New Guides for Researchers, Bloggers and Parents by Thomas Ultican

By Thomas Ultican 4/4/2020

Two new sources provide guidance for researching and decoding education jargon. At the beginning of the year, Teacher College Press published Diane Ravitch’s and Nancy Bailey’s EdSpeak and Doubletalk; A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. Near February’s completion, Garn Press published Mercedes Schneider’s new book, A Practical Guide To Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies , in which Schneider explains the investigative tools and techniques she uses plus provides examples from her own work.

A Practical Guide to Digital Research

The fifth Network for Public Education (NPE) conference was held in Indianapolis, Indiana during October of 2018. I attended the session “Where did all this Money Come from: Locating and Following the Dark Money Trail” which was presented by Darcie Cimarusti, Andrea Gabor and Mercedes Schneider.

Cimarusti writes a blog called Mother Crusader which opens with the line “Never intended to become a parent advocate until I watched the great schools in my little town come under attack.” Darcie also works part time for NPE where she is half the two person staff and does research. Gabor is a Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College. She is a researcher who currently has ten books listed on Amazon. The MC of the session was the author of Guide to Digital Research, Mercedes Schneider.

The session had three presentations and a question and answer period. Darcie introduced the LittleSis data base and oligrapher. She shared her LittleSis map creation  “Louisiana 2011: Jeb Bush Calls and Billionaire Dollars Follow” and demonstrated its interactive functions. Andre presented “990S: Mining Nonprofit Tax Returns” where she used forms from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation to explain how to read them and where to find them. Finally, Mercedes used examples from New York to share how she researches campaign finance data.

In her new book, Mercedes reflects back on that NPE session and notes:

“In preparing for our presentation, Darcie asked me to send her the information I wished to include in my presentation slides.

“In that moment, I thought, ‘To do this justice, my slides would need to be the length of a book. And there’s no time for me to write a book before we present.

“So, the book was on my mind, particularly on one Saturday after the 2018 NPE.”

Schneider also shares, “Thus, the initial idea for this publication stemmed from my desire to equip parents and other community members to investigate the activities and spending of individuals and groups associated with market-based ed reform.”

This is Mercedes Schneider’s fourth book. She is a Louisiana native with secondary education degrees in English, German and guidance counseling.  Mercedes also has a PhD in applied statistics and research. Her three previous books are A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education, The Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? and School Choice: The End of Public Education?

The educator, blogger and Forbes commentator Peter Greene when praising Mercedes work and her new book stated,

“… A Practical Guide To Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies is a thorough look at how to go cyberdigging, looking at both the techniques and the tools that can be used to uncover whatever truth is lurking out there. Because she provides plenty of examples and demonstrations of how these tools and techniques have worked for her, Schneider also gives us a sort of greatest hits collection.”

An example of one of those greatest hits Greene alludes to is when she reported in Chronicle of Echoes that Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers only taught full time for one semester. In the new book, she reveals how she found this information and that Weingarten’s legal name is Rhonda Weingarten.

Another hit was how she was able to discover who the anonymous donor to Education Post was. In 2014, the Washington Post introduced the new ed reform organization Education Post and stated its initial funding came from “the Broad Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation and an anonymous donor.” By reviewing the 2014 tax forms of the known donors, she was able to learn that they were actually giving their grants to the Results in Education Foundation which was financing Education Post. Once she found the name of the actual foundation she was able to reveal that Laurene Powell Jobs was the anonymous donor.

Schneider uses many episodes like the two mentioned above to demonstrate how to use different investigative tools and provides practical evidence for how she has applied them. The book is a wonderful extension to that 2018 NPE presentation.

EdSpeak and Doubletalk

Thanks to the authors and the facilities at Teacher’s College, this is a living book. At the book’s cyber address, there is a link to a 58 page downloadable supplement as well as an updates tab.

Diane Ravitch explains in the introduction that she originally published EdSpeak in 2006, however she concludes:

“In the years since, a sea change has occurred in education and in the vocabulary used to describe plans, policies, pedagogy, and priorities. I realized that EdSpeak had become obsolete because times had changed.”

Diane says she found the perfect collaborator, Nancy Bailey, who is passionate about education and “knew more than I did about the language of the classroom, and who, as an experienced teacher, had firsthand experience of the impact of policy at the school and classroom level.”

Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University, David Berliner applauded the book. He writes,

“This glossary provides excellent and accurate definitions of the educational terms common to our times. Novice educators, school board members, and parents of school-age children can all use this book to decode the specialized vocabulary of this profession. In addition, the authors are unapologetically strong believers in our public schools, and it shows, making this book much more valuable. This is a glossary with an attitude, and because of that, I endorse it even more strongly.”

Concerning that last line, Ravitch states,

“This book is more than a glossary. It has a point of view – about public schools, about teachers and teaching, and particularly about the insidious efforts to undermine public schools and the teaching profession.”

The book is arranged into 18 chapters with each chapter arranged alphabetically. The online supplement has another 9 chapters.

How to use this reference book. One might have heard of a group called School Board Partners. A quick look at the books index would send you to page 78 in “Chapter 11: School Reform Groups and Terms, or ‘Money Talk.’” There you would find the description of School Board Partners:

“A group that pretends to be concerned about public schools and communities, but that encourages choice and privatization goals. School Board Partners claims that school boards are failing kids, and school board members need the help of outside mentors so they will make the right decisions to promote change and ‘buck the status quo.’ Their deceptive title is intended to confuse the public and to substitute themselves for existing state and national school board associations, which advocate on behalf of public schools. School Board Partners is currently funded by the same corporate reform groups that fund Education Cities, which include the Arnold, Dell, Gates, Kauffman, and Walton Family Foundations. Its real goal is to dissolve the school board’s connection to its own community and make it part of the privatization movement. Their current targeted cities include Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Stockton.”

In the book supplement there are definitions of terms like “restorative justice” and “backward mapping.” One of my favorite definitions, I found in the supplement was “research shows.” It is defined as,

“A phrase often used to evoke authority and end discussions even when research is equivocal. Parents and other non-educators must be wary of accepting the claim that ‘research shows’ a given outcome unless they receive a clear, impartial summary of the evidence.”

These two books bring light to the corrupt billionaire led privatization of America’s public schools and provide some tools that citizens can use to fight back. As an unapologetic advocate for elected school board led public schools, I hardily recommend these two new publications.