When a study comes out showing positive results for vouchers the teacher unions are normally quick to release a statement dissecting the results, highlighting any negative discoveries, and pointing out (mostly imaginary) flaws in research design.
Why the deafening silence from the unions on the new D.C. voucher study? I guess you don’t even have to pretend to make the case for union policy positions if you already have the politicians reading from your cue cards.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
In the continuing “cue card check” scandal, this new photo was discovered.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Jay is in today’s Wall Street Journal making the case that appeasement doesn’t work in foreign affairs, nor does it work in education policy. A number of people, including President Obama, attempt to identify themselves as reformers by supporting charter schools, while saying they oppose vouchers. They support evidence based reform, except when they don’t. Triangulate, obfuscate, repeat as necessary.
As Whitney Tilson and John Kirtley have noted: when they have finished with the 1,700 Opportunity Scholarship kids, they are coming after you Mr. and Mrs. Progressive Education Triangulator. Far more students attend charter schools than vouchers in the District. Why stop with vouchers?
A professor of mine noted what a tragic mistake it was for Chamberlain to throw the Czechs under the bus. Not only was it deeply immoral, it was strategic suicide. The Czechs were well armed. Britain and France’s betrayal took substantial military resources away from the Allies and handed them to the Nazis.
Blah blah blah, Britain and France weren’t ready to go to war with the Nazis. They were much less ready after this cowardly mistake. It’s called feeding your hand to an alligator.
The NEA sends a letter to Congress insisting that they kill the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, and they rush to obey. A report shows the vouchers improve reading, the Deparment tries to spin and bury it. The UFT writes anti-charter questions for NYC Councilmen to ask, they dutifully read them off.
You can definitely see lips moving during this half-hearted attempt at ventriloquism.
(edited to add link)
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Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Go Juan go! Money quote:
This is an outrage to me. … This is so important that you give young people a chance to have an education in America and especially in a failing public school system like you have in the District of Columbia. This voucher system is a direct threat to the unions. And so I think everybody on Capitol Hill, that’s getting money from the NEA or AFT, they should be called on the table. They should ask them, ‘where do you send your kids to school?
And are you willing to say these kids getting the vouchers…and doing better than the rest of the kids, that these kids aren’t deserving of an opportunity to succeed in America?’ You just want to scream. Why Duncan and Obama aren’t in the forefront of education reform is an outrage and an insult to the very base that voted for them.
I’m keeping track of the Democrats who are standing up for what is right: Whitney Tilson, Anthony Williams, Kevin Chavous, Juan Williams. I’m sure there are more already, and more still to come.
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Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Poor Leo, first he can’t get his leveraged buyout for public schools LLC off the ground due to the credit crunch. Then he bounced around in the rubber room.
Now he gets caught red-handed using NYC politicians as his Polly Prissypants.
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Posted by matthewladner
All images from GothamSchools, whose Elizabeth Green broke the story
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Last week, the UFT got caught handing out cue cards to New York City Council members before a public hearing of the council’s education committee. The council members dutifully asked the questions they had been given, which pointedly invited anti-charter diatribes from the teacher-union and DOE witnesses.
The members then unanimously voted to make Grigori Potemkin their new committee chairman.
Internet wags are calling the scandal “cue card check.” ALELR has consulted his deep moles within UFT and offered an intriguing report on the union’s strategy for the Council’s next hearing.
The cue cards have to be seen to be believed:
That’s “questions for Leo” as in our dear friend and Sith apprentice Leo Casey, who testified at the hearing. My pledge to you, the reader: from now on, every time Leo posts calumnies about Jay, I will post a link to this story.
And that’s “questions for DOE” as in officials from the Department of Education. The cue cards were handed out by the UFT, but is it plausible that the department officials had no idea they were being asked scripted questions?
HILARIOUS UPDATE! When I first posted this, I didn’t look closely at the handwritten edit made to this cue card. Check it out – note the spelling. And this is from an organization of teachers!
This story doesn’t seem to have broken out of the local circuit yet, but it’s getting a whole lot of attention in the city media. The Daily News is leading the way, documenting the extent of UFT political contributions to the council members who got cue cards and covering Randi Weingarten’s attempts to deflect blame by claiming that a charter school organizer once did the same thing. (Not true, says the organizer – and who has more credibility here?)
But ALELR notes that props are not being given to Elizabeth Green of the blog GothamSchools, who broke the story and snapped all the pictures you see above (and more, which you can enjoy in all their glory by following the link).
Green wryly notes that the cue cards with accusatory anti-charter questions were handed out by “a representative of the city teachers union, which describes itself as in favor of charter schools.”
8 Comments | charter schools, journalism, teacher union | Tagged: Best of Greg, cue card check, Elizabeth Green, Greg Forster, Leo Casey, Mike Antonucci, Randi Weingarten, UFT | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
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Posted by matthewladner
Arne Duncan explains to Science magazine why school choice is so important (if you are wealthy and white and can move into the suburbs with good public schools). If you are poor, Black, and live in D.C. you should wait until we get around to improving the public schools. It should be any day now.
Anthony Williams and Kevin Chavous explain in the Washington Post why “We want freedom by any means necessary.” Man, the Washington Post has been solid in support of D.C. vouchers.
Mary Katharine Ham has a piece on the Weekly Standard web site that explains why “it’s clear that, when given a choice, Democrats are more petrified of unions than they are interested in doing something that works for some of the most underserved kids in the District.”
And my colleague Bob Maranto has a piece in Front Page Magazine that explains: “By voting to kill the DC OSP, the Democrats in Congress have placed themselves in opposition to the educational needs of low-income, minority, inner-city children. If they ignore, deny, or minimize the importance of this rigorous evaluation of the program’s effectiveness, they also would be pitting themselves against President Obama, who has repeatedly called for respecting the role of science and data rather than money and lobbyists in making public policy, including education policy.”
1 Comment | vouchers | Tagged: Anthony Williams, Arne Duncan, Bob Maranto, D.C. vouchers, Front Page Magazine, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Kevin Chavous, Mary Katharine Ham, Washington Post, Weekly Standard | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Mike Petrilli over at Flypaper has a copy of the letter sent to DC parents informing them in an obscure way that they’ve yanked a scholarship away from their child.
This completely insincere letter begins:
Dear Families
We deeply regret the confusion over whether your child would receive a scholarship through the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. Please know and understand that we deeply sympathize with the uncertainty that you and your family may have faced over the past few months, and we are committed to doing everything possible to ensure that your child is in a safe school environment that offers strengthened academic programs.
So let’s review: the Department decides, completely arbitrarily, to not allow any additional children into the DC program. Next, they have the sickening gall to express “regret” and go through the motions of claiming to be “committed to doing everything possible to ensure your child is in a safe school environment with strengthened academic programs.”
Do these people have any shame at all? Any?
1 Comment | vouchers | Tagged: DC Opportunity Scholarships | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Needing to one-up their apparent role-model, the Nixon administration, President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan have committed two Friday night massacres instead of Nixon’s one (on Saturday).
First, Duncan chose to release the positive results of the D.C. voucher evaluation late in the day two Fridays ago. He did this despite the fact that “IES stopped releasing reports on Fridays several years ago when an important report just happened to come out on that day and critics accused the agency of trying to bury it.” Clearly, Duncan intended to bury this report so that the positive results would not hamper their plans to kill the D.C. voucher program despite prior commitments to follow the evidence rather than predispositions or ideology.
And on this most recent Friday afternoon Obama and Duncan ordered the organization operating the D.C. voucher program to stop accepting applications for next year. Keep in mind that Congress did not require this action. Congress simply required that the program had to be reauthorized before it could continue. By stopping new applications Obama and Duncan have presupposed the outcome of that reauthorization vote, or as the Washington Post put it, they have “presumed dead” the program. Of course, it is quite likely that Congress will fail to reauthorize the program (following the Obama administration’s wishes), but by presupposing the program’s demise, they make its end a virtual certainty. Even if Congress were to reauthorize there would be no new applicants to put into the program.
Why do Obama and Duncan feel the need to take all of their actions against the D.C. voucher program on Friday afternoons when those actions would receive the least attention? Do they wish to be sneaky political tricksters of the sort they’ve condemned? Why don’t they have the intellectual and political courage to defend their actions against the D.C. voucher program in broad daylight? Shame.
One can only imagine what is coming this Friday afternoon.
(edited for clarity)
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
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