This week, the real reformers finally broke through!

On Thursday night, Diane Ravitch with her usual incisiveness pointed out the importance of poverty and the unfairness of teacher-bashing on Jon Stewart’s the Daily Show.

According to Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet, Ravitch’s book shot up from #758 on Amazon's list to #35 by the next afternoon.

Jon Stewart showed a short clip of the segment on Fox News debate, to ridicule the commentators’ attack on the “greed” of teachers, while defending the huge bonuses and salaries of Wall Street financiers and bankers whose irresponsible behavior caused the economic collapse in the first place.

On CNN, Matt Damon criticized President Obama's education policies:

“He misinterpreted his mandate…This idea that we’re tying teachers’ salaries to how their kids are performing do on tests. That kind of mechanistic thinking has nothing to do with higher order thinking; we’re training them, were not teaching them.”

Julie Cavanagh, NYC public school teacher and one of the leaders of the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), was brilliant on NY1's Inside City Hall, pointing out the importance of teacher experience (and class size), in opposition to the push by Mayor Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee to eliminate seniority protections for teachers.

The New York Times, the home of conventional wisdom, featured an extended article about how the scapegoating of teachers has gotten out of hand. (See also FAIR's critique of the article's claim that teachers are actually scorned by the majority of Americans, rather than simply by those in power.)

Thursday's To the Point, a national NPR radio show, also featured Diane, Kay McSpadden, a teacher from South Carolina, and I. Ms. McSpadden said that many people in her state regularly blame the teachers union for the poor performance of their schools, yet there is no teachers union in South Carolina!

A perfect example of how with the collusion of the media, the corporate CEOs and the elected officials whom they control have conveniently created a fictional bogeyman, as a distraction from the real problem that afflict our schools: rampant budget cuts, inequitable funding, large classes, lack of parental input into decision-making, and an overemphasis on testing and privatization.

Let’s hope this is just the beginning of a reversal in which the real educational reformers will finally get a chance to present their perspective in the major media, and the privateers are no longer able to monopolize the airwaves through their wealth and influence – though they have no research and no common sense to back them up.

The clip of Matt Damon on CNN is below:

CNN debate on class size on MLK's birthday

My debate with Matthew Chingos on CNN yesterday.



For Prof. Jeremy Finn's critique of Chingos' study of Florida's class size reduction program, Asking the Wrong Questions About the Impact of Class-Size Reduction, from the National Education Policy Center.

WAITING FOR GODOT--NO, A GOBLET by P.B.Lecron

At your service

CNN International used to run a commercial showing why its European Edition was so different from its American version. The ad's premise was that because the audiences were different, CNN's broadcasts to them were different, too.


To make the point that Europeans have other standards, the ad contrasted  being served by an untrained waiter in an American restaurant with being served by a professional waiter in France. The first scene showed a relaxed and overbearingly chatty American waiter schmoozing his diners. The second showed a white-aproned waiter in France, doing what he's supposed to do--giving discreet but attentive and competent service. 


The ad rang with truth. I was reminded of it when I took my Franco-American hybrid kids to northern California to see the giant Redwoods. Before trekking off to the Sequoia forests, we had lunch in a salad bar on the now fashionable Fourth Street in Berkeley. 


"Look, Maman, she's not using a tray," whispered my thirteen-year-old, agape. She nodded in the direction of a waitress crossing the room with a chilled bottle of white wine nestled snug in her bare armpit and goblets dangling from her fingers. 


No sooner had I given her a motherly hush in French, "Chut," than a second waitress appeared, this one balancing a huge round tray of glasses filled with Coca-Cola and ice. Having nothing better to do while waiting for our club sandwiches--a favorite short-order food for the French traveling in the States--we watched as she headed for a table where eight women decked out in their casual Berkeley best were eating.  When the waitress removed the first Coke to serve it, the tray's equilibrium changed and all of the glasses spilled, sopping the table and the women. Oh la-la.  A clumsy tragicomedy in two acts and a good reason for some to forego a tray, even if up to the armpits with work.


Why not take a hike?
 I've never heard so many different foreign languages being spoken in one natural setting as I did when we hiked five kilometers up a mountain to admire giant Sequoias. Even more astounding was that I hardly heard any English at all; it seemed we were the only Americans on the trail.


Text & photo ©2010 P.B.LECRON

The Dream and The Inauguration

Media outlets are reporting that Americans believe that Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has been fulfilled as a result of Barack Obama's election to the presidency. In fact, a new CNN poll found that more than two thirds of African-Americans believe that to be true.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King's vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech -- roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

But let us not forget that economic justice was a central component of King's vision. In fact, at the time of his assassination, King (with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) was focused on the "Poor People's Campaign," an effort to promote a bill of rights for poor Americans.

The election of Barack Obama by itself does not erase the fact that economic inequality in our nation is at historic highs. This inequality disproportionately affects the black community. There is work to be done. Educational opportunity provides a path to success in the labor market and resulting economic gains. President Obama has a tremendous opportunity to be not just a physical embodiment of King's dream but to change national policies that feed inequality, both in opportunities and in outcomes.

Obama Said What About Education????

Obama is giving a pretty good speech to the NAACP right now, and Liam and I were just sitting here listening and pretty psyched when he finally started talking about education. But no sooner had he begun to outline his plans for educational reforms, then CNN's Campbell Brown cut in and faded him out! As if, ok, education, booooring. She returned a few minutes later, once the education part was done.

ED in '08? Not working folks... not working. And CNN producers along with Campbell "Veep stakes baby...I don't understand the stock market" Brown are officially part of the problem.

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UPDATE: Here's the education-related text from Obama's speech:

And here’s what else we’ll do – we’ll make sure that every child in this country gets a world-class education from the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college. Now, I understand that Senator McCain is going to be coming here in a couple of days and talking about education, and I’m glad to hear it. But the fact is, what he’s offering amounts to little more than the same tired rhetoric about vouchers. Well, I believe we need to move beyond the same debate we’ve been having for the past 30 years when we haven’t gotten anything done. We need to fix and improve our public schools, not throw our hands up and walk away from them. We need to uphold the ideal of public education, but we also need reform.

That’s why I’ve introduced a comprehensive strategy to recruit an army of new quality teachers to our communities – and to pay them more and give them more support. And we’ll invest in early childhood education programs so that our kids don’t begin the race of life behind the starting line and offer a $4,000 tax credit to make college affordable for anyone who wants to go. Because as the NAACP knows better than anyone, the fight for social justice and economic justice begins in the classroom.