Michelle Rhee, the leader of the movement to privatize public schools and one of the “stars” of the propaganda film Waiting for Superman, will give the annual Olin Lecture at Bailey Hall at Cornell University on Friday, June 8.
Rhee founded Students First, which is spending millions of dollars to privatize education and is pushing testing and competition. Parents Across America recently gave Students First a failing report card. Here’s the link about all their reasons why.
Here’s a link to the $2 million the group spent in California recently. She has also worked actively to support anti-collective bargaining bills and union campaign spending caps in Florida, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey; and her Super PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect the most conservative political allies of Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
Now she wants to take New York. She has announced plans to spend $50 million in New York during the next five years to perform the political equivalent of a leveraged buyout of our schools, and that is just a start.
A group has formed to oppose her anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda in New York state. They will leaflet outside of Bailey Hall at Cornell starting about 2:15 p.m. Friday.
If you are in the area on June 8th, how about helping them spread the truth that Rheeform is NOT the solution!
I became aware of a new turn that state standardized testing has just recently taken.
I was talking to a former colleague who is a third grade teacher in a public school in the Washington Saratoga Warren Hamilton Essex BOCES area. She has just spent 2 days out of the classrrom working with other teachers to write questions for next year’s standardized test in ELA and Math. She will spend at least one more day next week doing this. The consultants running these work sessions also asked for teachers to “volunteer” to give a day or two over the summer to continue working on them. Of course, the reason for this is there “no money” to pay them.
Meanwhile, the school districts have to pay substitute teachers to come in and cover their classes during what is generally the busiest time of the school year. Between my friend’s days out for training on how to score the tests, giving the tests, scoring the tests, and now writing questions for next year’s tests she calculates she’s lost at least 20 days of instructional time with her students. That doesn’t include time spent just getting the kids ready for the tests and all instruction in the non-tested areas of the curriculum ceases.
And how can there not be any money? The district I work in got $80,000 of Race To The Top dollars, which is not even close to covering the costs of compliance, so the money was sent to WSWHE BOCES to pool with other districts to hire “specialists” to come in and work with school personnel to make the necessary changes in accordance with the RTTT guidelines. I was on the English Language Arts committee for my district and we saw this specialist a total of three times. We got together with a neighboring district to do this and there were probably 40 teachers and administrators in the room for a half day session. And that was just for the ELA portion. Another group of about the same size met to do the math portion.
How did they have money to pay Pearson for the assessment failures of 2012, but not have money to pay teachers to work on this during a time of year when they are not losing time with their students? What happened to all the RTTT money that BOCES received for this kind of work?
We can’t even buy paper in the district where I work. Each teacher is getting $170 total for supplies for 2012-2013. We’ve had to lay off all the Teacher Aides, which at $10/hour are education’s biggest bargain for what they do. Who’s got the money? It certainly isn’t the schools.
It’s time to start making making VOTE/COPE mandatory. Yeah, I know it sounds extreme, but we live in extreme times. It is the only way we can keep up with the political world post Citizens United. Money wins elections at this point. VOTE/COPE is really just an investment in our job security.
It is time for teachers to talk to other teachers. It is time to compare stories about how NCLB and RTTT are destroying public education. It is time to stand up and say no when you are asked to work for testing companies instead of for your students. It is time to talk to grassroots parent organizations like Parents Across America and NY State PTA and SEPTA. It is time to build coalitions to stop the testing mania that is taking important instructional time away from our students. It is time to ‘Save Our Schools’. If parents and teachers don’t stand up to defend every child’s right to receive an excellent education…. who will? It certainly won’t be our local, state, or national Chamber of Commerce. They are in business to make money. Their concern is not the education of our children. The testing industry and the product pushers need to be defunded. Our tax dollars should not be diverted from the schools and put into the coffers of private profiteers. Our elected representatives need to know that they will be voted out if they stand with big business and against the best interests of our students.
Don’t trust our “colleagues” at Cornell – check out the “Rural Schools Association” at Cornell… imbedded in their teacher development programs. They are anti-union, pro-Tier 6, anti-Triborough, etc. Check it out.
http://education.cornell.edu/rsa/statement.html