More from The Star-Ledger’s Bob Braun on the Facebook Newark grant and the disingenuousness of school reformers, who refuse to let the facts get in the way of their bashing of public schools.
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Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
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Hank Kalet 
It's an all out war on our traditional public schools, on public school teachers and on, most of all, their unions. On any given day, on any TV channel, any newspaper, or any radio station you can see or hear the latest anti-public school screed. A few nights ago, CBS News had a story about how Japanese teachers are outperforming American teachers. Really? Do Japanese teachers face all the challenges of American teachers? However, the report did reveal that Japanese teachers have union representation. What never comes out in these reports is that the USA has more children living in poverty than any of the other advanced democracies in Asia or Europe. The western European democracies have an amazing social safety net in addition to a universal education system and a free or virtually free university education.This nonstop 24/7 swift boating and demeaning of US teachers is disgusting and just appalling.That horrible anti-union, anti-teacher film, Waiting for Superman, was made by Davis Guggenheim, supposedly some kind of liberal. He's the darling of Cory Booker and Oprah Winfrey, rich liberals. American teachers and their unions do not stand a chance against this onslaught from the right wing and even some on the wealthy left wing.
From the Daily Howler:On Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams continued to play a favorite new corporate tune. He treated viewers to a tough-talking moment from a no-nonsense, straight-shooting governor—a no-nonsense, tough-talking man who hates those teachers unions:WILLIAMS (9/29/10): Incendiary words last night from New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, who lit into teachers' unions at a meeting as he unveiled a plan to let schools strip tenure from failing teachers and allow merit pay.CHRISTIE (videotape): Your performance was awful. You didn't do what we asked you to do. You didn't produce the product we wanted you to produce. But we don't look at that. All we look at is, are you still breathing?WILLIAMS: Governor Christie is in the midst of a big education battle in the most densely populated state in the union, which brings us to Education Nation, our summit, our series of reports, on our schools in this country.We don’t know when we’ve seen a “news organization” push a line quite so hard.Williams didn’t try to evaluate any of Christie’s tough talk. You see, the corporation’s theme this week has been teacher-bashing; NBC News has been trashing the teachers, and their infernal unions. So Williams just played the governor’s rant, making us rubes at home cower.Is something wrong with New Jersey’s teachers? It isn’t easy to say, of course. But on the NAEP, statewide test scores have risen from 1992 to 2009. As a matter of fact, Garden State scores have risen a lot, and they exceed the national average among all major groups. But don’t expect to hear such twaddle when you watch Williams strut and fret his tailored suits across the stage. In an earlier era, Williams and his gruesome network were devoted to trashing the Clintons, then Gore. Now, the network is trashing the teachers.So Christie got a free rant.
@anonymous I'm no fan of EITHER party. And, you know I think that Gooferment Skrules are a disaster on so many levels. I think that demonizing teachers is missing the target. The problem is the politicians and bureaucrats. They have set up and operates a system that has a stated public purpose but really has a hidden agenda. Political power for the politicians to tap into and a fountain of money for the bureaucrats suck up.How we get that turned around is a horrendous problem? We have to figure it out — students aren't being educated, teachers are being abused, the costs are unsustainable, and the unfunded liabilities are a disgrace.Neither the D's or the R's will fix this mess. They are content to benefit from this \”education theater\”!
From Diane Ravitch, Part 1:For the past week, the national media has launched an attack on American public education that is unprecedented in our history. NBC devoted countless hours to panels stacked with \”experts\” who believe that public education is horrible because it has so many \”bad\” teachers and \”bad\” principals. The same \”experts\” appeared again and again to call for privatization, breaking teachers' unions, and mass firings of \”bad\” educators. Oprah devoted two shows to the same voices. The movie Waiting for \”Superman\”, possibly the most ballyhooed documentary of all time, explains patiently that poor test scores are caused by bad teachers, that bad teachers are protected for life by their unions, and that the answer to our terrible test scores is privatization. If only we fire enough teachers every year, goes the oft-repeated claim, our national test scores will soar to meet those of Finland, the highest scoring nation.
Diane Ravitch, part 2:This narrative began with George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002, which mandated that 100 percent of all children would be proficient by 2014. Leaving aside the fact that no nation or state has ever achieved 100 percent proficiency, this law unleashed a frenzy of testing in American public schools. The results are meager, as judged by the highly respected federal tests.Instead of changing direction, Barack Obama has tightened the screws on Bush's policies. Now, testing is more important than ever. Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are pressing states to adopt merit pay, so that teachers will get bonuses if student scores go up, and pressing them to evaluate teachers by student test scores. Testing is the key element in this approach. Woe to the teacher who cannot raise test scores on standardized tests that demand only the skill of selecting the right bubble of four possible bubbles.Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program handed out almost $5 billion to promote these ideas. States leapt to be eligible for the money, promising to open more privately managed charter schools, to fire the principal of every low-performing school, to fire most or all of the teachers in schools with low scores, and to close public schools if their scores are low. None of these approaches works.Privately managed charter schools do not get better results on average than regular public schools. Some are excellent, some are awful, but most are no better than their public counterparts. Even the Superman movie admitted that only one in five (actually, only 17 percent) of charters get great test scores. Twice as many charters (37 percent) are even worse than the neighborhood public school. The claim that \”tenure\” is a guarantee of lifetime employment is a canard. Professors in higher education get lifetime tenure, but teachers in K-12 schools do not have lifetime employment: they have the right to due process if the principal wants to fire them. Teachers get due process rights only after a principal agrees that they have earned it. The reason for due-process rights is that teachers have been fired because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, or because a supervisor didn't like them. Teachers with due process can be fired, but only after a hearing by an impartial hearing officer.
Part 4 from Diane Ravitch:This past summer, the Los Angeles Times published a database in which they rated 6,000 elementary teachers as effective or ineffective, using what is called \”value-added methodology,\” that is, whether their students' scores went up. Their decision to do this was denounced by testing experts and applauded by Secretary Duncan. Testing experts tried to explain why this method is likely to mislabel teachers and why it is so error-prone that it must be used—if at all—with extreme caution. One teacher who was rated \”less effective\” than his peers was Rigoberto Ruelas. A few days ago, Mr. Ruelas committed suicide. Many educators blamed the Los Angeles Times for his death, but it is impossible to know what his state of mind was. The Times reported his death and noted that he taught in a neighborhood that was one of the city's most impoverished and gang-ridden, and that he had a nearly perfect attendance record. Former students of Mr. Ruelas' wrote on websites to express their admiration for him, to explain how he reached out to the most difficult students, how he was so kind and gentle in a tough, tough neighborhood, how he was the best teacher they ever had. None of the current remedies now embraced by the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the GOP, Davis Guggenheim, or other so-called reformers will improve education. Making war on teachers and principals is ridiculous, outrageous. None of the people at the foundations or in the policymaking circles work as hard as the average teacher, face as many challenges every day, for as little pay. None of the pundits who blithely denounce teachers would work 20 years with the hope of getting a salary (today) of $52,000. No nation in the world—certainly not Finland—has improved its education system by belittling and firing teachers and principals.People who know nothing about education and whose ideas have no basis in research or practice are calling the shots. Left to their own devices, they will destroy public education. They have already demoralized our nation's teachers. Eventually, their bad ideas will fail, because they are wrong.
Whoops, I screwed up on the numbering of the parts of Ravitch's article. I have an ancient computer with an ancient dial up modem. Slow as molasses.
From the NYTimes:. . . .Charter schools over all received lower grades than traditional schools, a result the teachers’ union president seized on.Sixty-one percent of traditional public schools, which are unionized, got A’s and B’s, compared with 48 percent of charter schools, where union representation is rare.“This means that either the strategy Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have touted so often for school reform — the creation of more charter schools — isn’t working,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, “or that the entire progress-report methodology, which relies almost completely on standardized test scores, is flawed.”. . . .