Joe Williams' Blog
September 14, 2007
Special Guest Charles Barone: Loopholes, Stalemates, and Common Ground
(DFER Note: We obviously don't know what goes on behind closed doors in Congressional committees and such, which made trying to read the action on NCLB reauthorization the last few weeks somewhat puzzling at times. For some additional perspective and context on what is happening in Washington, we asked Charles Barone, a former staffer with the House Education and Labor Committee and a longtime aide to Rep. George Miller (pictured here) to offer his thoughts. Barrone played a key role in the work leading up to the original passage of NCLB in 2001.)
Secretary Margaret Spellings and Congressman George Miller, Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee will, as they say in Texas, "visit" on Monday to dedicate the new Department of Education building in the name of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who pioneered the federal approach to education that Miller and Spellings supercharged in 2001.
Miller and Spellings have a long and, at least sometimes, productive history.
They worked closely together on NCLB, beginning in Austin in late 2000 before Bush even took office, while Warren Christopher and James Baker were still duking it out in Florida. The result was the most significant change in federal education policy since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was launched under Johnson in the 1960s.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with their respective views, it is undeniable that both have a sincere interest in quality public education, coupled with finely honed political skills and an information-driven approach to policy-making.
Continue reading "Special Guest Charles Barone: Loopholes, Stalemates, and Common Ground"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 14, 2007 5:19 PM
EXTRA: Reg Weaver Supports Merit Pay!
But only if the president and members of Congress also are subject to pay for performance.
Sounds like there is room for a deal here!
In all honesty, Weaver's caustic comments aside, he doesn't seem like someone who is trying to reach any sort of consensus with Rep. George Miller and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sounds like "It's the NEA way or the highway." Throw People for the American Way into the mix and you could have a kick-butt tongue-twister, no?
UPDATE: One DFER friend emails: "I always thought those guys were paid for performance. It's called election day."
UPDATE II: Free advice to members of Congress on this one: Take Weaver's pay for performance offer, but insist on tenure, the right to remove unflattering letters from the file, and a better dental plan. And if you have to cave, cave on the letters in the file issue. That's what shredders are for anyway.
UPDATE III: Mike Antonucci has a much funnier take on Reg Weaver's Iowa speech. Take the standardized test he created on his blog.
Posted by Joe Williams on September 14, 2007 10:03 AM
Thomas Sobol: Fear Not The Gadfly
As a newspaper reporter, I spent a shocking amount of time in my career attending school board meetings around the country. I began to appreciate the fact that no matter where you were, you almost always had certain "type" characters in the room:
The guys in expensive suits representing (insert your favorite business that is making a ton of cash off their contract with the school district), the journalism students from the local university who were sent there by their professors to watch how edu-political sausage was made, the acting principal at a school who was hoping the closed-session would result in him/her being named "permanent" principal, the teachers unions reps who were always the first ones to arrive and the last ones to leave, the bureaucrats who had to sit through all these meetings even if they never were called on to contribute anything, the parents of the kids who were going to play the Star Spangled Banner on their clarinets to start the meeting, and the school board members who would gush and pat themselves on the back for running school systems where cute kids like that could learn music, etc.
But no matter where you go, you also find that one dude who gets up every year and rips the school board a new one because their spending is increasing too fast, they aren't getting multiple bids from vendors, they aren't reading the spreadsheets, etc. It is like clockwork every year: the budget comes out, and these guys within a day or two have digested the whole thing and can tell you in great detail how screwed up it is.
Former New York Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol, discussing his time as superintendent of the Scarsdale Schools, remembered one such gadfly in what I found was a very endearing tale retold in a Teachers College publication.
If you too, have routinely found yourself trying to stay awake at 3 a.m. during school budget deliberations, you'll get a kick out of the anecdote, after the jump.
Continue reading "Thomas Sobol: Fear Not The Gadfly"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 14, 2007 9:13 AM
September 11, 2007
Rep. George Miller: The CTA Is Lying And They Know It
Has the National Education Association overplayed its hand on the NCLB reauthorization?
First there was the testy exchange at yesterday's NCLB hearing where Congressman George Miller pretty much accused the NEA of acting in bad faith for opposing some teacher pay language which the union had previously approved. (The AFT seems to have covered its tracks on that front - welcome back Michele!)
Now Miller is lashing back at the California Teachers Association for spreading bad information in its "war" against him and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We'll see if making the chairman declare "liar liar, pants on fire," is a winning strategy for Team Weaver.
Read an extended excerpt from the statement (courtesy of David Hoff's NCLB blog) after the jump.
Continue reading "Rep. George Miller: The CTA Is Lying And They Know It"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 11, 2007 2:43 PM
Now NCLB Causes Strokes Too?
I was going to post yesterday on the front pager in New York's Hometown Newspaper about the girl who suffered a stroke at a school in Queens but sat there - literally, for more than an hour - because there was some edict at the school that deans are banned from dialing 9-1-1.
I was going to ask dear readers to decide who was worse: the jackass well-intentioned person who came up with the rule, or the jackasses well-intentioned people who followed it?
But then, today, the story took on a whole new twist. While I'm sitting in an Amtrak lounge, I see on CNN that the teachers union in New York is now blaming the whole thing on NCLB. (The argument is that the school didn't want to look bad on paper, so it discouraged police calls that would increase crime stats for the school.)
OK, I suppose that was predictable.
But couldn't it work the other way too?
Continue reading "Now NCLB Causes Strokes Too?"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 11, 2007 12:37 PM
September 10, 2007
NCLB Reauthorization Now A "War"
That's the word a California Teachers Association guy used when he was talking to Education Week's David Hoff today at the House Education and Labor Committee hearing on NCLB.
Strangely enough, after practically twisting himself into a knot to try to appease the NEA and AFT (and coming up with compromise language which significantly takes the teeth out of the law in parts) Congressman George Miller appears to be the target, along with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The NEA, in particular, was out in full-force at the hearing. Union members were flown in from all over the place (I met one from Hawaii even) and packed the hearing room and overflow room upstairs. The price of admission to the hearing, for much of the day, appeared to be one red sticker which said something about how a child is more than a test. Seriously, if you had a sticker, you got to jump the line to get in.
Both Miller and Pelosi are from California, which means they are getting completely dumped on by the CTA. Alexander Russo has more on that here.
Watching the union lobbying operation in full force is one of the most amazing sights. They have all these handlers and they are very good at what they do.
Will Miller and Pelosi dig in their heels or cave?
If you'd like to help encourage the former, drop me a line.
Posted by Joe Williams on September 10, 2007 10:35 PM
When Did Reg Weaver Lose the Farm Workers?
(OK, so I confess that I have no idea whether Reg Weaver actually HAD the Farm Workers, though there is the stuff out there in the Jack Coons article about Cesar Chavez holding back support for vouchers so he wouldn't lose $200,000 per year that was being pumped to him by Al Shanker and the AFT.)
One tidbit from inside today's House Education and Labor Committee hearing on NCLB reauthorization that I wanted to pass along, especially in light of the recent blogospheric flap over whether or not public charter schools should be named after Cesar Chavez if they don't force teachers to automatically become union members:
Wasn't it odd to see the United Farm Workers, which now operates free tutoring programs for kids in failing schools under NCLB, firmly (relatively speaking, since everyone seems to have come out against the draft revisions, but for different reasons) on the opposite side of the National Education Association? Those right-winger UFW'ers!
Continue reading "When Did Reg Weaver Lose the Farm Workers?"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 10, 2007 9:10 PM
