Tag Archives: Campbell Brown

January 4, 2015 · 9:52 pm

A New Year’s Resolution for Ed “Reformers” — Remember Our Future Teachers Are In The Schools You Are “Reforming”

About five years back, I got my first impression that our older child might potentially decide to become a teacher. It was during what I thought was going to be a game of “Hungry Hungry Hippos” which took quite an unexpected turn when our child took all of the marbles, placed them neatly in the center of the game, and told the hippos that they all had to “wait for snack time.” Over time and with more time in school, other hints have cropped up such as an almost immediate affinity for any teacher at the head of the classroom, a willingness to respect norms of classroom behavior, an almost obsessive love of certain stories and storytelling, a fascination with explaining acquired knowledge to others, giddy excitement at the opportunity to do a presentation for students in a lower grade, and a certain flair for the theatrical. While this same child is also a bit of a homework resister and not a fan of rote tasks, I can see aspects of a “born teacher” growing up (even though these same traits could apply to other fields).

This lines up well with what we know about how individual students make the decision to become teachers. It is not a process that begins simply with a sudden decision to teach. Rather, it unfolds over time during the some 13,000 hours that students spend in contact with classroom teachers from Kindergarten to 12th grade, a period that Dan Lortie called the “apprenticeship of observation” in his 1975 work, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Those who decide to teach have prolonged and substantial experiences with people practicing their chosen profession over the course of 13 years, and many potential teachers wish to teach because they, themselves, enjoyed being taught. They found the study of subjects and school itself to be enjoyable. While many of the ideas about what teaching actually is that are formed during this observational period are simplistic and need to be challenged both in teacher preparation and throughout the career, it remains true that school is the most active recruiter of future teachers. If my older child does decide to become a teacher, like most others who choose the field, it will be out of a desire to share with future generations of students a love of learning and to make their school experiences enjoyable, joyous, and inspirational as well.

That is, if Governor Andrew Cuomo and Board of Regents Chancellor Dr. Merryl Tisch manage to not ruin New York’s schools first.

That statement is not made even a little bit tongue in cheek because both Governor Cuomo and Dr. Tisch have made it abundantly clear in the past month that their dissatisfaction with New York teacher evaluations will not go unanswered and their likely “solution” will unleash a torrent of perverse incentives upon our schools. Andrew Cuomo signaled his intentions to make teacher evaluations more “rigorous” just before the election with newspaper interviews and public statements. The process was set in motion last month with a letter from Jim Malatras, director of state operations, to Dr. Tisch and outgoing New York State Education Department Commissioner Dr. John King. The letter opens with the now familiar refrain that the new Common Core aligned state examinations are showing far too few of graduating seniors being “college ready” (even though the proficiency levels, which were set with cut scores pinned to the SAT scores of successful college freshmen, slightly exceed the percentage of New Yorkers over 25 with a bachelor’s degree), and then laments about the unacceptability of the situation. Teacher and blogger Peter Greene nearly dissects the letter in this post, and among its many facets is a clear desire to make it far easier to get rid of teachers and to increase the number of teachers found ineffective and thus able to be removed from the classroom.

On December 29th, Governor Cuomo vetoed a bill his office had originally drafted that would have given teachers a two year grace period from the new exams being used to remove them from the classroom, a move that starkly reversed his pre-election promises to give the new systems more time to be understood. Questioned on his change of course, the governor raised the irrelevant specter of child abusers remaining in the classroom, “I understand the union’s issue; they don’t want anyone fired,” Cuomo said. “But we have teachers that have been found guilty of sexually abusing students who we can’t get out of the classroom.” He did not explain himself with any specific cases of teachers actually found guilty of sexual abuse still teaching, nor did he explain how tying more of teachers’ evaluations to student test scores will get abusers out of schools faster, but he did join both Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown in trying to scare people into endorsing radical changes to teachers’ workplace protections.

Dr. Tisch responded to Mr. Malatras’ letter with her own set of priorities to tie far more of teachers’ evaluations directly to student progress in the state examinations and possibly eliminating local measures of teacher effectiveness altogether. 2013 New York Principal of the Year Carol Burris explains in this article what Dr. Tisch and Governor Cuomo appear to be proposing:

The system she wants to change is one that she created several years ago with former education commissioner John King, which was put into law by the New York Legislature and that was rushed into place by Gov. Andrew Cuomo who denied districts state aid if they did not adopt it. It became mandatory for teachers and principals to be evaluated in part by student standardized test scores.

The short version of what she wants to do now is this—double down on test scores and strip away the power of local school boards to negotiate the majority of the evaluation plan. Tisch would get rid of the locally selected measures of achievement, which now comprise 20 percent of the evaluation, and double the state test score portion, to 40 percent. She also recommends that the score ranges for the observation process be taken out of the hands of local districts, and be determined by Albany instead.

Principal Burris further notes that Dr. Tisch appears intent on ensuring that the predicted growth of students on standardized tests be the supreme measure of teacher effectiveness, suggesting that teachers found ineffective by those measures be found ineffective overall and removed from the classroom after two such ratings. Such a system would provide no room for a principal to protect a teacher known locally as both effective and valued by the community, as Principal Burris relates in the story of a teacher from Great Neck who would fall victim to Dr. Tisch and Governor Cuomo. Given the growing understanding that value added measures (VAMs) of teacher effectiveness rely upon tests not designed to detect teacher input, are highly unstable, and cannot account for teacher impact on variability among student scores, it is quite apt that Dr. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley of Arizona State University and a leading researcher on value-added measures, described the proposal as going from “bad to idiotic.”

This aggressive move to double the value added portion of teacher evaluations and to override local measures in favor of standardized tests is bad for teachers, and it is potentially even worse for students. By doubling the state examination’s role, eliminating locally chosen measures, and potentially overriding any consideration other than the state examination, Dr. Tisch and Governor Cuomo are proposing a system where teachers would face strong incentives to push test preparation into a central role in the curriculum. Michelle Rhee’s tenure as Chancellor Schools in Washington, D.C. demonstrated the not excusable but entirely predictable results of tying people’s job security to capriciously unstable measures of their effectiveness. Less drastic, but potentially more widely damaging for more students, is the evidence that raising the stakes on standardized tests to these extremes will result in an even narrower curriculum than under the original No Child Left Behind provisions which have already reduced time spent on non-tested content and increased teacher centered instruction. In New York State this will be compounded by the constant gaming of state aid from the Cuomo administration that has coincided with increased demands on districts, especially struggling districts, to perform at higher levels.

It takes no powers of prognostication to see where New York schools are headed if the Governor and Chancellor get their way.

John I. Goodlad, a giant in education research in the second half of the 20th century, passed away at the age of 94 on November 29th of last year. In his 1984 book, A Place Called School, he asked, “Boredom is a disease of epidemic proportions. … Why are our schools not places of joy?” The Cuomo/Tisch goals for teacher evaluation are almost guaranteed to drive a huge amount of joy right out of our schools alongside art, music, civics, and health. Teachers and students will have less room to explore, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and shared purposes for education outside of test performance will be even further diminished.

And this is where education “reformers” need to think especially carefully because it is not just the schools of today that they are impacting. Children in Kindergarten today were born in 2009. Several 100 thousand of them will likely be first year teachers by the year 2031-2032, and the kinds of teachers they will become will be greatly influenced by what school is like for them between now and their graduation from high school as the class of 2027. Will their schools be places of extreme test preparation, didactic instruction, and a curriculum that is narrowed by the parameters of tests? Will these future teachers learn that school is supposed to be emulate even a fraction of the stress and narrowness of the Chinese cram school portrayed in this recent New York Times Magazine? Will there be joy? And if not, what kinds of future teachers will emerge from those schools to teach the generations behind them?

So, education “reformers” — a New Year’s Resolution for you just as America’s teachers are returning for the second half of the year: The next generation of teachers are currently in the schools that you are reforming. Resolve not to wipe out the joy.

2 Comments

Filed under schools, Stories, teacher learning, teaching, Testing

Tagged as Andrew Cuomo, Campbell Brown, classrooms, learning, learning to teach, Merryl Tisch, New York Times, shenanigans

October 29, 2014 · 3:09 pm

Teachers: They’re Not Piñatas

Another week, another plateful of teacher bashing in the popular press.

First, Time Magazine introduced its November 3rd cover story on the campaign to eliminate teacher tenure via litigation with a provocative cover picturing a judge’s gavel poised to smash an apple and a sub-headline repeating the inaccurate mantra that it is “nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher.” Teachers across the country were outraged, and strongly written responses to the cover came from Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers and from Lily Eskelsen Garcia, President of the National Education Association. The AFT is gathering signatures for a petition demanding that Time magazine apologize for the cover, but no sooner than responses to the Time cover began than New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his education agenda in a second term in Albany would be to break the “public monopoly” of schooling in the Empire State by even more test based assessments of teacher performance and even greater charter school favoritism from his office. As the dust settles from that shot across the bow of New York’s 600,000 unionized teachers, Frank Bruni of the New York Times (and personal friend of anti-tenure activist Campbell Brown) dove back into the issue of teacher quality, a topic he has opined on previously with an extraordinarily one-sided perspective. Today, he gave entirely uncritical space to former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein who is hawking his own book claiming that “a great teacher can rescue a child from a life of struggle” and saying that the teacher workforce will improve if we recruit teachers with higher test scores, limit or remove workplace protections, and offer pay for performance, which in Klein’s world is always measured in standardized test scores. Absent in the “discussion”? Any mention of the persistence of poverty in our most struggling school systems, and any plan for society taking full responsibility for helping to alleviate it — instead, it all rests on teachers and schools.

Today’s education reformers seem to think that our nation’s teachers are like piñatas. If you just keep hitting them long enough and hard enough, something wonderful and sweet and that will delight children will come pouring out.

Mr. Bruni thinks teachers are being closed-minded towards the likes of Mr. Klein and Ms. Brown. He dismissively portrays their reaction to the Time Magazine cover as evidence of teachers reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to any criticism, and he actually claims that people like Klein want to partner with teachers — even while advocating taking away their workplace protections. That teachers are finally speaking up loudly should not be taken by Mr. Bruni as some sudden intransigence on the part of a profession that wants to keep cushy perks, but rather it should be seen as the final straw exasperation of a profession that has been under constant attack since the early 1980s, probably longer.

Teaching has always had the potential to be contentious which is one of the reasons why tenure protections matter. Teachers are responsible for, as author, scholar, and activist Lisa Delpit puts it, “other people’s children,” a task that comes with enormous professional and moral obligations. Practicing that responsibility potentially puts teachers at odds with parental, administrative, and community priorities, and it can require that teachers take unpopular stances on behalf of their students. However, the current wave of reforms had their genesis with the 1983 Reagan administration report, “A Nation at Risk” which declared our current school system so unsuited for the task of educating our children that it would be considered an “act of war” for a foreign power to have imposed it upon us. The constant refrain of school failure has hardly relented ever since, and it has gone into overdrive in its current iteration of test based accountability since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act and its lunatic cousin Race to the Top. Since 2001, the standards and testing environment have merged to become test-based accountability for teachers, and since the Obama administration announced Race to the Top, states have been heavily incentivized to adopted teacher evaluations based upon standardized testing.

While pressure on teachers has increased, funding and resources have decreased. State contributions to K-12 education account for roughly 44% of all spending, but most states still fund schools below the levels that they did before the Great Recession. Because of the housing crisis which prompted the recession, local revenue in the form of property taxes have also declined, putting a further pinch on school budgets. In New York State, for example, Governor Cuomo and the Assembly have used accounting tricks like the Gap Elimination Adjustment to trim school aid by BILLIONS of dollars while enacting property tax caps that prevent localities from making up any shortfalls. Meanwhile, teacher pay has lost substantial ground with comparable workers with the wage gap growing by 13.4% between 1979 and 2006 and most of that loss happening between 1996 and 2006 as the age of test-based accountability started cranking up.

And now, after decades of declaring our schools to be failure factories, after a decade and half of warped accountability measures, and after six years of being told to do far more with far less even though their real world wages have declined, along come some technology billionaires who think the thing that is really wrong with school is the fact that tenured teachers have due process rights before they can be fired? They recruit telegenic personalities to lead litigation against teachers’ workplace protections (likely because their previous media hero is tainted by scandals and failure) and to do the interview rounds making claims that do not stand up to fact checking and research.

Meanwhile, serial misleaders like Joel Klein, whose claims about his record as NYC Schools Chancellor fail to stand up to real scrutiny, are out there claiming that all we need are great teachers and children’s lives can be turned around. We don’t have to worry that we’ve cut nutrition programs for the neediest even though nutrition in the first three years of life can have profound effects for a person’s entire life. We don’t have to worry that our economy is losing large portions of its lower middle class to wage insecurity, effectively sawing rungs off of the ladder of opportunity. We don’t have to worry about the long known impacts of poverty on children or on how it is deeply concentrated in specific communities whose schools serve high poverty populations.

We don’t have to do any of that, say the Kleins, the Rhees, the Browns, and the Brunis of the world. We just have to keep whacking away at teachers until the great teaching comes spilling out and children can jump up the ladder towards economic security without a single billionaire being asked to pay a cent more in taxes.

Frank Bruni pays about 27 words with of lip service towards supporting teachers and paying them more, but then immediately follows it with saying teachers should see the likes of Joel Klein as someone who wants to “team up” with them. After so many years of being continuously blamed for failings our society refuses to discuss and absolutely refuses to address, the only thing astonishing about recently voiced teacher frustration is that it has taken so long to hear it.

Teachers are not piñatas.

3 Comments

Filed under Funding, Media, politics, schools

Tagged as Andrew Cuomo, Campbell Brown, media, Michelle Rhee, New York Times, opportunity, Poverty, shenanigans, tenure

October 15, 2014 · 10:56 am

So, Governor Cuomo, about those proficiency levels….

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo caused a stir among education observers recently by commenting on the need for future changes to the New York state teacher evaluation system. The Governor is quoted in The Buffalo News:

Cuomo said he sees value in the teacher rankings, but said critics who question how 94 percent of the state’s teachers can be “highly effective” or “effective” have a valid point.

“I’m excited that we started,” Cuomo said of the teacher evaluation system put into effect during the 2012-13 school year. “And I think once we start to study it and learn it and refine it – because there’s no doubt it needs refinement, not everybody can get an ‘A,’ it can’t be – I think it’s going to be a very valuable tool.”

But he conceded the system might need more scrutiny.

Critics of the teacher evaluations have pointed out the wide gap between the 94 percent of teachers who were rated “effective” or “highly effective” and the number of students failing to do well on state tests and in other measures of student success.

State law required school districts to negotiate with teacher and principal unions to create evaluation systems within certain state requirements, including using student performance on state tests as one measure of how well a teacher is performing.

“The way we’ve done it the first few years is they’re negotiated locally. There is no statewide negotiation,” Cuomo said during a meeting with editors and reporters at The Buffalo News. “Each district negotiates it’s own criteria within certain mandates. So the suggestion was the way they negotiated it may be too loose because everyone’s doing well, and I think that’s a valid question.”

While some education bloggers speculate that this means Governor Cuomo will join an aggressive campaign to push out more experienced teachers in his second term, I am more interested in the mentality that the Governor is demonstrating here. It is one that assumes that if 30% of New York students are being rated as “proficient” and “highly proficient” on the new, Common Core aligned, tests, then it is impossible that 94% of New York teachers are rated as “effective” and “highly effective” even though the new evaluation system makes generous use of value added measures of teacher performance utilizing test scores. It is a mentality that is shared by Campbell Brown and others seeking to eliminate teachers’ due process rights via ending teacher tenure. In fact, this is almost precisely what Ms. Brown said when she appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show earlier this year. Mercedes Schneider, a teacher, author, and blogger from Louisiana provided this transcript:

CB: So, if you look at, if you look at the, um, outcomes, student outcomes in New York, okay? So, 91 percent of teachers are around the state of New York are rated either “effective” or “highly effective,” and yet [SC: Sounds good.] 31 percent, [SC: Yep.] 31 percent of our kids are reading, writing, and doing math at grade level. How does that compute? I mean, how can you argue the status quo is okay with numbers like that??

This same viewpoint was central to Eva Moskowitz’s recent advertising blitz to expand charter schools in New York City for the alleged benefit of an estimated 143,000 students she claims are trapped in “failing schools.” The key information supporting that claim? A “report” from the charter school advocacy group “Families for Excellent Schools” that claims at a quarter of New York City schools only 10% of students “pass” the state exams. The Daily News reported this as students failing to read and do math at “grade level” like Ms. Brown did, and others repeatedly say that the students do not “pass” their exams.

The examinations, however, say no such thing.

It is important to recall that the examinations are aligned with the Common Core State Standards which invoke the language of “College and Career Readiness.” In fact, New York’s Common Core testing consortium is PARCC, which stands for “Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.” New York has been administering exams aligned with the new standards for two years now, and students are assessed as “highly proficient,” “proficient,” “partially proficient” and “not proficient” on a 1-4 point scale. The result of the examinations has not been exceptional according to many observers, including the Governor. In the 2012-13 school year, the first year of the new examinations, student proficiency levels dropped from 55% overall for English Language Arts to 31% and remained there in the 2013-2014 school year. In mathematics, a proficiency level of 65% in 2011-2012 dropped to 31% in 2012-2013 and rose slightly last year to 36%. The numbers are even lower for students who belong to ethnic minorities or who are from economically disadvantaged families. African American students plunged from a 37% proficiency level in English to 16% in the first year of examinations, and Hispanic students fell from 40% to 18% with students from poor families tracking closely to these numbers.

However, these percentages are absent context if we do not understand how “proficient” is determined, and that determination was plainly designed to get percentages like this. Carol Burris, an award-winning principal from South Side High School, makes it very clear that Commissioner John King set the cut scores at different levels of proficiency based on data designed to reflect SAT scores that are loosely correlated with “successful” completion of freshman level college English and mathematics courses. Although the use of the SAT is dubious and the definitions of “success” in college level courses arbitrary, it was no surprise that the proficiency levels of the new exams closely tracked the target SAT levels. As Principal Burris notes:

After coming up with three scores — 540 in math, 560 in reading and 530 in writing– the College Board determined the percentage of New York students who achieved those SAT scores. Those percentages were used to “inform” the cut score setting committee. As the committee went through questions, according to member Dr. Baldassarre-Hopkins, the SED helpers said, “If you put your bookmark on page X for level 3 [passing], it would be aligned with these data [referring to the college readiness data],” thus nudging the cut score where they wanted it to be.

When the cut scores were set, the overall proficiency rate was 31 percent–close to the commissioner’s prediction. The proportion of test takers who score 1630 on the SAT is 32 percent. Coincidence? Bet your sleeveless pineapple it’s not. Heck, the way I see it, the kids did not even need to show up for the test.

It is possible, I suppose, to argue that since the Common Core State Standards and the accompanying examinations ARE supposed to be tied to “college and career readiness” that there is nothing conceptually wrong with the examinations themselves producing much lower proficiency levels than previous exams. Certainly, it is worth a vigorous discussion in public about what the exams are supposed to reflect and whether or not we want the criteria to be aimed at the population of New York students likely to go on to post-secondary education. Just to make this more interesting: the percentage of New York state residents over the age of 25 in possession of a bachelor’s degree? 32.8%. So Commissioner King’s cut scores discovered roughly the population of the state likely to continue into higher education.

One thing should be very clear from this: Levels 3 and 4 in the Common Core aligned examinations do NOT, have not, and will not align with “grade level” performance at ANY level of the New York school system (unless you want to argue that most NY residents without a BA graduated high school BELOW grade level), and if you have been talking as if they do, you need to stop. Yesterday.

It is also possible to argue that our nation requires more college educated citizens in order to properly serve the needs of a 21st century economy. Certainly, Professor Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University believes so, and he believes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ estimate that only 27% of the jobs in the economy will require a BA by 2022 is “frighteningly low.” Professor Carnevale and his colleagues at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce believe that by 2020, the economy will require 35% of the workforce will require a BA or higher. This argument is predicated, in part, on the existence of a “college wage premium” that has grown in recent decades because employers are paying graduates with college degrees a higher wage than their non-college educated peers. While the college wage premium is real and has grown since the late 1970s, the conclusions from Georgetown are not universally accepted. To begin with, over 98% of job gains between 2007 and 2011 were made by those with advanced degrees beyond a bachelor’s. Additionally, large numbers of today’s graduates with a bachelor’s are being hired into jobs that traditionally do not require a full four years of college, and while Georgetown’s study found that demand for college educated workers outstripped supply, the college wage premium they cite as evidence has been stuck for ten years. Based on data from Pew Social trends, it is evident that much of the benefit of going to college is made up of the collapsing wages for non-college graduates rather than intense market competition for those with college degrees into jobs that require them:

Suffice to say, this is still an issue that is subject to appropriately vigorous debate, and it is unlikely we can look at the current number of college educated New Yorkers and say with certainty that it is sufficient or insufficient.

Another argument aims at a much harder nut to crack: the persistent imbalance in college attendance and completion by students who are ethnic minorities and who grow up in poverty. Even with the newly designed examinations, white and Asian students far outperformed other cohorts of students, demonstrating something else that we know: while the number of minority students in higher education has been rising from the mid-1970’s until today, white students still make up 61% of American college students. Hispanic students currently represent 14% of college students, and African American students make up 15%. While these numbers roughly approximate these groups’ percentages in the general population of Generation Y, they do not reflect how decreased opportunities for higher education concentrate in urban, predominantly minority, communities. While that is a conversation and debate we ought to be having, past experience with Governor Cuomo suggests that he would steer the conversation towards more charter schools, even though the charter school segment as a whole did no better than the rest of the education system on the new exams. The Governor certainly is not eager to discuss how his budgets have forced schools to work with dwindling resources, and he has continued to use what were originally designed as emergency budget measures to keep the state’s ledgers balanced without tax increases — on the backs of poor and rural schools. So while it would be worthwhile to discuss how to extend genuine educational opportunity to more and more students, especially those in districts afflicted with urban and rural poverty, there is really no indication at all that Governor Cuomo is interested in a full-throated debate on the topic.

Instead, he wants to revisit the state’s teacher evaluation system because he believes that with state examination results like we have seen in recent years, many more teachers must be incompetent than the current system detects.

In the classic film “Casablanca,” Captain Louis Renault is ordered by his German overseer to close Rick’s American Cafe on any grounds he can find. Captain Renault, played by the incomparable Claude Rains, closes the cafe on the grounds that he is “shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here” — immediately before he is handed his winnings for the evening. Governor Cuomo wants us to believe that we must get even tougher on teachers in New York because of state exam results that a) reflect what we already know about the likely college bound population of New York students and b) that are the direct result of his commissioner pegging proficiency levels to college performance.

I am not sure what his “winnings” are in this act of hypocrisy, but he doesn’t rise to Claude Rains’ level of charm in performance.

4 Comments

Filed under Common Core, politics, Social Justice

Tagged as Andrew Cuomo, Campbell Brown, Common Core, Economy, Millennials

August 31, 2014 · 8:59 am

NYCPU to Campbell Brown: Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal!

Mona Davids and the New York City Parents Union are disappointed in Campbell Brown. Ms. Davids, whose causes as a parent activist in New York have been various and have led her to join or oppose other education advocates and “reformers” depending on the issue at hand, followed the Vergara decision in California with plans to file her own lawsuit in New York aimed at laws she claims protect incompetent educators. While not as far reaching as the Vergara plaintiffs’ case, Ms. Davids aims to have injunctions issued against “last in, first out” and other dismissal rules.

Ms. Davids initially expected and received assistance from Campbell Brown’s “Partnership for Eduational Justice” that initiated its own, separate suit with a more Vergara-like profile than Ms. Davids’. According to interviews given to Eclectablog, Ms. Brown contacted Ms. David’s and NYCPU Vice-President Sam Pirozzolo wanting to discuss and coordinate efforts, but that meeting was cancelled. Concerned that PEJ would file a lawsuit first, NYCPU rushed to file in Staten Island on July 3, 2014. Davids and Pirozzolo claim they were subsequently contacted by Brown again who praised them and offered help which initially manifested with input from Brown’s attorney on how to amend the NYCPU suit to improve it. Meanwhile, Brown filed her own lawsuit in Albany in an emotionally orchestrated press conference. The NYCPU lawsuit soon got support from “Students Matter,” the California group funded by technology entrepreneur David Welch which launched the Vergara suit, and legal representation was offered by law firm Gibson Dunn. It certainly seemed as if the anti-tenure forces in New York were coordinating their efforts.

Given the similarities between Davids’ and Brown’s suits, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a motion to have the suits combined in Staten Island, and a hearing with all parties was agreed to for September 3rd.

Davids and Pirozzolo allege that what happened next is the fault of Brown and her allies threatening parties supporting the NYCPU suit. Officially, both Gibson Dunn and Students Matter have withdrawn their support and representation in the NYCPU lawsuit, and the New York Post reports “sources” saying Gibson Dunn had existing education clients not pleased with them representing Davids. That doesn’t explain why Students Matter withdrew, and according to their interview with Electablog, both Davids and Pirozzolo claim they were told by their Gibson Dunn attorney that Brown had directly stirred up the trouble with the firm’s existing clients. Brown, in keeping with her established practice of not disclosing very much about how Partnership for Educational Justice operates, had no comment for the NY Post story. What this means is that the New York City Parents Union is slated to go into the September 3rd hearing with no effective legal representation, and Brown, who has told the press that she expects both suits to be merged, will likely find her organization in effective control of the whole deal.

Davids and her organization have been firing off Tweets and speaking to anyone who will listen about how they believe Brown has sought to hijack the entire cause for herself:

Campbell Brown does not speak for #DAVIDSvNY We are INDEPENDENT, GRASSROOTS PUBLIC SCHOOL PARENTS who can speak & advocate for OUR children

— NYC Parents Union (@NYCParentsUnion) August 29, 2014

Campbell Brown's bullying exposed! & Seems charter lobby still angry WE successfully reformed Charter Schools Act! http://t.co/7Fufdrsc3N

— NYC Parents Union (@NYCParentsUnion) August 30, 2014

BREAKING: PARENTS being bullied by Campbell Brown. http://t.co/RzzvAhT3wL @hamletgarcia17 @CTparentsunion @GloriaJRomero @rweingarten

— NYC Parents Union (@NYCParentsUnion) August 30, 2014

It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what is going on here. It is entirely possible that Gibson Dunn, a 124 year-old firm with office in 18 cities across 4 continents, did not bother to check if Ms. Davids’ group had any negative experiences with their existing clients or had been involved in legal action with them. It is entirely possible that Gibson Dunn found Ms. Davids’ group too difficult to work with or had irreconcilable ideas about how to proceed. It is possible that Students Matter simply felt that Ms. Davids’ more modestly framed lawsuit was not aggressive enough to suit its own form of advocacy.

It is also entirely possible that Ms. Brown and her organization want full control of the agenda and have decided to sweep aside Ms. Davids by behind the scenes manipulation. It certainly would fit Ms. Brown’s profile of secrecy. She has steadfastly refused to discuss who is funding her organization, citing the ridiculous and anti-democratic notion that her funders deserve to have huge influence over the future of public education in this country without anyone knowing who they are. When appearing on The Colbert Report, she even said she didn’t want “the people who are outside today” to “silence” the debate, so her funders should remain anonymous. “The people” to which she was referring? The ones who could “silence” Brown’s millionaire and billionaire financiers? A handful of parents and teachers with home made signs:

So we probably cannot expect a clear explanation from Brown about how Gibson Dunn AND Students Matter yanked their support out from under Mona Davids, but we know one thing for certain: These developments put Brown in the driver’s seat.

As for Ms. Davids and Mr. Pirozzolo — it is probably unfair to suggest that they absolutely should have seen this coming, but I think it is fair to say they were quite naive in 1) trying to get in on the national drive to break teacher unions from their position as a local organization 2) trusting that Campbell Brown’s primary motivation is what is “best for children” while she deflects any attempt to get information on what interests are behind her efforts. I do not always agree with NYC Parents Union, and I think that their efforts would have been far better spent on what the research tells us about how to retain great teachers — increase support for principal leadership, teacher collaboration and improvements to the workplace environment.

However, from the position of a Campbell Brown or a David Welch, NYCPU is also small potatoes. Their executive board doesn’t even have a SINGLE hedge fund manager which is a requirement these days in education “reform” circles. If they are going to insist upon having an opinion and input instead of simply providing parents to make for good optics at press conferences where Ms. Brown can cry about how “honored” she is to be near them, then they are more trouble than they are worth. Campbell Brown has a mission to break up the workplace protections of the last large group of unionized middle class workers in the country, and this is her career now. She’s got secret billionaires to please. She’s got the efforts of former high level White House staffers to coordinate. She’s got more legal coups to coordinate with famous legal scholars like Lawrence Tribe. This is making her famous again, and if history is any judge about the career trajectories of education reformers, she is likely to get (more) rich doing so.

Did anyone REALLY think that New York City Parents Union was going to be an equal partner in this? Does anyone doubt whether this is about what is “best for children” instead of what is “best” for breaking the backs of unions and keeping Campbell Brown in the news?

The betrayal may have been sudden, but it was probably inevitable.

5 Comments

Filed under Activism, Funding, Media, politics, Unions

Tagged as Activism, Campbell Brown, Hedge Fund Money, shenanigans, Vergara Decision

August 28, 2014 · 11:22 am

Anti-Tenure – Union Busting FIRST, Students Second

One consequence of becoming active in social media and blogging is crossing paths with people that you would not normally encounter face to face. For example, among my normal Twitter feed comprised of classroom teachers, public school advocates, researchers and news sources, a certain gentleman was noticeably involved in several arguments. Shortly thereafter, he began following me on Twitter. His name is Dmitri Mehlhorn, and he is a former C.O.O. for Michelle Rhee’s Students First organization, and, suffice to say, he is a true believer in current education “reforms”. When Rhee announced that she was stepping down as the head of Students First, Mr. Mehlhorn penned this astonishing piece of apologia for The Daily Beast on her behalf, which despite saying she was “right about everything” cannot really name a measurable outcome of Ms. Rhee’s activism that has improved education. Mostly, he spends the article lamenting the attacks upon Ms. Rhee, even going so far as to paint her famous on camera firing of a school principal as her sending a “message” to teachers that she was on their side:

As I said, Mr. Mehlhorn is a true believer, and the arguments he was involved in on Twitter centered on former television anchor Campbell Brown’s efforts to sue teacher tenure out of existence in New York. As a devotee of Michelle Rhee, Mehlhorn is obviously in favor the current lawsuits, and as a former close associate of Rhee’s organization, he ought to be well-versed in the arguments against teacher tenure and be able to explain why it is better for the profession and for students to end due process protections for teachers and make them at will employees.

In fact, that is not a simple argument to make, especially since all research demonstrates that the urban schools Mr. Mehlhorn and Ms. Brown insist will be made better by eliminating tenure suffer far more from high teacher TURNOVER with some districts losing up to 50% of teachers within 5 years. However, Mr. Mehlhorn did not seem overly interested in making the argument, preferring to respond with broad accusations that “my side” did not “care” about doing anything while “children suffer”. That prompted my request for an actual argument about how ending tenure will make schools better able to retain good teachers instead of vague accusations and assertions of his bona fides in education reform. This is what he came up with:

@DmitriMehlhorn @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs I’ll be likely to be int. when you stop running in circles, answer questions and make arguments—
Daniel Katz (@Prof_Katz) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs 10 arguments. (1) Best countries in the world have become good by using rigor over time. Incl. Finland.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (2) In US, gr8 teachers tend to have amazing skills AND work longer hours. Their hourly wages below mkt—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (3) In US, low-effort & low-skill teachers make above-market hourly wages, b/c wages+bens OK, hours low—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (4) So, least-qualified get highest hourly premium v. market; most-qualified get biggest gap v. market.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (5) Note, this is not ed market — this is noting that schools recruit teachers in a labor market.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (6) With best people giving up the most money to be teachers, system will have a hard time w talent.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (7) Schools fortunately cannot rely on gender discrimination to constraint talent = need new pitch.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (8) Every gr8 school system recruits the very best folks out of college, gives them responsibility.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (9) Very hard to due that when tenure & related systems lock compensation, classroom roles in place.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

@Prof_Katz @MindyRosier @NYStateBATs (10) More broadly, can’t attract best college grads w/ system that dx recognize, reward differences.—
Dmitri Mehlhorn (@DmitriMehlhorn) August 20, 2014

I will confess that I had to read this several times before understanding that the gist of it was really Mr. Mehlhorn’s argument. I also tried looking at it out of order and contemplated standing on my head before accepting that the argument was basically this: Good teachers work more hours than bad teachers (conceded). So good teachers get paid less per hour than their bad teacher peers because for the same salary, they work more hours (conceded but in a nobody-calculates-teacher-pay-that-way-not-even-teachers kind of way). Ergo, the presence of bad teachers demotivates good teachers who either leave the profession or don’t go into it at all knowing their work is not valued at as high an hourly wage as their bad teacher peers.

Now keep in mind that Mr. Mehlhorn is not RANDOMLY opining on this subject. At Students First, teacher unions are not regarded highly. Consider this post where a “balanced” perspective on teacher unions as “change agents” or “opposition” is considered. The union as “change agent” comprised a handful of paragraphs from a DC public school teacher Eric Bethel (who has since been appointed as a principal in the district) about the union getting on board with “reform” – reforms that just happen to be those approved of by Michelle Rhee. The second piece goes on at some length and is written by Hoover Institute Fellow Terry Moe who co-wrote the Bible of school choice “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools” and his basic point is that strong teacher unions will always prevent schools from changing. His solution? Make unions far less powerful. This is a Students First presentation of “balance” on a key issue.

So Mr. Mehlhorn, prepped with Michelle Rhee’s culture of anti-unionism, ought to have a sophisticated argument as to why eliminating tenure will make schools better, not by merely removing the percentage of teachers who ought not be teaching at more rapid pace, but by addressing one of the most complicated problems actually facing schools: retaining teachers at our schools with the highest levels of poverty and disadvantage.

His best stab at it? A cost-benefit calculation on salary that I have never heard one teacher make in my entire 21 year long career in secondary and higher education.

The problem for Mr. Mehlhorn and for the argument he tried to represent is that this is a matter that ought to be quantifiable. There ought to be a way for him to say that there are “X” “bad teachers” in the classroom who are protected by tenure laws. Then he ought to be able to certify what percentage of X are effectively irremovable and tie that to their tenured status and no other reason such as ineffective school and district leadership. Then he should be able to demonstrate that the harm inflicted upon 3,000,000 – X teachers and their classrooms and students will not be GREATER than the harm reduced by making it easier to remove X teachers.

Of course, he cannot do that or, at the very least, has not been given arguments to make those points. While Mr. Mehlhorn proved very adept at dropping the names of researchers used by the plaintiffs in the Vergara lawsuit to claim that there is a specific monetary cost for students who have a “grossly ineffective teacher”, he was completely unable to or unwilling to address that the research is highly controversial, rests on exceptionally shaky assumptions, and is not widely accepted in its current form. Additionally, the premise for going after tenure protections of ALL teachers summarily dismisses any other fix for the the assumed problem. Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown and Dmitri Mehlhorn do not advocate enhancing the process by which teachers are moved from probationary status. They do not advocate for making principals more effective at their jobs (except for making it easier for them to fire teachers), and, in fact, advocate for making principals MORE adversarial to their faculty and undermining their ability to be instructional leaders. They do not advocate for reforms to the procedures by which a school district can demonstrate cause for removing a teacher who is no longer probationary (something that already happened in New York State). They advocate that every teacher become an at will employee. Teachers have taken to Twitter with the hashtag #WithoutTenure to explain what the consequences of that would be for their ability to robustly advocate for their students’ needs, and this piece by Peter Greene makes it clear what could happen in schools where teachers lose their current job protections.

Further, from what we know about why teachers leave positions, resentment of other teachers making more money per hour does not enter the equation. Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania notes that teacher turnover is a significant phenomenon which drives a large proportion of the annual demand for new teachers. While Dr. Ingersoll’s research notes that teachers at small, private schools actually turn over at rates that far exceed those elsewhere, he compared high poverty, urban teachers’ reasons for leaving with those of small, private schools and found that school management factors contributed highly to both populations’ reasons for leaving. Small, private school teachers cited low salary overwhelmingly as a factor along with dissatisfaction with school administration, a concern shared with teachers in urban, high poverty schools who also listed lack of administrative support, low student motivation, discipline problems and lack of decision making support as roughly equal reasons for leaving.

Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, affirms that the teaching environment has a large impact on teacher satisfaction, fully independent of the demographic contexts of the school and more closely related to the social conditions of working in the school. Their research further states that a positive school climate can impact student learning, again independent of the school’s demographics. Dr. Moore Johnson’s work also notes that once school environment factors are taken into account no student demographic factors remain as significant indicators of why teachers leave. Factors that contribute to teacher dissatisfaction with working conditions include principal leadership that is effective, fair, provides instructional leadership and practices inclusive decision making. Teachers also gauge the quality of their collegial relationships and issues regarding how student discipline is supported in these decisions.

Dr. Moore Johnson notes that the good news in this is that “unlike demographic characteristics of students, working conditions can be changed.” To be fair to Mr. Mehlhorn and his ilk, one COULD make an argument that eliminating tenure will help “change” working conditions by making it simpler to weed out bad teachers — but you would have to push really hard to make that your first priority or even on the top ten list. Improving principal leadership and building more structures for effective and productive collaboration among teachers should be near the top of such a list because 1) effective principals seek ways to meaningfully evaluate and support teachers and 2) a collaborative environment would more easily identify those teachers who do not want to improve and make a reasonable case of removal for cause under existing rules. It would also have the benefit of aiming to support and improve everyone at a school not merely to exact punitive costs upon individual teachers and administrators, and it would preserve the ability of teachers to advocate on behalf of their students in cases that require a more adversarial stance.

But the anti-tenure campaign does not push meaningfully for any reforms to school climates. In fact, they advocate making the climate worse by suggesting that all teachers must lose the “for cause” protections of tenure in order to weed out the minority of teachers deemed ineffective. There is nothing in the current lawsuits that will improve what it is like to work in schools that suffer high rates of teacher attrition, and, thus, nothing in those suits that will help retain effective teachers for students in urban poverty. Campbell Brown makes only token and meaningless statements about “raising up” the teaching profession, and she certainly is not suing any state legislatures for not instituting reforms that strengthen principal leadership or teachers’ collegiality.

At the end of the discussion, therefore, the effort to sue away tenure is not about making schools better directly through “removing ineffective teachers.” It is about greatly weakening teacher unions, as argued by Terry Moe in the Students First blog post linked above. People like Moe, Rhee, Brown and Mehlhorn clearly believe that those unions need to be broken first, and they ASSUME that schools will improve for students when teachers are more free to be treated like employees at Walmart. That belief may be sincerely held, but they should stop obfuscating on it and admit that their primary goal is to bust one of the last large, middle class unionized workforces left in America.

Mr. Mehlhorn, by the way, stopped following me on Twitter.

4 Comments

Filed under politics, teaching, Unions

Tagged as Campbell Brown, Michelle Rhee, shenanigans, tenure, Vergara Decision

August 19, 2014 · 4:06 pm

Frank Bruni and the Failure of the New York Times

For more than a year now, I have despaired of the New York Times’ editorial page whenever the topic of education reform has come up. It is not because those pages have disagreed with me, although it would be pleasant to occasionally see representation of lively and vital debate make it on to those pages. It is because the editorialists who have opined on the reform efforts now engulfing America’s public education have appeared so ill-informed that there even is a debate to be had, writing pieces that have graced the pages of America’s “Gray Lady” of journalism with what could have been submitted to them as brochures from Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee. On topics from the Common Core State Standards to the issues and concerns with teacher preparation, columnists such as David Brooks, Joe Nocera, Frank Bruni and Bill Keller have provided staggeringly limited perspectives and have even taken effectively discredited organizations and reports at face value. Again, it is not that these columnists do not see things my way that is the problem, but by entirely failing to engage the arguments even in passing, they have acted as if those arguments do not exist.

Today, Frank Bruni entered the fray again with a remarkably one-sided piece about teacher tenure. I will not dissect all of its problematic assumptions here, but I will point out that Bruni’s source on the “problems” with tenure is ONE individual, a former TFA teacher and current state senator in Colorado who was central to efforts that tied teachers’ contract renewals to multiple years of student gains in, you guessed it, standardized testing. For his take on an issue that effects the working conditions and workplace protections of the millions of public school teachers in America to be limited to one source is staggering. Mr. Bruni also directly quotes the judge in the California Vergara lawsuit as if there were not reams of critiques of the judge’s legal reasoning and use of controversial research.

And thanks to some Internet sleuthing on Twitter, it also demonstrates an apparent flaw in how the OpEd page of the New York Times operates today. Mr. Bruni may not come to the issue of teacher tenure entirely out of natural interest:

The smoking gun behind the Bruni article. Seems Bruni has the same disclosure problem @campbell_brown has http://t.co/Y3MzMPsU2N @nytimes

— rratto (@rratto) August 19, 2014

According to this People Magazine article located by teachers and posted to Twitter, Mr. Bruni is a personal friend of Campbell Brown, the former NBC and CNN news personality who has dedicated herself to suing teacher tenure out of existence first in New York and then elsewhere.

Mr. Bruni is, of course, entitled to the friends he wishes, but the operation of the flagship newspaper of the world’s oldest continuous democracy ought to be better than this. Given the thoroughly one-sided and completely unresearched positions staked out by David Brooks, Joe Nocera, Bill Keller and Frank Bruni, it is easy to postulate how Mr. Bruni’s wading into the Tenure Wars took place. A personal phone call from a personal friend is made. It is suggested that he ought to turn his talents upon this very important issue that is “for the kids”. He is even given the name of an impressive person to contact and an offer of an introduction. Voila. “Partnership For Educational Justice” gets free replication of their talking points against teacher tenure on the OpEd page of the New York Times.

The position of opinion writer on the New York Times is a highly privileged one. I suspect that those who hold that position are frequently contacted by the influential in society with suggestions towards what they should aim their pens. It should come, therefore, with great sense of responsibility for recognizing when there are areas in our society with dynamic and complex debates, and, when taking a position, demonstrating an understanding of those complexities.

Mr. Bruni and his esteemed colleagues at the Times have repeatedly demonstrated no such understanding. It is well past time for the editorial board to either seek out additional voices on these issues or to provide their opinion writers with remedial instruction on how to acknowledge and engage arguments without simply bypassing them in favor of one-sided talking points.

Alternately, Mr. Bruni and his colleagues could meet more people. I know quite a few who would be happy to provide more information.

1 Comment

Filed under Media, politics, teaching, Unions

Tagged as bias, Campbell Brown, New York Times, tenure

August 12, 2014 · 1:55 pm

Messages From the Tenure War – “Teachers Aren’t Special”

When Campbell Brown goes on air to discuss the lawsuits against teacher tenure protections, she knows how to comport herself. First, it is very important to profess her respect for teachers and the teaching profession and to make it clear she just wants teaching to be a well-compensated and treated profession. Then she has to express a completely sincere desire that the profession improve for the sake itself and the children. At this point, she has to point out that the laws she is suing to overturn stand in the way of that improvement and that it is simply ridiculous to oppose that effort. When on The Colbert Report, she conveyed this message by leaning forward and pitching her voice for maximum earnestness as she stated that everybody agrees that the due process and “last in first out” provisions are “just anachronistic.” A media representative has to make the pitch appealing to the broadest possible demographic.

Her general audience supporters are under no such restraints.

I’ve been reading #WithoutTenure on Twitter and made the very poor choice to read comments on some news articles about the lawsuit. Obviously, some people support Ms. Brown’s efforts, and that is expected in a democratic society. What I did not expect was the periodic denigration of teachers as a whole and fairly serious hostility to the concept that teachers have job protections granted through tenure that the respondents do not believe other professions have. A refrain that sums up the attitude is “Teachers aren’t special.”

Teachers aren’t special.

Hostility towards teachers’ due process protections is necessarily a complex phenomenon. President Ronald Reagan made contempt for unionized workers fashionable in his first administration, and since the late 1970s, public approval for organized labor has ticked down from 59% to 52% with some fluctuations along the way. Public disapproval, however, has steadily gained from 31% to 42%, meaning that there is decreasing middle ground in public opinion on unions at a time when less than 11% of the total workforce is unionized. Some of the contemptuous remarks certainly stem from the growth in hostility to unions.

Some who expressed that opinion based it on their belief that teachers are given undue job protections via tenure that other professional workers in the economy do not have. Part of this is stems from the popular misconception, encouraged by Ms. Brown, that a teacher with tenure has “permanent lifetime employment” and is shielded from removal even in the face of serious incompetence or misconduct. Another part stems from a belief that the critics do not possess any particular protections in their employment, even in highly skilled fields, and a demand to know what about teachers makes them deserve what the others do not have. This is a particularly odd and perhaps uniquely American aspect of class relationships. Instead of asking why their employer or profession does not do more to protect and compensate them fairly, many Americans demand to know why others are better protected and/or compensated. We tend to fight our class wars against each other in the United States.

I cannot solve that tangled mess in this essay, but I do want to examine one of its consequences: Teachers aren’t special. It sits me back on my chair a bit, to be honest. Wrapping my head around it is nearly impossible as I have spent every working day of my life since 1993 around teachers, either as a high school English teacher or as a graduate researcher or as a college professor. I have met, worked with and taught some incredibly special teachers over the years, and I am continuously impressed by the caliber of young person who shows up at our teacher education program each Fall looking to start her or his professional career. These are people who could have sought more lucrative careers , and having worked with them I do not doubt that most could have been successful in those careers. However, something draws them to teaching: a passion for learning, for a subject matter and for the transformational power that it holds, for children and their growth.

Gary Fenstermacher, Richard Osguthorpe and Matthew Sanger, writing in the Summer, 2009 issue of Teacher Education Quarterly, discussed how teaching not only involves content related to morality but also demands moral characteristics of teachers:

Just how teachers attended to moral matters became more apparent as we examined the connections between moral manner and moral content more closely. We sought to “see” the ways they imparted moral ideas and ideals to their students. We encountered six methods used by most or all of the teachers as they went about the work of teaching their students. They are: 1) the construction of the classroom community, 2) showcasing specific students, 3) design and execution of academic task structures, 4) calling out for conduct of a particular kind, 5) private conversations, and 6) didactic instruction (Fenstermacher, 2001). These six methods suggest how moral traits and dispositions of teachers might be reflected in their practice. They also suggest an important interplay between moral content and moral manner. (p. 12)

The authors go on to ask their central question, “how do we seek ensure that those who teach possess a moral manner that is proper and appropriate for the tasks of teaching, and that they learn to employ this manner properly and appropriately in the course of instruction?” (p. 16) This is something much deeper than professional ethics, although those matter for teachers as well, because we entrust that teachers will be involved in the implicit of explicit instruction of moral conduct for their students through both the curriculum and the environment in which it is taught.

It is very clear to me what it is that makes teachers “special,” and it is the sense that they are as much in a vocation that is of service to others as they are in a profession in service of themselves. When people dismiss the due process rights in tenure by saying “teachers are not special” they are simply dead wrong. It is true, however, that teachers are not unique in this central premise of vocationalism. Many, in a wide range of professions, are driven by the call to serve purposes greater than themselves. There are doctors who seek to aid those in lands afflicted by disease and warfare, and there are medical practitioners who eschew more lucrative practices in the effort to provide needed general and family practice. There are lawyers who dedicate themselves to low cost or pro bono services for the indigent , and there are attorneys who seek to use their talents to right great wrongs. Fields like nursing and social work are full of people who are on the front line of patient and client care and who are primarily motivated by their desire to help those in great need and with little voice.

Teachers are special. They are not unique in how special they are.

Which still leaves an open question: If teachers are special in a way that is shared across other professions what is it about tenure and its due process protections that matter for teachers? There is no single answer to this. However, not only do teachers need strong due process, but also good teachers need it even more. Reflecting back upon what Fenstermacher, Osguthorpe and Sanger wrote, it is clear that good teachers must be motivated to rock the boat on behalf of their students. Having a “moral manner” is not simply about appropriate behavior, it is about appropriate advocacy that will sometimes run afoul of administration and community expectations.

A good teacher will question curriculum priorities and instructional materials on behalf of students and their needs. A good teacher will question spending priorities within a school a district if classroom needs are neglected. A good teacher will advocate that students receive special education, ESL and enrichment materials that will enhance their experience and provide them with opportunities to learn. A good teacher will help unpopular viewpoints gain a voice within the class regardless of the teacher’s or the community’s views. A good teacher insists on the integrity of instruction and assessment even if it means a popular student athlete is made ineligible to compete or if it means the child of a local politician does not pass a class. A good teacher collaborates with peers and experiments with new teaching strategies and constantly questions whether or not what is happening in the classroom, the school and the community is what is best for students. A good teacher will make people uncomfortable at least some of the time.

A good teacher must do all of these things even as he or she is an employee of a system controlled and administered via local politics. Teachers, of all of the moral vocations, are the most public and the most in need of the ability to openly question and confront on behalf of students and learning. Taking away the due process rights of tenure diminishes the ability of teachers to buck the system and to make necessary waves for the good of their students.

Reference:

Fenstermacher, G.D., Osguthorpe, R.D., Sanger, M. (2009). “Teaching Morally and Teaching Morality.” Teacher Education Quarterly, 36 (3), 7-19.

1 Comment

Filed under Activism, politics, Social Justice, teaching, Unions

Tagged as Campbell Brown, Philosophy, tenure

August 10, 2014 · 10:28 pm

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a News Show Tenure Lawsuit Discussion…

…intelligent and informed debate!

Melissa Harris-Perry, professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, has a Sunday morning show on MSNBC, and on August 10th, she had a panel on to discuss the recent attempts to bring California’s Vergara v. California lawsuit against teacher tenure protections to New York State. Her panelists were Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, Dana Goldstein, author and reporter for The Marshall Project and Derrell Bradford of the NY Campaign for Achievement Now and formerly of Governor Christie’s Educator Effectiveness Task Force.

From the opening minute of the first segment, it is obvious that Ms. Harris-Perry was not going to let Mr. Bradford get away with Campbell Brown like talking points unchallenged, and the rest of the panel was certainly not inclined to back off either. Ms. Harris-Perry quotes directly from the language of the challenged New York statutes in response to the standard claim that teachers with tenure have permanent lifetime employment. Mr. Bradford tried to sneak in another favored talking point of the anti-tenure campaign by claiming a time frame of nearly 3 years to remove a teacher under the law, but Ms. Weingarten immediately pushed back with the changes that have already been made to the law and the current, more accurate figure nearly 1/6th the time of Mr. Bradford’s assertion.

For once, a media discussion on these lawsuits was not a monologue, and the moderator of the discussion, while not claiming the “neutral” ground so cherished by many figures, did something, in my opinion, more important. She did not set up conditions of “false equivalency” where someone like Mr. Bradford, whose own history in education reform and willingness to try to frame his advocacy of privatization of schools in civil rights terminology is neither upfront nor honest, is treated as having equivalent facts on his side even if he is prevaricating on most of them. While this is not “balanced” it is absolutely fair, and it is the result of the host having actually studied the issues before moderating her panel and clearly noting that Mr. Bradford’s side of the debate is routinely distorting the truth. Would that we could have that more frequently.

The entire segment runs close to 30 minutes, but is worth it:

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 1

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 2

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 3

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 4
One notable exchange happens at 5 minutes, 44 seconds in the second segment, where Randi Weingarten says:

RW: How do we attract and retain well-prepared great teachers for our most needy kids? Because what’s happening is just a few miles down the road in Westchester we’re not talking about this issue but in Rochester we are and we are in the places where there’s intense, real social-economic issues. So why are we not having that conversation? That is the conversation we need to have. (Turns to Derrell Bradford) And what I would argue is that you need to give people better working conditions. We need to make sure that they don’t feel that they are going to be fired if they try something new or if they stand up for their special needs kids. That’s what we’d like to do.

Pay special attention to Mr. Bradford’s body and facial language during this. Twice, near the end, he purses his lips and looks down very briefly. I am possibly reading too much in this, but to my eyes he is distinctly uncomfortable at not being able to simply say what he wants without challenge. Understandable, as Ms. Weingarten just cornered him repeating a talking point based on out of date data.

It happens again in segment 4, when Mr. Bradford lengthily admits that there is no “one thing” that is driving the achievement gaps and states that inequality is “hardwired” into the system. He does not explain how eliminating tenure assists that in any way, and he even makes an ironic statement to my ears that we attract the least experienced teachers to the most needy kids — when his stance on tenure would do absolutely nothing to improve that situation and could actually make it worse. Ms. Goldstein then notes that we have reduced the achievement gap in the past when we “aggressively” integrated schools, and Ms. Weingarten again pushes on the need for resources and support instead of attack. I’d invite any reader to look at the body language of Mr. Bradford here as well. When Ms. Weingarten talks about the outcomes of the NYC Chancellor’s District and the proven value of attracting and retaining great teachers and giving them and their students resources. Mr. Bradford looked, to me, like he was trying to figure out a way to sidestep that or dismiss it when time ran out.

When the echo chamber is filled with more voices and when the host has studied the issue, the corporate reform advocates have a much harder time of it.

I want more.

Going After Tenure — Missing the Real Needs of Students

There is a character in the 1984 movie “Teachers” starring Nick Nolte and JoBeth Williams, who is unaffectionately named “Ditto,” played by Royal Dano. Ditto is old, orderly, mind-numbingly boring and tenured. His “teaching” consists of running off enough mimeographs each day for all of his students, sitting in the back of his classroom where he can see all of his students in rows, having his ditto sheets distributed, reading his newspaper and having students turn in the dittos when the bell rings. So rigid is his routine that the students can do the entire process without him, a premise tested when he suffers a fatal coronary in class and none of his students notice.

The movie’s satirical take on jaded teachers strikes a humorous note by playing off of a lot of stereotypes and some common experiences. Many people, sadly, have experienced classrooms with teachers either out of their depth or beyond their professionally useful life. In a system of 60 million students and over 3 million practitioners, quality cannot possibly be uniformly excellent. The situation in the movie also speaks to a number of popular if misinformed stereotypes, the most persistent of which is that once granted tenure, a teacher has no need to remain vigorous or skilled or even all that present in the classroom.

This movie must keep Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown and Whoopi Goldberg up at night.

The argument against teacher tenure goes approximately like this: 1) children need a quality education in order to have opportunity to succeed 2) a quality education requires quality teachers 3) teachers of low quality are concentrated in schools that serve poor and minority students 4) poor and minority students do not do well on examinations because of those low quality teachers 5) doing poorly on standardized examinations is the main blocker of opportunity for poor and minority students 6) some low quality teachers have tenure 7) firing low quality teachers with tenure takes too much work 8) we need to do away with tenure so we can fire low quality teachers and replace them 9) replacing low quality teachers will raise test scores and improve opportunity 10) if you don’t want to do that you care more about low quality teachers than you care about children.

The problem, however, is that a lot of that is hooey.

Assume, for example, that tenure is a problem, as reformers do, because it keeps low quality teachers in teaching for too long. This, however, is as much a function of administrators not doing their evaluative job as it is the due process guaranteed by tenure. Further, if it was tenure that was the actual problem, we would expect to see negative impacts on the performance of those districts that have the largest portion of their faculty with tenure – suburban districts with the most experienced faculties compared with urban districts that have extremely high turn over rates. This, however, is not the case. When the PISA examination scores that give our political class such concerns are broken out by the poverty characteristics of communities, we see startling effects:

U.S. Reading Literacy Scores By Poverty Characteristics

David Berliner writes:

On each of these three international tests, U.S. public school students did terrific in the schools where poverty rates of families were under 10%, or even when poverty rates were between 10% and 25%. But we did not do well in schools where poverty rates were above 50%, and we did even worse on those tests in schools where poverty rates for families were in the 75-100% bracket.

So students who do the worst on international examinations are those who live in high poverty districts which, because of income segregation, tend to be urban and rural. Despite the movie “Teachers”, those students do not attend schools that are full of dusty, burnt out teachers who are waiting to die at their desks. Quite the contrary. They are far more likely to attend schools with extremely high concentrations of novices.

Helen F. Ladd, professor of economics and public policy at Duke University, notes that today, over a quarter of the teacher workforce has less than five years of experience teaching. This is a problem because experience actually matters in teacher effectiveness, and research supports the need for teachers who have made it through the steep learning curve of their early years in the classroom. Teachers improve in effectiveness measures dramatically in this period, and while their gains level off, a workforce that is perpetually inexperienced is a workforce that is not optimally effective. According to research from the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, districts that are urban, high poverty, high minority and rural are far more likely to have high numbers of first year teachers than suburban counterparts. Ten percent of the districts in their sample had a “critical value” of more than 17% novices teaching classes, which was double the overall sample average and is correlated with other effects such as teachers leaving the profession altogether.

It is crucial to pause for a moment and consider the contradiction here. Our lowest performing schools are not plagued with teachers who are sit behind the mythic protections of tenure and do not do their jobs so much as they are burdened with a continually changing faculty who begin a steep learning period but who cannot be guaranteed to stay past five years. Further, such schools are burdened with the attendant costs that come with high turnover rates such as recruitment and training, giving fewer resources for other forms of support. So the attack on tenure has it backwards because the real problem for staff at our most struggling schools centers on too little retention of teachers.

Nicole S. Simon and Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers note many of the new teachers who leave working in urban and high poverty districts do so because of working conditions in such schools rather than any student demographic. In fact, negative school climate and organizational factors are such powerful predictors of why teachers leave schools, that no student based factors remain statistically significant. “Positive, trusting, working relationships” and “a strong sense of collective responsibility” prove to be strong predictors of schools that manage to retain teachers over schools with nearly identical student demographics. Considering all of this, if reform advocates TRULY wanted to assist children who suffer because of bad teachers, they ought to advocate for the following:

1) Ways to support administrators doing their evaluative role seriously. As has been pointed out from numerous sources, tenure grants teachers due process in any effort to remove them from the classroom. Administrators need to do this function, and they need to do it carefully and well, but that role is frequently an add on to an already extremely time consuming job. Principals can be supported in this function by robust peer observation and mentoring systems, but this would require that teachers also have additional time needed to mentor and evaluate each other.

2) Improve teachers’ working conditions. High poverty schools are notoriously difficult places to work, but not for the stereotypical reasons people presume. Teachers who seek out such careers are often highly motivated by a desire to do good, but face overcrowded classrooms, decaying facilities and inadequate resources. Further, lack of planning and collaboration time isolates teachers and makes it more difficult to access the expertise and insights of their peers. The saying that a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions needs to be seriously considered.

3) Remove the Sword of Damocles. We know that high poverty correlates to low test scores, and we know that the reasons are far more complicated than reformers’ preferred explanation of blaming teachers for everything. But the past 15 years of education reform have constantly increased the pressure on schools and teachers to raise test scores without our nation taking the least collective responsibility for alleviating our appalling child poverty rate. We should still test, but for diagnostic and triage purposes rather than to increasingly motivate skilled teachers to flee districts where they are professionally threatened without adequate support.

4) Discuss poverty and its effects of children. Education reformers have been consistently silent on this front except to accuse people who want to talk about it of “making excuses” for bad teachers. That is dishonest of them. Over 20% of our children come to school from homes that are in poverty with the negative impact on resources and development that comes from that. Many of our urban schools have student populations that top 75% in poverty. As David Berliner notes, we are obsessed with “one-way accountability” for schools and teachers to change this without requiring anything more of ourselves as a society.

5) Recognize that tenure protects teachers who rock the boat on behalf of their students. The due process rights with tenure may make removing a bad teacher more complicated than simply saying “you’re fired”, but it comes with important freedoms that teachers need. Many teachers have pointed out that tenure protects teachers from being threatened with capricious or political removal when they advocate for their students’ needs or call out bad behavior that harms students. John Goodlad called this “good stewardship” and it is a vital characteristic that we want to encourage among teachers.

Those attacking tenure seek to take that away from all teachers. That’s why I oppose them.

5 Comments

Filed under Activism, politics, schools, Unions

Tagged as Campbell Brown, Poverty, tenure, Vergara Decision

August 4, 2014 · 9:14 am

Campbell Brown’s Brings the Anti-Tenure “Argument” to Stephen Colbert

As a former broadcast personality, Campbell Brown has some advantages when appearing on the media to discuss her campaign to end teachers’ workplace protections. She has experience in interview techniques. She understands what works well on camera and what does not. She knows how to pitch her voice and use facial and body language to convey deep sincerity and earnestness regardless of what she really believes. These served her well on Mr. Colbert’s program last week.

Mr. Colbert is similarly skilled, but he plays a satirical representation of a right wing ideologue in order to lampoon a segment of the media and to keep his guests off balance. I would argue that he did not level the full weight of his satirical talents upon Ms. Brown, but rather he waited until the end of the interview to present her with some serious challenges that she could not respond to adequately. More on that later.

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post provides a pretty thorough assessment of Ms. Brown’s many prevarications and reliance on talking points over evidence courtesy of Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn of Michigan State University. Dr. Dunn makes it very clear that there simply isn’t a research base to support any of Ms. Brown’s assertions, and since she had made those assertions in the media prior to her appearance on The Colbert Report, I wish that Mr. Colbert had been more ready to take on some of the more stubborn and egregious talking points. For example, Ms. Brown repeated her claim that New York State’s teachers cannot possible be as effective as job evaluations say they are because student test scores are too low:

SC: Okay, how’s the crisis in New York? What’s the problem here?

CB: So, if you look at, if you look at the, um, outcomes, student outcomes in New York, okay? So, 91 percent of teachers are around the state of New York are rated either “effective” or “highly effective,” and yet [SC: Sounds good.] 31 percent, [SC: Yep.] 31 percent of our kids are reading, writing, and doing math at grade level. How does that compute? I mean, how can you argue the status quo is okay with numbers like that??

SC: Well, I went to public school in South Carolina and 31 percent sounds like a majority to me. (transcript is courtesy of Mercedes Schneider, teacher and author)

Mr. Colbert chose to lightly mock his own education, but there is a major, I would argue deliberate, flaw in Ms. Brown’s favored talking point. First, the 31% figure does not measure students’ grade level performance; it measures the percentage of students who scored “proficient” or above on the new Common Core aligned testing piloted by the Pearson corporation in New York. Second, the 31% proficiency rate was gamed by the process to determine the cut scores and openly predicted by New York State Education Commissioner John King before the tests were ever deployed. From the Times-Union in 2013:

State Education Commissioner John King said he expected some push-back. At a Times Unioneditorial board meeting on Tuesday, he said the number of students considered proficient will likely drop by 30 points. He said, while that number is intimidating, it provides a more honest assessment of what New York’s students know. He acknowledged that makes for nervous educators, but said the state can’t afford to roll back the tougher new standards students will be expected to meet because just 35 percent of New York’s high school freshmen leave ready for college or a career four years later.

How could the commissioner so accurately predict the drop in test scores for the new examinations? According to award-winning Principal Carol Burris, it is because his office deliberately sought to peg the cut scores between proficiency levels to markers that would leave just a third of New York students making the cut. The condensed version of Burris’ analysis: NY DOE sought information from the College Board on what SAT scores (widely considered only a loose predictor of college success) correlated to a successful first year in college, and set measures of that “success” that are clearly aimed at that 30% target. Once in possession of the desired SAT scores in reading, writing and mathematics for a combined 1630 points, the state’s committee went about setting cut scores for each level of performance on the new CCSS aligned tests. From Principal Burris again:

When the cut scores were set, the overall proficiency rate was 31 percent–close to the commissioner’s prediction. The proportion of test takers who score 1630 on the SAT is 32 percent. Coincidence? Bet your sleeveless pineapple it’s not. Heck, the way I see it, the kids did not even need to show up for the test.

So is it honest for Ms. Brown to keep repeating that only 31% of NY students are at “grade level”? Absolutely not — first, because this is not a “grade level” measure and second, because the result was gamed from the beginning.

This also brings up another question. If the goal of the “proficient” rating on the exams is “college and career ready” is a 31% proficiency rating actually wrong? In 2013, 33.6% of the U.S. population aged 25-29 had a bachelors degree, which is up over 11 points from 22.5% in 1980 when the education “crisis” rhetoric began in earnest. More of our young population is in possession of college degree today than ever before in our history, and the economic data does not suggest we are in a crisis of too few people with such degrees in the economy. 48% of recent college graduates are underemployed, and in 2010, over 5 million college graduates were employed in jobs requiring only a high school diploma. Moreover, according to Pew Social Trends, today’s wage benefit for obtaining a college degree comes less from rising wages for college graduates than from cratering wages for those without college.

One could argue that more students need to be on path to be “college and career ready” by their third grade exams because college is increasingly necessary to keep from falling behind economically moreso than it is necessary to get ahead. Something tells me that today’s reform advocates don’t want to emphasize that point. We would do better to question if the distribution of students who qualify for and are successful at college are concentrated in specific communities and neighborhoods, but discussed honestly, that would require examining America’s rising Residential Income Segregation Index, another topic education reform advocates don’t like to discuss.

Mr. Colbert made a feint at this late in his interview with Ms. Brown:

SC: You can mention. I’ll edit it out, but you can mention it. [CB: Okay.] [Audience laughter.] All right, now, but, here’s, the thing is aren’t you opening a can of worms there, because [4:00] if you say the kids are entitled to e, equal education, if that’s your argument, doesn’t that mean eventually, you’re going to say, “Every child in the state of New York should have the same amount of money spent on their education”—rich community, poor community—pool it all in, split it all up among Bobby and Susie and Billy—everywhere. [Audience applause.] Because the argument is, everyone gets the same opportunity. [Audience applause.]

CB: But, but you, you’re suggesting that mon, that it’s all about the money, and I think it’s not about the money.

SC: Well, you’re suggesting it’s about equality, and money is one of the equations in equality, or have I just schooled you? [Audience laughter.]

Mr. Colbert did not let Ms. Brown duck the question of money and school funding entirely, but she quickly professed how she wants to “pay teachers more” AND treat them like “professionals” through evaluations. Then she sidestepped to her “safe” territory by claiming it is almost impossible to fire a teacher with tenure. As previously noted, Dr. Dunn of Michigan State makes it clear that these claims are completely problematic because first, new evaluations using student test scores focus on formulations of teachers’ impact that only accounts for 1-14% of variability between student performance and second, Ms. Brown’s information on the length of time needed to remove a tenured teacher is badly out of date and her assessment of that time is possibly off by more than a factor of four. This all tied to her previous claims the “least effective” teachers are concentrated in schools with high levels of disadvantaged students, but her argument against tenure is not remotely related to that because measuring effectiveness via test scores automatically makes urban teachers less effective regardless of their experience and skill. Additionally, these school have far fewer tenured teachers because the turnover rate in many urban districts tops 50% in three years, resulting in a dearth of teachers with the skills that come from experience.

If tenure were truly the problem with teacher quality, then wealthy suburban districts with more stable and experienced teacher corps would not be the districts with high test scores and large percentages of college bound graduates. In this sense, Ms. Brown’s fight against tenure resembles Republican led drives for voter ID laws that threaten to block 100s of 1000s of currently eligible voters in order to stop a “problem,’ voter impersonation, that occurs so rarely it does not statistically exist.

Mr. Colbert then pivoted to what appears to have been his most important question of the interview — what is the money involved in Ms. Brown’s lawsuit?

SC: Just trying to win, Campbell. Just trying to win, all right? Um, your organization, where does it’s money come from? That’s one of the things they asked me to ask you.

CB: I, I saw that on my Twitter feed today. The, the, who’s funding this effort?

SC: Yeah, who’s funding your, your effort, [CB: Kirkland Ellis.] your organization.

CB: The law firm…

SC: The law firm is funding it?

CB: Well, the law firm is doing this for free, so we haven’t gone out…

Ms. Brown’s point here appears to be that despite her fronting the organization that is facilitating the lawsuit, the efforts on behalf of that suit are, in essence, charitable. This may be true as far as legal fees are concerned, but it is absurd on the face to even hint that there is no monetary value to the assistance Ms. Brown is giving the plaintiffs her organization recruited. First, her connections and celebrity almost certainly played a role in obtaining the legal services. Second, Ms. Brown is a media ready spokesperson who has been giving interviews and penning opinion articles on behalf of this cause, and such services would cost dearly if they came from a private consulting firm. Further, Ms. Brown has managed to sign up the services of Incite Agency, led by former Obama administration alumni Robert Gibbs and Ben LaBolt to do publicity for the cause on a national level. The plaintiffs in this case are enjoying pro bono legal services, Ms. Brown’s celebrity and public relations services from former White House personnel. I think it is sufficient to say that those are no small levels of support.

Mr. Colbert pressed on about financial support and finally got Ms. Brown to admit to something which I find astonishing:

SC: So, the Partnership for Educational Justice [7:00] has not raised any money so far?

CB:Yeah, we are raising money.

SC: And who did you raise it from?

CB: I’m not gonna reveal who the donors are because the people (pointing toward window) are out…

SC: I’m going to respect that because I had a super PAC. [Audience applause.]

CB: I hear you. But, part of the reason is the people who are outside today, trying to protest, trying to silence our parents who want to have a voice in this debate…

SC: Exercising First Amendment rights…

CB: Absolutely, but they’re also going to go after people who are funding this, and I think this is a good cause and an important cause, and if someone wants to contribute to this cause without having to put their name on it so they can become a target of the people who were out there earlier today, then I respect that.

Ms. Brown is married to Dan Senor, who was the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq following the fall of the Hussein Regime. He sits on the board of of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirstNY, and he joined hedge fund Elliot Management before becoming a top adviser to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Ms. Brown is on the Board of Directors of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy chain of charter schools, an organization that boasts massive financial support from Wall Street. Her ties to people who have been pouring money into education “reform” in the interest of charter schools is not difficult to establish, as blogger Mother Crusader has demonstrated. Suffice to say that these are incredibly wealthy and politically connected people who are the most likely donors to her organization.

And Ms. Brown wants us to believe that they need to be “protected”. That if people want to know who is funding lawsuits to challenge laws that were passed by democratically elected governments and job protections that were subject to open and adversarial negotiations between unions and administrators, they cannot know because the donors seeking to overturn such laws could not abide potential criticism of themselves in the public sphere.

Wow.

Let’s be clear. Who are “the people who are outside today” who Ms. Brown assumes will bully and intimidate her donors? According to The Daily News:

I am sure that Eva Moskowitz’s donors are just quaking in their boots…right after they drop another $400,000 into Governor Cuomo’s pockets.

Mr. Colbert did not sneak a camera crew down to the street to make Ms. Brown look as ridiculous as she richly deserved at that moment, but the fact that he led her to make such a ludicrous statement is telling in an of itself. Today, it is very hard to trust that major media outlets will take the time and effort to research and interview people trying to lead public debate via deception, and on issues that require a genuine understanding of complex social phenomena, that is even less likely. I have written before how abysmally the New York Times’ editorial staff have failed in that regard, preferring to take the statements of advocates with wealth and connections at face value.

Mr. Colbert is not a journalist, yet he and his fellow comedians Jon Stewart and John Oliver have become almost guardians of truth in recent years. It is often more likely that Mr. Colbert or Mr. Stewart or Mr. Oliver will highlight the absurd inanities, half truths and contradictions routinely offered by politicians, pundits and advocates. In the case of Ms. Brown, Mr. Colbert got her to openly confess to a truth that is gaining greater and greater public awareness: American governance is increasingly oligarchical in nature whereby elected officials craft policy more to serve the interests of their very wealthy donors rather than the interests of the actual voters who put them in office. Ms. Brown’s undisclosed donor list is a perfect example of this, and her refusal to disclose under the fiction that her donors could possibly be intimidated by moms and teachers with home made posters should be mocked loudly and frequently.

I am grateful to Mr. Colbert for organizing his interview to that point, but I am saddened that we rely almost exclusively on satirists to get to the heart of public affairs these days.

3 Comments

Filed under Activism, Funding, Media, politics, schools, Social Justice, Testing, Unions, VAMs

Tagged as Activism, bias, Campbell Brown, Eva Moskowitz, Hedge Fund Money, New York Times, Poverty, reporting, shenanigans, Success Academy, Vergara Decision

Tag Archives: Campbell Brown

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