The Breitbartian Taint: Snowden, Greenwald, and Secrecy

Woody has been remarkably and commendably circumspect about Edward Snowden and Greenwald's free-lance espionage escapades to this point. Much of interest has been revealed, much more--one suspects--has not.

As you'd know, if they still taught history when you were in school, our government has been doing shit like this since at LEAST the 1870s. Only then it was the Wobblies, or the nigras, or the Irish, then Italian immigrants, or the socialists, or suffragettes, or the Mexicans, or some other acceptably marginalized group (civil rights workers, student activists, more recently), so that the good burghers didn't feel imposed upon. Now those complacent burghers feel like they're being cast with the ni**ers and the rest of the undesirables, and they don't like it; their tits are in the wringer, and they're squealing.

But it's too late for that. That ship done sailed...

For now, many, many people have very, very much different stuff invested in the Greenwald version of the story. It seems to be a huge cudgel to wield against o'er-weening power of the State. But Greenwald's a libertarian bomb-thrower, and I doubt his allegiance to principle of any kind other than self-interest. Though he's a brilliant self-promoter, you have to give that to him...

And, I've felt all along like something about Snowden "clanged." Something was "off," something was "not right."

It turns out there may have been quite a LOT was and is "off," about both of them AND the story. Its author, Milt Shook, is not an unimpeachable source, either, being accused by detractors of indiscriminately fellating the leadership of the DLC, upon occasion.

Still, I have said and felt since Day 1 of this affair that there was always the troubling whiff of the dissembling, Breitbartian provocateur about Snowden and about the whole proceeding, like Jamie O'Keefe and ACORN, the skeevey little shit "proving" a fallacious point just to create shitstorms of trouble for ideological foes. Greenwald's enough of an opportunist to exploit (or even plot) it.

So I do not give perfect credence to EITHER account. I have my own confirmation bias to deal with; but, I believe I stand confirmed in my doubts, if we may believe this report in any of its particulars...

Which is debatable, of course. Indeed, someone inquired why I should believe this account, or give it more credence than reports by Snowden's coworkers as to his "humble brilliance?"

I said, I see no reason to "believe in" the persona Snowden's projected 'at work,' where, he has as much as admitted he was working as a mole.

Yes indeed, the revelations may  spawn a necessary "national dialogue"--though it should have happened generations ago. It was a common-place among the members of the counter-culture for their business to be reported by moles and impostures. We complained. It didn't stop.

I'll gladly, NOW, admit the need for 'dialogue" on the subject, though it is altogether, utterly unlikely to result in significantly curtailing intel-gathering and analysis activities of all 16 federal bureaus and 2000(+) private corporations doing the Gummint's snooping and analysis. (and arguably, dangerous in a world where EVERY nation possesses and deploys all the intelligence-gathering resources they can afford to posses in pursuit of the same goals).

It may be that  am too cynical, but I'm not sure what's gonne result from this "national debate."
We have 'em all the time, and they're generally fruitless:
Guns, Choice, Wars, Safety Net, Banks/Markets, Corporat Personhood?
We are supposed to have had robust, national debates about all of those. Yet pretty much, the status quo ante obtains.

And, as the FISA/Church Act reforms demonstrated in their failure to prevent the expansion of the Intel mission, the exigencies of global real-politik will compelled (within the epistemic structure of the institution)  them to "stretch" and even break the law. As the "State" is the natal ground of the ends-justifying-means rationality, it is a bit hypocritical to blame it for that means of being, no matter how much we abhor it.

Here's a list of the the countries which have espionage/intel agencies. Many are maintained by nations which are adversaries and/or enemies of the US Empire. For a nation and empire--the largest, richest, most powerful, most despised, most dangerous in history-- which stands (still) atop the pyramid of global power, unilateral disarmament on this front would be as foolhardy, as dangerous as unilaterally disarming the military.

And that's NAGAHAPUN, either.

A Danielson Evaluation of Thanksgiving Dinner

Woody'z gotta Holiday Treat for those teachers of his acquaintance-- PE Nolan, Suzanne Farley, Suzanne Libourel, Ellen Jampole, Susan Huddleston Edgerton, and all the rest.
(For non-teachers, The Danielson Guide is a notorious teacher-evaluation "rubric" which permits the disguises of evaluators' biases behind glossy glossaries. Here's your monthly "eval.")

The Danielson Guide to a Highly Effective Thanksgiving:
Unsatisfactory: You don’t know how to cook a turkey. You serve a chicken instead. Half your family doesn’t show because they are unmotivated by your invitation, which was issued at the last minute via Facebook. The other half turn on the football game and fall asleep. Your aunt gets into a fight with your uncle and a big brawl erupts. Food is served on paper plates in front of the TV. You watch the game, and root for the Redskins.

Needs Improvement: You set the alarm, but don’t get up and the turkey is undercooked. 3 children are laughing while you say grace. 4 of your nephews refuse to watch the game with the rest of the family because you have failed to offer differentiated game choices. Conversation during dinner is marked by family members mumbling under their breath at your aunt Rose, who confuses the Mayflower with Titanic after third Martini. Only the somewhat nice relatives thank you on the way out. Your team loses the game.

Proficient: The turkey is heated to the right temperature. All the guests, whom you have invited by formal written correspondence, arrive on time with their assigned dish to pass. Your nephew sneaks near the dessert dish, but quickly walks away when you mention that it is being saved until after dinner. You share a meal in which all family members speak respectfully in turn as they share their thoughts on the meaning of Thanksgiving. All foods served at the table can be traced historically to the time of the Pilgrims. You watch the game as a family, cheer in unison for your team. They win.

Distinguished: The turkey, which has been growing free range in your back yard, comes in your house and jumps in the oven. The guests, who wrote to ask you please be invited to your house, show early with foods to fit all dietary and cultural needs. You watch the game on tape, but only as a video prompt for your family discussion of man’s inhumanity to man. Your family plays six degrees of Sir Francis Bacon and is thus able to resolve, once and for all, the issue of whether Oswald acted alone.

Once Upon A Time in Philadelphia: Moonbats in Beards, 2005

Citizens' Dispatch: "Why Spy?"

Here's a question for those who want to shutter the NSA: Objectively, in the "REAL WORLD" of Nuclear politics and Big Money, why WOULDN'T ANYBODY bug everything and everyone they could? Especially when knowing that EVERYBODY is trying to bug YOU?

That's pretty much how ALL intel gathering works: scoop up everything and hope there's something useful. Back in my day, we used antennae which were pointed where we wanted to listen, and that's what we heard. Today, satellites only point DOWN, and down there, everything is available

"Real-politik" is all about power. It's a bitch if you're on the business end of it, and there is this bit of "real politik/Intel"to consider: Knowledge really is power, especially in state-craft. Information is the raw material of knowledge. You wouldn't want YOUR 'State' to have an information deficit in its dealings with other 'States," would you? You wouldn't want the Govt. NOT TO KNOW what the Russkis are doing, what the Iranians are up to, or whom the Israelis are screwing. NOT KNOWING would be foolishness, where the fate of the world/'civilization' is, often quite literally, in the balance. Ignorance is right on the brink of irresponsibility because, in fact, the world really IS a pretty dangerous place.

So: Everybody spies on everybody else. How could it be otherwise? Johnson knew, via "illegal" phone taps, that Nixon and Kissinger were sabotaging the Paris Peace talks in '68, but "couldn't" reveal it cuz it was "illegally" obtained information, or so it is often alleged. So, too, I imagine that Carter, via the same expedients--"illegal surveillance"-- probably knew that William Casey and GHW Bush were engaged in illegal negotiations with the Iranian mullahs to pre-empt an October Surprise, but "couldn't/wouldn't" blow the whistle on the Raygooners treason.

So: Nobody's really unhappy when the Govt spies on "enemies," "antagonists," etc. No worries. It just gets "tetchy" when you begin to feel like you're the object of the power.

And, NSA spied and spies on EVERYBODY! That's its job, mission, and purpose. In the super-power world of "real-politik," it's just not possible to run an Empire without nearly total supervision and surveillance, domestically and abroad.  And it won't stop, despite all the lawz, regulationz, and rulez Congress can make--there'll STILL be room for plenty of "exceptions." The "law/rule/reg-makers" themselves will see to that.

Remember "Total Information Awareness," from the bad, old days? It "went away" after being exposed, right? Only it was just renamed something more innocuous. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/06/07/u-s-never-really-ended-creepy-total-information-awareness-program/ The Govt just completed a multi-billion-dollar/multi-million square foot 'information processing'  facility in the Utah desert. What does anyone suppose they're going to do there? Have rodeos? Soccer matches?

Technically, I suppose, "spying" on your own people is ethically questionable. But states/Governments do NOT have "morals." The US Govt has been spying on its own citizens since the Gilded Age, in the 19th Century. Mostly, the targets have been on the margins of society: Wobblies, Communists, Anarchists, labor movements, civil rights activists, etc. Until recently, nobody much complained. Now some (but not all) "every-day" citizens are feeling the pinch of marginality, and are uncomfortable...

Welllll: Pay-back's a bitch, innit, hippies?

Da Nooz: Skuled

 If there is one thing that the folks in ALEC, and the Bush crime family, and the Corporatizers, and the Charterizers, and the Privatizers all agree on, it is that schools, foremost among public services, should be conducted in accordance with "market principles." (If you have any doubt as to what those are, read Naomi Klein's invaluable book, The Shock Doctrine." Unfortunately for the business axis, it's just not true.

"Market-based educational reform" is an utter failure, and yet we still can’t shake the nasty, decaying effluent of its bad policy influence from our classrooms.
One of the more difficult things to impress upon people schooled from birth in the articles of faith of Capital, such as the"logic" and the "magic" of markets, as every, single citizen and resident of the USofA has been for every moment of the last 60 years at least, is that schools and other public services should NOT be subject to the same expectations as "businesses."

They perform different duties, do different jobs. This was illustrated for me in the following account, by a former, high-power, big-money entrepreneur, Codename: Blueberries.

The entrepreneur had been engaged as a motivational speaker at a teachers' in-service in a nearby town and, as an unabashed acolyte of the Friedman Free Markets model, had set about extolling the principles, and enjoining the teachers to adopt the model of markets in their schools. He noted a bit of a frosty reception, but it was during the Q&A after the speech that the inappropriateness of the whole speech was placed before him.

A questioner from the seats began by congratulating him on his success and the success of his product--ice cream, as it happened. The teacher, a woman, induced to speaker to admit how proud he was of his ice-cream, and his personal attention to the details, the immaculate machinery, the spotless plant, the quality of the ingredients, all the best that money could buy. Then she stuck him: "So," she said, "if you're down on the loading dock and a shipment of blueberries comes in, and they're not good enough, what do you do?"

And he knew she had him, because when he said, "I send them back," she then pointed out that she and her fellow teachers in the school don't have that luxury. They have to take what they get and do the best with that.

The Ed Beat: Personnel Issues

Ed Beat: It's Personnel



He Left His Job In Tallahassee: The biggest news in many education circles in the last week was the sudden, unexpected resignation of recently hired Florida State Ed. Sec, Tony Bennett, after it was revealed that he had personally intervened to change "standards" in the State of Indiana to improve the assessment of a charter school and to preserve its status, according to sources in St. Petersberg and elsewhere:

Bennett has been the center of controversy since the Associated Press reported that school grades in Indiana, where he previously worked, had been changed to benefit a political donor.

The AP reported (last week) that Bennett and his Indiana employees “frantically overhauled” the Hoosier State’s school-grading system last year when it looked like one of his political contributors’ schools might get a “C.” But in a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Bennett said it was “absurd” to believe he inflated grades to help Christel DeHann because of her political contributions to Bennett. 

According to the Miami Herald, the larger issue is over the ways the State should conduct evaluations and  whole schools should be assessed and ranked. These rankings are crucial to charter schools, especially, because they are the the forefront of the commodification of the public schools, and are supposed to operate within the frames of 'competition.' Bad grades for schools can cost the owners a lot of money. The alleged superiority of privatized schools and charters is a big selling point. Any data or scandal which undermines that presumption  of superiority.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~  

 

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
No Rhee-forms Are Good Reforms: Teach For American alum and well-placed corpoRatist "reformer" Michel Rhee, former "miracle-worker" administrator of the Washington, DC, schools and now a promoter of a scam called the "parental option," charter schools, and 'national standards,' is also having credibility difficulties since it has been revealed that the "miracles" she was alleged to have wrought in the DC schools were mainly accomplished with the strenuous application of smoke and mirrors. Noted education critic John Merrow, in April, took Rhee to task for her persistent obfuscation about her own involvement in reports that DC students' tests had been doctored to improve the district's appearance. Merrow also rehearsed Rhee's cronyist appointees and her lasting attachment to TFA:

The 37-year-old Michelle Rhee had been a surprise choice to lead the (DC) schools. After college, she joined Teach for America and taught for three years in a low-income school in Baltimore. After earning a graduate degree in public policy at Harvard, she took^[5] over a fledgling non-profit that recruits mid-career professionals into teaching, The New Teacher Project. In that role, she eventually ended up supervising 120 employees. As Chancellor, Rhee would be managing a school system with 55,000 students, 11,500 employees and a budget of nearly $200 million.

She surrounded herself with people with no experience running a large urban school system. Her deputy would be her best friend, Kaya Henderson, another former Teach for America corps member who was then Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at TNTP. She would be managing the District’s 11,500 employees.

Her Chief of Data and Accountability would be Erin McGoldrick, whom Rhee had met at Sacramento High School some years earlier and who was an avowed fan of Rhee. A classics major at Notre Dame, McGoldrick also studied public policy at UCLA. Although she was in charge of data analysis at the California Charter Schools Association when Rhee offered her the job, McGoldrick had no experience in Rhee’s ‘data-driven decision making,’ according to several reliable sources.

Rhee's skill as an educational 'grifter' has been documented:

She appears to have started her career by greatly overstating test score improvements during her Teach for America days;
As an administrator, she was charged with abusing her authority to political ends:
and covering up a major cheating scandal;
She lent her political capital to anti-labor measures only tangentially related to education (but vital to her allies);
She oversaw the creation of a convoluted metric that assigned the top ranks to schools she and her allies were responsible for (despite those schools' terrible performance on the very metrics Rhee had previously championed);
And she endorsed a Bobby Jindal  initiative which pretty much guaranteed wide-spread fraud (in Louisiana schools).

Meanwhile her "gift for grift" in the Louisiana deal has been reported by no less reliable source than the redoubtable Charlie Pierce, of Esquire. Inexplicably (or not), Rhee still retains the apparent trust of US Dept. of Ed. Sec, Arne Duncan.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
TFA BASHING, Cont'd.: My distaste for Teach For America is boundless. The director, Wendy Kopp, and her minions have taken what was once a pretty bad, thoroughly neo-colonialist idea (The "rub-off theory": Put poor kids in classrooms with upper-class college grads to be inspired) and advanced it into the national educational dialogue by becoming, in effect a "school for scabs" where poor, struggling, and/or impoverished school/districts use the slightly trained TFA "teachers" to augment and then replace skilled profesionals in the classroom. The melody lingers on.

Twenty-four years running, the rap on Teach for America (TFA) is a sampled, re-sampled, burned-out record: The organization’s five-week training program is too short to prepare its recruits to teach, especially in chronically under-served urban and rural districts; corps members only have to commit to teach for two years, which destabilizes schools, undermines the teaching profession, and undercuts teachers unions; and TFA, with the help of its 501(c)4 spin-off, Leadership for Educational Equity, is a leading force in the movement to close “failing” schools, expand charter schools, and tie teachers’ job security to their students’ standardized test scores. Critics burn TFA in internet-effigy across the universe of teacher listservs and labor-friendly blogs. Last July, it earned Onion fame: an op-ed entitled “My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids,” followed by a student’s take, “Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher?”

The reach of the organization is appalling.

TFA’s resources are enormous. The organization’s total assets for the 2011 fiscal year topped $350 million. That includes eight-figure support from the Broad, Walton, and Gates Foundations, leading bankrollers of campaigns to privatize school districts and ramp up standardized testing. The TFA orbit is also growing. It now has more than 10,000 corps members in 48 regions, as well as more than 32,000 alumni. Districts pay thousands in fees to TFA for each corps member in addition to their salaries—at the expense of the existing teacher workforce. Chicago, for example, is closing 48 schools and laying off 850 teachers and staff while welcoming 350 corps members. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans cut 7,500 school staff, converted the majority of its schools to charters, and, between 2005 and 2010, saw its share of black teachers drop from 73 percent to 56 percent. Over the past five years, TFA expanded its Greater New Orleans corps from 85 teachers to 375. (Emphasis supplied.)

 Education is becoming a decaying carcass around which all the grifters and vultures collect to feed at the public's expense:

The 11,000 alumni who attended TFA’s 20-year anniversary summit in 2011 got to hear from charter boosters ranging from Harlem Children’s Zone CEO Geoffrey Canada and StudentsFirst CEO Michelle Rhee to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Colorado State Senator Michael Johnston. TFA alums are principals at half of KIPP charter schools—which two alumni founded—and the majority of Achievement First schools. Of the corps members TFA claims remain in education after their two-year stint (a  hotly contested figure), administrators and extracurricular leaders are included.

 If TFA comes to your town or school, remember they're the genteel shock-troops of the "Rhee-form" movement.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
What's Wrong With Teacher Assessment Reforms?: Much of teacher discomfort with "rhee-formers" and their plans is embodied in what are called "value-added" assessments and pay and promotion based upon it. Here, in just about three minutes, is what is wrong with those "value added" and "merit pay" schemes for teacher "assessment and accountability:




~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
It's A War-Zone Out There: It is possible that some folks have not been affedted by it yet, but there is a silent, deadly conflict being waged in the public sphere between the Grasping Oligarchz and Plutocratz, who are adamantly opposed to ANY notion of the "commons" or of public sovereignty, and the rest of us. Schools have become a battleground in the conflict.

The terrain, described recently by economist Michael Hudson, in Counterpoint, looks like this: The depth of this has been described by economist Michael Hudson:

. . . financial elites are demanding privatization sell-offs from debt-strapped governments. Pressure is being brought to bear on Detroit to sell off its most valuable paintings and statues from its art museums. The idea is to sell their artworks for tycoons to buy as trophies, with the money being used to pay bondholders. . . .  . . .[A] new neo-feudal rentier class [is] eager to buy roads to turn into toll roads, to buy parking-meter rights (as in Chicago’s notorious deal), to buy prisons, schools and other basic infrastructure. The aim is to build financial charges and tollbooth rents into the prices charged for access to these essential, hitherto public services.

Blogger/critic Michael D. Yates observes: "Not only will working people become increasingly insecure, but to secure essential services, they will have to pay the new owners monopoly prices."

 The flashpoint of the war being waged by capital and its political allies against the public provision of services is education, especially that which serves poor and minority communities. Billionaires like Bill Gates (Microsoft) and the Walton family (Walmart) have established organizations and contributed enormous sums of money to do two things. First, they seek to revolutionize the way in which students are taught. Here they have achieved great victories, with two presidents enacting sweeping laws: No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Both condition federal aid to schools upon what has been described as “teaching to the test.” Literature, art, music, and all critical education are to be sacrificed so that children do well on standardized examinations. Then, how schools and their teachers fare, including whether or not a school continues to exist, depends on students’ scores.  Second, these plutocrat “reformers” want to alter radically the way in which schools are organized. The best way to describe their aim is to say that they want them schools to resemble assembly lines, with students as outputs and teachers as assembly-line-like mechanisms who do not think or instill in their students the capacity to conceptualize critically and become active participants in a democratic society. And this Taylorization of schooling has a military-like component, with pupils expected to react to commands with rote discipline and respond unthinkingly to rewards for appropriate behavior.( Emphasis supplied.)

"... financial elites are demanding privatization sell-offs from debt-strapped governments. Pressure is being brought to bear on Detroit to sell off its most valuable paintings and statues from its art museums. The idea is to sell their artworks for tycoons to buy as trophies, with the money being used to pay bondholders. ... [A] new neo-feudal rentier class [is] eager to buy roads to turn into toll roads, to buy parking-meter rights (as in Chicago's notorious deal), to buy prisons, schools and other basic infrastructure. The aim is to build financial charges and tollbooth rents into the prices charged for access to these essential, hitherto public services."
Not only will working people become increasingly insecure, but to secure essential services, they will have to pay the new owners monopoly prices.
- See more at: http://portside.org/print/2013-07-22/war-public-school-teachers#sthash.PiZVC0jX.dpuf

"... financial elites are demanding privatization sell-offs from debt-strapped governments. Pressure is being brought to bear on Detroit to sell off its most valuable paintings and statues from its art museums. The idea is to sell their artworks for tycoons to buy as trophies, with the money being used to pay bondholders. ... [A] new neo-feudal rentier class [is] eager to buy roads to turn into toll roads, to buy parking-meter rights (as in Chicago's notorious deal), to buy prisons, schools and other basic infrastructure. The aim is to build financial charges and tollbooth rents into the prices charged for access to these essential, hitherto public services." - See more at: http://portside.org/2013-07-22/war-public-school-teachers#sthash.lnTLCEi4.dpuf

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~ A heroine of mine: Not-quite-finally, today, here's a recent contribution from one of my favorite, practical thinkers on these matters, Deborah Meiers, the ground-breaking founder of the inspirational and innovative schools lumped together as "Central park West," in NYC. Her book "The Power of Their Ideas" hasa been an inspiration to twenty-five years of teacher-educators and pre-service students. Here is a recent, thoughtful essay which is aimed at "early childhood" educators, but could be read with profit by any and all with any skin in the game.

 (C)an we shift the conversation from the “accountability/testing” mania to a real meaty discussion about how learning takes place. Maybe we have to dig deeper into what purposes we expect schooling to serve, or each step forward or back may represent just a new no-nothing fad. Until then we are avoiding the BIG question, “accountable for what?”

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
 Finally: Your Weekly Ravitch...

Ed Beat: Hard Work; Starvation; I'm Flying!; Deformity; Hike! (& More)

Ed Beat: Hard Work; Starvation; I'm Flying!; Deformity; Hike! (& More)


Ask ANYBODY! Teaching is a LOT harder than anybody ever thinks it is:

Have you ever watched professional athletes and gawked at how easy they make it look? Kobe Bryant weaves through five opposing players, sinking the ball into the basket without even glancing in its direction. Brett Favre spirals a football 100 feet through the air, landing it in the arms of a teammate running at full speed. Does anyone have any delusions that they can do what Kobe and Brett do?

The author then asks, sensibly, why do folks grant less skill or talent to good teachers? This piece, from a blog I hadn't seen before, is a very tidy, closely argued, thoughtful rejoinder to those who make light of teaching as a profession. I heartily recommend it to your attention. Might provided a needed jolt of professional esteem which is too often withheld or denied.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Starve the Beast: One way in which states and local school districts are trying to further reduce the dreaded power that teachers are said to have over young minds is to replace "teachers" with "baby-sitters." This has been occurring all over the country, in districts wealthy and poor. Just as at universities, adjunct faculty are displacing and replacing tenured faculty, so to in schools, "alternatively certified" teachers are supplanting experienced faculty.

Teach for America puts "teachers" in classrooms in (usually) predominantly poor, urban and rural schools after only FIVE weeks of training.  TFA supplies a relatively miniscule fraction of the alterntively certified, too. Troops-to-Teachers, a program begun in 1994 directed many are former military into classrooms, and both the Bushevik and the LowBar regimes have actively recruited. TFA has recently begun to recruit military veterans, too.

The chart below illustrates the swiftness with which these changes have occurred.





~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
In a similar vein: Blogger Julian Vasquez Heilig offers the following thought game:
 

He writes: "Unbelievably, I have travelled more than 20,000 miles over the past five weeks— Brazil, Princeton, New York City, Las Vegas and Oregon. Imagine a scenario where I showed up at the airport and the airline employee gave me the following choices:

1) You can fly on an airplane today with a pilot with 30 hours of alternative pilot certification training. 2) You can fly on an airplane today with a pilot who has five weeks of training in a special pilots corp. 3) You can fly on an airplane today with a pilot who has been certified to fly the plane and has a year of teaching experience learning curriculum planning, pedagogy, and classroom management. I mean flying the plane…

It's a powerful parable, but it's not the only point he's making. Again, I commend your close attention to what he's got to say.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~ Deformed Reform: One of the resources I have grown to trust over the last three decades during which I have been engaged in the world of education is Rethinking Schools. They're reliably authentic, well-researched, and authoritative. Here's their take on one of the core issues of the 'reform' movement: the Core Curriculum:

We know there have been many positive claims made for the Common Core:

• That it represents a tighter set of smarter standards focused on developing critical learning skills instead of mastering fragmented bits of knowledge.
• That it requires more progressive, student-centered teaching with strong elements of collaborative and reflective learning.
• That it equalizes the playing field by raising expectations for all children, especially those suffering the worst effects of the “drill and kill” test prep norms of the recent past.

We also know that many creative, heroic teachers are seeking ways to use this latest reform wave to serve their students well. Especially in the current interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests, some teachers have embraced the Common Core as an alternative to the scripted commercial formulas of recent experience, and are trying to use the space opened up by the Common Core transition to do positive things in their classrooms.
We'd like to believe these claims and efforts can trump the more political uses of the Common Core project. But we can't.

That is because it is a tissue of lies, exaggerations, dissembling and top-down imposition of  what amounts to ED Hirsch's "trivial pursuits" version of the curriculum, nationalized, standardized and accountable-ized.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~ Ed Beat: Hard Work; Starvation; I'm Flying!; Deformity; Hike! (& More)

Hut-Hut-Hut: What if the NFL had a standardized playbook? Asked nobody ever. Though it is another interesting extrapolative exercise.

NFL Adopts Common Core Playbook–Copying Education Reforms
by John J. Viall
(Washington, D. C.) In a surprise news conference today U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell announced plans to improve NFL performance in coming seasons.
Unlike news conferences on education, which draw sparse crowds, representatives from hundreds of newspapers, television and radio networks, and ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN for Kids and ESPN Tales from the Crypt were in attendance.
Mr. Duncan spoke first. “We are pleased to announce a partnership involving the U. S. Department of Education and the NFL,” he explained. “We will call this new effort to improve pro football ‘Race to the End Zone.’ All the leading school reform experts insist this approach will dramatically improve the quality of football play.”

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~

Your Weekly Ravitch: North Carolina's troglodytic, peckerwood Legislature and Tea-bagger Governor are working hard to cut the heart out of public schools in the state. A Tar-heel teacher writes:

Eliminating $110 million for teacher assistants, eliminating teacher tenure, eliminating class size limits for K-3, no raise again this year, all of these unnecessary cuts wipe out three decades of steady progress. The most damaging is allowing for our hard earned tax dollars to be transferred to private schools. The privatization of public schools threatens the very cornerstone of our democracy and violates our state constitution.

No small amount of the impetus to undercut, impoverish, asnd disable public schools comes form agents of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

Founded only two years after the release of the infamous (though barely known) Powell Memorandum, which outlined how the financial interests could defeat the growing populism and egalitarianism of the 60s, ALEC epitomizes and crystallizes the document's underlying principles.

ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the "Stand Your Ground" legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald's, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy's, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there's still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

There is MUCH more to be said about the pernicious and malign influe4nces of the Grasping Oligarchz and Plutocratz. I wouldn't want to be a spoiler.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Meanwhile:  It's not teachers only who are feeling the sting of stingy school boards and federal bureaucrats, to say nothing of the bite of the privatizers' profits.  School support staff, too, are getting screwed. Nothing highlights the differences like comparing a union school with an "unorganized," charter school. That's what an Alternet writer did recently:

At the end of the 2012-2013 school year, two of America’s largest school districts, Chicago and Philadelphia, closed a total of 73 public schools between the two cities. Thousands of employees were laid off, including many food service, janitorial and security workers. In Philadelphia alone, 1,202 safety staffers who prevent violence when students aren’t in class, were laid off.  
These cutbacks are only the latest instances of a sustained effort to cut costs by eliminating unionized positions in public schools either by hiring support staff through private entities—like Aramark or Sodhexo—or by replacing traditional schools with charters, which are usually aren’t covered by a school district’s union contracts. There’s a vast difference between working in an unionized public school district and working in an unorganized school of any kind. For employees, non-teacher positions at non-union schools usually means little job or retirement security, limited (if any) health insurance, sick leave, vacations, and much lower pay.(Emphases supplied).

Once again, Chicago is at the epicenter.

~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~