But this is Obama, Arne Duncan and Bill Gate’s favorite way to fight poverty. Spend billions on Ed Tech but not one more cent for schools and early childhood education programs for children living in poverty. Do you think speeding billions for Apple iPads will take a child from poverty and motivate them to work harder in school so they grow up and join the middle class?
I worked with children who lived in poverty for thirty years and I know an Apple iPad will not change anything. All the iPad will become is an expensive toy—another form of TV to distract children from reading and doing homework. In fact, I was born to poverty and grew up as a child in poverty. I know!
“Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions. Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings.”
Where does America rank in early childhood education programs? Watch the video and find out.
An Apple iPad does not equal high quality material that may be used in the classroom. That choice must be left up to teachers—not politicians or billionaires like Bill Gates.
Caitlin Emmaof Politico.com paid a visit to Finland and was surprised to discover that teachers are not depending on educational technology. By contrast, American schools are spending billions of dollars on tablets, laptops, and other devices.
She writes:
“Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.
“That’s in stark contrast to what reformers in the U.S. say. From President Barack Obama on down, they have called education technology critical to improving schools. By shifting around $2 billion in existing funds and soliciting $2 billion in contributions from private companies, the Obama administration is pressing to expand schools’ access to broadband and the devices that thrive on it.
“School districts nationwide have loaded up students with…
Discover how the traditional media is doing all it can to cover up the truth about Obama’s Machiavellian Common Core and discredit the democratic resistance, and is there a link between Bill Gates billions and this propaganda?
It is getting to be a dizzying experience to read about the Common Core on the Néw York Times. When Motoko Rich reported from Tennessee, she found an unlikely left-right alliance questioning the standards. A few days later, and the familiar script is back in place: only the far right opposes this fine experiment.
Once again, Mike Petrilli is trotted out to defend them. This seems to be his job now.
No mention of the early childhood experts who oppose them or the critics of high stakes testing or computer graded tests or standardization or the Chicago Teachers Union or Carol Burris or Anthony Cody or any number of credible, non-Tea Party critics.
It would be refreshing to learn in the Times which groups have received millions from the Gates Foundation to support the CCSS.
It is not because they get better results. They don’t.
It is not because they save money. They don’t.
They are very effective at busting unions. Nearly 90% of the nation’s charters are non-union. This makes possible a flexible workforce that works long hours, accepts whatever pay management wants to pay, and makes no demands.
Last week Vanderbilt hosted an education writers seminar. It was a pretty big deal. Such a big a deal that it brought Arne Duncan to town. Arne spent some time making appearances with his good buddy Kevin Huffman touting all the wonderful things that Mr Huffman was responsible for in Tennessee. There were quite a few quotable quotes dropped. My favorite was, “The biggest challenge of our nation isn’t the knowledge side of things but the courage. There is a courage gap.” That’s the one that got me thinking.
The more I thought about it, the more I saw its relevance. You know holding children accountable is very difficult. I’ve got a three year old and a 4 year old in my household, so this is a constant running battle. My wife and I attach a great deal of importance to instilling accountability in them. Its important to us that they understand actions have…
Here’s more evidence that the fake education reform movement in the United States and the international PISA test are both frauds. After two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that lifted limits on political campaign contributions so the wealthiest Americans can buy the U.S. government, there may be only one country left on the earth that billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates, the Walton family, the Koch brothers and American Hedge Fund billionaires can’t buy. To discover the answer, watch the video and read the rest of this post.
What Does the PISA Test really reveal about U.S. Public Education?
Guess who may be dropping out of the PISA?
China
Here’s a piece that appeared in The Washington Post on May 26, 2014: “No. 1 Shanghai may drop out of PISA”:
The Washington Post says: “First in 2009 and then in 2012, Shanghai’s 15-year-old students (or, rather, a supposed representative group) were No. 1 in the world on the recent Program for International Student Assessment reading, math and science exams. But now, according to a popular Shanghai newspaper, Shanghai is considering dropping out of PISA. Why?
“According to the article, explained in the following post by scholar Yong Zhao, Shanghai officials want to de-emphasize standardized test scores, homework and rote learning that has characterized Chinese education. And PISA, which is sponsored by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, emphasizes standardized test scores.
“Last year, China began a major education reform initiative designed to increase student engagement and end student boredom and anxiety — and reduce the importance of standardized test scores.”
<strong>Imagine that, China moving away from raising generations of robots while the Western Democracies, with the exception of Finland, are moving toward standard thinking and behavior</strong>. Who would have thought?
Finland’s poverty rate is less than 5%. In the U.S., poverty is 23% or almost ten times the total population of Finland.
What does the PISA results reveal about poverty?
Professor Robert Lingard compares Australia and New Zealand with a focus on poverty and reveals the truth.
When the OECD releases the PISA report every three years, many people use the ranking to claim public education in the U.S. is failing and push their corporate education reform agenda. But looking at the data, lessons that can be learned from the highest performing countries point in a completely different direction. Watch the first video again, and again, and ….
You may be wondering why the GOP was included in the title of this post. Ask yourself, why Republicans haven’t said a word about the fake education reform movement that started with President G. W. Bush, is being driven by his brother Jeb Bush and supported by the Obama Administration and Arne Dunan, appointed by Obama, as the Secretary of the Department of Education.
And if you are having trouble shaking off the lies that only the tea party people are protesting Obama’s Machiavellian Common Core standardization of the United States public education system, visit Education Bloggers Network or Diane Ravitch, and discover how many tea baggers there are among these professionals.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Don’t read me wrong as you read this post. There are some great administrators in the public schools but some are horrible and in this post you will meet a few.
The problem is that the incompetent administrators don’t think they’re incompetent—they think everyone else is. Imagine a school with a hundred teachers and one really bad principal and he thinks most of the teachers don’t know what they are doing so he tells them what to do and that advice backfires. Who do you think gets blamed for that principal’s failure?
In addition, school boards are elected and sometimes some can be misguided and ignorant, and it doesn’t help when the district administration is just as bad or worse.
It’s actually easy to identify the incompetent administrators if you know what to look for. With 13,600 public school districts in the U.S. and more than 1,000 of them in California where I taught for thirty years, it makes sense that some would eventually end up being managed by idiots who would make Hitler, Mao and Stalin envious.
My first full-time teaching job started in 78-79 when Ralph Pagan, my first principal, hired me one summer and asked me to drive from Chicago to Southern California by Monday. The call came 48 hours before the school year started, and we drove straight through only stopping for gas. That was quite a drive.
The first three years before that phone call, (75-78), I was a full-time, paid intern (75-76), and then a substitute for the next two years in seven school districts.
I think Ralph Pagan was a genius, and he spoiled me. He managed Giano Intermediate like the schools in Finland by turning the school over to the teachers and together with Ralph’s support we turned a school that had a bad reputation and was considered one of the most dangerous schools in California’s San Gabriel Valley into a success story.
Ralph supported the teacher teams on just about every decision made on discipline and curriculum, and he ran interference between district administration and teachers—but we didn’t know that until after he had his heart attack/stroke. The pressure the idiots who worked in the district office caused for Ralph with their incompetence must have been intense to almost kill him and land him in the hospital.
Until I retired in 2005, the few highly placed district administrators in Rowland who managed the district were incompetent, because no matter what language was used to describe how the district was managed, teachers weren’t part of the decision making process. We were usually told what to do by someone who worked in the district office and if that often no-choice mandate didn’t work, teachers got the blame for the failure even if they had never liked what they were forced to do.
In addition, I walked picked lines more than once when the district had more than enough money to cut class size and increase pay to keep up with the cost of living, but the district fought us almost every time we negotiated a new contract. I’ve been out of the classroom now almost ten years, and I have no idea what the elected Rowland Unified school board is like or if the top district administration is competent and fair. I hope so. The teachers deserve the best, and they also deserve to be part of making major decisions that reach into the classroom and affect kids. If a majority of teachers don’t like a curriculum or program that administration is in love with, that program shouldn’t be used.
In this post, I want to shine a spotlight on Chino Valley Unified School District in Southern California. A former colleague-teacher and friend of mine, who once worked at Nogales in Rowland Unified—until he couldn’t stand the incompetent decisions micromanagers out of the district office were making that hurt teachers and kids—left to teach in Chino where he was happy until recent years. Once you watch the video, you’ll know how to identify incomplete public school leadership from the elected school board to the top administration.
My friend wrote in his e-mail: “I thought you might want to read about the sad state of negotiations in my district (The Chino Valley Unified School District). Of course, you experienced this type of negotiating in the Rowland Unified School District when you were teaching. Feel free to use this information in your Crazy Normal blog.”
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Charter schools were created to help the neediest students. Now, however, many charters skim off the most advantaged students and avoid those who are needy. This harms the public schools, removing their best students and overloading them with the students who require the most services.
“Woodland Community Consolidated School District 50 in Gurnee filed a lawsuit against Prairie Crossing Charter School and two state agencies Tuesday, alleging that millions in state aid that should have been spent on instruction for low-income and at-risk students have been “siphoned away” to pay for a small number of charter school students, officials announced.”
“The district has asked a Cook County court to reverse a five-year reauthorization of Prairie Crossing Charter School approved in April by the Illinois State Charter School Commission, which is named in the lawsuit. The district also named as a defendant the Illinois…
To discover the world’s best teachers we have to look at children who live in poverty. Teachers who successfully teach as many of these children as possible are the world’s best teachers.
TheUS National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health says: “It is well documented that poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods. Six poverty-related factors are known to impact child development in general and school readiness in particular. They are:
The incidence of poverty
The depth of poverty
The duration of poverty
The timing of poverty (eg, age of child)
Community characteristics (eg, concentration of poverty and crime in neighborhood, and school characteristics)
and the impact poverty has on the child’s social network (parents, relatives and neighbors).
“A child’s home has a particularly strong impact on school readiness. Children from low-income families often do not receive the stimulation and do not learn the social skills required to prepare them for school. Typical problems are parental inconsistency (with regard to daily routines and parenting), frequent changes of primary caregivers, lack of supervision and poor role modelling. Very often, the parents of these children also lack support.”
What I’m about to share with you reveals the second smoking gun that leads from the Department of Education to the White House through Obama’s Machiavellian Race to the Top and Common Core testing.
Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) analyzed the most resent international PISA test and his results revealed that public school teachers in America are more successful teaching children who live in poverty than any other country on the planet. He did this by comparing PISA test results with comparable schools that had the same number of children who lived in poverty.
In every comparison, the US was #1 when it came to teaching the most difficult at-risk children on the planet. For instance, for a more accurate assessment of the performance of U.S. students, Tirozzi aligns the scores of American schools with those of other countries with comparable poverty rates.
Tirozzi shows the ranking of schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate compared with ten countries with similar poverty numbers, and the United States ranked #1 with a PISA score of 551, and Finland was #2 with a score of 536 for those similar schools with similar poverty rates.
Did you get that? Teachers in the U.S. were more successful teaching children who lived in poverty than teachers in Finland who are considered some of the best teachers working in one of the best public school systems in the world—and Finland doesn’t test its children and judge teachers based on the results.
Tirozzi then matches schools with a poverty rate of 10-24.9% with ten comparable nations, and once again the United States was #1 with a PISA score of 527. Canada was #2 with a score of 524.
No other developed country tested had schools with poverty rates approaching 25%, and the U.S. Census reports: “The U.S. poverty rate in 2012 for children under age 18 was 21.8% (16,073,000).”
At this point, I want to emphasize that teaching in a classrooms with high rates of children who live in poverty offers extreme challenges that don’t exist in schools with lower rates. The behavior problems are sometimes overwhelming. Many of these children hate school, hate reading, hate teachers and often come from dysfunctional homes in gang infested communities. And some of these children are gang members.
For instance, for most of the 30 years I taught, the schools where I worked had poverty rates of 70% or more—Tirozzi found similar schools in Mexico, where only a third of its adult population has a high school degree, and if we compare U.S. schools with poverty rates over 75%, the U.S. PISA score was 446 compared to 425 for similar schools in Mexico. (NOTE: Mexico is not considered one of the 35 developed countries)
To deal with poverty in the United States, what did the Obama administration do? Congress passed Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core standardized testing that punishes only public school teachers. That is all President Obama’s administration has done!
There have been no early childhood education programs from the Obama White House, and even the U.S. Department of Education admits “There is a tremendous unmet need for high-quality early learning throughout the country … the importance of early learning is clear. Studies prove that children who have rich early learning experiences are better prepared to thrive in kindergarten and beyond.” (Just in case, Arne Duncan has this page revised, I took a screen shot of it.)
Map: How 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34th)
This Machiavellian insanity started with President G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, but President Obama’s Race to the Top legally defined public school teachers and the public schools as failures to be fired and/or replaced by private sector Charter schools that don’t have to teach difficult at-risk children who live in poverty.
President Obama, Arne Duncan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, and Bill Gates, for instance, all demand that America’s public school teachers must teach America’s children so 100% are college and career ready by age 17/18 while ignoring the needs of more than sixteen million children who live in poverty—something that no other country has demanded of their public school teachers in history.
Do you smell the smoking gun coming from the Department of Education and the White House? I hope so.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
How do you deceive a nation? The answer is simple—by loading the dice, stacking the deck and dealing off the bottom.
It’s called deceit!
It’s called fraud!
It’s called treason!
And it’s a crime!
This “Smoking Gun” leads from Arne Duncan to the White House because Arne, who was appointed by President Obama, pulls the trigger repeatedly every time he opens his mouth about the PISA, Common Core and how great Charter Schools are, so if there’s a fall guy (and that depends on Congress launching an in-depth, honest investigation—don’t hold your breath) it will be Arne who gets fired and may end up in prison if the president doesn’t pardon him like President Ford pardoned Nixon for his attempted cover up of his Watergate guilt.
Hey Arne, you better start shredding all those memos and deleting all your private e-mails. All it takes is one to prove you’re guilty—that you are responsible for rigging the PISA test in the U.S., and can you trust everyone who was involved, because no one could do this alone?
The cornerstone of the fake education reform movement has been the PISA rankings of developed countries where 15-year old students were supposedly selected at random, but how were the schools selected?
Before I reveal the smoking gun that leads to the White House, do you know what happens to a student’s grade point average (GPA) when there are too many poor grades? The highest GPA a student may earn is a 4.0 without advanced placement and honors classes. The reason I mention this is because the method used to compute GPA is similar to the PISA average.
For instance, if there are 100 grades of equal value and 22 are failing grades and the other 78 are A’s, that student will have a 3.12 GPA (a B-). Those 22 poor grades have a lot of weight, and when the PISA test was administered to random students, the evidence suggests that Arne Duncan made sure there would be more than 22 poor grades to drag the U.S. PISA average down.
To discover how this was done we’re going to look at the results of two studies that analyzed the details of the PISA test from different sources. It was only by chance that I discovered both and connected the dots.
The first analysis of the PISA test was from theEconomic Policy Institutethat concluded: “The U.S. administration of the most recent (2012) international (PISA) test resulted in students from the most disadvantaged schools being over-represented in the overall U.S. test-taker sample. This error further depressed the reported average U.S. test score.”
In fact, the report goes on: “U.S. students from advantaged social class backgrounds (students who do not live in poverty) perform better relative to their social class peers in the top-scoring countries of Finland and Canada …”
Then there’s the other analysis by Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). Tirozzi reports: “The problem is that the United States has by far the highest rate of child poverty of any of the advanced industrial countries, and it is these children who perform very poorly on the (PISA) international tests. For example, U.S. students in schools with less than 10% poverty rank number one in the world, while students in schools with greater than 50% poverty score significantly below average.”
When Tirozzi compared the ranking of schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate with ten countries with similar poverty numbers, the US was in first place with a PISA score of 551 and Finland—with its public schools and unionized teachers considered among the best in the world—was #2 with a score of 536. Then Tirozzi matched schools with a poverty rate of 10 to 24.9% with ten comparable countries, and the United States once again was ranked #1 at 527, and Canada was in second place with a PISA average of 524.
In addition, the U.S. PISA average of 502 for schools with poverty rates between 25 to 49.9% was still in the upper half of the scores—higher than twenty countries including Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, the UK, Italy, Spain and Israel.
How bad is childhood poverty in the United States?
Of the 35-developed countries compared by the PISA test, the US was ranked 34th for childhood poverty while Finland’s poverty rate was less than 5%—in the U.S. 22% of all children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level. That fact by itself without stacking the deck would drive the U.S. average down because the higher a country’s childhood poverty rate, the lower the PISA average would be.
Why did the Department of Education test more schools in the U.S. with higher rates of poverty than the other developed countries? Was this deliberate?
I think so—by rigging the PISA test to be given to students who attend more schools with the highest poverty rates led to an average that made all the U.S. public schools look bad when they’re not—just like a child’s GPA drops when there are more poor grades. Schools with high rates of children living in poverty resulted in a lower PISA average by offsetting the scores of the 78% of students who do not live in poverty.
Tirozzi’s analysis clearly reveals that the average score of 78% of America’s children (39 million) who don’t live in poverty ranked #1 in the world on the international PISA test when compared to the other 35 developed countries similar to the United States, but testing an unfair ratio of students from the 22% (11 million) who live in poverty dropped the U.S. average drastically creating a false sense of failure in the U.S. public schools.
In conclusion: “National efforts to improve public education—from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind to President Obama’s Race to the Top—have been focused on the wrong problems, said Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at the Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.” (The Washington Post)
Poverty is the problem!
The public schools and the teachers are not the problem, because when children don’t live in poverty, they score higher on the international PISA test in every developed country with the U.S. ranked #1.
What should we call this fraud—Education Gate or something else?
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
First is the myth that they are public schools. They are not. They are private corporations with contracts to run schools, exempt from most state laws and from most state oversight. In court after court, the charters themselves have argued that they are NOT public schools. We should take their word for it. They are not public schools.
Second is the myth that charter schools enroll exactly the same demographic of students as the real public schools. This is patently false. With few exceptions, they take smaller proportions of students with disabilities and almost no students with severe disabilities, and they enroll smaller proportions of English language learners. They have the power to kick out students who do not meet their stringent disciplinary codes…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 