According to Politico, the web site devoted to mocking and attacking Michelle Rhee was not the spontaneous act of a group of disgruntled citizens, but was actually created on a computer registered to the American Federation of Teachers. Reporter, Ben Smith, writes:
Rheefirst.com, the anonymous website bashing former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, was created by a computer registered to the American Federation of Teachers.The site, which refers to Rhee as “the Sarah Palin of education” among other things and is the main online source of attacks on Rhee, was launched in February. An tracking tool traces the IP address back to the AFT’s offices in D.C. The site has since jumped to several other IP addresses….The site is the latest in a series of seemingly grass-roots education movements that are actually backed by unions and union members. Last month, we reported that the Save Our Schools March presented itself as a grass-roots event but failed to publicly list the union members involved in its executive committee.
This sort of thing is known among internet hipsters as sock-puppetry — you make it seem like there are many independent voices saying the same thing, but really it’s just somebody’s hand up the business end of an old sock.
Readers of JPGB will be familiar with several example of teacher union sock-puppetry that we have highlighted in previous posts, like this, this, this, and this.
I came across the following correspondence that appears to describe an ingenious plot to plant someone named “Diane” as a double-agent in the teacher union ranks. Once “Diane” gains their trust, her mission is to rile up an Army of Angry Teachers whose slogan-chanting would become so bellicose and unreasonable that it would undermine the popular impression of teachers as a loving extension of the family.
As I’ve argued before, the teacher unions play a double game. They put out a public image of being like the doting aunt or uncle who cares about our kids almost as much as (if not more than) parents do. They know that as long as the public sees the school system as part of the family, they will favor policies that exempt education from the rigors of the marketplace. People see their families as a refuge from the rough and tumble of the marketplace. Families are governed by affection and mutual obligation rather than choice and competition. But in the corridors of power, the teacher unions haggle over pay, benefits, work rules, and autonomy as if they were auto workers, not your favorite aunt or uncle.
The purpose of Diane’s under-cover operation appears to be to undermine that double game and make the self-interested power-grabs by the unions more transparent for what they are. If teacher unions are not viewed as extensions of the family, people would stop exempting education from their normal expectation that there should be choice and competition in the provision of goods and services. If “Diane’s” double-agent sabotage succeeds, the image of teachers buying school supplies out of their own pocket and believing in student potential regardless of difficulties would be replaced with the image of teachers demanding benefits for themselves and blaming circumstances for student low performance.
I’ve inserted videos throughout this post that may provide evidence to substantiate the existence of this conspiracy.
———————————————————————————————
Diane —
We commend you on your willingness to accept this difficult assignment. We know you will have to estrange yourself from former friends and adherents. We know that you will have to ingratiate yourself into a new network whose company may at times be difficult to tolerate — what with their obvious self-interest thinly disguised by shallow slogans, inconsistent arguments, and indifference to empirical evidence. But those qualities are precisely the things that will allow you to gain their trust and rile them into a self-destructive frenzy. Just feed them more shallow slogans, inconsistent arguments, and non-empirically-supported views and they will be like putty in your hands.
There will also be compensating benefits. We know that reformers have stopped paying much attention to you as they shift focus to rigorous quantitative analyses of test results rather than stories spun by polemical historians. But your new teacher union friends will shower plenty of attention on you, as they make no demands for rigor in quantitative or historical analyses and instead judge the merits of arguments based on how they serve their interests. Your new friends will also shower plenty of cash on you as they invite you to speak around the country at about $20,000 a pop. Kozol and Kohn have earned a summer home or two doing this, so don’t let anyone tell you that advocating for public education is not financially rewarding. Of course, if you are successful in this mission, your efforts will undermine the effectiveness of their advocacy by making it seem extreme and self-serving. If you succeed we will reward you even more richly.
Good luck in your efforts!
–The Pentaverate
The Pentaverate —
It has been some time since you sent me on this deep-cover operation, but I am pleased to report that our plan is progressing well. I’ve launched a blog on Education Week as a platform for my sabotage. I’ve written a best-selling book whose arguments are so weak that a grad student could pick them apart in a few blog posts, but which is like catnip to our target audience. I’ve recruited Valerie Strauss, a previously normal and respected journalist, to join our efforts at agitation. And most importantly, I’ve developed a following of 17,307 on Twitter to whom I send about 70 missives a day. I just get the ball rolling and then my followers write the craziest stuff, which I can then just retweet with the plausible deniability that I wasn’t saying it.
For example, I retweeted a message from Gary Stager describing Bill Gates’ view that education can overcome poverty as “Sad, pathetic, ignorant, dangerous, genocidal, wrong.” Genocidal! That’s gold. That weak Jay P. Greene just says that the Gates Foundation has a flawed strategy, but I have folks saying that Gates and anyone who believes that poverty is not immutable is advocating genocide. If stuff like that doesn’t undermine teacher union credibility with sensible people I have no idea what will.
In short, as you have requested I have assembled an Army of Angry Teachers and, like Pogo, they have met the enemy and they are it. Last weekend we marched on Washington for the Save Our Schools (SOS) rally, which should reveal the nuttiness of my Army to policy and opinion leaders nationwide.
–Diane
Diane —
We are very proud of your efforts and admire your heroism is fulfilling the unpleasant task of mobilizing angry teachers into a fevered state. For that work the members of The Pentaverate have decided to award you the Keyser Soze Medal for Excellence in Deception.
We are, however, a bit disappointed with the SOS Rally. You only managed to get 2,000-3,000 people to show up, which makes your army seem like a distinct minority of all teachers (which it probably is). We did, however, like your transparently false description of the rally as the spontaneous outpouring of a grassroots movement, even though it received half its roughly $100k funding from the teacher unions and another quarter from donations by you and Kozol (we will reimburse you for those expenses, just like before).
We liked your speech, particularly the part about how education policy should be made by educators, not by policymakers. Of course by that reasoning energy policy should be made by energy-producers, not policymakers and tax policy should be made by accountants and lawyers. Again, these flimsy and shallow slogans/arguments are doing a great job of undermining the teacher union cause.
We were also pleased with Kozol’s lecture. He’s still rehashing the same stories he acquired from spending a few weeks with poor kids several decades ago, but his slightly slurred and irate delivery gives it just the right touch of insanity. Even Kevin Carey had to comment that Kozol is “edging into deranged preacher territory.” Excellent work!
Still, the small crowd was very discouraging. We know that you couldn’t control the fact that there was a debt crisis going on at the same time, but we are worried about your success at convincing opinion and policy leaders of how representative and unreasonable the Army of Angry Teachers really is.
–The Pentaverate
The Pentaverate —
I appreciate your concerns. It is true that we only managed to get CNN and the HuffPo to cover our rally while the rest of the media ignored us. But we did get Matt Damon to speak at the event. He’s always so eloquent. I’ve attached a video of his speech below.
We will redouble our efforts and I assure you that by the time I am done with this Army of Angry Teachers, they will have thoroughly discredited the teacher unions.
Jay and Greg have been carrying on an important discussion concerning the Gates Foundation and education reform. I wanted to add a few thoughts.
Rick Hess and others have noted the “philanthropist as royalty” phenomenon in the past. Any philanthropist runs the danger of only hearing what they want to hear from their supplicants, and Gates as the largest private foundation runs the biggest risk. The criticism of the Gates Foundation I had seen in the past emanated from the K-12 reactionary fever swamp, hardly qualifying as constructive.
The challenge faced by philanthropists: how do you challenge your own assumptions and evaluate your own efforts honestly? Do you hire formidable Devil’s advocates to level their most skeptical case against your efforts?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, just that if I were Bill Gates I would be terrified of everyone telling me how right my thinking is because they want my money. This is however the best sort of problem to have…
Jay’s central critique of the Gates Foundation strategy seems to be that they have put too much faith in a centralized command and control strategy. They would be wise to entertain this thought. If command and control alone were the solution, then we wouldn’t have education problems-district, state and federal governance have all failed to prevent widespread academic failure for decades.
The Gates strategy does however embrace decentralization. Over the years they have supported charter schools, and fiercely opposed the worst one-size fits all policy of all: salary schedules and automatic/irrevocable tenure. Riley’s WSJ article makes clear that Gates understands the benefits of private school choice, but that he falls for the Jay Mathews fallacy of thinking it is just too politically difficult.
Sigh…perhaps next year Greg can make a dinner bet with Bill.
Gates is also the primary backer of Khan Academy. This new article on Sal Khan in Wired magazine makes clear that Khan understands the danger of being swallowed by school systems and that he is not going to allow it to happen. Khan academy is both radically decentralized and is in the early stages of being used by people within the centralized school system to improve outcomes.
Whatever the mistakes to date, the Gates Foundation has in my mind has succeeded in serving as a counter-weight to the NEA, mostly through funding the efforts of a myriad network of reform organizations collectively known as the Cool Kids. Today, there is a struggle for power going on within the Democratic Party over K-12 policy and the Gates Foundation deserves some credit in my mind for supporting the ideas behind the “Democrat Spring” on education policy. This spring is following more of the Syrian than the Egyptian model thus far, but it is happening, and it is very important.
Does that mean that they are the “good guys” and Jay should lay off of them? Of course not-reasoned critiques of large philanthropists are in short supply for all of the factors cited above. Jason Riley wished that Gates were bolder in embracing decentralization reforms, but noted that in the end that it was the Gates rather than the Riley Foundation. This is absolutely true, but it doesn’t make the royalty problem go away, and leaves a continuous question of how the emperor gets feedback on his new clothes.
I don’t agree with the Cool Kids about everything. The next time I hear someone ask a question about having Common Core replace NAEP (the very pinnacle of naive folly) for instance I may pull out entire tufts of my graying, thinning hair in utter exasperation. Reformers of all stripes need to be on guard against the ship-wheel conceit, which is to imagine that if only my strong hands steered the ship, we’d sail through the rocky shoals of ed reform without a hitch.
The East Germans ran a much better economy than the North Koreans, much to the benefit of Germans and to the detriment of Koreans. This is real and important in human terms- I do not make this point glibly. I never heard about an East German famine decimating the population, but food shortages have even soldiers starving to death in North Korea (pity the women and children). Better quality management is good and desirable, but…it will only take you so far. Today, Chinese apparatchiks are noisily crediting themselves for the tremendous economic progress in China without the slightest hint of irony. Without the market forces Deng introduced and with more apparatchiks, China would revert back to a starving backwater. With fewer apparatchiks, her progress would almost certainly accelerate.
As Sara Mead correctly noted in this guest post at Eduwonk, today’s education debate largely involves a mixture of technocratic and market-based reforms (neo-liberals) on one side and a group of reactionaries lacking realistic solutions on the other. A third of our 4th graders can’t read and have been shoved into the dropout pipeline. We need both technocratic and market based reforms, and we need stronger reforms of both sorts than those fielded to date.
Jay’s critique concerns the right mix of reforms within the bounds of the neo-liberal consensus. This of course is a matter of debate, and debate is the path to deeper understanding. The sheer size of the Gates Foundation has the potential to stifle such debate as it relates to their efforts, even passively, and reformers should recognize the danger in allowing it to do so. This isn’t about them so much as it is about us.
It must feel empowering for teachers upset by current developments to hold big rallies with thousands of union members chanting slogans. They must finally feel like their voice is being heard, as Diane Ravitch, Valerie Strauss, and the new breed of teacher union advocates make their case.
While this may all feel like success to the teacher unions, I suspect that it is actually breeding failure. The unions succeed by intimidating politicians with their raw power while convincing the public that teacher unions love their children almost as much as the parents do. Maintaining this double-game is essential because it disarms parents, media elites, and others who might otherwise mobilize against teacher unions and apply their own direct pressure to politicians.
As long as teacher unions act like Mary Poppins to parents, media elites, and others, the general public is willing to suspend their normal inclination to desire choice and competition in the goods and services they consume. Mary Poppins is an extension of the family and we don’t apply market principles to our family. The family is a refuge from the rough and tumble of the market which is instead governed by a sense of mutual obligations and affection. Where the family ends, the market begins and people think the market needs choice and competition to stay healthy.
But when the public face of the teacher unions is the Army of Angry Teachers, they no longer seem like Mary Poppins and begin to look a lot more like longshoremen beating their opponents with metal pipes. Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss may provide psychological comfort to angry teachers (some of whom seem so irate that they may need professional psychological help to manage their anger), but it undermines the double-game that is at the heart of the teacher union strategy.
Giant mobs of yelling protesters and blogs filled with tirades may increase the intimidation politicians feel, but it seriously undermines the image of teachers as an extension of our family. And as that Mary Poppins image is significantly eroded, media elites and the general public will increasingly think of education as something in the marketplace that requires choice and competition. And this erosion is extremely hard for teacher unions to reverse.
What feels like success to angry teachers is actually sowing the seeds of failure for the teacher union.
Fans of JPGB know that we do love us some high-tech transformation of schooling around here. Matt has been on this beat for a long time, and hardly a week goes by that he doesn’t update us on the latest victory of “the cool kids” over “edu-reactionaries” in the reinvention of the school. But he doesn’t own that turf entirely; I made this the theme of my contribution to Freedom and School Choice(as did Matt, of course).
The problem is that Moe insists high-tech transformation of schooling, and the destruction of union control it entails, is absolutely, positively a separate phenomenon from the wave of school reform victories this year:
This has been a horrible year for teachers unions…But the unions’ hegemony is not going to end soon. All of their big political losses have come at the hands of oversized Republican majorities. Eventually Democrats will regain control, and many of the recent reforms may be undone. The financial crisis will pass, too, taking pressure off states and giving Republicans less political cover…
Over the long haul, however, the unions are in grave trouble—for reasons that have little to do with the tribulations of this year…The first is that they are losing their grip on the Democratic base…Then there’s a crucial dynamic outside of politics: the revolution in information technology.
Really? The victories of 2011 – “the year of school choice” – aren’t in the same category with the long-term path to oblivion the unions are on? On the contrary, 2011 is the year of school choice precisely because it has become obvious that the unions are on track for oblivion, for the reasons Moe identifies.
Moe’s argument relies on the assumption that when Republicans are in power, they always make dramatic and innovative school reform policies their #1 priority.
Sorry . . . lost my train of thought I was laughing so hard . . . let me pick myself up off the floor . . . there, now where was I? Oh, yes.
The GOP hasn’t touched real school reforms with a hundred-foot pole in years. Why did it all of a sudden embrace real reform this year?
Could it be because…
…the unions are losing their grip on the Democratic base, meaning squishy Republicans don’t have to worry about being demonized as right-wing loonies simply for embracing real reform, and…
…the revolution in information technology has made it obvious to MSM and other key cultural gatekeepers that the unions are the reactionaries, once again reassuring squishy Republicans they won’t be demonized for embracing real reform?
Obviously the financial crisis was also a factor here, as Moe rightly points out. But is that really an immediate-term phenomenon, bound to disappear next week? What really counts is whether the nation feels so rich it can afford to ignore ballooning school costs. Technically the recession ended two years ago and we’ve been in “recovery” for two years. How’s that feeling? Do we feel rich and luxurious again? Are we on track to restore a widespread national sense of inevitable prosperity by 2012? By 2014? By 2020?
Bottom line, the unions losing Democratic support and taking their stand in opposition to entrepreneurial change was the crucial, indispensable precondition for this year’s wave of school reform success.
Oh, and guess what? Sustaining those policies, especially school choice, will be the only way this wave of advancing technology will produce the results Moe is expecting. Only school choice can prevent the blob from neutralizing any reform you throw at it. If the techno-innovators turn their back on choice and competition, they’ll be dead meat. (For more on that topic, see the aforementioned chapter by your humble servant in Freedom and School Choice.)
Jennifer Dounay Zinth, a senior policy analyst at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, which has been tracking the legislation closely, said the protracted interest in revamping the teaching profession amounts to a “sea change.”
“It’s hard to get your arms around—not just the number of bills being enacted but the breadth and depth of changes being made,” she said.
Note that while Red states are in the lead, even deep Blue states like Illinois have undertaken reform as well.
Ms. Weingarten, who has long opposed the cuts — both budgetary and rhetorical — made to teachers, told her audience that the current debate on education “has been hijacked by a group of self-styled reformers” from “on high” who want to blame educators’ benefits and job security for states’ notorious budget problems. Calling the union gathering “an affirmation,” she countered that change to the education system should instead come through greater community support for teachers themselves and recognition for the commitment to children they already demonstrate.
“Hijacked from self-styled reformers from on high”
…oh sorry…
…just savoring the moment.
We are still in what I view as the early stages of divorcing ourselves from the entirely indefensible practice of treating teachers like interchangeable widgets. We have a great deal to learn, and may need to develop a reliable system of third-party academic assessment as we seek to attach greater consequences to student learning gains if techniques like erasure analysis ultimately fall short. Rather than an argument for the status-quo, this is all the more reason to get on with it.
The debate hasn’t been hijacked Randi, it’s been won fair and square.
Choice by itself won’t lift U.S. K-12 education to where it needs to be…But choice is essential to driving reform because it erodes the union-dominated monopoly that assigns children to schools based on where they live. Unions defend the monopoly to protect jobs for their members, but education should above all serve students and the larger goal of a society in which everyone has an opportunity to prosper.
I can only think of one reason for this move, the Obama people are going into over drive to get as much into Obama’s coffers as possible, and thus asked for this explicitly. These are action of a very desperate campaign…on both sides. The Obama administration obviously is not raising enough money; the NEA is losing friends on the Democrat side of the aisle (see Cuomo).
Geraghty also points to this comment on Daily Kos:
I am a building rep for the NEA. I actually spoke personally with about 2/3 of my unionized teachers when the early endorsement – the first such in NEA history – was proposed. Out of the more than 80 teachers with whom I spoke only one supported the early endorsement. Many did not like giving up what little leverage the union had with the administration.
The comment just gets better from there – go read the whole thing. And there’s more where that came from!
In resopnse to these concerns, a team of spokespeople for the NEA released the following joint statement:
CONSTABLE: O, hell!
ORLÉANS: O Lord, the day is lost! All is lost!
DAUPHIN: Dear God! All is lost, all! Regret and everlasting shame sit on our helmets, mocking us.
[A brief blast of battle noises]
What stinking luck! Do not run away.
CONSTABLE: Our men have all broken ranks.
DAUPHIN: O, everlasting shame! Let’s fall on our swords. Are these the wretches that we threw dice for?
ORLÉANS: Is this the king we offered to ransom?
BOURBON: Shame, eternal shame, and nothing but shame! Let us die honorably. Back into the fray once again! He who will not follow me now, let him depart and stand in the doorway like a pimp, cap in hand, while some slave, no nobler than my dog, violates his daughter.
CONSTABLE: Maybe we can benefit from the same chaos that has defeated us. Let’s go offer up our lives en masse.
The National Center for Education Policy, having put out a “review” whose central thesis was refuted in its own appendix, have decided to try again this time by “reviewing” a powerpoint presentation that Governor Bush made in Michigan. Oh well, I guess it is time to lop off another limb.
Btw, I am not making this business up about them reviewing a powerpoint they didn’t see presented. Perhaps Governor Bush should make sure to spell-check his emails, because they may be up next for a “review.”
Madhabi Chatterji to very likely be the cause for much or most of the NAEP gains—but not in the positive learning sense that Mr. Bush is arguing. Chatterji demonstrates that by screening for low reading scores and then holding these students back a year, the state is able to initially exclude low-scoring students from the fourth-grade NAEP. Then, once these students are promoted to the next grade, the state is able to give the fourth-grade test to a group of students who would otherwise be fifth-graders. That is, these students have another year of learning under their belts. Further, these retained students are disproportionately from minority groups, meaning that the retention policy simultaneously falsely inflates overall scores while creating a misleading impression that the achievement gap is closing.
Ooooops…I still have the Appendix from the previous “review”:
If retention is causing “much or most” of the improvement in 4th grade scores, why have 3rd grade scores improved so much? Why did reading scores improve by a grade level worth of progress before the retention policy went into effect? Why have scores continued to climb even as retentions have substantially declined?
NEPC response:
The fact that Mathis doesn’t address any of this, but simply reasserts the flawed conclusion (the new reviewer at least attributes it to Chatterji rather than claiming it as his own this time- but should credit Haney instead continuing to rip him off) as valid tells you what you need to know about these guys. They are out to muddy the water if they can, not to engage in a serious debate.
It seems painfully obvious that the reviewer neither watched Governor Bush’s presentation in Michigan, nor even a video of it. Much of the review reads like an ed-school graduate student trying to get their comprehensive exams past a committee including David Berliner and Gene Glass: I cited you! I cited you! The poor chap seems to think that things these guys wrote in the past about programs in other states serves as proof positive about programs in Florida (they don’t) and that a consensus among left wing ed school profs constitutes evidence (it doesn’t).
“Unfortunately, if research is our guide, the effect of the Florida reforms will likely prove to be a more inequitable and inadequate educational system,” Mathis wrote. Mathis should have said “Unfortunately, if the nonsense that passes for ‘research’ in my ideological tribe is our guide, the effect of the Florida reforms will likely prove to be a more inequitable and inadequate educational system.”
That’s an awfully tart statement. You were just thinking “Can he back that up with evidence?” Glad you asked!
It just so happens that I have been digging into the NAEP data to look at achievement gap trends by state. I combined all four major NAEP exams (4th grade reading, 4th grade math, 8th grade reading, 8th grade math) for the entire period that all 50 states participated (2003-2009). Anyone can go and look these numbers up for themselves, and here is a little sneak peek:
If you guessed that Florida made more progress than any other state in narrowing the Black-White achievement gap on the combined NAEP exams, give yourself a gold star. If you don’t believe it, go look the numbers up for yourself. White students made gains, but Black students made bigger gains. This is really the only good way to narrow an achievement gap, and it is the way it happened in Florida. The same is true of the Hispanic-White gap- Florida led the nation, and bettered the national average by a factor of almost six. Florida achieved the second largest narrowing in the gap between poor and non-poor students, and between children with disabilities and without them.
However, following the example of Arthur, King of the Britons, we’ll call it a draw.
UPDATE Commentor Chan S detected a computational error in the Black-White achievement gap which underestimated Florida’s progress in reducing the gap. After double checking the figures, I’ve included a corrected chart.
The struggle in Oregon is a microcosm of a greater battle going on within the Democratic Party between the Waiting for “Superman” liberals and teacher unions. Progressives can either have education progress or a lockstep alliance with education reactionaries, but they cannot have both. The opening of the article makes this point well:
Last week, Gov. John Kitzhaber and his allies rammed a dozen education bills through roadblocks erected by the 48,000-member Oregon Education Association.
A coalition of Kitzhaber, House Republicans, a few Democrats willing to buck the teachers’ union, and newly emboldened interest groups handed the OEA its biggest policy setbacks in years.
“There is a strong desire for real movement forward on education, and people were willing to break a few eggs to get there,” says Rep. Chris Garrett (D-Lake Oswego), one of three Democrats who voted “yes” on HB 2301, a controversial online charter-school bill that catalyzed the breakthrough.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Jay P. Greene's Blog 