Support The Student Testing Improvement and Accountability Act and banish federally mandated annual testing in the public schools. Let’s return out schools to the states and elected school boards that run almost 15,000 individual public school districts—that are not a monopoly as the true monopolist corporate reformers claim with their lies and propaganda.
Congressman Chris Gibson (R-NY) and Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are sponsoring legislation to banish federally mandated annual testing. Everyone who is opposed to the overuse and misuse of standardized testing should support this bill. It is called The Student Testing Improvement and Accountability Act.
Although our locally elected school boards may not be perfect, they represent one of the purest forms of democracy we have. Bad ideas in the small do damage in the small and are easily corrected. Bad ideas at the federal level result in massive failure and are far harder to fix.
The Senate hearings on NCLB are being live-streamed right now. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chair of the HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) quoted New York principal Carol Burris, as follows, from the article she published on Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet:
This is what Senator Alexander quoted:
As we engage in the debate on the issue of how to fix NCLB, I ask that your committee remember that the American public school system was built on the belief that local communities cherish their children and have the right and responsibility, within sensible limits, to determine how they are schooled.
While the federal government has a very special role in ensuring that our students do not experience discrimination based on who they are or what their disability may be, Congress is not a National School Board.
Although our locally elected school boards may not be perfect, they…
“Based on the indicators included in this study, it seems clear that the United States has the most highly educated workforce among these 9 nations. At the same time, American society reveals the greatest economic inequities among the advanced nations in this analysis, combined with the highest levels of social stress, and the lowest levels of support for young families.”
Canada
China
Finland
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
United Kingdom
United States
In fact, more than a third of all adult Americans have earned a college degree. That is more than 100 million people. No other country on the planet has that many college educated citizens.
The report released today–titled “Schools in Context”– by the National Superintendents Roundtable and the Horace Mann League tells a different story about international comparisons by looking at a broad range of indicators, not just test scores.
One part of the report is called “The Iceberg Effect,” and it shows what happens when you look only at the tip of the iceberg–test scores. A more complex and more interesting portrait of schools and society emerges when you look at the whole iceberg, not just the part that is easily measured by a standardized test. See the pdf here.
The full report of “Schools in Context” may be located in this pdf file.
The countries included in this contextual study are the United States, China, Canada, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan.
Yohuru Williams, professor of history at Fairfield University, has written a brilliant and powerful piece about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the current effort to privatize large sectors of public education, especially in urban districts.
He scoffs at the idea that turning public schools over to private management is “the civil rights issue of our time,” as so many “reformers” say. He cites a number of statements by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that claim the mantle of civil rights for policies that actually exacerbate segregation.
He cites Dr. King at length to show that he would not have supported the use of standardized testing as a means of “reform.”
Dr. Williams writes:
“We must remember,” King warned, “that intelligence is not enough . . . Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” He asserted, “The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy…
In the book The Educator And The Oligarch Anthony Cody critically examines the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to reform education and describes a series of blog posts written by Cody and high ranking officials in the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation which focused on five mutually agreed upon issues. To me, the key issue was the role of education in the elimination of poverty.
According to Chris Williams, author of the Gates Foundation’s response,
There are more Great Teachers in the public schools than incompetent ones.
In fact, 97-99% great teachers versus 1-3% who are alleged to be incompetent—because there is no proof. The 1-3% was a guesstimate from witnesses in the recent Los Angeles Vergara trial where the judge’s verdict stripped teachers in California of their legal due process rights where they must be proven guilty of any alleged claims before losing their jobs.
This fact—alone—-reveals the corporate education reform fraud and all of the movements lies.
What we need to know is why President Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family and Hedge Fund billionaires on Wall Street are waging a war against 100% of public school teachers.
Last night my wife and I were having one of those rare after dinner conversations. We have a four year old and a five year old, so when I say rare, I do mean rare. The topic of the conversation was our daughter’s kindergarten teacher and how impressed we are with her. I made the comment, “We got lucky.” My wife’s response was, “No. I don’t think we got lucky at all.” Puzzled, I asked, “What do you mean?” She replied, “I think that she’s a great teacher but there are a lot of great teachers out there. In fact, our daughter’s school is filled with great teachers doing great work in an unrecognized urban school. There are great teachers doing great work all over.” It hit me then just how deep this anti-teacher rhetoric has imbedded itself in our collective thinking.
Think about it, if someone married to a teacher and…
I enjoy seeing films when they first come out, and this weekend was no different. On Friday, I walked the three miles to the local theater to see “American Sniper”, and today, Saturday, I went to see “Spare Parts”—both films are based on true stories.
“Spare Parts” is a must see film for every grandparent, uncle, aunt, cousin, parent, teacher and child in America. It’s based on a true story of success against all odds.
I taught (1975-2005) in public schools similar to the high school depicted in this film—a school with mostly minority children who live in poverty.
Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona has received worldwide acclaim for its Robotics team, which first earned notoriety by beating MIT and other universities in an underwater robotics competition in 2004, a story that has been chronicled on ABC’s Nightline and in The Reader’s Digest—and now in film.
Once you take a closer look at the Carl Hayden High School depicted in the film, it doesn’t take much to imagine what might have happened if NCLB, Race to the Top, Common Core and VAM had been in place in 2004—the teachers and administrators who supported the high school students who beat MIT might have lost their jobs, the high school closed, and the students sent to rigid corporate Charter schools probably owned by the Walton family where teachers are forced to teach to a script written by corporate hacks who know nothing about teaching children.
Wired.com reported, “Fredi Lajvardi and Allan Cameron have 54 years of public school teaching experience between them. They are the celebrated creators of a student robotics program at Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, where roughly 80 percent of the student population lives below the poverty line. … Lajvardi and Cameron are deeply concerned about the state of American secondary education. Teachers, they say, are stymied by bureaucracy and confounded by rigid curricula optimized to produce better test results, not better students.”
Imagine an America where there had never been the fraud of a flawed study called A Nation at Risk in 1983, the insane and impossible demands of G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, in addition to Obama’s worse Race to the Top goals in 2009 with its Bill Gates supported Common Core agenda (in 2010) to rank and fire teachers based on the results of student test scores and to close public schools with low performing students who mostly live in poverty.
Imagine an America without the segregation and fraud of for-profit corporate Charter schools that are stealing taxes meant to fund public schools.
Imagine an America without Teach for America that was designed to break teachers’ unions by churning out recruits who are no different than someone drafted to serve in the military for a two-year stint and then most of those recruits are gone.
Imagine an America where teacher training programs were improved to match what teachers receive in Finland and other countries with high preforming public schools.
Imagine teachers getting follow up support after they start teaching—especially in low performing schools where most of the children live in poverty.
Imagine an America where all public schools in the United States are fully funded and properly maintained.
Imagine an America with a public school, national early childhood education program similar to what works in France.
Imagine the possibilities!
_______________________
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/Autobiogrpahy
2015 Florida Book Festival
Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography 2014 Southern California Book Festival
2014 New England 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).
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The OECD war against national and ethnic cultures by using the PISA test to break the religious and cultural ties that bind until everyone is cut from the same cloth. Isn’t this what the Nazis attempted to do with the concentration camps.
I recently received a letter from Professor Dr. Jochen Krautz, a professor of art education at the University of Wuppertal. Dr. Krautz is a critic of the PISA examinations, for reasons he makes clear in the posted article, which he wrote with economist Silja Graupe.
The article is aptly titled “From Yardstick to Hegemony,” and it analyzes the steady expansion of PISA, first seen as a yardstick, but eventually evolving into a means of disrupting the cultures and educational systems of every nation it tests.
As early as 1961, the OECD issued a conference volume in which its goals were clear:
The conference was explicitly not about setting standards which would do justice to respective national traditions of education and education policy. On the contrary, the new standard was geared toward overruling all traditional concepts. The same conference volume states that, with regard to developing countries, it would be…
How do you turn a winner into a loser?
you generate lies and propaganda
Hey, Wisconsin voters, when you voted out the Democratic majority in your state government back in 2010, and handed the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature to a Republican majority, I’ll bet you had no idea that you might lose your excellent public schools—and, no matter what you are hearing in the media, by any comparison, your state’s public schools are excellent and might soon be as extinct as the Passenger Pigeon.
I’m sure Wisconsin isn’t hearing much truth about the state’s public schools in the media these days, but according to Governing.com, in 2010-11, Wisconsin was tied with Vermont for the 2nd highest on-time high school graduation rate in the U.S. at 87%. Only Iowa was higher at 88%. For a comparison, the two worst states for on-time high school graduation were New Mexico at 63% and Nevada at 62%.
Then there is the Wisconsin high school graduate rate of adults age 25 and over. In 2009-2013, that number was 90.4% compared to an average of 84.9% for the U.S.
In addition, College Completion Chronical.com, reported that the 2010 college graduation rate in Wisconsin was ranked 15th in the U.S. ahead of 35 states and the District of Columbia. After spending at least six years in college, Wisconsin’s college graduation rate was 60.4%.
How does the United States and Wisconsin compare to the world?
Between 2010 and 2011, the percentage of adults with a college degree in the United States remained unchanged at 42%, and that, according to 24/7 Wall Street was 5th place. Russia was ranked 1st with 53.5% of the population compared to Wisconsin’s 60.4% that was 18.5% higher than the U.S. national average and almost 7% higher than Russia.
College graduation rates, however, are extremely misleading, because too many college graduates in the U.S., Russia, Canada (2nd place), and Japan (3rd place) can’t find jobs that require a college education. What this means is that these countries are graduating far too many students from expensive colleges when a vocational school would have been enough to find a job.
Comparing the United States to other countries using the average score on the PISA test is always misleading. For instance, Great Schools.org reports that the first study comparing states in the U.S. to other countries discovered that in science, students in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin were only behind students in Singapore and Taiwan, but were equal to or ahead of students in the other 45 countries in the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).
Then there is the World Economic Forum that ranks the United States #1 out of 131 nations in global competitiveness, using primary and higher education as part of its calculations.
I wonder how the corporate education reformers missed that rank, but I think we know that answer.
They accidentally missed it on purpose.
So, with Wisconsin graduating more students from high school than the national average, and graduating more students from college than the #1 country in the world, Russia, in addition to ranking in the top 4.25% of OECD countries in science, why is the GOP in Wisconsin pushing to get rid of the state’s obviously excellent public schools, and turn the state’s children over to for-profit corporate Charters that Stanford comparisons have revealed are mostly worse or the same as the public schools they are stealing children from—and that comparison is based on the country’s average.
Wisconsin is clearly way above the national average.
If that isn’t enough, The Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reported on how Wisconsin’s school districts compared internationally: “The Global Report Card indicates the level of math or reading achievement by the average student in a Wisconsin school district compared to the average student achievement in Finland, and average student achievement in a set of 25 developed countries. (Note—if you click on the link in this paragraph, you will discover that the database supporting this statement is no longer available. Why?)
In conclusion, I’ve read enough to know that education reform in the United States is clearly not about improving education, or the quality of teachers. In fact, it’s painfully obvious that education reform is about getting rid of one education system that’s democratic and replacing it with one that is corporate and will make rich people wealthier.
_______________________
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
2015 Florida Book Festival
Honorable Mentions in Biography/Autobiography 2014 Southern California Book Festival
2014 New England Book Festival
214 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).
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An older friend of mine who is in his 80’s once told me that he’d rather be wealthy and unhappy than poor and hungry. Then there is the old curse of racism.
Racism exists when one ethnic group dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another ethnic group on the basis that it believes are hereditary and unalterable, and in history there is no end to examples of racism. To this day, examples of racism may be found in Europe, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, North American, etc.
For instance, the persecution and murder of millions of Jews by Hitler’s Nazis during World War II, and the list of ethnic cleansings can be traced back to 350 AD in ancient China when 200,000 people with racial characteristics such as high-bridged noses and bushy beards were slaughtered. The history of racism through ethnic cleansings is so long and brutal, it might make you sick to your stomach if you click on the link in this paragraph and scroll through the list.
In addition, a long history of racism exists for the United States. American natives, Asian Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Black or African Americans, and even Whites have been victims of racism/discrimination. For Whites, the Mormons and Jews have faced persecution in the United States, and Smithsonian.com says, “The idea that the United States has always been a bastion of religious freedom is reassuring—and utterly at odds with the historical record. … The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side.”
The Chinese, for instance, are the only minority in the U.S. to have had national legislation passed that was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in US history, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. It was called the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it was signed into law on May 6, 1882, and wouldn’t be repealed until 1943. In fact, Asian Americans have been denied equal rights, subjected to harassment and hostility had their rights revoked and imprisoned for no justifiable reason, physically attacked, and murdered.
The Latino community has also faced discrimination, and according to Pew Research.org, Latinos are the 2nd most discriminated against ethnic group after African-Americans. Sixty-one percent of Latinos say discrimination against Hispanics is a “major problem.”
For Black or African Americans, Pew Research.org reports that 88% of Blacks felt that there was discrimination against African Americans. Even 57% of Whites think that African Americans are discriminated against.
If you remember what I said in my first paragraph, you might have an idea of where I’m going with this, but don’t read me wrong. I think we must always be on guard and protest acts of racism and discrimination, but if history teaches us anything, we know that racism is always going to be around in one form or another, and I think it would be easier to face this curse in strength: educated, literate, and middle class or wealthy and not feeling helpless because of illiteracy, poverty and hunger.
In a previous post Suspensions and Expulsions in the US Public Schools—what does that 3.3 million really mean, it’s obvious that I failed to reach some readers with what I meant to say instead of what they thought I wrote. Some readers of that post became angry and some accused me of having racist tendencies, and then I was locked out and shunned by one group.
I haven’t changed my mind. I still think that poverty and/or single parent homes are the main culprit behind the number of suspensions and expulsions in the public schools, and I pointed this out and provided links to the research in my other post about suspensions and expulsions to support what I wrote.
While racism might be a factor in some of the suspensions and expulsions of Black or African-American children, there was no evidence that this was the case for Asian-Americans and Hispanic/Latinos—both minorities with a long history of being the victims of racism and discrimination—and even if it were true that some suspensions of Black or African Americans was motivated by racism, what could we do to identify individual cases and stop this unacceptable behavior?
Sources used for last two columns in the chart may be found at: High School Graduation Rate Hits 40-Year Peak in the U.S.The Atlantic.com; Race Gap Narrows in College Enrollment, But Not in GraduationFiveThirtyEight.com, and all other sources for the chart may be found in the Suspensions and Expulsions post.
But we can make an effort to reduce the suffering caused by poverty and illiteracy, and there are proven methods that work. For instance, a transparent, national, early childhood education program that would be managed by the democratic public schools where we’d have a better chance to keep an eye on these programs working with our youngest and neediest children to make sure racism, segregation and discrimination doesn’t rear its evil, horned face behind a wall of secrecy.
The foundation of a strong middle class is access to education for every child beginning in the first few years of life. Sadly, millions of children in this country are cut off from quality early learning. Children in countries as diverse as Mexico, France, and Singapore have a better chance of receiving preschool education than do children in the United States. For children in the U.S. who do attend, quality varies widely and access to high-quality programs is even more limited in low-income communities where it’s needed most.
We already know from decades of evidence that the education reform movement’s opaque and secretive corporate Charter schools are contributing to a resurgence of segregation. This is wrong, and it will lead to more racism and discrimination—instead of less.
If we bicker with each other over how many—difficult to prove and even harder to stop—suspensions of Black or African American children in the public schools is influenced by racism, we are allowing ourselves to get sidetracked from dealing with a challenge we can do something about, and that is to combat poverty and illiteracy.
Like my 80+ year-old friend said but with a revision to his thinking, “I’d rather face racism from a position of strength with an education, a high level of literacy and in the middle class instead of living in poverty, illiterate, feeling angry and powerless.”
UPDATE on 1-11-15
One more thing—looking at that chart, I have to ask this question: With the obvious racism and discrimination that Asian Americans faced and still face, how did they achieve those numbers beating out even the Whites in every column? In addition, the Asian-American unemployment rate is the lowest of all racial groups. The Asian American divorce rate by race is also the lowest at 8% while Whites are the highest at 27%, African Americans are 22% and Hispanics are 20%. There’s more I could add to this list, but that’s in another post I wrote at https://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/2013/05/11/what-parenting-method-works-best/
In addition read this post on Marie Corfield’s blog about the segregationist practices of New Jersey’s Charter Schools.
UPDATE on 1-20-15
AARP Bulletin asked, “What can be done to make black youth less vulnerable and fully integrated into mainstream America?” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar replied, “The main problem is the reluctance to educate black Americans. Since the Civil War, people have been indifferent to it—including black Americans.”
_______________________
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
2015 Florida Book Festival
Honorable Mentions in Biography/Autobiography 2014 Southern California Book Festival
2014 New England 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!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 