Carol Burris and Ethan Young on the Common Core and testing

Last night, principal Carol Burris of South Shore High School on Long Island and Tennessee student Ethan Young were on the Huckabee Show on Fox News.  Carol was named principal of the year in New York State and is the author of a petition against the state's teacher evaluation system in New York that more than one third of the principals in the state have signed onto.

Ethan's brilliant speech blasting the Common Core before the Knox Co. school board has gone viral on YouTube, BuzzFeed and elsewhere. Their appear appearance on the show is in two segments below; Carol and Ethan come on at about seven  minutes in the first segment.

Apparently Huckabee has been getting heat from his audience for his support of Common Core and testing,so the first and last part of the show features his attempt to clarify his views -- not altogether successfully.

It is fascinating how the conservative news shows have picked up on the grassroots rebellion against the Common Core, testing and student data sharing before the liberal cable channels like MSNBC; but still seem somewhat ambivalent -- probably because the Common Core high-stakes tests are so useful in allowing the bashing of public schools and teachers.

This week, the real reformers finally broke through!

On Thursday night, Diane Ravitch with her usual incisiveness pointed out the importance of poverty and the unfairness of teacher-bashing on Jon Stewart’s the Daily Show.

According to Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet, Ravitch’s book shot up from #758 on Amazon's list to #35 by the next afternoon.

Jon Stewart showed a short clip of the segment on Fox News debate, to ridicule the commentators’ attack on the “greed” of teachers, while defending the huge bonuses and salaries of Wall Street financiers and bankers whose irresponsible behavior caused the economic collapse in the first place.

On CNN, Matt Damon criticized President Obama's education policies:

“He misinterpreted his mandate…This idea that we’re tying teachers’ salaries to how their kids are performing do on tests. That kind of mechanistic thinking has nothing to do with higher order thinking; we’re training them, were not teaching them.”

Julie Cavanagh, NYC public school teacher and one of the leaders of the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), was brilliant on NY1's Inside City Hall, pointing out the importance of teacher experience (and class size), in opposition to the push by Mayor Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee to eliminate seniority protections for teachers.

The New York Times, the home of conventional wisdom, featured an extended article about how the scapegoating of teachers has gotten out of hand. (See also FAIR's critique of the article's claim that teachers are actually scorned by the majority of Americans, rather than simply by those in power.)

Thursday's To the Point, a national NPR radio show, also featured Diane, Kay McSpadden, a teacher from South Carolina, and I. Ms. McSpadden said that many people in her state regularly blame the teachers union for the poor performance of their schools, yet there is no teachers union in South Carolina!

A perfect example of how with the collusion of the media, the corporate CEOs and the elected officials whom they control have conveniently created a fictional bogeyman, as a distraction from the real problem that afflict our schools: rampant budget cuts, inequitable funding, large classes, lack of parental input into decision-making, and an overemphasis on testing and privatization.

Let’s hope this is just the beginning of a reversal in which the real educational reformers will finally get a chance to present their perspective in the major media, and the privateers are no longer able to monopolize the airwaves through their wealth and influence – though they have no research and no common sense to back them up.

The clip of Matt Damon on CNN is below:

My debate on public sector unions on Fox News today

Check out my debate on Fox News today on a "power panel" with Steven Malanga of the right wing Manhattan Institute and Tracy Byrnes, Fox business correspondent. Megyn Kelly was pretty fair as the moderator, I thought.

My favorite moment was when Malanga said he didn't feel "oppressed" by not being a member of a union.

My least favorite? Having three irate voicemail messages on my machine when I returned to my office twenty minutes later. One woman screamed at me for having messy hair!

As the booking producer pointed out, this proves at least people were watching. He said this show has more than one million viewers. Scary! Please leave a comment.

Educators go and apply for Cathie Black's old job

NYC teacher and parent critique "Waiting for Superman"

Check out the dynamic duo, Julie Cavanagh, public school teacher at PS 15 in Brooklyn and member of CAPE and GEM, and Mona Davids, charter school parent and head of the New York Charter Parents Association, talking about "Waiting for Superman" on Fox TV this morning.

Also be sure to check out the GEM video, "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman." Hurray for them!