Arthur Getzel: Small Lies, Big Lies, and School Statistics
Guest post by Arthur Getzel.
Over the past few days, I was torn whether or not to publish a letter I wrote to Michael Mulgrew. I was hesitant for several reasons. First, I hold a position with the United Federation of Teachers and I was in no mood for flak from those just above me because I would be publicly disagreeing with the leader of my union. Second, I thought that if I sent the head of my union a personal letter disagreeing with him, I should at least have the courtesy to wait until he replied. Right now, it is over three days since I sent the letter and as of yet, no reply. What prompted the letter was an email to union members critiquing Bloomberg's reaction to the recent results of the ELA and Math Common Core State Assessments. In a nutshell, he made two statements that I had to disagree with. One, that educators developed the Common Core and that the Common Core is the way to make our students college and career ready as well as develop deep higher level thinking skills.
In the last seventy-two hours, three things convinced me that I have to publish the letter. First, I asked the opinion of several bloggers who I greatly respect. One wrote me saying that I should not care what he thinks while the other blogger said that my letter was powerful and needed to be heard. Next, I read a great blog from NYC Educator critiquing Mulgrew's email