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Category Archives: propaganda and lies

What if there’s no one to vote for in the 2014 elections because they all sold out?

There’s so much at stake in this election that I refuse to vote for the lessor of two evils. When I sat down to go over the California Statewide Direct Primary ballot information, my goal was to research every candidate to discover where they stood regarding President Obama’s Common Core Standards.

But first, I decided to see where the California Teacher’s Associations stood on this issue and was shocked when I discovered this page on the CTA Website about the Common Core Standards.

Just in case CTA takes the page down or edits it after this post appears on my Blog and/or my snail mail letter arrives, I’ve taken snapshots of it. I also wrote and sent snail mail letters to Dean E. Vogel, the president of CTA and a copy to Tom Torlakson, the California State Superintendent of Public Education, who’s up for reelection and just lost my vote. Visit the CTA page that supports Obama’s national (and unconstitutional) Common Core Standards (click on link in previous paragraph), scroll to the bottom and you’ll discover the embedded YouTube video that caused Torlakson to lose my vote. The rest of this post is the paper letter that I mailed the old fashioned way.

Dear Mr. Vogel, CTA President:

Regarding President Obama’s Common Core Standards:

From 1975 – 2005, I was a public school teacher in Rowland Unified School District, and I belonged to ARE/CTA for most of those thirty years. Often working 60 to 100 hours a week as a classroom teacher, there were times that I also walked the picket lines during contract negotiations and volunteered as an ARE Nogales High School rep.

Just because I’ve been retired from teaching since 2005 doesn’t mean I don’t keep up with current events in public education, and this morning I decided to see where CTA stood regarding President Obama’s Common Core Standards and was extremely disappointed to discover that CTA was selling its teachers out.

When I visited CTA’s Website and read the page about the Common Core State Standards, I thought that Bill Gates or Arne Duncan had offered so much money to CTA that the California Teachers Association decided to stab its own members in the back.

Do you have any idea what’s going on nationally regarding Obama’s Common Core Standards and the Machiavellian methods of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as he promotes private sector (and often corrupt) non-union, for-profit Charter schools over public schools and encourages states to use the results of the Common Core Standardized test that students take to judge if public school teachers are bad or good—then fire teachers deemed bad and close public schools all based on the results of test scores.

I urge CTA to stop supporting President Obama’s Common Core Standards and return to supporting the standards that California started developing in 1999 taking the time to implement and adjust as needed with many stakeholders (teachers, parents and students) involved in the process.

In addition, I suggest you read Diane Ravitch’s “Reign of Error” and follow her Blog at http://dianeravitch.net/ to become educated about the travesty of President Obama’s Common Core Standards.

Note: Seeing the video of Tom Torlakson supporting the Common Core Standards on CTA’s website caused him to lose my vote for the office of California State Superintendent of Public Education. I refuse to vote for anyone from the GOP and will not vote for any Democratic candidates unless they clearly come out in support of public school teachers and against President Obama’s Common Core Standards. The public schools are not broken and the only reform needed is for the federal government to butt out of the public schools and to let public school teachers decide what needs reforming with the help of parents and students. That’s what they do in Finland, and that’s what we should do in the US—treat teachers with respect and trust!

In fact, because CTA publicly supports the national Common Core Standards, I can’t trust any candidate CTA endorses, and I may end up with no one to vote for. Why vote if the United States is being sold to a handful of greedy billionaire oligarchs and corporate CEO plutocrats.

cc: Tom Torlakson, California State Superintendent of Public Education

_______________________

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

His 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!”

4 Comments

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

Tags: Common Core Standards in California, CTA supports Common Core

Veteran Medical Care through VA Neglected by Obama Administration and Congress

13 May

What would the U.S. do without its volunteer army? What would happen to corporate profits if Americans refused to join and fight the wars that profit the few while many die and are wounded? To understand what I mean, I suggest you read this post on my Soulful Veteran Blog @ http://thesoulfulveteran.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/i-was-never-a-pow-but-what-about-the-next-american-war/

Think about those questions as you read the May 20, 2014 update of the scandal at the VA, and then ask this question: What would the United States do if its public school teachers—all 3.3 million—refused to teach until they were allowed to do their jobs without fake education reformers from Washington DC interfering in the process of educating our youth? I’m talking about Arne Duncan and billionaire plutocrats like BIll Gates and the Walton family who seem to own the White House and Congress? It seems that the U.S. can’t afford to treat the active military and its veterans the way they treat the nation’s public school teachers.

I urge both NEA and AFT (the two major teacher unions) to call a national walk-out day for all public school teachers across the nation to grab the country’s attention and demand change at the Department of Education by first getting rid of Arne Duncan and ending the Common Core testing as a way to evaluate teachers and close public schools. If the American Legion is willing to stand up and fight for America’s military veterans (and I’m one of them and my medical provider is the VA), then the two teacher unions must stand up and fight for America’s teachers! Pick a school day and every public school teacher in the country calls in sick because they are sick and tired of being treated like trash.

UPDATE May 20, 2014

The top official for veterans’ health care resigned Friday, as the Obama administration and Congress begin to respond to a growing political firestorm over allegations of treatment delays and falsified records at veterans’ hospitals nationwide. The House has scheduled a vote for Wednesday on legislation that would give Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki greater authority to fire or demote senior executives and administrators at the agency and its 152 medical Centers. (You may read the rest of this report @ Military.com http://www.military.com/veterans-report/steps-taken-to-address-va-firestorm?ESRC=vr.nl)

Original Post from May 13

What’s going on? First the public schools and now the VA!

First: Under President Clinton and a Congress dominated by a GOP majority, the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 that was meant to protect the United States from another Great Depression was repealed in 1999 leading to the Great Recession of 2007-08 under President G. W. Bush, the 2nd worse global financial disaster since the Great Depression.

Second: President G. W. Bush—with approval from a GOP dominated Congress—enacts the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and the U.S. Government declares war on its own Public Schools under the false claims that the public schools are failing when they aren’t.

Third: President Obama, with overwhelming approval from Congress enacts Race to the Top in 2009 along with the Common Core Standards as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act escalating the White House’s war on Public Education to Machiavellian levels.

Fourth: In early April 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court—dominated by a conservative majority—wipes out the overall limit on what a wealthy donor can give to political parties and federal candidates during an election cycle with the McCutcheon decision. This ruling reinforced the unwritten iron law that now prevails in American politics: Pay to Play

Fifth: A very real threat to Net Neutrality. Network neutrality is basically the principle that Internet access providers—[including] companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast—shouldn’t discriminate in how they handle traffic on the Internet. And without this neutrality, the Internet also becomes “Pay to Play” or vanish into obscurity.

Sixth: Now medical care through the Veterans Administration (VA)! Since the late 1990s under President Bill Clinton, the VA became an efficient model medical care system, and President Obama can’t reform something that works so what’s the best way to change that? The answer: make sure it needs reforming by introducing corruption through the VA’s top leaders.

The Obama Administration and the Congress seem hell bent to privatize government. The public schools are in the middle of an all-out war with the federal government to turn education over to private sector Charter schools that are riddled with corruption and mostly worse than the public schools. It also seems that the VA is under attack as services and support has been eroding under the Obama White House and Congress.

Does this mean the VA has also been targeted to be privatized just like the public schools, prison systems, and even the military? After all, if the VA failed to provide adequate services, then the White House will have an excuse to demand reforms and that usually means privatization.

The American Legion.org reports: “At a May 5 press conference in Indianapolis, American Legion National Commander Daniel M. Dellinger called for the resignation of Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki (appointed by President Obama in 2009), as well as Robert Petzel (appointed in 2010) and Allison Hickey (appointed in 2011), VA’s undersecretaries for health and benefits, respectively. It was a decision the Legion arrived at gradually, after years of support. …

“Dellinger noted two of the most recent revelations that finally convinced him that top VA leadership in Washington needed to change: allegations that the Phoenix VA medical center kept a secret list of patients waiting months for medical care, which was linked by CNN to preventable deaths of about 40 veterans; and findings by a VA investigation that workers at the VA clinic in Fort Collins, Colo., had been instructed on how to falsify appointment records. …

“The American Legion expects when such errors and lapses are discovered, that they are dealt with swiftly and that the responsible parties are held accountable,” Dellinger said. “This has not happened at the Department of Veterans Affairs. There needs to be a change, and that change needs to occur at the top.”

The American Legion may demand changes within the VA but the problem originates from the White House and a neo-liberal president and his administration, who have clearly signaled that they are allied with neo-conservatives in the Republican Party with a common goal to privatize most if not all of government services.

Once the VA, the public schools, the military and the prisons are turned over to private sector, for profit corporations, does that mean the Constitution and Bill of Rights will be meaningless. After all, what the Founding Fathers wrote in 1776 was meant to protect all U.S. citizens from their own elected government and not private sector corporations (that didn’t exist in the 18^th century) run by billionaire oligarchs and CEO autocrats.

For instance, the 1st Amendment freedom of speech protections only protects Americans from their elected federal and state governments. The 2nd Amendment’s right to own and bear arms also protects America’s citizens only from our elected governments—the feds and the states can’t legally take away a citizen’s right to own firearms.

But what happens when there is only a puppet government owned by the wealthiest 1% of Americans and all federal and state services have been turned over to, for instance, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Koch brothers, the (Wall-Mart) Walton family, and Hedge Fund billionaire’s on Wall Street?

Imagine what will happen if the IRS is turned over to Microsoft or Rupert Murdock’s Media Corp; if the U.S. Forest Service is privatized and turned over to the Koch brothers, and if President Obama is successful in doing away with Internet Neutrality.

Also Recommended:

President Obama’s Failure of Leadership

Who crowned Bill Gates the Emperor of Education?

Education Bloggers Network Supporting the Public Schools

The compulsory Common Core standards and the facts behind the Controversy

The challenge of teaching At-Risk Kids reveals why Charter schools are abandoning them

The successful history of—and the threat to—Public Education in the United States

_______________________

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

His 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 May 13, 2014 in American Public Schools, government, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies

Tags: corruption in the veterans administration, Internet Neutrality under attack by the Obama White House, The Public Schools under attack by the Obama White House, the VA under attack by Obama's White House

The challenge of teaching At-Risk Kids reveals why Charter schools are abandoning them

10 May

The full post on this issue may be found at EdGator: Education Headlines from Everywhere and it’s a MUST READ piece—that is if you are interested in education, our children and the truth. What I offer in this post are a few pull quotes from that longer piece at EdGator, and two embedded videos you won’t find on that Blog.

This video should be required viewing for every American citizen.

First: KIPP is an acronym for “Knowledge is Power Program”, and Wiki tells us this about KIPP: “a nationwide network of free open-enrollment college-preparatory schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. KIPP schools are usually established under state charter school laws and KIPP is America’s largest network of charter schools. Its headquarters are in San Francisco”

But KIPP is not free, because the taxpayer pays for KIPP, and what are tax payers getting for their money?

EdGator says: 40% of KIPP’s African-American male students who enter in sixth grade disappear before graduation. Some teachers who leave KIPP also have serious concerns and criticism about the chain’s pedagogical practices. …

If every traditional school becomes KIPP, what happens to the kids who won’t work hard and be nice? If KIPP can’t send those kids away to a waiting public school system, then where will they go? Will they simply be denied an education? …

Because here’s the plain fact: KIPP’s motto has a third clause written in invisible ink that no one wants to talk about: “Work Hard, Be Nice, or Go Away.”

KIPP doesn’t seem to have an answer for those kids who won’t work hard or be nice. KIPP has the luxury of washing its hands of them.

This is a pitch but worth watching to get everyone thinking about teaching at-risk kids.

Note: Teachers today are challenged daily by the task of “Educating At-Risk Youth” who appear to be extremely apathetic at times. When teachers fail, the fake education reformers blame them, want to fire them and close their schools and then replace them with corporate operated schools that fail too—but we seldom if ever hear about those failures that are swept under the media rug. The truth is that the fake education reformers are doing worse than the public schools as they take over and steal from the taxpayer every penny they can get.

_______________________

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!”

President Obama’s Failure of Leadership

08 May

Recently, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing reported on the release of a dozen years of 12th grade NAEP scores revealing the test-based accountability era of G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top with its seriously flawed and Machiavellian Common Core Standards has had no discernible effect on the test scores of seniors.

“How much more evidence do federal and state policy-makers need that driving schooling through standardized exams does not increase educational quality?” asked Fair Test Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer. “It is time to abandon failed test-and-punish policies and adopt assessments that have been shown to improve teaching and learning.”

Second, I read What, Me Worry? By Kristin Sainani writing for a Publication of the Stanford Alumni Association. The Stanford piece discussed two kinds of stress: Good Stress vs. Bad Stress, and how chronic stress shrinks the hippocampus (one of the brain’s key memory centers), impairs cognitive function and increases risk of mental illness.

Sainani quotes Kelly McGonigal, PhD, a health psychologist, author and Stanford Lecturer who says, “I’ve become even more convinced that the type of ‘stress’ that is toxic has more to do with social status, social isolation and social rejections. It’s not just having a hard life that seems to be toxic, but it’s some of the social poisons that can go alone with stigma or poverty.”

Echoing McGonigal, Robert Sapolsky—the Stanford John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and of Neurosurgery—adds: “I’d say that, overall, the most corrosive type of social stress in our Western world is low socioeconomic status—i.e., poverty.”

At this point, you might be scratching your head wondering what Sainani’s Stanford piece has to do with President Obama’s “Failure of Leadership”. For an answer, I’ll refer you to Chapter 10 in Diane Ravitch’s “Reign of Error”. The title of that chapter is: How Poverty Affects Academic Achievement.

Ravitch’s chapter starts with: “Reformers often say that poverty is an excuse for ‘bad teachers.’ If all teachers were great, then all children would score well on tests, and there would be no achievement gaps between children of different groups.”

Sainani’s Stanford piece based on highly reputable scientific studies of stress and its effects on the brain proves beyond a doubt that Ravitch was right and the fake education reformers were wrong. Children who live in poverty are already under “Bad Stress” and long days of test prep followed by flawed and stressful Common Core testing only adds more stress to children living in poverty and there are 16 million of them in the United States.

Third: there is a popular myth—due to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the fake education reformers promoting the Charter school sector with (cherry picked) misleading facts—that Charter schools are superior to public schools, but the second study out of Stanford (the 1st was in 2009) proved that myth wrong. Stanford’s Credo Center for Research and Education Outcomes National Charter School Study of 2013 revealed that for reading, 19% of Charters were worse than the public schools; 56% were no different and only 25% were better. For math, 31% were worse; 40% were no different and only 29% were better. It was mentioned that this was an improvement over the 2009 study but that improvement was—in part—because of the bad Charters that were closed after the results of the 2009 Stanford study was released.

How long has this Charter movement been with us? longer than twenty years

In addition, The Public School Advantage Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski published by University of Chicago Press (2013) used sophisticated analytical tools to discover that even though private school children arrive in kindergarten a little bit more academically prepared than their public school peers, public school students make up the difference over the course of elementary school.” The Lubienskis also revealed that traditional public schools hold a slight edge over the Charter sector.

Last, there’s the fact that private sector Charter schools supported by the same tax revenue used to support the public schools may be opaque with their finances while public schools must be transparent with every penny spent, and Bill Moyers and Company reported Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste.

Sabrina Joy Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education, told BillMoyers.com, “Our report shows that over $100 million has been lost to fraud and abuse in the charter industry, because there is virtually no proactive oversight system in place to thwart unscrupulous or incompetent charter operators before they cheat the public.” The actual amount of fraud and abuse the report uncovered totaled $136 million, and that was just in the 15 states they studied.

In addition, an NBC4 investigation reported: “In 2013, 17 charter schools in Columbus (Ohio) closed, joining 150 other charter schools around Ohio. It’s a failure rate of 29 percent. $1.4 billion has been spent since 2005 through school year 2012-2013 on charter schools that have never gotten any higher grade than an F or a D.”

What does all this show us? It reveals that both Presidents G. W. Bush and Barack Obama’s fake education reform movement through No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Common Core Standards have failed miserably, but President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, continue to ignore the mountain of growing evidence while promoting the corporate, for profit Charter school sector.

In conclusion, this is more than a failure of leadership. It’s a Constitutional crime.

The oath of office of the President of the United States: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The White House is not a platform for pushing the agenda of a few powerful and wealthy oligarchs while ignoring overwhelming evidence that proves that agenda wrong. The President’s job is to serve all the people by defending the Constitution and not ignoring it.

_______________________

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

His 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 May 8, 2014 in American Public Schools, Education, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing

Tags: comparing charter schools to public schools, Diane Ravitch, poverty and stress, President Obama's Failure of Leadership, the failure of the charter school sector

Mother Crusader discovers who’s behind the agenda to profit off Newark, New Jersey’s children?

07 May

UPDATE: May 13, 2014

In a major setback for the Chris Christie administration, City Councilman Ras Baraka was elected Mayor of Newark tonight with 54% of the vote. School closings were a major issue in the election.

Over on Blogspot.com, Mother Crusader (click link to read her full post) discovers that billionaires are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the mayor’s race in Newark, New Jersey to defeat Ras Baraka, because these fake education reformers want to continue to shut down public schools and profit from taxes meant to teach our children.

Mother Crusader says, “Never intended to become a parent advocate until I watched the great schools in my little town come under attack. The more I learned about what was happening the more I read. The more I read the more I saw how what is happening here is tied to towns across not only New Jersey, but the country. And now I’m in the thick of it, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing.”

Mother Crusader reveals: “The Newark mayoral race is heating up with less than a week to go, and there has been plenty of discussion about an influx of cash to the Jeffries campaign and questions as to where the money is coming from.

The group has raised more than $1.3 million. Its donors include several financial executives and an $850,000 donation from Education Reform Now, a politically active education reform organization, according to its election filing report.

Newark First has spent almost $425,000 on the election, the report says.

Click Mother Crusader to discover what her investigative reporting has revealed about this corrupt attempt to steal an election from Ras Baraka.

Who Crowned Bill Gates the Emperor of Education?

01 May

Over on Mercedes Schneider’s Blog, she tackles and criticizes Bill Gates view of the Common Core State Standards.

“Bill defines standards as a ‘list of what kids are supposed to know’ at each grade level.”

But Mercedes, Bill Gates is correct in his thinking—for computer programs stored on hard drives—not children. After all, in his Microsoft world where he’s the Emperor, if he pays programmers to write a computer program, the finished product better work or else, right? And the Emperor did pay more than $2 billion to create the Common Core standards and convince the states to accept them.

Bill Gates must honestly think that teachers are incompetent when the same process doesn’t work between teachers (the Emperor must see teachers as programmers) and children (as programmed computer hard drives) who don’t know the standards on the Common Core curriculum program that Gates paid for.

I wonder if Emperor Gates knows that a child’s brain doesn’t work like a computer program on a hard drive, because children don’t all live in the same environment with equal and supportive parents. In fact, teachers don’t teach the same way and every child’s DNA is different along with how they learn.

For the Gates’ list of Common Core Standards to work, every child would have to grow up in a similar common environment with parents who love reading, start reading to and with their child by at least age three and support teachers every step of the way from pre-school to graduation; from high school and beyond. Every child would also have to have an equally efficient short and long term memory (the same hard drive), and there could not be any learning disabilities to get in the way. This common environment would also include the same nutritious, brain food diet for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with no sugary sodas—only safe-to-drink water.

No parent could be abusive in any way—a drug addict, an alcoholic, a chronic gambler, illiterate and every family would have to earn a livable wage—meaning no poverty.

In addition, every parent would have to attend parent conferences with their children’s teachers and keep an eye on grades so if any grade fell below a C, the parent would call the same day and schedule an appointment with the teacher to find out why it happened and what they could do to fix the problem since failing grades are usually caused by children who—for instance—don’t pay attention, hate to read, don’t work in class, have lousy diets, don’t get enough sleep, watch too much TV, play too many video games, don’t cooperate, cause disruptions in class, don’t ask questions or seldom if ever read outside of class or do homework.

Learn from a 15-Year-Old how dangerous Emperor Bill Gates really is!

Emperor Gates, unlike a computer programmer, the greatest teacher can’t update a child’s memory with a patch to make sure the child learns your list of Common Core standards—that is if the child learned and remembered what the teacher taught in the first place.

For the Gates’ “Common Core list” to work, every child would have to arrive at school equally eager and willing to learn what teachers teach, and every parent would have to consider Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” as a role model and not an abusive, tiger parent—and that ain’t going to happen in the United States.

I have a question for Emperor Gates:

Since when did the electorate agree that you should use your great wealth to decide how this country should educate the 49 million+ children who attend public schools while ignoring the 7.4+ million who attend private schools?

I want to ask President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan the same question. I thought the Constitution—the law of the land—written by the Founding Fathers of the United States made this sort of thing a crime.

In conclusion: It seems that every week—this has been going on for years—a new update arrives from Microsoft to patch something wrong with Microsoft’s operating system. Considering these constant flaws that keep appearing in programs written by Microsoft programmers, Emperor Bill Gates should be the last person to advise the Obama White House how fix the unbroken public schools that really only need him and the other fake education reformers to butt out. The best people to patch anything in the public schools are teachers supported by everyone else, because that’s they were trained for, and that’s what Finland does.

_______________________

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

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 May 1, 2014 in child abuse, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, Parenting, politics, propaganda and lies, Public School, Standardized Testing, Teaching

Tags: Bill Gates, Bill Gates and the Common Core Standards, Common Core Standards, What's wrong with the Common Core standards

Cherry picking facts without lying to make the bad look good or the good look bad

26 Apr

It’s easy to manipulate facts. The fake Ed reforms do it all the time to make the public schools look bad, and even some public schools cherry pick facts to look good. Technically what both sides share with the public are not lies, but they don’t paint a holistic and/or honest picture either.

For instance, I checked several on-line accountability school report cards for the high school (I will not provide the links or name of that school here) where I taught for the last 16 years of the thirty I was a classroom teacher (1975 – 2005).

For instance, that high school reported that the 2012 graduation rate was more than 89% for the 449 (from a class of 502) seniors who graduated on time that year. That’s way above the national average of 78.2% for 2010 (the highest national average on-time graduation rate in U.S. history), and the reported average for California that was even better that year at 78.5% (reported by the L. A. Times).

Why do so many Americans earn their high school diploma between the age of 18 and 25?

The high school’s accountability report card that’s posted on-line shows for 2011-12 that there were:

545 students in 9th grade
631in 10th
581 in 11th (This is the year most students turn 16 and by law they may drop out of school—did you notice the 8% drop from 10th grade and an additional 14% drop by the end of 12th grade)
502 in 12th grade.

But nowhere is there any information about how large the 2012 graduating class was four years earlier in 9th grade. To discover that, I had to find the on-line accountability report card for 2008-09, and I did. When you know a school’s name, Google is great—most of the time.

During the 2008-09 school year, there were 659 students in 9th grade, but four years later only 502 were still there. Where did the other 157 go? Did they move, drop dead, drop out, transfer to other schools? Why isn’t there an explanation? 659 students started as 9th graders in the class of 2012 but only 449 graduated—that’s an almost 32% drop.

It probably would have been more realistic to say: The on-time graduation rate for 2012 was 68.2% when taking into account the number of students who started in 9th grade four years earlier. Then there should be an explanation of what happened to the other 210 kids, but that might not look good for the school district. Instead, administrators at the district level probably went through the figures—with legal advice to make sure they weren’t breaking any laws—and cherry picked facts that end up looking better than the holistic story.

And of course the fake Ed reformers never mention how many adults in the U.S. have earned a high school degree or its equivalent by age 25. For 2013, that number was 88.15%.

The reality is that everyone doesn’t learn at the same speed; doesn’t mature at the same pace, and better late is better than never.

Instead, the fake Ed reformers that include President Obama and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have mandated through Race to the Top legislation that every child must be college ready by age 17/18 and if they aren’t those schools and their teachers will be crucified in the media and labeled as failures in a world where no country has ever achieved that goal in recorded history.

But how can anyone place blame for those 157 kids who vanished, because you can’t teach a kid who isn’t there and you can’t stop them from leaving if they want to go?

There’s also another fact that the fake Ed reformers don’t report holistically. You will hear them shouting that the US has a high school dropout epidemic but nowhere will they say that in 1970, the high school dropout rate was 14.6%, but by 2011 it had fallen to 7% according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Recent dropout rates by race (reported by the National Center for Education Statistics):

Asian/Pacific Islanders: 3.4%
Whites: 5%
Blacks: 7%
Hispanic 14%

Recent on-time graduation rates by race (did you know that the on-time high school graduation rate in the U.S. in 1900 was 6.4% and by 1950, it was 59%):

Asian: 93.5% (by age 25 to 29 that number reaches 96%)
White: 83% (95%)
Black: 66.1% (89%)
Hispanic: 71.4% (75%)

Does that look like an epidemic?

_______________________

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

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 April 26, 2014 in American Public Schools, Education, Lloyd Lofthouse, Obama's Race to the Top, propaganda and lies, Public School

Tags: cherry picking facts to twist the truth, high school drop our rate in the United States, how to mislead the public, on-time high school graduation rate in the United States, the importance of graduating from high school

The Truth Behind “Waiting for Superman” and the myth of Teacher Tenure

22 Apr

FIRST:

Watch the trailer for the longer documentary that sets the record straight. Then if you want to learn more, please watch the full length version (scroll down to find it).

SECOND:

Then there’s “Fact-checking Waiting for Superman” that appeared at the Huffington Post.

Fact-checking Waiting for ‘Superman’: Documentary or Urban Myth?

“We simply cannot trust the corporate oligarchy currently making policies for our schools to create a fair evaluation system, including those who backed Waiting for ‘Superman‘, given their proclivity to misuse and distort data, as shown by the inaccurate figures cited in the film.”

“Rather than a documentary, perhaps the movie (Waiting for Superman) should be re-categorized, with an appropriate disclaimer, as an urban myth.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/factchecking-waiting-for-_b_802900.html

THIRD:

Full length version of “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman”

FOURTH: Recently I had a debate with an individual, an acquaintance, who believed the schools were broken and the only way to fix them was to take away all teacher legal, due process rights so any teacher could be fired without due process. That way, the schools would be able to remove so-called incompetent teachers without the burden of proof.

That’s why I suggest you also read: The Myth of Teacher Tenure published by The Washington Post

“School districts consistently win the vast majority of the court decisions concerning the involuntary cessation of a teacher’s employment based on incompetency. In a comprehensive canvassing of court decisions based on teacher evaluation for competency, I found that the defendant districts prevailed in more than a 3-to-1 ratio, and that there was no significant difference between the outcomes for nontenured as compared to tenured teachers.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-myth-of-teacher-tenure.html

_______________________

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

His 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!”

4 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on April 22, 2014 in American Public Schools, Education, government, NCLB, Obama's Race to the Top, politics, propaganda and lies, Teaching

Tags: the myth of teacher tenure, the real threat to democratic public education in the United States, The truth behind Waiting for Superman, what is Common Core all about

What happens to women’s rights if the public schools are abolished?

17 Apr

The title of this post was a question I wanted to ask four authors on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival held at USC, but when I walked to the mike, I did an information dump about the fake Ed reformers war on public education instead; mentioned Diane Ravitch, her book and her blog; was challenged by the moderator, but was saved by an ESL teacher in the audience I didn’t know and still don’t.

This all happened on Saturday, April 12, after my wife and I arrived at USC’s campus after walking three miles from the downtown Los Angeles hotel where we were staying. It’s amazing how much the glitz and modern polish of downtown Los Angeles changes in a few miles. It almost felt as if we were leaving the concrete and glass Garden of Eden for a desert of fast food littered with car dealerships.

My wife was scheduled to be on a panel at 3:30, “Memoir: The Places that Makes Us” in a lecture hall located in the Andrus Gerontology Center. But three hours earlier, we went to another panel called “Nonfiction: The Evolution of Feminism” from 12:30 to 1:30 held in USC’s Taper Hall.

Robin Abcarian, an LA Times columnist, was the moderator with Nancy L. Cohen, M.G. Lord, and Myra MacPherson making up the panel of feminist authors.

Nancy L. Cohen is the author of “Delirium, the Politics of Sex in America”.

M. G. Lord is the author of “The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice”.

Lord’s segment starts at 28:00 if you don’t want to watch the entire video.

Myra MacPherson is the author of “The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age”.

When we sat down shortly before the moderated conversation between the panelists started, I wasn’t planning on asking any questions. Then during the conversation, Myra MacPherson mentioned the Koch brothers funding the far-right conservative efforts that are rolling back some of the gains the equal rights movement for women achieved during the 20th century.

When I heard that, I sat straighter because these billionaires were also involved in the war against the public schools in the US. If the billionaires won, the democratically run public schools that have been around for more than a hundred years would be closed and the almost $700 billion in annual taxes that support those schools and more than four million school teachers would be turned over to CEO’s and corporations; democratically elected school boards would be abolished, parents would have no say, and these corporate-run schools paid for by the taxpayers would operate without government oversight. The transparent democratically run public schools would be flushed down the sewer of history and the opaque corporate schools would replace them—corporations run by Bill Gates, Rupert Murdock, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg along with several Hedge Fund billionaires—who are in it only for the money—among other vultures. And parents would have no say what these corporate run schools taught their children; no control over how their children would be treated or how the tax dollars were spent.

When I was standing in front of that mike talking about the war on the public schools, the moderator, Robin Abcarian, interrupted me—which was right because I was off topic—a woman sitting in the crowded lecture hall behind me leaped up and shouted, “It has everything to do with it!”

Abcarian then invited the ESL teacher to the mike and I was thankful to sit down and shut up so I could cool off. It turned out that the woman who saved me teaches in a Los Angeles Unified elementary school, and when she reached the mike she made a connection between what was happening to the public schools and the roll back on women’s rights in the US.

Later—after returning home—I discovered that “in recent years, the number of public schools segregating their students by sex has ballooned, despite mounting evidence that single-sex programs don’t improve academic performance and instead perpetuate sex stereotypes.” (aclu.org)

I still don’t have an answer to my question: What happens to women’s rights if the public schools are abolished?

What I found really interesting was the fact that there wasn’t one panel at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival about the war being waged against the public schools by the fake education reformers even though there have been several books out recently on the subject loaded with facts proving that the public schools aren’t failing and don’t need drastic reforming.

What we are hearing in the traditional media is what the fake education reformers want us to hear. Why isn’t the media reporting on this controversy? Why is the resistance against the fake education reformers mostly being ignored?

_______________________

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

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

The Walking Dead and their Whipping Boys

13 Apr

Thanks to the fake Ed reformers—for instance, Bill Gates, President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (there are many others)—teachers have become the 21st century’s whipping boys.

Are you familiar with the definition of “Whipping Boy”?

Merriam-Webster.com says, “Whipping boy: someone or something that often is blamed for problems caused by other people.”

In one of the internet forums I belong to, the following pull quote was posted in a discussion.

“Enrolling students of color in ‘rigorous’ academic programs that hold them to high academic standards is one way that educators attempt to close achievement gaps and disrupt the self-perpetuating nature of low expectations.” This quote was pulled from a fake Ed reformer website.

When I read it the first time, I smiled wryly and wanted to laugh but there were too many painful memories from the thirty years I worked as a classroom teacher.

I taught mostly students of color who lived in poverty and/or belonged to violent street gangs and no matter how rigorous the academic program, too many of these kids didn’t give a rat’s ass about what some distant autocrat or billionaire expected teachers to teach.

In fact, I was often criticized by parents and kids for demanding too much of my students. Some of these kids who refused to learn called me “mean” and one or two would ask what I’d do if “they jumped me.” Another excuse often used by some kids who did little to nothing was that I was “boring”, and because I was “boring”, they didn’t have to do the work.

However, that didn’t stop a “few” in every class from earning A’s and B’s and doing the quality of work I demanded of them.

It doesn’t matter how fantastic a teacher teaches, there is no way to force a kid to bring their book to class, pay attention, read anything, or do the work. For these kids, the results of standardized tests will always be dismal.

Those who don’t work, well, don’t—LEARN. And the ones who don’t learn (because they didn’t do the work not because the teacher didn’t teach) are the ones who get the lower standardized test scores that will get teachers fired and schools closed.

There was a term that some veteran teachers at the high school where I taught used to describe these students who refused to learn: “the walking dead”. One teacher who had been teaching for more than forty years used this term in a staff meeting and administration criticized him severely. Every teacher at the high school signed a petition in his defense because we all knew what he said was true.

In reality, teachers are the whipping boys for the parents who didn’t support them and the kids, “the walking dead”, who refuse to cooperate, read and study. Teachers are also the whipping boys for the fake Ed reformers.

The only thing that happens to the kids who wouldn’t cooperate is that they might not earn a high school diploma by age 17/18. About twenty percent don’t but as they mature and go out into the work world and learn the value of that high school degree, the number of adults in American who have earned a high school degree or its equivalent by age 24 reaches more than 90%—we won’t hear that from the fake Ed Reformers. There’s an old saying, “Better late than never,” but that isn’t stopping the fake Ed reformers from demanding that so-called failing teachers be fired and failing schools be closed.

The failure rate in my class was based on the work and not on tests. About 5% (on average) earned A’s, because they did most or all of the work, and 30% to 50% earned F’s for not working. Instead, some warmed a seat and a few caused a lot of trouble making it challenging for me to teach the 50% to 70% (it varied from class to class) who were willing to do some, most or all of the work.

I was one of those “whipping boys” for most of the thirty years I taught, but today I’m retired and angry, because I worked 60 to 100 hour weeks on average challenging my students to close that “achievement gap”.

Why is this happening? Why are teachers being used as whipping boys?

One answer may be: In a stock market prospectus uncovered by education author Jonathan Kozol, the Montgomery Securities group explains to Corporate America the lure of privatizing education. Kozol writes: “The education industry,” according to these analysts, “represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control” that have either voluntarily opened or, they note in pointed terms, have “been forced” to open up to private enterprise. Indeed, they write, “the education industry represents the largest market opportunity” since health-care services were privatized during the 1970’s…. From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “The K–12 market is the Big Enchilada.” (IS Review.org)

How much money are we talking about? The annual appropriation for the entire Federal Department of Education in 2012 was $64.1 Billion and the total from the fifty states for public elementary and secondary schools amounted to $638 billion in 2009-10.

Imagine the profits to be gained by a parasitic Corporate America. All they have to do is sweep aside more than four million public school teachers, their retirement plans, and their labor unions. And the hell with those brats who won’t behave and do what the corporate stooges tell them. Maybe they’ll send those kids, “the walking dead”, to prisons or concentration camps to get them out of the way.

_______________________

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

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

2 Comments

Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse on April 13, 2014 in American Public Schools, American Street Gangs, child abuse, Education, family values, government, Lloyd Lofthouse, propaganda and lies, Public School, Teaching

Tags: closing the achievement gap, fake Education reformers, high academic standards, making money off the public schools, teachers as whipping boys, The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead in America's schools

Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

Category Archives: propaganda and lies

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Who Crowned Bill Gates the Emperor of Education?

Cherry picking facts without lying to make the bad look good or the good look bad

The Truth Behind “Waiting for Superman” and the myth of Teacher Tenure

What happens to women’s rights if the public schools are abolished?

The Walking Dead and their Whipping Boys

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