This the Waiver Administration, they have made an art form of the waiver-issuing process.

Obama advocates reducing rescources to schools which are having problem?

What are “failing” communities and children living in those communities then to do?

Forgive my stupidity, but it seems that denying help to those schools and communities OBVIOUSLY in need of help, is not the height of brilliance.

In fact it ssems very much like the opposite … and not only will children suffer now, but later all of society will suffer …

Talk about wasting potential.

You do realize, Barack Obama, that your children, and mine, will be guaranteed a society in which the potential of too many of their peers has been neglected and “written off”?

This is a classic example of mean-spirited shortsightedness, built upon the original mean-spirited short-sightededess and elitist disdain of the Bush/Cheney reign of error and terror.

Pathetic.

DW

Does Arne Duncan ever say anything that is not a lie?

But let’s take him at his word about getting out of the way, and promote the disappearance of Arne Duncan and the Department of Education. Public education is being ruined by teaching to the test under NCLB. Congress has no business in it either — education should be a local matter, as the recent problems illustrate.

But what if the locals aren’t interested? Or only interested in pushing their uneducated notions of creationism or whites-only history? “No Mind Left To Shine” was really just that – an attempt to take education out of the hands of those who have to live with the consequences. It’s the Terry Shiavo version of educational reform – kill the patient with kindness to make them moral. We need to bite the bullet and push education to the level of the rest of the industrialized world. And for those who can’t go to college, make arrangements for them as quickly as possible, so they can become useful members of society. The right to fail and be a stupid adult should not be a possibility.

Side note: does Arne Duncan ever say anything that is not a cliche?

There musta been a required multiple choice cliche test in the charter school Duncan went to.

I demand, demand I say, that ALL elementary/secondary schoolz in the U.S. be above average.

The Rs will never get rid of DoE. That would lose them one of their fave scapegoats for the moral deterioration of the U.S.

As others have said, it really was ‘no child left a dime.’

I actually favor leaving those situations alone for several reasons, most of them practical & tactical. 1. There’s very little central govt can do about them. 2. The locals do have quite a few tools to fight them should they choose (to wit that creationism case in PA). 3. With parents like that, the kids are screwed regardless of what schools do. 4. Kids can always go back for further education later on if they figure out what went wrong.

Or as Greg Palast put it: No child’s behind left.

No mention of reducing class size to increase achievement.

Obama should call this a Stress Test; he can then reuse the letterhead and PR scripts he worked out for the banks. Or he could stop his Bushian permanent campaign in lieu of governing and attempt to change or rescind a badly working law. Or is such thinking too 20th century for our post-partisan, changey, neocon president?

Yeah! What you said. And I’d like to add that it’s curious that these Union-busting deniers of Union-busting like my City’s beard/”first lady” (in my opinion)that want flexibility to lay off or fire experienced and seasoned teachers, that we don’t hear any demand to get rid of experienced and seasoned surgeons, attorneys, pilots, or other professionals who hold our lives in their hands.
So, I am left to call bullshit.

It’s a way to make the public schools so bad, and the teachers so disgruntled, that the charter schools will look good by comparison, which is what the non-educator Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee want.

A good K-12 education above all else depends upon teachers knowing the community is behind them when they promote their own unique and creative ways of educating children according to the childrens’ needs. A non-educator in Washington trying to dictate a teach-to-the-test for algebra and reading program when kids need SO much more is causing a breakdown of the K-12 education system in this country.

Of course there are problems at the local level too, but the teachers are the heart and soul of the system and they are currently being driven out of it by the current stupid policies.

Diane Ravitch:

“I have been seeing profound demoralization among teachers in America today,” Ravitch said. “It is almost hard to convey. Teachers feel they are being held accountable for social conditions beyond their control. We have to have an ethos in education of encouragement, support, at the same time encourage and respect teachers and stop beating up on them.”

She said the 2002 No Child Left Behind law has narrowed curriculum, placed undue pressure on educators and perverted the proper role of testing.

“We are now as a nation investing billions in testing,” Ravitch said. “If we took all the billions and put it into early childhood education, we would make a difference. We’re using testing as punishment, and [as a result] we’ve got cheating in Baltimore, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, Atlanta. [Teachers are told] if you don’t meet an impossible goal, you’re going to be fired and your school is going to be closed. Punishing people, threatening people never works…What people need is an appeal to a sense of purpose, they need autonomy.”

Ravitch is absolutely correct, donbacon, thank you for putting that up.

DW

From the Pacified Northwest, Great State of Wishy Warshy, City of Bill How Great thou Art –

seattle is feeling the heat in the great reformista battle.

at least 0bummer is being consistent.

in the financial mess, he let the rich pigs and the Democratic Party yuppie fuck sell out suck ups off the hook AND kept them all in charge,

in the health care debacle, he let the ruling class and their Democratic Party yuppie fuck sell out sucks ups run the show,

in education “reform”, he let the ruling class run rampant as long as their Democratic Party yuppie fuck sell out sucks ups can get their Kopp-Kipp Krime Syndicate Snouts in the trough.

BUT … yawn … he’s giving speeches about class warfare, so I’m supposed to clap louder & swoon!

rmm.

“Actually, implicit in this situation is that Congress failed to do its job to modify standards that were impossible for schools to reach, especially given chronic underfunding from the feds.”

This is the nut, I think. It’s a set up.

The plan for public education, as with many public programs, is to privatize it, to place private profit over public good, to limit institutional education to those who can afford it. Where are the schools that are doing so poorly located? Mainly these are in rural and inner city areas where job prospects are low. If the reward for sitting in a classroom almost every year of one’s childhood is a job waiting at the other end, who in their right mind would participate in the memorization and regurgitation required of the imbalanced focus on testing that NCLB demands if no decent job was waiting at the end? There is a reason these schools have such high dropout rates, and it isn’t because they don’t have “effective” teachers and principals or because the students are dumb or lazy. It is because the benefit that is supposed to be awaiting students at the end is not there. They know this. They are not fooled. Their parents and their communities have already been tossed aside by outsourcing. The public schools that used to feed industrial needs are going away next.

Ravitch from DB @15: “Teachers feel they are being held accountable for social conditions beyond their control.” Ding!

We have in place in our school district professional learning communities (PLCs). This brings all the teachers in a team together to exchange ideas and approaches of best practices. It raises the level of teaching for all. Merit pay will be the end of that because the teachers will not want to help someone else get more money for the same class. Anyway, it is very hard to make sure that all things are equal so that a differentiated pay scale is fair (which nobody will agree is fair except the higher earners).

Everything this administration does seems designed to destroy public education. Charter schools don’t do any better than public schools and will wind up costing more. School taxes will not go down, and, in fact, will probably go up because all of the costs will be there with a layer of capitalist profits on top of it.

“Forgive my stupidity, but it seems that denying help to those schools and communities OBVIOUSLY in need of help, is not the height of brilliance.”

DW, this is only my perception and is not backed up by any research, but there seems to be a trend in public education from kindergarten to college to get away from supporting those students most at risk in favor of focusing on those who already have the means to do well. This is a departure from the progressive ideas of the ’20s and 30s as well as the later efforts in the ’60s and ’70s. I hear it from the future K-12 teachers I work with when they talk about their student teaching, and I see it at the university where I work where the land grant mission to educate everyone in the state gets fainter every year. For example, the Board of Regents just mandated higher scores on college entrance exams as a requirement for admission, this in spite of the fact that ACTs and SATs are poor predictors of college success–making up only about 15% of what goes into this very fuzzy calculation, according to my buddy who studies this sort of thing.

Couldn’t agree more with everything you’ve said. Merit pay will most assuredly damage the collaborative efforts by teachers that are essential in producing quality education. The best education is a community effort. It is not served well by competitive atomization.

Teachers deserve our praise, not threats. They are a precious, dwindling resource for a battered citizenry and there was not one of them in my children’s lives to whom I do not owe a debt of gratitude because they cared and they worked with the system such as it was when my kids were growing up. This is one issue where I’m with the Teaparty folk – hands OFF, Government! Teachers are like firefighters, they are dedicated for crying out loud. None of them is going to be President; none of them is going to be among the two percent. They chose a far better path, and maybe that’s why you are picking on them, Maestro Obama. Maybe you are just a teensy bit unsettled by their integrity? Leave them alone and let them forge new creative paths with intelligent little minds – just teach them to love learning and see how they’ll go beyond all expectations on their own!

For crying out loud.

Here again is an analogy: as with terrorist tactics using terror to defeat them only multiplies them, so with teaching, if you keep on doing what you have been doing you will keep getting what you have been getting. No, it wasn’t heckava job Bushie; HE WAS WRONG! But (sigh) you must know that, Mr. Obama. Surely you know that. You are college educated, for crying out loud. And see, just see, how wrongheaded the kind of education YOU got has been! Don’t try to create more little Obamas! One is enough! ENOUGH!

Otto, as usual, your comments are enlightening and revealing of a deep appreciation of many crucial aspects of education. Yes, the land grant mission is increasingly foreign to many Americans and to virtually every politician, certainly on the national level.

It is simply appalling to realize that the very powerful and important ideas of the need of widespread public education and access to education developed early in the last century, strongly revisited in the progressive advances in providing and supporting public education, especially at the college level, in the ’20s amd ’30s, and again in the broadening of educational opportunities in the ’60s and ’70s, stemming largely from the Civil Rights era has been not merely turned away from but, too often turned on its head. Many pulic schools at the primary and secondary level are cutting back on art and music programs even as the school dsitricts “privatize” bus service and not longer provide basic school supplies, such as paper and pencils to students, simply because local politicians, of BOTH “major” parties are cutting school taxes to pander to an increasingly stingy and selfish minority.

The cost of higher education is equally appalling and unworthy of a nation claiming to be a democracy and one of the wealthiest, which was “true” before “Greed is Good” became the battle cry of certain Business Schools … when the class war was “sexed up” in deadly earnest.

“Teaching to the test”, the Bush/Cheney educatiional “legacy”, is fundamentally fraudulent and along with “Merit Pay”, as you say elsewhere in your comments, will destroy cooperative and collaborative efforts by teachers engaged in common cause which is the ONLY means which ensures consistency and constancy in the process of learning.

I hope that you might someday consider gifting the rest of us with a diary discussing your considered concerns about and your informed insights, or “speculations”, as you might term them, as well as the research of other’s, such as your friend, with which you might have familiarity, regarding educational “best practice” as well as current educational “reality”. In essence, your understanding and philosophy of public education, its best methods, purpose, and success or failures. Such an effort would be greatly appreciated by and most useful to many, here at FDL and elsewhere, as critical and informed overviews on the state of education in America, with a few exceptions, as you have noted and recommended, are something singularly lacking. Your thoughts, in particular, might well help fill this void in unique and accessible form.

DW

Ravitch: ““If we took all the billions and put it into early childhood education, we would make a difference.”

As a third generation teacher and in spite of my employment at a university, I think the single most important place to put as much effort and resources as possible is early childhood education. If a person does not get solid experience thinking, creating, exercising and interacting with others during those first five years of life, it is very difficult for further education to make the desired impact. Good early childhood education is far more important than a college degree.

The disappearance of Arne Duncan? Yes, please.

Though there may be some, I don’t know a single teacher who chose the career because they were after money or prestige.

“. . . just teach them to love learning and see how they’ll go beyond all expectations on their own!”

Amen. And there’s the nut: self-directed learning for its own sake. Real learning is the subjective interaction with one’s own environment that begins with asking questions. Standardized testing is education’s great enemy and instrument of punishing control.

Standardized testing is education’s great enemy and instrument of punishing control.

Maybe “education” and learning aren’t the same thing? I’m saying that only half jokingly.

“The cost of higher education is equally appalling and unworthy of a nation claiming to be a democracy and one of the wealthiest . . .”

The cost of tuition at my institution increases almost every year at a rate several times that of inflation. This is due mainly to two factors, both relating to the decline in the collective impulse behind the land grant mission. First, the percentage of the operating costs provided by tax dollars has gone from 27% to 22% in the ten years I’ve been there and is still falling. The university president estimates that it will approach a single digit soon, as is the case in a few surrounding states. Second, the school is run not on an educational model but on a business model. Perhaps some of this development can be explained away in relation to declining public funds, but it is more than that. It is a function of how our society views education.

To compound the rising costs and profit/fundraising demands of the university, a college degree is becoming more like a high school degree was a generation or two ago. The blue and pink collar jobs that only required a high school diploma and that used to pay enough to buy a house are mostly long gone. For most folks this means that unless one wants to stack shelves they have to get a college degree. This is a serious issue for US citizens that is not being addressed. And making college more inaccessible ain’t helping.

All of the above has a disproportionately negative effect on working class, brown, and/or first-generation college students.

I’ll think about your suggestion in your last paragraph, especially how to focus it in a way that might be useful to others. In the meantime, I am starting my first project toward experiential and service learning outside of the classroom. When the exploratory/practice run is completed this Nov., I may post something about that.

Indeed. I suspect there is a good deal of confusion about terms and goals. If training and conditioning people for a society that has a near fetish for technical “experts” in institutions historically dominated by the needs of industry is the objective, then perhaps standardized testing is useful. But if education is an internally-motivated, subjective experience based on questioning and creating in such a way that new things can always be learned, then testing is antithetical. I don’t mean to suggest a mutual exclusivity here, though I have oversimplified the issue in this dichotomous way, but the outcome depends on what is important in terms of educational process and philosophy. It is the old issue of where on the curriculum-centered to student-centered spectrum lies one’s idea of what education should be.

I think of it all this way: If a person is allowed to think and create in a self-directed way, they can always imitate an expert or memorize relevant data if they need to; but if most of their educational experience–especially when they are very young–is spent memorizing, regurgitating and conforming to externally-directed, technical processes reinforced by standardized punishment and reward, it cripples the emotional and intellectual muscles needed to be a flexible, thoughtful lifelong learner. And as DW pointed out, a reliance on the latter can be fatal to democracy.