Are the winds shifting? The tides turning? Could the tables already have turned?

Here are some reasons I think this may be happening.

1) An op ed in yesterday’s Guardian of London newspaper suggests that the Chicago Teachers’ Union is sending shock waves far beyond our home town for its string of upsets against the offensive moves of the city’s Democratic establishment:

This is getting national attention in the US, and a strike could be an embarrassment to President Obama. Moreover, it could re-ignite the American labour movement at a time of global unrest.

2) A few days ago, blogger Jim Warren compared a vacationing CPS CEO JC Brizard to Nero, “kayaking while Rome burns”:

I stumbled into Brizard’s absence during a chance conversation with (a) Chicago educator Thursday. The person mentioned that Brizard was out of town. He mentioned that Brizard had asked colleagues not to bother him with calls. He indicated that Brizard had posted on his Facebook page a photo of his wife with a kayak in Vermont. He rolled his eyes…..(Brizard)’s given ammunition already to anybody who looks to bypass or intentionally undermine him.

3) The Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman’s piecesuggesting Rahm’s honeymoon is over was prominently placed in Sunday’s paper. The media is beginning to be more skeptical about Rahm, his CPS schools team, and, to some extent, to corporate reform itself. The teachers’ contract arbitrator, whom Rahm’s team had set up as the voice of reason, actually made a very reasonable case for treating teachers fairly. In fact, his report comes across as a breath of fresh air amidst the hot air politicians and their corporate sponsors have beenblowing.

And media reports about the CPS ISAT scores were quite critical, especially of the lackluster charter school and longer day “pioneer” schools’ results.

4) Surprising “new” suggestion from Public Agenda and the Joyce Foundation – support LSCs.

I just read all the way through a May 2012 Public Agenda report called “Community Responses to School Reform in Chicago” and was surprised by at least one of the report’s recommendations for more effectively collaborating with the community in school reform: that CPS “consider re-engaging and strengthening the capacity of Local School Council (LSC) members” by “improving the way new members are educated and prepared for their role and responsibilities and by using this structure as a means to reach residents in local neighborhoods.” Wow. What a concept.

I found this surprising because this report follows up on a particularly yucchy “analysis” by Public Agenda (look at point four here) showing how corporate reformers can better manipulate parents to support their agenda. It was so creepy that the National Education Policy Center titled their review of the report, “Giving Parents the Run-Around on School Turnarounds.”

Both reports were funded by the Joyce Foundation, which dropped all support of LSCs several years ago as it embraced full-out corporate reform. Time for one of those foundation retreats to re-evaluate your “philanthropic goals”?

5) And….Huffington Post published one of my articles! They’ve censored me for several months and, frankly, I wasn’t expecting them to let this one on charter schools and violence get past Arianna’s protective shield.

So, what can you do to encourage the momentum?

Turn up the heat! (I ask this even though our 20+year-old air conditioner died today of all days. This is how much I love public education!).

Chicago is on the forefront of corporate education-busting because of the true grass roots collaboration between the Chicago Teachers’ Union and Chicago’s old and new parent and community groups. Let’s keep it going!

• Learn HOW to turn up the heat from the best of the best, CTU’s Karen Lewis and KOCO’s Jitu Brown, in an SOS webinar tonight: “Build a United Fighting Teachers Union with Parent and Community Support,” moderated by Michael Klonsky. Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 9 PM Eastern Daylight Time [EDT]

“On every issue, they offered counters to his “reform” agenda of privatization, charter schools, longer school day,and test-based teacher evaluation….After more than 4,000 CTU members poured out of the Congress Theater, they were joined by rallying supporters across the street in Grant Park, with the groups merging into a sea of red-shirted marchers. As they proceeded up Michigan Ave. and then west on Adams, they were greeted with signs of support from onlookers — a group of custodians, some medical techs, hard-hatted construction workers and retail clerks.
~ Mike Klonsky’s Blog

From Mike: “For those of you who don’t know what a webinar is, think of it as an online, interactive radio show, where you can participate by asking my guests question or making comments as time allows. Otherwise just listen and take it all in. All you need is a computer with internet access and a working mic (if you want to speak).”

REGISTER HERE.

2) Help Parents4Teachers and CODE: Our Elected School Board Campaign is heading in to the home stretch. We need your help for two more weeks to finish strong!
Help us this week and next to circulate petitions to get a referendum for an elected school board on the November ballot.

• Tuesday, July 17: West Rogers Park, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Meet at 6635  N. Mozart.
• Wednesday, July 18: Logan Square, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Meet at the Starbucks on California and Logan Blvd.
• Thursday, July 19: West Town, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Meet at 2002 W. Superior.

Please email info@parents4teachers.net if you can help out on any of these nights! YOU are the key to this campaign’s success!

3) (Also from Parents4Teachers): Stand Strong for Our Teachers July 25
The Chicago Teachers Union ( CTU) is asking parents and everyone concerned about quality education to take a stand at the July 25 CPS Board meeting. Meet at 9 a.am., at 125 S. Clark St. (7 a.m., if you want to testify)

The Board will be voting on the unfair CPS proposed budget that day and  CTU has called for a big demonstration before the meeting.

We need to STAND STRONG for our teachers. They are in the fight of their lives, standing up for our kids. Help them win the schools our children need and deserve.

4) Finally, like, share, and tweet my Huffington Post story – thanks!

The latest offer of “help” from the hedge fund crowd comes from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which is establishing ELP Venture, a “venture philanthropy fund” to offer rewards for more education innovations to inflict on CPS students.

According to the Sun-Times, “Rather than focus on proven reforms, the group hopes to develop ‘the new, yet-to-be-proven reform,’ said class member Gillian Darlow, a principal at Civic Consulting Alliance.”

How have they done so far? Well, Global Council Chair, Bruce Rauner, was one of the corporate brains behind SB7 and its 75% “strike-proof” vote standard that was supposed to be too high for the Chicago Teachers’ Union to meet. We know what happened there. Rauner also supports the Noble charter network schools, one of which is named after him. We all know what those schools are like.

Rauner admits to his lousy track record in education reform: he “warned the group that the ‘school improvement wars’ was an important struggle but also was ‘ugly, dirty’ and ‘not fun.’ He said he provided $20 million to help with education reform and 80 percent of it was ‘wasted.’ ’’

But now they’re going to collect $10 million to fund more “unproven” boondoggles.

Hey Bruce – why don’t you mess around with your own children’s schools for a while and leave ours alone?

Students in Shamrock school garden - photo by Pamela Grundy

As we sit back and reflect on the powerful message the Chicago Teachers’ Union sent to Mayor Rahm yesterday, it seems like a good time to muse about where we go from here.

The CTU has some great ideas in their “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve” report.

Today I’d like to add to that approach by passing on a beautiful article by our Charlotte, NC, Parents Across America member, Pamela Grundy, who writes about the last day at a school she was warned against sending her son to — “one of the many high-poverty, high-minority schools created as Charlotte dismantled its once-celebrated program of busing for desegregation.”

Pamela writes:

Six years ago, the (newspaper) coverage struck an ominous note. “If it were your child, would you risk it?” the headline asked, invoking the phrases that strike terror into ambitious parents’ hearts: “low scores,” “high poverty” and “struggling school.” The reporter followed several middle-class families who were thinking about sending kids to Shamrock, their neighborhood elementary. By the end of the article, we were the only family left.

Now, the pendulum has swung the other way.  ”An elementary once so bad the state took it over has some miracle growth,” the Observer informed its readers. The article went on to detail the progress we have made: new programs, more strong teachers, higher test scores, an abundance of gardens and a growing number of the neighborhood families who once avoided the school….

Our successes were rooted in time-tested ideas – small classes, a stable, experienced staff, racial and economic integration – tempered with the understanding that good work takes time and patience. To use a garden metaphor, Miracle Gro may help you for a season, but if you want lasting success you have to build your soil.

This reminds me so much of another garden at school I knew pretty well a few years ago. Last week, I ran into a teacher at Ruiz Elementary school who told me about the wonderful programs happening there. In fact, Ruiz was about to celebrate the opening of their new Learning Garden.

14 or so years ago things weren’t so rosy at Ruiz. PURE was called in by a teacher member of the Local School Council to train the LSC in monitoring and revising their school improvement plan. The parents were unhappy with the school. It seemed to be in perpetual lockdown, parents didn’t feel welcome, and there wasn’t much happening for students. Then things got pretty exciting – the assistant principal displayed a gun (which he claimed was a toy) at an LSC meeting, and later the principal tried to get rid of a much-loved teacher.

With lots of training and support from PURE, the LSC selected a new principal and a new era began with the first Ruiz garden and a parent patrol, a PTA, and a bilingual committee. PURE named the Ruiz LSC our first “Good News LSC” – a recognition became a regular feature of our LSC newsletter.

Oh, and the teacher whom the original principal tried to force out eventually became the school principal.

Many communities across Chicago have been persistently asking to have the same chance as Pamela and her family and the Ruiz LSC – to work with a school over time, grow the programs in ways that engage children, and help build a stronger learning community.

Sadly, most communities are being denied this opportunity by the city’s greedy school closure and take-over frenzy. The lack of strong support for LSCs – either from CPS or independent groups like PURE, which no longer have the funding to provide those services – makes it more and more difficult for those elected bodies to do their important work planning for and supporting stronger schools. The communities and LSCs that have done so (like those supporting Dyett and Piccolo) have had the door slammed in their faces by the Board of Education.

What can we do?

Well, first of all, we need to keep fighting the weeds and pests of corporate reform that are trying to destroy our democratic system of public education. But we need to spend just as much energy planting and enriching the garden, promoting what we know works — processes and programs such as those laid out in the CTU proposal or in this excellent community-based piece, “Sustainable School Transformation,” put together by Communities for Excellent Public Schools.

We can’t stop. And, as Pamela has shown us, with patience, the garden will grow and thrive.

A mercenary is a person who takes part in an armed conflict, who is not a national or a party to the conflict, and is “motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party” (Wikipedia)

How spot-on is this as a description of the folks who staff corporate reform movement shops?

Well, our San Francisco PAA member, Caroline Grannan, was just banned for a month from posting comments on a blog that leans toward the corporate reform agenda. Her offense? Attaching the label “mercenary” to newly-hired Obama campaign staffer, Linda Serrato, who used to work for the Parent Revolution after she worked for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, after she worked for Hilary Clinton’s campaign. The blogger characterized Caroline’s comment as “offensive”:

Here’s what Caroline wrote:

Serrato, like Parent Revolution director Ben Austin (the main force behind the Parent Trigger) and the rest of that crew, are purely hired mercenaries who promote whatever position they’re paid to promote. A lot of the conversation seems to be based on the mistaken assumption that they are heartfelt advocates who infuse their work with their deep belief in the Parent Trigger, wherever they go. That seems naive to me. Once the last paycheck is deposited, Parent Trigger will be forgotten.

Exposing the agenda behind the propaganda

While I might not agree with Caroline about how much we can see into someone else’s heart, I completely agree that it is critically important for us – and for the mainstream media – to loudly, regularly, and publicly call into question the motivation of the corporate reform movement and its agents, because corporate reform is first and foremost a propaganda campaign.

Case in point, the income and expense report I mentioned in my PURE Thoughts blog yesterday showing that the Education Reform Now group, which paid for the anti-union robo calls to Chicago Public Schools parents over the weekend, had an income of $9 million last year (up from $1 million the prior year) and about half of that was spent on a contract with one advertising firm.

Let me go back to the Wikipedia passage I quoted back in late 2010, during the Waiting for Superman furor:

As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare. (emphasis added)

It is clear from their spending and activities that, for corporate reformers, the war against public education is a propaganda war in service of their political agenda to privatize schools, destroy the teachers unions, and generally take control of education away from the public and put it in the hands of businesses and politicians.

Time to be (on the) offensive

So, if we are to fight this propaganda war, it’s legitimate, it’s necessary, to analyze and expose the political agenda behind the propaganda. That must entail questioning and critiquing what motivates the propaganda mercenaries carrying out the fight. In doing so, we are being “offensive” only in the sense that we are fighting pro-actively to protect democratic public education.

So, is everyone who works for corporate reform just in it for the money, as Caroline suggests?

Could be. Going back to the definition at the top of this article, mercenaries generally earn substantially more money than the local troops. Oh, yeah – we know that’s true. Most grass roots advocates make little or nothing, even as hired staff.

But I suspect that most mercenaries actually like the battle itself and have battle skills that they are proud to display (think Jonah Edelman at Aspen last year). Each battle builds the resume – but then that’s about money, too.

The other characteristic of mercenaries is that they are “not nationals” – i.e. “not from around here.” They come in for the job, they are not people who live and work and raise families in the place where they drop in to carry out their boss’s agenda. So, they are almost the definition of astroturf. No roots, just artificial coverage that can be picked up and moved somewhere else.

And that’s a pretty good way to tell the mercenaries from the real advocates.

It really hit home today as I read the ugly Huffington Post blog by Jacqueline Edelberg, in which the self-described “CPS Mommy” who “love, love, l-o-v-e”s teachers describes Chicago’s as “the red-shirted mob now marching with pitchforks against the House of Brizard.”

After considerable protest from commenters on the post, HuffPo actually deleted the words “midgets” and “freak show” from Edelberg’s description of the controversy over the teachers union strike authorization vote as offensive (ya think?). Here’s Edelberg’s original wording:

“In the Springeresque circus that’s come to town, we’ve seen Lewis flanked by rabid parent Matt Farmer and perennial parade-marshal Rev. Jesse Jackson (extra ironic since disadvantaged minority children will be the ones most impacted by a strike). And whoa! Hollywood? Even Matt Damon has piled-on. By the time the bouncers, midgets, and 405,000 bored kids rush the stage, Wisconsin’s pizza and beer slug-fest will look tame. This is exactly the kind of polarizing freak show that SB7 sought to avoid.”

But HuffPo editors APPROVED IT as it was originally written. Midgets, freak show and all.

Why does this bother me? Besides the obvious? Because I am still waiting for HuffPo editors to approve my recent post sharing Parents Across America’s parent report card on Michelle Rhee, which I posted last Wednesday to my HuffPo Backstage submission page.

It usually takes about 24 hours for a post to go live. It’s been 5 days. And I’ve been here before – I know they won’t post it. It’s why I have more or less stopped posting there anyway.

But it shows that HuffPo is more interested in protecting corporate darlings like Michelle Rhee than in using taste or judgment about offensive references to little people or attacks on other CPS parents like Matt Farmer who emotionally, devastatingly, and FACTUALLY argued at a CTU rally that Penny Pritzker does not expose her children to the same policies and programs she approves for CPS children as a member of the Chicago Board.

When it comes to education reform, there is no liberal or conservative anyway, there’s only “pro-corporate,” “pro-public,” and, I guess, “home school.” So, next time you see Arianna representing the “liberal” point of view on a talk show, remember where her biases really lie.

The book is called “Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education” and includes a chapter I wrote, ” ‘Just parents’ challenge Mayor Daley, Arne Duncan and Renaissance 2010.” 

From the publisher:

A collection of empowering stories bringing together the voices of teachers, parents, and educational activists fighting market-driven educational policies

Lost amid the heated debate over educational policies are the stories of the educators, parents, and students who are most affected by policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. In Educational Courage, veteran education scholars Nancy Schniedewind and Mara Sapon-Shevin bring together the voices of those who are resisting market-driven initiatives such as high-stakes testing, charter schools, mayoral control, and merit pay. The diverse narrators who write in this volume confront the educational initiatives that undermine teachers’ judgment and knowledge, ignore the different backgrounds of students and parents, and debase the learning process. These voices offer stories of activism, hope, and possibility. Though these stories describe the negative effects of the corporate-driven educational initiatives of the past decade, they are primarily stories of resistance-of educators, parents, and education activists fighting mightily to uphold the ideals of democratic public education. In doing so, they inspire others to do the same.

Pre-order it from Amazon or the BN. It will be out on September 4. You’re gonna like it.

If you take the time to read Diane Ravitch’s latest book review, “Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?” you will be rewarded with one of her best critical summaries of corporate reform propaganda.

She recaps several generations of alarm-raising about public education, concluding,

Somehow, despite the widely broadcast perception that educational achievement was declining, the United States continued to grow and thrive as an economic, military, and technological power….How is it possible that this nation became so successful if its public schools, which enroll 90 percent of its children, have been consistently failing for the past generation or more?

The current red-flag-waving book is a report by the Council on Foreign Relations headed by former NYC schools Chancellor Joel Klein and former Bush Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. According to Ravitch,

What marks this report as different from its predecessors, however, is its profound indifference to the role of public education in a democratic society, and its certainty that private organizations will succeed where the public schools have failed. Previous hand-wringing reports sought to improve public schooling; this one suggests that public schools themselves are the problem, and the sooner they are handed over to private operators, the sooner we will see widespread innovation and improved academic achievement. The report is a mishmash of misleading statistics and incoherent arguments, intended to exaggerate the failure of public education.

My favorite part is seeing PURE’s expose of the Noble Street Charter Network’s fine-based discipline policy nicely worked into Diane’s argument that charter schools have not lived up to the hype.

The task force asserts that charters will lead the way to innovative methods of education. But the charters with the highest test scores are typically known not for innovation, but for ‘no excuses’ discipline policies, where students may be fined or suspended or expelled if they fail to follow the rules of the school with unquestioning obedience, such as not making eye contact with the teacher or slouching or bringing candy to school or being too noisy in gym or the lunchroom.

The real threat to national security is squeezing the democracy out of our schools with such “reform school” approaches replacing efforts at real school reform, and with standardized testing narrowing the curriculum so that our schools are simply no longer able to produce informed citizens. And, I guess, that’s what the Joel Kleins of this country are really after.