NEA President Van Roekel Criticizes School Reformers

The “Answer Sheet” blog of the Washington Post (6/16, Strauss) reported this weekend on the response to the Vergara decision, highlighting a series of past headlines which claimed that teachers’ unions have been under attack for years. The article seems to imply that despite school reformers’ jubilation over the video and belief that teachers’ unions are struggling, unions are not under any more threat today than they have been in the past. The Post also focuses on a video and statement by National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel, which criticizes school reformers for their “political attacks” on educators.

        In its coverage, Politico (6/16, Simon) reported that Van Roekel referred to an ad in USA Today which called on citizens to sue teachers unions as well as a Politico article on the decline of unions. “It’s easy to get discouraged when the rhetoric of our opponents dominates the headlines and the airwaves... But I, like you, don’t look at the world through the pages of USA Today or the headlines in POLITICO,” he wrote. Referring to the reformers who filed the Vergara lawsuit, Van Roekel said, “I have a message for those people who would seek to reduce children to a test score and teaching to a technological transaction. You are mistaken if you think we will see your attacks and get discouraged, that we will read the headlines and give up.”

Ravitch Speaks Out Against Corporate Education Reform

The Los Angeles Times (10/6, Blume) reports on an appearance by former Assistant Secretary Diane Ravitch in Los Angeles to protest “corporate-style school reform, which emphasizes competition and accountability and is promulgated by many state governments and the US Department of Education.” The piece describes the events at which Ravitch spoke, describing her as “widely seen as a leading spokeswoman for a movement that calls for collaborative school reform, which emphasizes social services for families and anti-poverty economic policies.”

Retired Teacher Criticizes Four Decades Of US Education Reform

In an op-ed in the Washington Post (9/28), Patrick Welsh, who recently retired after 43 years teaching English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, writes about the frustrations teachers feel about “the politics of education reform,” which results in a constant stream of new reform policies that are often jettisoned soon after being adopted. During his career, Welsh writes, he “saw countless reforms come and go; some even returned years later disguised in new education lingo.” He laments that none of the policies he witnessed “make students care about what they’re studying and understand how it’s relevant to their lives.”