In Monday's New York Times, journalist Motoko Rich gives a master class in how to let the subjects of a story make themselves look ridiculous.
The piece takes us to San Antonio to give us a look at how the Big Standard Tests are actually graded, and in doing so, shows how the BS Tests are not one whit more advanced than the old school bubble tests they claim to replace.
Rich begins by noting that the scoring is not necessarily (or even probably) done by actual teachers. But Pearson's vp of content and scoring management is here to reassure us with this astonishing quote:
“From the standpoint of comparing us to a Starbucks or McDonald’s, where you go into those places you know exactly what you’re going to get,” said Bob Sanders, vice president of content and scoring management at Pearson North America, when asked whether such an analogy was apt.
“McDonald’s has a process in place to make sure they put two patties on that Big Mac,” he continued. “We do that exact same thing. We have processes to oversee our processes, and to make sure they are being followed.”
This is not news, really. For years we've been reading exposes by former graders and Pearson's advertisements in craigslist. It can be no surprise that the same country that has worked hard to teacher-proof classrooms would also find a test-scoring method suitable for folks with no educational expertise.
How low does the bar go? Consider this quote from one scorer, a former wedding planner who immigrated from France just five years ago:
She acknowledged that scoring was challenging. “Only after all these weeks being here,” Ms. Gomm said, “I am finally getting it.”
Sigh. I cut and pasted that. It is not one of my innumerable typos.
Look, here's the real problem revealed by this article (and others like it).
The test manufacturers have repeatedly argued that these new generation tests are better because they don't use bubble tests. They incorporate open-ended essay(ish) questions, so they can test deeper levels of understanding-- that's the argument. A multiple choice question (whether bubbling, clicking, or drag-and-dropping) only has one correct answer, and that narrow questioning strategy can only measure a narrow set of skills or understanding.
So essays ought to be better. Unless you score them like this, according to a narrow set of criteria to be used by people with no expertise in the area being tested. If someone who doesn't know the field is sitting there with a rubric that narrowly defines success, all you've got is a slightly more complicated bubble test. Instead of having four choices, the student has an infinite number of choices, but there's still just one way to be right.
Nobody has yet come up with a computerized system of grading writing that doesn't suck and which can't be publicly embarrassed. But if you're going to hire humans to act like a computer ("Just follow these instructions carefully and precisely"), your suckage levels will stay the same.
If it doesn't take a person with subject knowledge to score the essay, it doesn't take a person with subject knowledge to write it.
So the take-away from Rich's piece is not just that these tests are being graded by people who don't necessarily know what the hell they're doing, but that test manufacturers have created tests for which graders who don't know what the hell they're doing seems like a viable option. And that is just one more sign that the Big Standardized Tests are pointless slices of expensive baloney. You can't make a test like McDonalds and still pretend that you're cooking classic cuisine.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Campbell Brown's New Assault
Today the Wall Street Journal is announcing that Campbell Brown is launching a new education site that "won't shy away from advocacy." Which is kind of like announcing that Wal-Mart is opening a new store and will not shy away from marketing or that Burger King is opening up at a new location that might sell hamburgers.
Sadly, there are no surprises in this story. The site, called The Seventy Four in reference to the seventy-four million students in the US (and not say, the seventy-four gazillion dollars Campbell and her friends hope to make from privatizing education). Here's the blurb currently resting on the site:
The Seventy Four is a non-profit, non-partisan news site covering education in America. Our public education system is in crisis. In the United States, less than half of our students can read or do math at grade-level, yet the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin. Our mission is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children under the age of 18 the education they deserve.
From this I can only assume that when they say that the "education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin," the rest of the sentence was supposed to be "and we hope to get our misinformation and political spin to the front of the pack."
We haven't heard much lately about Brown's PR campaign to break the teachers union (loosely attached to her Vergara-style lawsuit). But where the Parent's Transparency Projected was marked by a distinctly non-transparent resolve to protect the tender identities of Brown's backers, this new project has clear funders.
The new site will launch with thirteen employees and a $4 million dollar budget, courtesy of backers that include Bloomberg Philanthropies (as in former anti-public ed NY mayor Michael Bloomberg), Walton Family Foundation, Johnathan Sackler, and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation-- in other words, the usual group of charter school backers.
And while the WSJ is extraordinarily generous in calling Brown an education-reform advocate (just as Ronald McDonald is haute cuisine advocate and the heads of the tobacco industry are health advocates), they do also note:
Ms. Brown’s husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, which advocates for charter schools among other issues. Joel Klein, head of the Amplify digital education unit at The Wall Street Journal’s parent company News Corp, is also on the board.
There's a nifty video, slickly shot and produced, that ticks off the usual topics in "I want to know..." statements. These folks want to know about positive news about what works, which makes me wonder why Gates isn't in on this, as he is a fan of positive outcomes journalism. They want to know about "the best teachers, the best schools." So, looking for super-heroes. And a whole progression of students remind us that they are the seventy four-- this site will apparently be big on For The Children. Brown also expresses her desire to use the site to push education issues to the forefront of the Presidential campaign.
Brown has used some of that $4 million to hire actual journalists, including Pullitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker, Conor Williams from Talking Points Memo (but his day job is senior researcher in the Early Education Initiative at New America-- he also once wrote a spirited defense of Brown), and Steve Snyder from Time Magazine (where he was in charge of digital editorial coverage).
As usual, I am struck by just how much money reformsters are willing to pump into the cause. I'm here with my staff of one (me) and a budget of-- well, I guess you could claim that my budget today is about 75 cents because while I was sitting here working on this, I had a bagel and a cup of orange juice.
At any rate, brace yourselves boys and girls-- here comes the next wave of faux progressive teacher bashing and charter pushing by privatizers who will not rest until they've cracked that golden egg full of tax dollars. Because that's the other reason they're willing to sink $4 million into something like this-- because while that may seem like a lot of money to you or me, to them it's peanuts, an investment that they hope will pay off eventually in billions of tax dollars directed away from public education and to the private corporations that are drooling at the prospect of cashing in on education.
Sadly, there are no surprises in this story. The site, called The Seventy Four in reference to the seventy-four million students in the US (and not say, the seventy-four gazillion dollars Campbell and her friends hope to make from privatizing education). Here's the blurb currently resting on the site:
The Seventy Four is a non-profit, non-partisan news site covering education in America. Our public education system is in crisis. In the United States, less than half of our students can read or do math at grade-level, yet the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin. Our mission is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children under the age of 18 the education they deserve.
From this I can only assume that when they say that the "education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin," the rest of the sentence was supposed to be "and we hope to get our misinformation and political spin to the front of the pack."
We haven't heard much lately about Brown's PR campaign to break the teachers union (loosely attached to her Vergara-style lawsuit). But where the Parent's Transparency Projected was marked by a distinctly non-transparent resolve to protect the tender identities of Brown's backers, this new project has clear funders.
The new site will launch with thirteen employees and a $4 million dollar budget, courtesy of backers that include Bloomberg Philanthropies (as in former anti-public ed NY mayor Michael Bloomberg), Walton Family Foundation, Johnathan Sackler, and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation-- in other words, the usual group of charter school backers.
And while the WSJ is extraordinarily generous in calling Brown an education-reform advocate (just as Ronald McDonald is haute cuisine advocate and the heads of the tobacco industry are health advocates), they do also note:
Ms. Brown’s husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, which advocates for charter schools among other issues. Joel Klein, head of the Amplify digital education unit at The Wall Street Journal’s parent company News Corp, is also on the board.
There's a nifty video, slickly shot and produced, that ticks off the usual topics in "I want to know..." statements. These folks want to know about positive news about what works, which makes me wonder why Gates isn't in on this, as he is a fan of positive outcomes journalism. They want to know about "the best teachers, the best schools." So, looking for super-heroes. And a whole progression of students remind us that they are the seventy four-- this site will apparently be big on For The Children. Brown also expresses her desire to use the site to push education issues to the forefront of the Presidential campaign.
Brown has used some of that $4 million to hire actual journalists, including Pullitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker, Conor Williams from Talking Points Memo (but his day job is senior researcher in the Early Education Initiative at New America-- he also once wrote a spirited defense of Brown), and Steve Snyder from Time Magazine (where he was in charge of digital editorial coverage).
As usual, I am struck by just how much money reformsters are willing to pump into the cause. I'm here with my staff of one (me) and a budget of-- well, I guess you could claim that my budget today is about 75 cents because while I was sitting here working on this, I had a bagel and a cup of orange juice.
At any rate, brace yourselves boys and girls-- here comes the next wave of faux progressive teacher bashing and charter pushing by privatizers who will not rest until they've cracked that golden egg full of tax dollars. Because that's the other reason they're willing to sink $4 million into something like this-- because while that may seem like a lot of money to you or me, to them it's peanuts, an investment that they hope will pay off eventually in billions of tax dollars directed away from public education and to the private corporations that are drooling at the prospect of cashing in on education.
Monday, June 22, 2015
So Long, Cami. No Celebration To Follow.
After four years of consistently disastrous misleadership, Cami Anderson will be stepping down as head of Newark Schools.
The announcement came today, attached to the name of Commissioner David Hespe. Who finally shoved Anderson out the door? It doesn't really matter. In the manner of other reformsters, I expect that she will fail upwards.
That's the good news. The less good news is that, contrary to Bob Braun's report last week, Anderson will not be replaced by Chris Cerf on a temporary basis; instead, Cerf will reportedly be offered a three year contract. While expectations of an Anderson resignation have been kicking around for at least a year, the emptying of her office gave new life to those expectations. Whoever shoved her gets no credit; Anderson's administration has been so clearly dysfunctional and addicted to failure that it's hard to think of anything that she ever did even sort of right. Leaving her in office this long has been its own sort of spectacular failure, like driving from New York to San Francisco in a car that blew out all four tires somewhere around Philadelphia. You don't get any genius points for finally doing something about the problem that has been killing you for years.
Cerf, of course, comes with a strong reformster pedigree. He worked for Joel Klein from 2006 to 2009, helping make a hash out of New York City schools. He became New Jersey's school chief next, leaving that job in 2014 at about the same time that Bridgegate was taking off. Cerf left directly to work for his old boss Klein at Amplify, the company that Rupert Murdoch hoped would help him cash in in the educational tech biz. No sooner had Cerf exited his New Jersey office then Cami Anderson awarded Amplify over $2 million worth of contracts. It is a cozy club that reformster belong to.
Cerf is one of those guys who has no regrets and never admits a mistake. But Amplify has been a train wreck. They were going to revolutionize education with tablets and on-line content. But, as Bloomberg put it, "that hasn't happened." Amplify couldn't come up with hardware that worked, software that worked, content that impressed anybody, and a workable plan to crack the crowded school market. They couldn't crack the market in assessments, they couldn't get their own internal bureaucracy sorted out, and they couldn't stop hemorrhaging money, making their market as the one division of News Corp that couldn't turn a profit. So when News Corp started waving its ax around, Amplify felt the cutting edge.
Cerf's trajectory is unusual-- he returns to New Jersey in a lower position than he left. But there is no reason to think that his arrival in Newark will be good news for anybody. At the same time, he will be facing some of the strongest, smartest and most experienced student and community activists anywhere in the country. It's true that Anderson set the bar low-- she couldn't even bring herself to speak with anybody in the community. But Cerf is walking into a huge mess with a four-year history of denying Newark citizens any semblance of democracy and any imitation of a working plan for running a public school system.
Cerf starts at the beginning of July. It should be an interesting summer.
The announcement came today, attached to the name of Commissioner David Hespe. Who finally shoved Anderson out the door? It doesn't really matter. In the manner of other reformsters, I expect that she will fail upwards.
That's the good news. The less good news is that, contrary to Bob Braun's report last week, Anderson will not be replaced by Chris Cerf on a temporary basis; instead, Cerf will reportedly be offered a three year contract. While expectations of an Anderson resignation have been kicking around for at least a year, the emptying of her office gave new life to those expectations. Whoever shoved her gets no credit; Anderson's administration has been so clearly dysfunctional and addicted to failure that it's hard to think of anything that she ever did even sort of right. Leaving her in office this long has been its own sort of spectacular failure, like driving from New York to San Francisco in a car that blew out all four tires somewhere around Philadelphia. You don't get any genius points for finally doing something about the problem that has been killing you for years.
Cerf, of course, comes with a strong reformster pedigree. He worked for Joel Klein from 2006 to 2009, helping make a hash out of New York City schools. He became New Jersey's school chief next, leaving that job in 2014 at about the same time that Bridgegate was taking off. Cerf left directly to work for his old boss Klein at Amplify, the company that Rupert Murdoch hoped would help him cash in in the educational tech biz. No sooner had Cerf exited his New Jersey office then Cami Anderson awarded Amplify over $2 million worth of contracts. It is a cozy club that reformster belong to.
Cerf is one of those guys who has no regrets and never admits a mistake. But Amplify has been a train wreck. They were going to revolutionize education with tablets and on-line content. But, as Bloomberg put it, "that hasn't happened." Amplify couldn't come up with hardware that worked, software that worked, content that impressed anybody, and a workable plan to crack the crowded school market. They couldn't crack the market in assessments, they couldn't get their own internal bureaucracy sorted out, and they couldn't stop hemorrhaging money, making their market as the one division of News Corp that couldn't turn a profit. So when News Corp started waving its ax around, Amplify felt the cutting edge.
Cerf's trajectory is unusual-- he returns to New Jersey in a lower position than he left. But there is no reason to think that his arrival in Newark will be good news for anybody. At the same time, he will be facing some of the strongest, smartest and most experienced student and community activists anywhere in the country. It's true that Anderson set the bar low-- she couldn't even bring herself to speak with anybody in the community. But Cerf is walking into a huge mess with a four-year history of denying Newark citizens any semblance of democracy and any imitation of a working plan for running a public school system.
Cerf starts at the beginning of July. It should be an interesting summer.
Fox Runs PARCC PR
Fox News Sunday took a little under four minutes to provide some uncritical promotional time for PARCC, using their "Power Player of the Week" spot to let Laura Slover, PARCC CEO, push the usual PARCC baloney. It's short-- but I've watched it so that you don't have to.
Chris Wallace kicks things off by saying that Common Core was "started by governors and state education officials as a way to set standards," so we know we're entering the Feel Free To Spin Zone right off the bat, though the second half of that sentence notes that it has become controversial because of concerns over federal interference (it is) and whether or not it's the best way to teach kids (it isn't). So I guess he's acknowledging the controversy, if not teaching it. But let's go visit a group that's testing how well Common Core works.
Roll title card for PPOTW.
Cut to Slover's talking head saying that high standards are vital because high expectations will make students do better.
Explanation that PARCC is one of two state consortia for testing. This is the first of many opportunities Wallace will have to note that PARCC started out with twenty-three members and is now down to twelve, but that little market-based measure of PARCC's failure will not make it into the profile. He'll just mention the twelve state figure in passing and let it go at that.
Slover will now run the talking point about how PARCC is a new kind of test where you don't (always) bubble in the right answer, but now drag and drop the right answer, which is, you know, totally different. She also claims that the tests measure critical thinking, problem solving, and writing, and as we have seen repeatedly, that's mostly a lie. Problem solving, maybe. Writing, not in any meaningful way. Critical thinking, never.
Wallace takes a third grade test and mentions that it was "a little challenging." We see a shot of him being amazed? incredulous? that an answer is dragged and dropped instead of being clicked on (because this is how we test eight year olds' advanced mouse operating skills-- that's in the Core, right?) but no real discussoin of what the questions entailed. Nor do we ever address where the questions come from or why anyone should believe they are a good measure of anything in particular.
Next, several GOP Presidential hopefuls say mean things about Common Core, including Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz, both of whom get sound bites about how the feds are intruding. Wallace tells Slover, "The main complaint is that this is all part of a federal takeover of local schools." And I suppose that might be the main complaint among Fox News viewers, but c'mon-- even over there word has to have come by now that a whole host of working teachers and education experts have a list of concerns about the actual quality of the standards.
Slover counters that this is a state-driven program and states make all the decisions. But Wallace says it's more complicated than that (though not to Slover, who clearly did not need to wear her big girl pants to this interview). Wallace notes that Race to the Top effectively pushed the Core on states, but he skips over the whole business of waivers; that omission seems odd, given that the Obama administration end run around the law would be just the sort of shenanigans that Fox viewers would love to get outraged about.
We'll now give a few seconds to the opt out movement. Actually, we don't acknowledge there's a movement--we just indicate that some parents choose to pull their children from the test. But not Slover-- she wants to have her young daughter take the test because "I want to be sure she's learning." Because this highly educated CEO of a testing corporation won't know whether or not her child can read or do math unless she has test results to look at. There are so many things Wallace could have done at this juncture, but even in non-confrontation mode, he could have shown us the report that PARCC provides, which basically gives a simple verbal version of a letter grade.
But we're sticking to the usual narrative, which means that besides the usual anti-fed opposition to the Core, the other group we'll mention is-- you guessed it-- the teachers unions. As we watch picketing clips, we're reminded that the union doesn't like testing because they "worry" that their members will be judged on test results. Wallace has nothing to say about that concern (not even a simple observation that the Value-Added method for doing test-based judgment has been rejected by every authority on the subject).
Instead we go back to Slover to ask her how she feels about being slammed by both the right and the left. She takes the softball and says, "We must be doing something right," with a hearty smile.
Wallace begins the wrapup by observing that PARCC is fine-tuning by doing things like making the test 90 minutes shorter next year. But, he says, Slover says the basic principle is sound. Was there a basic principle we talked about anywhere in this piece? No matter- Slover is going to now opine on the testing talking point that we haven't yet squeezed into this piece of PR fluffery yet:
For too long in this country, success has been really a function of what income level parents have and where kids grow up. We think it's critical that kids all have opportunities, whether they live in Mississippi or Massachusetts or Colorado or Ohio, they should all have access to an excellent education, and this is a step in the right direction.
I'll note one more instance of the "access" construction favored by reformsters (would you rather have access to food, or food?). But mostly I'm impressed that Slover is able to deliver all of that speech with a straight face, given that we know that the PARCC and tests like it correlate most directly to socio-economic class. It would have been nice if Wallace had asked something like, "So how, exactly, does taking a standardized test give kids access to an excellent education?" But he just pops up to note that whether or not this is a step in the right direction is debatable, which, yes, yes, it is, and as a debatable issue, it deserves some actual fact-based reporting about the sides of that debate, but Wallace just finishes the sentence by promising us that it will be a big issue for GOP candidates.
I know that the "Power Player of the Week" segments are not meant to be hard news, but this is just a three-minute advertisement for PARCC masquerading as news. A long time ago, television personalities used to pitch products in advertisements during their own programs, but they stopped doing it because it was undignified and hurt credibility. Would that modern news channels (not just Fox) would have another such epiphany.
Chris Wallace kicks things off by saying that Common Core was "started by governors and state education officials as a way to set standards," so we know we're entering the Feel Free To Spin Zone right off the bat, though the second half of that sentence notes that it has become controversial because of concerns over federal interference (it is) and whether or not it's the best way to teach kids (it isn't). So I guess he's acknowledging the controversy, if not teaching it. But let's go visit a group that's testing how well Common Core works.
Roll title card for PPOTW.
Cut to Slover's talking head saying that high standards are vital because high expectations will make students do better.
Explanation that PARCC is one of two state consortia for testing. This is the first of many opportunities Wallace will have to note that PARCC started out with twenty-three members and is now down to twelve, but that little market-based measure of PARCC's failure will not make it into the profile. He'll just mention the twelve state figure in passing and let it go at that.
Slover will now run the talking point about how PARCC is a new kind of test where you don't (always) bubble in the right answer, but now drag and drop the right answer, which is, you know, totally different. She also claims that the tests measure critical thinking, problem solving, and writing, and as we have seen repeatedly, that's mostly a lie. Problem solving, maybe. Writing, not in any meaningful way. Critical thinking, never.
Wallace takes a third grade test and mentions that it was "a little challenging." We see a shot of him being amazed? incredulous? that an answer is dragged and dropped instead of being clicked on (because this is how we test eight year olds' advanced mouse operating skills-- that's in the Core, right?) but no real discussoin of what the questions entailed. Nor do we ever address where the questions come from or why anyone should believe they are a good measure of anything in particular.
Next, several GOP Presidential hopefuls say mean things about Common Core, including Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz, both of whom get sound bites about how the feds are intruding. Wallace tells Slover, "The main complaint is that this is all part of a federal takeover of local schools." And I suppose that might be the main complaint among Fox News viewers, but c'mon-- even over there word has to have come by now that a whole host of working teachers and education experts have a list of concerns about the actual quality of the standards.
Slover counters that this is a state-driven program and states make all the decisions. But Wallace says it's more complicated than that (though not to Slover, who clearly did not need to wear her big girl pants to this interview). Wallace notes that Race to the Top effectively pushed the Core on states, but he skips over the whole business of waivers; that omission seems odd, given that the Obama administration end run around the law would be just the sort of shenanigans that Fox viewers would love to get outraged about.
We'll now give a few seconds to the opt out movement. Actually, we don't acknowledge there's a movement--we just indicate that some parents choose to pull their children from the test. But not Slover-- she wants to have her young daughter take the test because "I want to be sure she's learning." Because this highly educated CEO of a testing corporation won't know whether or not her child can read or do math unless she has test results to look at. There are so many things Wallace could have done at this juncture, but even in non-confrontation mode, he could have shown us the report that PARCC provides, which basically gives a simple verbal version of a letter grade.
But we're sticking to the usual narrative, which means that besides the usual anti-fed opposition to the Core, the other group we'll mention is-- you guessed it-- the teachers unions. As we watch picketing clips, we're reminded that the union doesn't like testing because they "worry" that their members will be judged on test results. Wallace has nothing to say about that concern (not even a simple observation that the Value-Added method for doing test-based judgment has been rejected by every authority on the subject).
Instead we go back to Slover to ask her how she feels about being slammed by both the right and the left. She takes the softball and says, "We must be doing something right," with a hearty smile.
Wallace begins the wrapup by observing that PARCC is fine-tuning by doing things like making the test 90 minutes shorter next year. But, he says, Slover says the basic principle is sound. Was there a basic principle we talked about anywhere in this piece? No matter- Slover is going to now opine on the testing talking point that we haven't yet squeezed into this piece of PR fluffery yet:
For too long in this country, success has been really a function of what income level parents have and where kids grow up. We think it's critical that kids all have opportunities, whether they live in Mississippi or Massachusetts or Colorado or Ohio, they should all have access to an excellent education, and this is a step in the right direction.
I'll note one more instance of the "access" construction favored by reformsters (would you rather have access to food, or food?). But mostly I'm impressed that Slover is able to deliver all of that speech with a straight face, given that we know that the PARCC and tests like it correlate most directly to socio-economic class. It would have been nice if Wallace had asked something like, "So how, exactly, does taking a standardized test give kids access to an excellent education?" But he just pops up to note that whether or not this is a step in the right direction is debatable, which, yes, yes, it is, and as a debatable issue, it deserves some actual fact-based reporting about the sides of that debate, but Wallace just finishes the sentence by promising us that it will be a big issue for GOP candidates.
I know that the "Power Player of the Week" segments are not meant to be hard news, but this is just a three-minute advertisement for PARCC masquerading as news. A long time ago, television personalities used to pitch products in advertisements during their own programs, but they stopped doing it because it was undignified and hurt credibility. Would that modern news channels (not just Fox) would have another such epiphany.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Einstein on Learning
I'm a fan of the website Brain Pickings, a site where Maria Popova curates a cool collection of cool, smart things. Today for Father's Day she offers an excerpt from the book Posterity, a cool collection of letters from important Americans to their children.
She picked a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his son when Einstein was 36 and his son Hans Albert was 11. It was 1914 and Einstein had just finished his paper on his general theory of relativity which was about to make him a Very Famous Smart Guy.
In his letter, Einstein included an observation about education. After discussing his son's pursuits, Einstein offered some advice about piano practice-- play the pieces that gave his son joy, whether they were assigned by the teacher or not.
That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.
Well, isn't that the truth. It is admittedly a difficult state to achieve in a classroom full of teenagers (or six year olds), but it certainly makes a better star to navigate toward than "learn to do something with full awareness that failure will be punished."
She picked a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his son when Einstein was 36 and his son Hans Albert was 11. It was 1914 and Einstein had just finished his paper on his general theory of relativity which was about to make him a Very Famous Smart Guy.
In his letter, Einstein included an observation about education. After discussing his son's pursuits, Einstein offered some advice about piano practice-- play the pieces that gave his son joy, whether they were assigned by the teacher or not.
That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.
Well, isn't that the truth. It is admittedly a difficult state to achieve in a classroom full of teenagers (or six year olds), but it certainly makes a better star to navigate toward than "learn to do something with full awareness that failure will be punished."
NYT CCSS ELA PR
Last Friday, Kate Taylor took to the pages of the New York Times to provide a sort of update on what's going on in English classrooms in the "Common Core era." So how are things going? According to Taylor, pretty swell, thanks.
Taylor focuses on the shiny new injection of "informational" reading into the English classroom, leading with the pairing of fiction and non-fiction works, like Catcher in the Rye and articles about bi-polar disorder, the Odyssey and the GI Bill, Tom Sawyer and an op-ed about teenaged unemployment.
The piece is a monument to reportorial Swiss-cheesery, and while I recognize that reporters do not have infinite space available to them, Taylor has skipped over some fairly significant parts of the story.
Here are some things that Taylor does not know.
Taylor does not know that Common Core is in the weeds
She takes a half-sentence to note that schools choose their own readings, so I'm guessing Taylor's heard that not everybody feels the CCSS love. But she fails to teach the controversy here.
She also fails to note that Common Core increasingly means whatever the local authorities want it to mean, or nothing at all. The Common Core of the actual standards is not the same as the Core in the Big Standardized Test, nor is it the same as whatever teaching materials your district has bought-- and all of that is before we get to your local administrator, who may have her own idea of what edited version of CCSS to enforce. The term "Common Core" now means so many different things that it is essentially meaningless.
Taylor does not know where the informational text requirement came from.
Taylor notes that "the new standards stipulate" that a certain percentage (50 for elementary, 70 for high school) of a student's daily reading diet should be informational. And that's as deep as she digs.
But why is the informational requirement in the Common Core in the first place? There's only one reason-- because David Coleman thought it would be a good idea. All these years later, and not one shred of evidence, one scrap of research, not a solitary other nation that has used such a requirement to good results--- there isn't anything at all to back up the inclusion of the informational reading requirement in the standards except that David Coleman thought it would be a good idea. Coleman, I will remind you, is not a teacher, not an educator, not a person with one iota of expertise in teaching and is, in fact, proud of his lack of qualifications. In fact, Coleman has shared with us his thoughts about how to teach literature, and they are -- not good. If Coleman were student teaching in my classroom, I would be sending him back to the drawing board (or letting him try his ideas out so that we could have a post-crash-and-burn "How could we do better" session).
Coleman has pulled off one of the greatest cons ever. If a random guy walked in off the street into your district office and said, "Hey, I want to rewrite some big chunks of your curriculum just because," he would be justly ignored. But Coleman has managed to walk in off the street and force every American school district pay attention to him.
Taylor does not know what we've given up to meet the new requirements
Taylor uses a quote to both pay lip service to and also to dismiss concerns about curricular cuts.
“Unfortunately there has been some elimination of some literature,” said Kimberly Skillen, the district administrator for secondary curriculum and instruction in Deer Park, N.Y. But she added: “We look at teaching literature as teaching particular concepts and skills. So we maybe aren’t teaching an entire novel, but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that that novel would have gotten across.”
So, you see, we really only use literature in the classroom as a sort of bucket to carry in little nuggets of concept and skill. The literature doesn't really have any intrinsic value of its own. Why read the whole novel when we only really care about (aka test) a couple of paragraphs on page 142? If we were hoping to pick up some metaphor-reading skills along the way, why not just read a page of metaphor examples?
This is an attitude of such staggering ignorance and numbskullery that I hardly know how to address it. This is like saying, "Why bother with getting to know someone and dating and talking to each other and listening to each other and spending months just doing things together and sharing hopes and dreams and finally deciding to commit your lives to each other and planning a life together and then after all that finally sleeping together-- why do all that when you could just hire a fifty-dollar hooker and skid straight to the sex?" It so completely misses the point, and if neither Taylor nor Skillen can see how it misses the point, I'm not even sure where to begin.
Literature creates a complex web of relationships, relationships between the reader and the author, between the various parts of the text, between the writing techniques and the meaning.
You don't get the literature without reading the whole thing. The "we'll just read the critical part of the work" school of teaching belongs right up there with a "Just the last five minutes" film festival. Heck, as long as you see the sled go into the furnace or the death star blow up or Kevin Spacey lose the limp, you don't really need the rest of the film for anything, right?
Taylor does not know that English teachers have heard of non-fiction
Taylor makes sure to point out that sometimes, non-fiction is interesting to students. Why, thanks, ma'm! I have also heard that students enjoy the rap music and often eat more than one type of food. Also, water is wet. Taylor also doesn't know that some literature is non-fiction; like most writers on this topic, she mentions the Gettysburg Address as a new non-fiction focus, even though the speech (along with "I Will Fight No More Forever") is in every major 11th grade literature anthology in the US.
But Taylor goes with the notion, anecdotally supported by one administrator, that the English teaching world is loaded with teachers who only and always teach fiction, even though there was this one time that an administrator totally saw a class fully engaged in discussion about a real life issue.
I don't know. Maybe New York is just another world. But I find it hard to believe that Taylor could not have walked up any hall and found an English teacher who has always taught non-fiction material in her class. So if non-fiction is not news to us, then what's the big deal? Hold that thought for a few subheadings.
Taylor does not know why we teach literature in the first place
Hint: it's not just so that literature can be a bucket in which to carry other skills to the student.
The purposes of teaching literature is a topic that deserves not just its own post, but its own blog. But let me just skim the surface of the surface.
Literature lets students experience people and places and feelings and ideas that they do not encounter in their own world, and it lets them encounter things exactly like what they experience in their own, and it lets them experience both in ways that open the experience up to new understanding and expression. Literature opens up new worlds to students, and it opens up familiar worlds as well. It builds depth of understanding and depth of expression. It gives them practice and exercise in developing, holding, connecting many ideas. Reading literature is part of the process of growing and advancing and becoming more fully human.
Taylor slips in the notion that some literature is just hard and probably pointless; she recounts the story of one teacher who was happy to cut Beowulf back to an excerpt because, you know, who really wants to teach that piece of ancient junk?
But the selection of particular works is tricky, because the "right" work is found at the intersection of teacher, students, and the work itself. A literary teacher is the students' guide to that world. The best guides to a place are not the ones who either don't know it or who just plain hate it; the best guides are the people who know and love the territory. You could not pay me enough to teach Paradise Lost to high school students, but I have a colleague who does it every year with huge success. Meanwhile, I'm about the only teacher I know who likes to teach Heart of Darkness. Most on point, I teach Hamlet every year, and I teach it differently every year, partly because of me and partly because of whatever group of students I'm teaching.
Pet peeve: "making" works relevant. Either you can see how it connects to the world and your students or you can't-- there's no point in trying to force or fake it. But of course all of that also applies to non-fiction as well. Here's a delightful quote from a newly-minted assistant principal:
Ms. Thomas said she believed many students were more interested in talking about real-world issues like genetic testing than about how a character changed over the course of a novel.
Yes, because how people change and grow and develop is certainly a fake, not-real-world issue that teenagers could never relate to. Gah! The notion that fiction is somehow "fake" and unrelated to the "real" world is just so-- dumb! Literature is one more engage with what is real and true about the world, and anybody who doesn't get that is welcome to come watch my students argue endlessly about Edna Pontillier (The Awakening) and the proper role of women in the world.
Taylor does not know what the real problem with Common Core reading is
If administrators keep their heads and don't let Common Core scare them, the losses under Core reading are minimal. But if administrators start to worry about test scores, things get ugly.
Perdido Street School lays out some of the losses in New York school district that lose their heads and jump into the EngageNY pool. That's similar to what happens in places where administrators take seriously all the baloney about Close Reading 2.0, which is a thing that calls itself close reading and which is really just test prep.
For schools that decide to let the Big Standardized Test drive the curriculum bus, the path is clear-- the significant change is not read more non-fiction, but to do all reading in little chunks. The Common Core can pay lip service to reading whole works and developing an understanding of themes and ideas that are developed through an entire work, but that will never, ever be on the test.
So, as Taylor's article hints but never flat out admits, we don't cut Romeo and Juliet entirely, but we only read a few key portions. Tom Sawyer? We'll just read that fence-painting scene, thanks. We'll read literary slices and filets. We'll get our non-fiction fill with short articles. But we will never, ever again, read an entire book from front to back.
And we will always read our short selections to suit someone else's purpose. Personal responses are not the point; the point is to find the answers to the (probably multiple choice) questions in the packet, questions modeled on the BS Test so that students are better prepared for that experience. Do not stop to develop any sort of personal relationship with the reading; figure out what the questions want from you, and go look for that.
Common Core ELA supports the notion that reading, in fact all human relationships, are simple transactions in which the only real question is "What can I get from this and how can I get it?" It is dehumanizing for both teachers and students.
Outside of missing all of that, Taylor did a super job with the article. It's fluffy and to the untrained eye hardly looks like more Common Core PR at all.
Taylor focuses on the shiny new injection of "informational" reading into the English classroom, leading with the pairing of fiction and non-fiction works, like Catcher in the Rye and articles about bi-polar disorder, the Odyssey and the GI Bill, Tom Sawyer and an op-ed about teenaged unemployment.
The piece is a monument to reportorial Swiss-cheesery, and while I recognize that reporters do not have infinite space available to them, Taylor has skipped over some fairly significant parts of the story.
Here are some things that Taylor does not know.
Taylor does not know that Common Core is in the weeds
She takes a half-sentence to note that schools choose their own readings, so I'm guessing Taylor's heard that not everybody feels the CCSS love. But she fails to teach the controversy here.
She also fails to note that Common Core increasingly means whatever the local authorities want it to mean, or nothing at all. The Common Core of the actual standards is not the same as the Core in the Big Standardized Test, nor is it the same as whatever teaching materials your district has bought-- and all of that is before we get to your local administrator, who may have her own idea of what edited version of CCSS to enforce. The term "Common Core" now means so many different things that it is essentially meaningless.
Taylor does not know where the informational text requirement came from.
Taylor notes that "the new standards stipulate" that a certain percentage (50 for elementary, 70 for high school) of a student's daily reading diet should be informational. And that's as deep as she digs.
But why is the informational requirement in the Common Core in the first place? There's only one reason-- because David Coleman thought it would be a good idea. All these years later, and not one shred of evidence, one scrap of research, not a solitary other nation that has used such a requirement to good results--- there isn't anything at all to back up the inclusion of the informational reading requirement in the standards except that David Coleman thought it would be a good idea. Coleman, I will remind you, is not a teacher, not an educator, not a person with one iota of expertise in teaching and is, in fact, proud of his lack of qualifications. In fact, Coleman has shared with us his thoughts about how to teach literature, and they are -- not good. If Coleman were student teaching in my classroom, I would be sending him back to the drawing board (or letting him try his ideas out so that we could have a post-crash-and-burn "How could we do better" session).
Coleman has pulled off one of the greatest cons ever. If a random guy walked in off the street into your district office and said, "Hey, I want to rewrite some big chunks of your curriculum just because," he would be justly ignored. But Coleman has managed to walk in off the street and force every American school district pay attention to him.
Taylor does not know what we've given up to meet the new requirements
Taylor uses a quote to both pay lip service to and also to dismiss concerns about curricular cuts.
“Unfortunately there has been some elimination of some literature,” said Kimberly Skillen, the district administrator for secondary curriculum and instruction in Deer Park, N.Y. But she added: “We look at teaching literature as teaching particular concepts and skills. So we maybe aren’t teaching an entire novel, but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that that novel would have gotten across.”
So, you see, we really only use literature in the classroom as a sort of bucket to carry in little nuggets of concept and skill. The literature doesn't really have any intrinsic value of its own. Why read the whole novel when we only really care about (aka test) a couple of paragraphs on page 142? If we were hoping to pick up some metaphor-reading skills along the way, why not just read a page of metaphor examples?
This is an attitude of such staggering ignorance and numbskullery that I hardly know how to address it. This is like saying, "Why bother with getting to know someone and dating and talking to each other and listening to each other and spending months just doing things together and sharing hopes and dreams and finally deciding to commit your lives to each other and planning a life together and then after all that finally sleeping together-- why do all that when you could just hire a fifty-dollar hooker and skid straight to the sex?" It so completely misses the point, and if neither Taylor nor Skillen can see how it misses the point, I'm not even sure where to begin.
Literature creates a complex web of relationships, relationships between the reader and the author, between the various parts of the text, between the writing techniques and the meaning.
You don't get the literature without reading the whole thing. The "we'll just read the critical part of the work" school of teaching belongs right up there with a "Just the last five minutes" film festival. Heck, as long as you see the sled go into the furnace or the death star blow up or Kevin Spacey lose the limp, you don't really need the rest of the film for anything, right?
Taylor does not know that English teachers have heard of non-fiction
Taylor makes sure to point out that sometimes, non-fiction is interesting to students. Why, thanks, ma'm! I have also heard that students enjoy the rap music and often eat more than one type of food. Also, water is wet. Taylor also doesn't know that some literature is non-fiction; like most writers on this topic, she mentions the Gettysburg Address as a new non-fiction focus, even though the speech (along with "I Will Fight No More Forever") is in every major 11th grade literature anthology in the US.
But Taylor goes with the notion, anecdotally supported by one administrator, that the English teaching world is loaded with teachers who only and always teach fiction, even though there was this one time that an administrator totally saw a class fully engaged in discussion about a real life issue.
I don't know. Maybe New York is just another world. But I find it hard to believe that Taylor could not have walked up any hall and found an English teacher who has always taught non-fiction material in her class. So if non-fiction is not news to us, then what's the big deal? Hold that thought for a few subheadings.
Taylor does not know why we teach literature in the first place
Hint: it's not just so that literature can be a bucket in which to carry other skills to the student.
The purposes of teaching literature is a topic that deserves not just its own post, but its own blog. But let me just skim the surface of the surface.
Literature lets students experience people and places and feelings and ideas that they do not encounter in their own world, and it lets them encounter things exactly like what they experience in their own, and it lets them experience both in ways that open the experience up to new understanding and expression. Literature opens up new worlds to students, and it opens up familiar worlds as well. It builds depth of understanding and depth of expression. It gives them practice and exercise in developing, holding, connecting many ideas. Reading literature is part of the process of growing and advancing and becoming more fully human.
Taylor slips in the notion that some literature is just hard and probably pointless; she recounts the story of one teacher who was happy to cut Beowulf back to an excerpt because, you know, who really wants to teach that piece of ancient junk?
But the selection of particular works is tricky, because the "right" work is found at the intersection of teacher, students, and the work itself. A literary teacher is the students' guide to that world. The best guides to a place are not the ones who either don't know it or who just plain hate it; the best guides are the people who know and love the territory. You could not pay me enough to teach Paradise Lost to high school students, but I have a colleague who does it every year with huge success. Meanwhile, I'm about the only teacher I know who likes to teach Heart of Darkness. Most on point, I teach Hamlet every year, and I teach it differently every year, partly because of me and partly because of whatever group of students I'm teaching.
Pet peeve: "making" works relevant. Either you can see how it connects to the world and your students or you can't-- there's no point in trying to force or fake it. But of course all of that also applies to non-fiction as well. Here's a delightful quote from a newly-minted assistant principal:
Ms. Thomas said she believed many students were more interested in talking about real-world issues like genetic testing than about how a character changed over the course of a novel.
Yes, because how people change and grow and develop is certainly a fake, not-real-world issue that teenagers could never relate to. Gah! The notion that fiction is somehow "fake" and unrelated to the "real" world is just so-- dumb! Literature is one more engage with what is real and true about the world, and anybody who doesn't get that is welcome to come watch my students argue endlessly about Edna Pontillier (The Awakening) and the proper role of women in the world.
Taylor does not know what the real problem with Common Core reading is
If administrators keep their heads and don't let Common Core scare them, the losses under Core reading are minimal. But if administrators start to worry about test scores, things get ugly.
Perdido Street School lays out some of the losses in New York school district that lose their heads and jump into the EngageNY pool. That's similar to what happens in places where administrators take seriously all the baloney about Close Reading 2.0, which is a thing that calls itself close reading and which is really just test prep.
For schools that decide to let the Big Standardized Test drive the curriculum bus, the path is clear-- the significant change is not read more non-fiction, but to do all reading in little chunks. The Common Core can pay lip service to reading whole works and developing an understanding of themes and ideas that are developed through an entire work, but that will never, ever be on the test.
So, as Taylor's article hints but never flat out admits, we don't cut Romeo and Juliet entirely, but we only read a few key portions. Tom Sawyer? We'll just read that fence-painting scene, thanks. We'll read literary slices and filets. We'll get our non-fiction fill with short articles. But we will never, ever again, read an entire book from front to back.
And we will always read our short selections to suit someone else's purpose. Personal responses are not the point; the point is to find the answers to the (probably multiple choice) questions in the packet, questions modeled on the BS Test so that students are better prepared for that experience. Do not stop to develop any sort of personal relationship with the reading; figure out what the questions want from you, and go look for that.
Common Core ELA supports the notion that reading, in fact all human relationships, are simple transactions in which the only real question is "What can I get from this and how can I get it?" It is dehumanizing for both teachers and students.
Outside of missing all of that, Taylor did a super job with the article. It's fluffy and to the untrained eye hardly looks like more Common Core PR at all.
NY: Toxic Dollars
Polishing the Apple might well have been entitled Poisoning the Apple. The new report from Common Cause delineates just how much money has poured into New York education politics, from where, and to whom. It is not a pretty picture.
The full report runs over fifty pages, so I'm not going to try to capture the full Brobdinagian wreck here. But let me share some of the most striking findings.
The report lumps pro-ed-reform groups under the heading "privatizers," and I have no disagreement there.
2014 was a huge year for reformsters spending, with the privatizers outspending the union for the first time. There is a whole other conversation to be had about how much the union does or does not represent actual opposition to the privatizers, particularly those who fly the Democrat flag, but we'll let that go for now.
The union is not outspent in all areas-- between 2005 and 2014, the union (and friends) spent over $144 million on lobbying, while reformsters dropped a measly $44 mill. Reformsters are, however, catching up, with a staggering jump in reformster lobbying spending in 2014, when those expenditures jumped up to $12-ish million, over twice what the unions spent.
Who are the major players?
The biggest reformster player by far is the group Families for Excellent Schools, Inc; these guys are pumping tens of millions of dollars into the political arena. FES was founded in 2011 by five individuals, four of them Wall Street players. The group became the high-profile face of opposition to Bill DeBlasio, staging rallies and running expensive ad campaigns to thwart his plan to put a leash on NYC charter expansion. The group, which shares the same address as StudentsFirst of NY, has steadfastly refused to admit where their funding comes from. Mercedes Schneider has pierced a little of that fog, and the results are unsurprising-- FES has close ties to (among others) the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Tapestry Project, a group whose executive director is Eva Moscowitz's husband. The group also tried to produce some "research" to support their point of view, but as Bruce Baker showed, that research probably didn't cost them more than a couple of bucks. The FES motto is "Don't Steal Possible," which appears to be short for, "Don't Steal Possible When You Can Just Go Ahead and Buy It."
Families for Excellent Schools, Inc, is spending more money on NY politics than anybody-- and nobody otside of their organization knows where that money is coming from.
How to raise money
The union and reformsters have different techniques for raising money, and the difference tells us a great deal.
Pro-privatization campaign contributions totaled $46.1 million raised through 5,700 contributions from less than 400 wealthy individuals, associated organizations and PACs.
Got that? The reformsters gathered over $46 million from just 400 contributors. The top five: Michael Bloomberg ($9.2 million), James Simons ($3 million), Paul Singer ($2.2 million), Daniel Loeb ($1.9 million) and David Koch ($1.6 million).
Meanwhile, the union raised over $87 million in campaign funds from over 18,000 contributors.Their top five contributors were organizations, including the union itself.
Befriending Andy Cuomo
Between 2005 and 2014, privatizers contributed a little over $3 million to the Cuomo campaign coffers. During that same period, the union contributed $153,892.06 to Cuomo's campaign (it is not clear whether that includes the cost of Randi Weingarten's 11th-hour robo-call in support of Cuomo's Lt. Governor).
Privatizers also kicked in $5 million to the Senate GOP Housekeeping Account (because "housekeeping" is a prettier word than "slush") while the union contributed less than half a million-- so less than a dime for every every reformster dollar.
Patterns of Campaign Support
This may seem like an arcane point here, but once the union and the reformsters collect their money, they spend it differently, and those differences have implications for the exercise of influence.
The vast majority of union money goes to PACs, and that translates mainly to advertising and PR campaigns to support particular positions, to sway the public in a particular direction. However, the reformster money goes not only to PACs, but to the party and candidate committees.
So even though the union had twice the money to spend that the reformsters did, the union only gave about $1 million to the candidate committees, while reformsters gave $14 million to individual candidate committees. The union gave under $7 million to the party, but the reformsters contributed almost three times the amount.
In other words, the union is trying to influence the election, but the reformsters are influencing the candidates and the parties. We can argue (and should, really) just how separate from the candidates the individual PACs are, but the PACs are certainly one more step removed form the candidate than his actual campaign committee. This is the difference between saying, "We're going to help you by cleaning up the neighborhood," and "We're going to help you by giving you money to furnish your house." This is about reformsters stocking up on favors.
Does this pay off?
I cannot recommend enough that you go read this entire report to get all the details, specifics, and painful facts and figures. But the bottom line here is that where you find heavy contributions from reformsters, you find New York legislators working hard to make sure privatizers can make a profit.
FES, Inc.'s visible lobbying and ads and rallies in Albany may be the more obvious exercises of their money and reach, but when the Senate GOP Committee is raking in $5 mill from charterific contributors and then making sure that the State of New York sets aside tax dollars just to support charters, that should give us pause as well. Andrew Cuomo has announced his intent to break public education; privatizers are getting their $3 million's worth.
One can argue that the money is not corrupting the system, but simply following its own interests. In other words, maybe it's not that Cuomo attacks public ed because he's been paid to, but that reformsters support him because he is already a public ed-hating troll. But if Cuomo and the GOP are already firmly on your side, why do you need to give them more money the God? Sure, you support the people who favor your interests-- that's politics. But this isn't support-- this is SUPPPOOOORTTTTTT!!!!! And it's support given straight to the politicians, not to organizations that support their interests. This kind of money doesn't just say, "Keep up the good work." This is the kind of money that says, "Don't forget who your friends are."
The Marketplace of Ideas
This sort of toxic money flinging, repeated in state after state across the country, is a reminder of the weakness of the reformster ideas.
Remember when it took millions of dollars to politicians to get Civil Rights legislation passed? Or the way that a small group of billionaires convinced a few states' legislators to legalize same-gender marriage?That's right-- those things didn't happen. They didn't need to.
If the people of the US overwhelmingly, strongly desired to tear down our system of public education and replace it with privatized profit-making charter schools, we'd be there. If the system of disenfranchising local people and replacing their community schools with smaller, more exclusive, more expensive charters was really appealing, folks would be outside state capitals clamoring for it. Groups like Families for Excellent Schools would have actual real live grass roots support instead of relying on 400 shadowy contributors who don't even have enough courage of their convictions to be public and visible.
Not that the collective political voice of America is always wise or right. But if you have to buy friends for your child, that tells you something about your child. If your political agenda can only survive on the strength of your checkbook and the depth of your pockets and the powerful friends you can buy to look after it, maybe you are backing the wrong horse.
The full report runs over fifty pages, so I'm not going to try to capture the full Brobdinagian wreck here. But let me share some of the most striking findings.
The report lumps pro-ed-reform groups under the heading "privatizers," and I have no disagreement there.
2014 was a huge year for reformsters spending, with the privatizers outspending the union for the first time. There is a whole other conversation to be had about how much the union does or does not represent actual opposition to the privatizers, particularly those who fly the Democrat flag, but we'll let that go for now.
The union is not outspent in all areas-- between 2005 and 2014, the union (and friends) spent over $144 million on lobbying, while reformsters dropped a measly $44 mill. Reformsters are, however, catching up, with a staggering jump in reformster lobbying spending in 2014, when those expenditures jumped up to $12-ish million, over twice what the unions spent.
Who are the major players?
The biggest reformster player by far is the group Families for Excellent Schools, Inc; these guys are pumping tens of millions of dollars into the political arena. FES was founded in 2011 by five individuals, four of them Wall Street players. The group became the high-profile face of opposition to Bill DeBlasio, staging rallies and running expensive ad campaigns to thwart his plan to put a leash on NYC charter expansion. The group, which shares the same address as StudentsFirst of NY, has steadfastly refused to admit where their funding comes from. Mercedes Schneider has pierced a little of that fog, and the results are unsurprising-- FES has close ties to (among others) the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Tapestry Project, a group whose executive director is Eva Moscowitz's husband. The group also tried to produce some "research" to support their point of view, but as Bruce Baker showed, that research probably didn't cost them more than a couple of bucks. The FES motto is "Don't Steal Possible," which appears to be short for, "Don't Steal Possible When You Can Just Go Ahead and Buy It."
Families for Excellent Schools, Inc, is spending more money on NY politics than anybody-- and nobody otside of their organization knows where that money is coming from.
How to raise money
The union and reformsters have different techniques for raising money, and the difference tells us a great deal.
Pro-privatization campaign contributions totaled $46.1 million raised through 5,700 contributions from less than 400 wealthy individuals, associated organizations and PACs.
Got that? The reformsters gathered over $46 million from just 400 contributors. The top five: Michael Bloomberg ($9.2 million), James Simons ($3 million), Paul Singer ($2.2 million), Daniel Loeb ($1.9 million) and David Koch ($1.6 million).
Meanwhile, the union raised over $87 million in campaign funds from over 18,000 contributors.Their top five contributors were organizations, including the union itself.
Befriending Andy Cuomo
Between 2005 and 2014, privatizers contributed a little over $3 million to the Cuomo campaign coffers. During that same period, the union contributed $153,892.06 to Cuomo's campaign (it is not clear whether that includes the cost of Randi Weingarten's 11th-hour robo-call in support of Cuomo's Lt. Governor).
Privatizers also kicked in $5 million to the Senate GOP Housekeeping Account (because "housekeeping" is a prettier word than "slush") while the union contributed less than half a million-- so less than a dime for every every reformster dollar.
Patterns of Campaign Support
This may seem like an arcane point here, but once the union and the reformsters collect their money, they spend it differently, and those differences have implications for the exercise of influence.
The vast majority of union money goes to PACs, and that translates mainly to advertising and PR campaigns to support particular positions, to sway the public in a particular direction. However, the reformster money goes not only to PACs, but to the party and candidate committees.
So even though the union had twice the money to spend that the reformsters did, the union only gave about $1 million to the candidate committees, while reformsters gave $14 million to individual candidate committees. The union gave under $7 million to the party, but the reformsters contributed almost three times the amount.
In other words, the union is trying to influence the election, but the reformsters are influencing the candidates and the parties. We can argue (and should, really) just how separate from the candidates the individual PACs are, but the PACs are certainly one more step removed form the candidate than his actual campaign committee. This is the difference between saying, "We're going to help you by cleaning up the neighborhood," and "We're going to help you by giving you money to furnish your house." This is about reformsters stocking up on favors.
Does this pay off?
I cannot recommend enough that you go read this entire report to get all the details, specifics, and painful facts and figures. But the bottom line here is that where you find heavy contributions from reformsters, you find New York legislators working hard to make sure privatizers can make a profit.
FES, Inc.'s visible lobbying and ads and rallies in Albany may be the more obvious exercises of their money and reach, but when the Senate GOP Committee is raking in $5 mill from charterific contributors and then making sure that the State of New York sets aside tax dollars just to support charters, that should give us pause as well. Andrew Cuomo has announced his intent to break public education; privatizers are getting their $3 million's worth.
One can argue that the money is not corrupting the system, but simply following its own interests. In other words, maybe it's not that Cuomo attacks public ed because he's been paid to, but that reformsters support him because he is already a public ed-hating troll. But if Cuomo and the GOP are already firmly on your side, why do you need to give them more money the God? Sure, you support the people who favor your interests-- that's politics. But this isn't support-- this is SUPPPOOOORTTTTTT!!!!! And it's support given straight to the politicians, not to organizations that support their interests. This kind of money doesn't just say, "Keep up the good work." This is the kind of money that says, "Don't forget who your friends are."
The Marketplace of Ideas
This sort of toxic money flinging, repeated in state after state across the country, is a reminder of the weakness of the reformster ideas.
Remember when it took millions of dollars to politicians to get Civil Rights legislation passed? Or the way that a small group of billionaires convinced a few states' legislators to legalize same-gender marriage?That's right-- those things didn't happen. They didn't need to.
If the people of the US overwhelmingly, strongly desired to tear down our system of public education and replace it with privatized profit-making charter schools, we'd be there. If the system of disenfranchising local people and replacing their community schools with smaller, more exclusive, more expensive charters was really appealing, folks would be outside state capitals clamoring for it. Groups like Families for Excellent Schools would have actual real live grass roots support instead of relying on 400 shadowy contributors who don't even have enough courage of their convictions to be public and visible.
Not that the collective political voice of America is always wise or right. But if you have to buy friends for your child, that tells you something about your child. If your political agenda can only survive on the strength of your checkbook and the depth of your pockets and the powerful friends you can buy to look after it, maybe you are backing the wrong horse.
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