Tim Slekar moved not long ago from Penn State-Altoona to Edgewood College in Wisconsin, a small Catholic liberal arts college.
In both places, he has been a firebrand, fighting to restore common sense to the national dialogue and to promote respect for educators.
Tim has made videos, podcasts, a radio show, run for school board (in Pennsylvania), and done whatever he could to draw attention to the outrageous attacks on public education by extremists governors and legislators (such as those in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
Tim is a no-holds-barred fighter for justice and the American way, or what the American way should be–liberty and justice for all. Tim knows that a decent society does not tolerate the extremes of wealth and poverty that have become part of our national fabric in the past few decades.
He is fearless and does not hide behind academic jargon.
A 30-year attack has worked to erode the legitimacy of the public education system. And teachers are taking much of the blame for the stark findings of the data now pulled from classrooms, he says.
“We’re absolutely horrible at educating poor minority kids,” says Slekar. “We absolutely know that.”
But neither the so-called reformers, nor many more casual observers, want to talk about the real reason for the disparities in achievement, Slekar says, which is poverty.
“That’s not an excuse, it’s a diagnosis,” he says, quoting John Kuhn, a firebrand Texas superintendent and activist who, at a 2011 rally, suggested that instead of performance-based salaries for teachers, the nation institute merit pay for members of Congress.
“If we were willing to start looking at things like hunger, homelessness and lack of access to books,” Slekar says, “we would do more to attack the achievement gap and spend less money than we’re spending on computer driven tests and all these reforms that we know we don’t work. When you continue to design a system that says ‘look at these bad teachers,’ I say look at these social structures that keep teachers from being successful.”
Slekar ridicules the “ass-backwards notion that we’re going to end poverty by taking poor kids and educating them – then they’ll lift themselves out of poverty. That happens, but it’s very rare. And what you are saying when you say that is that we’ll allow a child to live in poverty for 18 years while we ‘educate’ them. That’s unacceptable.”
Even worse, Slekar says, is using low test scores by poor kids on reading and math as an excuse to withhold from them the very aspects of school experience that might help them lift themselves from poverty. And it’s no accident, he says.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Join the Future on Ohio charters.
http://www.jointhefuture.org/1408-too-many-bad-choices
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I was encouraged by the linked articles until I read that UW-Madison has a “Value-Added Research Center.” I’ll bet it was established and funded by a corporation.
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There are hundreds of millions of very poor people in China who are not terribly difficult to educate. The “Achievement Gap” is primarily due to genetic differences affecting cognitive level between different populations.
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Does that mean you’re opposed to considering student achievement in teacher evaluations?
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Your nonsense has been debunked so many times around here – why do you keep coming back for more embarrassment? Y’know, racism went out of style 50 years ago.
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Don’t feed the trolls.
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Tim Slekar is a gift to all of us. My only concern is when we limit this conversation to a focus on poor & minority students. As true as that is (and it is), suburban parents often tune out because they think it does not affect them. We need the conversation to start being united. We need Garden City parents along side New York CIty parents. We need Main Line parents along side Philadelphia students. As a parent and teacher in an affluent suburb, I see the parent denial. Parents think that these reforms are not impacting our children, when indeed everything in our schools has been shifted. Our once truly student centered schools were focused on creativity, questioning, multiple perspectives and multiple approaches to teaching. Now it is all data driven and parents haven’t noticed that their kids aren’t learning as much and aren’t enjoying learning anymore. Separating the attack on public education by income is important for fair funding. Otherwise, we need to be united in our message.
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Danielle,
You are right. This is an attack on all public school children. We need more suburban parents to get behind the fight. What happens to schools in poor neighborhoods will also happen to suburban schools. The end of public education is the goal.
Tim
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What I find so frustrating is this corporate assault on pubic schools is being orchestrated by our own government & some public institutions. Look at this new bi-partisan consortium of politicians, academics, think-tanks and foundations : Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC). From the website:
SMHC’s two initial funders also are supporting other projects focused on human capital management in education, with which we are collaborating.
Carnegie Corporation of New York has funded Teach for America, The New Teacher Project , New Leaders for New Schools, all three of which are represented on the SMHC Task Force, and the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools.
The Bill and Melinda Gates has funded the Urban Institute, the Aspen Institute and the Center for American Progress. The Aspen Institute coordinates their efforts with complementary projects on rethinking human capital, including those carried out by CALDER and the Center for American Progress.
– See more at: http://www.smhc-cpre.org/about/#sthash.2S9GMa2h.dpuf
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FLERP –
Obviously the difference between the students that two different teachers have will make a big difference in outcomes. It is of course falacious to judge that a teacher at say St. Paul’s Academy or the Bronx High School of Science is a better teacher than a teacher in an inner city school in Detroit based on the performance of their students. The average IQ of the student bodies is very different.
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One time not so long ago it was pretty conventional wisdom that education was the long-term solution to poverty. Certainly long ago when I was young virtually everybody, regardless of their postion in the political spectrum, seemed to take it for granted that education would go a long way to solve the problem of poverty. It is interesting to read on this blog the assertion by many that education can avail little in reducing poverty. To the extent that this view of the impotence of education to affect poverty becomes the dominant view it will constitute a massive change in our Weltanschauung.
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Jim, do you pretend that you don’t understand what people are saying so that you can set fire to a straw man, or do you simply not understand what they are saying? You attribute crazy notions to people on this blog all the time. No one here thinks that education can avail little in reducing poverty. What people say here, again and again, is that we will not see large increases in average outcomes among the poor in the United States until the savage inequalities faced by our children are addressed. Different statements, Jim. Yes, there are people who lift themselves out of poverty through education. However, educational outcomes are highly correlated with socioeconomic status of parents and communities, and anyone who has taught poor kids knows that their poverty presents enormous barriers. Hungry kids, stressed out kids whose parents have no work, kids with no table at home on which to do homework, and kids of parents who must travel about the country to do migrant labor, for example, don’t fare well in school. Is this difficult to follow?
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“We’re absolutely horrible at educationg poor minority children.” “Poor minority children” here means blacks and mestizos. But who in the world does a “good job” of educating blacks? Certainly no country in Africa. Mexican-Americans in US schools score higher than children in Mexican schools. So apparently we do a better job of educating mestizos than Mexico does. There is no place in Latin America which does any better at educating mestizos than US schools. In fact PISA scores suggest that the US is better at educating mestizos than any country in Latin America.
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It’s fascinating, Jim, that you know, so intimately, educational outcomes across all the countries of Africa and in every school in Latin America and that you understand all the factors affecting those. Impressive. Such godlike omniscience and omnipresence! You must really get around, like Superman! But then you believe in Supermen, don’t you? Supermen and inferior men. Must be quite a load on you, that white man’s burden! But I guess a Superman like you can bear it with ease. Ah,
“he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about.”
Seriously, though, to what do you attribute your virulent racism, Jim? Is it caused by your genes, your environment, or a combination of the two? Did you pick all this up from reading comic books and The Bell Curve, or did you grow up reading Rasse und Seele in the original? Are you old enough to have done that? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Others on this blog: I know that you are aghast at Jim’s comments. But such ignorance as this is far more dangerous in those who have learned, as Jim has not, to keep their backward, racist ideology to themselves. Many who think just as Jim does are in positions of considerable power and influence in the United States. There are many such, for example, in the Education Deform crowd. Those–the ones who speak such crap only among themselves–are the ones to be really concerned about.
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Tim is a powerful advocate for public education. He also makes developing partnerships with local public school districts part of his plan for the school of education.
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Tim Slekar rocks. And he’s a Yinzer.
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Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
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What’s a Yinzer?
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Yinzers are special!
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I just heard an author on the news say that the Millennial generation is the most educated in American History.
After hearing from Washington DC; Congress; the President, a host of billionaires including Bill Gates, about the horrible job the public schools are doing, how do they explain this away?
I used Google to find more info on this:
The most detailed study to date of the 18- to 29-year-old Millennial generation finds this group probably will be the most educated in American history … released by the Pew Research Center February 2010.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-24-millennials24_st_n.htm
How can the public schools be failing when 50 million millennial may be the most educated generation in US history?
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Timothy D. Slekar – We had few problems educating the children of Vietnamese boat people who grew up in Thailand, with no formal education and treated like dirt by the Thai soldiers. Of course they were genetically mostly Han Chinese. No one has ever had any difficulty educating East Asian children.
You say that we’re “absolutely horrible” at educating blacks and Mestizos. But nobody does any better. US blacks and mestizos are bettter educated than blacks and mestizos almost anywhere else in the world.
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Robert – I remember when Head Start was initiated when I was just finishing high school. At that time there was great enthusiasm and expectations that Head Start would shortly bring dramatic improvements in the educational performance of black children. There is a striking contrast between the pessimism often expressed on this blog about the ability of education to remedy poverty and the high hopes of that time. I do think that has been a great change in my lifetime in the view of education as a panacea for social problems.
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If only everyone involved in educational decision-making believed that the American way was truly “liberty and justice for all”! I agree that if all Americans were held accountable for the poverty that many in our country face in the same way that educators are, the public would understand how much more complicated this issue is. So many factors affect the progress of students. Good teaching plays a significant role, but cannot compensate fully for the obstacles which students who live in poverty face. One of the greatest injustices that low-performing students face is the test-focused education that they are required to complete, concerned more about the bottom line of fact-memorization and success within the multiple-choice format than stimulating activities which promote higher-order thinking and creativity. If these students’ and teachers’ progress were not measured primarily by high-stakes tests, teachers would be free to teach more innovatively and effectively.
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