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Category Archives: NCLB

Mao had his Little Red Book and Bill Gates has Common Core

30 Dec

For the second time in world history, the public schools of a country are under attack by powerful men. The first time a country waged war on its public schools was when Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976).

How successful was Mao in destroying more than 2,000 years of public school tradition in
China? The answer may shock you. By the time Mao died in 1976, the literacy rate in China had plunged to 20%, and the poverty rate was 85%.

In the United States the biggest crime of the corporate education reformers is chasing profits and not dealing with the challenges of poverty. In fact, corporate education reform supported by billionaire oligarchs—for instance, Bill Gates, the Walton family, Eli Broad, and the Koch brothers—are doing nothing to deal with poverty. Instead they claim that if they get wealthier that will somehow magically solve poverty. When, at any time in history, has the wealthy solved poverty by getting richer?

In a Chicago Sun Times Op-Ed piece, Laura Washington writes about Ted Manuel, an African American who lives in Hyde Park: Manuel said, ‘Although we have one or more churches on every other block, what effect are the preachers having? Why is there no partnering of schools with corporations, where glimpses of future possibilities can inspire the kids?  I know of no such connections, if they exist.’”

To answer Ted Manual’s questions, the reason that corporate education reformers are doing nothing about poverty is because dealing with the causes of poverty is not profitable.

And how can the public schools do anything? Funds for public schools have been cut drastically while other funds have been diverted to the Common Core test taking culture supported and driven by Bill Gates—the wealthiest man in the world. Mao had his Little Red Book, and Bill Gates has his Common Core.

Who will profit the most from Bill Gates war on the public schools? UK’s Pearson—a company that will make money every time an American child takes one of their tests, and they want to test children from pre-school to high school graduation—hours of tests annually.

What about China? Starting in the late 1970’s under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, who do you think China learned from as they started to rebuild their public schools after Mao’s Cultural Revolution?

If you answered the United States and Europe, you would have been right. China sent teams to the United States to learn from America’s public schools—and this all happened before A Nation at Risk, NCLB, Race to the Top and Common Core—and according to the last two international PISA tests, China’s 15-year-olds in Shanghai are ranked #1 in the world thanks to what China learned in the United States before the corporate war on public education.

In fact, China is moving away from a test-based public education system and toward what the United States is abandoning thanks to Bill Gates and the $5 – $7 billion he is spending in his crusade to destroy what works and replace it with a market-based education system that several Stanford studies have already proved is a failure.

Education Week.com reported in 2010 that Schools in China and U.S. Move in Opposite Directions. Schools in China are slowly trying to break away from their emphasis on memorization (and testing) toward adopting strategies that stress creativity. Until now, schools believed that the former was the best way to score high on the gao kao (the college entrance exam taken the last year of high school). But recognizing that the approach is counterproductive in the new global economy, China is attempting to change.

Meanwhile, Education Week.com  says, “In the U.S., a different trend is underway. Convinced that high-stakes tests are the best way to measure educational quality and assure our economic hegemony, (corporate) reformers are running roughshod over those who believe otherwise.”

France dealt with poverty more than thirty years ago when they introduced a national early childhood education program starting as young as age two, a program that is transparent and part of the French public education system. France, unlike the United States, puts its education dollars in one pot and then shares that money equally among all of its public schools. But in the U.S. funding is not equitable. School districts in wealthy communities spend heavily on their public schools while schools in communities infected with poverty spend much less.

Thirty years after France implemented its national early childhood education program in the public schools—not run by the private sector—poverty has been cut drastically. In 1970, 15% of France’s population lived in poverty. By 2001, only 6.1% lived in poverty. In 1970, about 86% of the population of France was literate, but by 2003, the literacy rate improved to 99%. – Our World in Data.org

China had to wait for Mao to die before its war on public education ended. Will the United States have to wait for the oligarchs to all die before the corporate war on public education ends?

Don’t forget, Mao had his Little Red Book, and Bill Gates has his Common Core.

_______________________

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

Runner Up in Memoir
2014 Florida Book Festival

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography
2014 Southern California Book Festival and at the 2014 London Book Festival

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

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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 December 30, 2014 in American Public Schools, child poverty in the US, Common Core, Education, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, PISA, politics, propaganda and lies, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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Science Proves School Reform EQUALS Prejudice, Inequality, Workplace Discrimination and Child Neglect

25 Dec

The reason education reform in the United States is a fraud is because of G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act that demanded public school teachers achieve the impossible and educate 100% of America’s children to be college and career ready by age 17 or 18. Never mind that about half of today’s college graduates are underpaid and/or can’t find a job that requires a college degree.

This crime was made worse with President Obama’s Race To The Top, in addition to Bill Gates’s funding the Common Core agenda to use student test scores to rank and then fire teachers soon followed by closing public schools when that 100% mandate isn’t met.

The rank and yank testing mentality has become so Orwellian that some cities and states are now testing kindergarteners to see if they are college and career ready at age 5/6, with talk of doing the same with preschool children.

To insure that this national crime against children and teachers continues, Bill Gates has dedicated $5 – $7 billion dollars in grants—a fancy name for bribes—to influence state and federal leaders.

Why is it impossible to educate 100% of U.S. children to be college and career ready by age 17/18?

Because it is a proven fact that both poverty and lack of proper sleep play a major role in how a child performs in school—two major factors that teachers have no power over.

Late last night it all came together after I read a piece in the January 2015 National Geographic Magazine (NGM) that provided the evidence that the school reform movement leads to prejudice, inequality, workplace discrimination and child neglect. I also think that if Bill Gates and the other fake reformers had known that NGM was going to publish this piece, they would have done all they could to stop it from being printed.

The title was A baby’s brain needs love to develop. What happens in THE FIRST YEAR is profound. The link should take you to this heavily research-based story that proves without-doubt that poverty damages children’s brains (and more than 16-million children in America live in poverty—22% of all children). The story also points out how this damage can be avoided—something that teachers have known for decades, but the fake education reformers ignore, while they rake in profits from taxes meant to support education.

The researchers used magnetoencephalography (EEG) to scan the brains of children as the brain developed and discovered that for a child’s brain to develop to its potential, the child needs to be nurtured in a stable home environment with supportive parents.

“The amount of brain activity in the earliest years affects how much (brain activity) there is later in life. EEG scans of eight-year-olds show that institutionalized children who were not moved to a nurturing foster care environment before they were two-years old have less (brain) activity than those who were.”

In addition, “Children in well-off families—where the parents were typically college-educated professionals—heard an average of 2,153 words an hour spoken to them, whereas children in families on welfare heard an average of 616 words. By the age of four this difference translated to a cumulative gap of some 30 million words.”

This scientific evidence is the reason why teachers who are fired based on the results of student test scores are victims of workplace discrimination, because teachers are being punished for children who don’t have the same nurturing and supportive home environment as children from well-off families.

Another important factor in the development and health of a child’s brain is sleep. The same day that I read the piece in NGM, I also read a short piece in the December 2014 issue of AARP Magazine: Why Sleep Is Precious for Staying Sharp. “New research indicates chronic sleep deprivation can lead to irreversible brain damage … extended wakefulness can injure neurons essential for alertness and cognition—and that the damage might be permanent.”

Children in the United States aren’t getting enough sleep, and many parents do not identify their children’s sleep problems as an issue that should be addressed.  Add to the mix that doctors often aren’t asking enough questions about their young patients’ sleep. These are some of the major findings in the 2004 Sleep in America poll, the first nationwide survey on the sleep habits of children and their parents.

In addition, adolescents are notorious for not getting enough sleep. The average amount of sleep that teenagers get is between 7 and 7 ¼ hours. However, studies show that most teenagers need exactly 9 ¼ hours of sleep. – Nationwide Childrens.org

But when 100% of the children are not college and career ready according to the results of Common Core standardized tests, teachers are losing their jobs, and public schools are being closed and replaced with corporate Charters that—according to several Stanford studies—are often worse or no better than the public school that they replaced. Dr. Margaret Raymond, Stanford’s CREDO Director, says that after decades of looking at the nation’s charter school sector, she has come to the conclusion that the “market mechanism just doesn’t work” in education.

In the last decade—thanks to the fake education reformers—thousands of public schools have been closed, tens of thousands of teachers have been heartlessly fired and hundreds of thousands of children have been forced—in some cases—to attend corporate Charter schools that often kick out the students who are the most difficult to teach, the same children that caused those standardized test scores to suffer—-children who don’t get enough sleep and/or live in poverty.

Tell President Obama, Arne Duncan and Bill Gates we are going to hold them accountable for their crimes against children and teachers.

_______________________

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

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival

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

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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 December 25, 2014 in child abuse, child poverty in the US, Common Core, Education, family values, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, Parenting, politics, propaganda and lies, Standardized Testing, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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The Educator and the Oligarch Reveals the Real Bill Gates

23 Dec

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines CORRUPTION as “dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people”, and by the time I finished reading the last page of The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation, I was convinced that Bill Gates was a charlatan, is corrupt, and three famous quotes were spinning inside my head.

The first quote was from Lord John Acton (1834-1902) who said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”

I think Bill Gates is one of those bad men who is using his wealth to exercise influence over government to achieve his own goals for public education in the United States—no matter how many millions of children, parents and teachers he will hurt.

There are 27 chapters in the book and—in many—Cody offers examples of Bill Gates saying one thing for public consumption to obviously fool as many people as possible while Cody offers the evidence that the Gates Foundation does the exact opposite.

For instance—not mentioned in the book—is the fact that recently the Gates Foundation promoted in the media an offer of one million dollars in grants to help teachers buy classroom supplies, but—in the book—Cody reveals that the Gates Foundation has dedicated $5 to $7 billion to influence federal and state governments to develop the Common Core State Standards and use student test results to rank and yank teachers in addition to supporting the spread of corporate Charter schools while getting rid of elected school boards and closing public schools—for good.

THINK—Bill Gates spends one million dollars to boost his public image as a humanitarian, but at the same time, his foundation is quietly spending $5 to $7 billion to spread his influence like a malignant cancer—did you know that almost 4-million public school teachers spend about two billion dollars annually to buy materials for their classrooms so children can learn? But Bill Gates offered 0.0005% of what teachers spend annually to buy supplies for their classrooms, and 0.00014% of what he is spending to destroy the public schools.

The second quote comes from Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996): “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

It is arguable that Bill Gates was bamboozled by Gene Wilhoit and David Coleman who went to see Bill Gates in 2008 to ask him to underwrite the Common Core State Standards, and now Bill Gates is not interested in finding out the truth and is bamboozling as many people as possible when he says one thing in the media to make himself look good, but then spends billions to crush the teachers’ unions, take away due process job protection from all teachers with a goal to fire almost one million teachers annually, increase class sizes and turn children into brainwashed, bamboozled drones who are forced to learn from computers while the few teachers that remain become classroom monitors (baby sitters) with one goal: to force those children to raise test scores—no questions asked. It doesn’t matter if the children learn anything useful as long as the test scores improve, and billionaires like Bill Gates get to brag that they made it all happen—even if they have to falsify the facts to look like they succeeded when they didn’t, which is already happening—the falsifying of facts!

The third quote comes from Abraham Lincoln who said, “You (Bill Gates) can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you (Bill Gates) cannot fool all the people all the time.”

I think that once many of the people who have already been fooled by Bill Gates discover the facts—then the house of cards that Bill Gates has spent billions to build is going to crumble along with his false reputation as a humanitarian that he has worked so hard to create.

This is where Cody’s book works best, because when you finish reading it, if you still think Bill Gates is a humanitarian—instead of the corrupt billionaire that he clearly is—then you have been bamboozled proving that Carl Sagan was right.

I bought The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation at Laurel Book Store in Oakland, California. This review is my honest opinion about Bill Gates and a book that reveals that power and wealth have corrupted this billionaire totally with little chance of redemption.

_______________________

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

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival

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

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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 December 23, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, propoganda, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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Badass Teachers Association versus Corporate War on Public Education

15 Dec

Marla Kilfoyle is the General Manager of an education activist group called The Badass Teachers Association.

The Badass Teachers Association has broken new ground because they are the first of their kind. They started as a Facebook group of teachers angry with federal education policy. In a year and a half, they grew into a strong and powerful national presence both on and off social media. BadassTA is now 53,000 strong on Facebook, 15,000 strong on twitter, and has a strong presence in fighting the privatization of our public school system around the nation.

BadassTA uses social media to expose the false narrative of the wealthy oligarchs, for instance, the Koch Brothers and Eli Broad. BadassTA trended on twitter for 2 days straight with their #Evaluatethat campaign, and they were recently featured in Time Magazine for their rebuttal to the Time cover showing teachers as rotten apples.

The Badass Teachers Association was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education.

Badass teachers refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities (funded mainly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning. They refuse to accept the fact that non educators are allowed to make education policies that hurt our children, communities, and public schools. Badass teachers insist on equality, social justice, and equity in education and society. They will be meeting in Washington DC this summer, July 23-26 for their BAT Congress where they plan to lobby the U.S. Congress for children and public education. They are truth tellers and are united in their cause.

NOTE FROM BLOG HOST

The corporate funded and driven public education—FAKE—reform movement in the United States does not respect teachers, pay them what they deserve or intend to train them properly. All anyone has to do is look at Teach for America (TFA) to see what I mean. A TFA recruit has five weeks of summer training and little or no classroom experience with little or no follow up support when they take over a classroom, often from a highly trained and experienced teacher who was paid more and lost their job. More than two-thirds of TFA recruits leave teaching in 2 – 4 years and never return to education as a teacher. Of the one-third that remain, all but 3% transfer to higher preforming schools in wealthier communities that do not teach high numbers of challenging to teach at-risk children who live in poverty. TFA is an element of the corporate public education fake reform movement that was designed to break the teachers’ unions.

If you need more convincing, I suggest you examine closely the Bill Gates funded and driven Common Core Standardized Testing agenda that will rank and yank teachers—in addition to closing public schools and turning our children over to corporate Charters that often lie and deceive through corporate funded propaganda to lure children away from public schools—Did you know that several Stanford studies have reported that about 75% of private sector Charter schools perform worse or the same as the public schools they replaced, and a Stanford professor, who supports market based reforms, says this reform movement does not work in education?

Instead of ranking teachers, firing them and closing public schools, the United States must offer proper training and support for teachers who want and/or need help. Ask yourself this question: Once the public schools are gone, will we ever get them back from profit-hungry corporations and billionaire oligarchs like the labor union hating Walmart Walton family and Koch brothers? Do you want democratically elected school boards in public schools to be in charge of your child’s education or a billionaire/CEO, for instance Bill Gates, who sends his children to the same expensive private school he attended as a child, a school that doesn’t give endless Common Core standardized tests?


Anthony Cody, author of The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation

_______________________

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

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival

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

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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

 

 
3 Comments

Posted by on December 15, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, propoganda, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching, teaching children who live in poverty

 

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The corporate face of profit-driven terrorism against the Public Schools comes dressed in a $40k Brioni suit

22 Nov

If the damage to public education in the United States caused by the profit-driven, corporate supported war on the public schools were added up in dollars and damaged lives, how much would that equal?

And if we were to compare that amount to the cost of the wars in the Middle East in the West’s fight against Islamic fundamentalist extremist terrorism with Al Qaeda and ISIS, how would that compare?

Once we have those numbers boiled down to solid figures with dollar signs, we then have the evidence that provides proof that the corporate war on public education is an act of terror close to or equal to the world war on Islamic terrorism.

Both wars—the one against the public schools and the one against Islamic terrorists—destroy lives and damage the economy, but corporations always win and profit. It doesn’t matter if the corporation supplies the tests for the Common Core agenda that ranks and yanks teachers and closes public schools or makes bombs and drones, because someone loses or profits.

When those passenger jets hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, The New York Times reported that the losses caused by 9/11 were about $3.3 Trillion, but someone profited from that attack—the corporations that rebuilt the World Trade Center and the corporations that make the weapons and bombs used in the ongoing war on terror. The money spent to fight the war against terror doesn’t vanish down a rabbit hole.

For instance, Halliburton made a killing on the Iraq War. In the end, how is this different from The war on teachers and children?

If you want to know some of the faces behind the  corporate economic war of terror on public education, it’s easy—follow the money.

“Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field.” Dissent Magazine.org

And if you want to follow money’s bloody trail to discover more faces dressed in expensive suits who are funding the terrorist war against the public schools, I strongly suggest reading “A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education” by Mercedes K. Schenider

Billions are being spent annually to fund the war on the U.S. public schools. Does this mean the billionaires in expensive suits who are funding this war against our children and public school teachers think of these innocents as terrorists to be targeted and destroyed?

The equation is simple—terrorists often target innocent people. it doesn’t matter if the terrorist comes dressed in a suit or they are dressed in black with a mask hiding their face while wearing a keffiyeh on their head before they behead an innocent victim.

_______________________

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

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

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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 November 22, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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The truth about so-called Social Promotion in the U.S. Public schools

21 Nov

The term social promotion has been misused by the corporate supported, fake, public-education reform movement to fool as many people as possible—the same as they have misused the meaning of teacher tenure.

There is no such thing as social promotion in most if not all of the U.S. public schools that leads to an automatic high school (HS) graduation by age 17/18. To think that social promotion in the public schools moves children along as if they were parts on an assembly line is as foolish as thinking that public school teachers have total job protection through tenure and cannot lose their jobs for any reason—of course teachers can be fired. All a school district has to do is prove that the claims of incompetence are true through due process, and due process cases in court against teachers take place annually across America in every state and some are successful.

Social promotion does not mean the student will earn a HS degree, and the system that appears to move children along as if they were on an assembly line was not created by teachers—it was created by legislation and/or public pressure through political correctness such as the parent self-esteem movement that swept the nation for several decades and is still a formidable force.  Parents who don’t want their child’s self-esteem to suffer will fight to keep the child moving along with their peers.

But, social promotion doesn’t always mean the child, who falls behind in reading and/or math, is neglected and ignored as they move along from grade to grade.

Most if not all public schools have interventions as long as they have the funding to support those interventions.

The law makes education mandatory from age 5/6 to 17/18, but it doesn’t—until Bill Gates and Obama’s Common Core State Standards interfered with the process—control what the schools can do to re-mediate a child who is falling behind.

For instance, in the district where I taught for thirty years, children who fell behind in reading were assigned to reading labs in lieu of electives. If the child continued to fall behind, they might be assigned to two sections of a reading lab.  The reading labs usually had 20-25 students with a teacher and an adult assistant.  Children who were reading close to, on, or above grade level would not be scheduled into a reading lab. Reading specialists and reading labs may be found in most elementary, middle and high schools as long as the money is there to fund these resources.

The district where I taught also offered after school tutoring—for the children who needed it most—and parents and students were counseled and advised to attend, but after mandatory school hours, attending the tutoring, night classes or summer school classes was voluntary and many of these children, who needed this remedial help the most, didn’t take advantage of what was offered, and that was usually due to lack of parent support.

For children with special needs, there was also special education classes with teachers who were trained specialists certificated in that area, and individualized instruction was offered for each of these students. The special education teachers worked with the mainstream classroom teachers in other subjects to create individualized plans that would focus on improving the areas where these children needed the most help.

For most of the years I taught, I also taught summer school to children who needed to make up classes they had failed or to improve their reading skills.  Summer school was not mandatory, and for that reason, on the first day of summer school, my class loads would start out with 50 – 60 students, but by the end of the first week, that number would be cut in half as students decided to leave and not return. By the end of summer school, it was common to have less than twenty students and closer to ten in a class.

Social promotion does not equal an automatic HS graduation. Students must still pass the required classes, earn the required number of credits/units and, in about half of the states including California where I taught, pass a competency exam that indicates the student has the minimum skills in English, math and maybe science to qualify for HS graduation. In California, students who failed all or a portion of the competency exam as early as tenth grade would be encouraged to enroll in summer school classes designed to help the student to catch up and pass the competency exam before on-time graduation at age 17/18.

If students, for instance, failed 9th grade English, they would still move on to 10th grade English the next year, but counselors would advise the students to catch up in the summer by taking the 9th grade English class a second or third time, or to take night classes at the local community college to make up any failed classes that were required for HS graduation.

Every year at the high school where I taught for the last 16 years of my 30 year teaching career, there were always seniors who reached the 12th grade deficient in units, and it was up to them to retake the classes they had failed before graduation in June.  Those who did not were told they could finish high school late by taking classes at the local community college.

This explains why the on-time HS graduation rate is about 80%, but by age twenty-five, 90% of Americans have earned a HS degree or its equivalent. And the 10% (about 24 million) of adult Americans that never earned a HS degree or its equivalent, well, it was their choice not to take advantage of every effort that was offered to them every step of the way.

In the United States, it is mandatory that a child stay in school to age 18 (it’s possible to drop out at 16 with permission), but, for a number of reasons, it would be wrong to keep a child in grade school until they turned 18 just because they were reading below grade level and made little or no effort to catch up.  I’m sure most parents wouldn’t want their six-year old in the same classroom sitting next to a hormonal raging sixteen year old, who, for whatever reason, just didn’t qualify to move on according to some test.

_______________________

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

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

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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Posted by on November 21, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, family values, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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The Pre-Election, Next-Door Homestead – Marshall Tuck versus Tom Torlakson – Debate

10 Nov

Close to the run up to the November 4, 2014 elections, Tuck was leading in the polls for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in California by a small margin—enough to look ominous considering the platform he was running on that would lead to the further destruction of California’s public schools in favor of private-sector, for profit—anyway you look at it—corporate Charters that mostly perform worse or the same as the public schools they replace.

I belong to Nextdoor.com in my community. Nextdoor is a social networking service for neighborhoods in the United States. It allows users to connect with people who live in their neighborhood.

The community debate I became embroiled in started when another member left a long rambling comment—long on claims and without  supporting data—calling on everyone in our neighborhood to vote for Marshall Tuck, because the public schools were failing our children.

When I checked this neighbor out, I discovered he was a Venture Capitalist, and  during our debate he mentioned he knew Marshall Tuck, who, according to the Venture Capitalist, is a great guy who will save our children from horrible and incompetent public schools teachers.

Instead of sharing the entire debate—that ran long and rambled with the Venture Capitalist repeating his claims and offering no data to support them—I will share only the last two  comments here.

The Venture Capitalist said, “whether it is Tuck or not (and it will be, either for this office, or another statewide office within 10 years), the changes all of us with young kids want to see, will be implemented.”

My reply and last comment: When you say “all of us”, who are you talking about—after all, there are 316-million Americans and about 240-million are old enough to vote and make up their own minds? Do you claim to speak for those 240-million Americans?

As for your (earlier) claim that it is a flawed ploy that “wealthy oligarchs are funding the war on public education”, the evidence is there for anyone to read, and I already mentioned the book and provided the link earlier in this debate. How did you get a copy of Schneider’s book and read it so fast and then decide there is nothing valid to support the premise and evidence she presents?

Here’s the book again—all anyone has to do, who has an open mind, is follow the money to the source to see the obvious, because Mercedes Schneider has already done the investigative reporting and followed the money to its source, but if you think she’s wrong, then go ahead and prove her wrong. (Note: I never heard back from the Venture Capitalist who lives in my neighborhood).

“A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education” by Mercedes K. Schenider

Anyone interested to discover more about Schneider, here’s the link to her about page on her blog:

http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/about/

In addition, Mercedes has written posts about all or most of the major players who are funding the corporate war on public education. She doesn’t just spout opinions. She provides the evidence (the data) to support what she says.

In addition, maybe anyone reading this thread—other than a Venture Capitalist—would be interested in what The Washington Post had to say about Bill Gates, and how he is the money man behind the implementation of the Common Core agenda to rank and yank teachers then close public schools turning our children over to corporate Charters that profit off taxpayers at our children’s expense.

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

Answer Sheet: Gates Foundation pours millions into Common Core in 2014

Then there is this quote from one of the Koch brothers, who admits what they are doing that was published in The New Yorker Magazine.

‘Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.’

Or this one: ““Broad school bully?”

“Today, the 79-year-old Broad (it rhymes with “road”), who lives in Los Angeles, is spending a good chunk of his fortune on education reform – steadfast in his belief that applying the same data-driven, free-market principles that made him so wealthy can also make U.S. schools great again. … Critics insist that the unseen hand of the Broad Foundation played a role on this winter’s dramatic move to close 23 public schools across Philadelphia – noting that the foundation in 2009 published an 83-page School Closure Guide, now no longer on its website, for large urban districts.”

Did you know that there are only 442 billionaires in the United States, but the United States has a population of 316 million people, in a country that is supposed to be a democracy where the people also have a right to what they think as individuals?

Does anyone want to know what the people think about the public schools?

The answer to that question may be found in the September and October 2014 PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools:

  1. 64% of Americans have trust and confidence in teachers compared to 35% who do not.
  2. 61% of Americans are against using student test results to evaluate teachers compared to 38% who favor using VAM.
  3. 77% of Americans felt it was important to help teachers improve their ability to teach
  4. Only 24% of Americans felt that performing well on a standardized test such as ACT or SAT would help students get good jobs while 86% felt learning skills like dependability, persistence and teamwork was more important.
  5. When asked what grade respondents would give the public schools in their own community, 12% gave their schools an A, 38% a B and 31% a C. Only 6% failed their community’s schools.
  6. When asked who should have the greatest influence on what public school teach, 56% said school boards and 28% state governments.
  7. 63% oppose vouchers

In addition to the debate, in conclusion, Tom Torlakson won the election by a wider margin—52% to 48%—than the lead Tuck had in the polls running-up to the election. The margin of difference came down to about 180,000 votes.

Torlakson—early in his adult working life—was a teacher who taught in the public schools for several years before he was first elected to the California State Legislature in 1996. Then in 2011, he was elected as the 27th State Superintendent of Public Instruction of California.

Tuck never taught a day in his life, and he has a history of being part of the corporate Charter school reform movement that is closing public schools and turning our children over to corporations that do not answer to the voter and/or the public.

The race between these two Democrats became a proxy war between two differing views on education overhaul. Mr. Torlakson relied on heavy support from teachers unions, while Mr. Tuck depended on a few independent supporters who Mercedes K. Schenider has linked to the corporate war on the public schools in the United States. In total, about $30 million was spent on this race this year, more than three times the amount spent for the last race in 2010, and Tuck, who lost, raised about $3 more than Torlakson.

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on November 10, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, family values, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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The facts about Common Core and why it must be stopped

22 Oct

Originally published at Examiner.com on October 21, 2014 9:00 PM MST

What is Common Core? Common Core is a set of uniform national curriculum standards for K-12 developed by DC based organizations under the auspices of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). These standards are disguised to many uninformed as standards that will help our children become better prepared for college. The Standards cover mathematics and English language arts (although they also claim to cover “literacy” in other subjects such as science, history/social studies, and technical subjects). Common Core is a special interest takeover of education that replaces local control with national standards, treating every child as though they are the same and learn the same. We all know that this is not the case. We must do something to stop this takeover, but we first have to educate ourselves before we can educate others.

Below is one of several videos created by Stop Common Core, American Principles Project and the Concerned Women of America in Georgia on the Common Core State Standards. Watch Jane Robbins give a broad explanation of the problems with Common Core and then watch the other videos.  Just click on the link to the original piece.

Continued at:

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-facts-about-common-core-and-why-it-must-be-stopped

A suggestion: Copy and paste the following tweet into your Twitter page, if you have one.

Facts about Common Core & why it must be stopped
From Concerned Women of America in Georgia
http://exm.nr/1tLbCsg

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on October 22, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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Two Politically Correct Scams Supported by Corporate Owned Media that Threaten Democracy in America

16 Oct

The actual U.S. place in the international ranking of all OECD countries from the International PISA test was 6th in reading and 13th in math—not 14th in reading and 25th in math as reported. The 2012, PISA tested about 85,000 students in 44 countries placing the U.S. in the top 13.6% for reading and 29% for math. Thirty-eight countries ranked lower in reading and 31 in math.

This post is about the two scams that have led to the era of corporate supported, public education reform in the United States. The first scam was a report called “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, during the Reagan era. Because of this report, teachers, teachers’ unions and the democratic public schools have been painted as failures, and the corporate owned media turned “A Nation at Risk” into front page news with endless, never-ending chatter that focuses on the so-called failing public schools and lazy, incompetent teachers. This has gone on for more than thirty years.

The truth first appeared in 1990, when the Scandia Report was released revealing that “A Nation at Risk” was a misleading fraud. The corporate owned media ignored the results of the Scandia Report, and continued to attack public school teachers and teachers’ unions.

Eric.ed.gov offers its Straight Talk about America’s Public Schools: Dispelling the Myths. Hot Topics Series. Chapter 1 contains the entire text of the 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk”; a summary of the results of the 1990 “Scandia Report”, which contradicted many of the previous report’s allegations; and an article by Daniel Tanner, which describes how the Scandia Report was commissioned and why it was later suppressed by the federal government.

The second scam has to do with the OECD’s international PISA tests. The corporate owned media, using only the overall average comparisons of countries, has reported repeatedly and widely how poorly the U.S. public schools compare to the other OECD countries, but the average ranking used to condemn America’s public education system, teachers and teachers’ unions is criminally misleading.

The Economic Policy Institute, similar to the Scandia Report, studied the PISA scores and published an in-depth revealing report. What follows the video are a few key points from The EPI.org report that reveals that the PISA results have been manipulated by the corporate-owned media misleading many Americans to think that the democratic public schools in the United States are failing and must be reformed and turned over to corporations to teach our children, that will, of course, eventually profit off the almost annual $1 trillion in taxes that supports the public schools.


This video is filled with false claims and lies but also the truth. I suggest that you read the rest of this post carefully before watching the video.

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

In conclusion, what these two scams tell me is that everything that came after “A Nation at Risk” is based on misinformation at best and possibly fraud, meaning that No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Common Core States Standards with Bill Gates rank and yank agenda to fire teachers and close public schools is all based on lies and misinformation.

The only risk that the United States faces today is from the corporate owned media and the corporate funded fake education reform movement. Yes, we can improve our public schools, but we don’t need to reform and destroy them to achieve that.

Please Tweet this post and/or share it on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and as many other social network sites as possible.  In fact, also copy and paste it into an e-mail and send it to everyone you know.

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on October 16, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, media, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Standardized Testing

 

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

11 Oct

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 _______________________

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

Book Cover Here

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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

 

 
3 Comments

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

 

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