Former Obama Press Secretary Leading PR Drive Against K-12 Teacher Tenure

Robert Gibbs
(Image: politico.com)

One of the Obama presidency's curiosities is its hostility to K-12 teachers unions. Key administration figures, including Education Secretary (and 44's basketball bud) Arne Duncan, have expressed their opposition to teacher tenure. The anti-tenure mob asserts that tenure encourages ineffective teachers to remain on the job, while implicitly denying better instructors an opportunity to practice their trade. Powerful forces from all political spectra have embraced part or all of this perspective.

A recent addition to this unseemly alliance is an enterprise created by former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and former BO campaign spokesperson Ben Labolt. According to a Politico story, the pair's Insight Agency "will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have protected ferociously. LaBold and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones -- the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign -- will take the lead in the public relations initiative."

While the movement to dismantle the existing K-12 instructional force gathers momentum, one wonders what bright future these champions of meritocracy envision. Looming large in many of these brave new worlds is data accumulation and analysis. The nearly religious belief in data's "truth" masks data's considerable flaws as an educational tool. Meanwhile, what of the teachers themselves?  Media stories, think-tank white papers, and political speeches rarely bother to present the thoughts and feelings of tenured teachers. There's little that's fair and balanced from the right or from the left on the tenure issue. Minds have been made up in the anti-tenure kangaroo court. Human sacrifice, in the form of the dismissal of an entire professional class, appears to be demanded.

Replacing a generation of experienced instructors will be cannon fodder from organizations such as Teach for America, whose sixteen-hour work days virtually guarantee its well-intended adherents will promptly drop out of the teaching biz. That phenomenon, coincidentally, pushes salaries down and effectively keeps curricular direction and performance appraisal in the hands of "management" rather than trained, seasoned professional instructors.

Cultural Revolution
(Image: bbc.co.uk)

Many years ago, I taught English to adult Chinese immigrants. I listened to stories about the Cultural Revolution, whose incidents included forcing teachers to parade through their town while wearing humiliating signs. The tagging of an entire generation of American K-12 teachers as deadbeats, deserving of the punishment of tenure elimination, is not far away from the mass insanity China experienced a half-century ago.

Be careful what you wish for.

Obama Cites Obscure Law to KO Chinese Ownership of Oregon Wind Farm

Wind Farm
(photo and related story from Politico)

On a late Friday night, well after the news hounds dropped the scent, President Obama blocked a Chinese firm from owning and operating a wind farm near a militarily sensitive site in Oregon.

This evening's online edition of the BBC reported this very unusual American action. The concern was the wind farm's location, which is near "restricted airspace" the U.S. Navy uses to test unmanned drones and other electronic equipment. That was too close for comfort.

The US Committee on Foreign Investments (CFIUS), an inter-agency group under the Treasury Department's organizational umbrella, had recently reported there was no reliable way to "mitigate the national security risks posed by the Chinese company's plans," according to the BBC piece. CFIUS basically has a Roman emperor's power of life or death over a foreign enterprise's plans to enter US businesses in any strategically important area.

The Financial Times also reported on Obama's decision, and added some useful details about it.

Small Media Happy, Fiction Mafia Miffed Over Pulitzer Prizes

Award-winning cartoon by Politico's Matt Wuerker

This year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, with some winners bringing welcome new blood into the media mix. According to the Washington Post's report on the prizes, the Pulitzer jurors found the year's best journalism outside the heavy, big-city hitters. That small, relatively unknown reporters and photographers could create prize-winning pieces is a testimony to their determination, skill, and editorial backing. The Pulitzer committee also awarded a prize to a writer from the Huffington Post (a publication whose editor is, in my opinion, intellectually and morally dishonest) and a cartoonist from another blog, Politico.

Journalism is difficult work, often denigrated by a public that prefers ideology and certitude to reasoned argument and dispassionate fact. What's striking about the Pulitzer winners is the risks implicit in the stories they covered so well. They weren't paid enough for their labors and the hazards of their jobs, but you can't put a price on guts.

Ironically, while new media advanced, the Pulitzer committee stiffed the fiction category. This decision, according to a New York Times report, has upset the fiction mafia and some percentage of people who actually read "serious" contemporary novels. While the supposed focus of the publishers' ire was the snubbed books' quality, the Times piece kept coming back to the impact of the Pulitzer action on book sales. Apparently not bent out of shape by the Pulitzer decision was Nora Roberts, whose novels are massive best sellers. She doesn't give a damn about the Pulitzer, or any other award. For a rather different look at an author's life and perspective on publishing, by all means read a recent Washington Post feature on Ms. Roberts.