“Arghhh!”
“What,” says Anne as we are driving to get some coffee at Peets this morning. “Are you having a heart attack?”
Not quite. But I was listening to NPR do a story on college and university teacher preparation programs based on a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Most programs, the report said, were failures. Colleges of education were sending out fools, incompetents and clowns into America’s classrooms.
NPR was reporting this as if NCTQ doesn’t have an agenda that is totally aligned with the corporate reformers.
Or that the NCTQ ranking of teacher preparation programs is totally aligned with Common Core standards.
This morning Diane Ravtich’s blog explains the history of NCTQ.
That history is exactly what caused me to raise a stink a few years ago when I discovered that IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin had agreed to sit on NCTQ advisory board.
While our union should be concerned with teacher quality, I couldn’t understand what kind of common ground we had with these right-wingers and corporate windbags.
Audrey soon saw the light and got off the board.
But shame on NPR for just repeating corporate reform talking points without a critical eye.
Fred Klonsky 
Fred, it’s not “shame on NPR . . .”, they’re in with the corporate reformers like everyone else. I stopped giving to WBEZ because they’ve become a mouthpiece for the Civic Federation and Rahm Emmanuel. During the whole pension debate year, when they would have people on to explain why there is a “pension crisis” they never had anyone like you on who could and would explain that it was a revenue problem. If they did have someone who tried to bring up the real issues about funding there were always two guests that would blather away about how Illinois is going to go bankrupt. Where does WBEZ and WTTW get their funding from? Not little guys like you and me but the big donors – the banks, law firms, airlines, food manufacturers, and guys like Bruce Rauner. Why do you think their “sponsorship” acknowledgements sound more and more like consumer ads – because they are.
The new CEO of WBEZ was interviewed on Chicago Tonight last night. I am sure she would be interested in your blog. One of her goals is to connect WBEZ with the community and truth in education would be an important way to do that.
Good comments Ann and Roger. So right about having a voice like Fred’s to tell listeners the truth about the so called “pension crisis”. To all reading this, make sure that you stay abreast of the words penned by Ben Joravsky in the Chicago Reader, as well. Joravsky is well aware of Rahm’s deceitful games. He breaks all of Emmanuel’s phoniness down to laymen’s terms.
The mayoral election will be here before you know it. Spread the word. Let’s dump this guy and the alderman that so obediently support him.
It’s 90 degrees – hot and humid – and I’m still dodging the winter’s potholes on the South Side.
Speaking of corporations having motive to push for tests and destroy teachers, I saw this ad today. Seems like they are telling schools to get a lot of money ready to buy new computers. This money will come from where? Teacher pay, teacher health insurance, more state money taken from state pension funding? If they were truly interested in helping education, why don’t they donate these computers free of charge?
http://www.microsoft.com/education/ww/products/xpeos/Pages/default.aspx?id=top_5_tech_essentials?CR_CC=200385727
They would but it would effect their bottom line.
If you really want to go grey and have your stomach upset, you should have continued on WBEZ until they got to their version of “Vergara.” Their expert, from a “non-partisan group”, was Robin Steans of Advance Illinois. I’ve already posted my appreciation of that bit of propaganda. NPR = National Propaganda Radio.
NPR is a shill for the corporatization movement. Yesterday the Diane Rhehm program discussed the Vergara decision with Greg Toppo of USA Today, Michael Feuer of George Washington University, Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education, and Dana Goldstein of The Marshall Project. Where was the K-12 educator in the group?
Teachers are too stupid for NPR to talk about things that impact teaching.