Pickering v. Garcetti -- How Mass Opt-Outs Will Aid Teachers Brought Up on Charges Over Opt-Out Advocacy

In the coming prosecutions we will see a collision over state authority and teachers' expression rights in the public interest.  The parents' and students' opt-out activities will support teachers in their claim to use the free speech power as expressed in Pickering, over the state power as expressed in Garcetti.

The massive parent and student support that we have seen in the opt-out rebellion in the last two weeks profoundly shows popular revulsion for the high-stakes standardized tests that have no purpose other than to sort teachers. And as has been shown in statistical analyses, whether by Gary Rubinstein or by the American Statistical Association, Value-Added Measuring is invalid in assessing teachers.

Case law on public employee free speech, briefly
In Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) the Supreme Court justices upheld a teacher's right of free speech. A teacher had written a letter criticizing school board policy. The Court decided that teachers have a right of free speech if they are speaking truthfully and in the public interest.

By contrast a more recent Supreme Court ruling, Garcetti v. Ceballo (2006) the Court held that the interests of smooth government operation trumped government employee free speech rights. The case involved a dispute on the over over proper procedure with a warrant. For a lengthier look at the question of teachers' free speech rights see this posting at Diane Ravitch's blog.

A few days ago I wrote on how the Supreme Court has protected the free speech rights of youths. A case on a youth of the Jehovah's Witnesses faith was supported in a quest of being free from mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. In a later case, a youth was supported in challenging the constitutionality of the mandate of reciting a prayer in school. These precedents would support those youths that would resent being compelled to sign a contract of secrecy regarding test content. Further, parental rights have been found to have had given greater weight than property rights.
How all this relates to kids and this month's tests: students should not have to sign secrecy oaths. Parents' rights mean that they can allow their children to opt out of tests.

Teachers: Massive student opt-outs, massive parental OKs are proof that you are speaking to a public interest need
The entire 11th grade in one Seattle school resisted taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test. (See "What If They Gave the SBAC and Nobody Took It?") In Long Island the percentage of students\opting out of taking the Common Core-based tests took a meteoric rise. In Baldwin, Nassau County, student opt-outs took a 232 percent increase. (New York State has decided to use its own test, instead of the PARCC or SBAC tests used in other states.) A full 39 percent of third through eighth grade students opted out of taking the English Language Arts "assessment" (test for those of you in the real world). Across New York, the number of opt-outs (from about 73 percent of the districts) there were 185,000 opt-outs on the ELA test, an increase over the 49,000 from last year. About 1.1 million students took the test last year.

These numbers demonstrate that the parents and students are in alignment with the teachers.
So, if and when authorities prosecute teachers, as suggested by this disciplinary threat in Philadelphia, this mandate in New Mexico that compels teachers to withhold their speech on opting out, this suspension of a Rhode Island teacher, and this threat in Rochester, New York, teachers will be able to argue that the Pickering principal of protecting speech that is in the public interest evidently outweighs the Garcetti case emphasis on the smooth operation of the government.

It will be a great fight over the judgments of the two precedential cases. Bring it on.

Teachers should express special thanks to Change the Stakes, NYS Allies for Public Education, United Opt Out, Long Island Parents and Teachers Against Standardized Testing and APPR.

So that's why Teacher College welcomes testing; other Pearson secrets, from Huffington Post

Alan Singer wrote in "The Huffington Post" September 4, 2012 "Pearson 'Education' -- Who Are These People?" that Pearson PLC the publishing magnate that has secured breath-taking influence over testing and curricular materials in New York State and beyond, has close connections with Teachers College Columbia University.
Recall that Thompson for Mayor campaign chairwoman Merryl Tisch was honored with being asked to speak at Teacher College's 2013 invocation, which occasioned Diane Ravitch's may 6, 2013 blogpost, "Teachers College to Honor Doyenne of High-Stakes Testing." TC's press release feting Dr. Tisch follows below this post.

"Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College-Columbia University is listed as a non-executive director of Pearson. As of February 29, 2012, she held 12,927 shares of Pearson stock valued at $240,000. As a non-executive director she also receives an annual fee of 65,000 or almost $100,000. Fuhrman has been a non-executive director since 2004 and has received fees and stock I estimate worth more than a million dollars, certainly a substantial sum, but not the $20 million I initially reported," wrote college professor Alan Singer in Huffington Post.

Pearson, powerful in the education field, American publishing, the Financial Times and the British Economist magazine.
To boot, from Wikipedia: the British corporation, "Pearson holds 47% in Penguin Random House, the world's largest consumer book publisher, and 50% stake in the Economist Group, the publishing group which specialises in international business. Pearson has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange."
Singer goes on to name the most powerful names behind the mysterious mighty Pearson:
Glen Moreno (Chairman of Pearson)
Dame Marjorie Morris Scardino (born in Arizona a mere American commoner, before moving to Britain and somehow getting the title of "Dame") -who saved Pearson at the turn of the century from being a "basket case" http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/mar/09/pearson.city
She was replaced as Pearson CEO a month after Singer's Huffington Post piece. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/business/media/scardino-ceo-of-pearson-to-step-down.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1353416506-jFFHYW5vCZm1S6CATWdNRQ&_r=1&
2002 PBS Frontline story on the big four in testing back in the industry's relative 2002 infancy: The Testing Industry's Big Four: Profiles of the four companies that dominate the business of making and scoring standardized achievement tests.
(The Big Four of American Education Testing: Harcourt Educational Publishing (Market share: 40 percent of test-design market), CTB McGraw-Hill (Market share: 40 percent of test-design market), Riverside Publishing (Market share: 20 percent of test-design market), NCS Pearson (Market position: Leading scorer of standardized tests))

The Libyan Dictatorship Partially Owns the Company Scoring Your Kids' Standardized Tests (corroborated in Singer's article) http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/10561-the-libyan-dictatorship-partially-owns-the-company-scoring-your-kids-standardized-tests

Interesting aside from Dan DiMaggio of Truth-Out: ("Anecdote: The testing industry has grown so fast and been so desperate for workers that they even re-hired my friend Todd Farley after he published a must-read book, Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, in which he denounces the entire industry based on his fourteen years scoring and designing tests.")

United Opt Out: BOYCOTT PEARSON NOW http://unitedoptout.com/boycott-pearson-now/

Diane Ravitch blogpost: Does Pearson Own American Education? UPDATE!

TEACHER COLLEGE'S PRESS RELEASE, FETING DR. MERRYL TISCH, CHAIRWOMAN OF THOMPSON FOR MAYOR, CHANCELLOR OF NEW YORK STATE BOARD OF REGENTS:

“TC alumna Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents. Tisch will speak at the first master’s degree ceremony on May 21st, which starts at 9:30 a.m. As Chancellor, Tisch, a former first-grade teacher, has championed public education as “the greatest civic and civil liberties issue of our time.” She galvanized the state’s bid to receive federal Race to the Top funding, helping persuade teachers unions and other players to commit to increased charter school development and creation of a system that substantially based a teacher’s performance evaluation on students’ test scores. She has spearheaded creation of a statewide data system that ties student performance to specific teacher input – and to the school of education that prepared that teacher. On her watch, the state has provided annual $2 million grants to low-performing schools that have a demonstrated plan for turn-around. And she has expanded teacher preparation beyond the standard range of players and perspectives, leading the way in accrediting new preparation programs housed in museums and other non-traditional venues.”

The progressive fightback on education has fused statewide across New York State! Coordination among the people's side is a great idea, for a recent report indicates that this has been coordination among the Rhee-type education Astroturf groups through the PIE Network.

From the Movement of Rank and File Educators (UFT) website:

Education Advocacy Groups from across New York Unite to form NYS Allies for Public Education by morecaucusnyc

Show Up In Person to Stand Up for Public Education!

Education Advocacy Groups from across New York Unite to form NYS Allies for Public Education and Plan Protest  at Commissioner King’s Visit to Rochester

New York Education Commissioner John King will be visiting Rochester’s School of the Arts on August 28th. Although his visit is not open to the public, members of a newly formed coalition of parents, educators and students called New York State Allies for Public Education [NYSAPE] plan to make their opposition to excessive tests and data sharing known by protesting outside of the school at 1pm.

NYSAPE includes groups from the following regions:

NYC: Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), Save Our Schools, Stop Common Core in NYS, Change the Stakes, Class Size Matters, ParentVoicesNY, Time Out From Testing

Long Island: Long Island Opt Out Info, Long Island Parents for Education

Western New York: Western New Yorkers for Public Education, Concerned Teachers of Chautauqua County, East Aurora Supporters of Public Education, Hamburg Parents for QUALITY Public Education, Ken-Ton Parents Against Excessive Testing, Lancaster Central School District Info on Standardized Testing, NYS Stop Testing, O.P. Parents Against Excessive Testing, Partnership for Smarter Schools , Rush Henrietta Parents Against Excessive Standardized Testing, Williamsville Parents for Meaningful Assessment

Central New York: New York State Foundations of Education Association Opt Out of State Standardized Tests - New York (Opt Out NY) 

Oneonta Area for Public Education 

Adirondack Region: Opt Out Staab, Saranac Lake Parent Faculty Education Alliance 

Hudson Valley: Heads Down-Thumbs Up, Ossining Citizens For Schools, 

Parents For Change - Warwick, NY, Re-Thinking Testing Mid-Hudson Region

Student test scores on the state standardized exams plummeted this year: only 31% of students passed these tests.  Parents throughout the state are outraged and convinced that Commissioner King set the passing scores on these exams to convince them that their children and schools are failing to help him impose his damaging agenda.   Last weekend, nearly 2,000 parents and teachers, including members of NYSAPE, attended a protest rally in Long Island, expressing their opposition to these unfair and invalid exams.

Organizations from every region of the state have now joined forces to oppose these exams, the time and money spent preparing, giving and scoring them, and the invalid results, which one Long Island superintendent recently said were so unreliable he would ignore them.

According to Long Island Principal Carol Burris, author of the New York Principal’s Letter and recent recipient of New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year award, “Excessive testing is the wrong strategy to improve schools and bring all students to college and career readiness.  This year's tests, which caused the achievement gap to widen, and the percentage of students labeled "below basic" to balloon, will only discourage our students and push them into remedial services that they do not need, at taxpayer expense. It's time to end these wrong-headed strategies before we lose a generation of students.”

“High-stakes tests are resulting in substantial negative educational and fiscal impacts: School districts are diverting money to pay for systems of testing and scoring, a cost burden that is pushed to local taxpayers as the portion of school budgets funded by the state continues to be well below historical levels.” Says KT Tobin, a former vice president of the New Paltz School board and a founding  member of NYSAPE ally ReThinking Testing, Mid Hudson Region.

Chris Cerrone an educator, parent and member of NYSAPE ally Western New Yorkers for Public Education says, "Parents have the power to prevent damage to our children's education from high-stakes assessments. By uniting grassroots groups from around New York we can fight the impact of over-testing."  According to Tim Farley, an Albany parent and school principal, “Now is the time to take our schools back from corporate interests!” and as Dr. Joseph Rella, Superintendent of Comsewogue School District says, "Stop it, fix it, or scrap it!"

According to Nancy Cauthen of the NYC based parent and educator group Change the Stakes, “The efforts of Change the Stakes (CTS) have been greatly strengthened by learning from and with like-minded groups across the state. Last spring, the opt-out movements in Western New York and Long Island exploded with activity, and groups across the state benefited from the research they did as well as the excitement and energy they generated. CTS is thrilled to formalize this kind of collaboration by being part of NYS Allies for Public Education."

Lisa Rudley, President of Ossining Citizens For Schools said, “The state is overreaching and our rights are being trampled on and now there is a divisive campaign to “contain” parents, educators and community members.  We are joining forces across the state to protect authentic public education and our children’s privacy. Together NYSAPE Allies are a strong block of very concerned stakeholders committed to informing parents of excessive testing and inappropriate sharing of student data to third party vendors without parental consent.

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters in NYC said, “Parents throughout the state were outraged when they learned last year that their children’s most sensitive, personal information would be shared with a corporation called inBloom Inc. and for-profit vendors, without their consent.  Thousands of them contacted Commissioner King to protest and asking to opt out, but he refused to acknowledge their wishes.  Two bills that would have prevented the state’s plan were passed by the Assembly in June.  Five states have now pulled out of inBloom because of the risk to student privacy.  Working together with NYSAPE and other parents throughout the state, we are intent on fighting to make sure that the State Education Department respects our rights and protects our children’s privacy and safety, by pulling out of inBloom as well.”

Bianca Tanis, a Hudson Valley parent said, “As a parent of a child with special needs, I am distressed by the state’s plan to share sensitive educational data, data that may include information pertaining to a student’s disability. This is a violation of a child’s dignity and right to privacy and may cause harm to our children. As parents, we insist on the right to say no.”

“Our teachers and schools are misrepresented as failing. We demand that the Commissioner, Chancellor and Regents support educators and communities in the hard work of creating and implementing meaningful curricula and assessments.” said David Hursh, a member of NYSAPE and a Professor at the University of Rochester. Eric Mihelbergel, a parent from Rochester NY says, "Public education is about teaching our children, not about teaching a test to our children. We must spend our time and money on our children, not on corporate and political interests."

NYSAPE urges parents and concerned community members to become an ally, join them on Facebook, and sign the NYSAPE petition against excessive testing and data collection. Parents and educator members of NYSAPE will raise their voices in support of public education at 1pm at the School of the Arts, 45 Prince Street, Rochester, NY 14607. Please visit www.nysape.org for complete details.

The Tale of Two New York Teacher Unions and the Significance of Mulgrew/UFT's Ignoring of NYSUT's 6/8 Rally

The city union and the state union, the tale of two New York teachers' unions.

When we look at the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT, the state federation of teachers' unions) and the United Federation of Teachers (the union of New York City teachers) we see very different unions.

Centerpiece graphic from NYSUT's website.
The state union is holding a rally on Saturday, June 8 in Albany, at Empire State Plaza, which symbolically abuts both the NYSED building and the New York State Legislature, touching on many specific issues that address patterns of the worsening conditions that teachers are facing. (Special resources page for rally with leaflets and social media links such as Facebook and Twitter.) Furthermore, the timing will be important --we anticipate that one week prior, at or around June 1, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Education Commissioner John King will impose a teacher evaluation system on New York City teachers.
Of course, we can, and should, point out that the leadership of this same state federation have appeared with state officials, collaborating with some of the policies that teachers are chafing under --for example, see the cooperation with the New York State Race to the Top application. Obviously, if you support the wrong-headed policies, working conditions will deteriorate and learning conditions will deteriorate. (He signed onto not just RTTT but also its controversial components such as evaluations based on students' test scores; and he was aware of other parts that likewise could portent trouble. See this 2011 interview at Education Next.) And we would be greatly remiss if we did not recall that NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi performed the misdeed of sending a letter warning (or threatening?) teachers that followed their conscience and were active in opposing cooperation with the high-stakes tests. (See my post a month ago, "NYSUT's Iannuzzi as Discipliner, Warns Teachers on Opt-Out Advocacy; Ignores Great Anxiety Tests Can Create.")

The out-of-New York City teachers union locals are making a lot of the critiques that MORE and its allied bloggers have been making on their sites. (Find your hard copy, inserted in the latest NY Teacher or go to NYSUT's site.) True, the next step, the identification of national and state politicians, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Andrew Cuomo, John King, is missing but, the critiques are there, nearly reaching that point. It is instructive to note that the kind of searing critique that arises from statements published on the NYSUT site and in the NYSUT paper are far beyond the limited criticisms that appear on the UFT site and paper.

Nonetheless, the state level union is waking up. OK, so there's no mea culpa, acknowledging the mistakes of collaboration that engendered this present crisis across the state, we applaud the state union for the way that it is focusing on the worsening conditions. Maybe it was the booing at President Iannuzzi by some of the troops at the state's Representatives Assembly a few weeks back that woke up NYSUT's leadership. And yes, the rhetoric of NYSUT's literature and the statements it is printing in its newspaper could be viewed as a preventive co-optation of the percolating of radical dissidence across New York State.

We must fault Michael Mulgrew and the United Federation of Teachers for its silence/black-out of the June 8 Albany rally. (Nowhere to be found on the UFT site, not even on its calendar for June.) Moreover, the UFT's June 12 rally has been poorly publicized as of yet. At the June 12 rally we can expect simplistic signs, leaflets that are not text-rich, but whining, short soundbytes; and also, look for noise-makers which will drown out the potential for rank and file chants. Additionally, the contract rally is one which does not at all replicate the issues that the Albany rally raises. Instead, look for criticisms of Bloomberg that do not engage in the holistic analysis that the NYSUT literature has. By having an all unions contracts rally, a specific analysis of the ruinous education policies will get lost.

NYSUT's rally includes important focus on the terrible patterns. Now, don't get me wrong. The NYSUT literature is incomplete-- it stops short of the properly far reaching connection-making analysis that we would see in Chicago Teachers Union or Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE Caucus-UFT). But the fact remains that this is more of what we would like than the UFT says.

NYSUT (SORT OF) CHANNELING MORE AND CORE? Onto the close reading of the NYSUT literature. Exhibit A, NYSUT's general community oriented flyer. It criticizes the tests for crowding out quality instruction. Parts of it parallel the kinds of critiques that the UFT's dissident MORE caucus has been making. Granted, it does echo American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten's call for a moratorium on the high-stakes use of the high-stakes tests until the problems can be worked out. Preferable would be an out-right rejection. Yet, it is worth noting that Weingarten's limited critique is still far beyond anything Mulgrew has called for. Note that he has made no statement echoing her moratorium call. Again, the UFT's ignoring of the NYSUT rally speaks volumes. For Mulgrew to give attention to the NYSUT rally and its literature would inherently concede the legitimacy of the MORE caucus' critiques, as well as the points that MORE activists such as Julie Cavanagh and Brian Jones have been making since before the formation of MORE.
From the flyer:

End the over-reliance on expensive corporate-developed tests!
* Rethink the use of high stakes assessments and the negative impact on students and entire school community. Call for a moratorium on high stakes consequences for testing until the state can get it right!
* These tests put too much stress on students and reduce real learning time.
* Sensible and meaningful assessments are needed that align with instruction and accurately measure student progress.

Recall how MORE has been making parallel calls for a more holistic, comprehensive curriculum, as the Chicago Teachers Union (under the leadership of the CORE caucus) has made, in contrast to the UFT's comparative reticence on the excessive test prep focus on English Language Arts (ELA) and math to the exclusion of other subjects? Well, the next topical demand on the flyer has parts from MORE's mission statement or election platform:

Demand fair and equitable funding of our schools!
* Restore the programs that are being eliminated across the state and which research shows improve academic performance, especially in communities in need, including pre-kindergarten programs, pre- and after-school programs, art, music, foreign languages, advanced placement, etc.

Remember mayoral control? Mulgrew and the Unity-controlled UFT brazenly called for the extension of it under slight modifications. With the prospect of Christine Quinn as mayor can we really afford to gamble on more mayoral control?
What is the NYSUT position? Note how the flyer pitches to communities' desires for community input (dare I say community control?) and democratic yearnings.
Progressive unionists must say clearly that the institution of mayoral control as implemented in urban cities with majority minority populations is the exercise of a separate but equal standard.
Progressives that assert to support democracy and oppose racism should support the complete elimination of mayoral control and the complete restoration of elected school-boards. There is the grandest of double standards whereby public discourse points to instances of corruption in the old Board of Education, yet turns a blind eye to how corruption can and does happen in white, more affluent communities. Witness the suspected municipal corruption that engendered a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) lockdown Wednesday of Ramapo, Rockland County, New York Town Hall offices. It was no man gone wild, no threat of terrorism; no, it was the securing of records that could implicate people in acts of political corruption, with 40 (!) FBI agents wheeling out documents. See the media buzz the FBI raid has raised.

Restore local control of our public schools! Fix the tax cap!
* We need to restore our democratic principle of majority rule and local control in educational decision-making.
* Our parents, teachers and local communities know better than Albany does

Goodness gracious, democratic principle of majority rule and local control, --shudders!-- what wild radical ideas! What would Mulgrew, Mendel or Barr say???
Finally, we have demands that reach beyond the school teachers, to immigrant communities and to health care workers. Wow! More radical social justice talk! What would Mulgrew, Mendel or Barr say???

Invest in public higher education!
* Make higher education available and affordable for all students!
* Pass the DREAM Act; renew the opportunity for all students to pursue higher education!
* Save SUNY Downstate! New York State public teaching hospitals provide quality community care and avenues for low-income students to become doctors and other health care professionals.

Exhibit B: NYSUT's more simply worded flyer. It has a reduced version of the above discussed flyer. With this added part: slogan against corporate control of education. OK, so it doesn't mention Pearson, but this isn't Uncle Mike's UFT.

* Against corporate control of public education!

Next, we have the latest editions of NYSUT's newspaper, NYSUT United and the UFT's New York Teacher to compare and contrast.

	NYSUT United	UFT and New York Teacher
Common Core	implicit, critical mention	apologies to the CCSS, the message: just let us get it right next time
High-stakes tests	tests causing near anguish	weaker commentary
Group's stance	as early as 2011, NYSUT challenged the new evaluation system in court	endorse VAM/ test-based evaluations, then gripe over the results
Rally	June 8, dealing with wider range of issues, reaching to the wider community; major push; literature already released, latest issue of paper has stories emphasizing issues attending to in rally promo leaflets	silence on June 8 rally, diversionary June 12 rally*, narrower, dealing with a contract-oriented focus; weaker promotion so far --watch for bland, top-heavy announcements

*It is valid to have a contract rally, but the timing is conveniently distracting from the June 8 rally. Anyway, as The Chief reported in its latest issue this week, contract arbitration is expected to drag into the summer. And Mulgrew and company are essentially on record as saying that they will not seek a new contract until Bloomberg is out of office.

NYSUT United's May issue includes an article giving the overall rationale for the rally; an article with various (non-NYC) NYSUT local leaders speaking critically of the tests and for the students, "At testing forums, educators stand up for their students," in which teachers speak up to Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and referencing the Common Cause in a critical manner. Also, note the tone of this language:

"We torture our students with assessments that do not take into account learning styles," said Malone FT's Angela Spahr. "It's a free, appropriate public education we're supposed to be providing. This isn't appropriate."

By contrast, the UFT paper's editors and or writers made sure to couch any criticisms of the Common Core with praising comments. NYSUT printed a pitch by the Averill Park Teachers' Association president for the rally that skewered Pearson, inBloom, high-stakes tests, points we rarely see made in the UFT paper:

TOP TEN reasons to March on Albany in the Rally for Public Education:
10. You have realized public education is being hi-jacked by for profit organizations.
9. You are tired of reading about how ineffective you are at your own profession by people who know nothing about education.
8. You believe high stakes testing is out of control in NY.
7. You believe you have not had enough time to learn the Common Core yourself, let alone have your students tested on it!
6. You believe your students’ personal information, including their state assessment results and their IEPs and other personal data should be kept confidential.
5. You believe your effectiveness rating should be kept confidential, and don’t want a link on the district web page to this information or directions given to get this information.
4. You believe that NYS should report to the public the amount of tax payer money spent on developing, administering, grading and reviewing state assessments.
3. The word PEARSON makes your skin crawl.
2. You work in Averill Park (Insert your own school district.) and have lost about a quarter of your faculty due to unfair state budget cuts!
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON….
1. You are a caring professional who wants the BEST public education for your own students, children, and grandchildren and you know this isn't it!

NYSUT has also prominently reprinted an impassioned poem by a teacher worn-out by the test-prep focused routine that teaching has become. See Samantha Kucerak's poem, "I am a teacher, and I am tired," reprinted from the NYSUT website, on the side-bar at the right. While she writes from Homer, New York, she speaks for what thousands of New York City teachers are feeling.
In closing, the June 8 rally is an opportunity for progressive New York City teacher activists to make common cause with and to meet teachers from AFT locals across the state that are kindred spirits. Would Michael Mulgrew and his allied masters of ossified, bureaucratic unionism was to expose UFT rank and filers to the sort of leaflets, slogans and conversations that are closer to those expressed by MORE activists or their favorite national columnists, Diane Ravitch, Valerie Strauss or Susan Ohanian? (Not to mention the potential of meeting members of parent-teacher alliances from Long Island or Western New York that have been active in building test opt-out movements.) Of course not.
Let's defy Mulgrew's cynical move to ignore the June 8 Albany rally of our upstate and Long Island brothers and sisters.
Let's rally at Albany, the source of so much our working condition woes, from the state's Race to the Top application to the evaluation system that Cuomo will impose on New York City teachers just a week before.

Ohanian on Common Core: Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools / Data Analysis in Pre-K? -Update re Diane Ravitch

(Click to February 20, 2013's post, "A Debate About Little Children and the Common Core," at Diane Ravitch's blog. The comments themselves are revealing some serious issues in the Common Core that parents and teachers are observing.)

Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools

Susan Ohanian, writing at Daily Censored nails it, on how the Common Core State [sic] Standards are part and parcel actively destroying the spirit and soul of American education.

In response to a poverty rate that tops 90% in many urban and rural schools –and 1.6 million homeless children—many in schools with no libraries–education reformers at the White House, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Governors Association call for a radical, untried curriculum overhaul and two versions of nonstop national testing to measure whether teachers are producing workers for the Global Economy.

They call this upheaval the Common Core State (sic) Standards (CCSS) and there are two things to remember: The Common Core did not originate with the states and it is speculative and experimental–in a word, cuckoo. I use the (sic) in its title because putting the word “state” in there is a political move, a public relations ploy. Learning from President Bill Clinton’s failure to get the national test he wanted, corporate leaders and their political allies try to keep this school remake as distant from the White House as possible, insisting over and over that it’s a “grassroots initiative” –what the people asked for. Every time they say this, the press repeats it. The Common Core reality is about as far from Mom and apple pie as a zombie invasion.

Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Golden was one of the few journalists to acknowledge the closeness of the White House to the Common Core: “Today, the Gates Foundation and Education Secretary Duncan move in apparent lockstep.”

School reform rhetoric about the “failure” of public schools draws on the notoriously deceptive and fear-mongering A Nation at Risk–pushed by entities ranging from the Business Roundtable and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U. S. Department of Education. This rhetoric is bi-partisan. Both Republicans and Democrats like to bash schools—as a diversionary tactic to avoid accepting responsibility for the Wall Street and banking debacles. School reform solutions are also bi-partisan–exponentially increasing the number of standardized tests children take, tying teacher salaries to those test scores, dismissing whole school staffs, and shutting down neighborhood schools.

This latest corporate reform plan, the Common Core State (sic) Standards (CCSS), eliminates community-based planning, destroys personal response to literature, and, instead of fostering education for individual need and the common good, puts children on a treadmill to becoming scared, obedient workers for the global economy. The constant exhortation to teachers and students is “You’re not good enough for the market economy!” When the ruling class screams about people not measuring up, over time the besieged are trained to blame themselves for the lack of jobs, lack of benefits, lack of a safety net. Blame themselves and not the politicos, hedgefunders, bankers, and cronies whose own greed has put our entire system in peril. According to an Associated Press 2012 analysis, the typical CEO took home $9.6 million.

The Common Core State (sic) Standards are the result of hundreds of millions of dollars disbursed in carefully distributed grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accompanied by the threat from U. S. Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold federal funds if individual states did not sign on the dotted line. I looked at two months worth of press citations praising the CCSS –August and September, 2012–and then looked up the Gates money given to those who come to praise CCSS. The list ranges from the American Federation of Teachers ($1,000,000) to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction ($823,637), from the neo-liberal Center for American Progress ($2,998,809) to the neo-conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute ($5,711,462). The PTA got money ($2,005,000); so did the National Writing Project ($2,645,593). And so on and so on. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and with money in their pockets, many are eager to sing the Common Core song and eat the funeral meats.

Although these groups all play a cheerleading role, here are the significant players in deforming school curriculum and testing and their Gates haul.

• Achieve, Inc.: $25,787,051
• The Council of Chief State School Officers: $71,302,833
• National Governors Association Center for Best Practices: $30,679,116

Chief architects of the literacy content for the Common Core content are a lawyer and David Coleman, an education entrepreneur. Coleman gained the most notoriety as he barnstormed the country preaching the importance of nonfiction and a bastardized form of New Criticism, a literary theory abandoned long ago by just about everybody except Mr. Coleman. In his presentation at the New York State Education Building in April 2011, Coleman declared that teachers must tell students: “When you grow up in this world you realize people don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” Student Achievement Partners, an outfit Coleman co-founded is now churning out Common Core curriculum. They’re bankrolled by $6,533,350 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and $18,000,000 from the General Electric Foundation. Coleman has moved on to head the College Board ($31,178,497 in Gates funds).

My state education department in Vermont urged every teacher to watch a video produced by the Council of Great City Schools ($8,496,854 from Gates) in which Coleman offers advice to the student who reads several grade levels below the complex text assigned to his class: “You’re going to practice it again and again and again and again. . . so there’s a chance you can finally do that level of work.” It sounds like a very bizarre application of Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule. Coleman decries offering students with learning problems alternate resources, insisting that repetition will clear up difficulties with the mandatory complex text. And teachers are told kids must start early with complexity. The New York Post ran a piece–Playtime’s Over, Kindergartners: Standards stressing kids out–explaining that the New York City Department of Education wants 4- and 5-year-olds to forgo building blocks and crayons and get busy writing “informative/explanatory reports.” This includes writing a topic sentence. Teachers report such complexity makes kids cry, but the corporate imperative doesn’t stop for tears. In rebuttal, Kurt Schwengel, a 15-year Santa Monica kindergarten teacher, insists, “They’re going to have to pry the crayons out of my cold, dead hands.”

A February 2013 New York Times story reads like satire–third graders doing one-arm pushups while performing mathematics tasks with Legos while the teacher recites an important vocabulary word for them to learn (and switch arms when they hear it). I wrote the reporter that I predict a big lawsuit when an 8-year-old engaged in a one-arm pushup while doing Legos gets distracted by vocabulary study, falls, and breaks off his front teeth. I wonder why the people pushing this integrated curriculum leave out The Arts. They could have those third graders singing “Dixie” as they do their one-arm pushups, et al. A teacher friend suggested they could put math facts and vocabulary drill on the toilet paper, and I’d be willing to bet some schools are already doing that. Teachers are feeling the pressure of getting in all the skills, and a lot of readers praised this “integration of mind and body” as a way for kids to learn all they have to learn in our brave new Common Core world. Bad things happen to scared people–and the children in their care.

When I received a note from a desperate Oregon mom telling me the only school available to her family wanted to make her son repeat kindergarten because he didn’t measure up on the federally-required DIBELS phonics test, I asked, “Is there any way you can homeschool?” When I tried to tell this story as an invited speaker at the Chicago AFT Progressive Caucus, I was hooted off the podium as soon as I mentioned the homeschool recommendation. I’ve spent my life working for public school for the common good–and I’m not about to stop–but if I wouldn’t allow a school to destroy a six-year-old I loved, then I can’t allow it to happen to anybody else’s child either. In Finland, lauded for its lead on international tests, they don’t even start teaching reading skills until the kids are 7, and then, children in grade school have a play break every 45 minutes, and don’t take any standardized tests until they’re ready to graduate from high school. I just bought a T-Shirt: Occupy Kindergarten!

I scream about the topic sentence requirement in kindergarten and assigning As I Lay Dying, with its 15 narrators, in 11th grade; I mock the notion of such “informational text” as “Invasive Plant Inventory” and Euclid’s Elements (listed in Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, Appendix B) supplanting To Kill a Mockingbird and “Macbeth” as vehicles for conveying to students the world knowledge Common Core thugs insist is necessary to compete as workers in the Global Economy. And I’d scream just as loudly if every required text was a book I loved. All this arguing about the percentage of fiction allowed and what that fiction should be is a deliberate distraction thrown up by the power brokers. They do it with school reform; they do it with social issues. They want us to wage battle with each other–over the content of national standards–so we’ll have no breath left over to ask Who decides? Who’s in charge of public schools? And for whose benefit do they operate?

Make no mistake about it: current school reform is destroying the lives of children. Here in Vermont, my so-called progressive governor, Peter Shumlin, eager to show his chops to the National Governors Association, cheerfully laps up their Kool-Aid. He’s pushing algebra and geometry as requirements for a high school diploma. Longtime public school superintendent and now managing director of the National Education Policy Center, William Mathis calls the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) crisis the new urban legend. In reality, for some Vermont kids, lumberjack skills are much more important than algebra and before we proclaim algebra more important than music and the arts, we must again ask, Important for whom? Mathis points out that there are more STEM-qualified workers than jobs available and of the nation’s nine million people with STEM degrees, only about three million work in STEM fields.

In his second inaugural address Governor Shumlin put Vermont’s economic future on the backs of teachers and children, saying that “to ensure our success, we must embrace change in the way we both view and deliver education. The rapid change that is required of us is not optional; it will define our success or deliver our failure.” No options. Note how the governor defines education as a delivery system. His emphasis on “rapid change” is both disingenuous and dangerous. Teaching is much more like watching what Whitman called the “trickling sap of maple,” which matures and intensifies slowly, than about delivering rigor to kindergartners—or high schoolers. As Wendell Berry points out, “Good teaching is an investment in the minds of the young, as obscure in result, as remote from immediate proof as planting a chestnut seedling.” One of my third grade students, a deaf child in public school for the first time, recently found me on FaceBook to tell me what Amelia Bedelia meant to her thirty years ago. I think of this as teacher wait time.

Lots of school watchers believe the sole purpose of the Common Core State (sic) Standards is to drive the national test which has been on the corporate agenda for more than two decades. Although the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the CCSS, the new, super-duper assessments traveling with those standards are funded by you and me. The U. S. Department of Education gave $335 million to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop computer-based tests for grades 3-12. They both plan a lot of testing, and costs of hardware and software requirements, of rewiring school buildings and buying computers that meet the specifications are on the backs of local taxpayers. The Florida state department of education recently announced an infusion of nearly half a billion dollars to develop the necessary technology infrastructure capable of delivering the tests. New York City estimates the same amount.

Although hubris seems to drive Bill Gates’ education reform ideology, it is no surprise that his foundation would find the Common Core’s huge reliance on technology attractive. Technology and the desire to put schools under the oversight and domination of a national test also motivated education reformers in September 1989, when President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting in Charlottesville, Va., for the first-ever National Education Summit. Teachers were also absent from that meeting, Instead, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner joined hands with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to lead the effort. Gerstner and his Business Roundtable cronies got to name the problem and define the solution, which was a relabeled Business Roundtable plan calling for school choice, competition, and a massive infusion of technology. It was signed into federal law as America 2000. When it morphed into Goals 2000, President Clinton was foiled in his attempt to add a national test. Then came No Child Left Behind under President Bush the Younger and Race to the Top and the Common Core under President Obama. With each residency change at the White House, the name of ed reform has changed and the content has become more destructive to the needs of public schools and the children in them.

Resistance There is resistance. A national movement of parents opting their children out of standardized testing started when Professor Tim Slekar and his wife went with their son Luke to a school conference to learn why Luke’s grades were slipping. The teacher showed them a sample paper, with a test-prep writing prompt: Write about the two most exciting times you have had with your family. Luke’s response, started, “Whoo-hoo! Let me tell you about my great family vacation trip to the Adirondacks.”

The teacher stopped Luke and asked him to explain to his parents why this opening was unacceptable. “Whoo-hoo! isn’t a sentence,” he acknowledged, adding that the first sentence to a writing prompt must begin by restating the prompt. The teacher said that according to standards, Luke’s response would have been scored a zero, and her obligation was to prepare children to pass the state test. Feeling that education shouldn’t be about preparing students to write answers in a format low-paid temp workers can score, the Slekars decided to opt Luke out of future standardized testing. “We would not allow our son to provide data to a system that was designed to prove that he, the teacher, the system, and the community were failing.” Tim found people of like mind– Peggy Robertson, Morna McDermmott, Ceresta Smith, Shaun Johnson and Laurie Murphy–and together they founded United Opt Out, a national movement to opt students out of standardized testing. Its endorsers include John Kuhn, an outspoken Texas school superintendent, who says, “Parents and students have the power to say when enough is enough.”

Teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle recently demonstrated that teachers also have this power. Despite intense administrative pressure, the whole faculty refused to administer a standardized test there. When a retired Florida kindergarten teacher heard about Garfield High, she called a Seattle pizza shop and ordered five large pizzas with two toppings to be sent to the school. Other expressions of support have poured in from across the country. School watchers are now hopeful that a revolution may be at hand.

Whoo-hoo! Occupy the schools!