Stand for Children Stands for the Rich and the Powerful…

…who want to break the backs of the teachers’ unions.

Many of us have said that before, now you can see and hear it for yourselves.

This video was taken at the Aspen Ideas Festival which is heavily funded by Bill Gates. Stand For Children’s Co-Founder Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan’s  senior advisor Jo Anderson, out foxed the Chicago teachers’ union.

This is where the money that Stand for Children raises actually goes to, to gain power for the billionaire boyz club,  DFER and all of those hedge fund millionaires who want to take over and privatize our pubic schools.

SFC received $4.5M last year from Bill Gates and $3M from wealthy donors for destroying the teachers’ union in Chicago. Substance News did an article in January about the wealthy who financed the big push to bust the unions in Chicago, see: Emanuel’s Billionaire donors also bankrolling Stand for Children, pushing union busting organizations in Illinois. Oregon, also, has been infected by the virus by way of Stand for Children as well as Texas.

This is what Edelman had to say about our state:

“We’re already getting going. We’re doing this level of work in every state. ..In Washington state, same goal. We could readily outspend the WEA. MA, very similar. It might be a ballot measure in WA. It might be we have a ballot measure on the ballot in MA, and we use it as a lever.”

Thanks to Jennifer Marshall for capturing the video and providing the clip and to Fred Klonsky for posting this video on his blog.

Dora

A transcript of Edelman’s 14 minute presentation can be found at the Parents Across America website.

I would also highly recommend reading Susan Ohanian’s article about the Aspen Institute in Substance News,

Aspen Institute Session on SB7… How the Ruling Class works against public schools and teacher unions…

Post Script: Remember the mantra of “effective teachers” that began with NCTQ two years ago in Seattle and how that mutated into “bad teachers” by groups like LEV and SFC? And how that mutated into unions are bad because they protect bad teachers? Are you starting to see the end game to all of this?

Charter schools, low paid teaching staff with no union protection, pre-packaged lesson plans and tests developing route memory but nothing else and everything on the computer including lessons and of course testing all brought to you by Broad, Gates, the Edelmans and all the other wealthy “liberals” who have everything to gain financially in one form or another whether it is immediate gains or having a mass of workers who can “compete with the global economy” by being happy with low wages and no union protections such as long hours, unsafe working conditions and no medical benefits.

Are these the first few steps towards that brave new world?

Post Script Deux: This story keeps growing by the hour! Much information has come to light in the last 24 hours, at least for me, in terms of the Edelman link. George Schmidt with Substance News covers Jonah’s brother, Josh Edelman, through his tenure as Chief Officer, Office of New School (where do they come up with these job titles!?) in an article titled Josh Edelman Ousted.

Interesting read.

By the way, Josh and Jonah both attended the Sidwell Friends School, the one that Obama’s daughters attend now in D.C. I would hazard a guess that if Josh and Jonah have school aged children that they do not attend a public school but somehow these two manage to know what’s best for the rest of us in our underfunded public schools.

NEA Nixes TFA, Inc.

One of our very own teachers in Seattle, Marianne Bratsanos, brought forth an item regarding the hiring of Teach for America, Inc. recruits which was approved by the delegates at the National Education Association (NEA) Convention in Chicago last week.

Here in Seattle 70 teachers received pink slips this spring in response to budget cuts. In the meantime, Tom Stritikus, a former TFA, Inc. recruit and now Dean of the School of Education at the University of Washington, is gearing up to crank out Teach for America recruits to plug into a school district that is not lacking in qualified teachers. The unholy agreement between our former Broad-trained superintendent, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson, with the Seattle school board’s blessings, and Teach for America is to hire 25 recruits this fall at the additional expense of $4,000 per year. This additional fee goes directly to TFA, Inc.

Does this make any kind of economic sense? Does this at all address the best interests and needs of our students?

The teachers who comprise the membership of the NEA don’t think so along with the majority of parents who I have communicated with about this issue.

Will our interim superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield, continue the charge towards dumbing down our children’s education? The jury is still out on that. Unfortunately she took the initiative under our former superintendent’s guidance to push TFA, Inc. through rather hastily with the cooperation of the former school board president Michael DeBell. “Community Engagement” meant Ms. Ortega, the representative for TFA Inc., meeting with the Gates’ backed organizations such as the Alliance for Education, the League of Education Voters (LEV),  Stand for Children and the like. It also meant going to Rainier Beach High School and having Ms. Ortega get on the stage and extol the virtues of their recruits in a PTA meeting. Rainier Beach High School, watching how this goes nationally, would be a target school simply because of its’ large minority population.

The worst of it was that a false deadline had been brought to bear on our district. TFA, Inc. stated that they had to have an answer by a certain date, less than a month at the time, to determine whether they could open an office in our state this year. As far as I could see, this was a well-coordinated effort on the part of our former supe, TFA, Inc and the school board President Micheal DeBell to push TFA, Inc. through quickly and quietly. It did pass through quickly but not so quietly. “Community Engagement” was distilled down to one school board meeting where Ms. Ortega with TFA, Inc. stood in front of the school board on one side and the President and Vice President of SEA, stood on the other side and the school board posed questions mostly to Ms. Ortega. Both the President and Vice-President of SEA shared their frustration during the meeting with the school board members that there were few if any questions being directed towards them. All of the softball questions were directed to Ms. Ortega. The fix was in and all but Betty Patu voted for TFA, Inc. coming to Seattle.

Shortly after this approval by our school board, Bill Gates provided TFA, Inc. with $1M to open an office in the Puget Sound area.

Fortunately, the teachers of Seattle and around the country are now speaking up about TFA, Inc.

Below is an excerpt from an article in Education Week, NEA Delegates Take Swipe at Teach for America.

Dora

In the union’s strongest stance yet against the popular Teach For America alternative-certification program, National Education Association delegates approved an item that accuses TFA of taking jobs from other teachers in locales where positions are scarce.

Until now, the NEA had no formal position on the organization, though many of the union’s internal resolutions stood in contrast with such TFA practices as its short formal training program. There has long been friction between the two groups, though.

The item calls on the NEA to “publicly oppose” contracts with TFA when they are used in districts with no teacher shortages, or to save money on salaries.

Even before this item got to the floor, its drafters added stronger language, saying that some TFA contracts could be used to “bust unions.”

The sponsor, Marianne Bratsanos of Washington State, praised the program for filling hard-to-staff positions but said it has gone too far by placing recruits in districts with no teacher shortages. (She was probably referring to headlines earlier this year out of Kansas City, Mo., where the district was laying off some educators while bringing on others trained by TFA.)

“While this may temporarily suffice when you cannot fill a teaching position, it is not OK where hundreds of experienced teachers have been pink-slipped and are clamoring for limited positions,” she said.

She added that the program hurts local colleges of education. And finally, she said “antiunion foundations and corporations substantially fund TFA,” naming the Walton, Broad, and Gates foundations. “These corporations work to silence union voices,” she said. (The Broad and Gates foundations are past providers of grant support to Education Week ‘s nonprofit parent corporation.)

The NEA Fails Its’ Members and Our Students

I met a retired principal who worked within the Seattle Public School District for many years last week on the ferry going to Bremerton. He remarked that the ferry-boat workers made more money than teachers saying that the ferry-boat workers made on average $70,000 per year. You don’t need an education, a certificate of any sort or any other validation of your expertise to take tickets and route cars to a particular lane but that’s what they get.

How can anyone say that the teachers’ unions are the fat cats of our educational system when we all know that is not the case? The corporate venturers and privatizers who want to squeeze a buck out of our public school system with their charter schools think so because when they look at the balance sheet, the teachers are the most costly line item. The cost is relative of course, but for a charter school to make a profit, all expenses have to be pared down and what better way to do it than to have teachers compete over test scores? The only way that a charter school can keep its’ state license is to show high test scores.

This is an introduction to an article by Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer NEA Flunks Crucial Test posted in Counter Punch on July 7, 2011. It goes as follows:

The New York Times coverage of the recent National Education Association (N.E.A.) convention focused on the inconsequential, while paying little notice to what harbored fundamental significance. It aimed its spotlight and lingered on what it referred to as a shift in position: “… the nation’s largest teachers’ union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country.” (The New York Times, July 5, 2011).

In fact, there was little in the way of concessions by N.E.A. on this point, as The New York Times article itself conceded: “But blunting the policy’s potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers…” And the Times added that the N.E.A. went on to insist that only those tests that have been shown to be “developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher’s performance” should be used. This qualification eliminates almost, if not all, conventional tests.

The N.E.A. is right to be cautious about basing teacher evaluations and the fate of teachers on the test scores of their students, as the Obama administration has been single-mindedly promoting. We know that students’ standardized test scores are correlated above all with their economic standing. As Joe Nocera recently pointed out in an op-ed New York Times article (April 25, 2011): “Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn.”

With the growing inequalities in wealth in the U.S., where money is increasingly concentrated at the top while the working people and poor are losing ground, it becomes even more irrational and even criminal to hold teachers responsible for low test scores. But the Obama administration, which is dominated by the interests of those at the top, is studiously ignoring this point.

The bigger problem with all tests, however, is that they rest on subjective values regarding which skills are important and which are not. Tests that place an emphasis on the ability to regurgitate random information rest on one set of values. Tests that encourage critical thinking and the challenging of basic assumptions rest on a different set of values. The problem with standardized tests is that they do not allow students to challenge the significance, relevance or clarity of the questions being asked them on these tests. The framework of the standardized test does not allow for the give and take that can transpire between a teacher and a challenging student. In other words, these tests rule out one of the most important educational skills a student can acquire: the ability to challenge the test-giver. They instead reflect the kind of values employers often prize at a workplace: willingness to follow directions —no matter how unethical or irrational — without raising troubling questions.

And this takes us back to the N.E.A. convention. The most significant step taken with a vote of almost 2 to 1 — and the point that should have been the major focus of The New York Times article — was the decision to endorse Barack Obama for his election run in 2012. Did two-thirds of the teachers at the N.E.A. convention suddenly lose their critical thinking faculties simultaneously? Did they really feel compelled to accept the conventional political framework where they must always endorse either a Democrat or Republican, choosing the lesser of two evils?

Without doubt, the Obama administration has been the bane of public education. Its emphasis on standardized tests as the determining factor in evaluating teachers throws rationality and critical thinking aside by ignoring the scientific data that proves student test scores do not provide a simple correlation with a teacher’s abilities.

The Obama administration’s avid promotion of charter schools has actually lowered the quality of education, if one uses the criterion that the administration loves most: standardized test scores. And when a charter school replaces a traditional public school, the teachers’ union is de facto eliminated, which is often the hidden motive behind the charter school campaign.

Teachers’ unions are what stand between teachers and slave wages, which is what many in the corporate world would prefer. And the unions protect senior teachers with higher salaries from being replaced by new, lower paid teachers who are just beginning their careers. Cash-strapped schools often take advantage of this practice if there is no union to stop it.

With someone like Arne Duncan as Obama’s Secretary of Education promoting all these policies and operating as a kind of a role model to students and teachers alike while creating an environment that is hostile to any real learning, it is nothing short of a miracle that eager students and teachers are still exercising their critical thinking skills at all.

As long as the N.E.A. as well as organized labor in general remain tied to the corporate-dominated Democratic Party, public education will deteriorate, critical thinking will be undermined, wages will remain low, and the working class will continue to suffer a decline.

But there is an alternative. Organized labor has the resources to pursue its own political agenda where it defends the interests of all working people in the face of this current historic corporate attack. As a start, it could mobilize working people in massive demonstrations to demand that the politicians respond to the needs of the majority of Americans: full funding for public education and social services, no cuts but a stronger Social Security and Medicare, a massive federal job creation program, and raising taxes on Wall Street and the rich in order to fund these programs.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has already called for a strong independent labor movement. Massive demonstrations could be a first step in this direction, because working people will be standing up for themselves, not sitting back and relying on the politicians. But the logic of this first step will then lead to a second step: the creation of a labor party whose goal would be the defense and promotion of the interests of all working people.

Ann Robertson is a Lecturer at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association.

Bill Leumer is a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.). They can be contacted at sanfrancisco@workerscompass.org.

Dora