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Notable Quotes
"The new TerraNova Common Core offers constructed-response, extended constructed- response, and performance task items in the same test, on the same scale. Results are available in seven days or less and reports are designed to show administrators, students, and teachers where they stand on both national and the Common Core standards today and over time.
"Only dead men can tell the truth in this world.
"They say shut it down. We say spread it around! No history is illegal!
"The political landscape has shifted dramatically under Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes. Budget cuts slashed spending on student financial aid, food stamps, Medicaid, school lunch programs, veterans hospitals, and aid to single mothers. The social safety net is shredded. Most federal tax dollars flow directly into the Pentagon and defense contractors such as Halliburton.
"No great book is explicable. . . An explanation--indeed, any explanation--would defile it, for reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers, convenient summaries, quiz questions, annotations, arrows, highlighted lines, lists of its references, the numbers of its sources, echoes, and influences, an outline of its design--useful as sometimes such helps are--nevertheless very seriously mislead. Guidebooks are useful, but only to what is past. Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. 'Okay, I get it,' we say, dusting our hands, 'and that takes care of that.' 'At last I understand Kafka' is a foolish and conceited remark." "If you are to remain known while writing books(for the books themselves are likely to have a mayfly's life), you must either court the media and let publicity be your pimp, a la Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, or cling like old ivy to the walls of the Academy, passing your person around from campus to campus like a canape on a party tray. . . . You review. Yes, you do; you descend to your opponents' depths, where you'll be seen as just another shark. You sympose. You give interviews. All of it adding to the stuff about and by you that a student, a critic, or a scholar must consult. For you are as large as your library's catalog entries." "Assessing teachers based on their students' academic performance is an idea whose time has come."
"CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. " "My rabies fear started with To Kill a Mockingbird, the same way my appendicitis fear started with Madeline, and my brain tumor fear started with Death Be Not Proud. On an ideal planet, children's books wouldn't be censored for references to sex, but for illnesses." "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry -- especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly. " "The No Consultant Left Behind dictum is why NCTE, ASCD, et al like Common Core." "The role of courtiers is to parrot the official propaganda. Shame on courtiers in the media, in professional organizations like NCTE,NCTM, ASCD. "
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may my heart always be open to little "Resolved 2012: Abolish NCLB. NCLB is Frankenstein in a good suit." "Whoever Said There's No Such Thing As a Stupid Question Never Looked Carefully at a Standardized Test " " I encourage those students interested in becoming TFA corps members to read Paul Goodman's Compulsory Mis-Education (1964), in my opinion the single-best critique of the kind of education that the TFA insurgency seeks to perfect."
"There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the US than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling--the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997. . . .
"Saturday, March 12, 2011
Tell Them About The Golf Links
"A report by the Alliance of Childhood found an average of 20 to 30 minutes a day of testing and test preparation among kindergarteners in Los Angeles and New York." " Two McKinsey reports [How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top, by Michael Barber and Mona Mourshed, [foreword by Michael Fullan, special Advisor on Education to the Premier of Ontario] September 2007 and How the world's most improved school systems keep getting better by Mourshed, Chijioke and Barber, Dec. 2010] which have achieved such global influence within a short time deserve the closest scrutiny. Yet when they are so examined, the first fails for at least four reasons: it is methodologically flawed; selective; superficial; and its rhetoric on leadership runs ahead of the evidence. The second, although it corrects some of the faults of its predecessor and offers a more elaborate explanation of success, still possesses six faults: it has an impoverished view of teaching and learning; its evidential base is thin; its central arguments are implausible; its language is technocratic and authoritarian; it underplays the role of culture in education and it omits any mention of democracy. "
"As the police carried off a young protester whose head was covered in a crown of blood, a photographer stood behind a metal barricade and raised his camera. Two officers ran at him, grabbed the barrier and struck him in the chest, knees and shins. You are not permitted, the police yelled, to photograph on the sidewalk.
"[W]e are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while the people running this country for years now have been operating according to the completely opposite principle that different people have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case-by-case basis.
"If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. "
"Unless value-added measures can capture the teacher effectiveness construct more consistently and reliably, they cannot be used for much decision-making,
especially if high-stakes consequences are to be attached to such decisions. They are not, in fact, good enough.
"The class was working on word problems, one of which went as such: 'Alyssa has 16 marbles and then lost 9 of them. How many marbles does she have left?' Most students worked through it and said the expected answer. One girl said, 'Alyssa still has 16 marbles, she just doesn't know where 9 of them are right now. But she'll find them soon.'"
"'The 0utcome of 2012 campaign will depend not on what I do but on what YOU do.'--President Obama TV ad.
"If we don't count something, it gets ignored. If we do count it, it gets perverted." "The only way teachers appear at ed reform table is when they're served up as main course--to be eaten alive. " "The US Congress and the Department of Agriculture have collectively agreed that pepper spray, an inflammatory agent commonly used in riot control and personal self-defense, is now publicly recognized as a member of the vegetable food group." "Hey teachers, if you're a parent who allows your child to take standardized tests, you're part of the problem." "A child who has been boxed up six hours in school might spend the next four hours in study, but it is impossible to develop the child’s intellect in this way. The laws of nature are inexorable. By dint of great and painful labor, the child may succeed in repeating a lot of words, like a parrot, but, with the power of its brain all exhausted, it is out of the question for it to really master and comprehend its lessons. The effect of the system is to enfeeble the intellect even more than the body. We never see a little girl staggering home under a load of books, or knitting her brow over them at eight o’clock in the evening, without wondering that our citizens do not arm themselves at once with carving knives, pokers, clubs, paving stones or any weapons at hand, and chase out the managers of our common schools, as they would wild beasts that were devouring their children" "I don't know which seems more incomprehensible: that we would have had to explain journalism to the publisher of a newspaper or that it didn't matter whether we did or not. " "The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. Among other things, the book is a reminder that whenever you think things can't get worse, they can. They can get much, much worse." "[David] Coleman is deluding himself on the joys of objectivity in writing. What employers (corporations) want is not so much an absence of personal opinion and voice, in favor of objective facts, but for their opinions to be cleverly disguised as objective and factual. But, that wouldn't work as a standard, would it?" "Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. --Matt Taibi, Rolling Stone, Nov. 10, 2011 Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110#ixzz1dPaXsJFO" "In republics as in the kitchen, it's the little things, respected for themselves rather than pureed into sameness, that make the finest sauces."
"I'm from New Jersey
"They think they can tame you, name you and frame you,
"There's one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands? ['Occupy' protests have spread around the world as discontentment with capitalism has grown. (EPA)] 'Occupy' protests have spread around the world as discontentment with capitalism has grown. (EPA)
"We have reached a point where measuring things doesn't work any more. When you're in politics or business and you need to measure the unmeasurable in order to make things happen - and your career and our lives may depend on you being able to do so -- then you have crisis. It is a counting crisis, born out of using numbers to distil the sheer complexity of life into something manageable. The closer you get to measuring what's really important, the more it escapes you. Because number-crunching brings a kind of blindness with it. When we measure life, we reduce it. "
"'Give me your definition of a horse.'
"Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know. " "We have reached a point where measuring things doesn't work any more. When you're in politics or business and you need to measure the unmeasurable in order to make things happen - and your career and our lives may depend on you being able to do so - then you have crisis. It is a counting crisis, born out of using numbers to distil the sheer complexity of life into something manageable. The closer you get to measuring what's really important, the more it escapes you. Because number-crunching brings a kind of blindness with it. When we measure life, we reduce it. "
"Sylvester Stalone has stated, "I could play Hamlet if I wanted to. I just don't want to." Mr. Stallone may be understating his case. He may be able to play Lear.
"Level Playing Field: An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations. The level playing field is an idealized vision of the open market. Here the close relationship between corporate mythology and competitive sport is fully consummated. . . . The people who cry loudest for a level playing field fall into two categories: those who own the goal-posts and fools." "The Global Economy is a nineteenth-century concept dressed up in high-tech and posing as the future. . . . Passive acceptance of the Global Economy as an unregulated international demolition crew would mean a return to the past. " "New York Times has Wealth Matters column but no Poverty Matters column, a Business Section but no Labor Section." " The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. " "Mr. Rambharose goes to college at night, after working from 5 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in a bookstore at La Guardia Airport. One of the best things about the job, he said, is that when the store is empty, he can read the books. Recently he has finished 'Three Cups of Tea,' 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' and 'The Kite Runner.' " "I appeal to teachers in the face of every hysterical wave of emotion, and of every subtle appeal of sinister class interest, to remember that they above all others are consecrated servants of the democratic ideas in which alone this country is truly a distinctive nation--ideas of friendly and helpful intercourse between all and the equipment of every individual to serve the community by how own best powers in his own best way."
"Susan Ohanian, creator of www.susanohanian.org, has won the 2003 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Orwell Award. The award recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse and is give by the NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak.
"You have to pedal and keep pedaling. " "Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." "As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. " "The bill is 868 pages and we got it yesterday, and I talked to committee members today and said this isn't the way government should work. I thought we'd have hearings. We've had zero hearings on No Child Left Behind. I would think we’d have several significant hearings…Bring in the teachers, bring in the superintendents, bring in the principals and find out more about it. We've had none of that, and I think it's rotten." "In America the banks went down but the big shots in them still got rich; in Ireland the big shots went down with the banks. Sean Fitzpatrick, a working-class kid turned banker who built Anglo Irish Bank more or less from scratch, is widely viewed as the chief architect of Ireland's misfortune: today he is not merely bankrupt but unable to show his face in public. . . . When the bank failed Fitzpatrick was listed among its creditors, having (in April 2008!) purchased five million euros of Anglo Irish subordinated floating rate notes. The top executives of all three big banks operated in a similar spirit: They bought shares in their own companies right up to the moment of collapse, and continued to pay dividends , as if they had capital to burn. Virtually all of the big Irish property developers who behaved recklessly signed personal guarantees for their loans." "Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in Iceland, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people--or, to put it more plainly, elves--in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it."
"It is Not Just Bankers. It is Capitalism. The core issue of our time is the potential of a mass, activist, class conscious movement to transcend capitalism met by the reality of a corporate state, fascism, conducting perpetual war on workers world-wide.
"Obama should bow to political pressure & replace Arne with new Department of Education: Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, Happy, Dopey, Doc, & Bashful."
"And the little very very very very very very very old man smiled, and looking at the faerie he said: 'Why?'
"If you want to make kids stupid, put them on a computer. Every Federal study shows that the more time kids spend on computers, in and out of school, the dumber they are." "If anyonequestions what this president thinks about teachers who teach anything BUT math and science look to the Teacher Loan Forgiveness rules for federal student loans. Highly Qualified elementary and secondary teachers are eligible for $5,000.00 in loan forgiveness. Math or science Highly Qualified? Shave off $17,500.00. Pretty much says it all." "The lie has failed; now we must help the truth return. " "Most of the great things that teachers do are not seen by adults, and are taken for granted by children. " "We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere." "Jesus was an itinerant preacher who demanded an immediate redistribution of wealth to the poor." "In a wonderful book Remembering Denny, Calvin Trillin notes that a large number of Rhodes scholars commit suicide. He reasons that people who have gone through the first 22 years of their lives without making a mistake or failing are ill equipped mentally to deal with their first setbacks. " "500 pages of specific, grade level standards in reading and math will likely be obsolete before implementation. " "Mayor Rhambo Emanuel has made a longer school day, where kids can spend even more time doing test prep, out to be the most important innovation to education since the basal reader was implemented a century ago." "My wife and I just did Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with our two children.[first grader & third grader]" "Contrary to any prognostications made by Secretary Arne Duncan and his corporate backers, The Race to the Top must be understood as nothing more than the abdication of the social responsibility of the state in assuring public education by stressing instead, individual freedom through privatized choice, 'free'-markets and personal responsibility in the ruthless and unequal capitalist marketplace of despair. It is being camouflaged as educational reform, when in fact it will serve to deform education and its stakeholders. " "Duncan doesn't want to change the factory style of education; he simply wants to hi-tech it. " "There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. "
"Once again the time has come for revolution in America. Instead of a British king we have a ruling class of bankers and billion-aires who control the gov-ernment and all the impor-tant institutions of society. Despite the electoral circus and other trappings of de-mocracy, the big shots call the tune. Politicians serve them, not us. This dictator-ship of the rich has pushed economic inequality to ob-scene levels, has left more and more Americans unemployed or working at jobs that pay too little, has driven homes into foreclosure, deprived families of adequate medical care, saddled young people with huge student loans, caused envi-ronmental disasters like BP in the Gulf, and sent loved ones to kill or be killed in wars based on lies. The future holds misery for the many and privilege for the few.
These and other problems. . . .
"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given Georgia $1.3 million to help with the Common Core roll-out. . . . [training teachers]." "Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither. Pass it on. "
" There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there--good for you.
"
The best educators get what it means to say that every teacher is inexperienced with each new group of students. They get that prefabricated, content-bloated curriculums, pacing guides and laminated lesson plans are the definitive way to pretend to teach.
" Incredible leadership by 20 states jointly creating new science education standards to better prepare students for the jobs of the future. @arneduncan As the Feds cut support of science research, just what are these jobs of the future that require new science standards? " "As the Obama administration announced plans for hundreds of billions of dollars more in domestic budget cuts, it late last week solicited bids for the construction of a massive new prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. Posted on the aptly named FedBizOps.Gov website which it uses to announce new privatized spending projects, the administration unveiled plans for 'the construction of Detention Facility in Parwan (DFIP), Bagram, Afghanistan' which includes "detainee housing capability for approximately 2000 detainees." It will also feature 'guard towers, administrative facility and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems.' The announcement provided: 'the estimated cost of the project is between $25,000,000 to $100,000,000.'" "The critical question is whether children must be made to work a second shift after spending a full day at school." "There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and lies funded by the Gates Foundation." "Get with it. Either you're opting out in the many ways we described or you're wasting our time. The corporate reformers love that we still can't form a united coalition. Sh$t or get off the pot. Stop worrying about your stupid jobs. If you don't start kicking some as$, be prepared to be kicked in the ass. The corporate reformers love the fact that we're all trying to be cumbbyya. Rise against! Rage against the machine!" "Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government." "I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. " "Academic achievement gaps are well-established long before the first day of kindergarten. " "16.4 million children living in poverty in this country. Solution: Blame the schools and take away teacher benefits and bargaining rights. " "Forty-six million two hundred thousand Americans are poor-- 2.6 million more than two years ago. Poverty = $22,113 for family of four." "Corporate school privatizers feign disgust with teachers that cheat the standardized tests. But big business theft of public education is by far the greater sin. The real cheats are those that pushed high stakes testing under the false pretexts of reform, when the actual goal was union busting and privatization." "In real life my heroes are elementary-school band directors." " I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. . . .[H. L. Mencken] was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. . . . It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it. "
". . . [T]he people he's surrounded himself with are not labor people, but stooges from Wall Street. Barack Obama has as his chief of staff a former top-ranking executive from one of the most grossly corrupt mega-companies on earth, JP Morgan Chase. He sees Bill Daley in his own office every day, yet when it comes time to talk abut labor issues, he has to go out and make selected visits twice a year or whatever to the Richard Trumkas of the world.
"Steven Brill's Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools celebrates the improbable consensus among conservative Republicans, major foundations, Wall Street financiers, and the Obama administration about school reform."
"The Palm Beach County implementation of the Common Core Standards boggles the mind. Teaching kindergartners the ellipses is worthy of a Jon Stewart sketch, though what it really needs is Monty Python. . . or maybe an update of Abbott and Costello's 'Who's On First?'
"Justice Dept investigating Standard & Poor's. I wish someone would investigate CTB McGraw-Hill tests " "The standards movement has become the conventional wisdom of both political parties and all the recent Administrations--Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. Standards-based accountability trumpets the values of the marketplace--school districts incentivized to manage a portfolio of schools that are opened or closed depending on their test scores—states competing for funding--teachers incentivized by merit pay for production of higher test scores--management efficiency valued over democratic governance." "We mega-rich should not continue to get extraordinary tax breaks while most Americans struggle to make ends meet. My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice. - "
"Blame for financial mess starts with the corporate lobby
"Mr. Allbright broadcast 1,500 Brooklyn Dodgers games without seeing a single one. Inspiration for Gates education policy? " "The relationship between poverty and all kinds of academic achievement is one of the best-established and most replicated results in all of educational research. People keep "rediscovering it" and politicians keep ignoring it, or tell people to 'stop whining' (Rod Paige)."
"I don't read for data, I read for style, force of expression, power of imagination, use of language. So if I find that in looking through pages of a book, then I will stay with the whole thing. Unfortunately, most people are taught to read as if it's homework. They are not taught to read for pleasure.
"As long as the labor movement (what is left of a labor movement) continues to support 'Democrats' who stab them in the back, the future for the labor movement is nonexistent. And since the Democratic Party can not exist without union financial support, the Party itself, under Obama and the phonies, is committing suicide. http://www.thenation.com/article/158640/labors-last-stand" "Let us label our lawmakers like they label teachers. Let us have a hard look at their data. Let us have merit pay in Congress!" "Advice for Bill Gates and Arne: Spend one year in Finland as classroom teacher and one year in Detroit classroom. Then, join the conversation. " "How should Gates spend next $5 billion? Schools would be better off if he flushed it down toilet." "Naked greed is no longer shameful." "Who needs a monarchy when you have capitalism? ( commenting on $50,000 kid's playhouse that comes with a flat-screen TV)" " No, I don't want a ten minute phone call from Arne Duncan, unless it's the one where he leaks the news of his resignation. "
"may my heart always be open to little
"I am not saying, 'If it feels good, it’s good for you. But if we’re doing it right, it should feel good. If we’re doing literacy and language development right, teachers and students should be having a pretty good time. If there's pain, something's really wrong." "Capitalism defines human beings as primarily greedy, self-interested animals designed to maximize their own position, especially in the acquisition of material goods and status. That instinct obviously is part of our nature, but -- just as obviously -- that is not all there is to human nature; given the long evolutionary history of humans in band-level societies defined by solidarity and cooperation, we should assume the greedy instincts probably are not primary. Yet in capitalism that sociopathic instinct is rewarded and reinforced. With each generation that lives in such a system, our capacity for empathy is undermined. This is not an argument against individuality or for complete subordination to the collective, but merely recognition of one of the ugliest aspects of capitalism -- the belief that we can ignore the fate of others and still make a decent world."
"Obama is one of the most boring and pedantic presidents we have had. His occasional basketball tosses and silly little jogs up the steps to the podium can't hide the vapid quality of what he has to say.
"[T]he federal drive to use student test scores to grade teachers--came exclusively from the Obama administration." "This is a matter of honor, plain and simple. An ocean of blood, sweat and tears has been spent bringing these all-important programs to life, and even more has been spent protecting and defending them. If this president consents to throw all that over [Social Security and Medicare] in an act of political triangulation, he will be marked in my book for all time as a failure, a betrayer, and a disgrace." "The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know it's being used. " "Dr. Seuss has written more immortal works than any other twentieth-century American author. Think about it. Virtually every child in this country has read, is reading, or will read The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, The Butter Battle Book, and perhaps a dozen others equally splendid. Consider too that each of Seuss's more than forty titles is read not once, not twice, but scores of times, usually to pieces. . . . And what do we learn from Seuss? The joy of words and pictures at play, of course, but also the best and most humane values any of us might wish to possess: pluck, determination, tolerance, reverence for the earth, suspicion of the martial spirit, the fundamental value of the imagination. This is why early reading matter. At any age, but especially in childhood, books can transform lives. . . ." "What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust's innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet's father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they 'are burnt and purged away.'" "I've seen enough 'data.' Next year my classroom is going to be about creativity, projects, and having fun with ideas. The way I look at it now, every year may be my last, and I don't want to go out playing a numbers game that was rigged against me and my students from the start. Rigidly applied standards will fail the kids; that's not my job." " This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. " "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum -- even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. " ". . . Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. . . . David and Charles Koch are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. " "With charters, choice is a political movement, not an education movement." "Due process is one of the hallmarks of a civilized society."
"I march because of what this war on education will do to my former colleagues and the new teachers with whom I work.
I march for change.
I march for reform. "Why does the media always refer to people defending our civil liberties and the Constitution as 'activists' or 'advocates?' Wouldn't 'citizens' do just as well? " "[Arne Duncan] is not the nation's superintendent. Unquestionably, Congress gave the secretary way too much authority in the stimulus bill when it said, 'Here’s $5 billion, go do good things for education.' " "If you read the waiver language in the [NCLB] law, the secretary absolutely does not have the right to arbitrarily think up good reform ideas and require that states do them in return for waivers. That's a violation of constitutional design. " "Food, education, housing, jobs, and prisons will become systems of social management. This will enable a small white power elite and their overseers to control the unarmed, uneducated, unhealthy grassroots, working class groups and eliminate a real middle class by subjecting them to extreme social pressures that demean and debilitate them to preclude any thoughts of rebellion by keeping them in a constant basic survival mode from day to day. . . . "
"There is a ghetto to prison pipeline.
". . . the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit. " "Public schools HAVE to fail in order to crack open this egg and give these financiers access to the $360 billion they are after (estimates are that it is around $700 billion today). No matter what logic you use to explain the problems or successes of public education, it will be of no avail: public schools HAVE to fail. Whatever it takes." "Teachers don't care about kids. They don't care about classrooms. They only care about their jobs and their pensions." "I’ve seen enough “data”. Next year my classroom is going to be about creativity, projects, and having fun with ideas. The way I look at it now, every year may be my last, and I don’t want to go out playing a numbers game that was rigged against me and my students from the start. Rigidly applied standards will fail the kids; that’s not my job" "I said I’d be going with the happiness plan. What's that? It's getting the kids to enjoy reading so that they do it on their own. How does it work? Easy. Give them choices and time to read every day, and then celebrate their accomplishments."
"OUR GOALS
"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.... " "Those who can't teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers." "To Mr Obama: it is obvious to most experts that the problems in school are not teachers' fault; it follows that teachers cant fix it either. " " Scantron Tip #8: Every bubble feeds the hydra. " "WARNING: Close contact with Common Core standards may cause irregular heartbeat, dark urine; dizziness; unusual bruising or bleeding." "Absence of warning label on Common Core should not be construed to indicate they are safe, effective or appropriate for any given classroom" "Re LEARN Act: If I were in charge of the world, politicos would stop passing legislation telling teachers how to teach." "To US DOE: Your promise of more RTTT $$$ sounds like those late night TV ads for set of 17 kitchen knives that glow in dark and whistle Dixie." "Arne says 'We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum.' And just what do you think the Common Core Assessment will do?" "If you want Race to the Top money for your state, you apparently like the Federal Govt running your life. Take control of your own education." "It was only after he left school and joined the army that he discovered he was intelligent." "Saying schools need more $$ is a dangerous argument, failing to recognize deep problem. Poor people are the ones truly needing more money." "Under 'Similar to Arne Duncan,' Twitter lists 'ASCD.' Is this because of the $3 million Gates gave ASCD to promote Common Core?" "Think I will join the Gates ed reform movement & start manufacturing bunk desks for profit. Twice as many kids per classroom."
"Before we can make workers, we must first make people. But people are not made--they are conserved and grown.
"Momma, don't let your baby grow up to be a Standardisto." "Refuse all cooperation with the heart's death...." "Even a fool, when he is holding a bucket of standardized test scores, is counted wise by the U. S. Secretary of Education."
"Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism....
"If I had a kid facing the kindergarten skills blitz today, I'd red shirt him until he was 42."
"NYC Charter tried to make kid wear a T-shirt with words "Not Yet" on it, meaning not ready for regular classes
"In 1980 CEOs made 42 times as much as workers, in 1990 they made 85 times as much, in 2000 they made 531 times as much."
"I can't recall a single corporate executive ever making a literary allusion in my 20 years as a business reporter.
"Quote of the day: 'Can't explain it, but just seeing them there smiling and talking makes me want to kill them all'
"Where do books go when libraries close? See Gates/Duncan plan to use them as extra fiber in lunch: http://tinyurl.com/3p3tj7o" "It was only after he left school and joined the army that he discovered he was intelligent."
"Absence of warning label on Common Core should not be construed to indicate they are safe, effective or appropriate for any given classroom.
"STOP apologizing for bad teachers. Doctors ignore. bad medicos, Congressmen crooked politicos, journalists hack scribes, Gates lousy Windows." "When people with wealth and power say they are not acting to protect their wealth and power, you can be pretty sure that's exactly what they are doing. http://tinyurl.com/3qexonw"
"[W]e can only untangle the classroom level effects, which include different mixes of students, class sizes and classroom settings, or even time of day a specific course is taught, if each teacher to be evaluated has the opportunity to teach different mixes of kids, in different classroom settings and at different times of day and so on. Otherwise, some teachers are subjected to persistently different teaching conditions. . . .
"If I hear one more person talk about the 'liberal media' in America, I will probably vomit on them. . . . The [media] made the "Tea Party" into a legitimate political phenomenon by dint of total-saturation coverage. But now, they are trying to disappear the Wisconsin protests by ignoring them entirely. . . . Is it because this national action scares the ever-lovin' crap out of them? I think absolutely yes.. . ." "21st Century Definitions: torture is renamed harsh interrogation; technological fundamentalism is renamed merit pay." "America has bought an education pig in a poke peddled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies, and packaged by Congress. The animal is a freak, shaped by naiveté, political ideology, unexamined assumptions, ignorance of history, and myths. " "Bill Gates, Sandy Kress & Arne Duncan walk into a bar--and rename NCLB. What's the new name? ('Great Leap Forward' already taken. 大躍進.)"
"Teacher,
"The children can’t learn if they don’t play. The children must play."
"10.You could be fired because of student test scores.
The bill contains a new ground for termination.
Without any definition, it states that professional
employees can now be terminated for 'a consistent or
pervasive record of inadequate student achievement
or performance under the employees supervision.'
In other words, teachers can be terminated by test
scores rather than the realities of the particular
students they are asked to educate. The failed No
Child Left Behind Act has taught the entire nation
that judging schools by test scores doesn't work. Now,
AASB wants to apply that failed logic to teachers. The
fact is that some of the best teachers take on some of
the most difficult students. The test scores of those
students may be low, but the teaching they receive
may be the best in the nation. That doesn't matter
under this bill-- only test scores.
"Non-Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including any attachments, contains no confidential or privileged information. It can be shared, and used for any reasonable purpose. It can be posted, downloaded, and shared with anybody, with the following exceptions: Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.
"Dr/Rev/Prussian Dryasdust, a character in various Walter Scott novels, was revived by Bill Gates/Achieve/Duncan to write the Common Core Standards." "James Popham said testing companies hijacked term 'formative assessment,' using it to mean interim testing." "Deb Meier asked children questions everybody should ask, 'Why do your parents send you to school?' Think about answers: http://tinyurl.com/3duwscs" "Stages of teacher reaction to Common Core Standards: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression. . . Let's skip 'Acceptance' & move to RESISTANCE" "It's easy to forget that before [Bloomberg] spent a fortune buying his job in City Hall, people thought of him as a kind of a jerk. Rich and successful, but a wise guy with a big ego who thought he was the smartest guy he ever met." "Part of the Deweyan ideal of a participatory democratic classroom is that everyone learns together, which does not presuppose that they are learning the same thing, though they are studying the same subject matter." "We argue that reverence is central to the kind of teaching and leadership we need in today's schools and that listening is one of the prime activities of reverence. . . . Reverent teachers listen carefully to what the subject matter has to say to them, but they also listen carefully to what their students say to them as well. Teachers must know not only their subject matter, but their students as well. To do this successfully, they must accept the risk and vulnerability of openness to what their students suggest, and what they might not know themselves as teachers. That means that good teachers must have the moral perception and imagination to connect to students, and the intellectual command of subject matter to readily reconfigure it. Both require a kind of learning unique to the practice of teaching. Teaching is not just about the transmission of knowledge, or even its expansion. Its calling is higher than that; it seeks wisdom beyond knowledge alone by applying knowledge to life, especially the life of students and the larger community, and thereby to express life itself. Reverent listening to both students and subject matter greatly aids this kind of teaching and learning." "In addition to consistency, scripts offered a degree of control and micromanagement for administrators which consumed every facet of life in the school. Teachers (and students) were exempt from making virtually any decision themselves. This included (but was not limited to) what to teach, when to teach it, how to teach it, how to line our students up, how to have them walk in hallway, when to take our classes to the bathroom, how much homework to give, what homework to give, how to handle classroom management, what to put on our bulletin boards, how to arrange our furniture, when to read a book to our students, how to distribute crayons and pencils, and a myriad of other things. I found it ironic, not to mention insulting, that the same administrators who preached about the virtues of teaching and our high level of "professionalism" seemed to regard us as bumbling idiots incapable of doing anything short of walking upright without a set of detailed instructions." "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." "If I could be the principal for a day I would change a lot of rules. Like, I would allow hugs at school again! " ". . . For some reason, though, the New York Times seems to think that giving op-ed space to this mediocre fiction writer [David Brooks] is an apotropaic charm against being accused of liberalism. And for some other reasons, liberals find Brooks to be a tolerable conservative, presumably because he doesn't move his lips when he reads. But, really, never believe anything this guy says without checking his sources. Newspaper editors were once expected to do that sort of thing, but some combination of economic pressure and ideological anxiety earns Brooks a pass. http://lbo-news.com/2011/04/09/david-brooks-can%E2%80%99t-add" "When the children of New York City grow up, they will not remember who the chancellor was when they were in school. They will not remember the name of the secretary of education. But until the day they die, they will remember their kindergarten teachers." "Daniel Ellsberg asked us if we knew the names of the two languages of Afghanistan. Almost nobody in the audience knew. 'The two languages are Dari—which is eastern Farsi, or Persian—and Pashto,' he said. 'In Vietnam, none of us spoke the language, but we knew the language that we didn’t speak--that it was Vietnamese. We're fighting in a country now where we don't know the language we don't know. " ". . . teachers have taught me a lesson that I, like many academics, needed to learn: Don't be so damned superior! Don't look down your nose at people out there teaching real children in real and sometimes dreadful circumstances. Don't question their intelligence, or their commitment, or their motives." "You can't understand problems and fix them unless you create a culture in which employees share information without fear. " "The school privatisation movement is one of unparalleled genius. It proposes free-market solutions to a problem created by the free market: wealthy taxpayers refusing to adequately fund poor people's schools and a deindustrialised service economy that has eliminated good jobs for the working class. Once upon a time, in the 1990s, young people who wanted to change education for the better read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities. Today, they watch the film Waiting for'"Superman', join Teach for America for a couple of years and work for organisations dedicated to attacking teachers' unions." ". . . we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience . . . ." "The department[US DOE] and I will continue to disagree about the whole concept of Race to the Top and the effect it has had on American schools. We'll keep debating that in this space." "Honesty is praised and then left to freeze." "The most striking thing about the sweeping federal educational reforms debuting this fall is how much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued that efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed, and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no widget would be left behind. Now we have 'No Child Left Behind,' in which Congress has set up a complex apparatus of sanctions and standards designed to compel individual schools toward steady annual improvement, with the goal of making a hundred per cent of American schoolchildren proficient in math and reading by 2014. It is hard to look at the new legislation and not share in its Fordist vision of the classroom as a brightly lit assembly line, in which curriculum standards sail down from Washington through a chute, and fresh-scrubbed, defect-free students come bouncing out the other end. " "[T]he comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor. " "Americans with jobs imagine they now work longer and harder hours than did their forebears on Mark Twain's Missouri frontier; if so, their labor serves a purpose other than the one in hand. Finance accounted for 47% of total U.S. corporate profits in 2007; 58% of Harvard University's male graduates in that same year (the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Wilson's small class of persons deserving of a liberal education) took up careers as high-end traffickers in the drug of debt. It's a lucrative trade, up to the standard of the cotton export from the dear old antebellum South. That it doesn't add to the sum of human happiness or meaning is probably why the gentry on the lawns of Connecticut, together with their upper servants in Washington and the news media, talk about the lost battalion of America's unemployed as a set of conveniently invisible numbers rather than as a body of fellow citizens. "
"Everyone must do their share, says New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Including the rich? In the old days, corporate income taxes accounted for about one-third of the revenues in the federal budget; today, according to the Tax Policy Center, they provide less than one-sixth of federal tax revenues. One percent of the population possesses the lion's share of our national wealth and mustn't be asked to make it fairer because then they might pack up for foreign shores, to nations with or without democracy.
"The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left. We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America."
". . . The computer is the ultimate weapon of instructional programers, and in many people's minds at least, it is a device to take the place of teachers. Anyone who believes that students learn best from systematic instruction and tests can say goodbye to teachers. For dispensing programmatic instruction, computers are cheaper and more efficient than humans.. . .
"The holy grail of productivity is to do the job without people."
". . . Democrats are offering little pushback. The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas; it no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.
"Teaching at its core is a moral profession. Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose. " "Obama is great at co-opting his critics' arguments even if he doesn’t take to heart their policy suggestions. It’s an excellent strategy for cornering his critics and closing off the political space that critics of standardized tests have carved out for themselves in the often confounding education debate." " y = Xβ + Zv + ε where β is a p-by-1 vector of fixed effects; X is an n-by-p matrix; v is a q-by-1 vector of random effects; Z is an n-by-q matrix; E(v) = 0, Var(v) = G; E(ε) = 0, Var(ε) = R; Cov(v,ε) = 0. V = Var(y) = Var(y - Xβ) = Var(Zv + ε) = ZGZT + R." "No rational reading of these NAEP data can support Bill Gates' claim that 'student achievement has remained virtually flat' over the last four decades" "We can't do enough to award excellence, incent it, put a spotlight on it and let the country know how much great teaching matters. . . . We need to look at student results to see who's really making a great difference in students' lives." "We are very proud of our teachers." " I find it offensive to read someone like Tom Payzant over at Harvard and Broad say what he thinks my children need." "Every parent should use any means necessary to opt their own children out of standardized testing. I did." "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, green, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
" Unemployment has become a trap, one that's very difficult to escape. There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record.
"Let's blame
"Zone of Proximal Development.
"It used to be Abyssinia; now it's Ethiopia.
"Just watched "Kings of Pastry," Surely, THIS is coming next: a red, white & blue collar to be worn by Gates-approved teachers of excellence." " We fired over 100 Tomahawk missiles into Libya this weekend @ over $600K-1M a missile. Each missile would pay for 12-20 teachers in US. " " [I]f you've reached the point where you don't pay attention to anything that might disturb your orthodoxy, you’re not doing science, you're not even pursuing a discipline. All you're doing is perpetuating a smug, closed-minded sect. " "I don't get paid enough to be perfect." "30 years of shopping has had an enormous impact on the population."
"Was this the test that launched 100,000 workers for the Global Economy, "Parrots so can learn to prate. . . ." "I am a 62 year old man who grew up in abject poverty, sold blood to go to college, drafted during the prime years of my life, worked three jobs for over 25 years and look what I got out of it.....the privilege to serve 2,500 kids, see their shining, hopeful faces wanting to be their best, working with people I care deeply about and knowing that this work is truly sacred work. Remember the Inuit word for children means the same as their word for sacred."
"Sheening
"My child Henry has Down syndrome, and I have plenty to say about how obstetricians could better discuss genetic disability with new or expecting parents. Conversely, many doctors report feeling ill-prepared to face parents who have received a "positive" prenatal diagnosis or have just learned that their newborn has Down syndrome. I was intrigued but dubious about what would come of this meeting. Since Henry's birth, in 2007, I've spent a lot of time with doctors. Thanks in part to excellent medical care, Henry is thriving. Nonetheless, my background in disability studies makes me skeptical of the way doctors tend to focus exclusively on the effects of individual ailments and ignore the overall physical and developmental well-being of a patient. Doctors are good at treating Henry's blocked tear ducts and ear infections, but they never think to ask what he's up to in his integrated preschool classroom, or how we've assimilated his therapy into our family life. . . . "
"James Elliot, astronomer who discovered rings of Saturn.
"If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement, then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put in out. " "Understand what we do to you. We spend all of our time raising money, often from strangers we do not even know. Then we spend it in three specific ways: First we measure you, what it is you want to purchase in the political marketplace--just like Campbell's soup or Kellogg's cereal. Next, we hire some consultants who know how to tailor our image to fit what we sell. Lastly, we bombard you with the meaningless, issueless, emotional nonsense that is always the result. And whichever one of us does that best will win."
"I agree with Krashen that more skills lessons will not help adolescent struggling readers. The whole field in adolescent literacy is in a sorry state. The federal Striving Readers large scale research study, using approved programs of course, showed that adding a period of Read 180 or some such thing each day to HS days could improve reading about a year. They were disappointed. I wonder what they expected. Add a period get a years growth. that seems reasonable to me. Why would anyone expect 3 to 5 years growth from a single HS period class?
"No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music…made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird—they taught me to woo the muse of the odd and made me the happy adult I am today. The NYRB edition of Lizard Music is a beautiful… hardcover, a testament to Pinkwater’s influence on generations of readers. It’s one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever. . . . I do believe that Daniel Pinkwater is my favorite writer, living or dead. "
"The outstanding Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is in the house. . . . I am so grateful to have Melinda Gates joining us here today. . . . Instead of pouring money into a broken system, under Arne's leadership, what we've done is we've launched a competition. We call it Race to the Top. (Applause.) We call it Race to the Top, and it's basically a challenge to states and school districts, prove to us that you're serious about reform. We've said to all 50 states, if you show us the most innovative plans for improving teacher quality and improving student achievement, then we'll show you the money. . . . The more innovative you are, the more money you can get for your schools. . . .
"Last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates published an op-ed in the Washington Post, 'How Teacher Development could Revolutionize our Schools,' proposing that American public schools should do a better job of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, a goal with which none can disagree. But his specific prescriptions, and the urgency he attaches to them, are based on the misrepresentation of one fact, the misinterpretation of another and the demagogic presentation of a third. It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved." "Saving money by reducing library services is like trying to save a bleeding man by cutting out his heart." "The idea that we're testing kids and we're tying teacher salaries to how kids are performing on tests, that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher order. . . . We're training them we're not teaching them. " "Once we start to measure excellence, we'll unleash the true power of teachers." "Data systems, of course, will tell us which teachers are getting the biggest achievement gains every year. " "There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice." "Right now, the Zeitgeist is to beat back the deformers and then take on the Standardistas, which is when certain celebrities may have to duck for cover. " "[Television] is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap."
"I can't prove it, but I sure feel it. The Obama administration in recent weeks seems to have stalled out. Right in the middle of the fast lane at rush hour. We've got the Mid East uprisings, the Madison protests, financial disaster - and the self-proclaimed voice of hope and change has turned into a whisper.
"If Bill Gates had no money, who would listen to him about education reform? No one--the same as who should listen to him now. " "The wealth gap in America is the greatest it has been since the Roaring Twenties. In 1928, the top one-hundredth of 1 percent of American families earned 892 times more income than the bottom 90 percent of Americans. That gap declined for decades before it began climbing in the late 1970s. Today the top one-hundredth of one percent of American families earns 976 times more than the bottom 90 percent of Americans." "I confess. . . I am put off by critics who tell the world with full confidence exactly what you were up to in writing what you wrote, as though they kept a booth at the fair in the middle of your soul" "Next month a new set of Florida third graders will be vomiting on their test booklets, losing sleep, reduced to tears and frightened over the fear of failure." "Maybe the unions that endorsed Gov. Scott Walker will soon realize that not even being a 'Reagan Democrat' will save them from being losers under the boot of the corporate supremacists. " "It wasn't that I was stupid (although a lot of teachers thought so when I first entered their classes), or that I didn't like people. It was just that there didn't seem to be a lot to say that someone wasn't already saying. I liked listening."
"The current Obama budget is essentially a political package that focuses on the concerns exaggerated by the deficit hawks while countering the harsher proposals by Republicans for cuts in areas like healthcare and education. The budget proposal makes clear that Obama’s efforts to reduce the budget in coming years will come from cuts in social programs—including some that assist the very poorest Americans—rather than increases in taxes. . . .
"Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes. " "Using students' test scores as the chief marker of teacher quality is terribly dangerous. . . ."
"[V]ery comfortable reasoning for the very comfortable class identifies "failing" schools and dumb workers for the economic calamity actually caused by a deregulated financial sector following a massive redistribution of income and wealth.
"What we need are teachers who don't make excuses. I don't want to hear about bureaucracy. We have always had bureaucracies. We are looking for people who say 'I can teach a rock to read.' If it is not the right place for you then you should find another place to go." "44.2% of our public school students live in poverty and the Obama administration offers the National Financial Capability Toolkit, lesson plans to teach students about investing & protecting against risk."
"[It is] so covered over with the scab of symbols that I had not the patience to examine whether it be well or ill demonstrated. . . . And thus having examined your pannier of Mathematics, and finding in it no knowledge, neither of quantity, nor of measure, nor of proportion, nor of time, not of motion, nor of any thing, but only if certain characters as if a hen had been scraping there. . . .
"There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and a lot of dead armadillos." "We read to know we're not alone." "The Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind commends the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers for undertaking the difficult but vital work of crafting and building support for a set of high, common academic standards for our nation’s students." "Venture philanthropists have been working hard to remake classrooms, school leadership, and teacher education--while teacher unions, professional organizations, and colleges of education take a snooze." "'When the team loses,' Duncan, a former professional basketball player is reported to have said more than once, 'you fire the coach.' But every teacher knows the coach recruits the players and no teacher gets to choose which 'players' are going to play on his/her team." " Mother Teresa was in conversation with a reporter one time, and he said, 'You must get very discouraged,' because she's dealing with dying people, and she said, 'Well, he didn't call upon me to be successful, he just called upon me to be faithful.'" "There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. . . . Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. " "I went to my nearest middle school and borrowed popular eighth-grade textbooks for math, science, language arts, and social studies. Assuming that the glossaries of the books contained the main ideas the authors and the textbook selection committees thought were important, I counted them. There were 1,465 important ideas. That comes out to a brand new idea about every twenty minutes, and no going back for review.”" "The examined life is not worth living." ". . . it was muchwhat indifferent." "Emotions are central to the experience of reading literary fiction, not just during reading but also before and after reading." "The Department of Education clearly thinks that weighing the animal more frequently is more important than feeding it."
"You see, there is another major factor that makes the [Christmas] season tough in this industry. There are kids--literally hundreds of them in my school--for whom the holidays are the very worst time of year. Their stories make the stereotypical horrid-moments-with-the-in-laws tales sound like "Silver Bells." During the season of giving, many of these kids have nothing to give and will get nothing, including dinner. Many of them will be surrounded by screaming, drunk, violent adults, or they will be the prey of such people. Many will have to act like adults themselves, caring for scared siblings or infirm grandparents. Many will spend Christmas in a cramped car.
"Local schools board members are elected. Who elected Arne Duncan? Duncan's push for faddish reforms without any proof that they actually work should indeed raise the hackles of school board members. These experiments are being forced on the most vulnerable students. Meanwhile, where is the money for counselors, librarians and classroom aids? We know that support staff helps educate kids, but those positions are being cut." "Bill Gates and Hosni Mubarak vie for Sexiest Man Alive." "Duncan is a great example of the 'Peter Principle.' He failed in Chicago; then he was promoted so that he could repeat his failure on a national scale." "As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open. " "You know, maybe we should try tenure in other professions. Just, you know, mix it up a little bit. Pay newspaper editors by seniority. Have tenure for them and see how that works. Try it for hot-dog making or restaurants." "The national academic standards in English and math adopted last year by most states has been a very exciting thing. We'll go from being the country with the most messed-up core curriculum standards to actually having the best." "No Child Left Behind basically forced people to look at the numbers and see how bad the U.S. education system was. That was a good thing. ... And I bet they'll change some of the adjectives. You know, the word 'failing' is no longer as popular as it used to be. ... But as long as they keep measuring and actually look at the inner-city versus suburban district differentials, the racial differentials -- as long as they keep measuring, then you’ve got this hot potato: 'Oh no -- whose fault is this?' And that’s good. It’s causing at least some energy to be put in the system to try to improve it." "There's almost no profession that you could say that the 2011 practitioner may not be any better than the 1920 practitioner, and teaching I think is the only profession you can say that about. ... If you look at any objective data, [baseball] pitchers are just in another league than they were in 1920, and the batters are a lot better. Baseball players are way, way, way better. But the teachers are just sort of -- if they're good, they're good. If they're not, they're not."
"Dear President Obama:
"On tenure, Gates said he understood why it was needed for college professors. But he said he was perplexed by tenure laws and rules that provide school teachers with significant due-process protections in personnel cases after they pass a probationary period.
"Let's 'open the market' to all professions, now. Let’s stop messing around with this licensure nonesense and just compete.
"Size matters because size brings complexity. Finland, the country that usually ranks in the top five on international tests has 5.5 million people. In the U.S. we call that Wisconsin." "The fact is China and its continued manipulation of its currency, the Yuan, and iron-fisted control of its labor pool, has a greater effect on our economic strength than if every American child scored at the top of every international test, the SAT, the ACT, the GRE, or the MAT." " [D]espite Bill Gates's prediction at a press conference to mark Buffet's pledge that there was now “No reason why we can't cure the top 20 diseases," observers are starting to question whether all this money is reaping sufficient rewards. For although the foundation has given a huge boost to research and development into technologies against some of the world's most devastating and neglected diseases, critics suggest that its reluctance to embrace research, demonstration, and capacity building in health delivery systems is worsening the gap between what technology can do and what is actually happening to health in poor communities. This situation, critics charge, is preventing the Gates grants from achieving their full potential. . . . [T]he foundation's business-like approach has also gained its fair share of detractors. A commitment to results oriented spending ensures that money is linked to measurable and demonstrable outcomes. But although this strategy makes accounting easier to handle, it has perpetuated vertical, disease specific funding strategies that damage health systems in developing countries. . . ."
"The [ State of the Union] speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment, and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole. . . .
"[B]efore people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant." "'Win the future.' That was President Obama's slogan for his State of the Union address, in which he used the phrase (or a variant) 11 times. Not only is Obama courting American business, he's using tag lines from corporate marketing. But as the president spoke, the line sounded more like the title of a self-help seminar, with Obama in the role of Tony Robbins." "When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are constructed. " "The only gatherings worth attending from now on are acts that organize civil disobedience. . . . " "Illegal Madagascar radiated tortoise brings $30,000; Spix's macaw $100,000. With Common Core, what will Professor Poopypants be worth?" "Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice"
"I know a good kindergarten teacher when I see the fingerpaint easels in the room.
"[T]he funniest thing I ever did was to teach school. For ten years I taught a little bit of everything, from first-grade homeroom to eighth-grade algebra. And it absolutely changed my life. Because it was there in school that I rediscovered how smart and funny kids are. In school I found my true audience. In school my kids taught me about the importance of play. . . .
"What was the last funny book to win a Caldecott or Newbery?" "After two years of watching Obama in action, we can now see him for who he is: Bill Clinton. . . . In terms of our country's 14 trillion debt, the $5 billion to be 'saved' over two years by Obama's wage freeze [on government workers] is chump change--for example, it's less than he's spending per month on his Afghanistan adventure." "Journalists and commentators who make their living by being skeptical -- David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, Arianna Huffington -- leave their skepticism at the door when it comes to the topic of education. " "When President Obama visited my home state of California, the person he met with to talk about education was Steve Jobs."
"When the Pony Express needed
"Refuse all cooperation with the heart's death." "Can you remember another time when education reform has so ignored the realities of public education?" "My military experience provides me a strong academic foundation." "Breathtaking. We continue to go through the worst recession since the depression in which the American taxpayer bailed out some of the most wealthy people who ever lived and it's labor unions who are given the blame. The people who teach your kids take the blame. The people who plow your snow take the blame. The recipients who we bailed out, get richer and richer and they serve no tangible purpose. They exist to create their own wealth. What a country." "The accountability mantra is a sham. . . but I wonder why we aren't calling for holding ALL politicians accountable for the test scores in the schools in their districts? Why stop at teachers, who in the last 30 years have been reduced to simply implementing mandates created by politicians and bureaucrats? " "It's not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." "It's not down in any map, true places never are." "I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed ... I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.'" "Now that self-proclaimed progressives have passed the point of disenchantment with Barack Obama and entered the stage of active anger at their once-imagined ally, they should quickly take the next step and acknowledge that he is what we at Black Agenda Report have been saying for six years: a right-wing Democrat who has long been aligned with the corporate Democratic Leadership Conference, and whose mission is to expand U.S. empire and put the American state at the service of Wall Street. He has been remarkably successful in both endeavors. The Left and Obama-Trauma" "When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything --yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever." "There are designations, like 'economist,' 'prostitute,' or 'consultant,' for which additional characterization doesn't add information. . . . A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a 'solution' and creates a problem." "They read Gibbon's Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Chateau Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup." "I suspect that IQ, SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent." "The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits." "Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat." "If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead--the more precision, the more dead you are." "An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite." "Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases." "I am a teacher who rejects the present system of capitalism, responsible for the aberration of misery in the midst of plenty." "We know of course there's really no such thing as the 'voiceless.' There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. Peace and the New Corporate Liberation Theology" "CNN, HuffingtonPost, The Colbert Report, Oprah, Real Time with Bill Maher--these media outlets are not Fox News. They are often charged with being the "liberal media," but they invite and endorse the exact misguided commentary I have identified in three pieces now--and while free speech means Rhee, Duncan, and Gates have every right to make their claims (although I am not sure free speech should encourage dishonesty), free speech and freedom of the press, I believe, allow and even encourage someone somewhere to raise a hand and say, 'That's misleading.' (Or, 'Wait a minute; that's not even true.') Daily Censored"
" "Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it! " "I wonder if Harvard researcher Ronald Ferguson's survey, designed as part of the Gates-financed $45 million research project intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad, asked kids questions that matter most to learning: Do you think your teacher loves you? Does he/she understand you? Do you laugh with your teacher and the class?" "You may have heard about the schools my friend works for. Oprah loves 'em. Turns out the federal government loves 'em to. I'd be willing to venture neither Oprah nor Sec. Duncan would want to learn there, but they're fine enough for other people's children." "A library of four hundred books--the number that John Harvard left at his death--was considered so colossal that they named Harvard college after him." "I don't write very easily. I just wait until the self-loathing becomes too intense. "
"[W]hat's most remarkable is how -- as always -- leading media figures and government officials are completely indistinguishable in what they think, say and do with regard to these [WikiLeaks] controversies; that's why [NY Times reporter] Burns and [Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration] Rubin clung together so closely throughout the segment, because there is no real distinction between most of these establishment reporters and the government; the former serve the latter.
"It is time to dispense with -- and quickly -- self defeating liberal notions. For example, the election of Barack Obama as president is no more the culmination or fulfillment of the ongoing civil/human rights struggle in this country than was the installment of Clarence Thomas as a Justice in the U.S. Supreme Court. We must dispense with these ridiculously dangerous and absurd liberal notions. Those so-called "changes" were merely cosmetic and represent no real or fundamental systemic change. Indeed, if anything, those said changes represent a psychological strengthening of the (Democratic and Republican) two-party dictatorship -- which is precisely the opposite of much-needed, fundamental systemic change. .
"One of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. " "By the way, we have nearly 500 ED employees who have been teachers, totaling almost 3000 yrs of edu experience."
"Wealthiest .0000001% Hail Tax Deal
"In Latest Compromise with GOP, Obama Agrees He is a Muslim
"We're now at the brink of a new economic disaster that will eventually yank a chicken out of every pot. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that the extended Bush-era tax cuts will contribute by far the largest share to the next decade’s deficits --ahead of the recession’s drain on tax revenues, Iraq and Afghanistan war spending, TARP and Obama's stimulus." "The creation of a permanent, insecure and frightened underclass is the most effective weapon to thwart rebellion and resistance as our economy worsens. Huge pools of unemployed and underemployed blunt labor organizing, since any job, no matter how menial, is zealously coveted. As state and federal social welfare programs, especially in education, are gutted, we create a wider and wider gulf between the resources available to the tiny elite and the deprivation and suffering visited on our permanent underclass. Access to education, for example, is now largely defined by class. The middle class, taking on huge debt, desperately flees to private institutions to make sure their children have a chance to enter the managerial ranks of the corporate elite. And this is the idea. Public education, which, when it functions, gives opportunities to all citizens, hinders a system of corporate neofeudalism. Corporations are advancing, with Barack Obama's assistance, charter schools and educational services that are stripped down and designed to train classes for their appropriate vocations, which, if you’re poor means a future in the service sector. The eradication of teachers' unions, under way in states such as New Jersey, is a vital component in the dismantling of public education. Corporations know that good systems of public education are a hindrance to a rigid caste system. In corporate America everyone will be kept in his or her place. http://www.truth-out.org/happy-a-hangman65703" "You can't call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid." "Our job is to remain fast around moral imperatives that we do not compromise on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCvSntOI5s" "I wonder why a man of [Gates'] vast wealth spends so much time trying to figuring out how to cut teachers' pay. Does he truly believe that our nation's schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience?" "Never before has the United States looked so much like a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich." "If education reform is truly to be grounded in sound research, it is rather interesting to see so many reforms that focus only on band-aid solutions that research has shown can actually be counterproductive to improving education outcomes."
"In 2008-09, 44.2% of students in U. S. public schools were identified as low income.
"Freedom to make mistakes and benefit from them is the basis of intellectual growth." "It takes almost twice as long to find something in your coat pockets when you are not wearing your coat. If you have a flight jacket or parka with more than four pockets, you can usually save time by putting it on just to look through the pockets. " "The choice of what to read is very personal. What I enjoy, is crap to others, and vice versa. Life is too short, and there are too many books out there, for folks to be compelled to read books that they hate." "You study for what you know will be on the test and when you show up, no one asks you to make a bundt cake." "In response to the question, 'Are people born good writers?' 'No. You have to read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, and read. As you read, you unconsciously assimilate the rudiments of style and technique.' " "We know that standardized testing is here to stay. To improve our scores, we need more instructional time, not more tests. "
"Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! "There’s no word in the language I revere more than teacher. My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I've honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher. " "We use the word 'academic entrepreneurs.' We are expanding what it means to be a knowledge enterprise. We use knowledge as a form of venture capital." "The Department of Education should not be treated as a playground for the rich and famous or who are tired of their corporate careers. Cathie Black has not demonstrated any indication throughout her entire adult life of an interest in public education." "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt--until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."
"Self-styled liberals who defend the Archangel Obama in sickness and in health must no reckon with the realization that their redeemer appears to have moved the Supreme Court farther to the right of where it stood under George S. Bush, at least on the all-important issue of executive power. Obama and his Clintonian advisers now embody the worst traits of both parties. As terrible as the new administration has been with regard to finance and health care, its record on torture, detention, and executive authority is even worse. Obama has institutionalized the usurpations and abuses of the Bush regime; they are now a part of the bipartisan Washington consensus. Our constitutional system may never recover.
"The health bill is of a piece with Obama's general approach to governance, which is to make loud, dramatic claims about his purportedly reformist agenda--claims that both his supporters and his enemies almost always take at face value--while working behind the scenes to ensure that no major stockholder in his coalition of corporate backers will suffer significant losses.
"[D]espite his vaunted pragmatism and his determination to be 'guided by what works,' Obama chose as his two closest economic advisers men whose understanding of the failed policies of the past could hardly be more intimate--precisely because they bear direct personal responsibility for those policies and thus for the ensuing crisis, which not only destroyed trillions of dollars in fictitious wealth but has also inflicted untold miseries on millions of Americans, who have lost their jobs and their homes and have little prospect of ever recovering their vanished standard of living. . . . With the possible exception of Geithner, Bernanke was the second-worst bank regulator in America--the first rank belonging, without question, to Alan Greenspan, who carefully nurtured one economic bubble after another during his long tenure at the Fed. (p. 82)" "There is no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy."
"Let's see if I got this right... Because standardize testing was unsuccessful at adequately dumbing down public education, many states now plan to develop common core standards --that will inevitably be evaluated with a common core test-- so at least all states will be dumbed down the same?
"Fear seems to be the core emotional value in schools today." "I now freely concede that I was wrong to support the expansion of testing and accountability. I believe that this approach has created a major national fraud, as the more we rely on testing, and the more we emphasize accountability, the less interest there is in anything that you [Deborah Meier] or I would recognize as good education." "Merit Pay linked to test scores is a move toward implementing a 21st century version of Child Labor." "Now we have a new teacher evaluation system where we know who's ineffective, minimally effective and highly effective. We're going to back-map where they came from, which schools produced these people. And if you are producing ineffective or minimally effective teachers, we're going to send them back to you." "'Reform' is anything that makes the wealthy, wealthier, helps to destroy organized labor, and screws the poor and working class. " "Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results--and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it's easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. 'At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,' says Ioannidis. 'There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.'" "The No Child Left Behind Act has already shown that universal standards don't work when applied to real-world education, in which students come from different economic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The way to attract superior teachers is to pay teachers what they are worth." "It's all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow.--Thomas Cromwell" "What is defined can be redefined, yes?" "Give him a year or two and we may all find ourselves superfluous." "If they could think up forty-four charges, then--if fantasy is unconstrained by truth--they can think up forty-four more." "There are some strange cold people in this world. . . . Training themselves out of natural feeling." "One of the dicta of information theory is that information resides in the unexpected. We gain knowledge when we encounter what we don't anticipate. A stream of data that we can predict with perfect accuracy contains no information; it can't tell us anything that we don't already know. The quest for knowledge is a quest for novelty, a search for a new set of data or a new idea that forces us to look at the world in a slightly different way than we did before. Knowledge-gathering is systematic demolition and reconstruction of our view of the world."
"Every time a journalist cites the margin of error as a reason to believe the results of a poll, he's doing the logical equivalent of looking only one way before crossing a two-way street. Sooner rather than later, he'll be clobbered by a bus.
"It was all starting to fall into place. So much for the PTA being an advocate for my child, they had become advocates for the Gates and the Broads and the hedge fund millionaires. They had sold our children out for a few shekels, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, and charter schools. That was all part of the package. Gates had provided the PTA with all of the "research" material that they would need to sell their ideas." "So we know master's degrees have almost no value. We know certifications don't make a difference. We know that after three years, seniority doesn't really matter." "If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it. Even the silliest absurdities seem plausible the moment that they're expressed in numerical terms," "Despite more than 50 years of political noise regarding America's imminent demise at the hands of education systems like the Soviet Union, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, the U.S. economy has remained the strongest and most nimble in the world. What is this infatuation on the part of some education leaders, professional associations, and policy makers with asking how before they ask why? The facts just do not support the rhetoric in the case of Common Core State Standards and should prompt all of us to ask why." "The estimated number of people in the United States 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher was 56.3 million. Of this group, 20.5 million, or 36.4 percent, held at least one science and engineering degree. " "This [Michelle Rhee]is a warrior woman! This is a warrior woman! " "You won't find much of school life in NCLB or Race to the Top; in fact, you'll be hard pressed to find a single example of a teacher thinking through a lesson or interacting with a child or a child learning a scientific concept or being engaged with a book. What we do have is a technocratic and structural approach to education, and sadly it has become the coin of the realm." " For the last seven years, we have been asking for an expansion to the school. It was rumored that 'La Casita' was to be torn down due to 'structural concerns' and to make way for a soccer field, but [neither] the parents nor the L.S.C was consulted in this. But, Whittier does not have a library and we have books donated already for the desired library and it will be cheaper to renovate than to knock it down. [The parents consulted with an independent building engineer, whose evaluation of the field house was that it is sound and just needed minor repairs...maybe the roof could use replacing.] We approached the Board of Ed numerous times with our concerns and received no commitments nor results, but with the pat 'we'll get back to you.' At 11:00 am on the 17th of September, the police arrived to block anyone from entering the field house. With CPS security and Chicago Police each saying that they were under orders not to allow passage into the field house. We were not intending to start a hunger strike, but it looked like what they were going to force us to do. By doing this, they made us stronger and more united. " "There are a lot of things that other schools have that we don't and can be done easily. Basic necessities, like--how about a warm lunch and a library. They are basics, nothing extraordinary. When we heard that they wanted to knock down this place, at $354.000, we all got very very upset, and why not use it to help the kids? And that the new space, (soccer field), is not even for us. We want something from the bottom up and the library should occupy this space. " "We are fighting together so they let us create a library for our children." "Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit. Purporting to support the troops in their crusade to free the world obviates any obligation to assess the implications of how Americans themselves choose to exercise freedom. is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. " " People are what they do. Not what they say they do or would do if not scared. "
"Guggenheim told me that we now know what to do to educate and advance every kid. He said, 'In recent years, we've cracked the code. The high-performing charter schools, like KIPP and others, have figured out the system that works for kids in even the toughest neighborhoods.'
"But, meanwhile, teachers continue to administer the tests. They choose to fall on their own swords, but there is no honor in it " "Even a casual Oprah watcher can name Ms. Winfrey's best friend, favorite actors, party planner, beloved authors, mentors, medical expert, personal trainer, hair stylist, home decorator, chef, financial advisor and spiritual guru. Oprah shares her favorite experts, friends and ideas with her audience. That's her brand. If Oprah thinks it, you might too. If Oprah loves a product, you need to run out and buy one." "[C]raziness has gone mainstream. It's one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It's another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, 'anticolonialist' agenda, that 'the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.' When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply."
"
" "Common Corerrata: Mistakes thrust on nation's schools by corporate-politico alliance in the name of preparing workers for Global Economy." "I want everybody to also know that I've got one of the finest Secretaries of Education I think in the history of this country in Arne Duncan. . . ." "The truth is that no institution of American government is more responsible for our inability to address pressing national problems than the Senate, and no institution is in greater need of reform. Another truth, alas: probably no institution is more resistant to reform."
"NEW YORK TIMES: The film 'Waiting for Superman' blames teachers' unions for the failure of public schools because the unions have made it almost impossible to fire lazy teachers. Are you against teachers' unions?
"Do not fear Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Do not fear the tea party movement, the birthers, the legions of conspiracy theorists or the militias. Fear the underlying corporate power structure, which no one, from Barack Obama to the right-wing nut cases who pollute the airwaves, can alter. If the hegemony of the corporate state is not soon broken we will descend into a technologically enhanced age of barbarism. " "Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose . . . " " [Common Core]standards reinforce the flawed idea that one shared set of goals suits all students. It conflates the idea of higher standards at the high school level with standardization of high school curriculum. We need curriculum opportunities that recognize the diversity of students, how different they are when they enter high school, their different goals, learning modes, and ambitions. "
"Education is a tough issue. Bill and I often joke that maybe it's the toughest issue we've taken on, tougher even than the intractable health problems the foundation has tackled in the third world.
"Once Vander Ark and Gates shifted their focus from startup schools with proven track records to "school-within-a-school" academies in large, failing urban high schools, it was no surprise to anyone who understood the small-high-schools movement that results would be underwhelming. Vander Ark and Gates ignored the research; they ignored the advice of the successful practitioners; and they acted with arrogance and contempt toward the existing high school faculties, whom they assumed would do what they were told in the academy model."
"SIMPLICIO: But don’t we need third graders to be able to do arithmetic?
"Question: People criticize standardized testing because teachers have to teach to the test. What do you say to that?
"The most fundamental and inherent danger vis-a-vis the Tea Party is the propensity on the part of liberals and 'progressives' to pretend that the Obama / Biden / Rahm Emanuel regime is somehow intrinsically different from the regime of its predecessor George W. Bush; while essentially ignoring their duty to organize with everyday people for real systemic change, which must include unabashedly standing up to and rejecting the policies of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party foxes, and the Republican Party wolves." "No Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize teaching as an occupation. . . . The thinking is that the biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that's put into public education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching. They have to make it a revolving door, in which we're not going to pay teachers very much. They're not going to stay very long. We're going to credential them really fast. They're going to go in. We're going to burn them up. They're going to leave in three, four, five years. And that's the model that they want. " "[I]t's just a lot easier to test, test, test children. Our curriculum has narrowed in Chicago. If you look at the average day for an elementary school kid, it's reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, math, math, math, reading, reading, reading, reading, math. I mean, kids are bored to tears. They're hating school at an early age. There's no joy. There's no passion. And the results show that. " "Teachers have been a critical voice in the development of the standards. The National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), among other organizations have been instrumental in bringing together teachers to provide specific, constructive feedback on the standards." "Common Core literacy standards will seriously damage the 15,783,462 high schoolers who have no inclination to become English majors." "Doesn't "turnaround" remind you of "shock and awe," "blitzkrieg," and other tactics designed primarily to demoralize an opponent? Cost savings are incidental. Collateral damage is integral to the plan. " "If new laws or policies specifically require that teachers be fired if their students’ test scores do not rise by a certain amount, then more teachers might well be terminated than is now the case. But there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains. " "If people want higher test scores, they'll get higher test scores. I just hope they don't complain when that's all they get. "
"The planned release by the Los Angles Times of the test score standings of individual teachers in your system is one of the worst acts of journalism I've run across in a half century in the trade. It's unfair, cheap and disgusting.
"What the children in America's failing schools need is direct policy intervention to reduce inequality, to provide broader public services and to connect residents of very poor neighborhoods to jobs that pay a living wage.
"A perfect storm--fueled by the outmigration of young adults and rising poverty and strengthened by a declining economy and loss of jobs--swirls across rural Alabama. In its wake lie communities struggling not only tomaintain a certain standard of living, but just to exist. And the most notable victims are the smallest among us, the children. Nowhere does this show up as starkly as visiting a school lunchroom.Here you find that six out of ten students in Alabama's rural public schools are receiving either free or reduced meals. http://agi.alabama.gov/uploads/r7/5w/r75wkW1B6Dsr2VVuI5hx2w/LessonsLearnedRuralSchools2009.pdf?mc_cid=14be37a5e5&mc_eid=81c002752d" "President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top grant program is the most promising education initiative in decades, giving the nation an opportunity to take a hard look at raising standards and closing achievement gaps in public education." "Don't forget October 7th."
"We may all be created equal, but we're all wired differently looks at the Myers-Briggs personality preferences for 103 teachers at the 10 schools. The intent was to see if successful teachers have commonalities in personality traits. The results were surprising in some instances.
"Aperfect storm–fueled by the outmigration of young adults and rising poverty and strengthened by a declining economy and loss of jobs–swirls across rural Alabama. In its wake lie communities struggling not only tomaintain a certain standard of living, but just to exist. And the most notable victims are the smallest among us, the children. Nowhere does this show up as starkly as visiting a school lunchroom.Here you find that six out of ten students in Alabama’s rural public schools are receiving either free or reduced meals. http://agi.alabama.gov/uploads/r7/5w/r75wkW1B6Dsr2VVuI5hx2w/LessonsLearnedRuralSchools2009.pdf?mc_cid=14be37a5e5&mc_eid=81c002752d" "If I were assigning reading to staff members at the U.S. Department of Education, I would ask them to study Richard Rothstein's Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right(Teachers College and Economic Policy Institute; $19.95, paper). Rothstein and his colleagues explain in plain language why current accountability policies, which focus only on basic skills, are making education worse, not better, by narrowing the curriculum. With apt examples, they also show how the pursuit of numbers distorts more important goals and how schools may get higher test scores without supplying better education. " "The War on Public Education: Data Drone Duncan supports release of teacher test scores." "According to the mythology of 'Data Driven Management,' anyone who can read the bottom line of a spreadsheet is fit to run a major urban school system--and tell teachers and principals, some with decades of experience, not only what to do but how to do it." "During the 19 months since Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed him Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools, Ron Huberman has refused to provide the public with his organizational chart. In the Proposed Budget 2010 - 2011, Huberman finally provided the chart (which appears on Page 314 of the print edition of the Proposed Budget for those who can get one). The chart shows a major expansion of the "Area Offices" and the appointment of people without any educational experience, credentials, or training to virtually every key post. " "I want to be a good constructivist, but we are immersed in a behaviorist setting. It is not my job to transform or challenge that culture. I understand that. I am doing what I need to do to be a team player. I tell them to pull up their pants and tuck in their shirts (sometimes). I monitor for horseplay, but I will not be getting any students suspended if I can help it. I think the tardy policy is draconian and calling Child Protective Services (CPS) for students being late for class is a great way to make parents distrust authority figures even more." "A call for national standards is a political veneer, a tragic waste of time and energy that would be better spent addressing real needs in the lives of children-safe homes, adequate and plentiful food, essential health care, and neighborhood schools that are not reflections of the neighborhoods where children live through no choice of their own." "Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives." "[I]f Duncan really wants to stop the biggest bully in America's schools right now, he'll have to confront his boss, President Obama. In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers. " "The parallel between health care and education keeps coming to mind: both systems are being strained by growing economic inequalities and the insistence of corporate players and their ideological allies on market solutions in a domain where the market has proven to be harmful. Most developed societies agree that the market is not the best way to deliver public services in areas like schooling or health. In the free market the rich and more knowledgeable tend to get richer and the poor get poorer. Just as everybody needs a doctor or fresh water, there should be a decent school near every family, not because of income but as a matter of right and democratic, civilized values. Our society must begin to strike a different and more equitable balance between public and private realms. In health care we have seen how difficult it has been to nudge the system toward the more universal one we need, in which every person has a right to care. In education, we already have the outlines of a universal system, however flawed; this democratic legacy is too important to entrust to the market." "the call for college- and career-ready standards as necessary for the 21st century global economy does not meet two somewhat different criteria. First, it does not reflect the actual workforce needs of the nation and, second, it is a vague and all-encompassing term that while appearing to be definitive, is anything but that." "Beyond entry-level training and on-the-job training, 70% of United States jobs do not require more than a high school education, 20% require a college education, and only 10% require technical training." "Mr. B, he's a handful -- he teaches us but we teach him -- he's not just a regular teacher -- he is un-ordinary." "The Feds are feeding our young to the corporations. Teachers are reduced to waiting on the tables while our young are the meals. "
"A foolish quest for spurious precision is the hobgoblin of little minds.
"he current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them [fads and ill-considered ideas in American Education], for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?" "The 'turnaround' models in the Race to the Top, the Title I School Improvement Grants, and the President's Blueprint for the ESEA reauthorization epitomize thinking that is mechanistic, with the buildings, the principals, the teachers, and the students all just moveable parts that can be switched around without attention to the value of human relationship." "The Gates program and the Arne Duncan program are pretty much the same program."
"The most ridiculous statement in Duncan's speech is "Competition isn't about winners and losers. It's about getting better." That might be true of professional sports where even the losing team gets paid for participating, but it certainly isn't true of war, starving people fighting over food, or, in this case, starving schools.
"The most ridiculous statement in Duncan's speech is "Competition isn't about winners and losers. It's about getting better." That might be true of professional sports where even the losing team gets paid for participating, but it certainly isn't true of war, starving people fighting over food, or, in this case, starving schools.
"You can look back at the president as a candidate speaking before the unions making it clear about his support for charter schools, his support for things like performance pay. It was not a closeted agenda. And for people to act right now like they feel betrayed by this president only suggests that they were not paying attention when he was speaking.)" "I'll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the secretary of Education." "The Gates Foundation's agenda is very much aligned with the Obama Administration agenda. We partner with them on a whole host of things." " It's conceivable you could get a value-added score to work at an elementary level, but how can you do it at a high school?" he asks. "How should my physics gain score match against your French score? Was Mozart a better musician than Babe Ruth was a hitter?" "We are in control of so little. " "In February 2010, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced 15 grants worth $19.5 million to support the development of math and English/language arts materials for the Common Core Standards" "Kids and their teachers need to know about General John E. Hull. He was in charge at the American Air Force base at Iwakuni, Japan, on a May morning in 1955 when twenty-five Japanese women, badly crippled and disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima, were to begin their trip for medical help in America. They were already aboard the U. S. Air Force plane when an aide dashed up to General Hull with an urgent cable from Washington. Not wishing to risk repercussions should the Hiroshima women encounter medical complications, a committee at the State Department had ordered the flight canceled. For a long moment, General Hull said nothing. Then he handed the cable back to his aide. "Unfortunately, I don't have my reading glasses with me," he said. "Be sure to remind me to read this later." And the plane took off."
"I used to ask teachers, 'What would happen if you were shut up in a room with thirty of your colleagues and not allowed to leave until you'd all read the same book?'
"[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. " "Are you saying not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?" "I don't think in terms of 'why,' only in terms of when. . . and occasionally where. . . The fact is what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay. " "[S]ome people, including I think the Obama administration, have it in their head that eliminating schools and firing staff are the way you're going to bring about improvement. Well, the record doesn't show that. " " The public library is the most dangerous place in town. " "I think testing gets a bad rap sometimes. Consistently assessing our kids is going to lead to more information about what they are learning and mastering and what they are not." "My teaching has changed ... because I'm so regulated, and my students are doing worse and worse and worse every year. My kids are doing okay on the tests, but I can't reach them anymore because I'm not allowed to do what I know works. That's what breaks my heart." "I think this [Race to the Top] is a brilliant idea, a race. America loves competition. And our schools need modernizing. " "Standards and assessments are the core of our agenda- common, career and college ready standards, and the assessments that measure them-these are the bedrock on which the rest of the reforms are built." "While the National Education Association Representative Assembly supports and appreciates the significant increase in federal funding for education, the NEA takes a position of no confidence in the US Department of Education's Race to the Top competitive grant policies and guidelines as a basis for the reauthorization of ESEA and similar initiatives and policies that undermine public education." "For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake." "I didn't come here to be Arne Duncan's congressman. Who do people think put the money into these programs in the first place? I did ... Welcome to Washington and welcome to hard choices. " "In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. " "Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery." "Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?" "It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school "reform," with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom's after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture." "[W]hen poor children go to public schools that serve the poor, and wealthy children go to public schools that serve the wealthy, then the huge gaps in achievement that we see bring us closer to establishing an apartheid public school system. We create through our housing, school attendance, and school districting policies a system designed to encourage castes--a system promoting a greater likelihood of a privileged class and an under class. These are, of course, harbingers of demise for our fragile democracy." "Is it possible to organize a teacher's strike AGAINST the Union for agreeing to this kind of contract? " "The most useful thing Congress and state departments of education can do is abandon authoritarian, centralizing initiatives and legislation that dictate what's taught. By propping up an obsolete, dysfunctional curriculum, they're making a very bad situation much worse." "[When watching children play], there are always more questions to ask. I so often have the feeling in a classroom that I am interrupting the play just as something important is about to be revealed." "The Washington Post article on a report that finds KIPP students outscore public school peers (June 22, 2010) is another example of the cold fusion approach to the sharing of scientific information. The study is shared with the media, and the media reports it to millions before the scientific community is allowed to even read it. No peer review. Scientific review is now performed by journalists, who may or may not be experts, but who practice educational research without a license. " "The nation's unionized public school teachers are in a race for survival, whether they know it or not. Their worst enemy - the one that can do them and the public the most harm -- was not George Bush, the white Republican, who called teachers' unions 'terrorists.' It is Barack Obama, the Black Democrat, who has taken the corporate education agenda farther than Bush could ever dream of." "You learn a lot more from trying to defend your policies when not preaching to the choir. " " Eat.
"
"If we are willing to learn from top-performing nations, we should establish a substantive national curriculum that designates the essential knowledge and skills students need to learn." "Few speak easily to billionaires. Even the gods hesitate. " "STANDARSTRATO: teacher whose professionalism is cut off by the corporate-politico imperative, the latest display being the Common Core."
"Just what will the test to assess eighth-graders' knowledge of 21st-century skills, which include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, innovation and use of technology, look like?
"In 1983, A Nation at Risk misidentified what is wrong with our public schools and consequently set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm than good.
"Mr. Bourdain tells us about becoming a father for the first time. Hoping to instill a lifelong aversion to McDonald's in his small daughter, he convinces her that Ronald McDonald has head lice."
"
The Obama administration and Gates Foundation are orchestrating an effort to get every state to adopt a set of national standards for public elementary and secondary schools.
"An honest explanation of the value of college acknowledges that when college accomplishes what it can, a good part of that achievement is teaching students how to play with ideas in thoughtful ways and follow up that play in a reasonable, rigorous manner. This is neither a comprehensive nor exclusive way of thinking about college: formal schooling doesn't guarantee this result, and there are plenty of wise people in this world who can play with ideas without having finished secondary school, let alone college. But you're far more likely to get adults who can play with ideas in a productive sense if some critical mass of them have attended formal schooling where that was one of the outcomes."
" I've argued very clearly, and so has the president, that our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short.
"Fortunately, we know what works when it comes to good education. We know how to teach children to read. We know what a well-trained teacher does. We know how an outstanding principal leads. We know how to run outstanding schools. We have plenty of examples, including schools that succeed with extremely disadvantaged youngsters." "So if it looks like we are unabashed supporters of the Common Core Standards, it's because we are."
"Adopting NAEP achievement levels would be a multifaceted, unmitigated disaster. . . .
"It has become conventional to say that holding educators accountable and paying for higher test scores will improve performance. When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced the city would pay teachers bonuses where scores increase, he said, 'In the private sector, cash incentives are proven motivators for producing results. The most successful employees work harder, and everyone else tries to figure out how they can improve as well.'
"I found out that the math I learned in school had the same relationship to mathematics as a log has to a blueberry.
"Teaching is a profoundly intellectual activity, and this applies to kindergarten as much as to Advanced Placement Physics. Most people will grant the brain work in physics, but what is neglected is the intellectual chops it takes to teach any subject to any age. " "Christopher Haney, co-creator of Trivial Pursuit (estimated sales: $1 billion), dropped out of high school at 17 and later said that he regretted it -- that he should have dropped out at 12." "[The flawed theory behind pay for performance is that] student achievement is not as high as you'd like it to be because teachers, to use the economists' term, are shirking, are not doing as well as they could, so they need incentives to work harder or better. That assumes that reason student achievement is poor is that teachers know what to do and just aren't doing it. The assumption is that all our problems are due to teachers, so we don't need to pay attention to social conditions students come from.'" " NY state RTTT proposal will fatten state bureaucracy. Lots more data & testing. Trash for cash. " "At some point, it might occur to the president that he allowed Duncan to push an education agenda that was not sound and that will leave public schools in no better shape than they are now. Here’s hoping it's not too late."
"Military Maintenance Law: If it moves, oil it. If it doesn't move, paint it.
"Art Linkletter to 7-year-old boy whose dog died: 'Don't be sad because your dog is up in heaven with God.'
"Evil comes from obedience without introspection." "If we toughen up preschool, will there soon be pressure to toughen up (and require) toddler programs to prepare for preschool? And then what? Prenatal literacy training?"
"Existing Laws:
"[T]he so-called experts on education go through the motions of hearing teachers, but not really listening. Our expertise is discounted or ignored, and our criticisms are held against us like so much self-interested complaining. If an architectural firm were designing a new workplace for you, wouldn't you appreciate having the architects asking you about your work, trying to understand your needs? Well, at the architectural firm of Arne Duncan and Co., they tell you what they're going to do about your workplace, then they offer you a chance to respond to their plans -- for about 15 minutes -- and then proceed with their designs regardless of what you actually need." "Duncan's collusion with the growing corporatization and militarizing of public schools, along with the increased use of harsh disciplinary modes of punishment, surveillance, control and containment, especially in schools inhabited largely by poor minorities of color, reveals his unwillingness to address the degree to which many schools are dominated by a politics of fear, containment and authoritarianism, even as he advances reform as a civil rights issue." "Almost all of Duncan's polices are indebted to the codes of a market-driven business culture, legitimated through discourses of measurement, efficiency and utility. This is a discourse that values hedge fund managers over teachers, privatization over the public good, management over leadership and training over education. Duncan's fervent support of neoliberal values are well-known and are evident in his support for high-stakes testing, charter schools, school-business alliances, merit pay, linking teacher pay to higher test scores, offering students monetary rewards for higher grades, CEO-type management, abolishing tenure, defining the purpose of schooling as largely job training, the weakening of teacher unions and blaming teachers exclusively for the failure of public schooling." "10 years from now, we will look back with regret and even shame on this misuse of federal power [Race to the Top]. Books will be written analyzing where these ideas came from and why they were foisted on the nation's public schools at a time of fiscal distress. And we will be left to wonder why so much money and energy was spent promoting so many dubious ideas. " "They [Sec. Duncan and his aides]seemed to think we had questions, and their job was to answer them. We had actually approached the conversation from a different place. We thought perhaps they might want to ask US questions, or hear our ideas about how to improve schools." "What would it be like if the U.S. Department of Education took the 'mass localism' approach to distributing the 4.3 billion dollars? For sure, we will get a lot more innovative, locally produced and owned, and effective solutions than what has been prescribed." " Our children won't read better because Congress serves as the national school board. Nor will they learn more mathematics with the president as the national superintendent of schools. We risk making things worse across the country by giving up more policy control for education to the federal government. By centralizing our system of education, we put the whole nation at risk, should Beltway bureaucrats and policy pundits guess wrong about curriculum, instruction, and the range of policy decisions associated with public education." "I have yet to meet a teacher who favors No Child Left Behind and the Teacher's Union wants to increase funding for No Child Left Behind?" "Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. " ". . .the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians. . ." "We object to Duncan's political pressure to force our state to raise the cap on charters, without any protections in place to prevent financial corruption and abuse of power. He has said that there is 'zero' opposition to his policies, and yet more than two thousand people have signed our petition against raising the charter cap in the last two weeks. We also resent the way the charter lobby is spreading disinformation, including the false claim that the 'Race to the Top' funding can be used to prevent layoffs at schools. As Kathleen Grimm pointed out at City Council hearings last week, the use of this federal grant program is very restrictive and cannot be used for these purposes." "Increasing the number of charter schools without acknowledging the growing list of complaints and concerns, AND without providing remedies, is irresponsible at least, and even more so when supported by the Secretary of Education. Today, I waited in the rain until I could ask Secretary Duncan when he would talk to charter parents to hear their concerns. He politely responded that he does talk to parents and was willing to meet with us. But when I asked how we could arrange this, I immediately became invisible, as he turned his back, walked away and shut his car door. Now I understand how it is that Secretary Duncan says there is zero opposition to his charter school proposals. Today, Secretary Duncan deemed me a zero." "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. " "It is wonderful to be back here with the men and women of the Business Roundtable. Over the last year, we've worked together on a number of issues -- from economic recovery and tax policy to education and to health care. And more often than not, we've found common ground . . . . To train our workers for the jobs of tomorrow, we've made education reform a top priority in this administration. We are not interested in just putting more money into our schools; we want that money moving toward reform. And last year we launched a national competition to improve our schools based on a simple idea: Instead of funding the status quo, we will only invest in reform -- reform that raises student achievement and inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans. I just met this week with the nation's governors, and education reform is one of those rare issues where both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastic."
"It used to be that Bill Gates was the most powerful education philanthropist in America. Thanks to the Race to the Top, that mantle has passed to Arne Duncan. Do we want to make that the permanent status of U.S. secretaries of education?
"Good teachers find a way, despite all obstacles, to obtain these gains in student achievement " ""We use the word 'academic entrepreneurs.' We are expanding what it means to be a knowledge enterprise. We use knowledge as a form of venture capital. "
"Whether it's textbooks, supplementary educational services, tests, testing programs and testing guides, packaged curriculum, data aggregation systems, scripted programs for teachers, corporate-sponsored university research, bringing advertisements into the classroom, or renaming university and public school centers after commercial brands, whether it's for profit universities or the explosion in online degrees or "branding" schools, whether it's the commercialization of college sports and cultural resources or the surrender to the ratings game of U.S. News and World Report, whether it's the student loan scandal or the scandal over Reading First, or it's the privatization of schools in New Orleans and Chicago, there is overwhelming evidence of the intrusion into education of for-profit corporations. Most teachers and educators know this, but, in their daily life in school, they are aware of it as something outside themselves, something done to them or imposed on them or their schools. Teachers, teacher educators, and administrators know that corporations are slowly gobbling up the very market in education those corporations have created. And yet there seems very little resistance.
"Fort Monroe, VA — The United States Army Accessions Command (USAAC) commends the leadership of 48 states, the District of Columbia and two territories in committing to a process to adopt common high academic standards in mathematics and English language arts for our Nation's public school students." "American middle-class living standards are threatened not because workers lack competitive skills but because the richest among us have seized the fruits of productivity growth, denying fair shares to the working- and middle-class Americans, educated in American schools, who have created the additional national wealth. . . No amount of school reform can undo policies that redirect wealth generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses." "If you're doing the wrong thing well, you're still doing the wrong thing." " Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me --won't get fooled again. -- George W. Bush So many times they fooled us -- so many times that the Bush library in Dallas could have a wing devoted just to deceit." "In 2009, when Klein announced the expansion of charter schools, he didn't mention that of 51,316 public school students in the city who were homeless, only 11 were enrolled in charter schools." "The Department's 500-point system [for Race to the Top Grant proporals] is needlessly complex. Its implied precision makes the results seem less affected by human judgment than is the case." "Despite widespread use of testing in education and employment, there is no US agency (analogous to the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration) that independently audits the processes and products of testing agencies. The lack of oversight makes errors difficult to detect. Individuals harmed by a flawed test may not even be aware of the harm. Although consumers who become aware of a problem with a test can contact the educational agency that commissioned it, or the testing company; it is likely that many problems go unnoticed. " "Today those who take and use many tests have less consumer protection than those who buy a toy, a toaster, or a plane ticket. Rarely is an important test or its use subject to formal, systematic, independent professional scrutiny or audit. Civil servants who contract to have a test built, or who purchase commercial tests in education, have only the testing companies' assurances that their product is technically sound and appropriate for its stated purpose. Further, those who have no choice but to take a particular test -- often having to pay to take it -- have inadequate protection against either a faulty instrument or the misuse of a well-constructed one. Although the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council for Measurement in Education have formulated professional standards for test development and use in education and employment, they lack any effective enforcement mechanism. "
" One of the things that concerns me is that --while I admire the work that Teach For America does and many of these other groups do--sometimes there's an implication that their work is required because existing teachers are terrible. That bothers me, because the evidence doesn't support that.
"Obama isn't a socialist. He's not even a liberal.
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." "It is only a slight exaggeration to describe the test theory that dominates educational measurement today as the application of twentieth-century statistics to nineteenth-century psychology." "No Child Left Behind was the most advanced civil rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act."
"Any test can be used to predict anything in the future. Whether it predicts the future or not is an empirical question. We use the SAT (which used to be called a test of developed abilities, adding further fog to the confusion) to predict college grade points. We could just as well use the Iowa Tests of Educational Development, which are high school achievement tests.
"Principle of Data Interpretation: Do the arithmetic.
"American middle-class living standards are threatened, not because workers lack competitive skills but because the richest among us have seized the fruits of productivity growth, denying fair shares to the working- and middle-class Americans, educated in American schools, who have created the additional national wealth. Over the last few decades, wages of college graduates overall have increased, but some college graduates -- managers, executives, white-collar sales workers -- have commandeered disproportionate shares, with little left over for scientists, engineers, teachers, computer programmers, and others with high levels of skill. No amount of school reform can undo policies that redirect wealth generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses." "We should understand what we are up against: not that tests are arbitrary, but a class society that requires such tests. No attack on these rites of passage can be finally successful unless it overturns bourgeois culture, itself, and the rule of our dominant classes." "It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly." "I could give you 30 minutes a day to play outside, but I care about you and want you all to pass the FCAT test." "[M]ost American kids are unwilling to work all that hard. The slacker mentality would not be tolerated in China. Here it is a dominant style." "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. " "All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard. " "We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. " "Education can democratize access to the labor market, but education cannot eliminate labor market tyranny. . . education can't create good jobs. . . and we in education have to say this. . . . We need to say to to the Democrats: If you're willing to bail out the banks, you have to be willing to bail out the schools. . . . Teachers must realize that you're swimming against the tide. Everything is set up to subvert us. " "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts." "The proper attitude toward a criminal government is not deference and respect, however much some at The Nation might love a smooth-talking Democrat, but defiance and rebellion -- of the non-violent variety." "I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court." "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
"War is Peace
"War is Peace
"Data! Data! Fly back to Gates.
"He is marooned, in case you have not noticed, on that balmy tropical isle pronounced Selador, spelled cellardoor. . . . Do you know a committee of Language Hump-type professors put out a committee finding back in 1936 -- most beautiful word in the English language is cellardoor." "Why is the education of a disadvantaged child in a very poor rural community worth only half as much to the federal government as the education of a disadvantaged child in a very poor urban community?"
"As the husband of a public-school teacher, I am happy that Ravitch has finally seen the light on the folly of universal proficiency standards in the public schools. Setting classroom standards is something that every teacher should do individually; mandating them across a wide range of geographical, economic, and biological variations has always made little sense to me.
"Dear Arne Duncan, . . . How about spending some money to solve the problem and not just measure it? " "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser." "Teachers will work no harder when their tenure or their salary depends upon their students' test scores, but the kind of work they do, if such plans are adopted, will not resemble the work of the attentive gardener tending these tender tendrils of humanity that constitute our future." "While Duncan is evidently prepared to spend part of his days bending the rules for the rich and powerful, he seems to relish spending the rest of the day terrorizing public school teachers across the country, demanding that they strictly adhere to a whole array of standards, no matter how insidious these standards are in terms of undermining quality education, demoralizing teachers, and forcing students to devote themselves to a boring curriculum. But if the teachers do not comply, Duncan wants them fired. There is no mercy or rule-bending here. " "So the Volunteer State volunteered to throw the teachers under the school bus."
"Race to the Top may be the sickest, most cynical thing I've seen pulled in education by a progressive administration ever.
"No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush's education law, had so many harmful, though unintended, effects on American education that even the law's name has become 'toxic.' So says President Barack Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But Duncan has failed to learn from his predecessor. . . ." "The federal stimulus money that's being offered now to the states is being offered on the condition that they raise charter school caps, that they tie teacher evaluations to students' test scores, that they close what they call failing schools, that they turn them over to private turnaround operators. So we have a neoliberal project nationally, which was tested out in Chicago and then is now being pushed out nationally." "Parents, students and community members must come to terms with what it means to be 'educated.' Until this happens, the agenda will revert to the numerologists looking to make a fast buck on our kids while controlling the curriculum from 'surveillance watch towers,' the panopticon of learning!" "Suppose we give a high school test to everyone in Congress, with scores listed in rank order and serious penalties--including deselecting the bottom 10 percent?" "I am sure the state ed people will be back--to see if we've dismantled our learning stations, found an appropriate reading system, and written up all our objectives. I wouldn't dare be caught with my cloze down. I have a list of standard objectives for all those things that seem to matter to evaluators: the rules about the silent e, dropping the y, the apostrophe before the s, and so on. I'm hoping that after I produce the list the wit and whimsy with which I try to fill our classroom will be forgiven. If it isn't, I'll console myself with this silent prayer: Yea, though I walk in the shadow of conglomerate criterion referenced curriculum, I will fear no evil, the children they will comfort me." "I had to reassure my third grader yet AGAIN this morning that there was no, absolutely no, chance that her principal would get fired if she did poorly on the MCAS."
"Attempting to explain its controversial decision to revamp its history textbooks, The Texas State Board of Education issued an official statement today.
"The higher-performing schools will be left alone, which will make a lot of people happy. But the lower-performing schools, particularly those in the bottom 5 percent, and then an additional 5 percent to 10 percent to 15 percent, are going to be very unhappy, because they're going to worry about falling into that bottom 5 percent.
"What are the things that (define) college and career readiness? Do you mean welding at the community college or astrophysics at MIT?" "I had the opportunity last night to download and look at the blueprint, and my concern as I read through it is the number of times competition and competitive grants is mentioned in it -- that monies would be allocated by competition. Whenever we have competition, we have winners and losers. I don’t believe that we can afford to have losers in education."
"Dear NCTE
"Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers' unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency." " The gods can never afford to leave a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here. They will at once send him packing. How can you walk on ground when you see through it? " "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand. Our possibilities are endless." " Thomas and Wingert, you are totally, utterly socially irresponsible. How dare you write such a rag of a (poorly researched) story and reinforce the notion that only the bottom of the barrel of individuals would want to be a thing as lowly and ignoble as a teacher? Only lazy, boorish imbeciles would deign to spend their life in the classroom, cleaning up all the messes that you can't imagine sitting in your policy-making offices. But, I digress. I have to get ready for another day of being lowly and mediocre."
"
"The Obama administration appointed somebody from the NewSchools Venture Fund to run this so-called Race to the Top. The NewSchools Venture Fund exists to promote charter schools. So, what we're seeing with the proliferation--with this demand from the federal government, if you want to be part of this $4 billion fund, you better be prepared to create lots more charter schools. Well, it's all predetermined by who the personnel is. And, you know, so we see this immense influence of the foundations.
"If Obama is willing to go in the dark where even Bush feared to tread, and if Arne Duncan is reckless enough to proceed where even Margaret Spelling drew the line, you can bet that there is enough corporate-government money in the current reform school agenda to buy the media and the research and the politicians needed to push forward with the continued demolition of American public education. " "Business Roundtable member CEOs congratulate President-elect Obama on the selection of Arne Duncan as the next Secretary of Education. The selection signals that the Obama administration believes that aggressive efforts are needed to raise U.S. student achievement. Mr. Duncan has a strong record of working with the business community to improve schools in Chicago. " "I never dreamed we would have to protect our kids from President Obama."
"'I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.
"Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security."
"It's always been a little odd the way that there is only one U.S. federal department that uses its ineffectiveness as a major speaking point.
"Central Falls could be--ANYWHERE. . . but, obviously, it's a hell of a long way from Wall Street: " "We no longer wonder 'Who are you?' but instead decide quickly 'What can we do to fix you?'" "I'm willing to argue that even with time and training, interactive whiteboards are an under-informed and irresponsible purchase. They do little more than reinforce a teacher-centric model of learning. Heck, even whiteboard companies market them as a bridging technology, designed to replicate traditional instructional practices (make presentations, give notes, deliver lectures) in an attempt to move digital teacher-dinosaurs into the light. I ask you: Do we really want to spend thousands of dollars on a tool that makes stand-and-deliver instruction easier?" "When it comes to education warriors, Rep. George Miller is a warrior's warrior. DFER is proud to recognize Congressman Miller's impressive work as chair of the Education and Labor Committee, especially in drafting and fighting for the 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) act. Rep. Miller’s steadfast dedication to serious results in education is what makes him an effective leader in reforming America's education system. His tendency to side with the reform-disruptors rather than the reform-incrementalists makes him an recipient especially worthy of our Education Reformer of the Month." "Common Core Standards. Plato's "Allegory of Cave" for 11-year-olds. Bipartisan is euphemism for unilateral oppression." "...I am sensible, that there would be something like impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially different from those upon which general approbation is at present bestowed...." "...I have a prediction to make: As hundreds and possibly thousands more charter schools open, we will see many financial and political scandals. We will see corrupt politicians and investors putting their hands into the cashbox. We will see corrupt deals where public school space is handed over to entrepreneurs who have made contributions to the politicians making the decisions. We will see many more charter operators pulling in $400,000-500,000 a year for their role, not as principals, but as 'rainmakers' who build warm relationships with politicians and investors.... " "What I cannot understand in this 'jobs creating' President is why gutting teachers and ruining so many lives, is not important enough to halt. . . ." "What if we insisted that doctors be paid based upon the relative health of their patients regardless of whether those same patients smoke, are overweight or have a prior illness? " "Children under NCLB are to learn only what the New Aryans want them to learn. To this end they created 'standards' and high-stakes tests that put such great emphasis on two subjects, reading and math, that nothing else gets taught. Professional educators lament the "narrowing of the curriculum" but are studiously ignored. Yet even they never seem to grasp that the narrowing of the curriculum is precisely the point of the illogical testing program in the first place." "If education policymakers knew what they were doing, instead of demanding national standards and tests keyed to a curriculum generated in an era long past and no longer relevant, they'd be calling for an emergency national conference to rethink what's being taught, and why."
"The single story creates stereotypes. The trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. . . . The single story robs people of dignity. . . stories matters.
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
"[G]rowth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.--Edward Abbey
"Let's call it: Formative Assessment Techniques for Achieving Student Success (FAT-ASS). "
"The absolute requirement of RTTT is that states must adopt national standards. Forty-eight of the fifty states, with Alaska and Texas being the only exceptions, have signed on to the Common Core Standards Initiative. This initiative is funded and promoted by the National Governors' Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). They are developing common core standards in math and English that are 'internationally benchmarked.'
Although touted as "state-led" and "voluntary," all of these severely cash-strapped states (41 as of the January 19th deadline) that hope to receive RTTT funds MUST adopt these standards (national curriculum). Part of the competitive application process requires states to show the largest number of school districts agreeing to take on these national/international standards. That is not voluntary. Rather, depending on one's point of view, it is either bribery or economic and ideological blackmail.
"We still live a classist, racist, sexist, homophobic, religionist society. Civil rights is still a huge issue in this country. When teachers can't exercise civil disobedience, then something is truly wrong in this "so-called" land of the free. We ain't free and it is getting worse. The way the standards are right now, they promote complacency.
"On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right." "It is odd that school leaders feel triumphant when they close schools, as though they were not responsible for them. They enjoy the role of executioner, shirking any responsibility for the schools in their care." "Most researchers in the field of childhood development agree that the minds of nursery-school children are far too raw to be judged. Sally Shaywitz, author of Overcoming Dyslexia, is in the midst of a decades-long study that examines reading development in children. She says she couldn't even use the reading data she'd collected from first-graders for some of the longitudinal analyses. 'It simply wasn't stable,' she says. I tell her that most New York City schools don't share this view. 'A young brain is a moving target,' she replies. 'It should not be treated as if it were fixed.'" "When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that's supposed to be qualitative at a young age,no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents' anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there's a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it's beginning at an age that's criminal. -- Steve Nelson, Head of Calhoun School, a school that includes "progressive" in its identification" "Admirers of the president now embrace actions they once denounced as criminal, or rationalize and evade such questions, or attempt to explain away what cannot be excused. That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past. Even as many casual supporters begin to show their inevitable displeasure with his 'job performance,' and his poll numbers decline, the character and motivations of the president remain above question. He is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing." "'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewer of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.' " "[A spending freeze] is a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view --and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, 'I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.'" "[A spending freeze] is a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view --and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, 'I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.'" "Right now I'm just marveling at the ability of both the Obama White House and the leadership of the Democratic Party to have rehabilitated both the direct fortunes and the ideological outlook of the Bush Jr. / Reagan II Republican Party in 1 year." "I would like to know who in our country would like their pay to be based on the actions of a group of children. " "Education policy does not solve economic problems. Economic policy solves economic problems." "Republicans who otherwise have little use for the Obama Administration's policies approve of Duncan's commitment to market-based reforms. John Kline, of Minnesota, the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, told me, 'In many ways, it's a Republican agenda.' " "In order to understand school reform one need remember only two words: Standardistos lie." "Perhaps Justice Kennedy didn't hear that the financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report titled: Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America " "Readers concerned about the paper's journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com. " "Losing the super majority won’t kill the Obama presidency. It’s his sudden inability to tell a good tale that will be his death-knell. If I were him, I’d have hired fewer Ivy League policy wonks and brought in a couple of storytellers. " "The standards movement, sad to say, morphed long ago into a push for standardization. The last thing we need is more of the same." "I think it high time Congress enact similar mandates for other professions that utilize a single measure to determine success. Dentists should be evaluated on how many teeth they save, doctors should be evaluated on how many patients they save, lawyers should be evaluated on how many cases they win, accountants should be evaluated on much money they save clients, and engineers on how many buildings they've designed get built. Congress should also enact national, comprehensive standards for each profession without any input from members of said professions since we know they can't be trusted to make informed decisions or contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way. Anyone who won't come on board should be fired and labeled a dissident. Conformity and control are a must, so teachers should be thankful they are first in the firing line." " Children can be trained to get the right answer, like parrots or seals, but the higher scores are not a measure of a good education or a good teacher." "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. " "No fact, investigation, or conclusion can be theory-free; as William James said, you can't pick up rocks in a field without a theory. The issue is whether you are aware of the theory you are using, and whether you are using it critically or uncritically" ",,,Most of the claims Duncan has been making are simply not true. Not a question of interpretation: Not True. As in 'He lies.'" "The Cliffs Notes to 'Race to the Top' are in Atlas Shrugged and the other radical economic theories of Ayn Rand. Arne Duncan isn't simply trying to privatize a little piece of public education, he really believes that public is bad and private is good. And anyone who doesn't look at Duncan's strange career with that viewpoint in mind is having a great deal of trouble figuring out why RttT is such a strange thing. " "...I spend as much time worrying about the crap in kids' imaginative diet as I do fretting over their eating habits. " "Who blames teachers? Obama, Duncan, Bush, Spellings, Rhee, Klein, the Education Equity Project. A chorus of economists: Bad teachers!" "What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while." "'War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength'—more than a quarter-century after those oxymorons were supposed to pervade an Orwellian 1984, today's media make such newspeak even more preposterous: On economic issues, we are often told that right is center, center is left, and left is fringe." "If you torture data long enough, it will tell you anything you want." " Has any student ever actually USED a protractor?" "When teachers are forced, against their better judgment, to focus on teaching test content to the exclusion of almost everything else, I can only conclude that the high-stakes testing movement nourishes totalitarian regimes." "The state in its efforts to control beyond where it can effectively impose itself, destroys everything. " "As soon as the central administration decides to close a school, it is a fait accompli. New York City has a rubber-stamp 'board' of 13, with a majority appointed by the mayor, serving at his pleasure; it approves every executive decision, with only a single dissenting vote (the heroic Patrick Sullivan, a public school parent). Public hearings are pro forma; no decision is ever reversed. Parents and teachers may protest 'til the cows come home, and they can't change a thing. Their school will be closed, the low-performing students will be dispersed, and either new small schools or charter schools will take over their building. Some of the schools that will close are, funnily enough, small schools that were opened by Bloomberg and Klein only a few years ago. Does anyone believe that this sorry game of musical chairs will improve education? Does anyone in Washington or at central headquarters grasp the pointlessness of the disruption needlessly inflicted on students, families, teachers, principals, and communities in the name of 'reform'? Do these people have no shame?" "In the last 30 years the range of independent mobility for North American 12-year-olds has shriveled from one mile to 550 yards." " Issue a gag order silencing all education experts who haven't taught in public school classrooms for the bulk of their careers. Offer these authorities – cabinet officers, commissioners, legislators, education professors, and think-tankers – the chance to reapply for an education preaching license after they've spent the next five years teaching on their own in a real classroom with real kids." "Afghanistan has become Absurdistan. "
" The purpose of Renaissance 2010 [in Chicago] was to increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of accountability - a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago's 2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district's alleged underachieving schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification. Most of the new experimental schools have eliminated the teacher union. The Commercial Club hired corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearney to write Ren2010, which called for the closing of 100 public schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more charters to circumvent state limits) and "performance" schools. Kearney's web site is unapologetic about its business-oriented notion of leadership, one that John Dewey thought should be avoided at all costs. It states, 'Drawing on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used across industries, we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge other large urban education transformations.'
"People who know who they are make trouble for schools." "Why is it that education 'reformers' feel obligated to idealize education elsewhere and demonize it here? " "Give the administration an A for motive, effort and reach. Give them an A+ for wiliness in getting states to change their policies toward those favored by the administration in order to qualify for a competition for $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funds that few will win. With state coffers empty and demands for education funding unabated, states have gambled on a long-odds bribe from Washington. Much of what the administration could hope to get from states on education reform has been gotten in the first year and before a dollar of discretionary funding has been spent." "President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's 'Race' has nearly $5 billion as a lure to persuade states to climb aboard the express train to privatization."
"Lining up for Duncan's corporate-politico RttT funds, like Soviets lining up in a bread line.
"With their advocacy of the LEARN (sic) legislation, the NCTE and IRA executives and lobbyists come perilously close to resembling the elite managers in Vonnegut's The Piano Player, living in their gated committees and keeping all due vigilance lest someone show any hint of disloyalty to the managerial system run by the corporate-politicos. " "It seems to me that in the rush to improve student achievement through accountability systems relying on high-stakes tests, our policy makers and citizens forgot, or cannot understand, or deliberately avoid the fact, that our children live nested lives. Our youth are in classrooms, so when those classrooms do not function as we want them to, we go to work on improving them. Those classrooms are in schools, so when we decide that those schools are not performing appropriately, we go to work on improving them, as well. But both students and schools are situated in neighborhoods filled with families. And in our country the individuals living in those school neighborhoods are not a random cross section of Americans. Our neighborhoods are highly segregated by social class, and thus, also segregated by race and ethnicity. So all educational efforts that focus on classrooms and schools, as does NCLB, could be reversed by family, could be negated by neighborhoods, and might well be subverted or minimized by what happens to children outside of school. Improving classrooms and schools, working on curricula and standards, improving teacher quality and fostering better use of technology are certainly helpful. But sadly, such activities may also be similar to those of the drunk found on his hands and knees under a street lamp. When asked by a passerby what he was doing, the drunk replied that he was looking for his keys. When asked where he lost them, the drunk replied 'over there,' and pointed back up the dark street. When the passerby then asked the drunk why he was looking for the keys where they were located, the drunk answered, 'the light is better here!' " "The health doesn't matter. The housing doesn't matter. The dysfunctional communities don't matter. None of these things matter. The only thing that matters is whether teachers have high expectations of children. I don't think we can make social policy on the basis of a myth. " "We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. . ."" "Race to the Top relies on old GOP agenda of accountability, choice, merit pay. Nothing new. Which Dems if any will fight it?" "Man say that tortoises, when they have eaten part of a viper, eat marojoram as an antidote, and, if the creature fails to find it at once, it dies; that many of the country-folk, wishing to prove whether this is true, whenever they see it acting in this manner, pluck up the marjoram, and when they have done so, the tortoise is presently seen dying."
"Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Toni and Charley,
"Everywhere, nowadays, the sole ruler is money. . . "WHEN. . . do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? . . . That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head. . . . For what is there that you can still expect, if night is not able to veil your nefarious meetings in darkness, and if private houses cannot conceal the voice of your conspiracy within their walls- if everything is seen and displayed? Change your mind: trust me: forget the slaughter and conflagration you are meditating. You are hemmed in on all sides; all your plans are clearer than the day to us. . . . " "The Business Roundtable says, 'Be still and know that we Rule.'" "Life is complicated, so think small." "During his short stop in New Orleans, Obama did manage to promote his and Arne Duncan's corporate-crafted schools privatization agenda by visiting the oxymoronically named "Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School" in the city's predominantly black, flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. "The school," Times reporters Peter Baker and Campbell Robertson noted, was "surrounded by boarded-up houses, empty lots with overgrown grass and dilapidated storefronts with for-rent signs." [9] Baker and Cambell might have noted that corporate education forces had seized on Katrina as a great opportunity, using the crisis to advance their privatization model on the reconstitution of New Orleans' school system." " One blogger wrote: 'More children died violent deaths in Chicago this year than in any other city in America. But all Obama cares about is bringing the Olympics to a city where basic services like water, sanitation and power often don't work. ... If Chicago does win the bid there will be plenty of police and National Guard on hand to protect the international visitors. That's more than they are willing to do for their own residents.'" "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up. " " There's a huge amount of data on the internet about normal developmental milestones -- when most kids start to crawl, say their first word, or learn the alphabet -- but such information often lacks the disclaimer that 50 percent of children will fall either above or below the average range." "I do not expect the students who take my courses to absorb any particular 'body of knowledge' or attain any new 'skills.' On the contrary, for the most part, they will probably develop new kinds of doubts and anxieties, concerns and hesitations. They will not learn anything that has any advantageous practical implications, nor will they learn anything that can be 'applied' to any other situation, except in the most oblique ways. They will not develop any new 'transferable benchmark skills.' They will not achieve any 'goals or outcomes.' Indeed, they will not have "achieved" anything, except, perhaps, to doubt the value of terms like 'achievement' when applied to reading literature. " "I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer. . . . We're very important. We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It's a virtuous cycle. . . .We have a social purpose. [I'm just a banker] doing God's work" "At a time when children are overwhelmed with tests, when NCLB has turned schools into test-prep academies, and when education is facing severe budget cuts, the last thing we need is Race to the Top with more standards and tests. If we are interested in picking up an extra 500 million, all we need to do is drop the state high school exit exam. Exit exams don't work: Studies have shown that that state exit exams do not result in improved academic achievement. In addition, recent research done by scholars at Indiana University has shown that state high school exit exams do not lead to more college completion, higher employment, or higher earnings by graduates. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam." "Do American parents want schools to be run like businesses and their children to be treated as employees? Will they accept the idea of delivering their children into the hands of specialists in financial deal-making and cutthroat competition, who may or may not have completed college themselves and who view students strictly as "human capital" to be schooled in skills narrowly tailored to niches in today’s ever-so-transient corporate job market? " "The Obama White House is morphing into the Bush White House with frightening speed. Its transparency is already fogged up." "Don't forget one of the obvious fallacies of Duncan's goal of turning around the 5,000 worst performing schools in the US in the next five years: As long as schools are ranked based on test scores, there will ALWAYS be 5,000 worst performing schools! It's an inherently impossible goal! " "When charters shut down, typically it's because they've cooked the books or engaged in actual criminal activity, not because they've failed the children." "The National Parent Teacher Association has received a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to begin organizing parental support for setting more uniform academic expectations in four states: Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina." "In section 3, 2A of Senate Bill 2740 it says that the LEARN Act is designed "to ensure that every child can read and write at grade level or above." Grade level means the 50th percentile. The education experts who wrote this either don't know basic educational terminology or need some remedial math. Getting everybody at the 50th percentile is possible only if everybody has exactly the same score. Getting everybody above the 50th percentile is possible only in Lake Wobegon. " "Nor do I admire their belief that schools will get dramatically better if they compete, just like businesses do. Maybe people in business win by competing, maybe competition produces better mousetraps, but that is not the way that schools function. Schools work best when teachers collaborate with one another to identify students who need extra attention or a different program or to mentor weak teachers; schools work best when they collaborate around common goals. Schools are not trying to build a better mousetrap. They are trying to educate our citizenry. Schools are not businesses, and we will continue to flounder so long as we put politicians and business leaders in the driver's seat on education policy." "This machine kills fascists. " "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Studies have shown that consuming foods grown using compost made from the pages of any book written by conservative politicians and/or Fox News pundits may result in bloating, brain damage, grammar mutilation and the mad desire to taxidermy your cat. Read more." "" "Competition brings out the best performance. That's true in athletics and in business, and it's true in education." "Stop paying teachers and principals a salary. Instead pay teachers and principals on a per standardized test point basis each day. At the end of each school day, students should be tested using a standardized test, what a teacher and principal is paid is calculated at the end of the day based on the growth of the student, i.e., how much has the student improved over the previous day. This is true accountability and will for sure keep teachers and principals on their toes! " "Whining is not the same thing as doing something. Whining is whining. Action is something else." "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvn_Ied9t4M "
"UC Santa Cruz is looking for a Grateful Dead Archivist. They're looking for someone who loves the Grateful Dead, and yet somehow has exceptional organizational skills. So basically what they're saying--is that they need a miracle.
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. " "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. " "People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different." "America cannot test and punish its way to better schools, no matter how good its standardized tests might become. " "Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer. " "Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize? Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He's holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize." "How rotten the Democrats are. This other big business party that the Union officials hitch our wagon to needs to be seen for what it is by working people. We can and must build an alterative independent worker's political party rooted in the communities in which we live and work. " "[A] schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." "Look at a picture of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Look at all the ribbons on their chests, ribbons for killing people. If Data Warehousing takes over your school, demand ribbons to spread across your chest, ribbons for killing children." "Arizona now has corporate prisons to house poor adult lawbreakers. Will nationalized corporate chain gang schools be the cheap solution to urban and rural poverty among those too young for prison? " "Only if a person has emerged from mother's lap and father's commands, only if he has emerged as a fully developed individual and thus has acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say "no" to power, to disobey. A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. . . . The organization man has lost the capacity to disobey, he is not even aware of the fact that he obeys. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. "
"Whom are we talking about when we talk about an eighth grader? The girl who spells her name "Sherri" and hides a copy of True Confessions in her binder? Or the "Sherry" who sucks her thumb and wants to listen to a tape of "Rumpelstiltskin?" Sherri/Sherry can't be pinned down to read the same book on different days of the week, let alone the same book as all of her classmates.
"I've nevermet a required book list I liked. Such lists are always prescriptive and retrospective. They keep us looking over our shoulders, maintaining a static rather than a dynamic notion of culture. And the worse part is that once you let a core list into your life, it's very hard to dislodge it. Asking a faculty to change a recommended book list and getting a new list approved by administrators and the board of education is like asking someone to move a graveyard. . . The same people who swap copies of Stephen King in the faculty room put Dickens on the core lists."
"'Can I see the lesson plans for a unit?'
"Bill- if you want to improve education, RECALL every X-box your company ever made and destroy them. Convince Sony, Apple and every other videogame producer to do the same. Next, make computers and printers FREE to schools. School budgets have increased dramatically trying to keep up with technology. Finally, give every school library lots of money to BUY books and pay for librarians. You were smart enough to create game systems, but too many parents were stupid enough to buy them!" "Obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). " "From Maryland to Michigan to Montana, reading is reading and math is math. . . .We want 100 percent of our kids to pass this test."
"Math Skills Show Little Growth
"You were right. You were always right. It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide…..I’ve been living here, quietly, beside you, for years, just waiting for Tojo to flash me the high sign. So go ahead and lock me up. Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. . . . Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. Too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud. Put it down in writing. . . . " "The closer you are to ground level in U.S. schools, the more you become aware of the deprofessionalizing power of complex educational systems and programs. Often, especially in more-affluent districts, these systems pile up on one another, creating an indigestible, incompatible mess: Christmas-tree schools, with lots of ornaments. Programs for the responsive classroom, comprehension strategies, guided reading, direct instruction, leveled book, differentiated instruction, focused correction, and writing workshop jostle for teachers' attention, all claiming to be aligned with state systems of evaluation (and all, of course, 'research-based')." "Turnaround is the deadliest reform of all.... " "I love Arne. He must have the most compartmentalized brain in the country. 'We have too many bad tests,' he says. He also says we need data bases to link student performance to teacher performance. And what will be in those data bases? Scores from those bad tests." "One of the books I read was Cities of Lonesome Fear: God Among the Gangs by Gordon McLean. It reminded me not to give up on the students. Even if they give up on themselves, we cannot give up on them. " "Your 401(k)'s are not dying because not enough kids took calculus. " "Do you want to improve the lives of poor and minority students? Then improve the lives of poor and minority students: provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate housing, medical, dental and mental health care and, yes, adequately funded schools with committed (sorry, TFA) and qualified teachers. Amen." "Schools never 'fail' where the SUVs roam. But where hubcab theft is the only growth industry, schools can't get anything right. Right?" "The next time you see a full-face picture of Arne Duncan, cover everything but the eyes and judge what he's about." "I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk. "
"Myth #5: 'Subjective assessments of performance can't work.'
"It was more than two years ago when headlines around the city screamed that the Aspira Haugen Middle School fired a racist art teacher who said Mexicans are only good for cleaning floors. Substance finally caught up with the former teacher and discovered that the whole story was a cruel fabrication, possibly prompted by the fact that the teacher had begun demanding union rights in a school that was actively anti-union: the Aspira Charter schools.
"The character most resembling Chicago Schools CEO Ron Huberman in "The Wire" is the corrupt Deputy Chief of Police, Chief of Operations, Bill Rawls. The role of the "data driven" tyrant is played with zest all the way through "The Wire." But "The Wire" and Deputy for Operations Bill Rawls are fiction. Ron Huberman's performance on the opening day of school is fact in Chicago as the 2009-2010 school year dawns. . . . "A preliminary review of the new executives of the Chicago Public Schools being appointed at the Chicago Board of Education's August 26, 2009, meeting shows that at least one of them has admitted to criminal fraud (in two other states) and others are being brought into CPS with no experience, training, or certification to lead public school systems in Illinois. . . ."
"These delegates are sharply opposed to the key things going on in schools: Regimented curricula (national standards). High stakes exams. Militarization. To some extent, privatization and charters. A culture of fear.
"In the Chicago Public Schools, remediation means that a principal, for various reasons (teacher is old, costs too much, uses 'old' methods, is too outspoken, or a supporter needs a job), has decided to encourage a staff member to quit or retire. . . .
"After 15 years of a corporate model of school governance in Chicago, Chicago's leaders were confident in 2009 that they could get away with Ron Huberman and his data driven nonsense without paying any serious political price. How many Chicago teachers and principals bend to the sheer stupidity and irrelevance of the new regime remains to be seen. During the past year there has been more resistance in Chicago to the Daley regime than at any time since 1995, when the Illinois General Assembly made Richard M. Daley dictator of Chicago's public schools." "When you see a car hurtling toward your child, you push him out of the way before you engage in conversation about Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Until we stop the abusive standardized testing i elementary schools, I refuse to talk about a better kind of test. We must stop harming the children presently in our care. Right now. Today."
"General, your tank is a powerful vehicle. "The Duct Tape Theory of Standardized Testing. If Duct Fails, it's because you haven't used enough. If standardized tests fail to close the Achievement Gap, it's because you haven't given enough of them." "Even a fool, when he is holding a bucket of standardized test scores, is counted wise by the U. S. Secretary of Education." "Well, Cindy, if we had a Broad Prize for charter schools, KIPP would certainly be the winner." "There may come a time, a renewal of the spirit of society, a time such as that when the Preamble to the Constitution of the State of Illinois was drafted and ratified by the citizens, when policymakers' attention will turn again toward the external factors that educators know affect student learning. Until then, we can race to the top all we want and when we get there we will be joined by the young people who were smart enough to choose educated, affluent parents."
". . . In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the believability of the Big Lie as compared to the small lie: 'In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.'
"They Say Cutback "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination. " "Scientific achievement is not standardized. The natural world is diverse, and productive human inquiry takes many forms. . . ." "Today may actually be worse for poor children in the US than at any time in the last half century. This is because the lower classes are being kept from the liberal arts and humanities curricula by design. Using the argument that we must get their test scores up, we in the US are designing curriculum for poor children, often poor children of color but certainly, numerically, for poor white children, that will keep them ignorant and provide them with vocational training, at best. Their chances of entrance to college and middle class lives are being diminished, and this is all being done under the banner of "closing the gap," a laudable goal, but one that has produced educational policies with severe and negative side effects." "Hippocrates once said that the chief function of medicine is to entertain patients until they heal themselves." "Every teacher in America should be working to support the Baca Bill, the Save our Schools (S.O.S.) Act. http://www.susanohanian.org/show_yahoo.html?id=466" "Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama continues to tell American that to get higher wages they need to go to college and improve their skills, as though there weren't a surplus of underemployed college grads already." "The Obush administration. . . . The Obush administration is not just threatening public education, it is more like a threat to the entire concept of democracy." "In order to go on with our lives, we are always making the ominous into the merely strange." "[Arne Duncan] has asked all of his senior staff members to read some of the formal public comments submitted about the proposed Race to the Top Fund regulations so they can get a feel for how the education community has reacted. [emphasis added]" "Enough with 'academic rigor.' No more projects on the Chesapeake Bay (or whatever body of water you happen to live near.) Stop testing them into submission." " Any time a kindergarten class needs an online system to track assignments, that's a sign that school has gone too far." "You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there's something almost chess-like in the way the other side has narrowed the field, neutralized lines of attack, co-opted the terms of battle. It's all about them now; every move we make plays into their hands, confirms their values." "Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism." "Reformers need to incorporate rather than disregard the rich wisdom of the classroom, for the history of policy failure is littered with cases where local knowledge and circumstance were ignored." "[T]here is nothing in the standard talk about schooling--and this has been true for decades--that leads us to consider how school is perceived by those who attend it." "Education is learning how to spin your own web, not how to climb someone else's ladder."
"The final test:Kaplan passes
"What if we asked where it was written that all 16 years olds are ready sit their exams on exactly the same day?"
"What if the qualifications with which children leave school don't actually count for very much beyond the world of education?
"What if many people were to admit that if they had spent more time as a child learning to play the piano and less time learning algebra they would probably be spending more time as an adult playing the piano than they do using algebra?" "What if math is not as important as, say, art or music?" "[T]he impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country. " "Why don't they learn what we teach them? The answer I have come to boils down to this: Because we teach them – that is, try to control the contents of their minds. . . .I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything, that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts … we cannot give them our mental structures; they must build their own." "I will show you Obama's birth certificate if you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma." "In Arne Duncan's world, if standardized test scores aren't the answer, you've asked the wrong question." "I dream of schools where days are not scripted by those who could not find the Post Office in your town." "Remember, before the Race to the Top planned, funded, and decreed by the Obama/Duncan administration, the 3rd grade teacher heard why Tyrannosaurus X crossed the road, read Charlotte’s Web aloud, and comforted children who vomit. After the Obama/Duncan grand race, Tyrannosaurus X and Charlotte will be gone and the teacher will be vomiting along with the children." "Send in the Clowns: 3 Stooges Hit Road for Corporate School Reform. http://tinyurl.com/naskao " "Are education policymakers deeply religious? Why are they always in search of miracles?" "What is Green Dot's record? Why are 'reformers' rushing to open Green Dot schools with no proof of anything?" "[Race to the Top] pits one state against others to see which gets most and sacrifices quality education, local autonomy, and the interests of parents and youths doing it." "Obama plans to reinvent a failed policy, give it a new name, and claim it will fix NCLB's shortcomings." "Obama has always been more comfortable with the center-right forces within the Democratic party--Senator Max Baucus and the Blue Dogs--and the Clintonistas of DLC lineage who now fill his administration. His real political challenge was to string along the liberals with reassuring talk until they were stuck with lousy choices-- either go along with this popular president's pale version of reform or take him on and risk ruining his presidency. This sounds a lot like the choices Democrats faced during the Clinton years. Candidate Obama said it was "time to turn the page." We are still waiting to see what he meant. "
"How long will it take for people to realize that the education "reform"
proposed by Obama-Duncan is no different from the Weapons of Mass
Destruction from Bush (I say this as a depressed person who canvassed for
Obama, campaigned for him, donated for him, and voted for him (with my
entire family) in Virginian before moving to the blue-secure state of
Washington.
"That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn't surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism's success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for 'success,' the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. . . . By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we're well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe." "[S]hould there be some sort of T-shirt for the Arne, Newt, and Al Tour? "
"Why Does Barack Obama Follow The George W Bush Playbook? "Now that Duncan/Gates/Broad have coopted NCTE/IRA and NEA/AFT, who is left to accuse them? Teacher silence is killing us and the kids." "First Arne Duncan says the tests we have stink, then he says evaluate teachers and schools based on stinking tests." "When we stop playing, we start dying." "[T]he opposite of play is not work--the opposite of play is depression. Our inherent need for variety and challenge can be buried by an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Over the long haul, when these spice-of-life elements are missing, what is left is a dulled soul." "A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem." "Today I will strive to be omnipotent. I will start by condemning Standardistos, Common Core advocates, Racers to the Top, and their water carriers to an eternal SAT exam."
"Handing out standards in the name of preparing everyone to meet the high skills
that will be demanded for employment in the twenty-first century is as cynical
as handing out menus to homeless people in the name of eradicating hunger. "The earlier [that schools try] to inculcate…academic skills, the deeper the damage & the more permanent the achievement gap." " "Dear Ms. Class: What's the latest word on sugar and hyperactivity? --Independence, MO Dear Independence, Research is not complete on the effects of sugar on teachers' hyperactivity. One teacher of Ms. Class's acquaintance, not content with Oreos and Twinkies, eats dry brownie mix right out of the box. Ms. Class admits she admires the efficiency: No dishes to wash. This teacher has had a brownie-mix lunch for fifteen years and has not been convicted of a felony." "A hyperactive parent inquires how his child is doing more than twice a year." "The first rule of Standards is that if you don't see what the problem is, you are the problem. " "Boredom was born on a day of uniformity." "They may prefer stories to theories, anecdotes to concepts, images to ideas--that doesn't stop them from philosophizing." "With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it was ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: 'Did you like this text/this book?' And yet that is the only question that could give meaning to the narrative points of view or the construction of the story. . . Let me explain: at my age, all you need is to talk to us about something with some passion, pluck the right strings (love, rebellion, thirst for novelty, etc) and you have every chance of succeeding." "Believing that public school should focus on providing workers for industrial corporations is very much to believe that children are nothing more than commodities to be developed for harvesting. It views children much as chicken eggs, to be taken from parents and standardized for commercial consumption. A broader understanding of education's purpose exists - nurturing children so that they will feel at home in the world. " " Basing bonus or merit pay on test scores is like giving auto workers a bonus based on people’s driving skills." "What else was being a teacher but trying to respond as humanly as possible to problems that would not wait for an expert." " If Arne Duncan knows exactly how to reform American education, why didn’t he reform Chicago’s schools? A report came out a couple of weeks ago from the Civic Committee of Chicago (”Still Left Behind”) saying that Chicago’s much-touted score gains in the past several years were phony, that they were generated after the state lowered the passing mark on the state tests, that the purported gains did not show up on the federal tests, and that Chicago’s high schools are still failing. On the respected federal test (NAEP), Chicago continues to be one of the lowest performing cities in the nation. I want to know why Washington is pushing “reform” ideas that have so little evidence behind them, ideas that might do serious damage to public education in America?"
"Apostrophe Advice, Part 1 "Above all, we should bear in mind that the best ways to improve our schools are those that enhance the dignity of parents and the autonomy and professional status of educators. . . . Our parents, and our teachers, indeed our whole nation, would have fewer problems if the goals we set for the nation included creating jobs with decent wages, restoring fair tax rates on corporations and wealthy individuals, providing universal coverage for high-quality health and day care, providing euitable funding for schools, and developing organizations to build more caring relationships among all members of our communities. . . . School improvement begins with concerns about the dignity and respect accorded to the adults in the community who care for our young. " "[T]he best ways to improve education are not those that are based on the factory model but rather are those that presume trust, grant autonomy, and seek ways to enlarge the lives of students and teachers. Perhaps the surest way to RUIN American education would be to expand the use of carrots and sticks with students and teachers." "[Chicago] teachers citing fact after fact to show what a lying, cheating, stealing corporate stooge Arne Duncan is." "A major problem of teachers' problem is that they haven't read Marx. They haven't read Marx for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of how to teach phonemic awareness or apostrophes. I feel I can say this because I'm a teacher and, consumed by what to do on Monday, I haven't read Marx." "There is a testing fixation controlling many, many authorities on this planet. The 3Es [Execrable, Emetic and E xcretal] activities in schools are replacing the 3Ls [Learning, Love and Laughter] and the 3Rs [Reading, Riting,Rithmetic]." "The president and his party have received more money from private insurers and the for-profit health care industry than even Republicans, with the president alone taking $19 million in the 2008 election cycle alone, more than all his Republican, Democratic and independent rivals combined." "Twenty-four cooks assigned to the same mayonnaise recipe--the same bowls, same spoons, same eggs. same mustard, same oil, same whisks, same peppermills, same measuring cups, same room, same time of day, same marching orders--will create twenty-four different mayonnaises. " "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit." "[W]e need two things we don't have yet. We need a common set of high standards so all teachers know exactly what their students need to learn. And we need to evaluate teachers based on how well their students are learning it. . . .We can't identify good teachers without measuring student performance." "Everyone in this room knows that high school is not high enough. We have to create a society that expects all students to go on to college and complete a degree—whether it's a certificate, associate's degree, or bachelor's degree." "After working my butt off to get this man elected, I am more than disappointed. These policies are truly bad for public education. " "Standards plastered on her door. Standards, benchmarks, tests and data Plastered on the classroom door. Only these, and nothing more. " "Just because the bar in the high jump is set at six feet, it doesn't mean EVERYONE can jump six feet (or should even try)." "The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they’re learning it. " "Arne Duncan and his accomplices aren't advocating the close examination of poverty data: health, tooth decay, presence of iron, family income. No, they declare test data is king. All you have to do is look at the really ineffective, misleading, inappropriate, and just plain stupid test questions on which they are basing all this data collection to know the data emperor has no clothes. Depending on McGraw-Hill, Pearson, et al student standardized test results is the most expensive, least effective, and most damaging way to evaluate teacher performance. Period." "Either we fight back as one class or its death by a thousand cuts. "
"Never pretend "We know charter schools provide real public school choice. When I became President, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. Today, thanks to you, there are 1,700. I ask you now to help us meet our goal of 3,000 charter schools by next year. (Applause.) " "When I became president, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. With our support on a bipartisan basis, today there are 1,100. My budget assures that early in the next century, there will be 3,000." "[T]here are two kinds of people who take the SATs: those who believe that they mean something and those who believe that they don't. The young aptocrats who think that the SATs measure their worth are perhaps more likely to be flummoxed when the real learning required by college is harder than choosing the right answer on a test or satisfying a teacher. Those students who have understood all along that tests are just tests and that teachers are just people may in the end be more well suited to the business of real learning. So perhaps we should be testing for attitude rather than aptitude. " "Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail." "Take a look at Duncan's speeches. Over the past six months, he's made nine major policy addresses that have been posted on his Department's web site. And in those speeches, he's mentioned "history," "literature," and "geography" exactly zero times. Meanwhile, there were seven instances of "accountability," and "charter schools" left his lips an astounding twenty-nine times." "'Still Life' translates into French as 'nature morte.' 'NCLB' translates as 'les enfants morts.'" "It is only a slight exaggeration to describe the test theory that dominates educational measurement today as the application of 20th century statistics to 19th century psychology." "For many critics, teachers have become the villains in the wealthy elite's panic over educational accomplishment and foreign competition. But teachers don't cause financial meltdowns, home foreclosures, climate change, or hurricanes. And they don't invade countries or outsource jobs. Teachers don't cause mind-numbing conditions of poverty that limit children's ability to learn. However, teachers are the ones asked to cope with the poisonous effects of poverty. Why? Because most of society doesn't give a damn." "Although the corporate-political alliance won't believe this, teaching is much more like a Chinese lyric painting than a bus schedule. You can't chart a kid's learning like the daily temperature. No matter how many tests you inflict on him. "
"What few people outside of the teaching profession realize is that a teacher’s
hours are very different from, say, an architect’s. Simply stated, there is
zero downtime. When that classroom door opens, in flood dozens of teenagers
with dozens of problems that need solutions. It is estimated that an average
high-school teacher makes more than 1,500 decisions each day. Some compare
their work to managing triage in a hospital, absent a support team.
"Only when I entered Princeton did I start to have doubts about the system that got me there. Some took the form of doubts about myself. My impressive performance on the SATs (whose supposed biases I was blind to, perhaps because I was a middle-class Caucasian and they operated in my favor) didn't seem to count for much now that I found myself having to absorb volumes upon volumes of information rather than get the right answers on multiple-choice tests. Yes, I had a large vocabulary, and yes, I knew how to deploy it to good effect in classroom discussions and during professors' office hours, but suddenly my prowess felt slightly fraudulent. Called upon to read whole books, many of them old, obscure and difficult, I discovered that I lacked stamina and insight. The little word puzzles I cut my teeth on were irrelevant to the daunting task of digesting Chaucer and Milton. My solution? I didn't have one. Like countless college students before and since, I relied for my scholastic survival on a combination of verbal bluster, teacher-pleasing good manners and handy study aids." "Prefer to participate in a happy education revolution rather than a heated debate about education reform?" "The New Haven case is a mess caused by infatuation with the law, mistaking verbal dexterity for practical skill, and an obsession with examinations. It has protected neither people's safety nor their civil liberties. " "Barack Obama didn't kill liberalism; he's just doing a nice job of burying it. The end of liberalism as a meaningful ideology came with the nomination of Bill Clinton. The argument was - although hardly phrased so accurately - that it was far better for liberals to dump their policies and become the indentured servants of an elected Democrat than to continue to press for their beliefs and miss out on all the power and the parties. " "I'm as optimistic as I've ever been that we now have, in this administration, a leader in Secretary Duncan." "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." "Arne was in town at the Hyatt Regency as a guest of an educational policy group. Inside the hotel they probably gave him an award for his wonderful achievements in education, while outside, C.O.R.E., Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. . . , was demonstrating against his wonderfulness. The Chicago teachers in the C.O.R.E. picket line were protesting the process by which a worm public school becomes a butterfly charter institution. Apparently the larvae stage is called: TURNAROUND."
"
I get weary of this zero tolerance bullshit. It's annoying. To begin with, it's a fascist concept; it's what Hitler and Stalin practiced. It allows for no exceptions or compassion of any kind. All is black and white--no gradations. But even more important, it doesn't solve anything. The use of such a slogan simply allows whichever company, school or municipality is using it to claim they're doing something about a problem when, in fact, nothing is being done at all ant the problem is being ignored. It's a cosmetic non-solution designed to impress simpletons.
"Without question, Bill Clinton was the single most important force in establishing the framework of standards, accountability, and testing that were put into law under NCLB."
"An unprecedented collaborative effort led by the Gates Foundation, ACHIEVE, and the NGA (National Governors Association) is underway now to establish a single set of national standards and to develop aligned assessments. The project is on an ambitious timeline, with a full set of academic standards to be developed by the end of the year.
"The Race to the Top fund is the icing on the cake of more than $100 billion in federal education funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in February. This fund, which represents 5% of the recent historic investment in America’s schools, allows Secretary Duncan to establish clear reform priorities for states and to back those priorities up by funding only those states which are willing to break through the chains of a status quo which historically has failed too many students."
"Teachers must begin to speak out against dangerous and irresponsbile rhetoric like 'The Race to the Top.' It is disgraceful, immoral and plain wrong to frame education reform in this language. It is especially egregious in the midst of an economic depression.
"
'Hungry children are distracted children. We want to make sure nothing gets in the way of our children performing well academically, including hunger. "They fuck you up, the Standardistos." "Bill Gates has paid tens of millions of dollars to have his childhood bullies tracked down and killed."
"Grade 4
"A Standardisto has Van Gogh's ear for classroom nuance." "There are two Standardistos drowning and you can only save one. What do you do? Take a nap or go shopping?" "I performed badly in the Civil Service examinations because evidently I knew more about economics than my examiners." "Gardening books will tell you that some of these things in my garden can't be done, but I had never read them when I got started. Not knowing ahead of time that something is supposed to be impossible often makes it possible to achieve. I didn't have any limitations because I really didn't know anything about horticulture. I just figured I could do whatever I wanted with any plant I had." "National Standards are something you can't use at a price you can't afford." "Standardistos like answering questions nobody asked them." "One has to suppose that Standardistos were children once." "Many of my peers in China became teachers. It was partly because we had been educational volunteers, but it also had to do with the skills we developed--the flexibility, the sense of humor, the willingness to handle anything an eighth grader could throw at us." "Your rules are not unreasonable, but neither are they poetry or the will of God. They are just rules you made up. Surely it is good if a child respects and obeys the rules her parents make up. But it is also a rule that when a child becomes a teenager she has sudden, inexplicable needs, and it is assured that she will start trying to meet those needs in whatever improvised fashion she can come up with. This is normal."
"How do you know when Arne Duncan is lying?
"I attended a luncheon at the private Club Colette in Palm Beach a few days ago for feral cats. There are about 400 of these wild animals on the island and they are treated better than the 4,000 homeless across the bridge. The cats get fed regularly and are watched over by a number of dedicated society ladies. It costs several hundred thousand dollars a year to treat these cats in the fashion in which they are accustomed, whereas last year The Lord's Place [dedicated to helping homeless people in Palm Beach County] raised only $40,000 in Palm Beach.
"For some reason, first the Bush people and now the Obama people believe they know exactly how to fix American education. (Chicago, their model, is one of the lowest-performing cities in the nation on national tests, and Texas was never a national model for academic excellence.) Their answer starts with testing and ends with data and more testing. If children were widgets, they might be right; but children are not widgets, they are individuals. If reading and math were all that mattered in school, they might be right, but basic skills are not the be-all and end-all of being educated. " "I believe the impetus behind 'standardization' of students is the same as the "pay students for test scores" movement. Both seek to control the depth of learning that occurs as well as train children from a young age to get ready to be part of the labor force. "
"As long as there are content-based standards,
there will be machine-scoreable standardized tests.
"No, Mr. Duncan, the 'best and the brightest' are not the people we need in our schools: We need the savvy, rock steady, dependable, loving, forgiving people who have an enormous capacity for wait time and the psychological equilibrium to be able to enter the classroom every day not holding a grudge for what happened the day before. " "If we kill you, you are a terrorist. " "But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score" "I am sorely disappointed in Arne Duncan. I don't see any change from the mean, punitive version of accountability that the Bush administration foisted on the nation's schools. "
"Standards are currently rhetoric for holding children accountable for things they have no control over and things the adults in our state and national capitols do a poor job of demonstrating. We need new rhetoric-- some that matters and makes a difference to the quality of education we offer all children. The first standards we should set are standards of communication, standards of facilities and standards of human and monetary resources. And that doesn't mean the same amount or form for everyone. These things should vary with need.
"Frank Sullivan says that “half of our stock of maxims is designed to quell children….children are, of course, sitting ducks for proverbs." "Every day I get up and look out the window, and something occurs to me, something always occurs to me. And if it doesn't, I just lower my standards." "If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds -- a struggle against accepting the world as it's being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats, and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success."
"Dear Mr. Obama,
" The three institutions that most endanger the preservation of any culture are Wal-Mart, TV and law school. Each imposes its own style, values and habits on those it influences making it hard, as Harvard Law School grad Barack Obama has already proved, to retain one's roots. " "A high school diploma itself seems to help keep black men out of trouble. The likelihood of incarceration drops fourfold among black high school graduates compared to those who make it only to tenth or eleventh grade." "When you're a teacher, you have to own every word you say." "SWAMPOODLE REPORT The 2008 election was a hat trick of infidelity. One candidate's husband had cheated on her. Another candidate was found to be cheating on his wife. And the winner began cheating on his strongest supporters as soon as he was in office. " "When someone suggests that all children will be able to perform at __(>0) level, that all children will succeed, that all students will be proficient, or that no child will be left behind, he or she is contributing to unhelpful silly talk about schools and schooling. . . . NCLB is a prime example of absurd education policy that is divorced from data and reality checks about the meaning of data." "On the Medical Model of schooling. Being a student is not an illness." "We can hope that one day the media that now format as news items the publicity releases issued by the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc., will figure out that Appellate Justice Lerner is just stating baldly the marketplace truth that few dare speak aloud: 'An eighth- or ninth-grade education is adequate to provide the skills required to enable a person to secure low-level employment.' Maybe the media will one day acknowledge that our nation runs on low-paid employment. Maybe one day newspapers will publish a labor section next to the business section; maybe some reporter will point out that the global economy doesn't have jobs for hundreds of thousands of high-tech workers adept at algebra and calculus; maybe the reporter will even notice that this job scarcity and the fact that the Business Roundtable and their Standardisto cohorts have pressured schools into making higher math a prerequisite for a high school diploma are related. The global economy -- and the local one too -- needs plenty of service workers. The crime is not that people work at these jobs. The crime is that they are not paid a living wage to do so." "What is needed for education is a model of professional action that acknowledges the noncausal nature of educational interaction and the fact that the means and ends of education are internally rather than externally related. What is needed, in other words, is an acknowledgment of the fact that education is a moral practice, rather than a technical or technological one — a distinction that dates back to Aristotle’s distinction between phronesis (practical wisdom) and techne (instrumental knowledge). The most important question for educational professionals is therefore not about the effectiveness of their actions but about the potential educational value of what they do, that is, about the educational desirability of the opportunities for learning that follow from their actions (and what should be prevented at all costs is the situation in which there is a performative contradiction between what they preach and what they practice). This is why the 'what works' agenda of evidence-based practice is at least insufficient and probably misplaced in the case of education, because judgment in education is not simply about what is possible (a factual judgment) but about what is educationally desirable (a value judgment)." "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. " "Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who life, or who are privileged to think that they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work. " "Take away the right to say 'f---' and you take away the right to say 'f--- the government.'" "They were that new kind of Democrat who didn’t seem to know any working people. They were limited to their own breed" "I'm very sympathetic to the argument that we need to convey and find ways to enforce high expectations for students. But I'm uncomfortable with this form of doing it, because it targets very strong penalties on the most at-risk students. The pejorative consequences appear to be concentrated in populations and communities that lack the capacity to meet these standards. . . .The cynic in me worries that we're just going to continue to see these [exit exam] policies proliferate, because it seems like an obvious way to convey the expectations that we should have for students and the negative effects appear to be hidden from public discussion." "WARNING: Objects In the NCLB Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" "Researchers have yet to discover any clear evidence that High School Exit Exams benefit anyone except the companies that make and sell them." "Despite the best hopes of proponents, test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal that urban school districts run by mayors do no better in reading or math than districts run by traditional boards. School governance is not the same as school reform. Structure is not a remedy for failure." "Without the support of The Broad Foundation, we would not be where we are today. The foundation’s belief, not only in our particular model, but also in the importance of talent to the ultimate success of the education reform effort, has been catalytic. Time and again, we have turned to the foundation for its judgment, and we’ve come to expect that it will hold us to high standards." "We cannnot look our students in the eye and tell them that they should learn to read and write according to our directions because it will necessarily pay off for them in the future." "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." "'We're all in this together,' President Obama, March 24 press conference. No we're not, that's the point of this book. . . . We the ROBBED class are in this together. THEY the ROBBER Class are in it for themselves." "I think Joel Klein and Mike Bennet and Arne Duncan are some of the best superintendents around, and they were never teachers. "
"
Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci.
"For someone who taught constitutional law, Obama is showing striking contempt for some of the founding document's key provisions such as the division of powers between the legislative and executive branch and that between federal and state government. His hectoring of public school teachers - some of the hardest working and least well paid professionals in America - is not only disrespectful, it ignores the fact that how a state runs its school system is, constitutionally, not subject to the sort of federal interference that Obama and his predecessors have engaged in, using funds as the whip to drive their preferred policies. Further, if we applied federal standards to heads of school systems, Obama's own education secretary would be in trouble as he didn't do all that well in Chicago. " "How did that performance pay thing work out for the American financial system?"
"Meanwhile, NEA mis-leaders joined AFT, the Business Roundtable, and other employer groups to promote national teaching standards,
"I believe that the consequence of scripted curriculum, teacher accountability, continuous monitoring of student performance, high stakes testing, and punishment for not reaching external standards is that schools become educational panopticons, that is, total control and surveillance communities dedicated to undermining the imagination, creativity, intelligence, and autonomy of students and teachers. " "No is simply no." "Is it really so startling that those who call themselves progressive are generally as incapable of critical thought as those who label themselves conservative? " "Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum. Facts do not solve problems. . . . The gadgeteers and the data collectors have threatened to become the supreme chieftains of the scholarly world. " "Obama has named a secretary of education who has been deeply involved in the corporate takeover of public school policy, which has left schools in poorer areas the target of urban developers, encouraged mindless emphasis on test taking designed to create obedient drones rather than critical thinkers, and which has even, in Secretary Duncan's case, resulted in several military academies antithetical to decent public education in a democracy." "Ask children. Hear them. Teach children to ask the questions they want answers to. Believe that what a seven-year-old has to say is important. Because it is. Just ask. " "If Obama really wants to associate himself with Lincoln, there is a far better place to start than apple cinnamon sponges, moldy old Bibles, and sucking up to conservative columnists: don't tell lies." "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." "The Norton Anthology of English Literature is seventeen hundred pages long. It's a fat and heavy book. It will stop a bullet, but it won't cover your nakedness."
"The Army Experience Center, located in the Franklin Mills Mall just north of Philadelphia, bills itself as a 'state-of-the-art educational facility that uses interactive simulations and online learning programs to educate visitors about the many careers, training and educational opportunities available in the Army.' . . . .
"Obama's call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse." ""What do you do?" "What we can.""
"Algebra When Ready
"We want beans, not goals." "You begin to die the moment you are born, and you really, really begin to die the day your child goes to school alone. " "Play is integral to the academic environment. It ensures that the school setting attends to the social and emotional development of children as well as their cognitive development. It has been shown to help children adjust to the school setting and even to enhance children's learning readiness, learning behaviors, and problem-solving skills. Social-emotional learning is best integrated with academic learning; it is concerning if some of the forces that enhance children's ability to learn are elevated at the expense of others. Play and unscheduled time that allow for peer interactions are important components of social-emotional learning." "[T]his is the hard truth – the blood-and-iron truth – that our age has taught us so well: war is always a win-win proposition for the corporate-militarist state that has devoured the American Republic. Even if the particular conflict itself ends badly or inconclusively, it always engenders vast profits and increased power and privilege for the corporate- militarist elite -- and the temporary managers they graciously allow the American people to "choose" from a rigorously sifted, highly circumscribed menu of "viable" candidates. So it doesn't matter if this war or that war is "ill-conceived" or "badly managed" or a "serious mistake" or "the wrong war at the wrong time," or if its public justifications are based on lies or ignorance or arrogance, or if it bankrupts the treasury, beggars the citizenry, and destabilizes the world. The small, golden, coddled circle still reaps dividends of profit and dominance." "Never! Never! Never! Never! Never!" "As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles. You can't say, 'My students didn't get any breakfast today,' or No one put them to bed last night,' or 'Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn't do their homework.'" "What the education world needs is a few strong administrators and teachers and parents to join together, proclaiming, 'Enough is enough'-- people who know how to say, 'We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to do this any more.'" "School Takes 13 Years Because That's How Long It Takes to Break a Child's Spirit." "Do not depend on the hope of results. . . . concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself." "Teachers now are expected to staff the permanent emergency rooms of our country’s dysfunctional social order. They are expected to compensate for what families, communities, and culture fail to do. Like our soldiers in Iraq, they are sent into urban combat zones, on impossible missions under inhospitable conditions, and then abandoned by politicians and policy makers who have already cut and run, leaving teachers on their own. " "Just abut everywhere we turn the next generation is being indoctrinated to think of themselves narrowly as producers, employees, spectators, and consumers--everything but citizens. I have no solutions to the particular challenges facing urban schools--achievement scores, learning disabilities, teacher shortages--but I know we must change the curriculum in order to change the metaphor of our children from orphans of democracy to its rightful sons and daughters. Who will teach them that they, too, can mount a Boston Tea Party?" "You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." "The conservative movement stands intellectually and morally bankrupt while Democrats talk about a 'new direction' without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass." "How much disrespect will you tolerate?" "The government's Web site www.ed.gov/nclb claims the act holds schools accountable. All I see is the pressure that has fallen on children and their parents. Without the recognition that there are no one-size-fits-all teaching methods and the funding for a true education fix, NCLB is detrimental to my family. It undermines childhood pleasures and threatens to destroy my son's self-esteem. I want it to go away. "
"She may be dead.
"If somebody will fund it, 83,473 researchers will submit grant proposals to do it. And 82,029 will be from Texas and Oregon." "You don't have to change the world. Just keep the world from changing you." "Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg in a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you are destroying the peg." "A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves." "Closing the school would be better than breaking their hearts. "
"Technology to wipe out truth is now available.
not everybody can afford it but it's available.
when the cost comes down look out!
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? " "Although the United States is the largest imperial power in history, this fact rarely is mentioned. Nor do Americans refer to themselves as capitalists. As with typical neoliberal discourses, when capitalism is addressed, it is framed in democratic or Enlightenment terms as individual rights, freedom, and progress rather than as imperialism. This viewpoint ignores issues of power and does not name who is and who is not advantaged. Aijaz Ahmad claims that economic realities surround and saturate us; that corporate repressions, the rise of a compliant bourgeoisie [college-educated, managerial class], and strengthened market mentality regarding schools are interrelated. " "More and more people are talking about national standards." "When test companies sell things and call them formative, these vendors are being disingenuous —we used to call it lying."
"Question: What do you think is your own best
novel?
"Whenever I hear someone say something that is inarticulate, unintelligible, or just plain stupid, and I want to provide a retort that confuses them, establishes my disinterest, and cracks me up all at the same time, I respond with, 'Wear a long coat and nobody will notice.'
"We introduce the whole alphabet, but emphasize 'A' through 'D' since they come up most for the multiple-choice standardized test. " "Unfortunately, all evidence of your son's intelligence is purely anecdotal." "Your cry is, 'we must agitate, we must agitate.' So you must bear in mind that the agitation of deeds is tenfold more effectual than the agitation of words." "(Arlington, Va.)The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) honored State Farm Insurance Companies Chairman and CEO [and George Bush Education advisor, chair Business Roundtable Education Task Force, member of the board McGraw-Hill, member of the board Achieve] Edward B. Rust, Jr. for his contributions to advancing the teaching profession." "More than anything else, the corporate-politicos have charged teachers to educate for civil obedience."
"
Politicians' Syllogism: "Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen." "No studies of Open Court Reading© that fall within the scope of the Beginning Reading review meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Open Court Reading©." "In short, we must organize. Writing a book will not do it. Writing a paper will not do it. " "[S]tudents do perform or ventriloquize what teachers request. . . ." "Poverty is the single greatest risk factor for almost every 'life-smashing' condition a kid might be at risk for, save perhaps compulsive shopping." "I don't think there is such a thing as being 'apolitical' about NCLB. Enforcing it, not speaking out, adopting the language around it are all ways of supporting it." "The Reading First program's corruption is now legendary. Those who turn a blind eye to that corruption and its concomitant exploitation of our children are themselves participating in the corruption. " "A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. " "The bailouts are rewarding the very people and institutions whose reckless behavior caused this financial mess. Yet government demands nothing from them in return--like new rules for prudent behavior and explicit obligations to serve the national interest. Washington ought to compel the financial players to rein in their appetite for profit in order to help save the country from a far worse fate: a depressed economy that cannot regain its normal energies. Instead, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Democratic Congress and of course the Republicans meekly defer to the wise men of high finance, who no longer seem so all-knowing. . ." "We. . . get into these terrible dilemmas - where the big guys step all over everyone else and the victims are required to pay the hospital bills - because we refuse to recognize the connection between money and politics. This is the great denial in democracy that may ultimately mean our ruin. We just don't seem able to see or accept the fact that money drives policy." "When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."
"....................for
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." "One Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, compared the Obama campaign unfavorably to President Bush's administration. 'At least Bush waited until he was in the White House before they started ignoring everybody,' the aide said." "The only way to have reasonably decent politicians is to keep them humble, make constant fun of them and don't let them get away with anything. It is by ignoring such rules that we have ended up with the likes of George Bush and Bill Clinton." "The members who comprised it were seven-eighths of them, ...the meanest kind of bawling and blowing officeholders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contracts, kept-editors, spaniels well train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyists, spongers, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combinings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. " "With California requiring 8th graders to know algebra, it might be a good time to start a Kindergarten Kalculus movement." "There is surely no more reliable way to kill enthusiasm and interest in a subject than to make it a mandatory part of the school curriculum. Include it as a major component of standardized testing and you virtually guarantee that the education establishment will suck the life out of it. School boards do not understand what math is, neither do educators, textbook authors, publishing companies, and sadly, neither do most of our math teachers. " "Always you have been working in the system. Always you have been tied down by the struggle to make your payments. These payments are not just checks and cash. We make our payments when we knuckle under. We make our payments when we live in fear. We make our payments when we pretend the emperor is clothed in the finest raiments of the land. We make our payments when we 'buy in.'" "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. " "Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
"
We shall not cease from exploration "Since the symptoms of lead poisoning are irritability, distractibility, impulsivity, aggression and a loss of over seven IQ points, we should not complain when lead poisoned children are irritable, distractible, impulsive, aggressive and do not do well on academic tests. . . . It's not the parents' indifference that is the problem, it is society's indifference. "
"No matter what happens, just keep shopping.
" High-stakes Testing: Brainboarding" "Anger is always the self-selected moral choice when cowardice is the only perceived alternative." ""If you go too far from your natural manner it can be damaging," she warns. . . "Your good qualities aren't being used. They're getting beaten down.""
"I pledge allegiance to the children
"I pledge allegiance to the soil "The 21st Century Global Economy? Standards. Standardization. No! Children. Each a unique individual more precious than all the material possessions in the world. And wonderfully resistant to being standardized. Keep on loving the children and keep swimming upstream!" "Indeed, one PERFECT resister is enough to win the battle of Right against Wrong." "Fright destroys the possibility of good teaching." "The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good." "So displeased am I with the direction public education is going, I have chosen to make this my last year." "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. " "I don't know if Reading First can teach children to read, but I am confident that it can teach children to hate to read. " "We know that the more children read, the better their literacy development. There is now overwhelming research showing that free voluntary reading is the primary source of our reading ability, our writing style, much of our vocabulary and spelling knowledge, and our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions. It has also been confirmed that those who read more know more: They know more about history, literature, and even have more 'practical knowledge.' " "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. " "It is the duty of the teacher to protect her students from the overreaching of the government."
""SILENCE!" The King of the Turtles barked back. "I'm the king, and you're only a turtle named Mack. You stay in your place while I sit here and rule."
"Moderation in temper is always a virtue. But moderation in principle is always a vice. "
"Fool me once, shame on you.
" . . .the hearse is parked in the halls of the high school "Schools run by the market will favor the haves, not the have-nots. " "We don't have a money problem, we have a values problem. " "If teachers had a union that honored its own Code of Ethics, the inhumane and unethical use of tests and the warping of children's futures would not be something that teachers, students, and parents all had to lose sleep about." "Understand that you, as a parent, have the right to request your child opt out of the tests. This is a little known, but very important, fact. School districts are required by law to inform parents of this right, but it's not widely advertised. There have even been cases where principals have pressured parents to not opt out because their child's score is needed to bring up the school's overall ranking." "The biggest disappointment in 30 years of education work was the No Child Left Behind Act. It did (and does) more damage to schools and children than anything short of war. Indeed, in my opinion, it's a war on childhood. Created by lobbyists for the textbook-testing industry and a Congress that never sees the inside of a school except for photo-ops, it has driven out thousands of the most experienced teachers (who refuse to practice intellectual child abuse) while disillusioning thousands of the youngest teachers -- all in the name of testing that makes hundreds of millions for the testing industry. Beyond profits, NCLB's only other accomplishment has been to create hundreds of thousands of school children who associate reading with dry-boned textbooks, boredom, pain, and the threat of failure. A strange way to create a nation of readers! Saddest of all, it was built on a hoax -- there was no Texas education miracle. They cooked the books the Enron way and that's been documented time and again." "I believe strongly, in this country, that I ought to be able to stand up and say "No" to something that I believe in my soul is bad for kids." "Yay, my revolutionary papa! But remember, no one should try to do something like this in a vacuum. Rosa Parks did not just sit on that bus by herself. She had hundreds if not thousands of people backing her up and giving her courage. Go out and let people know what you are doing so you don't feel alone." "This year, the politicians are back with their speeches about how they are going to arrange for vocational classes so the voters will be able to compete in the twenty-first century. The first decade of the twenty-first century is already almost over. Time to drop that line, lest the small-town people turn bitter." "Yep, I was all for more tests and more sanctions on schools that didn't measure up. How could they hurt? That's what I thought until, as a parent, I was exposed first-hand to the disturbing transformation in school instruction caused by the federal education mandate. " " The testing system also forces teachers out, Linda McNeil and Sherrie Matula say. 'We're killing the brand-new teachers,' Matula says. says." "1st Place is not a good observation point. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. There is grace afoot in the world and it will find you. You don't have to be first in line: It will be diligent in pursuing you and passing on its gifts, which are faith, hope, love and a sense of humor. The harder you strive for a gift, the more it eludes you. . . ." "Teachers, stand up and insist that you be allowed to be a professional instead of a pawn in a system that is destroying your profession. Your voices together can make a difference and move mountains." "Whose good is being served when once-venerable professional organizations like the National Council of Teachers of English are now hawking corporate flimflam called 21st-century skills?" "Ask a dozen people for a detailed list of information that kids should know, and you'll get a dozen different lists. We may well agree on fundamentals, but the devil is in the details. And in the end the details are arbitrary, which is why the Code of Hammurabi appears in sixth grade in some standards and high school in others. Only William Bennett puts it in second grade. Education Trust trumpets that "College Begins in Kindergarten." On the topic of the failures of African-Americans and Hispanics taking the New York Regents exam, Education Trust CEO Katy Haycock made one of the most outrageous, cruel, and asinine statements imaginable: 'At least they failed something worthwhile.' That one is worth reading again: 'At least they failed something worthwhile.'"
"Teachers "Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes." "I don't know if I can find the words for it, but if this country ever recovers, it will not be in my lifetime. If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there." "When my friends at The Nation asked what MY nation was, I replied simply: Indig(Nation)." "Ding Wenyu always had a relatively half-assed attitude toward exams, loads of students registered for his classes precisely because they wouldn't have to worry too much about tests. Ding Wenyu never once took grading exams seriously: he simply piled them up and gave out marks according to his own random formula. The highest grade Ding usually gave was a 90 and the lowest grade would be a 70. Naturally the first exam on the top of the pile would get a 90; Ding would then subtract two points from each following test until he got down to 70.At that point he would start all over again. His preposterous grading method was always a big joke around campus, but Ding Wneyu was never concerned with what other people think-even if they were all laughing about him behind his back. He felt that since taking exams was not the objective of education, there was no reason to use them as a means to measure his students. Test scores could never truly represent the level of a student's performance. " "We will never close the achievement gap if all we do is measure it." "Then there is an elite private system where the rich go to school as in Mitt Romney’s lovely alma mater, Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where rolling hills, a carefully kept landscape, swimming pools that appear to be small lakes, hockey rinks, an art colony and museum, an observatory, set up the view of those who, unthinkingly perhaps, are schooled to glaze at a globe and think, 'this is ours, let us set about seeing how we make it work,' quite distinct from the employee mentality, 'tell me what to do and I will do it,' imposed by most NCLB schooling." "Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get 8 cats to pull a sled through the snow." "Why would we persist in a practice whose value isn't supported by research? How can we justify making all the students in a class do the same homework? And, given that almost all kids regard homework as something they can't wait to be done with so they can move on to activities they enjoy, why in the world would we assume it's beneficial? (Do we regard children as so many vending machines, such that you put in an assignment and get out learning?)"
"If I can stop on heart from breaking "13.6 million of America's children live in poverty."
" For my whole professional career I was a strong advocate of compulsory schooling. I was vigilant and relentless about getting every kid on my rolls into my classroom. For example, when I asked 7th graders, "Where's Tom?" kids told me he hadn't shown up to school since the second half of first grade. I found Tom, using legal means to force him into school. And this was a story with a happy ending. I adored Tommy and he ended up excelling in school.
"M. F. K. Fisher once pointed out that a three-minute egg took about the same length of time to boil in 1922 as it did in 1722. And things are no better in 2008: still three minutes. Eggs can dawdle, but kindergartners can't." "What is a teacher to do? Subversion or victimhood. " "This law has turned my sweet, happy classroom into a test-prep mill. " "Uniform Curriculum is a euphemism for teaching to the test. " "Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too." "The brain-research evidence for certain instructional strategies continues to increase, but there still is no sturdy bridge between neuroscience and what educators do in the classroom. But educators’ knowledge and experience will enable them to use the knowledge gained from brain research in their classrooms. For example, choice, interest-driven investigation, collaboration, intrinsic motivation, and creative problem solving are associated with increased levels of such neurotransmitters as dopamine, as well as the pleasurable state dopamine promotes. Novelty, surprise, and teaching that connects with students’ past experiences and personal interests and that is low in threat and high in challenge are instructional strategies that appear to be correlated with increased information passage through the brain’s information filters, such as the amygdala and reticular activating system." "Not every state will meet the core principles that are required. This is complicated stuff that requires sound data systems, good reporting systems." "Our children are unique, creative creatures, not McNuggets, and they need to be inspired, not standardized." "Our public education system should be allowed to educate children, not merely test them." "Politicians are like diapers. They need to be changed often and for the exact same reasons." "All acts of war should be put to a national vote. Anyone voting yes has to register as a volunteer for service in the United States Army." "As an educator, I am sure of one thing, above all others: the difference adults can make in the life of a child. One need not be a prophet to transform a student’s life; one need only be present, consistent, loving, challenging and exemplary."
"Dear Education Week,
"Rules take us only so far, even good rules." "I also trust you will find what I found: that teaching can be a marriage of soul and mind, that the classroom can be a place of discovery, passion, and very real joy. While not every class is wonderful every day--for there is occasional bitterness and pain and disappointment in this business--teaching is, for me, a consuming and deeply satisfying profession. Once I emerged on the other side and realized that I was a teacher, had become a teacher, I realized that I had also found, in essence, my calling, my life's work."
"Delta's Law
"Kai's Exactness Dilemma
"Sapolsky's Third Law
"Davies' Second Law
"Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate
"Quartz's Law of The Primacy of Feeling
"Campbell's Third Law
"Anderson's Law of Causal Instinct
"
Devlin's First Law
" Myers' Law of Self-Perception
"Minsky's Second Law
"Kellys' First Law
"Lykken's First Law
"Schank's Law
"O'Donnell's Law of Academic Administration
"Gardner's First Law "[T]he rush to get more information faster almost forces people to avoid the act of thinking. Why stop and try to make sense of the information we’ve obtained when we can click on that icon and get still more data? And more. " "Occupations such as food preparation and service worker, retail salesperson, customer service representative, cashier, office clerk, and laborer and material mover will employ about five times more people than the computer/high-tech fields requiring a college education. No matter what we do in schools, most of our high school graduates will work at such jobs." ""Believe me, my young friend," said the water rat solemnly, "there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing--nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular. . . ."" "All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand. Not only must we cross the line many times, but in the words of the old spiritual, nobody else can cross it for us, we must cross it by ourselves. Being shoved or dragged across does no good." "We teachers like to think that we can trans- plant our own mental models into the minds of children by means of explanations. It can't be done." "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. " "The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what's to come if they win the White House. And if we don't pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there's still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame." "THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God." "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." "You can't bullshit your way through this." "These [standardized]tests [required by NCLB] should be a gnat on the windshield. . . a good teacher will just cruise through them."
"In his State of the Union address, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. With the official count at 15 million children in America living in poverty, this comes out to $20 per child.
"I feel that writing is a moral responsibility. I don’t know how else to put it. Take, for example, when I write about illegal immigration. I’m tired of the issue, and I don’t want to get involved in it. But I see and I hear the injustice, the way immigrants are demeaned in this country, the disrespect many Americans have for them. I did a piece on National Public Radio about immigrants, and the only thing I said, essentially, was, 'Thank you.' Nobody has thanked these people for working so well and so hard. The inhumanity of the disrespect is just appalling to me. Here is not the America I love. There’s something in this country right now that is so fierce, so unloving, that I want to protest. I feel responsible for speaking against it." ". . . I trust doubt; it keeps you on the journey." "The essence and elegance of No Child Left Behind is that we are going to peel back the onion and hold ourselves accountable. We really mean it--every kid on grade level by 2014, and obviously that causes some discomfort, particularly as we come closer and closer to that date." "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion" "Test publishers are hawking anything they can. It’s absolutely a fraud." " Maybe the Feds should appoint a few teachers to a Homeland Security Best Practices Panel. " " If you go along with the most tepid aspects of education reform, you run the risk of not being able to bar the door, and they will run their agenda right over the top of you."
"If you don't know the kind of person I am "One person's 'partisan political influence' is another person's good old fashioned democracy. I will take partisan politics over unfettered corporatism any day." "Black civil rights weren't won by suited men (or women) sitting at desks. They were won by a mass movement of millions who marched, sat in at lunch counters, endured jailings, and took bullets and beatings for the right to vote and move freely about. Some were students and pastors; many were dirt-poor farmers and urban workers. No one has ever attempted to list all their names." "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it." "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." "We used to think our future was in the stars. Now the federal government is trying to convince us it's in phonemic awareness." "No Child Left Behind is at its heart very simple: every kid on grade level by 2014 in reading and math." "As I write, the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system. So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food." "I know No Child Left Behind has worked." "Why so little coverage of poverty? For one, journalists like a story to have a resolution, preferably a happy one. Often journalists see poverty as a sad, intractable fact of life, a story that never gets better and generates little interest or news." "As first lady of Arkansas, Hillary had an education plan long before she had a health plan." "Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you'd find the allspice next to the ant poison." "Family income of children below 5 years of age has a bigger impact on whether these children complete high school than their family income later when they are actually in high school." "Some of the confusion about NCLB is understandable. The U.S. Department of Education has been slow to issue guidance and in many cases has offered conflicting information about what the new law entails. But most of the misinformation is cleared up by even a cursory reading of the law or the available research literature." "The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king." "[The] demand for ‘standards and accountability’ has been a diversion from a campaign for economic and social justice for the children of the poor. " " The journey to learning cannot be planned in advance and controlled like a journey to the moon. " ".The cons see education as just another commodity. And if it’s just a commodity, like shoes or carrots, there must be a simple way to measure it. So instead of measuring its impact on society, they say, “Let’s just see how well our kids are doing at memorizing some of the things that we think are important" "As we earnestly try to fix what's broken, we are, in the process, turning an entire generation of children into a giant flock of canaries in the coal mine. " " NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized -- not this year, not ever."
"It's winter in the classroom "My son is in a 'good' kindergarten, but they are obsessed with skills. He works so hard at school (for five hours and 45 minutes) to "be good" that by the time he comes home he can't do anything but have temper tantrums!" "We are like people born in a cage and unable to visualize any world beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That Opinion the Few create in order to control the Many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate. Even so, a number of prisoners are testing the bars." "Witness the effect of the five-year-old Newsweek rankings on the school nearest you. Mathews' rankings formula leans heavily on a school's involvement in the College Board's Advanced Placement program. As a result, thousands of local dollars are now being spent on AP curriculum and tests so that Any Local High School will make an appearance somewhere in Newsweek's list. The College Board, in essence, is now writing the curriculum for many of America's secondary schools-with little debate among educators and parents about what we hope our children will know and be able to do at the end of their high school years. These days, we just hope we're on the list." "Stop treating teachers as potted plants." "I wish I'd made a lawnmower."
"At most, only a relatively few of America's students (let's say 5%) will actually end up in the kinds of math and science jobs the Gates and Broad types think will save us from India and China. So how much sense does it make to drag the other 95% through that regimen?
"It's broke. Don't fix it." "Lansing Public Schools will spend $1.25 million over two years to hire a firm from Arizona to explain how to teach kids in Michigan. Actually, this comes closest to compliance with AYP, which is basically a full employment law for consultants. " "When people ask no questions, it is because they think they have all the answers." "'Good' teachers are the ones who teach to the test, rather than those who employ creativity, excitement and a positive learning environment. At my school, a specialist has created a rigorous 'bell-to-bell' schedule, in which each minute of our day is mapped out. We are told what and how to teach, what to put on our walls, and what interventions to provide."
"Dear Mr. President,
"At age ten, I came home from classes and my father asked me: 'Well, Ralph, what did you learn in school today, did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?'" "NAEP achievement levels have been rejected by everyone who has ever studied them: UCLA’s Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing, the GAO and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as by individual psychometricians such as Lyle Jones of the University of North Carolina. . . . There is no good reason to use the NAEP achievement levels except to beat schools over the head and that is what will happen. Critics will take the discrepancy between the state results and the NAEP results as evidence that the schools are still failing and that the states are lying to their citizens." "One of the things the next president should do is ax the No Child Left Behind law. It is based on a false premise. . . . It is wrong to set low expectations, but it is infinitely crueler to burden children with high expectations beyond their ability to achieve." "Advice for the creators of No Child Left Behind: Leave me alone and let me do my job."
"Teach to Mastery
"Max Apple prefers plain and simple sentences. He is anti-adverb; he thinks a verb shouldn't need any help." "Tom Friedman single-handedly did more than anyone else to convince liberals and Democrats to support the invasion of Iraq; the only competitors for that ignominious distinction are Colin Powell and Ken Pollack. And while he has spent the last year or so feigning angst over his years of pro-war cheerleading, he has not changed in the slightest." "The child that you send over is nothing like the child that comes back to you. " "There is a phenomenon that sociologist Noelle Neumann calls 'The Spiral of Silence.' This occurs when people silence their own feelings because they believe that their opinion is in the distinct minority; they're outnumbered, and there is no hope of their opinion carrying the day. They may actually be in the majority, but if they think they are outnumbered, they will sabotage (censure) themselves. Major political figures and media have been carrying out a campaign to create the impression that the sweeping and dramatic public policy changes we have seen in the last few years are a product of a popular mandate and that popular sentiment is driving these changes in our society. In a sense, this impression management is not brand new, it is forceful, planned and purposeful to control an image that the public is allowed to view. It is then, the mainstream media, that is in control of news worthiness. " "The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is fundamentally flawed and provides neither an efficient, nor an effective path to improving schooling for all students. Some provisions in the law are actually harmful for students." "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. "
"
This external testing model (state testing) is a model of standardization. Standardize everything—the standards, the curriculum, the instruction, the teachers, the schools . . . like fast food chains where customers are generally guaranteed, no matter the location, what they will receive. . . .
"Right now I'm taking 3 AP classes and i WISH I had time to sleep. Parents should let kids at least get sleep when they are young--they won’t get it in high school! " "I have been in schools were the reading coach is used as a data repository, spending most of her time in an office lined with bookshelves filled with unused young adult novels. Such coaches spend their time manipulating and remanipulating the reams of data that cross their desks daily. Education has become so data driven that we sometimes forget that human beings are more than data suppliers." "If you were in an open field with an angry rhinoceros about to charge at you, the silliest thing you could do would be to imagine you were a rhinoceros too. The outcome would be obvious. What can you do, faced with a rhinoceros, to get the better of it eventually and come away unharmed? What is the only thing; in this case, that is more powerful than a rhinoceros? Why, a swarm of mosquitoes." "Everyone came out of that room glowing, He really understood education and cared about what we did. He sounds like us, one of our teachers told me."
"External exams and projects -- no matter who endorses them from afar -- are
teacher bashing.
"In America you can say anything you want -- as long as it doesn't have any effect." "What is shared by mass murderers, felony drunk drivers, starving children, head banging laboratory animals, anxious overworked students and all reptiles? . . . They don't play. What do most Nobel Laureates, historically renowned creative artists, successful multi-career entrepreneurs and animals of superior intelligence have in common? . . . They are full of play throughout their lives."
"Question: If a kid is asked on a test to “give an example of a stereotype” and he answers, 'Sony,' does he really deserve no credit at all for that response?
"Every year, thousands of law school graduates leap into the nerve-wracking and costly process of preparing for the bar exam. The bar consists of two days of testing (three in California) on memorization and comprehension of specific areas of law. Failure is hardly uncommon: various estimates place the passage rate at roughly 70 percent, while the failure rate in California was a whopping 56 percent in 2004." "The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt." "College graduates are, in fact, not in short supply. . . . In plain language, many college graduates are now forced to take jobs requiring only high school educations." "American middle-class living standards are threatened, not because workers lack competitive skills but because the richest among us have seized the fruits of productivity growth, denying fair shares to the working- and middle-class Americans, educated in American schools, who have created the additional national wealth." "Rising workforce skills can indeed make American firms more competitive. But better skills, while essential, are not the only source of productivity growth. The honesty of our capital markets, the accountability of our corporations, our fiscal-policy and currency management, our national investment in R&D and infrastructure, and the fair-play of the trading system (or its absence), also influence whether the U.S. economy reaps the gains of Americans' diligence and ingenuity. The singular obsession with schools deflects political attention from policy failures in those other realms." "The Tough Choices report bemoans the fact that "Indian engineers make $7,500 a year against $45,000 for an American engineer with the same qualifications" and concludes from this that we can compete with the Indian economy only if our engineers are smarter than theirs. This is silly: No matter how good our schools, American engineers won't be six times as smart as those in the rest of the world. " "Teaching is a labor of love." "[T}oo much external regulation will turn schools into regulated utilities. All the research on effective schools shows that the success of a school is unique and home-grown." "This facile suggestion [in "A Nation at Risk"] that we need to extend the school year is but one example of the rampant shortsightedness growing out of the recommendations of this commission. It must be obvious to anyone who cares to make an inventory of our nation's troubles - and this a nation at risk - that it is not our uneducated, our low SAT scorers, our dropouts who have brought us into this time of trouble, but rather our leaders who have enjoyed an excellent education, both at the secondary and professional levels. To cite but one example, those million-car recalls are the fault of well-educated engineers. " "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words .... Is that all you blighters can do?" ""I've administered the test for years and I'm not going to do it anymore. The last time I gave the test, a child dissolved in tears from anxiety. I'd put her in a situation I didn't want her to be in. My gut feeling as a teacher made me say, 'I'm going to take a stand here.'" "About 18 months ago, I was invited to meet Eli Broad in his gorgeous penthouse in NYC, overlooking Central Park. I hear that he made his billions in the insurance and real estate businesses. I am not sure when he became an education expert. We talked about school reform for an hour or more, and he told me that what was needed to fix the schools was not all that complicated: A tough manager surrounded by smart graduates of business schools and law schools. Accountability. Tight controls. Results. In fact, NYC is the perfect model of school reform from his point of view. Indeed, this version of school reform deserves the Broad Prize, a prize conferred by one billionaire on another." "Living in NYC, I see what happens when businessmen and lawyers take over a school system, attempt to demolish everything that existed before they got there, and mount a dazzling PR blitz to prove that they are successful." "We don't want public education to become a 13-year course in how to take a test. I want the testing called for by No Child Left Behind to become a reflection of how a progressive curriculum is being taught. " "The first rule of media survival is use it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment, a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions. Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere else." "I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it." "Why does the media always refer to people defending our civil liberties and the Constitution as "activists" or 'advocates?' Wouldn't 'citizens' do just as well? " "It may be time to reflect on the possibility that a nation of good test-takers is not necessarily a well-educated nation." "When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal." " Somehow we have decided to hand more and more power to far-off educrats and executive-branch power mavens. In the process we've taken something --teaching--that ought to be personalized and creative and made it into something mass-produced, programmed and copyrighted." "Teachers drill, drill, drill until students follow the exact format of proven WASL responses. Practice forms duplicate WASL templates. Past WASL questions become new writing prompts. Precise WASL vocabulary is practiced weekly." "No pupil under the age of fifteen years in any grammar or primary school shall be required to do any home study." "Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball, or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. The room is different because I was in it. The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed. "
"Fetching objects for people
"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral." "The greatest sin of NCLB is to make what should be a lifelong joy into a tedious, bureaucratic exercise - making words far harder to learn and infinitely harder to love. Kids need more words in their lives - and fewer tests. " "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. " "Above all, we must stop worshiping curriculum. Setting higher standards and describing what all students should know and be able to do is not the way to improve education. Indeed, to continue on this path is the sure way to destroy our society. The more we try to standardize children, the more we encourage violence, crime, drugs, and other problems. When we try to stuff children into a common mold, we destroy feelings of self-worth on a grand scale."
"In order for high school kids to understand many of the topics we expect them to grasp, they have to be reading a wide range of material. Kids need to be reading in their spare time. Kids need to read for fun. . . .
"Lorna Leone [a director of school performance for Anne Arundel County] emphasizes uniformity--at quite a detailed level. . . . [She] was concerned that each classroom in each grade didn't have the same number of vocabulary words displayed on their Word Walls. Why aren't they all the same size? Why do some teachers post the words on the wall and some on a flip chart? Why does one fifth-grade teacher have parts of speech on the wall but the other doesn't? . . .
" I've been teaching K-1 for 11 years. I have my Masters, and am Nationally Board Certified. I've spent the last 2 days in a DIBELS training class with fellow teachers. I am absolutely horrified! I can't imagine anything that could be more detrimental to the reading development of young children (not to mention insulting to professionals). " " The most striking thing about the sweeping federal educational reforms debuting this fall is how much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued that efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed, and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no widget would be left behind. Now we have "No Child Left Behind," in which Congress has set up a complex apparatus of sanctions and standards designed to compel individual schools toward steady annual improvement, with the goal of making a hundred per cent of American schoolchildren proficient in math and reading by 2014. It is hard to look at the new legislation and not share in its Fordist vision of the classroom as a brightly lit assembly line, in which curriculum standards sail down from Washington through a chute, and fresh-scrubbed, defect-free students come bouncing out the other end." "When you are told, 'It was meant to be,' ask, 'Who meant it?' " "I hat my sof Be cus I Dw Not No how to Rit." "WHY IS IT safer to say "fuck" than to say "fascism?" One of the curiosities of post-cold-war rhetoric is that we no longer have a term for those who practice ideologies antithetical to democracy. Current American foreign policy seems aimed at turning incompetent communists into competent fascists. One American politician once put it this way: 'The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.' Would such a radical be allowed on Sunday morning talk shows today? Probably not, even though his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. " "I am on a mission to help teachers reclaim their professional knowledge, their common sense and to maintain the dignity and integrity of each child in their presence."
"The first time it was reported that one child vomited on a high stakes test, there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred vomited. But when a thousand vomited and there was no end to the tales of young terror, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'
"This document printed on recycled paper." "A favorite Standardisto metaphor is School as a race. How about school as a beehive? A song? A handshake? Possibilities abound."
"It's all I have to bring today—
"In 1967 my second year of teaching in Atlanta, I emptied the room before the students returned in August. My five periods were full of kids who hated school and hated English, the subject Itaught. We created U.S.A. G.E (United States of America Grammatical English). Gradually with ideas from students we designed our classroom with furniture, books, and other equipment. The Atlanta public library had started a telephone service answering research questions. When we requested a telephone the principal, a rigid nun, put her foot down. Imagine schools without telephone computer hookups now. I was able to eliminate quizzes and tests, and the students let me work them to death. Some still hug me forty years later when we see each other in a local post office.
"Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts. NY Times headline, 6/27/07
"We have this bizarre situation where people pay $50 to $90 to the plumber, to whom we entrust our pipes. But according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the child care worker, to whom we entrust our children, averages $10 an hour, no benefits.
"Some teachers say kids these days only respond to shouting. Guess I am getting old, but. . . . First the parents scream, then the teacher shouts, then the assistant principal uses a bull horn, and then the guards yell over a PA system when these kids graduate to prison, and finally the ambulance siren signals their death.
"If I do say so modestly, [NCLB] is the jewel in the crown of President Bush's domestic achievements." "When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion. " "We are well past the time for leaders to show us the way. We know the way! We just need to be committed to it. " "Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among [NCLB's] goals; equal educational opportunity is not. In fact, the latter term--which had been prominent in previous versions of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act--appears nowhere in NCLB. " "The No Child Left Behind Act has worked for America's children and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law." "Just because your smoke alarm went off doesn't mean your trout's done." "Under No Child Left Behind, states and school districts have unprecedented flexibility in how they use federal education funds." "I can't stand giving kindergartners timed standards tests and watching tears trickle down their cheeks. It's just not right." "Don’t say data equals children. Equals learning. Say something gentler. Say No Child Left Behind."
"Throw away your red pencils. "I think in the learning process it’s really valuable for people to go very, very deeply into one thing at one point in their lives and touch quality. And then they can, like you’ve described, translate that quality into other things, because I believe these principles are the same. They transcend specific disciplines. " "The disingenuous nature of the Spellings gospel of accountability becomes all the more apparent in light of her post facto reaction to the scandal. Her press releases and disavowal of authority and responsibility are ample enough proof that the thought that accountability applies to her as well has yet to cross the secretary's mind." "The world's five hundred wealthiest people have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million." "There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes. " "I am a war president." "If there is one thing that I have learned throughout my travels, it's that education is not a 'one-size-fits-all' enterprise. Through the No Child Left Behind Act, our teachers can fine-tune instruction to make sure that every child is learning. They have more tools to measure student progress and better data to identify which strategies are most effective."
"Question: Your anecdotes. . . .
"When I raised my hand in class,
"There's not a thing wrong with teaching to the test.
"Always there is something worth saying about
"People go into teaching because they want to teach. Teaching is not like a business or corporation where managers jump from job to job and where people have to be incentivized to work harder or longer hours. Teaching is hard work, and the rest of us should not do anything to make it harder. State and local education authorities should focus on improving the conditions in the schools so that teachers can do the job they prepared to do." "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the commissioner of education . . . Amen." "Yes, we accept as a given that we need better teachers." "We have to counter the mentality of such mantras as 'competition for this century' and 'closing the achievement gap.' We have to raise our voices in harmony with the human need for community, co-operation, and compassion. Without these elements, we'll turn our planet into a cinder. " "There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." "Cut scores on tests, determining who is proficient and who is not, are political decisions. They are not scientific or psychometric decisions. " " Are we sure we want to live with the consequences of high percentage of minority students not finishing high school? " "High-stakes decisions based on school-mean proficiency are scientifically indefensible. We cannot regard differences in school-mean proficiency as reflecting differences in school effectiveness. . . . To reward schools for high mean achievement is tantamount to rewarding those schools for serving students who were doing well prior to school entry." "Viewing teaching as a moral endeavor filled with uncertain and inevitable dilemmas positions the teacher always as an inquirer." "Novelist Tom Sharpe said, 'There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk.' He'd never heard a corporate politico making laws about how teachers should do their jobs. Of course, some of them are introspective drunks." "The Utah State Core Curriculum, the Utah Performance Assessment System for Students (UPASS) accountability system, and the Reading First program of NCLB, all make curriculum a 'business' and effectively prevent teachers from performing as true mentors and professionals. Teachers are slaves to the required curriculum, scripted teaching and state testing, all of which cause many students to develop an aversion to learning." "The NCLB federal law, scheduled for reauthorization this year, expects everyone to stay the course on the wrong road." "It should be spelled Reading FUrst." "The last thing I'm going to do is subject some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over them saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it." "Silence, indifference, and inaction were Hitler's principal allies." "The consequences of NCLB are far more damaging to our National Security than Iraq ever was." "The problem America faces is not a lack of educated people, but a lack of jobs for educated people. In the 21st century, the U. S. economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic services, such as waitresses, bartenders, and health and social services. The vast majority of these jobs do not require a college education. . . ." "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was." "Today almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government. " "The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed. "
"THe emperor who "What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler. . . ." "As a student in the new education system produced by the NCLB, I have obtained six perfect scores on my states form of standardized testing. It is not an accomplishment that I esteem highly and I had no desire to include it on my applications to college. The reason why? Those test are destroying everything that is basic and good about education. There is no longer a desire to learn, There is no longer a desire to teach. If this law is not done away with their will be no hope for democracy in America let alone in Iraq. Without knowledge there is no democracy." " Today democracy, liberty, and equality are words to fool the people. No nation can progress with such ideas. They stand in the way of action. Therefore we frankly abolish them. In the future each man will serve the interest of the state with absolute obedience. Let him who refuses beware." "To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself." "Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. " "Poetries is nots for all the peoples, it is for the ones that listens." "My District sent out a flyer to offer a Stress Reduction Workshop If they allowed us the joy of teaching free of the joke of mandating and scripting, the poetry that we would write with our children would, believe me, do more to salve the stress than any kind of 'training.' " "As we know, there is not really such a thing as education. There is only helping somebody to learn, and the learning process is a complex adaptive system; fooling around, making mistakes, somehow having contact with reality or truth, correcting the mistakes, assuring self-consistency and so on--in short, messing about." "Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. " "Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? it is not to save time, but to squander it. " "Ordering a child to write a CTB/McGraw-Hill writing prompt in the narrative, informative, or persuasive mode is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child." "Because the arms industry is coddled by political parties and the mass media, their antics go largely unnoticed. Our politicians and pundits argue endlessly about a couple of billion dollars that may be spent on improving education or ending poverty, but they casually waste that amount in a few days in Iraq." "When a rich man's dog died, everyone commiserated. When a poor man lost his mother, no one noticed. " "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. " "Liberal: a power worshipper without power." "GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect It needs a driver. " "A lot of people say a lot of things, which doesn't make what they say true." "...no educational system is possible unless every question directly asked of a pupil at any examination is either framed or modified by that actual teacher of that pupil in that subject." " "Literacy is a malleable repertoire of practices, not an unchanging or universal set of skills. Learning to be literate is like learning to be an artisan in a guild, to play an instrument in an ensemble, like acquiring a craft within a community whose art and forms of life are dynamic, rather than a robotic acquisition and authorization of core skills. Once we understand this we can find the resources, grounds and normative purposes for teaching literacy not from textbooks and skill taxonomies, but by attending closely to what children and communities actually do with texts, old and new, print and multimodal, traditional and radical. This requires something more than common sense, and that we get out of the staffroom, get away from the teachers guidebooks and draw upon all skills as teachers and intellectuals, psychologists and sociologists, linguists and ethnographers. The systematic engagement with these everyday texts, discourses and practices is at the heart of teaching and learning. And it is in these artifacts and practices that you will find the generative domains, text and practices for lessons, units and classrooms events " "I wonder what the NEA actually disagrees with?" "I have been an NEA member for 6 years, and am furious about their misrepresentation of this. NCLB is destroying public education at the very foundation. The purpose is to privatize education with vouchers and school choice. This is wrong. I want to be held accountable, but not like this." "NEA opposes this petition... that will NOTstop me from signing ..in fact that enrages me as much as this idiotic Act. I am a veteran teacher of 23 years and am so disgusted with the state of education today that it makes me want to leave te classroom. Get with it NEA! Get on board before I start a petition against your stance on this! " "As President of the Oakland Education Association and a veteran teacher, I call on Congress to dismantle NCLB. It is far too flawed to be fixed. We can't allow public education to be hijacked by corporate interests who don't have the first clue about truly educating a child. " "Death to DIBELS." "I think this a part of a plan to reshape the good old USA for people who do not believe in 'by and for the people.'" "About Damn Time! " "Organizations (NEA, state boards of ed, and others) keep pushing and pushing for funding and complaining that the problems with NCLB are caused by lack of money, especially all the money promised by Congress that has not been delivered. I have news for them -- if the entire federal budget were allocated to NCLB, it would not "fix" it! Where does anyone get the idea that full appropriations will do anything to make this work? Money is NOT the issue. " " I do what I have to do." "I'm glad I never attended school under the present conditions - age: 72 years." "NCLB is a thinly disguised program designed to open our educational system to corporate interests. The real goal of NCLB is failure of our public school systems, paving the way for privatization through the charter school concept. We will be training our children to acquiesce to a future with no possibilities, cannon and service industry fodder and nothing more. The funds being used for one more failed Bush policy is also money generated from our taxes. I don't want to pay for it. Clear enough?" "NCLB breaks children's hearts. " " I have voted in every election since 1980, and will continue doing so until I die. I will always vote AGAINST anyone who FAILS to vote against NCLB" "I am well on my way to becoming an embittered and mediocre teacher, who heretofore, considered teaching to be a profession, not a job. I once loved what I did. I do not now, nor do my students; school has become a rather grim and joyless place for all. By "McDonald's-izing" education we have done a grave disservice to those we serve, our children. I despair. . . ." "I would be willing to give up part of my salary to help cover the Federal money lost if our district told the Federal Govt we are not going to comply with the onerous NCLB standards." "NCLB testing discriminates againist special education children who cannot function on grade level due to their handicapping conditions. Our brilliant brain surgeons throughout this nation cannot get everyone on grade level by 2014. Why blame our teachers who are working themselves to death? My oldest son struggled for years to meet the NCLB laws. As a parent, I hurt inside due to my son telling me he will hurt his school because he cannot do it. Someone discriminated against my son's rights. Please dismantle this monster so other children will not be labeled failures as my son was labeled by your NCLB. " "The No Child Left Behind Act should read, 'No Child Left Behind, Unless They are Really Smart. Then They Can Fend For Themselves.'" "Think For yourself. Question Authority. Read banned books! Kids have the same constitutional rights as grown-ups!!! Don't Forget to boycott standardized testing!!!" "I do wish we had something in education like AA, our own Test-a-holics Anonymous." "I became a teacher because I want to serve struggling students who need a little extra motivation and exposure to rich learning experiences. But my options are being narrowed down by a restrictive curriculum and a scripted phonics-limited reading program. I feel as though I am becoming a learning technician instead of a teacher." "Children have souls. Teachers do, too. Help us return heart, soul, and love back to our classrooms, without fear of retribution when our young charges cannot meet unrealistic standards." "This law must not be reauthorized. It is having a devastating impact on public education. We must return to the wisdom of the framers of the Constution who did not create a federalized education system in our country. NCLB is unconstitutional, unwise, destructive, unimplementable and illogical. It is the shame of our nation to make a law with high-sounding and noble rhetoric about educational equity that accomplishes just the opposite: more discrimination and reduced opportunities for our most disadvantaged students to realize their full human potential. I strongly support this effort to dismantle NCLB." "One of the things we can learn from history is that history is not only a history of things inflicted on us by the powers that be. History is also a history of resistance. It's a history of people who endure tyranny for decades, but who ultimately rise up and overthrow the dictator. We've seen this in country after country, surprise after surprise. Rulers who seem to have total control, they suddenly wake up one day, and there are a million people in the streets, and they pack up and leave. This has happened in the Philippines, in Yemen, all over, in Nepal. Million people in the streets, and then the ruler has to get out of the way. So, this is what we're aiming for in this country. Everything we do is important. Every little thing we do, every picket line we walk on, every letter we write, every act of civil disobedience we engage in, any recruiter that we talk to, any parent that we talk to, any GI that we talk to, any young person that we talk to, anything we do in class, outside of class, everything we do in the direction of a different world is important, even though at the moment they seem futile, because that's how change comes about. Change comes about when millions of people do little things, which at certain points in history come together, and then something good and something important happens." " This law represents the federal takeover of America's public schools and completely undermines the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Congress should be ashamed of themselves." "I scored quite poorly on the SAT and now I am a Ph.D. student in astrophysics at Berkeley. I can't imagine how different my life would be had the SAT been the most important indicator of my intelligence, as it obviously was not an accurate indicator." "We move on data We're moving on scientifically based research. We're not going to rely on creativity to support these children. We're not looking for [teachers] to do their own thing.[describing Open Court]" "No Child Left Behind is harming my child, I have watched him change from an engaged, excited student to a passive student. Is this really the next generation we are looking for?" "Senator Kennedy, this Act Sucks!!!" "Senator Kennedy this Act Sucks!!! " "Let a thousand flowers bloom. Give us some money for fertilizer. " "Political, not scientific, considerations continue to explain NAGB's stubborn refusal to abandon achievement level cut scores which have no scientific or scholarly credibility." "What NCLB has done is the equivalent of demanding not only that 'C' students become 'A' students nationwide, but that 'D' and 'F' students also become 'A' students. As noted above, this confuses two distinct goals -- that of raising the performance of typical students, and that of raising the minimum level of performance we expect of all, or almost all students. Both are reasonable instructional goals. But given the nature of human variability, no single standard can possibly describe both of these accomplishments. If we define proficiency-for-all as the minimum standard, it cannot possibly be challenging for most students. If we define proficiency-for-all as a challenging standard (as does NCLB), the inevitable patterns of individual variability dictate that significant numbers of students will still fail, even if they all improve. This will be true no matter what date is substituted for NCLB's 2014." "Under NCLB, children with I.Q.s as low as 65 must achieve a standard of proficiency in math which is higher than that achieved by 60 percent of students in Taiwan, the highest scoring country in the world (in math), and a standard of proficiency in reading which is higher than that achieved by 65 percent of students in Sweden, the highest scoring country in the world (in reading)." "the conceptual basis of NCLB is deeply flawed; no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. A standard can either be a minimal standard which presents no challenge to typical and advanced students, or it can be a challenging standard which is unachievable by most below-average students. No standard can serve both purposes this is why we call 'proficiency for all' an oxymoron - but this is what NCLB requires." "There is no date by which all (or even nearly all) students in any subgroup, even middle-class white students, can achieve proficiency. Proficiency for all is an oxymoron, as the term 'proficiency' is commonly understood and properly used." "I'm angry as hell about NCLB." "There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all. " "Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. " "Before, if my kids wrote, 'Apples are red,' I was excited. But if they write that same sentence in the week when we're writing narratives, they get a low grade. It's descriptive, not narrative." "Before, if my kids wrote, 'Apples are red,' I was excited. But if they write that same sentence in the week when we're writing narratives, they get a low grade. It's descriptive, not narrative." " Justice cannot be won without organization." "Action engenders hope." "IF THE $5.15 HOURLY minimum wage had risen at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would now stand at $23.03." "The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs." "[E}ducation is not going to be the answer to our economic crisis. It is clearly an answer to every single individual -- they should get every piece of education, we should pay for it, give our kids the skills, the training, the college education. But here's the problem: only 1 percent more of all jobs by 2012 will require a college education. So if everybody went to college, and only 1 percent more require a college education, that's going to be a problem. Only eight of the 30 fastest-growing jobs in America require a college education. On top of all of that, college-educated kids in the last five years have lost the same amount of money in wages as blue-collar people. So if college education was the answer to America's problems -- yes, we need it, but we should not be fooled by people that say, 'Well, if everybody just gets an education, then America will redistribute its wealth.' It will not do that.--Changing How America Works "
"McGraw-Hill's tests "First they came for the senior teachers near retirement; then they came for the non-tenured; then they came for the people who could not produce the results they wanted; then they came for those who could not turn straw into gold; when they came for me, there was no one left. " "Every test, every grade affects the learner. Every dull test - no matter how technically sound - affects the learner's future initiative and engagement. No, even saying it this way does not do justice to the consequences of our testing practices: every test TEACHES the student." "Who's worse: The people who produce the goods that harm children or the people who use them?" "Have we become so complacent, so coward and intimidated by this government that we have forgotten our own revolutionary birthright of rebellion and dissent? Have we become so paralyzed by the eleventh of September that we would give up our liberty and freedom for the promise of a security that does not exist by a government that now threatens our very lives? What will it take before we finally realize the true reality of this crisis? How many more terrorist attacks, senseless wars, flag draped caskets, grieving mothers, paraplegics, amputees, stressed out sons and daughters before we finally begin to break the silence of this shameful night? Let us open up our hearts and speak in a way we have never spoken before knowing that lives now depend on it, and the very survival of our nation is now at stake. Let not our silence in this crucial moment betray us from our destiny. " "A time comes when silence is betrayal. " "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
"If you want a green light for government spending in America, just say the word defense.
"Christian faith demands, as a matter of justice and compassion, that we be concerned about public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act approaches the education of America's children through an inside-the-school management strategy of increased productivity rather than providing resources and support for the individuals who will shape children's lives. As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings to be nurtured and educated. We call on our political leaders to invest in developing the capacity of all schools. Our nation should be judged by the way we care for our children." "Play--it's by definition absorbing. The outcome is always uncertain. Play makes children nimble--neurobiologically, mentally, behaviorally--capable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world. That makes it just about the best preparation for life in the 21st century. Psychologists believe that play cajoles people toward their human potential because it preserves all the possibilities nervous systems tend to otherwise prune away. It's no accident that all of the predicaments of play--the challenges, the dares, the races and chases--model the struggle for survival. Think of play as the future with sneakers on." " One reason the Democrats lose so many elections is that they seem to care more about who said what about Valerie Plame and who said what on an ABC TV show than they do about healthcare, pensions, or jobs or how much it costs to own a house."
"All I have is a voice "DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards. "
"Science
"Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.
A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating President. . . . "All of a sudden, the federal government and Bill Gates have decided that high schools are in need of reform. Anyone who has been around schools for some time can see the familiar political task force pattern emerge. They declare a crisis, have a conference, put out a report with a bunch of homilies and vague 'motherhood' recommendations, cop a trivial amount of money for 'lighthouse' projects, take pictures of themselves in front of the schools, and run around to the media to say what a great thing they've done. That's nonsense. Reform is hard work and it's not glorious. Schools do not improve through political opportunism." "Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom. . . . http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/#060830b" "I like to talk about No Child Left Behind as Ivory soap. It's 99.9 percent pure. There's not much needed in the way of changes. . . . As much grist as there was for the mill five years ago on various fronts . . . we've come a long way in a short time in a big system affecting 50 million kids." "I've got an ekuletic reading list." " Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world." "With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system. " "Reading First has demonstrated once again that politics and greed trump research and benefits to at-risk children every time." "If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." "L'essential est invsible pour les eaux. (What is essential is invisible to the eyes.)" "Who bears more responsibility: the people who produce the high stakes tests and scripted curricula, the people who demand they be inflicted on children, or the people who use them day in and day out?" "Obedience is boring. We want to think about it. We want to decide whether a particular law applies to our specific case. In that place, at that time." "Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give . . . . " The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the cliches of a long series of story conferences." "I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. " "They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem. " "He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, 'Give me the co-ordinates.'... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog! " "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny.""
"Power Corrupts.
PowerPoint Corrupts "First you establish the traditional "two views" of the question. You then put forward a common-sensical justification of the one, only to refute it by the other. Finally, you send them both packing by the use of a third interpretation, in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory. Certain verbal maneuvers enable you to line up the traditional 'antitheses' as complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and the 'accomlished philosopher' may be recognized by the ingenuity with which he makes ever-bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings."
"Words strain, "It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up." "It would seem prudent to address the issue of the hard bigotry of high expectations with inadequate resources. It is not merely whether the mandates of NCLB were fully funded -- it is clear they weren't -- but whether the social capital is provided to schools, families and communities to overcome years of racism and neglect. This leads to the need to examine the goal of closing the achievement gap. Is it a real goal and does it even makes sense?"
"There are three possible explanations for the Administration's publishing a good-day-for-bombing color guidebook. "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." "Must the citizen even for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." "It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporatio |
