The purposes for which schools are designed structures educational experiences; it structures the curriculum, the approved teaching methods, and the culture of school, etc. To understand the significance of Mr. Duncan’s assertion regarding the aim for schooling, the content of “compete and succeed in the global economy” must be spelled out: it means empire building in social, psychological, economic and political terms.

As a result of the collapse of the bi-polar division of the world (the “end of communism”) Duncan and the social class he represents have been working feverishly over the past decades to establish a new equilibrium in favor of the U.S., its “allies” and “corporate partners” as global tensions mount and the U.S. strives to “stay on top” by “any means necessary”. This means war by economic, political, psychological and of course military means. (No wonder Collin Powell and allies want the Department of Defense to have a role in collecting and analyzing data related to the Common Core.) Note the “Go USA” tone of the so-called RESPECT project, which is to mobilize support from the teaching profession to restructure education to serve the aim of “global competition” (as if one becomes a teacher to take up the chauvinist aim of beating down and oppressing Indian, Chinese, German or Finish children).

In order for these objectives to be realized in the current historical conditions, public schooling must be altered or eliminated all together; cheapened so that the resources can go directly to “winning the war”, while the character of the schooling must be narrowed and altered such that it prepares young people to submit to and serve this aim (or else be subject to even more “incentives”, “accountability” and “competitive grants”).

The aim of “winning the global competition” does not represent the interests of teachers, students, parents and their communities or the society as a whole. In other words, it does not serve the public interest. No amount of double-speak about “respect” for teachers can change the fact that the aims set for education by the so-called reformers are diametrically opposed to the general welfare, general interest, general wellbeing of the people. The more these aims are served, the more intolerable the conditions in schools will become.

Related Posts:

• Ravitch: The Problem Is Bigger Than a Pineapple
• The Common Core and the Public/Private Distinction
• The Common Core “Standards” are the Global Competition Warriors’ “Product Specifications”
• Anthony Cody on the Common Core: The Technocrats Re-engineer Learning
• Alan Singer: Cuomo, Common Core and Pearson-for-Profit

Might we be misled?

For example, the effort to frame this as a revolts against testing is misleading, at best. One does not revolt against a technology only, but the power that imposes the technology. People are actually questioning the power that imposes the testing insanity. We know to deride “the war on drugs” (and every other similar “war”) as it makes so little sense and provides so unclear a guide. Is this a “war on testing”? In the 1960s, Banesh Hoffman mis-identified the problem as the Tyranny of Testing, but we know that tests do not get all tyrannical on their own.

The fact is, rendering current sentiment as a rebellion against tests misses the key conclusion that has been hammered home by most exposes of education “reform”. The problem with these “reforms” is that they are rooted in the exclusion of parents, educators and students (and their communities) from being decision makers. The problem is that the “reforms” put “business” in power against the people — a private power over that which is to be public. The character of what these “leaders” decide is not what teachers, students and parents want or would decide if they had real political power to influence the nature and function of their schools. Thus their exclusion. They don’t make those “tough” decisions, the “right ones”.

These tests are a political tool of and for the economic and political elite; their use, form and function reflects the narrow and self-serving interest of this elite, an elite with no legitimacy and no credibility: the rebellion needs to be exposed as against them and for a new vision of public education.

Yes, the problem is bigger than a pineapple. It is the problem of decision making. The attack on public education will not cease until those empowered to attack are no longer empowered to attack. So yes, sign the petition. But be clear on the limits of asking those attacking you to stop.

Related Posts:

• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part 1 – Danger, Will Robinson, Irrational Discourse Ahead!
• The Common Core and the Public/Private Distinction
• The Common Core “Standards” are the Global Competition Warriors’ “Product Specifications”

Included in the list of “impermissible uses” is this: “any use that may be prejudicial to the Common Core State Standards, NGA Center, or CCSSO.” So if I use the Standards to reveal their flaws am I violating copyright law? Are members of the public not allowed to be “prejudicial” to the Core? (Now, while I suspect this language has particular meaning in its legal context — if you know, please post in comments — it still strikes me as inappropriate for something that is to guide the educational practice of the entire public school apparatus in the US.)

Up to this point in time, public school standards and curriculum were governed by explicitly public entities: local and state education agencies serving elected authorities. While many have long pointed to the publishing industry in establishing a “de facto” national curriculum, and while these companies certainly copyrighted their materials, official designations regarding curriculum or standards emanated from public agents and thus were publicly owned. Such entities must adhere to public disclosure laws: meetings, expenditures, etc. Thus, as public entities, specific legal standards must be upheld; private entities are not restricted in this manner.

Given that the NGA/CCSSO own and control the Standards, it is legitimate to be concerned regarding the apparent limited public status of these entities. What type of organization is the NGA? The CCSSO?

The NGA files with the IRS as a 501c3, according to the NGA website, and it thus appears as a private, non-profit organization. As such, it is not subject to the same statutes as a public school board or other public authority.

What is the status of PARCC — the institution crafted to construct and implement the assessment system tied to the Core? Like the NGA, PARCC appears to be established as a 501c3. While few appear to be especially concerned about the Core, focusing instead on various issues with testing, opinions will change once the tentacles of this assessment octopus are felt.

Thus a linked set of well-funded (e.g. Gates) private, non-profit organizations (with for-profits providing “technical assistance”) is taking over the governing functions of local and state education agencies. This of course has profound implications regarding the public accountability of these organizations and points to the emasculation of legislatures and elected boards as representatives of the people. It also indicates a governing philosophy that does not rely on the consent of the governed.

Related Posts:

• Ravitch: The Problem Is Bigger Than a Pineapple
• Bruce Baker: Charter Schools Are… [Public? Private? Neither? Both?]
• Inside Higher Ed: For-Profit Colleges Open Another Front
• Alan Singer: Charter Schools Don’t Do Miracles
• “Best Urban School District in America” Blocks Access to Websites Critical of “Education Reform”

After pointing out that charter schools ”are limited public access in the sense that:

1. They can define the number of enrollment slots they wish to make available
2. They can admit students only on an annual basis and do not have to take students mid-year
3. They can set academic, behavior and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students via attrition

While these conditions may vary and/or be restricted under state policies, Baker offers this:

Imagine a community park, for example, that is paid for with tax dollars collected by all taxpayers in the community, and managed by a private board of directors. That board has determined that the park may reasonably serve only 100 of the community’s 1,000 residents. The amount of tax levied is adjusted for the park’s capacity. To determine who gets to use the park annually, interested residents subscribe to a lottery, where 100 are chosen each year. Others continue to pay the tax whether chosen for park access or not. The park has a big fence around it, and only those granted access through the lottery may gain entrance. Imagine also that each of the 100 lottery winners must sign a code of conduct to be unilaterally enforced by the private manager of the park. That management firm can establish its own procedures (or essentially have none) for determining who has or has not abided by the code of conduct and revoke access privileges unilaterally. This is clearly not a PUBLIC park in the way that scholars such as Paul Samuelson describe public goods.

Related Posts:

• Alan Singer: Charter Schools Don’t Do Miracles
• Are Charter Schools Public Schools?
• The Common Core and the Public/Private Distinction
• Inside Higher Ed: For-Profit Colleges Open Another Front
• Charter Schools/Market Violence/Disruptive Innovation: Student Beating, Paying the Rich, and the Irrelevance of Facts

The Core Standards Reflect The Aims of the Global Warriors

Standards reflect the aims and outlook of those who established them. The Core were crafted by representatives of the monopolies and key state and federal executives. The Gates Foundation alone has spent more than $800 million between 2009 and 2011 on building and imposing the “Career and College Ready” machine. Educators and the public were actively excluded. These are standards of the global warriors, and they reflect the way these warriors view and vision the world.

A key feature of the Core is the manner in which they attempt to eliminate aim, or purpose, among those who are the object of the Core (students, teachers, administrators). The Core is premised on a model that views human beings as things to be exploited by the global warriors in their quest for the domination of markets, natural resources and peoples (this is called “human capital”). These warriors cannot recognize or even tolerate the existence of the human will, or conscience; things make no claims on that which the monopolies believe is theirs, and theirs alone.

Thus I think the Core (and the so-called standards movement that has led up to them) can be best understood as product specifications. “The lightbulb will illuminate 1500 lumens of white light for 1000 hours.” In this scheme, students are products to be manufactured according to specifications in the Core (with production standards for each stage along the production line) by the workers (teachers). Principals are the production managers held accountable for the productivity of their unit in the production process. Developmentally appropriate educational practice does not align with the warriors vision: if you don’t meet the standard, too bad for you. They do not give a … if Johnny is not ready to read at age 4; like a production manager, the inputs are carefully reviewed before production begins (this is why KIPP, etc., has parent contracts); raw materials not meeting the production specifications are returned or thrown out. Don’t believe the talk about problem solving and creativity and perseverance. It is the kind of problem solving and creativity and perseverance that comes from a machine, an algorithm. And there is no curriculum anymore, only the assembly line, the series of steps of the manufacturing process.

Thus, students are to be made “career and college ready” — that is, market ready, ready to be consumed. The act of their consumption by “business” or the “education” industry (even non-profit Colleges are succumbing to the business model of education) is redefined as “opportunity”. In this scheme, those not meeting the standards are junked or listed as “B” stock. Concretely this means even more poverty and even more prisons. It also means more canon fodder available to the global warriors for their endless criminal wars.

For those who look at the world this way, humans are no different from natural resources, ready to be exploited as the global warriors see fit. Humans also become, in this model, reduced to a conduit for the exchange of capital, as various monopolies hedge their bets on the “value added” at any point in the production/consumption process. Some warriors make money off of the production line itself, while others hope to benefit from future exploitation of the product. Some use the crisis they create to simply steal from the public treasury. Political authorities hope the product is compliant, eschewing the very notion of “public”. Products are not empowered; they are managed, bought and sold.

The notorious (and not even very entertaining) movie “Waiting for Superman” thus advocates teachers open up students’ heads and pour in “the” “knowledge” and “skills”, a job they are increasingly turning over to the corporate charter camps. This is why “reformers” are shutting down public school districts. They are not reformers; they are destroyers and robbers of public assets and smashers of public opinion. The KIPP’s (and Green Dot’s and Imagines and Uncommon Schools, etc.) “No Excuses” (read: “I don’t f-ing care what you think”) pedagogy is just what Wall Street ordered for the mainly black, brown and working-class contingent of youth. The fact is, traditional public schools were built for a different purpose from that of the charter camps, and while they are also implicated in the reproduction of social inequality, they cannot exist absent the public and democratic ideals so violently attacked by “reformers”. In their failure to fully acquiesce, public schools must be removed (especially in those “urban” areas). They must be destroyed in the eyes of the global warriors.

Standards Are Not Aims

Fictional literature and personal narrative is often the place where questions of one’s outlook are entertained (issues of identify, purpose, ethics, etc.) and in this sense, Core advocates emphasis on information and “facts” is central to their outlook. Computers can generate facts and even discern patterns; now we are told they will grade essays. But these machines have no purpose. No aim. No will. No conscience. And as a result, they have no demands, no concerns, no worries. They have no individual or collective will to be. They do not organize to defend their collective interests. They do not call in sick. They cannot read Shakespeare, or Malcolm X; they can only process. There is no meaning.

In his unimpressive book designed to win support for the Common Core, Robert Rothman (who does not mention Bill Gates once) writes:

Standards also represent high aspirations. Selective universities, for example, set stringent admissions requirements, and if they admit students who do not meet those requirements, they are often accused of lowering standards. In that sense, standards or goals that not all students can meet, but rather aspirations that all can strive for.

In the 1980s, in the wake of the report, a nation at risk, which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity,” educators began to talk of standards has aspirations. Yet they also began to express the belief that high standards could apply to every student. Invoking the mantra “all children can learn,” educators develop standards that they expected all students to me. They represented a profound change in American education. In contrast to traditional practice, in which some students learned that high levels one almost learned basic skills, the new standards were aimed at making sure that all students, regardless of their backgrounds or life aspirations, would have the same educational opportunities. (p. 15)

There are several things to point out here. Most important is the thesis that standards are aims. Standards are not aims, but rather, standards embody aims. The aim of turning human beings into products is reflected in the Core standards and the “curriculum” offered up to help meet the product specifications. Standards are concrete things used to assess, compare or measure something; they exist; they are not “aspirations.” Children don’t simply “hope” to “grow taller,” they strive to become active members of the society and to contribute to that society. They want to participate, to play and to work. Education is the process by which society assists the young in doing just that. To render standards as aims serves to eliminate aims; it eliminates purpose and hope. It reduces the territory to the map. It gives directions, but refuses to articulate a vision of where we are going and why we are going there. It refuses this because that vision is against the public interest.

An expression of this problem is “teaching to the test.” The problem with teaching to the test is not simply that it narrows what is taught. The problem is that it is an act of philosophical suicide. It is to accept and socialize people to accept acting without purpose. “Why are we engaged in teaching and learning,” a teacher asks? “To raise test scores,” retorts the reformer, or more commonly, “to close achievement gaps” — that is, you teach in order to reduce the gap between test score averages of different groupings of students. Wow, now I’m fired up! Where do I sign up! But seriously, why should we want to raise test scores or close gaps between test scores? What is the purpose of all this? To be globally competitive? Sure, but no reformer actually explains in concrete terms what that actually means, what it assumes and what it has and will yield. Such rhetoric is devoid of purpose for those who are the object of the rhetoric. At best, we are to be satisfied with policy objective. “We will work to reduce unemployment by 5 percent.” This may be a policy goal, but it is not an aim that will animate human action. Education worthy of its name must serve to animate and generate purpose and reflection upon purpose within the total human condition. The purpose must reflect the interests of those being educated. Education worthy of its name must unleash and serve to further develop “human-ness”; it must give rise to conscious human action and reflection, the forming and evaluation of aspiration. “Career and college-ready” is not a philosophy and cannot guide or animate human purpose in schools. “Oh mommy, I’m so eager to go to school so I can be prepared to be sold on the labor market so that global capital can be further enriched!”

We must reject this aim and envision a new one.

Another feature of this argument is the subtle but powerful way in which the notion of equality is transformed and repurposed for the global arena in which the global warriors act. Equality does not come about through political struggle in society, but submission to the standardization required by the global market place. Equality is not material; it originates in the ideas (standards as aspirations) in peoples heads. By rendering the ideas in peoples heads as the source of the problem (soft bigotry), equal opportunity also becomes an idea which will be solved by fixing standards as aims (ideas) — if we all believe that all can learn the same things the same way and demonstrate the same learning on the same test, equality will be achieved. This is ultimately the “separate but equal” model wrapped in the octopus of global capital. We are to ignore the increasing segregation by social class and race — “Excellence for All” as the champions of human capital say. Thus, meeting the measure of the market is the aim. There is no other aim. There is not other purpose. There is no alternative.

It’s a good thing Orwell is classified as fiction.

In short, then, the Core should be opposed because it and all that it is tied to (RTT, PARCC, “Value Added” etc.,) is premised on eliminating the human factor from the education of human beings.

Related Posts:

• Ravitch: The Problem Is Bigger Than a Pineapple
• Anthony Cody on the Common Core: The Technocrats Re-engineer Learning
• Alan Singer: Cuomo, Common Core and Pearson-for-Profit
• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Detroit Free Press: MEAP may be replaced by national online test

As criticism of No Child Left Behind and the associated tests rises, we are hearing more and more about the Common Core Standards (CCS), the next great thing that is supposed to fix all that ails us. When a talking pineapple made New York tests a laughing stock, state education commissioner John King reassured us,

It is important to note that this test section does not incorporate the Common Core and other improvements to test quality currently underway. This year’s tests incorporate a small number of Common Core field test questions. Next year’s test will be fully aligned with the Common Core.

My comment: So while there are many things one might say about this and Cody’s article, it should be pointed out that King’s comment is a clear example of an increasing trend: those now holding positions of power and drone on about the need for “accountability” (as if it were a thing to be purchased) are themselves acting with impunity. King takes no responsibility for this assumed “mistake”.

In my view, the pineapple question is not a mistake but rather a reflection of the type of world those pushing “reform” envision — a world where human beings are pushed to accept irrationalism or else face more “incentives”.

Related Posts:

• Ravitch: The Problem Is Bigger Than a Pineapple
• The Common Core “Standards” are the Global Competition Warriors’ “Product Specifications”
• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?

While the actual connections to Pearson that are documented in the article are important to know in order to make sense of the Common Core love fest, the conclusions that narrow profit motive and office-seeking is driving the Common Core implementation in New York is both politically naive (the Core must be serving a much broader constituency of the elite than the publishing sector) and hides much of the more politically important policy content — namely the evident demise of State’s rights as a frame for U.S. governance¹, the overall trend of the privatization of public education and the decline in the role of school boards in curriculum and personnel decisions (as the Core will be connected to assessments used to retain or fire teachers).

Related Posts:

• Ravitch: The Problem Is Bigger Than a Pineapple
• The Common Core “Standards” are the Global Competition Warriors’ “Product Specifications”
• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Detroit Free Press: MEAP may be replaced by national online test
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance

1. Witness the defeat of state laws in opposition to the Core: both South Carolina and Utah saw failed attempts at legislation opposing the Common Core

But the idea — let alone the adoption of — a national curriculum appears as a sharp break with the foundation of the American Republic, the commitment to “state’s rights,” to decentralization and a relatively weak central government.

Thus begins the introduction of my forthcoming book, Testing for Tyranny: The Political Significance of a National Curriculum and Testing Regime in the United States.

At present, the push to implement the so-called Common Core Standards (not federal, not national, as Diane Ravitch would have it, but “common,” and so the choice of language is significant) represents a turning point in American history. There are many questions that must be answered about this initiative, the most important one being this: Whose standards are they? Whose interests do they serve?

This question is being posed from a variety of perspectives. For example, a Tea Party activist noted this:

The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers (collectively, NGA Center/CCSSO), as the owners of the Common Core State Standards (College- and Career-Readiness Standards and K-12 Standards in English Language Arts and Math), grant this license to the Licensee identified below, subject to the terms set forth herein. The Common Core State Standards are protected by copyright and/or other applicable law, and any use of the Common Core State Standards other than as authorized under this License is prohibited.

And so:

As a parent, where will you go if you feel a change should be made to the ELA or math content to be taught to the students in your neighborhood and community schools? To the school? the local school board? to the state education dept or the state school board? to the federal government? Sorry, it is out their hands. They no longer have control over the content for ELA and math that is to be taught to the students in the states that have adopted the CCSS.

This line of questioning might help explain the choice of language and the administrative mechanisms used to push the standards.  If they were national, this notion of ownership would seem counter productive (who owns the American Flag)? If they were federal, clearly they are in the control of the federal government, owned by it, but presumably on behalf of the people as a whole. But they are merely “common” — ushered in and controlled by an “association” of associations that is neither federally constituted nor bound to a state, a “public/private partnership” of government leaders and business interests; an entity that does not report to a legislature or even a defined constituency.

And now the Schlechty Center releases, Whose Standards Are They?

Offering a broad minded and thoughtful presentation of standards and their role in education, the paper is particularly significant for the guidance it provides school personnel in organizing discussions about the Common Core Standards in their schools and communities.  It offers a concrete guide for evaluating the Common Core Standards, affirming the right of communities to have a say over the nature and function of the education provided to their youth.

Asking the “who decides” question is by far the most important question to ask when examining the Common Core initiative. Discussions narrowly fixated on implementation, or even concerns about whether national standards and tests will improve education, serve to veil consideration of how contemporary education reform (such as the Common Core) serves to re-articulate governing arrangements such that the vast majority — parents, teachers, administrators, local school boards, and youth — are excluded from involvement in decisions that directly affect their lives, and their future.

Related Posts:

• Ravitch: The Problem Is Bigger Than a Pineapple
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part 1 – Danger, Will Robinson, Irrational Discourse Ahead!
• “Best Urban School District in America” Blocks Access to Websites Critical of “Education Reform”
• The Common Core “Standards” are the Global Competition Warriors’ “Product Specifications”

I am sure many have read your May 2, 2011 Open Letter to teachers. I am impressed with its rhetorical slight of hand, how it gently yet forcefully pushes — with all apparent conviction — what more and more of the research community and the public is rejecting.

I presume that it is this broad and growing opposition to Race to the Top (the nearly $5 billion in discretionary monies given to the U.S. Department of Education by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) that caused you to publish your Open Letter. But I do not believe that your rhetoric, however clever, can erase from consciousness the fact that Race to the Top is anti-democratic — imposed through bribery using taxpayer money. It is an open agenda for privatization and the elimination of any last vestiges of democratic governance of and purpose for schooling. Wall Street and various monopolies are attempting total control through for-profit charters, anti-worker legislation, publishing and testing companies, private foundations, and of course, a national curriculum and privately managed testing regime aimed at workers compliance.

Given this reality, I think it is very important to examine how your letter makes its case. And while others have spoken to what is wrong with what you say, and what is wrong with what you propose, I want to focus on something that might be missed, possibly even by you: your letter’s appeal to your personal convictions and beliefs as a basis for legitimating government action.

Your letter constitutes a public sharing of your personal conviction about teaching and the teaching profession. The theory of action appears to be this: teachers believe that you are ill-willed, and have wrong-headed ideas about education. To counter, you are disclosing yourself, and we educators are to be comforted by your stated respect for teachers, and your commitment to fair evaluation systems that you believe will raise the prestige of the profession. You confess, for example, to believing that teachers actually work hard (Well, now, you must be an ally!). And you suggest, although you never really openly say so, that you oppose teaching to the test and the narrowing of curriculum that follows. I should expose the trickery in pretending to address concerns with a curriculum narrowed only to tested subjects with a plan for more frequent testing in all subjects (that is, a national curriculum and series of tests developed by CEOs of corporations, private foundations and publishing and testing companies, with no role for the public). But this is not what I find most striking.

What I find most striking is how you position your personal beliefs and experiences as criteria for the legitimacy of government action. To quote a former president of the United States, you are “the decider,” and you decide based on your beliefs. We the subjects are called upon to accept government action on account of the public expression of your beliefs.

For example, you state: “I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do.” Are the completely invalid pay-per-test-score schemes being imposed in state after state as a result of your Race to the Top competition (referenced in your letter as “sophisticated assessments that measure individual student growth”) somehow now acceptable because the Holy Education Executive has uttered his genuine appreciation for the work teachers do?

Does the fact that you believe “that most teachers did not enter the profession for the money” justify pay and healthcare cuts, layoffs and terminations for those who’s students don’t show enough growth on the “sophisticated assessments” you believe in? After all, you believe the key to reform is building “an accountability system based on data we trust” — so as long as the “data” are trustworthy test hell for parents, students and educators is acceptable? If we don’t go along with “in data we trust” will Senator McCarthy rise from the dead to demand our testimony? (“Mr. Garrison, are you, or have you ever been, or have you ever been associated with, a critic of standardized testing and merit pay for teachers?”)

Equally impressive is how you position yourself as the great leader who has these personal relationships with people — “I am here to help,” you offer (if it were that simple, we could just respond, “thanks, but no thanks!”). You assert, as if it is a settled matter: “We understand that the surest way to [help America’s children] is to make sure that the 3.2 million teachers in America’s classrooms are the very best they can be.” This master lie deserves its own book, but the fact of the matter is the majority of people in America understand that poverty is a very serious and rapidly growing problem. But poverty is brazenly ignored by you and most education reformers. If you want to “help America’s children,” eliminate poverty (and I guarantee the test scores will go up too, without any test prep!).

Like the Royal Wedding which celebrated the grossest forms of inequality, you’re governing strategy is reminiscent of a period of history humanity has fought hard to leave behind: the despotic rule of kings and their royal families. During those times, the beliefs of royalty were all that mattered, and royalty were the only public officially recognized.

So, Mr. Duncan, at the end of the day, I don’t care what you believe. In a democracy, the government must represent the will of the people, not impose its beliefs on them. No one wants a patronizing government that figures its role as “helping.” Any reform that disempowers, any reform that doesn’t help realize social equality, will fail, as the corporate reforms you defend in your letter already have.

Related Posts:

• ARRA Education Funds and the Crisis of Legitimacy
• Secretary Arne Duncan Testifies Before the House Education and Labor Committee
• Mayor Bing Says Eliminating Democratic Control of Schools (“Change”) is Necessary; Ducan’s “Race to Wreck Education” Funds Used as Wedge Against Detroit Voters
• Educational Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
• Clifford Adelman’s “White Noise of Accountability”

The University of Missouri system has been besieged with angry letters and phone calls, and top officials at its St. Louis campus have asked an adjunct faculty member to resign, as a result of the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s posting videos this week that appear to show two labor-studies instructors advocating union violence.

The videos, however, were a “hatchet Job”.

Yet, “both Mr. Giljum and Ms. Ancel [the instructors] said they have been barraged with angry phone calls and letters, and Mr. Giljum said he has received explicit death threats over the phone.”

I assume the contradiction does not go unnoticed. The story continues:

If Mr. Breitbart’s Web site has broadcast a misleadingly edited video, it would hardly be the first time. The site is notorious for having put up the video that purported to show a Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, saying she had discriminated against a white farmer, when a review of her comments in context show that she said no such thing. (Ms. Sherrod, who was forced to resign after the video came out, has sued Mr. Breitbart.)

Mr. Breitbart’s Web site also publicized the 2009 hidden-camera videos of employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, which appear to show the employees advising a pimp and prostitute on how to deceive the IRS about their activities and income. Law-enforcement officials who investigated the allegations have said the videos were edited to make it look as if the employees were actively engaged in wrongdoing when, in fact, they were not.

Mr. Breitbart had indicated in an April 18 interview on Hannity, Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, that he planned to “go after” educators and their union organizers.

Related Posts:

• Teachers have a right to unionize
• Stephen Sawchuk: States Aim to Curb Collective Bargaining
• Anthony Cody: Teachers Beware — They are Coming for Our Pensions
• Buffalo News endorses flawed system of teacher compensation
• Thousand Demonstrate Against California Education Cuts