My friend, who is still teaching—with nearly 30 years of experience—is not happy with his/her school district. I’m deliberately avoiding revealing who he/she is, because I’ve seen what happens to teachers who break the omerta of an American public school district, and I have also been a victim—it shouldn’t be a secret that school districts in America hate bad press.
I’m not saying that the administrators in my friend’s school district will make his/her life miserable if they discover who he/she is but having been a teacher for thirty years, I don’t want to take any chances, because I’ve seen the lives of teachers destroyed by administrators and/or elected school board members.
Public school teachers have due process rights, but they do not have tenure.
A vice principal at the high school where I taught for sixteen of those thirty years, once told me—even with all that I had accomplished as a teacher—that because I was an outspoken critic of what I saw as poor leadership in the school district where I taught, that my name was on a black list, and she had been told to find a way to get rid of me. She didn’t do much to get rid of me and lost her job at the end of the school year.
One trick used to force teachers out of education is to assign them five-different classrooms with five-different subjects to teach. For example, instead of teaching five, tenth-grade English classes in the same room, each class would be different, so the teacher would have five different lesson plans to work on in addition to rushing to a different classroom every period.
In fact, I knew one teacher who had her teaching day split between two high schools several miles apart with a half-hour window to drive from the first high school to the second one after teaching three classes in the morning to teach two classes in the afternoon. And she was assigned to five different classrooms. That tactic worked, because she quit and left that district to find work elsewhere.
As you may see, it is a myth that public school teachers have total job protection known as tenure.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Before I comment on what a friend—who is still in the classroom teaching—wrote in a recent e-mail about the district he/she teaches in, I want to mention my own thirty years as a teacher [1975 – 2005] as a way to establish that I know what I’m talking about.
During my early years in the classroom, many of my seventh and eighth grade students won half the poetry awards in a state-wide contest in California. The award ceremonies were held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
The poems that won came out of a workshop I developed, and that success led me to develop a short-story writing workshop where two of my eighth-grade students one-year ended up published in a special edition of a Los Angeles Times Magazine that showcased maybe twenty or thirty short stories out of more than 10,000 submitted from schools in Los Angeles County.
That was back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, over the years, I developed most of my own curriculum to teach English and writing that I used successfully for decades.
In the 1990s, when I taught journalism and was the advisor of a high-school newspaper—in addition to teaching four periods of English—my journalism students won national and international recognition for their work. In fact, you can read about it here. Just click on the next link to see what the Rowland Heights Highlander had to say: Extra! Nogales newspaper a five-time winner
In the late 1990’s, a vice principal told a room full of English teachers at the high school where I taught that my students outperformed—by a large margin—the students of every English teacher in the district at the same grade level when it came to writing. At another meeting, another VP would mention that my students—year after year—always showed gains, on average, on annual standardized tests.
I was a tough, no-nonsense teacher who often created his own curriculum units and that included getting ideas from other teachers who I worked with. Some of my best teaching methods were learned from other veteran teacher like my friend.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
The United States has never had a Golden Age of Education unless it is happening today, but the media and politicians with political/religious agendas—without exception—misrepresent the truth. The art of deception is based on picking the facts you want the public to hear, and what’s left out of the message is what leads people to believe something that is false.
The piece goes into detail showing the sort of questions 8th graders were expected to know in 1912. What the Smithsonian does not mention is how many children were attending 8th grade in 1912 compared to today.
In 1912, 61.3% of 5-to-19-year-old whites were enrolled in school and less than 10% would graduate from high school. That percentage was even lower for Blacks and other races.
There is a huge difference between less than 10% of children motivated to learn who have supporting parents and the ninety percent of children who did not.
In fact, in 1918, every state required children to only complete elementary school. And a movement in 1920 to extend compulsory education to 12th grade failed and would not be revived until after World War II.
WiseGeek.org says, “Prior to the passing of compulsory school attendance laws, education was primarily localized and available only to the wealthy, and it often included religious teachings. …
“By the 1950s, compulsory education had become well established, but the K-12 education system was really still in its infancy. Schools were still primarily localized, but education was no longer available only to the wealthy. Even in the 1950s, however, segregation by race was still common practice in public schools in the US.
“Then in 1954, in the US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.”
The Smithsonian piece is misleading because in 1912, students attending school were there because their parents believed in the value of an education, and sending children to school was still a luxury for most Americans who could not afford to send a child to school or felt an education was a waste of time.
Back then, many poor parents even sold their children as young as age five into servitude in the coal mines or factories—those children never had a chance to go to school. In some industrial cities, half the workforce was made up of children, who were much cheaper to employ and easier to manage than teenagers or adults. In some states it was also legal for parents to sell children into prostitution.
How bad was it? For example, in 1916, President Wilson pushed the Keating-Owen Act through Congress barring interstate commerce of goods produced by child labor, but a conservative U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1918 that this law was unconstitutional because it infringed on states’ rights and denied children the freedom to contract to work. Source: Scholastic.com[recommended reading]
And in 1912, there was no parent-driven self-esteem movement that values dreams, having fun and feeling good over working hard to earn an education. There was also no TV, no video games, and no cell phones. A lot has changed in the last century.
I also compared the high school graduation rate for 17/18 year olds in 1912 with today. According to A Hundred Years Ago.com, “only 20% of youth attended high school in 1911 and less than 10% graduated.”
Today, even most high school dropouts are better educated than 90% of Americans in 1912. Since 1968, the US high school graduation rate has fluctuated in the 70% range and it has never been higher in the history of this country. In 2012, Wisconsin had the highest rate at 90% with Vermont a close 89.6%.
In 2012, The Washington Post reported, “Researchers found that graduation rates vary by race, with 91.8 percent of Asian students, 82 percent of whites, 65.9 percent of Hispanics and 63.5 percent of blacks graduating on time.”
If you are interested in the graduation rate of each state, click Governing.com, and you will discover that even the state with the lowest graduation rate today beats 1912 by a wide margin.
Do not be fooled again, because politicians, the media and critics of public education will keep telling us that the public education system in America is failing, but now you know the truth. It’s not perfect but it has never been better and it is still evolving—for better or worse.
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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I taught in the public schools in California from 1975 – 2005 and contributed eight percent of my monthly gross pay into The California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). In addition, the school district where I taught matched my contributions. I also invested (rolled over) more than $100,000 from an IRA into CalSTRS to increase how much I would earn by about 9% annually.
Although critics of public education and teacher unions claim teacher retirement in California is a burden for taxpayers that is an outright lie.
CalSTRS is funded by the employees (working teachers), the teacher’s employer—school district, community college district, participating charter school or county office of education. The state of California currently contributes 2.541 percent of the annual earnings of all members—this is an insignificant burden on taxpayers.
For example, the budget for the state of California for 2013 was $477.8 Billion. However, total state contributions for the State Teachers Retirement Plan (STRP) increased by $109.2 million or 9.2 percent to $1.3 billion as a result of additional state contributions due to the unfunded obligation—that is 0.272% (about one quarter of one percent) of the total-state budget.
The video looks back at significant points in California history while chronicling the evolution of CalSTRS from its beginnings as the Public School Teachers’ Retirement Salary Fund to its current position as the largest educator-only pension fund in the world. The video was produced internally by members of the CalSTRS Communications staff.
CalSTRS was founded on the principle that hard-earned retirement benefits recognize decades of classroom service—now and for generations to come.
What pensioners get: The median annual benefit for new CalSTRS retirees represents 60 percent of a member’s final compensation earned while still teaching—that means the average teacher takes a 40% cut in pay when he or she retires—as I did.
The average age of retirees is 62. CalSTRS members do not receive Social Security benefits—even if he or she qualifies—as I did, because I worked outside of education for more than a decade—and most retired teachers do not receive health benefits from their employers.
For example, when I retired at age 60 in 2005, I left teaching with no health benefits. If I had not served in the US Marines and fought in Vietnam, I would have had no health benefits from age 60 until I qualified for Medicare. However, because of my military service, my health care provider became the VA soon after I left teaching. Most teachers are not that fortunate and are not qualified for VA health benefits.
Without question, CalSTRS, like pension funds worldwide, took a hit due to the 2007-08 global recession, but it is not bankrupt, nor will it bankrupt the state. CalSTRS has historically been a sound system, and until the market collapse had consistently met or exceeded its assumed rate of return. Even under current economic conditions, CalSTRS is about 70 percent funded and has sufficient assets and projected contributions to pay benefits until 2044.
CalSTRS ended 2012 with a market value of $150.61 Billion. The average age of members who retired in 2011-12 was 62 years with a median of 24.4 years of service and the average monthly member-only benefit was $3,936.
For example, if I live to see the year 2044, I would be age 98. How many people live that long? So, who is it that hates teachers so much they are willing to lie to mislead the public?
Discover Razor Wire — “I was alone in my classroom the afternoon the boy’s father walked in unexpectedly. He cursed at me and accused me of incompetence, but I was the wrong teacher.”
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
PBS.kids.org says, “Online bullying often called online harassment is a serious issue, and it’s getting more common.”
In fact, no one on the Internet—especially those that are transparent—is safe from an anonymous online bully, who uses the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution as a shield to abuse the character and/or reputation of individuals that are not anonymous online. For example, authors, who may also be publishers, often find their reputations as authors/publishers damaged by the comments of anonymous online bullies.
I have been doing extensive ongoing research on this issue due to my own run-in with a pack of these anonymous bullies recently (and a few years ago), and I have discovered that this is a problem that permeates Amazon (in addition to other sites such as Goodreads) affecting possibly hundreds and even thousands of people due to the fact that Amazon cannot, at this time, police itself efficiently or adequately to protect transparent people—mostly authors—that have become victims of alleged malicious and obviously premeditated attacks by anonymous people that demonstrate by their own words alleged sociopath-narcissist tendencies.
I have also come to the conclusion that we cannot blame Amazon.com for this toxic environment. Amazon is also a victim due to the “freedom of speech” dilemma. However, the 1st Amendment does not offer total protection from abusers.
1st Amendment Text: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Study these 1st Amendment words carefully. Nowhere does it say in the 1st Amendment that a private sector business and social network like Amazon.com cannot limit freedom of speech on its site. The key words are “Congress shall make no law …”, and Amazon.com does not make the laws.
In addition, The Freedom Forum clearly says that the First Amendment does not say anyone can say anything at any time, and the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an interpretation of speech without limits.
The Supreme Court has ruled regarding libel and slander: “Was the statement false, or put in a context that makes true statements misleading? You do not have a constitutional right to tell lies that damage or defame the reputation of a person or organization.” Source: Freedom Forum.org
The virtual world is a new legal arena and the courts are dealing with hundreds of libel law suits monthly and, true to form, legislation at the state and national level is moving slowly as this hot button issue over “freedom of speech” gives cause for caution. Our elected representatives do not want to be smeared with accusations that they are limiting freedom of speech so they must tread cautiously or lose votes.
However, there is another side to this issue that I haven’t seen expressed yet. Freedom of Speech is only one of the rights/protections that the US Constitution offers its citizens. What everyone seems to have overlooked is the Confrontation Clause of the 6th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The Confrontation Clause has its roots in both English common law, protecting the right of cross-examination, and Roman law, which guaranteed persons accused of a crime the right to look their accusers in the eye. In noting the right’s long history, the United States Supreme Court has cited Acts of the Apostles 25:16, which reports the Roman governor Porcius Festus, discussing the proper treatment of his prisoner Paul: “It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man up to die before the accused has met his accusers face-to-face, and has been given a chance to defend himself against the charges.” It has also cited Shakespeare’s Richard II, Blackstone’s treatise, and statutes.
By allowing people to hide behind an anonymous identity on the Internet and allowing them to write negative reviews/comments and even level ad-hominem attacks against easy to identify individuals who are transparent, the 6th Amendment rights of these transparent people have been violated because one cannot look his or her accuser/s face-to-face and eye-to-eye.
After all, how can any author, for example, who is transparent and working under his or her real name, defend against alleged anonymous bullies on Amazon.com (and similar sites such as Goodreads)—that leave negative reviews or even YES votes to support those anonymous, negative reviews/comments—and have a chance to defend his or her damaged reputation by facing his or her critic face-to-face and eye-to-eye?
In this example, knowing the history of your critic might be vital if it is discovered that an anonymous person leaving negative reviews/comments has a hidden history of this sort of behavior on the Internet spreading criticism, lies and ad-hominem insults in addition to using what is known as SockPuppets to gain an unfair advantage thus establishing premeditation—the law says that premeditation is the contemplation of a crime well enough in advance to show deliberate intent to commit the crime; forethought.
In conclusion, because going to court to resolve this hot button issue may be too costly and beyond the average citizen’s ability to pay for justice, this issue may be open to a lawyer or law firm to take pro bono or as a class action suit on a consignment and/or contingency basis. The defendant in this sort of class action case might be a consumer, social networking sites such as Amazon.com—an online community similar to a town, city, state or nation and therefore held responsible to uphold the protections offered by the U.S. Constitution to its Internet citizens.
In this case, a transparent victim online, such as an author or other individual, should have the right to demand knowing who his or her anonymous critic/accuser is that may be smearing his or her good name and/or product. After all, the online environment has created a court of public opinion that if unchecked may damage the reputation and well being of an innocent victim.
Of course, there may be a simple solution to avoid having this issue reach and be defined by the United States Supreme Court: When a transparent person claims his or her 6th Amendment rights when confronted by an alleged online anonymous bully, Amazon.com—for example—automatically provides an online form that the anonymous person may fill out revealing his or her real-life name, location and information leading to his or her online history that could then be verified before publication, or the anonymous person may decide to delete his or her review/comment and remain anonymous. If the anonymous person refuses to cooperate, Amazon may refuse to offer them a forum on its site and remove every review/comment made by that anonymous individual. Eventually, even the SockPuppets an anonymous person may have created might be revealed and vanish under such a policy.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
My parents were both high school dropouts, but I grew up seeing them read books almost every day and that was probably the most important reason I did not grow up illiterate or functionally illiterate.
Millions of children in America are not that fortunate and never see his or her parents read anything. This image of the most important role model in a child’s life ends up being the foundation that leads to illiteracy.
On February 14, 2013, Valentine’s Day, President Obama said, “Let’s make it a national priority to give every child access to a high-quality early education.”
This message was also included in his second State of the Union address.
But conservatives have made it clear that they are against public supported, high-quality early education. Instead, conservatives want to give taxpayer money to private or church-based preschools and leave it up to parents to decide to send his or her children. Source: Mike the Mad Biologist
Mike the Mad Biologist quoted the Heritage Foundation, a far-right conservative think tank that is also part of the Koch Foundation Associate Program. To learn more about the political/religious agenda of the billionaire Koch brothers, click Discovering the four Koch brothers.
Then President Obama also said, “Fewer than 3 in 10 four-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program.”
Because of those facts, the United States must take it one step further and make it mandatory for children that are not learning literacy skills at home before age four to start a high-quality early education literacy program in the public schools.
To do that, all children must be tested starting at age three and six months by having them read out loud to a properly credentialed educator-teacher to demonstrate that the child is learning to read simple, basic one-syllable words in simple sentence in addition to demonstrating understanding. Then every twelve months before starting kindergarten, those children must be tested again to see that he or she is improving. It would be easy. Every public school in America would receive the mandate and funding to support this simple test.
Children that fail the test would be enrolled in the type of program President Obama is talking about.
Obama said that these young children must be in a safe learning environment with high quality teachers that are held accountable. Private and religious schools are not held as accountable the same as the public schools. Private and religious schools have no oversight—no one watching what is going on in that classroom.
There are an estimated 121,169 libraries of all kinds in the United States today.
These facts say if we leave it up to most illiterate parents of illiterate children to enroll those children in a voluntary literacy program before age four, it will not happen—not in the United States.
In Finland, the parents do this at home. In Finland, most parents start teaching their own children how to read by age three. That does not happen to millions of young children in the United States.
The reason I think the conservative religious/political agenda regarding a high-quality early (public) education program in America is racist is because of the following numbers.
In 2003, about seven percent of white adults were reading below basic (this means they were functionally illiterate or illiterate), compared to 24% of Blacks, 44% of Hispanics, and 14% of Asian/Pacific Islanders. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
If we are going to break the cycle of the high ratio of race-based illiteracy in America, we must make it mandatory for children that are not learning literacy skills at home to be in a supervised public education, literacy programs before age four so the public in the United States knows that every child is safe from a possibly biased, conservative political and/or religious agenda.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
For months, I’ve been searching for studies that show the odds of winning the job/career lottery that leads to a glamorous/famous, wealth growth job.
I didn’t find my answer from a study. I found it from a super model, Cameron Russell.
What Cameron Russell says in this YouTube TED video is the real story of dream jobs. She says, “I am standing on this stage because I am a pretty white woman and in my industry we call that a sexy girl. … The real way I became a model is I won a genetic lottery and I became the recipient of a legacy. Saying you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It’s awesome and it’s out of your control and it’s not a career path.” Source: Shine.Yahoo.com
Pay attention to Cameron’s words. She offers wise advice about reality and life.
Before I go on, I want to say that genetics is not the only factor in many dream jobs/professions. Dedication, hard work and persistence also play a part in fields such as sports, acting, the arts, etc.
But, what Cameron has to say holds truth for all of the dream jobs that so many young people chase often destroying his or her future.
It’s okay to have a dream but dream realistically. The odds are against anyone becoming a super model like Cameron Russell, an icon in football, baseball, or basketball, for example. This also applies to acting, the music industry and being a published author no matter what path an author takes such as indie, self-published or traditional.
That is why I believe every child, teen and young person must have a backup plan that is realistic but often leads to a boring job—when dreams fail to materialize—that pays more than working for Wal-Mart, the fast-food industry, cleaning pools, cutting crass, washing dishes, tending bar or waiting on tables.
Being a life-long-learner is important to having a backup plan and this message is for parents. It is your job to make sure your child loves to read and sees that learning is important and not boring and a waste of time. The future belongs to life-long learners.
Education is getting a bad rep from the media in the United States and college educations are under attack. Why?
Who stands to benefit from an ignorant, functionally illiterate population struggling to survive on minimum wages working in insecure jobs?
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
I think you have made a great point or at least inadvertently focused a spotlight on an important issue and why it is there. Turnover in a school or school district may be a red flag—a strong warning sign— that the school board/administration/students are not the easiest to work with or work for [another word would be dysfunctional ].
This could be extended to an entire state since each state has its own department of education that decides policy in that state as directed by the elected politicians from the governor of a state on down. Due to a need to gain votes, religious and/or political agendas tend to rule in such organizations and the winds may shift at any time.
For example, I friend sent me this about the current situation in the high school in Southern California where he now teaches.
I was a public school teacher from 1975 – 2005 and we worked together before dysfunctional administration at our high school and in our school district drove him to quit and find a job in another district that at the time was a better place to work.
But beware of the grass is greener over there syndrome because a drought will kill the green grass leaving behind sweltering heat and dust.
During my thirty years in the classroom, I worked under nine-different principals. Some were great, some good and some horrible.
The horrible ones drove teachers, counselors and VPs out of the schools where they ruled Nazi style and turnover could reach as high as fifty percent in a few years.
Good principals, who are usually a sign of good administration and a sensible school board, tend to hold on to staff.
I mean, how many people quit jobs—any job—with a boss that knows what he or she is doing; a boss that supports his workers in the best possible ways to make the work environment a place where we want to spend twenty to forty years of our lives?
My friend said of this school year (2012 – 2013):
“112 scheduling changes in the first three weeks (the classes he teaches)
“75% of the administrative team is new; a lot of chaos
“50% of the counselors are new; a lot of chaos
“We lost our department chairs, so there is no communication between the teachers and administration
[This high school, he says] “once had a top-notch academic program; however, we are falling apart at the seams; our test scores have flat-lined and they will continue to flat-line because there are just too many new faces at our school; two of our Vice Principals have never been a VP before; they’re nice people, but we have to wade through their learning curve.”
For another example: at the high school where I taught for the last sixteen of the thirty years I was in the classroom as a teacher, we had one new teacher quit at lunch on his first day on the job with two more classes to teach after lunch. During the lunch break, he walked in the principal’s office, tossed his room keys on the desk and said, “If they won’t show some respect for me and attempt to learn, then I refuse to teach them.”
I know from experience, that district did not do a good job creating a positive, supportive educational environment for its teachers because I worked in that district for thirty years. Instead, it was more of a combative environment that did not offer the support teachers wanted or needed to teach.
It is a fact that teachers teach and students learn. However, that is not always the case. Instead, teachers in a toxic educational environment often struggle to teach while too many students make no effort to learn.
Elected School Boards and the administrators they hire should support an environment where teachers may teach and students will learn, and we can learn from two of the best public educations system in the world: Finland and Singapore.
In Finland, the teachers have a strong union and the teachers make the decisions in a supportive educational environment and it works. Parents start teaching children how to read at age three but the first year of school is at age seven.
In Singapore, merit rules. Students must compete academically to earn where they are tracked and the system is heavily tracked based on performance. There is no self-esteem driven educational environment; there is corporal punishment and students may be publicly beat with a bamboo cane if caught breaking strict-rules built to support a merit based education system.
Why can’t we in the United States learn from Finland and Singapore?
Are you aware of James Samuel Coleman’s work? The Coleman report was published in 1966 and is considered the most important education study of the 20th century. In 1970, he served as adviser to President Richard Nixon and, in a “Forbes” article in 1987, he wrote that we cannot blame the deteriorating school system “all on the teachers: the greatest culprits are parents and changes in family structure.”
It feels strange to hear your voice praising teachers for their selflessness, dedication, and love for their students. We’re listening to what you’re saying, but we must admit that we are listening with tilted head and quizzical eye. Why? Because we’ve become accustomed to hearing a very different voice from you.
For the past few years, you’ve been certain that most of society’s problems stem from our schools, more specifically the teachers in those schools. We are lazy and useless, we are only in it for the money, we only teach for the vacation time, we don’t possess the intelligence to teach anyone much of anything, our demands for a respectable wage are selfish, we don’t teach students respect, we are leeches sucking the blood from State coffers, we don’t even work a full day like everyone else, and…
Under President George W. Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) increased the Department of Education’s (DOE) budget from $46 Billion to $60 Billion (In 2012, the budget reached $68.1 Billion). For a comparison, under Bush, the Department of Defense (DOD) budget went from $308.9 Billion in 2001 to $729.6 Billion in 2008—an increase of $420.7 Billion compared to the $14 Billion increase for the DOE.
Meanwhile, in 2012, the federal deficit was $1.327 Trillion and the Interest on the debt was $224.8 Billion.
But the GOP wants to save money by abolishing the DOE while increasing the budget for the DOD. I’m confused because this makes no sense, and I wonder what the real reason is. What are they not telling us?
The NCLBA was enacted due to an act of Congress, and Congress represents the fifty states. The NCLBA gave the DOE more responsibilities to monitor public education in all fifty states.
When congress voted and authorized the NCLBA that gave the DOE more responsibility and more funding on May 23, 2001, the House of Representatives voted 384 – 45, and the Senate voted 91 – 8 in favor of the act.
In 2001, the 107th Congress had a Senate that was split 50-50 and the House of Representatives had 221 Republicans to 212 Democrats.
In truth, it was an imperfect bill incapable of solving the challenges of public education in part because it put the blame and responsibility on the shoulders of teachers and none on parents and students.
In 2001, the Republican Party held majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate with a GOP president in the White House.
If you were to read the history of the DOE, you would discover it was created in 1867 to collect information on schools and teaching that would help the States establish effective school systems. Over the last 145 years, this goal of gathering information on what works in education continues. Source: ed.gov
In fact, in 1867, in the 40th Congress, the GOP held a vast majority in both Houses: 42 to 11 in the Senate and 143 to 49 in the House.
As you have now learned, the GOP, as the majority, created the DOE in 1867, and played a crucial role increasing its responsibility in 2001, so why has the Republican Party in recent years set a goal to abolish the DOE?
Think Progress.org reported, “As recently as 1996, the Republican Party platform declared, ‘The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.’ … Now, a new wave of Republicans (along with many old hard-line conservatives) are trying to number its days once again.” …
“A comprehensive review of the voting records and statements of Republican incumbents and candidates finds that there are 111 GOPers (Republicans) who support shutting down the Department of Education,” Think Progress said.
Yet, in 145 years, the Supreme Court of the United States has never questioned the Constitutionality of the DOE and the mandate it was given by more than one act of Congress.
For a comparison, the federal government only had 2.8 million civilian employees in 2010 and 25.6% of federal civilian employees worked for the DOD while only about two tenths of one percent (0.17%) work for the DOE. In addition, the DOE’s share of the federal budget is 5%, while the DOD’s budget has increased to about 55% of the federal pie.
If the DOE were abolished, public education in the US would lose its eyes and ears, and abolishing the DOE would do nothing to stem the tide of the national debt. It would literally be a drop in the ocean.
In addition, public education in the US is often compared as inferior to Finland’s schools that are ranked as one of the best public educational systems in the world. Compared to the top thirty-three ranked countries for 2009, Finland was 2nd in Reading, 1st in Math, and 1st in Science. The US was ranked 33rd, 27th, and 22nd respectively.
If we want to learn something from Finland, it helps to know that in the Finnish Government, the Ministry of Education and Culture is responsible for developing educational, science, sport and youth policies and international cooperation in these fields. The Ministry also allows the teachers’ union a role in decision making on duties, conditions of work, salary scales and instruction time. However, in the US, teachers are often not part of the decision making process and teachers’ unions are under constant attack and criticism.
It is obvious that as long as the US has fifty different educational systems each based on conflicting political and religious agendas, then the US educational system will never compete equally with countries such as Finland. If we are to compete with Finland, we must learn from what they do–not just compare rankings and blame our teachers and teachers’ unions.
Therefore, why are hard-line conservative types taking aim at the DOE in the US? (For example: think of the Tea Party that was founded and supported in large part by two of the four Koch brothers and the Wal-Mart, Walton family that has pushed hard for voucher schools. This list also includes fundamentalist, evangelical, born again Christians that want the schools to teach creationism instead of evolution and science.)
What is the political agenda of these factions of the Republican Party? Why do these factions in the GOP want to cripple and blind the public education system in the United States leaving it fractured in fifty different pieces? What will these hard-line conservatives and capitalists gain if they succeed?
The answer may be found, in part, from these facts: In the US, there are about 16,000 school districts and approximately 49 million students attending more than 98,000 public schools and 28,000 private schools. To pay for this, the fifty states raise (mostly through local and state taxes) and spend almost one trillion dollars annually for public and private funded education. The budget of the DOE represents about 6.8% of that total. The DOE is the guard dog that gathers information on education in all fifty states and reports to Congress and the president what it learns. If any states or school districts are found to be in violation of laws enacted by the Congress, then the President of the United States is duty bound by his or her oath of office to protect and defend those laws.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 