Critically Acclaimed Corporate Propaganda

Here’s another Good One From Chris Guerrieri at Education Matters

You say critically acclaimed, I say propaganda designed to destroy our public schools and to line the pockets of corporate fat cats. 

In a recent article about Micelle Rhee, controversial former D.C. schools chancellor, addressing the Florida Legislature, Brandon Larrabee sited her presence in the movie, Waiting for Superman. I say movie not documentary because many of its dramatic scenes were staged. Mr. Larrabee referred to the movie as being critically acclaimed, I say the movie was blatant propaganda made by a public school hating film maker, financed by billionaires interested in increasing their share in the education market through misinformation, teacher demonizing, charter schools and an increased reliance on standardized testing. In case you blinked, you should know that education has become a multi-billion dollar business.

You know what really gets me? It’s the fact that many of those that embraced Waiting for Superman as the gospel are the same people that will dismiss a Michael Moore movie as Hollywood crap. I share many of Michael Moore’s views but I know when I watch his films to do so with both eyes open and to take them with a grain of salt.

Even if all of what was portrayed in Waiting for Superman was true regardless of the fact much has been debunked, (sadly however that didn’t get nearly the press the film did) it would still only show a miniscule fraction of what is going on in our schools. It would be like looking at three doctors you knew were bad and then condemning the whole medical field nationwide because of their actions.

Friends we do have serious problems in our education system but listening to slanted propaganda, like Waiting for Superman is, and to which Mr. Larrabee contributed to by his choice of words, is not the way to fix them.

Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher

Teacher Quality and Testing Don’t Mix

Bill Gates, Arne Duncan and others have been spewing the ridiculous lie that teacher experience and education do not matter very much, as indicated by the fact that student test scores are often low, even when their teachers are experienced.

It’s the Class, Stoopid

This should come as no surprise since standardized tests measure students’ material security and social privilege, not the quality of their teachers. Any teacher at a low income school, whether young, old, experienced, or novice, will have lower test scores than those teaching at middle class schools. (The data below offers just one example of the correlation between standardized test scores and poverty). For some explanations of how poverty influences student achievement, please see 8 Delusions About Education, The Dropout Process in Life Course Perspective, Inequality at the Starting Gate, Meaningful Differences in the Every Day Experience of Young American Children and any number of articles by Richard Rothstein.

2005 College Bound Seniors Average SAT Test Scores

                                                                                       Verbal         Math       Total 

Source: Test Scores, Poverty and Ethnicity

Could the Ed Deformers be Right? (Of course not, they don’t even make sense)

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that experience and education do not matter much. Let’s further assume that student test scores can discern the good teachers from the bad ones. This leaves a fundamental question unanswered: How did these good teachers become good teachers?

Was it on the job training, an argument made by those who wish to throw more undertrained novices (like Teach for America) into the ring? If so, then experience really does matter. Throw them into the deep end and, if they don’t sink, they will improve over time.

Or is it some magical ability that certain “supermen” teachers have, that most of us lack? If this is the explanation, then it seems unlikely that the magic can be transferred to the rest of us mortals, and we’ll just have to be happy with the few “supermen” out there and make do with a majority of mediocre grunts.

Or perhaps it’s just that unionized, well-trained teachers are spoiled and lazy and need to have the discipline that only a non-union, down-sized, assembly line charter school can impose? If this was the case, then we should only find good teachers and never any bad ones in charter schools, which is clearly not the case. Or perhaps we just need to abolish the unions entirely, since they are clearly such an impediment to progress. Of course, if this were the case, then why do “right to work” states and districts without union contracts tend to have lower student test scores?

Waiting for sanity in education reform

This is a reposting of an article by George Wood in Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet

By George Wood

This fall brought not only the start of another school year but plenty of noise about schools as well. A movie, a manifesto, and a mayoral election in Washington D.C. all amplified the ongoing debate about who the real education reformers are. Noise and more noise.


Thank goodness for the sane voices that arose in the midst of all this. There is Diane Ravitch with her continued campaign that brings us back to what is really at stake when filmmakers try to bend public opinion. And Mike Rose, always close to the ground, reminding us of what school reform really involves.

Now comes the news that, in light of whatever is going to happen on Nov. 2nd, the Obama administration is looking for ways to work with the next Congress and has targeted, among other things, No Child Left Behind.
Yikes.

With the level of animosity and acrimony currently filling the airways it is hard to imagine that Congress and the president will do anything together, let alone the long overdue overhaul of NCLB. I worry about the common ground they might actually reach: grading teachers by student tests scores, breaking unions, putting every kid in a charter school. None of these strategies has been proven as a recipe for the schools our children need and our communities deserve, but lack of evidence has never stopped us before.

With all of this in mind I have decided to trek off to Washington this weekend and join Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. Why? Because I want to talk to some folks and see if they might accept a few basic principles around what it would take to shore up our public school system. I want to see if they are willing to take seriously the Jeffersonian ideal that public education is vital to a healthy democracy, and the notion that now, as much as any time in our history, we need such a system of public schools.

I haven’t been invited to speak at the rally, but if Stewart calls, here is what I might say:
“America’s public schools are a national treasure and it is past time that we started treating them as such. Every one of you here today probably has a schoolteacher to thank for the fact that you can read, add, and think rationally. A teacher who opened your mind to new ideas, who helped you speak that mind and listen when others spoke theirs. It’s a great system, and it opens its doors to every kid no matter their race or nationality, no matter what language they speak or if they can speak at all, no matter rich or poor, motivated or not, whole or impaired.

“We have spent too much time the blaming our schools for all that ails us. Sure schools could do better—but so could the banks, big business, and Congress. Schools, our teachers, and our kids, are not responsible for the economic strains our nation feels; or for the loosening bonds that threaten the civil discourse our republic requires. They are, however, part of the solution to these threats to our social security. But only if we come together on a few things in the name of a saner approach to making sure every kid has a good public school to attend.

“First, we have to admit that as much as schools can do, they can’t do it alone. It is hard for a child who is homeless, hungry, or in pain to heed the lessons of her teacher. America should, as part of education policy, work to see that every child is safe and secure, has good medical care, a roof over her head, and food in her stomach.

“Second, we must all admit that there is no doing a good school system on the cheap. America is 14th among the 16 industrialized nations in how much we spend on our kids’ education. But it is not just how much we spend, it is where we spend it. In the Harlem Children’s Zone, a project that considers all of what it takes to raise a child, the charter schools are spending one-third more than the public schools in the city, and they still are struggling.

"This is not a condemnation of that important work—it just means we should admit that we are going to have to invest heavily and in a targeted way if we want our schools to work for all our kids.

“Third, over 90% of our schools are good old regular public schools—not a charter or a choice, just where kids go to school. If we are serious about every child having a good school, it won’t be by creating a few fancy alternative schools. It will be by improving all of our schools.

“Fourth, we already know what works. All our schools--charters, magnets, public--have had successes, but we don’t seem to learn from them. Successful schools are places filled with good teachers who are well supported, where strong connections are built with students and families, where kids do real work not just read textbooks or listen to lectures, and where kids are evaluated by what they can do not by what test question they can answer. They also are places not segregated by social class.

“So what would a sane person, perchance a sane Congress, do to help and support our kids and schools? Hate to be simplistic, but here you go—We have to shore up our safety net for all kids to have access to health care, food, and shelter; use federal resources to get dollars to kid in the most need; and focus on all schools using the lessons learned from our most innovative and successful schools and getting the regulations and rules that prevent this change out of the way.

“This is what I wish for my school, your school, all schools. We don’t need Superman. We just need some sanity.”

Waiting For Super Bucks

“Waiting for Superman,” (WFS) the new education documentary by Davis Guggenheim, the director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” claims that public education is in crisis and can only be saved through charter schools. Such claims should immediately make one suspicious. Who is really behind this movie? After all, numerous studies have shown that charter schools are no better (and often far worse) than traditional public schools. They tend to be much more segregated. They generally hire non-unionized teachers at scab wages. They lack the accountability and community oversight of traditional schools. Most significantly, they tend to be run or managed by private, for-profit businesses that turn profits by underpaying employees and scrimping on educational supplies and a safety.

One would expect that the people behind the charter school movement would be wealthy entrepreneurs looking for the next big buck, and they are. A recent article by Barbara Miner, “Ultimate $uperpower,” identifies the financial backers of WFS and the big players behind the charter school movement. It’s a rogues’ galley of media moguls, high tech billionaires, hedge fund gamblers and Wall Street bankers, combined with a few Christian billionaires.

The Real Enemies of Education

Teachers have become the latest political bogey man. We are now officially responsible for everything wrong with public education, even delusional, nonexistent wrongs. We are even blamed for corrupting the political process. However, the real enemies of public education are the Duncans, Gates, Buffets, Waltons and Broads who are attempting to give the school house away to educational profiteers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, Platform Learning, Imagine Schools, Edison, White Hat, Reed Elsevier and Neil Bush. As far as they’re concerned, the real problem is that public education is locally controlled, unionized and nonprofit, thereby limiting their access and control of this huge potential market. Public education is mandatory. Consumption is required. The funding stream is secure, so long as the anti-tax movement doesn’t succeed in abolishing taxes entirely. If only they ran the schools instead of local school boards.

Arne Duncan had a solution: as CEO of Chicago schools he privatized many of its schools. When he called “Katrina the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans,” it was because it allowed the government to privatize it. Within two years of the disaster, 107 out of 128 New Orleans schools had been converted to charter schools and the number of unionized teachers dropped from 4700 to 500. They also fired 7500 school employees, many of whom had school age children who would now be attending New Orleans public schools hungry, homeless or stressed out by the economic uncertainty at home, or simply fleeing the city entirely, like so many of New Orleans’ lower income residents. The “reforms” have been hailed as a success since New Orleans test scores have improved since Katrina. However, the relative wealth of city residents also rose after Katrina and affluent students generally do much better on standardized tests than lower income students.

“Waiting for Superman,” which blames teachers for the problems with public education is essentially just an expensive piece of advertising for charter schools. It was largely funded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two proponents of school privatization. Almost immediately after the film was aired, the donations to charter schools started to pour in. The venture capital Charter School Growth Fund recently secured $100 million from sources including the Walton Family Foundation. Oprah just coughed up $6 million for six charter schools.

Neil Bush, Reed Elsevier and McGraw-Hill were all well-connected with President Bush and all were beneficiaries of NCLB give-aways. While schools were forced to buy their products, money and time for real teaching and learning were diverted to test preparation and testing. As NCLB declared increasing numbers of schools to be failing, teachers were forced to work harder and longer, usually without extra compensation, to implement “reforms” that had no possibility of solving the problem. They couldn’t solve the problem because NCLB was designed to increase failure, not increase student achievement.

Even banks and investment firms can be seen as the enemies of education. They are largely responsible for the current financial crisis that has bankrupted cities, lowered property values and school funding, and made millions of people unemployed, homeless and angry. In all likelihood, we shall see test scores and graduation rates decline, as more and more families become impoverished. Meanwhile, they blame teachers for hindering real educational improvements and bemoan the lack of sufficiently educated workers to fill their nonexistent job openings, implying that teachers are the cause of high unemployment rates and the persistence of the recession.