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As the DFER veneer for right-wing "parent trigger" laws wears off, and more and more people see the privatization agenda for what it is, charlatans like Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have been scrambling to hide or minimize their ties to right wing extremists. The good news is that it isn't working, and that aside from shills like Andi Rotherham and Alex Russo even mainstream media journalists are starting to see through what the distinguished Professor Diane Ravitch refers to as the "Parent Tricker." Josh Eidelson's "Parent trigger": The latest tactic for fighting teachers' unions is a good example.

"Tenure is nothing more than a guarantee of due process in disciplinary matters It seems to me the people who complain about tenure for public school teachers have somewhat dictatorial powers.  They are similar to those who complain that police and prosecutors are hamstrung by having to follow the provisions of the Bill of Rights when going after those accused of crimes. We have a system of laws that provide for due process precisely because our Founders recognized that there must be some controls on those exercising power, ostensibly in the name of We, the People of the United States.  They also recognized the danger of a mob mentality, which is why our system removed from being subject to simple majority rule things like our ability to worship or not worship in the religious sect of our choice, how we speak out politically, the ability of the press to act as our eyes and ears, and our ability to gather and organize for political and other purposes.  These are all rights guaranteed in the First Amendment."

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia's school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

In light of recent controversy over the role of state appointed "emergency" managers in Michigan,   I've been pondering the state of taxpayer rights under the current education policy agenda(s) in New Jersey

This transformation of the New Orleans educational system may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation. Desegregation righted the morality of government in schooling. New Orleans may well right the role of government in schooling.

Asked today about a proposal by New York State Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch to change state law to prevent the public release of teacher evaluations in the future, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "I would be opposed to any law that tried to restrict parents' right to know."

The recent agreement to clarify and refine the New York teacher evaluation law took up an issue that has a special importance for New York City public school educators- the appeals process for ineffective ratings on end-of-the-year summative evaluations. Readers of Edwize know that last December the ship of teacher evaluation negotiations for the 34 Transformation and Restart schools sunk on the rocky shoals of this very issue, when Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education refused to negotiate a meaningful and substantive appeals process. For there to be renewed progress on those negotiations, as well as on the negotiations for the evaluations of all New York City public school educators, the issue of the appeal process had to be resolved. The agreement settled the issue of the appeals process for New York City by guaranteeing vital and indispensable due process rights in the teacher evaluation process. With these rights, the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure. To understand the importance of the appeals process, and why the agreement secured what New York public school teachers need from due process in such a process, we must first examine the background and context of this issue.

"Proponents of the Common Core have likened the struggle to implement it to the Civil Rights Movement. As we reflect on the 50th anniversary of the height of that movement, we must consider how these standards and the related testing are threatening students' rights to education, not upholding them. As one critical example, the Common Core's strict interpretation of "close reading of a text" dismisses the notion that students' own thoughts and experiences, and how they connect to a text, are integral to reading. Rather, student voices are silenced in their own classrooms, and literacy is reduced to the ability to navigate standardized tests."

"You don' t need to be a policy analyst to know that huge changes in education are happening at the state- and local-levels right now - teacher performance pay, the restriction of teachers' collective bargaining rights, the incorporation of heavily-weighted growth model estimates in teacher evaluations, the elimination of tenure, etc. Like many, I am concerned about the possible consequences of some of these new policies (particularly about their details), as well as about the apparent lack of serious efforts to monitor them."

"Few people realize that the struggle for civil rights and racial integration had a northern component and many battles were fought in the New York metropolitan area. Palisades Amusement Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey would not permit African Americans in its famous saltwater swimming pool until 1961. Levittown on Long Island originally required homebuyers to sign a contract that they would not sell or rent to Blacks. Many local battles of the Civil Rights era took place in Hempstead, so Dawn Sumner and Claire LaMothe had students learn about these struggles. "

Some may be put off by Superintendant John Kuhn of Texas calling out politicians directly, and flipping the notion of "failure" on its head. But he is right, and his conviction is inspiring.  (See the VIDEO of his speech BELOW.) His points reveal in a timely way an inconvenient truth in education and politics right now. NCLB, Race to the Top, and other policies that use high stakes tests to assign value to students, teachers and administrators do one thing really well: they create an even stronger disincentive for teaching in high needs schools than do the difficult working conditions that have always existed in underresourced schools--the imminent threat of being labelled unacceptable or ineffective by one narrow standradized test given on one day in a year, the results of which correspond more closely nation-wide to socio-economic status than any other factor. They create the same disincentive to learn for such students.

A majority of states deserve a failing grade for how they handle the teaching of civil rights history in their standards, while just three-Alabama, Florida, and New York-merit an A, concludes a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

Latest news from the Mitten State: Legislators propose privatizing teaching. Lots of ways to accomplish this, including designating Michigan a "right-to-teach" state, preserving the right to collectively bargain for police, firefighters and private-industry unions, but making teacher unionizing illegal.

Here is an edited version of a briefing on the right way to evaluate teachers that Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond and other leading education research experts gave this week on Capitol Hill to policymakers.

The State of Michigan is currently considering a bill that would limit collective bargaining rights among teachers. Under the proposal, paying dues would be optional. This legislation, like other so-called "right to work" laws, represents an attempt to defund and create divisions within labor unions, which severely weakens teachers' ability to bargain fair contracts, as well as the capacity of their unions to advocate on behalf of of public schools and workers in general.

"The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business."

In the 2010 midterm election, Republicans won complete legislative control of twenty-one states and the American Legislative Exchange Council was right there with model legislation to help them push through a radical right-wing agenda. Funded by billionaires like the Koch brothers, ALEC has provided the template for more than 800 bills aimed at undermining environmental protection, privatizing education, busting unions and curbing government regulation.

In the 2007 case Morse v. Frederick, when the court upheld the discipline of a student who had unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-related event, Justice Thomas joined the majority's opinion. But he wrote a separate concurrence, for himself only, explaining that he would go further and overrule the landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. That case, involving students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War, has been a fundamental guarantee of student speech rights in school.