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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

Undermining Public Education

Published October 27, 2011 on Schools Closed
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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.

Metropolis

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.

Public Education and the Tentacles of Profit

Published August 31, 2011 on Schools Closed
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PUBLIC EDUCATION AND THE TENTACLES 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?

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.

School reform? First we need parenting reform.

Published June 16, 2011 on Schools 2 Comments
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School reform? First we need parenting reform.

We are presently witnessing an historical moment of truth as one state government after another begins a budget massacre. Getting the axe first will be the softest target of them all – public education. Aside from the obvious, immediate damage this does to public education, it shows how deep the belief in education goes in contemporary American society. The “real” social value of education to the public and to politicians these days is revealed – when budget cutting is the current issue, education gets it in the neck first. The only reasonably intelligent question that can be asked is, “Why?”

One possibility is that education is no longer as valued a part of the national belief system as it once was. Education seems to no longer be held as an investment in the future, but more of a fungible line item in a strained budget. Why should it be this way? Here are some of the arguments being expressed:

– Has education made getting a job easier or even possible?

– Teachers are merely putting in their time to retirement.

– Teachers have too much prep time.

– Schools have too much vacation time.

– Teachers are paid too much and there are too many of them.

– Kids aren’t learning how to read as well or as quickly as the new “experts” tell us they should, and that is, no doubt, the fault of teachers.

Schools, we are told, need the guidance of “experts” like Jeb Bush of Florida and Hanna Skandera in New Mexico, neither of whom has a background in education. Apparently they don’t need experience or background. I suppose we could all be grateful they aren’t interested in doing brain surgery.

Easier to pick on teachers

Why have public schools and teachers become the soft target of the moment? One reason, I believe, is because schools are simply vulnerable to this sort of attack; they are easy to criticize and difficult to defend. Not all kids learn at the same rate nor do they all have the same motivations to learn – they are not production-line widgets; hence, their achievement progress is not uniform. Children too often come from homes where parents are more interested in big screen TVs, sports, recreational activities – anything but learning. Research has shown that many children come from homes where there are scant if any reading materials at hand. Oh, and let me suggest one more reason – parents’ lack of interest in assuming responsibility for their kids’ performance in school.

If politicians and the new educational experts were to pick on parents the way they pick on teachers, it would be a parlous situation for their political ambitions. If the new self-anointed experts spoke up about curriculum and instruction, it would be too obvious that they don’t know what they are talking about. So, the response is to require more testing and pick on teachers – much easier. Imagine, if you can, one of these politicians standing up before an audience of parents and saying, “These are your children, dammit, and you are responsible for them.” Not in this lifetime, I assure you.

Parenting reform

Where can we go from here? We cannot even begin to discuss school reform until we deal with parenting reform. How can we convince parents that they are the front lines of education? I would suggest one first step would be to stop the politically motivated rhetoric. Next, stop the eye-wash and propaganda about testing. Seriously, folks there is no better indication that you don’t know what you are talking about when you promote more testing as educational reform. An experienced classroom teacher is never not testing. Never!

Next we need political leadership that instructs – yes, instructs – the public about their role in the process of educating their young. (See above.) We need public dialog that elevates teachers and teaching to the same level as firemen and cops. Have you ever heard a politician mouth-off about firemen and policemen on a par with what we hear about public schools and teachers? I doubt it. Teachers, for their part need to get their backs up and start educating the public – not just parents, but the body politic.

Teachers, weed out the deadwood

Teachers also need to clean up their profession and weed out the deadwood. Stop hunkering down and denying the obvious – there are ineffective, lazy people in the teaching profession, and teachers and their unions are the only ones who can properly get rid of them. Be proactive, get over the notion that protecting the deadwood protects you – it does not. In fact, you will all look better when you give those guys the boot.

When I was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, I never saw a bad carpenter protected by anyone. The best were separated from the good, the good from the bad, and the bad eliminated. It wasn’t the employers who enforced the standards either, it was the union.

The carpenters and joiners are a strong and respected union because they insist on excellence. If they can do it, so can the American Federation of Teachers. Come on Randi*, get with it!

* Randi Weingarten, AFT president.

This essay first appeared on nmPolitics.net

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