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Discover what the media doesn’t report about the U.S. public schools

02 Nov

Warning! If you have high blood pressure or anger issues, don’t read this!

There is a vast difference between teaching and learning. A Teacher can teach a great lesson and the students who participate and pay attention will learn, while the students who don’t pay attention and participate don’t learn.

Do we shoot the teacher because of those children who did not cooperate and did not pay attention?  And when we test 100% of the students to judge teachers and discover what they learned, there is no way to know what students cooperated with the teacher.

The reason why children who live in poverty do poorly in every country on the PISA, for instance, is because it is in this socioeconomic group where we find the most students who do not participate and cooperate with what a teacher struggles to teach them.

And this hold true in every country where the PISA tests 15-year old students. There is no exception. In fact, in January 2013, a study out of Stanford that broke down the PISA results by socioeconomic level proves this FACT. The same study was validated by the Economic Policy Institute. Here are a few key points from that study that emphasize this FACT that is being totally ignored by the corporate supported fake education reformers and the media they own and/or control, as they chase tax dollars and don’t give a fart about what children learn.

  • Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.
  • A sampling error in the U.S. administration of the most recent 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.
  • If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.
  • This re-estimate would also improve the U.S. place in the international ranking of all OECD countries, bringing the U.S. average score to sixth in reading and 13th in math. Conventional ranking reports based on PISA, which make no adjustments for social class composition or for sampling errors, and which rank countries irrespective of whether score differences are large enough to be meaningful, report that the U.S. average score is 14th in reading and 25th in math.
  • Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.
  • U.S. students from disadvantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in the three similar post-industrial countries than advantaged U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers. But U.S. students from advantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in the top-scoring countries of Finland and Canada than disadvantaged U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers.
  • On average, and for almost every social class group, U.S. students do relatively better in reading than in math, compared to students in both the top-scoring and the similar post-industrial countries.

This revealing study out of Stanford has been out there for almost two years, but Arne Duncan and his master, Bill Gates—and the rest of the pack of vampires leading the charge to destroy the democratically run public schools haven’t hesitated in their relentless assault to dismantle the public schools and replace them with corporate Charters that several other Stanford studies reported are mostly worse or equal to the public schools they are replacing, and these Stanford studies were funded by the Gates foundation, so Bill Gates can’t be ignorant of the facts. Gates has to know what he is doing is perpetrating and supporting a fraud against the Citizens of the United States, and that is a federal crime that comes with a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a $10-million dollar fine.

Who is guilty without a doubt of this fraud? For sure, Bill Gates and Arne Duncan are aware that they are contributing to this fraud. Maybe Obama is just another ignorant fool, because it might be difficult to prove he’s read or heard of the results of the Stanford studies and even the Sandia report of 1990 that proved, without a doubt, that President Reagan’s A Nation at Risk was also misleading and where this fraud started.

Here’s a summary of what the Sandia Report discovered about A Nation at Risk, a fraud that has been supported by every President starting with Reagan.

“A Nation at Risk” (1983) – What the report claimed

  • American students are never first and frequently last academically compared to students in other industrialized nations.
  • American student achievement declined dramatically after Russia launched Sputnik, and hit bottom in the early 1980s.
  • SAT scores fell markedly between 1960 and 1980.
  • Student achievement levels in science were declining steadily.
  • Business and the military were spending millions on remedial education for new hires and recruits.

The Sandia Report (1990) – What was actually happening

  • Between 1975 and 1988, average SAT scores went up or held steady for every student subgroup.
  • Between 1977 and 1988, math proficiency among seventeen-year-olds improved slightly for whites, notably for minorities.
  • Between 1971 and 1988, reading skills among all student subgroups held steady or improved.
  • Between 1977 and 1988, in science, the number of seventeen-year-olds at or above basic competency levels stayed the same or improved slightly.
  • Between 1970 and 1988, the number of twenty-two-year-old Americans with bachelor degrees increased every year; the United States led all developed nations in 1988.

If this makes you angry, then Tweet it repeatidly, and share it with all of your social networking connections. Here’s a Tweet you are free to copy and paste.

 Discover what the media doesn’t report about the U.S. public schools

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

Crazy-is-Normal-a-classroom-expose-200x300

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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4 responses to “Discover what the media doesn’t report about the U.S. public schools

  1. liberalteacher

    November 2, 2014 at 16:25

    Excellent as always. Of course, the corporate media will never report the above. We must remember that we are not dealing with people who are interested in peer reviewed research. Their agenda is POLITICAL. The ONE PERCENT wants to CONTROL THE EDUCATION FUNDS THAT ARE COLLECTED THROUGH TAXES. Their agenda: To use that money to ENRICH THEMSELVES. They will throw a FEW CRUMBS to the masses, but the bulk of the edudollars they will control will be used to enrich themselves. Their charters will educate only those who can easily be educated through the use of transient TFA-type teachers who they will pay slaves wages to. The result will be a further stratification of our society. The charters will be second tier schools for the working class while only those who go to real private schools or those who go to well financed suburban public schools will get the type of education that will open the door to higher education. The rest will be the worker bees in their box stores and fast food restaurants whose low wages will be subsidized by the few government welfare programs that will survive their planned dismantling of whatever is left of America’s social safety net.

     
    • Lloyd Lofthouse

      November 2, 2014 at 17:59

      Thank you. I agree, but I think it goes further than that. For instance, the Koch brother and the Walton family have already exposed their secondary goals with the Charter schools they have launched with curriculum designed to brainwash kids to be fundamentalist Christians guided by Scripture, and/or anarchists who will only accept a weak libertarian govenrment that allows the private business sector to do whatever it wants tax free without any government watch dogs.

       
      • liberalteacher

        November 2, 2014 at 21:16

        Again you are right. I forgot about their fundamentalist charters. Ironically, for all their fake talk about our weak STEM scores, they want an educational system that will not even believe in science. They want to destroy public education in order to stamp out those pesky liberal social science ideas and any type of real scientific ideas that might create another industry that might interfere with their bottom line.

         
      • Lloyd Lofthouse

        November 3, 2014 at 08:44

        The oligarchs also want to rid themselves of the pesky labor unions that get in the way of their insatiable greed and hunger for power. They want to take away the voice of the other 99.9% of the people—the working class—who would then have no voice at the table of the oligarchy that will replace the republic and its democracy in the U.S.

         

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