This post is more a personal reflection of Diane Ravitch’s recent speaking engagement in my town and my own personal analysis. For a more comprehensive look at that event, look here. I’ll be adding more posts at http://sacteachers.org/ over the next few days. These views are my own opinion, not the union’s, etc.

Diane Ravitch was everything you’d want her to be, but for my money, Linda Darling-Hammond has come to be much more than I expected. What do I mean by this? If you’ve been following the ed “reform” discussion online for a while, as I have, you know a lot of what Diane Ravitch is going to say because we all pass around her bon mots and tweets. She has a great delivery, and I am pleased and proud to have seen her in person, but Darling-Hammond was and has become a more surprising advocate for real education reform. While Ravitch has been hitting the book tour/lecture circuit following writing Death and Life, Hammond has continued her work on education research and policy. Her appearances have largely been at professional conferences where she has discussed her work.  I’ve seen her a couple times over the last few years. Most of her work has been on what does work in education, in places like Singapore and Finland (which she has visited), and programs that work or have worked in California and the U.S. (but were often abandoned)  I’ll give you a hint, it’s not what’s coming out of US DoEd these days.

The first time I saw her was at CABE in March of 2010. I didn’t blog about that for a number of reasons (I received a pink slip from my job that day, and my school was identified for “turn-around” the following week), but she had a well researched, but quietly delivered presentation on performance gaps and teacher preparation (that’s the part that I caught). What stood out for me was a quote she had from Martin Luther King, Jr.

“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question,
‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
And Vanity comes along and asks the question,
‘Is it popular?’
But Conscience asks the question ‘Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,
But he must do it because Conscience tells him  it is right.”

I later cribbed it for a statement to our school board urging them to not bring in Teach for America.

At that time, Dr. Darling-Hammond was doing a lot of work and speaking on issues around school improvement that clearly pointed in the opposite direction than where Arne Duncan was going, but she was not a Diane Ravitch. At this point, I used to point to Darling-Hammond’s work when folks would say, “That’s nice what Diane Ravitch is saying, but what’s she offering as an alternative?” I love that–were abolitionists supposed to offer an “alternative” to slave labor for the South? I think the quote from MLK reflected the tone that Darling-Hammond was taking of quiet but firm, resistance.

Then, last March, I went to ASCD where she received the Dewey Award, and there was another quote that set the tone, “You can’t fire your way to Finland.” She also clearly and strongly stated that those who say poverty does not matter are wrong. It was clear that she was confronting her opposition more directly and strongly.

I’ve noticed in that speech and last night’s that her arguments are even more meticulous and relentless than Ravitch, and that’s saying something.

Here are some tweets from Friday night…

• In the 1970s we were equalizing incomes, desegregating schools, and the achievement gap would have disappeared if we hadn’t changed course. – LDH
• NCLB identifies the highest need schools with the poorest students. This makes them less desirable to teach in, and to attend. – LDH
• We come into these schools, fire the teachers, close it down, and call that accountability. – LDH
• What reformers don’t talk about is that schools with less than 10% poverty score as well as the top performing countries. Those countries do well because they do not allow children to live in poverty.
• We need to keep the American dream alive. We have cut spending in California in a state that has some of the lowest pupil spending.

But it was perhaps this one at the beginning that was the most surprising:

Linda Darling-Hammond (LDH) If this many people can turn out to see Diane Ravitch imagine how much we could change with marching, etc.?

A call to direct action is really kicking it to the next level.

Little wonder that Diane Ravitch started out her comments with the statement about how she had been urging Linda Darling-Hammond to “come out…(she) came out tonight” I for one, am glad she did because the more voices we have in this fight, the better. That morning, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson announced that he is forming an Educator Excellence Task Force, which Darling-Hammond will co-chair, so she now has a position to work from, and even if it’s not in DC, I’m glad she’s in California at least.

Image Credit: Schott Foundation for Public Education training 2010 by Schott Foundation for Public Education, on Flickr

This post is more a personal behind the scenes reflection of Diane Ravitch’s recent speaking engagement in my town. For a more comprehensive look at that event, look here. I’ll be adding more posts at http://sacteachers.org/ over the next few days.

Part of mi vida loca lately has been taking over social media duties for my union local. Complicating my union work further, we are having our contract “opened” on wages and benefits, and there were threats to bring TFA to our district (now quashed, thankfully). Just to make life exciting, I’m doing this while teaching  full-time, and I also suffered through stomach flu, and one of the worst sinus allergy attacks of my life since coming back from Winter Break.

The capstone to the last few weeks, heck to the last month or two, was a visit from education historian and commentator Diane Ravitch,  in an event to which SCTA (my union local) was the main sponsor and organizer. Needless to say, when you are having the Queen of Education Twitterers visiting , you want a robust social media presence. I was happy to supply that . What did I do? I put up Facebook and Twitter notices of the event, and got others (Larry Ferlazzo, other locals, etc.) do share and re-Tweet. For the event, I tweeted, perhaps excessively at points (blame it on the coca-cola I was drinking to get through a long night) during the actual event. I made some videos, and took some pictures. I even had an “intern” (a high school volunteer) who helped with coverage. Did it turn out perfect? No, but I got some great stuff, and some good responses. Could I have done more–maybe a live stream? Sure, but we managed (thank you intern JivAn Feliciano) to get some great audio of Diane Ravitch. The pictures, because of the dim lighting, were less than optimal, but others with better cameras were there, and I’m going to try to collect shots from them over the next few days.

Lessons learned? In the immortal words of Wes Fryer, it’s better to bring your own bandwidth. I’m now packing a 4G (LTE) hotspot on my new Moto Droid Bionic. That kept me online, and helped David Cohen earlier in the day, and Larry Ferlazzo at the event. Oh, and the reporter from the Stockton Record would have been “dead in the water” filing his story without “borrowing” from me. Having electrical will also help make you friends. Because I was with the folks putting the event on, I had the set up crew rig me up a cord, and a table, and brought my trusty 8 foot power strip. This helped the Stockton Record reporter, and the video crew from PBS who filming the event. That’s how you make friends! My take away, I think during live events, I need to edit my tweeting a bit more, and not flood the stream with every comment the speaker makes, but you as readers will have the final word on that.

I have been hard at work getting together the Website for my union local, and ramping up our Facebook presence. I just haven’t had time to post, but lots is going on both in the classroom and out.I’ll try to fit in sharing that with you all in the next two weeks.

Most of the news from the UC school to the west have been about, police power, tuition hikes, and executive pay. This story, on the sports page, would normally get a lot more discussion, but it’s likely to get lost in furor, and that’s a shame, because while it’s not as important as these other stories, the university is at the cusp of facing a choice about whether to “play like the big boys”– south state “neighbor” and frequently on probation USC, and who could resist comparisons to the corrupting influence of big-time college ball at Penn State? What is so lovely about this piece is how revealing many of the quotes from the report are about so-called amateur athletics. Here are some choice picks:

…(S)ome facets of UC Davis’ operating philosophy do not align with many top-tier Division I programs.

Among the audit’s more controversial points has been that several of the eight “core principles” established by UC Davis to guide its move to Division I may actually “represent an impediment to increased competitiveness in Division I.”

Apparently, in amateur athletics there is no room from niceties like “philosophy” and “principles”,  but they do recommend a business plan…

Most Division I programs, the audit states, operate under a “business model” in which revenue comes mostly from external resources and funding is directed to those sports – most often football and basketball – thought to have the best chance of generating revenue through competitive success.

Really, not even the fig-leaf of “love of the game” can remain after this report, but I’ll remember this the next time I hear some suit at the NCAA going on about the purity and beauty of college athletics because now we not only know that’s a lie, we know they know it’s a lie.

Recent feature on my former school site, featuring yours truly…