The MPAA Is Going After Schoolchildren

Pirating Creativity
by TRAVIS EBY

For years now the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying its best, unsuccessfully, to enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media. They are of course not the only ones trying to get IP enforced; we have seen the same trends in music and gaming. Since it has long become clear that they cannot stop the sharing of media on the internet, the MPAA is going for the gold: Get pirates when they are young. In other words, the MPAA has gone to work getting its mission inserted into the public school curriculum.

A nonprofit group called the Center for Copyright Information, supported by the MPAA and other groups, is in the early drafting phases of a school curriculum to teach children the supposed value of copyright. Of course, this whole plan is not without critics. Some argue that Hollywood studios and music labels are simply trying to promote their own biased agendas, while others say that such a curriculum would use up valuable classroom time needed to simply cover the basics.

There are two fundamental things for us to look at here, and they are both highly problematic. These are public education and intellectual property.

Public education is an environment wherein children are taught that there is such a thing as objective authority figures. This may not be overt, especially given how many well meaning and sincere public educators are out there, but the fact remains that public schools are among the first places where children start to be molded into compliant, servile people. There is not a whole lot of room for individuality, and even less room for questioning the teacher’s lesson plans. It is the perfect place to instill far-reaching values, such as statism, when children are at their most intellectually vulnerable.

Intellectual property is a ruse the political class uses to control free market — a clever tool to inhibit competition. There is no logical way to own something like an idea, and there is no logical argument against people sharing information, including media of all kinds. By enforcing claims on “intellectual property,” the political class inhibits competition, innovation and creativity.

But they would have us believe otherwise. They argue that IP protects creativity, that it protects competition, and that it protects the market. But if this is truly the case, then why would so many be fighting to undermine it? They also argue that sharing their supposed intellectual property is hurting the industry and costing people jobs. This of course flies in the face of the billions of dollars the movie industry, the music industry, and the game industry rake in every year. But they would still seek to get these regressive values into the minds of schoolchildren.

The fact of the matter is that sharing information, including media, is a massive check against the mandated market control of these big media groups. In many ways it has actually served to help them due to more people having access. It has also pushed them to innovate and make their products worth more to the general consumer. In other words, real market forces have created arguably better products. For years IP has stifled innovation, and it has been through revolutionary market forces that we have seen some exciting changes in the media industry. One such example is the Steam video game client that, while still a player in IP, has been making more and more quality games available for dirt cheap. In many cases, some will stop pirating because the games they might be interested in are available for so little money.

In short, not only is IP a regressive, anti-freedom framework, but the notion that they are so desperate that they would seek to get into the minds of children means that they are scared. Not to mention that their efforts will most likely meet with derision from the older siblings of these kids and create even more media sharing than before, thereby furthering their own demise.

Simply put: They are losing. Let’s keep it that way.

Texas Republican Party

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

You Can Kiss Public Education (and the Middle Class) Goodbye

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

December 14, 2012  |  Alternet  | By Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks

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.

Despite several progressive victories this Election Day, there was one significant defeat in Georgia, as voters approved of Constitutional Amendment 1 [3], which changes Georgia’s Constitution to give Republicans in that state the power to create charter schools as part of Georgia’s public education system. The result will be crucial taxpayer dollars being funneled away from free public schools and directed toward brand new, sometimes for-profit, privately-run charter schools.

Even though studies show [4] that costly private schools don’t produce any better educational results than free public schools, for-profit schools have popped up all around the nation in recent years because of how valuable they are to corporate America. In fact, the historic Chicago Teachers Union strike earlier this year was largely in response to the city’s push to open up more charter schools to replace traditional public schools.

Education is a recession-proof industry that will always be in high demand. The corporate money-changers know if they can get their hands on this industry, "reform" it to replace decently-paid teachers and faculty with McTeachers, and then get taxpayers to foot the bill, quarterly profits and lavish bonuses for CEOs can explode. Even in so-called "non-profit" charter schools, management can make big bucks.

And that’s exactly what Georgia’s Constitutional Amendment 1 accomplishes. Expect similar amendments to pop up in other state elections in the near future.

This is a major shot in the multigenerational war on public education part of our commons.

Ultimately, as more states pass charter school amendments like Georgia, and money is sucked out of public schools, then public schools will meet the same fate as the rest of the ghettoized public institutions in America.

Public education will be just like public housing, which most Americans think of as low-income, crime-ridden neighborhoods. Or it will be like public hospitals, which most Americans see as disease-ridden institutions filled with impoverished, sick people. Because, in both cases, these institutions principally serve the very poor, there’s little sympathy for Americans stuck in public housing or public hospitals. Little sympathy also translates into little funding, which perpetuates the cycle of poverty and the disintegration of our public institutions.

But up until the Reagan "reforms," public education had avoided this same ghettoizing fate. Historically, our public education system was a marvel for the rest of the world, producing generations of scientists, doctors, and engineers from all races and socio-economic classes. Whether you came from a wealthy family or a poor family, the American public education system didn’t discriminate. As much as possible, it was a multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-class public institution that produced great results.

But as state governments embrace for-profit charter schools, traditional public schools will be neglected and see their funding cut until eventually they, too, will suffer the same fate that ghettoized public housing and public hospitals.

Even prominent Republicans are owning up to this. After passage of Georgia’s Constitutional Amendment 1, Lee Raudonis, the former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party, penned an op-ed [5] for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution warning that passage of the amendment was, “an endorsement for a drastically altering public education as most Americans define it.”

Raudonis foresees a future in which there’s a “new type of public school” as a result of this move toward charter schools. He describes this new public school as, “one for those children whose parents were not motivated enough to move them into a charter or private school or for whom there were none available.”

After all, there will be a lot of low-income parents who simply can't afford to pay a bit more for a private education for their child or whose low-income neighborhood wasn’t chosen for a new charter school location. And, tragically, there's no shortage of poor parents who are dysfunctional because of the poverty-associated diseases of drug addiction and mental illness. The kids of these parents will be forced to into cash-strapped, forgotten public schools. As Raudonis concludes, “public schools will come to be viewed similarly to public housing and public hospitals, as places for children whose parents, for whatever reasons, cannot find a better alternative.”

This will mark the beginning of the end for not just public education in America, but also for the American middle class itself, which is shrinking faster and faster each day. Public schools will be the new dumping ground for the poor and the working poor. And just as public housing provides the bare minimum for its inhabitants, and just as public hospitals provide the bare minimum for their patients, the new ghettoized public schools will provide a bare minimum of education for low-income students.

The public education system itself will no longer be America's great equalizer, churning out successful students from all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Instead, it will shackle the poor, keeping them from learning the essentials needed to find that great job for the 21st century and move up the economic ladder into the middle class – to achieve the American Dream.

America needs to "just say no" to public funding of private schools.

The Campaign to Privatize the World

Friday, April 13, 2012 by Common Dreams
by David Macaray


One of the biggest con games going on at the moment is the sustained attack on the U.S. public school system. It’s being perpetrated by predatory entrepreneurs (disguised as “concerned citizens” and “education reformers”) hoping to persuade the parents of school-age children that the only way their kids are going to get a decent education is by paying for something that they can already get for free. You might say it’s the same marketing campaign that launched bottled water.

The profit impulse fueling this drive is understandable. All it takes is a cursory look at the economic landscape to see why these speculators are drooling at the prospect of privatizing education. Millions of students pulling up stakes, bailing out of the public school system, and enrolling in private or charter schools? Are you kidding? Just think of the money that would generate.

Mind you, these “education reformers” are the same people who want to privatize the world—the same people who want more toll roads, who want hikers to pay trail fees, who want city parks and public beaches to charge admission. Indeed, they’re the same tribe who convinced a thirsty nation to voluntarily pay for drinking water that it could otherwise get for free.

Before comparing private and public schools, let’s revisit that bottled water craze, the stunning marketing phenomenon that made beverage companies wealthy and added a billion plastic bottles to our landfills and oceans. For the record, since passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), municipal water, unlike bottled, has been stringently regulated by the EPA, which is why bottled water contains more impurities and bacteria. In truth, city water is safer, cheaper and better for the environment.
Of course, there are people who refuse to believe one word the government (municipal or otherwise) tells them. They don’t believe the census, they don’t believe the figures in the federal budget, and they regard EPA statistics as state-sponsored propaganda. Fine. You’ll never get these people to change their minds, so save your breath. Let them, Grover Norquist, and Orly Taitz do whatever it is they do.

And then you have your beverage connoisseurs who (even though blind taste-tests tend to dispute this) insist that they can not only instantly tell the difference between bottled and tap water, but can tell the difference between varying brands of bottled water. I’m not saying that some of these epicureans (taste-test evidence aside) can’t do this. All I’m saying is that they’re fanatical about it.

Offer a glass of tap water to a beverage connoisseur who—before the bottled water craze swept the nation—had happily guzzled city water his entire life, and he’ll recoil in horror, as if you’d invited him to drink from your toilet. I’ve joked with these people that if I ever introduced a brand of bottled water, I would name it “Placebo.”

Back to education. The thing about private schools is that they’re very much like bottled water. They are far less regulated than public schools. In fact, they’re largely unregulated. Take California, for example. In order to teach in a California public school (elementary, intermediate or high school), you must have both a college degree and a teaching credential. The private schools require neither.

Not only can you teach in a private without a credential or degree, but private teachers earn significantly less than their public counterparts. Less education, less certification, less salary. The obvious question: Which institution—private or public—is going to attract the better instructor? Would we ever choose a medical doctor with those startling deficiencies? Yet, free enterprise hounds continue to extol the virtues of privatization, pretending it’s the cure for what ails us.

Another component to this anti-public education campaign is the Republican Party’s on-going attempt to subvert organized labor by attributing the flaws in our public school system to the teachers’ union. In 2008, labor is reported to have donated $400 million to the Democratic Party, which has been a rallying cry for Republicans ever since. Their stated goal is to neutralize the Democrats by crippling organized labor.

Of course, the irony here is that labor is furious at the Democrats for having more or less abandoned them. Labor places $400 million in the Democrats’ war chest, and what do they get in return? A pat on the head and a condescending lecture on the virtues of patience from Rahm Emanuel. Talk about your placebo.

Race to Nowhere

Stealing From The Mouth of Public Education to Feed the Prison Industrial Complex

Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by Institute for Policy Studies
We are witnessing a systemic recasting of education priorities that gives official structure and permanence to a preexisting underclass comprised largely of criminalized poor black and brown people.
by Adwoa Masozi

States across the US are excising billions of dollars from their education budgets as if 22% of the population isn’t functionally illiterate.According to the NAAL standards of the National Center for Education Statistics 68 million people are reading below basic levels. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that “nearly all states are spending less money (on education) than they spent in 2008 (after inflation), even though the cost of providing services will be higher.” On top of cutting 4 billion dollars from their budget, Texas has also eliminated state funding for pre-K programs that serve around 100,000 mostly at-risk children. North Carolina has cut nearly a half billion dollars from K-12 education resulting in an 80 percent loss for textbook funds and a 5 percent cut in support positions like guidance counselors and social workers among numerous other cuts. Decisions like these leave little reason to wonder why both those states are facing 27% drop out rates.

Closing public schools has so become the rage that the state of California has even produced a best practices guide on how to close and make them fit for turn-around. Why not promote a ‘best practices guide for keeping a school going’ instead? Why make these decisions when we know that a lack of education decreases access to quality (and legitimate) employment opportunities, increases the likelihood of encounters with the criminal (in)justice system, negatively impacts health outcomes, and altogether limits one’s ability to determine her or his own future?

What we’re witnessing is a systemic recasting of education priorities that gives official structure and permanence to a preexisting underclass comprised of largely criminalized poor black and brown people. Certainly having a prominent underclass isn’t new to the US as it has quite the track record of denying fill-in-the-blank people fill-in-the-blank rights. But the material outcomes of this shift are as communally and economically devastating as were the outcomes of the Black Codes in the 1800s and subsequent Jim Crow laws that persisted until 1965; both of which were legal, with implementation that varied from state to state and still impacts communities today.

The collusion between this government and private interests are not new either. It is not a coincidence that at the same time neighborhoods with high incidences of black people are being destabilized and displaced through fast track urban-land grabs, or gentrification, by developers empowered by local municipalities states are divesting from the public school infrastructure serving them. This is an insidious process that forces the hand of communities. Public education is something more than a right, a liberty, or a privilege. It is a need. One as basic and inarguable as the land we must walk on, food we must eat, water we must drink, and air we must breathe to live. For absolutely nothing will or can be done in human society without it. So who would want to send their children to schools that have police presence and metal detectors in place of books? Or to overcrowded schools with teacher to student ratios of 1 to 30 and little to no extra curricular activities or wrap-around services? These are the material consequences of divestment from public schools. Who wants to send their children to schools in neighborhoods that are mini-police states? If it can be helped, no one.

Charter schools by definition aren’t the real problem. They have been practical and creative solutions to educating children when needs go unmet. Forming alternative centers of education has been a norm practiced in communities across the country since the 1800s. But what we have today is something very different. Charters now elbow out established public schools in part or completely. Corporations like Wells Fargo, BOA, JP Morgan, and Wal-Mart, all major investors in private prisons and players in corporate education reform, have extraordinary influence on education policy at the state and federal levels.

Parents, students, teachers, and other relevant stakeholders are manipulated into making a false choice, drawing a line in the sand where the wrong group of people is on the opposing side. Whether for public schools or charters, both sides want the same outcomes - creative, critical thinking students who are equipped to participate fully in their community and society at large. Instead of charters continuing to operate as creative workarounds, especially for communities in crisis, sharing in the resources for the public, they’ve been co-opted. Now taking an antagonistic role towards traditional public schools.

While these turf wars are being fought, the children who don’t make it into the tier one schools or roll sevens in the charter lotteries are left behind and to their own devices in these poorly administered, under resourced and overcrowded schools.

Forty-six percent of the 2.3 million people incarcerated are without a high school diploma and the skills to compete in an ever-shrinking job market. This means roughly a million people won’t ever get a shot at what should already be low-hanging fruit—a low-waged, skill-lite, benefit-deplete, socially unrewarding job with a work environment that’s likely to be mentally and spiritually stifling.

Little guesswork is needed around what will happen to these unskilled and undereducated millions who have been failed by these schools that continue to be eroded. It is the prisons that will have them; for these youth are the preferred meat of the criminal (in)justice system.

This is why we can have record closings of public schools throughout the country, and at the same time witness the rise of corporate backed charter schools and private prisons. The message to the people being that a select few will be educated and the rest will be locked in struggle against their own commoditization. This is why we must continue to fight.

Corporations Hate Taxes, So They Let the Children Pay

Monday, January 9, 2012 by CommonDreams.org

by Paul Buchheit

 

 

Two recent studies, both rather troubling on their own, are even more disturbing when the relationship between the two is considered.

The first is a study by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) that shows tax avoidance at the state level. The CTJ study, which evaluated 265 large companies, determined that an average of 3% was paid in state taxes, less than half the average state tax rate of 6.2%. The ten states with 10 or more companies in the study all collected between 2.5% and 3.55%: Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Virginia, California, North Carolina, and New York.

CTJ notes that "these 265 companies avoided a total of $42.7 billion in state corporate income taxes over the three years." That's about $14 billion per year.

The second study, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), reports that "Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states, and in at least 30 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels - often far below."

Combining CBPP figures with enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics reveals that total K-12 education cuts for fiscal 2012 are about $12.7 billion.
To summarize:

• Corporate state tax avoidance is about $14 billion for one year.

• State education cuts amount to about $12.7 billion for one year.

The connection becomes clearer with a look at the details. The figures for all 20 states represented by four or more companies in the CTJ tax avoidance study are listed at PayUpNow.org. A comparison with the CBPP study on education cuts shows that 19 of these 20 states cut education funding in Fiscal 2012. The nine states that increased educational funding were largely absent from the CTJ study, with a total of only 15 (out of 265) tax avoiding companies.

In general, the states with significant tax-avoiding corporations tended to make sizable cuts in education.

It might be argued that no direct connection exists between corporate state tax shortfalls and school cuts, or that the unpayed tax money might have been earmarked for other expenditures.

But the amounts of corporate savings and student loss are distressingly similar. Big companies refuse to meet their tax obligations, and our children end up paying through cuts to their educations.

The Nightly News - Infographics

 

by Jonathan Hickman ©2007 Pronea & Image Comics 

The infographics above came from the comic. The data they contain is accurate, for the most part--though some of the conclusions are obviously opinion and/or part of the story.

The TV graphic is one I made.

Schools Nationwide Cut Down to 4 Days/wk, Since Wealthy Refuse to Pay Fair Share

GOP's anti-tax attitude and budget cuts mean some states are closing schools on Fridays, leaving parents, workers and students in the lurch.
By Sarah Seltzer, AlterNet
Posted on August 23, 2011

I doubt there's any student in the world who would object to having Fridays off. But when it comes to policy, the increasing number of American schools moving to a four-day week is not necessarily news to jump for joy about. In fact, it's potentially devastating for parents, school workers and students all left in the lurch by budget cuts. And it's happening more and more, as state and local budgets shrink to tiny levels and raising taxes on the wealthy is somehow considered verboten.

This anti-school thinking is evidenced by the fact that a leading right-wing businessman wrote an op-ed yesterday in which he questioned his taxes going toward the existence of a Department of Education. "Do we really need an energy department or an education department at all?" the American Enterprise Institute's Harvey Golub wrote in the Wall Street Journal, while arguing, contra Warren Buffet, that taxes for the ultra-rich not be raised.

We need more revenue for education, Harvey. Just ask the growing group of parents who are stuck with their young school-age children on Mondays or Fridays because the schools can't even afford to open that day.

The Associated Press reports that the Irene-Wakonda School District in South Dakota is the latest to move to the four-day week, bringing the state close to having one-fourth of its districts on the reduced schedule.

“It got down to monetary reasons more than anything else,’’ Superintendent Larry Johnke said. The $50,000 savings will preserve a vocational education program that otherwise would have been scrapped.

The four-day school week is an increasingly visible example of the impact of state budget problems on rural education. This fall, fully one-fourth of South Dakota’s districts will have moved to some form of the abbreviated schedule. Only Colorado and Wyoming have a larger proportion of schools using a shortened week. According to one study, more than 120 school districts in 20 states, most in the west, now use four-day weeks.

The AP notes that while district officials are quick to tout the fact that there's no recorded difference in standardized testing and so on for the schools with the four-day schedule, "parents aren't convinced."

Last year, the Wall Street Journal ran a big feature on the movement toward shorter school weeks as well, including a map showing at least 16 states where the policy is allowed, including Colorado, Wyoming, Georgia and South Dakota. The piece's author found that no conclusive data could be pinpointed explaining where test scores go when Friday classes disappear.

But education advocates expressed grave concern, saying teachers had to fight to keep students focused during the newly longer days, and Randi Weingarten of the AFT noted that implementing reforms and new ideas was more difficult with the four-day week.

To be fair to energetic local educators, there are some advantages in a reduced-day schedule, particularly for older students in rural areas with long commutes, according to this 2010 piece in USA Today and this 2008 Time Magazine piece on the growing trend in rural districts from Maine to New York to Georgia to the Southwest, and even Hawaii. The practice can allow teachers more time to prepare and students more time to rest. Going to doctors' appointments, helping out around the family farm, and other reasons to skip school may lessen in frequency. And the remaining school days will by necessity be longer and involve more tutoring and activities, which could motivate students.

But it certainly isn't a cure-all for budget woes. Educators from other districts where the experiment has been tried have also said it was hard to keep up the pace of the curriculum and some have eventually abandoned the schedule, saying it wasn't worth the money "saved."

Many districts that have the shortened schedule say they've seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. But others say that not only did they not save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren't in class enough and didn't have enough contact with teachers.

The best conclusion that could be drawn from the small amount of research and reporting that's been done on the matter is this: pedagogically, there's no formula and each school and population will see different results from the shortened week. So the real question remains, why are schools even pushed to make this choice?

Regardless of what works academically for each school, the idea that many are being forced to shut down because of budget constraints is disturbing to say the least--and that's indeed the case for many of these schools, as the WSJ article notes:

Some schools, meanwhile, say they are turning to the four-day schedule as a last resort. In North Branch, Minn., school Superintendent Deb Henton said her 3,500-student district, facing a $1.3 million deficit, is simply out of options.

"We've repeatedly asked our residents to pay higher taxes, cut some of our staff, and we may even close one of our schools," she said. "What else can you really do?" Despite a "lot of opposition" from parents, she said, the district is set to adopt a four-day week for next school year.

Indeed, one of the groups hardest hit is working parents, who have to scramble for childcare on the extra day, an extra-tough task during the recession when many may need the time to work or look for work.

Another group hit hard? Bus drivers, cafeteria workers, maintenance staff and others whose smaller work-weeks may in fact be the main reason districts "save" money on the four-day week: they're gaining extra pockets in their budgets by cutting these staff members salaries by up to a fifth. This is hardly a rejuvenating measure, and combined with the hit to parents this loss of employment could certainly put a dent in small communities' financial well-being.

And presumably, for the day off to actually help schools academically, the facilities would still be open on the fifth day. If bus drivers and other staffers aren't around that fifth day because of budget cuts, then how can students get to school for extra help, or activities? It completely undercuts the point.

This lost day is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to school budget cuts. But it underscores quite drastically the way budget cuts are decimating schools' ability to make choices that will best help students; instead, they're left playing defense. Texas, which has many districts with the four-day policy, is a particularly egregious example of the toll budget cuts have taken on education.

A local columnist explained how the 2011-'12 school year is going to begin for young Texans:

The massive cuts to public education approved last spring in Austin also will have long-lasting and devastating consequences for the children of our state. CPPP estimates that Texas schools must manage cuts, on average, of nearly $1,000 per student just when the needs of our students are increasing. Although earlier this month HISD restored some funding to schools that had been previously cut, the severity of the reductions mandated by the Legislature won't come to fruition for another year or longer. It is clear that dark times are ahead for the hard-working employees and families of Texas schools.

Paul Krugman made a similar point earlier this year when addressing Texas budget cuts, noting that the right-wing push to de-fund schools and hurt children will result in economic pain in the future: "The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness. What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?"

THE DEATH OF FREE WILL Part 1

PART 1 of 5

By Charlotte Iserbyt

NewsWithViews.com

 

“To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.” – William Ellery Channing 1780-1842

 

Something is drastically wrong with the present restructuring of education. I hope this article will persuade parents and traditional public school administrators and teachers to work together to stop the dismantling of what was once considered the finest educational system in the world. The traditional system’s successful administrative structure which allowed elected school boards (working with superintendents, principals, and teachers) to provide our children with an academic education, should not be changed to accommodate the needs of the corporate fascist/socialist (government/business) partnerships and tax-exempt foundations. 

One must understand that the situation with low academic test scores and unacceptable behavior of students was deliberately created over a period of 80 years, starting in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation’s plan to use schools to bring about a Soviet-style (performance-based) planned economic system. See reference to Carnegie Corporation's Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and Carnegie-Soviet Academy of Science Agreement (1985). The latter agreement was signed the same year Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed the U.S.-USSR Education Exchange Agreement. 

The first experiment with Outcomes/Performance-Based Education (the restructuring system being implemented today) was Carnegie Corporation’s “Eight Year Study” (1933-1941).

To get an idea of the enormity and severity of the problems addressed by this article, see the OECD-SSRC Stupski Next-Gen Data System Workshop (October 2010) presentation which states the following: “We will build capacity to leave a dying system and give birth to a new one…”

Solution—the following government agencies which control local education must be abolished: 

U.S. Department of Education, its laboratories and centers, and all federally funded state departments of education. Also, legislation must be passed prohibiting outside meddling in state or local education matters by corporations and tax exempt foundations. Such legislation would prevent international, national or corporate entities from administering attitudinal assessments and collecting private data on students, their families, educators and/or members of small businesses. 

It is doubtful that major conservative groups would help in this endeavor. Our best hope is to enlist the help of traditional teachers and administrators, and small business owners, who would have to go up against their prospective organization leadership. It might work. It’s worth a try. 

This article is written for the benefit of parents, our children, and the teachers of our children; it explains the following:

Link 1: Re-inventing Schools Coalition
Link 2: Back to Basics Reform or. . .OBE . . .Skinnerian International Curriculum and the deliberate dumbing down of america
Link 3: Jed Brown on Behavioral Conditioning
Link 4: Educators Push Back Against Obama’s “Business Model” for School Reform
(If a link becomes broken, please do a Google search for the title.)

The last nail of so-called school reform is being struck in the coffin of traditional American education which made our nation the envy of the Free World and which produced famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, artists, musicians, doctors, etc. 

The reform is not new. It started in the early 1900s when John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Director of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, Frederick T. Gates, set up the Southern Education Board. In 1913 the organization was incorporated into the General Education Board. These boards set in motion “the deliberate dumbing down of America”. In Frederick T. Gates’ “The Country School of Tomorrow” Occasional Papers No. 1 (General Education Board, New York, 1913) was a section entitled “A Vision of the Remedy” in which he wrote:

“Is there aught a remedy for this neglect of rural life? Let us, at least, yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream that there is. In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”

The above quote sounds like something from one of the public/private school-to-work/tax-exempt foundation partnerships involved in the Reinventing Schools Coalition agenda, as well as other innocuous sounding current-day initiatives that are being implemented across the nation.

The above Rockefeller agenda was followed up by the Carnegie Corporation’s little volume on education entitled Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (Charles Scribner’s Sons: N.Y. 1934) — funded to the tune of $340,000. This little book called for using the schools to turn the United States into a socialist nation, ultimately to become a member of a socialist/communist world government. Author Francis Gannon wrote that Harold Laski, the philosopher of British socialism, said of this report:

“At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the Report is an educational program for a Socialist America.”

Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies is the most important book I ever laid my hands on. You can find it here. Following are important and revealing excerpts from Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies:

“The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism [free enterprise], and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people…” (pp. 1-2)
“. . . Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States and in other countries the age of ‘laissez faire’ in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging.” (p. 16)

In 1951, Human Relations in Curriculum Change was published (Ed. Kenneth D. Benne and Bozidar Muntyan, The Dryden Press, Inc., NY). The book contains “Selected readings with an emphasis on group development.” Most works—written by social scientists and philosophers of-the-day—appeared in publications during the 1940s decade; some included references dating from the 1930s decade. Human Relations in Curriculum Change discusses “social engineering” (theory, methods); “re-education of personnel in knowledge, skills, and attitudes”; schools as potential laboratories for “experimental social science”; “human engineering”; “group thinking”; “change agents”; Kurt Lewin’s “change process” theory; “consensus”; and more.

In Critical Theory, Marxism, Dialectical Method and Total Quality Management (2002), author Judy McLemore explains that the editors of Human Relations and Curriculum Change selected for inclusion “the research experiments and writings on group development and human engineering by various transformational Marxists to create a blueprint for the ‘re-education’ or brainwashing of the masses and subsequent transformation of America. It is a master plan for ‘inducing and controlling changes in social systems,’ that is, changes in the individuals within schools, government, universities, industries, etc. by way of the ‘group’ (Benne Preface, 24). . . . The plan includes a dialectical method of ‘resolving’ personal individual beliefs and dispositions of traditional Americans into a ‘common social outlook’ defined by these Marxists (336). By common they mean of the same mind, feelings, habits, knowledge, motivation, beliefs and values. In effect they mean to mold each individual personality to conform to a facilitated group adaptable to change.”

Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and the old progressive theories and practices that appeared in Human Relations in Curriculum Change (1951) are accommodated by school/workforce reforms today that promote so-called global competitiveness and global citizenship. (Note: the term progressive was “in the middle of the last century, what socialists and communists used for themselves because they believed they had the key to the future."[1])

Please use this article “The Death of Free Will” to fight state implementation of the federal Common Core Standards. Use this article to fight the totalitarian Pavlovian/Skinnerian performance-based workforce training agenda that will dumb down students as well as teachers . . . which will pay teachers for students’ good grades (teach to the test/what are they testing?) and very likely also pay children as well for good grades.

This agenda MUST be stopped or all of us will suffer: our children, their teachers, and our free political and economic system of government. Once FREE WILL is destroyed, there is no protection from descending to the level of animals, subjected to “training”. Only human beings can be educated. Why have we opted for animal training, with or without the computer, rather than continuing to educate our children in the traditional way for upward mobility?

This is the ultimate war for our children’s minds and souls. No other war has ever been more important. If you don’t have time to read this entire article, please at least click on the links at the beginning of this article as well as their associated links. Descriptions of the links follow. See Charlotte's 9 min. vedeo below. For part two click below.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

Endnote:

1- Project MUSE - Sewanee Review, Vol. 118, No. 2, Spring 2010, The John Hopkins University Press.

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Monday, April 11, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

Without aid, Detroit Public Sschools may close half of its schools

(I have friends in Detroit, and the problems there continue to be a concern for me.--jef)

***

Class sizes also would swell under proposal filed with the state
Jennifer Chambers / The Detroit News - January 17. 2011

Detroit — Detroit Public Schools would close nearly half of its schools in the next two years, and increase high school class sizes to 62 by the following year, under a deficit-reduction plan filed with the state.

The plan, part of a monthly update Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb gives the Department of Education, was filed late Monday to provide insight into Bobb's progress in his attempt to slash a $327 million deficit in the district to zero over the next several years. Under it, the district would slim down from 142 schools now to 72 during 2012-13.

Bobb has said school closures, bigger classes and other measures would be needed if he cannot get help from lawmakers to restructure finances in the state's largest school district.

DPS considered but declined to file for bankruptcy in 2009. In the past year, debt in the district has increased by more than $100 million, brought on by a mix of revenue declines in property taxes, reduced state aid, declining enrollment and an unplanned staffing surge this past fall.

Starting this fall, the district plans to boost class sizes in grades 4-12 and at all grade levels by fiscal 2012, which begins July 1, to save $16.8 million. The plan would hike class sizes for: Grades K-3 from 17-25 students to 29 in 2012-13 and 31 in 2013-14.

Grades 4-5 from 30 students to 37 in 2012-13 and 39 in 2013-14.

Grades 6-8 from 35 students to 45 in 2012-13 and 47 in 2013-14.

Grades 9-12 from 35 students to 60 in 2012-13 and 62 in 2013-14.

Because the district's contract with the Detroit Federation of Teachers requires payments to teachers for class sizes that exceed specified maximums, the district estimates it would spend $10 million in oversize class pay over four years.

Keith Johnson, president of the teachers union, said the proposed class size increases won't work and will never happen.

"I will never agree to any class-size increases," Johnson said. "These increases are antithetical to learning. Secondly, our classrooms aren't even built to accommodate those numbers.

"Johnson said the teachers' contract does not let the district exceed contracted class sizes through 2012. DFT filed an unfair labor practice charge in July to restore class sizes for the upcoming school year.

Parent Petrina Johnson said swelling high school classrooms to 60 students or more will only leave them uneducated.

"There is one teacher and she can barely get to each of the 36 kids now. That makes no sense," said Johnson, who has three children at Mumford High School.

School officials said the plan would create a "lecture hall" model similar to a university.

Johnson said teenagers aren't ready for that.

"This gives more opportunity for them to slip through the cracks," she said.

The proposal calls for closing 40 schools in fiscal 2012 and 30 schools in fiscal 2013. That would leave DPS with 72 schools for a projected 58,570 students, down from about 74,000 now. The district closed 30 schools this fiscal year, which is expected to save $23 million. The planned closings in fiscal 2012-14 would save more than $33 million.

Bobb said the district could save another $12.4 million from the school closures if it "simply abandons" the closed buildings. Past policy has been to keep the closed schools clean and secure, officials said, but the district could cut costs by eliminating storage, board-up and security.

DPS spokesman Steve Wasko said the district has laid out the path it must take to eliminate the deficit, and Bobb remains focused on working with lawmakers to pass one of three plans to restructure DPS' finances.

Those plans include splitting the district in two to put its debt obligation with an "old district," covering about 9,000 students. State revenue would pay off the debt, allowing the "new district" to move forward debt-free with undetermined start-up funds.

Such a plan would need approval by state lawmakers and Gov. Rick Snyder.

District officials said they are pursuing "renaissance" legislation to free up $400 million in future tobacco settlement funds that could help mend DPS' deficit and those of 40 other districts statewide. In return, the districts would make dramatic reforms based on the federal Race to the Top initiative, such as eliminating teacher seniority.

That proposal died last month in the state Legislature's lame duck session. A third plan would look at new systems and agencies used in New Orleans, which has converted more than half of its public schools into charter schools in the past several years.

Besides closing schools and increasing class sizes, Bobb's plan calls for the district to abolish its divisions of finance, legal services, human services and public safety and contract with either Wayne County or the city of Detroit for those services.

"This is the route that we'd need to take if the other larger solutions are not found," Wasko said. "It is in fact the route that we continue to take until alternatives are approved."

There was no mention of any of these plans in the documents Bobb filed with the state, Wasko said, because the plans are still being researched and fleshed out in and outside DPS.

"There is a lot of work going on," he said.

Joseph Johnson, executive director for the National Center for Urban School Transformation, said almost every urban school district in the country is struggling, but perhaps none as severely as Detroit.

"I haven't heard of an urban district taking such drastic of steps," Joseph Johnson said. "Certainly every urban district is engaging in some serious belt-tightening as they are dealing with smaller budgets and at the same time often higher expectation from the public in terms of student achievement."

Los Angeles public schools open doors to ‘corporate brand identity’

(Wow, I'm almost afraid to check out how this works out in a few years.--jef)

This algebraic equation, brought to you by Coca-Cola?


By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, December 16th, 2010 



Absurd as it may sound, that will soon be a figurative reality for many students in Los Angeles county, as public school officials there have announced a plan to solicit corporate sponsorship to help grow their budgets and retain staff.

In a unanimous vote, the board decided yesterday to allow "corporate brand identity" proliferation throughout the facilities of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district's policy would allow corporate donors to earmark what programs they'd like their money to support, be they sports, arts or academic.

While not the first school district to do so, Los Angeles is certainly the largest, according to The New York Times. The move comes amid one of the state's worst budget crises ever.

The discussion of private money being diverted to aid public schools is not a new one and is not without controversy, but there are reasonable advocates on both sides of the issue.

When two Sheboygan, Wisconsin high schools changed the names of their cafeteria kitchens to "the Kohler Credit Union kitchens" in 2006, critics lined up to attack the plan as indicative of America's social decline. But the schools took in $45,000 for the re-namings, according to USA Today, and promptly put the cafeterias up for sponsorship next at $300,000 apiece.

That translated into more teachers, higher salaries and newer books, supporters said.
Similar words were echoed by Los Angeles school board members, according to the Times.
"This is really our way to be responsive to that reality; we need to look for other sources of revenue," Melissa Infusino, the district's partnerships director, was quoted as saying. "As uncomfortable as it may be for folks, it’s less comfortable to get rid of programs or go through more layoffs."

The board also agreed to shorter summers, with students leaving classes on June 1 and starting again on Aug. 15.

Los Angeles public schools served nearly 700,000 students in the 2007-2008 season, according to district figures.

Strong New Films Go After the Much Hyped "Waiting For Superman" and Its Simplistic Educational Analysis

New documentaries take strong steps to undermine the "Blame the Teachers" mentality of Davis Guggenheim's superficial take on education system ills.
By Megan Driscoll, AlterNet
Posted on November 16, 2010

In light of the success of Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, Waiting for Superman, many education experts have come out with vehement criticism against the film’s assertion that teachers, and the unions that protect them, are the primary cause of the public education crisis. Now, Guggenheim’s fellow filmmakers are beginning to do the same.

Vicky Abeles rejects Superman’s allegation in her new film, Race to Nowhere. Instead of placing blame on educators, Abeles suggests that the current failures of the education system are largely due to the excessive pressures students and teachers alike endure on a daily basis, primarily as a result of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy.

Inspired to make Race to Nowhere after observing the detrimental effects that extreme academic burdens were having on her own children, Abeles’ picture portrays a number of students who exhibits signs of emotional distress under the confines of NCLB. Abeles highlights the consequences of a test score-driven system – one that Superman emphasizes as a solution – featuring students who feel overwhelmed by the intense academic expectations imposed upon them and begin to manifest their stress both emotionally and physically. One teacher interviewed in the film remarks, “You have a system that is trying to further roboticize students, mechanize them if you will, to be these academic competitors, these producers. The very nature of it in itself is very dehumanizing,” while a frustrated student exclaims, “Everyone expects us to be superheroes.”

While Abeles’ depiction of the consequences NCLB has on American youth is certainly compelling, it is her portrayal of exhausted teachers that proves to be her strongest case against Superman’s claims.

Race to Nowhere, currently screening in schools and theaters across the country, examines the effects NCLB has had on educators and public schools since its inception in 2001. The education policy, which measures success and determines funding almost entirely based on standardized test results, leaves little room for teachers to develop alternative instruction methods that may better appeal to individual students. Rather, educators are left “literally just drowning in content” they are obligated to teach in order to ensure that adequate scores are achieved and necessary financial support is provided. Numerous teachers throughout Abeles’ film express frustration with the pressures they endure to follow the rigid curriculum. “Do it or you don’t have a job,” says one teacher. “It’s gotten harder and harder to feel like I can teach the things I believe in, versus be a yes-man.”

Vanessa Roth reiterates the prevalence of undervalued educators in her upcoming documentary that exists as part of The Teacher Salary Project, a campaign spearheaded by Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari to advocate for higher wages for teachers across the country. The Project, set to premier May 3, 2011, is comprised of Roth’s film, as well as an interactive online resource and a national outreach campaign, all of which collectively seek to educate and empower citizens on both the local and national level on the fight for sustainable wages for educators.

Eggers and Calegari, who co-authored the 2005 book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, joined with Roth to produce and create a film that emphasizes the struggles educators face in a system that fails to recognize their significant role in shaping American youth. Contrary to Guggenheim’s contention against today’s teachers, Calegari stresses that, “The main reason that American public schools are failing is because we, as a country, haven’t taken the teaching profession seriously.” The Project, like Race to Nowhere, asserts that current U.S. education policy has resulted in schools that are gravely underfunded and educators who are too often forced to survive on unsustainable salaries or abandon their professions altogether. As noted on The Teacher Salary Project’s Web site, 50 percent of the nation’s best teachers are forced to take on second jobs in order to be able to actually afford teaching.

Calegari continues on the subject, contending, “Research has proven that the quality of a students’ teacher has the greatest impact on a students’ future success.” These findings, however, suggest a grim future, when 46 percent of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of being in the classroom.

So what methods of reform are needed?

Contrary to Superman’s not-so-subtle urging for the dismantling of teacher unions, The Teacher Salary Project team advocates for the increase of teacher wages. “Raising effective teachers’ salaries, and keeping them in the classroom, is the most important thing we can do to preserve our democracy,” Calegari argues, “We need to create an overwhelming movement that says to everyone that teachers need to have a new day. A day with a seriously prestigious profession, that is wildly competitive, with strong and inspiring leadership, meaningful development, and legitimate financial rewards and incentives.”

Abeles urges for similar changes in Race to Nowhere, where she emphasizes the need for a more personalized curriculum that permits teachers flexibility in the classroom and encourages more creative approaches, such as project-based learning. Moreover, Race to Nowhere suggests that a reevaluation of our capitalistic focus on creating an academically competitive youth is essential. Abeles’ film suggests that America’s incessant dependence on test results to measure knowledge and achievement is rapidly destroying students’ overall health and eagerness to learn. Thus, the call for a greater emphasis on more uniquely tailored methods of teaching will serve to benefit both educators and the students they instruct.

In other words, the two projects suggest, Guggenheim gets it utterly wrong – it is about the funding, it is about sustainable-living wages, and it is about providing students with a customized, challenging curriculum that does not equate them or their teachers to a group of homogenous androids.

Collectively, the films serve to illustrate the true complexity of today’s education crisis. Both show that placing blame on educators and their unions is not only a gross oversimplification of the current circumstances, but in fact is a disservice to those teachers who make substantial financial sacrifices with very little return.

With 2010 being deemed the year of education films and Superman at the forefront, make sure to watch these alternatives that offer a different perspective on the call for education reform.