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Indestructible! Nothing Can Stop it! The "Education Reform" Bubble
In 1958, The Blob – a gelatinous B-movie creature from outer space – crash landed in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania consuming whatever poor screaming extra happened to be directed into its path. “Devoid of personality and intelligence,” The Blob expanded relentlessly in Cold War America, moving from the screen to the our “popular consciousness,” becoming something of a “pop icon,” Steve Biodrowski wrote in a retrospective review in 1989. While the film was even horribly dated in 1989, The Blob nonetheless became a modern myth, an archetype capturing the deepest fear of the true American individual: that his unique self would be subsumed, lost forever in a formless, ill-defined mass.
Indestructible! Nothing Can Stop it! The BubbleNow, in 2011, we have a new B-movie horror: The Bubble.
Like The Blob, The Bubble grows unremittingly, threatening to obliterate the unique character of the individual. Unlike The Blob, The Bubble is real … and really boring.
Since George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, and still today under President Obama with Race to the Top, it feels to me, as a former high school teacher and current community college professor, like The Bubble – the drive towards standardized-testing, standardized learning, and standardized students – is ever-expanding. It threatens to consume our students’ and teachers’ minds, reducing the complex work of learning – individual thought, creativity, curiosity, empathy, citizenship – into a short list of machine-readable bubbles, that the students fill in, and which fill in the students themselves.
The Bubble standardizes the world, making it appear much more coherent than it really is. The Bubble doesn’t allow for elaboration, for alternative perspectives, for ambiguity, for debate. Rather, with its orderly rows of bubbles, and authoritative, syntactically clear solutions, The Bubble constructs a polished marble façade of truth, a mythology of consensus. And as it moves from the margins of the classroom to its focus, as it becomes central to the classroom experience, The Bubble encourages students to think like it, to reason in black and white terms, to become intellectually rigid, seeing the world as a series of clearly defined pre-selected options, rather the often grey, contested and confusing place in which we live and work.
The Bubble silences debate and speech; it is a quieting force, suffusing the classroom in silence. It centralizes knowledge in the hands of the state, the federal government, and testing industry, taking it out of the hands of classroom teacher, local communities, parents, and ultimately, students themselves, who are increasingly mandated to submit to its authority without recourse, without debate.
The Bubble is undemocratic.
And what’s more concerning is that the new breed of corporate reformers – who are the greatest supporters of The Bubble as a means for “accountability” – are themselves in a Bubble, in an echo-chamber of agreement all but cut off from dissent, and largely unwilling to entertain legitimate critiques of their proposals. For the last year, the “bad teacher” has become an icon of lazy avarice, an antagonist in a corporate media narrative that shows public education in state of crisis, a crisis on par with global warming as the promotional poster forWaiting for Superman suggests, with a cute, attentive kid sitting ready to learn at school desk amidst a bombed-out wasteland. This wasteland, though, is not the poverty caused by mass foreclosures, by outsourced jobs, nor by crumbling social services, by the destruction left in the wake of this Inside Job, but rather, by inept, overpaid educators, and the greedy unions who keep them safe from consequence. And The Bubble, and the reformers who support it, are the saviors.
The plot is about as believable as The Blob.
But this “bad teacher” narrative has been incredibly powerful: it is heavily subsidized by billionaires like Bill Gates, broadcast essentially unchallenged by the corporate media, and tacitly approved by President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who invited the kids from WFS to the White House). And it should thus come as little surprise, as the New York Times reported recently, this ire against teachers appears to never have been stronger (Mickey Huff and I present our extensive research on the framing of educators (and other public workers) in a chapter in the forthcoming Project Censored 2012 (Seven Stories Press)).
The most vocal critic of The Bubble – in every sense of the word – is distinguished education professor Diane Ravitch, who used to be ensconced in the free-market corporate education reform echo-chamber. After studying the disappointing data on NCLB, she freed herself from the hype, and wrote a best-selling, award winning critique of the corporate reform movement The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
Once outside of The Bubble, though, Ravitch was first actively ignored, and then when she could no longer be ignored, publically flogged. She recounted to me in an email conversation a year of frustration, as her publisher couldn’t get her on a single show to debate with Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and other corporate reformers. In the seminal event on education reform – NBC’s Education Nation, a week-long infomercial for WFS and free-market education reforms – she was afforded a scant 30-second clip, according to veteran educator andEducation Week blogger Anthony Cody’s interview with her. Once Ravitch did publish an NYT Op-Ed in which she called into question the hype around corporate education reform, she was not engaged thoughtfully, but was bashed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, whowrote that “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day.” Two prominent writers – NYT’s David Brooks and Bloomberg/Time’s Jonathan Alter – both wrote articles singling her out as some sort of fringe voice, a lone dissenter that is sadly misguided on corporate education reform, if only she could see the free-market light.
We’ve heard echoes of this before. “Cut off from dissenters, the [echo] chambers fill with an unjustified sense of certainty,” NPR reporter Brooke Gladstone observes in The Influencing Machine. Gladstone calls this phenomenon “incestuous amplification,” in which the “like-minded,” isolated or insulated from critique, grow increasingly extreme in there beliefs, “marginaliz[ing] the moderates and demonize[ing] dissenters.” The Bubble amplifies the chorus, it encourages ideological harmony, and shuts out or seeks out discredit anyone who refuses to sing along. Gladstone rightly believes this is “an ongoing threat to our democracy,” as we saw vividly illustrated in the Real Estate Bubble, in which unjustified optimism in the free-market, unfettered by earnest critique and dialogue, nearly destroyed our economy.
Unfettered by critique, unaccountable to questions, disinterested in serious debate, The Bubble will expand unchecked and unbalanced, Blob-like, gorging itself on dissenting opinion, a mass of coerced, gelatinous consensus, posing a threat not only to our children’s education, but to our democracy.
The End…?
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50 Comments so far
Show AllThere are certain corporations who will do anything to kill public education.
There's one condition of public education they wish to retain, the public funding of it.
I think edukashun is grately over raited. Just my to sense.
Leern ti spel er git of the thred u nuklhed.
you spelled 'think' wrong
The public service unions thought they'd secured their place inside the Corporatist bubble but alas they are finding that there is only enough room for Corp. CEOs and Top Gov't bureaucrats. To that end they are now in the bulls eye for destruction as are what is left of the private Unions. Everywhere Unions are under assault. Contracts are now only considered inviolate if they favor the Corp. elite, other wise they are ignored or broken.
The standardize testing is meant to create a standardized worker drone. It's the equivalent of a factory farm where one type of potato is grown in 100 mile long farms.
The goal is to create unthinking drones for industry and or the military. The elite have their own schools where their children go to become the future corrupt ruling class.
This is of course true but we shouldn't pretend it's just the "elites", or that this is all conscious. Most importantly, this view of people as cogs in a machine is perfectly compatible with the way science and engineering (at least the institutions and communities of science and engineering that exist now) are currently integrated into our society. It's not just a way to control people. It is also how engineers think of progress.
First and foremost, standardized testing was designed to make profit for the huge testing and publication industry.
Other theories about purpose miss the point.
I disagree. Of course that part is important, but American big business has always known how important education is as what Ellul called "pre-propaganda" (it's just plain old propaganda but whatever), and has invested incredible amounts of money in it for this reason, for decades now. A flexible labour market, in general, is way, way more important for business than such a minor (in comparison to what depends on it) "industry" (a bit OT, but isn't designating this an "industry" disturbing in itself?) In fact, if standardised testing was primarily good for profit this industry but didn't deliver the labour structure needed, it would need to be dismantled (by capitalist industry itself) or could even bring down the whole system. It's just way too important to keep people underpaid, exploited and in line. (So in fact, it may turn out be a good thing if you're right on this issue.)
Atomsk: Excellent analyses, this and the former post.
Tom, the u.s. school system has always been about creating drones that obey authority. The first thing a student is taught on his or her first day, when the bell rings for the first time, is to shut up and get in line. The potato analogy is apt. This truly is a nation full of spuds.
Most Western education is about that though. Not in this efficient and industrial fashion, but still. It's not like you guys had to invent everything that's fucked up, don't be shy to acknowledge the achievements of Europe :-D Even in terms of Empire, you still have some way to go if you ever want to do as much harm as us.
Do you imagine schooling is different in most countries of the world? The choral responses, reliance on memorizing textbook content, the teacher at the front of the classroom droning on and on--do you think it is so different in Africa, Latin America, Asia, or Europe, for that matter? As a matter of fact, there are plenty of schools in the United States that try to teach critical thinking and the scientific method. Perhaps more than in Asia. Why do you think schools abroad look here for models that teach higher-level schools? There are some, you know. It's just that you were not schooled in one.
My very similar thought while reading the article is that the Amerikan educational system strives to be an efficient brain processor that converts thinking children into pasteurized processed workbots, good conformist imperial citizenbots, and materialistic pop-culture consumerbots-- aka hive-mind "drones".
Therefore those private schools of the elite should be physically destroyed. Or is that violence and therefore unacceptable?
Having followed educational "reform" for more than forty years, I have come to the conclusion that people don't care about schools. It is all just talk, a a domain for ideologues to display their true colors, a cockfight full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
If society really cared about schools, leaders would allocate resources to solve problems. Both conservative solutions--academies, uniforms, a curriculum fraught with memorization, merit pay, test scores as analogues to dollars--and progressive solutions--portfolio assessments, smaller class sizes, addressing the needs of special populations of students--would be put to the test.
It takes resources to make change happen. So far, neither states nor the federal government have made any effort to increase educational funding. In fact, an effort is being made to defund public education at all levels. This latest "reform" effort will pass away as all the rest have done in the past as politicians find a new game to play. There is nothing new under the sun.
While I don't think the methods you listed as progressive are a panacea, or anything close even, but there is a deep difference between the two approaches: newer "conservative" solutions in fact try to save money - they use industrial (engineering based) quality control methods to optimise the "human resource production line." Merit pay is the same as productivity based pay (and remember how much traditional working class ideology likes that), test scores are just QC measurements of standardised quality criteria (even the idea that you can "standardise" levels of knowledge is ridiculous, but the basic operative principle that you can measure this by fucking multiple choice tests is straight out obvious lunacy), and the dehumanisation of learning is in general the same as the dehumanisation of labour in factories.
To be honest, this article is behind the times. Currently there is a huge debate about NCLB, and states are beginning to say NO to NCLB. Arne Duncan is considering waivers for certain states (apparently all Obama policies will be followed by waivers ---- think the massive healthcare bill ---- will Obama's place in history be The Waiver or is that The Waiverer?).
The bad news is we don't know what corporations will use to fill the void, could still be dependent on standardized testing because it's hugely profitable (little cost to actually manufacture and process and the states and localities pay for the actual labor). But to keep profits rolling in, they have to think of something new to replace all the material they sold the states over the past twenty years.
At risk of seeming boorish, I really hope that folks will consider the importance of learning about the Doctrine of Discovery, how it negated and still negates human rights in the no-longer-separate area of property law. In an era when all is product/resource/property, how this functions is important. Reaffirmed in US law in the 2005 SCOTUS case of Johnson v M'Intosh, laws and decrees dating from 15th century Europe essentially constitute a "too big to fail" version of property law.
As we are in competition with other countries for a global labor market, we naturally measure the effectiveness of our education system against theirs (we are doing this even if we think we are not: most arguments about the American education system end with an ominous nod in the direction of China). So, I'm just a little amazed that we aren't looking 'overseas' for the solutions to our education crisis. We should model our education system after countries with proven systems, like Finland and Japan. These systems, while they differ from ours, are not 'for profit' systems. The fact that these countries with citizens obviously concerned about the competitiveness of their children, don't trust their education to corporations should tell us all we need to know about the advisability of that idea.
Here is why its important to frame the debate in that manner: it places the corporations on the defense. What 'for profit' education advocates are thus seen as advocating, is a system of education UNIQUE in the entire world. So, the next question is, what make them think American children are so unique in their capabilities? The 'meme' of American uniqueness should be attacked wherever it is found. Its a weak argument (that stems from empire-thinking) because its an untrue argument. Ultimately, people who think Americans are unique (and thus deserve a uniquely 'for profit' healthcare system, or a uniquely 'for profit' education system) are, at the end of the day, thinking that the fact that we have more nukes pointed at everyone else than they have pointed at us, MAKES us unique. While it makes us uniquely thuggish, we are as individuals, rather ordinary. After a decade of killing 200,000 Iraqis for what 'they did to us' on 9-11, and tanking the global economy with mortgage derivatives, its time to attack American uniqueness before it destroys the planet.
Education, from the pov of individual competitiveness, in the current economic structure, is actually counterproductive, because it is about being able to use more efficient and productive tools, which, overall, *decrease* the total amount of human labour. Decreasing total amount of consumed labour and increasing the quality and amount of the workforce will of course decrease workers' economic power, and thus, wages. The struggle for competitiveness and efficiency leads to "flexible labour markets" - a highly trained, international, uniform army of unemployed.
This is why the central role of education is NOT about training a workforce (and why the fuck should companies not handle training at their own expense anyway? Why do individuals have to spend money to teach their kids shit that's only good for corporations?) Education is a democratic DUTY of any democratic state, that allows people to understand and help shape the world around them. Because Western civilisation has produced so much technology to control the world, the most basic duty of any democratic state is to give people the intellectual tools to understand them. If there is knowledge that allows someone to manipulate and control others, that knowledge should not be private and should be shared as widely as possible.
I so agree with everything you say here and you seem to cover the most glaring however, no one ever gets into the area of the really big picture and how our 'children' are viewed and managed by the controlling elite that is the scariest of all. As the adoptive grandmother of three young children, now 9, 10 & 12 - I've seen a part of the system that plays just as big a part as this educational slice as is the attack on Planned Parenthood that will ensure no contraceptives/abortions to reducing/eliminating social programs that help people, the goal is to remove children from parents/faith/education via any means necessary. The mold has been designed by the 'group' with the most money. Some call it a school to prison pipeline and I've been up close as a foster parent and have seen the protective care/foster care system and learned the money that drives it; it should scare the hell out of anyone reading this. If you're a parent, you're in the way and they will devise a way to fix that and get to your kids. In their view, they can find or make up any reason to prove we're bad parents and that we were given a shot at teaching our kids the rules but failed so they have to 'take over'. You'll have to battle TV and other media of course (and let's not forget their right to play violent video games as SCOTUS said last week) to do it and it's time for everyone to wake up and see this. The battle is here and the battle is now....for our kids. The teachers are just as in the way as we are. Don't believe me? Watch an episode of kids programming on cable/satellite, the big D for one and N ick also, every parent or authority figure are shown as idiots....kids rule every show and operate without parental or academic authority....it's disgusting and it tells kids to do whatever they want and to hell with parents and teachers. They have any number of ways of adding to their bottom line once that child has been torn away. August twel ve....demonstrations around the country at county buildings in every state, where children are being taken for BS reasons. Educate yourself on this one, get involved and save your child or mine.
Maiden: excellent post, crucial points. I'm trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and could use your help.
Please post any information you have (links, books, whatever) and keep in touch here.
Elizabeth H
RIGHT ON TARGET regarding Diz and Nick. I have noticed that for years now, have voiced my concerns, and been shouted down because of it. GLAD to read another person put it to words (and so well, too!) because that means there are more and will be more. If my children were young in this day and age, there'd be NO television set in the house.
"Watch an episode of kids programming on cable/satellite, the big D for one and N ick also, every parent or authority figure are shown as idiots....kids rule every show and operate without parental or academic authority."
Is this new? Television sit-coms have always portrayed parents as shlubs.
"Is this new?"
Relatively speaking, yes it is "new". It wasn't like that in the 70s, but I did notice it by the mid 80s when I was raising my daughter. So, an entire generation has been indoctrinated and the situation has neither improved nor changed.
I really like the point you make about mass media directly assaulting parents' and teachers' power over child-rearing. In general too, I think it's pretty obvious that the current "inefficiency" of the educational system (and parenting) stems mainly from the overwhelming manipulative power that centrally produced (and designed based on engineering principles) mass entertainment/propaganda has over children, compared to both education and family.
Parents and schools have huge disadvantages over mass media: they have much more complex goals, respect (and of course love) children and their development more, and are at least in principle against manipulation for ulterior motives. They handle (not always, but very very often) children as an end to themselves, their development not as a tool to achieve some other external goal (increasing consumption or increasing jingoism or militarism). Simply put: family and education have lost a lot of their pedagogical power over children to mass produced entertainment and other media. In addition to this, I think the media technologies themselves, or at least their current social forms, have pretty obvious effects on some basic mechanisms of human thinking itself, mainly in the form of decreasing focus and attention span.
Basically, parents and schools are competing with mass produced crap for children's attention, and in such a "free (media) market" they're clearly losing. Not many teachers can compete with video games in terms of holding a kids interest, or with idiotic TV, or Facebook games and so on. These technologies and tools, whether you think of them as good or bad or neutral, have a definite *long term* formative effect on children. 7.5 hours of daily consumption of screen media designed for easy consumption, based on research investments orders of magnitude higher than research into traditional pedagogy, well, that will have an effect. I don't think violent video games are the biggest problem because I'm not sure what kind of effects violence has (although I can't imagine that its overwhelming importance in the media diets of most children doesn't have an effect) - I think it's the decrease of attention span and the general world view propaganda effects that are the most important.
I mean, I'm not sure that a normal horror video game (which can be gory enough) in which you slaughter monsters, is as damaging as, say the disgusting racist jingoistic games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, in which children can play as AC-130 gunship gunners ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1Gg5Sehg0 - notice the video poster's comment: "ac-130 gunship call of duty 4 modern warfare mission. this is y this is the best game i have ever played. death from above"; compare with a real life AC-130 footae: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OkoWEMCnLQ ). I keep bringing this game up because it's still one of the most popular video game series that exist now. Its development (last year's episode was called "Call of Duty: Black Ops") is also, errr, interesting, especially the way it parallels actual the real life military/political approach to ongoing wars. This is of course very important - but even so, I think the ongoing social destruction of traditional types of mental activity (mainly traditional linear reading) might be worse.
In general, not many (generally overworked, underpaid, exhausted and often daily humiliated, completely pride-less) parents can compete with with Farmville. Not many physics or mathematics or history teachers can compete with the retarded pseudo-science of video games, comic books, and even the general "popular science" shit (which is often so incredibly shallow and bombastic that it becomes an absolute misrepresentation of science). Having turned children's pedagogical environment into a competitive market, one cannot expect difficult, time investment-heavy issues, which are often not immediately satisfying or even interesting, like an understanding of the scientific method or some overview of history to be able to compete successfully. These things are difficult, require a lot of time, and the satisfaction they cause is delayed often for very long times. Compared to the short cycle of the easy "investment" in mass media consumption (which basically consists of letting the shit take over your mind) and the satisfaction it provides (seeing a big explosion or something), pedagogy and traditional child rearing simply have no chance. This is why so many young people, even if they're interested in, say, physics, have no basic understanding of even the simplest (and most beautiful) concepts and theories of classical mechanics, the most important seed of modern science and scientific education (I'm pretty sure that even Newton's first law or even the concept of mass is far from being widely understood).
Our Democracy??
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/04-4
Kids are doing poorly because their families are broken, their communities are broken, and schools have been cut off from reliable sources of revenue. However, the blame is falling on the teachers because they are unionized, and the schools because they are "gummint-run". People even blame clothing for failure in school--put those kids in uniforms and they'll learn real good! There's no shortage of boneheads in administration of education, which is why they just need to give complete control of the schools over to the teachers and do away with all the deadwood above them.
"The Bubble encourages students to think like it, to reason in black and white terms, to become intellectually rigid, seeing the world as a series of clearly defined pre-selected options, rather than the often grey, contested and confusing place in which we live and work."
Yes, indeed, this is precisely what the emphasis on standardized education does to the human mind. It destroys the imagination. It reduces the world to a series of clearly defined choices that seldom, if ever, exist.
What happens, however, when none of the existing choices work any more? What happens when highly innovative, inventive and imaginative minds are needed to create new choices and new solutions?
Students grounded in standardized testing will not be able to make those leaps into the spheres of new knowledge. They will be trying to apply old choices to new problems--which is precisely, of course, what our political leaders in both major political parties have been promoting for some time. The end result is a total stagnation of ideas and necessary solutions.
Change is the nature of human life. Standardized testing, however, works on the false assumption that all things are permanent and all choices will always be the same.
It will be the human imagination that leads our species out of the wilderness of false choices, but imagination is the last thing our current political leaders and the phony educational reformers wish to instill in young people.
Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination ... is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
The nations that recognize the importance of developing the human imagination in their educational systems are the nations that will survive, perhaps even prosper. The others, led by the blind bigots who support standardized testing, will have no future.
Sadly, instead of supporting educational systems that inspire young people to develop their creative and imaginative skills, our lost leaders are taking us down the path to oblivion.
Einstein also said that the honeybee is the most important living thing on the planet, because without it all civilizations would lose their food sources and collapse.
Similarly, the human imagination is the honeybee of all human progress, for it fertilizes all new ideas and enables them to flourish.
Thing is, I don't think too many acts of imagination had much to do with schooling in any form. And education was far, far from perfect before standardised testing - it's just a natural consequence of the trends organising the capitalist mode of production and social organisation. Innovative minds are not often created by educational systems - sometimes they are created by great teachers, but more often than not, it's the community they grow up in, their families, friends, access to knowledge, how it's discussed in the family, what values are associated with it etc (in addition to one's own talent and effort of course) that brings innovative ideas out.
Focus on facts and memorisation and physical discipline was very traditional in Europe - it's not like this focus on an industrialised form of education (because standardised testing is nothing but applying assembly line quality control techniques to people) is such a new trend. It's a more extreme form, of course, but Western education has been about this for a few centuries now.
Many American universities have stressed critical and creative thinking instead of rote learning. Indeed, I know many college professors, and they all dismiss rote learning and standardized testing as the lowest forms of education.
The whole "Writing Across the Curriculum" movement that started in the 1960s was an attempt to promote serious written dialogue, problem solving, and argumentation instead of non-thinking multiple guess tests.
This is why many foreign students come to America to attend college and graduate school. They are very open about their reasons for wanting to participate in our system of higher education. They claim that critical and creative thinking are simply not allowed in their nations' universities.
The problem is that the corporations are making huge inroads into our colleges and universities, and wherever possible they are trying to force our system of higher education to accept the same failed pedagogy of standardized testing, rote learning and lock-step thinking that has already destroyed K-12 education.
It's the next step in our nation's determined effort to teach students how not to think.
OLD GUY: Great post. I've written several children's books precisely to stir imagination; however, the literary agents I've dealt with want things like Zombie or vampire stories, really ugly dark stuff. I don't and won't write it. I fully agree with your well-constructed points.
Siouxrose, good luck with your children's stories. I still remember the children's stories I read (or our teachers read to us) over 60 years ago. It was the magic in those plots (not zombies or vampires) and the imaginative storytelling techniques they used that pulled me into those worlds and made me a voracious reader for life.
In my opinion, these early stories that stir a child's imagination and turn them into active readers for life would go a long ways towards solving many of our educational problems.
You might try some of the smaller or mid-size publishing companies. That's where you will often find editors and publishers with the most literary integrity.
Good luck!
One summer, when I was teaching an introductory science course at a university, I had a student who was a senior at a private college in the same state. He needed one more course to graduate, and his parents lived in the city I was teaching in, so he took the course.
I gave a standardized (i.e. multiple-choice) test after a few weeks and he got the lowest grade in the class. When I asked him how long it had been since he took that kind of test, he said "since high school." So before the next test, he had to learn the material, and he had to learn how to take a multiple-choice test.
He did that, and passed the course, but the experience says a lot about large state schools and small private schools. How many minds are wasted by spending so much time learning how to take a test? And how many teachers misjudge the abilties of their students by giving those tests?
Full disclosure: I always gave those tests in the introductory classes because I did not have the time to grade 100 or so essay tests a couple of times each semester, and publish research papers, and write grant proposals, and serve on committees. The system required it. In classes of 10 to 30 students, I could give tests that let me evaluate the students, but not in the big classes.
Bubble -- wrong metaphor.
Hive or meat-grinder would have been better.
Thanks Adam great article
DIVERSITY is The first thing to kill for a religious fundamentalist or a wall street one & right now in some quarters they are ONE.
DIVERSITY is a wonderful train it goes everywhere we don't often know who drives it, they say EVOLUTION, that's what they say, but we won't go there, I think its PEOPLE, I meant passengers REMEMBER its a train, people have a go & drive us through mountains, cliff, lakes, little houses in the prairies, that way we get to know the perils & wonders of cliffs, mountains, oceans & other people, consciousness.
We experience all sorts of states hear, touch, feel & SEA LIFE. We get to slow down, speed or stop the train if we must. When somebody is not feeling well even if it is only one child. we don't ditch the last carriage even its of a different colour, smaller, bigger, the latest trend or to old to be dragged along carriage. the last carriage stays even if it slows the train.
Diversity is creativity, creativity is key to evolution, it does not in any way DIMINISH US from being SPIRITUAL evolving ORGANISMS.
FUNDAMENTALISM too, needs a train SADLY it does not go very far it tend to go around the same circuit, perhaps because its safe or perhaps its of the interest of a very few or most likely both I will live to you .
First the drivers & foresight are often the same ones controlling all the way the journey & DESTYnation. The roles are pretty much distributed the goals are set from the get go. la difference is definitely not tolerated.
The train is not allowed to stop everywhere if it does passengers are not allowed to touch, smell, hear, feel or experience everything.
All carriages are of the same size, colours & shape. Moving between carriages is not advised, for your safety. asking questions to the driver is not recommended one bit.
The driver may decide to avoid certain cliffs & seas specially mountains for your own good.
Accepting his wisdom is definitely encouraged, part of his teachings, which takes us back to diversity & education.
The 21 century objectives of fundamentalist America is financed & controlled by big business its goals dismantling EDUCATION, the UNION, a mission of not all faith, but many fundamentalist institutions
combined with science and a cannibalistic flavour of capitalism, both may give birth to a new strand of DOGMA. A train to nowhere.
Just a guess, they will fail but at what price I ask you.
No terror no torture just truth.
Can the Jeanie be put back in the bottle? Can we un-ring the bell? The Federal government has grossly over stepped it's constitutional authority in virtually every way possible. Invading, and attempting to control every aspect of our lives. What better way to control a population then to “educate” the little children, to mold them into happy productive citizen workers. This federal behemoth is creating death and destruction around the globe. Here at home it is destroying our middle class, our economy, the educational system,and along with it our childrens future. A good place to start putting this federal monster back in it's place,would be to end all federal involvement in education at every level. I know this sounds shocking and unworkable to many of you, but bear in mind there was a time in this country when there was no department of education. Many of our locally funded and operated schools produced outstanding results. Think of all the writers, inventors, leaders, and other great achievers America produced before the federal system took over. The complete takeover of the school system is a tool of empire, and that is why it was instituted. We need to take control of our lives back from the brain dead corporate tools that dominate the federal government, or they will take us to ruin. Everyone in life will not be a high achiever,a scientist, a doctor, or a CEO. We do nothing to deal with this reality. Education doesn't teach you what to think, it teaches you how to think A federally run school system cannot create the independent imaginative thinkers we need to move successfully in to the future. Let's start dismantling this federal monster with the DOE.
First let's get rid of Duncan. When he was superintendent of Chicago he and Senator Feinstein wrote letters to the California legislature to promote mayoral control of LAUSD, in Los Angeles. They both stated that those who ran Chicago before Daley took over in 1995 had put the district into $1.8 billion in debt which they had to clean up. I used to have a complete copy of the 1994 Chicago Budget until someone decided to relieve me of it mysteriously. However, I had scanned the pertinent financial pages onto a disc which was unmarked. The budget was balanced. BOTH TOLD BIG LIES FOR POLITICAL REASONS. I have copies of the letters and my letter to Chicago and their official response. In 1995 Obama become president of the Annenburg Foundation for Chicago Public Schools. Annenburg poured about $360 million in in 6-7 years. Read their own report. Almost nothing happened?
The Chicago School of Finance has helped to crash the world finances a few times. The Chicago School of Education is now spreading their failure to the rest of the U.S. and planet. Is this what we want????
Rod Paige under Bush 1 lost his job eventually when it was discovered that his claim that he had dropped the dropout rate to 0% when it was really 50%. Should not the same happen to Duncan????
"First let's get rid of Duncan" No. First, let's get rid rid of the Dept of Education.
See iwonder, below for further exposition. You mention the Rod Paige fiasco. I heard about it years ago and then it disappeared as a news story. Our entire federal education plan is a lie built on hypocrisy.
It is June 25. A child in P.S. 24 in the Bronx in late April passed the practice ELA tests, which predicted that she would pass the actual tests. Her parents spent more than $1,000 on a theater summer camp for the child who has "gifted-n-talented" musical aptitude. The camp is to start on July 5. On June 24, PS 24's Principal Donna Connelly, sends a machine-signed note dated June 20 that the girl failed the language part of the ELA IN EARLY MAY and is mandated to go to summer school, which starts on July 5-Aug 9. (Highly paid, Connelly: Why didn't the parents get the results in May?) On Aug 9, the child must pass the language part of the "No Child Left Behind" ELA test or be held back from the fifth grade. So: the Einsteins who run New York and the U.S. set it up so that a 10-year-old believes that she will go to fifth grade with her peers next fall and this summer will receive one-on-one singing and dancing lessons while also singing and acting in two musicals. Because PS 24 didn't tell her parents what they knew in May and put into an impersonal letter June 20, until June 25, the hardworking parents must now tell the child that her dream camp is cancelled and she must study all summer and that she likely will be ridiculed by her peers this fall if she fails at studying hard when her heart is somewhere else. Great! Let's shaft our 10-year-olds in a misplaced attempt to turn all children into productive workers who can do math and write, even if they have perfect pitch and memorize melodies and lyrics at first glance. Donna Connelly, the principal at PS 24, should be fired as should the little girl's teacher. Her parents told that teacher over and over to challenge their little girl and give her more homework and send it home with her. No, the teacher never complied. Was she stupid, lying, or rebellious? No matter. A 10-year-old, a future entertainer in the U.S. when Americans are going to need entertainment as their health and retirements disappear, was handled like a gulag prisoner. Tests of teachers are equally insane. Read "Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences," by Thomas Armstrong. If you finally take a scientific look at good and bad teachers and students, you realize that, perhaps, if you let them focus on their aptitude and then work that aptitude into other subjects like math and language, you might get better results--instead of the cookie-cutter approach created by our state and federal legislators who all came from the same cookie-cutter, which was in the shape of a dollar sign. So, get lost Donna Connelly, the phone-call dodging principal of PS 24 (how chicken can you get? Awful chicken once you have those paychecks coming in regularly), and those NY politicians and federal lunatic so-called congresspersons.
What most impresses (and frightens) me about Bessie's excellent article is how it articulates a syndrome of our time in which there is a sense of an unstoppable "Blob" or Bubble which we feel powerless to stop or even effectively to oppose. He says about the proponents of educational corporativism and accountability, that they live in "an echo-chamber of agreement all but cut off from dissent, and largely unwilling to entertain legitimate critiques of their proposals." Whoa now, isn't this the very bubble in which all of us live who try to make "legitimate critiques" of policies, educational and otherwise, of the reigning Dear Leader in the White House? To raise questions about humanitarian intervention in Libya that kills "protected" civilians or about health care "reforms" that are designed to maximize profits for health care industries, is to marginalize ourselves by standing outside the mantle of acceptability in the circles of our peers. Certainly I feel empathy for Diane Ravitch for being ignored and castigated because she breaks ranks from professional educators supporting Race to the Top. But hers is, alas, the fate of all of us who have to come to the comments threads of Common Dreams to find people who will join us in declaring that the emperor is naked. Though the emperor has his critics, the "Blob" of consensus is so smothering that it's unlikely that this critique will rise to the level of (perish the thought) actually voting Dear Leader out of office. If a somewhat optimistic "yes we can" prevailed in the presidential election of 2008, "we could do worse" will be the shoulder-shrugging resignation to the inevitability of the Blob in 2012. Unless, by some miracle, we suddenly discover that we are actually human beings with human agency and can resist rather than being swallowed up the blob.
These corporate thugs want to privatize everything on the planet so they can bilk the system and get rich. I saw a Frontline program, College, Inc, and the American tax payer has been bilked for 500 billion dollars in student loans that all went into these thieves pockets. 500 billion that could have been used to build good, affordable community colleges. Public libraries are being privatized. Maybe the police and fire departments will be next. The lackeys for these thugs will get kicked out in the next elections after not raising the debt ceiling,after another financial collapse and they impose their austerity measures.
We must be aware about the debating the issue of public & private schools, it is almost similar to the weapon of mass distraction.
ONE DIRECT THREAT TO EDUCTION IS THE SUBTLE PRIVATISATION OF IT THAT IS TAKING PLACE.
PRIVATISATION AN EROSION A THEFT OF PUBLIC ASSETS INCLUDING SCHOOLS. A PLANETARY EPIDEMIC & HAEMORRHAGE, WE MUST PUT AN END TO IT.
FIRST WE MUST WORK ON A GRASS ROOT LEVEL TO REJECT DEEPENING CLASS DISADVANTAGE.
THE OTHER WAY WOULD BE TO SIMPLY REFUSE TO RE-ELECT THE POLITICIANS WHO BREAK THE SOCIAL CONTRACT BY PRECISELY NOT RESPECTING THEIR PROMISE TO NOT SELL PUBLIC ASSETS INCLUDING SCHOOLS. MILLIONS OF PARENTS COULD MARCH FOR THEIR CHILDREN.
ITS NOTHING SHORT OFRUPTURE OF A CONTRACT THE MOST SERIOUS ONE NEXT TO ENGAGING INTO COWARD CRIMINAL WARS.
No terror no torture just truth
----> WHY? WHY THE BI-PARTISAN DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION??? READ THIS INSIGHTFUL WSWS PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE, LINKED BELOW FOR FULL ARTICLE!
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jul2011/pers-j02.shtml
The assault on public education in America
Andre Damon
2 July 2011
The ruling class in the United States is intensifying its campaign to dismantle public education.
With the new fiscal year that began yesterday, states throughout the country are slashing education funding, leading to the layoff of tens of thousands of teachers and the closure of hundreds of schools.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are using the fiscal crisis—the outcome of decades of tax cuts to the rich, the bailout of the banks, and an economic crash caused by rampant speculation—as an opportunity to undermine and eliminate public education.
In 2010 alone, 151,000 state and local education workers were laid off. In the coming school year, a further 227,000 layoffs are planned, according to a recent survey by the American Association of School Administrators. This is the elimination, in just one year, of 2.2 percent of the 10.3 million state and local education workers in the US.
California is cutting university funding by 23 percent, on top of earlier cuts, which will lead to further tuition hikes. Florida is cutting 15,000 children from a school readiness program for low-income families. Michigan is cutting spending on K-12 education by $470 per student, which will force local districts to lay off teachers and shut down schools. New York, the home state of Wall Street, is cutting its education budget by 6.1 percent. The list goes on and on.
...
In Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, teachers have been forced into signing contracts that cut their pay, increase their hours and give administrators the right to fire them for any reason.
The attack on public education is a bipartisan policy. Governors, mayors, and state legislators—Democrat and Republican alike—are working in tandem to close and charterize schools.
The entire process is overseen by the Obama administration, which has made “education reform” a key component of its domestic agenda. Obama has tied additional funding through the “race to the top program” to the expansion of charter schools and the implementation of punitive measures against teachers, such as merit pay.
Obama has deliberately blamed teachers for the crisis of education, praising the mass firing of educators at “failing schools.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street speculators responsible for the economic crisis have been given a free pass, and indeed are now wealthier than ever.
Equally culpable are the trade unions, which have worked with the Obama administration to implement its attack on education. Amid mass layoffs and wage cuts, the teachers’ unions have rejected any struggle. In fact, they have supported the expansion of charters and the sell-off of schools, the destruction of tenure, and the entire framework of the fiscal crisis, demanding only that their right to collect dues from their members be protected.
The dismantling of public education represents a historic turning point in the United States. The concept that everyone should have access to education provided by the state, one long central to American democracy, is under attack.
...
The Civil Rights movements as well had as a central aim the extension of decent public education to African Americans.
All of this is now being reversed. The attack on education is one manifestation of a social counterrevolution, in the United States and internationally: the assault on the gains made by the working class over decades of struggle.
Underlying this attack is a historic reversal in the position of the United States. If the expansion of public education was associated with the growth of American capitalism, the attack has been associated with a period of decline.
There is a class policy at work. The financial aristocracy that has arisen along with, and indeed as a product of, this decline, has absolute contempt for democratic and egalitarian principles at the heart of public education. This aristocracy has a stranglehold over the entire political system and controls both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Free, universal public education is a democratic, not a specifically socialist, demand. The defense and expansion of public education, however, is incompatible with a society whose fundamental principle is inequality, a society in which trillions are handed to the banks and the entire political and media establishment proclaims that there is “no money” to keep schools open and to pay teachers a decent wage.
Public education can be defended only through the struggle for socialism: that is, to the extension of the principle of equality to every aspect of life, through the establishment of democratic control by the working class over the economy. The central impulse of public education, to “equalize the conditions of men,” must become the watchword of a new political struggle by the working class.
Outstanding article. Inspired humans like Adam Bessie and professor Diane Ravitch make me think we still have hope. After reading countless other articles, seeing little fight against the corporate machine, I sometimes wonder where our collective brains and backbones have gone. Thank you Adam and Diane!
"A consequence of the slow growth endemic to the developed economies is that the giant corporations that dominate today’s economic world are compelled to search for new markets for investment, outside their traditional fields of operation, leading to the takeover and privatization of key elements of the state economy. The political counterpart of monopoly-finance capital is therefore neoliberal restructuring, in which the state is increasingly cannibalized by private interests.
"It should hardly surprise us, under these circumstances, that financial circles now increasingly refer to public education in the United States as an unexploited market opportunity—or that the private education industry is calling for a further opening-up of the multi-trillion-dollar global public education market to capital accumulation."
This quotation is from the current July-August issue of the Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine. Go to monthlyreview.org The whole issue is devoted to "Education under fire: the U. S. corporate attack on students, teacher, and schools." Excellent articles on economics, militarism, race, testing, "the culture of poverty reloaded," and more.