If Our Schools Are So Bad, Why Are They Teaching This Stuff?

I need my hope for the future restored in a big way. It's gone. I want to pack up my family and take them to another country. Shit, another world, another reality. Everything about this country is corrupt and it only gets worse, and if you stand up for your rights, or stand up for reform, the government and its corporate rulers have seen to it that they will crush you. Education reform is a joke.

The Hollow Reform Movement
by DAVID MACARAY


By now, thankfully, most people have come to the realization that the so-called “reform movement,” nominally dedicated to improving America’s public schools, is as bogus, misleading, and greed-driven as those tricked-out, bundled-up, sub-prime mortgages that almost sank Wall Street, and required a nearly trillion-dollar bailout from taxpayers.

Make no mistake. This well-coordinated effort to debase our schools is being fueled by (1) Republican anti-union forces who want to bust the teachers’ union, (2) entrepreneurs who see privatization as a potential gold mine, and (3) education mandarins and “consultants” who make their living peddling the view that our schools are in crisis.

Of course, all three groups blame the teachers and the teachers’ union for the mess we’re in, which, besides being vicious and duplicitous, is tantamount to blaming doctors for America’s obesity epidemic. (“Hey, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?? Then do something about all these fat people!!”)

Another thing most people probably realize is that there is an almost one-to-one correlation between bad, rundown, low-employment, high-crime neighborhoods and bad, low-achieving schools. Even though that correlation is a fact, the purveyors of public education horror stories continue to ignore it, and try, instead, to blame the teachers, accusing them of incompetence and apathy. Why? Because blaming teachers is so much easier than addressing those knotty sociological or economic problems.

But something that most people may not realize is that the curriculum being taught in those distressed inner city schools (where the percentage of students in foster care can be as high as 35-percent) is the exact same curriculum being taught in those affluent, stable, high-achieving school districts. Moreover, both sets of students take the exact same standardized tests to determine proficiency.

I asked a teacher in the LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District), the second-largest school district in the U.S. (behind New York City), for some sample 5th grade math questions from the CST (California Standards Test). At the bottom of the page are five (5) actual math problems from that test.

Take a peek at them and ask yourself this question: If our schools used to be “good,” and are now “bad,” why do these math problems seem harder than the ones we had as 5th graders? I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t exposed to this material until the 7th grade. They’re also teaching the periodic table to inner-city 5th graders, which, I vividly recall, we didn’t learn until high school.

Another thing people may not realize is that the CST has no bearing on a student’s report card or whether he or she will be promoted to the next grade. You can bottom out on the CST and pay no price (hence the concern over a student’s incentive to do well on an “irrelevant” standardized test). The CST is used solely as a means of measuring overall proficiency….and, of course, as ammunition for attacks on public school teachers.

Here are those test questions. I did not include the most difficult problems because the most difficult ones used geometric figures, algebraic graphs, and truth tables, none of which, alas, I was able to format.

But if the material I did include is the kind of material 5th grade teachers expect students to know, then the standards of our “bad” schools are not only significantly higher than people realize, but the 5th grade today is significantly harder than it was when I was a kid, back in the days when our schools were “good.”

1. 15.12 ÷ 2.4 =

A. 0.513
B. 0.63
C. 5.13
D. 6.3

2. What value of p makes this equation true?

44×73 = 44×( p + 3)

A. 41
B. 47
C. 70
D. 73

3. c + 2.5
Which situation could be described by the expression above?

A. Lia jogged c miles yesterday, and 2.5 miles farther today.
B. Lia jogged c miles yesterday, and 2.5 miles fewer today.
C. Lia jogged 2.5 miles yesterday, and c miles fewer today.
D. Lia jogged 2.5 miles yesterday, and c times as far today.

4. What is the prime factorization of 36?

A. 2-squared ×3-squared
B. 2-squared ×3-cubed
C. 4×3-squared
D. 4×9

5. Javier bought 9 pounds of ground beef. He saved $8.37 by using a store coupon. How much did he save per pound of ground beef?

A. $0.89
B. $0.93
C. $1.08
D. $75.33

Answers: 1. D, 2. C, 3. A, 4. A, 5. B

The Corporate Dream: Teachers as Temps

Sunday, May 29, 2011 by Black Agenda Report
by Glen Ford

As Democrats hustle to shovel a billion dollars into President Obama’s campaign coffers – making promises to rich people and their corporations every step of the way – America’s billionaires are spending even more money to seize control of the nation’s public schools. Although super-wealthy capitalists like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, fellow computer mogul Michael Dell, real estate magnate Eli Broad, and the rapacious owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton Family, would like people to think of them as philanthropists, they are nothing more than down-and-dirty investors who hope to reap much more than they sow. This mega-buck mafia's goal is to gain access to the $600 billion per year that taxpayers pump into public schools, and then to profit in perpetuity by shaping the nation’s educational system to their corporate needs. The corporate education project has nothing to do with growing new generations of smarter, socially aware, independent-thinking citizens, but is designed to raid public treasuries through wholesale contracting-out of public schooling.

Teachers are the biggest obstacle in the way of the corporate educational coup, which is why the billionaires, eagerly assisted by their servants in the Obama administration, have made demonization and eventual destruction of teachers unions their top priority. Corporations hate collective bargaining, or working people’s power of any kind, but their vision goes way beyond simply neutralizing teachers unions. The billionaires, and the politicians they have purchased, want nothing less than to destroy teaching as a profession. Plutocrats like Bill Gates and politicians like Barack Obama may make noises about respecting teachers' life-long commitment to learning, but their actions prove the opposite. At every opportunity, whenever a real or manufactured educational crisis presents itself, the corporate gang champions charter schools and imports platoons of young, mostly white, inexperienced rookies from programs like Teach for America. Most of these neophytes have no intention of making teaching a career, so they accept low wages, turnover is high, and they have no long term interest in any particular school, or school system, or the profession in general. They are temporary teachers – which is precisely the point.

Just as corporations have revamped the private white collar workforce, replacing full-time, salaried personnel with “temporary” workers – a system in which some managers are officially temps – such are the prospects for teachers in the brave new corporate world of education “reform.”

The billionaires' propaganda machinery claims the corporatization of American education is necessary to make the United States “competitive,” internationally. But teachers in most of the countries that lead the U.S. in learning are highly respected, if not revered, and relatively well compensated. Under the guise of “reform,” the United States is moving in exactly the opposite direction as the rest of the world. The American people are being conned by billionaire hustlers who are stealing the public schools – and the national future – right in front of our eyes.

Collective bargaining law published despite court order blocking it

CLAY BARBOUR and ED TRELEVEN |Posted: Friday, March 25, 2011

The drama over Gov. Scott Walker's controversial measure limiting public sector collective bargaining took a sharp turn Friday when the Legislative Reference Bureau published the law — normally the last step before legislation takes effect.

But the surprise publication on the Legislature's website had lawmakers and their attorneys arguing over whether the law will be in force Saturday.

Walker's legislation has been stuck in court ever since he signed it two weeks ago, challenged by critics who say Republicans violated the state's open meetings law to pass the measure.

A restraining order prevented Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the act. But the state constitution says only that laws must be published before they can take effect; it does not specify by whom.

State statutes require the secretary of state to set a publication date no more than 10 working days after a law is signed, while a related statute requires the Reference Bureau to publish legislation within 10 days of enactment.

Bill Cosh, a state Department of Justice spokesman, said no action by the secretary of state was required for the Reference Bureau to act, adding that La Follette did not direct the publication of the law and thus is not in violation of a temporary court order barring him from publishing the law.

And the governor and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said flatly Friday the law will take effect Saturday.

But officials with the nonpartisan Reference Bureau and the Legislative Council — the Legislature's drafting and research agency and its legal service, respectively — said publication of the act online was only an administrative step.

Reference Bureau Director Steve Miller and Legislative Council staff attorney Scott Grosz both said La Follette still needs to designate a date for publication and actually publish the act in the Wisconsin State Journal — something the court order bars the secretary of state from doing.

"This bill has been under a cloud of suspicion since day one," said State Rep. Peter Barca, D-Kenosha. "Today's actions and statements are only perpetuating the problem."

After he was ordered not to publish the law, La Follette sent the Reference Bureau a letter March 18 rescinding his instructions setting Friday as the publication date.

But Fitzgerald said attorneys have told him the letter has no standing.

"Every attorney I have consulted said this will now be law," Fitzgerald said. "It wasn't a secret. I think they left the door open for this."

Still, Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi's March 18 order appears broadly aimed at stopping the law from taking effect until questions about its passage could be addressed.

"I do, therefore, restrain and enjoin the further implementation of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10," Sumi said, according to a transcript. "The next step in implementation of that law would be the publication of that law by the secretary of state. He is restrained and enjoined from such publication until further order of this court."

If the bureau's action did constitute publication, it could make moot the state's appeal of Sumi's order, now before the state Supreme Court.

That could actually simplify the case that District Attorney Ismael Ozanne is seeking to make on the alleged open meetings violation if he doesn't have to worry about whether a judge has the authority to stop legislation before it takes effect, said Madison lawyer Lester Pines.

"I suspect that if Judge Sumi was willing to take up a (temporary restraining order) against publication I suspect she'd do the same thing on enforcement" of the new law, Pines said.

Pines said it would also open up legal channels for other groups who have been waiting to challenge the law but had to wait until it was enacted.

"This is going to unleash a tsunami of litigation," Pines said.

When the People Lead, Leaders Will Follow

The War in Madison
By CHRISTOPHER FONS  
 

Day five and six in Madison and momentum continues to build as finally Milwaukee Public School teachers, the largest district in the state, called in sick en masse and shut down the district.  The nation has now been inspired by Wisconsinites as they put their jobs on the line to defend the right to collectively bargain for public employees.

Thursday’s “strike” by the Democratic Senators -- they hopped on a bus and decamped to Rockford, IL to deny quorum in the State Senate --  showed that if the people act, the leaders will follow.  The same phenomenon has occurred within the teachers’ unions both in local unions and statewide.  The leadership of both WEAC (Wisconsin Education Association Council) the state-wide organization and the largest local, MTEA (Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association), have grudgingly endorsed job actions after members took matters into their own hands and starting calling in on the second day of the demonstrations (Tuesday).  In the case of WEAC, the leadership followed the lead of the Madison local MTI (Madison Teachers Incorporated), who went out on their own without any prodding from above.  Madison Teachers and support staff stayed out all week and meet Sunday in a mass meeting to decide what to do Monday and the coming week.  In Milwaukee one school took the lead on Tuesday and by Wednesday night the MTEA leadership had no choice but to endorse action, which led to a system-wide shut down by Friday.

35 smaller school districts across the state have also been closed or had opening times pushed back as teachers realized that now is the time to defend their collective bargaining rights.

Saturday morning broke with a crisp arctic cold but everyone in the movement was warmed by the realization we had now gone international.  One picture in particular inspired us all: that of a young Egyptian man in Tahrir Square with a sign stating “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers: One World, One Pain.”

 

By Wednesday MSNBC picked up the story and egofest was on as each of the liberal talking heads tried to position themselves as the savior of the people.  Big Ed and Maddow showed they have a little fight in them as they recognized the historic nature of the moment but by the end of the week the Oprah-like narratives emerged and for Maddow it was all about the Democratic Party.  Even Ed knew this was baloney as he has rightly asked, again and again, where are the Democrats?  Jesse Jackson showed up on Friday and seems to be the only national Democratic stalwart with any links to the popular movement left.  Obama’s comments were typically milktoast in an interview with a Milwaukee TV journalist stating it “seemed like” Walker was going out of his way to bust the union.

The buzz on Friday was a little ominous as talk of a mass Tea Party rally irritated the crowd.  The local and national media salivated as visions of hippies in dreadlocks screaming at Joe the Plumber danced in their heads. Sarah Palin was rumored to be coming as she tweeted her “Union Brothers and Sisters” to come to Madison to support union busting Governor “Snot” Walker. But boy were they disappointed as “CHAOS IN MADISON” became 80,000 mild mannered middle of the road Midwesterners came to the capitol and packed the streets in an orderly fashion to show solidarity with the public sector workers of Wisconsin while a few befuddled white dudes told them they were making too much. 

Even the Tea Party folk seemed quite humbled as their paltry numbers (a thousand or two?) were dwarfed by the mass of determination that encircled them.  The goal of the organizers and police was to keep the two sides apart by dividing the capitol in half but because our crowd was so large this became an impossibility and the crowd, like the rank and file members of the unions across the state, created their own path and made history in Madison once again. 

This week will be a test as many will be pressured to return to work and the renegade Senators tire of phone calls from Good Morning America.

Obama Applauds Mass Firing of Teachers, Just Like When He Applauded the Mass Firing of Banksters. Oh wait.

Obama Applauds Mass Firing of Teachers, Just Like When He Applauded the Mass Firing of Banksters. Oh wait.
By: Michael Whitney

This is the kind of moment for which you want your Democratic President to really step up.

In the middle of the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, more than 90 dedicated professional educators find themselves put out into the street. On Feb. 23, the Central Falls, R.I., school trustees fired the entire teaching staff of Central Falls High School, supposedly because of declining test scores at the school, which is located in Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest city.

In all, 93 persons were put in the street—74 classroom teachers, plus reading specialists, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, the school psychologist, the principal and three assistant principals. Negotiations over ways to improve the school between teachers and the school superintendent broke down when school officials insisted that teachers add new duties, some without any extra pay at all.

A wholesale firing of an entire school; the only ones left in the entire high school are the food service workers and the custodians.

So why is the Obama administration going out of its way to praise this mass firing?  In a speech to Colin Powell’s dropout prevention nonprofit at the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters, Obama “voiced support” for the firings.

President Obama voiced support Monday for the mass firings of educators at a failing Rhode Island school, drawing an immediate rebuke from teachers union officials whose members have chafed at some of his education policies.

Speaking at an event intended to highlight his strategy for turning around struggling schools by offering an increase in federal funding for local districts that shake up their lowest-achieving campuses, Obama called the controversial firings justified.

This wasn’t just an off the cuff remark from Obama – this is the administration’s official position. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went out of his way to praise the firings.

Meanwhile, state and local education officials received some high-powered support of their own, when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in, saying he “applauded” them for “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.” [...]
“This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education,” Education Secretary Duncan said, “and when schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action.”

So yeah, the position of Barack Obama’s administration is that when schools aren’t doing well, it’s totally cool to clean house and fire everyone but the food service workers, no questions asked.
And the position of Barack Obama’s administration with failing banks and financial institutions?  Keep every single one (except the guy forced out by shareholders), and hell, keep their ludicrous pay – cause it’s in their contracts.

At least he’s consistent.