Most educators and even most legislators seem to recognize that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed to “reform” American education. After 13 years of test-based evaluation and school closings, no one claims success. We need what: More of the same! Congress doesn’t know what to do to change a failed status quo. Feckless Arne Duncan, having failed in Chicago, now looks for scapegoats for the failure of the Bush-Obame bipartisan consensus.
Duncan has one sure ally: Tom Friedman of the Néw York Times
They are certain that American schools are terrible, even though test scores and graduation rates are at a historic high. They want us to be just like South Korea, where exams determine one’s life (see Mercedes Schneider on examination hell in Korea).
They blame parents. They blame teachers. They blame students. They blame schools.
They blame everyone but the obvious perpetrators: failed federal policies that undermine the autonomy of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and states; budget cuts that have increased class sizes and narrowed curricula, closed libraries and eliminated social workers, nurses, psychologists, and guidance counselors; the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation; the largest inequality gap in a century; rising levels of segregation; a popular culture that celebrates instant success, not the earnest hard work required for academic success; the ubiquity of distracting electronic toys: the intrusion of philanthropic behemoths like Gates, with its own failed solutions; a media indifferent to a rapacious privatization movement that cares more about budget-cutting and profiteering than education.
They are looking for blame in all the wrong places.
Tom Friedman – always the corporate right apologist…
Btw, Melissa Harris Perry TO THIS DAY does not ‘get’ the strategic interests of Wall Street hedge funders and other corporate right money pots and their support for education ‘reform’… You might try giving her a call to inform her deliberate ignorance…
Friedman really REALLY likes Arne– this one is bad but perhaps his worst column ever was the one in which he suggested Arne Duncan for Secretary of State:
and he gets paid for this stuff.
Poor Mrs. Friedman, isn’t she or wasn’t she a teacher? Just google Friedman and matt Taibbi….what a hoot.
Why?
What does Matt Taibi have to say about the reform movement?
PLEASE let me know . . . .
No no…he has had several pieces dissing Friedman. I will try to find the funniest one. Make popcorn.
Here it is the best Taibbi takedown of the pompous, know-nothing Friedman:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/thomas-friedmans-new-state-of-grace-20120627
Taibbi’s article “Flathead” is considered a classic of the Friedman takedown genre:
http://www.alternet.org/story/21856/flathead/?page=entire
I read the article . . . good for Taibbi!
Concerned Citizen,Bawahahahahaha! I missed this one. Flathead IS one of Taibbi’s top 10 Freidman take downs.
Friedman was unconcerned & unashamed that the 2008 Wall St. crash negated most of his Flatworld economic fantasies on free-trade, deregulation, & globalization.
Freidman was interviewed by an Australian journalist who challenged him on his positions. At one point, he became really angry about her questions and exclaimed that if the US didn’t embrace globalized neoliberalism we would end up like North Korea!
She’s an heiress and never had to work a day in her life.
is a graduate of London School of Economics…. which produced economists Keynes and Hayak
Friedman is disgraceful.
And his daughter was a chosen one, TFA dabbler.
Given how wealthy the Friedman/Bucksbaum family is, his daughter must have done TFA due to misguided noblesse oblige.
Years ago a program in Chicago which reformed the way reading was taught, was declared a fsilure . It wasn’t. They proved they could dumb down a cities children in just a few short years. That proved to be just the beginning of the REFORM which has always been about dumbing down our Nation. They have nearly succeeded.
Well, the NYT in general never strays too far from monied interests. And they don’t pay their columnists to be right, just to advance the interests of a particular economic class. Let’s also not forget who Mr. Firedman is married too. A billionaire in the bedroom is a nice thing indeed!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/billionaire-scion-tom-fri_b_26164.html
Friedman is not the only cheerleader for Duncan at the Times, so are the editors and other op-ed writers. The Times made sure of this when the demoted Michael Winerip. I know I write a lot about Winerip, but I have yet to see anyone else come to his defense. So I will continue to do so.
Bill Keller, far more powerful than Friedman, is the biggest Duncan cheerleader . . . . .
Down with Keller.
You might be amused by this take on Friedman’s column: http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2014/01/and-im-docking-you-one-letter-grade-for.html
Has there been anyone writing on education in the NYT who is not clueless? Bruni, Kristof, even Krugman. The entire Editorial Board. I’m praying that Dowd doesn’t have anything in the hopper on the subject.
What happened to Michael Winerip?
What I did not see in today’s Times was a story about the suspension of five African-American principals in Newark. Not part of the narrative, I guess.
He was taken off the Education beat and put in the Boomer Generation beat. He now writes about Baby Boomers. Talk about being put out to pasture. That’s exactly what schools are doing to experienced teachers.
Funny after every Winerip article, the editors would put up an editorial against everything he wrote. Now all the ed writers just put out the spin reformers feed them. No need to write the facts ever again.
he’s NOT clueless – he’s made a choice, made a commitment and is following the script that comes with the edreform agenda….
I wish people would get this & change theirv response….
Stop offering these people the “out” of being ‘clueless’ or stupid… they are not – they are highly intelligent people who are making a choice to stand with the plutocrats in the hostile takeover of public education, which is merely one – and maybe the last – arm of a plan to completely control the entire economic, political and social system ….
DITTO THAT.
DOUBLE DITTO!
Sadly this is SO TRUE!
I second this. Or fourth, I guess. I’ve been trying to make this point ever since the Bush years. For someone as allegedly “stupid” as Shrub was, he sure managed to pull off quite a feat (not a good one, mind, but a feat nonetheless). Same with Duncan.
Just as he beat the war drums for our move into Iraq.
Looking at Bill Gates’ activities thru the social engineering lens might be useful http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au/apsa2008/Refereed-papers/Barker-Dev.pdf …
I agree. They are not clueless. They are cunning.
Also keep in mind that Duncan’s speech was given to groups with ties to the Gates Foundation. He would never speak to real teachers and parents after what King went through.
Sahila,
You are spot on! Thank you!
People choose what they think and do . . . No one holds a gun to their head.
I used to pay for the NY Times. I don’t bother any more. Same with the Chicago Tribune. Why buy papers that spit propaganda at you?
RR: Here is the result of googling those two names:
Surprise Winner in Thomas Friedman Porn-Title Contest
By MATT TAIBBI
http://rol.st/KmZHfh
There’s nothing like rehashing the same tripe that we read about US kids and public education in the ’80s and pretending that it wasn’t being said at that time (hence, the negative comparisons of today’s kids, schools, teachers, etc. to those of the ’80s can be viewed as meaningful). Is it that Friedman has no memory of how frequently this nonsense has been written, or is it that he really thinks that we’re all as ahistorical as he is? Let’s just ignore how often Gerald Bracey debunked this sort of bilge and start collective hand-wringing, right, Tom? Not bloody likely.
Michael Paul Goldenberg: Tom Friedman is just as clueless about education as he was about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And as for what was said about US youth in the 1980s… Sheesh, maybe you missed his other comment—
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Oops! My bad. The “his” should have read “this.” And I should have attributed it to Socrates, one of those old dead Greek guys. You can’t get everything right, now can you? But in Mr. Friedman’s case, it is a marvel and a wonder how he can get almost everything wrong and still keep a straight face…
Just keep recycling twenty five hundred year old clichés—isn’t that what the punditocracy is paid to do?
Or as Mr. Friedman might say in imitation of deep[-pocketed] thinker, Leona Helmsley: “Facts, logic and good sense are for the little people.”
😎
Those with the stomach to read more about Friedman will find material of interest here:
http://jilliancyork.com/2011/12/14/the-definitive-collection-of-thomas-friedman-takedowns/
Alex Pareene has done many good callouts of Friedman’s nonsense, including last month in SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/16/hack_list_no_9_thomas_friedman/
Both are evil men. Both are too lazy to get real jobs. Thus, they rely on cronies. I can say more, but the previous responses speak for me.
Tommy Boy, does not know the limits of his ignorance.
Both of them have a lot in common: They both got to where they are today because of connections. Duncan got his job by being a crony of Obama’s, and Friedman, well, he did it the old-fashioned way–he married into obscene wealth. Both of them are typical of the stupid rich and privileged–they think they are meritorious but they are not.
Just some more info on Tom Friedman and his push for BIG MONEY. This is 2006, but it could have been written today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/billionaire-scion-tom-fri_b_26164.html
PROGRESSIVE right vs PROGRESSIVE left. IMPORTANT. NOT Liberal vs Conservative.
Dear Diane,
I am going to save your post here because of the amazing list of things and people that are responsible for the failure to educate. They alwaya point at teachers, then they pull the rug out from under us and say do more with less and shove lessons down kids throats so they look good on tests. HUH? Such studpidity, how I wish you were somehow connected to the dept of education. Maybe if Hillary gets in? I do hope she has the brains to see through this foolishness.
Hillary will sound the death knell. Wake up. She is the penultimate PROGRESSOVE.
Hillary will be NCLB and RttT on steroids. But all the good “progressives” will support her no matter what she does, even if she does the same things that would have them storming the Bastille if a Republican did them.
Not me. I will never, ever vote for Hillary or any other Democrat who supported the Iraq war. And I certainly don’t trust Hillary on education.
Right now I have my eye on Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren is merely Hillary lite. Don’t go there.
Yes I agree. The Clintons are always swooning over Gates ( I accidentally typed Gators, maybe I should have left) especially Chelsea.
Please research the CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE, I believe they are setting this up for the very purpose of boosting reforms to privatize education.
What even scares me a bit more is that Randi has been guest speaker for CGI. I also believe Randi is gunning to be next Arne. Again ,just my beliefs.
The Bill and Chelsea speak and are heavily involved lately reducing poverty in Africa; which is noble; but not Detroit, Newark etc.
This is a link to CGI, lots of great stuff, but still worried about privatizing of public education.
http://press.clintonglobalinitiative.org/press_releases/president-clinton-former-secretary-clinton-and-chelsea-clinton-unveil-new-commitments-to-action-on-second-day-of-2013-clinton-global-initiative-annual-meeting/
Diane, lately you have been more tempered with your language regarding educational technology, noting that it has powerful potentials when used correctly and also properly noting the stupidity of some implementation efforts (e.g., L.A. Unified and its iPads). However, you undercut your messaging – and reinforce my earlier concerns about the anti-technology tone of your blogging – when you use phrases like this:
“the ubiquity of distracting electronic toys”
As you know, how we say things is important. I wish you would be more consistent with your nuanced language when it comes to instructional technology. Laptops and iPads and smartphones and other computing devices in schools are not ‘toys’ (as you have stated several times) but instead powerful access vehicles to our increasingly-digital information, economic, and learning landscapes. If a particular implementation is dumb, go ahead and label it as such. But please don’t label all instructional technology efforts as ‘distracting’ or ‘toys.’
Thank you.
When they cost above market rates and come preloaded with Pearson software but without keyboards, they are worse than “distracting toys”. Diane was being generous about the way technology is increasingly being used in the classroom.
I thought the “distracting electronic toys” remark was in reference to electronics outside the classroom. TV, video games, computers and phones are ubiquitous for almost every waking moment for many children today. One article I read said that average Americans ages 8-18 are using electronic entertainment devices for 7 hours per day.
Diane:
Are you saying the letters from teachers cited in the TF article are inaccurate? In comments made a few threads back, Lloyd Lofthouse, a classroom teacher, eloquently described setting extremely high standards for his daughter in what I take to be a suburban school system?.
I understand that higher standards and expectations may not be sufficient, but are they not necessary?
Bernie,
You always try SO hard . . . . . .
From the article (actually a quote from Amanda Ripley): “Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that … their kindergartners learn math while they still loved numbers.”
Doesn’t anyone ever stop to wonder why kids don’t love numbers later on in life? Maybe it has something to do with the way we teach math? Maybe “teaching math” in kindergarten (the way Ripley and Duncan want it taught, anyway) would just make them not love numbers that much sooner?
Diane,
To echo everything you said about the current state of affairs and add one important thing you did not explicitly mention, there is the child; the child entering kindergarten, moving onto middle school and with great hope graduating high school and going on to college. The child developing through adolescence and onto young adulthood. Twelve incredibly dynamic years for which we have come over the past generations to a fairly good understanding of what works best in terms of his or her education. And now in the space of ten years all of this has been turned on its head and every child in a public or charter school in the USA is being cheated by greed. Class size? Who cares! The Arts? Unnecessary. Foreign language instruction? Es eso un problema? PE? Who has the time? A well paid and motivated group of teachers. Why? Isn’t there TFA? Children who should all be well fed, clothed, with quiet and safe spaces at home in which to work, spaces where they are loved and encouraged to love school by their loving families, are now asked to learn more with less!! Students told their teachers are failures, that they are failures, that they will never make it in the competitive global economy without longer school days, less summer vacation, math for which they are not developmentally ready, books chosen by lexile analysis, classes where the teacher is presented via the internet. And more tests, harder tests, longer tests. For the most part children are no longer being hit in schools across the nation, but right now the powerful are wielding a heavy and awful hand against them.
Beautifully written poignant prose. Thanks for so eloquently summarizing the big picture.
I don’t know if any Teachers are here. But I did teach with a TFA.
What some people don’t know is that they get 8 weeks of Instruction on ” How to teach” & then are put in a classroom. The one that taught next door to me, asked me for help to organize her books into Genres. She didn’t know what a genre was? This was in the City of Boston. In a BPS, no less .
I did help her…, but I was in her room more times than not!
I did 4 years earning a Masters in Elementary Education w/ minor
In Art. TFA does not make a teacher.
ab: with all due respect, what you are describing is what the leading charterites/privatizers are mandating for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, here’s just a snippet from the Delbarton School [for boys; one or both of Gov. Chris Christie’s two boys go there] website under “Academics”—described thusly:
[start quote]
The studies are intended to help a boy shape a thought and sentence, to speak clearly about ideas and effectively about feelings, and to seek relevant facts in making judgments.
The faculty, many of whom hold higher degrees in field, consists of 80 men and women. And because the average class size is 15 and student-teacher ratio 7:1, the learning environment at Delbarton is designed to be intimate and challenging.
[end quote]
Link: http://www.delbarton.org/academics/academic-program/index.aspx
As you can see, students at Delbarton suffer under an oppressive regime of overly large classes, inexperienced bumpkins posing as educators, and little or no opportunity to interact with their teachers given the cruel teacher/student ratio.
It’s no different at Harpeth Hall, Cranbrook, Sidwell Friends, Lakeside School and… I think you have suffered enough.
It’s hard being the advantaged offspring of members of the “new civil rights movement” of our time.
Or not.
😎
Krazy TA: We have received 5 flyers in the mail this week from local private schools advertising the opposite of Common Core. All printed on expensive glossy, colorful, and large postcards.
Krazy TA,
I am aware of this essential problem, but it is important to voice it over and over: the children of rich and those few children chosen from the underclasses benefit from everything we have come to know is right about educating children, including shorter school years, fewer or no standardized tests, exposure to all the arts, PE and after school athletics, foreign languages, ………… Thanks for reminding us all.
StudentsFirst drops pushing Parent Trigger gimmick in Florida:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/legislature/once-a-priority-parent-trigger-idea-no-longer-figures-in-groups-education/2160892
On to the next fad!
I guess there is a reason for some people to “respond” to the nonsense preached by Tom Friedman and Arne Duncan, but at this point most of us have better things to do — such as organizing against their policies and those who empower them.
What was interesting about Thomas Friedman’s article was that the teacher’s complaint that administration told her the students couldn’t fail even though they did no work is a direct product of those very test driven policies that Thomas Friedman advocates. I was a teacher and Assistant Principal in NYC for 23 years, and I saw the difference especially when schools were given letter grades. Passing rates determined whether or not principals kept their jobs. This gave unprincipled administrators who had been given excessive power the right to tell teachers they had to pass students. A teacher told me her principal told her that she would be deemed effective or ineffective depending on students’ passing rates. The problem is not parents, teachers and students. The problem is the skewed system created by Bush and continued with a vengeance by Obama, Duncan and Bloomberg.
You need to go back before Bush to find the start of the Reform. Clinton was Governor of Arkansas when the Governors Association got things rolling. He and Hillary have been busy reforming ever since. Google searches the Dear Hillary letter for confirmation.
I am hopping on this train a little bit late after just reading the Friedman article in the paper. I’ll begin by stating that I don’t agree with everything that Friedman or the administration has spouted. I think that the reliance on testing has made teaching more about how to master a test instead of about learning.
However, the emotions of the teachers in the letters resonated with me. I taught for 10 years, including five of them in Washington DC at a DC Public School. Before patting me on the back for that, I should say that I taught at a relatively new city wide, application school…
a little about my school- a school that was named a Blue Ribbon School for raising test scores, one that lowered it’s student population by removing students who struggled, one that also raised admission requirements so that students had to be proficient in order to enter the school. It’s not that hard to raise test scores when the students are entering a a high bar. (this was mainly done with the second principal, one that was a NLNS alumnus, etc)
I remember when I was in high school in the early 1990s, if I did poorly in a class, the response from my parents was usually, “What more could you have done?” not “What didn’t the teacher do?”…yes, I am from an upper middle class family and usually had strong teachers..
Just 10 years later, many students felt a bit invincible, that if they did poorly in a class, that it was the teacher’s fault. I taught students who were trying to take AP Calculus who felt that they didn’t have to take any notes or do their HW…
Motivation is a tricky thing – there are some principals (including my second boss at the magnet school) who felt that if any students failed that I wasn’t doing my job motivating them. I agree that we as teachers need to create lessons that are more hands on – my first principal at the school, still a mentor of mine, constantly noted that if teachers focused more on lesson planning they would have to worry less about classroom management…
I feel that over the past 10-20 years the tide has changed where all of the responsibility for succeeding is on the teacher as opposed to education being a combined effort. On my syllabus one of my class rules was that students had to “do their part in learning” And if they did, then I would do everything in my power to help them succeed…but I couldn’t make them bring a pencil to class (even as I often provided extras), I couldn’t make them do their HW (even if I made extensions for those who had extra circumstances)…We have to stop playing the blame game – blaming students, blaming parents, and we have to work together.
Fantastic points by Friedman. We chose to take our child out of our zoned school and put him in our local public charter school for the reasons he mentions. The zoned school was slow educationg and we felt the standards were subpar. At the public charter we are in (Success Academy) he is being challenged and is already multiple reading letter levels ahead of the front of his old zoned class, and he is in the lower middle of his class at the public charter just catching up with the kids who started K there. Our mistake was going to the zoned school for K. We lost about a half a year in education.
MS: what city? just wondering
All the factors mentioned by Friedman as well as those mentioned by you should be considered factors in the degrading of education in America. As a board member (way back) I had to be present at a “hearing” brought by parents, and including lawyers trying to change a grade given to a student that failed to hand in homework on time because it “ruined her perfect A record”. We are now in the phase of “teaching to the test”, manipulating test scores and “purging” student lists all brought about by the misuse of the tests (which are needed as benchmarks). In the end however the responsibility lies with the parent/voters that support the political climate where
So bizarre. Why do Obama and Duncan insist on naming South Korea as a model? Other than testing results, there is little that is admirable about the South Korean education system and South Koreans would be the first to admit it (I am South Korean, although I was educated in the US because my parents immigrated to — you guessed it — spare my siblings and me from the South Korean education system). Public schooling is basically meaningless, kids start going to cram schools that run until 10pm or later while in middle school. Regular school is just for sleeping and socializing. Parents have only one kid (Korea has the lowest birthrate of any OECD country) because educating them is such an insane cash drain. Even so Korea spends much more of its GDP % on education than the US has or ever would. Korean schools can be better funded, standardized and operated because the central government provides most of the funding and sets the curriculum. Socially, Korea is a very horizontally integrated country (at least superficially) outside of certain well-known wealthy neighborhoods like Gangnam, so there are very few equivalents of inner city schools. Most kids, rich or poor, attend similar schools with similar resources.
However, it doesn’t really even matter that Korean public schools are supercifially decent across the board because the reality is that most of them don’t matter to an extent that makes a poorly performing inner city school in the US look like a fountain of opportunity in comparison. There are specific schools in Gangnam that everybody tries to send their kids to because they are known as magnet schools for the best universities. Average academic achievement is very high in Korea but the results are horrifically unjust – in a recent year it was found that 60% of the new hires by Samsung (the most prestigious employer in Korea) were graduates of a single high school in Seoul (plus of course one of the top three universities). Think about that. You don’t go to that high school and you’re basically screwed if you want to work for the biggest, most prestigious company in your country. No wonder the kids are committing suicide.
Korea has the highest immigration rate among OECD countries because even now, if you aren’t one of the lucky elite, you’re better off trying your luck in a foreign country. Imagine if the US had higher test scores but millions of our best and brightest left every year because the US had nothing for them to do. There is your South Korean “model.” That the President and the Secretary of Education know so little about what they are talking about when it comes to public schools makes me seriously worry about whether they know anything about the other things I don’t have any expertise on, and therefore have to take their word that they have a competent level of mastery on the subject.
Reblogged this on onewomansjournal and commented:
Clueless is right!