Everything I have been blogging and saying about public education , he says it all and says it better than I ever did.
Now try this one;
And he says the rest.
For those who grow impatient with long postings,here is the short story :
1. The attack on public education and unions has been a long time developing and it is both tactical and strategic.
2. Test and punish is a failed model for both business and education - especially for education.
3. The strategic benefits of following this failed model are an enriched corporate sector (textbooks, low state corporate taxes,consultants etc.) and an electorate that has no sound historical foundation to judge the lies they are being told.
4. This electorate is not only easily lied to , they form angry uninformed movements - the Tea Party - who carry water for the very people who abuse them and pull grief upon their backs.
5.The strategy is to attack the national government, by turning the states into 50 right wing "utopias".
6. This effort is very well funded, persistent and long term in its planning and execution.
7. We are at a hinge point of this effort now. Either Progressives get smart and strategic or they will surely become even more marginalized.
8. Either become part of the solution now or take your lumps.
Now back to my posting....
These videos crossed my desk at the same time as I read this from Diane Ravitch's excellent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education:
[The latest generation of "education reformers"] say that academic performance lags because we don't have enough effective teachers, the one who students consistently improve their standardized test scores. The major obstacle to getting enough "effective" teachers and getting rid of ineffective teachers, they say, is the teachers unions. Union contracts provide job security that prevents administers from hiring and firing teachers,at will. If there are no unions, no unions contracts and no tenure, then superintendents could get rid of the bad teachers and hire only highly effective teachers. Teacher's salaries would be based on the test scores of their students, rather than on their seniority and credentials. According to the theory, compensation would attract outstanding teachers - the kind who students will get higher scores - to the nation's classrooms. So long as the unions insist on a uniform salary scale that gives equal rewards to effective teachers and mediocre teachers, then outstanding teachers will leave teaching and outstanding college graduates will never enter the profession. The answer to the problem of effective teachers, or so goes the argument, is to eliminate teacher's unions or at least rather than toothless, then fire teaches whose students get low scores.
The disconnect between the reality of the classrooms revealed in the videos and the ridiculous business "wannabe" theory of education reform is breathe-taking. I teach, I have numerous friends who teach and the theory of punish and ridicule is bad management in business , it is worse in education. In case there is any doubt has to how lame this theory is , Texas has been the flagship for it since Bush Junior was governor. We all know how that worked out. But, that is not true. I found myself literally rendered speechless by comment that fell from the mouths of people I know who are not in education. Like so much else about the present crisis, all they know is what the undermanned and hopelessly inept/clueless/uncaring media tell them. Hint: its light on analysis and context, heavy on easy-cheesy well crafted sound bytes. Let me then spell it out for you:
Texas State Board of Education v Race to the Top: Who will win? Let's consider the context around this curriculum standards debate, first: Texas is 49th in the US for verbal SAT scores, 46th for math SAT scores, 36th in high school graduation rates, only six (2 public and 4 private) of Texas' 145 higher education institutions are ranked among the nation's top 100, and from fiscal years 1999 to 2006, average tuition and fees at public universities have increased 95.5% while college degree rates are under 25% (all data public information from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts). And yet, we rank 14th in government expenditures on higher education. (You might also like to review the ratings and rankings of Texas public schools.) Texas is 38th for education expenditures and education. And yet, only 9.5% of our schools are exemplary and we aren't in the top half ranking of states for public school performance...we're in the bottom of the bottom half.
When US public schools were graded, Texas received a low score (below a C). In that, report education expert Christopher B. Swanson, vice president of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Week, said
"A convergence of political and economic factors has generated a great deal of momentum behind the push for common standards right now," Swanson added. "But the success of this movement will ultimately hinge on follow-through on key issues like aligning curriculum with the common standards, supporting high-quality instruction, and measuring student performance against the new expectations."
Unfortunately, as per typical, Texas leaders are not aligning themselves with common high standards, which now is the current Administration's program Race to the Top. Instead, the Texas State Board of Education is making changes to public school curriculum that Indoctrinate rather than Educate. In short, after modifying science to support creationism theory, the SBOE is now working to rewrite history to be more white male and less minorities and women.
The lame "punish and test" reform movement had several side benefits for the Repubs who pushed it. Excellent profit margins for test writers, graders and prep booklets and materials were one of these. Another was the virtual elimination of strong history, government and humanities elements of the High School curriculum. If Mary and Johnny don't know history then you when you and Fox News make it up, they won't notice. They will believe any spin you deliver. If you say the Founding Fathers were all born again Christians, it must be so. If you say that American was made great by loners who did not cooperate with each others, it must be so. If you say that Nazism was a left-wing movement, then that is also true.
That this effort is happening now , at the state level is not an accident either.
Who's Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn't Start Here) The most important group, I'm pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft "model bills" that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)
If you're as impressed by these numbers as I am, I'm hoping you'll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.
You can start by studying ALEC's own website. Begin with its home page at
http://www.alec.org First visit the "About" menu to get a sense of the organization's history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the "model legislation" page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Templat...
You'll of course be eager to look these over...but you won't be able to, because you're not a member.
But, dear reader, if you follow the links the author gives you discover that the web sites are now down, unresponsive. It seems that they now wish to avoid the spotlight that the good professor has shone upon them. There is nothing illegal about what they are doing, but there is something frightening when there "suggestions" are simultaneously and mindlessly being pushed in the several states. What if the purely ideological "model legislation" is NOT good for say, Wisconsin but the rabid partisans who are gathered at the ALEC seminars and who carry their water for them don't even bother to consider this point. Shouldn't the public at least know where all the divisive and out of the mainstream ideas are coming from? This seems fair to me.
This effort - from ALEC to Fox News to the Heritage Foundation to the anonymous hate emails - are both well-founded (Koch brothers are not the only ones) and they have been in business for a long time. The Arizona immigration bill was one of theres, so are many of the state "abortion" initiatives as well. Follow the link to the good professors blog for more and see my previous blog here.
What we have is a hinge moment in our history. The right , well organized , determined , strategic in its organizational and planning has gotten a chance to finally consummate its wet dream by using the states and the financial crisis to their partisan advantage. The anti-Washington theme , the secessionist talk is not a bug , it is feature of this effort. The Tea Party Movement is a natural product of the effort as well.
Where does all this lead? To an America run by the corporations, where the average worker is totally at the mercy of the corporation, and mercy is NOT a quality of the profit model. It will be an America without public schools, with a many tiered privatized educational system. The rich and the lucky will receive good educations, the troubled , the different, the poor - that is most of us - will not. It will be an America with the outward form of democracy but at heart it will be closer in essence to the Soviet democracy of the present moment, of the plutocrat, by the plutocrat and for the plutocrat. We will go through the motions of elections etc. but only the corporate friendly or the independently wealthy will be able to run for office.
And the average voter/subject/citizen will insist that they are free and happy and living in the best of all possible worlds. They will given scapegoats to hate for whatever disasters befall them - immigrants, unions, teachers, bureaucrats, liberals, everybody but those in charge, those really responsible. And so it will go....
Or not.
There are many, myself included, who believed that in this moment of their "triumph" , they have overreached. But this belief rests upon the proposition that average people will awaken from their uninformed slumber and become engaged and informed. It also rests upon the proposition that Democrats, as the best organized and only realistic counterweight to the Republican remaking of America provide leadership, message and coordination to the push back. You see my hesitation, I don't have complete faith in that happening in time.
In conversations with some progressive friends recently I was greeted with the angry complaint that Perry has an ulterior motive in pushing his Draconian budget. He is trying to kill public education. I first wrote about that 6 years ago. I thought it common knowledge in the Progressive community, if not among the general public . I was wrong.
Even in writing this blog, I have no illusion. I am speaking to a very small audience . Who in the MSM are following this story, digging into the deeper roots of the events unfolding in Austin and Wisconsin and Arizona? Who indeed?
So, now more than ever it is necessary to inform yourself on at least one of the great topics of the present debate and be ready to talk to your co-workers and friend about it with passion and clarity and persuasion.
I refer you to my posting here on how you do that.
