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Flotsam & Jetsam: Flunkin' Duncan:: The Test Results

Sam Sam Smith is the longtime
editor of the Progressive Review, an
online review of alternative news and
information. You can--and should--sign up for
Undernews, an e-mail update. Sam is
irreverent, trenchant, funny, and, most of all,
right.

by Sam Smith

If we're going to insist on judging our
children primarily by how well they score on
tests, we should probably do the same for
education secretary nominees. The problem is
that it spoils the fantasy that the major media
has been creating around Arne Duncan. Still,
turnabout is fair play, so here are a few of
the results.

Duncan was named head of the Chicago schools
the middle of 2001. The following results of
the National Assessment of Educational Progress
cover 2002-2007. To summarize what has happened
in Chicago schools: not much. Bear in mind,
that even where there has been improvement, it
has amounted to less than a 1% increase in test
scores over a five year period.

Fourth grade reading

Scores were 3 points higher in 2007 compared
with 2005 and 8 points higher than in 2002.
Total change: less than one half of one
percent.

The 2007 score was lower than that of public
schools in large central cities

Eighth grade reading

Scores were one point higher than in 2002.

Fourth grade math

Between 2003 and 2007 scores rose 6 points, or
less than three tenths of a percent.

The scores in Chicago rose only 2 more points
than in the state of Illinois at large.

Black students gained 6 points, Hispanics 2
points, and whites nine points.

Eighth grade math

Scores rose 5 points in Chicago and 7 points
nationwide between 2003 and 2007

Blacks gained 2 points, latinos gained 6 points
and whites gained 11 points.

Duncan - like DC's school chancellor Michelle
Rhee - has fostered a dysfunctional rightwing,
corporatized system of education that not only
isn't working, it is damaging our children as
it trains them to be obedient worker-drones
incapable of analyzing or understanding what is
really going on about them. This system is
being enabled by the same media that for three
decades enabled a dysfunctional rightwing,
corporatized economic system that finally
collapsed in 2008.

The dangers of this system include:

- Teaching our children only to give the right
answers and not to ask the right questions.

- Grossly limiting education to fact
accumulation and basic manipulation of data,
leaving little time for analysis, creativity,
judgment, philosophy, gaining social
intelligence, as well as learning about, and
participating in, the non-mechanical aspects of
life such as art, theater and music. This
system deliberately teaches our children not to
think.

- Through the use of charter schools, turning
public education into what was known in earlier
times as pauper schools.

- Damaging communities by destroying schools,
institutions that not only served students but
their parents and provided commonality in ever
more atomized urban areas.






— Sam Smith
Progressive Review
2008-12-20
http://www.prorev.com/

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