NY Times Endorses Low Standards

For years I have noticed that the NY Times has the very worst education reporting in the city. I often disagree with the editorials in the News and the Post, but their reporting often contradicts what appears on their op-ed pages. Sometimes I wonder whether the editorial writers read their own reporting. Since Times reporting is so frequently timid and wishy-washy, I guess their editorial writers follow it, except the great piece that exposed the Moskowitz Academies.

Their piece today is utter nonsense of the same variety put forth by Nicholas Kristof, who bemoaned the fact that Merryl Streep and Colin Powell were unqualified to teach in public schools. The fact that they had never expressed to remotest desire to do that, let alone take the spectacular pay cut that would accompany that decision, never entered his mind. If it did, it certainly never entered his column.

The Times criticizes teacher training programs. I will admit that I took some crappy and useless courses when getting my Master's. But I also took great courses in my subject area, courses that gave me a very good understanding of language acquisition, bilingualism, and the structure of the English language. We all kind of implicity understand its structure but never really have to think about it.

The Times thinks I don't need that sort of training even though I use it absolutely every day in my work. Here's what the Times thinks:

New York’s high-performing charter schools have long complained that rules requiring them to hire state-certified teachers make it difficult to find high-quality applicants in high-demand specialties like math, science and special education. They tell of sorting through hundreds of candidates to fill a few positions, only to find that the strongest candidates have no interest in working in the low-income communities where charters are typically located.

Curiously, it's escaped the Times' notice that public school teachers work in every single one of those communities without exception. And if we take this paragraph at face value, it clearly states that the strongest candidates have no desire to teach at these charters. Why is that? Is it because of the neighborhoods they're in? Or could it possibly be that they don't wish to work under substandard conditions in Moskowitz test-prep factories? Maybe they don't feel like giving scripted lessons and wish to develop their own teacher voice.

The new rules will allow charter schools that receive SUNY approval to recruit people who have college degrees in areas other than education as well as 3.0 averages for training programs that consist of a month of instruction and a week of practice teaching. Exceptions could be made for musicians or other artists who lack degrees but have been widely recognized in their fields. 

Finally, a chance for Merryl Streep and Colin Powell to become NYC teachers. The only issue is that they've never applied. Well, you can't have everything. The Times goes on:

In its general outlines, the training regime resembles the highly successful Teaching Fellows program, under which New York City recruits college graduates and people who are changing careers to work in schools serving low-income children.

Except for the fact that Teaching Fellows eventually needed to get Master's degrees and meet state standards for certification.  Oopzie. Well, the Times doesn't always vet its sources all that closely.

Maybe the Times editorial writers followed a similar program. 30 days of reading newspapers, a month writing a few things, and who cares if your ideas are fundamentally unsound? Hey, let's stop wasting time with all that medical school, buy a few stethescopes, and let the Doctor Fellows work on NY Times editorial writers. And if it doesn't work out, the Times can always hire a Lawyer Fellow to mess around with a lawsuit. Are lawsuits two-piece or three-piece suits? Who cares?

The important thing is giving them a chance.

Doing to the Times What the Times Does to ATR Teachers

Judith Miller was a reporter at the NY Times. She was known for "anti-Isiamic bias," and was famous for perpetrating the weapons of mass destruction nonsense that dragged us into a costly and endless involvement in Iraq. She was also involved in the disastrous matter of Valerie Plame. Though she acknowledged having used inaccurate sources, she went on to work for Fox News and Newsmax, likely offering the same crap she did at the Times.

Jayson Blair was famously caught fabricating sources, yet continued on writing. Blair wrote a book called Burning Down My Master's House, and people not only bought it, but also evidently read it. In the book, Blair revealed substance abuse, and revealed that he had committed said abuse before he left the NY Times.

Numerous columnists on the NY Times write baseless reformy nonsense. This includes Nicholas Kristof, who put forth the absurd notion that teacher certification was keeping Colin Powell and Meryl Streep from careers as teachers, though neither of them had expressed any remote interest in doing so. Kristof also thinks that students need to learn Spanish before they learn Chinese, as though no American child has Chinese family, or interest in learning the most-spoken language in the world.

NY Times Columnist Charles Blow thinks Eli Broad is fighting the good fight to "reform" education. Diane Ravitch deems him hopelessly misinformed, and says he relies on flawed information. He's one of several NY Times columnist who got on board with the Common Core lovefest the paper seemed to embrace.

Former food critic Frank Bruni was made a columnist, and writes a whole lot of nonsense about city teachers. He indulges in stereotype and says it's nearly impossible to fire teachers. Oddly, I know teachers who have been fired, and I'm just a lowly teacher, without nearly the resources of a NY Times reporter. Bruni relies on interviews with E4E folk for information, and that's good enough for him. Bruni relies on logical fallacy like appeal to authority to make his point.

Do you see what I'm doing here? I'm using stereotype to bash the NY Times. I'm giving you several examples, drawn from who knows how many, and painting a picture of the entire organization. This is the same as when people point to members of a religion, racial group, or nationality and attribute some quality to said group as a result. I'm an ESL teacher. I have taught students from every corner of the earth, from many religions and countries. One thing I've learned is that no stereotype is true.

Over at the NY Times, education reporter Kate Taylor has learned no such thing. Thus, she takes a handful of anecdotes about ATR teachers, places them all into a story, and paints the entire group with one brush. That's stereotype, that's logical fallacy, and make no mistake, that's what the Times is offering us as reporting.

This is no different from the trash we see in NY Post and Fox News editorials. I read education reporting all the time, and the Times is way behind the News and the Post. I remember, years ago, reading that the February break was a big loss for parents, because they'd have to find some way to care for their children. Unlike every single teacher in NY, the Times was unaware that NYC's preferred alternative to the week off was teachers going in for PD. There was no scenario under which the students were going to attend, but that didn't get in their way of demonizing the UFT.

This Times story is a disgraceful piece of trash. This is exactly how Campbell Brown made her career as a reformy, and the Times story is no better than any of the nonsense propagated in the tabloids by Brown. Kate Taylor should get in touch with her inner sense of shame, if indeed she has one.

All the Cluelessness That's Fit to Print

A few days ago, Diane Ravitch wrote about the NY Times and Trump. They oppose him, both on their editorial and op-ed pages. Ravitch gives particular attention to Charles Blow. Sometimes I like him, but not always. Ravitch herself wrote about him and how misinformed he is on the topic of reforminess. For me, once people spout reforminess, it's hard to take anything they say seriously. This is especially true when being well-informed is a crucial factor of their job description.

Of course Blow is not the only Times op-ed writer who adores all things reformy. Nicholas Kristof, like Eva Moskowitz, doesn't favor teacher certification. Now we all understand Eva wants cheap, replaceable teachers. If she could simply open up a new can every time she needed a few fresh ones, surely she'd be happy. Kristof, on the other hand, is ridiculous and illogical to the point of contending that teacher certification kept Meryl Streep and Colin Powell from becoming NYC teachers.

Have you noticed Streep and Powell coming to your school asking for work? Are their CVs on your principal's desk? Hey, I know it's a strain for Kristof to bang out 700 words twice a week. That's one heckuva burden. Perhaps all that work has addled his brain. Or maybe, just maybe, we need to be united in something more than opposition to Donald Trump.

Every reformy I know of opposes Trump. Even hyper-opportunist Eva Moskowitz was shamed into saying something negative about him after he vilified people who oppose white supremacy. But we have to be careful before we determine they're our friends. A while back I was Facebook friends with a whole lot of people who opposed Common Core. It was pretty clear, to me at least, that a lot of right-leaning people who opposed it would've embraced it had it not been pushed by Barack Obama. I mean, it was nice agreeing about Common Core, but all in all we don't see eye to eye.

I have a similar issue with opinion writers who oppose Trump but embrace all things reformy. These are people who either can't be bothered with cursory research or choose not to accept it. What's the fundamental difference between them and the climate change deniers? How are their beliefs more acceptable than those of people who think the earth was created 600 years ago, or whatever?

They don’t like Trump. We don’t like Trump. But they go along with nonsense like Common Core and charters. This is pretty much what Hillary did, and what she ran on. And this watered down wimpy nonsense is precisely what placed Donald Trump in the White House. Now they're all on their high horses, telling us how bad he is.

Truth is not a box of chocolates. You don't get to bite into one and place it back into the box half-eaten if you don't like it. There are no "alternative facts." You have to pretty much take it all, whether you like it or not, and deal with it. I voted for Hillary against Donald Trump, but I was sickened by her failure to embrace universal health care, college for all, and a living wage. Most Americans favor it, and a whole lot need it.

The point is we’re gonna have to do better in providing a vision for the future, because theirs has failed spectacularly. You can't come into an election with half-assed warmed-over platitudes and say, "Trump sucks so vote for us." More importantly, you can't present yourself as an authority and then pontificate on topics about which you know nothing.

A free press is vital to a democracy. The outrageous ignorance of NY Times columnists is most definitely one of the things that's brought us where we are today. On education, at least, their editorial staff is no better. Their education reporting, with notable exceptions, can be the very worst of any NY paper. On ATRs, it's little better than reformy Chalkbeat.

If we want to educate our children, and if we want to beat Trump and his merry band of white supremacist apologists, we're gonna need better from the "paper of record."

Frank Bruni Waxes Poetic on the Teacher Shortage

It must be great to be Frank Bruni. One day you're a food columnist, and the next you're an education expert. Today Frank is all upset about the teacher shortage. After all, his own paper wrote a big story about it. Nowhere did they bother acknowledging that teachers are pretty much under nationwide assault, but hey, why sweat the details when you're writing for the Paper of Record? The fact that they print the column should be good enough for anyone.

As it happens, Bruni himself is a prominent teacher basher. He believes passionately in junk science rating of teachers and can't be bothered to do the most fundamental research. Who cares if the American Statistical Association says teachers change test scores by a factor of 1-14%? What's the big deal if they say use of high stakes evaluation is counter-productive? He knows some guy who likes it and that should be good enough for anyone. Bruni does other important work, like spitting out press releases for Joel Klein's latest book.

But now he's amazed no one wants to be a teacher. Naturally, being a New York Times reporter who has access to pretty much anyone, he goes right to the source, the very best representative of teachers he can muster:

Teachers crave better opportunities for career growth. Evan Stone, one of the chief executives of Educators 4 Excellence, which represents about 17,000 teachers nationwide, called for “career ladders for teachers to move into specialist roles, master-teacher roles.”

“They’re worried that they’re going to be doing the same thing on Day 1 as they’ll be doing 30 years in,” he told me.

This is what Frank Bruni interprets as vision. Let's make one thing clear--Evan Stone is not a teacher. He was for a few excruciating and clearly unrewarding years. But once he learned all he could from that dead end job, he started this glitzy new E4E thing and got his hands on Gates money. Now he gets to make pronouncements to distinguished NY Times reporters like Bruni. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck actually teaching children. Naturally Bruni doesn't ask us what we think. After all, given our obvious lack of ambition, what could we possibly know?

Bruni has gala luncheons to attend, fois gras to critique, and he can't be bothered.  Still just because Evan Stone's E4E got 17, 000 people to sign papers in exchange for free drinks doesn't mean they actually represent those people. I happen to know, for example, a UFT official who signed the paper just to see what was going on at one of those meetings.

In fact, there's no evidence to indicate anything E4E says is based on anything beyond Bill Gates's druthers. Their support for junk science and calls to actually worsen already tough working conditions border on lunacy. Their acceptance of reformy money and embrace of a reformy agenda mean they do NOT represent working teachers.

Here's something no one told Frank Bruni--teachers who want to "get out of the classroom" make the very worst educational leaders there are. How many of us have worked under supervisors who don't love our job, who can't do our job, but who don't hesitate to tell us all the ways we do our job wrong? How many of us know the, "Do as I say, not as I do." mantra well enough it might be tattooed on our foreheads?

Yes, Frank Bruni, there is a teacher shortage. And yes, there are reasons for it. Some reasons are your BFFs like Joel Klein, Campbell Brown, and Gates-funded astroturf groups like E4E. They spout nonsense-based corporate ideas designed to destroy public education and union. You talk to them and can't be bothered with us.

Another big reason is mainstream media, which hires people like you. When people read nonsense like the stuff you write, they may not know that fundamental research is something you consider beyond the pale. They may not be aware that your piece does not entail talking to working teachers. They may think we don't love our jobs and we don't love working with and helping children. They may not know that merit pay, which E4E is pushing in one form or another, has been around for 100 years and has never worked. They may even think that Evan Stone knows what he's talking about.

But he doesn't, Frank. And neither do you. That's why you're a big part of the problem.

On Being Unhindered by Inconvenient Reality

It must be great to be Joel Klein. You can simply blame the UFT for everything. There's that awful contract that restrains you from doing all the wonderful work you aspire to. Never mind that you signed it and had a hand in writing it. And the best thing about it is that even if stuff isn't in the contract, you can just make it up and get it printed in the Atlantic. There's prestige for you. And in fairness, why should New York Times columnists and editorial writers corner the market on reforminess?

Klein laments that he could not meet with teachers because the contract prohibited it. I find that odd because I teach in the largest school in Queens and for his entire eight-year tenure the Kleinster did not see fit to set foot in our school even once. I've read the UFT Contract and I haven't seen the part that says a Chancellor may not enter the school building. In fact, both Cathie Black and Dennis Walcott visited my school and I didn't even file a grievance. Walcott and I actually spoke on several occasions.

But Joel Klein is different. He has deep and abiding respect for clauses in the UFT Contract, even if they do not exist. That's just the kind of guy he is. The union was completely uncooperative when Joel tried to reach out. Just look at how hostile then-UFT President Randi Weingarten looks in the photo above. You can just sense the absolute enmity between the two of them. Clearly she isn't cooperating with him at all.

Odd that Klein was so respectful of the Imaginary UFT Contract,  but had multiple issues abiding by the actual UFT Contract. If I'm not mistaken, one year he decided to deny all sabbaticals. I believe that was taken to arbitration and he lost. Odd that someone absolutely willing to unilaterally ignore the real contract would be so upset by clauses hindering his options under the imaginary one.

What's truly odd to me, though, is that several times I directly spoke to Klein at the PEP. Not only did he fail to utter a single word in response, but he appeared to be playing with his Blackberry and utterly ignoring every word I said about the then-massive overcrowding at Francis Lewis High School. I watched him do the same to James Eterno as he spoke the outrageous conditions at Jamaica High School. In fact, though Eterno emailed Klein about the false assumptions used to close Jamaica High School, that didn't stop Klein from going ahead and closing it on those very assumptions.

But of course that is reality, and Klein can't be bothered with such things when telling his story. That's what enables reforminess, actually. You can't get up and say there are billions of dollars in education and Eva Moskowitz needs to get her taste. You can't say you want to close neighborhood schools and make profits for your BFFs. You can't get up and say you're determined to ignore poverty and cut taxes for people who don't send their kids to public schools. Really, you can't get up and say, "I'm Joel Klein, or Mike Bloomberg, or John King, and I choose not to send my own kids to the schools I make up rules for."

Rather, you can write books about the way you choose to remember things. Because Eva Moskowitz, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and the other people who read such books are highly unlikely to fact-check or read blogs like this one. 

As Education Commenter, Frank Bruni Is a Great Food Critic

by special guest blogger Harris Lirtzman

Time Magazine’s most recent issue offers for its readers the picture of a perfectly round, deep red apple about to be squashed to a pulp by a judge’s gavel with the warning:  “Rotten Apples: It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to change all of that.”

Evidently, the article is not as terrible as the visual, though the writer couldn’t be bothered to find a single working teacher to talk to as part of her reporting.  But we all know that thousands of grocery shoppers and patients in doctor’s offices very often see only a magazine cover and magazine editors know that.  Score another for the “education reformers” in their campaign to demolish the integrity and hard work that almost every teacher I have ever known brings to his or her job every day.

The other day, the New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, recently its restaurant critic, wrote a “thought piece” called “Towards Better Teachers.”  I know that the pressure of writing two eight hundred word columns a week can bring any author to his knees so Mr. Bruni decided to offer his readers a book report instead of his usual opinion piece.  Bruni sat down with former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to puff his new book Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools.  During the interview, er, transcription, of Mr. Klein’s words, Bruni offered "But they [teachers] owe us a discussion about education that fully acknowledges the existence of too many underperformers in their ranks. Klein and others who bring that up aren’t trying to insult or demonize them. They’re trying to team up with them on a project that matters more than any other: a better future for kids."

 Joel Klein has never, ever, not once during or since his Chancellorship "tried to team up with teachers to build a better future for our kids."

This is stenography. This is not reporting.  Joel Klein spoke. Bruni wrote.
Bruni feels sorry that we teachers had our feelings hurt by the recent Time article
My feelings aren't hurt that the man who was the Times restaurant critic until two years ago now takes dictation while Joel Klein pontificates about teachers. I am simply angry. I am simply tired that restaurant critics, technology entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers now make policy for public schools and for public school teachers.

But that's OK. Andrew Cuomo, our governor and likely to be our governor for the next eight years, declared early this week to the NY Daily News editorial board that public schools are "one of our only remaining public monopolies" and that he feels obligated to break that monopoly by going to war with public teacher unions in order to increase the number of almost entirely unregulated and unsupervised charter schools in the state.

Mr. Bruni opines, with help from his keepers.  Mr. Cuomo rules, with no apparent help from anyone. And though Mr. Cuomo is a fearful man there are brave teachers and parents and students who will resist his determination to turn public schools over to private oligarchs, restaurant critics and former Michael Bloomberg autocrats.

Many of you may believe that public schools need to do better and are angry that teachers have pensions and tenure. Yes, public schools need to do a better job but public schools have always played an important role in forming citizens who function in a democratic society and teachers struggle every day to teach children who speak dozens of languages, have special needs, come from dispossessed communities with limited resources and require extraordinary and skillful work to make them proficient in language and math and history and science. Taking away tenure will solve none of these problems and Joel Klein and Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee and David Boies and John King, all of whom send their children to private schools, have never once extended a hand in partnership to teachers to work together to improve public schools. They just want teachers to be humiliated and frightened enough so that they will not fight for public schools or for the preservation of their unions and well-earned but not profligate salaries and pensions.

Mr. Bruni, I hear there's a really good salad being served at Per Se and a wonderful Chateaubriand available at Eleven Madison Park. May I reserve a table for you so that you and a few of your closest hedge fund manager and Silicon Valley friends can think of a few new ways to save black and brown kids in Brownsville and Corona Park from the hands of yet another grasping dolt of a teacher?  After all, my friends who’ve been doing this work for more than twenty years “don’ know nothin’ about teachin’” public school students and eagerly await your latest prescriptions for forcing them do their jobs better by taking away their basic work-rights and job protections and destroying their union. That will, I’m sure, spur them onto great and glorious feats of teacherdom not possible without the new paradigm of private management of public schools promised by our Silicon Valley experts, restaurant critics and education-warrior of a governor.

Is Reformy John King's Decree Worse Than NY Times Thinks?

There's a piece in the NY Times all about the issues with the new evaluation system. They're the paper of record, so it must be accurate. I've no idea how large the school is, but I'm sure the Times reporter carefully considered its application to large schools, and understands completely what it means in a large school where APs are in charge of maybe 40 teachers a piece. After all, reporters get paid for that sort of thing.

On the other hand, the reporter estimates under the assumption that observers will not spend more than 15 minutes a piece on informal observations. In this astral plane, it's unlikely many observations by responsible admin are 15 minutes. Teachers tell me admin usually stays at least 25 minutes, and often wait until whatever activity they're engaged in is completed, so as to get a real picture of what's happening. Of course, I'm just someone who talks to working teachers every single day, and not a NY Times reporter, so I guess you can't go by me.


And it's not just the observations. They have to be low-inference and aligned to the Danielson rubric. Responsible administrators have to take copious notes, supposedly reserving any and all value judgments. They then have to align these supposedly non-judgmental notes to the rubric. That's pretty time-consuming and taxing, particularly for people who aren't used to doing such things. I write very fast, but not everyone does. This is going to be very tough for some administrators, particularly if teachers are sharp enough to catch them when they offer judgments with little or no evidence.

In my school, an AP is responsible for 30 or 40 teachers. At maybe 200 per year, that makes more than one observation per day. APs who are not in the habit of writing regularly are going to have a really tough time of it. I know APs who write well who are having an even tougher time of it. Being conscientious, they labor over every word. I've actually had administrators, who don't usually complain to me of such things, say they'd like to take entire days off just so they could get to their writing.

APs are supposed to help teachers who really need support, but haven't got time to devote to those who really needs it. They also haven't got the time to help kids who have problems with teachers. King mandated more observations than either the DOE or UFT requested, according to Gotham Schools. What sort of mediator, when you want to sell a car for $500, and I want to pay $200, charges $1000?

That would be the esteemed Mr. King.

In our school, the principal has decided that anyone who wished to change from option one or two was free to do so. I recently spoke to an AP who was delighted that two department members decided to go from six observations to a mere four. It was like a Christmas gift.

That's four down, and a million to go.

NY Times Uncritically Hypes Corporate Agenda

The next time I read or hear that education is the civil rights issue of our time, I'm going to projectile vomit. So you'd best get out of my way quickly. Reformy John is no Dr. King, no matter what the paper of record may believe.

Tonight John and Silent Merryl have yet another meeting with New Yorkers. They will sit, nod their heads, pretend they care what people say, and then go on their golly gosh-darn way doing whatever the hell they please. They'll say we need to stay the course, and perhaps they will make some adjustments, and blah, blah, blah.

Then the self-righteous corporate columnists from the NY Times will continue to claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that we need to move ahead with this untested and unproven Common Core mandate, because no one can possibly learn anything unless the hundreds of millions Bill Gates invested drive American public education. That's odd, because Gates himself has no idea whether the ideas he's forced on our children will work. He says it will take ten years to find out, and has no compunctions about using our children as guinea pigs.

Meanwhile, the great minds at the NY Times are keenly focused on helping education. The only way to do so, in their view, is to use not only reformy curricula that's never been tested, but also to use things that have never worked anywhere, like merit pay. Though it's been around for over a hundred years and has failed everywhere it's been tried, the NY Times editorial board can't be bothered doing any research whatsoever. After all, many of them wear bow ties, and if that isn't credibility, what is?

The Times has also had it with all this seniority nonsense. After all, it's better to use criteria like value-added, which has also never been proven effective anywhere. Perhaps the Times wishes us to use multiple measures, like who washed the principal's car most recently, or who spent last Tuesday at a Comfort Inn with the odd AP.

The Times also has issues with salary increasing as teachers spend more years in the system, because who the hell wishes to foster long-term commitment in a job like that? Better to declare TFA 6-week wonders highly-qualified, sweep them out after two or three years, then open up an entire new can of teachers to experiment on public school children.

Let's fire all the ATR teachers, most displaced for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's a much better idea than actually putting them to work. Why should we use working teachers to help children or reduce class sizes when we can simply fire them? Won't that be more beneficial to our most important educational goal--reducing the tax bill of Michael Bloomberg and his cronies?

And hey, let's make public schools more like charter schools. We've learned it's OK to drop entire cohorts, like Geoffrey Canada did, and to resist accepting representative populations, or public scrutiny, like Eva Moskowitz does. We've learned it's OK to pay obscene sums to charter leaders, and to share the wealth with Mike Bloomberg's other BFFs. Why not exclude high-needs kids from not only charters, but public schools as well? That will certainly raise those test scores, which are clearly the only measure of student achievement.

And let's give up on how many hours teachers work. Let's give them cell phones so they can answer questions 24-7, because teachers don't need private lives. They don't deserve social lives or families and neither do any working Americans. Such frivolities should be the exclusive province of writers who can't be bothered doing the most cursory research before issuing pontifications on how the rest of the world should live.


Because that's the sort of crap you get from the New York Times. And if they're this abysmal on education reporting, who knows what sort of crap you get if you rely on them for national and international news? They've blundered in the past, and their lame reporting may have been largely responsible for the wasteful debacle that is the Iraq war.

What will they surprise us with next?

Charles M. Blow Joins NY Times Common Core Lovefest

It looks like, in the space of a week, three NY Times columnists have come out swinging in favor of the Common Core. The latest is Charles M. Blow, who I'd previously found thoughtful and worthwhile. His opening salvo informs us we are not keeping up with other countries, yet our lower test scores align precisely with our disgraceful higher poverty levels. As if that were not enough, Broad's source for this proclamation is the Broad Foundation. One wonders why he doesn't just go to the Walmart family, with his particular standard for objective sources.

It's ironic that Common Core is supposed to teach our children to think critically, and its prominent proponents appear incapable of doing so. Blow's second source, right out of the gate, is Amanda Ripley, who he describes as a journalist. One of Ripley's journalistic specialties is ad hominem attacks against real-live education expert Diane Ravitch, accused by Ripley of living in an "alternate universe."

Blow then explains it is endorsed by the Obama administration, and he's apparently unaware or uninterested that this administration has endorsed demonstrably nonsensical things like merit pay, which has worked nowhere, ever, value-added evaluations, which have worked nowhere ever, higher class sizes, which have worked nowhere, ever, and Hurricane Katrina, which Arne Duncan declared the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans, despite the abysmal results after it was privatized. One might say this administration was more or less in the bag for billionaires like Broad, Gates, and the Walmart family.

Then comes the unkindest cut of all, though this one is by no means Blow's fault. Common Core is also supported by the American Federation of Teachers. This certainly gives street cred to this reformy screed. One would thing that a group that ostensibly represents teachers would demand evidence that a group of standards were effective, but one would be mistaken. We've allowed this corporate scheme to be foisted upon our children for reasons that elude me utterly, and shame on us for doing so.

We're also led to believe it's a good thing because 45 states have accepted it. And yet, with all that apparent acceptance, an Edweek article suggests two out of three Americans know nothing about Common Core. While that's certainly a poor showing for an alleged democracy, it appears nationally prominent columnists who write about it don't know all that much about it either, so perhaps the majority of Americans, getting their information from sources like the NY Times, are doing the best they can with the information they have.

Blow finally says something that makes sense in this column:

We have drifted away from the fundamentals of what makes a great teacher: the ability to light a fire in a child, to develop in him or her a level of intellectual curiosity, the grit to persevere and the capacity to expand. Great teachers help to activate a small thing that breeds great minds: thirst.

And yet, Blow's very next statement suggests Common Core will do that. A fundamental misconception here is that testing our kids to death will somehow make them love to read. And yet, reformy folks like Obama, Bloomberg, Rahm, and even Reformy John King send their kids to private schools with reasonable class sizes. They don't send their kids to places that will treat their kids the way they want ours treated. They don't set their kids up for failure the way ours were, via Common Core.

In fact, kids who love to read can plod through the nonsense set forth in Common Core. They can read anything, no matter how dry or tedious, if there is some worthwhile task attached to it. But the notion we can get kids to love reading via forcing arbitrary percentages of non-fiction on them is ridiculous. In fact, the notion that there is value in writing that is difficult to comprehend is in itself questionable. I've read enough poorly-written textbooks to personally attest to that.

One of my favorite quotes is from Pete Seeger:

Any damn fool can get complicated. It takes a genius to attain simplicity.

Seeger was referring to the songwriting skills of Woody Guthrie, most famous for the classic This Land is Your Land. Even as NY Times columnists rewrite Woody's ballad:

This land is Broad's land,
This land is Gates' land,
Walmart education,
For the kids of the nation...

It just doesn't have the same ring to it. This is especially true when Gates deems such nonsense unsuitable for his own kids. And any way you slice it, Common Core, established nowhere to prove anything whatsoever, is something less than classic, something distinctly less than genius.

Ignoring the massive poverty that afflicts this country, poverty that is exacerbated by the very businesses of the reformy foundations that presume to know how to educate our children, is not particularly genius either.

What a disgrace that people promoted by the NY Times are too incurious to examine the other side of this issue.