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yurbud

(39,405 posts)
Sat Oct 25, 2014, 06:23 PM Oct 2014

The Big Problem With Time's Teacher-Bashing Cover Story

Wall Street has had their eye on the hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that go to public education for a couple of decades. They think it rightly belongs in their pockets. So they have campaigned relentlessly to demonize teachers and reduce their control over what goes on in the classroom and replace them with short term recent college grads, who quickly burn out and move on to other professions, standardize testing and curriculum to make it easier for a few companies to monopolize, and replace public schools with privatized, for profit charter schools and education management companies (get our tax dollars but skim some off as profits).

The people pushing this movement don't advocate the same changes for the private schools their own children attend.

This movement has had some major setbacks recently with several states investigating fraud and embezzling at charter chains, and the superintendent of LA schools being fired in part for buying a billion dollars worth of iPads at full retail price, acting as an agent of Apple rather than of the public.
With this movement on the ropes, Time magazine decided that this was a good time to bash teachers again rather than investigate how a few wealthy people bought our federal education policy, and are doing to public education what they did to our manufacturing base and housing market.

If Democrats wanted to turn the election around, they could drop this corrupt education policy that puts Wall Street profits ahead of our kids' futures.

There are a few problems with the story, but the biggest one is pretty familiar: It buries the lead. The Time piece, by Haley Sweetland Edwards, waits until the very end to tell readers that the teacher evaluation scheme central to argument is advancing is highly dubious.

The article is about how a small group of very wealthy Silicon Valley millionaires have decided they're the ones who can fix America's public schools–a "half-dozen tech titans who are making the repair of public education something of a second career." The movement has been joined by people like "CNN anchor turned education activist Campbell Brown."

The piece focuses on a relatively unknown figure named David Welch, an "unassuming father of three" who "clearly prefers a world of concrete facts to taking sides." Welch evidently came up with the novel legal strategy behind the Vergara case in California. A court ruling in June found that tenure provisions serve to protect failing public school teachers, and thus the civil rights of the students forced to endure these conditions have been violated.

Time tells readers that Welch arrived at this simple conclusion by asking a "big-city California superintendent" how to fix the schools. His answer "blew Welch away"...

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/10/24/the-big-problem-with-times-teacher-bashing-cover-story/
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The Big Problem With Time's Teacher-Bashing Cover Story (Original Post) yurbud Oct 2014 OP
K&R.... daleanime Oct 2014 #1
thanks for your support. yurbud Oct 2014 #2
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