NYSED Commissioner John King Says APPR Teacher Evaluations And Common Core Will Bring About Greater Economic Equality

I called this yesterday before NYSED Commissioner King gave his Brown vs Board of Education speech:

Anybody want to bet an APPR artifact that King recycles some of the same boilerplate from the last speech about how the fight for education reform/Common Core is much like the fight for civil rights for this speech today?

Here's Jessica Bakeman on yesterday's speech:

ALBANY—On the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that compelled the nation's schools to integrate, New York education commissioner John King argued that the state's students are still very much segregated by economic status.

During a speech at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, King offered education reforms such as the Common Core standards and teacher evaluations as vehicles of greater equality in schools.

“Believe it or not, 60 years after [Brown v. Board of Ed], we remain deeply segregated,” King said. “According to one recent report, New York has the most segregated schools in the country, both racially and economically. Not only do our 700 school district lines often track patterns of residential economic segregation, there are school districts in this state today—including New York City—with boundary lines within the district that keep children of wealth starkly separated from children of poverty. And we know from our history that segregation, whether it’s economic or racial, breeds inequality.”

...

King said he respects those who are critics of his policies, and he listens to them patiently, even when the attacks are personal. But he won't be persuaded to retreat from raising standards and implementing education reforms like teacher evaluations, he said.

“Too many of the voices attacking the Common Core have done so with false narratives about the motives and intentions of education reform,” he said. “This isn’t about privatization or federal curriculum or enriching testing companies.

“This is about taking responsibility for educating every single child, no matter what his or her race, background or economic status,” he continued. “What those who resist high standards for all students are really saying is that some kids are just not going to make it, and that’s acceptable.

“But it is not acceptable,” he said. “It violates everything that America stands for. It’s an assault on the values of America, a country based on equality of opportunity.”

In short, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that every school district in the nation would have an APPR teacher evaluation system tied to Common Core test scores to ensure a day when all men and women will be judged not by the color of their skin by their Common Core test results.

I dunno about you, but I'm getting sick of these reformers wrapping themselves in the civil rights rhetoric.

Get Ready For Another Common Core/Civil Rights Speech From NYSED Commissioner John King

NYSED Commissioner King has already compared himself to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and said the education reform/Common Core fight is much like the fight for civil rights:

Paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr., the commissioner said: “In a real sense, this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, but our souls are rested.

“Change is hard,” he continued. “It is challenging, and it is tiring, but the goal, their goal, was to advance the cause of civil rights. Our goal is to advance the cause of civil rights through educational justice, through ensuring that all of our students have access to the richest possible instruction that prepares them to succeed when they graduate from high school, in college and careers, and prepares them to be good citizens.

“It will be hard; it will continue to be tiring,” he said. “I am sure there are some sore feet in the room. It will continue to be tiring, but we must remain laser-focused on the outcome we seek for our students.”

Watch here (the Civil Rights talk starts at 17:13).

Here's Dr. King's schedule for today (that's John King, not Martin Luther King Jr.):

At 1 p.m., state Education Commissioner John King delivers speech on anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Rockefeller Institute of Government, 411 State St., Albany.

Anybody want to bet an APPR artifact that King recycles some of the same boilerplate from the last speech about how the fight for education reform/Common Core is much like the fight for civil rights for this speech today?

NYSED Commissioner King: Opponents To Common Core Are Opposed To MLK's Dream

You knew someone prominent in the corporate education reform movement would trot out the "If Dr. King were alive today, he would be a huge proponent of the Common Core State Standards to drive racial and economic justice..." meme.

That prominent someone was NYSED Commissioner John King.

The underlying theme to his piece is that the Common Core will help bring about Dr. King's dream of racial and economic justice and if you're opposed to the Common Core you're opposed to Dr. King's dream.

See, he says it right here:

The Common Core offers a path to the precise reading, writing and thinking skills that will help propel their children and children across the state to success. Yet some now want us to delay, or even abandon, our efforts to raise standards.

I say no. As King said in that speech a little more than fifty years ago, “We do not have as much time as the cautious and the patient try to give us.”

Many people have noted that the Common Core are dumbed-down standards in math
and English Language Arts and are an attempt by a corporate elite to strip children of critical thinking and love of reading by imposing rote skills and drills learning.

Dr. King (Little Johnny, not Martin Luther Jr.) doesn't address any of the Common Core criticism, just sets up the straw man argument that the CCSS are rigorous and will lead to more students being "college-and career- ready," wraps the whole thing in a civil rights veneer and leaves the reader with the idea that anybody opposed to the Common Core is opposed to economic and racial equality and justice.

His argument is not going to convince anybody who already doesn't believe the same reform meme that he does, and it certainly isn't going to stop the growing rebellion against Common Core, high stakes testing and other reforms that the NYSED and Regents are pushing.

The civil right cliches the reformers trot out have grown stale and past their shelf life.

They might still work for the people who are already on board the ed deform express, but they are less and less effective on everybody else.

Rod Paige: If MLK Jr. Were Alive, He Would Be On Board With Education Reform

From the NY Post:

Paige said America has come a long way on race relations in a short period of time. The former teacher-in-chief gave the United States a grade of B for advancing civil rights — and pointedly recognized the progress made in his native Mississippi.

He said discrimination still exists, but described it as “episodic,” not government-sanctioned and systemic.

“There are opportunities out there. The doors are open now. The ceilings are broken,” he said.

He said President Obama’s election — as well as his own success — provide powerful lessons that black people are prospering as productive and equal citizens in 21st century America.

While celebrating the racial progress, Paige — who helped craft the federal No Child Left Behind Law — said there’s more work to be done. He said if King were here today, he would agree that “closing the racial achievement gap in education is the civil-rights issue of our time.”

Education, said Paige, can help overcome the cycle of poverty and dysfunction that has held back many minorities.

King would likely call Paige a “drum major for justice” — dedicating his life to helping provide better educational opportunities to children, particularly minorities in poor urban areas.

Notice the dog whistle words meant to appeal to the education reform free marketeers in Paige's MLK Jr. account.

King would agree that closing "the racial achievement gap in education is the civil-rights issue of our time."

King would pat Paige on the back for being a "drum major for justice" who helped bring "better educational opportunities" to "minorities in poor urban areas."

Those are the buzzwords the corporate education reformers use all the time to justify privatizing the public education system - the "racial achievement gap" in test scores and graduation rates is alarmingly high, it is the "civil rights issue of our time," we can solve that issue by bringing "better educational opportunities" to "minorities in poor urban areas" (i.e., by closing public schools, firing the unionized teachers, opening charter schools, hiring non-unionized TFAers who can be fired at will.)

In short, Paige is claiming MLK would be on board with NCLB, RttT and the rest of the corporate education reform agenda.

Can't you hear it?

I have a dream that every child will be tested in every subject in every grade all the year through so that their teachers can be evaluated, their data can be collected and tracked, vendors can be provided that data to better provide on line educational tools and assessments so that we can close the "racial achievement gap" and finally live in a land where children of all races, religions, colors and creeds enjoy similar test scores.

The March on Washington as brought to us by Rod "Houston Miracle" Paige.

Why isn't he up on charges along with Beverly Hall for fraud?

You can read about Paige's education reform miracle when he was running the Houston school district here.

Like Eva Moskowitz at Harlem Success Academy, Rod Paige knows that "success" in education comes by subtracting the "problem students' from your statistics.

I wonder what Paige thinks King would say about that.

MLK, Economic Justice and Public Education

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot while he was focusing on economic justice issues.

The charter school movement would have us believe that were King alive today, he would be promoting the corporate-funded charter school movement as the means to racial equality (despite the fact that charter schools are overwhelmingly segregated by race.)

But given where King was headed on economic justice before he was killed, I don't think that is the case.

Common Dreams reran an editorial from the Capital Times that focuses on King's work on economic justice issues and how that part of his legacy has been conveniently forgotten:

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not assassinated at a rally organized by a right-wing talk radio host, or at the inauguration of a conservative Republican governor.

King, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning campaigner for economic and social justice whose legacy we celebrate with a holiday that falls on Jan. 17 this year, died while supporting the right of public employees to organize labor unions and to fight for the preservation of public services.

That inconvenient truth is sometimes obscured by pop historians, who would have us believe that King was merely a "civil rights leader." King's was a comprehensive activism that extended far beyond the boundaries of the movement to end segregation. His most famous address, the "I Have a Dream" speech, was delivered at the 1963 "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" — a historic event that explicitly linked the social and economic demands of campaigners for civil rights and economic justice.

And King always saw that linkage as being well-expressed — arguably best expressed — in the struggles of public employees and their unions for dignity, fair pay, fair benefits and a recognition of the contributions made by those who collect our garbage, clean our streets, police our communities, protect our environment, care for our aged and infirm family members, teach our children and deliver our mail.

It was to that end that King made his last journey, at the age of 39, to march with and campaign on behalf of members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union in Memphis, Tenn., in April of 1968.

The sanitation workers of Memphis had experienced not just racial discrimination but the disregard and disrespect that is so often directed at those who perform essential public services.

No one should miss the fact that AFSCME, the union that they joined and the union with which King worked so closely, is now under attack by right-wingers who would have us believe that public workers are to blame for the problems that occur when policymakers blow the budget on tax cuts for the rich, bailouts for big banks and military adventures abroad.

King did not fall for the fantasy. He stood at the side of public employees, telling a Memphis congregation on the night before he died: "Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on … the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them."

King was proud to rally with public workers, and proud to make the connection between their struggle and the broader struggle for a fair and equitable economy that served all workers — public and private.

The defense of public employees — so essential to a functional society, and yet so frequently abused by the powerful players who would diminish the role of government in order to enhance their own wealth and authority — is as vital a struggle today as it was in 1968.

As Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative allies target public employees for abuse, it is as necessary for the right-minded and right-hearted people of Wisconsin to defend those workers as it was for the right-minded and right-hearted people of Memphis.

King's call echoes now. "Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness," he declared on the night before he was slain. "Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation."

Brian Jones at Huffingtonpost brings the economic justice issue to the current education climate:

The current fad in education "reform" is to put as much daylight as possible between racial justice and social justice. The result is fine words about closing the achievement gap, but little to show for it. Worse, the proposals on offer today -- charter schools, privatization, testing, teacher data-reports -- threaten to actually widen the gap, while those that have demonstrably had some effect -- Head Start, desegregation, smaller class sizes -- are ignored.

This is an historic reversal. It was the Civil Rights Movement that placed the onus on society to deal with the effects of racism. "We are likely to find," Dr. King wrote, "that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished."

Today, the onus is increasingly placed on the individual teacher, or the individual student, or the parents. Any discussion of poverty or racism is tantamount to "making excuses."

"The task is considerable," King wrote, "it is not merely to bring Negroes up to higher educational levels, but to close the gap between their educational levels and those of whites."

But against the current "reform" consensus, King understood that providing a quality education is very much a question of resources. "Much more money has to be spent on education of the children of the poor;" King argued, "the rate of increase in expenditures for the poor has to be greater than for the well-off if the children of the poor are to catch up." He went on to argue for reductions in class sizes, for greater community involvement, a greater commitment from educators, and a strategy for promoting desegregation.

If we truly want to close the achievement gap, we should remember Dr. King's words. At the end of his life, his perspectives were diametrically opposed to those of today's political elites. Yet, come Monday, they will all line up to praise his dreams of equality. They will quote his famous speech from 1963, but not his perspectives from 1967:

"If the society changes its concept by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach of all."

Somehow the American economic system - exposed as corrupt, predatory, and diseased by the financial crisis of 2007-2008 in which bankers, Wall Street traders, hedge fund managers and real estate executives gamed the system for their own interests, stole billions, then in many cases received government-funded bailouts while paying themselves billions more in bonuses - escapes responsibility when fingers are being pointed at teachers and schools.

But the system - along with the political and business elites who benefit from it - ARE at fault for so many of the problems in today's society, including the ones in public education.

As Brian Jones points out, until "society changes its concept by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income," not much will change.

Bloomberg Says Regulating Charter School Authorizations Dishonors MLK

Not kidding:

Speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration, Mayor Bloomberg charged today that the state Assembly's last-minute attempt to overhaul charter schools would "gut" a successful system and dishonor King's memory.

"Tomorrow, unbelievably, our state Legislature may actually vote in a bill that would basically gut the law and make it harder to open charter schools," the mayor told 400 people gathered at City Hall to mark what would have been the revered civil rights leader's 81st birthday.

"Dr. King told us that a right delayed is a right denied and this bill would continue to deny those children the quality school options that they deserve. The bill really is an insult to parents and children and Dr. King and his legacy," added the mayor.

The mayor said that the Assembly bill, while doubling the cap on the number of charter schools to 400, would also impose new requirements that would make it difficult to open any new ones.

Refusing to lower class sizes even when the state gives you extra funds and mandates you do so, closing schools and dumping at risk students into other schools without providing extra resources to help them, turning over public schools to your hedge fund buddies and calling that a civil rights victory, stealing space and resources from the public schools for charter schools run by your hedge fund buddies -that's not dishonoring MLK.

But limiting charter schools to 10% of all public schools in the state and forcing them to educate the same body of students the non-charter public schools have to educate - that's dishonoring MLK.

What jive.