Until Feb 27, Watch "The Revisionaries" Here

Watch The Revisionaries on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

The Ed. Beat: On-line Hype; Common Corruption; Gahhhd! Texas!

 Techno-Hype!: Richard D. Wolff, the most popular Marxist in the USofA, writing in Truthout, dissects the latest flatulence from the Tom Friedman, The NYTimes' Moustache of Punditical Masterfulness, on the subject of what costs are concealed behind the "Wonders" of the electronic classroom:

Thomas Friedman's latest column touting online education "is another exercise in (1) finding a potential positive dimension of capital's latest profit-driven move, (2) hyping it and (3) ignoring its contradictions, especially those that are negative."  No doubt such exercises comfort and distract many of his readers who might have entertained the suspicion of something important lost in the proliferation of online "education." They can relax in the secure feeling that critics of that proliferation are enemies of progress, while promoters of that proliferation are overcoming poverty. If this sounds more like TV soap opera morality than social analysis, you may be right.

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The Common Corpse Curriculum: MUCH needs to be said about the burgeoning efforts to force all USer schools into the same box, the so-called Common Core Curriculum. To say it is controversial, at least among most educators, is a HUGE understatement; a fate shared by how it is speciously misrepresented by its advocates. A case in point, here, a dialogue between an advocate and a detractor, on the blog of that red-haired, educational gad-fly, Susan Ohanian. It's long but needs to be read in whole:

What I am against is Common and Core, that is, the same standards for all students and a few subjects (currently math and English language arts) as the core of all children's education diet. I might even love the Common Core if they were not common or core.

Tucker disagrees. He argues it is both possible and necessary to predetermine and impose upon all students the same knowledge and skills and America is immune to the damages of such efforts that have been experienced in China and other similar East Asian countries."

There is no evidence that standards and tests improve school achievement. The huge sums of money budgeted for standards and for tests to enforce the standards should be used to protect children from the effects of poverty, the real reason so many students struggle in school...It is simply not true that the Common Core will prepare our children for the future. To conclude, I quote a comment left on my Facebook page by one of my personal heros, former president of America Educational Research Association (AERA) and widely respected educational researcher Gene Glass: "Common Core Standards are idiots' solution to a misunderstood problem. The problem is an archaic, useless curriculum that will prepare no child for life in 2040 and beyond."

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"Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Texans!": A bunch of ignorant, hyper-biased, white supremacist, cretinous, Christard/dominionist fucknozzles, peckerwoods, asshats and douchewaffles with the average IQ of dust mites, and the social sensitivity of steel-wool, controls the content of school textbooks from a back room in Austin, Tx. That, alone, SHOULD be cause for alarm. But these shitwhistles also dictqte the content of more than HALF of the rest of the nation's school books. A documentary on the subject, the Revisionaries, recently appeared on PBS' program, The Independent Lens.


What are the consequences, you might ask? Well, some Texas schools have revived the biblically-founded canard about the theologically inspired theory about the inferiority of blacks:

A new  report put out by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund revealed that Texas Public School books are filled with flawed Biblical theories, including the idea that Jews practice a ‘flawed religion’. The classes, which are supposed to be about the impact of the Bible on history, are basically right wing propaganda classes.
The students are being taught that the world is only 6,000 years old and that blacks were descendants of HAM, while students are taught that whites are descendants of Japheth, and Jews are descendants of Shem.
The report found that the textbooks adopt a right wing nationalist ideology, and even pass off lies about the Founding Fathers:

And if that weren't bad enough:( A recent) report by Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, reveals that at least 57 school districts and three charter schools in the state taught courses about the Bible in 2011-12. That's more than double the 25 school districts teaching such courses in the 2006-06 school year. In 2007 the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1287, which included guidelines designed to improve the quality of such courses while protecting the religious freedom of students and their families.The new report shows that state agencies and many local school districts have largely ignored those guidelines.

http://freakoutnation.com/2013/01/28/in-texas-public-schools-the-bible-gives-scientific-proof-that-the-earth-is-6000-years-old/.

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Last week we told you about the brave, Seattle teachers who have organized behind their refusal to administer yet another, meaningless, but required, standardized exam. Apparently, the movement is spreading!

A boycott of Washington state’s mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers’ unions, parents, students, researchers and educators.

The decision by teachers at Garfield High School to boycott the state’s Measures of Academy Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time is fueling a growing debate about the misuse of standardized tests in public education.

The Garfield teachers have now been joined by some teachers at a few other schools in Seattle, including the alternative Orca K-8 school. Colleagues at other schools have sent letters of support, as have groups including the Garfield PTSA, the Seattle Student Senate and a group of more than 60 researchers, educators and education activists, including Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol. "...

...Almost all of the teachers and staff at Garfield High are boycotting the test because they say it is not aligned with curriculum and is inappropriately being used by administrators to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not designed. District administrators have defended the test.

The presidents of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which collectively have more than 4.5 million members, issued separate statements supporting the Garfield-led boycott."

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Ed Beat: A Personal Note; Resistance!, Gran Snark!

Rant: The CorpoRatistas, the Standardistas, the Charteristas are making tortured noises about the condition of Amrica's public schools, bemoaning the recently released test results which place the US 18th overall, among the 34 industrialized nations.

 Just as COMPARISONS between Iceland's treatment of its bankers, and ours, are difficult at besT, to sustain with any relevance, SO comparisons on such global, and ephemeral measures ad test scores among countries are virtually meaningless. Their significance is merely political. 
 
The scores of Finnish kids, nor Korean kids, nor English kids in school are not comparable to those recorded by USer kids, in general.

Why? Lots of reasons, many abstruse and statistical. 

But the BIGGEST one is the economic. 
 
In discussions of these sorts of reports, NEVER do you hear mentioned anything about consistent finding that middle-class American students attending WELL-FUNDED schools outscore students in nearly all other countries on these tests. 

Our overall scores are unspectacular because 23.1% of our children live in poverty, the second-highest percentage among 34 economically advanced countries. High-scoring Finland has less than 5.3% child poverty. Poverty means poor diet, poor health care, and little access to books; all have a devastating effect on school performance. 

It's a typical right-wing dodge to blame the schools for the conditions of their students over which they have little or no influence, and this includes teachers in those schools. 

You wanna raise the US standing in the Academic world, reduce the number of kids in poverty to 5%..

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Alert, Will Robinson: If anyone cherished any illusions that the enterprise of 'schooling' had become anything more than just another business, here's a useful, apposite reminder: Educational technology companies and entrepreneurs may face the risk of a "tech bubble," similar to the massive boom-and-bust that rocked the technology market in the late 1990s, according to market analysts and a recently released paper. The triumph of the corpoRistas has costs, though they are seldom borne by those who incur them.
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Vive l'Resistance!:  On January 9, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle announced their pledge to refuse to administer a standardized test that has faced widespread and persistent opposition throughout the Seattle Public Schools (SPS). The Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test is supposed to chart student academic growth in math and language arts, but teachers--members of the Seattle Education Association (SEA)--are frustrated by the failure of the test to align with state standards they are supposed to teach to. And because MAP test results don't affect student grades or graduation, many students don't take the test seriously.
The latest news indicates that the teachers at Garfield ar standing firm, and have earned support from local groups, including parents. The struggle goes on.
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World-Class Snark: The Ode to the Unknown Teacher
She was found by the U. S. Department of Education to be
One against whom there was no official debit side,
And all the reports on her conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, she was highly qualified,
For in everything she did she obeyed Standardisto decrees.
Except for maternity leave, till the day she retired
She worked in a classroom and in dissent never was mired;
She satisfied the State and the literacy coach
In following script she was above reproach.
She wasn’t a complainer, not odd in her views,
And her Union reports that she paid her dues,
(Our report on her Union shows it was sound
Advocating NCLB, RTTT, CCSS reform, and did not revolt expound.)
She cared for children and offered no danger to the power elite.

The State is pleased she offered phonemic segmentation fluency each day
And kept the Bill Gates-funded Common Core on display
And that her responses to directives were obedient in every way.
Both Republicans and Democrats assert it:
She was fully sensible to the advantages of the Standardisto gas
She had everything necessary for a Global Economy class,
A script, a timer, and a bag for collecting vomit.
Bill Gates and Eli Broad are content
That she held the proper opinions for the corporate-politico crowd
When there were DIBELS, she DIBLED; she offered no dissent.
Her students scored a proficiency
Which our experts say was a sufficiency.
Was she free? Was she happy? Don’t cause a fuss.
Had anything been wrong, her union certainly would’ve told us.

Susan Ohanian, with apologies/gratitude to W.H. Auden:, in honor of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...
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Ed Beat:Praying, Asking, Da NUTZ, Da Shortz

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Say Your Prayers! There's a saying that goes, "as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools."

At one time, that likely reflected a fairly uniform view about school prayer: that despite what federal law said about the practice, religious Americans by and large approved of it.

A new study, however, paints a more complicated picture of attitudes toward school prayer over the last four decades, finding sharp differences in school-prayer support between different generations and their religious denominations.
Forthcoming in the journal Sociological Forum, the study maps a general decline in advocacy for school prayer starting in the mid-1970s and accelerating as skeptical Baby Boomers became ascendant through the 1980s.
According to the study's findings, school-prayer support remains markedly lower today among Catholics and mainline Protestants yet unwaveringly high among their evangelical counterparts.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-school-prayer.html#jCp"

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Serious People Are Asking: Can Public Education survive? That's the frequently heard question, as more and more of the terrain of the academy becomes the battlegrounds for competing social/economic forces, sites of battles which CorpoRat interests USUALLY prevail.
Schools, either per se or in the abstract, were NOT regarded as anything  but an undiluted "public good" from the mid-19th Century until Brown v. Board of Education. Thereafter, a lot of (mainly white) parents decided  they didn't want to send their kids going to school--mingling, socializing, and maybe even having sex with--with "those people."
On a similar note:  Along with every other facet of the "commons," such shreds as have still escaped being engulfed in the ravening maw of predatory, shock-driven capitalism, everything "public" has been subjected to a kind of specious scrutiny and criticism based as much on ideas of "class" as any measurable criteria. Answering a similar question--"Why You Can Kiss Public Education (and the Middle Class) Goodbye," ;a piece on Alternet last month/year began with this provocative hook:

 "Quick - when you hear "public housing," what picture jumps into your mind?  Or "public hospital"?"

All around us, our public institutions are disintegrating, and the most important public
institution of all – our public education system – is the next to be ghettoized.

This is the coda to the mantra of privatization, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unfortunately (quote-unquote), the new, private, charter schools won't be able to take EVERYBODY. There will always be (much poorer, much shabbier, much more dangerous) "public" schools for the losers and the dregs.
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Da Nutz: "It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder. What we’re talking about is a threat to the
American dream." - Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford.
  That's why the for-profit "Schools" and so-called 'private' universities like Phoenix and its emulators are such predatory scum. They sell spurious (at best) "degrees" as credentials for professions don't exist to people desperate to believe in the mobility myth...A recent piece in the NYTimes provided some of the nasty details.

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The CTU Took It In The Shortz: In the context of a moving and accurate Jeremiad on the decline--well, the erasure, if we were honest--of anything even remotely resembling an American "left," an Australian scholar, writing on TruthOut, explains just how FAR the Chicago Teachers' Union were backed into a corner by Rahm Emanuel, and how MUCH to which they were forced to concede.

Quotha: As Reuters reported on September 18,
 "those were major goals for Emanuel and positive outcomes for any Emanuel financial backers associated with the national education reform movement." The outcome, however, was widely viewed in the United States as a victory for the teachers, since (amazingly, to most Americans) they retained their pre-strike jobs, salaries, and health insurance benefits

EducationBeat: Dirty Secrets; Goldilocks in Class; Emanuel Says "Scroom! "

 The Dirty Secret of Proprietary "Universities": Mainly, it is that they are rip-offs. They 'sell' credentials, the way Toyota or GM sell cars: on credit.

They prey on the aspirations of education-propaganda maddened students facing desperate employment conditions (LOTS of competition, for scarce jobs, with artificial, spurious "education" requirements), and the flexible "mythology" of the magic of the 'Degree." 

What they do, in fact, is essentially indenture their students to life-long, irrevocable loan-repayment contracts, in exchange for essentially meaningless credentials in 'invented' pseudo-disciplines ("Office management?" Really!) which wouldn't REQUIRE "degrees," except that that requirement makes sorting out undesirables from the applications pools easier.

University of Phoenix, an egregiously piratical lending institution fronting as a proprietary school, recently "settled" a $75.5 million claim against them for fraud.
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TFA: The Myth of Goldilocks
Through the efforts of the likes of the Gates Foundation, and other "well-meaning blunderers" (scare quotes intended), and despite the frequent recitations in praise of good teachers and their effects, there is a mythology growing that teachers NEED NOT be skilled, well-trained, devoted professionals.

In this discourse, teachers are automatons, merely "delivering content," like fucking pizzas, and conduct periodic examinations. This has contributed to a growing sense--has been apparent since the 80s, actually--that anybody can "teach.

 It's not true, of course. Teaching is as much an art, requiring years of practice to master, as it is anything else.

Along with Gates, and the rest of the zombie-capitalist "philanthropists" mucking about, this sense that teachers are a dime a dozen has been adumbrated and popularized by a project called "Teach For America," which began life as a sorority do-good project developed by a coed from the University of Mississippi to flesh out her CV. I shan't occupy more space here with critiques. They are frequent and fierce, and to my mind, well-deserved.

But since you asked, imho, TFA mainly serves as a safe, non-committal way for the social "debutante" class of graduating sorority girls to safely pass their time whilst winnowing the possible applicants for the appropriately endowed prospective fathers of and providers for their children. 

But I'm told I have too jaundiced a view.
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Emanuel: "Screw the Unions." Obama's ass-whole buddy, former White House insider and now Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a CorpoRat rat-bastard of the first order. He's implementing school privatization of Chicago schools regardless of the predicted and predictable, negative consequences for the city, the schools and Chicago's kids. But it WILL make plenty of money for his friends.

""An internal Chicago Public Schools document obtained by the Tribune shows for the first time that the Emanuel administration has weighed how many elementary and high schools to close in which neighborhoods and how to manage the public fallout... ...(T)he internal document, prepared at a time when school leaders faced a December deadline to make their decisions public, lays out multiple scenarios for closing neighborhood schools and adding privately run charters — a key component of Emanuel's plans for improving public education. Chicago Teachers Union members, aldermen and other charter school critics have accused the administration of favoring the charters while depriving schools in poor neighborhoods of needed improvements." (DOTOF to F-Booker Beth Townsley)

Really? Ya THINK? Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Windy City's tortuous school hallways, there are indications of chicanerey between a commission empaneled to recommend school closures and a politically and corporately connected "consulting" firm with boardroom lingks to Bain Capital, Citigroup, McNally Capital, and a slew of big, pro-corpoRat law firms.
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Union Workers Died: It would be nice to think that, after enduring years of slanders and obloquy about their membership in unions, more would have been made about the fact that the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary were all members of the American Federation of Teachers. But outside the notice of a few folks like "yrs truly" on Facebook and elsewhere, that fact has been largely elided from the discourse of the tragedy.

I got criticized for "profaning the memory of the children" with my "pro-Union "bullshit" I mentioned it on my FB "wall." But, I told my detractor, I didn't mind, because I'd never heard of one single corpoRat CEO who EVER stood and took a bullet protecting his workers or anyone else.

Meanwhile in LA: .The LAUSD stepped up for teachers and students when it unanimously returned to the Board the authority to seek and accept federal, education grants. The Obomber/Duncan RTTP (Race To The Top) replacement for the disastrous NCLB of the Bushevik era is a subtle bribery system, making big money available to grant-0seekers which are willing to throw teachers and students under the (yellow) bus by adopting assessment plans which in effect blame teachers and schools for students' poor performance, and rewards schools and districts which will adapt the test-centered, para-private curricular interventions.

The LAUSD returned these authoroities to the board from the Superintendent's Office, at present occupied by faux-reformer, corpoRatist, test-nazi John Deacy.

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As the Cookie Crumbles: Dolchstoss

The GOPhux are struggling to explain their "loss" at the polls in November. I predict their explanations will evolve, and the GOPhux will eventually--before 2016--come to explain and rationalize their "loss" this year with silent, implicit reference to the Dolchstoss! The "Stab in the back." 

In Germany in the 30s, it was what the Nazis blamed the decline of  'das Heimat' on: the Dolchstoss Legende. The GOPhux have pointed in that direction, already, with their explanations blaming the indolent, grasping poor, women, and minorities.

The GOPhux threw this election, of course; as they did the last one. They didn't "lose" it. That's one of the reasons Bombing Johnny McStain still has his boxers in a bunch: He KNOWS they tossed him under a bus. It was evident after September, '08, and the death-knell the derivatives, when Sarah Palin was named to the ticket. 

Similarly, one knew they were throwing it, this time, from the first appearance of the clown car full of "candidates." They COULDN'T be serious. Choosing among the utterly clueless, doltish, stupidly arrogant Rick Perry? Michelle ("I'm so batshit crazy I flutter") Bachmann? Frothy-mix Rick Santorum? Herman Cain, the serial sex abuser? Come ON! Even Willard looked weird on a stage with that screw-ball lot.This was the "cream of the electoral crop? Newt Gingrich?

Really???

What became painfully clear, right from the start, was that the Owners do NOT want a "white" face associated with the pains and disjunctions which will accompany the forthcoming "Great Austerity." They needed a black face to sell it--and later to become the recipient of all the obloquy and vilification which will inevitably, and horrifically, follow from it, as the pains of austerity extract what's left of the soul of the Murkin worker.

Folks are "worried" about the future of the GOPhux, but not me. Just like I'm not worried about the future of cancer. It will somehow survive. Shamwow was and is the last gasp of ANYTHING even FAINTLY resembling a "liberal" or "progressive" government, and from that perspective, Obomber is pretty fucking pathetic, it has to be admitted..

The GOPhux will "retake" the country in 2016, with Bush/Cheney (II): Jebbie and Lizzie, on the platform of "restoring America's lost glory and honor after the depredations of that Negro and his socialist party."

Be attentive: I am almost CERTAIN the GOPhux will soon start to talk about a "dolchstoss," a "stab-in-the-back." It's coming. They're already alluding to the weakness of the 47%, their greed, and indolence.

The only question is which feculent, reaking, drooling GOPhux/Faux demagogue will broach the subject first. I'll say Hannity, but it could be Limbaugh or O'Reilly. He;;, it might be one of the Gretchens or Megyns, the panty-flashers on Faux Nooz.

In whatever case, it is coming.

Can you say "landslide?"

Education Beat: All Efferent Now; DIY School Gear; More Bushit; Keeping Watch; Follow the Money

Efferent vs. Aesthetic: Around 75 years ago, the ground-breaking literary theorist Louise Rosenblatt determined the "reading" always occurs for one of two purposed: Efferent reading was reading to find specific information; Aesthetic reading was reading done for pleasure. Now, with the full backing and encouragement of Bill Gates Foundation, and the National Association of School Principals, too, schools in 46 states are getting ready to scrub "classic" literature from their curricula and replace it with instruction manuals. Let NO ONE EVER ENJOY READING AGAIN!@

No, Really! Not kidding:

American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014. A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.

Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird,  will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards.

As much as 70% of reading materials for high school seniors are slated to be drawn from technical "literature." This 'reform' is called the "Common Core Curriculum." I shall have MUCH more to say about this in future columns.
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Y'know, Cats Are The Same Way...: Here's something to strike fear into the hearts of marketers of childhood "equipment": It seems like kids don't notice when the branded stuff is replaced with quotidian, common-place items like cardboard boxes and blocks.
Really!

When a preschool teacher in Ohio decided to replace all the toys and learning materials in the class with cardboard boxes and other raw materials, he expected some grumbling from his three-year-old students.
Much to his surprise, he received none whatsoever.
"Not one of them complained about not having a toys and it was actually really cool because some of the quieter kids actually got to show leadership roles in projects," Pete Kaser told NBC4.
Indeed, not only did the kids enjoy playing with boxes more than they ever enjoyed playing with brand-name toys, but the experiment actually saw some behavioral changes take place as well.
"Kids who had trouble separating from their parents in the morning or just were quieter in the classroom, we have actually seen them become leaders and we have seen them grow," Kaser noted.

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Bush's Family Profited from 'No Child' Act:
In fact, they did (and are still doing) pretty damned well exploiting their position and influence to profit from their own schemes. This, from 2006, is a good example.

A company headed by President Bush's brother and partly owned by his parents is benefiting from Republican connections and federal dollars targeted for economically disadvantaged students under the No Child Left Behind Act.
With investments from his parents, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, and other backers, Neil Bush's company, Ignite! Learning, has placed its products in 40 U.S. school districts and now plans to market internationally.
At least 13 U.S. school districts have used federal funds available through the president's signature education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, to buy Ignite's portable learning centers at $3,800 apiece.

And now Jebbie's jumped into the fray with his unexpectedly honestly monikered foundation,  "Foundation for Excellence in Education" "FEE."). Just as a reminder:

Aptly named FEE, Bush's group is backed by many of the same for-profit school corporations that have funded ALEC and vote as equals with its legislators on templates to change laws governing America's public schools. FEE is also bankrolled by many of the same hard-right foundations bent on privatizing public schools that have funded ALEC. And, they have pushed many of the same changes to the law, which benefit their corporate benefactors and satisfy the free market fundamentalism of the billionaires whose tax-deductible charities underwrite the agenda of these two groups.

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Do We NEED a "White Students' Association?": Folks who advocate for "white students' leagues" seem somehow to have missed the fact that pretty much EVERY organization in colleges and universities are "white" by default. Here's a fat, ugly, white-boy virgin trying to reclaim the low ground:

Senior Matthew Heimbach, who started the White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland, claims his organization is necessary to fight "inherent anti-white bias in academia and mainstream society."
In a let­ter to Towson’s cam­pus news­pa­per, The Tow­erlight, in September, Heim­bach wrote that “a White Stu­dent Union would rep­re­sent the unique cul­tural her­itage, folk cus­toms and strong Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions that define white civilization.”
Heim­bach also attacked what he claims was the genocide of whites in South Africa and the black on white attacks in the U.S., according to the Anti-Defamation League website ADL.org.
Heim­bach, a former member of Youth for Western Civilization which was disbanded by Towson University last Spring, wrote that the iden­tity of white “folk” has been “tram­pled and attacked for gen­er­a­tions” and that it was time for whites to “stand up for our rights.”
Heim­bach ended his let­ter with: “We must pro­tect the secu­rity of Euro­peans and a future for the next generation."

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Follow the Money: The CorpoRat investors are DROOLING over $500 BILLION School "Honey Pot"

The investors gathered in a tony private club in Manhattan were eager to hear about the next big thing, and education consultant Rob Lytle was happy to oblige.
Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they're as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They'll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.
"You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up," said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting firm. "It could get really, really big."
Indeed, investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education.

Pres. Shamwow and his Education Secretary, the corpoRat lawyer, Arne Duncan are all in for the privatization of schools, through charters, mainly.