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'Teachers Want Corporate America Assessed'
It has been more than a week ago since I stood in Times Square penned in behind barricaded fences in a sea of tens of thousands protesters at the Occupy Wall Street rally. As an education blogger, I was on the lookout for teachers when I saw a man with a large yellow sign that read, “Teachers Want Corporate America Assessed.” 
In the past year, three newly established grassroots education movements have been organized as parents, teachers, and citizens begin to focus on ending the reign of terror in schools. The fight, however, is just beginning. (Image: Schools Matter)
The message was loud and clear -- it is time for educators to turn the table on the corporations and politicians and begin evaluating, measuring and assessing their performance. Here are some well-known statistics: 25 million people are out of work or underemployed, 50 million people have no access to health insurance and one in five children in the U.S. is living in poverty, with four of every ten black children living in poverty. Everyone but the wealthy has become part of corporate America's collateral damage, and the country appears poised on the brink of calamity. So far the protests have been relatively peaceful, but unless the deep and widespread concerns jar loose some real change, if history is any guide, the anger and outrage will not remained contained.
Despite the potential consequences of joining in the protests (like being fired), teachers are also standing up and participating in the OWS movement. Teachers have finally had enough. After years of blame for students’ low test scores in a country that has no accountability for the perpetrators of endless wars and the economic meltdown that make teaching evermore challenging, teachers are beginning to loudly call out those in power and to reclaim their voices that have been muffled by years of threats and sanctions.
Since its inception in 2002, teachers have known that No Child Left Behind was bad policy, but no one was listening or even cared. In fact, anyone who voiced opposition was accused of engaging the “bigotry of low expectations,” even though today’s officialdom now acknowledges the criticism of impossible testing targets was, in fact, true.
Four years ago, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute summarized his findings on NCLB. Research showed the damage to American education by NCLB included
- Conversion of struggling elementary schools into test-prep factories;
- Narrowing of curriculum so that disadvantaged children who most need enrichment would be denied lessons in social studies, the sciences, the arts and music, even recess and exercise, so that every available minute of the school day could be devoted to drill for tests of basic skills in math and reading;
- Demoralization of the best teachers, now prohibited from engaging children in discovery and instead required to follow pre-set instructional scripts aligned with low-quality tests;
- Boredom and terror among young children who no longer looked forward to school but instead anticipated another day of rote exercises and practice testing designed to increase scores by a point or two.
What a difference a few years makes. OWS has catalyzed a long overdue conversation about the abuses of corporate power and, it is the spark that has also ignited the pent-up anger and frustration brewing in the education community for a decade. The pushback against corporate abuse in all areas of our lives, including education, is well underway and gaining momentum.
In the past year, three newly established grassroots education movements have been organized as parents, teachers, and citizens begin to focus on ending the reign of terror in schools. Save Our Schools and National Call to Action held a Rally and Conference in Washington over the summer and is now a national organization with chapters in more than 30 states. Parents Across America and United Opt Out National are gaining traction by shining a spotlight on legislation, generating excitement and political action, and keeping a close watch on the education policy positions of candidates running in local school boards and all the way to Congress. What they all have in common is a passion for child advocacy and for authentic learning that strengthens our democracy.
This translates into their core demands to end the abuse and misuse of high stakes testing and to return to well-rounded curriculums and community control over local schools. These are only three of many organized political groups providing a platform for the millions of Americans who see how the unrestrained greed of corporations has hijacked the country and our political leaders.
These patriotic citizens are passionate and determined, not because of self-interest, but because they understand that the destruction of a sound public education system is a direct assault on democracy itself. They want their country back, they want their professional lives back, and they want their schools back. Parents are joining to support teachers because they see how the test and punish model is aimed at indoctrinating their children into becoming mindless, obedient corporate citizens and consumers. Parents are tired of seeing their children humiliated and used as guinea pigs, measured, assessed, and labeled as early as kindergarten. And teachers with a conscience that their professional integrity demands are no longer willing to mindlessly execute orders from powerful moneyed interests that are harmful to their students and their profession.
Amidst all the chattering on TV about education reform, teachers are hard at work each day in overcrowded, dilapidated classrooms with meager supplies and budgets. Many teach in classrooms with hungry, anxious students who lack health care and safe neighborhoods. Other teachers are seeing more homeless students whose parents lost jobs or have been deported because they came here illegally. Teachers will continue to teach children who might have one or both parents overseas fighting in Afghanistan. Despite all this, teachers continue to do whatever is necessary to care for their students. Teachers now find themselves as the last line of defense in the battle for the souls of our nation's children.
That's why teachers will continue to occupy Wall Street and Washington, Trenton and Oakland, Knoxville and Raleigh, as they turn the tables and demand accountability for the crimes against children being committed in the name of education reform. They are finally standing up to the bullies. As Congress debates No Child Left Behind and the future role of the federal government in education, this time around teachers and parents are no longer going to be silent, sitting on the sidelines. They are going to be marching in the streets, protesting, calling their congressmen and senators and making their voices heard. Teachers are finally demanding the freedom to teach and the professional autonomy and respect that they deserve.
We can do better! Join one of the many organizations fighting for the future of our children and our nation. Go to their websites, make a donation, and get involved.
http://unitedoptout.com/our-demands-for-public-education
http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/
http://parentsacrossamerica.org/
38 Comments so far
Show AllTeachers must go on strike...Nationwide...January 1,2012...
One way Arne Duncan style reform has impacted education has been the abandonment of learning activities like field trips throughout American classrooms. If you cannot justify a field trip according to state standards, you cannot go. That means no visits to museums, planetariums, aquariums, galleries, and public parks. It means that school time is just that: seat time spent in drill and practice.
Local events, local history, local assets are sacrificed for state and federal long-term goals that may have no relevance to communities. Who cares about the deserts of the Southwest if you live in the Great Lakes? Why not study the Lakes in detail, not the lives of plants and animals few students will ever see in their natural surroundings? Why not study racism as it played out locally rather than racism as a topic that is only relevant to Detroit or Montgomery, AL?
Education needs to be relevant to students' lives. It should answer real questions they have about their environment and their history. It should not be about proving the superiority of one school over another, one teacher over another, or one student over another. We need to test only to improve instruction and to help students learn. Comparison is what we don't need.
Arne Duncan is an incompetant ass and an idiot. Hired by a fool.
Surely you don't mean students don't need an overview though? A framework to hang their learning on?
Testing is a means to help students and teachers understand what they have learned and what they have not. Teachers can adjust their teaching according to what they learn about their students' progress. Students can see where they have fallen short and can ask the important questions that help them to understand the material. This sort of testing is called "formative" and is meant to improve instruction.
Summative assessment can summarize how much students have learned in a course, in a year, in a grade. It is frequently used as a judgment about teachers, schools, students, and school districts. It also is used to allocate resources--the poor performers getting the punishment of fewer resources. I question this use of testing. Assessment should be used to improve the teaching/learning process--and not to drive hurtful comparisons between students, teachers, and schools.
Thank you.
Those interested in testing and the flaws in standardized testing to evaluate students, teachers, and schools in most contexts should check Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man and also Alfred Binet's original writings.
Binet himself, as much as anyone the progenitor of standardized tests, warned against almost every use currently made of them.
I want teachers assessed. Why are so few willing to teach an accurate view of USA and world history? Why are schools hot-beds of false patriotism? Why do so few schools use Zinn's History as a text book?
Still trying to unlearn the 'lies my teachers taught me'..........
many of them would love to teach zinn
but are denied chance
Public school teachers do not choose the textbooks they use. They ususally are chosen by the school district from a list prepared by their state's education department.
And even if they chose to insert material from unauthorized sources (like Zinn's book), they might be disciplined, and might be fired.
textbooks are often selected by the largest school districts, nationwide, e.g. Texas.
Seriously? You claim, in one of your other comments, that you have been teaching for decades, yet you want teachers "assessed" over why they don't teach an "accurate view" of history and use Howard Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." as a textbook? I call B. S. on this.
Anyone who has ever been a classroom teacher in the U.S. knows that teachers do NOT choose their own textbooks, and teachers who deviate from the district-approved propaganda are putting themselves in real danger of unemployment.
The real "problem" with teachers is that they still have strong unions, and the powers that be want to destroy all unions in this country.
Are there "bad" teachers? Sure. Just as there are bad nurses, doctors, lawyers, ministers, electricians, plumbers, chefs, businessmen, politicians, etc. So what? Having served on a school board, I know that it is not at all difficult to get rid of "bad" teachers. Unions don't protect "bad" teachers, they just make sure that the rights of all the teachers to due process and fairness are observed.
Thanks to their union, teachers have protection from being arbitrarily fired on some jerk's whim. A protection, I might add, that would protect a good teacher who dared to use "A People's History of the United States" as a reference book in her classroom.
Somehow, I don't believe you really "want teachers assessed." I think you want the teachers' unions destroyed. Shame.
What we need is an assessment of every public school teacher in America. Those who are good should get an immediate raise in pay, and those who prove to be lacking should be fired. However seeing that it is almost impossible to fire a incompetent teacher, most likely public education will remain in the miserable state it is in today.
It's challenging, this business of framing the criteria for "good" teachers and "good" teaching. and a substantial part of the challenge is first agreeing on what we want for our children, our students: what we want them to learn, how we want them to learn it, when and where we think that learning should take place. Perhaps the time has finally come for the beginnings of this vitally necessary dialogue in this country. The old-school demagogues in both state and federal legislatures have done too much damage for far too long.
go drink more cool aid, its always the working people, including teachers who are the problem and the scapegoats
what they hell do you do for a living, that makes you so superior
djb...Thanks for the comment. I have been teaching since 1957. Every grade level. Recently at a college.
Really? And exactly how does one do an assessment? What criteria does one use? How does one assess those doing the assessing to evaluate their competency to evaluate others?
Yes, there are incompetent teachers. No that is not the reason schools are a mess. Personally, I would fire teachers who regularly expect their students to be medicated.
Part of the reason there are incompetent teachers is that some principals and other administrators don't have the guts to deal with problems. Also, the system as it stands now, pushes many good teachers out due to the bureaucracy and fear of innovation and creativity. Uh-oh, it might not work. I once had a department head tell me he didn't know how anyone in my class could learn if they weren't sitting with their feet on the floor and hands folded.
Schools, like police, are expected to deal with/solve problems of society that are not of their making. Repeal of NCLB is the place to start. Then start pulling the federal gov't out of the education business. Local control of schools is imperative, some will thrive, others won't, or will learn from those that do..
Great post!
"principals and other administrators don't have the guts to deal with problems"
Let's add school boards and state education agencies to that, could we?
"Let's add school boards and state education agencies..." We sure can, and as others here have pointed out, why are we not assessing politicians and bureaucrats in general? We ought to start with an assessment of campaign promises, fulfilled or ignored with built in recall possibilities.
It's almost always the system that doesn't work that produces poor results.
Lets add them in.
If only people were so keen on "assessment" and "performance evaluation" in the case of people with real decisionmaking power, and not just poor slobs who have no freedom whatsoever in their work.
For example, the people pushing "school reform", a regressive, reactionary and authoritarian set of changes that boil down to basically turning education into a production line for creating mostly ignorant but docile interchangeable "workers", fit for the corporate capitalist model of production. I mean, didn't these people have enough time and money to prove that focus on testing works? If teachers are supposed to demonstrate year-on-year development, why isn't Duncan and the rest of the technocratic retards willing to take the same assessment? If teachers, the outcome of whose work depends very much on the set of students they get, their social circumstances and the general cultural environment, are supposed to be able to overcome this variability, why aren't the same types of performance evaluations required from the top people? Why aren't they willing to practice what they preach? Is it because they need more time (unlike teachers who have to perform immediately) - or is it because they are just hypocritical, ignorant scum with at best a religious belief in this Taylorist crap? Seriously, I believe these people are serious once they put themselves, and their friends, to the same test as they put teachers.
If the "establishment" took "assessment" and the rest of the bullshit as seriously as they pretend, why is it filled with people who have already proven their worthlessness, lack of foresight and general understanding several times already? Not just in the education establishment of course - this is true from economics to the military: people who have proven to be ignorant idiots, whose strategies and actions were proven, again and again, in the real world, not to work at all and mostly just make things worse continue to make decisions/write newspapers/command soldiers.
Anyone who's not a complete idiot should realise that responsibility should be the largest at the top, and if the top is not willing to subject themselves to the same rules as they want the bottom to adhere to, they are lying and their motives have nothing to do with what they are saying. Responsibility should be proportional to power, and additionally, in any organisation, it should also flow from the bottom to the top: the failure of the common teacher should be considered the failure of their superior, and if the common teacher statistically cannot "perform" in the way that the idiots at the top expect them to do, then maybe there's something wrong with the expectations and the model also. Not that there was any scientific or professional background for this idiotic idea - it is pure central-control, scientific management, assembly line technocratic ideology, nothing more. That the goal of education is not primarily assembly-line production of little cogs fit for unskilled or semiskilled work is a different matter altogether. Why don't corporations pay for their own education by the way? Why do people accept so willingly the idea that a publicly financed educational system should serve primarily not for the public, the people attending it and paying for it, but for private interests? Who, btw, love to steal public education money and turn it into profits.
As for why education is getting "worse": apart from the generally worsening socio-economic circumstances and the retarded behaviourist doctrine beneath the school reforms that themselves inevitably have to lead to a decreasing performance (because it is false and has nothing to do with reality), it is because of the changing cultural environment. The 7.5 hour per day average screen media consumption for American kids changes the content and focus of children's mental activities; and the mental patterns to which the tools beneath the media accomodate children change the methods and ways of their thinking. Teachers teaching for idiotic tests can not in any way compete with video games, internet crap, ads, IMs and so on; and the incredible overuse of the tools themselves basically disable children mentally. In addition to this, adolescents have less and less contact with people outside their age group and get more and more closed in into their own worlds, with no relevance to reality. Instead of recognising these developmentally negative effects, education and general cultural strategy enhances them in general and completely denies their existence.
And before another ignorant kid comes in and accuses me of being an old fogey who doesn't understand new stuff ("get off my lawn"), I'd like to tell that I am only 38, I've been programming for almost 30 years, using and programming for the internet for 20 years, electronic education is in fact my specialty and I'm pretty fucking well read and informed about it and while I'm very willing to discuss details, I am too lazy to bother with the ignorant generic arguments of people who want only to defend their way of life, their hobbies and interests without giving them a second look.
Well said, Atomsk.
I introduced the idea to this forum of holding others (like the bankers, government officials, Military) accountable if ours is to be an "Accountability Society," as opposed to one where blame is merely directed at teachers.
Gee, would this assessment be done by the same people who choose the Pollyanna textbooks and insist on top-down teaching with few teachers and many students?
jimmyy2shoes....I agree. A long teachers strike just ended here. 3000 students were out of school for many days. One of the issues was a disagreement about how many minutes the teachers should be required to spend with the students.
I believe they objected to an additional 15 or 20 minutes per day.
The solution to the poor quality of education is"CHOICE". Some teachers disagree. Government schools teach government propaganda. There should be an alternative. Publicly funded education for all - in smaller schools that are controlled by families. What about families that object to the pro-war indoctrinization that goes on in most schools?
(I am a former teacher.)
See my article titled THE TEXAS TEXBOOK MASSACRE
I cannot speak to the issues raised by the strike in your district. I will say that adding 15 to 20 minutes a day to the teacher's workday is significant. Where will it end? Does it mean secondary teachers will have six teaching hours instead of five? Why couldn't you interpret the teachers' stand as a position in favor of a decent education for all? After all, extra time teaching every day means an exhausted teacher trying to deal with exhausted kids for another twenty minutes every day. Maybe hiring more teachers would be better for kids than making teachers work harder. Surely as a former teacher, you must see the truth to that argument.
Your statement about "government schools" teaching "government propaganda does not resonate with anything I experienced as a public school teacher. Does it resonate with your experience? Certainly some teachers inject their "pro-war" sentiments into their teaching, but that is not what public education is about. It simply happens--just as charter school teachers, parochial school teachers, and private school teachers sneak in their personal views into instruction. It is hard to avoid such things.
Choice? In what form? More charters? Magnet schools? Montessori? Need more guidance about what you mean. And small schools controlled by families--sounds like charters to me--are not the utopias you think they are. From my experience with a local charter, such schools are a hotbed of dissonance and division, parents pulling their kids out at the least provocation. It's not as simple as you think.
"Does it resonate with your experience? Certainly some teachers inject their "pro-war" sentiments into their teaching, but that is not what public education is about"
No teacher should be interjecting their own personal political views in teaching their students. That's not teaching, that's propaganda.
drosera... Every school is different. Every teacher is different. I know some teachers who are using Zinn as a text book. BUT, In many areas, teachers invite uniformed troops into the elementry class rooms to indoctrinate the students. This is a common practice where I live. It is considered patriotic. VFP has struggled against all odds to do Counter Recruiting and show the other side in high schools.
Choice for families. Since we cannot all agree on what should be taught, who should have the final say? Families, in my view. It should be a fair system that does not disenfranchise students in poor families. Many families would prefer to home school. That would be my choice - if a parent received the per pupil cost paid to schools, they would not need to work 2 or 3 jobs and could stay home and teach their children. This is consistent with OWS and empowering the people.
Why is it that people want choice and power in other areas, but when it comes to the educational system they are so willing to surrender their children to the 'system'. Many parents would be horrified if they knew what really happens in schools.
Also - there is the culture of many schools - drugs, violence, and bullying at a level that makes many kids contemplate suicide.
Agree with much you say. Finding a consensus about what and how things should be taught is not easy--whatever the school environment. Home school is great for some families, though a thorough understanding of everything from clarinet to calculus is beyond the capabilities of most parents.
I sent my kids to the public schools. I was not horrified. Neither were most other parents. And I knew exactly what was going on. Perhaps you are speaking from experiences you have had--and those experiences don't extend to other places. In general, my kids got a decent education (better than the one I received long ago) and did quite well in college.
If the learning environment is bad for my kid, I would get him out of that school/classroom in a second (though I would try to fix the problem with school officials first).
Why are people so willing to to surrender the children to "the system"? Perhaps they feel "the system" is not hurtful to their children. Perhaps they see benefits in terms of socialization, working within groups, setting standards, and learning discipline. Perhaps, they look at other alternatives--homeschooling that falls short of any educational standard, charters with factions of quarreling parents, religious schools with particularly narrow perspectives on academic subjects--and they decide the public schools are better than anything else out there. There are public schools like that, you know.
drosera...Thanks...I agree with much of what you say. Many teachers try to do a good job. It is the system that I have issues with. The bottom line for me is - who should have the final say about the educatiion of a child. I firmly believe that that is not the job of government.
Also, probably you and I have different global views about politics and world government. I am told that I am to the very far left of the dems. I have been a candidate for State Attorney General on the Socialist ticket. I believe that it is important to acknowledge all USA history - even that part of US history that exposes US War Crimes. That is why I wrote the article THE TEXAS TEXTBOOK MASSACRE. It is on the internet. When we teach children that the US has never done anything wrong, it gives them a false sence of US Exceptionalism and paves the way for them to fall victims of US propaganda. Remember how many were so easily duped into believing that Iraq had WMDs... and that 9/11 was because 'they hate us for our freedom'. Never a mention of Blowback, even though the CIA predicted blowback way back in the 50s.
Sometimes government schools can teach math with success, but I would never want any child to believe the propaganda about US history that is taught in most schools.
This is the quote I most appreciated from the article:
"The message was loud and clear -- it is time for educators to turn the table on the corporations and politicians and begin evaluating, measuring and assessing their performance. Here are some well-known statistics: 25 million people are out of work or underemployed, 50 million people have no access to health insurance and one in five children in the U.S. is living in poverty, with four of every ten black children living in poverty. Everyone but the wealthy has become part of corporate America's collateral damage, and the country appears poised on the brink of calamity."
I raised this issue in the forum on at least 3 previous occasions. Only a few responded, and the majority went on and on about how to evalute teachers, entirely missing the point of (and rationale for) a more all-encompassing fairness. In other words, they keep the subject on TEACHERS only.
This quote is directed at ELIZABETH H and explains why I regard her anti-public school commentary as grossly misrepresentative of any faint form of Progressive values. The idiom of "my child first" is a libertarian premise, as the more children are taken out of public schools, the less funding will remain in place to sustain the public school system.
"These patriotic citizens are passionate and determined, not because of self-interest, but because they understand that the destruction of a sound public education system is a direct assault on democracy itself."
I would encourage Elizabeth H to carefully read this article, as she has a tendency to blame public schools for indoctrinating and/or boring students, without taking the larger societal factors (inclusive of who funds & regulates the schools and for what puruposes) into her calculus.
Teachers are mostly female...victims.
Siouxrose, I have no reason to fight with you. A discussion would be nice. I have to say, though, that if parents find that the school system in their districts are doing far more harm than good to the well-being of our children--and many homeschoolers have reached that conclusion--it's rather ruthless to say that they must keep on inflicting that system on their children "for the good of the progressive cause," in this case the existence of public schools. To label this libertarian and selfish seems rather extreme. If our children's minds must be dwarfed, if the noncompliant must be drugged, if the populace must be stupified for the cause, then the cause needs to be re-examined. Have you ever read any of the links I've posted here regarding education?
We want to make sure all Politicians are assessed too!
Yes. Teachers must go on strike no matter what. They have been victimized too long by politicians.. a great distraction while our country is looted and we are looted.
Corporate charters were originally (and wisely) temporary agreements around accomplishing a particular task. When the task was completed, the charter was dissolved.
A 21st century version of this might be to periodically review (independently) the conduct and the value to society of each corporation as a condition for renewing their charter.
The current corporate/political agenda doesn't want education per se as much as arming our children with the bare minimum of tools to be effective employees. Critical thinking skills are now discouraged via NCLB and the rigid alternative emphasis on standardized testing. After all, what Wall Street executive, military commander or multi-national chain wants children learning how to critically analyze the mainstream propaganda that is fed to them on a daily basis?
Improving education is actually quite easy. Simply by reducing the size of children's classrooms (12 to 15 is ideal), raising children's families out of poverty, emphasizing critical thinking skills and improving the school environment in general would go a long way to raising the bar. Subjects that deal with the dangers of celebrity homage, the lies the media and politicians convey to us on a regular basis, the value of community and the options we have available to change the world into a better place would be a good start as well. Problem with this is that corporate America won't benefit from it. Therefore all of their bought and paid for politicians will be instructed to undermine such proposals at every turn reinforced by the mainstream media and ultimately applauded by huge numbers of ill-informed, patriotic, God-Bless-America, right wing types who are filled with so much bitterness that any solution tabled is seen as an attack on their faux civil liberties.
Meanwhile, the 1% who run this country, couldn't care less about the state of our public schools as their children attend well funded, elite, private schools. Therefore it is essential that we demand the same advantages for our children's education as those offered to the offspring of the wealthy.
In the meantime I would suggest to all CD readers to back off of the anti-teacher platforms and concentrate on how we can seize the public domain from the iron grip of wealthy sociopaths.
I was a teacher once. Not a good one but I gave it a go. Most of my colleagues on the other had were very good and accomplished wonderful outcomes in less than ideal circumstances. The not so good, like me, don't stay around. Frankly, if you don't have what it takes to be a good teacher, hanging around for a pay check and benefits is just to stressful. There are too many other ways to make a living.
Sometimes teachers do need to asked to move on and most principals will find a way to see that it happens.
All this blame the teacher stuff is way over rated. The USA public school system, regardless to the bad press it constantly receives, is still a superior systems. It is one of the few that attempts to educate EVERY single child.
Private schools make not attempt to educate everyone regardless of aptitude, attitude, emotional readiness, and psychological stability. Public schools stand alone in that arena. Given these challenges, we need to give our teachers and our public schools a break and give them our support rather than our grief.
Cutting the war spending and diverting just a fraction to schools could improve our schools tremendously. Crumbling and crowded environments create stress. They do not encourage learning. So, yes, through some money at our schools.
AlanL & PetrKrop: Excellent posts. You laid out the key issues.
Thank you Alanl.
You may have been a better teacher than you give yourself credit for being.
Common sense in the classroom goes a long ways.
To Atomsk, Siouxrose & every one else, I add my voice about
ACCOUNTABILITY in various sectors & industries, in POLITICS, THE MILITARY, CIA, FINANCE, BANKING, THE CORPORATE WORLD. ALSO IMPORTANT THE PLACE & TRUE MEANING OF POLITICAL IMMUNITY IN POLITICS, THE USE & ABUSE OF IT to a stage where it has become a carte blanche for unlimited crimes, with catastrophic repercutions on millions of citizens.
No terror no torture just truth