President Obama visited the University of Chicago in January 2014, and said, “We know that not enough low-income students are taking the steps required to prepare for college.” He said this because No Child Left Behind, his Race To The Top program, and Bill Gates Common Core agenda demands that 100% of all U.S. children grow up to be college and career ready when they leave high school.
Why do I think this is an insane and criminal goal? The first part of my answer is simple. According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2013–2014 school year was $30,094 at private colleges, $8,893 for state residents at public colleges, and $22,203 for out-of-state residents attending public universities.
Presidents G. W. Bush and Obama are selling parents and children a fantasy that everyone can go to college and end up with a college career job, but that is not going to happen.
Currently, the U.S. has almost three college graduates for every available job that requires a college degree (according to the Bureau of labor Statistics), and I’ll bet not many people know that AT&T stores—for instance, where people go to buy mobile phones, TV’s and Internet access—are mostly staffed with college graduates who sell the services AT&T provides.
When I was working my way through college with some help from the GI Bill, I stocked shelves and sold shoes working at a J.C. Penny. I also bagged groceries in a super market and finished up college with a job at a Gallo winery one summer. None of these jobs required a college degree, and a job selling mobile phones at AT&T shouldn’t require it either.
If we take the lowest college cost at almost $9,000 annually, four years of college would cost $36,000, but 26% of the jobs in the U.S. don’t even require a H.S. degree and another 40% only required a high school degree. If we go with the highest cost, in four years, a college degree would cost more than $120,000 — for a possible job selling mobile phones for AT&T!
Because the U.S. has the 3rd largest population in the world, it is currently the most educated nation in the world when we look at gross numbers and not ratios because ratios can be misleading when a country only has 35.16 million people like Canada does.
Yes, Canada does have a higher ratio of college grads then the U.S. In 2012, Canada was ranked #1 with 55.8% of adults having college degrees, but 35.1% of those graduates are in jobs that are not related to their education. If we subtract the 10.1 million Canadians that are age 0 to 24, that leaves 25 million or 14 million college grads compared to the U.S. that has more than 108 million college grads—almost 8x the number in Canada, and more than 3X the entire population of America’s northern neighbor.
When corporate education reformers want to make America’s public schools look bad, they don’t mention the 108 million college graduates in the U.S. What they do is just mention that Canada has a higher ratio of college grads than the U.S.
But PBS reported that only 27% of the jobs in the United States require a college degree.
Glendon Cameron knows what he is talking about.
In 2013, there were 204.3 million Americans age 25 and over.
88.15%—180 million—had a high school degree.
9.84%—20.1 million—had an Associate degree (two years of college)
31.66%—64.7 million—had a Bachelor’s degree
8.41%—17.1 million—had a Master’s degree
1.48%—3 million—had a professional degree
1.68%—3.4 million—had a Doctorate
Only 11.85%—24.2 million—did not earn a HS degree
The corporate education reform movement that President Obama and Bill Gates support is a war being waged against the public schools because of the 11.85% of Americans who never graduated from high school and most of these citizens grew up in and still live in poverty—something Obama and his most powerful and wealthiest supporter, Bill Gates, are doing nothing to change. But Bill Gates is spending $5 to $7 billion to wreck America’s public schools and turn our children over to autocratic corporations to teach.
Did you know that corporate Charters are suspending and kicking out at-risk and difficult to teach children in much larger ratios than the public school have ever done?
I think the U.S. should focus more on dealing with the damage caused by children living in poverty and stop demanding that the public schools make sure every child is college and career ready. But—thanks to the President, Bill Gates and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of the Department of Education—in 2010, 62.5% of high school grads went directly to college expecting to graduate and find a high-paying secure job. HigherEdInfo.org
A lot of young Americans are being lied to, and a lot of public school teachers are being persecuted and punished for not achieving impossible goals set by criminals and con men — because not one country in the history of the world has ever educated 100% of its children to be college and career ready.
Not even Canada where the functional illiteracy rate is 42% or some 12 million adults aged 16 and over. Reverse that and functional Literacy is 58%. In 2003, the Document U.S. Functional Literacy level was 66% for Intermediate and Proficient. The U.S. scale is based on four levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate and Proficient. In Canada, literacy is divided into five levels with level 3 as the internationally accepted level of literacy considered necessary for meeting the demands of everyday life and work in an information-based society, the same as level 3, the Intermediate level, in the U.S.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, who went to college on the GI Bill, and taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
THIRD UPDATE
(Scroll down for the Second and First updates followed by the actual post that started a Twitter storm)
This afternoon, I received an e-mail informing me that because of my racist tendencies I was being removed as a member of the TBATS. I can only assume that this is because I think poverty and single parent homes are more of a factor in the behavior of students who are suspended from school than racism.
Therefore, this update includes a new chart with more information. Using the information in this chart, we will attempt to compare the ratio of White children living in poverty and single parent homes to see if the suspensions of Blacks, Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islander students was equal or close to the ratio of White students who were suspended.
Using 22.3% of total white students living in poverty and 5.1% of total white students who were suspended as the base, then 49.5% of Black students living in poverty is 2.2 times the number of White students. This equals 11.22% of 8.4 million. If racism was a factor in the additional 3.58% of Black student who were suspended, then 300,720 Black students might have been suspended due to racist tendencies leaving 74.9% of the total students suspended due to factors that might have been related to growing up in poverty and/or single parent homes.
Using 25% of total White students living in single family homes and 5.1% of students who were suspended as the base, then 58.57% of Black students living in single parent homes is 2.34 times the number of White students or 11.9% instead of 14.8% of black students suspended offering evidence that racism might have been a factor in 2.9% of the suspensions of Black students. If true, then 240,400 Black students might have been suspended due to racist tendencies leaving 83.3% of the total students suspended that might have been related to growing up in poverty and/or single parent homes.
The ratio of Hispanic students who live in poverty is 2.15 times the number of White students and that ratio is equal to 10.97% instead of the 5.8% who were suspended offering no evidence that racism was a factor in the suspension of Hispanic students.
The ratio of Hispanic students who live in single family homes is 1.7 times the number of White students and this ratio is equal to 8.64% instead of the 5.8% of Hispanic students who were suspended offering no evidence that racism was a factor in the suspensions of Hispanic students.
The ratio of Asian/Pacific Islander students who live in poverty is 0.73 times the White students who live in poverty and this ratio is equal to 3.72% instead of the 2.2% of total Asian/Pacific Islander students who were suspended offering no evidence that racism was a factor in the suspensions of Asian/Pacific Islander students.
The ratio of Asian/Pacific Islander students who live in single parent homes was 0.4 times the White students and this ratio was equal to 2.42% instead of the 2.2% who were suspended offering no evidence that racism was a factor in the suspensions of Asian/Pacific Islander students.
In conclusion, poverty and growing up in single family homes is a much larger factor in the number of student suspensions than racism, and a transparent, public school, national, early childhood education program starting as early as age two might have a large impact that will eventually reduce poverty and increase literacy and life-long learning skills in children who grow up in poverty and/or single parent homes. Racism is another issue and other methods will be necessary to deal with this challenge. I don’t think early childhood education will have much of an impact in reducing racism.
SECOND UPDATE
Because I asked this question in my post there was an explosion on Twitter taking me to task for not focusing on racism and not admitting that it was a problem.
In the original post I wrote, “When 6.1% of the total students are suspended from public schools—or less as you will see—is that cause for a national crises and is it evidence of alleged racism?” … Later in the post, I also said, “Some critics have even alleged that the ratio of Black children being suspended is a sign of racism. I disagree, but you will have to make up your own mind after you look at all the numbers and in this post there are a lot of numbers to wrap your critical thinking around.”
Here is my response to one of the reactions that arrived as an e-mail. Too bad they couldn’t have left a comment here so we could have talked it over and explored the issue here where others could follow along.
My reply, I can see that racism is a topic you are passionate about. I think you even prove my point with your examples. We can’t stop racism, but we can help children who live in poverty and/or who grow up in single parent homes by implementing a public school managed national early childhood education program so those children grow up with the tools that will help them escape poverty and combat racism without anger and a sense of helplessness.
That’s why I refuse to allow the focus of my post to be hijacked by people obsessed with racism. …
What do you propose we do to stop racism—-send out mobs of vigilantes to hang anyone we suspect of racist tendencies?
I think the strongest weapon we can give victims of racism is literacy and an education and a good start, our best chance, would be a transparent publicly managed national early childhood education program that is not managed by corporations, because the evidence is strong that corporate Charters are racist because they encourage segregation and mostly refuse to work with the children who suffer the most from racism—at-risk children who grow up in poverty and/or single parent homes.
We can stay angry at racists, or we can eventually defeat racism by doing something about childhood poverty by intervening in the development of children as young as age two. They did it in France more than thirty years ago and poverty has dropped more than 50% since.
FIRST UPDATE
It came to my attention this morning (1-7-2015) that this post was severely criticized and attacked by some of the members of a site (TBATS) that recommended the post to their members—TBATS has deleted the recommendation and apologized to those who complained. The reason for this is because one paragraph in this post quoted information for one post at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
I want to make it clear that the numbers used in the chart did not come from the Heritage Foundation. They came from other sources, and I made the mistake of listing those sources further down in the post—and for that confusion, I apologize but for nothing else. I think this post was unfairly criticized. I have now moved those links, and they may be found right below the chart.
The only information quoted from the Heritage Foundation was the quote in that one paragraph about “children raised in single-parent homes are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; and drop out of high school.” Nowhere in that quote was race mentioned.
However, because of the criticism of my post based on that one quote in one paragraph from the Heritage Foundation—a foundation that has been linked to ALEX and support from the Koch brothers and Bill Gates—that had nothing to do with the data in the chart, I decided to go directly to the U.S. Census.gov to verify some of the data that I used in the chart and made two revisions where—if you visit the actual Census data—you will discover that the total number of Black or African American family households was (in Table 1) 8,726,419, and that 836,460 single family households were are led by a male, while 4,085,938 were led by female householders for a total of 4,922,398 or 56.4% of the total number of Black and African American households in 2011. I have corrected the chart to show 56.4% instead of the 67% quoted from a 2013 source—that was not the Heritage Foundation. In addition, about 43.6% of Black or African American family households were led by married couples.
I then turned directly to the U.S. Census for info about poverty by race and found this data from 2013. In 2013, 38% (4.158 million) of Black or African-American children under 18 years lived in families below poverty. I used the data for Black Alone on page 53, Table B-2. The previous number that was quoted in my chart from another 2013 source was much lower.
Here is the actual pull quote from the conclusion of the study that the Heritage Foundation quoted in their piece:
“A large body of research has documented the disadvantages of children raised in single-parent homes relative to children raised in two-parent homes. Lower high school graduation rates, lower GPAs, and greater risk for drug abuse are only some of the negative outcomes associated with growing up in a single-parent home. … This paper has been a review and critique of research from the past few decades regarding single parenthood. While the economic and social costs of single parenthood have been well documented, the strengths of single parents and their children have been largely overlooked.”
I think we might be able to learn something from this—that just because information comes from a conservative source doesn’t mean that information is wrong. Just like we sometimes have to follow the money, we also have to go to the original source.
THE ORIGINAL POST STARTS NEXT
In 2006, the U.S. public schools suspended students 3.3 million times. Note that I did not say 3.3 million students, because that might be misleading as you will see if you keep reading.
There is currently a group in the United States demanding that teachers and schools be restricted when it comes to suspending children from classrooms and schools. It would be interesting to know who is funding this issue and pushing it. Is it Arne Duncan who is the Secretary of the federal Department of Education or is it Bill Gates who is funding the push for Common Core standardized testing with $5 – $7 billion—test results that will be used to rank and fire teachers in addition to close public schools and turn our children over to corporations to teach even if parents don’t want that?
Corporate education reformers love throwing around numbers like 3.3 million, because that will make the public schools look really bad, and big numbers tossed out like that look so impressive to people who are easy to fool.
I decided to dig deeper to understand what that number really means.
In this post, we will explore what is behind the suspension and expulsion rates in the United States, because the public schools have been criticized for suspending too many students. Some critics have even alleged that the ratio of Black children being suspended is a sign of racism. I disagree, but you will have to make up your own mind after you look at all the numbers and in this post there are a lot of numbers to wrap your critical thinking around. The followinSome critics have even alleged that the ratio of Black children being suspended is a sign of racism.g chart provides a powerful and revealing comparison and I’m interested in your conclusions from this data.
Table 169, at this National Center for Educational Statistics.gov link lists the “Number of students suspended and expelled from public elementary and secondary schools, by sex, race/ethnicity, and state: 2006”.
The ratio of children living in single family homes by race may be found through this link at Kids Count data center.org
Heritage.org says “Seventy-one percent of poor families with children are headed by single parents, mostly single mothers. Compared to children raised in an intact family, children raised in single-parent homes are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; and drop out of high school.” The Heritage Foundation reports that in the United States, marriage drops the probability of child poverty by 82 percent.
In 2006, there were 53.8 million children in the k – 12 public schools, and there were 3.3 million suspensions representing 6.1% of the total number of students. That means almost 94% (or more) of the children did not earn a suspension. Census.gov
When 6.1% of the total students are suspended from public schools—or less as you will see—is that cause for a national crises and is it evidence of alleged racism?
If we average that 3.3 million suspensions per school, it means each school suspended an average of about 33.4 students during the 2006 school year, and a school year has about 180 instructional days—I suspect the ratio is higher for schools with higher levels of childhood poverty and there is a reason for that, and it isn’t unique to the United States as you will see if you keep reading.
If we take that per-school average of 33.4 suspensions, it equals one student is suspended on average every 5.4 days for each school—but was it always a different student or were there repeat offenders as I strongly suspect based on my 30 years of experience as a public school teacher.
When I say repeat, I mean the same student being suspended more than once during one school year, and some of those chronic offenders eventually end up with an expulsion hearing.
For instance, at the high school where I taught from 1989 to 2005 there was a 70% childhood poverty rate at the time (it’s higher today) based on free and/or reduced lunch, and 92% of the students were non-white. The teacher—we called him Mr. D—who ran the in-house suspension system—a separate classroom on campus where students were required to do worksheets (the students were not allowed to just sit and visit. If they didn’t do the academic worksheets, they’d end up returning the next day for another period suspension), said that about 5% of the students at the high school earned 95% of the average 20,000 annual referrals that teachers wrote. At the time, Nogales High School had a student population of about 2,600. Five percent equals 130 students who earned 95% of the 20,000 referrals written by teachers each year. That works out to 146 referrals for each one of those 130 students, and yes, we had students who earned referrals from more than one of their teachers on a daily basis. Some students would earn six referrals a day—one for each class—day after day and if the teacher didn’t write the referral and send the student to Mr. D in the in-house suspension center for a class suspension, that student would often disrupt the learning environment for the rest of the students in the class—stealing learning time from every child.
The teacher couldn’t teach and the other students couldn’t learn.
What if the 3.3 million suspensions in 2006 were not from 3.3 million individual children because many might have been repeat offenders. It would be nice to know how many students were suspended more than once but I couldn’t find that information. For instance, what if only 500-thousand students or less earned those 3.3 million suspensions? If correct, that would mean less than 1% of the total public school students were actually suspended from school—some multiple times.
But what if the 3.3 million suspended students were counted as individuals and not multiple offenders. Then there’s another way to look at this large but insignificant number.
There were about 7.2 million teachers in the United States in 2009. Almost 3 million taught at the elementary and middle school level. The remainder included those teaching at the post secondary, secondary, preschool, kindergarten levels, special education and other teachers or instructors.
Taking the total number of teachers into account, if we divided the 3.3 million suspended students up evenly among the 7.2 million teachers, that equals 0.45 or less than half a student for each teacher for an entire school year. And even if we only counted the regular k – 12 teachers it would break about even—one suspended student each school year for each teacher. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as cited in the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011, Table 615 <https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/>
And if all we do is count just the 3.7 million full-time-equivalent (FTE) elementary and secondary school teachers engaged in classroom instruction in fall 2012, then for every teacher there was 0.89% of a student suspended from a school for breaking rules and/or disrupting the educational environment so other students couldn’t learn. nces.ed.govDo you know of any child who is only 0.89% of a child? Where did the missing 0.11% go—did that part of the suspended student stay in the classroom to cooperate and learn?
What about the 112k who were expelled from all of the public schools in 2006?
If we average that 112k, it becomes about 1.1 students for each school in the United States. Is that excessive requiring an act of Congress to control, and what happens to the Common Core standardized test scores that are being used to rank and fire teachers in only the public schools when teachers are forced to keep disruptive students in the classroom who literally rob learning time from all of our children—the 94% that don’t earn suspensions?
What about suspensions and expulsions in the other OECD nations, or is this something that Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and the other corporate education reformers don’t want America to know—because some OECD countries have higher rates of suspension and expulsion than the United States does?
The corporate reformers can avoid this information in their allegations of the US public schools, but they can’t hide it. The Stanford Graduate School of Education reported in January 2013 that Poor ranking on international tests misleading about U.S. performance and said, “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries. Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.”
In addition, while fewer than 3 percent of students in 13 countries—including Japan, Norway, and the United Kingdom—reported ever repeating a grade, more than 25 percent of students repeated at least once in France, Spain, Brazil, and a dozen others studied. The United States reported more than one in 10 students (10 percent) repeating a grade, higher than the OECD average, while the top-performing countries, Finland and Korea, do not allow grade retention. … The OECD found that both high rates of grade retention and transfer happened in countries in which a child’s socioeconomic status was more likely to predict that child’s academic performance. Education Week.org
What happens to teachers if the Department of Education and/or the U.S. Congress caves in to pressure from special interest groups—possibly funded by Bill Gates or the Walton family—and drafts legislation that takes away a teacher or school’s power to suspend or remove a student through expulsion—especially when teachers are being ranked and then fired based on the Common Core standardized test results of a teacher’s students?
If being ranked and fired by those test scores becomes a reality for every public school teacher, then every instructional and/or learning minute will become vitally important and forcing teachers to keep children who cause problems and disrupt the learning environment will cripple a teacher’s ability to teach.
Maybe that’s what President Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and the Walton family want to happen so they can turn our children over the corporations to brainwash.
In conclusion, if you are one of the critics of public education who thinks 3.3 million (6.1%) children suspended from the public schools in one school year is too many, then instead of passing laws restricting the public schools’ ability—because these laws will not impact the corporate Charter schools that also are not required to teach to the Common Core—to decide who gets suspended, consider looking at what causes those children to disrupt the classroom—for instance, poverty and single parents families, and do something about that instead of making a teacher’s job to teach more difficult by forcing them to keep those at-risk and difficult to teach children in the classroom. And if you think the corporate reform movement has the answer, think again.
Joseph Williams, a veteran journalist and former White House correspondent for Politico, reported, “Charter schools also lead their traditional counterparts in a more disturbing trend: the number of students who are suspended or expelled each year … charter schools are far more likely to suspend students for infractions such as dress code violations and insubordination toward teachers.”
In fact, if there are suspension restrictions imposed on the public schools, those same restrictions will not be imposed on the corporate Charters just like the Common Core agenda to rank and fire teachers is not found in private-sector Charters—proving that this latest manufactured crisis in public education is another ploy by the corporate reformers to destroy the public schools.
_____________________________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Runner Up in Biography/Autobiography
2014 Florida Book Festival
Honorable Mentions in Biography/Autobiography
2014 Southern California Book Festival
2014 London Book Festival
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!”
I broke a tooth over the weekend and visited the dentist this afternoon spending a few hours in THE chair. I hate those shots that numb your jaw making it feel swollen like a puffy blimp. In a few days I will return for the fitting of the crown.
But when I returned home with that numb jaw, there was a surprise—a double dose of what I think was good news.
“”“Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose” didn’t earn any awards from Writer’s Digest, but the judge’s comments were appreciated. :o)
_______________________
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!”
You might notice that my last post about Anthony Cody’s book is not the same as the review I’m posting on Amazon, and that’s because Amazon might not approve what I said in my Blog review of “The Educator and the Oligarch”. They might not approve of this watered down version either, but what the heck—nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I firmly believe that the best way to judge a person is by what they do—not what they say—and Bill Gates seldom does what he says when it comes to improving public education in the United States.
When I say that in front of our daughter—and I’ve done it several times—who graduated from Stanford in June, she looks at me in disgust, because she thinks Bill Gates is a great man, a humanitarian and philanthropist, who is trying to make the world a better place—at least that’s what Bill Gates wants her to think. It also helps to know that Bill Gates gave the commencement address for our daughter’s Stanford graduating class in 2014.
Our daughter is right about one thing, Bill Gates is a great man, and that’s why he is CORRUPT. If you doubt what I just said, then argue with Lord Acton—not me. Lord John Acton (1834-1902) said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men (like Bill Gates) are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”
Bill Gates is not the man he wants people like our daughter to think he is, and Anthony Cody in “The Educator and the Oligarch” proves repeatedly in almost every chapter that what Bill Gates says he wants to do to improve public education in the United States isn’t what he’s doing. Instead, Gates is spending billions to influence (through bribes that are called grants) state and national leaders to do what he wants.
For instance, in Chapter 2, Anthony Cody mentions that in 2011, NBC held the Teacher Town Hall program, and Bill Gates was introduced as the top funder of education in the world … spending half a billion dollars to devise a way to figure out what makes a great teacher, what makes them most effective, and Melinda Gates acknowledged that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score—but that’s exactly what her husband is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do: to judge teachers by test scores.
Then in Chapter 3, Cody quotes an Op-Ed piece that Bill Gates wrote for the New York Times: Gates said, “Student test scores alone aren’t a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching, nor are they diagnostic enough to identify areas of improvement.”
But regardless of what Melinda and Bill Gates say, the Gates Foundation has spent and is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the federal and state governments to use the results of the Common Core student standardized tests to judge and then rank and yank (fire) teachers with an ultimate goal to close public schools and replace them with corporate Charter schools—that several Stanford studies funded by the Gates Foundation have already proven are mostly worse or the same as the public schools they are replacing.
To achieve these goals, Bill Gates is spending $5 – $7 billion dollars, and when he ran into opposition from democratically elected school boards, what did Bill Gates do—he started spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get rid of the democratically elected school boards that run public school districts and replace them with the corporate CEOs of charter schools who will do what Bill Gates wants.
Cody’s book has 27 chapters and they are loaded with more examples than the few I have shared in this review.
How do you help someone by firing them? Why isn’t Bill Gates funding training programs that will eventually show teachers methods that work—that Bill Gates doesn’t select—that will help teachers become better at their job?
Just for a moment, imagine what investing $5 – $7 billion in early childhood education and improving teacher training and follow up support after a new teacher is in the classroom would have achieved—-instead of destroying lives by firing teachers and subjecting children to hours of testing that serves no purpose except labeling children as FAILURES.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival
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!”
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines CORRUPTION as “dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people”, and by the time I finished reading the last page of The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation, I was convinced that Bill Gates was a charlatan, is corrupt, and three famous quotes were spinning inside my head.
The first quote was from Lord John Acton (1834-1902) who said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”
I think Bill Gates is one of those bad men who is using his wealth to exercise influence over government to achieve his own goals for public education in the United States—no matter how many millions of children, parents and teachers he will hurt.
There are 27 chapters in the book and—in many—Cody offers examples of Bill Gates saying one thing for public consumption to obviously fool as many people as possible while Cody offers the evidence that the Gates Foundation does the exact opposite.
For instance—not mentioned in the book—is the fact that recently the Gates Foundation promoted in the media an offer of one million dollars in grants to help teachers buy classroom supplies, but—in the book—Cody reveals that the Gates Foundation has dedicated $5 to $7 billion to influence federal and state governments to develop the Common Core State Standards and use student test results to rank and yank teachers in addition to supporting the spread of corporate Charter schools while getting rid of elected school boards and closing public schools—for good.
THINK—Bill Gates spends one million dollars to boost his public image as a humanitarian, but at the same time, his foundation is quietly spending $5 to $7 billion to spread his influence like a malignant cancer—did you know that almost 4-million public school teachers spend about two billion dollars annually to buy materials for their classrooms so children can learn? But Bill Gates offered 0.0005% of what teachers spend annually to buy supplies for their classrooms, and 0.00014% of what he is spending to destroy the public schools.
The second quote comes from Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996): “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
It is arguable that Bill Gates was bamboozled by Gene Wilhoit and David Coleman who went to see Bill Gates in 2008 to ask him to underwrite the Common Core State Standards, and now Bill Gates is not interested in finding out the truth and is bamboozling as many people as possible when he says one thing in the media to make himself look good, but then spends billions to crush the teachers’ unions, take away due process job protection from all teachers with a goal to fire almost one million teachers annually, increase class sizes and turn children into brainwashed, bamboozled drones who are forced to learn from computers while the few teachers that remain become classroom monitors (baby sitters) with one goal: to force those children to raise test scores—no questions asked. It doesn’t matter if the children learn anything useful as long as the test scores improve, and billionaires like Bill Gates get to brag that they made it all happen—even if they have to falsify the facts to look like they succeeded when they didn’t, which is already happening—the falsifying of facts!
The third quote comes from Abraham Lincoln who said, “You (Bill Gates) can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you (Bill Gates) cannot fool all the people all the time.”
I think that once many of the people who have already been fooled by Bill Gates discover the facts—then the house of cards that Bill Gates has spent billions to build is going to crumble along with his false reputation as a humanitarian that he has worked so hard to create.
This is where Cody’s book works best, because when you finish reading it, if you still think Bill Gates is a humanitarian—instead of the corrupt billionaire that he clearly is—then you have been bamboozled proving that Carl Sagan was right.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival
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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Marla Kilfoyle is the General Manager of an education activist group called The Badass Teachers Association.
The Badass Teachers Association has broken new ground because they are the first of their kind. They started as a Facebook group of teachers angry with federal education policy. In a year and a half, they grew into a strong and powerful national presence both on and off social media. BadassTA is now 53,000 strong on Facebook, 15,000 strong on twitter, and has a strong presence in fighting the privatization of our public school system around the nation.
BadassTA uses social media to expose the false narrative of the wealthy oligarchs, for instance, the Koch Brothers and Eli Broad. BadassTA trended on twitter for 2 days straight with their #Evaluatethat campaign, and they were recently featured in Time Magazinefor their rebuttal to the Timecover showing teachers as rotten apples.
The Badass Teachers Association was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education.
Badass teachers refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities (funded mainly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning. They refuse to accept the fact that non educators are allowed to make education policies that hurt our children, communities, and public schools. Badass teachers insist on equality, social justice, and equity in education and society. They will be meeting in Washington DC this summer, July 23-26 for their BAT Congress where they plan to lobby the U.S. Congress for children and public education. They are truth tellers and are united in their cause.
NOTE FROM BLOG HOST
The corporate funded and driven public education—FAKE—reform movement in the United States does not respect teachers, pay them what they deserve or intend to train them properly. All anyone has to do is look at Teach for America (TFA) to see what I mean. A TFA recruit has five weeks of summer training and little or no classroom experience with little or no follow up support when they take over a classroom, often from a highly trained and experienced teacher who was paid more and lost their job. More than two-thirds of TFA recruits leave teaching in 2 – 4 years and never return to education as a teacher. Of the one-third that remain, all but 3% transfer to higher preforming schools in wealthier communities that do not teach high numbers of challenging to teach at-risk children who live in poverty. TFA is an element of the corporate public education fake reform movement that was designed to break the teachers’ unions.
If you need more convincing, I suggest you examine closely the Bill Gates funded and driven Common Core Standardized Testing agenda that will rank and yank teachers—in addition to closing public schools and turning our children over to corporate Charters that often lie and deceive through corporate funded propaganda to lure children away from public schools—Did you know that several Stanford studies have reported that about 75% of private sector Charter schools perform worse or the same as the public schools they replaced, and a Stanford professor, who supports market based reforms, says this reform movement does not work in education?
Instead of ranking teachers, firing them and closing public schools, the United States must offer proper training and support for teachers who want and/or need help. Ask yourself this question: Once the public schools are gone, will we ever get them back from profit-hungry corporations and billionaire oligarchs like the labor union hating Walmart Walton family and Koch brothers? Do you want democratically elected school boards in public schools to be in charge of your child’s education or a billionaire/CEO, for instance Bill Gates, who sends his children to the same expensive private school he attended as a child, a school that doesn’t give endless Common Core standardized tests?
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival
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!”
The Oligarch is Bill Gates. The Educator is Anthony Cody, who has gone toe-to-toe with the Gates Foundation in private conversations and publicly for several years. Cody’s book, The Educator and the Oligarch, covers what he has learned while in the trenches battling a billionaire and his vast, entrenched organization, and the book is worth reading.
Do I NEED to repeat that?
At 2:30, Saturday (12-6) afternoon, I left home to walk the two miles to the nearest BART station.
At 4:05, I walked into the Laurel Book Store in Oakland, California to hear Anthony Cody, who started talking soon after I sat down, and by then it was standing room only.
Cody has been in the fight to save democratic public education much longer than I have, and his knowledge of the issue is deeper. Back in the mid 1980’s, I started suspecting that there might be a plot to destroy the public schools—it was just a feeling I had due to the crazy and insane things that teachers were being forced to do that made no sense.
Thinking I was cooking up a conspiracy theory, I went into denial mode and continued teaching and dodging bullets from those imagined ghosts until I retired in 2005 after thirty years in the classroom. Then in November 2013, my wife came home and told me she’d heard Diane Ravtich on NPR talking about her book “Reign of Error,” and I read the book and discovered my suspicions had been true all along—but like cancer this plot has branched out and taken on a malignant life of its own and it’s spreading into every element of public education in the United States in addition to corrupting our democratic government—thanks in large part to Bill Gates.
Listening to Cody late this afternoon, I learned how Bill Gates always gets what he wants—he buys everyone and everything he can, and he has dedicated between $5 to $7 billion dollars to destroy America’s democratic public education system and rebuild it into what HE thinks it should be.
I didn’t raise my hand until the end of Cody’s talk, and after several others had asked questions and shared their thinking. It was obvious that there was a lot of passion in the room among parents and teachers.
Then I had my say—not knowing that I was going to be attacked, not by Cody, but by another person in the audience. I said that we had to stop measuring children and focus on the children who needed the most help: children from dysfunctional homes and who lived in poverty. I mentioned that France had launched a national early childhood education program managed by its own public schools in the 1970’s, and thirty years later, the French poverty rate had dropped more than 50%.
When I finished talking—one loud person—grabbed the crowd’s attention and attacked me for blaming dysfunctional parents for at risk children who were difficult to teach. She said that it wasn’t the parent’s fault their children were not succeeding. I didn’t respond to her attack maybe because I’m severely dyslexic and it takes me time to think before I open my mouth. It’s so much easier to write, revise, edit and wait a few days and then revise some more. I had no desire to get into a heated shouting match with this stranger.
When the event ended and the crowd moved from the event area into the bookstore, several people came up to me and offered support. They all agreed that I had never blamed dysfunctional parents for the problems in classrooms caused by at-risk and difficult to teach children.
I replied that dysfunctional parents can’t be blamed when their children are not learning in school, because my parents were dysfunctional—who both dropped out of high school when they were fourteen—because I was born to poverty; because when I was six or seven, my mother was told I would never learn to read, but she taught me anyway after failing to teach my older brother 12 years earlier. My brother died at age 64 illiterate and he left behind several of his own adult children who are still illiterate. My father was a gambler and an alcoholic. If he wasn’t drinking, he was a wonderful, gentle man. My brother spent about 15 years of his life in prison. He was also an alcoholic, a sometime drug user, and a heavy smoker. Like our parents, he also never had the tools to raise children who easily learned in school.
If my family wasn’t dysfunctional, I don’t know what is.
If you ask someone to fix your car who doesn’t know how to use the tools, do we blame that person for not fixing the car? Dysfunctional parents—like my parents—did not have the parenting tools to raise children that were ready to learn, and I wasn’t ready to learn until I was in my early twenties after serving several years in the U.S. Marines and fighting in Vietnam.
It was dark out when I left the bookstore and started the long ride home on BART, and it was a long ride. The BART train was delayed several times sitting at stations because of some problem down the line. What should have been a 25-minute ride stretched to about one-and-a-half hours, and this turned out to be a good thing, because the wait provided time for me to read to Chapter 4 in Cody’s book, and discover just how involved Bill Gates is in HIS own goal to destroy our democratic public schools, and replace those schools with what HE wants. For instance, if Gates was cutting open our bodies and reaching inside to do surgery to save our lives HIS way, he’d have our blood all the way to his shoulders, smeared on his face and drenching his clothing down to his shoes as he pulled out one organ after another and threw them over his shoulder to the filthy floor.
Bill Gates has bought—bribed would be more appropriate—the media, nonprofits, and institutions for education, state governments, the Department of Education, and the White House. At the moment, Bill Gates is the unelected emperor of the United States, and if he achieves HIS goals with our schools, our democracy and our freedom will be gone too.
It’s getting late. If this needs editing, I’ll fix it tomorrow. Right now, I want to publish this post, brush my teeth and relax by watching the last of the 3rd season of The Tudors . I think I see a lot of similarities between Emperor Bill Gates and England’s King Henry 8, but Bill Gates isn’t beheading wives. He is beheading teachers, children—and our democracy.
_______________________
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!”
Its Black Friday and time to look closer at the corporate war against public education that’s supported by the neo-liberal Common Core agenda out of the Obama White House.
The Common Core agenda mandates that all high school graduates must be college and career ready by 17/18 years old. This means every high school graduate must read at an intermediate or advanced literacy level by high school graduation.
Any school that doesn’t achieve 100% success with every child—no matter what—is considered a failure according to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top, Common Core agenda.
When public schools don’t meet this impossible goal that no other country on the earth has ever achieved with children, teachers must be ranked and yanked (fired) by using CCSS standardized tests, and public schools labeled failures must be closed and replaced with corporate Charters that must turn a profit—no matter what—or go out of business.
But, what does it take to become an economist or an electrician? Let’s find out.
According to bls.gov, in 2013, 26-percent of the 143.9 million jobs [37.4 million] did not require a high school diploma or its equivalent; 40-percent [57.56 million] only required a high school degree; 6% [8.6 million] required a post-secondary non-degree award (I think that is some form of specific job training that may lead to a certificate – for instance, a plumber, mechanic, etc.); 4% required an Associate degree—about 2 years of college [5.7 million]; 18% required a BA degree [25.9 million], 2% a Master’s degree [2.87 million], and 3% [4.3 million] a doctoral or professional degree.
In addition, according to The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, in 2003, 123-million adults in the United States read at a level that indicates they were college ready—but less than 39-million jobs required that level of literacy compared to almost 104-million jobs that didn’t.
Common Core is mentioned at 7:17 – 8:24
I know someone who earned a PhD in economics, and then he became an electrician just like his HS graduate father—he was perfectly happy doing electrical work for a living instead of economics. The only reason he earned that PhD in economics was because that’s what his father wanted for his son. The father thought it would lead to a better paying, more secure job—he was wrong!
How many jobs are there for people who have a PhD in economics compared to an electrician?
According to BLS.gov, there are almost 600,000 electricians in the United States earning the median of about $50k annually with almost 115,000 job openings between 2012-22 (that’s 11,500 new jobs annually).
Although most electricians learn through an apprenticeship, some start out by attending a technical school. Most states require electricians to be licensed. What does it cost to become an electrician? A certificate or associate’s degree costs about $1,000 to $11,000.
Now, let’s look at the job market for an economist—entry level is a Master’s degree in economics, and there are less than 17,000 jobs in this field in the United States with only 2,300 openings predicted to be available between 2012-22 (that’s 230 annually). The median pay for these jobs is more than $92k annually—great if you can get one of these jobs.
What does it take? Most economists need a master’s degree or Ph.D. However, some entry-level jobs—primarily in the federal government—are available for workers with a bachelor’s degree.
What does it cost to earn a PhD? According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a typical doctoral program takes five full-time years to complete, bringing the total cost to roughly $123,500-$181,500, depending on whether attendance is at a public or private school (nces.ed.gov).
NOW, what do you think about President Obama’s Common Core agenda that mandates every 17/18 year old must be college and career ready right out of high school, and that public school teachers and the public schools MUST be punished by termination if every child doesn’t achieve that impossible CCSS goal?
_______________________
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!”
Another example of how the corporate supported education reformers will cherry-pick data, spy on children long after they graduate from high school, and DELIBERATELY LIE to achieve their agenda to destroy the public schools, and this is just in one state, New York—-it’s happening in every state!.
Read “Big Brother and His Holding Company- John King and The New York State Education Department: Manipulating Student Information to Drive Agendas” @ Staying Strong in School.
Corporate controlled, Common Core supporter and public education reformer State Education Commissioner John King is verbally spanked in a PTA presentation in New York State.
If the damage to public education in the United States caused by the profit-driven, corporate supported war on the public schools were added up in dollars and damaged lives, how much would that equal?
And if we were to compare that amount to the cost of the wars in the Middle East in the West’s fight against Islamic fundamentalist extremist terrorism with Al Qaeda and ISIS, how would that compare?
Once we have those numbers boiled down to solid figures with dollar signs, we then have the evidence that provides proof that the corporate war on public education is an act of terror close to or equal to the world war on Islamic terrorism.
Both wars—the one against the public schools and the one against Islamic terrorists—destroy lives and damage the economy, but corporations always win and profit. It doesn’t matter if the corporation supplies the tests for the Common Core agenda that ranks and yanks teachers and closes public schools or makes bombs and drones, because someone loses or profits.
When those passenger jets hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, The New York Times reported that the losses caused by 9/11 were about $3.3 Trillion, but someone profited from that attack—the corporations that rebuilt the World Trade Center and the corporations that make the weapons and bombs used in the ongoing war on terror. The money spent to fight the war against terror doesn’t vanish down a rabbit hole.
If you want to know some of the faces behind the corporate economic war of terror on public education, it’s easy—follow the money.
“Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field.” Dissent Magazine.org
Billions are being spent annually to fund the war on the U.S. public schools. Does this mean the billionaires in expensive suits who are funding this war against our children and public school teachers think of these innocents as terrorists to be targeted and destroyed?
The equation is simple—terrorists often target innocent people. it doesn’t matter if the terrorist comes dressed in a suit or they are dressed in black with a mask hiding their face while wearing a keffiyeh on their head before they behead an innocent victim.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
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!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 