Another Dear Congressman Letter

Dear Jim - 

I already wrote you another Dear Congressman piece on the subject of school libraries  after our meeting last year. Today you asked me "So it's bad for a legislator to ask for facts and data?"

Well Jim, of course it isn't, and I feel, once again, you are asking me a disingenuous question, which makes me lose even more of the respect I once had for you. Because Jim, you know I once had a LOT of respect for you. What's more, I BELIEVED in you. I really thought that if we sent a smart guy like you to Washington it could really make a difference for our country. I lost my columnist gig with Hearst over you - but I even thought it was worth it, because I believed in you that much. 

But you want to know something? You have done more to make me discouraged with our political system than anyone. It's the people we believe in most that cause the greatest damage to our beliefs. 

So why do I feel you are being disingenuous? 

Let's see...perhaps because when we met to discuss education, I brought you lots of "facts and data." I brought you studies that showed that TFA are less effective than traditionally trained teachers, and the higher costs to school districts of their frequent turnover. 

I brought you data about how despite charter schools like Achievement First claiming 100% graduation rates, if you look at their cohort graduation rate from the students who start 9th grade it's nothing too special. 

I told you about charters not serving the same special ed and ELL populations and Achievement First having the highest kindergarten suspension rate in CT, and the lawsuit against them for special ed violations and how it made me furious when I read it because some of the things they were PUNISHING kids for were the kinds of coping strategies my son would use when he was trying to avoid a meltdown when he was having sensory overload. But these kids were being PUNISHED for that. 

But despite being my legislator, you didn't appear to have the same intellectual curiosity about THOSE "facts and data."And I can't help thinking that it's because it's too politically inconvenient for you to do so. That's why when you asked me the question about research on school libraries, it seemed more like you were deflecting me so you didn't have to answer my question, rather than requesting actual facts and data. 

I gave you the facts and data anyway, because there's over 40 years worth of studies proving the efficacy of having certified school librarians. Annual Testing like SBAC that we're wasting so many billions of dollars on? Not so much. But that doesn't seem to make a difference to policy makers, does it? Because facts and data don't appear to be driving education policy. 

 Why weren't you, and Dan Malloy, and Arne Duncan et al asking such questions BEFORE making the policy that is destroying our education system, driving teachers out of the profession (despite Gov Malloy's utterly ridiculous claim that they are all leaving "because they were hired at the same time, like the state troopers") and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars? Why weren't you asking questions about no-bid contracts by all the crony edreform folks? Because I've been asking those questions. 

Here's another thing that seriously rattled me about my Congressman: your reaction to being told of a Democratic elected official threatening to sue a member of the press, despite not being able to point to anything factually inaccurate in the piece. There's a name for when someone does that -  it's called a SLAPP suit - stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation", and it's intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense.

 If a Republican had done this during the Bush years, I know you would have had something to say about it. But instead you laughed it off, like it wasn't an attempt at press intimidation by your own party. Now you're probably going to tell me you're a supporter of the First Amendment, but your reaction sure didn't give me a whole lot of confidence that as my Congressman you're going to do much to protect me, a constituent of yours and a journalist, if it's someone in the Democratic Party at fault. In fact, it showed me that you are happy to put party over process. 

And that, Jim, is why I am not a party member anymore, and why you, personally, have made me so incredibly disillusioned with the political process. Because if someone I thought was a smart, good guy ends up like this after a few terms in Washington, what the hell hope do we have in this country?

I would write more, but I spent four hours today doing a library program with seven other authors getting kids excited about writing - because they don't get the chance to do enough creative writing in school these days. Too much testing. Too much Common Core. All those things you told me were so wonderful and needed. 

I spent the afternoon with kids who crave creativity - who couldn't wait to use their voices. Isn't that what we should be encouraging in a democracy instead of test taking?

Shared Awareness: Information + Technology = "Education Spring"

Matt DiRienzo, Group Editor for 21st Century Media in CT, recommended Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" for one of my MFA students (thanks Matt!) and I've been reading it, too. It's worth picking up if you want to understand the growing backlash against Corporate Education Reform, the Common Core and my focus here, recent events in Hartford, CT.

As anyone who has following the edreform debate will be aware, the push for the current brand of high stakes, test-based stacked ranking of students, teachers and schools has come from moneyed interests - hedge fund billionaires like Paul Tudor Jones, Steve Mandel & Whitney Tilson, and tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg,


Add in the mega bucks of megaphilanthropies like Broad Education Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Donald and Doris Fisher Fund, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and corporate interests like Pearson, and you get a pretty clear idea of how much money and power is behind the corporate education reform movement and the push to privatize our public schools.

It was difficult for the constituency of people who work with children and could see the many, valid problems with corporate edreform strategies to make themselves heard, because to put it bluntly, in this country, for all of our ideals of being a democracy and a meritocracy, money talks. This has only become more pronounced in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

It's not just that the wealthy have greater influence in the corridors of power because of their ability to make campaign donations. It's that the wealthy and powerful have a disproportionate influence on traditional means of communication - newspapers, television, radio. To get out a conflicting narrative means rocking the donor/advertising boat, and when media outlets are already struggling to survive in choppy economic waters, it's become abundantly clear that boat rocking is avoided at all costs.

But what's happened in Hartford - and is catching fire all across the country, much to Arne Duncan's chagrin - is that new technology is giving the rest of us (Shirky's "everybody")the tools for shared awareness and that awareness leads to action, which is resulting in consequences for those who have willfully ignored our voices for far too long.

Let's focus on an example from Hartford. The Hartford Board of Education, consists of 9 members, 5 appointed by Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra (including himself) and 4 elected members. Parents have complained about lack of transparency about process, lack of interest in the types of programs being pushed on them, and lack of resources before the decision to privatize the schools. But they haven't always had sufficient information and the ability to communicate and disperse that information in a timely way, in order to protest the Board's decisions.

In the last year or so, however, things have changed. First, there is the blogosphere - and blogs like Wait What? and Real Hartford have been providing a function that traditional media sources haven't - investigative reporting - thus giving parents information.

Social media is what has given this information power. By spreading the information far and wide, it's become harder for the traditional media to ignore, and thus for the Hartford politicians and the Board of Education to turn a blind eye to parent's concerns.

What's more, as Shirky observed in HERE COMES EVERYBODY regarding protests in Liepzig, (GDR) in 1989 prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, "each of the citizens...had some threshold at which they might join a protest. Each week the march happened without a crackdown offered additional eidence that the marches provided an outlet for their disaffection; each successful march diminished the fear felt by some additional part of the populace."

We saw this with the Steve Perry/Capital Prep story in Hartford. Jonathan Pelto started covering Perry's inappropriate tweets, his chronic absenteeism for speaking engagements, and his bullying behavior on Wait What?. Former and current teachers started approaching him behind the scenes, but because of Perry's threats to ruin their careers, they were concerned about going on the record. However a few things happened at once which changed the situation. A former Capital Prep teacher, Michael Fryar, 45, filed a complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities over his alleged treatment at Capital Prep.

According to a report in the Hartford Courant:

"Fryar said he was fired Nov. 8, only weeks after he formally complained to the district and state that he was denied professional development opportunities and given low evaluation scores "with no factual basis."

Fryar criticized Perry's leadership and described an environment of low teacher morale. He also questioned Capital Prep's disciplinary practices, including instances in which students ran up and down the school's stairs as an apparent form of punishment, Fryar said.

City schools spokesman David Medina said the district would not comment on Fryar's allegations because of "pending litigation." Perry, who declined to comment on much of Fryar's remarks, denied that morale is low."

This, coupled with Supt Christina Kishimoto's proposal to give Perry an additional school to run, (under structured as a private management company owned by Perry) which was scheduled for a hasty BOE vote, lit the spark. Having social media tools allowed parents to stay informed, to spread the word, and to make their feelings known publicly. As more parents and teachers started telling their stories, others became more forthright.



From Wait What?



Addendum: New parental complaint

From Buffalospree.com

At this point the issues became harder for both the BOE and the traditional media to ignore, although the establishment paper,(CT's Daily Mail) the Courant, appears to still be doing its best to do so. In its late, and obviously reluctant coverage of the Perry tweet affair (which it posted after the Washington Post had already taken up the story)the Courant headlines with "Teacher's Union Asks for Investigation into Principal's 'threatening' tweet." Let's put "threatening' in quotes because we're going to pretend that a student or a teacher making that tweet like wouldn't have been suspended, right HC? It's just that meddlesome old teacher's union making trouble again! Okay...got it.

Multiply this effect with a network of concerned parents, educators, professors, writers and activists around the country and you can start to understand why the Opt Out Movement is growing, why opposition to the Common Core is growing, why districts are opting out of RTTT funding, and why Arne Duncan (and Democrats who support him) will regret that "white suburban mom" comment for a VERY VERY LONG TIME. Because it's not just white suburban moms. It's everybody. And we're here, armed with information, research and investigative reporting and the ability to spread it, even if the traditional media won't.