{"id":3748,"date":"2011-08-11T12:50:37","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T16:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3748"},"modified":"2011-08-11T14:23:38","modified_gmt":"2011-08-11T18:23:38","slug":"all-your-speaking-fee-are-belong-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3748","title":{"rendered":"All your speaking fee are belong to me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alexander Russo has a long and somewhat confusing entry this morning,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/scholasticadministrator.typepad.com\/thisweekineducation\/2011\/08\/reform-smearing-ravitch-will-likely-blow-up-in-reformers-faces.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fthisweekineducation+%28This+Week+In+Education%29\">Smearing Ravitch Will Likely Blow Up In Reformers Faces<\/a>, whose confusing presentation is probably rooted in the confusing presentation of Whitney Tilson, whom he quotes (and who quotes others in a style best described as confectionary). A few quick thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Brill and Ravitch will both sell more books as a result of this controversy and the fact that Ravitch is interviewing Brill on C-SPAN later this month (not that millions watch C-SPAN, but someone will clip and upload to Youtube, and that will spread).<\/li>\n<li>Brill&#8217;s claim and Tilson&#8217;s confection are confusing the question of being paid to speak to the public from the one of being paid to speak to a willing audience in a private setting. I still can&#8217;t figure out from Russo&#8217;s blog entry\/Tilson&#8217;s email\/Tilson&#8217;s quoting Brill and others\u00a0whether Ravitch was ever paid to speak on television about public policy in a way that was not made public (the case where you could argue that transparency is important). (For the record, I&#8217;m behind on a bunch of reading and I&#8217;m not inclined to buy Brill&#8217;s book just to read that passage. I&#8217;m also not buying Cathy Davidson&#8217;s new book on how we must GORILLA reorient all of education GORILLA around BRAIN-SCIENCE GORILLA odd attempts to apply neuroscience to children&#8217;s learning.) In terms of speaking fees and unions, the right question to ask is whether union members feel their dues are used appropriately to pay for Diane Ravitch to visit and speak with them.<\/li>\n<li>The speaking fees mentioned by Brill would be big bucks for me and most of my fellow historians but are tepid when compared to the ex-federal official speaking circuit or the famous-speaker circuit (and Ravitch falls in both categories). Did Brill ask who else unions paid to speak to them (I suspect FEA paid Erin Gruwell when she came to our delegate assembly a few years ago), and did Tilson ever complain about that? Has Tilson or Brill ever paid for motivational speakers to bloviate all over their employees?<\/li>\n<li>In general, speaking fees for private settings are swamped by the opportunity cost of the audience&#8217;s time. It is a very common thing for school districts to bring in &#8220;motivational speakers&#8221; such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wpaag.org\/CharacterEducationTowerArticle.htm\">Willard<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/gerald-bracey\/educations-baron-von-munc_b_101667.html\">Daggett<\/a> and require hundreds of teachers to spend a day traveling to and listening to a few hours of bloviation. I would love to criticize the speaking fees of Daggett, but that&#8217;s a pittance compared with the cost of hundreds of days of teacher time that could be better spent &#8230; oh, I don&#8217;t know, teaching, maybe?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div><strong>Update<\/strong>: I forgot to explain my own speaking fee structure:<\/div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>State of Florida: just pay my expenses<\/li>\n<li>Out of state: expenses plus an academic&#8217;s honorarium ($250)<\/li>\n<li>Daily deal: Pay me $1000 and I say <strong>NOTHING<\/strong> the whole day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alexander Russo has a long and somewhat confusing entry this morning,\u00a0Smearing Ravitch Will Likely Blow Up In Reformers Faces, whose confusing presentation is probably rooted in the confusing presentation of Whitney Tilson, whom he quotes (and who quotes others in a style best described as confectionary). A few quick thoughts: Brill and Ravitch will both [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Ys","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3748"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3753,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748\/revisions\/3753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}