In the past four years, TIME and Newsweek have published three cover stories that were openly hostile to teachers.
On December 8, 2008, TIME published a cover story featuring a photograph of Michelle Rhee, dressed in black and holding a broom, with the implication that she had arrived to sweep out the Augean stables of American education. (Detractors thought she looked like a witch.) The title on the cover was “How to Fix America’s Schools,” suggesting that Rhee knew how to fix the nation’s schools. The subtitle was “Michelle Rhee is the head of Washington, D.C., schools. Her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education.” The story inside was written by Amanda Ripley. We now know that Michelle Rhee did not transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, although she fired hundreds…
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.
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 http://wp.me/pLJTE-P6
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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).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
What’s interesting about Cuomo’s use of the word monopoly, when he recently described the public schools in New York State, is that it will be the for-profit, corporate Charter schools he supports that will become the real monopoly when there are no public schools left to compete with.
In fact, Cuomo may help elevate a corporate Charter school CEO in New York City to be one of the top-ten highest paid CEO’s in the United States.
A monopoly, by definition, is an industry that controls everything about the products it produces and sells—there is no competition. In comparison, there are 697 public school districts in New York State and each one is run by a democratically elected school board that answers to the public, and public school districts must be transparent about everything that that they do or else.
How about the corporate Charters that Governor Cuomo has been paid to love?
According to NYSED.gov, “As of the 2014-15 school year, New York has 248 operating charter schools serving approximately 92,132 students.”
And here’s a list of the Charter schools in New York State. If you look at the list carefully, you will discover that several of these Charter schools belong to growth corporations. For instance: Achievement First (9); Icahn (7); KIPP (6); New Visions (8), and Success Academy (24).
These Charters are private-sector corporations managed by CEO’s, regardless of the title they give themselves. Most, if not all of these CEO’s, pay themselves very well from the taxes that flow their way, and they run organizations that are all but opaque—meaning, it is difficult to discover what they are actually doing with the tax payers money they get, and the truth about student outcomes is often distorted and misleading—and they don’t have to answer to the voters or the public about anything they do.
If you want a perfect example of how one of these corporate, profit-driven CEO’s operates, look no further than Eva Moskowitz (a former media celebrity and non-educator), who pays herself more than a half-million dollars annually (more than the President of the United States who represents 316 million Americans, and the Chancellor of New York City’s public schools that teache1.1-million students), and Moskowitz uses hundreds of thousands of tax dollars that once went to teaching children in the public schools to run a well-oiled PR campaign to recruit more students and shut down more public schools, while the public schools are, by law, not allowed to use tax money for the same purpose.
Moskowitz runs the corporate, for profit Success Academy Charters, and her site says that private-sector corporation now operates 32 schools serving 9,000 students.
And Moskowtiz pays herself more than $500-thousand annually to serve 9,000 students while the Chancellor of New York City’s public schools annual salary is $212,614.
If we break that down by student, Moskowitz pays herself almost $56 for each student she recruits/serves. I find it interesting that she uses the word “serves” instead of “teaches”, don’t you? Who is she going to serve these children to—the vultures on Wall Street, who profit off her Charters?
What does it cost the tax payers to pay the salary of the Chancellor of the New York City public schools?
The answer: $5.17 a student, while Moskowitz payers herself more than 1,083-percent more per student.
How much will Moskowtiz earn if her so-called Success Academies (which are actually failures when you strip away the lies and look at the real numbers that she does all she can to hide) taught all of New York City’s children?
Moskowitz’s salary, with help from Governor Cuomo, who wants to fire public school teachers and close public schools, could eventually swell to more than $61-million annually.
When that day comes, if Cuomo has his way, Moskowitz will join the ranks of the 100 Highest Paid CEOs in the United States. In fact, she will rank #8 on that list and the tax payers of New York City will be paying the bill for her salary while the education of their children will be drastically curtailed and shortchanged, and the tax payers won’t be able to do anything about it, because there will be no democratically elected public school boards and no transparent public schools left.
To learn more about Eva Moskowitz and her relentless and ruthless goal to take over teaching all 1.1 million children in New York City, I suggest you read what Mercedes Schneider has to say on her Blog.
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!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 