Here’s more about the Tennessee proposal to cut the welfare benefits of families if their children don’t make progress on state tests.
155,000 families will be affected if the bill passes.
Is this value-added right-to-eat?
The main sponsor of the bill has no children.
I knew it was Ebenezer Scrooge.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Nothing motivates people like money,” Campfield said. “We have done very little to hold parents accountable for their child’s performance. It’s unacceptable to have this generational cycle of poverty continue.”
Out of the mouths of heartless morons.
With Common Core test results, the number of families may be even higher. Dare I even ask if teachers with low scoring kids are being punished by the TN legislature, also? I’m sure they are thinking about it as we write.
Is this a great country, or what? Soon, people will migrate to somewhere else.
How can families defend against this type of punishment. Many children in poverty score and function within the slow learner range of intelligence and are not able to make the progress a typical children make, and have more difficulty in all academic subjects. Many of their parents had similar difficulties in school. It just breaks my heart!
Diane, I recall that celebrated quote of Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” This could very easily be the issue that will wake the country up to the mean-spiritedness of this entire testing mania. Frank
I have had a busy weekend and day and just saw this post after my students (I teach in Memphis) left for the day. This is so stupid it’s just unbelievable. This is so weird that, Frank, I have to say I am inclined to agree with that quote. No one in my school mentioned this today, so it must not be common knowledge just yet because if it had been the kids themselves would have been up in arms. This law would have a lot of serious repercussions. It makes me wonder if the reformers won’t hang themselves on their own rope.
After all they are just here to try to help us.
I wish, but I don’t think so. They will applaud TN for punishing the poor.Our country is quite sick and twisted with many social and political issues. Politicians are not getting their job done and striking at anything that moves. Poor kids and poor schools don’t go away using their methods. Makes them furious and they retaliate.
Kicking puppies and slapping babies.
These morons in TN are truly heartless. I know something that would motivate kids to do well in school- knowing good jobs will be available and that college was an entitlement like it is in many European nations. We have reached facist proportions in this nations. What a shame. And I thought it was those “bad teachers” who were responsible for test scores.
Absolutely! But where ARE the jobs? My son has a Masters plus. He has great grades and a resume that is amazing. He can’t get an interview!!! It is ridiculous. He has a part time job. He could do anything. He speaks French, Spanish, English, is an excellent communicator, is computer literate and skilled. If companies overlook him, who has a chance?
Apparently they didn’t read our letter:
State Sen. in Tennessee proposes cutting welfare payments to families with students with bad report card. We respond.
Campfield proposal would hurt youths
Published in Knoxville News Sentinel, Knoxville, TN, Feb 3,2013.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/feb/03/letters-feb-3-2013/
State Sen. Stacey Campfield’s proposal to cut welfare payments for students with bad report cards is backwards. Poverty is the major cause of poor school performance. Poverty means inadequate diet, poor health care and lack of access to books at home, school and in the community: All of these are associated with low school achievement. The best teaching in the world will not help if children are hungry, ill and have little or nothing to read. Campfield’s bill will make things worse, not better. Benefits to families whose children have low school achievement should be increased, not decreased, in order to protect these children from the effects of poverty, and we should take some of the money we are so eager to spend on “tough” standards and tests and invest in food programs, health care and libraries.
Michelle Shory, Knoxville, Clara Lee Brown, Knoxville, and Stephen Krashen, Los Angeles, Calif.
This is truly appalling. But it is not surprising. They have taken this issue to the extreme. I understand that some people think they have worked “harder than” or “better than” or “wiser than” others. They think that we in the middle class have “earned” the right to be middle class an that helping helping anyone other than family (and often not even family) is as far as they they will extend their helping hands. They forget that they believe THEY are entitled to tax deductions for home mortgages and childcare credit and various other tax breaks. Yet they would take food, clothing an shelter away from the very people who need to be helped out of the rat hole that society has stuffed them into. I get really frustrated when people act as if some poor person with a cell phone is offensive when they likely got the phone as a used item or from someone who tossed it aside. Some act as if these people are living the easy life. How many of us would trade lives with them? To punish families further for their students’ school performance is truly hateful. I can see why attendance should be enforced. But if we truly want to help these people, w nee t o spend money to educate the parents as well as the children…in taking money away an depriving them of food is cruel at best.
I can’t believe TN is already cutting welfare benefits for families “by 20 percent if their child doesn’t show up for school.” Any other states doing that? I wonder how many parents are sending their kids to school when they’re sick now, just so they don’t lose a portion of the meager benefits they receive for basic survival?
This is all so mean spirited. So sad.
Hopefully, the more people see the kinds of non-educator politicians and their corporate cronies who are determining education policies, whether in the federal government, the statehouse or the mayor’s office, the more they will be motivated to take action and bring back local control to elected district school boards.
Clearly these struggling students will do better if they are hungry! I am afraid to think of what they will come up with next.
So now children shoulder the burden of responsibility for whether or not their familes eat? This is a joke, right?
Right to life. Responsibility to pass a test. Responsibiity to support a family. Right to starve. Let’s put more stress on the poor and their children. Is this helping them? Good grief.
unbelievable! Let’s blame the victims.
Yes . . . this will help – make the children already at risk for school failure due to the poverty they live in more vulnerable by taking away what little safety net they have – way to strengthen the school to prison pipeline!
This is incredibly disheartening. Does anyone know,of any other similar proposals in other states?
All oppressed people are authorized, wherever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
Henry Clay, speech, U.S. House of Representatives, March 24, 1818