Education Nation: serfdom never felt so fancy

This year NBC's Education Nation made its rounds around the nation, with the stated goal of creating an "open conversation" about results-oriented teaching reforms. I was invited to attend one of the "Teacher Town Halls" which I at first thought to be quite the honor. Little did I know what I had in store.

The event was hosted at a swanky downtown location, where Italian sparkling water bottles, and waiters carried around hors d'oeuvres with white gloves were served. I was appropriately dressed in my tie and slacks, but noticed I was not adequately technologically tethered to an iphone. Jazz music played imperceptibly in the background, just as Miles, Louis, and Bird would have wanted. After mingling and more inspection I noticed, oh my god, these people are my age! What the hell is going on? Half of the people I was introduced to asked me
"Oh, you're at ________ school! Are you TFA (Teach For America)too?"
"(nervous laugh)No, no, I went to school"
End of conversation. Whoops!



As a percentage young, urban, well dressed teachers are more likely to be involved in charters, Teach For America, or be reform minded, than their middle aged and older companions. There is definitely a generational gap between teachers, and I was worried that this crowd had been vetted carefully chosen with an agenda in mind. I was asked to go with my principal. Does that mean I'm one of them, a TFA at heart, an anti-union, data-driven bot? For the time, I preferred to live in the fantasy that I was there on my laurels, and was chosen for my quiet quality and confidence.

We were then led to the lecture hall town hall area where we were arranged in nice rows. I sat next to one of my TFA co-workers with whom I often clash on education policy, but on a personal level have a fine relationship. He was next to his obnoxiously GQ TFA co-worker that oozed dislike for me. I don't quite understand why.

Looking around the room, I noticed the sponsors:
American Airlines 
BlackBerry
Marvell
Members Project American Express (what teacher has AmEx?)
Microsoft
Raytheon (they build bombs!)
Scholastic
University of Phoenix (Really?)
W.K. Kellog Foundation

Huh? What do most of these have to do with education. Then I noticed:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation 

I wrote a post about a year ago on the Gates and Broad foundations, and their love of corporate modeled test taking as reform for schools. The Gates foundation alone has sunk billions into educational research to define what makes a good teacher. They are meddlers who have never taught a day in their life, but have the money to take a front seat in the discussion.

Unfortunately, millionaires and billionaires have been able to take advantage of the public school system through the tax code. The New Markets Tax Credit allows:

businesses and real estate projects located in low-income communities. The NMTC Program attracts investment capital to low-income communities by permitting individual and corporate investors to receive a tax credit against their Federal income tax return in exchange for making equity investments in specialized financial institutions called Community Development Entities (CDEs). The credit totals 39 percent of the original investment amount and is claimed over a period of seven years. Cite

Low income communities? Read: Poor, minority-majority, working class struggling schools where you can invest in a charter to spur competition and innovation! Competition works for the banking industry, of course it can do the same for education! In 2011, $573 million was invested in education facilities. Read about it here and here. Public schools have to go through a public bond process to get funding to purchase new science classrooms, whereas a tax evading philanthropist and bequeath it to a charter. Many of those philanthropists believe in fair competition, but the competition is never fair when one side gets to pick their team.

So, this event is sponsored by what Dianna Ravitch calls the "Billionaire Boys Club" I was still hoping for the best. As the talks started, it became very clear that those that were up on stage were carefully chosen, and unrepresentative of those who have a stake in education.

The first group of speakers who were interviewed on stage had a first (or second?) year charter school TFA teacher from our neighborhood competition, who spoke very idiotically about nothing. Every answer he gave was off topic and had no depth. My co-worker that sat next to me said he went through the program with the TFA on stage, and that the speaker was utterly unremarkable in every way. I later crossed path with the TFA again at a community town hall where the debate was about, and is still brewing, putting the newly confirmed HS charter in our building. The TFA had yelled and first pumped from the back of the room, yelling "we don't have time," responding to our school's concerns that more time was needed to study ours, and other possible locations for their charter. What a great, experienced role model to help drive education policy discussion...

As the night wore on, I accepted that I was wallpaper, and prop in larger production, in which I had no voice. The list of speakers:
•    Maria Bartiromo: Anchor of CNBC's "Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo" and Anchor and Managing Editor of "Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo"
•    Michael Bloomberg: Mayor, City of New York
•    Cory Booker: Mayor, City of Newark, New Jersey
•    Phil Bredesen: Governor, State of Tennessee
•    Steven Brill: co-founder of Journalism Online, CourtTV and American Lawyer magazine and author of "The Rubber Room" In The New Yorker
•    Tom Brokaw: NBC News Special Correspondent
•    Geoffrey Canada: CEO & President of Harlem Children's Zone Project
•    David Coleman: Founder & CEO, Student Achievement Partners; Contributing Author of the Common Core Standards
•    Ann Curry: News Anchor, "Today" and Anchor, "Dateline NBC"
•    Arne Duncan: US Secretary of Education
•    Byron Garrett: CEO of the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA)
•    Allan Golston, President, US Program, The Gates Foundation
•    Jennifer M. Granholm: Governor, State of Michigan
•    David Gregory: Moderator, "Meet the Press"
•    Reed Hastings: Founder & CEO of Netflix
•    Lester Holt: Anchor, "NBC Nightly News," Weekend Edition and Co-Host, "Today"  Weekend Edition
•    Walter Isaacson: President & CEO of the Aspen Institute
•    Joel Klein: Chancellor of New York City Schools
•    Wendy Kopp: CEO and Founder of Teach for America
•    John Legend: Musician; Founder of the Show Me Campaign
•    Jack Markell: Governor, State of Delaware
•    Gregory McGinity: Managing Director of Policy, The Broad Education Foundation
•    Andrea Mitchell: NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and Host, "Andrea Mitchell Reports"
•    Janet Murguia: President & CEO of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR)
•    Michael Nutter: Mayor, City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
•    Bill Pepicello, Ph.D.: President of University of Phoenix
•    Sally Ride: First Female Astronaut; Vice-chair of Change the Equation
•    Michelle Rhee: Chancellor, District of Columbia Public School System of Washington,D.C.
•    Edward Rust: Chairman & CEO of State Farm Insurance Companies
•    Gwen Samuel, CT delegate to Mom Congress
•    Barry Schuler: Former CEO of AOL
•    Sterling Speirn: CEO, Kellogg Foundation
•    Margaret Spellings: Former US Secretary of Education
•    Antonio Villaraigosa: Mayor, City of Los Angeles, California
•    Randi Weingarten: President of American Federation of Teachers (AFT-CLO)
•    Brian Williams: Anchor and Managing Editor "NBC Nightly News"

What do you notice? I see politicians, corporate executives, philanthropist, media, and education policy organizations. Those people are there to advance whatever agenda they have. What don't you see? Teachers. Not even state or national Teacher of the Year. Two parent groups, but no local groups. One of the two large, but smaller of the two, teacher unions.  Where were the people who have a stake in this? Where were the teachers? In the audience, listening participating.

The questions posed to the audience were carefully written to elicit certain reposes. Questions were written based on "their (Gates) facts that we're going to be referring to often to help along our conversation." This immediately placed any of the teachers responding into starting at a defense, and having to disprove the "facts" before giving any of their own "facts." Other ways in which we participated were lame and simple, eliciting jeers, groans, and giggles from the audience. We were given clickers to vote on one multiple choice question. For example "Is technology improving your discussion?" Hmm, guess how we voted? After the vote, the moderator would turn the discussion over to the panel on stage. I participated with my thumb!

The times that real teachers were brought on stage, it was usually half TFA teachers (.2% of all teachers). The questions posed were simplistic, not in depth, and gave no greater understanding of topics impacting teachers. It was news to NBC that teachers wanted more collaboration time.

All of this ridiculousness begs the question, who was this event for? Education Nation states its mission is

 NBC News' initiative to engage the country in a solutions-focused conversation about the state of education in America.

Obviously, it was not for teachers. Such low level guided discussion is below our pay grade. The "leaders" on stage talked with each other, and with the cameras, which were broadcasting to a tiny audience. It was a giant rah rah parade for those looking to change education, in ways I believe are for the worse. I walked out of the event feeling that Education Nation is a dangerous propaganda disseminator, and I was used.

Harvest my demesne serf! Once you're done you may attend to your furlong.

Afterwards, my principal decided to take me out for some late night tacos and beer. That made me feel better.