Vantage Point: The voice of hypocrisy must be challenged
By:
Frank Pugh
Published: April 5, 2010
A little over a month ago, my board president received a letter from the political director of EdVoice, and the letter has had me doing a slow burn ever since.
For those of you not familiar with the organization, EdVoice is a statewide education advocacy firm based in Sacramento. With a board of directors that includes Eli Broad and Reed Hastings, EdVoice has come to be almost omnipresent during discussions on public education issues. Their representatives appear regularly at legislative hearings, at meetings of the State Board of Education, and—in all likelihood—behind closed doors at the governor’s office.
The key goals of EdVoice—improving measurable student achievement, and eliminating educational inequality—are wholly consistent with the vision and mission of CSBA. Where I believe CSBA differs from EdVoice is on the level of tactics. For example, the first words under the “About Us” section of EdVoice’s Web site are the following: The California public school system is broken. The outcome is dismal student achievement at almost every level …
I hope all CSBA members can agree that there are aspects of our public education system that are in need of improvement. Unfortunately, there is evidence in some school districts that governance teams are failing the kids in their schools. Fortunately, that number is low. But where CSBA stands ready to help those governance teams improve, EdVoice appears to be prepared to throw out the public education system altogether, in favor of models that—despite the organization’s protestations to the contrary—are based neither on research nor common sense.
Which brings me to the letter that was received in my district’s office on March 1. It begins with the following paragraphs:
2010 has begun as a banner year for California’s public schools. I watched this month as politics were set aside to do what’s best for kids and fair for adults …
We owe a debt of gratitude to Senator Gloria Romero for her tireless work to ensure California receives its share of Race to the Top federal funding. But more importantly, we owe heartfelt “congratulations” to Sen. Romero, Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, Governor Schwarzenegger and a bipartisan group of education champions from across California—for bucking the status quo and giving parents real power to enact change in their own neighborhood schools.
Really? Politics were set aside to do what’s best for kids? I honestly don’t understand how anyone could write a sentence like that with a straight face. If the process that took place in our Capitol in late 2009 and early 2010 was really as pure as the letter states, then why was so much of the legislation focused on issues that had nothing to do with Race to the Top? My friends, the simple fact of the matter is that what happened in the debates over those bills represented power politics at their ugliest.
So before you congratulate the governor and the state’s legislative leadership, remember that those are the very people who have cut the state’s public education budget by over $17 billion in the last two years. So you won’t see me shaking their hands, or raising a glass in their honor. You’ll hear me calling them out for their hypocrisy, and doing everything I can to make them understand that this has got to stop.
EdVoice doesn’t seem to get this, so it’s incumbent upon all of us to remind them, every chance we get.