This is a post about two individuals whose actions contribute to the privatization of American public education: billionaire Eli Broad and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten.
Weingarten is working in tandem with corporate-driven “reform.” I wish it were not so. However, the evidence of Weingarten’s pro-privatization bent is profound.
This post focuses chiefly on Weingarten and Broad.
It is a long one.
UFT/AFT and the Simulated “Company Union”
What led to this post was my recent reading about billionaire Eli Broad, who spends his foundation’s money in order to turn public education into a continuous churn of profit-driven chaos.
In writing A Chronicle of Echoes, I learned that Weingarten is a favorite of Broad. It was then-New York City Chancellor Joel Klein (also a privatizer) who was writing as much to NYC charter vixen Eva Moskowitz. (See page 32 of Echoes.) Weingarten was president…
CCSS is now holding teachers responsible for how children arrive in school in kindergarten and 1st grade. If some children can’t read when they arrive in school for the first time, they still have to take the CCSS tests that will be used to rank and yank (fire) teachers and close public schools that will be turned over to for profit, corporate charter schools along with the taxes that once supported the public schools that have been closed. This had already happened in New Orleans, and is happening in Chicago and other cities across America.
This idiocy is obvious even to 6-year olds. One said to a teacher recently: “Teacher, why do they think I can answer those questions when I can’t read yet and they won’t let the computer read it to me?”
Chris in Florida describes here his attempt to introduce “close reading” as required by the Common Core. No one who wrote the Common Core ever taught elementary school. Yet they have imposed the Néw Criticism on young children who don’t yet know how to read.
Chris writes:
“Yep. I’m forced to test my 1st graders on tests where they are expected to do a close reading of a passage and answer complex, text-evidenced questions all because of David Coleman and CCSS.
“It is ridiculous. In that wonderful 1st grade way of creating one’s own reality many of my children WHO CAN’T READ YET simply select random answers, smile, and move on to something far more developmentally appropriate and fun.
“This idiocy is obvious even to 6-year olds. One said to me yesterday: “Teacher, why do they think I can answer those questions when I can’t read yet and they won’t…
“Fewer teachers are enthusiastic about Common Core implementation and fewer think the new standards will help their students, according to a survey sponsored by education publisher Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“The percentage of teachers who are enthusiastic about Common Core – a set of academic guidelines in math and English that more than 40 states have adopted – is down from 73 percent last year to 68 this year, according to a poll of 1,600 teachers across the country. And while more teachers continue to believe that the standards will help not hurt their students – 48 percent compared to 17 percent – the percentage of teachers in the survey who think the…
The new organization called Democrats for Public Education commissioned a poll, and it brought good news, reported here by Politico.com:
NEW POLL DATA BUOYS PUBLIC ED ADVOCATES: With a month to go before midterms, the activists at Democrats for Public Education are urging candidates to speak up – loudly – about their support for neighborhood schools. DPE gave Morning Education a sneak peek at new poll data that shows voters strongly back liberal priorities such as increasing funding for public schools, lowering class sizes and expanding programs to help low-income children overcome the disadvantages of poverty. Voters also express strong support and admiration for public school teachers – who have been popping up in candidates’ campaign ads for months, precisely because they’re seen as such trusted emissaries. Read more: http://bit.ly/ZvgcxK
– The national poll of 1,200 active voters, conducted by Democratic polling firm Harstad Strategic Research, found that 79…
Joseph Ricciotti, a former professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, wrote a powerful article in which he describes the sinking morale of teachers, weighed down by the dehumanizing and demoralizing policies of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top.
He writes:
“The war on teachers began with the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) program when George W. Bush was president and has continued with “Race to the Top” (RTTT) with President Obama and his non-educator, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Basically both programs are what is commonly referred to by public school educators as “test and punish” testing programs that are used primarily for closing schools, ranking students, demonizing teachers and for assessing teacher effectiveness. These programs have now morphed into the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in which the federal government has, in essence, usurped local control of education in the United…
Do we realize that saving our children requires that we ALL “must do right by the children”?
I know Peggy Robertson, a mom and a Colorado teacher who helped found United Opt Out.
I have more respect for her as a human being and as a teacher than I have for any of the bought-and-paid-for politicians who shill for the profit making CCSS (Yes, it is private. Yes, it was created to make profits.) and all of the profit making multinational fund managers and “philanthropic” foundation investors who are part of the coup against sane levels of valid testing.
Bill Gates once famously and publicly stated that it would take another ten years to see if the present “experiment” will work. Since his own children are not being experimented on, he avoids mentioning the direct and indirect profit taking he makes via…
On October 2, 2014, I will be speaking in Indiana to an audience chiefly comprised of university students who have a passing understanding of the intentions of moneyed interests to usurp control of public education.
With a mind toward preparing for my upcoming engagement, I happened to read three pertinent (and powerful) articles: This one on September 26, 2014, in Chalkbeat on Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s plan to use workforce data to determine what schools teach in order to subjugate education to the requirements of the job market, excerpted below:
…Indiana is quietly taking steps to position itself for a future where data drives much of what is learned in school. Gov. Mike Pence has made connecting education and workforce development a centerpiece of his administration’s agenda.…
This year, a bill he wrote created a new state office, under Pence’s direction, with a director who has been nicknamed the…
Common Core Education without Representation lists David Coleman as #9 on the top-ten list for scariest people in—fake—education reform. Coleman is the lead “architect” for the English Language Arts (ELA) portion of the Common Core, and he is not an educator, but he is a businessman.
He’s also responsible for enlisting Bill Gates—#5 on the list—to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting the Common Core agenda that will destroy democratic public education in the United States, and turn kids into traumatized robots attending for-profit, corporate Charters that more than one Stanford study has revealed are mostly worse or the same as the average public schools.
In fact, Truth Out.org reveals that the Gates Foundation funds the College Board, which is now run by David Coleman, who recruited Bill Gates to financially fund and promote the Common Core agenda in 2008, and then in 2012, Coleman becomes president of the College Board. Is this a coincidence?
The College Board has played an active role in the development of the Common Core State Standards, because the College Board is heavily into standardized testing: SAT®, the PSAT/NMSQT®, the Advanced Placement Program®(AP®), SpringBoard® and ACCUPLACER®.
What does David Coleman get out of this arrangement? Coleman earns a base pay of $550,000, with total annual compensation of nearly $750,000 to run the so-called, non-profit College Board.
Since at least the late 1970s, the College Board has been subject to criticism from students, educators, and consumer rights activists. College Board owns the SAT and many students must take SAT exams for admission to competitive colleges. For instance, in 2006, College Board took in $582.9 million in revenue from exam fees, but spent only $527.8 million, leaving a $55.1 million surplus. In 2013, fees from programs and services brought in $843.255 million, and in 2013, assets in cash and cash equivalents was $147.624 million—up $21.58 million from 2012.
It’s obvious from these numbers, that being a non-profit is profitable for the College Board and Coleman is paid well to create a national climate that depends on standardized tests.
With all of this clout—in 2013, Time Magazine listed Coleman as one of the 100 most influential people in the world—here’s what makes David Coleman dangerous. He said, “As you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
What Coleman said was probably true about David Coleman, who I think is a narcissist, sociopath and probably a psychopath.
But, in fact, David Coleman is wrong. Millions of Americans do care about what someone else thinks and feels, and here’s the proof. In 2013, there were 10,842 new biographies/memoirs published in the United States, and 29-percent of nonfiction sales were biographies/memoirs.
How many books does that translate into?
In 2013, 252.2-million nonfiction books were sold in the United States, and 29-percent of those sales translated to more than 73-million biographies and/or memoirs that were about what people feel and think.
In addition, Mental Health America reports, “Writing down your thoughts can be a great way to work through issues. Researchers have found that writing about painful events can reduce stress and improve health.”
With the importance of writing as a way to manage traumas like PTSD, one would think it would be important to have children write essays about what they feel and think. If you think children are not traumatized, think again.
The American Psychological Association says, “A significant number of children in American society are exposed to traumatic life events. A traumatic event is one that threatens injury, death, or the physical integrity of self or others and also causes horror, terror, or helplessness at the time it occurs. Traumatic events include sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence, community and school violence, medical trauma, motor vehicle accidents, acts of terrorism, war experiences, natural and human-made disasters, suicides, and other traumatic losses. In community samples, more than two thirds of children report experiencing a traumatic event by age 16.” Produced by: 2008 Presidential Task Force on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Trauma in Children and Adolescents
In conclusion, if David Coleman wins the Common Core War he helped launch as one of its lead “architects”, he will turn most of America’s children into obedient, greedy, power hungry, traumatized narcissists and sociopaths/psychopaths just like David Coleman.
Dana Goldstein, the author of “The Teacher Wars” says, “Alan Lawrence, an education blogger and former English teacher who was California’s 2007 “teacher of the year,” complained that Coleman “has zero K-12 teaching experience. Should we really be learning how to cook from a person who’s never been in the kitchen?”
Indeed, Coleman has never been a public school teacher. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge, and his mother is the president of tony Bennington College. So perhaps, critics say, Coleman doesn’t fully understand the power of “stories” to reach children—especially poor children—who would otherwise find reading and writing a chore. …
Goldstein says, “I’m sympathetic to teachers who are turned off by Coleman’s rhetoric. There’s something discomfiting about Coleman—a white guy with advanced degrees, who earns a living spreading his opinions—sending the message that children’s personal stories and feelings don’t matter, so they shouldn’t write them down.”
There’s a term for people who think and feel. It’s called empathy—something I’m convinced David Coleman doesn’t have along with a lack of common sense.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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An investigative reporter reveals the agenda of the corporate, fake-education reformers—-to disrupt public education by selling a propaganda narrative of failure, and the end goal is the reaping of billions in profits for entrepreneurs and investors—-they don’t care about the children.
This is the most important article you will read this week, this month, maybe this year. Lee Fang, a brilliant investigative reporter at the Nation Institute, documents the rise and growth of the new for-profit education industry. They seek out ways to make money by selling products to the schools, developing new technologies for the Common Core, writing lucrative leasing deals for charter school properties, mining students’ personal data and selling it, and investing in lucrative charter schools.
Their basic strategy: disrupt public education by selling a propaganda narrative of failure, which then generates consumer demand for new, privately managed forms of schooling (charters and vouchers), for new products (a laptop for every child), and for new standards (the Common Core) that require the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for new technology, consultants, and other new teaching products. The Common Core has the subsidiary effect of reducing…
Elected thieves in North Carolina—bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires—are quietly at work to destroy public education in that state—giving favored treatment to charters and adopting a voucher program that diverts funds from public schools and puts them in the hands of religious and other private schools immune from public accountability…
Professor Helen Ladd of Duke University, internationally renowned economist of education, and her husband Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, recently wrote about a sneaky move by the North Carolina legislature to undermine the funding of children in public schools. Not content to fund charters and vouchers, the legislature is directly attacking the basic funding formula for the state public system. The overwhelming majority of children in the state attend public schools. Why do their parents elect these people who short-change public education?
Ladd and Fiske write:
“In a last-minute change that was taken with no hearings and no prior publicity, the Republican-controlled General Assembly has undermined the fundamental building block of school finance in North Carolina.
“Ever since the state took over responsibility from the local districts for funding public schools during the Great Depression, state funding in North Carolina has been based on the…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 