DETROIT – Education Next just published a lengthy article of mine, which was largely about how the teachers’ unions tailor their message to the audience they are addressing. I did not expect to see such a fine illustration surface so quickly.

On December 16 National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia delivered a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, a group of business leaders headed by William Clay Ford Jr. of the Ford Motor Company. It cannot be said that its members are necessarily hostile to teachers’ unions, but the Club’s executive committee includes former Detroit mayor and charter school supporter Dave Bing, and its board of directors includes the chairman of Kelly Services, which has education staffing contracts with about a dozen public school districts.

Eskelsen Garcia acknowledged this was not her usual audience, but opened with an olive branch.

I am a union leader, along with being a teacher, and many of you are here because you are business leaders, and I think the news story of the day is that you and I are best friends. At least we should be.

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She went on to describe her hope that the rhetoric could be toned down.

I think we get to a better place when we can actually have a dialogue that’s not shrill, that’s not saying ‘you’re right, you’re wrong’ and we actually look at the evidence that would move us forward.

The evidence she then presented was highly selective, but we’ll ignore that for now. She concluded her almost hour-long speech with a final appeal. “I need you. We cannot succeed without you,” she said.

It’s safe to say that any members of the Detroit Economic Club who might have been moved by Eskelsen Garcia’s remarks were entirely unaware of her speech to the representative assembly of the Ohio Education Association only 10 days earlier.

It touched upon similar topics: exemplary education systems in other countries, the education reform movement, evidence or the lack thereof of its effectiveness, et al. The tone, however, was quite a bit different.

So we know how to talk about the Global Education Reform Movement, or the GERM, that has infected us. And we know all about what their pillars are, no matter what they are proposing, they love to say reform, reform, it’s corrupt, it needs to be changed, it’s all bad, little bad girls and little bad boys.

…It doesn’t work anywhere in the entire universe. No one can come up and say, if you privatize a school system, if you de-professionalize it and put a bunch of good-hearted folks in there that just want to try being teachers for a while, teach for a while, and none of it is working anywhere. We also know that the evidence is on our side. Privatization doesn’t work.

She rhetorically asked the delegates why reformers would continue to promote failing policies, then answered:

Follow the money. When it comes to K12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by teacher of the year, Rupert Murdoch.

…Who stands in our way? I don’t want to demonize the Koch brothers or the cloven-hoofed minions who dance at their side.

This is all about an agenda that says we will take advantage of some of the poorest communities, which in this country are high-minority communities, and we will wave these things in front of them that says your child deserves a private school, meaning a charter school.

The ALEC folks that will take out the unions because they want low, low, low taxes every day. Millionaires and billionaires who want to destroy public education and public unions, they’re the ones who stand in our way. But the public stands with us.

Eskelsen Garcia repeated AFT president Randi Weingarten’s assertion that in the November election “when the public looked at the issues that we supported for working families and for our schools, we won. And then they turned around and voted for people who weren’t for those things, which is what we’re trying to figure out, where the disconnect is.”

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Try looking here.

The bilingual Eskelsen Garcia is adept at speaking two different languages, but her audiences deserve to know if there’s one version for the natives and a different one for the foreigners.

Originally published here

Published with permission