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A LITTLE HISTORY

Published December 19, 2011 on Schools Closed
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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/

Fire Two Teachers and Call Me in the Morning.

Published November 23, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
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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

The More Things Change…

Published October 4, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
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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.

Here’s The Plan, Stan….

Published August 2, 2011 on Schools Closed
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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

Standardized Children?

Published July 21, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
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Have you ever met a standard child? Just one in your entire life? Were you, perhaps, a standard child yourself? No? Neither have I met one nor was I one. So what is it then with the idea of, the concept of, Standardized Tests for children? I am here making a distinction between early childhood education, let’s say from nursery school thru middle school. In the news on July 16th, 2011 a story is a about a cheating scandal in Atlanta, Georgia. The cheaters were not school children but teachers fudging the standardized testing such that No Child Would Be Left Behind nor would any teacher be tossed out or penalized because one of their students had failed the standardized test. Apparently teachers colluded to, among other things, erase wrong answers and replace them with correct ones. Are you surprised? I’m not.

The Georgia state report published this past June indicated that the cheating had been going on since 2001 and named 178 teachers, 82 principals and affected tens of thousands of children. According to the report the schools, as a result of the pressures of the No Child left Behind business, operated in a culture of “fear, intimidation, and retaliation,”. It is telling that teachers were told that even children entering middle school who were reading at a first grade level had to pass the standardized test at the middle school level or else!  Teachers were intimidated by administrators with humiliation and threats of dismissal.  So much for professionalism, so much for comprehending the innate abilities of children as individuals. So much for education whatever that might mean to the designers of No Child Left Behind which, in my opinion, was one of the many scams perpetrated during the Bush administration.

A clarion call? Perhaps.

At the July 2011 biennial conference of the American Federation of Teachers, AFT president Randi Weinegarten exhorted teachers stand up and push back against the new self-anointed education experts who seem to be coming out of the political woodwork around the country, Ms Weinegarten raised many important and critical issues including the destructive rhetoric being deployed against teachers and the cuts to education budgets among others. She made very good points including criticizing the making of testing “targets” more important that education. More of this needs to be heard and it needs to be addressed to parents as well as the general public.

We are not talking about utopia here we are looking at the cold hard realities of the state of public education today. In a July 10, 2011 article in the Sunday NY Times, Paul Tough, offered the following prescription for school reform.

“It means supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom: working intensively with the most disadvantaged families to improve home environments for young children; providing high-quality early-childhood education to children from the neediest families; and, once school begins, providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support.”

This prescription falls short of my own beliefs in several ways one of which is that it is not only disadvantaged children who are disadvantaged. Middle-class children have problems of their own that interfere in their educational lives and those concerns must be addressed as well. The whole of school reform encompasses much more than what happens in school and within families. School reform must be a sustained national priority.

A dismal vision of the future.

We are becoming to a large extent a society that puts a price on everything and knows the value of nothing. With regard to education, the most dismal outcome of this dynamic would be, in my opinion, the taking over of public education by private corporations, billionaires and their politicians and lawyers – their hired hands. Why are they promoting the privatization of public education? Not because they want to improve education for the masses you can be certain of that, but because they smell a profit. What then, if they succeed? What happens to children whose families cannot or will not pay – kids from homes where parents are themselves barely educated, indifferent or discouraged? What happens to schools in impoverished neighborhoods?

The first and foremost objective of the school privatization activists will be the elimination of teacher’s unions. Their next objective will be greater social control of students and the composition of school populations by economic class distinction. Poor kids will go to poor-kids schools and well off kids will go to well-off kids schools. The net result – even greater social polarization and alienation than we now see and much less commitment to the whole of society – to a viable national social contract. The privatization of public education has more to do with greed than altruistic feeling about improving education for all. It is about social control as well; standardized children are an essential component of that venal dystopian vision.

The Problem With Skandera

Published June 9, 2011 on Schools Closed
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It seems obvious, given her complete lack of educational credentials and her political background, that Hanna Skandera is a foot soldier in an ideological war taking place right now against working people – teachers and other unionized workers. This is the national agenda of the organizations she is and has been affiliated with. The children of New Mexico ought not be used as pawns in a national political strategy.

Her political credentials and affiliations aside, Ms. Skandera can offer absolutely no professional qualifications to be New Mexico’s or any other state’s secretary of education.

She has no background in curriculum and instruction, yet she feels competent enough to suggest a policy of assigning letter grades to classroom teachers as a solution. Skandera has never had the day-to-day experience of being in charge of a classroom with elementary school children herself, yet she feels competent to evaluate trained, experienced teachers.

So, then, why is she being vetted as the New Mexico secretary of education? Most likely the answer is because she was recommended to our new governor by people outside the state who are fronting a national political agenda that is antithetical and indifferent to the needs of the people and children of New Mexico.

This national agenda played out in Wisconsin and, if those behind the movement have their way, New Mexico will not be far behind.

Not grounded in experience

It is not new information that coercive programs like “No Child Left Behind” and other similar “great ideas” put forth not by educators but by people with political agendas have failed and failed badly. Now here comes Ms. Skandera advocating the simplistic notions that holding children back in grade promotion or assigning teachers letter grades are the magic bullet. Apparently no informed thought has crossed her mind that socially stigmatizing children for things that may be beyond a child’s ability serves no useful purpose, but only a destructive one.

Further, what possible rational train of thought could lead someone to believe that assigning teachers letter grades based on the achievement of their students will lead to a better educational outcome? No good purpose is served by humiliation – there are better ways to achieve educational goals.

Why do grand schemes such as these proposals fail? They fail because they are not grounded in informed educational experience and are not founded by educators but by politicians selling the public on easy answers to problems caused by “them.”

There are effective ways to deal with the teaching of reading, for example. One of these is based on a great deal of evidence that trying to teach reading to children who come from homes where parents do not read, where there are scant if any reading materials, where learning is not a family value is, at best, a futile endeavor.

In spite of parents’ desires to hold teachers responsible for their little darlings’ academic performance they, themselves, are the most responsible parties in the education of children. Blaming teachers is a convenient passing of the buck but is patently false. The valuing of education starts in the home, as does discipline.

A carpetbagger who is ignorant of our state

The people of New Mexico are being asked to hire a carpetbagger who is ignorant of our state, its history and its people. Why is this when we have plenty of qualified people residing here who could and would do an outstanding job if they could be assured their efforts would not be undermined or second-guessed for political purposes?

Teachers need community support and resources, and parents need to be held responsible for their children. It will take several years of concerted effort to bring everyone, children, parents and educators, on board with that idea.

Approving Ms Skandera’s appointment will be a step backwards in that endeavor. I will wager that this appointment would generate more resentment than reform, more heat than light.

It is always useful to recall  Governor Lew Wallace’s wisdom: “All efforts based on experience elsewhere fail in New Mexico.” It was as true then as it is true today. Relevant experience must be New Mexico, not California or Florida, based.

And individuals vetted for important positions ought to have at the very least minimal backgrounds, training and qualifications for the intended position.

This essay first appeared at NMPolitics.net

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