Education | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé

Comparing the Best Thinkers to Bill Gates and President Obama’s Common Core agenda

Harvard reports that The Best Thinkers Have 7 ‘Thinking Dispositions’, and they all require critical thinking and problem solving skills. Critical thinking is mentioned twice in the piece. Nowhere does the Harvard study mention the importance of high test scores in math, literacy or science.

Harvard says, “So if you want to be more inclined to critical thinking, you need to know what’s in your toolbox, just as Warren Buffett would have you do.”

There was also a photo of Bill Gates, and the photo’s caption says, “Bill Gates isn’t just a smart guy—he’s disposed to critical thinking.”

In addition, the Harvard report said, “Fundamental critical thinking is essential in business, and life, but is seldom seen on a college curriculum.”

Maybe it’s seldom seen on a curriculum, but in the public schools, teachers have focused on teaching critical thinking and how to solve problems for decades. How else did 15-year olds in the U.S. rank 4th, and almost tie for 2nd and 3rd place, in the relative performance in problem solving on the 2012 International PISA test?

Yes, the International PISA test also tests for Creative Problem Solving: Students’ Skills in Tackling Real-Life Problems. The same skills that led to the success of billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

However, the only PISA scores the profit-driven, corporate-supported, fake-education reformers focus on are the math, literacy and science rankings—areas that do not represent what the Harvard study revealed about the “Best Thinkers.”

But when we look at Finland, a country that the fake-education reformers often compare to the U.S. in math, science and literacy rankings, Finland does poorly in the relative performance in problem solving, and Shanghai, China, #1 in math, science and literacy on the PISA, was second to last in the relative performance in problem solving.

On the other hand, the Common Core agenda of Bill Gates and President Obama does not focus on critical thinking and problem solving. Instead, the Common Core agenda would turn our children into robots who score high on bubble tests in math, science and literacy.

Remember, the U.S. is currently ranked #4 and almost tied for 2nd and 3rd place in the relative performance in problem solving, but Shanghai, China is ranked #42.

The PISA says, “As in other assessment areas, there are wide differences between and within countries in the ability of 15-year-olds to fully engage with and solve non-routine problems in real-life contexts. These differences, however, do not always mirror those observed in the core PISA domains of mathematics, reading and science. Just because a student performs well in core school subjects doesn’t mean he or she is proficient in problem solving.”

In conclusion, why do Bill Gates and President Obama—partners in the destruction of the democratic public schools—want the United States to be more like Shanghai, China?

_______________________

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

Book Cover Here

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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3 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on October 11, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

Tags: 2012 PISA ranking for the United States, Bill Gates and President Obama's Common Core agenda, the importance of critical thinking, the importance of problem sovling

Saving the Republic: a simple, step-by-step battle plan and an army of U.S. citizens

07 Sep

When Benjamin Franklin was asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” Benjamin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

To save that Republic that the Founding Fathers gave to the citizens of the United States, there is something that can be done, and it only costs a little time—as little as a half hour a day or less.

First, visit Diane Ravitch’s Blog daily and “Like” as many of her daily posts as possible. Then ReTweet them before sharing on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and any other site where you might have your own page.

In addition, Diane’s Blog is a WordPress Blog, so do as I do, and Reblog some of her posts to your WordPress blog if you have one, but not all of her posts. You have to make a choice. If you Reblog all of her posts, you will probably overwhelm your blog’s readers. Pick out the best each day.

Second, if time permits after visiting Diane’s Blog, help spread the word and educate as many Americans as possible about what is going on to subvert the U.S. democracy by a handful of billionaire oligarchs that includes—for instance—Bill Gates, the Koch brother, Eli broad, the Walton Family, etc.—I suggest you familiarize yourself with the Education Bloggers Network, and support a few or all of those Blogs too. You may sign up for these Blogs to send you an e-mail when they publish something new.

To become more knowledgeable on this issue so you may hold your own in a debate and possibly enlighten the fools who are proving Abraham Lincoln right—who said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”—I highly suggest that you read these four nonfiction books that have come out recently on this issue.

We are in a propaganda war. The billionaires have money. We have numbers. There are 3.3+ million, public school teachers in the United States, and these teachers can win this war along with their parent and student allies, but only if they continue to mobilize and organize to spread the information that will counter the lies and propaganda of the manufactured, corporate-driven, fake-education reform movement.

Here are the four books I recommend. Read them to become an info-warrior in the democratic army that is spreading the truth through facts that are not cherry picked.

The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession
By Dana Goldstein
http://www.danagoldstein.com/

“Ms. Goldstein’s book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic … The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, I’d leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. I’d also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert can’t read, and Allison can’t add.” —New York Times

Reign of Error
By Diane Ravitch
http://dianeravitch.net/

Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under President G. W. Bush. She was appointed to public office by Presidents H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education
By Mercedes K. Schneider
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/

Schneider says, “Corporate reform” is not reform at all. Instead, it is the systematic destruction of the foundational American institution of public education. The primary motivation behind this destruction is greed. Public education in America is worth almost a trillion dollars a year. Whereas American public education is a democratic institution, its destruction is being choreographed by a few wealthy, well-positioned individuals and organizations. This book investigates and exposes the handful of people and institutions that are often working together to become the driving force behind destroying the community public school.

50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education
By David C. Berliner, Gene V Glass, Associates
http://nepc.colorado.edu/author/berliner-david-c

David C. Berliner is an educational psychologist and bestselling author. He was professor and Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Gene V Glass is a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a research professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder.

NOTE: All it will take is an army of informed and dedicated American citizens doing a little bit every day to defeat the oligarchs and their corporations from stealing the people’s democracy that the U.S. Founding Fathers gave us.

It’s up to us to keep our republic/democracy. If we are unwilling to sacrifice the time to educate ourselves and do it, then we deserve to lose this war to these oligarchs who will become members of a U.S. Monarchy that their children will inherit just like Kim Jong-un inherited North Korea from his father and grandfather.

_______________________

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!”

The Industry Built around Blaming Teachers while ignoring Poverty

02 Sep

Dana Goldstein’s book—“The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession”—was released today. Anyone who is passionate about what’s happening to public education in the United States today should read this book.

In addition, Goldstein was interviewed on September 2 [today], on the Majority Report.

“Journalist Dana Goldstein author of the new book The Teacher Wars, explains why teachers are held responsible for the American inequality crisis, if we want teachers to make a broader impact why we need structural policy solutions, the gendered dynamics of teaching, why we can’t support teaching in the age of austerity, the policy implications of merit pay, how the Obama Administration helped create the standardized test hysteria, what tests are meant for, the historical roots of the Teach For America model, what we can do to support teachers and what really harms inner city schools.”

After the interview with Dana Goldstein, the Majority Report discussed why poverty is always the [real] issue in education—[the one ignored by President Obama, Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan and a few other fake education reformers who think bubble tests will solve poverty].

_______________________

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!”

Explaining the TSP Education Equation

21 Aug

Decades ago in one staff meeting at the high school where I was teaching, we were told that for education to work, all the stakeholders—teachers, students and parents—had to be involved.

Here’s the TSP equation: T + S + P = E [which means: Teachers + Students + Parents = Education]

To define this formula further and add responsibility as a factor, let’s look at the results of the 1966 Coleman Report. In the 1960s, James Samuel Coleman, PhD, and several other scholars were commissioned by the US Department of Education to write a report on educational equality in the US. It was one of the largest studies in history, with more than 650,000 students in the sample. The result was a massive report of over 700 pages. A precise reading of the Coleman Report reveals that student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources.

Coleman explained, “differences in school facilities and curricula, which are made to improve schools, are so little related to differences in achievement levels of students that, with few exceptions, their efforts [or the effects of different classes or curricula] fail to appear in a survey of this magnitude.”

The Coleman report identified 14 correlates of elementary and secondary school achievement, six of which are related to school: curriculum, teacher preparation, teacher experience, class size, technology, and school safety. The remaining eight correlates are categorized as “Before and Beyond School:” parent participation, student mobility, birth-weight, lead poisoning, hunger and nutrition, reading in the home, television watching, and parent availability.

The study concluded that the negative impacts on school achievement of single-parent homes, poverty in the minority communities, food insecurity, parent unemployment, child care disparities, substantial differences in children’s measured abilities as they start kindergarten, frequency of student absences, and lack of educational resources and support in the home “account for about two-thirds [66 percent] of the large difference … in NAEP eight-grade reading scores.” Coleman Report at Encyclopedia.com

Then there are student test scores. From the Economic Policy Institute—Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers—we learn: “Student test score gains are also strongly influenced by school attendance and a variety of out-of-school learning experiences at home, with peers, at museums and libraries, in summer programs, on-line, and in the community. Well-educated and supportive parents can help their children with homework and secure a wide variety of other advantages for them. Other children have parents who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to support their learning academically. Student test score gains are also influenced by family resources, student health, family mobility, and the influence of neighborhood peers and of classmates who may be relatively more advantaged or disadvantaged.

“Only about 4% to 16% of the variation in a teacher’s value-added ranking [from the results of standardized tests] in one year can be predicted from his or her rating in the previous year.”

What does the education equation look like once we add the responsibly factor?

T [33; 4 to 16] + S + P [66; 84 to 96] = Education

Explained: The Teachers one child has K through 12 are responsible for about 33 percent of what a child learns in school in addition to being responsible for about 4 to 16 percent of the results on standardized tests. This means, if a student has 43 teachers K to 12, each teacher would be responsible for about 0.76 percent of a child’s education and even less for the results of standardized tests.

Students + Parents [and other out of school factors] are responsible for about 66 percent of the results of a child’s education in addition to being responsible for 84 to 96 percent of the results on standardized tests.

How can Bill Gates, Arne Duncan and President Obama—and all the other fake education reformers—justify firing teachers based on the results of standardized tests and stripping teachers of their Constitutional due process rights as a public employee when each teacher is only responsible for less than 1 percent of a child’s education K to 12?

_______________________

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!”

2 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on August 21, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, family values, Lloyd Lofthouse, Parenting, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

Tags: Arne Duncan, blaming teachers for everything, Common Core and Bill Gates, Poverty, President Obama's Common Core agenda, Rank and Yank and Bill Gates, standardized testing and Bill Gates

Facts that reveal Obama’s Manufactured Crises of College-Career readiness and the alleged Failure of Public Schools

15 Aug

What is the role of the public schools? The Center for Ethical Leadership (founded in 1991) says that public education is foundational to a healthy democracy and developing our humanity—not to have every student achieve high scores on standardized tests.

After you read this post, you decide if the U.S. public schools are doing their job and what that job description should be.

The goals of G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, and Obama’s Race to the Top and the President’s insane Common Core agenda that demands 100 percent of high school graduates by 2014-15, who are 17/18 years old, must be college and/or career ready is horribly wrong when we look at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov) report on the educational needs of the job market.

According to bls.gov, if 100 percent of Americans were college educated, then most would be overqualified for 67 – 77 percent of the jobs [96.5 to 110.9 million], and 26 percent of those jobs [37.4 million] don’t even require a high school diploma or its equivalent. In 2013, 143.9 million Americans were employed in the civilian labor force.

How can there be a public education crises when only 40 percent of the jobs require a high school degree and by age 25, 90 percent of Americans have a high school degree or its equivalent? I think those numbers say that the workforce is overqualified and someone is cherry picking numbers to manufacture a public education crises.

Then there are the jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or better—that number is 23 percent [about 33 million jobs], but according to a special report of The Most Educated Countries in the World, 42.5 percent of Americans [about 90 million] have a college degree. That means for every job that requires a college degree, there are 2.7 college graduates, and Bill Gates and President Obama want more college graduates and are willing to punish teachers by firing them and then turn public schools over to corporations if public school teachers don’t achieve the President’s artificial and unnecessary goals.

To discover what happens to college graduates who live in countries with high college graduation rates, we only need to look at South Korea, Russia and Japan.

President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have frequently cited Korea in contrast to America’s alleged shortcomings. They mention the diligence of its students, the commitment of its parents, its success in equipping successive generations to compete.

But the truth is that Korean officials are alarmed that many graduates are not finding jobs—more than 40 percent in the past year according to Washington Post.com

What’s even more shocking is the fact that the United States already has a higher percentage of college graduates than South Korea according to a special report of The Most Educated Countries in the World.

10. Australia, 38.3 %
9. Finland, 39.3 %
8. New Zealand, 39.3%
7. United Kingdom, 39.4%
6. South Korea, 40.4%
5. United States, 42.5%
4. Israel, 46.4%
3. Japan, 46.4%
2. Canada, 51.3%
1. Russia, 53.5%

As for Russia, according to DE, Germany’s international broadcaster, approximately 30 percent of Russian university graduates under the age of 25 don’t have a full-time job. If they do, they’ve had a rough time getting there.

Anywhere from 65 to 70 percent of graduates are not able to find work directly after graduation, but require, on average, five-to-six months to find a position. Nor is that position protected under Russian labor law. Twenty-five percent of those employed do not have a contract with their employer.

And often, those jobs do not provide enough to survive on. According to a study by the New Economic School in Moscow, more than 50 percent of young academics who work in the Russian public sector have second or even third jobs in order to make ends meet.

In addition, Japan’s college graduates also face a tough job market. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Monday’s data on how recent Japanese college graduates are faring in the job market show that, despite a slight improvement, the overall picture remains grim.”

In conclusion, what is the real agenda of President Obama, Bill Gates and the rest of the fake education reformers—a topic worth exploring?

_______________________

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

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!”

5 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on August 15, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

Tags: Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Bill Gates and his Common Core agenda, president obama, the manufactured crises in public education

Poverty with Pollution—Its impact on the education of children

03 Aug

Before I get started, according to the Common Core State Standards Initiative website, formal assessment is expected to take place in the 2014–2015 school year, and seeks to establish consistent educational standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit-bearing courses at two- or four-year college programs or enter the workforce.

There’s also a Common Core Timeline you might find interesting. If you click the previous link, also visit the Analysis page; then scroll down to #3: How is the federal government involved in the Common Core? The rest of that page is worth reading too. Look close to discover the short timeline to achieve goals that no country on the planet has ever achieved with 100 percent of 17/18 year olds no matter how much time they were given.

Anyway, the impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children is well documented. The US National Library of Medicine reports, “School readiness reflects a child’s ability to succeed both academically and socially in a school environment. It requires physical well-being and appropriate motor development, emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences, age-appropriate social knowledge and competence, age-appropriate language skills, and age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills. It is well documented that poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighborhoods.”

Poverty Timeline: In 2000, the poverty rate was at its lowest in U.S. history at 11.3 percent. Under Presidents G. W. Bush and Obama, by 2012, the poverty rate had soared to more than 15 percent, the highest rate in decades.

In addition, “The Department of Agriculture’s measure of poverty, every red state (Republican) from Arizona to South Carolina has the highest poverty rates in America; between 17.9% and 22.8%.” aattp.org

By 2012, the share of Hispanics living in poverty had risen to 25.6 percent and for blacks 27 percent lived in poverty—compared to 9.7 percent who were non-Hispanic white. In addition, in 2012, 73.7 million American children represented 23.7 percent of the total U.S. population, but made up a disquieting 34.6% of Americans in poverty and a full 35% of Americans living in deep poverty. National Center for Law and Economic Justice

From this point on, I’m going to focus on what air pollution does to children, and the challenges that their teachers face to achieve the goals set by the rank and yank assessments of the Common Core Standards.

The findings of the Yale University research add to evidence of a widening racial and economic gap when it comes to air pollution. Communities of color and those with low education and high poverty and unemployment face greater health risks even if their air quality meets federal health standards. … Also, children and teenagers were more likely than adults to breathe most of the substances.

A study of Air Pollution and Academic Performance from the University of Southern California in conjunction with the University of Maryland says, “In this study, we examine the effects of four common and nationally-regulated outdoor air pollutants (PM10, PM 2.5, NO2 and O3) on math and reading test scores.

“The results suggest a sizable effect of pollution on academic performance, which provides evidence of another avenue by which pollution is harmful. Not only is it bad for children’s health, but it also impacts negatively on students’ performance in school and their ability in general, which we would expect to reduce future labor earnings. Since lower socioeconomic households tend to reside in more highly polluted areas, our results suggest that a decrease in pollution will result in a decrease in inequality, everything else held equal.”

Conclusion: Thanks to President Obama and his partner Bill Gates, children who live in poverty can’t win in the fake corporate-reform movement that is at war with public education and classroom teachers. The war on public education seriously started with President G. W. Bush’s NCLB and became more Machiavellian—think of Darth Vader and the dark side of the force in the Star Wars films—with President Obama’s Race to the Top and the rank and yank assessments of the Common Core standards.

The Obama-Gates driven rank and yank method of judging teachers and children—then firing and/or failing the losers besides closing schools and turning those children over to corporations to teach—will hit the poorest schools with Thor’s Hammer.

If you have trouble accepting this conclusion, then I suggest reading Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing by Meredith Broussard published in The Atlantic Magazine on July 15, 2014, to discover the real agenda behind the reform movement in education—a reform movement that is focused on profit and to hell with children, teachers and parents.

Anyone who really wants to help the public schools improve would start with two programs: First, a national early childhood education program.

Second, teacher training resulting in a paid, full-time, year-long residency program with a master teacher and follow up support from the teacher-training program for the following two years. There would be no rank and yank assessment agenda linked to the Common Core Standards, and no public schools would be closed. Instead, they would be fully funded.

Discover who is responsible for blocking legislation in Congress that would reduce air pollution @ Is Global Warming a hoax and why should we care?

_______________________

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!”

3 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on August 3, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, pollution, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

Tags: effects of air pollution on children, impact of air pollution on children and education, poverty and air pollution, poverty and children, poverty and education, poverty in the public schools

Reviewing The Teacher Wars, a History of America’s Most Embattled Profession

24 Jul

Reading Dana Goldstein’s book was a journey of discovery that I wished I’d taken in 1975, before I ended up teaching for thirty years in the embattled and often abused public schools.

About the time I reached page 100, I e-mailed an old friend and told him that if I’d read this book before I went into education, I might have changed my mind. Maybe I would have even given the U.S. Marines a second chance at a career.

However, by the time I reached page 274 and finished Goldstein’s book, I changed my mind and was glad I spent thirty years in the classroom fighting the barbarians and fools who are working hard to destroy public education through politics.

On page 250 in the bound galley supplied by Amazon, Goldstein says, “The policy, one of several school turnaround strategies suggested by (President Obama’s) Race to the Top, is based on a faulty premise: that veteran teachers are to blame when schools experience many years of low test scores.”

I agree with Goldstein. Bill Gates and Obama’s Race to the Top and its Common Core crap is a faulty, untested theory that’s causing more problems and fixing none.

I read Goldstein’s book with a Hi-Liter, and tagged many pages with information I thought relevant. In this review, I’ve resisted the urge to list many of the key points in the book and rant about them, because then the review might run thirty to forty thousand words.

But there is one point I want to focus on, and that’s teacher training. On page 250, Goldstein mentions three methods of teacher training.

First is the most common path to the classroom through a traditional college of education; second is with an urban teacher residency program, and third is with Teach for America (TFA).

First, urban teacher residency programs have an 87-percent retention rate.

Second, the retention rate for teachers who go through a traditional college of education to reach the classroom is 50 percent.

Third, for a program like TFA’s with five-weeks of summer training and little or no follow up support in the classroom, retention was 33 percent.

Can you guess the teacher training program favored by the Obama administration? The correct answer is TFA.

However, the urban teacher residencies had the best teacher retention, because these programs required a year-long residency in a mentor’s classroom, a requirement that matches the teacher training methods used in high archiving nations like Finland and in Shanghai, China.

There is a profile on page 252 that describes teachers who are most often rated highly by principals. Those teachers stayed in their job for many years. They were usually thirty or older and had extensive experience in jobs outside of education. They were usually working class black, Latino or white who graduated from non-elite colleges and often started in a community college.

When I read that profile, I was shocked, because that description matched my path to teaching. I was born to poverty and my parents, both high school dropouts, were blue-collar working class. I started work at 15, and after graduating from high school served in the U.S Marines where I ended up fighting in Vietnam, and didn’t start teaching until I was 30. In 1970, after earning an Associate of Science degree from a community college, I attended a non-elite college where I earned a BA in journalism in 1973.

Then, after working for two years in middle management in the private sector, I went through a year-long residency in a mentor teacher’s classroom.

I urge you to read Goldstein’s book when it’s released by Doubleday on September 2, 2014. Through The Teacher Wars, you will discover how U.S. politics are mostly to blame for any problems that exist in the public schools, and it’s been this way for 175 years. Today’s 3.3+ million public school teachers are not the problem, and Obama’s Race to the Top’s and the Common Core agenda of Bill Gates along with TFA—with its 66-percent teacher dropout rate—are not the solution.

There are three areas that would lead to dramatic improvement in public education, but it won’t happen overnight. Teacher training is the first area that needs attention.

Teacher pay is another. The headline in a recent piece published by Education Week.com shouted, Teacher Pay Starts Low, Grows Slowly, Is Generally Awful, Report Says.

Then there are early childhood education programs that should be mandatory for children living in poverty in the United States and available to every child as early as age three. Early childhood education should focus on literacy and foster a passion for reading.

We must abandon President Obama’s Race to the Top and its Machiavellian Common Core agenda to “rank and yank” teachers after torturing children with too many standardized tests that are wrongheaded, flawed and meaningless.

I read a free advanced galley proof of this novel sent to me by Amazon Vine. Eventually, this 5-star review will appear on Amazon, probably revised if Amazon won’t accept it as it appears here.

_______________________

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).

6 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on July 24, 2014 in American Public Schools, book promotion, Common Core, Education, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching

Tags: Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

This is my PURGE post, and it isn’t a movie review

21 Jul

Sunday, I walked downtown to see The Purge: Anarchy, and while watching the film and walking home afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the unnamed New Founding Fathers mentioned at the beginning of the film—who were in their ninth year as the leaders of the United States. In case you forgot or never knew, the U.S. Constitution limits a U.S. president to two, four-year terms. Therefore, with the current U.S. Constitution, there’s no way one president can stay in office nine years. But in this film that’s set about a decade in the future, the United States is led by a cabal that calls itself the New Founding Fathers that’s more like the Politburo of the old Soviet Union. There is no mentioned that the United States still has a Congress or Supreme Court.

Let’s get the synopsis of this film out of the way first with no spoilers. In the film, a vengeful father comes to the aid of a mother, her teenage daughter, and a defenseless young couple on the one night of the year that all crime, including murder, is legal.

We never learn who the New Founding Fathers are, but who else could they be but Bill Gates, the infamous Koch brothers, the Walton family, Eli Broad, Rupert Murdoch and a few other ruthless billionaire oligarchs who either inherited their fortunes or earned the money through crooked trickery and the corruption of elected officials.

These billionaires are the same people who are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to mislead America as they reinvent the United States into something that will obviously resemble the country in this film—where the agenda of the New Founding Fathers is to get rid of the so-called vermin at the bottom who were probably born into poverty through no fault of their own.

Who are the working poor? According to a January 2014 Pew Research report most poor Americans are in their prime working years. In 2012, 57 percent of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, and only 9.1 percent were age 65 and over, while poverty among children younger than 18 was 21.8% in 2012, and is worse today.

In addition, research from the Brookings Institution says, “If you’re born into a middle-class family, there’s a 76 percent chance you’ll end up middle class or even wealthier. Born into a poor family? Only a 35 percent chance.

Brookings offers three simple rules to end up middle class, no matter how low you start out.

One: graduate from high school
Two: work full time
Three: marry before you have children

It’s easy to tell a kid who lives in poverty that they have to graduate from high school to have a chance to move up to the middle class, but to insure that this happens, all children must start kindergarten with a love of reading from day one—reaching high school with a high level of literacy is the key to being a lifelong learner.

To make this happen, we must start with a national early childhood education program for all children as young as three, and this is something that Obama plans to ask Congress to vote for during his last year in office.

What do you think the odds are that Congress will approve anything Obama asks for in 2015? Why didn’t President Obama start with a national early childhood education program when he had the votes in Congress instead of first starting with the flawed and brutal Bill Gates funded Common Core agenda?

Bill Gates—who I’m sure would be one of the New Founding Fathers if this film were to become reality—seems to be doing all he can to make sure children who are born to poverty stay in poverty.

I’m almost done reading “The Teacher Wars, A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession” by Dana Goldstein, and it was Bill Gates who derailed any meaningful improvement in the public schools by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to implement a Machiavellian “rank and yank” system called Common Core designed to punish children and teachers.

The tragedy is that there are proven, positive methods to improve public education, but President Obama and Bill Gates are all but ignoring those solutions for something malignant.

The programs I’m talking about are already being used in most developed countries with dramatic success. They’re known as Continuous Quality Improvement programs where teachers are mentored to become the best they can be instead of being ranked by annual student standardized tests and then yanked out of the classroom based on the results.

In fact, high-achieving nations like Finland and Shanghai, China already require that every teacher must go through a year-long residency in a mentor teacher’s classroom. Teacher programs that do this already exist in the United States but they are only turning out a few hundred teachers annually and aren’t getting the funding they should have.

Research from Urban Teacher Residency United, a national network of nineteen programs, reveals that principals consistently rate urban teacher residency graduates as more effective than other first-year teachers and nationwide, urban teacher residencies have an 87 percent retention rate at four years, compared to the loss of nearly half of all new urban teachers over a similar period of time, and two thirds (66 percent) of Teach for America (TFA) recruits, who only have five weeks of summer training before being tossed in urban classrooms to sink or swim. (The Teacher Wars, A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein)

By the way, in 1975-76, I was fortunate enough to go through a paid, year-long residency in a mentor teacher’s fifth-grade classroom, and I went from there to teach until August 2005 in public schools with a childhood poverty rate higher than 70 percent along with violent street gangs that dominated the streets around those schools, including the elementary school where I was an intern.

In conclusion, I think we should purge from all political power those who would most likely become the New Founding Fathers of the United States, before they get a chance to create the nightmare world we see in this film. After all, the billionaire oligarchs mentioned earlier in this post already seem to be working hard toward that goal.

If we don’t invest in early childhood education, we pay the price as a nation. Sesame Street can’t do it alone.

_______________________

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).

3 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on July 21, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, literacy, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

Tags: Bill Gates, Bill Gates and his Common Core agenda, common core, Obama's destructive Common core agenda, The Purge Anarchy, what is the best way to improve the public schools

The obvious facts behind why Massachusetts kept the CAP on Charter Schools growth

18 Jul

Scot Lehigh is a Boston Globe Op-Ed columnist and from a recent rant, he’s also an angry, fake education reformer and cheer leader of Charter schools, who claims that Charter schools have enemies and the Massachusetts State legislature caved to pressure from these critics, but Scot leaves out a lot of the facts behind the reasons for keeping the CAP.

For instance, “The demographics of charter schools differ in almost all cases from the demographics of their sending districts. … Charters serve fewer Hispanic students, English language learners, special education students and low-income students than their sending districts. (The Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, a nonpartisan, evidence-based organization.)

In addition, The Center for Education Policy and Practice reported that Boston’s (so-called) “high-performing” Commonwealth charter schools appear to be contributing to a two-track educational system that is segregating students based on language proficiency, special education status and poverty.

The result is that Commonwealth charter schools appear to be operating largely as publicly funded private schools.

While students may be selected through a lottery system, actual application and acceptance appears to be predicated on such practices as participating in parent or student school visits and pre-lottery interviews, parental behavior contracts and acceptance of rigid discipline codes … the claims of high performance appear to result from significant student attrition resulting from the use of “pushout” strategies based on student academic and/or behavioral performance. The promoting power of these schools puts them in the category of “dropout factories.”

The study concludes with: It appears that those who are part of this “selective out-migration of low achievers” are those who find the work too difficult or the rules too strict.

“Even the vaunted KIPP (Charter) schools are not immune to pushing out under performing students (to make it look like they are doing a better job than public schools). A study by SRI International in 2008 of five KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay area found that 60 percent of their students left in middle school. Predictably, those who were counseled out tended to be the weaker students.”(Education Week.org)

In conclusion, any school that hand picks students will have a higher success rate compared to public schools—as long as those weaker students who were given the boot are not included in any press release or Op-ed piece written by a fake education reformer and cheer leader of elitist Charter schools. Therefore, if you are a fan of Charter schools, look in a mirror and ask yourself if you are a fool, an elitist or a racist who doesn’t want your kids sharing classrooms with the at-risk students that cause the lower average test scores that make public schools look like losers when they aren’t.

Eighty-six percent of Blacks have completed high school by age 25+ compared to 89 percent for Asians, 65 percent for Hispanic, and 92 percent of Whites. – Pew Research Center.

_______________________

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).

First 5-star review of “Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose”

11 Jul

The reason for this Blog that I launched in January of 2010 was to support this memoir. Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose is based on a daily classroom journal that I kept as a teacher in 1994-95. I have friends who are still teaching, and I know that the work climate for public school teachers is worse today than it was back then thanks to two presidents: George W. Bush and even worse, Obama, who, like a fool, I voted for twice, because I had no idea of his agenda to destroy the public schools and replace them with corporate, for profit schools that would not be answerable to the public while the public supported them with the taxes they pay.

Why do you think President Obama partnered will the richest man on the planet to make this happen. Yes, Bill Gates is Obama’s partner in the destruction of the democratic public schools that have a 175 years of history behind them and nothing but a record of improvement that continues to this day regardless of the lies you might hear or read from the media.

The e-book came out in June 2014. The paperback is available @ Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose

Here’s the first reader review for the e-book on Amazon:

_______________________

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

Where to Buy

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!”

2 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on July 11, 2014 in American Public Schools, book promotion, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, Public School, student behavior, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

Tags: children and poverty, curriculum development, public education in the United States, public schools, street gangs, Teaching, teaching kids who live in poverty

Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

Category Archives: Education

Comparing the Best Thinkers to Bill Gates and President Obama’s Common Core agenda

Saving the Republic: a simple, step-by-step battle plan and an army of U.S. citizens

The Industry Built around Blaming Teachers while ignoring Poverty

Explaining the TSP Education Equation

Facts that reveal Obama’s Manufactured Crises of College-Career readiness and the alleged Failure of Public Schools

Poverty with Pollution—Its impact on the education of children

Reviewing The Teacher Wars, a History of America’s Most Embattled Profession

This is my PURGE post, and it isn’t a movie review

The obvious facts behind why Massachusetts kept the CAP on Charter Schools growth

First 5-star review of “Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose”

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