Teachers Speak Out

My friend from another blog and fellow teacher sheba reminds us today about the connections between the Bush administration and the makers of standardized tests. Specifically, she points to this startling article from The Nation from January 2002, the month George W. Bush signed ESEA 2001 (aka NCLB, IYKWIM). Just some highlights:

[T]he Bush legislation has ardent supporters in the testing and textbook publishing industries. Only days after the 2000 election, an executive for publishing giant NCS Pearson addressed a Waldorf ballroom filled with Wall Street analysts. According to Education Week, the executive displayed a quote from President-elect Bush calling for state testing and school-by-school report cards, and announced, "This almost reads like our business plan." The bill has allotted $387 million to get states up to speed; the National Association of State Boards of Education estimates that properly funding the testing mandate could cost anywhere from $2.7 billion to $7 billion. The bottom line? "This promises to be a bonanza for the testing companies," says Monte Neill of FairTest, a Boston-based nonprofit. "Fifteen states now test in all the grades Bush wants. All the rest are going to have to increase the amount of testing they do." [. . .]

The big educational testing companies have thus dispatched lobbyists to Capitol Hill. Bruce Hunter, who represents the American Association of School Administrators, says, "I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen before. At every hearing, every discussion, the big test publishers are always present with at least one lobbyist, sometimes more." Both standardized testing and textbook publishing are dominated by the so-called Big Three--McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Harcourt General--all identified as "Bush stocks" by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election.

While critics of the Bush Administration's energy policies have pointed repeatedly to its intimacy with the oil and gas industry--specifically the now-imploding Enron--few education critics have noted the Administration's cozy relationship with McGraw-Hill. At its heart lies the three-generation social mingling between the McGraw and Bush families. The McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed began to establish Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, as a haven for the Northeast wealthy. The island's original roster of socialite vacationers reads like a who's who of American industry, finance and government: the Meads, the Mellons, the Paysons, the Whitneys, the Lovetts, the Harrimans--and Prescott Bush and James McGraw Jr. The generations of the two families parallel each other closely in age: the patriarchs Prescott and James Jr., son George and nephew Harold Jr., and grandson George W. and grandnephew Harold III, who now runs the family publishing empire.

The amount of cross-pollination and mutual admiration between the Administration and that empire is striking: Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national grant advisory and founding board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. McGraw in turn received the highest literacy award from President Bush in the early 1990s, for his contributions to the cause of literacy. The McGraw Foundation awarded current Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige its highest educator's award while Paige was Houston's school chief; Paige, in turn, was the keynote speaker at McGraw-Hill's "government initiatives" conference last spring. Harold McGraw III was selected as a member of President George W. Bush's transition advisory team, along with McGraw-Hill board member Edward Rust Jr., the CEO of State Farm and an active member of the Business Roundtable on educational issues. An ex-chief of staff for Barbara Bush is returning to work for Laura Bush in the White House--after a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media relations executive. John Negroponte left his position as McGraw-Hill's executive vice president for global markets to become Bush's ambassador to the United Nations.

Again, NCLB is not our main thrust here, but it's so hard to avoid talking about all the other Things We Are Up Against. One of these days, I'll turn it into a real list. It will not be pleasant.

In the meantime, don't forget to Speak Out. Email us or click on "Speak Out!" below. Maybe take this time to talk about how NCLB has changed your classroom . . .

Every once in a while, I would get a little jealous that I would probably never be on that list of suspected insurgents who always get stopped at the airports and the Canadian border, that list of people so dangerous to the government that we must be stopped before we do irreparable harm to society or the world.

You know, terrorists.

I guess it was easier than I thought: Turns out I've been a terrorist since the day I became a teacher and joined the National Education Association. At least according to U.S. Education secretary Rod Paige:

Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union a "terrorist organization" during a private White House meeting with governors on Monday. [. . .] "These were the words, 'The NEA is a terrorist organization,'" said Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin. [. . .] Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican, said of Paige's comments: "Somebody asked him about the NEA's role and he offered his perspective on it." Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, said the comments were made in the context of "we can't be supportive of the status quo and they're the status quo. But whatever the context, it is inappropriate — I know he wasn't calling teachers terrorists — but to ever suggest that the organization they belong to was a terrorist organization is uncalled for."

I'm not really sure what else needs to be added, except perhaps that this off-the-cuff remark really demonstrates three things about the current (Republican) leadership in this country: They hate teachers, they hate public schools, and they really, really hate unions.

At the very least, Rod Paige should be out. At best, this may open up dialog about why we need teachers' unions in the first place, and how messed up public education would be with no or weak unions to protect our rights and support our colleagues.

And we can add this to that ever-growing list of Things We're Up Against.

UPDATE: Some other versions of the AP story cite NEA president Reg Weaver: "The education secretary's words were 'pathetic and they are not a laughing matter,'" despite Paige's insistence "that his comment was 'a bad joke; it was an inappropriate choice of words.'"

Why are we speaking out? Who can speak out? What are we speaking out about? What is this "blog" thing anyway?

These are all reasonable questions my fellow MPS teachers may have after hearing about Teachers Speak Out or dropping by this site for the first time. Well, I'll try to add some answers.

TSO is an organization designed to help teachers get their own message out. We want you, the teachers, to have a voice, to be an active, informed, and engaged part of the debate. What debate? Well, any debate--as you can see by tooling around this site a little bit, the range of issues that we discuss is broad. Sure, we formed initially in response to the media's and the superintendent's attacks on us and the benefits that we have earned, but we know that there is more to you than just that.

Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do as a teacher is tell your own story--speak out about your successes, your failures, your classroom, your life and how it is affected by these issues in education. That's what this "blog" is all about. "Blogs"--short for "web logs"--started as journals of a sort, on-line diaries that people could share with their friends. It didn't take long for "bloggers" to venture outside of themselves, though, and now you can find blogs dedicated to news, politics, sports, the arts, writing, and more. This blog is dedicated to us, the teachers in MPS who need a place to begin to speak out.

So, this is our call to you: Tell us your stories. Speak out. Get involved. There are three ways to speak out here at the blog:

Click on the "Speak Out!" links at the bottom of the stories to add your comments on whatever is being discussed. You can even write your story in the comments section, and, if you'd like, we can "promote" it to the main page.

Email your story to teachersspeakout@hotmail.com, and we will post it here for you.

Become a regular member of the Teachers Speak Out blog team. Send an email teachersspeakout@hotmail.com, telling us who you are, where you teach, and what your focus will be as a poster here on the blog, and we'll set you up with access so you can start speaking out.

Thanks for coming by; don't forget to check back often for updates, calls to action, and stories of your colleagues speaking out!