The Drucker Foundation
• Don McAdams, Founder, Center for Reform of School Systems
• Donald Nielsen, President, Hazelton Corporation, Chairman of the 2WAY Corporation
• Hugh B. Price, President and CEO, National Urban League
• Paul Ruiz, Principal Partner, Education Trust
• Adam Urbanski, Director of Teacher Union Reform Network
• Randi Weingarten, President, United Federation of Teachers.
• Superintendents from the Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Houston, Long Beach, Memphis, New Orleans, Oakland, Rochester, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle school districts also addressed the Academy.
On November 8th and 9th, 2002, Randi Weingarten participated in a retreat at the Eli Broad's home which included corporate and education leaders. The Press Release said this about the Broad Foundation Summit:

"The recent launch of several initiatives incubated at previous retreats and the Foundation's increase in assets to $400 million prompted the Foundation to convene this strategic planning session. Previously, the Foundation hosted retreats in May of 1999 and February of 2000. The Broad Foundation's mission is to dramatically improve K-12 public education through better governance, management and labor relations. The Foundation's investments are designed to transform large urban school districts from lackluster bureaucracies into high-performing public enterprises."

In 2005 the Broad Foundation made a $1 million grant to help the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, at that time headed by Randi Weingarten, to open two union-run charter schools in Brooklyn, the first such schools in the country. In October, 2012, it was announced these schools are in academic and enrollment trouble and will probably close at the end of the school year. This became another opportunity for another round of teacher bashing by the right-wing media. (Note: This column is written by Micah Lasher, executive director of StudentsFirstNY.)

On September 18, 2007, the Broad Foundation awarded New York City public schools the Broad Prize for Urban Education. Joining Eli Broad on stage at the ceremony were U.S. Secretary of Education in the Bush administration Margaret Spellings, New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein, and Randi Weingarten, President of the United Federation of Teachers.

On November 17th, 2008, shortly after the election of Barack Obama as President, Randi Weingarten spoke at the National Press Club. As reported by journalist Dana Goldstein, in a March 20, 2009 article The Education Wars in The American Prospect, Weingarten offered “an olive branch” to the corporate luminaries in attendance (including many mentioned in this article who are affiliated with the Broad Foundation). She spoke about seeking “common ground” on such things as merit pay for teachers, evaluations based on test scores, and teacher tenure.

In its 2009 Annual Report (Page 10), the Broad Foundation said,

“Teacher unions have always been a formidable voice in public education. We decided at the onset of our work to invest in smart, progressive labor leaders like Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City for more than a decade and now president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). We partnered with Weingarten to fund two union-run charter schools in Brooklyn and to fund New York City’s first incentive-based compensation program for schools, as well as the AFT’s Innovation Fund. We had previously helped advance pay for performance programs in Denver and Houston, but we were particularly encouraged to see New York City embrace the plan.” (See the picture in the 2008 Broad Foundation Annual Report, page 14 and a featured Weingarten quote on page 15.)

On the same page (Page 10) of the 2009 Annual Report the Report boasted of being one of the earliest funders of Teach For America stating “our investment in this innovative teaching corps has grown to more than $41 million.” The same page also says, “Since 2000, our CMO (charter management organization) investments have swelled to nearly $100 million, creating 54,474 charter seats in 16 cities. We provided early start-up capital for charter operators like KIPP, Aspire, Green Dot and Uncommon Schools. They have since become the models for other CMOs to emulate.”

In April, 2009, the AFT teamed with four venture philanthropies: the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation—to create the Innovation Fund. The private-foundation contributions, in addition to the AFT's down payment of $1 million, brought the fund's total to $2.8 million. Weingarten said its funds were made available for local affiliates to "incubate promising ideas to improve schools."
In an April 28, 2009 article, Education Week’s Teacher Beat described the purpose of the Innovation Fund this way:

“Both Weingarten and the foundation folks spoke a lot about the importance of working together and collaboration...Both she and Adam Urbanski, the president of the Rochester, N.Y., affiliate who will serve as the fund's executive director, were quick to minimize the fact that AFT's education-reform objectives haven't always been in line with those of the private foundations. (Broad and Gates, for instance, were said to be primed to offer financial support behind D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's two-tiered pay proposal, although as far as I know, neither foundation ever confirmed that on the record.)”

On June 3, 2010, at their union leader’s urging, the Washington D.C. teachers Union ratified a contract with the Washington D.C. School District, headed by Chancellor Michelle Rhee, which included performance pay linked to test score growth, and a weakening of seniority and tenure. Weingarten had interfered in the Union's election to ensure it would be held after the contract ratification. Rhee got most of what she wanted in terms of merit pay for teachers and loss of seniority. Union President George Parker called the ratification of the contract “a great day for teachers and students.”
When the union election was finally held on November 10, 2010, Parker was voted out of office by the union rank-and-file. On May 20, 2011, Michelle Rhee announced that Parker was joining her corporate reform organization StudentsFirst. Rhee had resigned as Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools on October 13, 2010, and started StudentsFirst soon after, after her sponsoring Mayor was not reelected. Rhee’s Deputy Chancellor and chief negotiator of the 2010 teachers’ contract, Kaya Henderson, replaced her. Henderson recently announced the proposed closing of 20 schools due to “under enrollment”.

On July 8th, 2010,   Randi Weingarten welcomed Bill Gates   as the   keynote speaker at the national AFT convention.   Subsequently, in April 17th, 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $2 million to five of the AFT’s TURN regional networks through the Consortium for Educational Change, “an Illinois-based network of teacher unions, school districts, and professional organizations that work to make school systems more collaborative, high-performing organizations.” Of the grant, Mary Jane Morris, executive director of CEC said, “There is clear evidence that policies and programs that truly impact teaching effectiveness result when teacher unions and management collaborate as equal partners. Each stakeholder brings a unique understanding and knowledge-base that must be considered.”

On June 7, 2012 the Chicago Teachers Union was holding a strike authoirzation vote. (90 percent of the teachers' union, and 98 percent of those voting called for a strike.) Randi Weingarten flew into Chicago the same day, not to support the teachers, but to attend the Clinton Global Initiative Conference. She participated on a panel with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to praise him for his Chicago Infrastructure Trust. Speaking on the panel, she supported the neoliberal agenda of labor and management collaboration which historically has been to the advantage of capital against labor. Weingarten left town without speaking to the teachers. She did join the picket line near the end of the strike. (It has not been disclosed if she was there to support the CTU or to end the strike.)

An article in Reuters, right after the 2012 AFT convention reelected Weingarten to a third term, began: “In the maelstrom of criticism surrounding America's unionized public school teachers, the woman running the second-largest educator union says time has come to collaborate on public school reform rather than resist.”  "U.S. teacher union boss bends to school reform winds", Reuters, July 31, 2012

The Chicago teachers' strike in September, 2012, to which the AFT gave tepid financial and verbal support (not rallying locals nationally to support the CTU), ended on September 19th, 2012. On September 22nd, Weingarten joined Secretary of Education Duncan, who was on a bus tour through the Midwest to promote Race to the Top as part of the President Obama's reelection campaign.

On the tour she joined Gayle Manchin, wife of West Virginia U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, on a panel to discuss “how to build public-private partnerships to support educational improvement as the path to a brighter future.”Weingarten had praised this program as an example of business/labor collarboration at the Clinton Global Initiative conference. The state-run McDowell County, West Virginia school system and the AFT had created the philanthropy organization "Reconnecting McDowell” in 2011 to foster “collaboration between business, government and nonprofit organizations to establish programs that address the challenges faced by this community.”  The AFT has given the fund millions of dollars from the dues of the AFT rank-and-file to this corporate organization. The AFT is now teaming with Teach for America and businesses (see the last paragraph) in McDowell County to build low income teacher housing for low income teachers. (For more on this and the use of the pension funds of AFT members to invest in this and other infrastructure projects, see Which Side Are You On? on this site.)

On November 17th, 2012, Weingarten teamed with New Jersey Education Secretary Chris Cerf (Broad Academy Class of 2004) to successfully promote the ratification of a contract for Newark teachers that included merit pay based on performance (including high-stakes test scores). The merit pay scheme was subsequently deemed to be a witout merit.

On December 13, 2012, the New Jersey Education Law Center announced it had found that Eli Broad was offering a $430,000 grant to New Jersey contingent on the reelection of Governor Chris Christie. Terms of the grant include a requirement that the number of charters be increased by 50%, requiring that all public announcements of the program by the state have to be cleared with the Broad Foundation, and it contained a lengthy provision about making documents, files, and records associated with the grant the property of the Foundation. New Jersey bloggers speculated that Broad’s real concern was the keeping Cerf as the New Jersey Secretary of Education.

On December 13th, 2012, Weingarten held a press conference with Bill Clinton and Obama’s housing secretary Shaun Donovan to announce the AFT would invest $1 billion from the NYC teachers pension fund for Hurricane Sandy relief for the NYC area. NYC Mayor Bloomburg criticized the investment because taxpayers would have to bail out the pension fund if the investment failed. 
One month later the U.S. Congress allocated $50.5 billion dollars for Hurricane Sandy relief.
Weingarten had explained her belief in the investment of the teacher pension fund in infrastructure projects around the country at the June 19th, 2012 Clinton Global Initiative Conference. She has never explained what gives her the right to use the pensions of millions of teachers for this purpose.

On January 29, 2013, Weingarten was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered. She continued her campaign for a teacher’s “Bar Exam”. This year long campaign is an endorsement of the corporate education reformers campaign against teachers that says the problem with schools is “bad teachers” and tenure. Arne Duncan and New York Governor Cuomo have been aggressively supporting this proposal. Weingarten did this NPR interview at the same time as New York City teachers are in a battle against an unfair and flawed teacher evaluation system which Cuomo was threatening to impose through drastic cuts in state funding for NYC public schools if not agreed to or dictatorially imposing the teacher evaluation system outright.

On March 11, 2009, in an article in the NYC education website Gotham News, in the article "Eli Broad describes close ties to Klein, Weingarten, Duncan", Broad described his education philosophy and his collaboration with Klein, Weingarten, and Duncan. The article did not state that Weingarten's relationship with Broad dates back to at least 2002.