Now that you have a better idea of what’s going on—with facts instead of just opinions—you may want to know who some of the players are behind the privatization movement for public education in the United States.
For instance: the Koch brothers (combined net worth $72 Billion); the Walton Family (combined net worth $103 Billion), the Bill and Melinda Gates ($72 Billion); Bloomberg ($31 Billion); William Ackman, who made his wealth from hedge funds ($1.2 Billion), and Rupert Murdock ($13.4 billion) etc.
The money behind the critics of public education comes from the families and individuals listed in the previous paragraph in addition to other wealthy Americans, who have spent millions of their own money to influence voters and elected representatives regarding the privatization of public education at the state and national level.
The voices of teachers and parents must be louder than the money of billionaires!
On the other side of this issue, millions of teachers have democratically elected union leaders to speak for them, but the billionaires have done all they can—for more than thirty years—to make the teachers’ unions look bad—unions that are funded by monthly member dues.
Teachers Union Exposed.com—evidently a critic of public education—reported that over the last 20 years, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has given more than $28 million in campaign contributions [on average, $1.4 million annually]; the National Education Association (NEA) has given almost $31 million [$1.55 million annually].
But Teachers Union Exposed.com doesn’t bother to mention how much the billionaires are spending to privatize public education in the United States. To read about one billionaire’s impact on higher education, I suggest reading “The Gates Effect”.
Bill Gates has spent $5 billion in his attempt to reform public education in the US. The Wall Street Journal says, “The Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.”
Do you know who owns the Wall Street Journal? Rupert Murdock (who, according to Mother Jones.com, wants to teach your kids (for a profit of course). This may explain why The Wall Street Journal claims that urban public schools are dysfunctional without any valid proof that this is true.
Do you really want Bill Gates—the man behind Microsoft and its endless software updates fixing what should have been fixed long ago—in charge of deciding how our kids learn, or having a multinational corporation [News Corp, the 2nd largest media corporation in the world] in charge of assessing kids’ reading skills?
Another example: Koch Brothers Exposed.com reported that the Koch brothers have donated more than $196 million to dozens of free-market and advocacy organizations. In 2008, the three main Koch family foundations contributed to 34 political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct.
What about a few of the other billionaires?
In 2010 (not the last twenty years), the Walton family contributed almost $5 million and Bloomberg contributed almost $3 million (outspending the teacher unions by a large margin). (Seattle Post Globe.org)
In other words, what Teachers Union Exposed.com says is that if teacher unions spend some of the money that comes from millions of teachers to defend the interests of the teachers and the public schools—that are not failing—that’s wrong, but it’s okay for billionaires to attack the public schools; claim whatever they want and spend whatever they want.
Without the unions more than 3 million teachers would have no voice and we’d only hear what a few billionaires want us to believe—that our public schools are broken when the facts say this is far from the truth. There are other studies but every study, pro or con, has critics who point out flaws.
In fact, there is no definitive proof that the public schools are broken and there have been no studies to identify how many teachers are incompetent or burned out. What we have are critics of public education—mostly private-sector billionaires—who pay PR people to cherry pick facts while spending millions spreading lies and misinformation while promoting unproven programs and theories.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
If only 17% of the Charter schools performed better than the public schools, what does that mean?
It means that 901 Charter schools outperformed, on average, 98,800 public schools—but at the same time 1,967 Charter schools performed worse than the average public school.
And if 83% of the public schools performed the same or better than Charter schools that means 82,004 public schools did not fail in teaching America’s children.
To have a better understanding of what the studies revealed it may help to know the numbers for Elementary and Secondary Education in the United States.
In 2010–11, there were about 13,600 different public school districts with over 98,800 public schools—including about 5,300 charter schools. In fall 2013, about 50.1 million students attended public elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.3 million were in prekindergarten through 8th grade and 14.8 million were in grades 9 through 12.
Today, the public schools employ about 3.3 million full-time-equivalent (FTE) teachers.
In the private sector there are about 30,900 private schools offering kindergarten or higher grades, and an additional 5.2 million students attended these private schools, and a projected 400,000 FTE teachers worked in this education sector. (nces.ed.gov)
Note: The public school districts are nonprofit and are run by democratically elected school boards that are usually made up of concerned parents whose children attend or attended the schools in the same district. Common sense says that these parents, who are in charge, have a vested interest that the schools do the best job possible under the circumstances. Public schools must hire qualified and trained teachers.
A public charter school is a publicly funded school that is typically governed by a group or organization under a legislative contract or charter with the state or jurisdiction. The charter exempts the school from selected state or local rules and regulations. In return for funding and autonomy, the charter school must meet the accountability standards articulated in its charter.
Private sector schools are not run by democratically elected school boards. If these schools are religious, they are run by the religions that own them. If the schools are secular, they are run by the CEO of a corporation or business that is profit based and the CEO answers to no one but the richest stock holders and investors. The only way a CEO usually loses his job is to die, retire or lose money. If the private schools are operated as a non-profit, the manager is usually paid several-hundred-thousand dollars annually and the costs are higher than public schools. Private schools may hire anyone to teach.
You may be surprised to learn that the charter school concept originated with educators who started in the classroom as teachers. Starting in 1974, Albert Shanker (1928 – 1997) and then Ray Budde (1923 – 2005) had the idea for charter schools and helped launch this concept as a way to meet the needs of the most difficult to teach students. Charter schools were not meant to be an option for every student. The concept was an alternative designed to deal with children who were at risk and difficult to teach.
Albert Shanker, who started out as a substitute teacher; then went on to teach math in East Harlem for eight years, became the president of the United Federation of Teachers in 1964. Ray Budde started as a 7th grade English teacher. (Education Evolving.org)
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
The public schools in the United States are often compared to the public schools of other nations but what about comparing them to the charter and private sector schools in the United States?
The forces that want to turn U.S. public education over to the private sector—while obviously fooling many and robbing working middle class Americans to pay the rich—have worked hard for decades to paint the public schools and millions of dedicated, hard-working teachers as failures, but those claims are far from the truth—a truth that is difficult to prove.
The reason for this is because state and federal governments do not monitor the charter or private schools as they do the public schools. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top focus on the public schools and ignore the others. For more information on private sector schools not being judged the same as the public schools, I suggest reading Comparing Private and Public School Test Scores from GreatSchools.org.
What’s at stake—more than one trillion annual tax payer dollars that funds public education nationwide. That means every ten years, those tax-payer dollars add up to more than $10 trillion. This money is one of the main reasons for the corporate attack on public schools.
To discover how the charter schools compare to the public schools, Stanford—a private sector university that is one of the top ranked universities in the world—conducted an in-depth study in 2009.
The study found that, on average, charter schools performed about the same or worse than traditional public schools. The Stanford study said that 46% of Charter schools were the same; 37% were worse [which means many public schools were better], but only 17% of the Charter schools were better.
The goal of the study was to examine differences in mean National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics scores between public and private schools when selected characteristics of students and/or schools were taken into account.
Among the student characteristics considered were gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, and identification as an English language learner. Among the school characteristics considered were school size and location, and composition of the student body and of the teaching staff.
For Catholic and Lutheran schools—for both reading and mathematics—the results were again similar to those based on all private schools.
For Conservative Christian schools, the average adjusted school mean in reading was not significantly different from that of public schools.
In mathematics, the average adjusted school mean for Conservative Christian schools was significantly lower than that of public schools.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
After reading “Reign of Error” by Diane Ravitch with a highlighter and flagging pages with Post-it-Notes, I finished with a question: Why would anyone want to teach in today’s toxic public-school environment? The answer to that question is vital.
If Americans who value our freedoms; the democracy we fought and bled for, as citizens we must have a say in how our public schools operate; teach and treat our children. Every teacher, parent and future parent in America must join forces and fight to keep the public schools from being destroyed by a malignant cancer that President G. W. Bush called “No Child Left Behind” and President Obama calls “Race to the Top”. Both of these Washington D.C. based programs supported by Congress demand that teachers are successful with 100% of the children and nothing else is acceptable.
This means that if a school improves scores—for example—by even 50% from 25 to 75, that school would still be considered a failure and all of its teachers branded as failures. Then those public schools may be closed and turned over to the private-sector where profit driven vampires may be allowed to suck out the profits as if it were the blood of a victim while the law is powerless to do anything.
If you read “Reign of Error”, you will discover this is exactly what happened to public schools in Chicago and New Orleans. In a few of Chicago’s public schools, for instance—that were more successful than the private-sector for profit schools replacing them—even the angry parents of the children who attended those improving public schools couldn’t stop the closures.
You see, “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” only punishes the public schools for not achieving the impossible goals set by the President and Congress but ignores the private sector schools that are replacing them.
The situation between the public schools and the private sector that’s moving in is similar to having Woody Allen age 77 fighting a 20-year old Mike Tyson at the height of his boxing career, but Allen has to wear gloves and can’t hit below the belt while Tyson is bare fisted and can hit anywhere he wants.
Sad to say, an old former friend of mine was seduced to the dark side—he was influenced by more than thirty years of corporate; private-sector propaganda into believing the public schools were broken and now he sides with the test-students-to-death mentality and blame teachers when 100% of the kids don’t show dramatic improvement with those test scores. This former, old friend firmly believes the only way to educate our children is through private sector, assembly-line, CEO mentality, corporate schooling. He thinks this is “school choice” but once the public schools are closed, there will no choice.
Halfway through reading “Reign of Error”, I sent this former friend I have known for almost sixty years an e-mail urging him to read Ravitch’s book. A few days later he wrote that he visited Amazon; read the 1-star reviews from critics of public education [there were eight when I last looked compared to one-hundred-thirteen 5-star reviews] and that was all he needed to make his mind up—he refused to read the book.
If you know anyone with a closed mind like his and a world view that sees everything through a black-and-white filter, don’t waste your time as I did. Individuals like my old, former friend are a lost cause, but we may still have a chance to save America’s public school before it is too late.
It isn’t as if I wasn’t aware of what was going on in the public school. After all, I successfully taught in the public schools for thirty years alongside many other hardworking teachers, and I have stayed in touch with colleagues and friends who are still in the classroom—they say it’s getting worse and not better. When I talk to them, I hear the stress; the pressure; the depression, and the sense of defeat. It doesn’t matter how great or hard working a teacher might be, they are all painted with the critic’s corporate-funded brush that says we must get rid of incompetent teachers [but not one study had indicated how many teachers in America are incompetent], and to do this we must strip all teachers of job protection; we must get rid of the unions who might fight for a [good] teacher’s rights; we must turn the schools over to corporations and non-profit organizations with highly paid CEOs who will make all the decisions and who have the power to fire teachers and administrators for any reason at any time—all without government oversight and supervision.
After reading “Reign of Error” I now have a complete picture of what has been going on for more than thirty years, and I taught in the public schools through most of that era, but I had no idea it was this bad.
We must fight to stop the special interests that are directed by billionaires and religions driven by idealistic beliefs that stem from racism; libertarianism; conservatism; neo-conservatism; progressive agendas, and fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Thirty years ago these wealthy individuals and organizations were critics of the public schools but they were not working together and the voters defeated them at the ballot box repeatedly.
That all changed starting with President G. W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and then even worse, President Obama’s “Race to the Top”. The critics found another way to achieve their goals; bypassed the voters and bought presidents, members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state legislatures, and to win elections outspent the candidates they couldn’t buy.
Today those groups and individuals in the private sector have a common goal and that goal is to strip democracy from the public schools and turn those schools over to “them” so they can teach the kids any way they want without any rules, oversight or restrictions.
The American people must fight and resist—for example: the Koch brothers; the Walton family and the Gates Foundation—to preserve America’s freedoms from a corporate CEO mentality; an autocratic and dictatorial thought process. How would you like Wal-Mart teaching your kids—a corporation that teaches its lowly paid workers how to apply for welfare/food stamps?
To learn more about the Walton family’s campaign against the public school in America, I suggest reading this post about Education that appeared on Walmart1percent.org.
Do you want America’s schools run by someone like the libertarian Koch brothers; the conservative Walton family; the progressive Gates family, or neoconservative Rupert Murdock who owns and controls Media Corp, the second largest media empire in the world?
Or do you want America’s 13,600 public school districts teaching more than 50-million kids to be managed by democratically elected school boards who answer to parents/voters as they have for more than a hundred years?
Ravitch’s book proves beyond a doubt for any open-minded person that our public schools have been slowly and steadily improving and are not failing, but that there’s still room for improvement. In fact, Ravitch closes her book with several chapters with suggestions to improve the public schools more than they have already improved in the last century. I agree with Ravitch’s recommendations.
When we look at more than a century of progress in the country’s public schools starting in 1900, there is nothing but progress as the high school graduation rate climbed from 3% to reach 90% in 2012.
Be aware that the numbers the critics report are the ones they want you to know—like the on-time graduation rates for 17/18 year olds which is also at its highest point in the history of this country, but they won’t tell you that last fact.
The critics don’t bother to mention that 15% of the 25%, who did not graduate on time, went on to graduate by age 24—most of them within a year.
What this proves is that the public schools are not social promotion factories as critics claim. High schools have minimum standards for high school graduation. Students must take and pass a given list of classes; earn enough credits in addition to passing a competency exam to prove they have the right to earn a high school diploma. And many of the students who did not qualify to graduate on time meet those requirements and graduate a year or more later. That additional 15% adds up to 7.65 million more high school graduates, who didn’t graduate on time but did graduate.
But “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” demands that every child finishes first and on time—something that has never happened in the history of any country in the world. These two Washington DC programs supported by the critics of public education are impossible to achieve and are nothing more than a bloody path to guaranteed failure.
As I was reading “Reign of Error”, at first I wanted to go into greater detail sharing what I had learned. But there is so much information from mostly primary sources supported by charts and a chapter by chapter detailed index, that there was no way I could do the book justice. All I can suggest is that if you love America; if you are a true patriot who supports the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you must read this book with an open mind. But be warned, the politicians that belong to the private-sector critics; billionaires and corporations calling for school reform, will do all they can to discredit this book to achieve their goals. They already achieved that goal with one former, old friend of mine, and I’m sure there are many more closed-minded fools just like him.
Ravitch is not against charter schools that teach at-risk kids. In fact, in “Reign of Error” Ravitch points out that the concept of charter schools came from Albert Shanker, who was the founding father of the charter-school movement, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997 [AFT is one of America’s two largest teacher unions with about 900-thousand members]. However, once the private -sector reformers and vultures arrived, the charter school concept was hijacked and changed. Now, as Ravitch points out in Chapter 16, [the 5,000] charter school run the gamut from excellent to awful and are, on average no more innovative or successful than public schools.
Shanker’s basic concept was that the charter schools would have a charter for a set period of time while still being part of a public school district; would work with the students who were at high risk of failure, and at some point its work would be done.
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!”
PBS.kids.org says, “Online bullying often called online harassment is a serious issue, and it’s getting more common.”
In fact, no one on the Internet—especially those that are transparent—is safe from an anonymous online bully, who uses the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution as a shield to abuse the character and/or reputation of individuals that are not anonymous online. For example, authors, who may also be publishers, often find their reputations as authors/publishers damaged by the comments of anonymous online bullies.
I have been doing extensive ongoing research on this issue due to my own run-in with a pack of these anonymous bullies recently (and a few years ago), and I have discovered that this is a problem that permeates Amazon (in addition to other sites such as Goodreads) affecting possibly hundreds and even thousands of people due to the fact that Amazon cannot, at this time, police itself efficiently or adequately to protect transparent people—mostly authors—that have become victims of alleged malicious and obviously premeditated attacks by anonymous people that demonstrate by their own words alleged sociopath-narcissist tendencies.
I have also come to the conclusion that we cannot blame Amazon.com for this toxic environment. Amazon is also a victim due to the “freedom of speech” dilemma. However, the 1st Amendment does not offer total protection from abusers.
1st Amendment Text: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Study these 1st Amendment words carefully. Nowhere does it say in the 1st Amendment that a private sector business and social network like Amazon.com cannot limit freedom of speech on its site. The key words are “Congress shall make no law …”, and Amazon.com does not make the laws.
In addition, The Freedom Forum clearly says that the First Amendment does not say anyone can say anything at any time, and the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an interpretation of speech without limits.
The Supreme Court has ruled regarding libel and slander: “Was the statement false, or put in a context that makes true statements misleading? You do not have a constitutional right to tell lies that damage or defame the reputation of a person or organization.” Source: Freedom Forum.org
The virtual world is a new legal arena and the courts are dealing with hundreds of libel law suits monthly and, true to form, legislation at the state and national level is moving slowly as this hot button issue over “freedom of speech” gives cause for caution. Our elected representatives do not want to be smeared with accusations that they are limiting freedom of speech so they must tread cautiously or lose votes.
However, there is another side to this issue that I haven’t seen expressed yet. Freedom of Speech is only one of the rights/protections that the US Constitution offers its citizens. What everyone seems to have overlooked is the Confrontation Clause of the 6th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The Confrontation Clause has its roots in both English common law, protecting the right of cross-examination, and Roman law, which guaranteed persons accused of a crime the right to look their accusers in the eye. In noting the right’s long history, the United States Supreme Court has cited Acts of the Apostles 25:16, which reports the Roman governor Porcius Festus, discussing the proper treatment of his prisoner Paul: “It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man up to die before the accused has met his accusers face-to-face, and has been given a chance to defend himself against the charges.” It has also cited Shakespeare’s Richard II, Blackstone’s treatise, and statutes.
By allowing people to hide behind an anonymous identity on the Internet and allowing them to write negative reviews/comments and even level ad-hominem attacks against easy to identify individuals who are transparent, the 6th Amendment rights of these transparent people have been violated because one cannot look his or her accuser/s face-to-face and eye-to-eye.
After all, how can any author, for example, who is transparent and working under his or her real name, defend against alleged anonymous bullies on Amazon.com (and similar sites such as Goodreads)—that leave negative reviews or even YES votes to support those anonymous, negative reviews/comments—and have a chance to defend his or her damaged reputation by facing his or her critic face-to-face and eye-to-eye?
In this example, knowing the history of your critic might be vital if it is discovered that an anonymous person leaving negative reviews/comments has a hidden history of this sort of behavior on the Internet spreading criticism, lies and ad-hominem insults in addition to using what is known as SockPuppets to gain an unfair advantage thus establishing premeditation—the law says that premeditation is the contemplation of a crime well enough in advance to show deliberate intent to commit the crime; forethought.
In conclusion, because going to court to resolve this hot button issue may be too costly and beyond the average citizen’s ability to pay for justice, this issue may be open to a lawyer or law firm to take pro bono or as a class action suit on a consignment and/or contingency basis. The defendant in this sort of class action case might be a consumer, social networking sites such as Amazon.com—an online community similar to a town, city, state or nation and therefore held responsible to uphold the protections offered by the U.S. Constitution to its Internet citizens.
In this case, a transparent victim online, such as an author or other individual, should have the right to demand knowing who his or her anonymous critic/accuser is that may be smearing his or her good name and/or product. After all, the online environment has created a court of public opinion that if unchecked may damage the reputation and well being of an innocent victim.
Of course, there may be a simple solution to avoid having this issue reach and be defined by the United States Supreme Court: When a transparent person claims his or her 6th Amendment rights when confronted by an alleged online anonymous bully, Amazon.com—for example—automatically provides an online form that the anonymous person may fill out revealing his or her real-life name, location and information leading to his or her online history that could then be verified before publication, or the anonymous person may decide to delete his or her review/comment and remain anonymous. If the anonymous person refuses to cooperate, Amazon may refuse to offer them a forum on its site and remove every review/comment made by that anonymous individual. Eventually, even the SockPuppets an anonymous person may have created might be revealed and vanish under such a policy.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
I think you have made a great point or at least inadvertently focused a spotlight on an important issue and why it is there. Turnover in a school or school district may be a red flag—a strong warning sign— that the school board/administration/students are not the easiest to work with or work for [another word would be dysfunctional ].
This could be extended to an entire state since each state has its own department of education that decides policy in that state as directed by the elected politicians from the governor of a state on down. Due to a need to gain votes, religious and/or political agendas tend to rule in such organizations and the winds may shift at any time.
For example, I friend sent me this about the current situation in the high school in Southern California where he now teaches.
I was a public school teacher from 1975 – 2005 and we worked together before dysfunctional administration at our high school and in our school district drove him to quit and find a job in another district that at the time was a better place to work.
But beware of the grass is greener over there syndrome because a drought will kill the green grass leaving behind sweltering heat and dust.
During my thirty years in the classroom, I worked under nine-different principals. Some were great, some good and some horrible.
The horrible ones drove teachers, counselors and VPs out of the schools where they ruled Nazi style and turnover could reach as high as fifty percent in a few years.
Good principals, who are usually a sign of good administration and a sensible school board, tend to hold on to staff.
I mean, how many people quit jobs—any job—with a boss that knows what he or she is doing; a boss that supports his workers in the best possible ways to make the work environment a place where we want to spend twenty to forty years of our lives?
My friend said of this school year (2012 – 2013):
“112 scheduling changes in the first three weeks (the classes he teaches)
“75% of the administrative team is new; a lot of chaos
“50% of the counselors are new; a lot of chaos
“We lost our department chairs, so there is no communication between the teachers and administration
[This high school, he says] “once had a top-notch academic program; however, we are falling apart at the seams; our test scores have flat-lined and they will continue to flat-line because there are just too many new faces at our school; two of our Vice Principals have never been a VP before; they’re nice people, but we have to wade through their learning curve.”
For another example: at the high school where I taught for the last sixteen of the thirty years I was in the classroom as a teacher, we had one new teacher quit at lunch on his first day on the job with two more classes to teach after lunch. During the lunch break, he walked in the principal’s office, tossed his room keys on the desk and said, “If they won’t show some respect for me and attempt to learn, then I refuse to teach them.”
I know from experience, that district did not do a good job creating a positive, supportive educational environment for its teachers because I worked in that district for thirty years. Instead, it was more of a combative environment that did not offer the support teachers wanted or needed to teach.
It is a fact that teachers teach and students learn. However, that is not always the case. Instead, teachers in a toxic educational environment often struggle to teach while too many students make no effort to learn.
Elected School Boards and the administrators they hire should support an environment where teachers may teach and students will learn, and we can learn from two of the best public educations system in the world: Finland and Singapore.
In Finland, the teachers have a strong union and the teachers make the decisions in a supportive educational environment and it works. Parents start teaching children how to read at age three but the first year of school is at age seven.
In Singapore, merit rules. Students must compete academically to earn where they are tracked and the system is heavily tracked based on performance. There is no self-esteem driven educational environment; there is corporal punishment and students may be publicly beat with a bamboo cane if caught breaking strict-rules built to support a merit based education system.
Why can’t we in the United States learn from Finland and Singapore?
Under President George W. Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) increased the Department of Education’s (DOE) budget from $46 Billion to $60 Billion (In 2012, the budget reached $68.1 Billion). For a comparison, under Bush, the Department of Defense (DOD) budget went from $308.9 Billion in 2001 to $729.6 Billion in 2008—an increase of $420.7 Billion compared to the $14 Billion increase for the DOE.
Meanwhile, in 2012, the federal deficit was $1.327 Trillion and the Interest on the debt was $224.8 Billion.
But the GOP wants to save money by abolishing the DOE while increasing the budget for the DOD. I’m confused because this makes no sense, and I wonder what the real reason is. What are they not telling us?
The NCLBA was enacted due to an act of Congress, and Congress represents the fifty states. The NCLBA gave the DOE more responsibilities to monitor public education in all fifty states.
When congress voted and authorized the NCLBA that gave the DOE more responsibility and more funding on May 23, 2001, the House of Representatives voted 384 – 45, and the Senate voted 91 – 8 in favor of the act.
In 2001, the 107th Congress had a Senate that was split 50-50 and the House of Representatives had 221 Republicans to 212 Democrats.
In truth, it was an imperfect bill incapable of solving the challenges of public education in part because it put the blame and responsibility on the shoulders of teachers and none on parents and students.
In 2001, the Republican Party held majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate with a GOP president in the White House.
If you were to read the history of the DOE, you would discover it was created in 1867 to collect information on schools and teaching that would help the States establish effective school systems. Over the last 145 years, this goal of gathering information on what works in education continues. Source: ed.gov
In fact, in 1867, in the 40th Congress, the GOP held a vast majority in both Houses: 42 to 11 in the Senate and 143 to 49 in the House.
As you have now learned, the GOP, as the majority, created the DOE in 1867, and played a crucial role increasing its responsibility in 2001, so why has the Republican Party in recent years set a goal to abolish the DOE?
Think Progress.org reported, “As recently as 1996, the Republican Party platform declared, ‘The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.’ … Now, a new wave of Republicans (along with many old hard-line conservatives) are trying to number its days once again.” …
“A comprehensive review of the voting records and statements of Republican incumbents and candidates finds that there are 111 GOPers (Republicans) who support shutting down the Department of Education,” Think Progress said.
Yet, in 145 years, the Supreme Court of the United States has never questioned the Constitutionality of the DOE and the mandate it was given by more than one act of Congress.
For a comparison, the federal government only had 2.8 million civilian employees in 2010 and 25.6% of federal civilian employees worked for the DOD while only about two tenths of one percent (0.17%) work for the DOE. In addition, the DOE’s share of the federal budget is 5%, while the DOD’s budget has increased to about 55% of the federal pie.
If the DOE were abolished, public education in the US would lose its eyes and ears, and abolishing the DOE would do nothing to stem the tide of the national debt. It would literally be a drop in the ocean.
In addition, public education in the US is often compared as inferior to Finland’s schools that are ranked as one of the best public educational systems in the world. Compared to the top thirty-three ranked countries for 2009, Finland was 2nd in Reading, 1st in Math, and 1st in Science. The US was ranked 33rd, 27th, and 22nd respectively.
If we want to learn something from Finland, it helps to know that in the Finnish Government, the Ministry of Education and Culture is responsible for developing educational, science, sport and youth policies and international cooperation in these fields. The Ministry also allows the teachers’ union a role in decision making on duties, conditions of work, salary scales and instruction time. However, in the US, teachers are often not part of the decision making process and teachers’ unions are under constant attack and criticism.
It is obvious that as long as the US has fifty different educational systems each based on conflicting political and religious agendas, then the US educational system will never compete equally with countries such as Finland. If we are to compete with Finland, we must learn from what they do–not just compare rankings and blame our teachers and teachers’ unions.
Therefore, why are hard-line conservative types taking aim at the DOE in the US? (For example: think of the Tea Party that was founded and supported in large part by two of the four Koch brothers and the Wal-Mart, Walton family that has pushed hard for voucher schools. This list also includes fundamentalist, evangelical, born again Christians that want the schools to teach creationism instead of evolution and science.)
What is the political agenda of these factions of the Republican Party? Why do these factions in the GOP want to cripple and blind the public education system in the United States leaving it fractured in fifty different pieces? What will these hard-line conservatives and capitalists gain if they succeed?
The answer may be found, in part, from these facts: In the US, there are about 16,000 school districts and approximately 49 million students attending more than 98,000 public schools and 28,000 private schools. To pay for this, the fifty states raise (mostly through local and state taxes) and spend almost one trillion dollars annually for public and private funded education. The budget of the DOE represents about 6.8% of that total. The DOE is the guard dog that gathers information on education in all fifty states and reports to Congress and the president what it learns. If any states or school districts are found to be in violation of laws enacted by the Congress, then the President of the United States is duty bound by his or her oath of office to protect and defend those laws.
In 1800, most Americans (94%) worked and lived on farms. After the Civil War, many left the farms to work in factories but the pay was low for men and even lower for women and children (a situation similar to what has been happening in China for the last few decades–this evolutionary transition happened in the US first. Now it is repeating itself in other countries.).
If life was so harsh in the cities and factories, these migrants could have stayed on the farms and I’m sure most would have if life had been better on the farm, but it wasn’t. For a migration of this size to take place means those people were desperate. That many people do not walk away from a good thing to be treated as if they were slaves.
Legally, children as young as age three worked in US factories (this is illegal in China today). A high number of children also worked as prostitutes (also illegal in China today). Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. That would not change until 1938 with the Federal regulation of child labor in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“From the early 1800s, children were an integral part of the textile industry’s work force. In the Manayunk district of Philadelphia, children as young as seven assisted in the spinning and weaving of cotton and woolen goods. By 1828, nearly half of Manayunk’s one-thousand laboring residents were children under the age of fifteen. In nearby Kensington, children labored as bobbin boys and girls from sunrise to sunset earning one dollar per week. Exhausted at the end of the work day, some slept in doorways and alleys near the mills. Philadelphia’s 1820 census found that 40 percent of the eleven-hundred workers employed in some thirty-nine textile firms were children.“
Annie Lowrey of the New York Times on 9-21-2012, reported on a study of Who Makes It Into the Middle Class, and education plays an important role but so does the environment and family a child grows up in.
Lowrey wrote, “Isabel V. Sawhill, Scott Winship and Kerry Searle Grannis tackled the question of why some children make it to the middle class and others do not, studying criteria that tend to be indicative of later economic success and examining how race, gender and family income come into play.”
The study discovered that graduating from high school was not enough.
In fact, a child that graduates with a grade-point average above 2.5 with no criminal conviction and no involvement in a teenage pregnancy had an 81% chance of joining the middle class as an adult. A child that does not meet this criteria only had a 24% chance.
The study found that “Children from disadvantaged families are less likely to be ready for school at age 5, less likely to be competent elementary-school students, less likely to graduate from high school without a criminal record or a child, and so on.”
I find it interesting that the study did not blame public school teachers for this.
Benchmarks for measuring the success of public schools is set by politicians in Washington DC and the capitals of the fifty American states, and teachers have no say in those benchmarks. In addition, public school teachers (all college educated with additional training required before becoming a credentialed teacher) have very little to do with the curriculum they teach or the methods used to measure success or failure of the public schools in the United States.
For example, if the Congress and White House says teachers must jump ten feet and they only jump seven, then they have failed and that is how the media reports it. Nowhere do any of these benchmarks for measuring the success of public schools include parents and the environment a child grows up in. Teachers are told to jump ten feet (with no pole, pogo stick or trampoline to help) with no consideration for the impossible.
The formula for education is simple:
teachers teach + students learn + parents help in every way possible and that equals education.
Teachers cannot replace parents or learn for his or her students. All a teacher can do is teach. If a child goes home and does not study or read, the teacher cannot jump the ten feet that Washington DC demands. If you still are not convinced, I suggest reading Not Broken.
What is wrong with the US Congress and the White House that they are so blind they cannot see this?
There are many ways to prove that America’s public education system is not a failure and is an INCREDIBLE success. This time, I will offer the rise of the modern American middle class as an example:
Today, the definition of the middle class in America is complex. In 1951, sociologist C. Wright Mills studied and wrote about the formation of a new middle class of white-collar workers—does not refer to Caucasians but to the type of work—described as mostly highly (college) educated, salaried professionals and managers (roughly 15 – 20% of households today). Then there is the lower middle class consisting mostly of semi-professionals, skilled craftsmen and lower-level management (roughly one third of households).
Another way to measure the size of the middle class in the US would be subtract Americans that live in poverty in addition to the top five percent. In 2010, fifteen-point-one percent (15.1%) of all persons in the US lived in poverty. That adds up to 47.4 million people.
Then annual-household earnings of $100,000 or more puts those Americans above the middle class. In 2005, an economic survey revealed that 5% of individuals in the US earned six-figure incomes exceeding $100,000 annually—that is 15.7 million people leaving 250.9 million Americans in the Middle Class.
A simple definitions says, “The middle-class commonly has a comfortable standard of living, and significant economic security.”
For a better idea of how many Americans enjoy significant economic security, we may want to take a glance at the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression (1929 – 1942), the highest unemployment rate reached almost 25% in 1933, then started to improve. Unemployment at its worst, means more than 75% of working adults in America were still employed (possibly defining significant economic security). It took thirteen years for unemployment to recover to the level of 1929. In 1940, unemployment was 15%. In 1941, unemployment was 10%. By 1942, thanks to World War II putting Americans in the military or back to work manufacturing weapons, unemployment dropped to 5%.
However, life in America was not always the way it is today and working to gain an education, with an emphasis on work, has mostly been the big game changer.
For example, before 1860, America had few cities and they were mostly small. The vast majority of people lived on farms and small rural towns. In fact, in 1800, ninety-four percent (94%) of Americans lived on farms or in small towns near farms.
Then by 2000, seventy-nine percent (79%) lived in urban population centers (cities and the suburbs of cities).
In 1850, the average age of death in years was 39.
By 1900, that average was age 49.
In 1970s, it was age 70, and life expectancy in 2010 reached age 78.3.
Life expectancy has also been linked to education. Those with more than 12 years of education—more than a high school diploma—can expect to live to age 82; for those with 12 or fewer years of education, life expectancy is age 75.
Harvard University was the first to set up student loans in 1840 but these loans didn’t become mainstream until the 1960s? Source: Free from Broke.com
Did you know that in 1986, President Reagan eliminated student loan interest as a tax deduction. For 10 years, student loans were not deductible until President Clinton once again allowed the interest to be deductible in 1997 (Forbes). However, Clinton only allowed the student loan interest to be deductible for the first five years the loan was in repayment; in 2001, the law was changed to allow the interest to be deductible for the life of the loan.
Then in 2007, President G. W. Bush, reduced the student-loan interest rate from 6.8% to 3.4%.
A few more facts to put the student, college-loan debate in perspective and what the media isn’t telling us:
The US has the 2nd highest number of higher education students in the world—4.75% of the total population. The U.S. Department of Education shows 4,861 colleges and universities with 18,248,128 students in 2007.
However, the median cumulative debt among graduating Bachelor’s degree recipients at 4-year undergraduate schools was $19,999 in 2007-08 and 65.6% of 4-year grads with BA degrees took out student loans, which means 34.4% did not.
Of the 9 million that borrowed, one-tenth (900 thousand) borrowed $44,668 or more, which means 90% (more than eight million students) borrowed less.
Graduate and professional students borrowed more, with the additional cumulative debt of a graduate degree typically ranging from $30,000 to $120,000.
How many borrowed the most?
More than 80% of students that are majoring in graduate degrees in medicine borrowed an average of $127,272, while 61.6% of those that graduated with only a BA degree borrowed an average of $23,494. Source: FinAid.org
If you recall, my $7,000 student loan in 1973 had the same buying power as $36,178.96 in 2012, and I paid it off in a decade by eventually working two jobs for three years.
That brings me back to the media. Why has the media been creepy-crawling all over how horrible college student debt is today when the facts say, “On average, most college graduates earn back enough to pay off their student expenses within a decade or so. Two studies by Baum found that graduates with a bachelor’s and no further schooling—or as the earnings literature calls it a bit too on point, a “terminal bachelor’s”—are on average able to repay their college tuition and loans, living expenses, and lost income from skipping four years of work by the time they turn 33. Private-college graduates spend more on their degrees, Baum says, but as they also have slightly higher earning power than their public-college counterparts, they still on the average earn back their college costs before age 40.”. Source: Village Voice
How about those medical students graduating as doctors with all that debt? Do you think they will earn enough to pay off his or her student loans?
Although the following site is moaning and groaning along with the national media, take a look at how much an MD earns after she starts practicing medicine: “The mean annual salary of a MD specialist is $175,011 in the US, and $272,000 for surgeons.” Source: MD Salaries.com
I’m really feeling sorry for these poor, suffering MDs. Maybe we should all chip in and help them pay off those student loans so they will have more money to spend on bigger houses and fancier cars.
In addition, I found this revealing: less than half a percent (0.05%) of those who graduate from college have student loans above $200,000—that means 99.5% do not. This may sound callous, but I do not feel sorry for these people. I paid off my student loans and so can they.
In conclusion, there is one more comparison that must be made. In 1980, the average credit-card debt in America was $670 per household, but today that number is up to $7,800 (per household)—an increase of more than 1,160 percent. If we factor in inflation, that $670 would be $1,875.90 today—not almost $8,000.
In 1980, credit card debt was less than 4% of household annual median income. That number is16% today. In fact, in 1980 through 1994, the US saving rate averaged 8%, but in 1976, the personal saving rate was 12%.
However, in October 2011, that saving rate was at 3.6%.
Where do you think America’s so called debt-ridden college students learned to borrow to get what they want? If the nation lets young Americans (or their parents and/or grandparents) off the hook for that student-loan debt, these people will never learn.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 