By John Thompson.

Three cheers for Warren Buffett’s speech at the Democratic National Convention which borrowed from Joe Welch’s challenge to Joe McCarthy. Buffett said, “‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ I ask Donald Trump, have you no sense decency, sir?” After all, it is time for Democrats to subordinate our differences in order to unite and fend off the Trump threat.

So, why would a former Obama administration staffer, Peter Cunningham, shamelessly scrape the bottom of the barrel and equate Diane Ravitch with Trumpism?

It’s bad enough that Cunningham accepts the Walton Foundation’s and the Billionaires Boys Club’s money and consistently shares anti-union material with The 74.  His “astroturf” outlet, the Education Post, pits liberals against liberals and civil rights advocates against civil rights advocates in order to promote test-driven, market driven reform. Their competition-driven charters increase segregation as a supposed tool policy for reversing the legacies of segregation.

It’s bad enough that the Ed Post recruits a handful of teachers to spread their corporate spin, emails them suggesting  “What you can blog about this week in education,” (emphasis in the original) and offers to “Help spread the word with this [attached] social graphic!,” and then brazenly pretends that they represent the teaching profession. It’s worse that Cunningham and his funders push the Karl Rove tactic of crippling or killing teachers’ unions in order to kneecap one of the Democratic Party’s key sources of funding and of boots on the ground.

Cunningham has made himself clear, maintaining that schools can’t be improved without what he calls “oversight and accountability.” He seems to believe that teachers – and the voters who pay our salaries – are so craven that the edu-politics of destruction are essential.  Public school educators must be beaten down (apparently so Democrats can look tough) and micromanaged, while charter management organizations run free.  But his assumptions are even more indecent than that.  Adopting the mentality of  “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” he choreographs a nonstop tirade of untruths and misleading numbers, balanced by supposedly aspirational clichés.  However, I will focus on the facts that Cunningham misstates and/or misunderstands.

Cunningham writes: “…the Common Core are not a set of ‘national’ standards'”

Of course, Common Core is designed to be a set of national standards. The question of whether Ravitch is correct and reformers pursue a national curriculum is more complicated. In an era of top-down reform, driven by nonprofit and for-profit agendas, by corporate elites and the federal mandates, and enforced by test-driven accountability, it’s unclear whether there would be a real-world difference between national standards and a national curriculum. Educators and patrons can’t take the chance that students, especially those in high-poverty, low-performing schools will be forced to endure an “if this is Tuesday,” everyone must be “on the same page” pedagogy, for teaching to the Common Core test questions. But, as Cunningham knows, the standards, alone, aren’t the biggest issue.

I originally assumed, naively, that even the Billionaires Boys Club understood that Common Core standards could only be implemented successfully after stakes were removed from standardized tests.  Assuming the best of my opponents, I would have supported Common Core and its assessments as tools to be taught with, but not to. No rational reformer, I assumed, would deny kids a high school diploma based on a college readiness test or evaluate teachers with an algorithm fueled by these untested metrics. No decent person would retain a 3rd grader or put the welfare benefits of TANF recipients or the paroles of prison inmates in jeopardy based on Common Core tests. It would be indecent to punish the most vulnerable parents in our society, as they struggle to earn a GED, by forcing them to answer questions such as:

If the numbers equal to the mode of the set B are weighted 75% and all other numbers combined are weighted 25%, what is the weighted average of set B?

Just as he does when ignoring the vast majority of educators and patrons who oppose high-stakes Common Core tests by saying that “many” teachers agree with the reformers, Cunningham spins these outrages as mistakes that remain exceptional.  The reason why these absurd policies weren’t implemented as widely as designed, however, is that leaders like Diane Ravitch and a grassroots uprising defeated them.

When I was a rookie teacher 25 years ago, I knew the inner city but I was as ignorant of actual schools as corporate reformers are today.  I just knew in my bones that Diane Ravitch was a great scholar but that she was wrong about curriculum. It took less than a semester for me to admit for the first of what would become many times that Ravitch was right and I was wrong.  I quickly learned that students need help in mastering a challenging curriculum.  The students quickly taught me how to teach them and, in doing so, I learned how to listen to my kids and pace instruction based on their needs, strengths, and interests. Moreover, the time it took to cover a challenging curriculum was the time it took to cover the curriculum. It could not be predetermined. The pace of instruction was based in large part on our ability to rebuild students’ confidence and motivations after unpredictable setbacks.

The system taught me that silly, cover-your-ass paperwork, known as curriculum pacing guides, would be distributed.  It was just one of those things that the system did to satisfy the Big Boys. Back then, the aligned standards schedule would be handed out by a grinning administrator who knew we would just toss it in the trash can.  Under test-driven accountability, however, when aligned and paced guides were enforced by high stakes, 40% of the students in the tested grades dropped out in three months.

The Carnegie Corporation later predicted that the nation’s dropout rate would double if Common Core (even without the high stakes testing) was adopted before establishing aligned and coordinated student supports. The resulting pushback by corporate reformers showed that they were oblivious of the phenomenon of promoting power and how the implementation of their grand idea would have wrecked students’ confidence and produced a disaster had we not defeated their micromanaging.

Similarly, the non-teachers who Cunningham serves remain oblivious to the emotional sides of learning. The single best explanation of the problems with Common Core was articulated by a middle school teacher, Claire Needell Hollander. Hollander explained for teachers, “Emotion is our lever. The teen mind is our stone.” Once high stakes standardized tests are involved, however, Common Core’s architects must focus on the “bloodless task” of avoiding political risks. They must then select neutral texts that are “created to be ‘agnostic’ with regard to student interest … they are texts that no student would choose to read on her own.” Hollander concluded that Common Core must be neutral as to whether “students should read Shakespeare, Salinger, or a Ford owner’s manual as long as the text remains ‘complex.’” As long as students’ curiosity, sadness, confusion and knowledge deficits are ignored, they will be on the “receiving end of lessons planned for a language-skills learning abstraction.”

In his “little ditty” about Diane Ravitch, Cunningham makes it obvious that he is livid that liberals and conservatives united against national standards, but that he can’t stand the rejection of Common Core tests to punish individuals and schools. Like Ravitch, it took me a while to conclude that even without the test, sort, reward, and punish culture of reform, Common Core is dangerous.  My worst fears were confirmed when teaching at an alternative charter school during the year when we were told that students (almost all of them felons who were years behind grade level) would have to pass Common Core exit exams to graduate.  Fortunately, the law was repealed before a widespread catastrophe occurred, but just the threat of the tests cost many of my kids their diplomas (and prompted me to re-retire prematurely.)  Since few kids in my classes of up to 25 students would have a chance to pass Common Core tests, I was ordered to stop teaching lessons, to ignore the vast majority of my students, to put them to work on worksheets or primitive online tutorials, and to intensively tutor the handful who had a chance of graduating.

Finally, Cunningham bemoans school segregation, albeit without articulating a logical connection to his condemnation of Ravitch. In doing so, he’s like the metaphorical person who killed his parents and asked for mercy because he was now an orphan.  Cunningham et. al push competition-driven reforms that increase segregation and then blame their opponents for not successfully integrating schools!

And, that brings us back to the original question.  I don’t believe we should use Trump’s methods on Trump.  If Cunningham were to rejoin the Democratic Party, I’d flinch if he fought Rightwingers’ fire with corporate-funded public relations fire, but given the stakes in this election, I wouldn’t call it indecent.  At a time like this, however, his latest attack on Diane Ravitch is shameful. 

What do you think?  Why would someone who calls himself a Democrat work so hard to divide the party during this election year? Why would someone who claims he wants to help students and promote civil rights be so persistent in putting his animosity towards adult opponents over students in particular, and our democracy in general?

Featured image: Peter Cunningham and Diane Ravitch at the Network for Public Education conference in Raleigh last April.