NCLB In Your Face

Defend Democracy: A $71.40 plan to Stop NCLB

Federick Douglass told us that "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Even though it is difficult for us teachers, who come from a culture of people-pleasing and trying to be agreeable, a culture of conciliation and compromise, we must learn how to refuse.

I came here wearing a T-shirt: Defend Democracy: Stop NCLB Insanity. But then a teacher handed me a shirt from the Northwest Inland Writing Project. This shirt declares Be a Malcontent. I approve this message. I wear the shirt with pride.

They didn't ride the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. We must not DIBEL, follow the script, or give the tests.

We must stand up and say "No!" Which amounts to saying "Yes!" for children.

And I have a little plan for achieving this goal, a $71.40 plan to help teachers come together in a grassroots movement of refusal. I never recommend that a lone teacher here or there refuse to give the test. I'm calling for a grassroots movement of refusal. We must join together in our resistance, presenting a solid mass of speaking up for children. We must be a solid mass of refusal.

Elizabeth Jaeger is in the audience, one of the Downer 5. Things ended badly for them because when they stood up for children, they were left standing alone. Colleagues didn't join them. We must grab hands and present a united front. And here is how we can do it:

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My website: http://www.susanohanian.org

I made my first online commentary about NCLB in June 2002. By now, I feel rather like Mme. Defarge, knitting a register of outrage. Dickens notes that Madame Defarge’s own cruelty and bloodthirstiness does not reflect any inherent flaw, but rather results from the oppression and personal tragedy that she has witnessed at the hands of the aristocracy. Realizing that I spend about 8 hours a day documenting the oppression and personal tragedy suffered by children at the hands of the corporate-politicos education plan, the Business Roundtable and their political handmaidens, I worry about how much longer I can contain my anger. I'm sure that the pounding I've suffered this year by pneumonia and hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a.k.a. "mushroom picker's disease," results from bearing witness to the personal tragedies brought on families by NCLB.

I get a lot of mail from desperate teachers, parents, grandparents. Lisa wrote me from Oregon, asking for advice, and her story of the DIBELS oppression of her young son became the introduction to Examining DIBELS: What it is and What it does, ed. by Ken Goodman.

Sarah, a California first grade teacher, is one of my most regular teacher correspondents, and I am so moved by her fight to nurture her students that she has her own page now: Sarah's Page. Just a few days ago, Sarah wrote me:

My school is currently imposing a program that "trains" children to write the Perfect sentence. Then the Perfect paragraph. Then the Perfect composition.

This is an expensive Directed and so-called explicit writing program that "trains" students to write well on assessments.

This goal is not only the school mission, it is the purpose of school life. Or, as I was just trained to understand via the Hollingsworth DataWorks model, All students taught at grade level--on Standards"--all day, every day. The Mission Statement. Especiallly if you are 6 years old. And learning Enlgish.

The district goal of the same page, same instructional process, same formalized method in every room, every day as a mantra of school writing done the "right" way.

Just recently, we've witnessed the horror story coming out of Mobile, AL: Schools now require letter grades for kindergarten students. If a child does not speak in complete sentences for Show and Tell, he fails. Here's what a dissenting teacher described:

"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."

This assault on kindergartners isn't just oppressive, it's also wrong, revealing a whole lot of ignorance about writing. And telling kindergartners that they're failing, that they're not good enough, is part of the corporate plan to create a scared, compliant, obedient workforce for the Global Economy. Tell kids that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there and that they don't measure up. Tell them that often enough, and they'll start to believe it. Pound that message home and they'll never know about education for the common good, education for democracy.

Take a look at the job projections over the next 15 years: The huge mass of jobs will be in the service industry, where lots of bodies are needed to work for minimum wage. Corporate America needs lots of school failures, people who have been trained to believe they don't deserve better The crime isn't that people take jobs in the service industry; the crime is that they do not receive a living wage for their labor.

As Kathy Emery and I documented in Why Is Corporate America Bashing our Public Schools, this plan to demean children and create a passive workforce started with the California Business Roundtable and quickly morphed into the national Business Roundtable plan, America 2000, Goals, 2000, and now NCLB, embraced by both political parties. Reward and punish schools based on high-stakes standardized test scores.

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Focused Activism Vermont Society for the Study of Education

The little engine that could: this tiny, penniless group published Ken's book on DIBELS. Ken gave us publishing rights and CELT pre-paid for books before they existed--so we could pay the printer. Now, we mail it out at cost. The important thing here is to show people how DIBELS oppresses young children. This is a message the public can understand.

Examining DIBELS: What it is and What it does, ed. Ken Goodman
The book costs $5.95, to cover printing and mailing. The special Convention rate: $5.00.

Let's give George Miller something to think about. Let's scare him into conversation. If everybody would buy a copy and send it to George Miller, he'd be forced to "notice."

Rep. George Miller
2205 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, will seek the Chairmanship of the Committee in the 110th Congress.
Miller said that it is his intention to use the Committee to benefit America’s children, families, and workers. Specifically, the first three priorities for the Committee will be to increase the national minimum wage, reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, and make college more affordable.

VSSE's second publication is A ROADBLOCK in Vermont’s Design for Education by Susan Ohanian.

This volume deconstructs Vermont’s application for a Reading First grant, comparing the goals, language, and purpose with the values of the Vermont Design for Education, values which were dumped in order to comply with the Feds. We hope people in other states will use this as a model for calling their own state departments of education to task. The public needs to know about this massive sell-out of children.

Price: $5.95

Free to VSSE members

VSSE also conducted a survey of Vermont Teacher Attitudes about the Effects of NCLB on State Policy, Classroom Climate, and Quality of Education

We received good press from this survey. Others may want to replicate it.

Join us! Send $25:
VSSE
P. O. Box 186
Brandon, VT 65733-0186


Coalition for Better Education

This Colorado group respresents grassroots organizing at its best. Joining hands, parents, students, and teachers are fighting to regain control of their schools from the politicians and large multinational corporations who advocate and profit from standardized testing programs like CSAP. It has been both impressive and heartwarming to watch their campaign to get ads on benches at bus stops, advising parents of their right to opt children out of the state test.

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CD: No Child Left Behind? Bring Back the Joy

Sing Out for Students!

15 songs for $15.00

Can you imagine a resistance movement without song? With this CD we bring you 15 songs.

Sing loud, sing often, joining hands to fight the destructive federal mandates.

Listen to samples

All proceeds from the sale of this CD go to the World of Opportunity in Birmingham, Alabama, to help them in their efforts to rescue young people systematically removed from the public schools in order to increase standardized scores on the state test. Birmingham was in danger of being taken over by the state if they didn't improve their test scores, and we all know the easiest way to do that--get rid of probable low scorers. Thanks to the WOO, some of these 'probable low scorers' are now in college.

More WOO

Some of the songs are original; some are old folk songs with new lyrics. I wrote one to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands," but my lyrics were rejected by the musicians, who feared that the lyrics would 'date' the song. Here's how that song began:

If you cannot find Osama,
Test the kids.

I guess I should have hung tough for those lyrics. . . but there are plenty of others that are quite wonderful.

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Substance

Substance is the only newspaper of resistance in the country. George Schmidt, a longtime Chicago English teacher as well as the editor/publisher of Substance, was sued by Chicago school authorities for $1.4 million for publishing the disreputable city exam in the newspaper. Secrecy about tests is killing us and George made visible how inaccurate, and nonsensical the Chicago test was.

A group of teachers at one high school announced ahead of time that they would not give the test. And then the test was cancelled for everybody. Dead. Never to rise again.

This quote appears on the Substance front page: "Where ignorance is the standard, intelligence is subversive."

Let us support Substance in their activism. As the National Resistance editor, I invite you to contribute.

Send $16 to:
Substance
5132 W. Berteau
Chicago, IL 60641

It would help if you added a little extra. We must support our own.

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Educator Roundtable

The Educator Roundtable: Ending NCLB is a grassroots movement of educators, parents, and concerned citizens who have signed a petition, rejecting the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act and calling for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law's simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

Here are the goals of the Educator Roundtable:

Goal 1: full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times.

NEED: 17,000 educators/concerned citizens to cough up $10.40 each.

Goal 1A: At the same time, we are positioning teachers, scholars, and activists to pursue a unified media campaign opposing reauthorization of NCLB. This will involve letters to editors and legislators, phone calls to media outlets, web-activism, and most importantly, physical presence at all 50 state capitals.

We are going to scare the hell out of the corporate politicos by our sheer numbers.

Goal 2: 1,000,000 signatures, to be printed and hand-delivered to a member of Congress committed to ending NCLB.

Goal 3: Witness the meltdown of NCLB.

The Educator Roundtable is a work in progress, an example of educators working together, despite geographic/ideological distances, to challenge NCLB on two fronts:

1) in the media

2) at the policy level

Here is our rationale of dissent.

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Take Back the Profession

At his presentation at NCTE Nashville (watch this site for news of its posting on the web)--NCLB: A Call to Action Part 2--Dick Allington provided evidence that there are no "proven" reading programs. No core or supplemental reading program exists that meets the federal "gold" standard. The Inspector General's report shows that Reading First is corrupt and illegal. Allington suggests that every teacher look at the state code of professional ethics. Then, when asked to read a script or DIBEL a child, teachers should insist, "Tell me in writing that I must violate this state code of ethics."

Tell me in writing.

NCLB is destroying any semblance of a teaching profession. We must take back our profession!

Ten Comandments of No Child Left Behind

And Congress spake, "We are your masters who brought you out of the wilderness of teacher professionalism and into the house of direct instruction."

I. We are the State, which has brought students out of the wilderness of teacher-led classrooms and into the kingdom of test prep. Thou shalt have no other guidance before thee, and then it will follow as night follows day that No Child is Left Behind.

II. Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven images, not any likeness of anything that contradicts the Standards and their tests. For the State is a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them who don't obey.

III. Thou shalt not take the name of the Standardistos, thy gods, in vain. For the State nor the testing company will not hold him guiltless that takes their name in vain.

IV. Remember the Standards and keep them holy. The State blessed the tests and hallowed them. Thy adequate yearly progress scores shall comfort thee.

V. Honor thy Standards, that thy days as teachers may be long upon the land of direct instruction which the State gives you.

VI. Thou shalt not kill Standardistos.

VII. Thou shalt not have intercourse with any other than thy lawful Standards and test prep materials.

VIII. Thou shalt not steal time away from the Standards and preparation for the State's tests for frivolous matters.

IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against the Standards.

X. Thou shalt not covet lesson plans of bygone times. Nor shalt thou covet libraries, books, recess, art, music, nor anything that went before.

In these days comes the band of the Reading First 73 to preach to the multitudes."Verily we say unto you seeking Title 1 funds, among the skills of reading, none is greater than Phonemic Segmentation."

Blessed are those who follow the Standardisto drum roll, for theirs is the kingdom of government contracts.

Here's news of the Eleventh Commandment

A Coda

I'd like to do something a little nervy here and read from a work in progress. This is from a book titled A Three-Cornered Year.
I read to you from the first section, Fall.

Labor Day: The first Monday in September,
Dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers,
Marks the end-of-summer return to the enslavement of children.

Schoolyards once alive
With running, jumping laughter
Are now silent
As recess is outlawed.
Children trained to follow corporate orders.

Standardisto,
So sure of knowledge
So ignorant of childhood.

Emerson reminded us,
What standardistos hever knew:
We boil at different degrees,
Children do
And teachers too.

Start each day
With an invocation:
May happiness pursue you,
And catch you often.
Children
And teachers too.

Map me no maps.
Search for years to find
A Way.
And then the path changes.
Standardistos insist on blueprints
Of humiliation and defeat,
Marking out their shares of the kingdom.
A fishy map for facile fishery.

Show me the coordinate grid system
For happiness.

Put down your business plans and tell me:
Which is harder--
Putting a man on the moon
Or teaching long division?
Or the apostrophe.

Teachers,
Take your Congressional representative's behavior
With a grain of salt.
And a pound of emetic.
Ask him to explain his NCLB vote.

Ah, Standardistos: Those with the haunting fear
that some child,
Somewhere
May be having a good time.

Peagogical Principle:
When Standardistos speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.
Lack of kid-savvy
Is no impediment to Standardisto rules.

Pedagogical quackery turns princes
Into frogs.
And teachers discover that the arid Standards desert
Of deficiency and recrimination
Won't save them.

Mediocrity cherishes rules
And when corporate politicos
Ballyhoo for Standards,
Sure as night follows day,
Children lose recess.

Terrible things done in the name of Standards
Aren't Standards at all,
Just terrible things.


Note: Of all the members of the United Nations, the United States of America and Somalia (which has no legally constituted government) are the only two nations that have failed to ratify the U. N. convention on the Rights of the Child.

fini

Do you know why the Standardisto crossed the road?

To kill the chicken and sell the data.

I repeat: They didn't ride the bus in Montgomery. We must not DIBEL, follow the script, or give the tests.

Take The Pledge

Stages of NCLB

$71.40:

You decide: Do you want a revolution or not?

Susan Ohanian, Nashville, 11/18/06

INDEX OF NCLB IN YOUR FACE