SENATE VOTE SCHEDULED FOR MONDAY ON EDUCATION JOBS

This from the NEA:

This week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked the Senate from voting on an education jobs amendment as part of a larger bill on small business. But, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has scheduled another vote for Monday evening, August 2. The package being considered will provide $10 billion to save over 135,000 education jobs. It will also provide funds for Medicaid to help prevent more deep cuts to the programs that serve our most vulnerable populations.

We are facing an education crisis, with hundreds of thousands of educators being laid off, class sizes growing, and programs critical to students’ success being cut or eliminated. Our students’ education and the future of our nation are at stake! EVERY VOTE COUNTS and every Senator needs to hear a strong message of support. Tell your Senatorts to stand up for what is right!

CONTACT YOUR SENATORS TODAY:

• E-mail your Senators. Tell them to VOTE YES on a $10 billion education jobs package (H.R. 1586).
  
  
• Call 1-866-608-6355 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1-866-608-6355      end_of_the_skype_highlighting to contact your Senators. You will hear talking points and will be connected to the United States Capitol Switchboard – ask for one of your Senators. Tell your Senator that public education faces a budget catastrophe and that he/she should VOTE YES on a $10 billion education jobs fund. Remember to call back to speak with your other Senator.

Mendacity!

"You said it yourself, Big Daddy, mendacity is a system we live in."-- Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Monty Neill's comments on Obama's Urban League Speech

Obama is responding to the jointly-issued statement from all of the major civil rights groups, which thrashed his Race To The Top reform. Monty makes reference to the 1958 film while taking issue with the style and substance of the speech in this post to the North Dakota Study Group.

Of course he defends RTTT even though its main tenets are not backed up by any evidence, as FEA, the civil rights groups and the community groups all point out. He simply asserts that because states are doing (were stampeded/bribed into doing) what Duncan wanted, they are automatically improving. Who needs evidence?... Mendacity

Duncan rewards Arizona

Arne Duncan has claimed sole discretion when it comes to awarding Race To The Top funding to states. "I look them in the eye to see if they are sincere," says the Ed Sec. He must have seen something in the eyes of Arizona's Gov. Brewer and Sen. McCain to push Arizona up from 40th to a finalist's position in the competition for a piece of the ever-shrinking federal funding pie.

Maybe it was the state's commitment to driving out Mexican immigrants from state schools under SB1070, that caught Duncan's eye. Or maybe it was their ban on minority studies.

Ann-Eve Pedersen of the Arizona Education Network says she can think of just one reason the economically depressed state was a surprise finalist in the second round of the $4 billion Race to the Top competition, after finishing 40th out of 41 competitors in the first round in March.“Maybe the federal government has taken pity on the state of education funding here." (Edweek)

QUOTABLES

Chicago Teachers Union V.P. Jesse Sharkey

“They have come into our house at night, the house of the public schools, and they have taken everything that isn’t nailed down,” Sharkey said. “Now they come to us and say, ‘Give us a hand.’”(Catalyst)

How "revolutionary" can you be when Jeb Bush is your biggest fan?

Duncan's "Quiet Revolution"

First we had Bush's No Child Left Behind, which took its name from the Children's Defense Fund's slogan, "Leave No Child Behind." Now we have Arne Duncan's "Quiet Revolution" with its name coopted from the 60's Quiet Revolution in Quebec. 


The irony is that at the heart of the Quebecois movement was the unionization of public employees. Duncan's "revolution" targets the teacher unions, collective-bargaining rights, and public space in general. And so it goes. Privatized charter schools,which systemically exclude ELL kids and those with disabilities, become "the civil rights movement of our generation."

Top-down corporate reform, mass teacher firings and school closings become r-r-r-revolutionary.

The question is: can you have a revolution, albeit a quiet one, that is skewered by every major civil rights organization in the country? If it's really about fixing failing schools, why has this coalition of community-based organizations trashed the Race To The Top and Duncan's Blueprint? I mean, how revolutionary can you be when Jeb Bush is your biggest fan?

He knows what's good for Detroit, including how people should vote

How does Arne Duncan know what's best for the people of Detroit? It's "common sense."

After all, says Arne, without big city mayors exercising one-man rule over the schools, it's impossible, "for children to reach their full potential, and ultimately for the city reach its full potential."

Is there any research to back up such a bizarre assertion? Of course not. But he does have a spokesman who doesn't mind fiddling with the truth.

Peter Cunningman, a Duncan spokesman, pointed out to The Detroit News that his boss previously worked as CEO for the Chicago Public Schools, where he said mayoral control led to improved test scores.

And what test scores might these be, you ask? And how did the mayor produce them, you ask? And how, from 400 miles away would Duncan or Cunningham know that the Chicago approach would be best for Detroit (whose former mayor is on his way to jail), you ask?

Why, it's common sense.

The impact of IMPACT

Here in D.C., Chancellor Rhee is sailing through the floodgates, opened when union leaders signed on to a bogus contract. The agreement allowed pay increases based mainly on the good will of a few private foundations, in exchange for Rhee's ability to fire teachers in mass, using the IMPACT evaluation process. IMPACT is mainly an attempt to link student test scores with individual teachers. It also includes 22 other measurement points which are supposed to be assessed in a 30 minute-observation by a master-teacher.  

Valerie Strauss shows why the entire process in suspect in this post on the Answer Sheet.

A number of teachers never got the full five evaluations, apparently because a number of master teachers hired to do the jobs quit, according to sources in the school system. But even if they all were, let’s look closely at this: In 30 minutes, a teacher is supposed to demonstrate all 22 different teaching elements. What teacher demonstrates 22 teaching elements -- some of which are not particularly related -- in 30 minutes? Suppose a teacher takes 30 minutes to introduce new material and doesn’t have time to show. ... Oh well. Bad evaluation.

In many cases, Rhee is even ignoring her own evaluation process and firing teachers and school staff arbitrarily, in hopes of impressing her corporate and foundation patrons and getting a leg-up on Race To The Top funding.

Rhee has used the vagaries of the contract to fire the first volley in what's bound to be a full-scale war, with the firing of 241 teachers. So far, the war has been one-sided with only Rhee's side on the attack. Hopefully, that will change.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Maureen Dowd

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong. Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s. (NYT)

Mayoral control

The only thing that every researcher agrees about is, as David Hursh of the Warner School of Education says, mayoral control represents “a decline in public input, a decline in accountability, a lack of debate over what schools should be doing.” (Shea Howell, Michigan Citizen)

Van Jones

The former White House green jobs czar who, like Shirley Sherrod, was thrown under the bus by the Obama administration amid another phony scandal stoked by Fox: 

Sherrod is "like Rosa Parks and she got slimed." (At Netroots) 

Past is prologue

Vacationing here in West Virgina, it's hard not to think about the state's rich history of struggle for social-justice. Signs are everywhere, especially in these difficult times. I got a good history lesson reading this editorial in yesterday's Charleston Gazette, showing once again that past is prologue.

In 1920, a strike at Matewan turned into a shoot-out that killed seven Baldwin-Felts guards who had been hired as strikebreakers. Town Police Chief Sid Hatfield, a champion of the strikers, was charged in a different fracas. As he and a companion walked up the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse, they were gunned down by other Baldwin-Felts agents. The murder inflamed miners, who gathered for a second march. In August 1921, 10,000 to 15,000 armed workers entered Logan County. Their advance was halted at Blair Mountain, where Sheriff Chafin's forces had installed machine guns behind breastworks. Full-scale warfare ensued for several days, and perhaps 20 were killed on both sides. President Warren Harding sent Army units and even a squadron of fighter planes to suppress the uprising. Afterward, UMW leaders were tried for treason, but juries found them innocent.

The locus of struggle now seems to be the hotel workers, among the lowest paid in the nation. Hyatt has now become the main target because of their refusal to negotiate a union contract in good faith. Yesterday in San Francisco, about 150 union marchers were jailed.  Hyatt becomes especially significant as it is owned by one of President Obama's richest and most powerful backers, Penny Pritzker and the Pritzker family. They became notorious for firing 98 hospitality workers at a Boston hotel and replacing them with non-union workers who they were forced to train before being put out on the street.

Connections to education reform and current administration policies couldn't be clearer as the fate of teachers and their right to bargain collectively also hangs in the balance. Hopefully Obama, who has backed union rights in the past, won't turn into Warren Harding on this one.

Resisting reseg

So much for the "new south" and the "post-racial era." 

Andrea Charity, left, and Monique Davis march down Fayetteville Street in Raleigh on Tuesday, July 20, 2010, to protest the Wake County school board majority's decision to end the district's diversity policy.

Re-seg is on the move again in Dixie as well as in Boston and Chicago. But this time around, it's dressed up as "school reform." Wake County, N.C. is now the focus of attention and civil rights activists are once again going to jail if they have to, to stop the re-segregation of public schools.