UPDATE 1: Apparently the blocks on the Education Nation Facebook page have been lifted and they are now allowing dissent. At the suggestion of OL commenter Gray, I'm urging you to log in there and make your voice heard. Tell them that more educators need to be included on the discussion panels. And ask why they weren't in the first place.
Can you imagine a major media outlet having extensive programming about the economy and inviting no economists? Would a news show doing an in-depth treatment about business ever fail to include spokes people from the business world?
Of course not. Yet later this week when NBC news rolls out its Education Nation extravaganza, what is by-and-large being left out of the programming are educators.
"there are many corporate executives, there are people from educational policy organizations, there are politicians, there are foundations. There are journalists. Many of these lack any real knowledge about education, or are well known for pushing a particular view of education to the exclusion of any other. There are more than 30 names. Of these two are from parent organizations, and there is one representative from the smaller of the two national teachers unions."
After scores of angry educators stormed the Education Nation Facebook page - which resulted in many of them being blocked - it appears that Diane Ravitch, a prominent critic of the Obama administration's education policies, will be interviewed - but not included in the panel discussions.
The Facebook "voice" for Education Nation consoles that there will be teachers included in a "Teachers' Town Hall" on Sunday September 26. But that's not the same thing as being included in the "panels of experts" as educator Nancy Flanagan notes in comments. Being "shuffled off into a 'Town Hall' while the headliner presenters - none of whom are educators and many of whom represent commercial interests" is a not-so-subtle attempt to show educators their "place" in the debate.
All of this falls in the midst of a full frontal assault on public education and teachers that is occurring this week in multiple venues. From Monday's ludicrous Oprah show playing up the debut of the movie Waiting for Superman, through the weekend's roll-out of Education Nation, this propaganda campaign is taking place with very little input from educators, unless they happen to work in charter schools.
And why should it? After all, we've all been to school. We all know what school is all about. And we all know what kind of schools we would like, right? Which begs a question posed in a blog post by the Learning First Alliance's Anne O'Brien recently, "Is teaching a profession or a public service?"
In other words, when we "the public" - which in the case of Education Nation means star journalists and representatives of big businesses, think tanks, and foundations - decide what we mean by a "good school" we basically just need to give educators their marching orders. I mean, when we decide it's time to re-engineer the city streets, do we go talk to the crews manning the bulldozers? If there's a problem with trash in our community, do we bother interviewing the garbage men to get their expertise? No. We just pay the taxes and make the decisions - cut this street through here, run the trucks every Wednesday - that will ensure we are being "well served" by the people who have to do the grunt work.
If indeed what we want is for educators to be public servants, then what we're going to get is education that is subject to those in the public who have the most power. And if you believe that's all well and good for those yayhoos down in Texas, then you don't know how the system works. Because Texas is the nation's second-largest textbook market, textbook companies and test makers that win contracts in Texas end up using the economies of scale of that contract to roll out their products across the country. So if you're okay with having the powerful control education, rather than those mean old teachers' unions, then you're opening the door to the potential for your kids or your neighbor's kids to be learning about Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority instead of reading biographies of George Washington.
Of course professional educators in the state of Texas are fighting these rightwing loonies every step of the way. Two of them have decided to run for the state school board to return textbook policy back to sanity. Tomorrow, the candidates, Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, will appear at a hearing where they will do battle against the ridiculous contention that teaching kids something about Islam is un-American.
If you care at all about education and kids, you'd better hope the professionals win this one. And you should also toss them a few bucks to ensure the voice of reason, developed through being a knowledgeable professional educator, still has some say-so in our "education nation."
Now Winfrey has squared off against Coburn, who has blocked S. 1738, the Combating Child Exploitation Act.
Winfrey asked her viewers Monday to call and write the Senate to demand their support for the legislation, sponsored by Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden (Del.).
Winfrey, herself a victim of sexual abuse, has asked viewers to sign and send a letter posted on her website calling for action on the bill.
Coburn is going to fight Winfrey by forcing the addition of a poisoned pill to this bill in the form of increased police powers to snoop on suspected criminals (ie. anyone). Both Alaska Republican Senators are cosponsoring the bill, as is Norm Coleman and Kay Bailey Hutchinson.
Barack Obama has inspired tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people to engage in the political process for the first time in their lives.
This campaign believes it's important to not only engage the already active, but to recruit new bodies in the march for progressive change. This weekend, Oprah Winfrey attracted thousands of people -- some of whom drove miles through the freezing rain -- to show up and listen to speeches about the necessity of political change in this country.
This wasn't about glitz and glamor. This wasn't just a photo-op. This was about organized grassroots mobilization.
Joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps was once an attractive choice for people with few options growing up in impoverished, predominantly black East Baltimore. That has all changed, largely because of the war in Iraq.
"Now, it is like, no way," said Cornelius McMurray, who does outreach with a local church and says the young black people he works with view life in Baltimore as enough of a war. "It is a continuous fight waking up and walking the streets every day."
In the Bronx, Adeyefa Finch says he simply walks past the recruiters who, seeking out minority members along Fordham Road, make the case that the military can help with college financing and job placement after they serve. "I'm not really into going overseas with guns and fighting other people's wars," said Mr. Finch, 18, headed to college this fall to study accounting.
That kind of rejection of military service as an option of young blacks throughout the country has resulted in a sharp drop in black recruitment figures since the war began. Defense Department reports show that the share of blacks among active-duty recruits declined to 13 percent in 2006 from 20 percent in 2001, the last year before the invasion of Iraq began to seem inevitable...
In a recent CBS News telephone poll, 83 percent of the blacks surveyed said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq; only 14 percent said it had done the right thing in taking military action. Whites, by contrast, were closely divided: 48 percent said military action had been right, and 46 percent said the United States should have stayed out. The poll was conducted Aug. 8-12 with 1,214 adults nationwide and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll numbers show up in the daily hardships of recruiters trained by Sgt. First Class Abdul-Malik Muhammad, based in Birmingham, Ala. "With blacks, there is not really a great support for the war," Sergeant Muhammad said, recalling one prospective recruit who was told by his parents that they would sever all ties with him if he enlisted.
My read on this is that there's a deep sense of betrayal within the African-American community that parallels what's going on in the activist base of the party in general. I took a glance at the drops in polling support for a variety of Democrats over the past month or two, and the drop is concentrated among liberals and African-Americans. At the same time, there's a deep sense of frustration with current black leadership centered in two areas. One, many opinion leaders in the hip hop community are deeply embittered by the civil rights generation of leaders and media stars like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Oprah that chide Hip Hop culture without speaking to the real concern in their music, communities, and expression. And two, the middle class emerging black activist class is furious with failures of the political leadership, represented both by the political leaders themselves and institutions like the NAACP and the Urban League that aren't capturing the newer generation. There's obviously overlap here, and I'm probably simplifying these trends dramatically.
It's still interesting, though, how this parallels what's going on with the new progressive movement on the blogs. We're part of a newer irony-infused culture, and we're constantly told by our progressive elders that we're too angry, controversial, or informal. We don't relate to traditional liberal institutions like unions or mass membership organizations like the ACLU, and our leaders tend to disappoint us on a regular basis. Permeating all of this is Iraq and the breakdown of trust in Republican governance. Anyway, I don't have tremendous insight here, but there are a lot of opportunities and I figured I'd point out that there's ferment all over the place.
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