Campbell Brown's Friends

Weekly Standard writer Mark Hemingway is in the December issue sticking up for Campbell Brown with the kind of PR fluff that usually costs big bucks. It's clear that Campbell Brown doesn't need friends. But it appears she's looking for something else.

In "Who's Afraid of Campbell Brown? (Teachers' unions, and for good reason)" Hemingway provides a dispatch from an alternate universe where teacher unions rule and Brown is a unjustly victimized humanitarian. It's not nearly as interesting as it could have been had Hemingway also checked out some of the recordings from the corruption trial of disgraced NY Senate Leader Dean Skelos, because those recordings give us a bit more information about Brown's friends. But we'll get back to that-- first, a look at Hemingway's piece.

He opens with a look at Brown's modest office arrangements, and as will be the case throughout the piece, uses a bit of misdirection to avoid including some details. For instance, after describing Brown's low-rent office, he writes "But don't let this modest arrangement fool you" but the next part of that sentence is not "Brown has been given a $4 million budget to run her website." Nor (spoiler alert) is he ever going to mention that Brown's site requires a reportorial commitment to never run anti-charter stories. Instead, he wants us to know that Brown is parked on the moral high road.

Brown has promised that the site won’t shy away from advocacy and opinion—which it labels “opinion”—but at the same time she insists that her mission is not political. “My whole point about school reform is it’s not partisan. It’s not,” she says. “It’s a moral issue.”

And who is standing in the way of her righteous crusade? Three guesses

The trouble is, the last thing America’s teachers’ unions want is real reform, and they certainly don’t want Campbell Brown leading the charge. Far from making education a moral issue, they’re counting on it remaining a partisan one.

Exactly what reform charge is Brown leading? So far it appears that mostly she is leading the charge to establish herself as an important player, and she's not doing well. Hemingway will offer his warmed-over claim that the union "got to" the Democratic candidates who skipped Brown's Education Summit in Iowa, but he doesn't address who "got to" the eight GOP candidates who skipped her similar session in New Hampshire (the six who showed up were Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, Christie, Jindal and Walker so she didn't squeeze much juice out of that group). Brown keeps trying to sell the "I'm so important the unions want to silence me" narrative, but it seems more likely that Brown just isn't that important. And her desire to inject education into the campaign would be admirable, if it were not so clearly attached to her privatization and teacher-busting agenda).

But in Hemingway's alternate universe, the unions' reach is long and strong.  In his universe, even Obama has "appeased" unions (by killing off DC's choice program). This is because "all meaningful education reforms hinge on greater accountability and erosion of the ironclad union protections that keep bad, even criminal, teachers in classrooms" and so unions are all about the status quo (except that the status quo these days is the reformster agenda of high-stakes testing and free-range charters). But again, our narrative brings us back to Campbell Brown, Education's Joan of Arc:

Given that teachers’ unions are used to making some of the most powerful politicians in the country dance on a string, they’re not happy about the emergence of Campbell Brown as a politically influential voice in education reform. She’s well-connected, independent, and has deep pockets. Perhaps most important, she’s a former A-list broadcast journalist, and her communication skills are superb. Consequently, union leaders don’t just disagree with Brown—they feel intense personal hatred.

This is the kind of writing that's hard to respond to because I don't even recognize the reality Hemingway speaks of. In my reality, there is not a single national-stage politician who clearly stands for public education, teachers or teachers unions. In my reality, rank and file teachers are repeatedly complaining about national union leaders who gladly tie themselves up so that they can dance to whatever tune the politicians pipe. Are there people who "intensely hate" Brown personally? I don't know. She tweeted at me once. It wasn't unpleasant. But mostly I don't think much about her. In the reformster landscape, she's one more well-funded pro-charter anti-teacher shill, probably a little less effective than many.

But Hemingway marshals a list of articles that were inspired by some mysterious teacher union memo. People keep asking who is funding her! People keep bringing up that her husband is a "Wall Street figure" and neocon who helped put positive spin on a war from which he allegedly profited. Hemingway lists all these unfun questions about Brown-- but he answers none of them. This is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest moment in a piece that is not exactly awash in rigor-- if Brown, who is pushing charters like crazy, is funded by people who stand to profit from charters, that matters. If it doesn't matter, then it also doesn't matter which politicians get teacher union money and support. Hemingway cannot have it both ways, but that's what he is demanding.

Then back to Brown's crusade against tenure, which is old news at this point (as is the lawsuit that was going to make her a player, but didn't). Hemingway also re-fries the old beans of a Diane Ravitch prettiness quote (calling her a union spokesperson, which is, again from some alternate universe).

Brown bemoans the lack of someone to engage with her, and again, this does not seem to be so much about the need to fix education as the need for Brown to find someone who will give her stature by treating her like she's a Big Deal. She wants someone from the opposition to debate her thoughtfully, and Hemingway neener-neeners that they're all afraid (she should take a page from the former failed chancellor of DC schools, who became a household ed reform name while steadfastly refusing to debate anybody). I believe there are many public education advocates who fit the bill of knowledgeable and interested in progress; I'm just not sure why they should feel the need to debate a self-appointed charter advocate, any more than I can think of a reason that the Secretary of Education should give me a call just because I'm a self-appointed education blogger.

Brown via Hemingway wades into other issues like testing and Common Core, but it's clear that's not her area of passion (or at least not one where it's clear which way the wind is blowing). But then she winds back around to choice, and heats up again.

Again, Hemingway lives in some alternate universe where Obama and the unions have fought school choice. In my universe, the Obama administration has thrown plenty of money and support at charters, and the unions have been exceptionally mild-mannered in doing anything that might resemble opposition of it. In fact, the problem with much of Hemingway's narrative is that it pictures the NEA and AFT as staunch defenders of traditional public schools at the same time that rank and file members have had to repeatedly try to force their unions to do things like call out Duncan (who was only implementing Obama policies, but the unions would never, ever say anything bad about an Obama policy). In other words, there are plenty of us who wish that the union had as much power and will to oppose ed reform as he imagines it does.

Hemingway lists some of the big failures in the ed reform biz, like Gates and Zuckerberg (and even, wierdly, Shyamalan), and asks how little old Campbell Brown can hope to succeed where they have failed.

Well, a little self-awareness goes a long way. Campbell Brown understands the roadblocks thrown in front of all of the wealthy dilettantes who came before her, and she intends to defy expectations. For one thing, far from trading on her celebrity, she’d already said goodbye to her high-flying career in broadcast journalism years before starting the Partnership for Educational Justice and the Seventy Four.

Not trading on her celebrity? I'm not faulting her for it-- she is who she is-- but pretending that her celebrity isn't a thing that factors into her new line of work is just silly. In fact, let's ask someone else to chime in on Campbell Brown's celebrity:

DEAN SKELOS:  "I'm going into the city, meeting with some billionaires ... on school tax credit stuff - "

ADAM SKELOS:  "Who are you meeting with?

DEAN SKELOS:  " Campbell Brown."

ADAM SKELOS:  "Ohhh... "

DEAN SKELOS:  "Okay."

ADAM SKELOS:  "Any financial ... people?"

DEAN SKELOS:  "Yeah, you know the ... uhh ...the reporter, former reporter ...a whole bunch of them(i.e. billionaire charter promoters) and I'm having lunch with a bunch of them. Then I'm going to - "

ADAM SKELOS:  "Dad, you’ve gotta ...you've gotta take these names down for me.”

DEAN SKELOS:  "I got 'em all.  I got 'em."

ADAM SKELOS:  "All right."

That's a transcript from some of the government wiretaps collected for the corruption trial of Dean Skelos who, at the time of this conversation, was hunting for a job for his son (you can listen to the recordings at the link). And so he set up a meeting with Campbell Brown and some billionaire charter backers.

So Campbell Brown doesn't need any more friends. She has friends who give her $4 million a year to run a charter advocacy website and very rich friends who help her meet with influential New York politicians and friends with deep pockets and even friends who write hugely complimentary profiles for conservative magazines.

No, what Brown needs is some enemies. She needs someone to take her on in public debate, or attack her on some high-profile platform. She needs to fight the Obama administration, maybe, she thinks, except that they are for pretty much most of the things she's for. She needs the unions to really come at her (she took a weakish swipe at them this weekend, about which I'll write elsewhere) and really draw some public blood so that people can see her really fighting hard, but the national unions are kind of soft and flabby and haven't shown much inclination to really fight reformy programs and in fact have cozied up to the Clinton campaign which will probably usher in even more programs that Brown actually agrees with.

Brown has unwittingly underlined our problem. She needs somebody with Stature and Importance to be her enemy, but there are very few people with Stature and Importance who are standing up for public education and teachers, and those few people don't seem to have the time or inclination to waste energy on an ed reform bit player.

Maybe Brown can start by going toe to toe with some C-level bloggers. Or maybe the next time she's having a backroom meeting with her billionaire charter buddies, she can ask them to buy her a sparring partner.

Naughty Union Spending

Campbell Brown's pet PR project went after some union blood this weekend with revelations about AFT, NEA and UFT spending. 

The lead is that between 2011 and 2014, the unions spent $5.7 on travel and hotel expenses. That's a lot of money.

Now, when we start breaking it down, there are some line items that seem a bit of a stretch in the outrage department. For instance, the AFT spent $6,700 at Walt Disney World, which is one day's admission for about 65 adults (who don't plan to eat during that day).

But the list also includes cruise tickets, international air travel, and fancy shmancy hotels. The 74 admits that the spending amounts to a small sliver of the total disbursements by the union, and that some of the travel and expense is an outgrowth of international union connections and even some humanitarian work.

The narrative here is a predictable one for the74-- those dollars are dues dollars and union members don't want their money spent on all this foolishness. Writer Naomi Nix has a nifty quote from Jade Thompson, an anti-"mandatory"-dues activist about how much the $800 of dues would mean to a working family. "It's our money," says Thompson, who probably meant to say, "It's our money that we only received in the first place because a union helped us negotiate a fair contract." And we should go back to the sliver. The article, for instance, marks NEA as spending $2.2 million over four years on "luxury travel and hotels." At three million members, that comes to about 18 cents a year in dues money.

But my absolute favorite nominee for Journalistic Insightfulness would be this part of Nix's article:

“They might have very good explanations for this. They might not,” Stanford University politics professor Terry Moe said of the spending on hotels and travel.

Well, you know. I think that just about covers it.

Moe also claims that "if you listen to them." the unions claim they are spending it all on collective bargaining. I don't know. I've been listening to them a long time, and I never got that impression. Moe claims that union spending on politics is like some kind of secret. I'm pretty sure he's wrong.

Look, I'm the last person to defend union spending patterns. As a local president, I went to region meetings that came complete with meals. I've sat through the arguments about whether to spend local dues money on things like retirement dinners and social gatherings. And I've been the teacher grumbling over state-level union people who wear suits that are nicer than anything I'll ever wear ever. There are some items in this article that do make me cringe.

I wish the unions operated on a shoestring and everyone traveled coach and stayed in a yurt. But I also understand that teachers give up time and effort to serve, and if the only time they can meet is during mealtime, then they should eat. I understand that maintaining a stable of experts who can be sent out to any local in need costs money, bot for maintaining and sending. I understand that if I want someone to go represent me in the big leagues, it helps if they look as if they belong in the big leagues. I understand all that, and I'll still vote for Bernie and not Hillary, because I want to believe in a world where it doesn't cost money to play in the big leagues. Of course, I also want to believe in a world in which you don't really need a union because the People In Charge already listen to employees and make sure those employees are treated well. 

 This is a yurt







I wish my union didn't spend big bucks on fancy hotels, especially because when they do, it makes it possible for outfits like the74 to do union hit pieces that throw around big numbers to make the union look bad. But this article was a fishing expedition, looking for a way to slam unions and support the narrative that unions need to be stripped of their ability to collect dues and gain members.

 

Brown Calls for End of Public Education

Well, at least she just put it right out there.

In a piece at the Daily Beast, Campbell Brown calls for US politicians to follow the example of  the UK Prime Minister David Cameron. And what example is that?

Last week, addressing his party for the first time since re-election in May, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called for an end to the country’s traditional public school system, endorsing instead a nationwide conversion to academies, which are essentially the British equivalent of charter schools—publicly funded, but with greater freedom over what they teach and how they are run.

And Brown includes this quote from Cameron:


“So my next ambition is this,” Cameron told a nationally televised audience, “five hundred new free schools. Every school an academy…and yes—local authorities running schools a thing of the past.”

And just in case you're wondering if I'm using context to make Brown seem more radical than she actually is, here are more of her own words;

In a rational world, hosannas might greet a head of state who used his power to reduce inequality.

There are several astonishing ideas folded into that sentence, but the most astonishing is that a Head of State has the power to reduce inequality. But of course Cameron is not so much interested in reducing inequality as he is interested in reducing democratic control of vital public institutions.

But that, apparently, is what Brown loves about him. She dismissing his opponents (and the similar-sounding opponents of charters and choice in the US) by mocking their talk of privatization and anti-democratic reform. 

[Addendum] I realized a bit after posting that some clarification is called for. British public schools both are and are not like US public schools. In their earliest form, they were not unlike the earliest version of US public schools-- local folks band together to set up a school for their kids. Somewhere in the middle of their growth, they came to resemble what we would call private schools, and then in more modern times have become more closely connected to each other and to the state-run school system. If you see US public schools as "government schools," created and operated by the state, then these will look like a different thing. But if like me you see US public schools as created and operated by locally chosen citizens, then British "public schools" look rather similar to the US public school. Either way, Cameron and Brown want to see it all replaced with a charter system.

Brown recognizes, sadly, that an American President doesn't have the power to simply erase democratic process with a wave of his hand (though she should have acknowledged the artful Duncan/Obama circumnavigation of the law with waivers), but she wants to at least get some red meat from the candidates.

Brown spends several paragraphs chicken littling education, throwing around fake statistics like three quarters of American students are unprepared for college in reading, math, and science (though she doesn't cite her source, I'm guessing it's the study that looked for students who scored high in all areas of the subject matter ACT, in which case her stat is twelve kinds of bogus). Seriously-- if three quarters of American students aren't capable of attending college, who are all those students on college campuses? She also throws in the old baloney that Back in the Golden Age, US students were absolutely awesome. That's simply not true. No matter how you slice it.

But she wants Presidential candidates to speak up, and to do it now:

Well, here’s a nudge: There is no need to wait to advocate until you are elected. And no need to wait until someone asks you. Seriously.

Because she really wanted to ask them. She wanted more than a middling six GOP candidates and way more flat-out zero Dems to show up for her education beauty pageants. Though I'll give her credit- she does get one assessment of the situation on the money:

Every candidate has the stage; the Republicans have used it to fuss unproductively over the Common Core. The Democrats have all but refused to speak.

But mostly she wants somebody to step up and show the wisdom and fire and determination of David Cameron and call for an end to this democracy baloney. Our beloved leader (whoever that turns out to be) will decide where schools should be and who should run them, and our beloved leader will decide what students (particular the poor ones who can't just escape to private school) need and what they deserve and what they are going to get.


Give Brown credit-- what other reformsters hint at and dance around and court with dog whistles, Brown just goes ahead and calls for directly and clearly-- an end to public schools controlled locally by citizens elected by the taxpayers. Public schools must be shut down. Democratic local control must be ended. The government, run by a Beloved Leader, will decide all. This is a nice, clear reminder that the attempt to shut down public education goes hand in hand with an assault on democracy itself.

Brown Wants More NY Teacher Blood

When reflecting on the new laws gutting the teaching profession in NY, I mused that Campbell Brown must be bummed that Andrew Cuomo had done an end run around her. But apparently teaching has not been sufficiently eviscerated to suit the Browninator.

Per Politico's morning education grab-bag, Brown is rolling on ahead with her lawsuit to strip tenure protections from all teachers in New York.

It's an interesting stance. After all, the new NY rules subordinate tenure to testing-- Carol Burris has the clearest breakdown on the new rules at Washington Post today, and it's clear that NY now will give teachers a couple of strikes, and then they're out. Two bad years of test results (which trump any observations by human life forms) seem like enough to end the career of any NY teachers, or keep those careers from ever starting in the first place. So why would Brown still want to tie tenure to the legal whipping post?

Here's the quote from Politico

While the budget reforms have promise, Brown said it’s still way too hard for districts to lay off bad teachers, especially those with seniority. “We are glad that Albany appears to have finally woken up to the crisis in our public schools. But make no mistake, they have a long way to go and there is much work ahead,” Brown told Morning Education. “This will have no bearing on the legal case moving forward.”

This can only mean one of two things:

1) Brown agrees that Cuomo's proposed evaluation method (one part test scores, one part evaluations mostly by strangers) is a lousy way of identifying whether teachers are any good or not. If this is the case, I look forward to hearing her articulate what she thinks needs to be tweaked. If this is not "far enough," what does she think an evaluation should look like? 100% test driven? 100% drive-by evaluation by strangers? Please, Ms. Brown-- spill!

2) Brown wants to be able to fire teachers for reasons other than poor job performance. If the state is going to measure how well teachers do their job (not measure it well, I know, but stay with me here) and fire them if they do their job poorly, and that's not good enough for Brown, then she must want to be able to fire them (especially the senior ones) for other reasons. Could we be on the cusp of hearing a reformsters finally say out loud and in public, "We want to be able to save money by firing the teachers who get paid the most!" Will Brown articulate why being able to fire a tenured teacher for being a bad teacher is somehow not enough for her?

Of course, there's a third possibility, which is that Brown's lawsuit is not about making changes in NY tenure law, but about having a platform from which to reduce the political clout of teachers and their union (although, again, moot point--why bother trying to reduce the clout of the ineffectual NY teachers union at this point). When Brown hired Incite and former Dem political operatives, it was not to build the case, but to mount a PR offensive against teachers. And she made damn sure that hers was the only such lawsuit being filed.

So what more does Campbell Brown want? Does she want teachers to be fireable for any reason at all, from bad hairs to wrong politics to costing too much money? Does she want them to be discredited in the public eye? Does she just want them to be sadder? I guess we'll see in the months ahead. I hope somebody in the court or press has the balls to ask her exactly why her lawsuit needs to go forward.

Live by the sword...

So CPAC happened this week, at which various GOP future candidates try to see if they can win a little conservative love. And that means that Common Core had to be trotted out for ceremonial abuse, like a disgraced former party officer in Communist China.

There was a CPAC panel that addressed the Core, and Patrick Brennan at National Review said it was "...not good." The American Conservative also covered the panel, which included such educational experts as Phyllis Schafly.

The panel featured that kind of Common Core opposition that creates a bit of a conundrum for those of us who support traditional public education. Because some of the people who oppose Common Core are (and I'm sorry to say this, because some of you are readers of this blog) peddling baloney. This is how challenging the Common Core debate has become-- here we are standing in front of our house telling our neighbor, "Do not take that sack of poisonous snakes into your home with your family," and we find ourselves joined on the sidewalk by another neighbor who joins in, hollering, "Yeah, don't take those snakes in there! They will make all the electrical circuits spit blood and cause your paint to peel."

So CPAC included people who somehow blamed CCSS for the teaching of sex education and evolution, as well as the usual concerns about informational reading being code for liberal propaganda. This was intermixed with legitimate points, such as the observation that there's not a lick of evidence to support the notion that broadly-accepted standards fix much of anything.

But mostly what CPAC featured re: Common Core was the Whiplash Brigade, a group of aspiring Presidential wanna-bes who lined up to take pot-shots at the policy initiative that had been, just a few years ago, their educational BFF. Haley Sweetland Edwards at Time noted the phenomenon that featured all the candidate hopefuls downplaying, distancing and demolishing their previous CCSS support. Well, all but one. Jeb Bush continues to signal that he is prepared to fight and die on Mount Common Core. Bush, however, reportedly depends on busloads of high-priced friends to back him, so that battle is not going well.

So who will hold Jindal and Christie and Walker and Huckabee accountable for their flip-floppage?

None other than newly-minted reformstress Campbell Brown, who took to the pages of the Washington Post to throw the "P" word at the assembled hopefuls-- pandering.

Pandering is a great word. Its definition, of course, is "offering support for a policy with which I disagree." Politicians who support policies I agree with are showing wisdom and vision, or at a minimum, smart realpolitik sense.

Brown lays out the history of Jindal and Christie re: Common Core and boils their defection down to this sentence:

All this, of course, is not about education. Or facts. 

Her outrage that these politicians are making political choices for political reasons mirrors an argument often used by reformsters in arguments about the Core-- why are you bringing up these political points? why make this issue about politics instead of discussing the educational merits?

How dare these politicians abandon CCSS because desertion id politically expedient?

Well, those who live by political expediency die by political expediency.

Jindal, Christie, Walker, and a host of other politicians did not ever support the Core because they had looked at it and determined that it was a sound educational package. They did not have a team of blue ribbon teachers examine the standards in order to render a solid educational judgment by which politicians might be guided. Heck, in many cases, the governors threw state support behind the standards before they were even written!

Nor were the CCSS birthed in education in the first place. They were created by corporate interests at the behest of politicians (or maybe vice versa). From the earliest sparks, they were created with an eye on the political angle, not by asking how can we create great educational standards, but how can we get some standards adopted by the entire country.

State leaders were convinced that it would be politically expedient to adopt the standards, that like most political education playmaking, there would be plenty of upside and no downside (remember those days not so long ago when saying you were for better schools did not start a cranky debate?). The leaders would adopt the standards, the standards would be driven down through the educational system, and leaders would get to call themselves part of a great transformative movement that made US education awesome.

Guys like Jindal and Christie were never looking at the educational effects or the best interests of students. They were doing political calculus, and the CCSS forefathers were cheering them on.

It's very hard to change the rules of these games in mid-contest. Core proponents wanted the standards to become victorious in a game played by the rules of politics and power, and that's what they got. Sad for them that they didn't anticipate how those rules could work against them one day, but they can't cry "foul" because no foul. By the rules of the game they set out to play, dropping the core because it's politically expedient to do so is right there in the rulebook.

Jeb's National Education Summit

It's almost November and that means it's time to start making our plans to attend Bush III's National Education Summit, brought to you by your friends at Jeb Bush for President 2016 Foundation for Excellence in Education. It's a giant reformsterpalooza. (For some great stories from previous summits, read here and here.)

This year's theme is Unlocking Student Achievement: Choice * Accountability and it provides a great template for how we can peddle all of the regular reformster wares even as we completely scrub them of any reference to the Common Core. Bush III has been scrubbing all of the royal presidential educational advocacy materials lately, having noticed that being a Common Core Adorer is not winning him big love from the conservative wing of the GOP. Note this fundraising letter that completely avoids any mention of Bush III's previous policy BFF.

The national conference may be Common Core Free, but it is still stacked tall with reformy baloney. Here are the sessions you can expect to enjoy if you attend, and to save you time, I'll go ahead and predict the takeaways for each right now.

After Bush III's opening keynote (still working on a title, I guess), will be followed by these strategy sessions:

Measurement 2.0: Elevating students by testing what you teach

"States are adopting more rigorous academic standards" is about as close as we get to acknowledging that the Core exist (though if we're talking in present tense "dumping and distancing themselves from" might make a better sentence middle here).

But add to your stack of 1001 Statements That Prove CCSS and Tests Cannot Be Decoupled this sentence:

A standard without accurate measurement and strong accountability quickly becomes optional.

You can't kill the tests without killing the standards, and don't think for a moment that reformsters don't understand that. At any rate, this session focuses on the search for a super-duper test that is impervious to test prep and rote learning, and which measures critical thinking and depth of understanding. We will hear from four states about their search for this mythical test. Since the four states are Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi and Florida (Pam Stewart will be there, perhaps to explain why tests should be administered to dying children), so I think we can cut to the chase, which is that nobody yet has the slightest clue how to create this mythically awesome tests.

Autonomy vs. Accountability: The right mix for school choice programs

We're talking about private school choice programs here. Michael McShane will be leading the panel, which includes leaders from FEE, Step Up for Students, and Alliance for School Choice.  Let's go ahead and predict that the right mix is "Let them do whatever the hell they want."

Communicating Reform Part 1: Crafting e-messages people will read and watch

Given the short life and sad demise of the "Learn More. Go Further" PR campaign that Bush and Friends launched. complete with sad sponsored teacher twitter accounts, I'm not sure FEE is the group to give advice about this. But somebody must because " we are confronted by an organized and well-funded opposition dedicated to maintaining the status quo." All I can say is-- somebody had better cough up my share of this well-fundedness, because I am clearly not getting a cut of the money that is buying other public education advocates their summer homes and fancy dijon mustard on their fancy ham sandwiches. I am literally sitting here at my desk in pajamas with a toasted bagel perched atop my desk mess, and shortly the dog is going to demand to go poop in the back yard and I will have to take him myself. I wonder if Jeb Bush has to take his own dog to poop in the back yard. I wonder how all of these reformsters dogs will cope when their owners are all in DC for two days.

In short, "organized and well-funded," my ass.

But @TeacherFaye is going to be here on the panel, so I'm pretty sure the takeaway will be, "Yes, go on and use the twitter on the interwebs, and the young persons will see your message and become convinced by the twitness."

Education Begins with K-3 Literacy: If kids can’t read, they can’t graduate

"because we won't let them" should probably be the rest of the title. FEE has beaten this drum since the first national convention in 2010, and the short form is simple-- flunk all third graders who can't pass your state's standardized reading test. The panel includes Mississippi State Senator Tollson and  Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross; if you are expecting to hear the slightest lick of research por evidence that this test and punish retention plan is a sound and helpful idea, you should just go wait in line with the people waiting to see Sasquatch riding a unicorn across the Bridge to Atlantis.

Takeaway: we should flunk third graders who flunk the state test because eight year olds need to be whipped into shape. Uphill, both ways.

Innovation in the Certification Process: Rethinking teacher licensure

"Rethinking" is a great word. I am rethinking taking my dog out to poop because my wife is now up and if I rethink it long enough, I might get out of doing it. While I do not mean to compare teacher licensure to dog poop, I think the rethinking process is similar. The panel also seems to be interested in rethinking tenure and FILO. It includes John King, so you know this will totally not be about how to rethink your way to an easily managed, low paid, non-licensed teaching workforce.

Making Schools Better Instead of Just More Expensive: How to make your education dollars count

"Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still widespread belief that school success is tied to school funding," begins this description. "So this panel will discuss how they cut the budgets of high achieving schools in rich neighborhoods down to level of low-achieving schools in poor neighborhoods because it shouldn't make any difference." Ha! Just kidding. This panel is led by Chester Finn. This panel will discuss how to "direct funds where they will do the most good" or, as I read it, how to rewrite funding rules so that generating good test scores gets you funding, because directing funding away from struggling schools so that they can be declared failures and closed is bad education, but damn fine business.

The Next Chapter in Educational Choice: Education Savings Accounts

aka "Maybe If We Try Legislating Vouchers This Way, We Can Finally Get Them Past the Courts."


Not Your Daddy’s Woodshop: Career and technical education in the 21st century

Possibly not stupid-- somebody has noticed that we have a problem filling high skills blue collar jobs. Since we haven't yet figured out how to make jobs like, say, welding as low-skills as making fries, we'll have to come up with a way to train these peoples. "This is definitely not your daddy's woodshop," they say, stopping just short of "And of course your mommy would never take wood shop because, no penis." The head of the US Chamber, heavy promoters of Common "Everyone Has To Go To College" Core will head this panel, so I hope he's taking his cognitive dissonance pills.

Accountability Works Workshop: A-F school grading

Another Bush III fave with no actual facts to back it up. Presumably we'll skip the unit on How To Tweak the System So You Don't Embarrass Your Charter School Friends.

Day II Starts with:

The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time: Access to a Quality Education

This general session is moderated by famous civil rights activist and educational expert Campbell Brown. Since she's only the moderator, presumably she will not deliver her speech on "How to squash uppity black ladies who try to horn in on your civil rights lawsuit action."

For actual panelists we get Andrew Malone of Harlem Success Academy, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Patrick Dobard or the New Orleans Recovery School District. The blurb suggests that this will be a demonstration of how to appropriate the language of civil rights to promote your business interests as you cash in in the education sector.

Communicating Reform Part 2: Delivering effective messages

Marketing strategy. This is about "how to effectively reach your target audiences with tailored messages." So I'm expecting an update of the classic Charter Messaging Bible.And it should be a good one-- one of the panelists is Felix Schein, president of RALLY, the PR firm that created the successful astroturf group Students Matter for David Welch. Expect some practical branding and messaging advice here.

Bridging the Access Gap: How to bring the best courses to every student, in every state

I last encountered this idea in Michael McShane's walk-and-talk video-- why voucherize entire schools when you can really unbundle and voucherize by individual classes. Charter operators, you should attend this session so that you can understand that when some reformsters look into the future of education, they don't see you.

Building Trust in the Classroom: Protecting student data privacy and security

The big question is why this is not entitled "Doing the Right Thing: Protecting student data and privacy." But in reformsterland, data security is a PR problem, not an actual problem. This session promises to address all the data security issues except the main ones. We're going to talk about securing your on-line gradebook, but apparently not for the wholesale collection, sharing and selling of the data gathered from high stakes testing.


And there you have it

The confab runs from early morning, Thursday, November 20, through Friday afternoon, thereby guaranteeing that the doors will not be darkened by anybody who actually works in a public school classroom. Registration for the event is $499, though you can apply for a scholarship. The conference will be held at the Washington Marriot Wardman Park, so, fancy.

But the organizers want you to know: "Attendees leave the National Summit armed with the knowledge and networks to advance bold education reform in their states." They call it an "uncommon conference" which is kind of hilarious because they have scrubbed every reference to certain common thing, so it is literally un-commoned. At any rate, it "serves as a catalyst for energizing and accelerating the reform movement across the nation. Be there or be left behind."

I would love to be there to watch and learn and write down things I could blog about in a well-funded and organized way later, but I actually lack the funding and I am using my personal days this year to visit my soon-to-be-newborn grandson. Also, somebody has to be here to take the dog out to poop. Priorities, you know.

Campbell Brown Can't Connect Dots

Monday, Campbell Brown, the new face of the attack on teacher job security, tried to "set the record straight." I suppose she did, a little, in the sense that she made it even clearer that her proposed lawsuit makes no sense. But I'm guessing that's not what she had in mind.

The tenacious New York parents who are challenging the state in court have one goal in mind: ensuring that all of our public school children have good teachers.

You know, I think I could comb the entire country, every state, every school, every teacher's lounge, every grocery store, every ballpark, every haberdashery, every Starbucks, every back alley with bad lighting-- I think I would be hard pressed to find someone who would say, "What I want is for some of the public school children in this country to have crappy teachers. That's what I would like to see."

So let's start out by setting the record straight on that goal-- it's like coming out in favor of air or food or cute puppies. It means nothing.

Lots of people want to see that every student gets a good teacher. Teachers become teachers because they dream of personally being that good teacher. The real issue is how to make that good chicken in every classroom pot dream come true.

An organization devoted to that goal might advocate for any number of things. They might advocate for more attractive teacher pay or working conditions to aid recruitment. They might advocate for a more robust system of professional support and development so that it's easy for teachers to keep getting better. They might demand better funding of ALL public schools from state and federal governments. They might even start by collecting some data beyond the anecdotal about exactly how widespread the problem of not-good teachers in classrooms actually is.

Any of these initiatives might make sense. But Campbell Brown wants us to believe that these parents sat down and said, "You know, of everything that makes it hard to insure a good teacher in every classroom, the biggest most central problem is that teachers have job security. Let's get rid of that."

Campbell says, in her straight record-setting way, "So let us dispense with the absurd: Seeking good teachers for all does not mean you are somehow going after teachers." I think she got it backwards. Going after teachers does not mean you are seeking good teachers.

Campbell tries to assert that her lawsuit is about "working to end laws that are not in the interests of children." But what she has failed to do, and what the Vergara plaintiffs failed to do, is connect these dots-- exactly how are tenure and FILO laws damaging to the interests of children? Or come at it from the other direction-- how would a school climate in which teachers were aware that they could be fired at any time for any reason help students get a better education?

This is central to these suits, and yet it has never been answered.

And in setting the record straight, she only fuzzes things up further. The lawsuit to end tenure would help students, somehow, and besides "for those who have the added due-process protections of tenure, the goal here is only to make sure that system actually makes sense, without undercutting our kids’ constitutional rights."


So, the lawsuit to end tenure is not supposed to end tenure??

And this quote from Arne Duncan "sums it up well." "Tenure itself is not the issue. Job protections for effective teachers are vital to keep teachers from being fired for random or political reasons."

So the longer Campbell works at setting things straight, the more crooked the whole things seems. Also, she adds, civil rights laws.

And tenure doesn't insure good teaching. Well, now, there you have us. Also, food and clothing and windows in a room also do not insure good teaching. If we are going to sue to get rid of everything that does not insure good teaching, we are going to be here a long time.

So what's say we go ahead and stick with things that support good teaching. Like, say, the knowledge that you can't be fired for arbitrary reasons or being too expensive.

Campbell Brown has tried to set the record straight, and yet it is more murky than ever. She is suing-- oh, no, wait-- a group of "tenacious" parents is suing, and Campbell Brown is just--what? Their new BFF? A concerned rich citizen who's now laid off and depending on her husband the charter school magnate to support her? The nice lady who writes their press for them? If this is a tenacious parent lawsuit, why are you here, Campbell? Anyway, somebody is suing in order to-- do something? Get rid of tenure, but not really hoping to fully succeed? Make it easier to fire teachers, but you know, only some teachers, because that will get students a better education... somehow?

As an exercise in record straightening, this was not very successful. I hope the next attempt by America's newest ed crusader is more helpful.

Brown Presents NY Lawsuit Talking Points

In the June 24 NY Daily News, Campbell Brown presented the basic talking points for the newly-manufactured NY road show version of the Vergara trial. Here we go.

A Stirring Anecdote

Her story centers on the Williams family

One of their children... felt so strongly about the lack of instruction she was getting at her Rochester school that she wrote an essay about her experience. Instead of getting help, Jada was confronted about it, and her mom received harassing calls from teachers. Subjected to unfair treatment, Jada eventually had to transfer school.

This "ordeal," says Brown, began with a student's "request for sound teaching."

It's a good story because it underlines exactly what is problematic about this sort of narrative as a model of teacher evaluation. This could in fact be the story of a student who made a reasonable request, wrote an essay about it, and was unfairly hounded by multiple teachers. While I'd like to say that I can't imagine that ever happening, it's certainly not impossible (though the harassing phone calls from plural teachers is hard to imagine).

But this could also be the story of a student who decide she knew better than a trained professional how the teacher should do his job, got called on it, and had the whole thing blow up when the school tried to deal with her insubordination and disrespect.

Either version of the story could be the truth. If we put in student hands the nuclear option of ending a teacher's career, we are certainly, as Brown says she wants to, changing the balance of power. But I'm not sure how we get to excellence in teaching by way of a student smiling and saying, "Mrs. DeGumbuddy, my lawyer and I think you really want to reconsider my grade on this essay."

The Three Basic Underminers

Brown's lawsuit (there really is no need to pretend that this is the students' lawsuit) asserts that three policies of the State of New York undermine the presence of quality teachers in the classroom.

Seniority-- "last in, first out" is bad. It's also a sign of how carefully this is all crafted, because for years I never heard the policy called anything by FILO (first in, last out). But since we need to focus on the young teachers unjustly terminated by this policy, LIFO suits us better.

Tenure-- NY makes teachers wait three years and eighteen observations for tenure. This is the most obvious difference between the New York case and Vergara (California was awarding tenure after less time). This is a hard argument to make-- if an administrator can't tell whether or not she's got a keeper after three years and eighteen observations, that administrator needs to go get a job selling real estate or groceries, because, damn!

On the plus side, I look forward to Brown's accompanying argument that all New York schools should be barred from ever again hiring Teach for America two-year contract temps. If it takes more than three years to determine if a teacher is any good, then clearly TFA is a waste of everybody's time. Do let me know when Brown brings that up.

Dismissals-- Too long, too hard. I'm not in New York, so I don't know the real numbers here. This was the weakest part of the state's case in Vergara-- while you can't rush through these proceedings, there's no excuse for dragging them out for months and years. It's not good for either party.

Brown Is Stumped

Brown's clincher is a sign that either she's playing dumb for rhetorical purposes, or she really doesn't understand schools at all.

...last year, nearly 92% of the state’s teachers outside New York City were deemed effective or highly effective. If this is the case, how can 69% of students fail to show they are proficient in math or English Language Arts testing?

The strictly factual answer of course would be the studies indicating that teachers account for 14% tops of student learning. I don't know if I buy that exact number personally, but it's out there. Certainly it can't be hard for Brown to imagine that some students are capable of sitting in a classroom with an awesome teacher and still not learn from her, either because of distraction, personal issues, or simple defiance.

But the other reason that 69% of NYS students came up short on math and ELA proficiency? Because they were supposed to. Because the NY cut scores (the line between passing and failing) were not set by using some scientific study of what a "sufficient" display of skill would be, but by determining distribution ahead of time. By saying, let's draw the pass-fail line so that 30% are above it, and the rest are below it. You can read a pretty thorough run-down of these tests by Carol Burris and John Murphy here.

And nice touch on calling the fail rate 69% instead of the 70% more commonly reported. 69% sound much more inexact and therefor more "real" than 70%, which in its very tidiness reveals its made-up origins.

I feel bad once again for the prop plaintiffs who are shown in the photo looking out at the crowd, shoulders hunched, like they are seeing a huge raging river that they have to cross. But the Vergara prop plaintiffs were well taken care of, and I'm sure these will be as well. But there is a special corner of hell reserved for adults who use children as tools to further their own agenda.

In the meantime, teachers here in the East can now look forward to a PR blitz tearing down teachers in support of a lawsuit designed to dismantle teaching as a profession. We can only hope the ultimate result will be better than the California version of this traveling circus.