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Stop presses: A defense of U.S. schools from the privatization world
by Caroline Grannan
President Obama was wrong to paint such a dismal picture of U.S. schools, a commentator declares on Forbes.com.
nd the headline news is that the author of "Educating Obama: American Schools Are – in Many Ways – the Best in the World," Matthew Kaminski, is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
The WSJ editorial board is the international high temple of the free-market right, and its op-ed pages have been Ground Zero for an incredible amount of anti-public education commentary, much of it based on flat-out misinformation (or, if you prefer the blunt term, also known as "lies").
A falsehood-filled Wall Street Journal editorial attacking SFUSD on behalf of now-failing for-profit Edison Schools in early 2001 started me on my crusade to learn about the murky and often creepy world of the charter/voucher/privatization crowd.
Kaminski, who emigrated from Poland as a child and experienced both Polish and U.S. schools, sticks to the free-market crowd’s party line in bashing teachers’ unions – but other than that he is an unabashed cheerleader for U.S. public education. He didn’t debunk the numerous false and misleading pieces of information Obama used in his speech, but went to the heart of it to just plain praise our school system.
Wow.
Mrs. McKay's [third-grade class in Kent, Ohio] brought another sort of revelation. Teachers could be nice and encouraging; at my school in Warsaw, the clearest memory is of an old codger rapping my ears. Here, I got silver stars for doing well; there, we plotted our escapes. American school, in short, was fun. Get a Japanese crammer to make that admission.
From primary school through America's unparalleled universities, our schools teach children to think critically better than almost any other. It lets them experiment and make their own mistakes. It doesn't lock anyone into a profession or academic track at 18, or earlier, as in Europe or Asia.
Something, after all, must account for the flexible and quick American mind that succeeds remarkably well in the world beyond, even if our reading scores lag Finland so badly. Without sounding overly corny, I think it goes back to the idea that school here is fun by comparison and admittedly often in retrospect. In one field, the nation runs a surplus: People who'd rather go to school here than somewhere else.
… the president should tone down the talk of American educational demise.
When responses to Obama’s misinformation-filled speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce started popping up on blogs, I despaired of any idea that the President would ever get wind of the fact that he’d been so wrong. That’s given that I think he’s getting corrupt and distorted advising in a field that’s not his area of expertise -- rather than on his own deliberately and maliciously spreading misinformation to attack and damage public education, as I believe many in the “school reform” crowd do.
But the backlash has been so increasingly visible and widespread that he has to recognize it. It would so fill us with joy if the President would be ethical enough to publicly acknowledge the errors and correct his misstatements.
— Caroline Grannan
SF Education Examiner blog
2009-03-20
http://www.examiner.com/x-356-SF-Education-Examiner~y2009m3d20-Stop-presses-A-defense-of-US-schools-from-the-privatization-world
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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