Firing Line:
The Grand Coalition Against Teachers
IN A nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers. Democrats from various wings of the party, virtually all Republicans, most think tanks that deal with education, progressive and conservative foundations, a proliferation of nonprofit advocacy organizations, right-wing anti-union groups, hedge fund managers, writers from right leftward, and editorialists in most mainstream media—all concur that teachers, protected by their unions, deserve primary blame for the failure of 15.6 million poor children to excel academically. They also bear much responsibility for the decline of K-12 education overall (about 85 percent of all children attend public schools), to the point that the United States is floundering in the global economy.
In the last few years, attention to the role of public school teachers has escalated into a high-profile, well-financed, and seriously misguided campaign to transform the profession based on this reasoning: if we can place a great teacher in every classroom, the achievement gap between middle-class white students and poor and minority students will close; all students will be prepared to earn a four-year college degree, find a “twenty-first-century job” at a good salary, and help to restore U.S. preeminence in the world economy.
Here is Barack Obama speaking at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Virginia on March 14, 2011:
The best economic policy is one that produces more college graduates. And that’s why, for the sake of our children and our economy and America’s future, we’re going to have to do a better job educating every single one of our sons and daughters…But when the quality of a teacher can make or break a child’s education, we’ve got to make sure our certified teachers are also outstanding teachers—teachers who can reach every last child.
This article will investigate the fix-the-teachers campaign of today’s “education reformers.” It’s not their only project. They also want public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses; they aim to replace as many regular public schools as possible with publicly funded, privately managed charter schools; some are trying to expand voucher programs to allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools. All this will reshape who controls the $540 billion that taxpayers spend on K-12 schools every year. It endangers the democratic nature of public education as well. But nothing affects children more directly in the classroom than what the reform movement is doing to teachers.
Some Necessary Context
Everyone who supports public education believes that only effective teachers should be in the classroom; ineffective teachers who can’t improve should lose their jobs. Accomplishing this requires a sound method for evaluating teachers and a fair process for firing. In the current system, school principals have the responsibility to assess teachers’ performance and dismiss ineffective ones. Making sure that principals do this well is the district superintendent’s responsibility (not the teachers’). The system works if administrators at all levels and school boards do their jobs.
Even with these assumptions stated, a productive discussion can’t begin without first addressing two questions: what accounts for variations in student achievement, and what is the overall state of K-12 education in the United States?
On the first question, research shows that teachers are the most important in-school factor determining students’ academic performance. But they are not the only in-school factor: class size and the quality of the school principal, for example, matter a great deal. Most crucially, out-of-school factors—family characteristics such as income and parents’ education, neighborhood environment, health care, housing stability, and so on—count for twice as much as all in-school factors. In 1966, a groundbreaking government study—the “Coleman Report”—first identified a “one-third in-school factors, two-thirds family characteristics” ratio to explain variations in student achievement. Since then researchers have endlessly tried to refine or refute the findings. Education scholar Richard Rothstein described their results: “No analyst has been able to attribute less than two-thirds of the variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics of their students” (Class and Schools, 2004). Factors such as neighborhood environment give still more weight to what goes on outside school.
Ed reformers have only one response to this reality: anyone who brings up out-of-school factors such as poverty is both defending the status quo of public education and claiming that schools can do nothing to overcome the life circumstances of poor children. The response is silly and, by now, tiresome. Some teachers will certainly be able to help compensate for the family backgrounds and out-of-school environments of some students. But the majority of poor children will not get all the help they need: their numbers are too great, their circumstances too severe, and resources too limited. Imagine teachers from excellent suburban public schools transferring en masse to low-performing, inner-city public schools. Would these teachers have as much success as they did in the suburbs? Would they be able to overcome the backgrounds of 15.6 million poor children? Even with bonus pay, would they stay with the job for more than a few years? Common sense and experience say no, and yet the reformers insist they can fix public schools by fixing the teachers.
On the second question—what is the state of education in the United States?—both critics and advocates of the reform movement agree that some public schools need significant improvement and that improvement is achievable. But in order to mobilize broad support for their program, ed reformers from Obama on down have pumped up a sense of crisis about the international standing of the entire education system. In reality, however, students in American public schools serving middle-class and affluent children surpass students in other nations in standardized test scores (which ed reformers use obsessively to define success).
The most recent data come from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, released in December 2010. PISA tested fifteen-year-olds in sixty countries (plus five non-state entities such as Hong Kong) in reading, math, and science. Consider the results in reading, the subject assessed in depth in 2009: U.S. students in public schools with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunches) scored 551, second only to the 556 score of the city of Shanghai, which doesn’t release poverty data. The U.S. students outperformed students in all eight participating nations whose reported poverty rates fall below 10 percent. Finland, with a poverty rate of just 3.4 percent, came in second with a score of 536. As the level of student poverty in U.S. public schools increased, scores fell. Because of the high overall child-poverty rate (20.7 percent), the average reading score for all U.S. students was 500 (fourteenth place). In short, poverty drags down our international standing (see this Department of Education site).
6/30/11
The Grand Coalition Against Teachers, By Joanne Barkan
6/29/11
6/28/11
Do You Know This Kid XXVI?
This kid was born in 1940 and died when I was about 10. He was famous. Still is.
6/25/11
TFA: A Failed Vision
by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan
Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: “Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way”
It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for American recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in.
Not one of them was accepted!
6/24/11
Peter Falk "Columbo": R.I.P.
LOS ANGELES – Peter Falk, the stage and movie actor who became identified as the squinty, rumpled detective in "Columbo," which spanned 30 years in prime-time television and established one of the most iconic characters in movie police work, has died. He was 83.HuffPo
Falk died Thursday in his Beverly Hills home, according to a statement released Friday by family friend Larry Larson.
In a court document filed in December 2008, Falk's daughter Catherine Falk said her father was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
Do Principals Create Bad Teachers?
What if a Principal Allows Teachers to be "Bad"?
The rhetoric about "bad teachers" may never go away -- in part some teachers will always perform poorly, act irresponsibly, and so on (just as there are poor performers and irresponsible people in all professions and fields). That said, what bothers me most about the rhetoric is that it continually oversimplifies the problem. Too many commentators seem to assume that bad people magically pop up in schools to torture principals and belittle children. But reality is more complex.
One situation that has arisen in numerous anecdotes I've heard from teachers is that a Principal will allow selected teachers (often their friends) to behave irresponsibly or worse. Examples include showing up late, parking illegally, dressing inappropriately, eating meals with the Principal instead of teaching, leaving other people in charge of their class while they run errands, and, in at least one instance, abusing children.
Are "bad teachers" a problem in these schools? Absolutely -- and they should be dealt with -- but not following the script we normally read (teacher is bad, principal wants to fire him/her, union steps in). In these cases, the story I hear is that a "bad" principal allows a few teachers to do as they please while the rest of the teachers stew in outrage and cower in fear.
Did the Principal in these situations make these teachers bad? It's not quite that simple. But these Principals have certainly negatively impacted the performance of a few teachers while subsequently damaging the climate and performance of the school as a whole.
Situations like these are why I worry more about the extent of the damage done by irresponsible Principals than I do about the damage done by irresponsible teachers.
6/19/11
Clarence Clemons, "The Big Man": R.I.P.
Clarence Anicholas Clemons, Jr. (January 11, 1942 – June 18, 2011), also known as The Big Man, was an American musician and actor. From 1972 until his death, he was a prominent member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, playing the saxophone. He released several solo albums and in 1985 had a hit single with "You're a Friend of Mine", a duet with Jackson Browne. As a guest musician he also featured on Aretha Franklin's classic "Freeway of Love" and on Twisted Sister's "Be Chrool to Your Scuel" as well as performing in concert with The Grateful Dead and Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. As an actor Clemons featured in several films, including New York, New York and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. He also made cameo appearances in several TV series, including Diff'rent Strokes, Nash Bridges, The Simpsons and The Wire. Together with his television writer friend Don Reo he published his autobiography, Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales, in 2009. Clemons suffered a stroke on June 12, 2011 and died of complications from the stroke on June 18. He was 69 years old.
6/16/11
The Erection Of An Alternative National System Of Charter Schools (pun intended)
How the Corporate Right Divided Blacks from Teachers Unions and Each Other
by Glen Ford
Back in the mid-Nineties, devious right-wing activists at the Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, hit upon a “wedge” issue designed to wreck the alliance at the core of the Democratic Party’s urban base. Blacks and public employee unions – particularly teachers – were the foundations of Democratic power in the cities. Aware that African Americans revered education but were often in conflict with largely white teachers unions over issues of racism and community control, the Bradley gang, under president Michael Joyce, created out of whole cloth a “movement” for publicly-funded vouchers for private schools. No such Black community “demand” had ever existed, but well-aimed infusions of millions of dollars among opportunistic politicians like Cory Booker, a first term city councilman who aspired to become mayor of Newark, New Jersey, grafted Black faces onto a Hard Right corporate scheme to divide key progressive constituencies: Blacks and unions.
By the turn of the millennium, the Bradley outfit solidified its position as George W. Bush’s “favorite” foundation when it invented “faith-based initiatives” to funnel millions of public dollars to churches to provide social services. Faith-based funding and private school vouchers comprised the totality of Bush’s first term outreach to Black America. Neither program drew masses of Blacks into the Republican Party – even the wealthy social engineers at Bradley can’t perform miracles. But Bradley and its far-right sister funders – the Walton and DeVos Family Foundations, Olin, Scaife, Freidman and other troglodytes – had succeeded in penetrating Black Democratic politics, where the real action would unfold. Cory Booker, Harold Ford, Jr., the 29-year-old who inherited his father’s congressional seat in Memphis, in 1996, and other hustlers were the “new Black leaders” ready to embrace “pro-business” solutions to inner city problems, said corporate media boosters. The Democratic Leadership Council, the party’s corporate money bagmen, launched a frenzied, and quite effective, recruitment campaign among Black office-holders and aspirants.
This is the national stage onto which Barack Obama stepped with his U.S. Senate campaign, in 2003-2004, as the very embodiment of the “new” Black politician, full of phrases like “public-private partnerships” and other codes for corporate penetration of the public sphere. By this time, the wealthy foundations were directing much of their money and attention to hawking charter schools as the cure for what ails education in the inner cities. Not that the Waltons and Friedmans and Scaifes give a damn about ghetto kids, but because they understood that Black parents were desperate for anything that might save their children, and would be receptive when fellow Blacks made the pitch. From its inception, the purpose of the project was to drive a wedge between teachers unions and Black constituencies. In addition to being unencumbered by sticky constitutional considerations, charter schools are technically public schools, and African Americans remain broadly committed to the concept of public education. Most importantly, from the rich man’s point of view, charter schools are the gateway to corporate access to the public education purse, a “market” worth hundreds of billions a year in which the public takes all the risk – a capitalist’s paradise! Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan – a veteran Chicago union buster and corporatist – have labored mightily to erect an alternative national system of charter schools.
The Hard Right foundations now had even bigger company as boosters of charter schools: the institutional weight of Wall Street, huge hedge funds, and individual billionaires, all out to make a financial killing, knock off teachers unions, and mold the world views of new generations. After more than a decade of corporate cultivation of ambitious “new Black leaders,” a large cadre of business-friendly African American politicians was in place – including, by 2008, in the highest place of all.
President Obama is the guy that Michael Joyce, at the Bradley Foundation, was dreaming about when he launched his campaign to split Blacks from unions, 15 years ago. Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan – a veteran Chicago union buster and corporatist – have labored mightily to erect an alternative national system of charter schools, plugged into a private financial and educational services sector, that in some cities is as large or larger than the traditional public schools. Obama, because of his race and his party affiliation, is a far more effective foe of public education and teachers unions than his white Republican predecessor.
Michael Joyce was right; he knew that the crucial battle over school privatization would have to occur in Black Democratic circles, if it were to work as a fractious wedge issue. Last month, the NAACP and the United Federations of Teachers filed a lawsuit to halt the closing of 20 public schools and to stop giving preferential treatment to charter schools that often share the same buildings. The differences in learning conditions, schedules and equipment are so striking, says the NAACP, as to reduce public students to second-class citizens. Charter schools, which President Obama fawns over like his own legacy, are blatantly favored by school systems and corporate sponsors. The NAACP is seeking to prove – in a different age and racial context – that separate is not equal, in New York City and other sites of breakneck charterization.
The inequalities are by design. From President Obama on down, charter school strategists hope to expand their privatized systems by deliberately making charters relatively more attractive than traditional classrooms, in order to create a political constituency for more charters. At root, it is a kind of bait-and-switch that is not sustainable, and will come to a halt once the public school “competition” is marginalized or eliminated. By then, the political forces necessary to revive public schooling will have been exhausted in fratricidal battles, and the corporations will have established a system to suit their own purposes– as Michael Joyce foresaw.
When the NAACP joined in the teachers union’s suit, charter school advocates declared war on the civil rights group. Two thousand people attended a May 26 rally in Harlem, accusing the NAACP of dividing the community. Of course, Michael Joyce knows who did the dividing – he and his right-wing schemers and billionaires wrote the script.
6/15/11
Why Is Germany Kicking Our Ass? Rising Hourly Pay And Unions, That's Why
Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).Bob Reich
What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.
How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.
That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.
Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.
6/13/11
Which Is It? Or, The Chicken Or The Egg? Or, Stronger Than Dirt Or Milking The Turkey?
My side, the teacher's side, the side that includes Diane Ravitch, Stephen Krashen, Jon Stewart and actual teachers believe that poverty stifles kids. There has been tons of research going back decades that shows, consistently, that the socioeconomic status of the parents is predictive of how well/poorly a child will do in school. We know that child poverty is higher now than ever. We know that wealth disparity is wider now than since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. We also now know of health issues that are a result of living in poverty, and new studies about the effects of poverty on people's health keep making findings and getting published.
The other side, the side that includes Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Jonathan Alter, Stephen Colbert, NBC, The Huffington Post, University of Phoenix, Michael Bloomberg, The Fordham Institute, and other powerful people and organizations, believe that the only way out of poverty is with an education. There are no studies that support anything these jokers say. Nothing. They might tout a position paper, or working paper, but they can cite no peer reviewed studies that show firing a whole staff, closing a school, making the day/year longer, hiring fresh young TFA teachers, ending LIFO, allowing for more charter schools, vouchers, VAM ,or alternative routes to a license will do anything for kids. None. Zilch. Zip.
So, which is it? Can we educate those mired in generational poverty out of it? Or must we first address poverty, and most of what we want for those kids will then flow from that?
And this, I think, is the battle. It is the battle between these two ideas to deal with the fact that so many of our impoverished kids do poorly in school. That is the reason for all the talk of reform, right? Too many kids doing poorly on tests and/or dropping out. Right?
You might think that there is a debate because some are creating one. Don't let that fool you into thinking too hard about it. It ain't rocket science! There is no debate about what kids need. There is a debate about who will get what they need, and who won't. It's a very old debate. Very, very old. Tunisia tried to end debate this year, along with Egypt and Libya. America won't do it until our televisions die, I'm afraid.
Think about why a kid from the worst part of town does worse in school than a kid from the best part of town. Got it? Don't think about the one or two kids who make it out because they worked so hard, like Obama. Remember, the correlation is socioeconomic status of the parents--Barack's parents were college educated. My little Gerard, who was a student of mine my first year of teaching ever (and who is clearly stuck in my heart), was too skinny (malnourished), meek, quiet, frightened, hungry, never complained about one thing, ever, whose father was absent and mom in jail, is not going to lift himself out of poverty, even with an education--an education he is ill-prepared to receive, much less work toward. He's hungry! Never saw a book until Kindergarten! His teeth were rotten. I wanted to take him home with me, but I made him lunch everyday instead. There are millions of Gerards. Millions. Fucking millions! In America (fuck yeah!).
The reformers have heard of Occam's Razor, but that won't make them rich so they are trying to show that the simple obvious reason for poor kids doing poorly are actually very complicated. No. They are not complicated.
Go to Michelle Rhee's Facebook page and read the vitriol aimed at teachers for "failing" these kids. Read and witness your fellow Americans calling people lazy and stupid. They are disgusting. They discount poverty and claim folks can get out if they just try harder. Really?
All the problems we face today in America are due to greed and the preservation of power by those in power. Voting might work, but I fear something more drastic will have to happen before a poor person can expect treated like a fellow human.
The reformers always ask us what are some solutions. I have three simple things that will help and they all require taxing the rich at a rate much higher than today.
1. Universal health/dental care.
2. Free high quality early childhood education programs
3. Books, books, some books, books, libraries, librarians, books and some free books.
Each one of my suggestions has a common sense basis as well as a research basis. We know ill health and hurting teeth make learning hard, so give them healthcare. We know impoverished kids start school with a deficit compared to their more affluent peers and providing high quality early childhood education programs staffed by credentialed teachers will help make up for the deficits and prepare impoverished kids for school. Kids like books, especially when they get to pick them and keep them. Everyone should give away books all the time. Quit closing school libraries, idiots.
There have been folks who have complained about the vitriol coming from teachers. Yeah, shut up. There's more where that came from.
6/10/11
6/9/11
Happy Birthday, Les Paul
I had a black Les Paul just like the one down there but had to sell it so I could eat. I loved that thing. And just look at that dude! He was cooler than you and me put together.
Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009)—known as Les Paul—was an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which "made the sound of rock and roll possible". He is credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound),[6] delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.
His innovative talents extended into his playing style, including licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques and timing, which set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day. He recorded with his wife Mary Ford in the 1950s, and they sold millions of records.
Among his many honors, Paul is one of a handful of artists with a permanent, stand-alone exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is prominently named by the music museum on its website as an "architect" and a "key inductee" along with Sam Phillips and Alan Freed.
6/8/11
"Mitigating poverty will improve education outcomes"...
This is no better than saying we can’t fix schools until we “fix poverty.” Anti-poverty policy, though costly, is very effective in the U.S., and education is only one among many factors that contribute to poverty and inequality (as is partially evident in the fact that much of the rise in inequality in the U.S. has occurred among similarly-educated people). In addition, while improving public education will help millions of people, the benefits will elude everyone who is beyond school age. These people need help now, and no amount of K-12 education reform will provide it. [emphasis mine]
Mitigating poverty will improve education outcomes, and vice-versa. So let’s not allow either to be an “excuse” for failing to comprehensively address the other.
6/5/11
6/4/11
Lawrence Eagleburger, R.I.P.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The only career foreign service officer to rise to the position of secretary of state, was a straightforward diplomat whose exuberant style masked a hard-driving commitment to solving tangled foreign policy problems.I'll reserve judgment.
"As good as they come," recalled his immediate predecessor as America's top diplomat.
Eagleburger, who died Saturday at age 80, held the job late in George H.W. Bush's presidency, culminating a distinguished diplomatic career.
Doug Noon: "As for me, I am done caring about reformist nonsense."
Doug Noon is tired of the nonsense, just like the rest of us in the trenches. Here is a snippet of his latest lament, and it's a sad state of affairs he is describing.
...
...
...As for me, I am done caring about reformist nonsense. At a staff meeting earlier this year we were discussing our AimsWeb Data Boards put up around the room to show how many students in each grade level are below proficient, at risk, or proficient based on how well they handled an oral one-minute timed reading. To me, this was a disgusting display of a brain-dead method to evaluate reading. We were asked to say what we planned to do to improve our students’ scores. Since the data showed lots of kids scoring “below proficient” in first and second grade and very few in that category by the time they got to sixth, I observed that the trend was positive, and that at least as far as word-calling skills go, we seem to be doing all right. Teachers at each grade level announced what they planned to do, like focus on comprehension, vocabulary, decoding – the usual. When it was my turn, I said I’d be going with the happiness plan. What’s that? It’s getting the kids to enjoy reading so that they do it on their own. How does it work? Easy. Give them choices and time to read every day, and then celebrate their accomplishments. I got a round of applause. Kind of sad, really, when I think about what that might mean.
6/3/11
Jack Kevorkian, R.I.P.
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, aka "Doctor Death" has died.
Jack Kevorkian — embraced as a compassionate crusader and reviled as a murderous crank — died early this morning.Detroit Free Press
Known as Dr. Death even before launching his fierce advocacy and practice of assisted suicides, Kevorkian, 83, died at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, where he had been hospitalized with kidney and heart problems.
6/2/11
The Charter School Myth Take-down
School Finance 101 is good at explaining data, especially the lies used to misrepresent the data by those who would like to push their charter agenda. To wit:
The Offensively Defensive Ideology of Charter SchoolingRead the rest, and the excellent point by point take-down (and links) here.
There now exists a fair amount of evidence that Charter schools in many locations, especially high performing charter schools in New Jersey and New York tend to serve much smaller shares of low income, special education and limited English proficient students (see various links that follow). And in some cases, high performing charter schools, especially charter middle schools, experience dramatic attrition between 6th and 8th grade, often the same grades over which student achievement climbs, suggesting that a “pushing out” form of attrition is partly accounting for charter achievement levels.
As I’ve stated many times on this blog, the extent to which we are concerned about these issues is a matter of perspective. It is entirely possible that a school – charter, private or otherwise – can achieve not only high performance levels but also greater achievement growth by serving a selective student population, including selection of students on the front end and attrition of students along the way. After all, one of the largest “within school effects on student performance” is the composition of the peer group.
From a parent (or child) perspective, one is relatively unconcerned whether the positive school effect is function of selectivity of peer group and attrition, so long as there is a positive effect.
But, from a public policy perspective, the model is only useful if the majority of positive effects are not due to peer group selectivity and attrition, but rather to the efficacy and transferability of the educational models, programs and strategies. To put it very bluntly, charters (or magnet schools) cannot dramatically improve overall performance in low income communities by this approach, because there simply aren’t enough less poor, fluent English speaking, non-disabled children to go around. They are not a replacement for the current public system, because their successes are in many cases based on doing things they couldn’t if they actually tried to serve everyone.
Again, this is not to say that some high performing charters aren’t essentially effective magnet school programs that do provide improved opportunities for select few. But that’s what they are.
But rather than acknowledging these issues and recognizing charters and their successes for what they are (or aren’t), charter pundits have developed a series of very intriguing (albeit largely unfounded) defensive responses (read excuses) to the available data. These include the arguments that:
6/1/11
A Pretend Letter To Obama From This Brazen Teacher
I have mentioned This Brazen Teacher a few times because she is awesome, brilliant, fearless and kind.
I think her new video (she claims she is new at the video making) hits it out of the park. Spread the word. Share the vid.
I think her new video (she claims she is new at the video making) hits it out of the park. Spread the word. Share the vid.
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