Do we realize that saving our children requires that we ALL “must do right by the children”?
I know Peggy Robertson, a mom and a Colorado teacher who helped found United Opt Out.
I have more respect for her as a human being and as a teacher than I have for any of the bought-and-paid-for politicians who shill for the profit making CCSS (Yes, it is private. Yes, it was created to make profits.) and all of the profit making multinational fund managers and “philanthropic” foundation investors who are part of the coup against sane levels of valid testing.
Bill Gates once famously and publicly stated that it would take another ten years to see if the present “experiment” will work. Since his own children are not being experimented on, he avoids mentioning the direct and indirect profit taking he makes via…
On October 2, 2014, I will be speaking in Indiana to an audience chiefly comprised of university students who have a passing understanding of the intentions of moneyed interests to usurp control of public education.
With a mind toward preparing for my upcoming engagement, I happened to read three pertinent (and powerful) articles: This one on September 26, 2014, in Chalkbeat on Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s plan to use workforce data to determine what schools teach in order to subjugate education to the requirements of the job market, excerpted below:
…Indiana is quietly taking steps to position itself for a future where data drives much of what is learned in school. Gov. Mike Pence has made connecting education and workforce development a centerpiece of his administration’s agenda.…
This year, a bill he wrote created a new state office, under Pence’s direction, with a director who has been nicknamed the…
Common Core Education without Representation lists David Coleman as #9 on the top-ten list for scariest people in—fake—education reform. Coleman is the lead “architect” for the English Language Arts (ELA) portion of the Common Core, and he is not an educator, but he is a businessman.
He’s also responsible for enlisting Bill Gates—#5 on the list—to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting the Common Core agenda that will destroy democratic public education in the United States, and turn kids into traumatized robots attending for-profit, corporate Charters that more than one Stanford study has revealed are mostly worse or the same as the average public schools.
In fact, Truth Out.org reveals that the Gates Foundation funds the College Board, which is now run by David Coleman, who recruited Bill Gates to financially fund and promote the Common Core agenda in 2008, and then in 2012, Coleman becomes president of the College Board. Is this a coincidence?
The College Board has played an active role in the development of the Common Core State Standards, because the College Board is heavily into standardized testing: SAT®, the PSAT/NMSQT®, the Advanced Placement Program®(AP®), SpringBoard® and ACCUPLACER®.
What does David Coleman get out of this arrangement? Coleman earns a base pay of $550,000, with total annual compensation of nearly $750,000 to run the so-called, non-profit College Board.
Since at least the late 1970s, the College Board has been subject to criticism from students, educators, and consumer rights activists. College Board owns the SAT and many students must take SAT exams for admission to competitive colleges. For instance, in 2006, College Board took in $582.9 million in revenue from exam fees, but spent only $527.8 million, leaving a $55.1 million surplus. In 2013, fees from programs and services brought in $843.255 million, and in 2013, assets in cash and cash equivalents was $147.624 million—up $21.58 million from 2012.
It’s obvious from these numbers, that being a non-profit is profitable for the College Board and Coleman is paid well to create a national climate that depends on standardized tests.
With all of this clout—in 2013, Time Magazine listed Coleman as one of the 100 most influential people in the world—here’s what makes David Coleman dangerous. He said, “As you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
What Coleman said was probably true about David Coleman, who I think is a narcissist, sociopath and probably a psychopath.
But, in fact, David Coleman is wrong. Millions of Americans do care about what someone else thinks and feels, and here’s the proof. In 2013, there were 10,842 new biographies/memoirs published in the United States, and 29-percent of nonfiction sales were biographies/memoirs.
How many books does that translate into?
In 2013, 252.2-million nonfiction books were sold in the United States, and 29-percent of those sales translated to more than 73-million biographies and/or memoirs that were about what people feel and think.
In addition, Mental Health America reports, “Writing down your thoughts can be a great way to work through issues. Researchers have found that writing about painful events can reduce stress and improve health.”
With the importance of writing as a way to manage traumas like PTSD, one would think it would be important to have children write essays about what they feel and think. If you think children are not traumatized, think again.
The American Psychological Association says, “A significant number of children in American society are exposed to traumatic life events. A traumatic event is one that threatens injury, death, or the physical integrity of self or others and also causes horror, terror, or helplessness at the time it occurs. Traumatic events include sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence, community and school violence, medical trauma, motor vehicle accidents, acts of terrorism, war experiences, natural and human-made disasters, suicides, and other traumatic losses. In community samples, more than two thirds of children report experiencing a traumatic event by age 16.” Produced by: 2008 Presidential Task Force on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Trauma in Children and Adolescents
In conclusion, if David Coleman wins the Common Core War he helped launch as one of its lead “architects”, he will turn most of America’s children into obedient, greedy, power hungry, traumatized narcissists and sociopaths/psychopaths just like David Coleman.
Dana Goldstein, the author of “The Teacher Wars” says, “Alan Lawrence, an education blogger and former English teacher who was California’s 2007 “teacher of the year,” complained that Coleman “has zero K-12 teaching experience. Should we really be learning how to cook from a person who’s never been in the kitchen?”
Indeed, Coleman has never been a public school teacher. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge, and his mother is the president of tony Bennington College. So perhaps, critics say, Coleman doesn’t fully understand the power of “stories” to reach children—especially poor children—who would otherwise find reading and writing a chore. …
Goldstein says, “I’m sympathetic to teachers who are turned off by Coleman’s rhetoric. There’s something discomfiting about Coleman—a white guy with advanced degrees, who earns a living spreading his opinions—sending the message that children’s personal stories and feelings don’t matter, so they shouldn’t write them down.”
There’s a term for people who think and feel. It’s called empathy—something I’m convinced David Coleman doesn’t have along with a lack of common sense.
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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).
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An investigative reporter reveals the agenda of the corporate, fake-education reformers—-to disrupt public education by selling a propaganda narrative of failure, and the end goal is the reaping of billions in profits for entrepreneurs and investors—-they don’t care about the children.
This is the most important article you will read this week, this month, maybe this year. Lee Fang, a brilliant investigative reporter at the Nation Institute, documents the rise and growth of the new for-profit education industry. They seek out ways to make money by selling products to the schools, developing new technologies for the Common Core, writing lucrative leasing deals for charter school properties, mining students’ personal data and selling it, and investing in lucrative charter schools.
Their basic strategy: disrupt public education by selling a propaganda narrative of failure, which then generates consumer demand for new, privately managed forms of schooling (charters and vouchers), for new products (a laptop for every child), and for new standards (the Common Core) that require the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for new technology, consultants, and other new teaching products. The Common Core has the subsidiary effect of reducing…
Elected thieves in North Carolina—bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires—are quietly at work to destroy public education in that state—giving favored treatment to charters and adopting a voucher program that diverts funds from public schools and puts them in the hands of religious and other private schools immune from public accountability…
Professor Helen Ladd of Duke University, internationally renowned economist of education, and her husband Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, recently wrote about a sneaky move by the North Carolina legislature to undermine the funding of children in public schools. Not content to fund charters and vouchers, the legislature is directly attacking the basic funding formula for the state public system. The overwhelming majority of children in the state attend public schools. Why do their parents elect these people who short-change public education?
Ladd and Fiske write:
“In a last-minute change that was taken with no hearings and no prior publicity, the Republican-controlled General Assembly has undermined the fundamental building block of school finance in North Carolina.
“Ever since the state took over responsibility from the local districts for funding public schools during the Great Depression, state funding in North Carolina has been based on the…
Sarah Darer Littman, who writes about education issues in Connecticut, tells a shocking story here of power and money.
The Hartford, Connecticut, schools are under mayoral control; the mayor appoints 5 of 9 members of the board of education. The other four are elected by the public. But the Board is bound by its bylaws to act as a whole. The five are not supposed to hold secret meetings to make policy.
But that is exactly what happened. The mayor’s five appointees met in secret with the Gates Foundation and charter school advocates. The Gates Foundation announced a $5 million grant in December 2012.
“On June 29, 2012, staff members of the Gates Foundation came to Hartford for a meeting. According to a memo former Hartford Schools Superintendent Christina Kishimoto sent to the Board on October 12, 2012 — which was the first time the wider board knew of the…
Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute says that the reformers cannot succeed, despite their best intentions, because they over promise what they can accomplish. Whether it is a promise of closing the achievement gap in short order, turning around 1,000 schools a year for five years, college for all, or making every single child proficient by the year 2014, they set goals that might–if all goes well–be achieved in decades, but cannot be achieved in a few years. They say “we can’t wait,” as if their sense of urgency will surely cause obstacles to crumble. But the obstacles are real, and genuine change requires time, patience, will, and the collaboration with teachers that reformers think they can bypass.
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley here summarizes and comments on a very enlightening interview with Jesse Rothstein in the Washington Post. Rothstein, an economist, conducts research on teacher evaluation and accountability.
Rothstein, on teacher evaluation:
“In terms of evaluating teachers, “[t]here’s no perfect method. I think there are lots of methods that give you some information, and there are lots of problems with any method. I think there’s been a tendency in thinking about methods to prioritize cheap methods over methods that might be more expensive. In particular, there’s been a tendency to prioritize statistical computations based on student test scores, because all you need is one statistician and the test score data….
“Why the interest in value-added? “I think that’s a complicated question. It seems scientific, in a way that other methods don’t. Partly it has to do with the fact that it’s cheap, and it seems like an easy answer.”
Joanne Yatvin, now retired, wrote the following commentary in 1990, almost 25 years ago. It was published in Education Week. It remains as pertinent today as it was then. In fact, with the Common Core adopted by most states, it is even more pertinent today than it was in 1990. Special thanks to Education Week for granting permission to reprint the article in full.
Published: September 19, 1990
Let More Teachers ‘Re-Invent the Wheel’
By Joanne Yatvin
As a young teacher, I served from time to time on committees charged with writing curricula and selecting new materials for teaching language arts and reading. Often, during committee deliberations, someone would come up with an idea that involved having teachers produce their own classroom strategies and activities. There was something very appealing about many of these ideas–at least to me–and we would spend a lot of time exploring their possibilities.
Infamous New York Charter threatens to send kids to jail and call Children’s Services if kids not picked up by parents by 3:45 PM. The public schools where I taught for thirty years still had teachers, staff and sports programs going until as late as 10:00 PM and starting before 7:00 AM. I think only ignorant fools believe corporate Charters are better than public schools, because they swallowed the corporate propaganda without question.
Blogger and retired teacher Norm Scott broke the story that Girls Prep Charter School in New York City posted a warning to parents about the dire consequences of arriving late to pick up their children. If the parent did not arrive by 3:45, the child would be taken to the local police precinct. Repeated failure to pick up on time would lead to a report to the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.
Referral to ACS might trigger an investigation of the parent and family. Chalkbeat picked up Scott’s report, based on an anonymous tip. ““You’re almost criminalizing parents. You’re calling them neglectful,” said Ocynthia Williams, an advocate with the Coalition for Educational Justice. “The bottom line is it’s a terrible policy for parent engagement at that school.”
Officials told Chalkbeat’s Geoffrey Decker that it was probably an idle threat. Girls Prep earlier came under criticism for…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 