November 29, 2006

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How Do We Convince “Corner Boys” To Pass Regents Exams?

Filed under: Middle Schools by Peter Goodman @ 6:24 pm

A few weeks ago I was in the audience and listened to the latest Joel Klein rap - he quoted Bush and warned against, ” the soft bigotry of low expectations.” He warned the assembled teachers against using “outside” influences on students as an “excuse.” The conservative think tanks and ideologues continue to claim that teacher contracts impose “work rules” that diminish pupil achievemnt and the Bush/Klein “low expectations” rap is another reason for school failures.

On the other hand an increasing number of researchers are relating educational achievement to poverty. The NYTimes magazine summarizes recent research and questions whether the impressive achievement in some charter schools is due to the commitment of the teachers or the self-selected nature of the student body. Does the pathology of poverty prior to entry into school disadvantage the poor?

The arguments back and forth across the spectrum are both fascinating and enlightening.

For those of us who ply their trade not in the intellectual ivory castles but in the classrooms the “answers” are somewhat clearer. Poverty, the culture of the streets is not shed at the classroom door!! As teachers we can’t make the streets safer or construct better housing or more stable family life … we can only teach and nurture and care …

How can the public, the larger audience understand the reality of the urban classroom? How can they understand the difficulty and complexity of our job? Would I recommend a book for the public to read?? No, I would recommend that they watch the HBO drama: The Wire.

In it’s fourth season this hardscrabble look at inner city Baltimore exposes a story line dealing with a group of middle school students, “corner boys,” young drug dealers, their teachers, school administrators and the life on the mean Baltimore streets.

Ed Burns, one of the writers, a retired Baltimore cop and teacher “catches” the flavor of the classroom. It is powerful!!

While I was sitting in a teacher lunchroom I “motivated” the meeting by mentioning the veracity of The Wire, and low and behold, everyone else at the table was “Addicted!!”

How many times have we screamed at some invisible educrat or politican: let them take over my class for a week!! The Wire allows millions, each week, to watch the realities of life in an urban school.

Kudos to HBO, Ed Burns and the wonderful actors.

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Debating school funding

Filed under: Education Funding by Maisie @ 2:15 pm

Now that the state’s top court has essentially tossed school funding back into the lap of the governor and legislature with the resolution of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, education finance is a topic with new urgency. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and other conservative education thinkers have proposed a way to redistribute school funds called weighted student funding, which I’ve blogged about here and here. They believe it’s a way to achieve equity without increasing school budgets. This week the Alliance for School Choice invited me to debate school funding with Eric Osberg, vice president and treasurer of the Fordham Foundation. Osberg is defending WSF; I’m opposing it. The debate is taking place in cyberspace, on the Alliance blog, Edspresso, every day this week. Please let me know what you think.

November 26, 2006

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Tough lessons, but true

Filed under: Charter School Labor NCLB by CitySue @ 12:59 am

Paul Tough’s article on closing the racial/economic education gap in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is must reading for education policy makers, and that includes not just those who run the schools but also those who fund them.

It’s also welcome news for educators who have been wondering whether Richard Rothstein is right, and there’s just no sense in continuing to work so hard and feel so bad about not being able to do more, because it will take the eradication of poverty to really close the learning gap.

Finally, it’s a relief for liberals who have found themselves in an uncomfortable position arguing with conservatives about the causes of the education gap, with the conservatives blaming the teachers and the liberals blaming, of all people, the very families they have always defended and tried to help.

That’s because what Tough does is reconcile right and left-wing views on whether the goals of No Child Left Behind are achievable, and if so, how.

The right is pointing to the success of some high-poverty schools and some charter schools as proof that the problem is in the public schools, specifically the teachers who don’t work hard enough, and the unions, whose rigid rules make good education impossible.

Rothstein effectively debunked the myth of highly successful poor schools by showing that the vast majority of the thousand-plus schools cited by the Education Trust were, on closer inspection, either not so successful after all, or not so poor, or not so representative of a low-performing student body.

Tough agrees. But there are still those few schools, mostly charters, that really do seem to have found the right formula: high standards, a structured instructional approach, character education, long hours, great teachers and development of a esprit d’corps.

And while Tough laments the fact that teacher unions have constrained the growth of charter schools, it is clear that there is little, if anything, these schools are doing that could not be done in a unionized school – unless of course we expect that schools that rely on teachers working twice the hours (15 or 16 a day, he says) can be replicated systemwide without increasing teacher salaries proportionally. (In fact, those strategies are precisely what the UFT and Chancellor Crew built into the Extended Time Schools back in the 90s, and many of them are working today in the UFT Charter Schools in East New York.)

So with what some charter schools, like KIPP, have shown us can be done, society has some choices to make. If we just want to pay lip service to the goals of NCLB without shelling out real money, we can allow charter schools to continue as exemplary but limited, non-unionized incubators of effective education strategies, and then continue to blame the teachers and their unions for preventing poor, black children from getting a good education. That’s the road many of those on the right have chosen because it kills several birds with one stone: it keeps taxes low and promotes their anti-union agenda.

On the other hand, if we are truly committed to giving all our kids a decent education, we can make the major investment necessary to take those strategies to scale so we might actually have a chance of closing the gap by 2014 (a la NCLB) or even 2020.

But in the real world, where teachers need to earn a living wage, that takes money. And not just for the longer school days and weeks and years. Also for the early childhood education, to help poor children start in first grade with the vocabulary and pre-reading skills that middle class six-year-olds have. And for the high-quality, ongoing professional development those successful schools provide their teachers. And probably for the smaller classes, too, though Tough doesn’t mention that.

Not coincidentally, those are all things the CFE money could have brought to New York’s poor children, had the Court of Appeals taken NCLB seriously.

So, as Tough says, if NCLB does not succeed in closing the education gap, as now seems likely, it will not be because we didn’t know what to do. It will be, he says, because that was the outcome we chose.

November 22, 2006

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Don’t Take it Personal

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Bimsmile @ 7:37 am

Sometimes it’s so hard to not feel personally insulted when students are bored, or they think an assignment is “dumb.” When this happens, or when a student just refuses to do any work, it sometimes makes me feel personally insulted.

I know I shouldn’t feel this way. I recall being told earlier on in my career – don’t take things personally! However, I have a real problem doing this. I want all my students to like me, listen to me and trust me – but that’s not always the case.

How much trust should students put in their teachers? It seems that when students don’t trust that you have their best interests at heart, then they don’t give you much respect. This lack of respect comes in all different shapes and sizes! I guess trust and respect go hand in hand in my mind. So when they don’t trust, they don’t respect.

Last Friday I stayed late to make phone calls to parents. I was feeling guilty about making the calls for such slight things as talking and coming late to class, especially on a Friday (I didn’t want to ruin anybody’s weekend). But I also felt it needed to be done.

The first call I made was to a student who, earlier in the week, as an absent note, had shown me a court order – just to give you a little of his background. I was calling to discuss his lack of effort and therefore work in class. When he answered the phone and informed me that his parents were not at home I thought quickly. Should I leave him with the message, should I leave any message? He had shown improvement in his attendance, and I didn’t want that to change, so I told him that’s why I was calling. He was short and curt with me, even after I told him I was calling for a positive reason. He said, “whatever, I’m out,” and hung up on me.

I was stunned and felt very insulted. No one likes to be hung up on. When I confronted him about it on Monday, he was just as rude and repeatedly said, “it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s my crib,” he said.

I guess he’s got a point. It doesn’t matter. If he doesn’t care, why should I? How can I not feel hurt? Isn’t it human nature to feel insulted when you reach out to someone and you get that sort of a response?

On the other hand, maybe some sort of a response is better than none. I’ve tried on numerous occasions to talk with a student of mine regarding his lack of effort. He sits in class and does little to no work. He’s not talking or misbehaving, he’s just not working. When I have tried to talk with him he won’t look at me, and he barley responds. I don’t understand what goes through his mind. Going through mines is:
• Is he confused, is he lost?
• Is this class to easy for him and thus boring?
• Is he lazy?

I asked him, again, today why he had not completed, or even begun the writing assignment. His response was, “I don’t like the topic.” He’s a very bright kid, and it bothers me that he doesn’t seem to put any trust in me as a teacher; that he can’t see that everything I ask of him, is only to assist in his learning and will benefit him in the long run.

Since when do students get to pick and chose which assignments they want to do? I called his mother today and am hoping that that will motivate him. I’m at a loss of how to deal with it further and I’m fed up. Other than physically forcing him to do any work,
I’m out of ideas.

There are so many things to keep in mind as a teacher – you never know a student’s background, his or her troubles or their reasoning. There is no easy solution. There’s a certain amount of trust that our students need to put in us. If they don’t allow that to happen, we become powerless.

Are they right to not always trust that what we ask them to do is best for their learning? Should they always do as we ask? Is there a way to get them to learn without getting them to trust you? I sort of feel like there isn’t.

November 21, 2006

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The Revolutionary Leninists of American Education

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 5:51 pm

The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.

The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance…

What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing - the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

V. I. Lenin, “Dual Power” (1917)

 

In an essay written in the wake of Bush’s 2004 election, “All God’s Children Got Values,” Michael Walzer noted how the triumph of the ideologically driven politics of contemporary conservatism had brought to power a movement which proudly embraced the idea of ‘revolution,’ with all of the rhetorical extravagance, all of the unshakeable zeal that one possesses knowledge of the Truth, and all of the unsparing criticism of the existing order of things that term implies. For many a generation, it had been the American left that was the primary bearer of the revolutionary idea, and significant parts of that left reveled in political hyperbole, embraced ideological dogma, and sought to overturn everything under the heavens. But today, in a political inversion, it is the American right that has a messianic solution — an unregulated, laissez-faire market — which it offers as the answer for every problem. The American conservative right has become, in Walzer’s parlance, ‘inegalitarian Bolsheviks.’

Nowhere is the revolutionary program and rhetoric of the American right more in play than in the field of education. In this regard, it is interesting that the first piece of evidence Walzer offers for his thesis is Richard Rothstein’s New York Review of Books review of Abigail and Stephan Thernstroms’ book on the achievement gap, No Excuses. Rothstein objected to the Thernstroms’ sweeping, reductionist argument that there is one meaningful cause and one cause only of the achievement gap – what they describe as flawed cultures of neglect and excuse among communities of color. Starting from this premise, their proposed program – market-based schools propounding a ‘no excuses’ message – is the only solution they could possibly find acceptable. Their dismissal of all other reforms targeting the achievement gap is, Rothstein argues, an example of the single-minded partisanship that has “poisoned” educational debate. In his view, educational problems like the achievement gap are complex, with many causes; they must be addressed on a number of different fronts in complementary, but distinct, ways; and real progress will be gradual. Here Rothstein, public intellectual of the left, is the political pragmatist, painfully aware of the complexity of the problems being addressed and firmly committed to transforming piece by piece, not overthrowing in one fell swoop, the existing world. By contrast, the Thernstroms, the public intellectuals of the right, are the zealous revolutionaries.

There is no shortage of examples of revolutionary calls from the educational right. On a recent Friday, Eugene Hickok, Heritage Foundation fellow and deputy secretary of education in the first Bush administration, appeared on the pages of the Washington Post calling for “an American education revolution.” Hickok argues that NCLB doesn’t go far enough, that it is insufficiently revolutionary. As a consequence, it will be impossible to meet the law’s promise that “every child will be proficient in reading and math by 2014.” For Hickok, the root of the problem is “the American education system,” “the existing institutional architecture of American public education.” He proposes, therefore, that we “put aside the tiresome debate over public versus private education,” which, it appears, means nothing less than that we put aside any recognizably public system of schooling. In order to make this case for the elimination of public schools, the existing public schools are dressed up in all of the pejorative characterizations which have become depressingly familiar to those who follow educational debates with revolutionaries of the right: they are government schools, instruments of self-perpetuating bureaucracies, and so on. Similarly, the laissez-faire market alternative is cloaked in positive sounding glittering generalities, around such terms as freedom, ownership and equality. A straightforward proposal for privatizing public schools, such as vouchers, is nowhere to be found.

Hickok’s presentation operates almost entirely at the level of rhetoric, associating public schools with negative images and his undefined market alternative to the public schools with positive connotations. But one does not have to go too far to find more forthright presentations of what the revolutionary agenda of the educational right entails. The day before Hickok’s column appeared in the Washington Post, the boys at the Fordham Foundation offered some revealing observations on the recent report of the National Charter School Research Project discussing a symposium on “The Future of Charter Schools and Teachers Unions.”* “The authors would like to think that a ‘third way’ exists in this fight,” their weekly Gadfly opines, “but like the Cold War, we will only have ‘détente’ when one side goes away for good.” No weak-kneed Mensheviks, blinded by liberal notions of dialogue and pluralism, at the Fordham Foundation: they have studied how to conduct a revolution, and understand full well that you have not won such an encounter until your political opposition has been eliminated. [If you can’t get enough snarkiness from your daily round of the blogs, you can listen to the boys at the Fordham Foundation make the same points on their podcast here.]

But these declarations operate primarily in the world of political discourse. The full practical scope of the revolutionary orientation of American educational conservatism is most evident where it has achieved its fullest programmatic victory — the city of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina created an opportunity for the Bush Department of Education and its Louisanna allies to take out an entire system of public schools and the union which represented the educators in those schools, United Teachers of New Orleans. In its stead, a new system of schools, mostly charters and entirely non-union, publicly financed but largely unaccountable to the public, has been created.

New Orleans represents an accelerated version of a model of change embraced by various elements of the American educational right — one which has as its ultimate goal the elimination of the existing systems of public schooling, together with the unions which represent the educators who work in them. New Orleans is their shining city, the future they would like to bring to a number of major urban centers with struggling public school systems, suffering from years of government neglect, calculated policies of underfunding and poor management. The goal is to bring these systems to a state of institutional collapse, where they could then be replaced in their entirety by alternative systems, “union free.” The “union free” part should be understood as a central political objective of this strategy: it is designed to eviscerate what the American right sees as one of the most significant institutional supporters of their electoral opposition.

There is a crucial distinction to be drawn here between educational pluralists and educational revolutionaries. Educational pluralists see the establishment of public schools of choice and individual charter schools as components of an effort to create within existing public education more good school choices, especially in poor communities; the term educational reformer properly belongs to them, as it describes their project of incremental change and improvement, school by school. By contrast, educational revolutionaries seek the wholesale replacement of the existing system of public education with a different system, based on a different organization of power – one in which the voices of teachers and parents are entirely marginalized, unions are eliminated and the decisive levers of power are controlled by private, largely corporate entities. It is public in name only.

What is especially worthy of note here is how closely this revolutionary agenda follows the Leninist theory of dual power, captured in the quotation from Lenin that begins this posting. The objective is to create a competing system of schooling, a competing system of power, and then replace the first system with the second. Is it possible to read this March 2005 New York Times article on the establishment of charter schools in the original hometown of the Fordham Foundation, Dayton, Ohio, and not see in these developments the same Leninist political logic, the same political strategy of dual power, that was realized in New Orleans? All that is different is the pace of the change.

It remains to be seen whether the recent election results, with the losses of the Congressional right, represents the first wave of a turning of the political moment, and thus, a substantive defeat for the revolutionary politics of the right those forces represented. That depends in part upon the educational reformers: it is our task to develop a convincing alternative, a vision of educational change that is transformative, deepening — not destroying — the public character of American schools.

* Personal disclosure: I was one of the teacher unionist participants in that symposium, and I have been involved in the establishment of the UFT Charter School.

November 17, 2006

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How Are We Doing? Is the New Student Assessment System Fairer?

Filed under: Testing by Peter Goodman @ 6:31 pm

Athletes define themselves by their success or failure: did they win or lose? Entrepreneurs define themselves by profit and loss: the fiscal “bottom line.” As teachers we define ourselves by the successes and failures of our students.

We want our students to do well on standardized tests, on Regents, and if they don’t, we wonder, deep down, was it their failure or ours?

But the 321 Empowerment Schools are being evaluated in a different manner. Rather than “how many students are at Level 3/4,” schools are being evaluated by “average pupil growth.” Not whether they are at Level 1, 2, 3 or 4, but rather by how much they improved over a baseline calculated from using school data from the last few years. The “average pupil growth” will be expressed in a letter grade based upon the schools standing vis-a-vis all other schools. Next year all schools will be evaluated through this letter grade/average pupil growth system.

Each Empowerment School will undergo five interim assessments of student work. Most schools are using a Princeton Review assessment tool, although a few are designing their own assessments. This data is meant to inform instruction.

The Empowerment Schools will be receiving their first Progress Report shortly, and I expect many will be surprised.

Under NCLB, schools are measured by the number of kids at Level 3/4 in ELA and Math - in reality schools are evaluated by zip code!

Schools in Bayside with all Level 3/4 students may get a “D” or an “F” because the students didn’t improve, while schools in Brownsville with Level 1/2 students may received an “B” or an “A” because the students showed considerable progress.

It is conceivable that the Feds and the State can laud a school for the number of kids at Level 3/4 while the DOE chastises the school for lack of student growth, or, the converse, the Feds/State places a school on the SURR or SINI list while the DOE praises the school … Alice in Wonderland??

And, of course, a couple years down the road the DOE can point to Ms. Smith, her kids have shown consistent “growth” while Ms. Jones’ kids have not shown growth … should Ms. Smith receive a “gold star,” or additional remuneration?

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Cruel School

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by cmitchell @ 4:09 pm

I come from restaurant kitchen where classically trained chefs wield 8 inch Global chef’s knives or 12″ Misonos. Yet, the self-inflicted cuts from a stainless steel blade are nowhere as painful as the wounds received from the invisible blade of a backstabber.

At my middle school, I have been the central character, unwittingly, in an enfolding Shakespearean drama. Jealousy, rivalry, betrayal, cunning and deceit are the leitmotifs of our play. Little did I know that I was working besides Iagos and Brutuses - “Et tu, Brutus?” In these past two weeks, I have experienced a deep sense of betrayal from my students, my co-teachers, and my principal.

I had called a meeting with my principal to resolve our issues and to find out his intentions at this point, was he determined to fire me? The UFT rep and I first met to go over the actions I had taken, post the DOE letter, to ameliorate the situation — speaking to the teachers about increasing my role in the classroom, reviewing less homework, conferring more with students to answer their questions, etc. The meeting with the principal was an hour before school started and my UFT rep encouraged me to start the meeting. The meeting did not go as smoothly as I had planned. I was still upset and I found the principal to be rather insensitive. He made some discouraging, if not demeaning and insulting, comments to me, which really shook up my composure. Afterwards, I was so upset, I could not teach for the first two periods of school in the morning so I left the building. I went to Duane Reade to buy tissues and Visine. I walked around the neighborhood until I could pull myself together, breathing in the fresh air.

The next day, my principal decided to institute a new math intervention program at the school. I would “pull-out” students from their classes rather than “pushi-in” to the sixth and seventh grade math classes. The math scores had finally come in so we could target the kids more effectively through this program. I’ll be able to assess their needs and strengths and help them progress. This was an excellent solution to getting me out of the situation with my two CTT teachers and simultaneously, utilizing my skills to reach as many kids as possible. I was relieved.

I think I’ll be able to have a greater impact on student academic achievement this way. At last, the tide is turning, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and possibly, a rainbow after a storm? Things are looking up and I feel a weight lifted off my shoulders. I’m looking forward to meeting more students and working with them one-on-one.

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Diary Of A Roller Coaster Ride

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Bimsmile @ 4:02 pm

The best analogy that I’ve heard so far  about what we do for a living is this: Teaching is like a roller coaster.                  This has been the story of my second year as a high school English teacher. It has been quite a ride and, for that reason, in a graduate course I am taking toward my master’s in education, I chose to focus on just what my ups and downs have been, what was causing them and how I could learn to understand them so I may become a better teacher.

But before I share my “roller coaster diary,”  let me give you a sense of where my head has been at these first three months.

I began my second year of teaching with lofty dreams of class projects and life-changing trips; then I learned that I would have more than 30 students in each of my classes. Now I realize my dreams were not too lofty, just not feasible with 32 students. That was my first major downer.

But since then there have been many highs and lows. Here then is a glimpse of some of them. I’m sure you can relate.

MY DIARY

Teaching highs:

• Some students were excited about writing their own memoirs.

• Logistics of cross-age tutoring trip are coming together.

• A positive conversation with a former and somewhat troubled student.

• Student letters to pupils at a nearby elementary school were encouraging; they showed effort and excitement.

• Students are reading books at a much faster rate than last year.

• One student’s mother wrote me a note requesting a meeting. That same student asked me to call his mother to ensure that I was able to meet with her on parent-teacher conference days.

• Students were continually excited about writing their personal memoirs and attending our field trip to the elementary school.

• The principal and a visitor from the superintendent’s office witnessed what turned out to be a fairly creative lesson as I introduced a new story.  I infused geography, technology and creative writing techniques and it worked!

• The students’ behavior was wonderful when the principal and AP unexpectedly came in to observe.

• During that observation, the kids virtually led their own discussion after finishing our class book. They respectfully responded to one another’s comments and pointed to specific incidents from the book to support their opinions.

• Old students came back to hang out and visit instead of leaving school to go home.

• A highly intelligent and motivated young woman in my Ramp-Up class came to school dressed up (business casual) just for our trip to visit the 1st-graders.

Teaching downs:

• Too many students lack any motivation to work in class or on their projects.

• First full week after a pair of four-day weeks and three-day weekends; the time off was great but getting back into a good flow in the classroom is very difficult!

• Students rowdy and too talkative.

• Difficult to obtain students’ attention for any extended period of time.

• I am so sick of repeating myself — “It is entirely too loud in here,” “Please quiet down and pay attention,” “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please,” “End the conversations and start reading” — will it ever end?

• Students continually lose or misplace permission slips and other necessary handouts.

• Lack of motivation from the prior two weeks continues.

• The principal and a visitor from the superintendent’s office unexpectedly came into my class.

• Permission slip screw-up: I need a signature by the principal for a class trip, and I didn’t realize it until the end of the day.

• The principal’s negative attitude and seeming refusal to assist in making the trip happen is disheartening.

• Taking full responsibility for forgetting to obtain the principal’s signature on trip permission slip.

• My feelings of guilt: one student was aggravated that she got up early to come in for the trip and it was cancelled, said she was sick and would have stayed home in bed had she known.

Like any experienced roller coaster rider, I am desperately trying to maintain balance on this wild ride and this research project, including the diary, has been helpful.

November 15, 2006

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NYC Public School Teacher Pay

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 11:34 am

According to this article in today’s Daily News, one in every eight New York City public school teachers earn more than the average pay of assistant principals, $87,130. Closer to one in every four teachers earn more than the starting pay of assistant principals, $79,357.

And all of this is BEFORE the pay increases in the proposed contract kick in.

November 14, 2006

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Wal-Mart The Beneficient?

Filed under: Charter School Privatization Wal-Mart by Leo Casey @ 3:00 pm

Over at The Quick and The Ed, Kevin Carey is defending an Education Sector puff piece on the educational giving of the Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart fame, “Big Box: How the Heirs of the Wal-Mart Fortune Have Fueled the Charter School Movement.”

It seems that the AFT’s Ed Muir upset Kevin by suggesting that Wal-Mart’s “philanthropy” in the educational sphere might actually have something to do with its political and economic agenda, that there might be some connection between its relentless advocacy of the most extreme anti-union, anti-public sector, and laissez-faire market policies, on the one hand, and its foundation’s support of organizations promoting educational vouchers, educational privatization, charter schools and anti-union “right to work” legislation, on the other hand.

“It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder if Walton Family Foundation is pursuing an anti-union agenda through its philanthropic activities,” Kevin allows. But apparently ‘wonder’ is all one is allowed to do, and don’t spend too much time in thought either. For a sentence later Kevin tell us that he finds “the idea that [Wal-Mart's educational philanthropy] is all just a stealth anti-union campaign to be ludricous and unserious.” To suggest otherwise, he goes on, is to commit philosophical crimes against empiricism, and to indulge in psychological sins of narcissism: in one brief post, the AFT’s Muir seems to have offended intellectual thought from Locke to Freud, if Kevin is to be our guide.

Teachers, unionists, and public school advocates were born, Kevin. It just wasn’t yesterday.

We understand that the charter movement is a politically heterogeneous movement, and that broadly speaking, it contains progressives who are supportive of teacher voice and open to working with teacher unions, as well as reactionaries who are involved with charters for the express purpose of undermining public schooling and teacher unionism — including those who would drop charter schools for vouchers in a flash if they saw more of an opportunity to win vouchers. That is why the UFT distinguishes between the two currents, and why we have joined with the progressives, who remain true to the vision of charter schools Al Shanker originally developed, in starting our own charter schools. It is also why we do not shirk from opposing the reactionaries in the charter school movement who are self-avowed foes of public schools and their teachers. There is a battle to be fought for the hearts and minds of the charter school movement, and we intend to be part of that fight.

We also know where the Walton Family Foundation stands in that fight. That is no more an open question than where we stand in that fight. It simply begs credulity to suggest otherwise.

We will limit ourselves here to a few examples that come straight out of the Education Sector report, although the context that would give them meaning there is generally missing. [Edwize has written on Wal-Mart before, so we will spare our readers the full nine yards of the record of this "educational giver" on such issues as its repeated violations of child labor laws in the US.] The Waltons and their foundation have supported political campaigns on behalf of voucher legislation and expansion in Washington DC, Milwaukee, and Michigan, to cite the most well-known cases. John Walton gave $50 million to a privately-financed voucher fund he put together with Wall Street financier Theodore Forstmann. The Walton Family Foundation provides support for organizations which have been the most strident advocates of educational privatization, from Jeannie Allen’s Center for for Educational Reform to Howard Fuller’s Black Alliance for Educational Options.

There are, however, a few questions that are worth pondering:

Why did Education Sector feel it important to produce this apology for Wal-Mart?

What does a charter school do to its integrity when it takes Wal-Mart’s blood money?

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