Standardized tests are just part of the industrial model.  The student is the product, and the standardized tests are the QA phase of production.

Privatization is at the root of Ruth’s remarks.  Privatization cannot exist without standardized testing.  Standardized testing greatly narrowcasts student achievement.  Standardized testing is the darling of uniquely un-gifted physical educators and business people.  Standardized testing lacks dynamism and validity.  Persons who celebrate standardized know NOTHING about teaching or education.  They are ideological nuts!  They would ruin the education system in the belief that they are right.  They are not.

First, the Superintendents and principals of public schools are strangely chosen from the ranks of physical education teachers, coaches.  Would you use an auto mechanic for heart surgery?  Why put physical educators in charge of academic schooling?  That’s shooting education in both feet before leaving the starting gate.

Second, classroom management skills are key to quality education.  Physical educator principals know zip about classroom management skills yet they are evaluating teacher performance.  Strike two!

Third, mainstreaming behaviorally challenged kids makes classrooms unmanageable without the presence of a full time specially trained teacher to work with the emotionally challenged.  Without the addition of the extra teacher classroom education suffers greatly because a teachers time is mostly spent on discipline, not education.  Governments cannot both mandate mainstreaming emotionally disturbed children and criticize low performance.

Finally, the high cost per student in the United States is simply because of physical education and sports programs.  Magnificent gym’s, olympic sized swimming pools, football fields, transportation to after school games, and extra pay for coaching boosts the cost per student into the stratosphere.  Without these costs there would be adequate funds to lower class sizes, place additional teachers in the classrooms with a high number of emotionally disturbed kids, and pay master teachers to evaluate teachers and recommend corrective actions to increase teacher effectiveness.  Choosing academic professionals to run the schools instead of jocks would also be a key improvement.

Yet, Obama, a simple minded jock, believes standardized tests are the answer.  Hubris!

And you need them, and their fellow citizens, to pay for it.  And you know what they say about he whp pays the piper.

Parent participation is misunderstood.  It means that
parents need to be involved in the schooling of their
kids; make them do their homework, provide supplies,
attend conferences and so-on.

No school needs parents in it.  We need parents to
support their child’s endeavor: getting educated.

gerard—I’m just going by what people say and what I can glean from direct experience.  In my experience no one in the schools actually wants parent involvement (unless perhaps it is extremely servile) but they always say they do.

One of the great difficulties of dealing with school is the huge amount of hypocrisy, cant and fantasy which schools seem to attract.  Underneath all that are strongly conflicted ideas about the purpose and nature of school.  I suppose a major source of the difficulty is that the objects of the exercise are politically helpless.

anarchissie:  One more point, and then I’ll quit:

About participation of parents—that works in the white middle-class districts, to a point—until the PTA gets it in for one particular teacher, God help her or him.  Then there’s the district that has to publish election materials in 7 languages, and most of th eparents can’t speak English.  So much for participation.  Their main goal is simply that their kids stay out of trouble—at school and on the way to and from home and school. Help with homework?  Give me a break!

Anarchissie:  Of course you make an important point. National control is bad in other ways.  I guess I’m prejudiced because I went through so many local elections talking to idiots about raising property taxes 1/2% to eke out a few more dollars, and listening to inane argumaents among board members about how “communistic” the textbooks were, etc.
And fights between teachers and admnistrators, and attempts to deny permanent positions and full-time assignments on the basis of “saving money.”  Goodbye to all that!

TFTeacher—Ruth Marcus is a neo-con shill for the Washington Post.  As far as she is concerned, the kind of people who post messages here are Not Important.

gerard—I hesiste to give advice for bourgeois institutions.  It will probably not be very good advice.  However, with my outsider’s position, I do hope to identify questions and assumptions that appear in the rhetoric for the amusement of others.  In the case of public schools, there is a great division of opinion as to what they are supposed to be doing: acting as prisons, asylums, factories, recreational centers, and so on.  An important aspect of public schools used to be the communal socialization I mentioned before.  But that was when we were all middle-class White Protestants.  Half the work had already been done!

A thought I would like to leave—it is not really a finished thought—is that everyone says schools are better when parents are involved.  This suggests that local direction of the schools on the neighborhood level is most desirable.  Instead we see Federal and State interference smacking of dictatorship.  What is the use of trying to deal with your local schools if they’re being run from Washington?

Will Ruth ever respond to the unanimity of responses
here?

Of course not.  Journalists who write this kind of
crap—the kind any moron could write when they don’t
have any idea what they are writing about—require
that we, citizens, call them out.

But how?

Like this: Hey, Ruth!  You are wrong!

That’s about it.  Oh well.

We need smarter voters.  Maybe we should teach civics
in school, again?

Anarchissie:  Federal control of education is one thing to be resisted and eliminated.  But ... the local level is also in need of change.  Having public schools dependent upon the local tax base is inevitably causing enormous differences in the amouont of money available (or not), district by district.  Also, local school board control over administratioin, teachers, allocation of funds, and choice of materials often gives inordinate power to fools who fancy themselves as local big-wigs with petty politicl ambitions and racial preferences.
  Still, I’m for really public schools as opposed to private and charter, but but but ... as long as the fight behind the fight is essentially anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-equality, anti-inner city, pro-America/anti-foreigner, I despair of real improvement.

There are several layers of government.  As the educational system becomes more and more determined by the top (Federal, political) layer, it is going to become more and more elitist and class-based, because that is the mental habit of the kind of people who get to the top.  Progressives still seem to be in awe of monarchical government, so the only people fighting this tendency are, unfortunately, some right-wing religious fanatics.

Let’s see, private armies, private prisons, private schools and a Government that has been on a contracting out tear for decades. I don’t understand how anyone could think closing schools will benefit the children. We have abdicated our responsibilities as a Government “for the people, by the people”. When pre-school was shown to improve inner-city children’s school performance, it was ended by Reagan and never looked at again. We pay our teachers less than fast food workers and expect them to pay for supplies out of pocket. We have successfully allowed our children to fall to the bottom in science and math compared to the rest of the industrialized World.

Education should be provided by the Government because an educated population is a prosperous population. We’d rather spend billions to lock up our citizens but balk at the thought of paying for education.

I think the issue is whether you want to have public schools at all.  The old ideal of the public school wasn’t just a jail to control children or a factory to insert knowledge into their heads so they could operate heavy machinery; it was also supposed to provide a communal experience.  As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, imperial war becomes continuous, and racism and religious fanaticism are pushed by famous politicans upon the people, maybe the idea of a community institution is completely passé.  It may really be impossible in a society whose social bonds are dissolving. 

What the ruling class is going to rule when things start to fall apart seriously, I don’t know.

When inner-city and rural schools have the SAME funding and resources that wealthy suburban schools already possess, then we can talk about their ability or inability to educate their students.  TFTeacher makes many excellent points, as does gerard. I don’t want to hear about pilot programs with 12 students in the classroom. How about 12 students in EVERY classroom?

Education begins in the home, and it’s not a high priority for many American parents, from the very poor to the very wealthy (see, e.g., GWB). With TFTeacher’s call for free early childhood education, we could perhaps help children from all classes who grow up in homes with no books, parents with no interest in the outside world, etc.

I don’t usually talk like this, but could we get together and duct tape Ruth Marcus? It would qualify us for some sort of humanitarian award, I am sure.

A very complicated problem. I worked for some years with public schools and private schools and saw their problems from the inside—particularly how they are impacted by politics.  I recognize the charter movement as basically an attempt to replace struggling non-profit public schools with for-profit endeavors attempting (among other things) to enforce a set of achievement goals mirroring the for-profit system.
  My suspicions of their real motives are based on the fact that so much of their “success” has been based on, and dependent upon, the “failure” of the public systems throughout the country.
  In my opinion, the time and money spent on trying to overturn the goals and processes of public schols would have been, and would be, much better spent on
working with, not against, the public system which was the backbone of democratic goals for a long time before inner-city problems, underfunding, and unwise local taxation decisions began to impinge on their accomplishments.
  To the degree that the charter movement has taken on an anti-union face, it shows itself to be inclined toward reaction, elitism and corporate domination.  Corporate power also plays a heavy role in the quality of materials, etc., which, though it may advantage charter students, takes away like benefits from public school students at the same time it lines the pockets of corporations providing those materials—not a small amount of money by any means.
  Raising teacher salaries, providing more help to young people who want to become teachers, getting rid of dependency on local taxes where local property values vary widely, and raising the general quality of inner city schools would have been better, in my opinion, than running a parallel, competitive and better-funded system alongdside, in a rather phoney “competition.”

When one creates a contest to see which American
children get a well-funded school, that insures some
American kids will not get one.

That is the problem with RTTT, charters, vouchers,
and the rest of the reform agenda (which is really a
privatization agenda).

We need to address poverty.  We do that with things
like; universal healthcare, free early childhood education, and an education system that actually
values children and teachers.

In any case, only small numbers were involved;

Well, of course. That’s what a pilot program is. If you want a larger case study, you can look at the Swedish system. But, if the preliminary results are positive, why not at least continue it, and possibly expand it?

I have no more love for monopolistic unions than I do for monopolistic corporations. Both are the result of government intervention. The union bosses are just as much “elites”, as are corporate leaders. I can tell you a story about how the local Iron Workers union in my state helped close a farmer’s market, through eminent domain, to make room for a sports complex. The union president’s brother is president of the State Senate.

I see nothing wrong with allowing private schools to compete for public funding. Let the consumers of education make the decision, not the government. If that means the unions are weakened, so be it. More choices always benefits the consumer and taxpayer, and keeps businesses “honest”.

Fat Freddy—I found the arguments given in the OSP case somewhat deceptive, which makes me suspicious.  The participants are clearly a highly motivated, self-selected minority; it is not surprising that, given a special opportunity, they will do well.  In any case, only small numbers were involved; we don’t know what effect, if any, the program had on the other students (those left behind) or the community in general.  The argument that the money spent on them does not come out of the school budget is a specious accounting quibble.  Many teachers probably view the program as primarily an entering wedge for privatization and weakening or dissolution of the teachers’ unions, an impression which the hostility of the writers does nothing to dispel.

One must expect people to seek their apparent self-interest.  With more and more people being driven into the lower classes and poverty by the ineptitude of the ruling class, we are not likely to see much further public support for elites.

Having an honest conversation about education in the country is second only to
honest conversations about race. The key variable in education success is
parental support and the home environment, which is closely tied to economic
status. We see that first hand here in Northern California, where volunteer
hours in public schools in rich neighborhoods are ten times higher than in
poorer neighborhoods.Schools in richer neighborhoods also receive a higher
degree of funding from parents which allows for maintenance of smaller
classroom size. Some of the schools are now required to support kindergarten
classes of 30 students up from 20 just two years ago. I don’t know how even
great teachers can cope with 30 five year olds. Yes there are bad teachers but
chances are you could get rid of every single bad teacher in the U.S. and you
would still see too many bad education outcomes. But if you could get parents
to ensure their kids did their homework every night, the education outcomes
would be significantly higher.  I know Obama has talked about parental
involvement but the actions of his Administration are to somehow make
teachers the scapegoats for our failed education policies. That is not right.

TFTeacher,

And what about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships Fund ( OSP or DC Voucher Program)?

But would OSP achieve measureable results?

The answer is a resounding yes.  Previous studies by Wolf showed an improvement in academic performance, to the point that a student participating in OSP from kindergarten through high school would likely be 2 ½ years ahead in reading.  The key finding in this final round of research, Wolf told us, was the graduation rates.  OSP dramatically increases prospects of high-school graduation.

Wolf pointed to research showing that high-school diplomas significantly improve the chance of getting a job.  And dropouts that do find employment earn about $8,500 less per year than their counterpoints with diplomas. Further, each graduate reduces the cost of crime by a stunning $112,000.  Cecelia Rouse, an economic advisor to President Obama, found that each additional high school graduate saves the country $260,000.

Simply put, OSP has a profoundly positive effect not just on students, but on the city and the country as a whole.

So when it came time for Congress to reauthorize OSP, it would seem to be a no-brainer:  Expand the program.

Instead, they killed it.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/07/06/the-death-of-the-dc-voucher-pr

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/06/the-education-debacle-of-the-decade/

tedmurphy41, August 2 at 8:34 am:

‘It may be that these people have not been educated to a
high enough standard to fully understand these
initiatives.’

It looks to me like they understand them very well.

Schools never ever worked in any iniquitously-structured society.

If schooling would teach kids to think-behave in an interdependent, instead in a fiercely independent manner, schooling would not be allowed.

To be is to be related!I.e., one has to be interdependent and understand fully the implications of being independent [not possible to ever achieve]which in life means being a near total dependency.

Even a city is but a prison of sorts; in which people are almost totally dependent on class number one americans; most of which live on ranches or in secluded areas, mountains, sheer crags, etc.

In fact, about 96% of americans are the servant class: in wars, spying, mining, fishing, tilling land, etc.

And became that way solely because they had been trained to do that while rich people’s kids go to colleges and go on to become ‘leaders’.

In fact, in countries such as india and US, nearly all of their citizens are partially imprisoned servants. tnx

Schools are the next target of privatization through a business model.  Schools are not businesses with a bottom line. The capital is children with varying needs and backgrounds.  Some teachers work with underprivaledged and underserved, some with special needs.  What kind of student success curve will determine success or failure of a single teacher or will we pit teacher performances against each other?  Will administration become the bad guy? 

Teachers train for 6 or more years, and then accumulate years of classroom experience.  Now, a further villianization on top of the disrespect teachers already receive.  This is happening by political business people that are non-educators, and who are funded by special interests.

Arne Duncan is from Chicago.  Chicago brought us the Friedman ‘Chicago School’ of economists who imposed disaster capitalism on Latin American with devastating results to the standard of living for all but the elite.

It is easy for people like Marcus, (who is an idiot) to blame teachers instead of take on the whole socioeconomic reality and political ideologies that account for public education.

It may be that these people have not been educated to a
high enough standard to fully understand these
initiatives.

To TFTeacher: Excellent points.

What is especially outrageous about this meddling in education and what looks like a wholesale union busting scheme is that only a (D) could get away with this stuff, like only a (D) could dream of passing a law mandating that citizens must purchase insurance from a for profit company-without a public option-essentially a republican plan. If a (R) had done either, Real democrats would have marched upon the District of Columbia.

Here’s a great discussion of Arnie Duncan and the whole charter school mess at Democracynow.org:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Professor Pauline Lipman. She teaches education and policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Arne Duncan said Katrina, you know, the hurricane, may have been the best thing to happen to New Orleans when it comes to education. How do you see what’s going on right now in Chicago playing out on the national scape with Arne Duncan, head of education in Chicago, now become the Education Secretary?

PAULINE LIPMAN: Well, I think that that’s a really good question, because I think probably the best phrase to describe what is happening nationally is what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” So we have a situation in which there’s a fiscal crisis in the cities and in the states. We have a situation in which we have a long history disinvested public schools in communities of color. And in that context, there is now a move to privatize public education, just as happened in New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and then that was seen as an opportunity to actually move in and privatize public schools…”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/26/a_look_at_arne_duncans_vip

Here’s a journal from a poster “madfloridian” at a democratic website that has been following this entire matter very closely:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian

   
   
“Imagine how different Washington DC would be if, just once, ONE time, every incumbent was sent packing regardless of the stupid (L)etter after their name… Just one time.” Yes We CAN!

Re Marcus: “Picking the Wrong Education Fight”

But Ruth . . . mayoral control?  She who would ban books - Sarah Palin - was a mayor before she became the temporary governor of Alaska:

“Meanwhile Secretary Duncan travels the country urging districts to adopt mayoral control, so they can emulate New York City. He carefully avoids mentioning Cleveland, which has had mayoral control for years and remains one of the lowest performing districts in the nation. Nor does he mention that Detroit had mayoral control and ended it. And it is hard to imagine that anyone would think of Chicago, which has been controlled by Mayor Richard Daley for many years, would serve as a national model.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/obamas-race-to-the-top-wi_b_666598.html

Yeah.  I made copious typos.  Sorry.  I was raging!!

Wow.  Did you research anything before writing this
piece of crap?

Charter studies indicate charters are no better,
often worse, than traditional public school.

The RTTT coercion scheme has caused states to change
their laws to accommodate more charter school.  many
of these charter schools are run by for-profit
outfits intent on privatizing public education so
they can get rich(er).

Let’s look at who’s behind all this reform, shall we? 
Bill Gates and Eli Broad, a couple of billionaires
who stand to make money of the privatization of
public schools.  Same for all the
eduprenuers/reformers.

Ruth Marcus is an idiot.  Can I get a witness?

Oh, and teachers are mainly black?  WTF?

Yes, “When the 2,000 worst-performing high schools
account for 75 percent of minority-student dropouts,
something is dangerously wrong” like the poverty that
has created these schools and neighborhoods, you
twit!

Failing schools are a symptom.  Poverty is the
disease.

We need universal health care and free early
childhood education for all, especially those inner-
city impoverished folks you and your friends don’t
give one shit about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/obamas-race-to-the-top-wi_b_666598.html