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Category Archives: NCLB

Looking at 5 countries with some of the best public education systems in the world, and—SURPRISE, SURPRISE—they all have teachers’ unions

12 Sep

This post will prove beyond a reasonable doubt—for open minds—that the teachers’ unions in the United States are not guilty of the alleged claims made by members of the manufactured, corporate-driven, fake-education, reform movement [MCDFERM].

There is an all-out war raging in the United States against public education, public school teachers and the teachers’ unions. This war started decades ago with the ultra-conservative Walton family supporting the school voucher movement, and the war escalated under neo-conservative President G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind [NCLB] mandating that 100 percent of children by age 17/18 must be college/career ready in 2014-15 [this school year].

Even though this goal has never been achieved throughout history in any country in the world including today, Congress approved NCLB—both Houses of Congress had a Republican majority, but 89-percent of the House and 91-percent of the Senate voted yes.

For instance, between 2005 and 2010, the Walton Family Foundation—an alleged member of the MCDFERM—gave nearly $700 million to education reform organizations. Specifically, the family provides lavish funding for voucher programs, charter schools, and policy and advocacy groups devoted to establishing and promoting alternatives to public schooling. The WALMART 1%

Then neo-liberal President Obama’s Race to the Top and his Common Core State Standards agenda—with help from more than $200 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, another alleged member of MCDFERM—made the situation worse when the federal government threatened the states with the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding through the Department of Education if the states did not use the results of standardized student tests to rank and then fire teachers in addition to closing schools classified as failing—even though the American Statistical Association says: “Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1 to 14-percent of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.”

The main talking points of the MCDFERM are that there are too many incompetent teachers and that the teacher’s unions and tenure—due process job protection that does NOT guarantee a job for life—get in the way of firing bad teachers. It doesn’t matter that there is no valid evidence to support these often repeated claims by members of the MCDFERM.

To discover the membership of MCDFERM, I strongly suggest you read A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education by Mercedes K. Schneider.

Before moving on, remember that despite great wealth, the U.S. has the highest rate of child poverty among industrialized countries—about 23-percent.

Poverty impairs all aspects of a child’s development and can have lifelong detrimental consequences. Poor children are more likely to go hungry and are less likely to be read to during their early year. Child Poverty

South Korea—ranked second in the 2012 OECD international PISA Tests—with a population 46 million and a childhood poverty rate of 10.2-percent. [Rankings in this post do not count the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, the island of Taipei, and the Principality of Liechtenstein]

In 1989, teachers in South Korea established an independent union.  According to a report in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the union claimed support from 82-percent of all teachers. The Korean Teachers Union (KTU) has demanded that the government halt standardized testing, which is used in the country to determine school budgets—those with higher test results get more money from the government. In October 2013, the South Korean government threatened to ban the teachers union—sound familiar?

Finland—ranked seventh—with a population of 5.4 million and a childhood poverty rate of 4.17-percent.

More than 95-percent of teachers in Finland are unionized, paying 1.2-percent of their gross salary to support the Trade Union of Education in Finland, OAJ.

The OAJ aims to influence policies that benefit educators. The OAJ negotiates on the national level with employer groups to create 14 universally binding agreements that spell out everything from minimum salaries to working hours for teachers and the length of the school year (currently 190 days).

In addition, Finland has only one standardized exam at the end of high school, says Pasi Sahlberg, a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an expert on testing in Finland—something we don’t see in the United States.

Canada—ranked eighth—with a population 34.3 million and a childhood poverty rate of 15.06-percent.

The Canadian Teacher’s Federation was founded in 1920 and has 200,000 members who work in the public education system, most of whom have four or five years of college.

“What makes Finland and Canada’s school systems more successful, Hargreaves argues, is that both countries value teachers and professional training for them. Most importantly, perhaps, there is discretion for teachers to make their own judgments. … Education reform has failed in countries where the teacher voice is absent – and also where teacher unions are absent.”

Japan—ranked third—with a population of 128-million and a childhood poverty rate of 13.69-percent.

Japan Teachers Union (JTU), established in 1947, was the largest teachers union until it split in the late 1980s. The JTU has been an active force in education and politics for almost 40 years.

The membership encompasses teachers and other education personnel at all levels, including college professors and clerical and support staff, in both public and private institutions. However, JTU’s members are predominantly teachers in the public elementary and secondary schools.

Some of the education issues about which JTU continues to feel strongly include decentralization of control, school autonomy, freedom of teachers to write and chose textbooks, student centered education, greater teacher participation in decision making, and comprehensive high schools for all youths.

There is a long history of conflict between JTU and the government, with many complex political ramifications not readily apparent or easily understood by those outside Japan.

Switzerland—ranked fourth—with a population of 8+ million and a childhood poverty rate of 6.8-percent

As part of the freedom of association, teachers in Switzerland are represented by trade unions and professional organizations. The representatives of the teachers’ unions are systematically included in all reform initiatives. They are very active not only in the negotiations defining teachers’ incentive structure and working conditions but also in producing proposals for policy development in a wide range of educational areas—something we don’t see in the United States.

In conclusion—15-year olds in the United States ranked fourth in problem solving on the 2012 PISA Tests—way above the OECD average, but you will not hear that from the MCDFERM.

We also won’t hear this from the MCDFERM—in mathematics performance among PISA 2012 participants, the U.S. mean score was ranked fifth.

There are many different ways to compare the countries that participated in the 2012 PISA tests, and if the MCDFERM wants to make public education in the United States look bad, all they have to do is cherry-pick select facts to make that happen. Their goal is to fool as many people as possible. To armor yourself against these false claims, I suggest that you carefully read the detailed key findings of the 2012 PISA.

After reading this post, why do you think the MCDFERM is ignoring childhood poverty?

I know that many in the middle class and those who live in poverty think it’s great to live in a capitalist country with an opportunity to get rich—all we have to do is work hard or buy a winning lottery ticket, right?

Wrong! About 50-million Americans live in poverty. That means there’s a 15.8-percent chance of landing in poverty.

But what are the odds of getting rich?

For instance, there are 492 billionaires in the United States—we’ll find the members of MCDFERM in that group—that’s 0.00015-percent of the population, and then there are 9.63 million households with a net worth of $1 million or more—that’s about 3-percent of the population. In addition, the odds of winning a lottery with one ticket are about 1 in 175-million.

_______________________

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!”

 
9 Comments

Posted by on September 12, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, Standardized Testing

 

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Deceptive PR Machine in Action

23 Aug

The art of manipulation and fooling people has become an industry of deception.

For instance, Katie Couric interviews Melinda Gates about the Gates Foundation’s pledge to donate $1 million to DonorsChoose. Melinda Gates says that million will go to help teachers.

To discover the obvious, The Journal.com reports “Public school teachers spent $1.6 billion of their own money on classroom supplies and gear in the 2012-2013 school year.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates contribution represents only 0.625 percent of what public school teachers spend annually on classroom supplies and gear. But that $1 million from Bill and Melinda will buy good press and PR worth a lot more—another agenda that will destroy the public schools.

To discover the real agenda of Bill and Melinda Gates, let’s look at how much they spent to destroy the public schools through the rank and yank agenda of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that Bill Gates was promoting before there was a CCSS.

Bradley County News reports the Gates Foundation contributions during the time frame of consideration and development of the Common Core initiative.

Counsel of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO):
2009–$9,961,842
2009–$3,185,750
2010–$743,331
2011–$9,388,911

National Governor’s Association (NGA):
2008–$2,259,780,Mark Tucker’s NCEE:
2009–$1,500,000

Total: $27,000,000

Then Mercedes Schneider at deutsch29 reveals: “The Gates amounts are even higher than for NGA. Prior to June 2009, the Gates Foundation gave $47.1 million to CCSSO (from 2002 to 2007), with the largest amount focused on data “access” and “data driven decisions” … In total, the four organizations primarily responsible for CCSS–NGA, CCSSO, Achieve, and Student Achievement Partners – have taken $147.9 million from Bill Gates.

Next, The Washington Post reports that “The Common Core standards were developed in 2009 and released in 2010. Within a matter of months, they had been endorsed by 45 states and the District of Columbia. At present, publishers are aligning their materials with the Common Core, technology companies are creating software and curriculum aligned with the Common Core, and two federally-funded consortia have created online tests of the Common Core.”

The Washington Post also reported, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.”

You may also want to know who the 24 people were who wrote the Common Core Standards: Altogether, 24 people wrote the Common Core standards. None identified himself or herself as a classroom teacher, although a few had taught in the past (not the recent past). The largest contingent on the work groups were representatives of the testing industry. Diane Ravitch.net

A brief timeline might help reveal what is really going on:

First—Bill Gates spends $47.1 million to promote the CCSSO before there was even a CCSSO. The goal of the CCSS is to use standardized tests to rank and then yank (fire) teachers in addition to closing democratically run public schools and turning our children over to private-sector, corporate run Charter schools.

Second—In 2009, 24 people, mostly non-educators who were representatives of the testing industry, wrote the Common Core Standards that Bill Gates spent more than $200 million promoting and supporting to develop this untested theory that has an agenda to fire teachers and replace public schools with corporate—mostly for profit—charter schools.

Third—There’s the Economic Policy Institute (EPI): The EPI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986. EPI believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security.  To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America.

The EPI says, “There is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.”

Conclusion: There is no evidence that the results of the Bill Gates developed and promoted Common Core standardized tests will improve the schools or help children learn—none. But there is evidence that standardized tests do little to nothing to help children learn. In addition, during the years that Bill and Melinda Gates spent more than $200-million to punish teachers through his CCSS rank and yank agenda that will destroy the public schools, teachers spent more than $11 billion to help children learn—and Bill and Melinda Gates think they can dig themselves out of their $200-million+ dollar hole with a $1-million dollar bribe.

Who do you trust more to teach your children—Bill and Melinda Gates or public school teachers?

_______________________

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!”

 
2 Comments

Posted by on August 23, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Standardized Testing

 

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

15 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

Crazy is Normal promotional image with blurbs

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

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

 
5 Comments

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

 

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Looking at the Bill Gates Common Core “Rank and Yank” agenda to Reform Public Education through the lens of the Vergara verdict

09 Aug

In the Vergara trial, the judge’s verdict was based on unproven theories that a few incompetent teachers would ruin a child’s ability to earn an education. The numbers presented in one theory were one to two percent of teachers might be incompetent—not “are incompetent” but “might be incompetent” because of classroom observations of one man over a period of several years.

The judge should have asked for details. For instance, how many teachers can one person observe long enough to form a valid judgment, and how long was each observation? What if a teacher considered incompetent was having a bad day and the other 179-instructional days that teacher was competent?

Anyway, let’s look at a few numbers based on the 2011-12 school year in California:

There were 6,220,993 students enrolled and attending 10,296 public schools in California. Another 438,474 students attended 1,019 Charter schools.

There were 300,140 teachers in the public schools. If we go with the 1 to 2 percent observational unproven guesstimate, that means 3,001 to 6,223 teachers might be incompetent, but there are 10,296 schools (not counting Charters) in California, so that means thousands of schools couldn’t have even one incompetent teacher, but the teachers in those schools risk losing legal due process rights that allow them to challenge any accusations made against them that they were incompetent.

In other words, 292,917 to 297,139 could be fired for any reason at any time and there would be no way for the teacher to defend the accusations made against them.

If the Vergara verdict survives the appeals, every teacher in California would be at risk of being fired at any moment by an administrator who could be incompetent or be a stooge owned, for instance, by the Koch brothers, the Walton family, hedge fund billionaires, or Bill Gates—stooges who might have walking orders to get rid of as many teachers as possible and replace them with younger, less competent teachers like those five-week wonders from Teach For America.  Did you know that the retention rate for TFA recruits was about 33 percent compared to more than 50 percent for teachers who earned their teaching credential through the traditional method or 86 percent for teachers who went through a yearlong residency program in a master teacher’s class room?

I think it’s obvious that Bill Gates is in charge of deciding how many teachers should go on an annual basis, because it is his “rank and yank” system that is part of the Common Core agenda, and all anyone has to do is look at the arbitrary numbers Bill Gates set in place at Microsoft to judge how many had to be ranked incompetent to be yanked and replaced by another crop who had to prove their competence on an annual basis. That anal, unproven, arbitrary number that Bill Gates must have pulled out of his crotch was 25 percent with no evidence to support the fact that so many Microsoft employees were actually incompetent.

In conclusion, it’s obvious where this is going. If President Obama’s partner in crime, Bill Gates, has his way, eventually 25 percent of public school teachers—not just the one-to-two percent that are alleged to be incompetent without any evidence to support the claim—would have to lose their jobs annually all based on student standardized test scores.

If you’ve read the recent news, Microsoft plans to lay off 18,000 workers this year in addition to 12,500 associated with the Nokia Device and Services team it acquired earlier this year. Microsoft has almost 130,000 employees across the world—the number losing their jobs is almost 24%. To replace them, Microsoft has requested that the U.S. increase the number of H-1 Visas at a time when there is no shortage of American citizens for jobs of this type. In fact, there are too many qualified applicants.

What could the reasons be for Microsoft to fire qualified American citizens and replace them with someone, for instance, from China or India?

How many teachers in California stand to lose their jobs annually to be replaced if the Gates “rank and yank” system is put in place in the public schools? The answer is about 75,000 annually. At that annual rate, every four years, California’s public schools would get rid of 300,140 teachers for a complete possible turnover in every school.

The Bill Gates “rank and yank” system used by Microsoft—and supported by President Obama and Arne Duncan to be used against teachers in the public schools—will rely on the test results of students to decide the teachers who must go, but first they must get rid of teacher due process job protection that exists under the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

However, the Economic Policy Institute reports that “there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.” This report has been ignored by Bill Gates, President Obama and Arne Duncan.

What are the odds of one of those 6.2 million students ending up in a classroom with one of those estimated 3,001 to 6,223 so-called incompetent teachers with no proven, accepted, valid method to judge teacher competence properly?

Does anyone have an answer?

What about the odds of a teacher ending up with incompetent students who have dysfunctional, incompetent parents? Does anyone have a theory for that number? I think we could start with the number of children living in poverty and/or who have severe learning disabilities.

These numbers might help: California’s child poverty rates for Latinos (31.2%) and African Americans (33.4%) are much higher than the rates among Asians (13.2%) and whites (10.1%). The child poverty rate in families where both parents do not have a high school diploma is high in California (48.5%). Just the Facts: CHILD POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA by Sarah Bohn and Matt Levin

It might help to compare the poverty rates with the on-time high school graduation rates in California (2011-2012):  State High School Graduation Rates by Race, Ethnicity

Asian/Pacific Islander 90%
White 86%
Hispanic 73%
Black 66%

Back to the Vergara trial—I think the verdict was bought and paid for in some way, or maybe the judge was blackmailed or biased.

In addition, reforming the public schools doesn’t mean that education for K to 12 children will improve, because it is obvious that the corporate war against the public schools is not about improving the schools. It’s about reforming the public schools into an economic engine that pours taxes into corporations who are out to make a profit.

If President Obama and his stooge, Arne Duncan, really wanted to improve the public schools, a good place to start would be to improve teacher training based on those yearlong internship programs that have the best teacher retention rate and enact a national, early childhood education program—both of which other countries have done with great success.


A must see documentary to discover what’s going on!

_______________________

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!”

 

 
1 Comment

Posted by on August 9, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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Poverty with Pollution—Its impact on the education of children

03 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

 

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

21 Jul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

_______________________

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

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

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).

 
3 Comments

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

 

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Let’s reverse “Those who can’t, teach”

08 Jul

There’s an old proverb that disparages teachers. It goes like this: “Those who can, do; those who can’t teach.” It means that people who are able to do something well can do that thing for a living, while people who are not able to do anything that well make a living by teaching.

I’ve worked in both worlds—the private sector and the public, and I can assure you that old proverb is wrong and anyone who disagrees with me, well, those will be fighting words.

I started at fifteen washing dishes in a coffee shop nights and weekends thirty hours a week for three years while I went to school days until the day the mean boss told three of us that we had to stay later than usual and do someone else’s job who didn’t show up for work, and he wasn’t going to pay us. All three of us quit. If I had done as told, I probably could’ve stayed working in restaurant jobs for the rest of my life. In that job, when I clocked out, I never took work home.

A few weeks later, I joined the U.S. Marines and went to boot camp after graduating from high school. I fought in Vietnam where snipers came close to taking me out more than once, and I decided I didn’t want to make a career out of the Marines. I could have. After all, I survived three years and earned an honorable discharge. I did bring PTSD home and still have it.

My third act was going to college on the GI Bill, and while in college, I worked a series of part-time jobs and I didn’t consider any of them jobs I’d want to work for a lifetime.

For instance, I worked on a crew that cleaned a new Sears store before it opened. In the morning, I clocked in and worked my eight hours and then clocked out. There was no stress, no challenges, and I didn’t take any work home.

In my next job, I walked door to door sixteen hours a day, seven days a week as a Fuller Brush Man where I was told three months later—after more than a thousand hours of work—that I had sold more product than anyone else in the region. I quit, because all I earned for all the door to door walking and sore feet was four hundred dollars—that wasn’t enough for even one month’s rent.

Next job, I bagged groceries in a super market for two years, and I never took any work home. It was an easy job and the people I worked for were good people. The manager of the store was also a nice guy.

After the market job, I stocked shelves and dressed manikins for window displays at a J.C. Penny, and I never took any work home. The store manager was also okay as a boss.

Then I worked one summer near Fresno at a Gallo Winery in a seasonal job during the grape crushing season and before summer ended I was offered a full-time job that came with health benefits and decent pay, but I turned it down, because I wanted to finish college. I also never took any work home while I worked for Gallo. When I clocked out, the work ended.

After graduating from college with a BA in journalism, I landed a job in middle management in a large trucking company. After several years of repetitive paperwork and long hours sitting at a desk in a glass walled office, I quit and went back to college to earn a teaching credential. While working that job, I never took any work home, and my boss was a decent guy to work for. He was fair and kind. From there, in 1975, I returned to college and earned a teaching credential.

In the early 1980s, while teaching days at a tough intermediate school, I worked for a few years at night and on weekends for a fancy nightclub/restaurant called the Red Onion in West Covina, California. At the time, there were several Red Onions in Southern California. The one where I worked had three dining rooms—one with a glass ceiling and a few full-sized palm trees—on one side of the lobby. On the other side was a three-bar nightclub that held a thousand drinkers and dancers. After a few months, I was promoted to the maître d position and put in charge of the front desk. Then the owner of the chain, who drove a white Rolls Royce, offered me a job in management, but I said no and stayed in the classroom as a teacher. The only thing I took home from that job was a few women I met at the night club and dated, and I have no complaints about that. All the managers I worked for were all decent, kind, hard working men.

When I compare all of the jobs I worked in my life, the toughest and most challenging job was teaching where I often worked sixty to one hundred hours a week. Twenty-five to thirty hours a week was teaching and the rest of the sixty to one hundred hours was planning lessons, making phone calls to parents, paperwork (grades, etc.), and correcting student work.

In fact, I took work home during the school year almost every night and weekend often working until I was too tired to keep going.

When I retired from teaching in 2005, I decided that if for any reason I ever had to go back to work, I’d rather be an old  U.S. Marine fighting in a war zone like Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, to avoid teaching again, I’d be willing to volunteer and strap on explosives and blow myself up along with a group of al Qaeda or Taliban terrorists before I’d go back in the classroom to be demeaned and abused by students, parents, administrators and our nation’s elected leaders, who make all the decisions for the public schools but accept none of the blame for anything that goes wrong and doesn’t work. Teachers are rarely part of the decision process. They are just the scapegoats for fools who say, “Those who can, do; those who can’t teach.”

I know the public schools are not broken. The crises in public education has been manufactured by a bunch of unscrupulous fake education reformers who are mostly interested in how much money they can steal from tax payers with the approval of the Obama White House.

To find out what it’s like to be a public school teacher in the United States, I suggest that you read my memoir, Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé. You see, I kept a daily journal in 1994-95 for one of the thirty years I was a teacher and captured that job in detail. The other option is to actually go teach in a school similar to the one where I taught.

_______________________

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).

 
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Posted by on July 8, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching

 

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Smoking Gun Three: Linking Education Fraud from Obama to GOP

29 May

Here’s more evidence that the fake education reform movement in the United States and the international PISA test are both frauds. After two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that lifted limits on political campaign contributions so the wealthiest Americans can buy the U.S. government, there may be only one country left on the earth that billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates, the Walton family, the Koch brothers and American Hedge Fund billionaires can’t buy. To discover the answer, watch the video and read the rest of this post.


What Does the PISA Test really reveal about U.S. Public Education?

Guess who may be dropping out of the PISA?

China

Here’s a piece that appeared in The Washington Post on May 26, 2014: “No. 1 Shanghai may drop out of PISA”:

The Washington Post says: “First in 2009 and then in 2012, Shanghai’s 15-year-old students (or, rather, a supposed representative group) were No. 1 in the world on the recent Program for International Student Assessment reading, math and science exams. But now, according to a popular Shanghai newspaper, Shanghai is considering dropping out of PISA. Why?

“According to the article, explained in the following post by scholar Yong Zhao, Shanghai officials want to de-emphasize standardized test scores, homework and rote learning that has characterized Chinese education. And PISA, which is sponsored by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, emphasizes standardized test scores.

“Last year, China began a major education reform initiative designed to increase student engagement and end student boredom and anxiety — and reduce the importance of standardized test scores.”

<strong>Imagine that, China moving away from raising generations of robots while the Western Democracies, with the exception of Finland, are moving toward standard thinking and behavior</strong>. Who would have thought?


Finland’s poverty rate is less than 5%. In the U.S., poverty is 23% or almost ten times the total population of Finland.

What does the PISA results reveal about poverty?


Professor Robert Lingard compares Australia and New Zealand with a focus on poverty and reveals the truth.

When the OECD releases the PISA report every three years, many people use the ranking to claim public education in the U.S. is failing and push their corporate education reform agenda. But looking at the data, lessons that can be learned from the highest performing countries point in a completely different direction. Watch the first video again, and again, and ….

You may be wondering why the GOP was included in the title of this post. Ask yourself, why Republicans haven’t said a word about the fake education reform movement that started with President G. W. Bush, is being driven by his brother Jeb Bush and supported by the Obama Administration and Arne Dunan, appointed by Obama, as the Secretary of the Department of Education.

And if you are having trouble shaking off the lies that only the tea party people are protesting Obama’s Machiavellian Common Core standardization of the United States public education system, visit Education Bloggers Network or Diane Ravitch, and discover how many tea baggers there are among these professionals.

Return to Discovering the world’s best teachers—Smoking Gun: Part 2 or start with Smoking Gun: Part 1

_______________________

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!”

 

 

 
8 Comments

Posted by on May 29, 2014 in American Public Schools, Common Core, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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Discovering the world’s best teachers—Smoking Gun: Part 2

21 May

To discover the world’s best teachers we have to look at children who live in poverty. Teachers who successfully teach as many of these children as possible are the world’s best teachers.

The US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health says: “It is well documented that poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods. Six poverty-related factors are known to impact child development in general and school readiness in particular. They are:

  • The incidence of poverty
  • The depth of poverty
  • The duration of poverty
  • The timing of poverty (eg, age of child)
  • Community characteristics (eg, concentration of poverty and crime in neighborhood, and school characteristics)
  • and the impact poverty has on the child’s social network (parents, relatives and neighbors).

“A child’s home has a particularly strong impact on school readiness. Children from low-income families often do not receive the stimulation and do not learn the social skills required to prepare them for school. Typical problems are parental inconsistency (with regard to daily routines and parenting), frequent changes of primary caregivers, lack of supervision and poor role modelling. Very often, the parents of these children also lack support.”

What I’m about to share with you reveals the second smoking gun that leads from the Department of Education to the  White House through Obama’s Machiavellian Race to the Top and Common Core testing.

Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) analyzed the most resent international PISA test and his results revealed that public school teachers in America are more successful teaching children who live in poverty than any other country on the planet. He did this by comparing PISA test results with comparable schools that had the same number of children who lived in poverty.

In every comparison, the US was #1 when it came to teaching the most difficult at-risk children on the planet. For instance, for a more accurate assessment of the performance of U.S. students, Tirozzi aligns the scores of American schools with those of other countries with comparable poverty rates.

Tirozzi shows the ranking of schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate compared with ten countries with similar poverty numbers, and the United States ranked #1 with a PISA score of 551, and Finland was #2 with a score of 536 for those similar schools with similar poverty rates.

Did you get that?  Teachers in the U.S. were more successful teaching children who lived in poverty than teachers in Finland who are considered some of the best teachers working in one of the best public school systems in the world—and Finland doesn’t test its children and judge teachers based on the results.

Tirozzi then matches schools with a poverty rate of 10-24.9% with ten comparable nations, and once again the United States was #1 with a PISA score of 527. Canada was #2 with a score of 524.

No other developed country tested had schools with poverty rates approaching 25%, and the U.S. Census reports: “The U.S. poverty rate in 2012 for children under age 18 was 21.8% (16,073,000).”

At this point, I want to emphasize that teaching in a classrooms with high rates of children who live in poverty offers extreme challenges that don’t exist in schools with lower rates. The behavior problems are sometimes overwhelming. Many of these children hate school, hate reading, hate teachers and often come from dysfunctional homes in gang infested communities. And some of these children are gang members.

For instance, for most of the 30 years I taught, the schools where I worked had poverty rates of 70% or more—Tirozzi found similar schools in Mexico, where only a third of its adult population has a high school degree, and if we compare U.S. schools with poverty rates over 75%, the U.S. PISA score was 446 compared to 425 for similar schools in Mexico. (NOTE: Mexico is not considered one of the 35 developed countries)

To deal with poverty in the United States, what did the Obama administration do?  Congress passed Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core standardized testing that punishes only public school teachers. That is all President Obama’s administration has done!

There have been no early childhood education programs from the Obama White House, and even the U.S. Department of Education admits “There is a tremendous unmet need for high-quality early learning throughout the country … the importance of early learning is clear. Studies prove that children who have rich early learning experiences are better prepared to thrive in kindergarten and beyond.” (Just in case, Arne Duncan has this page revised, I took a screen shot of it.)

Map: How 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34th)

 Data source: UNICEF

 

This Machiavellian insanity started with President G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, but President Obama’s Race to the Top legally defined public school teachers and the public schools as failures to be fired and/or replaced by private sector Charter schools that don’t have to teach difficult at-risk children who live in poverty.

President Obama, Arne Duncan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, and Bill Gates, for instance, all demand that America’s public school teachers must teach America’s children so 100% are college and career ready by age 17/18 while ignoring the needs of more than sixteen million children who live in poverty—something that no other country has demanded of their public school teachers in history.

Do you smell the smoking gun coming from the Department of Education and the White House? I hope so.

Continued with Smoking Gun Three: Linking Education Fraud from Obama to GOP or return to Smoking Gun: Part 1

_______________________

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!”

 
8 Comments

Posted by on May 21, 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 Fake Education Reformers “Smoking Gun” that leads from Arne Duncan to the White House: Part 1

19 May

How do you deceive a nation? The answer is simple—by loading the dice, stacking the deck and dealing off the bottom.

It’s called deceit!

It’s called fraud!

It’s called treason!

And it’s a crime!

This “Smoking Gun” leads from Arne Duncan to the White House because Arne, who was appointed by President Obama, pulls the trigger repeatedly every time he opens his mouth about the PISA, Common Core and how great Charter Schools are, so if there’s a fall guy (and that depends on Congress launching an in-depth, honest investigation—don’t hold your breath) it will be Arne who gets fired and may end up in prison if the president doesn’t pardon him like President Ford pardoned Nixon for his attempted cover up of his Watergate guilt.

Hey Arne, you better start shredding all those memos and deleting all your private e-mails. All it takes is one to prove you’re guilty—that you are responsible for rigging the PISA test in the U.S., and can you trust everyone who was involved, because no one could do this alone?

The cornerstone of the fake education reform movement has been the PISA rankings of developed countries where 15-year old students were supposedly selected at random, but how were the schools selected?

Before I reveal the smoking gun that leads to the White House, do you know what happens to a student’s grade point average (GPA) when there are too many poor grades? The highest GPA a student may earn is a 4.0 without advanced placement and honors classes. The reason I mention this is because the method used to compute GPA is similar to the PISA average.

For instance, if there are 100 grades of equal value and 22 are failing grades and the other 78 are A’s, that student will have a 3.12 GPA (a B-). Those 22 poor grades have a lot of weight, and when the PISA test was administered to random students, the evidence suggests that Arne Duncan made sure there would be more than 22 poor grades to drag the U.S. PISA average down.

To discover how this was done we’re going to look at the results of two studies that analyzed the details of the PISA test from different sources. It was only by chance that I discovered both and connected the dots.

The first analysis of the PISA test was from the Economic Policy Institute that concluded: “The U.S. administration of the most recent (2012) 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.”

In fact, the report goes on: “U.S. students from advantaged social class backgrounds (students who do not live in poverty) perform better relative to their social class peers in the top-scoring countries of Finland and Canada …”

Then there’s the other analysis by Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP).  Tirozzi reports: “The problem is that the United States has by far the highest rate of child poverty of any of the advanced industrial countries, and it is these children who perform very poorly on the (PISA) international tests. For example, U.S. students in schools with less than 10% poverty rank number one in the world, while students in schools with greater than 50% poverty score significantly below average.”

When Tirozzi compared the ranking of schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate with ten countries with similar poverty numbers, the US was in first place with a PISA score of 551 and Finland—with its public schools and unionized teachers considered among the best in the world—was #2 with a score of 536. Then Tirozzi matched schools with a poverty rate of 10 to 24.9% with ten comparable countries, and the United States once again was ranked #1 at 527, and Canada was in second place with a PISA average of 524.

In addition, the U.S. PISA average of 502 for schools with poverty rates between 25 to 49.9% was still in the upper half of the scores—higher than twenty countries including Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, the UK, Italy, Spain and Israel.

How bad is childhood poverty in the United States?

Of the 35-developed countries compared by the PISA test, the US was ranked 34th for childhood poverty while Finland’s poverty rate was less than 5%—in the U.S. 22% of all children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level. That fact by itself without stacking the deck would drive the U.S. average down because the higher a country’s childhood poverty rate, the lower the PISA average would be.

Why did the Department of Education test more schools in the U.S. with higher rates of poverty than the other developed countries? Was this deliberate?

I think so—by rigging the PISA test to be given to students who attend more schools with the highest poverty rates led to an average that made all the U.S. public schools look bad when they’re not—just like a child’s GPA drops when there are more poor grades. Schools with high rates of children living in poverty resulted in a lower PISA average by offsetting the scores of the 78% of students who do not live in poverty.

Tirozzi’s analysis clearly reveals that the average score of 78% of America’s children (39 million) who don’t live in poverty ranked #1 in the world on the international PISA test when compared to the other 35 developed countries similar to the United States, but testing an unfair ratio of students from the 22% (11 million) who live in poverty dropped the U.S. average drastically creating a false sense of failure in the U.S. public schools.

In conclusion: “National efforts to improve public education—from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind to President Obama’s Race to the Top—have been focused on the wrong problems, said Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at the Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.” (The Washington Post)

Poverty is the problem!

The public schools and the teachers are not the problem, because when children don’t live in poverty, they score higher on the international PISA test in every developed country with the U.S. ranked #1.

What should we call this fraud—Education Gate or something else?

Continued with: Discovering the world’s best teachers—Smoking Gun: Part 2

_______________________

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).

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Posted by on May 19, 2014 in American Public Schools, Education, government, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

 

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