(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.
1 Comment | 
teacher union | Tagged: Eric Cartman, Leo Casey, 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
Leave a Comment » | blogging | Tagged: Carnival of Education, Joanne Jacobs | Permalink
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)
9 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: D.C. vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Greg has an excellent piece today in Pajamas Media: “The Empty Promises on School Vouchers”
The money quote: “If evidence were going to decide the voucher debate, there wouldn’t be a debate any more. And in fact, we were repeatedly promised that evidence would decide the debate. The president, his education secretary, the head of the Senate subcommittee overseeing the program, and a host of others all promised that they would evaluate vouchers guided solely by evidence… The rest of the country is watching. If the politicians in Congress prove that they can get away with destroying the lives of 1,700 children while suppressing vital information showing that the program works, all in order to please their home-state unions, that sends a message to fifty statehouses. Conversely, if the word gets out about what’s happening and the program is restored, that sends the opposite message.”
And let’s be clear — “suppressing vital information” does not require that Arne Duncan knew of the positive results and delayed release. We know that the information was suppressed because 1) others in the Department of Ed, even if not Duncan, certainly knew of these results while Congress was debating killing the program and never bothered to alert anyone; 2) the study was released on a Friday afternoon when it would receive as little attention as possible — and that is something for which Duncan is clearly responsible; and 3) Duncan immediately applied a false negative spin and expressed his desire to end the program despite earlier commitments to be guided by evidence and not predispositions or ideology.
3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: D.C. vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Old Illinois hands Durbin, Duncan and Obama loom large in the battle over reauthorization of the DC Opportunity Scholarship program. Today, the Chicago Tribune weighs in an editorial named Do What’s Best for Kids:
Durbin told us he’s “not ruling out supporting this” voucher program. He’ll await further evidence at hearings to be chaired by Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.)
Sen. Durbin, Secretary Duncan, the evidence is piling up on your desks. The burden of proof is squarely on you to prove why, after so few years, we should stop—and stop evaluating—a program that is showing certifiable prospects of changing the futures of disadvantaged kids. You gentlemen know the embarrassing truth of what we’ve said previously: Opponents of school vouchers don’t want to snuff the life out of this program because they think it’s failing, but because they fear it’s working.
This is an excellent opportunity for both of you to acknowledge that you’ve been too hasty—and that if vouchers do work, the Obama administration will want to expand them, not quash them. As the now-president put it, we need to do what’s best for kids.
4 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: Arne Duncan, Chicago Tribune, Dick Durbin | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
It’s as if the writers of Lost have been reading this blog. They seem aware that there are problems with time travel and bringing people back from the dead without clearly defined rules to govern those exceptional plot devices. Lost has not fully resolved these concerns but the show has clearly acknowledged the difficulties. Perhaps for TV shows confession will bring absolution.
Two episodes ago (I know I skipped posting on Lost last week) in “Whatever Happened, Happened” Hurley and Miles articulate for us the paradoxes involved with time travel. Hurley stares at his hand expecting it to disappear like in Back to the Future.
And in the most recent episode, “Dead is Dead,” they directly discuss how strange it is to have people come back from the dead. Ben alternatively tells John that he predicted John would be resurrected and tells Sun that he had never seen the Island do something like that and that it scared the living hell out of him. John also admits to Sun that the idea of someone coming back from the dead is strange.
I suspect that the last two episode titles provide the Lost rules on time travel and resurrection. Whatever happened, happened tells us that time cannot be changed. And dead is dead tells us that people cannot come back from the dead. I know that Locke appears to have come back from the dead, but I suspect that he is no longer Locke. His emphatic statement to Sun that he is still the same person seemed strange and unnecessary, so perhaps he is lying. Perhaps he is not the same person, but an incarnation of the smoke monster or whatever supernatural force inhabits the island.
That is one other thing that Lost has made clear: there is a supernatural power on that Island that has a will of its own. Greg correctly described this weeks ago and correctly predicted that the central questions will become: 1) what is the will of this supernatural force? and 2) is what that force wants good or bad?
There is still ambiguity about the answers to both questions, but I’ll offer my predicted answers. I suspect that the Island may actually be evil. This may be the big twist of the show. The Island may be some Egyptian god that is intent on preserving itself and then eventually destroying the world. When the Island judges it doesn’t appear to punish evil and reward good. It lets Ben go despite his atrocities. It destroys Eko despite his apparent innocence. Its leaders, Charles and Ben, have been ruthless. As Charlotte said, “This place is death.” It, the Island, is evil and will eventually bring death to the whole world.
Ben and Charles may be struggling to be the Island’s representative, but there is a third group out there that is seeking to destroy the Island. They are the good people because only by destroying the Island will the rest of the world be saved.
3 Comments | Lost | Tagged: Lost | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner
Rotherham’s cynical take looks a little more on target this morning, while my own optimism looks a bit more naive. This morning the Washington Post ran an editorial blasting the United States Department of education for their latest attack on the DC Opportunity Scholarship program.
EDUCATION SECRETARY Arne Duncan has decided not to admit any new students to the D.C. voucher program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. The abrupt decision — made a week after 200 families had been told that their children were being awarded scholarships for the coming fall — comes despite a new study showing some initial good results for students in the program and before the Senate has had a chance to hold promised hearings. For all the talk about putting children first, it’s clear that the special interests that have long opposed vouchers are getting their way.
Secretary Duncan seems to be taking this action simply to create, as the WaPo describes, a presumption of death about the program in advance of next year’s reauthorization effort. The decision, as the WaPo describes, is extremely disruptive to lives of many families:
It’s a choice President Obama made when he enrolled his two children in the elite Sidwell Friends School. It’s a choice Mr. Duncan had when, after looking at the D.C. schools, he ended up buying a house in Arlington, where good schools are assumed. And it’s a choice taken away this week from LaTasha Bennett, a single mother who had planned to start her daughter in the same private school that her son attends and where he is excelling. Her desperation is heartbreaking as she talks about her daughter not getting the same opportunities her son has and of the hardship of having to shuttle between two schools.
Sadly for LaTasha Bennett and her children the above photo is increasingly becoming less of a pointed joke and more of a reality. How can anyone feel anything other than dismay to watch the nation’s first African American President, himself a product of private education, enroll his own daughters in an elite private institution and then rip that same opportunity away from people like LaTasha Bennett?
This action is in stark contrast with everything for which the left allegedly stands. As George Orwell once wrote: Four legs good, two legs better! The Washington Post makes it clear why the administration is behaving so disgracefully:
It’s clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents’ needs, student performance and program effectiveness don’t matter next to the political demands of teachers’ unions. Congressional Democrats who receive ample campaign contributions from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers laid the trap with budget language that placed the program on the block. And now comes Mr. Duncan with the sword.
Duncan and Obama should both be ashamed of themselves.
4 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, DC Oppotunity Scholarship Program, Washington Post | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Jay P. Greene's Blog 