The Privatization/Censorship/Indoctrination Agenda Is in Full Bloom

Most Americans believe that all children deserve a well-rounded education. Trump & MAGA argue that "Liberals" are damaging public education with a "radical woke agenda" of identity politics. Guess only extremist right wing "free speech" matters?!

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— Freedom Writers Collaborative (@fwcollaborative.bsky.social) July 15, 2025 at 1:25 PM

Why Does Aljazeera Have Better Programming on U. S. Education than U. S. Media?

Monty Neill, Andrew Carnevale, and Bethany Little on testing and reform.  Why do we have to look to Aljazeera to get this kind of quality exchange on education???

Oh yes, I forgot, Education Nation is on Microsoft-NBC and brought to you by the University of Phoenix.

Jonah, Jonah, Jonah

Caroline Grannan has the transcription of Jonah's 14+ minutes of fame here.

The Whale Coughs Up Jonah to Do Damage Control

Photo by George Schmidt for Substance News (Jonah the Day He Got Made and Swallowed)

The Oligarchs' lawyers were up late last night spinning a line of contrition for the arrogant a-hole, Jonah Edelman, after his 14 minutes of fame that was publicized days ago by George Schmidt at Substance News in Chicago and Susan Ohanian and later picked up by Fred Klonsky.  Here is one example of, first, Jonah today, and, second, Jonah a few days ago, as the Prince of Neoliberal Arrogance said what he really meant:

Jonah today, upon emerging from the belly of one pissed-off whale:

Chicago Public Schools will be able to lengthen its school day and school year in order to give teachers more time to help students learn and to plan and collaborate.

Jonah at Aspen a few days ago (the last couple of minutes of video below):

It's going to allow the new mayor and CEO to lengthen the day and year as much as they want--the unions cannot strike in Chicago--they will never be able to muster the 75 percent threshold to strike.  

And the whole framework for discussing IMPACT [the teacher evaluation and compensation plan based on test scores], you know the compensations that will be necessary, are set up through the fine print we approved to insure that the fact-finding recommendations that are non-binding would favor what we consider to be common sense.  

So that's what happened . . . and we're talking about an opportunity now for transformational change across Illinois, in that principals will have the power to dismiss ineffective teachers, that they will be able to hire who they want, that they will no longer be forced to accept teachers they don't want in their buildings, and when layoffs happen they will be able to let people go based on performance, not seniority.  And in Chicago, they will be able to lengthen their day and year which has been just a horrible inequity for decades.  And all this was the narrative of the union leadership because it was a fait accompli, they decided wisely that they would pursue a win-win. We gave them the space to win and (not understandable phrase).  And now it makes it hard for folks leading unions in other states to say these reforms are terrible because their colleagues in Illinois just said these are great.  So our hope is to use this as a catalyst to very quickly to make similar changes in other very entrenched states.  That's the overview.

Jonah Edelman Spills the Oligarchs' Blueprint for Crushing the Teaching Profession

Please share this WIDELY.  Why?  Here's why in 15 minutes or less:



As Lisa Guisbond quoted Fred Klonsky, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children’s Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan’s senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA’s Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

For those who still believe that there is any way to trust, negotiate with, compromise with, or have any dealings with Ed Deform in any way that does not demand complete capitulation to the ed deformers, watch this video.  Play it at your next union meeting, share it with the world. 

We do know some of what goes on at the Aspen Ideas Festival besides getting a chance to smell and touch sewer rats like Rupert Murdoch.  Here is a great example of massive ego mixed with manipulative glee that was posted and quickly pulled from the Aspen site, but not before Fred Klonsky captured a copy for the world to see and hear.

In this Machiavellian masterpiece, we see Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children infamy (list of donors here) describe in great detail how great wads of hedge-fund and other corporate cash came to bear on the last legislative election in Illinois, how all the best lobbyists were bought up by Deform (including minority ones), how unions were outspent and how politicians followed the money, how teacher unions were lured to the table and how they were totally manhandled by the best lawyers and negotiators that money can buy, how union leaders became complicit, scared, weak, groveling. 

Hear how Karen Lewis, head of Chicago Teachers Union was made a fool of, how she gave up the right to strike with less than a 75% strike vote (something that has never happened, as Jonah notes).  Hear how Lewis gave the Deformer lawyers free rein to work out the details on a terrible agreement.  As Jonah swaggers, "We got to decide all the fine print."  In those details is the insurance needed to impose the same IMPACT teacher eval plan that DC has.

Hear Jonah, with eyebrows arched like Mephistopheles, brag that Rahm can make the school day and year as long as he wants in Chicago, how principals can hire and fire whomever they like, how seniority is history, how Jonah now wants to use the union capitulation in Illinois to inspire unions in other states--quickly. 

Sorry, Jonah, for having to post this again.  You arrogant twerp.



You can get to the entire video from here: http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/your-very-own-copy-of-the-jonah-edelman-tape/

Some quotable quotes:

"There's a high squirm factor" about the way they bought and paid for Illinois Democratic legislative leaders.

"We're already getting going. We're doing this level of work in every state. ..In Washington state, same goal. We could readily outspend the WEA. MA, very similar. It might be a ballot measure in WA. If might be we have a ballot measure on the ballot in MA, and we use it as a lever.

"By the end of this decade we're going to have ended seniority-based decision making in education in this country. It's not enough to ensure better outcomes, but it's certainly something that has been long overdue."

"If you have a longer day but terrible teachers, that doesn't do anything. It's about performance management. It's boring, it's not a silver bullet. Brizard has to hire a lot of really good superintendent level people. They've got to evaluate their principals rigorously and create pipelines of quality principals. More people would want to be principals because not only do they have the accountability but they have the authority."

"The Tribune was fantastic. They probably wrote more than 10 supportive editorials. Sun Times was good. We had a lot of downstate editorial support."

"Wisconsin was a problem, but we were able to do a side by side comparison to say the unions mantra that this was a Wisconsin style attack was baloney."

Lies, Damn Lies, and David Brooks

David Brooks was the latest Diane Ravitch corporate savager until the New Republic's senior dolt, Jonathan Chait, strode in yesterday in the flyweight division of clueless corporate ed deformer commentators.  I'll get to Chait's thought disorder in another post, but first I must say something about that sweet-smiling fascist-next-door type, David Brooks, whose smarmy swipe at Diane Ravitch has gotten a lot attention among the Business Roundtable ed industry types who can't decide, at this point, whether to wait for Arne Duncan to be burned in effigy in Washington, DC before they take their bags of dirty money and head for the hills.

For, alas, there is a storm brewing among educators and parents against BRT, RTTT, and the Gates/Broad/Walton education oligarchy, as witnessed yesterday in actions by the tepid ranks of NEA delegates, who passed a resolution called "13 Things We Hate About Arne Duncan." 

Ravitch will have her own fun dissecting Brooks's lame attack on her, but it is this snippet I cannot let pass:

In sum, Ravitch highlights a core tension. Teaching is humane. Testing is mechanistic.

This is true, but look at which schools are most distorted by testing. As the education blogger Whitney Tilson has pointed out, the schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these schools are also the places where students are most likely to participate in chess and dance. They are the places where they are most likely to read Shakespeare and argue about philosophy and physics (emphasis not mine).

Now there have been many exaggerations created by KIPP's multimillion dollar marketing machine in order to frame KIPP's segregated 10-hour a day culture-scrubbing chain gangs as the ultimate child civil rights intervention, but this truly reaches a new level of monstrous myth-making in terms of content.  Most likely to learn chess, read Shakespeare, and argue about philosophy and physics? Whoa, David!

Jay Mathews is corporate media's expert on KIPP, and not even Mathews, in all his fawning over Levin and Feinberg in his book and in his endless promotion at WaPo or in interviews, even mentions chess programs, Shakepeare, philosophy, or physics in a KIPP school.  Not even chief hedge fund KIPPster propagandist, Whitney Tilson, would make up such an obvious lie.

The amount of argument, on anything, in a KIPP school or one of KIPP's knock-offs, is between negligible and none, and if Shakespeare or philosophy is ever mentioned, it is most likely on one of the thousands of worksheets these children fill out every year.  Has KIPP ever fielded a chess team or dance team?  Not even a mention on any of KIPP's websites, much less in a news article.  (There is a news story this week on KIPP's latest corporate madrassa in Jacksonville getting an "F" on Florida's new school rating system that asks children to write).

No doubt Brooks would like to assuage his under-developed neoliberal conscience with the self-delusion that the children in KIPPs and the KIPP wannabes have given up their childhoods for something, at least, of some value.  After all, a real education might take some of the bad taste off the years of psychological brutality and behavioral neutering that these children suffer as they learn the Seligman way of absorbing any level of abuse heaped on them as preparation for the Oligarchy's global economy.  Sorry, David, that's just not the case.  If you want to find schools with rich curriculum, go where the rich are.  Try Westchester County, or Bethesda, where you live, David.  The real question, David: would you send your own children to these schools that you tout as most likely to teach Shakespeare, philosophy, and chess?

Old News Missed But Worth Noting

When Broadie poster boy, Peter Gorman, came out with his plan in the spring for 52 new tests for Charlotte-Mecklenburg students to choke down more than once during coming school years, some called Gorman a visionary, while some called him the corporate whore.  As if to prove the latter correct, Gorman has signed on at NewsCorp with Klein and Klein's former NYC Schools COO, Kristen Kane, to run Rupert Murdoch's edu-adventures.  The Press Release is too good not to be shared:

. . . . Ms. Kane will become Chief Operating Officer of the group, responsible for driving operations and strategy. Dr. Gorman will be named Senior Vice President and work with school districts to implement the division's programs, as well as review their integrity and effectiveness.

News Corporation's Education Division is focused on individualized, technology-based content and learning opportunities that support world class student and teacher performance, as well as digital assessment tools for K-12 students in the United States that help eliminate the achievement gap. News Corporation recently acquired Brooklyn-based education technology company, Wireless Generation.

"Pete and Kristen are recognized leaders in their field and each brings particular strengths to bear on our growing business," said Joel Klein, CEO of News Corporation's Education Division. "Pete's success running one of the largest schools systems in the United States, combined with his commitment to educational innovation are the perfect complement to our mission. Furthermore, Kristen's proven leadership in shaping and running many of the New York City Department of Education's best programs will benefit us greatly over the years to come."

"I am delighted to have the opportunity to work with Joel and his team in this capacity," said Ms. Kane. "I strongly believe there are more efficient and effective ways to improve the system, and I'm eager to get started."

"I'm thrilled to join News Corporation, and to work with someone of Joel's caliber, and the rest of his team, to transform the educational system through digital technology and other means," said Dr. Gorman. "News Corporation has a reputation for leading significant change across many industries, and I look forward to what lies ahead for the education sector."

Ms. Kane brings a range of experience in both the public and private sectors. At the New York City Department of Education, she served as Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for the development and implementation of the Bloomberg administration's reform strategy as well as oversight of daily operations.

She also served as Chief Executive of the Office of New Schools, which opened 178 new schools and charters in New York City under her leadership. At the Federal Communications Commission, she served as a Director of the National Broadband Plan developing strategies for applying broadband technologies in the education, healthcare, and energy sectors. Earlier in her career, Kristen worked in equity research at JPMorgan covering the education sector. She holds an MBA and Certificate in Public Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from Yale.. . .

Ohanian Speaks to Our Canadian Friends and Lovers of Freedom Around the World

Ooh, good one. Posted at Susan's place:

from Our Schools/Our Selves, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Vol. 19, Number 2 (#98), Winter 2010

What's going on here?

Make no mistake: the assault on teachers in New York and Chicago also threatens teachers in Seoul (1) and London and Vancouver.

Worldwide, corporate interest strive to keep teachers intellectually barefoot. They want people who follow the script to train future workers for the global economy.

My bumper sticker reads Republicans/Democrats: Same shit, different piles. These two halves of the Corporate Party showed corporate loyalty by passing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001 by huge margins.

When this happened, Kathy Emery, my co-author for Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? noted, "When Ted Kennedy and George Bush agree on something, you need to worry about who the man behind the curtain is." While writing our book, it became clear to us that the men behind the curtain are the members of the Business Roundtable.

People are so used to thinking of issues as right wing and left wing that they miss the corporate wing. In the name of preparing students for "the 21st century workplace," the Business roundtable (BRT) wrote the NCLB Business Leaders Toolkit, urging CEOs to take advantage of this "exceptional window of opportunity...[to] act strategically and with a common voice."

In addition to declaring all public schools failures, opening the door to vouchers and privatization, the Business Roundtable plan also paved the way for school-to-work plans sitting on the back burner ever since President Clinton failed to get the national test he wanted.

By 2000, the Business Roundtable had managed to create an interlocking network of business associations, corporate foundations, governors' associations, non-profits, and educational institutions. This network includes the Education Trust, Annenberg Center, Harvard Graduate School, Public Agenda, Achieve, Inc., Education Commission of the States, the Broad Foundation, Institute for Educational Leadership, federally funded regional laboratories, and most newspaper editorial boards.

In December 2008, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner called for the abolition of all local school districts, eliminating local decisions regarding standards, teacher selection, and curriculum choice. He wrote, "Establish a National Skills Day on which every third-, sixth-, ninth-, and twelfth-grader would be tested against the national standards." (2)

Fellows like this show us why John Dewey said that "democracy must be reborn with each generation."

Ohama, Duncan--Progressive?
Some of the fiercest advocates of retrograde school reform in the US claim the label of "Progressive." Just take a look at the Center for American Progress.

In 2005, Senator Barack Obama's first speech on education was written by the Center for American Progress. The title, "Teaching Our Kids in a 21st Century Economy," should be a warning.

Anytime someone in your house starts talking about 21st century skills, lock up your kids, and count the silverware. Obama's speech called for instituting tougher standards and testing, creating mammoth data surveillance systems, paying teachers based on student test scores, and so on.

As a a Presidential candidate, Obama repeated this message via satellite hookup at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in 2008 in Chicago. In the presence of the Obama aura--even via a video hookup--union delegates were unwilling to say, "Hell, no!" to his program for de-professionalizing teaching. Instead, they stood and applauded. I was there, bearing witness.

Currently, Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's call for recruiting and training new, highly-qualified teachers for some of the hardest-to-teach classrooms in the country denies that highly qualified teachers already exist in these schools, denies that the problem is poverty, not teachers.

Duncan's Chicago strategy was to establish "turnaround" schools, meaning clean a school of all staff Bring in Teach for America and other recruits without teaching certificates.

As Gerald Bracey recounted in the Nov. 2009 Bracey Report (3):

[W]hen a school goes through turnaround, it loses the social fabric an experienced and professional staff provides. As the nation witnessed the horrific stomping/beating death of a Christian Fenger High School student on YouTube, they saw a “turnaround” become the deadliest school reform of all. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, high school teacher Deborah Lynch pointed out(4) that "reform" at Fenger meant "dumping all the staff, even the engineers," thereby removing human capital from the school:

We have relationships with kids who may not even have another adult in their homes, or their lives. It’s called human capital. We know brothers and sisters. . . We ask them how their sick mother is or how their job search is going. . . . We give them bus money when they have forgotten theirs. We share our lunches with those who missed breakfast. We kid them, we laugh with them, we exhort them to do better, to get to school on time, to work hard. . . . Oh yes, and we teach them. Yet you have to have a relationship with these kids in order to teach them.

The school website indicates that along with extensive building renovations, "a highly talented faculty and staff were hired." This means that when student Derrion Albert was killed, no one in this turnaround school had known the kids for more than three weeks. This is the concerted policy of the Secretary of Education.

Even when a teacher isn't in a turnaround school, she faces assault by NCLB rules which force teachers to be script readers. To receive NCLB money, school promise to use only certain approved programs and most of these programs are scripted--detailing what to say, and when.

To maintain NCLB purity, schools hire teaching "coaches" to patrol the hallways to make sure teachers are on the right page all through the day.

Of course this defies any kind of pedagogical justification but also consider the psychology of the matter. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert provides a clue as to why this is psychologically wrong: “Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball, or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. The room is different because I was in it.

Because I was in it.

Surely, if we are to call ourselves teachers, our classrooms must reflect our presence. We must not camouflage our identity with a McGraw-Hill script.

Sitting at the table even if the food is rotten
Finding no help from unions that refuse to negotiate on curriculum or teacher autonomy, hundreds of thousands of teachers feel this is the only choice: Follow the script or get out.

When Educator Roundtable website launched a petition calling for the end of NCLB,(5) the NEA, the largest of the U.S. teacher unions, objected. THey complained, "We have to keep a seat at the table." We argued abut the issue in Phi Delta Kappan. (6) Now, complaints to our professional organizations about their participation in the latest follow-up project, the Common Core Standards, are met with a similar, "We are fortunate to have a seat at the table."

In 2003, my website won the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Now, NCTE won't even print a small news item that a member has started a website opposing those Common Core Standards: www.StopNationalStandards.org.

Even when the food is rotten, people don't want to walk away from that corporate-politico table. For some, there are money possibilities--grants and consulting. But for most, it's both the lure of sitting with power and the timidity of standing up to power and saying "No." It matters not to the teacher organization leaders that they sit at the table despite clear teacher opposition to NCLB.

I would be willing to give up part of my salary to help cover the Federal money lost if our district told the Federal Government we are not going to comply with the onerous NCLB standards.
--Educator Roundtable Petition signer #15,462

NCLB breaks children's hearts.
--Educator Roundtable Petition signer #17,788

I look for the day when teachers unions and professional organizations will promote transparency about the corporate connections underlying national education policy.

Data warehousing will destroy your soul
A contributor to Work America, a newsletter of the National Alliance of Business, expressed the prototypical desire of the corporate-politico:

I dream of the day when I can go to a knowledge systems integrator, specify my needs and have them put all the partners together to deliver the people I need.

Applying the principles of the material supply chain to the process of lifelong learning is a cost-effective, efficient way businesses can ensure that worker knowledge is put to use to help companies' bottom line.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has absorbed this mentality with gusto. At a May 29,2009 presentation at the National Press Club he declared, "We have to be transparent about data. We have to raise the bar so that every child knows on every step of their educational trajectory what they're going to do."

These folks haven't a clue. Not a clue. For starters, they haven't figured out that a teacher can teach and teach and teach. But it still doesn't mean the students will learn it--not on schedule, anyway.

In Chicago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his team (7) hooked up 9th and 10th graders in advanced classes to beepers and beeped them during the school day, asking kids to answer questions in a provided booklet, questions which asked what they were thinking about at that time. As it happens, while a teacher lectured 27 students on Genghis Khan's invasion of China and the conquest of Bejing in 1215, only two students mentioned China: One was thinking about a meal he'd had the night before in a Chinese restaurant and the other wondered why the men used to wear pigtails. Nobody mentioned Genghis Khan.

No teacher is surprised to hear this.

Nonetheless, data-=driven decision-making means the computer tallies a kid's responses to shoddy standardized test questions and the teacher is supposed to make the results the basis of her teaching. Everything that happens in school is supposed to increase students' performance on those state tests.

One chapter in the 502-page tome Handbook of Data-Based Decision Making in Education (8) leads off with this exaltation of data offered by Education Week:

Imagine an afternoon when a teacher can sit down at a computer desktop and quickly sort through reams of data she'll use to plan lessons for the next day. . . . She'll compare every student's achievement against state standards to decide which students need review and which ones are ready to move on. . . . That technological capability can only be found in the rare classroom today, but some experts say that such a data-rich approach to instruction will soon be common place.

Yes,just imagine it. The authors view this positivist, technocratic view of teacher decision-making as something every teacher should strive for. Such "planning" assumes:

state standards cause learning;

achievement tests test those standards;

student scores on achievement tests reveal something important about what a student knows; and

students learn what teachers teach.

Education Week also exults, "Aldine (Texas) is striking because the district leaves so little chance when it comes to student success. . . . It takes little time for a visitor to Aldine to see the heavy emphasis that is placed on preparation for state tests. Computer programs scroll through lists of practice questions. Printers spit out scores for teachers to review. Timed practice quizzes help students prepare for the real thing."

Keeping teachers-on-script paid off for Aldine. After four times placing as a runner-up, they are the 2009 winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education. Maybe we should organize a campaign to send the Broad Foundation a few million copies of the Chinese proverb: A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.

We should follow David Berliner's lead in challenging conceptions of data. On a C-Span TV interview, Berliner gave his definition: (9)

Questioner: Your anecdotes. . . .
David Berliner: I'd like to call these data.

In the same vein, Dora Chaplin, Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology, General Theological Seminary, New York City, ib==observed, "Our Lord said, 'Feed my sheep'; he did not say, 'Count them.'"

Amen.

Taking a look at test questions
Standardistos who decry educators who "make decisions based on intuition, gut instinct, or facs," (10) take the content of standardized tests as a given. For seven years, I've run a website documenting the outrages offered by standardized tests. I have documented in chilling detail how schools have become test prep boot camps for tests questions that are just plain loony.

Here's an item from a test given to every fourth grader in New York State--the test that determined whether a student advanced to 5th grade. After reading a passage about how pretzels are made, fourth-graders were asked:

The best source of information about the history of pretzels would probable be
a) a cookbook
b) an almanac
c) an encyclopedia
d) a daily newspaper.

If you think you know the answer to this question, try looking up "pretzel" in the Encyclopedia. Nothing. In an article about bagels from the Dec. 31, 32003, New York Times, I did find a pretzel mention: "It wouldn't be Philadelphia without soft pretzels." More searching produced one sentence that might qualify as "historical": Old-time pretzel makers dipped the pretzels into a lye solution. I found it in my kitchen in A World of Breads by Dolores Casella. (11)

Everything about this item is emblematic of the hubris embedded in standardized tests. Item writers with no connection to real children in real classrooms, or even, it seems, any connection to real pretzel history, invent inaccurate and devious and just plain stupid material.

No wonder they insist on keeping tests secret. The teacher who is informed by computer printout that Johnny missed this answer won't know a thing about his reading comprehension, but she's ordered to base her lessons on the data provided.

With a high school diploma at stake, Florida high schoolers were quizzed about a reflective meditation on moose tracks in Alaska. I wrote the author, sending him the goofy question. He was astounded.

Now you know why it's a felony for teachers in Florida and in many other states to look at the tests. Test makers and the state officials who buy their product don't want word to get out about the specific content of these tests. But how professional can it be to base your lesson plans on test items you can't examine?

In Aberdeen, Washington, a fourth grader was suspended from school because he refused to answer the writing prompt directing him to compose a story about what would happen next if he saw the principal flying past the window. Despite urging from his teacher, his principal, and his mother (who was summoned to school), he didn't pick up the pencil.

He was given a five-day suspension--with a letter stating, "The fact that Tyler chose to simply refuse to work on the WASL, after many reasonable requests, is none other than blatant defiance and insubordination." Tyler explained, "I couldn't think of what to write without making fun of the principal."

I have a massive collection of outrages from teachers and parents about children vomiting on tests, children curling up in a fetal position and sobbing for a parent, children in Sunday school forming a prayer circle and praying their teacher won't be fired because they didn't do well enough on the test.

In Tennessee, where teachers are forbidden to talk to students taking the test, a teacher received an official letter of reprimand for comforting a sobbing child by saying, "Do your best."

Do you want someone in charge of your children who doesn't stop for tears?

High stakes standardized tests should come with a warning letter for parents to sign:

WARNING: Experts on child development have determined:

This may cause your child to vomit, have palpitations, nightmares, and school phobia.

This test will make your child feel insecure, ignorant, and helpless.

This test will distort your child's understanding of why people read.

This test has no academic value. Nobody but $8-an-hour test correctors get to see your child's answers.

Because of this test, your child will no longer have recess.

Because of this test you will become the warden of homework mania.

By taking this test your child becomes the property of the state.

Joel Klein, Chancellor for New York City, the largest public school system in the US, acknowledged that parents express concern "about the stress--they say there's too much high-stakes testing. But our kids are doing to grow up in a world with high-stakes testing at every level, high-stakes challenges in a very aggressive global economy." (11)

The Human Capitalists
"No excuses" is the mantra of the Human Capitalists. Place blame for lack of success on the teachers and the schools.

"No excuses" ignores poverty. They ignore the fact that half of American children receive food stamps. Adults who grew up in poverty are more likely to have impaired physical and mental growth, lower academic achievement, and to remain impoverished.

They ignore the Surgeon General's Report that says one third of all poor youngsters ages two to nine have untreated cavities. They pay no attention to the 12-year-old in Washington D. C. who died of an abscessed tooth, or that his 10-year-old brother had six abscessed teeth.

What human capitalist neoliberal reformers can't fathom is that good teaching is much more like a Chinese lyric painting than a bus schedule. You can't chart a kid's learning by taking his temperature or by getting a computer to track where he puts an apostrophe at 10 a.m. on Monday.

Data and knowledge are not the same thing. The late Gerald Bracey offered a neat recap: "There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all." (12)

Teaching is the messiest occupation imaginable, and with all the current hoopla for data warehousing, someone needs to speak for the metaphysics of quality. We teachers need to offer our data, to tell our stories. That's why I offer Michael's asparagus letter (13) every chance I get.

When I announced to my 7th and 98th graders, who as a group, tested out below the 20th percentile in reading, that we were going to exchange notes every day, kids looked at me like I was nuts. And Michael was the loudest complainer.

But I was tough. . . and persistent. . . and the lure was when a kid wrote a note he got one back. Before long, Michael was hooked. During the winter, as I complained a lot about shoveling sidewalks, Michael's notes advised me to take the months as they come. As spring approached I began mentioning that for me the first sign of spring was the asparagus ads in the newspaper. Kids thought this was a hoot--such a typical teacher concern. But they also began tearing ads out of the daily newspapers we received and leaving them on my desk--who could find the best asparagus buy for Ms O.

Michael won. He wrote me a long note about going to Boston to see a dolphin show and insisting that his family take time out from their busy schedule to visit a market so he could check out the price of asparagus. He concluded, "$1 a pound. But Boston is a long way to go for asprgs."

Every time I talk to teachers I show them Michael's letter. I don't have to explain things or apologize for the spelling. Teachers instantly recognize it as testimony to what we're about. Not quantifiable value-adding, but heart, faith, and grit. And do I dare add love?

When Michael graduated from 8th grade, his mother wrote ma a lovely letter, thanking me for all I'd done. She told me she was going to phone, but Michael urged her to write. He said, "When you care about somebody and when you're going to say something important, you write a letter."

This is what I mean when I say you can only teach who you are. And if you try to teach while submitting to a script dominatrix, then you lose not only your professionalism, but also your soul.

And there's more: Today, Michael is a chef in an upscale restaurant, making a whole lot of money. And I claim partial credit for his success because, after all, I introduced him to an interest in asparagus.

Today, Michael, who exhibited the classic signs of dyslexia, would not pass the New York Regents exam and would be denied a high school diploma, thus making him ineligible as a chef. Or automobile mechanic; baker; broadcast technician, or scores of other occupations.

To be a teacher these days, you have to decide who you're willing to obey.

Endnotes

1) In October 2007, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union asked me to go to Seoul and warn their political leaders about the dangers of NCLB.

2) Gerstner, L. (2008, December 1). Lessons from 40 years of education 'reform.' Wall Street Journal.

3) Bracey, G. (2009). Brace Report.

4) Lynch D. (2009, Oct. 2). "Safety at Fenger Yields to Reform" Chicago Sun-Times.

5) http://www.educatorroundtable.org/petition.html

6) Ohanian, S. and Kovacs, P. (2007, Dec. 1) "Make Room at the Table for Teachers," Phi Delta Kappan

7) Csikszentmihalyi, M, Rathunde, K, and Whalen, S. (1993). Talented Teenagers: The Roots of Success and Failure. Cambridge University Press.

8) Kowalski, T. J. and Lasley T. J., ed. (2009) Handbook of Data-Based Decision Making in Education. Routledge.

9)Berliner, David. (2007. April 28). C-Span.

10) Datnow, A. and Park, V. "School System Strategies for Supporting Data Use," in Kowalski and Lasled, ed.(2009) Handbook of Data-Based Decision Making in Education.

11)Casella, D. (1966). A World of Breads. David White, p. 277.

12) Mathews, J. (2006, Nov. 14). "Just whose idea was all this testing?" Washington Post.

13) Ohanian, S. (2001) Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum Heinemann.

Philanthrocapitalists Go Hollywood With Production of "Waiting for Superman"

As a not-so-subtle, though unconscious?, reference to the good ole' days that led up to the rise of national socialism, the new documentary, Waiting for Superman, features a number of Superman wannabes, including KIPP cult leaders Feinberg and Levin, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates and Eli Broad's boy, Steve Barr. And how well the film's poster inadvertently captures the venture philanthropists' self-imposed blindness to America's urban devastation in favor of a more lucrative focus on producing white-like compliant children whose psychological bubbles are bathed in a sweet incandescence from above that is worthy of a Microsoft ad. Nothing can stop you, boys and girls, if we can find the right superman to inspire you and to get your mind right. Onward, positive psychology soldiers!

The film is executive produced and financed by Participant Media, which was founded by venture philanthropist and former Ebayist, Jeffrey Skoll. Participant Media's current CEO is Jim Berk. Who is Jim Berk? Well, his recent job history, anyway:

Prior to Participant, Jim was Chairman and CEO of Gryphon Colleges Corporation, where he was responsible for the formation, platform acquisition and establishment of a private company operating for-profit post education schools.

At the Waiting for Superman website, here are the ways that are bulleted for you, the wet-eyed movie watcher, to get involved to make it all better for the poor children in the penal pedagogy urban schools. The list ranges from giving pencils to the poor to book donations to joining the PTA (a favorite of Bill Gates who has given generously to PTA) to visiting Arne Duncan's propaganda site (#4):

1. Join your local PTA

2. Fund specific school activities and supplies

3. Help donate books to kids

4. Check out how the U.S. compares to other industrialized countries
   

5. Text POSSIBLE to 44144 for campaign updates

There is nothing here about electing politicians whose education positions are not written by the Business Roundtable or about advocating for rebuilding our public education system, or for fighting to integrate our schools, or for rebuilding our rotting physical plants, or encouraging and rewarding our teachers, or for ending the genocide of testing and containment.

From PR Newswire:

. . . .The new film, developed, financed and executive produced by Participant Media, examines the crisis of public education in the United States through multiple interlocking stories – from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system.

The documentary features several leaders in the field of education, including philanthropist Bill Gates of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; President and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, New York Geoffrey Canada; Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools Michelle Rhee; Knowledge is Power Program Founders (KIPP) David Levin and Mike Feinberg; and President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation Bill Strickland.

Six-time Grammy Award-winning recording artist, concert performer and philanthropist John Legend composed the end title song 'Shine'. Legend's own Show Me campaign uses education to break the cycle of poverty through sustainable development at the individual, family, and community levels.

Said Paramount's Goodman: "Our commitment to this movie and the issue of education is urgently important to all of us at Paramount. In collaboration with our partners, we hope to bring about a real solution."

Said Davis Guggenheim: "With these two great partners, Participant Media and Paramount Pictures, we have a chance to create public awareness around this issue, and this is the only way we can make real change in our children's schools."

Said Jim Berk, CEO, Participant Media: "The movie creates an emotional personal connection to an issue which underpins the very future of our country. . . .

Yes, the very future that is waiting for the children of the poor who make it through the testing and containment camps that the Supermen want to manage--at public expense, of course:

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gryphon Investors announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Delta Educational Systems (Delta) through Gryphon's post-secondary education platform, Gryphon Colleges Corporation (GCC). Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Delta operates 16 accredited career colleges located in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The schools offer students courses in allied health, business, cosmetology, information technology, legal, and vocational trades through five well-established regional brands, Career Technical College, The Creative Circus, McCann School of Business & Technology, Miami-Jacobs Career College and Miller-Motte Technical College. McCann, Miami-Jacobs and Miller-Motte have each been providing students with high quality education for over ninety years.

Gryphon Colleges Corporation was formed at the end of 2004 by Gryphon Investors through the acquisition of National Career Education (NCE), a four campus school company located in Arizona and California. . . .

Calling Out Harvard's Graduate School of Education

Below is an open letter from three classroom teachers to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which has justly earned its current reputation as institutionally allied with the anti-democratic, corporate deformation of public schools and the continued undermining of public education in general. (ht to Monty Neill)

AN OPEN LETTER
TO THE ADMINISTRATION & FACULTY
OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
- JANUARY 4, 2010 -
THREE CLASSROOM TEACHERS ASK YOU TO SPEAK OUT

The Harvard Graduate School of Education pursues the goal of training leaders in the field, and will soon offer a new degree in educational leadership. The school's website mission statement reads as follows:

Mission
To prepare leaders in education and to generate knowledge to improve student opportunity, achievement, and success.

Overview
Education touches every aspect of human activity. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), we believe studying and improving the enterprise of education are central to the health and future of society.

Since its founding in 1920, the Ed School has been training leaders to transform education in the United States and around the globe. Today, our faculty, students, and alumni are studying and solving the most critical challenges facing education: student assessment, the achievement gap, urban education, and teacher shortages, to name just a few. Our work is shaping how people teach, learn, and lead in schools and colleges as well as in after-school programs, high-tech companies, and international organizations. The HGSE community is pushing the frontiers of education, and the effects of our entrepreneurship are improving the world.

As veteran public school teachers, we are disappointed that the HGSE has not shown the leadership it professes by speaking out against the unprecedented attack on public education. To be sure, there have been courageous voices on your faculty who have defended public schools and the endangered idea of educating the whole child. We know that a thoughtful faculty does not think with one mind, and that there will always be differences about what constitutes the most effective pedagogies or curricula. But we have not heard the HGSE as an institution speak out on issues fundamental to the educational well-being of children and their schools.

These issues include:

• The over-testing of students, beginning as early as 3rd grade, and the misuse of single, imperfect high- stakes standardized assessment instruments like MCAS;

• The expansion of charters through funding formulas that divert resources from those urban and rural public schools charged with educating our most challenged children;

• The stripping away of art, music, critical thinking, creativity, experiential learning, trips, and play periods-of joy itself-from schools so that they might become more effective test preparation centers;

• The use of state curriculum frameworks-and soon, possibly, national standards -to narrow and standardize our schools, an effort that only encourages increasing numbers of affluent middle class parents to seek out for their children the same private schools that so many "reformers" have already chosen for theirs;

• The cynical insistence that all schools be equal in a society whose social and economic policies make us increasingly unequal;

• Merit pay proposals that deny and undermine the essentially collaborative nature of teaching;

• And finally, the sustained media vilification of hard-working, dedicated public school teachers.

These depressing developments have intensified over the past fifteen years. They violate the first principles of humane and progressive education, as we understand them.

We are proud to have served as teachers in the commonwealth where public education began a century before the country itself was founded and where Horace Mann reinvented it a century and a half ago. We have many wonderful public schools in Massachusetts that can serve as models for all schools. No child in our state deserves any less. Certainly all deserve more than a parched vision of standardization and incessant testing. A global economy demands more than multiple-choice thinking. Most importantly, human beings require more.

HGSE administration and faculty, we need you to speak out in defense of our public system of education and against abuses that have been allowed to pass silently as reforms. We need you to remind our leaders, administrators, parents and students-all of us-what it means to be educated.

As young teachers, we were inspired by the words of John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Joseph Featherstone, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Friere. Later, we would read the works of Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Ted Sizer, and Jonathan Kozol. These were powerful voices to encounter. Now we need to hear your voice.

The time for Veritas is now.

Thank you.

Larry Aaronson, Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, 37 years (retired)
Teacher of the Year (Class of 2007)
Recipient, Key to the City of Cambridge for "Outstanding Service" (Mayor)
Recipient, Special Cambridge City Council Citation
Mentor, Student teachers from the HGSE, 1985-2005

Ann O'Halloran, Boston & Newton Public Schools, 30 years (retired)
Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2007 (DOE)
Finalist, National History Teacher of Year, 2007
Honorable Mention, Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2006 (DOE)
Friend of Education, 2009 (Newton Teachers Association)


Bill Schechter, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, 35 years (retired)
METCO Recognition Awards, 2001-2005 (L-S METCO Program
"Outstanding Educator" Award, 2002 (Cornell University)
Faculty Recognition Award (Class of 1992)
Finalist, Lucretia Mott Award, 1986 (DOE)
Horace Mann Grant, 1984 (DOE)

larindge@aol.com

ohalloran.ann@verizon.net

schech@rcn.com