Sold to the Poor for the Benefit of the Elite

No Summer Soldiers or Sunshine Patriots

Diane Ravitch often posts material from Peter Greene. This seems especially appropriate for the 4th of July.

Education Achievement Authority First Hand

Listen, learn and say, "This will not happen here!"
(Audio only.)

American Culture

Diane Ravitch hits the nail on the head when commenting about how American education policy is to make American classrooms more like Chinese classrooms.

This is the dream of “tiger moms” like Amy Chua and Michelle Rhee, to subject children to higher and higher stakes until they think of nothing other than their test scores.

Sorry, guys, but your dream is not the American dream. The American dream is one where everyone has a fair chance to realize their ambitions, whatever they may be–not just test scores, but in sports, music, or some other endeavor. The American dream celebrates those who tinker, who create, who improvise, who invent new ideas while “messing around” with stuff that interests them. This is the dream that made this country great, not a one-size-fits all examination hell that ranks kids according to the whims of the testing industry.

...At Hengshui, students study from 5:30 a.m. to 9:50 p.m., cannot have cell phones and are allowed just one day of vacation every month. Cameras are placed in each classroom to monitor students for laziness...

Look at Chinese society and culture under this system, totalitarian, high pressure and conformist. This is not what we should be aspiring to nor what we should be subjecting our children to.

The Big Crash

The Common Core State Standards or CCSS were never field tested nor were they written by educators. See here and  here. They are tied to high stakes tests that will be used to evaluate teachers which is very unreliable. See here. They emphasize non-fiction reading material and math concepts that already show they are especially inappropriate at the lower grades. You don't make kids smarter just by making school harder.

But, the Standards are under the control of the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. These are private, not public bodies. The tests are based on the Standards. If the Standards don't work they will need to be changed. But, changing the Standards will necessitate changing the tests. Therefore, nothing will change, hence the Big Crash.

Parents are objecting to their children being labeled failures. Student learning will not improve and their experience of school will suffer. Teachers are objecting to being evaluated using unreliable measures. Reports indicate there is a disconnect between the Standards and the tests! See here.

Many states are seeing that they have been sold a bill of goods and Common Core is failing out of the gate. See here.

The education reform monster was developed inappropriately, rolled out prematurely and adopted illegitimately (for Race to the Top eligibility). It is failing already. The BIG CRASH is coming.

What to do?

David Coleman - Architect and Author of the CCSS

Not Just Another Brick In The Wall

From Diane Ravitch's bolg... On a Gates Foundation website, seeking to persuade businesses how much America needs the Common Core–even though it has never been field-tested to gauge its real-world consequences–Alan Golston wrote this execrable sentence: “Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.” 

Peter Greene almost jumps through the page–or, the Internet–shouting NO! He writes:

“Output of our schools. Students are not output. They are not throughput. They are not toasters on an assembly line. They are not a manufactured product, and a school is not a factory. In fact, a school does not create “output” at all. Talking about the “output” of a school is like talking about the “output” of a hospital or a counseling center or a summer camp or a marriage. When talking about interactions between live carbon-based life forms (as in “That girl you’ve been dating is cute, but how’s the output of the relationship?”), talking about output is generally not a good thing. Primary consumers. Here’s another thing that students are not– students are not consumer goods. Businesses do not purchase them and then use them until they are discarded or replaced. Students are not a good whose value is measured strictly in its utility to the business that purchased it.”

They don't walk, talk or think like educators, yet they are foisting their unsophisticated, uninformed and misguided education policies on the entire country, not because they are wise, but because they can. See here.