LABOR DAY WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Students at Hawthorne Scholastic Academic on Chicago's North Side picked up supplies to use at home in the waning days of summer vacation. Remote classes for Chicago Public Schools students begin today. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

CPS parent

“I seriously want to cry. … There is NO WAY he can be online all day like this. It isn’t possible.” A teacher responded: “Believe me, teachers are crying too.” -- WBEZ

Diane Ravitch

 I am a proud anti-fascist. Are you? -- Blog

Robert Reich

No other developed nation has nearly the inequities found in the US, even though all have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change. -- Guardian

Donald Trump

...says his appointed Pentagon brass "want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy." -- WH Press Conference 

Columnist Eugene Robinson

 Trump’s message to Whites is unmistakable: Be afraid. Those people — you know who I mean — are trying to take over your country. I will stop them. All of this is nothing less than undisguised white supremacy. -- Washington Post

Senior administration official

“The president means no disrespect to our troops; it’s just that the way he speaks, he can sound like an asshole sometimes." -- Daily Beast

QUOTABLES

"I will destroy and obliterate the economy of Turkey" -- Stable Genius

I'm seriously trying to avoid quotes from the Stable Genius, but sometimes I just can't help myself.

...if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). -- Twitter

CTU Pres. Jesse Sharkey on contract negotiations

 “I don’t think we can find a boogeyman. It’s a very different dynamic." -- Sun-Times 

 Arnie Rivera, CPS’ chief operating officer.

“The tone behind closed doors is very productive, very respectful for the most part. This contract for both parties isn’t just about compensation, it’s about making the school system better.” -- Sun-Times

China's Foreign Minister, Wang Yi

“China will not interfere in the internal affairs of the US, and we trust that the American people will be able to sort out their own problems." -- Global Times

Diane Ravitch on reports that Sen. Warren had a longterm affair with 24-year old Marine

Damn, she’s good! -- Twitter

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Chuck Schumer gives advice to Trump on how to be a good opportunist

"He likes us. He likes me anyway..Here's what I told him. I said, 'Mr. President, you're much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left. If you have to step just in one direction, you're boxed.'" -- CNN 

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) on Dem's deal with Trump

"I love Nancy Pelosi. I don’t have any doubt of her authenticity and commitment. But how do I now have to accept border security? Do I now have to put up half a fence? Is it going to have electricity and barbed wire on it?" -- Politico 

Robert Jay Lifton, psychohistorian

The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He’s equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination. -- Bill Moyers & Co. 

Atty. G. Flint Taylor

About half (of the $125 million in taxpayer money used to defend torturer Jon Burge) has gone to the survivors. The other half has gone to...pin-stripe patronage'. That's all your downtown law firms that are hired to fight us in court, about twenty-five to thirty million that has gone into the pockets of those lawyers defending Jon Burge and Richie Daley. -- Hitting Left

Diane Ravitch

Betsy DeVos is the first secretary of education in our history who is actually hostile to public education. We've never had this before. -- NPE 

Racism works by raising the bar for some people, and lowering the bar considerably for other people. @chrislhayeshttps://t.co/paJ3Ztt4Dd

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 16, 2017

Diane Ravitch and Kevin Coval are our guests today on Hitting Left.

Diane Ravitch

First batter up on the Klonsky Brothers, Hitting Left show this morning is ed activist, historian, and author Diane Ravitch. Diane's latest book, "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools" is a must read.

You can follow her daily blog here. I do.

She and I will be talking about vouchers, charters, and the Trump/DeVos "choice" offensive which aims at nothing less that putting the final nail in the coffin of public education.

Hitting in the clean-up spot will be in-studio guest, Chicago poet Kevin Coval. He's bringing with him a young Louder Than a Bomb poet.

Kevin Coval

Kevin is the co-founder of LTAB, the world's largest poetry festival, which exploded on the Chicago scene back in 2001 and has grown exponentially since then. He's the is the editor of "The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop". His 8th book, “A People’s History of Chicago" came out earlier this month. It's a collection of 77 poems representing the city’s 77 diverse neighborhoods and the people within them.

You can hear it all live on WLPN 105.5 FM Chicago, this morning at 11 a.m. CDT, streaming at lumpenradio.com or listen to the podcast at your leisure on Liberated Syndication.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'No confidence' in Duncan/King

"No Confidence" in Duncan/King.

Jeanette Deutermann, Public school parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out

“Throughout his term in New York, John King was notorious for his complete disconnect from parents, teachers, and school officials. His blatant disregard for concerned parents and educators fueled opt outs to historic numbers. Our only hope is that this bizarre move by the White House will have the same effect across the country, spreading the Opt Out movement to every corner of the nation.” -- NYSAPE

John King

"It's [Duncan's]an incredible agenda and I'm proud to carry it forward.” -- Politico

Pres. Obama on Duncan resignation

"He's done more to bring our education system -- sometimes kicking and screaming -- into the 21st century more than anybody else." -- CNN

Diane Ravitch

So this is what the 21st century will look like: boot camps for minorities; teachers with scripts; schools run for profit; school scams by corporations; education industry traded on Néw York stick exchange; high-yield online schools with high attrition rates; the monetization of public education. -- Blog

Randi Weingarten

...his tenure as New York state’s education commissioner created so much polarization in the state with parents and educators alike that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo is finally doing a mea culpa over the obsession with testing. We can only hope that King has learned a thing or two since his tenure in New York.” -- AFT Press Release

Duncan's legacy

"It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education." -- Diane Ravitch

Arne Duncan says he will remain at the D.O.E. "until the final bell". At this point, no one really cares.

The damage is already done and with billions of Race To The Top money no longer in his back pocket, he has no more juice with states, school districts, or with Congress. According to most surveys, his version of school reform has been badly discredited (I hope I helped a little) and many feel he will be remembered as the worst ed secretary ever. 

Diane Ravitch documents the destruction left in his wake:

*He used his control of billions of dollars to promote a dual school system of privately managed charter schools operating alongside public schools; 

*He has done nothing to call attention to the fraud and corruption in the charter sector or to curb charters run by non-educators for profit or to insist on charter school accountability or to require charters to enroll the neediest children;

*He pushed to require states to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students, which has caused massive demoralization among teachers, raised the stakes attached to testing, and produced no positive results;

*He used federal funds and waivers from NCLB to push the adoption of Common Core standards and to create two testing consortia, which many states have abandoned;

*The Common Core tests are so absurdly “rigorous” that most students have failed them, even in schools that send high percentages of students to four-year colleges, the failure rates have been highest among students who are English language learners, students with disabilities, and students of color;

*He has bemoaned rising resegregation of the schools but done nothing to reduce it; [Here, I would add that Duncan openly opposed, what he referred to as "forced integration" and abandoned fellow cabinet member, AG Eric Holder on his deseg suit in Louisiana--mk].

*He has been silent as state after state has attacked collective bargaining and due process for teachers;

*He has done nothing in response to the explosion of voucher programs that transfer public funds to religious schools;

*Because of his policies, enrollments in teacher education programs, even in Teach for America, have plummeted, and many experienced teachers are taking early retirement;

*He has unleashed a mad frenzy of testing in classrooms across the country, treating standardized test scores as the goal of all education, rather than as a measure;

*His tenure has been marked by the rise of an aggressive privatization movement, which seeks to eliminate public education in urban districts, where residents have the least political power;

*He loosened the regulations on the federal student privacy act, permitting massive data mining of the data banks that federal funds created;

*He looked the other way as predatory for-profit colleges preyed on veterans and  minorities, plunging students deep into debt;

*Duncan has regularly accused parents and teachers of “lying” to students. For reasons that are unclear, he wants everyone to believe that our public schools are terrible, our students are lazy, not too bright, and lacking ambition.

Diane could have also included Duncan's unflagging support for autocratic mayoral control of urban school districts. He made mayoral control an essential piece of his top-down school reform model and went so far as to say he would consider his time as education secretary a “failure” if more mayors didn’t take over city school systems by the end of his tenure.

They didn't. It was and he is.

Final Note: According to a report in the S-T, while Duncan remains in D.C., is wife and two daughters returned to Chicago with the children to attend the expensive and private University of Chicago Lab School.

I leave it to Valery Strauss at WaPo to point out the obvious:

…now his children will attend a progressive private school in Chicago, a school that does not follow key school reform policies that his Education Department has set for public schools.

It does not, for example, use the Common Core State Standards (though many teachers there support them). It does not bombard its students with standardized tests or spend weeks each semester in test-prep mode. It does not evaluate teachers by student standardized test scores. In 2013, 20 Lab teachers signed a letter to Duncan protesting his policies that promote standardized test-based school reform. Also among the signatories were teachers from the Ariel Community Academy, a public school founded by a team of people that included Duncan.

[...]
Another irony is that Duncan will be sending his children to a private school in a city where he ran the public schools for seven years; he then went on to control federal oversight of the nation’s public schools for another seven years. One wonders if there is not a single public school — or public charter school — that Duncan could have chosen after being personally responsible in some way for the improvement of the public education system in Chicago.

Arne Duncan chooses a school free from his influence http://t.co/NIA1aWRXNf Because you know he has to do what is BEST for his kids

— linda (@breezydayz) July 10, 2015

Mucking up the data on post-Katrina New Orleans: A tale of two headlines.

"No Excuses" N.O. charter  (Mario Tama / Getty Images)

In our doc seminar at DePaul, my students like to compare and contrast quantitative (statistical) and qualitative (interpretive) methods. Some argue that statistical research is more "objective" while qualitative research, ie. ethnography, participatory action research, etc... is open to interpretation (actually requires it). But every once in a while, real life jumps up and mucks up the data.

For example, here's headline on a story latest study of school improvement in post-Katrina New Orleans. The report comes from Tulane's Cowan Institute whose research has been touted by numerous news agencies, charter school support groups and the Louisiana Department of Education.

NOLA schools show dramatic improvement post-Katrina

Here's the headline above a similar story on the same study. This one is published in EdWeek.

 10 Years After Katrina: New Orleans School System Still in Flux, Report Says

Remember, they're reporting on the same statistical study based on hard numbers on test scores and dropout rates. So which is it? Dramatic improvement or still in flux?  Or both? Can the same numbers tell two different stories depending on whose reviewing the data? Of course.

After Katrina

Readers might recall the last study published by the Cowan Institute in November, 2014, touting the great gains supposedly made since the hurricane by the Recovery School District's privately-run charter schools. But a scandal erupted and the study had to be retracted when it was learned that the hired-gun researchers had used a "value-added" model to predict academic performance at 25 high schools, based on students' socio-economic standing and past testing history. We were told that the researchers' conclusion -- that many high school-ers do better than expected, given their background -- was inaccurate due to their flawed methods.

According to reform critic and ed historian Diane Ravitch:

 The sponsors of the district from a public school district to an all-charter district celebrate the amazing progress that followed the elimination of public schools and the teachers’ union.  

Because so many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to “prove” that privatization works, we will see many more such declarations of success.

On the other hand, critics say that none of the data is trustworthy. They say the state department of education and the Recovery School District (the all-charter district) manipulate statistics.

Ravitch goes on to quote Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana high school teacher with a doctorate in research methods and statistics, who has been relentless in dissecting the narrative produced by apologists for the RSD. In her latest post, Schneider looks at the tale of graduation rates.

The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) hides information and releases delayed or partial information in an effort to keep the public ill-informed regarding the state of education in Louisiana and especially as concerns the now-all-charter Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, which White and other well-positioned, well-financed privatizing reform cronies actively endeavor to market as a national model. 

What the RSD is best at, she says, is marketing and sales.

 So much for objectivity vs. interpretation.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

SEIU Local 1 President Tom Balanoff 

“Mayor Emanuel doesn’t understand that what made Chicago great was working people. We think he has totally turned his back on that.” -- Sun-Times

Heather O’Donnell, vice president of public policy for Thresholds

“It’s like cutting someone off from chemotherapy when they have cancer.” -- Rauner's mental health cuts hit firefighter's family hard 

N.J. Superintendent Elizabeth C. Jewett 

I did not authorize the release of this email nor am I aware of who did release it. I am also not aware of the motives they may have had behind the release. That said, I completely stand behind my comments as they represent not only my views and concerns; they also represent the views and concerns of our Board of Education. -- Answer Sheet, Pearson monitoring social media for security breaches during PARCC testing

Diane Ravitch

 The Network for Public Education enthusiastically endorses Jesus (Chuy) Garcia for Mayor of Chicago. The election has national significance. NPE believes it will send a message that closing public schools en masse and replacing them with private charters is unacceptable; that the public schools are a public responsibility and should be fully funded to meet the needs of students. -- Ravitch Blog

CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey 

"Cease and desist" directive was given to any principal whose conduct could be construed as not following district policy in giving the state exams. -- PARCC testing launches with some pushback, confusion

More on 'Dare the School Create a New Social Order?'

I had no idea that my reference to George Counts' little book would arouse such passionate arguments (see comments section) against the notion of the school as a force for social reconstruction. I hope others will join in on this important conversation.

Of course neither schools -- nor any other single institution or social force -- can transform society, provide jobs, housing or end poverty and racism by itself. But thanks to my friends Diane Ravitch and Deb Meier for pointing that out once again. Of course, I was raising much broader issues, like the growing threat of nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe in my post.

Deb calls it a "Utopian" idea that will only "set teachers up" for failure. But I think there's power in Utopian ideas. I'm reminded here of  John Dewey's imagined visit to Utopia written up in a 1933 New York Times article, which influenced many involved in 60's youth revolt, which was built on the imagination of a better world in which to grow up. Or for that matter, the 1990's small schools movement.

Dewey wrote:

The most Utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no schools at all. Education is carried on without anything of the nature of schools, or, if this idea is so extreme that we cannot conceive of it as educational at all, then we may say nothing of the sort at present we know as schools.

Children, however, are gathered together in association with older and more mature people who direct their activity.  The assembly places all have large grounds, gardens, orchards, greenhouses, and none of the buildings in which children and older people gather will hold much more than 200 people, this having been found to be about the limits of close, intimate personal acquaintance on the part of people who associate together.

Yes, we have to separate (and connect) visions and dreams from/with daily classroom practical problem solving. But the question remains: What can must schools do?

Counts and Dewey's critique of fellow progressive educators is as relevant today as it was 80 years ago. Despite wishes that child-centered education could take place free from political and ideological struggle, schools remain contested territory. And why not? They are the places where future generations should be being prepared to become citizens in a participatory democracy rather than merely centers of social-reproduction (structures and activities that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next).

The best examples of democratic education I can come up with are the Freedom Schools and Citizen Schools that were a critical part of the 60's-era Civil Rights Movement. It's worth reading Charles Payne's book, I've Got The Light of Freedom on this, along with his chapter, Education for Activism: Mississippi's Freedom Schools in the 1960s" in Ayers, Klonsky & Lyon, A Simple Justice.

Yes, there is always the risk that schools and teachers will try to, or be asked to carry too much of the social change burden or substitute indoctrination for the development of reflective and critical thinking skills. But the greater risk, it seems to me, is the acceptance of school in its traditional form, bound by a common core curriculum, prescribed blocks of subject matter and standardized testing.

As for jobs and housing, it's worth noting that unlike 1932, those things are profoundly influenced by schools in a society where education has become the second largest sector of the GNP, trailing only healthcare. That's much too large a share, in the minds of corporate school reformers, to be left in the hands of democratic decision makers. Education is rapidly becoming a $1 trillion industry, representing 10% of America's GNP. Federal and State expenditures on education exceed $750 billion and education companies, with over $80 billion in annual revenues, already constitute a large sector in the education arena.

There are more than 4 million teachers and many more non-teaching workers and teacher unions remain the largest in the country and may be our last bastion of organized labor.

Yes, the schools remain a battle ground. So I guess I would argue that schools, students, and educators can, should and must "dare to create a new social order". The very survival of the planet may depend on it.

The sell-out disease

SEEMS TO BE A LOT OF THIS GOING AROUND LATELY.

Maybe SEIU #73 leaders somehow spread the sell-out disease to New Jersey.

Booker & Christie

The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) is now backing former Newark Mayor Corey Booker, one of its own worst enemies, for senator. Look, they even give him a full page on their website to prattle on about his love for school vouchers. On several occasions, Booker has let it be known that he wanted to make Newark N.J. the capitol of privately-run charter schools. He's also in bed (figuratively speaking, of course), with hated N.J. State Supt. Cami Anderson and her boss Chris Christie.

N.J. Blogger Bob Braun tries to make some sense of it all here.

SAVING AND TRANSFORMING PUBLIC SCHOOLS

I just got this week's special Saving Public Schools issue of The Nation and it's a good one. But the title is somewhat misleading. It's not just about saving public schools, but transforming them and changing the entire system of public education in the process.

The lead editorial, "Our Public Education System Needs Transformation, Not ‘Reform. I would argue, it needs transformation and reform. The great lineup of ed-activist writers includes: Dana Goldstein, Kenzo Shibata, Diane Ravitch, Lee Fang, Pedro Noguera, Gordon Lafer, Daniel Denvir, Michelle Fine, and Michael Fabricant. Don't miss.

The editors write:

A truly progressive vision for public education shouldn’t focus on stories of how a few kids competed their way out of blighted neighborhoods. Instead, it should focus on taking back that stream of money going to charter chains and corporate tax cuts and redirecting it toward schools anchored in strong communities and using proven methods for teaching kids—the very methods deployed in schools where the rich send their children. Indeed, the most disadvantaged kids should get even more support for their schools than their privileged suburban counterparts.

WAR!... Rahm has declared war on the city's retirees and has found some allies in the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals which has given the mayor the green light for his three-year phase-out of the city’s 55% city subsidy for retiree health care. This will be upwards of a 50% increase in medical costs for retired city workers, many of who live on a fixed income.

But if its war he wants, it's war he'll get. As Brother Fred points out:

Bad news for the employees. But bad news for Rahm as well. These employees are voters. 28,000 retiree voters.

Making learning authentic

With attacks mounting on colleges of education, including from Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan, I'm happy to read the occasional story about good young teachers who learned their skills in good teacher training programs. Yesterday's piece in DNAinfo gives us a snapshot of 5th-grade teacher Heather Reed at Chicago's Pritzker Elementary, teaching the way it's supposed to be done. Ms. Reed comes out of DePaul's teacher ed program.

Now in her eighth year of teaching at Pritzker School, Reed said her approach to teaching "relies heavily on making learning authentic to my students" because "if a topic doesn't matter to them, or they can't find something interesting in it, they're not very likely to understand or remember it."

Quotables

Billionaire Rauner

Bruce Rauner

“Capitalism is the greatest poverty-fighting machine in the history of mankind, and I’m proud of the role I’ve played in it,” says Rauner who reported his last year net income at $53 million. -- Sun-Times

Alderman Harry Osterman

"We don't need a charter school. we don't need another high school in Edgewater. We have one." -- DNAinfo

Jitu Brown (KOCO)

"That is not a choice. This [closing of Dyett H.S.] is displacement by force. This historic neighborhood, we feel, is being gutted." -- DNAinfo

Diane Ravitch

 It seems to me that we are thinking about children, teachers, and schools the same way we think about sports teams. In every league, there are winners and losers. But if we think about education as a culture that is very different from that of a competitive sports league, then the picture and the questions change. -- Huffington

'Hope springs eternal...'

Yesterday was the first official day of basketball practice. Alexander Pope said, "Hope springs eternal." Well, at least in November before we've played our first game. I've got a promising squad of hard-working, fun-loving kids and even have some height for a change. What Pope didn't say is that "you can't teach height". That was the old Utah Jazz coach, Frank Layden.  

Great news! Diane Ravitch's health has improved (I'm certain it was my matzo ball soup that did the trick) and she has been cleared by her doctors to travel to Chicago to speak on January 11th.

Saintly and patiently progressive Deb Meier lays out her views on democratic education in yet another round of debates at Bridging Differences. This time she's trying to find common ground with traditionalist educator and Common Core advocate, Robert Pondiscio. Pondiscio wrote in the Atlantic that he once considered himself a progressive teacher but now believes that he "damaged" his poor and urban students by teaching self-expressive writing instead of focusing on grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics (as if the two were separable to a good teacher).

Hopefully, this go-around will be a better than the last one when Deb took on the insufferable think-tank hack, Michael Petrilli. Makes me nostalgic for the days of the Meier/Ravitch blog tussles.

Arne Duncan's new flavor of the month is Career Education.

So I've changed my reform plan. Earlier I had advised Chicago schools to militarize their names, ie. Special Forces High School or Navy Seals Elementary, if they wanted to get adequate funding and survive the latest round of "reform."  But nationally, now I'm leaning more towards simply adding the words Career Academy to the school name in order to receive federal funding under Race To The Top. Take the case of Dunbar Early College High School in Dayton.

This from Huffington:

Dunbar was labeled underperforming, so in 2010, the school received money for an overhaul from the federal government, a favorite Duncan project known as "School Improvement Grants." At a later step in that transformation, Dunbar reinvented itself as an "early college" school. But recent visits to schools such as Dunbar, and Duncan's late October visit with President Barack Obama to a New York City school run in partnership with IBM, show that this mentality is shifting, at least rhetorically. At Pathways in Technology Early College High School in New York, Obama called on Congress to fund career education programs to help bolster the economy.

What's in a name? Shakespeare asked. Plenty, when it comes to funding schools.

Racing to the Top?

Socrates: "We're all mortal", even Diane. 

AMAZING DIANE RAVITCH, still blogging from her hospital bed. But she has to cancel her Chicago talk. First Free Church would have been packed to the rafters.

This week I realized that Socrates was right: All men are mortal. So are all women. I am going to take some time off and rest: Doctor’s order. And I will take better care of my health. I’m regretful about the reminder of my age and mortality, but I will be back. And we won’t give up.

Here's wishing her a speedy and complete recovery. I'm sending her some chicken soup.

CAN IT BE? -- Common Core implementation is worse than ObamaCare launch, says Weingarten.

#RACINGTOTHETOP -- Hey, have you heard the exciting news? NAEP math scores have rising almost 1% since 2011. Reading scores, not at all. Arne Duncan says, he "encouraged." At what?

LET US TEACH -- CTU Pres. Karen Lewis is calling on teachers and parents to take a stand against the testing mania.

“Why must our public school children be subjected to this battery of pointless standardized testing throughout the year, every year?,” asks Lewis. 

 “Year after year, I have watched my child stress over testing,” said mom Nellie Cotton, who has a special education student at Grimes Elementary School. “Year after year, the stakes have only gotten higher and the intense pressure to attain the magic score continue to grow.”

RAHM'S LATEST FIASCO is called Ventra. It will get you "coming and going" says the Transit Union. Reminds me of the old joke about mixing Viagra and Exlax.

According to the Sun-Times' Fran Spielman, Chicago's finances are in worse shape than all but two major cities, Boston and bankrupt Detroit since coming out of the 2008 depression.

The reasons are simple. The mountain of debt got higher. Unfunded pension liabilities are $19 billion and rising. And taxes are not growing as fast as city spending, according to the Civic Federation.

Rahm's approach (like Daley's before him) has been to engage in wild borrowing for short-term political gain while mortgaging the city's future. All this has led Tribune columnist John Kass to apologize for comparing Chicago's political machine to the old mob bosses -- apologize to the gangsters, that is. The gangsters ripped of millions. Rahm, Daley and the Chicago boys -- billions.

That's billions with a B, almost $10 billion, and that doesn't count other mountains of debt that the same bosses have put on the taxpayers through other agencies under their control, including Chicago Public Schools, parks and pension obligations, adding billions more.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Daley doesn't know what he knew.

Classic Daley under oath

 “I don’t know what I knew.” -- Sun-Times

Diane Ravitch

NPR says Rahm Emanuel gets a “mixed” grade at midterm. On education, his grade is not mixed. It is a big fat F.  -- Grading Rahm Emanuel 

IL Sen. Pres. John Cullerton

The state's massive public employee pension debt is not a "crisis," but instead an issue being pushed by business-backed groups seeking lower income taxes at the expense of retiree benefits. -- WGN interview 

John Dewey

D.C. whistle-blower principal, Adell Cothorne 

I was a principal in a Washington DC public school when IMPACT was being rolled out. I knew of other principals who had their secretaries fill out the complex teacher rating systems for them. In other words, there were no safe guards to ensure that the system wasn’t being manipulated. How can we justify a rating system that can be gamed? -- EduShyster

John Dewey

"Democracy needs to be reborn in each generation, and education is its midwife." -- Chicago Tribune Commentary

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Matt Damon and Diane Ravitch speaking at my alma mater, Cal-State Northridge.

Matt Damon

“I’m very honored to have the opportunity to introduce Diane tonight. She’s somebody that I have admired for a very long time. She’s an amazing person. She’s America’s foremost historian in the areas of education policy, she’s a champion of public education, she’s a courageous speaker and she’s a truth-teller.” -- Daily Sundial

Diane Ravitch

Do we have problems in American education? Of course we do! Our single biggest problem is that our policymakers have ignored the toxic effects of poverty and segregation. Our inner-city kids have low academic performance because they are poor, and worse, their schools are being stripped bare by budget cuts. -- Conversation with WaPo's Valerie Strauss

Tom Hayden

The logic of voter turnout data all but guarantees right-wing Republican congressional victories in 2014 and a sealing of the divide of America into two countries for the foreseeable future. -- The Rag Blog

Ta-Nehisi Coates

As I noted, the problem is not that I dwell too long and too angrily on America's systemic racism, but that America's systemic racism has tended to dwell too long and too angrily on me. -- The Atlantic

 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

"I have friends that I know, or very much suspect, are homosexual. Everybody does." -- TPM, Scalia Has Friends He 'Very Much Suspects' Are Homosexual 

Stern crawls out from under his rock to attack Ravitch

I haven't heard much from ’60s ultra-radical turned far-right think-tanker Sol Stern since 2008 when he tried to paint Barack Obama as a commie symp and make Bill Ayers the focus of the presidential election debate. He used to write me letters, trying to befriend me. He says he went to the same summer camp as me as a kid but I can't believe that Kinderland would ever turn out a creep like Stern. He even offered to take me to a Yankee game (yuck, I was born with Brooklyn Dodger blue in my veins)  if I would only give him some inside dope about Ayers for a book he was working on.

Last I heard, he had fled the country and was living in Israel. Now I see he's crawled out from under his rock once again, to attack think-tank apostate Diane Ravitch whose new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, has his and other former fellows' shorts in a twist.

Back in '08, Stern worked for the right-wing Manhattan Institute (he obviously still does) and raged against progressive and social-justice education, calling it akin to "Stalinism." Stern's job at the Institute included hunting down and “exposing” social-justice teachers, whom he accused of “trashing the American system.” In another post Stern, responding to the UFT's Leo Casey, called the teachers union "a shill for Obama" and referred to me as a "good friend of the UFT" (which I think I am).

As for Ravitch, Stern attacks her as a "crude" turncoat, accusing her of "surrendering abjectly to [Deborah] Meier, champion of social-justice teaching and other progressive fads."

He calls her blog "a propaganda hub for the national anti–corporate reform coalition."

This past Labor Day, for example, Ravitch posted the words of militant union songs like “Joe Hill” and “Which Side Are You On?” and lamented that teacher unions don’t have enough power or influence in America.

Stern adds to his list of charges:

Ravitch uses her blog to publicize and organize support for antireform school board candidates from Rochester to Los Angeles. She recently wrote an impassioned endorsement of Bill de Blasio, the most radical of the Democrats running in the New York mayoral primary and the eventual winner. 

Sol Stern

He even accuses Ravitch of apparently agreeing with the progressive-ed icon [his tongue burns and he sputters as he says his name] Jean Piaget.

But as you might expect, Stern's coup de grace is exposing Ravitch's friendship with Ayers and the Klonsky's.

Thus, she has praised the former Weather Underground terrorist and radical educator William Ayers for his contributions to the anticorporate insurgency. (She concedes that Ayers made some political “mistakes” in the sixties.) Ravitch has also had kind words for leftist education activist and onetime Ayers ally Mike Klonsky. On her blog, she recounted visiting two universities in Chicago in 2010, with Klonsky as her host. “For me, the fallen-away conservative, it was a trip getting to know Mike, because he had long ago been a leader of the SDS, which was a radical group in the 1960s that I did not admire. So meeting him and discovering that he and his wife Susan were thoughtful, caring, and kind people was an experience in itself.” 

According to Stern, I "spent several years in China during the horrific Cultural Revolution, attending state dinners with the Great Helmsman." Pure bullshit. He made that part up. That's okay. The legend grows.

All I can really say in response to Stern's diatribe is, thanks for everything you do, Diane. The very things that make you big, make them small.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Charter backer Cong. Polis calls Ravitch "evil woman"

Diane Ravitch responds to Cong. Polis 

Even though he is a billionaire, I will pick up the check for breakfast, lunch, or dinner on one condition: read my book. If you don’t like it, Jared, I will give you your money back. -- Blog

 Bill Gates

“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.” -- Washington Post

 Harry Reid

“The American people will not be extorted by tea party anarchists.” -- House Republicans vote to delay Obamacare for one year

Chris Hewitt, Local School Council member

"CPS has to realize that schools are more than scores. If there's a more qualitative approach, with district officials coming in and seeing how teachers and students interact, they'll see there's a lot of learning that happens informally." -- Chicago Tribune

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Emanuel cut short East Coast fundraising trip and flew back to Chicago after 13 people were shot at a South Side park.

Columnist John Kass

He was absolutely rolled by the Chicago Teachers Union in the strike, and his capitulation cost him credibility with business leaders. His closing of some four dozen schools cost him with African-American voters. Emanuel still found $17 million last week in extra funds for an elite Near North magnet school, while out in the Northwest Side bungalow belt, Ald. Nicholas Sposato, 36th, ran a "toilet paper" drive to help his neighborhood schools provide basic necessities to the children of taxpayers. 

And that $1 billion school deficit? -- Sun-Times

Melissa Harris-Perry 

 “Folks, if you want to do a re-enactment of slavery in your school, how about Nat Turner’s rebellion?” -- MSNBC

Diane Ravitch

"I Will Not Be Part of Education Nation." -- Blog

Barbara Ferguson, former New Orleans Supt.

“Whether the difficult-to-teach high school students are expelled by charter schools or whether they attended schools closed by the RSD, they are an outcast group, thrown into an abyss ..." -- Daily Beast

Ravitch a Texas-bred Paul Revere

When it comes to schooling, Diane Ravitch is a traditionalist in most senses of the word. But a defender of traditional democratic education at a time when corporate-style reformers and her former conservative think-tank friends have all donned the label of r-r-r-revolutionaries and fancy themselves as educational "change agents", is not bad. They "monitor" her and target her as "an agent of the status quo." But nothing could be further from the truth.

In her latest book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,  Diane plays the role of a Texas-bred Paul Revere warning the populace that the privatizers are coming -- and coming they are, tearing away at all public space and with it, public decision making. Diane lays it out, chapter by chapter.

Genuine school reform must be built on hope, not fear; on encouragement, not threats; on inspiration, not compulsion; on trust, not carrots and sticks; on belief in the dignity of the human person, not a slavish devotion to data; on support and mutual respect, not a regime of punishment and blame. To be lasting, school reform must rely on collaboration and teamwork among students, parents, teachers, principals, administrators and local communities.“ (p. 325)

What I love and admire about Diane is that she's not just writing (she's prolific) but she's always out on the stump, uniting body and brain to get the message out. I don't know how she does it. I need a nap just thinking about it. Her book tour is turning out thousands for whom the message resonates. And it's been a pro-teacher message, resonating with the nation's teachers as no other. Her book provides all the ammunition they (we) need as we go into battle (and it is a battle, make no mistake) to save and transform public education.

In a smart marketing move, Diane and blogger/supporter Jonathan Pelto have mobilized a band of blogger/Tweeter allies (including me) to promote and review Reign of Error. I can't recall a book in recent times that's been reviewed by so many, from the complaintive mainstream press ("she's too loud") to her laudatory and grateful social media-based followers.

Ravitch shows solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Union.

This review by my friend Deb Meier is one of the best I have read so far. Remember, it was largely through dialogue with Deb that Diane rediscovered her roots in democratic education and broke with her former allies in the right-wing think tanks.

I re-post Deb's review here in full:
 
Dear readers,

Definitely go out and buy Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to Americas Public Schools by Diane Ravitch, which just been launched with proper publicity. She is a phenomenal woman—sending out a half-dozen e-mails a day, two books in the last decade, and traveling to speak throughout the USA. And….while she’s younger than me, she’s old enough to have rested on her laurels. Maybe it helps to change your mind, because my exhaustion comes (in part) from feeling it’s all been said before (including by me).

Reign of Error lays out step by step the relentless thirty year drive to either centralize the education of the young—on one hand—or divest it entirely into privatized hands on the other. Finally, the two sides have joined forces on a strategy that simultaneously does both. While this coalition has many old roots, in its current form it began with the fanfare around the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983). Ravitch was, at that time, a supporter of this bold statement that more or less accused America’s teachers and school boards of a plot to undermine American health and welfare of the international scene. We were, said the signers, at risk of becoming a second rate nation if we didn’t take this crisis seriously. I asked my colleague on the NBPTS, AFT leader Al Shanker, why he had signed on. He said it was a good strategy because only in a crisis is the nation willing to put the money into schooling needed to make it really first-rate. He said—as I recall (paraphrased), ‘It’s true our schools are not as bad as the report suggests, but we are entering a new period and they either have to change dramatically or what the report accuses them of will become true. We need a smarter citizenry.’

The trouble is that crying “wolf” has never been a great way to make sensible policy. Sometimes there is no choice (like Pearl Harbor). But the continuous claims that our public education system is destroying our nation has almost entirely led to bad policy.

And in the past few years Diane’s change of mind has been a particular blessing. She hasn’t, as her preset opponents claim, done a complete switch at all—she was always pro-union, pro-public education and always for standards. Fairly traditional ones. (In fact, her criticism of Progressive educators was that so many had abandoned all standards, she believed.)

Then lo and behold: no one has pulled it all together better than Diane—over and over again in the past few years she has led the challenge to the corporate reformers—right , center and left.. Her last two books Reign of Error and The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) pull it altogether.

In Reign of Error she spends the first 20 chapters laying out the case, and the last 13 offering some obvious and do-able responses to the oft-heard, “but what else can we do?” She’s more supportive of the “way things were” than many other educators (like me) have been, relying subliminally perhaps on the fact that if we eliminate the scores of children in poverty on international tests, the USA does quite well. Yes, Massachusetts scores put it number one in the world, or close, if it were a nation (like Singapore?) rather than a mere state of the union. But I think neither of us is truly satisfied with what has passed for a good education in its highly regarded school districts, much less the districts that served the least advantaged schools. She also overestimates, in my view, the degree to which Americans ever attended “common schools” That’s another story which all this crisis talk leaves untouched—or actually exacerbates as she ably documents, and where the promising fledgling progressive reforms of the 60s through 80s had focused attention on. As my mentor, and author of a study of American high schools, Ted Sizer said, “using one’s mind well” is the essential unexplored task facing the high schools for democracy. We have barely skimmed the surface of making either our schools or our democracy “belong” to everyone.

Thanks, Diane. We all need to keep this book handy so we can whip out the citations to make our case for the kind of reform America really needs, in your own words: “to prepare citizens with the minds, hearts and character to sustain our democracy into the future.”

###

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

CPS teacher Ed Hershey, arrested trying to save La Casita 

"We couldn't just let them sweep it away without at least doing what we could. The school doesn't have a library and they bulldozed it. There's 160 schools that don't have a library." -- ABC News

Lisa Angonese, community activist

“He’s [Ald. Solis] been giving us so many different stories. We want him to come out of hiding to face us and to listen to the demands of the community.” -- WGN

Glenn Greenwald

At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him. -- Guardian

Peter Cunningham

During the Obama administration's first term, I served as Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach in the U.S. Department of Education, where one of my jobs was to monitor criticism of our policies and develop our responses. One of the people I monitored pretty closely was Diane Ravitch. -- Huffington

Valerie Strauss

It takes some degree of chutzpah to evaluate teacher preparation programs with data said to be “in-depth” and “comprehensively collected” and then bury in small type the fact that some of the data isn’t actually all that trustworthy. -- Washington Post