Dear Commons Community,

The following call for support for California teachers comes from Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers.  It is a most worthy cause.

Tony

============================================================

Supporter,

On Tuesday morning, teachers across California got up, went to their schools and dedicated their day to helping students learn and grow.

While teachers led their classrooms, a judge in a Los Angeles courtroom said that for students to win, teachers have to lose.

You’ve probably seen news about Vergara v. California. We want you to hear directly from us about how we’re fighting—in California and across the country—to support students, protect teachers and tackle the real issues facing public education.

Before we get into the details, it’s important to take a moment to acknowledge the teachers in California’s classrooms. Our opponents have spent months—and millions of dollars—vilifying California teachers to push a political agenda. So we want to start by telling teachers across California that we see their dedication, and we’re grateful for their service.

Sign our thank-you card to California teachers, and let them know you honor their commitment and courage.

If we want every child to have a chance to thrive, we must retain and support a stable teaching force—especially in high-poverty schools. By attacking the rules that protect and support teachers, the Vergara decision destabilizes public education.

Make no mistake: Last Tuesday was a sad day for public education. While the decision was not unexpected, the rhetoric and lack of a thorough, well-reasoned opinion are disturbing.

For example, the judge believes that due process is essential, but he ruled California’s protections for teachers unconstitutional because he believes two years is not long enough for probation.

The judge argues that no one should tolerate bad teachers in the classroom. We agree—and in many states we’ve reformed the process to protect teachers and ease the burden on schools. But in focusing on teachers who make up a fraction of the workforce, he strips the hundreds of thousands of good teachers of any right to a voice.

In focusing on who should be laid off in times of budget crises, he omits the larger problem at play: full and fair funding of our schools so all kids have access to the classes—like music, art and physical education—and opportunities they need.

The judge seems to think teachers are the core of the problem facing public education. We know that teachers hold our schools together, especially in the toughest times.

Sign our thank-you card, and tell California’s teachers that you know they’re the glue that holds public education together.

Sadly, while the court used its bully pulpit to criticize teacher protections, there was no mention of funding inequities, school segregation, high poverty or any other out-of-school or in-school factors that have been proven to affect student achievement and our children.

And perhaps worst of all, there is nothing in this opinion that suggests a thoughtful analysis of how these statutes should work, or lays groundwork for a path forward. Other states have found ways that don’t pit teachers against students but instead lift up entire communities.

This will not be the last word. As this case makes it through an appeal, we will do what we’ve done in state after state. We will work with parents and communities to fight for safe and welcoming neighborhood public schools that value both kids and the women and men who work with them. No wealthy benefactor with an extreme agenda will detour us from our path to reclaim the promise of public education.

We’re fighting back. When Secretary Duncan praised this flawed ruling, we publicly called him out for his mistaken views. We’ve been making our case in every form of media, all while gearing up to appeal the case in higher courts.

Stand with us in the fight to reclaim the promise of a high-quality public education for every child. Start by showing California teachers that we see and appreciate their dedication.

In unity,

Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Joshua Pechthalt, California Federation of Teachers

P.S.: We’ve included some fair, well-reasoned coverage of the case below, in case you’d like to read more.

Dear Commons Community,

On this Father’s Day, I remember my father, Amadeo, who died in 1973 at the age of 64. He worked very hard in the warehouses on 12th Avenue in Manhattan. When he came home from work, he was totally exhausted, had dinner, and would fall asleep on the couch for the rest of the evening. He never owned a car and never had a vacation other than to visit relatives on Long Island or in New Jersey.  Our big treat for the year was a day trip to Coney Island.  We lived with aunts, uncles, and cousins in my grandmother’s house in the South Bronx on 152nd Street and Morris Avenue. There was never a lack of love or attention for me and my two brothers as we were growing up.  One thing my father encouraged was that school was important and we had to go to college. We did.

Thank you, Dad!

Anthony

Dear Commons Community,

Diane Ravitch, is calling for a Congressional investigation of Bill Gates for his and his Foundation’s influence of education policy. In her blog, Dr. Ravitch writes:

 
“The story about Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education is startling. His role and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in drafting and imposing the Common Core standards on almost every state should be investigated by Congress.  The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A Congressional investigation is warranted.

The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.  Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.

Who knew that American education was for sale?

Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?

The revelation that education policy was shaped by one unelected man, underwriting dozens of groups. and allied with the Secretary of Education, whose staff was laced with Gates’ allies, is ample reason for Congressional hearings.”

I have followed Gates and his Foundation over the past several years and their involvement in  the “Great American Education-Industrial Complex”. I agree with Dr. Ravitch that an investigation is warranted but it is not likely to happen.  Too many government officials (elected and appointed) are under Gates’ influence.

 
Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman analyzes Eric Cantor’s primary loss to David Brat as bad for the Republican Party and worse for Washington D.C. governance.

 
“How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.

 
I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

 
By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.

 
To see what I mean by bait and switch, think about what happened in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election by posing as a champion of national security and traditional values — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — then turned immediately to his real priority: privatizing Social Security. It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent.”

Krugman concludes:

“Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

 
In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, President Obama promised “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.” His gun reform push, focused on a background check measure that had overwhelming public support, failed in the Senate last year, and Congress hasn’t passed any other gun legislation.

 
At least 74 school shootings happened during those 18 months, according to a tally by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group fighting to pass gun control laws. That’s more than one each week school was in session, with the longest gap between shootings spanning last summer’s break, from mid-June to mid-August.  The most recent shooting happened Tuesday morning at a high school east of Portland, Oregon. The gunman and a student are reported dead.

 
Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday declined to approve a bill that would have enabled millions of Americans with expensive student loans to refinance into cheaper debt.  The 56-38 vote on the refinancing proposal, sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), failed to garner the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Warren’s proposal, which mostly targeted student loans owned or guaranteed by the Department of Education, sought to fund the reduction in borrowers’ student loan payments by increasing taxes on wealthy households. As reported in The Huffington Post:

 
“With this vote we show the American people who we work for in the United States Senate: Billionaires or students,” Warren said minutes before the vote.
Other than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who voted against the measure on procedural grounds in order to preserve Democrats’ ability to reconsider it at a later date, only Republicans voted against it. They said the measure wouldn’t help reduce the skyrocketing cost of college and argued that it was not the best way to help former students manage their debt.  The proposal failed despite nearly widespread agreement among federal policymakers, financial regulators and financiers that Americans’ student debt burdens risk choking U.S. economic growth as student loan payments take ever bigger chunks of workers’ paychecks.”

With this vote, the Republicans are digging their own graves at least with the young people of this country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In one of the most stunning primary election upsets in congressional history, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, was soundly defeated on Tuesday by a Tea Party-backed economics professor who had hammered him for being insufficiently conservative.   As reported in the New York Times:

“The result delivered a major jolt to the Republican Party — Mr. Cantor had widely been considered the top candidate to succeed Speaker John A. Boehner — and it has the potential to change both the debate in Washington on immigration and, possibly, the midterm elections.
With just over $200,000, David Brat, a professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., toppled Mr. Cantor, repeatedly criticizing him for being soft on immigration and contending that he supported what critics call amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally.
During a short concession speech late Tuesday, Mr. Cantor did not try to analyze his defeat or cast blame, saying only that he knew he had disappointed his supporters.

In victory, Mr. Brat said that his candidacy had resonated with voters who believed that politics had been dumbed down by partisan infighting.

“The American people want to pay attention to serious ideas again,” Mr. Brat said, speaking on Fox News. “Our founding was built by people who were political philosophers, and we need to get back to that, away from this kind of cheap political rhetoric of right and left.” He will face Jack Trammell, a Democrat who is also a professor at Randolph-Macon, this fall in the heavily Republican district.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the long-awaited Vergara v. California case, a judge struck down tenure and other job protections for California’s public school teachers yesterday, saying such laws harm students — especially poor and minority ones — by saddling them with bad teachers who are almost impossible to fire. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“In a landmark decision that could influence the gathering debate over tenure across the country, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu cited the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education in ruling that students have a fundamental right to equal education.

Siding with the nine students who brought the lawsuit, he ruled that California’s laws on hiring and firing in schools have resulted in “a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”

He agreed, too, that a disproportionate number of these teachers are in schools that have mostly minority and low-income students.  The judge stayed the ruling pending appeals. The case involves 6 million students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The California Attorney General’s office said it is considering its legal options, while the California Teachers Association (CTA), the state’s biggest teachers union with 325,000 members, vowed an appeal.

“Circumventing the legislative process to strip teachers of their professional rights hurts our students and our schools,” the union said.

“This suit is not pro-student. It is fundamentally anti-public education, scapegoating teachers for problems originating in underfunding, poverty, and economic inequality,” California Federation of Teachers President Joshua Pechthalt said.”

The lawsuit was funded by Students Matter which was created by Silicon Valley multimillionaire David Welch and a private public relations firm. The group is supported by former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and Students First, Parent Revolution Executive Director Ben Austin, billionaire and school privatizer Eli Broad, former lawmaker Gloria Romero, and other corporate education reformers with an interest in privatizing public education and attacking teachers’ unions.

The appeals process is likely to take several years.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Washington Post had a featured article yesterday on the Gates Foundation’s influence on the implementation of the Common Core curriculum standards. I blogged about Gates and the Common Core last March.  Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post article.

 
“The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

 
But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.

 
On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.
Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.

 
The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.
“Can you do this?” Wilhoit recalled being asked. “Is there any proof that states are serious about this, because they haven’t been in the past?”

 
Wilhoit responded that he and Coleman could make no guarantees but that “we were going to give it the best shot we could.”

 
After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.

 
What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.

 
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

 
Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.

 
The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

 
Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

 
One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.

 
Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.

 
The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.
The math standards require students to learn multiple ways to solve problems and explain how they got their answers, while the English standards emphasize nonfiction and expect students to use evidence to back up oral and written arguments. The standards are not a curriculum but skills that students should acquire at each grade. How they are taught and materials used are decisions left to states and school districts.

 
And yet, because of the way education policy is generally decided, the Common Core was instituted in many states without a single vote taken by an elected lawmaker. Kentucky even adopted the standards before the final draft had been made public.

 
States were responding to a “common belief system supported by widespread investments,” according to one former Gates employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the foundation.

 
The movement grew so quickly and with so little public notice that opposition was initially almost nonexistent. That started to change last summer, when local tea party groups began protesting what they viewed as the latest intrusion by an overreaching federal government — even though the impetus had come from the states. In some circles, Common Core became known derisively as “Obamacore.”

 
Since then, anti-Common Core sentiment has intensified, to the extent that it has become a litmus test in the Republican Party ahead of the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination process. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Education has received about $5.2 million from the Gates Foundation since 2010, is one of the Common Core’s most vocal supporters. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who, like Bush, is a potential Republican presidential candidate, led a repeal of the standards in his state. In the past week, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), a former advocate of the standards, signed a law pulling her state out, days after South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, did the same.

 
Some liberals are angry, too, with a few teacher groups questioning Gates’s influence and motives. Critics say Microsoft stands to benefit from the Common Core’s embrace of technology and data — a charge Gates vehemently rejects.”

The article goes on with further details and is worth a read.  The bottom line is that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had a lot to offer education. Some of the initiatives it decided to fund make education sense but the ways it went about influencing decisions were more akin to monopolistic practices and hostile takeovers than democratic governance. It trampled the rights of parents and communities interested in their children’s education. And for that we say for shame on Bill and Melinda Gates!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

 
New York Times columnist Charles Blow commented on a recent Gallup Poll which indicated that 42% of Americans hold creationist views that is “God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.” Blow goes on to cite the poll:

 
“As a Gallup pointed out in a report issued last Wednesday, nearly a third of Americans continue to believe that the Bible “is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.”

 
Furthermore, nearly half believe that it is “the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally.”  About a fifth of Americans said they believe the Bible is “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”

 
Blow then calls out political leaders who espouse and promote creationist views:

 
“Marco Rubio told GQ in 2012: “Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.”
During a debate in 2007, Mike Huckabee made clear that he believed that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” but didn’t know when it was done or how long it took.
Bobby Jindal has voiced his support of creationism being taught in public schools alongside intelligent design and “the best science” and allowing students to “make up their own minds.”

 
Americans, particularly political leaders, who choose religious piety must also create an intellectual framework in which things of faith that exist without proof can make space for truths for which there is proof.”

In sum, pray to God to save us from religion!

Tony