Please take a moment to watch this video from an 11 year old boy to our
president. Articulate young Ethan, unfettered by the calculating minds driving public education deform, says it well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygXW1QnV2pE

I'm editing to tell you a little bit more about this delightful boy, Ethan Matsuda. He won a CTA Peace and Justice Caucus Youth Activism award four years ago when he was in second grade, for his book, "The
North Pole is Melting", about Global Warming. The next year he wrote "The Easter Bunny Breaks His Leg (and has no health insurance)".

Cross-posted at General Discussion.

From the Schools Matter blog, Kenneth Libby posts an essay by AEI/Fordham's Andy Smarick, a former Bush II Domestic Policy Council member tasked with K-12 and higher education issues. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2009/11/from...

Here, in Smarick's own words, the coldly calculating business scheme for the raiding and hijacking of public education through the charter school movement. Corporate feeding from the public trough has sure done wonders for democracy and the common good hasn't it?



Below find links to and excerpts from some of the latest reports on the "success" of charter schools compared to truly public schools. It says something that our traditional public schools generally outperform charters despite serving a much more challenging population of children. It says a LOT.

From the New York Daily News on the performance of charter schools in New York City, where Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are hell-bent on more charter schools: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/educat...



And from an article by Diane Ravitch on the most recent and comprehensive national study on charters to date: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/0...



Dear readers, given the evidence, please ask yourself why the moneyed interests driving the Obama/Duncan education reforms are so intent on expanding charter schools rather than strengthening and improving our existing public schools and keeping them public.

Finally, let me say that in this particular post I have addressed only ONE of the Obama/Duncan education initiatives which are not supported by research. More on that later but for now you can read here:http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/10/...

In regard to the comments by Nicholas D. Wolfwood on a recent thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

Mr. Wolfwood, I believe the evidence you cite is cooked data. Statistics are manufactured, manipulated and misinterpreted to distort and deceive all the time. Below I'll post historian Diane Ravitch's take on those NYC results. Like those of Duncan in Chicago, they are a sham.

Excerpts are from the Bridging Differences blog which Ravitch shares with Deborah Meier. I suggest you read the entire post and the links provided there: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Di...



Have a look here too: http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com...

And read Gerald Bracey. We lost him recently. Tactful he was not when exposing disinformation about our nation's public schools, but there was no equal to him in exposing the myths that have so long dominated the "failing public schools" narrative, including those largely meaningless international comparisons. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

The following article is by Brian Jones, a teacher, actor, and activist in NYC. I've cross-posted it at GD.

His commentary and writing have been featured on GritTV, SleptOn.com and the International Socialist Review. Jones has also lent his voice to several audiobooks, including Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's Voices of a People's History of the United States and Zinn's one-man play Marx in Soho (forthcoming from Haymarket Books).

Here's a link to the article at SOCIALISTWORKER.org: http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/30/usin... ...

by Brian Jones

(CAPS mine for emphasis)

WHO'S BEHIND the charter school movement? Increasingly, the answer is: big money. The owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton family, are the single biggest contributors. Bill Gates follows close behind. Not exactly the types known for their staunch commitment to economic equality or civil rights.

Yet New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzales revealed that Rev. Al Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, received half a million dollars from a hedge fund to lend its name and energies to the Education Equality Project (EEP). The EEP boasts supporters such as billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and--wait a minute, what's he doing there?--Newt Gingrich.

Yes, this is the new civil rights "movement"--a movement of the powerful, deep-pocketed, private-jet types, assembled to roll up their tailored silk sleeves to fight for equality in education.

Their Web site cries out against the inequality of our current education system--displaying statistics about the education gap, and notably, makes a point of speaking plainly about the racial disparities in the statistics about graduation rates, reading levels, and rates of incarceration.

Before we answer the obvious question--what's their angle?--we need to acknowledge that the "civil rights/social justice" message has worked brilliantly for the charter school movement. Charter schools are making converts of students and parents all over Harlem, where I am a teacher in a traditional public school.

Charter schools, where they haven't erected gleaming new buildings, have infiltrated existing school buildings and are slowly taking over, floor by floor. They are no longer a drop in the bucket--they are a serious threat to public education. There are 70 traditional public schools in Harlem, and as of this year, there are 24 charter schools (and counting). Where they aren't directly competing with public schools for space, they're draining Harlem's public schools of the most active parents and their children.

Those of us who think that charter schools are not the answer have our work cut out for us.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHAT'S REALLY winning over parents and students to charter schools? At a recent charter school rally in Harlem (yes, charter schools mobilize parents for rallies), one parent testified that it was the small class sizes and extra attention her child received that made a big difference.

A parent at a recent charter school fair in Harlem was quoted in the New York Times as favoring charter schools because of the wide range of enrichment programs they offer: "You've got to have baseball, chess, cheerleading, drama, debate, poetry and music--oh God, music--like cello and violin... I like charter schools because they don't just have children bubbling in tests; they give them time to unwind."

SMALLER CLASS SIZES? ARTS AND SPORTS? LESS TEST PREP AND MORE TIME TO UNWIND? WHY CAN'T WE HAVE THOSE THINGS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS? WHY CAN'T ALL CHILDREN EXPERIENCE THAT KIND OF EDUCATION?

On April 23, 5,000 parents waited in line to enter their children in the lottery for only 475 available seats at four Harlem Success Academy Charter schools. Is this the future we want? Education by lottery?

Nicole Lloyd-Abdou, a Harlem public school parent was in that line, but eventually walked away in frustration. "The whole idea of a lottery was a little disturbing to me," she told me. "They said it was going to be about choice, now it's going in a different direction--it's not about choices, it's about competition."

Yes, say the privatizers. They believe that schools benefit from market competition. Well, if ever there were a moment that called for hesitation before handing our children over to the "invisible hand" of the free market, the post-subprime mortgage meltdown we're currently living through would be one.

But the banks aren't the only example. Think about what's happened to health care. In order to have the "best health care in the world," we've erected a market that rewards those who provide the least amount of care for the highest price. Do we want the same profit motive logic applied to education?

Sure, money is flowing to a few charter schools now. Someone is paying for the glossy brochures in every parent's mailbox, and the violins, and the new buildings. But this money is part of a short-term strategy to win supporters. As the saying goes, you've got to spend money to make money. Make no mistake, the long-term goal is not to spend more per pupil, but less.

Harlem Success Academy admits as much on its Web site. Under the section oriented to donors, they write:






If you think about who is able to donate large sums to charter schools, and the fact that their children mostly go to private schools or better-funded suburban schools, this statement about spending is really stomach-turning. You could read the Web site message as reassurance to potential donors that the kids in Harlem won't get as much in per-pupil funding as their kids do.


As of 2005, per-pupil spending in the New York City suburbs was as much as twice what it was in the city. Wealthier kids need all the "bells and whistles" (and less "thinking smarter"), apparently. But kids in Harlem don't.

And it seems their "strict" spending guidelines include a healthy advertising budget. In addition to receiving glossy brochures by mail, Ms. Lloyd-Abdou was robo-called. "I got two phone calls every other day for about two weeks," she told me. "It was a recorded message. I don't give anyone my number."

Once, a live young man got her on the phone and pestered, "We've been trying to reach you. Are you coming to the lottery? Couldn't your husband or another family member attend? Are you sure you couldn't get anyone to come? Is that a yes?" Smarter thinking indeed.

THERE'S MORE. ACCORDING TO THE BIG MONEY BEHIND THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT, THE TEACHER'S UNIONS ARE PROTECTING BAD TEACHERS AND ARE STANDING IN THE WAY OF REFORM. NEVER MIND THAT FOR YEARS, TEACHERS HAVE BEEN ADVOCATING FOR SMALLER CLASSES, ARTS AND ENRICHMENT AND LESS TEST PREPARATION.

But there is a grain of truth here: teacher's unions do stand in the way--of privatization. Education is one of the last of the giant public programs in America that is heavily unionized. That's why you won't see the notoriously anti-union Walton family writing checks for public schools as they do now for charter schools.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SHOULD PARENTS care if their kids' teachers are unionized? Well, yes, if they want their kid to have an experienced teacher.

A recent study found that teachers in charter schools are 230 percent more likely to leave the profession than their public school counterparts. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education study found that charter schools are less likely to have teachers that meet the state certification standards. I suppose relying on a revolving staff of younger (read "cheaper") teachers is what they mean by "smarter thinking."

I just pulled Jonathan Kozol's excellent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America off the shelf. It reminds me of another thing that sticks in my craw about the charter school "movement"--the race question. Everything--from the charter school Web sites, to the rallies, to the glossy brochures--cry out against racial inequality and evoke the civil rights movement.

But the whole project is based on a rejection of one of the key goals of the civil rights movement: desegregating the schools. For all their talk of the race gap, why is there no discussion about mixing the predominantly kids of color from the city with the predominantly white kids in the suburbs? What about Brown v. Board of Education?

In his introduction to Shame of the Nation, Kozol writes of Black public school administrators who are pained by the fact that their schools are still so segregated, and by the fact that they are put in a position that requires them "to set aside the promises of Brown.

Perhaps--while never stating it or even thinking of it clearly--these administrators are being forced to settle for the promise made more than a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in which "separate but equal" was accepted as a tolerable rationale for the perpetuation of a dual racial system in American society."

IN THIS CONTEXT, THERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE THAN SINISTER ABOUT BILLIONAIRES USING THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO SET UP "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" SCHOOLS IN THE INNER CITIES, MASKING THE GOAL OF PRIVATIZATION BEHIND A CALL FOR RACIAL JUSTICE.

As if it weren't enough to have deep pockets on their side, the charter schools also have Barack Obama as their leading advocate. As I ride to and from work on Harlem's crosstown buses, large buttons pinned to the lapels of school children are a constant reminder that Obama "hearts" charter schools.

This is a serious blow to those of us who are trying to defend the idea of public education. "I'm disappointed in Obama," Regina Gutierrez, a Harlem public school teacher told me. "I voted for him assuming that he fully supported public education, not private or semi-private education. He said he was not in favor of privatizing the schools, but now all he's doing is supporting charter schools."

Obama sends his children to the Sidwell Friends School, which charges $28,442 a year for each of his two daughters to attend its Lower School (Pre-K through 4th grade).

That money buys a "relaxed and informal" environment "with a balance between freedom and discipline," according to the school's Web site. It buys a teacher-student ratio of one to 10 in the lower grades, and one to 16 in the fourth grade. By the end of the second grade, kids are expected to have mastered the basics of digital photography and Adobe Photoshop, and begin writing computer programs. By the end of fourth grade they've learned to edit video using iMovie. This May alone, Sidwell students will put on a choral concert, a play and a dance ensemble performance.

Obama doesn't have to go through a lottery to get his kids that kind of education. He's already won life's lottery, so he has the money to buy it outright. We need a grassroots movement of parents and teachers to tell Obama that we "heart" the same kind of programs his kids are getting, and that we need public education (not a private, competitive system) that makes them available to all kids.

The following article is by Brian Jones, a teacher, actor, and activist in NYC.

His commentary and writing have been featured on GritTV, SleptOn.com and the International Socialist Review. Jones has also lent his voice to several audiobooks, including Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's Voices of a People's History of the United States and Zinn's one-man play Marx in Soho (forthcoming from Haymarket Books).

Here's a link to the article at SOCIALISTWORKER.org: http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/30/usin...

by Brian Jones

(CAPS mine for emphasis)

WHO'S BEHIND the charter school movement? Increasingly, the answer is: big money. The owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton family, are the single biggest contributors. Bill Gates follows close behind. Not exactly the types known for their staunch commitment to economic equality or civil rights.

Yet New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzales revealed that Rev. Al Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, received half a million dollars from a hedge fund to lend its name and energies to the Education Equality Project (EEP). The EEP boasts supporters such as billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and--wait a minute, what's he doing there?--Newt Gingrich.

Yes, this is the new civil rights "movement"--a movement of the powerful, deep-pocketed, private-jet types, assembled to roll up their tailored silk sleeves to fight for equality in education.

Their Web site cries out against the inequality of our current education system--displaying statistics about the education gap, and notably, makes a point of speaking plainly about the racial disparities in the statistics about graduation rates, reading levels, and rates of incarceration.

Before we answer the obvious question--what's their angle?--we need to acknowledge that the "civil rights/social justice" message has worked brilliantly for the charter school movement. Charter schools are making converts of students and parents all over Harlem, where I am a teacher in a traditional public school.

Charter schools, where they haven't erected gleaming new buildings, have infiltrated existing school buildings and are slowly taking over, floor by floor. They are no longer a drop in the bucket--they are a serious threat to public education. There are 70 traditional public schools in Harlem, and as of this year, there are 24 charter schools (and counting). Where they aren't directly competing with public schools for space, they're draining Harlem's public schools of the most active parents and their children.

Those of us who think that charter schools are not the answer have our work cut out for us.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHAT'S REALLY winning over parents and students to charter schools? At a recent charter school rally in Harlem (yes, charter schools mobilize parents for rallies), one parent testified that it was the small class sizes and extra attention her child received that made a big difference.

A parent at a recent charter school fair in Harlem was quoted in the New York Times as favoring charter schools because of the wide range of enrichment programs they offer: "You've got to have baseball, chess, cheerleading, drama, debate, poetry and music--oh God, music--like cello and violin... I like charter schools because they don't just have children bubbling in tests; they give them time to unwind."

SMALLER CLASS SIZES? ARTS AND SPORTS? LESS TEST PREP AND MORE TIME TO UNWIND? WHY CAN'T WE HAVE THOSE THINGS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS? WHY CAN'T ALL CHILDREN EXPERIENCE THAT KIND OF EDUCATION?

On April 23, 5,000 parents waited in line to enter their children in the lottery for only 475 available seats at four Harlem Success Academy Charter schools. Is this the future we want? Education by lottery?

Nicole Lloyd-Abdou, a Harlem public school parent was in that line, but eventually walked away in frustration. "The whole idea of a lottery was a little disturbing to me," she told me. "They said it was going to be about choice, now it's going in a different direction--it's not about choices, it's about competition."

Yes, say the privatizers. They believe that schools benefit from market competition. Well, if ever there were a moment that called for hesitation before handing our children over to the "invisible hand" of the free market, the post-subprime mortgage meltdown we're currently living through would be one.

But the banks aren't the only example. Think about what's happened to health care. In order to have the "best health care in the world," we've erected a market that rewards those who provide the least amount of care for the highest price. Do we want the same profit motive logic applied to education?

Sure, money is flowing to a few charter schools now. Someone is paying for the glossy brochures in every parent's mailbox, and the violins, and the new buildings. But this money is part of a short-term strategy to win supporters. As the saying goes, you've got to spend money to make money. Make no mistake, the long-term goal is not to spend more per pupil, but less.

Harlem Success Academy admits as much on its Web site. Under the section oriented to donors, they write:

You can tell a lot about an organization's priorities by how they spend their money. We could spend $30,000 per child and run a fantastic school. We could raise millions and build a gorgeous new facility with all of the bells and whistles.





As of 2005, per-pupil spending in the New York City suburbs was as much as twice what it was in the city. Wealthier kids need all the "bells and whistles" (and less "thinking smarter"), apparently. But kids in Harlem don't.

And it seems their "strict" spending guidelines include a healthy advertising budget. In addition to receiving glossy brochures by mail, Ms. Lloyd-Abdou was robo-called. "I got two phone calls every other day for about two weeks," she told me. "It was a recorded message. I don't give anyone my number."

Once, a live young man got her on the phone and pestered, "We've been trying to reach you. Are you coming to the lottery? Couldn't your husband or another family member attend? Are you sure you couldn't get anyone to come? Is that a yes?" Smarter thinking indeed.

THERE'S MORE. ACCORDING TO THE BIG MONEY BEHIND THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT, THE TEACHER'S UNIONS ARE PROTECTING BAD TEACHERS AND ARE STANDING IN THE WAY OF REFORM. NEVER MIND THAT FOR YEARS, TEACHERS HAVE BEEN ADVOCATING FOR SMALLER CLASSES, ARTS AND ENRICHMENT AND LESS TEST PREPARATION.

But there is a grain of truth here: teacher's unions do stand in the way--of privatization. Education is one of the last of the giant public programs in America that is heavily unionized. That's why you won't see the notoriously anti-union Walton family writing checks for public schools as they do now for charter schools.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SHOULD PARENTS care if their kids' teachers are unionized? Well, yes, if they want their kid to have an experienced teacher.

A recent study found that teachers in charter schools are 230 percent more likely to leave the profession than their public school counterparts. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education study found that charter schools are less likely to have teachers that meet the state certification standards. I suppose relying on a revolving staff of younger (read "cheaper") teachers is what they mean by "smarter thinking."

I just pulled Jonathan Kozol's excellent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America off the shelf. It reminds me of another thing that sticks in my craw about the charter school "movement"--the race question. Everything--from the charter school Web sites, to the rallies, to the glossy brochures--cry out against racial inequality and evoke the civil rights movement.

But the whole project is based on a rejection of one of the key goals of the civil rights movement: desegregating the schools. For all their talk of the race gap, why is there no discussion about mixing the predominantly kids of color from the city with the predominantly white kids in the suburbs? What about Brown v. Board of Education?

In his introduction to Shame of the Nation, Kozol writes of Black public school administrators who are pained by the fact that their schools are still so segregated, and by the fact that they are put in a position that requires them "to set aside the promises of Brown.

Perhaps--while never stating it or even thinking of it clearly--these administrators are being forced to settle for the promise made more than a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in which "separate but equal" was accepted as a tolerable rationale for the perpetuation of a dual racial system in American society."

IN THIS CONTEXT, THERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE THAN SINISTER ABOUT BILLIONAIRES USING THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO SET UP "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" SCHOOLS IN THE INNER CITIES, MASKING THE GOAL OF PRIVATIZATION BEHIND A CALL FOR RACIAL JUSTICE.

As if it weren't enough to have deep pockets on their side, the charter schools also have Barack Obama as their leading advocate. As I ride to and from work on Harlem's crosstown buses, large buttons pinned to the lapels of school children are a constant reminder that Obama "hearts" charter schools.

This is a serious blow to those of us who are trying to defend the idea of public education. "I'm disappointed in Obama," Regina Gutierrez, a Harlem public school teacher told me. "I voted for him assuming that he fully supported public education, not private or semi-private education. He said he was not in favor of privatizing the schools, but now all he's doing is supporting charter schools."

Obama sends his children to the Sidwell Friends School, which charges $28,442 a year for each of his two daughters to attend its Lower School (Pre-K through 4th grade).

That money buys a "relaxed and informal" environment "with a balance between freedom and discipline," according to the school's Web site. It buys a teacher-student ratio of one to 10 in the lower grades, and one to 16 in the fourth grade. By the end of the second grade, kids are expected to have mastered the basics of digital photography and Adobe Photoshop, and begin writing computer programs. By the end of fourth grade they've learned to edit video using iMovie. This May alone, Sidwell students will put on a choral concert, a play and a dance ensemble performance.

Obama doesn't have to go through a lottery to get his kids that kind of education. He's already won life's lottery, so he has the money to buy it outright. We need a grassroots movement of parents and teachers to tell Obama that we "heart" the same kind of programs his kids are getting, and that we need public education (not a private, competitive system) that makes them available to all kids.

The following article is from Concerned Advocates for Public Education. You can visit their blog here:

http://capeducation.blogspot.com/2009/10/c...



Saturday, October 3, 2009
Capitalism and Social Policy

We cannot mention enough the concern we have that those that believe in the free-market, to the extent that capitalism has become an ideology rather than an economic system, have taken over the education reform movement. We have economics professors publishing studies that garner the majority of the media's attention, we have corporations funding the charter school movement, and we have our government catering to the business world and including them, while excluding parents, students, and teachers, when it comes to to the education reform debate.

It is our heartfelt belief that the direction education reform is taking has been generated by education myths that are rooted in fear, and the steps being propagated, based on these myths will destroy public education and create a new system of educational segregation in this country; reinforcing the roles of privilege and subordination that already exist.

Parents and Educators who choose to send their children to charter schools and/or work in charter schools are often making a tough choice that they believe is best, and may in fact be best, for them or their child. We, in Red Hook, know many parents who struggled with the decision to put their child in PAVE charter school, and only did so because their other choice, due to zoning, was a failing school. This dilemma is heartbreaking in that all children should have a successful public school they can send their child to, but it is also short-sided. What we take in the short run, another option to counter failing schools, we will pay for in the long run. In this country we always seem to be playing catch-up, we always seek the quick fix. Charter Schools are the new quick fix, and the intended (or if you want to give the benefit of the doubt- the unintended) consequences of this movement will be catastrophic to students without fierce advocates, it will hurt children with special needs and language barriers, and it will damage our collective culture- our society.

All children deserve a great public school option in their neighborhood and that is where the dollars and education reform efforts should be focused. There is more at play here than simply offering parents choice- if what was really desired was successful public schools for all, we wouldn't be promoting a system that will benefit children who win a lottery and hurt the children who don't. We wouldn't be promoting a system that is funded by those with other motives- to privatize education- who believe in the free market with such conviction that capitalism is their operating ideology, even when it comes to social policy.

We have seen in the last year the economic consequences of less regulation. We have seen the consequences of allowing capitalism to go unchecked in our economic policies... why would anyone want to see this repeated with our eduction system? Why, especially, knowing what we know now, are we allowing the corporate world to drive education reform? 1% of the country owns 90% of the wealth and therefore the perceived power, but last we checked this was still a democracy- we have the power of our vote, the power of our voice, and the power in our numbers. Education reform isn't 'sexy', but it is the most important issue in terms of the preservation of our culture and the progress of our citizenry. It is time for parents, educators, and children to mobilize and, even though it is not asked for, make their voices heard... stand up, take back our schools and our neighborhoods and say no to capitalist ideology being the driving force behind education reform.

...in which it was found that 77% of Oklahoma high school students do not know who the first president of the United States was (among other things). I noticed the survey results were posted a few days ago on DU but I didn't have time to comment then.

Think about it. This survey is almost certainly bogus, ridiculous on its face. I first heard of it about a week or ten days ago when I was watching MSNBC. It was uncritically reported as fact by Chris Matthews with the usual attendant outrage. I noticed it was also published as fact on the Puffington Post (sorry, I couldn't resist). If it's bad news about public education, it is accepted as fact. No digging or investigative reporting required, for everyone knows that public schools are failing.

Last week on Friday one of my special education students who I have for language arts happened to bring his social studies book with him to my class. He wanted to know if he could have some time to work on a social studies assignment. This little guy (third grader) has been getting in a bit of trouble lately with his regular education teacher for not making any effort in science and social studies.

Well, as you might guess, the Oklahoma survey came to mind. Before we even opened his book, I asked the boy who the first president was. He answered George Washington without hesitation. Ha, if I think of it tomorrow I'll take each of my students aside as they are leaving and ask them who the first president was. I guarantee you my 'survey' will be every bit as scientific as this Oklahoma survey was.

It was a telephone survey, for heaven's sake, commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA), a state level conservative think tank, with an ideology very similar to national conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institution. I'm sure they were just curious and deeply concerned about our public schools, with no agenda to prove they are failing. Is there a sarcasm icon?

An anti-government, anti-public think tank.

"Throughout its 15 years of existence, OCPA has conducted research and analysis of public issues in Oklahoma from a perspective of limited government, individual liberty and a free-market economy."

Here is how they apparently administered the test. They anonymously called 1000 Oklahoma students and asked them 10 questions, including who the first president was.

I'd bet a nickel the over-tested high school students had great fun with the answers they gave.

The OCPA and Strategic Vision (the company OCPA commissioned to conduct the poll) should be required to publish the actual answers the kids gave to determine how seriously they took this non-school, condescending test. I'll bet the answers were very entertaining!

I apologize if this is a rehash of comments that may have been posted earlier. The thread I saw the other day just posted the results of the survey and I felt a separate thread was in order to at least question the legitimacy of the survey. You decide.

It's late, good night. I'll check on this thread tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

BTW, some interesting discussion concerning this survey can be found here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/are...

Cross-posted at GD


The following letter-to-the-editor, published in Education Week, is by Professor David Marshak of Seattle University.

Education Week
Published Online: August 31, 2009
Published in Print: September 2, 2009
LETTER
Common-Standards Process: Rigged From the Beginning?

To the Editor:

The national-standards-development timeline of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Achieve Inc., a key player in the endeavor, is a dead giveaway to the closed, predetermined nature of the process ("Openness of Common- Standards Process at Issue," Aug. 12, 2009).

July 2009: Work groups are named.
July 2009: Three weeks later, draft college- and career-readiness standards are complete.
December 2009: The entire draft K-12 standards in language arts and math are complete.
January 2010: The standards are approved, and the effort to blackmail the states into signing on begins.

Anyone who has ever done curriculum- or standards-development work knows immediately that this timetable signals a process in which the end product has already been decided upon at the beginning.

This project is entirely closed off from educator and citizen engagement. And, as usual, there is not a single person on either development team who actually interacts with children or adolescents— just a bunch of directors, managers, and associates.

It is typical of the arrogance and stupidity of American educational policy development in our time that we have the policy developed exclusively by people who have no personal engagement with the institutions of schooling, people who are bureaucrats and paper- pushers and wouldn’t know how to engage a child if their ample salaries depended on it.

Of course, this is the logical conclusion of modernist consciousness, to which living wisdom is irrelevant. And this negation of wisdom is one of the key reasons that all of our modernist institutions are collapsing.

No doubt national standards and national tests will be shoved through, which will lead inevitably to ever-greater efforts to transform our schools from places with real educative purposes into test-prep factories.

David Marshak
Bellingham, Wash.

The following letter-to-the-editor, published in Education Week, is by Professor David Marshak of Seattle University.

Education Week
Published Online: August 31, 2009
Published in Print: September 2, 2009
LETTER
Common-Standards Process: Rigged From the Beginning?

To the Editor:

The national-standards-development timeline of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Achieve Inc., a key player in the endeavor, is a dead giveaway to the closed, predetermined nature of the process ("Openness of Common- Standards Process at Issue," Aug. 12, 2009).

July 2009: Work groups are named.
July 2009: Three weeks later, draft college- and career-readiness standards are complete.
December 2009: The entire draft K-12 standards in language arts and math are complete.
January 2010: The standards are approved, and the effort to blackmail the states into signing on begins.

Anyone who has ever done curriculum- or standards-development work knows immediately that this timetable signals a process in which the end product has already been decided upon at the beginning.

This project is entirely closed off from educator and citizen engagement. And, as usual, there is not a single person on either development team who actually interacts with children or adolescents— just a bunch of directors, managers, and associates.

It is typical of the arrogance and stupidity of American educational policy development in our time that we have the policy developed exclusively by people who have no personal engagement with the institutions of schooling, people who are bureaucrats and paper- pushers and wouldn’t know how to engage a child if their ample salaries depended on it.

Of course, this is the logical conclusion of modernist consciousness, to which living wisdom is irrelevant. And this negation of wisdom is one of the key reasons that all of our modernist institutions are collapsing.

No doubt national standards and national tests will be shoved through, which will lead inevitably to ever-greater efforts to transform our schools from places with real educative purposes into test-prep factories.

David Marshak
Bellingham, Wash.

Note: Michael Martin is a research analyst for the Arizona School Boards Association and a frequent commenter on the EDDRA Discussion List, run by independent researcher Gerald Bracey. EDDRA: Education Disinformation Detecting and Reporting Agency

As will become apparent when you read, Martin is responding to another EDDRA commenter but his insights are well worth considering. BTW, he has also done a great deal of research on the impact of lead poisoning on low-income urban children: http://www.azsba.org/static/index.cfm?cont...


by Michael Martin

I'm sorry, I fail to see the logic in any of this. I was an early supporter of charter schools and still believe they have a role to play in society. I was on legislative staff in Arizona when a Democratic senator asked me about the idea circulating to create charter schools and I argued that there were many circumstances where a charter school would be valuable, such as a shelter for domestic violence victims, for migrant children where the school could follow the harvest, and other examples.

But don't make charter schools the scapegoat for what is clearly another agenda that is exploiting charter schools.

This discussion of why the federal government is mandating charter schools despite evidence they fail to improve test scores should first of all recognize that they may be mandating charter schools BECAUSE they fail to improve test scores. You ASSUME that their impetus is to improve the lives of children because that is what motivates you, but there is no evidence that it motivates them.

We just completed a thread about a corporate sponsored commission that explicitly excluded any people who have to look at school children each morning. This commission included as its primary sponsor the Achieve organization that was founded by the person who was CEO of R.J. Rynolds Tobacco when it promoted Joe Camel to poison children. So why do you persist in thinking the basis of the argument about education in general has anything to do with the welfare of children?

Look at the original arguments that formed the basis for charter schools and the primary argument was that charter schools would be cheaper. That private enterprise would run schools cheaper than public schools. Recognize that the primary impetus now for charters is that they will break the unions and their high wage demands. Mandating charter schools represents the same logic as mandating tax cuts regardless of the consequences. Specifically it means they want government cheaper regardless of the consequences.

You talk about "possible" racism when former President Carter points out that the national discussion about incivility arises only because of the fact that the President is Black. The clear message behind the healthcare controversy is that it will provide healthcare to "them" while most of "us" already have healthcare. Consider why the anti-healthcare rallies often featured angry people who are on the federal healthcare program Medicare opposing a federal healthcare program for the poor and there isn't much logical ground other than to consider racism. But I would suggest that racism is not the primary issue either.

I suggest it would be more astute to recognize that it is really a synthesis of racism and classism. In particular, we have developed a multinational upper class that sees everything in terms of dollars, including people. They view everyone who is not in their class as "them" and see all children other than their own as nothing more than the equivalent of farm animals, as labor inputs, as creatures. And they see politics as nothing more than dollars spent to control politicians.

Sitting on my desk are books titled The Global Class War and The Divine Right of Capital and The Transnational Capitalist Class and The Soul of Capitalism and Global Capitalism which talk about a huge reality you are ignoring.

But don't make corporations the scapegoat for what is clearly another agenda that is exploiting corporations either. Most people work for corporations and most people are justly proud of the corporations they work for and what they contribute to the world. But most people have nothing in common with the multinational upper class that controls most major corporations.

The fundamental issue is not charter schools and it is not corporations or capitalism (which I also support), it is clearly a class of people who believe that money defines everything. They see nations and citizens as archaic. I call them The New Aryans because they have the same philosophical conception of themselves being supra-national superior beings and everyone else being expendable.

We are sitting on the verge of an incredible moment in history when the ideals behind America and American public education are poised to sweep the world. For many years we lived by the credo inscribed on the Statue of Liberty that what were considered "refuse" in other lands could come to America and transcend class. Public education was specifically developed to turn the children of refuse into people free to transform the world. Today we are seeing children around the world given the opportunity to go to school and transform themselves and their world. In China and India more and more children of virtual serfs are given the opportunity of an education and the eventual opportunity to create a society that transcends class.

But today we also see the multinational upper class reacting to these opportunities by creating initiatives in each country through their economic power to ensure that education creates only a worker class. Their vision of the world is a global class of leaders dominating their "workers" as if they were little more than beasts of burden and the workers have no unions, no rights, no opportunity to transcend class. Doesn't it occur to anyone here that the ultimate goal of these New Aryans is to create a sweatshop America? If you look closely at the Abramoff scandal of corrupting Congress a few years ago it was founded on the political machinations of maintaining sweatshops in American Guam.

Just as a mental exercise, pretend that you are a New Aryan with a global interest in maintaining your class. How would you go about doing that? Think about it. What would you do to ensure that your labor inputs do not influence your decisions? Would you want education to be defined entirely in terms of employability and to de-emphasize civics and history and logical thinking? Would you want schools to be controlled by mandates from easily corrupted federal authorities instead of myriad elected community leaders who have to look parents and teachers and children in the eye every day? Would you see diversity in common schools as a unifying influence, or would you see it as losing the opportunity to pit groups against each other? If you cannot figure it out as a mental exercise, I predict it will be imposed on you. Not difficult to predict since they are obviously in the process of doing it.

— Michael Martin
EDDRA discussion list
2009-09-23

For Immediate Release
Washington, D.C.

Gates Foundation & DOE to Fund High-Performing Footwear Initiative


Whenever edu-philanthropreneur Bill Gates gets down and out about the state of public education, the severe economic downturn we are all are experiencing, and the staggering inequalities incurred on the nation by poorly performing public school teachers, he visits some exceptional schools to lift his spirits. On a visit to a KIPP school in Houston, Gates witnessed an "unbelievable thing" about its teachers, a phenomenon apparently unheard of in traditional public schools.



Go to the following URL for the rest of the story because it has lots of hyperlinks that I don't know (or remember) how to manage on DU:

http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com/2009/0...

The following is cross-posted at GD.

Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report gets it and exposes public education deform with humor. I'll post excerpts from his right-on-target article below the cartoon but you can find the entire message at http://tinyurl.com/naskao







I encourage you to read the whole Dixon article at the URL posted above. And if you're willing, support the thread at GD.

Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report gets it and exposes public education deform with humor. I'll post excerpts from his right-on-target article below the cartoon but you can find the entire message at http://tinyurl.com/naskao







I urge readers to read Dixon's entire article at the URL posted above.

I posted the following on General Discussion but I think it will get very little play. Funny picture of McCain supporters along with a connection to the hypocrisy of big business ideas on "regulation" for business versus public education.
http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com/2008/0...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Take a look here:

http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com/2008/0...

My apologies if the picuture has already been circulating on DU.