Welcome
No matter what you hear leaders of the Save Our Schools (SOS) march claim, their event in Washington, DC on Saturday was a failure.
Who is SOS? They had a march on Saturday in Washington? Exactly.
Bulletin Board
- Learn what politicians, left-wing economic professors and the liberal media don’t want you to know about economics, all without the confusion and clutter of complicated mathematical equations. Attend the Civitas Institute’s Free Market Academy on Saturday, August 20 from 9 am to 3 pm at the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, NC. (Please note: There will be an hour break for lunch.) Cost is $5.00. Register online at http://www.nccivitas.org/events/ or call 919-834-2099.
- The North Carolina History Project would like educators and homeschool parents to submit lesson plans suitable for middle and high school courses in North Carolina history. Please provide links to NC History Project encyclopedia articles and other primary and secondary source material, if possible. Go to the NC History Project website for further information.
- Visit the "Secret Garden of Research, " also known as JLF’s research newsletter archive.
CommenTerry
Despite months of hype from the "new" Diane Ravitch and cheerleading from the folks at Education Week, not even an appearance by actor Matt Damon was able to generate more than a handful of media mentions of Saturday’s Save Our Schools (SOS) march in Washington, DC. On Sunday, Ravitch tweeted, "With exception of CNN and HuffPost, mainstream media ignored march. Lots of space for recipes, none for teachers, parents." A protester from Michigan also explained via Twitter, "The corporate owned new$ is theater. Propaganda." Of course, the debt-ceiling debate, NFL free agency, and the new Smurfs movie were much easier to understand (and stomach) than the SOS march.
It was easy to recognize the policies opposed by the protesters. According to the Washington Post, many marchers went "elementary" with a "No testing, no testing, 1-2-3" chant. Protesters attacked "failed top-down policies " like No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a bipartisan law that requires states to conduct extensive math and reading testing. While the law was the signature domestic achievement of the Bush presidency, The Huffington Post reported that most directed their ire toward President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. (Obviously, this woman did not get the memo.)
You see, the SOSers voted for Obama hoping that he would scrap the law’s strict accountability requirements and significantly increase federal funding to public schools. Instead, the Obama administration has kept NCLB completely intact and has shown no urgency to work with Congress to pass an alternative law. Even Hollywood’s uberliberal Matt Damon was disappointed. He told a Huffington Post reporter, "I wept when Barack Obama was elected president, but this isn’t the type of history I thought he’d make." This was one reason why mainstream media was reluctant to cover the march — they do not want the public to know that liberals and moderates have added "education" to the growing list of disappointments in the Obama administration.
But there is another problem. The SOSers have boxed themselves in by being miffed at nearly everyone who is in a position to actually change policy. Their enemy list includes the following:
- Democrats (e.g., Obama, Duncan);
- Republicans (e.g., Florida governor Rick Scott, New Jersey governor Chris Christie)
- Philanthropists (e.g., Bill Gates, Walton Family);
- Liberal school reform advocates (e.g., Jonathan Alter, Davis Guggenheim); and
- School reform organizations (e.g., Teach for America, KIPP).
So, who is on their side?
- Teachers unions (e.g., National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers);
- Public school employees (charters excepted);
- Hollywood (e.g., Damon; Jon Stewart);
- Academics (e.g., Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond); and
- Activists (e.g., Deborah Meier, Jonathan Kozol).
The list of supporters does not afford the SOSers much political clout, which does not appear to concern them.
Understanding what education policies they support is more complicated than discerning what (and who) they oppose. According to the group’s press release, SOS leaders champion equitable funding, typically a liberal cause, and curriculum and policies developed for/by local communities, traditionally a conservative cause. How do SOSers explain these incompatible positions? For the most part, they don’t.
In a recent blog post, for example, Diane Ravitch argued that federal government has the responsibility to support equity through funding. Two paragraphs later, she urged the federal government to recognize the constraints of the Constitution (which doesn’t say a word about public education) and federalism. The former necessarily violates the latter. More importantly, it ignores political realities in a way that only a dreamy-eyed academic like Ravitch could.
As Education Week reported, most of the participants in the SOS march, Ravitch included, did not formulate specific policy prescriptions and they did not appear to be interested in doing so. Rather, they spent much of their time making the argument that traditional public school employees deserve our sympathy and more of our money. In the end, the SOS march was not much more than a group therapy session.
Random Thought
On Aug 2, 1776, fifty-six congressional delegates, including North Carolinians William Hooper, John Penn, and Joseph Hewes, formally signed an enlarged copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Facts and Stats
Organizers of the SOS march estimated that 5,000 people attended the event. The Huffington Post put the estimate at 4,000 protesters, and an Education Week reporter said that the crowd was closer to 3,000. These independent estimates are far below the 5,000 to 10,000 marchers that organizers expected to attend.
I suspect that these estimates include tourists taking photos of the White House from the SOS gathering point at the Ellipse and professional protesters that had tangential interests in the march. (For example, see guy with the "Stop ALEC now" sign in this photograph or the socialists in this photograph.) To be fair, it was in the upper 90s in Washington, DC on Saturday, so the heat probably discouraged some from attending. You take that chance when you plan a march on Washington in late July.
Mailbag
I would like to invite all readers to submit announcements, as well as their personal insights, anecdotes, concerns, and observations about the state of education in North Carolina. I will publish selected submissions in future editions of the newsletter. Anonymity will be honored. For additional information or to send a submission, email Terry at [email protected].
Education Acronym of the Week
SOS — Save Our Schools
Quote of the Week
"High-stakes [testing] has got to go! Hey-hey! Ho-ho!"
– Chant heard at the July 30, 2011 SOS March in Washington, DC.
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