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The Tenticles of Profit

Published January 5, 2012 on Schools Closed
Tags: ALEC, curricula, education reform, Koch Brothers, NCLB, on Schools, parenting, privatizing schools, public education, school reform, schools, social contract, teacher unions, teachers, testing

PUBLIC EDUCATION AND THE TENTICLES OF PROFIT

A new reality is beginning to unfold. This other-reality is inhabited by fabulously wealthy people who want, indeed are compelled, to become even more wealthy since having all but a tiny percentage of the real world’s income is not quite enough – they apparently want it all. The May 2011 edition of Vanity Fair reports that 1% of the US population takes in 25% of all income and holds 40% of the nation’s wealth. http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105 There is today, it seems, an epidemic of consummate sociopathic greed by people who profit on everyone else’s losses and who buy politicians with the same ease normal people buy groceries. To further their ends the other-reality hosts pool-side gatherings at plush resorts for ambitious and eager other-reality wannabes to discuss how best to go about achieving their agendas. In these settings the wannabes rub shoulders with the other-reality folks and offer their services and willingness to assist the sponsors in their quest for an even greater slice of the National Pie. We can only wonder what the rewards can be for providing such assistance. One example, perhaps, of what possibilities might exist is revealed in how Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, cheerfully responded to a caller he thought was one of the multi-millionaire Koch brothers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBnSv3a6Nh4

Privatizing Public Education is one potential source of new wealth being explored by the other-reality people. Achieving control of the Public Education system which has existed, for better or for worse, in the US for more than a century, requires operatives appointed to governmental offices of education willing to carry out the agenda, New Mexico being one such example. Why not start the take over process with politicians who could use a little financial help with their campaigns provided by “Foundations” dedicated to the preservation of Democracy? A little help here and there results in such appointments to public office as I have described above and pretty soon you are on your way to grading schools and grading teachers and, in the end the inevitable conclusions that students are failing, teachers are failing and, of course, public schools are failing. Our only hope then in this scenario is privatization.

If you think the above is exaggeration please check out the following web sites which were provided by a reader of one of my earlier essays, “Hemingway” and I share his annotations here, with my thanks:

” Hemingway

August 2, 2011 • 9:23 am

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) sponsored model bills aiming to privatize public education, eliminate teacher’s unions, and make American universities adhere to the right wing and libertarian viewpoint.

http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_Teachers

http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&Template=/Templates/TemplateHomepage/ALEC_1502_20070319T102535_LayoutHomePage.cfm

The Kochs have given ALEC contributions exceeding $1 million—not including a half-million loaned to ALEC when the group had financial problems. “The Kochs’ mistrust of public education can be traced to their father, Fred, who ranted and raved that the National Education Association was a communist group and public-school books were filled with “communist propaganda,”

http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/alec-exposed-koch-connection

Interestingly ALEC was behind the scenes in Wisconsin in the education fight. Read this article by Dr. William Cronin.

http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/

This is wrong! ”

The Koch Brothers and others of their political persuasion it should be pointed out are not, lest we demonize them, the only example of moneyed people financing a social agenda. Money is power of course and the willingness to use it for social change has always been with us as a society. Recall the Carnegies and Rockefellers and presently Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and so on who are using their fortunes to sponsor scientific exploration and the advancement of technology and knowledge and create a safer disease-and hunger-free world.

WHO IS FAILING WHAT?

Let’s examine the failing schools agenda and how it is being rationalized for public consumption. Are teachers failing? Who says so and what is their agenda? Here is an exchange between the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a teacher) and a “reporter” from a Libertarian “news” organization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFHJkvEwyhk&feature=player_embedded

Teachers seem to have become a favorite soft target for the industrial reformers. Teachers are a convenient target for several reasons including their own unions which have failed to seize the moment and take control of the narrative. As an example of the assault on teachers, one of Governor Scott Walker’s first legislative “achievements”, in his opinion at least, was to disenfranchise Wisconsin teachers’ unions. An August 10th, 2011 item on the KOAT-TV web site details the problems teachers in Albuquerque are going to face with a 7% increase in class sizeshttp://www.koat.com/news/28819192/detail.html And, rest assured these class size increases will result in matching increases in standardized test result failures. This will be one more blow against the autonomy and authority of classroom teachers setting them up as scapegoats for politicians. Teachers will be blamed for the failures and the privatization band will strike up its familiar marching tune – “Privatize, privatize – Oh the results you’ll see. You won’t believe your eyes!

http://www.utahnsforpublicschools.org/policycenter/KeyLessonsClassSizeandStudentAchievement.htm

Tests can also exert a corrupting influence as we recently saw in the exposure of wide-spread cheating of No Child Left Behind test results in Atlanta, Georgia. According to ABC News in reporting the story at the time: “In Georgia, teachers complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, teachers said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. “Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice, authorities said.” In New Mexico 87% of schools fell short in the state-wide evaluations. Are schools failing? The best answer is probably, yes, and for good reasons. Are privatized schools doing better across the board? Not really.

It isn’t that privatized schools, as such, are instruments of some hidden social control agenda, many are not. The KIPP charter schools, for example, are first rate. The administrators, teachers and students are motivated. The educational results gained by these schools are excellent with a high number of graduates going on to college although I am not in favor of using that as an absolute metric for assessing schools and public education. But, more importantly KIPP schools motivate their students to learn. They mentor and develop their teachers in earnest, they engage parents, and they engage children holding their attention for a longer school day and week than public schools do. The “sample daily schedule”, as posted on the KIPP web site, gives teachers two hours of prep time between 8AM and 3PM, during which time they also teach 3 one-hour classes and get a 40-minute lunch break and get an hour for “advisory meetings”. The hours 3PM to 5PM are a blend of electives, prep and meetings. These particular charter schools are educating children with great success.

However, in spite of all the good these schools do the question remains – why can’t public schools do the same? Why can’t the existing public schools system be charged with the same responsibility, given the same resources and accomplish the same results?

AUTHENTIC EDUCATION

I have stressed many times in these essays that education is not a manufacturing process and uniformity is not the objective of authentic learning. There is no such thing on Earth as a “Standard Child” and by that reasoning alone standardized testing as the ultimate measure of pedagogical success is false out of the box. To claim otherwise is to trivialize human nature and human experience – it is, in fact, dehumanizing. To contend that standardized testing is a fair and proper method of assessment betrays a diminished view of humanity and ignorance of the educational process. The key to authentic education is interest and when interest is absent so too is authentic learning. Needless to say authentic learning and teaching go hand-in-hand and neither can function when a teacher cannot devote an appropriate amount of time to each learner. So, when a school system increases class sizes and decreases the number of available classroom teachers no claim to authentic teaching and learning can be made. This is a prescription for failure writ large. Class sizes must be adjusted to reasonable levels if effective teaching and learning are to take place. Next parents must be as fully engaged in the process as they are required to be in the charter school schemes.

In a recent news report( http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/education/social-promotion-could-be-on-agenda) about the push to eliminate, by statute, social promotion in New Mexico, Robin Gibson (A fourth grade teacher at Sandia Base Elementary School) said, ” … it’s unreasonable to think all students learn at the same pace. Kids are all coming from different backgrounds and we need to work with them and not punish them for something they can’t control.” So, what is the answer to this push, this fixation, to punish kids who don’t learn at the same rate as test writers think they should? How about doing away with grade levels at the elementary level and rather setting performance standards for matriculation? So simple. This is what REAL school reform needs to be about, the simple recognition that children, just like adults, do not all learn at the same rate. Next, in the lower grades do away with the fixation on standardized testing. Tests can certainly be useful as diagnostics (their only real value actually), instruments of policy and policy making or, just as easily, justification for the privatization of public education.

There are people out there waiting to pounce on failed schools and failed school systems. The hucksters will promise greater instructional success with lower costs and greater uniformity of results across the board. This will be brought to you by people who have social control and profit foremost in mind. These entrepreneurs can buy with ease politicians and acolytes; the real victims will be children and the greatest loss will be felt by society itself. Is this the new reality we wish to subscribe to, making rich people richer and, at the same time, impoverishing public education and consequently our children? It will be a hollowing out of the social contract and of our civil society. These possibilities cannot be taken lightly and certainly cannot be dismissed as paranoid rant – it has happened to other countries and societies throughout history and it can happen in the US just as easily. It does us well to consider that those who do not remember history are destined to repeat it.

What must we do to make schools safe from privatization and loss of public control? In my opinion perhaps the most important first step must be to depoliticize public education. This is a matter of grave consequence as partisan politics have no place in the process of schooling. Authentic school reforms must be immunized against politicization, commercialization and interference by people whose only qualification is that they have managed to be elected or appointed to public office. Educators must speak out forcefully, defend their expertise and demand control of the process of schooling. I think class sizes must be held at a level where each child can receive proper attention. How can teachers teach where class sizes clearly exceed any possibility of individualized attention? I cannot emphasize this class size issue too strongly. Each child as a learner is a unique center of experience and each child learns at a rate particular to that child so how then can any normal human teacher accomplish the level of individualized attention required to instruct each child with large class sizes and why aren’t parents up in arms over this breech of trust? Parents must be fully integrated into the educational model as the ultimate source of motivation and discipline. Being educated and being able to test out are two vastly different things. The question is, simply put, what are we after in public education – educated individuals or test-taking automatons?

A New Tower of Babel

Published January 5, 2012 on Schools Closed
Tags: ABCD-F Act, Bill Gates, curricula, cyber academies, education reform, Henry Giroux, Koch Brothers, NCLB, on Schools, parenting, public education, Rupert Murdoch, school reform, schools, social contract, teacher unions, teachers, testing

THE NEW TOWER OF BABEL

” [H]uman community depends on language” say the authors of the language chapter in the book Deep History (Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Univ. of California Press, 2011). The authors use the lesson of Babel described in the bible as an example of the power of language. According to the Babel story everyone spoke the same language until someone had the bright idea of building a tower so tall they could reach heaven. Their idea didn’t sit well with the proprietor of heaven so he “confounded” their language to prevent the project from proceeding. In short, control language and you control people.

Deliberate inversion of language has always been a favored tool of propagandists and demagogues. Consider just for a moment the current revulsion for and fear of the term “class-warfare” on the part of the 1% class. Another gem is referring to public education as “government education”. “Cowabunga Battyman, th’gummint’s after the kids!” In Orwell’s novel 1984 the users of “Newspeak” employed “doublethink” to manipulate the residents of the country.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

Newspeak and doublethink are now the “indispensably necessary” staples of the venality and political agendas sweeping across the US in the guise of education reform. By deliberately employing language contradictory to common usage and understanding, these interests are confounding the public narrative. The best example on a national scale is No Child Left Behind, which uses carefully contrived testing to leave not only children behind but teachers as well. In these so-called reform programs teaching becomes testing and failure is all but assured. In New Mexico we have the ABCD-F Schools Rating Act to insure failure, failure as defined by interested parties leading ultimately to privately run schools, online course work and what the Act itself refers to as “cyber academies” which, interestingly enough, are not included in the required ratings under Section 3 of the Act. The objective truth here: testing is not pedagogy, it is not curriculum and instruction, it is a strategy to set up public schools to fail and machine learning to prosper.

If you have any doubts about this strategy read the story in the Washington Post about a fellow who is a school board member, a corporate executive with a BS and two master’s degrees. He took the 10th grade reading and math tests required for students in his school district. He said he managed to “guess” the answers to ten out of sixty math questions and scored a “D” on the reading test. Is it any wonder then that these innocuous sounding rating and testing programs like ABCDF and NCLB are condemning public schools to failure? We must rightly ask, why? What’s in it for the perpetrators? What do they stand to gain?

Minions of wealthy business interests have moved across the country installing themselves into state governments and sundry “foundations”, spreading the idea that public schools are a failure and they have the solution – privatizing public schools, privatizing teacher education and installing high-tech teaching devices. Why? Because people like Rupert Murdoch, the Koch boys, Bill Gates and a host of others, having financed politicians as a down payment, are salivating over their potential profits. Rupert puts that potential at $500 billion.

The Tuesday, December 6, 2011, New York Times had two editorial pieces on education. One piece offered a “how to” as in “How To Rescue Education Reform” that sounded a death knell for teachers, describing “Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education“. In both articles what I found more interesting than the standard hollow circular arguments debasing public education and human teachers was that the three authors are all affiliated with Stanford University, as is the New Mexico Secretary-Designate of Public Education. Coincidence? Perhaps, perhaps not.

A viable democracy requires educated citizens capable of critical thinking and a strong sense of community. There is no social dimension to cyber or any other form of machine learning. Machines, by their nature, isolate learners from the social context provided by public schools and from the democratizing influences of that community. The 21st century Tower of Babel has been constructed and the intent clearly is to confound the narrative in order to dismantle the finest, most democratic and enabling institution this country has ever had, public education. At what price?

Henry Giroux, in Education And The Crisis Of Public Values, (Peter Lang Publishing, 2012) writing about what he calls the politics of humiliating teachers, public schooling and marginalizing youth put it this way.

Despite these grave circumstances, we seem to lack the critical language, civic courage, and public values to recognize that when a country institutionalizes a culture of cruelty that takes aim at public schools and their hard-working teachers, it is embarking on a form of self-sabotage and collective suicide whose victims will include not only education, but democracy itself.

This essay originally appeared at:http://www.nmpolitics.net/

A LITTLE HISTORY

Published December 19, 2011 on Schools Closed
Tags: ABCD-F Act, Bill Gates, curricula, education reform, Herbert M. Kliebard, Jeb Bush, Koch Brothers, NCLB, on Schools, parenting, Politics, public education, Rupert Murdoch, school reform, schools, social contract, teacher unions, teachers, testing

A LITTLE HISTORY

What bothers me most about the current war against public education is that it is a-historical. It is as if schools suddenly went bad a few months ago or coincidentally with Jeb Bush needing something to keep himself busy when his term of office in Florida expired. Without any education credentials whatsoever Jeb is now on the leading edge of the assault on public education and teachers. Foundations and acolytes scattered across the country are feeding the frenzy along with a little help from friends and buddies such as Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Koch boys and so forth. Without intending cynicism this to me resembles class warfare more than a little.

As the saying goes, those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it so I thought perhaps a small dose of history would render a bit of perspective to the snake-oil presently being offered by the newly ordained “experts” and their minions. This is also the first time teachers are being cast as villains so I will add here parenthetically, that anyone who thinks teachers control the curriculum in public schools is dangerously misinformed. Control of pubic education is and has long been in the hands of administrators, school boards and state and federal agencies. Teachers hold the lowest spot on the policy totem pole but they carry the greatest liability and the most intimate consequences.

Teachers are the public face of educational policy and so have become targets of opportunity. One television advertising campaign being used to promote mechanized education even goes so far as to demonize teachers as inferred child molesters. This malicious campaign was created by a national consultant who when speaking to wealthy education industry investors advised them that rather than “intellectualize ourselves into the [education reform] debate…is there a way that we can get into it at an emotional level? … Emotions will stay with people longer than concepts… We need to hit on fear and anger. Because fear and anger stays with people longer. And how you get the fear and anger is by reframing the problem.”

Reframing the problem is quite easy so long as no one engages the public narrative from a factual historical perspective. Even a well meaning public or a well intentioned state legislature can be easily manipulated with expertly applied misinformation and distortions doled out by unscrupulous public opinion manipulators and well placed operatives within governmental agencies. Government programs with simplistic innocuous sounding names like No Child Left Behind or ABCD-F – reflect professional advertising and propaganda to reframe the problem. After all, who would openly admit to wanting to leave a child behind. The unscrupulous lust for profit seems to have no moral, social or ethical boundaries. The running narrative placing blame on teachers and public schools has no rational justification. This distortion however is a time-honored technique of despots used throughout history to isolate and demonize minorities. The programs cited above are intended to create failure and thus frame the public dialog. In truth while schools and teachers are certainly not perfect I regard such propaganda campaigns as sociopathic. They are about money, not about children.

The short history of public education from the early 1800s to the present is a record of relentlessly evolving ideas about content and methodology, that is, curriculum and instruction. Generally speaking, public education seems to have absorbed in one way or another all the reforms initiated from the early 1800s to the present. In the 1820s there were Mental Disciplinarians, then Developmentalists and the Social Meliorists who were followed by the Social Efficiency movement of the early 20th century. There were others but these were the most influential and they provided the foundational ideas on which modern American curriculum and instruction were built. Over time the ideas embodied in these movements wove themselves into the fabric of American schooling so completely that they have become indistinguishable. I think it most important to point out here that not one of these influential movements spanning two centuries was ever motivated by profit.

In the early part of the 19th century and into the next the United States was primarily an agrarian society and what public schooling there was reflected that. Starting in the early 20th century the country began its transition to an industrial society. The industrial period ran through two world wars and America became the undisputed industrial giant of the entire planet. Public education was geared to the needs of an industrial society. Now, in the early 21st century we are becoming a post-industrial society and public education will again evolve to accommodate the needs of the new reality. There have been a multitude of other forces and influences on public education of course but those above are the broad strokes.

It is important also to note that at no time in the span of this history has any one educational movement held complete sway. In fact it seems that as they emerged each went to work with the others. Eventually parts of each became woven into the fabric of the educational experience. Today the US is a diverse society with a large but not dominant agricultural economic sector and, though somewhat diminished, a nevertheless vigorous industrial sector continues as well. Like all of history nothing is all the same everywhere all of the time but the parts and the influences of everything are wherever we look. In the future as in the past public education will reflect the times and the people. America needs people who can think critically, learn readily and reflect the values of the community. Public education’s mission is to encourage learning as a value and as a commitment to the society at large; this requires educating children not training them as if they are destined to become robots.

n.b. An excellent study of the history of American curriculum is:

The Struggle For The American Curriculum 1893-1958, 2nd ed., Herbert M. Kliebard, Routledge,1995

this essay first appeared at: http://nmpolitics.net/index/

The Vocabulary of Destruction

Published December 16, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
Tags: curricula, education reform, on Schools, Politics, public education, school reform, schools, teacher unions, teachers, testing

THE VOCABULARY OF DESTRUCTION

That public education is a vital component of a civil and just society is inarguable. The education of children in any society is the means by which social values are projected into the future. Education has been and remains an integral and defining aspect of our community and our social contract. What we now witnessing is a widespread assault on public education and by extension, the community, being waged by a spectrum of business and political interests. David M. Steiner, whose work is admired by the current US Secretary of Education was asked in 2007 about public education as a public good and responded to the interviewer: “Social justice promotes hatred. Hatred for the established order.”The “established order” comment immediately called to mind George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984.

Throughout, a song recurs in Winston’s mind:

Under the spreading chestnut tree

I sold you and you sold me—

Orwell described a world in which people sold each other out in a dystopian society overseen by “Big Brother“. The overseers spoke in what Orwell called “Newspeak” a reconstruction of language in which normal usage and understanding are inverted and subverted to undermine reasoning, perception and community. Newspeak required the use of “doublethink” as part of its methodology to reinforce the established order.

The distortion of language is a frequent and favored tool of demagoguery. What more deceitful and despicable form of thought control than the destruction of the common language and meaning of a society and thus its collective understanding and commitment to social justice? Under this scheme common vocabulary is recast and redefined to, among other purposes, deliberately isolate and ultimately demonize troublesome minority groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, political activists, labor unions and teachers. The aim is to isolate and then pit these groups and social strata against each other – a form of class warfare. Those in charge must of course deny this as class warfare lest the natives begin to suspect something other than what they are saying is going on.

I was again reminded of 1984 recently as I read a web post in which the author referred to public education as “government education”. Ominous sounding? Sinister even? You bet and it was intended to be. “Government education” sounds a lot like the former Maoist system of re-education camps where those who resisted intimidation and sheep-like following of orders were sent to have their thinking and behavior adjusted. Government as the big bad boogie-man enslaving the country with taxes, regulatory agencies and public education. This use of language to discredit public education and, for that matter, public service and the common polis is sociopathic, a selling out of the common good. Calling things what they are not is one of the means employed to destroy the social contract that has held this society together from its beginnings – to divide and thus recast the society to an end in which everyone and everything is owned by a few. A few as in 1%. In 1984, the Ministry of Peace is concerned with war, the Ministry of Love is concerned with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty is concerned with starvation. The three slogans of the Party: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. And now we are given another Orwellian re- construction, public education becomes “government education”. Newspeak – doublethink.

We are presently seeing a sinister display of deliberately deceptive language not only in recasting and demeaning democratic social practices and institutions but most artfully in the naming of political action committees as “foundations” and “institutes”. The monikers are sprinkled with sweet-sounding words such as “Freedom”, “Open”, “National Committee” or “National Council”, “Choice”, “Transformation”, “Liberty”, “Democracy”, “Family”, “Open”, “Prosperity”, “Values”; I have collected a list of over 250 of these outfits and, when reading the titles, I can almost hear strains of patriotic music in the background and the snap of “Old Glory” in the breeze. So deceitful, so cleverly designed to mask their ultimate purposes: to sow cognitive dissonance and cover their tracks.

And why this barrage of deceptive language? Public education, instead of being held as the community’s common commitment to the education of the young, is now seen as a potential income stream by people like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch, who has claimed a stake in what he recently assessed as a $500 billion opportunity². Rupert is joined by numbers of private, for-profit corporations with noble-sounding names that cleverly direct attention away from their objective of privatizing and “profitizing” public education. Billionaires “donate” millions to the campaigns of political hopefuls and in return expect the skids to be greased for the eventual replacement of public education with privatized and industrialized schooling from which they will profit. Those IOUs are coming due – teachers and students beware.

No matter what the topic, newspeak and doublethink dominate our public narrative on a daily basis. A web site titled “obamamustgo.org” recounts Speaker of the House John Boehner’s response to President Obama’s and the Occupy Wall Street movement’s calls for higher taxes for the wealthy:

“Listen, I understand people’s frustrations. I understand their concerns, and I frankly understand that we have differences in America. We are not going to engage in class warfare. The president is out there doing it every day. I frankly think it’s unfortunate, because our job is to help all Americans, not to pit one set of Americans against another.”³

My take on this is that Boehner sincerely believes the class war is over and his side has won. The Occupy movement is giving him and his friends and donors some wobbles. Boehner and friends don’t like to be challenged by the underclass and they especially don’t like it when the underclass presumptuously resists being an underclass. This is the great awakening the Occupy movement is causing among the non-existent underclass across the country – “We exist”!

Of course, Boehner was one of the architects of the tax laws that gave the wealthy their lucrative tax breaks and his language is clearly intended to obscure and confuse. I see this as a case of what Theodor Adorno meant when, in his essay Education After Auschwitz⁴, he commented on Freud’s observation in Civilization and its Discontents, “… that civilization itself produces anti-civilization and increasingly reinforces it.” Adorno goes on to say, “A pattern that has been conformed throughout the entire history of persecutions is that the fury against the weak chooses for its target especially those who are perceived as weak …”. In the war to privatize schools and what Adorno characterized as the “fetishization of technology” teachers are considered as the weak. The propaganda campaign called No Child Left Behind is a perfect example of using language to divert attention from the real agenda which, in this case, is clearly to discredit teachers and public schools. Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, called it a “well-funded, well-coordinated campaign to privatize as many schools as possible.” Ms. Ravitch went further to characterize the No Child Left Behind Act as, “the death star of American education”. ⁵

At a retreat in October 2011, Patricia Levesque, a former advisor to Jeb Bush and former Florida colleague of New Mexico’s Secretary-Designate of Education, urged attendees whose interests were to mechanize and privatize public education to “spread” the teachers’ unions, to “play offense” by introducing “decoy” legislation and to instigate other union busting measures which would allow bills favoring charter schools to “fly under the radar”.⁵Levesque’s business Meridian Strategies, LLC lobbies for several education-technology businesses and pushes for new laws to facilitate charter schools, academies and virtual learning. At this “retreat” for philanthropists and groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, all of which have an interest in education reform to privatize and mechanize learning, Ms. Levesque stated that she is fighting to “advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment”.⁶

In the end game the language employed will influence decision makers, legislators, the general public and even some parents who uncritically buy into the propaganda. Given the ultimate importance and influence of language, advocates for schools and children must compete using plain-spoken truth; the mechanistas, as I call them, must be exposed for what they are and for what their ulterior motives and ultimate goals are. I will say without hesitation that those whose purpose is to crucify public education on a cross of profit by distorting the public narrative with their vocabulary of destruction have defective moral compasses calibrated with dollar signs at all cardinal points.

This combat for public opinion recalls Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. It will be a dark world ahead indeed if the mechanistas succeed in their war against the common good, public education and the vocabulary of an open and democratic society. When I was a youngster, World War II had ended and the Great Depression was past, the pantheon of heroes was made up of, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and Trigger and Dale Evans and Buttermilk – all heroes in the classic sense of good ascending above evil and subverting such wrongdoing as a heartless banker’s foreclosure of a poor widow’s ranch. In the eternal war between good and evil, good prevailed and that, as anodyne and naïve as it might have been, was the message. The narrative has changed and what we now see glorified in the popular culture is violence for the sake of violence, unbridled ambition and profit for the sake of profiteering no matter the social costs. Sadly these perversions are the behavior children are being exposed to now. The world has changed not for the better and if we are to turn it around we must call out the language of destruction for what it is, we must change the narrative with the language of community and social good.

1. “Education And The Crisis of Public Values”, Henry A. Giroux, Peter Lang, 2012 p 81.

2. Rupert’s assessment.

3. Boehner, OWS and “class warfare”.

4. Adorno-Education-After-Auschwitz

5. http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/former-bush-education-official-reform

6. The Nation, 11/17/11

This article first appeared in both the print and online editions of Light of New Mexico – December 2011.

http://www.motivationalbooks.com/thelightofnewmexico/

Fire Two Teachers and Call Me in the Morning.

Published November 23, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
Tags: ABCD-F Act, Bush, curricula, education reform, Elwood Cubberly, George W, NCLB, on Schools, public education, school reform, schools, social contract, teacher unions, teachers, testing

Fire Two Teachers …

“Fire two teachers and call me in the morning …” seems to be the cure-all that neo-liberal and right-wing activists are banging their drums for. The next move after the “ABCD-F” scam will be to legislate recognition of mail-order teaching degrees from online diploma mills. Wanna bet? Recall that our secretary-designate of education has placed on her PED Advisory Board David Saba the CEO of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, a private company and publisher of self-paced online teaching certification programs. The train is coming down the tracks right now as public schools, public school teachers and teaching are attacked and denigrated.

Another private organization, “National Council on Teacher Quality” has published a little document titled a bit disingenuously, “Increasing the Odds – How Good Policies Can Yield Better Teachers“. The ultimate purpose of this document published in 2004 is to disenfranchise university and college-level schools of education and, most importantly, teachers and teachers’ unions. It is a call to dumb down the practice of teaching and learning to the extent that the authors claim there is no value to be gained from teachers earning masters’ degrees. So much for the value of education.

A problem cannot be solved without at least some measure of understanding and historical perspective as to what exactly the nature of the problem is and how it was arrived at. In other words, what are we talking about when someone says public education is failing? The condemnation of public education is a manufactured stampede to the destruction of that institution. The public needs to ask a lot of questions about the motives and intended purposes behind this condemnation. How are schools failing? Why are they failing? How did this all begin, when and where?

This entire early 21st century school reform argument is, I think, fueled by organized pretense and sophisticated public relations propaganda. When someone presents solutions to a problem without clearly defining that problem and its nature their motives and methods are to me suspect. When rapacious billionaires like Rupert Murdoch salivate for their piece of what they see as a lucrative education market, something other than authentic school reform is on their minds. Last year when Rupert acquired a school performance tracking firm, Wireless Generation, his take was, “When it comes to K-through-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” Murdoch later told an assembly of educational reform crusaders in San Francisco this past October, “Put simply we must approach education … willing to blow up what doesn’t work or gets in the way.” This week (11/15/11) the Walton (Wal-Mart) family’s foundation gave $25.5 million to the KIPP charter school system. Public schools, public school teachers and teachers’ unions beware – you are definitely in their way. You are on the target list. Duck and cover isn’t going to do it for you either, you are going have to come out swinging if you want to survive this onslaught.

SOME PERSPECTIVE

The problem with public education and the solution appeared with the George W. Bush administration and, as a result, we were “gifted” with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scam. The program, when stripped of its rhetoric, is essentially a testing regime starting with children as young as 4 years of age. Tests emanating from Washington DC and prepared by private testing companies, as might be expected, determined that kids were not learning to read and do arithmetic. Soon school systems, in order to retain federal funding, were pursuing better NCLB test scores by one means or another and you may recall the scandal that happened in Georgia. Atlanta teachers, on orders from their administrators, were altering test scores. Other teachers around the country began “teaching to the test”. Suddenly public education was on the ropes.

In my estimation, NCLB is the domestic propaganda equivalent of Iraq’s WMD – a problem created to rationalize and facilitate a “solution”. Another gift from the Bush dynasty, including brother Jeb who overnight became an education expert. And who were the beneficiaries of this gift that keeps on giving – kids, teachers, the public? Seed Money for Conservatives spells out who got the goodies: Shortly after the act was born in 2001 the US Department of Education doled out nearly $78 billion via NCLB to “private, for-profit and/or religious schools.” The two principle actors at the Department of Education at that time were Eugene Hickok and Nina Shokraii both with long histories with pro-privatization outfits like the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Tax Reform.

While the Bush 2005 budget provided the smallest spending for education compared to the nine preceding years, a $50 million experiment for school vouchers was approved diverting that money from public schools to private ones. From 2001 thru 2003 the US Department of Education gave $77.76 million to various groups all advocates for privatized education, including K12, founded by William Bennett. (Remember him?) You might recall our current secretary-designate of education, before she was posted to NM, was the CEO of Laying The Foundation, Inc. a private teacher training company. If you have harbored any doubts about what this new wave of school reform is about you now have a few things to think about.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

In the late 1800s when mass public education was in its infancy social needs and conditions were very different from what they are now. Public schools taught personal hygiene with as much intensity as they taught the alphabet. Why? Because living conditions were enormously different in those times. Punctuality was a major curricular objective among the teaching objectives in city schools in those times. Why? Because employers wanted reliable employees who could be counted upon to arrive at work on time and be prepared to carry out their tasks. The first writing on curriculum and instruction in the US was the work of industrial efficiency experts and academics such as Elwood Cubberly, who in 1905 had this to say about the purpose of public education:

“[Schools should be factories] “in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products…manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.” – Elwood Cubberly, Dean of Education at Stanford (1905)

LEARNING TO LEARN

What do children today need to learn in order to have a successful future life? A child entering public school this past September will not enter the work force, at the earliest if he or she matriculates from high school, until 2025. Who even has a clue what the world will be like in 2025? And therein lies the rub.

After a life-long involvement in teaching – elementary school children to graduate students – I will say without hesitation and without diminishing the value of other essential skills – learning to learn is, the most vital skill anyone can acquire. While content rapidly becomes obsolete the skill of learning lasts a life-time. Firing or demeaning teachers because students aren’t learning to read at a rate determined by someone who doesn’t know the individual children is a scam to justify hiring low-cost educational workers, installing high-cost teaching machines and hiring expensive “consultants”.

Testing is not by any stretch of the imagination teaching and it ought not to be the curriculum either. Razzle-dazzle machines are not teachers they are merely an impoverished implementation of low-level Skinnerian operant conditioning. Schools are not factories, children are not “products” to be “manufactured” and public education is not a market to be exploited . Teaching and learning are human-to-human activities, and this process has been going on since pre-historic times. The simple fact that we are still on the planet suggests success for the relationship. Let’s keep it that way.

This essay was first published at: http://NMPolitics.net

Undermining Public Education

Published October 27, 2011 on Schools Closed
Tags: "Metropolis", BillvGates, curricula, education reform, Fritz Lang, Hanna Skandera, Koch Brothers, on Schools, Paul Gessing, privatize public education, public education, school reform, schools, Scott Walker, Sussana Martinez, teacher unions, teachers, testing

Skandera takes steps to undermine public education

It’s no surprise that N.M. Education Secretary Designate Hanna Skandera is taking steps to undermine public education. The problem is that the educational model she and her backers pursue isn’t education at all. It’s operant conditioning.

Earlier this year I wrote about the questionable nomination of Hanna Skandera to the post of New Mexico secretary of public education – a job for which she is, on evidence, unqualified. Given her lack of a proper background and experience as an educator I wondered just what she was about.

As it turned out, Skandera failed to be confirmed for the secretary position during the 2011 regular session and so has held her office as “secretary designate.” Since holding this office, and without the mandate accorded by legislative approval, she has taken steps designed to undermine the authority of the Public Education Commission and the future of public education in the state.

Ms. Skandera came to New Mexico with a mission – to undertake the process of privatizing public education. She came here under the auspices and/or recommendations of various right-wing “foundations” and “institutes.” In some of them she had previously served as an officer.

Ms. Skandera and New Mexico are not alone in this scheme, as she has numerous counterparts across the country, all paid for by the same cabal of wealthy and influential individuals who underwrite the so-called “foundations” and “institutes” that finance their industrialized vision of public school reform. Here in New Mexico, Skandera has the backing of one of those so-called “foundations,” that being the Rio Grande Foundation and its chief executive Paul Gessing.

The majority of financial support for this “foundation” comes from out-of-state “foundations” and donors. Gessing’s donors include, among others, Donor’s Capital Fund of Virginia, State Policy Network of Virginia, Roe Foundation of South Carolina, Wal-Mart of Arizona and the Atlas Foundation of Washington DC.

A clear warning of an agenda

The obvious duplicity and fact-torturing employed by these so-called “foundations” and “institutes,” which are underwritten by some of the wealthiest people in the United States, ought to be a clear warning to all that they have an agenda. The shuck and jive surrounding their propaganda is patently transparent. What they are after is to defame, de-unionize, scrap and then privatize public education across the United States.

They are beginning with the founding and underwriting of variations on the charter-school theme. Charter schools, across the board, do not have a better academic record than their public school counterparts. What they do offer is that they are generally free of teachers’ unions, a holy grail for the sponsors on their path to privatization.

The efforts of these groups and their agents are sometimes clumsy and ham-handed but in so being they reveal the true nature of what they are up to. For example, Ms. Skandera just recently overruled the N.M. Public Education Commission’s (PEC) decision to not renew the credentials of three charter schools that utterly failed to meet required academic standards. To ensure she has legal cover for her actions, Skandera’s Public Education Department (PED) has now hired Patricia Matthews, who comes from the staff of a law firm that provides legal services to charter schools. The event was characterized by a member of the PEC as, “…hiring a fox to guard the hen house.”

Skandera also tailored the qualifications for a position within her department so she could hire the wife of the governor’s right-hand man. These antics are, to put it into the campaign rhetoric of our current governor, “Crony” hiring. So much for promised reform on that score.

Foot soldiers for the financially powerful

Why so blatant? Why the arrogance? Perhaps it arises from a sense of hubris gained by knowing you have the backing of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice that wants to become even more wealthy, and you can help.

Being a foot-soldier for the financially powerful has been known to confer delusions of elevated status to certain individuals. To get the picture, one has only to listen to Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who is doing his best to cut funding for public education at all levels in his state and disenfranchising teachers’ unions, speaking to someone he thought was one of the Koch brothers in this audio recording.

It is also worth noting that Governor Martinez’s campaign reports show that she took $10,000 directly from Koch Industries and $1.3 million from the Republican Governors’ Association. The RGA, for its part, took in at least $1 million from the Koch brothers and donated more than a million to the Republican Party of New Mexico, which heavily aided Martinez’s campaign.

The Koch brothers are businessmen – they expect a return on their investments, and you can rest assured they’ll have business in the Land of Enchantment.

Here is the agenda

Why do I object so strenuously and so strongly to all of the above? I do so because the industrialized education model being pursued by activists such as Skandera and her backers is an endless cycle of memorizing and regurgitating – no critical thinking, no creativity and, above all, no challenging of conventional wisdom or authority. The kind of training proposed by these people is not education – technically, it is operant conditioning.

Bill Gates, who invests heavily in this kind of educational reform through his own “foundation” once told an interviewer that any form of teaching and learning that could not be measured is useless. When was the last time you measured a beautiful sunset? How would you quantify the beauty of a Mahler symphony? Human beings have hearts and minds, Mr. Gates, not CPUs.

Conditioning of this kind is a dead end from which there is no exit. A better conception of the future will be impossible, because not only would the majority of children be unable to imagine such, they also wouldn’t know how to measure it. Children so conditioned would be left with no sense of authenticity or agency to shape their lives beyond low-paying, low-skill, treadmill jobs. Their lives and imaginations would be impoverished and, consequently, so too would be the world in which they would have to live.

People cannot have a better life or fashion a better world if they cannot imagine it, if they cannot imagine themselves creating it. Destroy imagination and you destroy tomorrow.

If people want more for their own children and if people who have no children want more for themselves, they must come to understand that today’s children will shape everyone’s future. We must all see our investment in public education today as an investment in our own futures, an investment in a civilized social contract, in a creative and thriving society.

scene from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"

The moral of Fritz Lang’s film “Metropolis” is that between head and hands there must be a heart. It is a heartless world imagined by those such as Skandera and her sponsors, those who would privatize and industrialize public education.

The More Things Change…

Published October 4, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
Tags: C-47, curricula, education reform, Gooney Bird, NCLB, on Schools, public education, school reform, schools, teachers, testing

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…

As I started to outline my thoughts for this essay, The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same, I recalled my first day in tech school at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas in 1961, learning how to maintain and launch an Atlas-F ICBM. I was a brand new 2nd Lieutenant in a group of about 20 officers ranging from “Brown Bars” like me to Lt. Colonels. The introduction was delivered by a young 1st Lt. who was enthusiastic to the point of delight about how modern warfare would never be the same because of these amazing ICBMs. The fellow rattled off dazzling statistic after dazzling statistic about range, targeting accuracy, response time, time to target and so on. The guy was absolutely glowing as he addressed the mixed group of newbies and old hands about the amazing capabilities of the Atlas F weapon system and a future of space travel, orbiting space stations, men on the moon and so on. For the time, it was all Buck Rogers whiz-bang.

At this point in the presentation there was a rather loud “Harrumph!!”. I looked back as a grizzled Captain, obviously recalled from retirement to active duty, growled loudly, “Aw, baloney! I’ll bet anybody anything that the day they land a man on the moon there’ll be a Goon in the pattern with fresh fruit and vegetables.”

(C-47 a WWII era cargo aircraft affectionately known in the AF as the “Gooney Bird” in which the author flew when he was first on active duty in 1961.)

Of course the class broke into gales of laughter – you had to be there I suppose – everyone enjoyed the counter-point. This guy had flown very many combat missions, had been shot at on numerous occasions and wasn’t terribly impressed with the idea of sitting in an underground bunker waiting to launch a missile at someone half-way around the planet he couldn’t see.

When I read the front page story in the Sunday, September 4th, New York Times, In Classrooms of Future, Stagnant Scores, I heard myself say, “Aw Baloney!” and I felt much the same way the Captain must have. The article cited details the introduction and use of high tech devices in a school system in Chandler, Arizona. This community has so far spent 33 million dollars to acquire the latest and greatest educational whiz-bang gadgets to outfit their schoolrooms. The article goes on to report that, “… schools are spending billions on technology, even as they lay off teachers, with little or no proof that this approach is improving basic learning.” The Chandler story is being repeated across the country as schools acquire the latest gadgets and get rid of teachers.

Frankly, I think we have slipped our intellectual and moral anchors and are now rapidly drifting off into an ocean of gullibility and hidden agendas. School officials are behaving much like Pacific island cargo cults waiting for that magical ship to sail over the horizon bearing all the answers to successful standardized test scores so they can beat the No Child Left Behind rap. They are bereft of good ideas of their own and are desperate. How did we come to this and what other ideas are possible?

WHAT’S THE REAL DEAL?

The “real deal” isn’t gadgets, it isn’t holding back and it certainly isn’t social promotion either. It isn’t bogus programs like No Child Left Behind. Those lame ideas have been and are being proven wrong over and over again – ad nauseum. Some things actually do work however and we need to ask, what is it that the successful charter schools do that regular public schools don’t? Are the technos ready for this brain-exploding revelation? 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 …… They spend more time with kids! “Eeeeeek! More time? That means more teachers and tutors. That means more mentoring. We don’t want to pay for more humans but …. maybe there’s a machine we can buy that will do the job.” There is more to the “Eeeeeek!” factor, however, and we’ll get to that later.

In contrast to the Chandler experience, in Houston, Texas the Schools Superintendent is experimenting with – are you ready for this? Here it comes !!!! ….. More time, More teachers, More tutors, More mentoring. And, as a result, the educational/instructional outcomes are improving. Troubled Schools Try Mimicking the Charters

There were five policies identified by the fellow who consulted with the Houston school system that he deemed “common to the successful charters” and these were:

Longer school days and years.
More rigorous and selective hiring of principals and teachers.
Frequent quizzes to determine what needs to be retaught – and “high dosage tutoring”.
A “no excuses” culture.

To this end, the Houston school cited in the story hired 50 full-time math tutors. More teachers, more tutors, more of the most essential ingredient in successful teaching and learning – one-on-one contact between teachers and learners. The tutors come from various backgrounds and the one cited in the story was formerly an engineer who easily illustrated how “negative 7 and positive 7 have the same absolute value” to a struggling student by drawing a number line for her. This is not unlike a master carpenter showing an apprentice how to square a layout – this is teaching as it has been done for as long as adults have been passing knowledge to young people.

Machines do not understand when a child is “struggling”, machines cannot interpret a puzzled look on a child’s face, machines cannot sense emotion and allay fear and uncertainty with a pat on the back or an encouraging word as can an adult who knows the child. These are the strong and irrefutable reasons why caring humans are the first and best teachers of other humans. And, it should go without saying that there have to be enough teachers, tutors and mentors to go around.

I am not at all opposed to the use of technology in classrooms as such. In these 21st Century times marvelous devices can be employed to extend the reach of teachers but, it must always be understood, machines cannot replace human teachers. Why? Because we are not talking about assembly lines and robots we are talking about schools and children. My values embrace personal achievement as opposed to standardized test scores and advocacy for children as distinct from advocacy for social promotion and holding back. Teaching a kid with the object of passing the NCLB test is not by any stretch of the imagination education. My advocacy is also a position with moral dimensions: we unquestionably devalue humanity by assigning to machines what is the essentially human task of people teaching people and when we demean a child with the humiliation of being held back. We have only to ask: What human values are transmitted to a child by a machine? What values are transmitted by humiliation? Who, in these circumstances is the ultimate beneficiary?

We must question why remedies are being proposed which are essentially punitive and not educative as to subject matter. We are justified in asking what other agendas might underlie policies that are essentially more political than educational. As a public policy, holding children back in grade is not about education but more a manipulation of public perception. The proposed policy of ending social promotion is no more than a Trojan Horse laying the ground work for selling out public education to the lowest bidder. This is the “Eeeeeek!” factor I alluded to earlier, this is the hidden agenda we must be alert to.

If we wish to promote a humane society, the teaching learning enterprise must then always be humane and human. In the final analysis there must always be teachers in the pattern, caring human teachers doing what teachers have been doing for eons – teaching children, passing on our collective knowledge and our collective societal values, which values include recognizing and respecting each other’s humanity – it cannot be about profit. Morally, the responsibility and execution of public education must always remain public. There is no other way to create and maintain a humane, just and civilized society except as a public enterprise.

Ditch the Corpse

Published September 8, 2011 on Schools Closed
Tags: B.F.Skinner, curricula, education reform, J.M.Stephens, KIPP, public education, retention, school reform, schools, teachers, testing

DITCH THE CORPSE

Both social promotion and holding children back in grade for failing to achieve according to arbitrary standards are counterproductive. The first is a disservice, the second a punishment. Both of these notions constitute a fundamental denial of the learning process and could easily be eliminated from the current educational narrative in one fell-swoop by simply eliminating grade levels.

If there were no grade levels from what are now considered kindergarten or first grade to 5th or 6th grade levels and if instead achievement or developmental levels were the gauge there would be no social promotion and no holding back. Nothing can change the simple fact of life that all learning is personal and is accomplished at a rate appropriate to each individual.

So, what’s the deal here with this urgent push to end social promotion and replace it with the Draconian practice of holding back? What personal, social or political agendas are being served by demeaning and humiliating children with this form of punishment? Is there an assumption that children who do not learn according to arbitrary expectations are doing so deliberately? Have any of those who are making these proposals ever taken instruction in human developmental psychology? We are not talking about Skinnerian pigeons here, we are talking about children – human children – and it is a given that all humans, children and adults, learn at their own rate according to their abilities. (n.b.: Not all of Skinner’s pigeons learned at the same rate either.) I would ask the so-called reformers who propose the holding-back policy how well they would do today in a differential equations class. How would they feel if they were socially stigmatized for not keeping up with others who are more mathematically inclined in a chat about Newton’s thoughts on the Binomial Theorem for Fractional or Negative Exponents?

What do the proponents of holding children back believe would be gained by social stigmatization? Do those who propose this antediluvian educational practice believe they are actually helping a child when they humiliate him or her in front of peers, and are they presuming to speak for the child and assert there is no need to feel humiliated? Do they want not only to specify how quickly a child should learn but also tell the child how to feel about being held back? This sounds to me a lot like adding insult to injury.

ARE THERE ALTERNATIVES?

How can anyone claim with a straight face that cutting school budgets, eliminating teachers, shortening the school day or week and limiting various classroom resources produces better educational outcomes and better serves a child who might be held back?

Where is common sense here? How can schools achieve more learning with fewer necessary resources? I think most educators would agree that, of all the educational resources, time is the one most closely related to good instructional outcomes. All of the most successful schools in the U.S. are making more time a priority and the KIPP schools are a sterling example of this. In one case, the Brooklyn Generation School ” … replaced most administrators with teachers and staggered all employees’ schedules allowing it to increase learning time by 30 percent without additional cost.” The result of this reordering of priorities and resources? “Last Spring, 90 percent of seniors graduated on time.” And this in the face of the fact that when those students entered the school, ” … only 20 percent were at grade level.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/shortchanged-by-the-school-bell.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Shortchanged by the Bell&st=cse So, what is the logical answer to the challenge for better alternatives? I would say more teachers and more time for them to teach and for children to learn.

In “The Process of Schooling” (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1967), J.M. Stephens tells a beautiful story to illustrate the ongoing educational debate.

“This preoccupation with the conspicuous and artificial aspects of education reminds one of an amusing, if spurious, account of the origins of agriculture. There was once a suggestion that, in some early burial services, it was customary to place wild grain in the grave for the use of the deceased in his new life. Inevitably some of this grain was spilled around the edge of the grave. In that fertile soil it took root and flourished, ultimately providing a harvest. The survivors noticed this result, and soon a definite principle was formulated: At a certain season, bury a corpse with all the proper ceremonies, and in due course there will be grain to harvest. The corpse, of course, was the most prominent feature of the process, and it became the focal point around which the whole principle was organized. When the planting season came around, corpses were in great demand and were even produced to order when not otherwise available. It was upon treatment of the corpse, moreover, that the success of the harvest was supposed to depend.”

Sooner or later it dawned on people that the corpse could be left out of the equation which, needless to say I suppose, depressed the market for corpses.

Stephens went on to say: ” It is easy to focus our attention on the conspicuous, dramatic events that call for deliberate attention. Conversely, it is natural to ignore the humble ever-present forces that work consistently, independent of our concern.”

I used to read this passage to my students in both my “Schools and Society” and “School Reform” classes because it illustrates how we become enamored of and wrapped up in certain kinds of ideas – ideas which lead us away from a more fundamental and effective understanding of the process of schooling, the natural processes of teaching and learning. I wanted to focus their attention on those “humble ever-present forces” that determine the outcomes of teaching and learning. So many “great” ideas have repeatedly come and gone, such as the mechanistic approach with all its whiz-bang gadgets and the Draconian approach with its punishment and humiliation regimes, and so on. None of these easy answer approaches has ever worked, which is exactly why they are always playing musical chairs with each other in the ongoing educational and political debate. It’s time to ditch the corpse of the grade level system and get on with the task of meaningful education.

Good and effective education is not about social promotion or holding back – it is about time and attention given by dedicated and committed adults, teachers and parents equally, exactly as it was when people taught their young to haft a spear-head or cook a bison. Life and learning go on as they have for eons and some things will simply never change. Properly teaching a child what he or she needs to know to survive is the result of care, concern, close attention, thoughtful mentoring and a belief that teaching is important work, which belief must be reinforced by the community at large. It should go without saying I suppose that the whole of society must participate in and respect this essential task. Educating children was, is and always will be a community responsibility for the simple reason that our children are our collective future.

This post may also be viewed at: www://NMPolitics.net

Public Education and the Tentacles of Profit

Published August 31, 2011 on Schools Closed
Tags: curricula, education reform, on Schools, parenting, Politics, public education, school reform, schools, social contract, teacher unions, teachers, testing

PUBLIC EDUCATION AND THE TENTACLES OF PROFIT

” Hemingway

August 2, 2011 • 9:23 am

http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_Teachers

http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&Template=/Templates/TemplateHomepage/ALEC_1502_20070319T102535_LayoutHomePage.cfm

http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/alec-exposed-koch-connection

Interestingly ALEC was behind the scenes in Wisconsin in the education fight. Read this article by Dr. William Cronin.

http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/

This is wrong! ”

WHO IS FAILING WHAT?

http://www.utahnsforpublicschools.org/policycenter/KeyLessonsClassSizeandStudentAchievement.htm

AUTHENTIC EDUCATION

Here’s The Plan, Stan….

Published August 2, 2011 on Schools Closed
Tags: Chris Christie, curricula, education reform, NCLB, on Schools, parenting, Politics, privatization, public education, Rick Perry, school reform, Scott Walker, social contract, teacher unions, teachers, testing, Truthout, Waiting For Superman

Here’s The Plan, Stan.

What’s the plan? Well, here’s how we do it. First we make sure we cut as much from public school budgets as we can without actually closing them. Then we hire a bunch of consultants from out of state who have the right political credentials to pronounce that the schools are dysfunctional and must be privatized in order to “save” them.

This scenario reminds me of a television news report I watched during the Vietnam war. The correspondent was lying in a ditch with an Army officer as bullets and artillery rounds whistled overhead. Every once in a while a helicopter gunship would spray machine gun fire and at least two aircraft swooped in overhead and dropped napalm. All the ordnance was impacting on what appeared to be a tiny village in the near distance. The cameraman was reacting to the explosions as the camera and image jumped around. The correspondent and the officer were lying on their backs and the microphone was placed in the officer’s face with the question: “What’s going on here, what’s the plan?” The reply was cool, calm and entirely without irony as is to be expected from a combat hardened trooper: “Well, we’re going to have to destroy this village in order to save it.”

Here we are, in 2011, destroying public education in order to “save” it. That’s the plan, Stan. We are at it again. The Bush-initiated No Child Left Behind scam is working its magic and schools all over the US are flunking the test. Teachers in Atlanta, Georgia, have been caught cheating the test results to make it look as though their students were actually passing the national exams; 178 teachers and administrators were named in the report! Florida is often held up as a place where students have improved but, in fact, their students still perform below national averages, so why is experience in Florida held up as a qualification to run a school system? Another question: Why is the charter school held up as a paragon? In Los Angeles the charter school faculty turnover rate is 50% per school year! One teacher described the situation thus; “By the time students graduated from my school, there was not a single teacher who had been there the whole time.” Then there are the demeaning lotteries for placement in charter schools, schools funded with public money. Watch the film “Waiting for Superman” online at http://www.waitingforsuperman.org/ to see how the charter school system works and then ask if you would want to place you child in this scene.

THE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

The working assumption here is that schools exist because society deems it important and necessary to educate children. And this is why schools should be left out of the political agenda where they seem now to occupy a central position. One has to wonder why someone like Jeb Bush would be touring the country advocating for policies that, in the end, will only damage the educational process. I have long wondered why political conservatives of a certain class (wealthy, privileged, politically influential) have such a fixation on schools and schooling. It is most certainly not because they have the welfare of children in mind. Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas, now a presidential possibility, is cutting $4 billion from the Texas school budget! In New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie attempted to cut $800 million from that state’s education budget but is being challenged by the courts and the story in Michigan is pretty much the same. Along with the usual budget cuts, Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Walker, encouraged by billionaires with no apparent connection to public education, has added disenfranchising teacher’s unions to the agenda.

When the same attacks are happening across the country one doesn’t have to be paranoid to question what the “real” agenda is. Here is a comment from the BuzzFlash on the blog site Truthout on Friday 17 June 2011 from a reader named Mario:

“This is really an assault on the working class. A good education is the first step towards upward social mobility. An ignorant populace (the Republican dream) is one that is easier to control and convince.

The BuzzFlash editor, Mark Karlin, added:

This will result in a caste system that will create not a “free market,” but a relatively closed one. Wealth and economic well-being then become not a result of ingenuity, education and entrepreneurialism, but rather of family inheritance. This is also called a fossilized economy.

The Objectives – The Cruel Myth of Privatization.

The first and foremost objective of the school privatization activists will be the elimination of teachers unions. The next objective they will seek to achieve will be greater social control of students and the composition of school population by social class distinction. Poor kids will go to poor-kids schools and well-off -kids will go to well-off-kids schools. The net result will be even greater social polarization, even greater alienation and much less commitment to the whole of society – a parlous path to the future to say the least. The privatization of schools has more to do with greed than altruistic feelings about improving education for all. It is about social control as well.

Adding to this dismal vision of the future are billionaires hiring politicians and lawyers to lobby for privatizing public education. Why? Not because they want to improve education for the masses but because they smell a profit. What then if they are successful? What happens to those who cannot or will not pay? Kids who are barely educated now, who come from homes where parents are indifferent or discouraged will certainly be excluded. That scenario obviously becomes a portrait of disenfranchisement, disillusionment and, worst of all alienation. At least when kids are in school they are exposed to adults who are caring and invested in preparing young people for a life in society, imperfect though it may be. As a result of the press for privatization the US will find itself with an alienated underclass with no commitment to a common social contract. We will become a society that puts a price on everything and knows the value of nothing – especially people.

This essay also appears at: NMPolitics.net

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