September 17, 2007

NCLB: Fact And Fiction In The Blogosphere

Filed under: Education NCLB by Leo Casey @ 1:17 pm

With the publication of the Miller-McKeon discussion draft bill for the reauthorization of NCLB, the debate over what changes should be made has become increasingly complicated. One could use a scorecard to keep track of the different positions being staked out on different sides. Our sister AFT blog, NCLBlog: Let’s Get It Right, and Sherman Dorn have done a fine job of explaining the debates, and both are refreshingly free of the sniping and name-calling that has taken over a number of educational blogs on this question.

In the midst of all of the back and forth, Joe Williams wrote a post, When Did Reg Weaver Lose the Farm Workers?, claiming that the United Farm Workers was at odds with the National Educational Association over NCLB. For good measure, Williams threw in a repeat of the slanderous hearsay that UFW founder Cesar Chavez was bought off from expressing his true opinions on vouchers by AFT contributions to the UFW. Williams seems to think that the way to defend the hypocritical use of Chavez’s name by anti-union charter schools is to besmirch his good name, again and again.

What was interesting was Williams’ post contained no link to support his claim. Curious, we ran a number of Google searches [NCLB and UFW, NCLB and United Farm Workers, No Child Left Behind and United Farm Workers] and found not one hit of UFW support for NCLB, much less one which indicated opposition to the NEA. Really curious, we went to the list of who had testified before Congress, and found no one representing the UFW.

We did discover that Sonia Hernandez, Executive Director of the National Farm Workers Service Center [NFWSC], a not for profit foundation set up many years ago by Cesar Chavez, had delivered this testimony. NFWSC delivers tutoring under the Supplementary Educational Services component of NCLB, and Hernandez’s testimony spoke entirely and exclusively to maintaining those services in the reauthorization of the act. Whatever one’s assessments of the value of NCLB’s SES provisions, it is clearly not an issue which is of great concern for teachers and teacher unions. Unlike many other sections of the law, it does no harm — the worst that could be said is that the funds could be better spent elsewhere.

So there you have it. Not a word from the UFW itself. Not even a hint of UFW conflict with the NEA. And the only testimony that one could conceivably link to farm workers, the testimony of the NFWSC, addressed only the issue of SES.

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  • [...] went looking for the same thing as Leo Casey when Democrats for Education Reform blogger, Joe “sourpuss” Williams claimed the [...]

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  • [...] and EIA's Mike Antonucci have also found some of the splits here to be noteworthy.But not Old Man Casey or the artist formerly known as PREA Prez, both of whom seemed to think it was total bullshit that [...]

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  • [...] Education Reform, Joe Williams once more tries to use the United Farm Workers as his shield against those who have busted him as the anti-union creep that he [...]

    Pingback by No hiding behind the farmworkers. « PREA Prez — September 25, 2007 @ 6:20 am

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