A reader writes. Be sure to read the last lines:
Dear President Obama,
Let’s face it.
Race to the Top is an epic fail just like No child Left Behind. Our children should not be the pawn of politics. Left or right, both have not gotten it right about education reform and it’s time we put that in the forefront.
I’m so tired of talking points. Some theories sound great on paper not in practice and there are testimonies after testimonies that children are NOT thriving with over-emphasis on state tests. Of course, we want children to learn how to think critically but saying that and making it happen needs serious input from EDUCATORS and our country might want to consider putting one in a position as important as US Secretary of Education. And perhaps, we need a NY Commissioner of Education that actually listens to what the feedback is and just perhaps we need Gov Cuomo to make a stand for our children because it’s inexcusable to distance himself from this whole issue.
And as the leader of the greatest country on Earth, please know that American’s excellence comes from our freedom, our love of this country and the promise of our children. Let’s get off the campaign trail you started many years ago and really make the people you put in charge of Education to do the right job for our children.
Please support the teachers that have been the inspiration for our children and please create a better initiative that truly rejects “filling in bubbles” because that is exactly what they are doing now and you need to stop the madness.
Thank you.
An American mother whose family fled Communist China and then left the oppressive British education in Hong Kong and was saved at age 8 by the love of American teachers who taught me to embrace the love of learning
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautiful letter mom and am moved by your inspiring story; however google TED Mitchell. He’s next in the appointments to DOE, pretty much Arne on steroids. So….Obama is probably chuckling at your letter, not reflecting on it.
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Lol! Agree.
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It was APPALLING to me when several years ago – about the time that “A Nation at Risk” came out – the Supreme Court stated in so many words that as the very foundation of their existence our public schools “promoted government agenda”. On that basis they made the ruling they did. For me, what could be more Fascist than that? For me EDUCATION should be based on scholarly research, on what humankind’s best minds have proclaimed as their best answers in the SEARCH FOR ultimate values: good, truth, and beauty, who are we as human beings, why are we here, the purpose of life etc. To say that schools existence is based on government agenda which would seem to indicate political winds of change makes no sense if we believe in democratic idealism.
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I fear our political / corporate wealthy leaders will neither listen, hear nor care. What a sad commentary . . .
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This may sound absurd…how about a rally in DC?
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My wife has said about the same thing. But my wife didn’t escape Mao’s Communist China. She didn’t escape until almost a decade after Mao was dead. In 1966 when Mao launched his Cultural Revolution and attacked the schools changing them drastically, the system broke down. Children were brainwashed to turn on their parents and on their teachers. My wife writes in her memoir, “Red Azalea” that the Red Guard convinced and forced her to denounce a teacher she loved and she did or the Red Guard would have turned on her and her family for not denouncing that teacher.
The schools were taken away from China’s professional educators, the teachers and administrators and a decade later, literacy had fallen to 20% and more than 2 million Chinese had committed suicide, many were K-12 teachers, college professors and school administrators.
After Mao died, China had to start over because what public education system they had been destroyed totally.
My wife says that what’s happening with the public schools in America is another Cultural Revolution and that Americans may have to suffer as horribly as the Chinese did during Mao’s Cultural Revolution before they wake up and stop what the billionaire plutocrats; robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street are doing and take back their schools from the few.
In the 1980s, while rebuilding its schools, China sent teams of educators to the West to learn how we do it. China also ended all the slogan Little Red Book brainwashing in their schools. Today, China has partnerships with American public schools and colleges and is on track to change its schools into what the public schools in America were before the plutocrats started to take over by demonizing public school teachers and forcing the public schools to be shut down and turned over to them. In fact, over the doors of the public schools in Shanghai, there is a new slogan that says there is more than one answer to each question.
If anyone wants to know what happens when a few control a country’s schools, look no further than China under Mao when the only thing behind taught was to worship Mao as a god by reading one textbook until it was memorized, Mao’s Little Red Book.
The interesting fact is that there isn’t one country in the world that’s turned it’s public schools over to a few billionaires to control and profit from. Because when a few control a country’s schools, there is no freedom.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: thank you for your comments.
😎
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Yes, thank you Mr. Lofthouse.
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Thanks for China’s history in education. I hope they aren’t buying into corp takeover. I hear they still have a rigid system that relies on testing and families will sacrifice everything for their kids to go to college.
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Yes, they have a rigid testing system but it isn’t used to judge teachers or public schools and it isn’t used to shut down schools and turn them over to corporations out to make a profit.
China’s tests are used as entrance exams to next level of education. I know of two. The one that gets students into senior high school, the last three grades of K-12 and another one that is used for selecting students to go to college.
How you place on those tests, decides what college in China you’re eligible to attend.
The highest scoring students end up in the highest rated high schools or colleges. If you are at the bottom of the list, you end up in high schools wit the lowest quality ratings.
With more than a 150 million students in k-12 only 10% of the total who start at age 6 end up going to senior high school.
The private school sector in China primary supports the public schools and like South Korea and Japan, they are known as cram schools.
A kid goes to the public school during the day, then goes home to eat before going to cram school that is designed to get child ready for next day in public school. Cram schools also operate on weekends and the most driven and motivated parents who have the money will send their kids to the best ranked cram schools to give them an edge over competition in public school
In China merit rules from day one—as it has for more than two thousand years when China built it’s first public schools during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Kids must earn there way to the next level.
The first public high school was opened about 141 BC in Chengdu, China. Confucianism values education and that value is instilled in the culture even if the people are not into Confucius. Most parents offer total support to teachers and it gets so dramatic at times that teachers must step in to intervene and get parents to back off from applying too much pressure in their children, pressure that can be intense; mentally and physically crippling. The same goes for South Korea and Japan. And both of these countries also offer vocational high schools that do not have an academic path to college.
But China also offers free public vocational schools for students who leave the first six to eight years of education and have no intention of going to senior high school or college.
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Thanks for your informative reply. Do you know what the outcome for those children living in poverty? How does their system take care of them educationally and in health care?
Seems like they have lots of schooling in different ways. Do curriculum makers come a dime a dozen like the US?
So is what you are saying cram schools are the rigor schools and public ed serve the basic needs?
I applaude their option of having vocational schools. That would help our dropout rates in the US.
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This should be the headline in every paper and on every news feed. How can we get organized to stop this insanity?
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“How can we get organized to stop this insanity?”
Join with others through social networks and work together using critical thinking and problem solving skills. Open Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube accounts (any any otherh’s you can think of) and launch Blogs through WordPress (WordPress allows us to Reblog each other).
Like each others Facebook pages. Retweet what Diane posts on her Blog and what others are saying on their Blogs. Like her posts too.
Then add original content to the Tweeter feed that others may RT. Keep reading this Blog and when Diane provides a link to a supporting piece in the media, use short link converters to create links and share these links on Twitter with everyone who follows your Twitter page.
This is a good place to start. In China, there have been millions who did just this through similar social networking sites in China and this has led to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) backing down on a number of issues and even doing away with new laws that were wildly unpopular. If it can work in China, it will work here.
The CCP employs exactly the same tactics the billionaire oligarch robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street use to influence public opinion but it doesn’t always work because in China the people have had decades to learn to distrust anything they hear through the media but they seem to trust social media even when popular memes are wrong.
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I am glad to hear more and more folks speaking out against Race to the Top.
It seemed for a long while nobody realized how bad it is.
It is the reason I dropped out of the Democratic party. I hope they give me reason to rejoin. But so long as Race to the Top is being hailed in praise and adoration, forget it.
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What a great signature to this letter!
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In January, I wrote the following letter to President Obama, copying Secretary Duncan. All I got was a form reply from Duncan’s office.
President Barak Obama January 29, 2014
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
I have been a big fan of yours for a long time. During the presidential campaign, I made phone calls on your behalf. I watched your State of the Union Address with great interest and hope. During the speech, you mentioned letters from ordinary citizens that helped you illustrate your points. I realize that those letters were selected by staffers and most of them never get in front of you. Hopefully, this one will reach you because I think you need to see it.
You and your administration have puzzled me with your approach to fixing the problems with Pre-K through 12 public education. You correctly state the importance of fixing the problems while systematically exacerbating them. For example, you say that every child should have an excellent education, but you support expanding choice and charter schools. Both choice and charter school programs make a better option available to some students while leaving a larger number of students behind in the schools from which they came. Race to the Top (RttT) basically picks winners and losers. We need a program that makes everyone winners. The groups that are benefitting most from the current round of reforms are the charter school operators and testing companies who are reaping huge windfall profits at the expense of our children; and the politicians who want to weaken the influence of the union workers. If that is your intention, (and I don’t believe it is) you can stop reading here. If you truly care about providing quality education to every child in America, read on.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Report is correctly cited as proof that America needs to improve K-12 education. Unfortunately, the rest of the excellent information in the report goes largely unheeded. The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) produced an analysis of the PISA report titled, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, benchmarking America’s programs and practices with the countries ahead of us in the PISA rankings. I was present when Arnie Duncan participated in the announcement of the report. The results of their analysis can best be summed up with the following brief quote.
“The Dog that Did Not Bark – “It turns out that neither the researchers whose work is reported on in this paper nor the analysts of the OECD PISA data have found any evidence that any country that leads the world’s education performance league tables has gotten there by implementing any of the major agenda items that dominate the education reform agenda in the United States.” [1]
Given that clear message, why do we continue to pursue the reforms that are not working? By the way, teachers unions are a vital part of the excellent performance of schools in those countries that lead the US. According to the PISA Report, you don’t need unions to help make it easier to fire ‘bad teachers’. Instead, you need unions to help identify ineffective teachers and improve them.
Charter schools were conceived to allow passionate creative educators to test innovative learning programs. They worked! We have some excellent charter schools; but more importantly, we have some excellent proven educational innovations. Rather than create more charter schools, it’s time to take the proven innovations and use them to transform existing public schools.
In her 1996 book It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton quoted the old African saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” The inverse is also true, “It takes a good school to raise a community.” There needs to be a carefully developed and maintained symbiotic relationship between a community and its schools. Instead of emphasizing and supporting the important roles of schools in their communities, the present national educational programs like RttT are identifying poorly performing schools and closing them down. While the intention is to put the students into better schools, the unintended consequence is the destruction of a vital community resource.
Schools are at the very heart of their communities. It begins in elementary schools and continues through high school – evidenced by the large numbers of people who attend Friday night football games to support their local teams. Go to a game and watch the social, cultural, political, educational, and economic (not to mention romantic) activity that occurs there – of course, there is also a football game. The neighborhood school is the gathering place for local businesses and service organizations. By eliminating ‘poorly performing’ schools, the NCLB and RttT programs are damaging their communities.
RttT starts off in the right direction by identifying the schools that are failing to meet the needs of the students and the community. However, after identifying them, the response should not be to close them but to improve them. It is time to stop experimenting with student lives. There are proven comprehensive transformational models. We need to be replicating these proven models, not trying to find another model that might work.
Under the RttT, after identifying poorly performing schools, the district then moves from that determination to a set of punitive and destructive options. Because of some long-term funding and other socioeconomic issues, the vast majority of these identified poorly performing schools will come from disadvantaged minority communities. Instead of punitive actions, the emphasis must be on investing in the resources and people needed to improve the disadvantaged schools and rebuild the communities based upon the proven models from the successful charter schools.
Race to the Top, in its present form, will not get us there!
You can’t be in favor of a program that tacitly accepts some schools will be better than others and seeks equity by balancing access instead of raising quality. If you believe that everyone has the potential for greatness, then you must also want to ensure that every child is nurtured to achieve that greatness. And you should not only want it on moral or ethical grounds; you should also want it on economic grounds. There are many reports on the economic and social benefits of providing equitable access to quality K-12 education. America has some excellent public schools, but that is not enough. America’s future is at risk as long as we continue to allow poor schools to exist.
In April of 2009, The McKinsey & Co. published, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools. The report summarized the issue as follows:
“This report finds that the underutilization of human potential in the United States is extremely costly. For individuals, our results show that:
• Avoidable shortfalls in academic achievement impose heavy and often tragic consequences, via lower earnings, poorer health, and higher rates of incarceration.
• For many students (but by no means all), lagging achievement evidenced as early as fourth grade appears to be a powerful predictor of rates of high school and college graduation, as well as lifetime earnings.
For the economy as a whole, our results show that:
• If the United States had in recent years closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of better-performing nations such as Finland and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher. This represents 9 to 16 percent of GDP.
• If the gap between black and Latino student performance and white student performance had been similarly narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher, or 2 to 4 percent of GDP. The magnitude of this impact will rise in the years ahead as demographic shifts result in blacks and Latinos becoming a larger proportion of the population and workforce.
• If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been similarly narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher, or 3 to 5 percent of GDP.
• If the gap between America’s low-performing states and the rest had been similarly narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been $425 billion to $700 billion higher, or 3 to 5 percent of GDP
Put differently, the persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. The recurring annual economic cost of the international achievement gap is substantially larger than the deep recession the United States is currently experiencing.[2] The annual output cost of the racial, income, and regional or systems achievement gap is larger than the US recession of 1981–82.” [3]
There is a solution. You should look at the transformational model at the three schools at the Tracy Learning Center (TLC) in Tracy, California. By designing and building the solution as a new system, the solution can be delivered within existing budgets. The annual per-pupil cost at the TLC is less than $7,500. By empowering the teachers to manage the whole program, the system adapts daily in response to needs that arise. From the beginning, this school was built to be a model for transforming public schools – not building more similar charter schools.
In eleven years of operation, the school, with a diverse population, has had less than 1% dropouts! In the same timeframe, very few teachers have left their positions. In 2013, the TLC elementary school was ranked as the third best charter school in the state by the USC Rossier School of Education. (There are about 1,000 charter schools in California.) As good as the present model is, the program does not promote or include any radical new ideas. The system is a comprehensive integrated set of selected, proven, student-centered and organizational best-practices. If you would like to get a better idea of the program at the TLC, look at the U-Tube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg38Y60bX20&feature=related
The program at the TLC has been favorably reviewed by people from both sides of the political spectrum. Bill Brock, Secretary of Labor under President Reagan and Ed McElroy, President Emeritus of the American Federation of teachers both endorse the TLC model and are both supporters. Randi Weingarten (AFT) and Dennis Van Roekel (NEA) have both said that their unions recognize the TLC model as one they would support for transforming K-12 education. Raul Yzaguirre, former head of La Raza and your ambassador to the Dominican Republic is another supporter of the TLC model. During your first campaign for President, Linda Darling Hammond served as your education surrogate. She was and is fantastic. You need to read her book, The Flat World and Education, or call her in for a refresher course. Linda supports the model at the TLC. When I described what they are doing at the TLC to Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet Ambassador, he commented, “That’s the way we work at Google.”
I live in nearby Haymarket, VA and would love to assist you in any way I can to improve America’s schools. The following quote from my friend Jack Taub sums up the situation.
“Together, we will create a national movement to unleash America’s largest, unlimited, and virtually untapped source of renewable energy: the minds of all of our children!!!!
The chorus from Whitney Houston’s beautiful song, “The Greatest Love of All”, should inspire us all.
I believe the children are our future,
Teach them well and let them lead the way,
Show them all the beauty they possess inside,
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier,
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.
We can transform America’s public schools. Let’s get to work!
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