Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article on the Big History Project funded by the Gates Foundation. Big History is a college course taught by David Christian, a professor from Australia. It does not confine itself to any particular topic, or even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it puts forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth. Christian says he was influenced by the Annales School, a group of early-20th-century French historians who insisted that history be explored on multiple scales of time and space. Christian had subsequently divided the history of the world into eight separate “thresholds,” beginning with the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago (Threshold 1), moving through to the origin of Homo sapiens (Threshold 6), the appearance of agriculture (Threshold 7) and, finally, the forces that gave birth to our modern world (Threshold 8).

The real meat of the article, however, is that in promoting Big History, Bill Gates cannot understand why he is encountering so much resistance from the education community.

“Perhaps the largest challenge facing the Big History Project, however, is Gates himself, or at least the specter of him. To his bafflement and frustration, he has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world….

In March, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it would no longer accept grants from the Gates Foundation for its innovation fund, which had already received more than $5 million from the organization. As Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, told Politico, “I got convinced by the level of distrust I was seeing — not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members and local leaders — that it was important to find a way to replace Gates’s funding.” When I spoke with Weingarten last month, she elaborated on her union members’ problem with Gates. “Instead of actually working with teachers and listening to what teachers needed to make public education better,” she said, Gates’s team “would work around teachers, and that created tremendous distrust.”

Weingarten used as an example the roll-out of the Common Core Curriculum.

“While Weingarten said that she tried to work with Gates to “pierce” the animosity, she ultimately chose to part ways because “our members perceived that we were doing things in our support of Common Core because of the Gates Foundation, as opposed to because it was the right thing to do.” It was a difficult decision, Weingarten said. “Bill Gates has more money than God. People just don’t do what we did.”

The article goes on to discuss the changing style of American corporate philanthropy in the 21^st centrury.

“Beginning with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, billionaires have long seen the nation’s education as a willing cause for their philanthropy — and, with it, their own ideas about how students should learn. The latest crop of billionaires, however, has tended to take the line that fixing our broken educational system is the key to unlocking our stagnant economy. Whether it’s hedge-fund managers like Paul Tudor Jones (who has given tens of millions to support charter schools) or industrialists like Eli Broad (who has backed “blended learning” programs that feature enhanced technology), these philanthropists have generally espoused the idea that education should operate more like a business. (The Walton Foundation, backed by the family that founded Walmart, has taken this idea to new heights: It has spent more than $1 billion supporting various charter schools and voucher programs that seek to establish alternatives to the current public-school system.) Often these patrons want to restructure the system to make it more efficient, utilizing the latest technology and management philosophies to turn out a new generation of employable students.

For many teachers, Weingarten explained, this outside influence has become off-putting, if not downright scary. “We have a really polarized environment in terms of education, which we didn’t have 10 years ago,” she said. “Public education was a bipartisan or multipartisan enterprise — it didn’t matter if you were a Republican or Democrat or elite or not elite. People viewed public education as an anchor of democracy and a propeller of the economy in the country.” Now, she said, “there are people that have been far away from classrooms who have an outsize influence on what happens inside classrooms. Beforehand, the philanthropies were viewed as one of many voices in education. Now they are viewed — and the market reformers and the tech folks — as the dominant forces, and as dissonant to those who work in schools every day. She took a deep breath and softened her tone: “In some ways, I give Bill Gates huge credit. Bill Gates took a risk to get engaged. The fact that he was willing to step up and say, ‘Public education is important,’ is very different than foundations like the Walton Foundation, who basically try to undermine public education at every opportunity.”

The article includes laughable quotes defending Bill Gates from Joel Klein who as chancellor was the biggest polarizer that the New York City public school system has ever seen.

The lesson is that Gates and other corporate philanthropies have indeed created a polarized, “us versus them” environment that uses their funding to undermine public education policy structures.  Gates is a monopolist who sought and continues to seek control of the education playing field in order to mold it to his own image.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Reuters is reporting that from 2010 to 2013, average income for U.S. families rose about 4 percent after accounting for inflation. All of the income growth was concentrated among the top earners with the top 3 percent accounting for 30.5 percent of all income.The disparity was even greater by wealth, with the top 3-percent holding 54.4 percent of all net worth in 2013, up from 51.8 percent in 2007 and 44.8 percent in 1989. As reported by Reuters:
 

“Sept 4 (Reuters) – The gap between the richest Americans and the rest of the nation widened after the Great Recession, a survey by the Federal Reserve showed on Thursday, suggesting deepening U.S. income inequality. Though incomes of the highest-earners rose, none of the groups analyzed by the Fed had regained their 2007 income levels by 2013, underscoring deep scars from the financial crisis and its aftermath. The data comes from a massive survey of consumer finances conducted by the Fed Board of Governors every three years. Many other studies have also shown the lasting effects of the recession and documented rising income disparity in the United States. The Fed survey released suggests that wealth and income is concentrated not just within the top 1 percent, as some analyzes have suggested, but actually among a slightly broader slice of the ultra-rich: the top 3 percent. From 2010 to 2013, average income for U.S. families rose about 4 percent after accounting for inflation, the survey showed. All of the income growth was concentrated among the top earners, the survey showed, with the top 3 percent accounting for 30.5 percent of all income. The disparity was even greater by wealth, with the top 3-percent holding 54.4 percent of all net worth in 2013, up from 51.8 percent in 2007 and 44.8 percent in 1989. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has called income inequality a disturbing trend, attributing some of it to the weak jobs market but also to underlying trends like technology and globalization. Overall for U.S. families, wealth stabilized from 2010 to 2013, after falling sharply during the prior three years. Fed economists attributed that pattern to the declines in home and business ownership during the recession, which stripped many families of their biggest sources of wealth. Families with income in the bottom half of those surveyed reduced their participation in retirement plans, continuing a trend seen from 2007 to 2010, but middle-income families increased their participation somewhat, the survey found. Still, overall participation rates were down from levels seen in 2007. Although wealth did not change much overall, many measures of debt decreased, the survey found, driven largely by declines in home ownership. On average, debt fell 13 percent.”

Income inequality is a travesty for American society and is crushing our political, economic, and social lives.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was the first day of prekindergarten for more than 51,000 children across New York City. It was the start of a vast and ambitious expansion of prekindergarten in the City’s schools.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, elected on promises of fighting income inequality, trumpeted the expansion of prekindergarten as a crucial step in leveling the playing field among children and declared it his first priority. He pushed to expand the system, more than doubling it in eight months. As reported in the New York Times:

“On Thursday, all that planning sprang to life as tens of thousands of 4-year-olds poured into freshly painted classrooms adorned with letters and numbers.

“President Kennedy said, quote, ‘Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education,’ ” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s as simple as that. Until we get education right, we can’t get the rest of the equation right. Today is a huge step forward for getting education right in this city.”

The city’s preschool program, which is by far the largest of its kind in the country, will be closely watched by educators, advocates and others who argue that quality public school programs for 4-year-olds are critical to improving the academic outcomes for children whose families cannot afford private alternatives.

And how the city’s program fares this year will be crucial for Mr. de Blasio, who plans to expand the program next year to 70,000 prekindergarten seats, enough for every 4-year-old in the city, and will need the support of lawmakers in Albany.”

Congratulations to Mr. de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina. This is real education reform and a breath of fresh air from the “test till you drop” policies of the last twelve years.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) blasted former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) for taking a job with the investment bank Moelis & Co.

“How wrong can this be that basically what’s happening here is that people work in Washington, and man, they hit that revolving door with a speed that would blind you,” Warren said in a Wednesday interview with Katie Couric of Yahoo! News.

Cantor will serve as a vice chairman, managing director and board member at the bank.

Warren claimed in the interview that people like Cantor “head straight out into the industry, not because they bring great expertise and insight, but because they’re selling access back in to their former colleagues who are still writing policy, who are still making laws.”

Cantor was defeated in his June GOP primary race by tea party-backed economics professor Dave Brat, and stepped down from his House seat on August 18.

“I just think this is fundamentally the wrong approach, and I think it’s — it worries me about what happens if people in government are looking for that next job … that ultimately infects whatever it is that they’re doing, and I just think this is wrong,” Warren said.

Amen!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Public school teachers are pushing back against Wal-Mart and the Walton family. Randi Weingarten and Joe Hansen in a Huffington Post blog comment:

“As part of Wal-Mart’s back-to-school marketing efforts, the company recently launched a series of teacher appreciation videos, ads, hashtags and discounts. Teachers–who routinely dig deep into their own pockets to pay for supplies and materials for their students–are grateful for appreciation in all its forms. They are understandably less pleased when half-hearted discounts come from a company with a terrible track record for respecting its own employees and are accompanied by a large-scale effort to dismantle our nation’s public education system and silence their voice. In fact, teachers are so offended by the so-called education reform agenda promoted by Wal-Mart’s owners, the Waltons, that one teacher recently launched a petition calling on his peers not to shop at Wal-Mart this back-to-school season. More than 5,000 teachers have already added their names to his pledge.

A closer look at the Walton family’s massive investment in “education” paints a clear picture of why teachers are so upset. Since 2000, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $1 billion to destabilize public education–draining funds from students and closing neighborhood schools, and instead supporting corporate-style education policies in an attempt to bring Wal-Mart’s business model to classrooms across the country. With a collective $148 billion fortune, the Walton family is using their unfathomable wealth to exert outsized influence on school systems in cities across the country, often in communities where they neither reside nor do business. In Chicago, the Waltons gave $500,000 to support the process that resulted in the closure of nearly 50 public schools in underserved communities. Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton spent $2.25 million in 2012 alone to promote the charter and private school sectors in Georgia, Indiana and Washington–hundreds of miles from her current home state of Texas…

If the Walton family is truly interested in helping every child achieve a high-quality education, they could begin by committing to pay their own workers a decent wage. Instead of spending their billions to wipe out our nation’s public school system, the Waltons could join the effort to reclaim the promise of public education in America–and ensure that we fulfill our collective obligation to help all children succeed by allowing their parents to succeed.

That’s the kind of appreciation teachers want. As Amber Rain Chandler, a teacher in New York, said to Wal-Mart: “Don’t discount the power of teachers.”

The Waltons, along with Bill Gates and Eli Broad, are the financial catalysts for much of the teacher-bashing movements that have plagued public education for the past decade.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press has compiled a state by state comparison of how the Common Core is playing out in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Below are examples of one state moving full speed ahead with the Common Core and another that has ended its participation. The vast majority of states have or are making plans to implement the Common Core.

Tony

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ILLINOIS

Illinois started to adopt the Common Core standards in 2010, and fully implemented them last school year. Next spring, the PARCC tests linked to Common Core standards will be used in school districts across the state.

The tests will be given to students in grades three to eight, but only partially rolled out in high school because the state board of education had its budget request for assessments cut by $10 million. The ACT exam has been a state mandated assessment for high school juniors in recent years and doubles as a college entrance exam.

By Kerry Lester

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INDIANA

Indiana formally ended its participation in Common Core this past spring, when Republican Gov. Mike Pence signed a measure pushed by conservative Republicans. But a key change in the legislation, mandating that any Indiana standards qualify for federal funding, spurred the bill’s original author, state Sen. Scott Schneider, a Republican, to withdraw his support.

The state Board of Education approved new education standards in April, a rare moment of agreement between Pence and Democratic Schools Superintendent Glenda Ritz. But the new standards drew criticism from conservatives and tea partyers who said they were too similar to the Common Core requirements.

By Tom Lobianco.

Dear Commons Community,

James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, examining what he calls the “new history wars”. Specifically, he discusses the response to the recently-distributed  history framework developed by the College Board. Here is an excerpt:

“Last month, the College Board released a revised “curriculum framework” to help high school teachers prepare students for the Advanced Placement test in United States history. Like the college courses the test is supposed to mirror, the A.P. course calls for a dialogue with the past — learning how to ask historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and critically on history.

Navigating the tension between patriotic inspiration and historical thinking, between respectful veneration and critical engagement, is an especially difficult task, made even more complicated by a marked shift in the very composition of “we the people.” This fall, whites will constitute a minority of public-school students in the United States. “Our” past is now more diverse than we once thought, whether we like it or not.

It turns out that some Americans don’t like it. A member of the Texas State Board of Education has accused the College Board of “promoting among our students a disdain for American principles and a lack of knowledge of major American achievements,” like those of the founding fathers and of the generals who fought in the Civil War and World War II. The Republican National Committee says the framework offers “a radically revisionist view” that “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history.” Stanley Kurtz, in National Review, called it “an attempt to hijack the teaching of U.S. history on behalf of a leftist political and ideological perspective.”

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Revisionism is necessary — and it generates controversy, especially when new scholarship finds its way into classrooms. But debate over what is taught in our schools is hardly new. Part of the logic underlying the creation of Catholic schools in 19th-century America had to do with a public-school curriculum that took a distinctly Protestant view of religious conflicts and cultural values. Since the early 20th century, battles have been waged over the relative place of “history” and “civics” in public education, a dichotomy that many professional historians don’t even accept.

In 1994, Lynne Cheney, a former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, pronounced the results of a congressionally mandated set of national standards in American history “grim and gloomy,” distorted by “political correctness,” and deficient for paying too much attention to the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism and too little to Robert E. Lee and the Wright brothers.

The latest accusations arise from belief born of assumption rather than careful reading. The document is not a curriculum; in the words of David Coleman, president of the College Board, “it is just a framework, requiring teachers to populate it with content required by their local standards and priorities.” Those who assume that America’s founders are neglected seem not to have actually read the material. The Declaration of Independence stands front and center alongside the Constitution in the section devoted to “experiments with democratic ideas and republican forms of government,” including those of France, Haiti and Latin America. The framework makes clear that these “new ideas” included evangelical religion.”

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The critics are unhappy, perhaps, that a once comforting story has become, in the hands of scholars, more complex, unsettling, provocative and compelling.

And there’s the rub. Fewer and fewer college professors are teaching the United States history our grandparents learned — memorizing a litany of names, dates and facts — and this upsets some people. “College-level work” now requires attention to context, and change over time; includes greater use of primary sources; and reassesses traditional narratives. This is work that requires and builds empathy, an essential aspect of historical thinking.

The educators and historians who worked on the new history framework were right to emphasize historical thinking as an essential aspect of civic culture. Their efforts deserve a spirited debate, one that is always open to revision, rather than ill-informed assumptions or political partisanship.”

Well-stated, important commentary!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

AFT President Randi Weingarten on this Labor Day has sent a letter to all members imploring them to take a pledge to reclaim public education. Below is her letter. At the end of her letter is the url for signing up to take the pledge.

Tony

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Dear Member,

The very first Labor Day was created to acknowledge and honor working people who aspired to the American dream and fought for a better life for themselves and their families.

Together, each and every day, we build on the work they began decades ago. As a union that is 1.6 million members strong, we are immensely proud of who we are, and we thank you for the work you do. Our union is at the intersection of two vital societal movements—creating educational opportunity through strong public schools, and advancing economic opportunity through the labor movement and sound economic policies. We not only teach our kids, heal our families, and keep our communities strong, we engage, mobilize and challenge ourselves and our communities to fight for a better nation.

As a union, we are fighting back against the relentless attacks on our jobs, our families and our communities. We are fighting back—whether it’s against Campbell Brown’s efforts to strip teachers of their due process rights and pit teachers against parents; corporate hospital chains seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of patients and healthcare professionals; politicians like Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who never met a public school, public service or public employee he didn’t want to eliminate; or those saddling students with debt, ripping them off and “Wal-Martizing” the higher education workforce.

The austerity hawks, the privatizers and the deprofessionalizers know that there’s a growing disconnect between what they are peddling and what the American people want. And the only way they can keep their power is by demonizing and marginalizing us.

There’s no doubt they will outspend us—as they will in this coming election. But our strength and the strength of the labor movement has never been our dollar power—it’s been our people power.

This is our fight. But fighting back only gets you so far; we must fight forward to move forward, and that means never being afraid to both engage in conflict and find common ground, particularly with our communities, those we serve and one another. Together, by being member-mobilized, community-engaged, solution-driven and, yes, a little bad ass, we can reclaim the promise of America. We can create a nation fueled by democracy, justice and opportunity for all, instead of for the very few.

On this Labor Day, let’s remember what this day is really about and recommit ourselves to the task before us—creating a more just world.

And to achieve a more just world, we must stand together against injustice everywhere, starting in our workplaces, our neighborhoods and the communities we serve. Pledge to stand with us.

In unity,

Randi Weingarten

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Take the Pledge: I Stand with Working People!

We are being ripped off.

Our students are suffering. School budgets are slashed, and with them, student opportunity. Test obsession drives a culture of punishment. Skyrocketing costs push higher education further out of reach.

Our families are being squeezed. Wages stagnate while benefits are gutted. Millions can no longer afford high-quality care for our young children. Wall Street profits from our pensions and uses our own money against us.

Our communities are being starved. Public services are privatized and cut to the bone. Healthcare is driven by corporate profits instead of patient care. Neighborhood schools are shuttered while public money goes to privately run charters.

Our enemy is organized.

This is no accident. Corporations and billionaires blame educators, public employees and workers for the broken economy. They sell austerity as the answer, while they buy elections, push radical legislation and fund court cases to strip workers of our rights. They won’t stop until unions are broken and their own power and profits are unopposed.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Not so long ago, the middle class was growing. Achievement gaps were shrinking. Opportunity was expanding. It can be that way again.

Together, we can win. We have before. It’s time to recommit to each other and to the communities we serve. Time to push back AND fight forward.

The promise of America is in our hands. Together, we can reclaim it.