politics | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

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

Hot Coffee reveals the Capitalist threat to all aspects of Democracy

05 Sep

My wife and I watched an award winning documentary Thursday night (September 4, 2014). It was called “Hot Coffee: Is Justice Being Served?” The DVD for the documentary was released November 1, 2011, and Amazon sells the DVD for more than $24.00, but you may be able to watch it free on YouTube or from HBO for a lot less.

This is what I learned: if you don’t want Bill Gates, the Walton family or the Koch brothers—for instance—ruling America instead of the elected representative of the people, I urge you not to make the mistake that capitalism is the same as democracy. It isn’t.

Marriam-Webster.com defines capitalism as “an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market”

By contrast, democracy is defined as “a form of government in which people choose leaders by voting and an organization or situation in which everyone is treated equally and has equal rights”

Under capitalism, everyone isn’t treated equally, and I’ve never heard of a corporate CEO elected by the people who work for the corporation the CEO rules over.

A member of the U.S. Congress is an elected—by the people—representative. The president is elected by the 538 electors of the Electoral College. Most states have a “winner-take-all” system—based on the popular vote of the people—that awards all electors to the winning presidential candidate. However, Maine and Nebraska each have a variation of “proportional representation.”

In fact, there have been four Presidential elections where the winner lost the popular vote of the people but won through the Electoral College: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and George W. Bush in 2000—yes, Al Gore had 540,000 more votes from the people than Bush, but G. W. won the electoral vote, 271 to 266. FactCheck.org

I’m going to copy the product description on Amazon here: “Everyone knows the case of the woman who sued McDonald s over spilled coffee. Or do they? More than 15 years after making international news, the case continues to be cited as an example of citizens who use frivolous lawsuits to take unfair advantage of the American legal system. But is that an accurate portrayal of the facts?

“An eye-opening documentary with jaw-dropping revelations, HOT COFFEE exposes how corporations spend millions on propaganda campaigns to distort Americans’ view of lawsuits forever changing the civil justice system. By examining the impact of tort reform on the lives of ordinary citizens, the film shows how Americans give up their Constitutional rights in all sorts of ways without knowing it for example, by voting for caps on damages or signing away your rights in contracts. Through interviews with politicians, judges, lawyers and ordinary citizens, first-time filmmaker and former public-interest lawyer Susan Saladoff delves into the facts of four cases to tear apart the conventional wisdom about jackpot justice.”

Watching this film, I discovered that the propaganda campaigns that were used to manipulate the justice system in the United States are also being used to distort Americans’ view of democratic public education.

Americans are literally being fooled—out of ignorance and laziness—to surrender their Constitutional Rights, vote out democracy, and replace democracy with a profit-driven, corporate oligarchy that doesn’t answer to the Constitution or the U.S. justice system. Watch the next video at your own peril.

_______________________

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

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

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

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

8 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on September 5, 2014 in American Public Schools, government, media, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School

Tags: capitalism is not democracy, democracy, Hot Coffee: Is Justice Being Served?, Is the US an oligarchy, oligarchy, the capitalist threat to democracy, the threat to the U.S. democracy today, what is a democracy, what is capitalism

The Industry Built around Blaming Teachers while ignoring Poverty

02 Sep

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

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

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

15 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

5 Comments

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

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

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

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 Lloyd Lofthouse 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

Tags: Bill Gates, common core, due process job protection for teachers, rank and yank, Vergara verdict

Poverty with Pollution—Its impact on the education of children

03 Aug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

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

3 Comments

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

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

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

24 Jul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

6 Comments

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

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

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

18 Jul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

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

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

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

The Obvious Threat of Public Education to the One Percent

05 Jul

In a recent online discussion, it was argued by one voice that the public schools have failed, because they don’t teach independent thinking.

However, I disagreed.

Evidence that the public schools work well—just not the way the one percent wants—comes from several surveys where the opinions of the top one percent are not included, because they can’t be reached.

I mean, if you wanted to call Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family or the Koch brothers, and ask them questions to a survey, how easy would that be? It’s obvious that the responses to surveys do not come from the one percent but from the 99 percent who are easier to reach.

Therefore, if anyone really want to know if the public schools do the job they are supposed to do, stop looking at standardized test results and look at the product of the public schools—that product is the majority of American adults and what they think reveals a lot about what they learned in the public schools when they were children.

Global Warming

Gallup reports that A Steady 57 percent in U.S. Blame Humans for Global Warming, and that is a clear majority. But, Greenpeace.org reports the Koch brothers spent almost $68 million since 1997 to fund groups that deny the causes of climate change.

What explains the public’s 77-percent approval rating of the Nation’s Public Schools?

From Gallup we discover that while the nation’s public schools only earn an 18-percent approval rating, 77 percent of parents gave the public schools their children attended an A or B grade indicating the real quality of the public schools, because how can parents honestly grade the rest of the nation’s public schools when their children have never attended them?

But Red State.com reports that “Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions to get unions, businesses, think tanks and states on board with Common Core standards developed by people who have no business being involved with the education of children.”

Alternative energy versus oil and coal

Gallup reports that Americans Want More Emphasis on Solar, Wind, and Natural Gas instead of the current focus on nuclear, oil, and coal. This begs for an answer to one question: if a HUGE majority of Americans want more emphasis on solar, wind, and natural gas, why is the focus on oil and coal? The answer to that question comes from Climate Progress: Dirty Money: Big Oil and corporate polluters spent over $500 million to kill climate bill, push offshore drilling

Gallup says, “No fewer than two in three Americans want the U.S. to put more emphasis on producing domestic energy using solar power (76%), wind (71%), and natural gas (65%). Far fewer want to emphasize the production of oil (46%) and the use of nuclear power (37%). Least favored is coal, with about one in three Americans wanting to prioritize its domestic production.”

Creationism versus Evolution

The National Center for Science Education reports that 64 percent of adults with less than a high school education believe in creationism while only 31 percent of college graduates do.

Did you get that—64 percent of Americans with less than a high school education believe in creationism? It’s obvious that ignorance leads to a lot of wrong-headed thinking.

Conclusion: I think the problem is ignorance and/or poverty in addition to elite private schools where the children of the rich, powerful, and famous learn that whatever they want, they can buy it—but the public schools teach the majority of children, who do not come from wealth, how to think independently through critical thinking and problem solving.

The one percent—of course—can’t accept that, and the public schools must go and be replaced by schools the one percent controls so the schools stop teaching children how to think independently and, instead, turns them into drones.

I wonder if it’s time to bring out the pitchforks and sharpen the guillotine, and then let’s invite the one percent to a party. Is the U.S. ready for its second independence day yet?

_______________________

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

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

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

5 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on July 5, 2014 in American Public Schools, English, Lloyd Lofthouse, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Teaching

Tags: creationism vs evolution, teaching children how to think and question authority, teaching critical thinking, teaching problem solving, the causes of global warming, what the public schools are good at

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

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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8 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 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

Tags: common core, NCLB, No Child Left Behind, President Obama's Failure of Leadership, Race to the Top, teaching children who live in poverty

Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

Category Archives: politics

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

Hot Coffee reveals the Capitalist threat to all aspects of Democracy

The Industry Built around Blaming Teachers while ignoring Poverty

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

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

Poverty with Pollution—Its impact on the education of children

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

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

The Obvious Threat of Public Education to the One Percent

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

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