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What Rorty's book also draws attention to is the power of narrative and the way in which the American Dream is a specific narrative that comes into being at a particular time and place and then can be "read back" onto American history - on the Puritan beginnings and those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is a narrative that can be "read forward," projected onto the future, as a means of establishing a vision for a society and economy. This is the art of narrative retellings of the America Dream, which, in the hands of Rorty or Barack Obama, becomes a shining beacon to unify the people in recognizing what is best in America. The question is whether, in a time of radical change and transition - when America is losing its world position as the only superpower, when millions of Americans are losing their homes and jobs as a result of the recession and financial crisis, when America enters into a massive budget-cutting and deficit-financing mode - whether the American Dream can be reclaimed, refurbished, re-articulated and retold in era of decline.

Though TFA reports the recent attrition rate as 92% completing the first year and 91% completing the second, there are some regions that have much higher quit rates than others. In Kansas City, they fired about 200 experienced teachers last year to make room for new TFA recruits.  The superintendent who made this decision, John Covington, resigned in August to take a job leading Detroit's school system.  Left behind, were the first year TFA corps members who surely did not get the kind support from their co-workers that helped people like me survive my first year. From an article I just read in the Kansas City Star, I've learned that Kansas City may have been the biggest disaster in the 2011-2012 school year for TFA.  They report that 32 out of 141 first year corps members, about 25%, will not be returning.  And that is just so far as there will surely be some who just haven't decided if they are coming back next year yet.

I have been hanging around charter school operators for the past few days, and the experience has left me with some complicated - and perhaps contradictory - thoughts about a movement that I have been following since 1988. I love the energy, intelligence and dedication of the people I spent time with, but I left the annual meeting of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Minneapolis with some concerns. I think they need to do a better job of choosing their friends and of refining their message, among other issues. For what it's worth, here's my thinking.

"This post is about rolling out some of the left over data I have from my various endeavors this summer.  These data include data from New York State personnel master files (PMFs) linked to New York City public schools and charter schools, NYC teacher value-added scores, and various bits of data on New York City charter and district schools including school site budget/annual financial report information. Here, I use these data combined with some of my previous stuff, to take a first, cursory shot at characterizing the teaching workforce of charter school teachers in New York City. All findings use data from 2008 to 2010."

"Our findings are consistent with research that finds models including student background and classroom characteristics are highly correlated with simpler specifications that only include a single-subject lagged test score, while value-added models estimated with school or student fixed effects have a lower correlation. Interestingly, teacher effectiveness estimates based on median student growth percentiles are highly correlated with estimates from VAMs that include only a lagged test score and those that also include lagged scores and student background characteristics, despite the fact that the two methods for estimating teacher effectiveness are, at least conceptually, quite different. However, even when the correlations between job performance estimates generated by different models are quite high, differences in the composition of students in teachers' classrooms can have sizable effects on the differences in their effectiveness estimates."

"It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the Chicago teachers' negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel's enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students' test scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped? I'm not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers' union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom autonomy -- remain more than salient today."

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the school's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 school year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

Regarding teachers' unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process - with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake - they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state's teachers' unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can't handle. As the governor put it on Monday, "Our schools are not an employment program." What has been lost in these performances of reproach and imperiousness is the extent to which the city and state, and the related unions (the United Federation of Teachers in the first instance and New York State United Teachers in the second) are generally in agreement over how classroom evaluations ought to be held and what, in fact, constitutes sound teaching. As it happens, the state union was at work devising substantive evaluation reform more than a year before Mr. Cuomo even took office.

Teaching is one of the most challenging jobs in the USA- and one of the most vital. According to the Census Bureau, about one in five American children live in poverty, and they face enormous obstacles as they journey through the public school system. Despite these challenges, skilled teachers manage every day to change the trajectory of students' lives.

Everyone working in a schools knows the hardest job is teaching special education - especially to the most challenging children. Like all elementary music teachers, I work with special education teachers every day, and I have to tell you that they constantly amaze me with their sympathy, intelligence, insight, and patience. As far as I am concerned, anyone who devotes their career to teaching these deserving but demanding children is an angel on earth. And people who casually dismiss their work ought to be ashamed of themselves. Which is why this next story bugs the hell out of me

Russo's underhanded dig is followed up with his suggestion that billionaire funded astroturf groups like StudentsFirst, Stand For Children, and TeachPlus have the potential to correct what he perceives as an "imbalance." For Russo, the corporate education reform astroturf need to step up and post comments under articles, use twitter, blog, and avail themselves of social media. It simply isn't enough to be funded by the likes of the wealthiest one percent including names like Walton, DeVos, Broad, Bradley, Gates, Koch, Hastings, Dell, Powell-Jobs, Scaife, Tilson, et al. It's not enough to have the unwavering support of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus at every level of government including the most anti-public education administration and Department of Education of all time. It isn't sufficient to have the unquestioning editorial support of every mainstream media outlet-not to mention Rupert Murdoch's vast propaganda empire-all of which spew a nonstop stream of privatization propaganda with nary a dissenting note. This last point is of paramount importance, since it's often forgotten that outside the realm of privilege that has regular access to the Internet, there's a majority that obtains their information from more traditional sources.

On the positive side, the Austin Inde­pen­dent School District's agreement to bring the IDEA Public Schools charter program into the Eastside certainly gave its students an instant education in local politics - of the grimly practical sort not generally available in classrooms. That may be the only good news to come out of the controversy, which featured the most spectacularly bungled adoption and public outreach process managed by a local government in quite some time. By the time the board of trustees made its formal adoption vote after midnight Monday, the board majority and Superintendent Meria Carstarphen had succeeded in alienating virtually everyone with some interest in the matter - most particularly those Eastside parents and students to be directly affected by IDEA's arrival at Allan Elementary next fall. Had the district been trying to intentionally undermine IDEA's potential relationships with the community, they couldn't have done a better job.

Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies on education reform are considering an unprecedented, statewide expansion of private school vouchers and steps to more closely link teachers' job security with performance, according to two officials who have consulted with the governor's office on proposals for this year's session at the Louisiana Legislature.

Okay, I think I'm going to need to preface this one.  I'm about to write the TFA version of the Kubler-Ross model.  Now, this analogy has to be taken with a grain of salt, because what CMs go through isn't exactly a grieving process.  BUT it's survival mode for the first year, and it requires a sense of humor.  After all, I'm more sarcastic now than I've ever been in my entire life.  It's like if Ms. Lora had a less successful, more sarcastic teacher down the hall that TFA will not have you visit as a prospective CM, it'd be me.  (Do I sense a sequel to Ms. Lora's Story?  A part-time summer job, perhaps? I need a title.  Suggestions are welcome.).  So here it goes.

Renee Kelly retired at 55 from her job teaching law at Riverview High School. Leaving early lowered her pension, she said. But she couldn't stomach changes under the new Gates-funded system of teacher evaluations. "We've been made out to be good guys against the bad guys," she said. Kelly is posting her views on websites and Facebook pages, and she isn't alone. In recent weeks, questions and complaints about the multimillion-dollar, seven-year Empowering Effective Teachers effort have grown more visible.

Alexander Russo chose to portray corporate reform critics such as myself as Goliaths who are trampling on the hapless reformers. But this analysis is a bit simple-minded. The corporate reformers have plenty of resources and personnel capable of responding. They are deliberately choosing to take their arguments elsewhere - to the corporate boardrooms, to the ALEC conference, to NBC's Education Nation, and to legislative hearings, speaking through hired lobbyists, astro-turf groups, and well-prepared and vetted experts. They are getting the job done there, if you notice. Most of these groups are seeing revenues climb, and state legislatures across the country are busy adopting more "reform" laws every month.

Anna Scholl, ProgressVA, joins Thom Hartmann in exposing ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. In case you dont know what ALEC is - it's a far-rightwing organization that brings together corporate CEOs and lobbyists with elected lawmakers to come up with custom-made legislation that benefits anti-public school  "reformers", big polluters, job outsourcers, and banksters, and hurts unions, poor people, and voters. And apparently it's found a friend in the Virginia General Assembly, where since 2007, over 50 different pieces of legislation have been introduced that are exact carbon copies of ALEC written legislation.

This year, the gloves came off, as teachers faced unprecedented attacks on our right to collective bargaining, as well as continued attempts to tie our pay and job security to test scores. Some of these attacks were blatant, as in Wisconsin, but most were veiled behind a cloak of rhetoric about education reform. Today I want to review some of the posts that attempted to bell the corporate education reform cat.

John White, who has experience working in school districts in New York City, New Orleans, and Chicago, was selected Wednesday by Louisiana's state board of education as the state's superintendent of education. The new schools chief was Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's pick for the job, and his supporters included U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

One of the most striking segments of Gov. Cuomo's State of the State address was the portion on  school children.  In a fit of flourishing rhetoric, Cuomo suggested that all the players in educational politics have lobbyists: the teachers have lobbyists, the school boards have lobbyists and even the janitors have lobbyists. However, he said, the students themselves are not represented by anyone. The governor promised to fix that, saying he would take on yet another job, that of lobbyist for the state's children. Sounds good, right? Well, let's take a look and see.