Butch Cassidy asked the
Sundance Kid about their pursuers, “Who ARE those guys?”
We could well ask the same about the posse now hoping to
standardize the nation’s children and teachers. What qualifies
Governor Cuomo, Chancellor King, and those others who are
cheerleaders for the Common Core (e.g., Joel Klein, Jeb Bush,
Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) to know
what children in the early and middle grades need to know to be
ready for college and careers?
This teacher writes: “As a 6-8 math
teacher in NYS, what I would like to see or find commentary on is
this question, “What qualifications do the Governor, Mayor,
Commissioner King, and others have to pinpoint precise benchmarks
toward ‘college and career ready’ in 3rd – 8th graders? I just
don’t believe the glide path toward readiness is accurate. Each
student’s path may be as varied and diverse as their own
backgrounds and motivations.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My thoughts exactly Who are these guys? And why are they telling moe what to do in education? I have three degrees and five certifications , which I worked very hard for.. I have a TFA at my school from Yale and they treat him like a GOD? I of course am kicked to the curb. They will be very sorry someday that they didn,t use my experiences Ad expertise to help them. It will come down… I feel so sorry for our students.
It’s less about who these guys are and more about who they should be. Our nation would be in a much better position If only the people in power were experienced in the fields they controlled. As it is, lawyers and MBAs make decisions in agriculture, education, health, and everything else. If only there were true representation in government for educators.
It’s a good idea for people of diverse backgrounds to serve in government, of course, but the problem is bigger than that.
I don’t have to be a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker to appreciate and respect the skills of people who are. There is some character flaw in these self-appointed masters of the universe that makes them think WQ (Wisdom Quotient) is measured in dollars, that caused them to have the total lack of empathy for others and the utter lack of respect for other people’s skills that they have.
I agree. I know I’m painting with a VERY broad brush here, but I haven’t met an MBA or lawyer who didn’t think they knew best. In my limited experience I haven’t come across many politicians who are genuinely able to listen, humbly, and learn. I think stepping into a role like that, a person has to have a certain level of arrogance.
A lack of empathy is a problem for most people, unfortunately.
It must be clear by now that we’ve been dealing all along with a force that is alien to the educational community. Its goals and ideals are the very opposite of the ones that genuine educators have been trying to promote since the dawn of civilization.
“Its goals and ideals are the very opposite of the ones that genuine educators have been trying to promote since the dawn of civilization.”
Exactly. The idea of Education (e + ducere = to draw out of) has nothing to do with their picture of “education” which envisions this process as if it were a long staircase that students need to climb up every year at a regulated pace. If students do not climb at the set pace, they are assumed to have “slipped”. And, because any slip supposedly has grave consequences for their future employability and our nation’s global competitiveness, today’s leaders ought to do everything in its power to make sure that slips never happen. Thus the ends justify the means. Punishments and all manner of pointless finger pointing along the way are actually a good thing, don’t-ya-know.
This is not education and children are not/i> merely the future workforce of our nation. They are human beings with an unknown reservoir of gifts to bring to the world if only we can find a way to draw them out. Marching in time up a staircase is a ridiculous way to approach this challenge. It is such a radical shift from the picture envisioned by our best philosophers through the ages.
I am beginning to feel as if their ultimate end goal is to make the standardization of the system seem so flawless that relative failure or success in life can only be interpreted as the “choice” of an individual. If that ideological circle is closed, what kind of society will we have?
Emmy, that was very, very beautifully put. Magnificent. Thank you.
Is assigning students to schools based on geography really the best way to treat students as individuals? My local school board works hard to ensure that no school is perceived to be too very different from any other in order to maintain the traditional zoned school system.
Thanks, Robert!
I second Robert, Emmy. So right on and well worded…children are not interchangeable widgets. Thanks for pointing out to us that those students who slip one year are not failures as posited by the education ‘deciders’ who are too often the lawyers Erin wrote about.
These people truly believe they are the masters of the universe. The new super heros of education.
They seek to judge a teacher not by what he or she does, but by what his or her students become.
How scary to think all children must “become” any one thing. Even our own middle school principal referred to our children as “products.”
I hope you corrected your principal. Maybe not call him/her out in public but at least discuss the terminology with him/her letting him/her know just how wrong and offensive it is.
Duane…dangerous to correct your principal. You could soon be out of a job.
Done it many a times and still do!
You’re correct about it being dangerous because so many of them are so insecure in their own skin that it has worn it thin. It’s a matter of being diplomatic about it. It’s best done in private but sometimes it has to be done in public as in a faculty meeting-again as diplomatic as possible.
Products? Oh my! “The dehumanization of people to be non-thinking, follow directions at any cost”is well and alive in these times of big economic crimes on ‘the people’ for $$$$$ at any cost.” These pundits are the rich who can live anywhere in the world. Heck they have built disaster shelters for themselves.
Bonfire of the Vanities….
Children as Products…what a horror.
I assume that “these guys” all went to school and perhaps the fact that they attended school at some point in their lives allows them to live with the illusion that they are thus empowered to make decisions about education and what should be taught in schools. (I agree with Erin).
The “Ivory Tower” gang continues to create a “Fox Hole” response in schools. Staff are just trying to hunker down and survive this maddness.
Standardizing humans is an exercise in futility.
As I read your posts and stories from around the country, what is most striking and most disturbing is take-your-breath-away arrogance. People with little background knowledge or experience are offered and accept high-level positions and then to proceed– in swift scorched earth fashion– to implement policies that are contraindicated by evidence and with little regard for “collateral damage.” Lacking humility, they have little interest or capacity to listen. You call this the Reign of Error. It only looks like error through our lens. Maybe it is the reign of mirrors that begat this reign of fervor. Maybe these are people who are so absolutely convinced of the rightness and smartness of who they see in the mirror that they blindly pursue their own ideas with unstoppable ideological fervor. Only concerted citizen action will end this. It will not collapse of its own weight.
The Reign of Mirrors, indeed, Arthur! The reformers are an incestuous lot. They have their own Galapagos–their forums and conferences–where they meet and meet and meet and listen to one another talk the religion of the KPI. And all this starts with cultural isolation on islands of privilege. And that worries me, a lot. We have ample evidence that no one in power is listening. We have Arne running about telling people that those who would stand like Tank Man before the reform juggernaut are just a bunch of kooks out on the fringe somewhere–a bunch of Tea Partiers and aging Marxists. And at any rate, they think that the opposition is like Tank Man and could be mowed down in a nanosecond, if it came to that. I fear that we’re going to have to see a lot more damage done–as if 13 years of NCLB weren’t enough–before most of these people start rushing to convince everybody that they were really against these excesses all along.
KPI???
Knowledge Priviledge Intersection?
key performance indicator
THE buzz phrase in corporate America for decades now. Just get the metrics right, the analytics, and all will be well. It’s not a crazy idea. It’s just that it doesn’t apply to everything. That’s how you can recognize a fundamentalist. He or she looks at everything through one distorting lens.
And sadly this cast of arrogant characters starts with Obama who really snowed us until he was elected. Then his choices of the lords of the universe, Summers/Rubin/Immelt/Geithner et al, has shown the world who he really is…add Duncan of Harvard, and as a matter of fact many of his choices are Harvard grads, and it makes educators wonder what we are doing with our lives.
Why aren’t the district superintendents speaking out or doing anything, they at least should know better. OMG what am I thinking ! They are ‘educators’ not teachers, their pay checks come first.
No, most are not educators but educrats.
Greg…many of the Supts. are Broad Academy grads….these are the true overlords.
Who is “this” guy. I am an overly ambitious politician who places image over substance and flawed rhetoric over the truth. I wanna be the president and I refuse to let the children of NYS to stand in my way!
Who are these guys? Well, they certainly aren’t people who know anything, anything at all, about how kids learn to read, write, listen, speak, or think.
Behind the Orwellian nightmare of the totalitarian testing and evaluation systems is yet another–a set of standards [sic] in ELA written by a small group of amateurs in almost complete obliviousness of what we’ve learned about learning in these domains over the past forty years or so. These new standards [sic] are an educational war crime. They are toxic. The financial cost to the country of the new testing will be high, but the cost to the teaching of English of these witless standards will be higher. I am still reeling from the presumption of the deformers–that they should have thought that they could appoint a few tyros to overrule every teacher, every curriculum coordinator, and every curriculum developer in the country. Here’s the list of outcomes to be considered important in your field. We don’t give a —– what you might think or feel about these. I am sick, sick to death of hearing these deformers talk about applying free market principles to education in one breath and about letting amateurs dictate to and micromanage us all in the other.
They could just as well have handed David Coleman a notepad and a copy of Grey’s Anatomy and sent him up to a cabin in Vermont to draw up a new set of standards for the practice of medicine in the United States.
The difference is, however, that physicians would not have allowed that to happen. Those standards [sic] would have been met with hoots of derision and disbelief.
But the oligarchy thinks that a manager is a manager is a manager. Just give a guy a KPI.
What’s a KPI??
The difference is that nobody would have paid any attention to what he had to say about the practice of medicine. They wouldn’t even have taken the time to laugh. It kind of gives you a window into how much respect teaching actually receives as a profession. People may get all of these warm, fuzzy feelings about their favorite teacher, but most people don’t really seem to think that teaching involves “real” work unless they have a teacher in the family.
Robert…”educational war crimes” is exactly the phrase. May I use it for an article I am writing on CC for our local newspaper?
And, tch who continues to teach us all, I hear this about teachers, most often from lawyers, every day. The comments are, it is an easy job for women who only work a few hours a day to add extra income for the family, and then can take the whole summer off…or similar ignorant palaver. Or in higher ed it goes like this…I am an investor and am angry at the waste of money to pay for professors who all earn over $250K and don’t have to do anything of value, but sit in their offices all day and keep their doors locked.
Yes….educational war crimes….
These teachers don’t take orders, they TAKE OVER!
http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-teachers-protest-mexico-education-law-051009845.html
You’ve got to be kidding. Look at the photo. First they get beaten to a pulp by the riot police and then they get shot and buried in a mass grave. They are not viable role models for American teachers who want to live to teach another day.
My mother had a saying that I think applies to “these guys”. When confronted with those who professed to know everything, she would respond, “Empty barrels rattle loudest.