Required Reading if You Are a Teacher

or even if you are not (especially if you are a politician) is this piece by education historian Diane Ravitch about the history behind ESEA and how it got all twisted by the reform crowd thanks to NCLB and other reform crap.

ESEA was designed to help poor children in schools, not to pervert the purpose of federal involvement in education, not to put forward an excuse to give handouts to billionaires and Wall Street types so they can make even more money at the public's expense.

Bill Moyers With Diane Ravitch

on the attempted destruction of public education by private interests:




link

The Leaning Tower of PISA is About to Topple Over

as the neolibs are being put on the defensive trying to explain what those international scores mean, which is very little with regard to the U.S. "results."

Ravitch:

Here is the background history that you need to know to interpret the PISA score release, as well as Secretary Duncan’s calculated effort to whip up national hysteria about our standing in the international league tables.
The United States has NEVER been first in the world, nor even near the top, on international tests.

Over the past half century, our students have typically scored at or near the median, or even in the bottom quartile.

And the scores don't mean shit. However, they make for good propaganda for the privatizers.

Arne Is All Upset

because his horrible education policies are finally being called out for the shit they are. Of course they are also Obama's ideas, and both have a hell of a lot to answer for, provided there is still a federal government left if the Kochroaches or fascists in Congress get done their way and Obama capitulates, just like he always does.

He think anybody who knows what he or she is talking about when it comes to education is an "armchair pundit" when this asshole doesn't care what he is doing to the country's public schools.

What he is whining about is Diane Ravitch's new book (which should arrive on my doorstep today) has hit the bestseller list, and she is getting a bit of media attention.

We can't have that, after all.

In My View, Charter Schools Aren't Just a "Mistake,"

they are just another means where the top one percent can get even more corporate welfare while providing inferior services.

Education is simply not a business. You'd think after years of the health care/insurance fiasco, people would realize there are certain things that cannot be done well by the private sector, and charter schools ARE private schools that get public subsidies.

Diane Ravitch look at some of the many problems with them:

Charter schools are "public" when it is time to claim public funding, but they have claimed in federal court and before the National Labor Relations Board to be private corporations when their employees seek the protection of state labor laws.

In Los Altos, a group of wealthy people opened a boutique charter school for their own children. Parents are asked to donate $5,000 per child each year. Local public school parents consider the charter to be an elite private school, albeit one primarily funded with public dollars.

Shooting the Messenger While Shooting Themselves in the Ass

The ed "reformers" are being exposed for the crooks and charlatans they are, especially by the likes of Diane Ravitch, who knows where all--or most--of the bodies are buried, and they don't like it one bit.

After some well-publicized defeats, most recently the New York mayoral race, they are howling louder and louder.

Ravitch has a new book coming out exposing further these scam artists, and they are working overtime to try and discredit her.

Ravitch, of whom I am a big fan, was the subject of this profile from the NYT.

The reformers, unfortunately, have a lot of big bucks behind them, and they will not stop until they milk every last dime of the trillion-dollar public school system in the United States.

Nixon Wasn't This Brazen

Lots and lots of discussion around the education blogs about this pile of crap whinefest by a former Department of Education official in anticipation of Diane Ravitch's new book on education reform. The book is due out next month, I believe, and it must be fairly explosive for anybody to make such a complete and total jackass of himself on behalf of his former boss's boss, meaning Obama.

People are finally waking up to this privatization scam and the bigger scammers in Washington who have RUINED the Democratic Party brand on behalf of the gangsters calling the shots (billionaires, hedge fund crooks, neoliberals). Public education is seen as a cash cow to loot and make these people even more rich. This has nothing to do with the kids, teachers, teaching, or learning. It certainly has nothing to do with the concept of the public good.

The privateers are really afraid their scam will be exposed to millions of people.


The Ravitch critic is probably upset she flunked his boss, also known as Obama's flunky, in this piece from last year:

Does Duncan respect the limited role of the federal government in education, which all previous secretaries have recognized?

No. Duncan has expanded the role of the federal government in unprecedented ways. He seems not to know that education is the responsibility of state and local governments, as defined by the Tenth amendment to our Constitution. States and local school districts now look to Washington to tell them how to reform their schools and must seek permission to deviate from the regulations written by the U.S. Department of Education. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) created the template for this growing federal control of education, but Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top has made it possible for Washington to dictate education policy across the nation. Grade: F.

_____


Has Duncan followed the law in his education policies?

No. Duncan has issued waivers to states that want to be relieved from NCLB’s impossible mandate of reaching 100 percent proficiency by 2014, but replaced that law’s demands with those of his own devising. Duncan says his waivers allow “flexibility,” but they serve simply to impose his own ideas about evaluating teachers, “transforming” low-performing schools (by firing staff or closing the schools), and adopting national standards in reading and mathematics. While very few people defend NCLB, which will write off almost every public school in the United States as a failure by 2014, it is still the law. Duncan has no authority to replace it with his own rules; cabinet members are not allowed to change the laws. Under our Constitution, Congress writes the laws, and the executive branch must enforce them, even as it seeks to change those that are onerous and misguided. Grade: F.

That's just two of her grades of Duncan, who gets an impressive "F" overall.

Diane Ravitch Held Her Own

in enemy territory a few days ago:



I guess Michelle Rhee is supposed to get a slot or something at the Democratic National Convention peddling that fraudulent movie about "parent triggers." No wonder I may end up writing my name in for president.

Diane Ravitch Defends Public Education

Speech yesterday at the AFT convention:

Two Reasons NOT to Apply for a Job at Connections Academy

It has to do with the REAL connections of the group.

First of all, the ubiquitous Pearson Corporation bought it out. And second and not least is the VP of Connections Academy is connected with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which is active in the destruction of public education in the United States.

Last year, as well, Pearson partnered with the American Council on Education with plans to turn the GED into a for-profit business. In addition, Pearson entered into a partnership in 2011 with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to produce instructional materials aligned to the Common Core standards. Pearson will create and market online math courses for kindergarten through 10th grades and online courses in reading for kindergarten through 12th grades. Gates put up $3 million to develop 24 new courses. Four courses will available for free, according to the story in The New York Times, "to give educators a taste of how the digital courses can be used in classrooms." In other words, four are marketing tools to promote the sales of the other 20.

New Yorkers have recently become aware of the incompetence of Pearson's standardized tests. Surely, everyone knows the story of "the hare and the pineapple," known on Twitter as #pineapplegate. That one went viral, with newspapers across the nation ridiculing a stupid story with stupid questions. The pineapple wasn't the only error on the tests. It turns out that a question in 5th grade math required knowledge that was taught in later grades, and other questions were canceled because they had no right answer or two right answers.

Since the tests are not released for public review, no one will ever know how many more pineapples or ill-phrased questions or bad answers are embedded there. It seems strange, doesn't it, to maintain a veil of secrecy over tests that will be used to shape the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools. Why not release the questions and let everyone pore over them? This seems a bit like a trial in which the accused is not allowed to view the evidence. When the conviction comes, the accused must trust that a higher power judged him or her to be good or bad. Teachers will be fired based on the Pearson tests, and neither they nor the public will be allowed to see the evidence.

Diane Ravitch really knows where the bodies are buried here.

"Smart" ALEC

ALEC is another outfit we who care about the future of public education (and thus democracy) should be paying close attention to:

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

It May Take a Parent Revolt

to stop the standardized testing madness. These tests were originally used as "diagnostic" tools; they were never designed to measure teacher "effectiveness," especially when the tests are so obviously flawed:

There is madness in tying teachers' careers and reputations to their students' scores on such low-quality and incoherent examinations. Our policymakers have chosen to ignore the research warning that value-added assessment is inherently fraught with error, instability, and unreliability. Children are not wheat, their growth is not utterly predictable, and the standardized tests capture only a subset of what matters most in education.

Michelle Rhee Is At It Again

She's going around the country peddling her dubious reform ideas, all of which center on the questionable notion the problem in education is with teachers, the people who have the least power in the system:

I am troubled that Rhee thinks that teachers are the biggest problem facing American education. Attacking teachers seems to be her hallmark. I was at an event on Martha's Vineyard last August when Rhee repeated a story she has often told: three "great teachers in a row" closes the achievement gap. I was waiting for her to say it, and I quickly chimed in to say that it is an urban myth. While writing my last book, I tried to discover if there was any district or any school that had actually closed the achievement gap by providing "three great teachers in a row." Certainly teachers make a difference, and no one would dispute that it is wonderful to have three great teachers in a row. But no one has ever figured out how to achieve this feat in an entire district. Certainly Rhee didn't when she was chancellor in the District of Columbia.

Rhee has turned this urban myth into a national crusade against teachers. If scores are low, she suggests, it is because the students have lazy, incompetent teachers who should be fired. She achieved national notoriety in Washington, D.C., for her readiness to fire teachers and principals whom she judged to be unworthy. You may recall the infamous cover of Time magazine, where she posed sternly with a broom, ready to sweep clean the District of Columbia's public schools. She did clear out a large proportion of the professional staff in the D.C. schools, and she did impose a new teacher evaluation system called IMPACT.

She should face the same fate as the Eli Broad Academy "fellows."