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Category Archives: NCLB

The US Department of Education Should not be Eliminated. Still, it must be reformed.

09 Feb

If you don’t have an attention span that lasts long enough to learn what I’m teaching in this post, start with the conclusion first. Then if you want to read the evidence following the CONCLUSION, it is your choice to stay ignorant, unless you already know what all the evidence shows us.

CONCLUSION

The United States should not eliminate the US Department of Education.

Still, the US Congress must pass legislation that standardizes teacher training to be more in line with what Finland does and require all K-12 teachers [in all K-12 schools private and public — that’s how it’s done in Finland] to complete a training program similar to what Finland does. The U.S. already has one that’s close, the U.S. Urban Teacher Residency programs.

Each state will still be in charge of education in their state, but setting standards for teacher training, and support for those teachers, should be the federal government’s responsibility.

In the United States, the best public schools are well funded Defense Department schools [DOD].

Department of Defense schools [DOD], are often considered to be “good” because of their consistent, well-funded structure, high expectations for student achievement, a strong focus on addressing the needs of military families with frequent moves, a culture of parental involvement, and a relatively uniform quality of education across all bases, resulting in high standardized test scores compared to many public schools.

The NY Times has an article about DOD schools, stating, “this school system outperformed all 50 states on reading and math scores for both eighth graders and fourth graders.” — Oct 10, 2023

The rest of the country must fall in line and stop fighting to see who can race to the bottom the fastest. No more teacher bashing. They get what you pay for. When they set low expectations and standards for teacher training like Teach for America [TFA] does, they can’t expect those teachers to turn out like Finland or the DOD’s public-schools.

For that to happen, the U.S. Department of Education [ED] must be reformed to be more like Finland’s Ministry of Education, with a mandate to insure all fifty states end up with highly trained and professional teachers in schools that perform like the DOD’s K-12 public schools.

End of Conclusion

Now you may start with the evidence if you haven’t fallen asleep yet.

The U.S. Department of Education [ED] is responsible for:

  • Establishing policy: The ED creates policies for federal education assistance, including financial aid and civil rights laws
  • Administering programs: The ED manages the distribution of federal funds for education programs, including grants and other assistance
  • Monitoring programs: The ED tracks how federal funds are used and ensures they are used effectively
  • Enforcing civil rights laws: The ED ensures that students have equal access to education and that programs receiving federal funds are free of discrimination
  • Researching education: The ED collects data and conducts research on education, including teaching techniques and best practices
  • Identifying issues: The ED identifies problems in education and recommends solutions
  • Raising awareness: The ED informs the public about education challenges and best practices
  • Helping communities: The ED works with communities to develop solutions to educational issues
  • The ED’s programs must be authorized by Congress and signed into law by the president
  • The ED’s budget is a portion of the total federal budget
  • The ED’s budget includes funding for programs like Pell Grants, early childhood education, and work assistance

Next Finland, a country considered one of the top in the world for education. It consistently ranks in the top ten for every subject in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

This is what Finland’s Ministry of Education is responsible for:

  • Developing education and TRAINING
  • Early childhood education
  • Lifelong learning
  • Internationalization
  • Preparing educational legislation
  • Making decisions about education
  • Managing the country’s budget for education

In Finland, teacher training is highly selective, requiring a master’s degree in education which includes extensive pedagogical studies, substantial teaching practice in real classrooms, and a strong emphasis on research-based practices, aiming to produce teachers capable of independent problem-solving and exploring new teaching approaches; essentially, becoming a teacher in Finland is considered a prestigious career path due to the rigorous training involved.

In the United States, there is no standard for teacher training. Instead, each of the fifty states in the US sets its own standards for teacher training and licensure. Teacher training ranges from programs like Teach for America [TFA], to an Urban Teacher Residency [UTR] program.

TEACH FOR AMERICA [TFA] training takes place both virtually [on a computer at home] and in-person over the course of about two months for about 6 to 8 hours a day. After completing that short program without much or any actual experience working with students in a real brick and mortar classroom, the TFA teacher trainees enter K-12 public schools and go straight into teaching. According to research, the average retention rate for TFA teachers is significantly lower than non-TFA teachers, with only around 25% of TFA teachers remaining in the classroom for five years or more.

I am a US Marine, combat vet where what we learned in basic training was discipline, how to obey orders, and how to fight in a team and as an individual. Lots of muscle challenge sweaty exercise, too. Our training days ran longer than 8 hours. We didn’t get weekends off. Boot camp lasted for 13 weeks, much longer than TFA teacher training.

Now for the teacher training program I went through a few years after I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines and earned AS and BA degrees. The MFA came later.

In the United States URBAN TEACHER RESIDENCY (UTR) programs that train teachers combine academic coursework with teaching experience in urban school districts. UTR programs are designed to help close achievement gaps in high-need schools.

Partner with universities and school districts — UTR programs work with universities and school districts to provide aspiring teachers with teaching experience and a master’s degree.

  • Work with a mentor teacher — UTR programs place teacher residents with experienced mentor teachers for a full school year.
  • Commit to teaching in the school district — After completing the residency, teachers agree to teach in the school district for at least three years. I stayed in the same district where I was trained in 1975-76 until 2005, when I retired from teaching.

According to research on teacher residency programs, the average retention rate for UTR teachers is typically between 80-90% within the same district after three years, and 70-80% after five years, indicating a significantly higher retention rate compared to traditional teacher preparation programs.

More than 65,000 teachers have earned their teaching credentials through TFA compared to nearly 4,200 through UTR programs.

As one of the few UTR trained teachers, my students learned problem solving and critical thinking skills, and how to understand what they read, and to write poetry, short stories, essays, et al. Starting in the late 1970s, students I worked with in middle school won awards in state poetry and short story contests in competition with other junior high schools

In high school, my journalism students won regional, state, national, and international awards competing with other high school journalism students and student newspapers. The English [teaching literature, how to understand it, and how to write essays] students I worked with dramatically outscored other students throughout the school on those annual rank-and-punish standardized tests. Still, I hated those tests and still do. While other teachers sweated bullets teaching to those tests, I focused on the literature and writing, ignoring those tests.  Finland has standardized tests, but it is up to the teachers to use them. Standardized testing in that country is not mandatory.

All teachers in Finland are required to have a master’s degree, which can be specialized based on the subject they will teach, meaning there are different programs for primary school teachers, subject-specific teachers in secondary school, and other educational areas, but all require a high level of academic study and rigorous practical training. Entrance into teacher education programs is highly competitive, with rigorous entrance exams and interviews to ensure only the most qualified candidates are admitted. Finnish teacher education is heavily focused on research and evidence-based practices. Teacher programs include significant in-school practice teaching with close supervision.

Take a glance at the list of teacher training options for the United States.
Don’t miss the last paragraph.
It may blow your mind.

K-12 teacher training programs in the US include traditional Bachelor’s degree programs in education, focused subject area specializations within a Bachelor’s degree, alternative certification programs, post-baccalaureate teacher certification programs, and various professional development courses covering different teaching methods and subject areas, often with options for online learning and specific grade level focuses like early childhood education or secondary education.

Key types of K-12 teacher training programs:

  • Traditional Bachelor’s in Education:

A standard 4-year degree program with a focus on general education coursework alongside specific teacher training classes, often allowing for specialization in a particular subject area like math, science, or elementary education. 

  • Subject-Specific Bachelor’s Degree with Teacher Certification:

A degree in a specific subject (e.g., biology, history) with additional education courses to qualify for teaching licensure at the secondary level. 

  • Early Childhood Education Degree:

A focused program preparing teachers to work with young children in preschool and early elementary grades. 

  • Alternative Teacher Certification Programs:

Designed for individuals with a bachelor’s degree in a non-education field, allowing them to gain teaching certification through a shorter, more targeted training program, often including accelerated coursework and intensive classroom practice. 

  • Post-Baccalaureate Teacher Certification Programs:

For individuals with a bachelor’s degree who want to add teaching credentials, offering focused coursework and additional student teaching to qualify for licensure. 

Areas of focus within K-12 teacher training programs:

  • Special Education: Training for teaching students with learning disabilities or other special needs 
  • Bilingual Education: Preparing teachers to work with students from diverse language backgrounds 
  • Gifted Education: Training for teaching highly gifted students 
  • Math Education: Focused curriculum and pedagogy for teaching mathematics at various grade levels 
  • Literacy Education: Training for teaching reading and writing skills 
  • Science Education: Specialized instruction in science concepts and inquiry-based teaching methods 

Professional development options for K-12 teachers:

  • Online Courses:

Flexible learning opportunities through online platforms covering diverse topics like classroom management, curriculum development, and instructional technology 

  • Workshops and Seminars:

Short-term training sessions focused on specific skills or pedagogical approaches 

  • Coaching and Mentoring:

Individualized support from experienced educators 

  • Professional Learning Communities (PLCs):

Collaborative groups of teachers focused on improving instruction through peer feedback and shared learning 

All states except Minnesota and Rhode Island allow individuals to become teachers through alternative certification, even if they don’t have a degree. However, each state has its own requirements for alternative certification. Many states in the United States allow high school graduates to substitute teach in K-12 public schools without a specific substitute teaching certificate. In some states, a high school diploma or GED is enough to start substitute teaching. Some states may also accept a bachelor’s degree or college credits. However, some states, like California, require a bachelor’s degree for all teachers, including substitute teachers.

In the majority of states, you don’t need a specific substitute teaching certificate to get started. This means you can often begin your substitute teaching journey with just a high school diploma or GED, and sometimes, a bachelor’s degree or some college credits.

Your Guide to Substitute Teaching Across the U.S.: Certification Requirements by State

 
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Posted by on February 9, 2025 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, English, literacy, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, PISA, Standardized Testing, substitute teaching, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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When I say “OUR,” I’m referring to more than 300,000,000 people that live in the United States. Our public schools need OUR help to stop the Destruction Of Public Education Syndicate (DOPES)destroying one of our country’s greatest public resources, OUR public schools. The DOPES, supported mostly by billionaires (there are only a few hundred of them), has been at it for decades, and those lying bullies are not going away.

01 Apr

Tim Slekar: Join and Listen to “Busted Pencils!”
 
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Posted by on April 1, 2024 in American Public Schools, child poverty in the US, Education, family values, literacy, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, Parenting, PISA, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Reading, Sandia Report, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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More about the political WAR to destroy Public Education in the U.S.

29 Dec
What Common Core Won
 
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Posted by on December 29, 2023 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, PISA, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Sandia Report, Standardized Testing, Teaching

 

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“Federal law requires some kind of accountability measure before graduation whether it be a standardized test or something else. Why can’t the state simply use classroom grades for this measure?”

11 Nov

I am biased. I hate tests and prefer GPA, based on classroom grades. Where does my bias come from?

From 30 years as a classroom teacher, who focused on how children learn and remember what they are taught. Tests cannot measure what a teacher teaches and what a student remembers from what the teacher taught.

School Directors Shouldn’t Double Down on PA’s Keystone Exam Circus 
 
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Posted by on November 11, 2023 in American Public Schools, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Sandia Report, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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James Harvey: How We Cooked the Books to Produce a Deeply Flawed “A Nation at Risk”

27 Apr

James Harvey, a member of the staff that wrote what ended up being called “A Nation at Risk”, reveals why/how our government in 1983, declared war on OUR public schools, our teachers, our family values, and our children.

A war that has made some wealthy while letting our schools rot, and turned our public schools into a Ukrainian battle field, under endless attack.

“The bumbling began immediately,” Harvey writes, when “Reagan startled the commission members by hailing their call for prayer in the schools, school vouchers, and the abolition of the Department of Education.”

Cherry Picking the Facts — Cooking the Books

“There were at least three problems with what the commission finally produced. First, it settled on its conclusions and then selected evidence to support them. Second, its argument was based on shockingly shoddy logic. And third, it proposed a curricular response that ignored the complexity of American life and the economic and racial divisions within the United States.” …

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James Harvey, a member of the staff that wrote what ended up being called “A Nation at Risk”, reveals why/how our government in 1983, declared war on OUR public schools, our teachers, our family values, and our children.

A war that has made some wealthy while letting our schools rot, and turned our public schools into a Ukrainian battle field, under endless attack.

“The bumbling began immediately,” Harvey writes, when “Reagan startled the commission members by hailing their call for prayer in the schools, school vouchers, and the abolition of the Department of Education.”

Cherry Picking the Facts

Cooking the Books

“There were at least three problems with what the commission finally produced. First, it settled on its conclusions and then selected evidence to support them. Second, its argument was based on shockingly shoddy logic. And third, it proposed a curricular response that ignored the complexity of American…

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Posted by on April 27, 2023 in American Public Schools, child poverty in the US, Common Core, Education, family values, government, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, Parenting, politics, propaganda and lies, propoganda, Public School, Sandia Report, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty, Uncategorized

 

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A Conspiracy Theory that turned out to be Real

05 Apr

On July 4, 1776, The Declaration of Independence said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Read Slaying Goliath, and learn that some of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans are trying to take away our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I was a public school teacher in California from 1975 – 2005. During those thirty years, I worked 60 to 100 hours a week during the school year. I took work home seven days a week and couldn’t wait for the winter and spring breaks, not because of the time off from teaching, but because I’d have time to catch up correcting student work. After all, teachers have to sleep, too.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan released a report that was a lie. That report was called “A Nation at Risk,” and it painted the nation’s public schools as failures.  After that misleading report, teachers were called lazy and incompetent. The public schools were blamed for the prison population in the United States that was really caused by Presidents Nixon and Reagan’s war on recreational drugs like marijuana.

The critics of the public schools even came up with a misleading term that was also a lie. It was called “The school to prison pipeline.” There has never been a school to prison pipeline in the United States.

After “A Nation at Risk,” came the Self Esteem Movement that got its start in Catholic K-12 schools and from the pulpit of evangelical Christian churches. When that failed, teachers were blamed again. However, the majority of teachers, including me, did not agree with the Self Esteem Movement that put pressure on us to stop failing students that refused to learn and inflate grades so children would feel good about themselves, even if they didn’t deserve it.

That top-down failure was followed by The Whole Language Approach to teaching. English Lit Teachers like me were told to stop teaching mechanics, grammar, and spelling because it was boring. We were told that the kids could learn that boring stuff just by reading on their own, except most kids do not read on their own.

A decade later, when that Whole Language Approach that was forced on teachers also failed, teachers were blamed again.

That is why, back in the 1980s, I started to think there was a conspiracy theory to destroy the public schools. Over the years, as one top-down movement after another to improve the public schools failed, I convinced myself that it could not be right that someone was trying to destroy our public schools.

Who could be that cruel, that greedy, that monstrous, to deliberately demonize teachers and blame them for almost every problem in the United States? The critics said teachers were lazy. The critics said we were incompetent. The critics said our labor unions were corrupt and were getting in the way of improving the public schools.

I retired from teaching in 2005 and swore that if I was forced to teach again, I’d instead rejoin the U.S. Marines and fight in Afghanistan against Islamic terrorists. Since I had already served in the Marines and fought in Vietnam before I was a teacher, I knew that being a teacher was way worse because of the way teachers are treated in this country.

When I retired, I took a 40-percent pay cut and left without medical insurance, but the critics said teachers were greedy, and our retirement systems would cause the states to go bankrupt. I live in California, and about 6% of the state’s annual budget goes to support the teacher retirement system.

If you believe that retired teachers are greedy, let me sell you a vacation home on a moon orbiting Saturn. I understand the view of Saturn’s rings are incredible.

Read Slaying Goliath, and you will learn that what I suspected back in the 1980s was real. There has been a movement in the United States for decades to replace the nation’s democratic, transparent, public schools and destroy the teaching profession. That disruptive movement wants to replace the people’s public school with a profit-driven, often corrupt, secretive, autocratic, private school system that operates without rules and oversight.

Read Slaying Goliath, and you will learn that the leaders of the publicly funded, private-sector charter school industry are mostly deceivers and liars.

Read Slaying Goliath, and you will learn that the leaders of the publicly-funded private/religious voucher school industry are also mostly deceivers and liars.

When you read Slaying Goliath, you will learn who those liars are. You will learn who is behind the disruption of our public schools and how they are subverting our Constitutional Republic to strip us of our rights. Then maybe you will be angry enough to support and even join the passionate resistance of parents, grandparents, teachers, and children that are already fighting to save America’s public schools.

__________________________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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Posted by on April 5, 2020 in American Public Schools, book promotion, child poverty in the US, Education, English, family values, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Reading, Sandia Report, self-esteem movement, Standardized Testing, Teaching

 

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The Not-so-Secret War against OUR Public Schools

03 Aug

About eight years ago my wife heard Diane Ravitch being interviewed on NPR. When Anchee got home, she told me I’d be interested, and I’ve been following Diane’s blog since and have read a few of her books on the war being waged against our public schools.

Make no mistake about this issue; it is a greed-based war of power and corruption that mostly old, white billionaires and corporations managed by old, white CEO’s launched against the people’s public schools long before I learned about Diane Ravitch.

I was a public school teacher for thirty years working in Rowland Unified School District in Southern California from 1975 to 2005. The two schools I taught at the longest were Giano Intermediate and Nogales High School in La Puente, California. After President Ronald Reagan’s flawed and misleading “A Nation at Risk” report was released in 1983, it didn’t take long for news and opinion pieces to start appearing in the media blaming public school teachers for literally everything that was allegedly wrong in the United States, including poverty and the number of Americans in Prison.

National Public Radio reported, “The idea that American schools were worse just wasn’t true,” says James Guthrie, an education professor at Lynn University in Florida. Guthrie published a scholarly article in 2004 titled “A Nation At Risk Revisited: Did ‘Wrong’ Reasoning Result in ‘Right’ Results? At What Cost?” … “I looked at it every which way,” he says now. The authors in 1983 “were hell-bent on proving that schools were bad. They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”

Did you know that one of the leaders in this war against our public schools is Bill Gates? But, he isn’t alone. There are others like Eli Broad, the Wal-Mart Walton family, the Koch brothers, and Betsy DeVos. Taking a page from Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine, these greedy, power-hungry enemies of our public education system created a misleading phrase and have relentlessly repeated it through the years. That phrase was the school to prison pipeline.

There is the Republican-Nixon-Reagan to prison pipeline, but there has never been a school to prison pipeline.  If anyone reading this doesn’t believe me, look up President Nixon’s War on Drugs (launched June 1971. Click the previous link and scroll down to find that date). Then President Reagan doubled the War on Drugs when he became president and the prison population in the United States exploded and eventually became the largest prison population in the world with China in a distant second place. Don’t forget that China has more than four times the population but several hundred thousand fewer people in its prisons.

If you are interested, you might want to read this report out of Stanford University about Nixon’s War on Drugs. “The United States has been engaged in a “war” for nearly 25 years. …  We spend $50 billion per year trying to eradicate drugs from this country. According to DEA estimates, we capture less than 10 percent of all illicit drugs. … Does $50 billion a year for a 90% failure rate seem like a good investment to you?”

If you do the math, the total spent on that war comes to more than 1.25-trillion dollars, while individuals that think like Bill Gates blame the public schools and public school teachers for the results of Republican President Nixon and Reagan’s War on Drugs.

Anyway, back to public education, there were other false claims in this war on our public schools: too many teachers are incompetent and we can’t fire them, the teachers’ unions are corrupt, test scores are too low, et al. It didn’t take me long after 1983 to start thinking that there was a conspiracy behind all of these lies demonizing public school teachers, but I convinced myself that couldn’t be true, because if the public school system in the United States was destroyed, it would be the end of our Constitutional Republic and a return to 1900 when 40-percent of Americans lived in poverty, only 7-percent graduated from high school, and 3-percent went to college.

Who were most of these high school and college graduates in 1900?
They were the children of the wealthiest, elite, white Americans like Bill Gates and his family.

After World War II, The United States became a great nation because of our public schools that have become the foundation of our modern Republic and Democracy. Once our public schools are gone, this county will return to 1900.

Then almost ten years ago, I started reading Diane Ravitch’s blog and some of her books and discovered from all the facts and evidence I was reading, that I had not been wrong. There was a deliberate conspiracy to destroy our public schools and it started back in the 1970s and went viral after 1983 thanks to the Republican Party and their President Ronald Reagan, and that war on our public schools is getting more vicious by the year and continues to escalate. The vampire corporations and extremist autocratic billionaires like Bill Gates and their paid-for-troops are not stopping, and the lies and dirty tricks they keep pulling out of their hats-from-hell seem never-ending.

__________________________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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Posted by on August 3, 2019 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, media, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, PISA, politics, propaganda and lies, propoganda, Public School, Sandia Report, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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Really, the United States has to tear down its public schools and start over?

08 Mar

I do not know how I ended up on a list that keeps sending me e-mails from The Medium. Most of the time I delete those e-mails without opening them, but recently I noticed that The Medium was publishing a series of posts that attacked America’s public schools and teachers and it seems every day there was another assault.

This is one of those hatchet jobs: 20 Ways American Schools Fail Students.

Megan E. Holstein starts with, “Everyone knows the American school system is broken.”  A few sentences later, she says, “American Education is broken beyond repair. We need to scrap the entire thing and start over.”

Here is my response (revised for this post) that I left in a comment following Holstein’s alleged propaganda hack piece that I think was written to help destroy what’s left of the U.S. public education system. To be clear, the American school system is not broken. Public education is underfunded and teachers are being blamed for the results of too much useless testing that only benefits the corporations that profit from it.

If the American school system is broken, then some very wealthy and powerful individuals like Betsy DeVos, David Coleman, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and the Walmart Walton family are responsible.

However, the NAEP is the Nation’s Report Card, and it clearly shows improvement and progress in the nation’s public schools starting in 1969 up until NCLB in 2001. After that, the progress flattened out. The No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of high-stakes, rank-and-punish tests and abandoned what was working.

The NAEP report said, “As noted earlier, one of the national educational goals calls for increases in students’ academic achievement. A stated objective of this goal is that the performance distribution for minority students will more closely reflect that of the student population as a whole. In some of the subject areas assessed by NAEP, results indicated progress toward meeting this goal.” — Page xi

In addition, a study released by Stanford University offers more evidence that America’s public school are not failing: “Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. student performance, Stanford researcher finds”

“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.”

“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared — Canada, Finland and Korea, for example — has been falling rapidly.”

It is possible that Medium.com also publishes pieces that support public education, but if those posts exist, they are not landing in my e-mail box.

The Atlantic says, “So what is Medium? Medium is a place to read articles on the Internet. Medium is a blogging platform, like WordPress or Blogger. Medium is the new project from the guys who brought you Twitter. Medium is chaotically, arrhythmically produced by a combination of top-notch editors, paid writers, PR flacks, startup bros, and hacks.”

There is always room for improvement, but if you want to see America’s public education system improve, we must turn back the clock and let teachers make most of the decisions just like teachers in Finland do … not someone like Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates or the Walmart Walton family.

Did you know that China actually learned what worked best in public education from the United States and then started rebuilding its education system in Shanghai based on what they learned?

In the 1990s, Chinese scholars visited the United States to learn what the United States was doing in its public schools.  After all, those public schools taught the generations that made the United States the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world.  In addition, the United States is one of the most educated countries in the world and is always listed in the top TEN, and there are 195 countries in the world today. No matter how great China’s 15-year-olds in Shanghai perform on the international PISA test, China hasn’t made the top TEN list yet. Canada is listed as #1, a country that does not measure success in education with high-stakes, rank-and-punish tests.

The 10 most educated countries in the world.

“What the Chinese found valuable in American education is the result of a decentralized, autonomous system that does not have standards, uses multiple criteria for judging the value of talents, and celebrates individual differences. Recognizing the negative consequences of ‘test-oriented education,’ China has launched a series of national reforms to cultivate more creative citizens.” – Reforming Chinese Education: What China is Trying to Learn from America

What happened after those Chinese scholars left the United States and went home?

With help from Bill Gates and other billionaire oligarchs that think like him, after NCLB in 2001, the Common Core standards and high stakes rank-and-punish tests were forced on the nation’s public schools literally destroying everything the country was doing right. Getting rid of those tests and that Common Core are the first steps toward fixing any damage those billionaires caused to the U.S. public schools. We do not have to tear down our public schools and start over. We only have to stop people like Bill Gates from meddling in our public education system.

__________________________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on March 8, 2019 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, PISA, politics, propaganda and lies, propoganda, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching

 

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Have you heard how horrible teachers are in the United States? Part 1 of 3

20 Oct

If you have read or heard that U.S. public school teachers are lazy, incompetent, and don’t care about the children they teach, that was a lie. After you read this post, ask why would anyone want to lie about that and who are these liars?

The BBC reports, “What hours do teachers really work?

“Teachers’ unions have warned about excessive workloads and complained about staff being put under too much pressure. The long working week has been one of the grievances prompting teachers to go on strike. …

So how long is the working week (for teachers)?

“For secondary head teachers, it stretches to an average of 63.3 hours per week – the longest of any of the teaching jobs. Primary classroom teachers worked longer hours – 59.3 hours – than their secondary school counterparts, who worked for 55.7 hours per week. The hours in a secondary academy were slightly less, at 55.2 hours.”

The Washington Post reported, “ Teachers work 53 hours per week on avearge (the source of funding for this survey will surprise some if not many who read this post)?

“Teaching is a much talked about yet often misunderstood profession. Educators frequently hear well-meaning comments from parents and friends like “It must be so sweet to spend your days with children” or “How wonderful to be done for the day by three o’clock.” Are they serious? …

“A new report from Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession, finally quantifies just how hard teachers work: 10 hours and 40 minutes a day on average. That’s a 53-hour work week! …

“The 7.5 hours in the classroom are just the starting point. On average, teachers are at school an additional 90 minutes beyond the school day for mentoring, providing after-school help for students, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Teachers then spend another 95 minutes at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. The workday is even longer for teachers who advise extracurricular clubs and coach sports —11 hours and 20 minutes, on average.”

For a comparison to understand how hard teachers work, it helps to know how long the average American works in a week.

“Americans do work hard. Americans work an average of 34.4 hours a week, longer than their counterparts in the world’s largest economies. Many work even longer. Adults employed full-time report working an average of 47 hours per week, which equates to nearly six days a week, according to Gallup.”

My works weeks when I was teaching ran between 60-to-100 hours for a seven day week.I didn’t work only five days. I took work home and worked all seven days.

Continued in Part 2 on October 21, 2017

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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Posted by on October 20, 2017 in American Public Schools, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Sandia Report, Teaching

 

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The Facebook Sucker-Berg Phenomenon and the Deliberate Destruction of Community-Based Public Ed

06 Dec

I read “I quit Facebook and my life is better now” at Cathy O’Neil’s Mathbabe blog, and my thoughts became a wild river about Facebook and its founder who launched Facebook by cheating two brothers and hijacking their idea. To learn more about Suckerberg’s own con, read 6 People Mark Zuckerberg Burned On His Way To The Top.

After reading O’Neil’s Mathbabe post, I was glad I was never suckered into a Facebook obsession. Yes, I do have two Facebook pages: one for my books that’s part of my internet-author’s platform, and a personal Facebook page, but all I did was set up automatic feeds from my 4 blogs to Facebook and occasionally I go there to reply to a comment.  The reason I never fell into the Facebook swamp was because it was a confusing maze to me, and I didn’t want to go through the learning curve to discover how to use all those allegedly great bells-and-whistles that Facebook offers to help destroy your life in the real world.

But the stream of thoughts that flowed between my ears as I was reading O’Neil’s Mathbabe blog post had nothing to do with Facebook. It was all about Mark Suckerberg, Facebook’s founder, and how he was conned out of a $100 million dollars to save the children of Newark, New Jersey from those horrible failing public schools that really never were failing anyone as schools. If you want to learn more (put an emphases in LEARN — because there are far too many ignorant, easy-to-fool voting citizen in the U.S., or we wouldn’t be stuck with narcissistic, psycho, serial-lying, con-man, Donald Trump for our next president — I suggest reading What Happened with the $100 million that Newark schools got from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Not Much from The Hechinger Report.

You see, there’s this myth that America’s traditional public schools are failing and to save our children we have to replace those schools with an unproven, genetically-modified crop of allegedly perfect, (hell sent) corporate charter schools that just happen to make profits for a host of greedy frauds and liars similar to Donald Trump and his current pick to run the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos.

If you think America’s community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools are failing and the choice of a corporate charter school is the answer to save our children, then I will roar as only a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Vet can angrily shout, “It’s the poverty, stupid, you ignorant, biased, deplorable, easy-to-fool ass!”

The fact is America’s traditional public school are not failing, and an often deliberately ignored report out of Stanford University proved that years ago in Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. student performance, Stanford researcher finds.

The conclusion of this report from one of the top-ranked universities in the world said, “A comprehensive analyses of international tests by Stanford and the Economic Policy Institute shows that U.S. Schools aren’t being outpaced by international competition.”

After reading that report, it was obvious to me that the results of the international test that Stanford referred to was rigged to make America’s traditional public school look bad.

Stanford reported that once the flawed data was corrected, the U.S. went from 14th in reading to SIXTH and went from 25th in math to 13th.

In addition, Stanford discovered “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students (living in poverty) in every country; surprisingly, the gap is smaller in the United States … and not much larger than the very highest scoring countries.”  In fact, “Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students (living in poverty) has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students (living in poverty) in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared … had been falling rapidly.”

It’s time for most voting Americans to wake up and stop being suckered like Suckerberg was in Newark, New Jersey.  It’s obvious that before the top-down reforms forced on the United States by President G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and continued with President Obama’s flawed and fraudulent Race To The Top bullshit and its Common Core test-and-punish crap, the United States had (and hopefully still has) one of the best public education systems in the world, and it was on track to only get better.

And who is con-man President-Elect Donald Trump putting in charge to finish the destruction of America’s top-rated public schools?  The answer: labor union hating, billionaire Betsy DeVos, who never attended a public school in her life, and she sends her own children to very expensive private schools that only the wealthy can afford.

If you want to educate yourself about this one-woman billionaire wrecking crew, learn, learn, learn from: Betsy DeVos and the Wrong Way to Fix Schools, 5 Things to Know about Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump Education Choice, and What’s the worst that could happen with Betsy DeVos as education secretary? Two scenarios.

Make no mistake about this. The United States is on the verge of the total destruction of one of the best public education systems in the world, and what is waiting to replace it is the autocratic, opaque-and-secretive, often fraudulent-and-inferior, private-sector corporate charter school industry that often bullies and terrorizes children to become assembly-line drones that score high on tests or face eviction back to the cold, brutal world of underfunded and deliberately abandoned, traditional public education.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

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Posted by on December 6, 2016 in American Public Schools, child poverty in the US, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, PISA, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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