Zephyr Teachout, who is opposing Governor Cuomo in the New York Democratic primary, explained her strong opposition to the Common Core standards, which Cuomo supports.
She writes:
“Common Core forces teachers to adhere to a narrow set of standards, rather than address the personal needs of students or foster their creativity. That’s because states that have adopted the standards issue mandatory tests whose results are improperly used to grade a teacher’s skill and even to determine if he or she keeps their job. These tests have created enormous and undue stress on students, and eroded real teaching and real learning. What’s more, there’s sound reason to question whether these standards even measure the right things or raise student achievement. No doubt, many teachers have found parts of the standards useful in their teaching, but there is a big difference between optional standards offered as support, and standards foisted on teachers regardless of students’ needs.
“Widespread outrage from teachers and parents has led Gov. Cuomo to tweak the rules around the implementation of the Common Core and call for a review of the rollout. But Gov. Andrew Cuomo has not addressed the real problem with Common Core.
“The fundamental issue is not the technicalities of how the standards are implemented. It is not even that Gov. Cuomo allowed this regime even as he was stripping schools of basic funding, leading class sizes to swell and forcing schools to slash programs in art and extra help. The root problem with Common Core is that it is undemocratic. It is a scheme conceived and heavily promoted by a handful of distant and powerful actors. Here in New York, it was adopted with insufficient input from local teachers, parents, school boards or students, the very people whose lives it so profoundly affects.
“Bill Gates’ coup is part of a larger coup we’re living through today – where a few moneyed interests increasingly use their wealth to steer public policy, believing that technocratic expertise and resources alone should answer vexing political questions. Sometimes their views have merit, but the way these private interests impose their visions on the public – by overriding democratic decision-making – is a deep threat to our democracy. What’s more, this private subversion of public process has come at the precise time when our common institutions, starved of funds, are most vulnerable. But by allowing private money to supplant democracy, we surrender the fate of our public institutions to the personal whims of a precious few.”
Teachout concludes:
“As did the founding generation in America, I believe public education is the infrastructure of democracy. The best public education is made democratically, in the local community: when parents, teachers, and administrators work together to build and refine the education models and standards right for our children.”
Agree. It was adopted here in WA State with very little input from stakeholders too. The state (OSPI) did have a few meetings about it around the state, but when I attended 2 of those meetings, it was clear that Common Core was a done deal no matter what. It was also clear frm those meetings that most people had no idea what Common Core was, where it had come from, and what it meant.
Something nice to wake up to this Saturday morning –
Her last name is an interesting one that I’ve not seen before. It reminds me of the Sixties – let’s have a “teachout”, maybe we could start a movement (pun intended sort of) ;^)
I can’t wait to vote for her in the primary.
I’m really happy Diane you have posted this. You have so many followers and mainstream news is working hard at keeping her name hidden deep in the local NY papers.
Two more votes here for Ms Teahout…from Long Island!
I am curios if folks think of districts like NYC as a the local community getting together to educate students. With over a million students, that district educates more than double the number of students as my entire state. Are these very large districts too large to be democratic?
Following a well-financed lobbying campaign by Wall Street and multimillionaires, NYC was finally placed under mayoral control in 2002. They argued the former Board of Ed was not accountable to voters and was dysfunctional because so many schools were low performing.
Since then, the achievement gap has worsened, and Bloomberg’s policies have left a legacy of privatization, testing, charter schools and morale so low that teachers left the profession in droves. The election of Mayor de Blasio may signal a new beginning but so far, he’s moving very slow if at all to deal with the worst issues.
Bloomberg’s record under mayoral control:
It is more a question about the size of the district. When a district educates over a million students in over 1,700 schools with 80,000 teachers, is that reasonably thought of as the local community working together?
Hedge funder Tilson sent his newsletter today, actually lauding the closing of Corinthian Coilege for profit CROOKS. Shocked to hear this privatizer support the side of the non privatizers.
He also sent the link to the Obama speech in the Washington Post which is worth reading…and crying over…and fighting back…even with a teachout.
————————————————–
Tilson says….
“Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. Many families are worried about how to get into and pay for increasingly expensive colleges.”
______________________
Sorry but my computer is not letting me post the link “a split vision”…
You mean like corporations too big to fail?
I am not sure what you mean there. Could you elaborate?
You are suggesting the size of the school district inversely relates to the quality of governance and outcomes? Does that suggestion apply directly to the size of businesses? In objective terms, if effectiveness of organizations in just a maximization problem, can businesses also grow too large and ineffective requiring intervention? Or we at the point adult supervision of markets in powerless leading to “too big to fail”?
MathVale,
I do think governance gets more difficult as organization size increases, and that applies to businesses as well as school districts. For some businesses there are other, countervailing, savings that come from scale. For other businesses there are diseconomies of scale that keep the businesses rather small. Airline manufacture, for example, has such economies of scale that there will never be as many airline manufacturing companies in the world as there are independent coffee shops in my rather small, college town (coffee shops do not have large economies of scale).
If an institution is getting implicit insurance from the government because it is too large to fail, it is important to either 1) make the firm small enough so that it is no longer too large to fail if the economies of scale are relatively small or 2) heavily regulate the company if shrinking the company would increase the social costs beyond what we are willing to pay.
MathVale,
By these standards, is Microsoft
too large? I understand they are having a massive layoff.
I believe the layoffs are mainly or entirely coming from the Nokia division.
Microsoft is milking cash cows and will for decades. There is little innovation coming from Microsoft if there ever was. TE raised the question of whether a school district can be too big. I generalized to all organizations. It is unfair to single out schools while giving private corporate behemoths a pass.
MathVale,
Generally if companies become inefficiently large they are forced by competitors to shrink. It is not a matter of fairness or giving a firm a free pass.
Is the United States too large to be democratic ? What about the state of California ?
That is an interesting question.
Many here argue that school decisions should not be made at the state or federal government level, but rather the district level. If you think that state level decisions are insufficiently democratic, you might think that districts that have twice as many students as some states are also too large to be sufficiently democratic.
Efficiency of scale peaks out at some point. Otherwise, dinosaurs would rule the earth!
What’s the optimum size for the organizational school unit of a district? 5K or 10K students?
How can a school board of 5 or 7 address the needs of 100K students? Like a big oil tanker, can’t turn fast, and can’t fit through the Panama Canal.
And NYC is not a school district of 100K students, it is ten times that size.
Crazed billionaire elitist ‘leftover’ Timothy Draper from 2001, when he tried to privatize all California public schools now wants my state to be divided into 6 separate states…. with the Silicon Valley, home of many billionaire privatizers like David Welch of Vergara fame, being a separate state. See the letters to the editor in the LA Times today.
He is paying vast amounts of his own moneyt to get this plan on the next ballot as an initiative. Sadly, California legal code allows any nut job with the cash to place their ill-concieved policies on our ballots. Then an ill informed electorate can vote on them, generally with their only information based endless 30 second sound bites full of lies, on tv and radio, paid for by the same plutocratic deep pockets.
This gave us the parent trigger law in 2010, financed by the Waltons and Eli Broad, and lobbyed by the notorious Ben Austin who has made a fortune as their toadie in chief.
California is somewhere between 7 – 10 greatest economy in the world and has the most diverse population in the US. Thinking people do not want us to secede and/or form 6 new states.
Money, like power, corrupts absolutely.
Is the United States too large to be democratic? Is democracy designed for small population centers?
NJ Teacher,
Again, many who post here argue that education decisions should not be made at the state or federal level despite both the state and federal claims to being democratic. You may think that it is fine to make education decisions at the state and federal government level, but it does not seem consistent with the vision of people working together in the local community.
TE, if teachers and principals in individual buildings are free to make their own decisions about pedagogy and curricula, then these can be, indeed, democratic institutions. This sort of arrangement, known as site-based management, used to be quite common in the United States.
Robert,
You know that I believe that building level independence is only achievable if parents are able to react to decisions made at the building level by changing schools. I have yet to see an argument that suggests this is wrong.
TE, there is not only an argument, there is an existence proof. We have had this sort of building-level autonomy over most of the U.S. during most of the history of the public schools while at the same time having assignment of students to their local schools. In such situations, parents got involved and worked through their school boards and directly with teachers and principals to get what they wanted.
Robert,
What happens when the school that the students living on the 500 block of Maple decides to become a Waldorf school and the school that the students living on the 600 block of Maple decides to become a Chinese language immersion school? Explain to me how the local school board will maintain catchment boundaries in this situation.
They didn’t do this, TE, in the past. But they did differentiate in response to local demand and were free to do so because they weren’t being ruled from above. You write, TE, as though we didn’t already have an enormous amount of experience of local governance and how that works. The enormous growth in cost of schooling has been in layers and layers of district and state and federal administration that have added ALMOST NOTHING to the quality of instruction and in many cases have degraded it.
Robert,
Is that what will be done moving forward? There is ample evidence that charter and private schools can become Waldorf or Chinese language immersion or French language immersion or Montessori. Do you reasonably expect traditional zoned schools to be given the freedom to choose to become these kind of schools when students are not allowed to choose which of the schools to attend?
Our experience with local traditional zoned schools is clear: the politics of assigning students to school based on street address REQUIRES uniformity across the schools.
What does the school board say to the residents of the 500 block of Maple about hey their children must attend the Waldorf school? What do they say to the folks living on the 600 block about having to attend the Chinese language immersion school? Any guesses about how that school board meeting would go?
Give me the choice between the salary of a district level language arts coordinator and books for the school library, there is no doubt which I would choose.
TE
Have you studied what happens in L.A.? Between Magnet schools, Charters of all descriptions, and open enrollment, no parent is really ” stuck” with a neighborhood school. Of course it takes effort to choose a school and get the child to the school. So does this model epitomize choice? And if so, is the competition produce the desired results?
Of course you could also study the district as perhaps being to big to govern. We certainly have more levels of administration than could possibly be healthy.
I am all in favor of choice schools, and am pretty much agnostic about who should run those schools. I am happy that students in LA have a variety of schools and approaches to education to choose from. From my point of view, the desired result is matching the students to the approach to education that best fits that student. I don’t think that can be achieved by using street addresses to assign students to schools.
LA unified is certainly large. Like NY public, it educates many more students than live in my entire state and more teachers than the eleventh largest city in my state has residents. It is hard to see LA unified as the “local community” working together.
You don’t need to physically sepearate students to offer choice. “Choice schools” can operate within buildings at a micro level.
You certainly can have different programs collocates in a single building. Economies of scale suggest though that it is often better to have one specialized program in a district rather than having tiny versions of that program in every elementary school.
I’d consider voting for her, if I resided in New York.
I would vote for her if I lived in NY.
Three things which are working strongly against her are the UFT’s and NYSUTS continued acceptance of the existence of the Common Core and their support of Cuomo, despite his public-school-destroying, charter-embracing ways, and the fact that outside the active communities of educators and parents, there are still a significant number of people who are horribly misinformed, or not informed at all, about the Common Core.
Many Democrats will vote for the one they believe has the best chance of winning, rather than make a statement, or attempt to try to create an upset. Many will sit this out, believing that it is hopeless. Apathy has set in in many frustrated, angry quarters.
If voters are unhappy, but sit it out, that’s illogical. If they think it’s hopeless, it’s probably because it is – the campaign finance system we have in place allows Cuomo to engage in perfectly legal pay-for-play, rewarding those who raise money for him with state contracts and sweetheart laws.
When someone like Teachout comes along, the best we can hope for is to show up and vote, volunteer, knock on doors, etc. If it fails, it’s because our fellow New Yorkers don’t care or know the difference, which means we need to have a huge crisis before they will notice.
Complete agreement here . . . the challenge is convincing them we have the crisis, right here, right now.
“VAM Pyres and DAM fires”
VAM pyres raging all around
Chitty papers on the ground
Politicians everywhere
Fleeing from the fiery err
(DAM = “Devalue Added Model”)
BEAT CUOMO: Teachout is spot on – the most serious problem was never standards, it is inequity. This is shown in the achievement gap, which Common Core has already made worse in the early adoption states. Cuomo, like almost everybody else, fell for four major fallacies that we now see are wasting precious time and money:
1 – The biggest misconception lawmakers are peddling right now is the fallacy that standards affect performance. The research is clear – there is no link. And common sense tells us that if poor kids were not reaching the old standards, changing them to more rigorous, confusing ones without anything new in the classroom to remove obstacles to learning will make it less likely kids can succeed – and that’s what’s happened.
So the whole push for Common Core therefore is an intentional effort to NOT look at need, or the whole child, and to make teachers responsible for the success or failure of entire urban communities, ignoring all other factors.
2 – This is where the next fallacy comes in – the Common Core as a set of academic standards are controversial, but the “accountability” policies have been contested so hotly, Bill Gates himself just flip-flopped on them, after spending hundreds of millions to develop them. NY just suspended them for two years and NJ just reduced their impact from 40% to 10%.
The theory that student test scores show teacher proficiency has been debunked – there is ample research to show that natural fluctuation in year-to-year achievement is a bigger factor than teacher proficiency, but so too are factors like need, language deficiency, documented trauma, developmental delays, etc. The idea of attaching bubble tests to personnel decisions is more than random, it knowably targets inner city teachers.
3 – The next big fallacy: the federal government is not dictating curriculum, or usurping local control of education. The USDOE made an end run around the law by supplying states with the actual tests (and lucrative contracts for corporate allies). If you make the tests, you dictate curriculum – it’s as cut and dry as that. I was just in my school’s math curriculum design team meeting where they worked backwards from the state exam to determine what would be taught, so there can be no doubt this is happening. They even said it aloud – to audible groans.
4 – Finally, the Common Core’s existence hinges on another huge false assumption – that every 3-8th grader in the nation could or should be on the same developmental level as everyone else their age. Reality doesn’t work that way, we have late bloomers, advanced/gifted learners and everything in between. Obama decided undemocratically that every kid must be measured by chronological age instead of developmental ability. This represents radical social engineering that counters longstanding norms in child development and classroom teaching practice.
The Common Core brings us ages backwards into the one-size-fits-all realm because Obama is looking through a corporate prism, seeing kids as McDonalds hamburgers instead of unique snowflakes. He tells us he wants them to be creative, critical thinkers as he takes away choices in literature and slows advanced learners, herding them all towards college loans that generate billions for his treasury.
Obama now affects decisions that used to be made at the district level, such as determining teacher proficiency or student progress. As a NYC teacher, I see how billions of education dollars are being wasted – privatization and propaganda instead of dialogue. Indeed, both parties are failing the students – the tests are killing the love of attending school for and the resulting data paints an inaccurate picture.
We actually raised Math scores in my school 30% and English scores by over 15%. Yet it means nothing, our kids are years behind grade level. Our teachers could easily keep quiet – we look great right now – but we all know the testing benefits Pearson and Scholastic, using our children as pawns in a sad political game they get nothing from.
The first two states to adopt Common Core, NY and KY set their “cut scores” (the mark for proficiency) using totally different criteria. That means you cannot truly compare students across states, after all the time and money spent.
The Common Core in it’s current form is a terrible waste of taxpayer money, hence the enormous, diverse, sustained backlash. Teachout is an excellent choice to speak out against Corporate Cuomo.
Cuomo is following the agenda dictated by big money interests who bankroll his campaigns and his administration.
It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t a biased, ignorant fool that unionized, democratically run public schools benefit the working class that represents 99-percent of the U.S. population, but these corporate run, for-profit, private-sector Charter schools will only benefit the wealthiest one percent who are mostly older, biased, white men.
In fact, the color of President Obama’s skin is blinding many black Americans to the fact that his Machiavellian agenda to destroy public education through Common Core are not going to beneift them in the long run.
All anyone with an open mind has to do is look closely, for instance, at the KIPP Charter schools and the 60% attrition rate among black male teenagers to discover this fact. Where do those children of color go after KIPP ejects them in favor or Asians and Whites who are easier to manage and teach.
Obama may have experienced prejudice in his life as most minorities of color do in the U.S., but his mother was white, his grandparents, who helped raise him in Hawaii were white blue collar, middle class, and his father was an African and not an American, who did not grow up in the U.S. to experience the bias, prejudice and segregation found here.
To really know and experience the U.S. racial prejudice aimed at minorities, one has to be born here and live here all or most of their life.
I think Obama is not a savior but a jackal in disguise. In the Biblical sense, a false prophet.
What about the non-profit stand alone charter schools like the Community Roots Charter School in NYC? Do they benefit the working class?
I don’t know enough about the charter school you mention to form an opinion for an answer. However, since you should have those answers, then you can supply them for all of my questions. If you do not answer every question in detail, what does that reveal about your own agenda?
Is this one (so-called) non profit charter school (out of the thousands of Charter schools that are sprouting like weeds across the U.S.) run exclusively by teachers with no links to a larger non-profit that might be a front for a corporation?
After all, the non-profit status has and is being used to mask the flow of money and fraud that is being discovered in every state where Charters are replacing the transparent, democratically run public schools.
And is this non-profit unionized as 12% of Charters are?
How much is the principal or CEO of this (so-called) non-profit paid compared to the teachers?
After all, the average manager of Charters is paid a lot more than the average pay of principals and even superintendents of public schools while Charter teachers are less educated and have less experience in the classroom, and, on average, earn much less than public school teachers while more than half of public schools teachers have masters degrees compared to less than a third in Charters.
What is the average class size?
Does this (so-called) non profit Charter use “continuous quality improvement” instead of the “rank and yank” method of management Bill Gates prefers and the Machiavellian Common Core agenda, he paid for, drives?
If you are unfamiliar with the “continuous quality improvement” method of running school, I suggest you study how they do it in Finland or look closely at Toyota or Sony. You may also look at Microsoft to see how the divide, conqueror and torture “rand and yank” methods works.
Lloyd,
Your post was clearly about corporate run, for profit charter schools, so I was interested in what you thought of non-corporate run, not for profit charter schools. I thought I would provide an example to give us an anchor in the discussion. Perhaps Dr. Ravitch even knows about this particular school. Here is the school site: http://www.communityroots.org/
Thank you for ignoring all my questions and revealing that it is obvious you have an agenda and a bias.
You are the one who asked the first question about that one Charter school in this thread and therefore you are responsible to prove you already know the answers. I don’t appreciate your giving me a link and then telling me to find the answer for myself.
If you have read Ravich closely, you would already know the answer that it seems you pretend to want to know. She has mentioned before—more than once–that there are a few good Charter schools that are run exclusively by teachers as the original concept of Charter schools was intended by Al Shanker, the president of UFT from 1964 to 1985.
In fact, Dana Goldstein mentions in her book “The Teacher Wars, A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession”, that Shanker a number of times and even quotes his great disappointment that his concept had been hijacked by be a biased, p[profit driven Corporate America.
Goldstein’s book, that I’m actually taking the time to read, will be out in September.
If you are honestly interested in educating yourself on the issue of public education in the U.S., you will read this book. There’s a good chance a copy will be available in the nearest public library to where you live if there are libraries in your area. From what you have shared about where you live, it seems you live in a wasteland of ignorance and illiteracy caused by underfunded public education and a lack of highly educated people.
The majority of Charters—as solid evidence supports–fits in the fraud and corrupt column. The few exceptions to this fact are not enough to warrant Bill Gates and his partner in crime, President Obama, their Machiavellian, Common Core Neda to destroy an already working and by all accounts successful Public Education system that already exists.
Evidence proves that public education works. It is successful. It needs help to become better—not to be replaced by something that isn’t working and is riddled with fraud, bias, racism and corruption.
Lloyd,
Good to know there are charter schools you approve of.
Are you putting words in my mouth?
I don’t know the names of any Charter schools that are operating as they were proposed to operate by Al Shanker, so I can’t approve of any.
For sure, if a Charter school is cooperatively run by teachers without any corporate or non-profit organization pulling the strings, the odds are that Charter would be a stand alone but still part of a public school district and the teachers would have union representation while having more autonomy to solve problems cooperatively where teachers and concerned parents work together instead of at each others throats as Gates and Obama would have it.
At this time, there are more than 5,700 charter schools in the US, and if 12 percent have union representations, that might mean that there are 684 operating under the direct control of the teachers who work in those schools and that those schools are serving the most at risk kids instead of tossing them out as the private sector Charters have been documented doing.
Lloyd,
You are of course entitled to your opinion. If you are against all charter schools, why not say that instead of talking about “these corporate run, for-profit, private-sector Charter schools” why not just say Charter schools. That way folks will know that you mean to be speaking about non-profit charter schools that are run by local school boards (The Walton Rural Life Center Charter School is one of these) as well as charter schools that are part of for profit charter school chains.
Did I say I was against all Charter schools? Find where I said that. Don’t assume something I didn’t say.
Fine Lloyd,
Are you only against for profit charter schools that are part of a chain, are you against for profit charter schools that are part of a chain and some other unspecified class of charter schools, or are you against all charter schools?
I’m against fraud, corruption, bribery, the lack of transparency and Machiavellian management methods like the one Bill Gates introduced to Microsoft and is pushing on the public schools while he spends billions to influence elected and appointed officials to achieve his own agenda.
I’m against PR campaigns that cherry-pick facts to mislead the public so a few billionaires may fatten their fortunes to grotesque amounts at the tax payers expense.
I’m against the two-track, national education system paid for by the tax payers that President Obama and his private-sector partners are building where the traditional public schools must achieve Obama’s Race to the Top agenda of 100% college/career ready while the other one, the private sector Charters, doesn’t.
Lloyd,
Could you tell us which types of charter schools you are against and which you would allow to remain open? That, after all, is the topic of this thread.
Pay attention to what I write. I answered in detail. However, it is possible I didn’t write what you wanted me to write. I think you are trying to control the response through your questions and it frustrates you when you don’t get what you expect so you keep asking questions in an attempt to lead others where you want them to go.
If you expect me to answer your questions, then you will have to go back and answer all of mine.
A discussion should be a two way street and often with you it is a one way street because endless questions from one person are a one way street when that same person ignores the questions they are asked.
Lloyd,
Perhaps you could actually address which charter schools you would close and which not. You made a good start by saying that for profit charter schools that are part of chains are objectionable. There has been much less progress in subsequent posts. This should not be that hard.
I’m not going to repeat myself. Go back and read what I wrote in my comments. The answer is there.
So which charter schools you would close remains a mystery. I think that is a losing strategy politically. You will face opposition from parents of students at the Walton Rural Center charter school even if you have no desire to close the school.
Put me in charge of closing Charters, and any Charter involved in fraud—and that would mean cherry-picking facts to make failure look like a success—would mean the criminals in charge all the way, for instance, to the Walton family, would end up in prison for ten life sentences, no parole, bunking next to Bernie Madoff.
Put me in charge, and any Charters that had a high student attrition rate as they attempted to get rid of the most at risk kids who need the most help would be closed and anyone involved in the ownership and management of that school would be barred from working in education with children for the rest of their lives.
If I was in charge, Charters would be required to mirror the local public schools. If the ratio of children living in poverty was 80% in the public schools the Charter was taking students from, then the students attending the Charters would have to have the same ratio—every ratio of every student group would have to match.
Put me in charge, and it would be a crime punished by ten life sentences without parole to use tax payer money to fund public relations and advertising campaigns to mislead the public.
Put me in charge, and every school that receives taxes from local, regional, state or the feds would be totally transparent and there would be a cap on how much the manager or CEO could pay themselves. There would be no Eva in NY paying herself almost a half million a year.
Put me in charge, and if a Charter hire a relative of anyone in charge or any one in ownership, all of those people go straight to jail for one life sentence with a shot at parole after serving ten years.
If even an illiterate, flea ridden homeless person came in and wanted to see the books, they would be ushered to a room with a copy machine and every penny would have to be accounted for.
Put me in Charge and if the public schools have to follow the Common Core and test the kids to death, then all the private sector Charter schools would have to do the same thing.
There wouldn’t be two systems. They would work under the same rules and restrictions. And teachers would use the problem solving management system not the monster created by Bill Gates.
Lloyd,
It seems that you would allow for profit charters that are part of chains to remain open if they satisfied your other conditions.Is that correct?
Would you hold all public schools to the same requirements or do they get a free pass? I am thinking in particular about qualified admission public high schools.
My first act as a judge would be to have you seen by a team of certified shrinks and medical doctors to diagnose what your dysfunction is that causes you to ask so many questions while ignoring all the overwhelming evidence that the for-profit, private-sector Charter movement is a failure subject to fraud and embezzling funds, while never answering any questions that you are asked in addition to the fact that there is no rational evidence to support the claims that the public schools are failing when in fact they have had nothing but steady progress and improvement for the least 175 years, and when compared to other countries—developed or otherwise—after breaking down socioeconomic factors for fair, across the spectrum comparisons, the U.S. public schools are the best in the world even using PISA’s flawed test results.
Maybe there is a drug from this list for your dysfunction. Then again, maybe all of them would be needed depending on how severe your attention deficit disorder dysfunction is.
WebMD offers an extensive list of drugs for your dysfunction:
Considering taking medication to treat Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? Below is a list of common medications used to treat or reduce the symptoms of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Follow the links to read common uses, side effects, dosage details and read user reviews for the drugs listed below. Click the link to find the long list.
http://www.webmd.com/drugs/condition-1028-Attention-Deficit+Hyperactivity+Disorder.aspx
In conclusion, there is no reason to fix something that isn’t broken with a solution that clearly leads to dire results and a broken system.
Lloyd,
That post certainly qualifies for the ad hominem hall of fame.
Any thoughts about the actual topic under discussion? How you would write a regulation allowing the charter schools you approve of to remain open and forcing the ones that you disapprove of to close? Articulating a position is the first step in persuading folks that your position is the right one.
When is the truth an ad hominess attack? I was only stating an observation based on evidence you provided in the form of endless questions.
Without articulating a postilion, you asked two questions—proving my point that you should be on meds—and then you said, “Articulating a position is the first step in persuading folks that your position is the right one.”
Please explain why you keep asking questions that never stop no matter what anyone says in response and articulate YOUR position—then prove YOUR position with valid evidence and not someone else’s unsupported opinions.
I have already done this many times, which you conventionality ignore. Read my Blog. Read all my comments on this site. Then you will find my position and the evidence I used to support my position.
But of course, actually taking time to honestly educate yourself on this issue would threaten your own unsupportable bias so the odds are that you will not read my position and the evidence I’ve used to support it.
I want to make this clear to someone I think is a foolish idiot. Constantly explaining myself to your endless questions—when you ignore my questions and any supported points that I make—is a waste of time. It is obvious that you are not interested in anything anyone else has to say, because no matter what they say, you will probably ignore it and will only ask more questions.
Do you think you win an argument when people get tired of your questions while you obviously ignore anything anyone says and seldom if ever answer their questions?
Lloyd,
In an ad hominem argument the person is attacked rather than the argument the person is making. Calling someone an idiot, for example. It has nothing to do with the truth of the actual claim about the person.
Once again, it is difficult to judge or implement a policy position when that position has not been articulated. You continue to distinguish between for profit and not for profit charter schools in your posts. Perhaps that is a place to start. Would you require that all charter schools be organized as not-for-profit schools, much like Stanford?
TE
Changing the topic with endless questions is flawed logic. When presented with an opinion supported by evidence, you never accept or acknowledge that information. You just lead with another question.
What I think about you being an idiot is my own opinion—it doesn’t mean it’s a fact—about an anonymous person who often changes the subject while slipping out of any argument he knows that he can’t win by asking another question that changes the topic. In fact, I think anyone who relies on flawed logic and informal fallacies is a fool and an idiot. So I’m not just picking on you.
In your questions you have introduced these informal fallacies:
Straw Man
Missing the Point
Red Herring
Hasty Generalization
False Cause
Begging the Question
Complex Question
Equivocation
Amphiboly
Is it true that you have studied how to use informal fallacies?
Do you think that your use of flawed logic and informal fallacies—listed above—led to me using the ad hominem?
Lloyd,
Perhaps you should review this thread. My posts all concern one point: what kinds of charter school would you regulate out of existence and what kinds of charter schools would you allow to continue? It should be a simple question given your strong and no doubt well thought out position on this issue, but I am finding it shockingly difficult to get you to talk about it.
TE,
So your asking me for my own opinion on this issue, which is about as valuable as your foolish questions because I’m only one person with one vote?
If so, then I think taxes/revenues that have always supported the transparent, democratically run public schools should only be used for the original purpose. This means that Charter schools that were set up to be run by teachers inside public school districts as they were originally meant to serve the most at risk kids should remain. Those teachers should be represented by a teacher union. The staff at those schools should be paid using the same pay scale that applies to the rest of the public school district they are part of.
Lloyd,
A well thought out position, though no mention of for profit or chains.
It seems to me that this is not far at all from the Walton Rural Life Center charter school. One clarifying question though concerns who has final authority over the formation of charter schools. Joe Nathan has reported that teachers in Minnesota who wished to start charter schools were frustrated by school boards that refused to endorse the teacher’s request. Would you give the school board final authority or would you allow teachers some way around the school board?
I have no opinion of my own to answer your latest question regarding who should be allowed to make this decision within public school districts.
Everyone can’t get what they want, so there ‘s usually a selection process with guidelines in place. We can only trust that it will be honest and fair and make the best choice. If there is favoritism, fraud, etc., then we also have no choice but to trust that the system and/or the media will discover it, cause a scandal, send some people to jail along with hefty fines, and then there will be a course correction.
But history teaches us this doesn’t always happen and sometime the crooks get away with their crime. This is a fact of life.
Lloyd,
Please make clear to whom your comments are directed. I can make a guess but would rather you make it clear.
Recently, most of my comments have been directed at TE. I’ll use TE from now on.
Lloyd,
Once again you specifically criticized the “for-profit, private-sector Charter movement”, suggesting that your are not critical of the not for profit public sector Charter movement. Would that be correct?
I think it is arguable that if you read the following sources and took copious notes, you would find an answer to your latest flawed logic of a question. In fact, you’d find answers to all of your questions regarding the manufactured and manipulated education crises in the United States—past, present and probably even the future.
_________________________
Have you read?
Reign of Error
By Diane Ravitch
https://dianeravitch.net/
Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under President G. W. Bush. She was appointed to public office by Presidents H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
If not, why?
_____________________
Have you read?
50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools:
The Real Crisis in Education
By David C. Berliner, Gene V Glass, Associates
http://nepc.colorado.edu/author/berliner-david-c
David C. Berliner is an educational psychologist and bestselling author. He was professor and Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Gene V Glass is a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a research professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder.
If not, why?
____________________________
Have you read?
A Chronicle of Echoes:
Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education
By Mercedes K. Schneider
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/
Schneider says, “Corporate reform” is not reform at all. Instead, it is the systematic destruction of the foundational American institution of public education. The primary motivation behind this destruction is greed. Public education in America is worth almost a trillion dollars a year. Whereas American public education is a democratic institution, its destruction is being choreographed by a few wealthy, well-positioned individuals and organizations. This book investigates and exposes the handful of people and institutions that are often working together to become the driving force behind destroying the community public school.
If not, why?
___________________________
Are you planning to buy and read?
The Teacher Wars, A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession
By Dana Goldstein
The release date is this September. You may order it early.
Teaching is a wildly contentious profession in America, one attacked and admired in equal measure. In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been similarly embattled for nearly two centuries. From the genteel founding of the common schools movement in the nineteenth century to the violent inner-city teacher strikes of the 1960s and ’70s, from the dispatching of Northeastern women to frontier schoolhouses to the founding of Teach for America on the Princeton University campus in 1990, Goldstein shows that the same issues have continued to bedevil us: Who should teach? What should be taught? Who should be held accountable for how our children learn?
She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change. And she also discovers an emerging effort that stands a real chance of transforming our schools for the better: drawing on the best practices of the three million public school teachers we already have in order to improve learning throughout our nation’s classrooms.
The Teacher Wars upends the conversation about American education by bringing the lessons of history to bear on the dilemmas we confront today. By asking “How did we get here?” Dana Goldstein brilliantly illuminates the path forward.
If not, why?
______________________________
Are you a regular reader of the Education Bloggers Network?
You may find information and links to these blogs here:
If not, why?
Lloyd,
Dana Goldstein is a gifted journalist but I don’t agree that what is happening today happened in the past. There was never a Bill Gates. an Eli Broad, a Walton family, an administration that was openly hostile to the teaching profession. What is happening today–the undisguised assault on the profession, the effort to quantify teacher quality—is unprecedented in our history.
Diane,
True, its worse now than all of the historical examples that Goldstein mentions in her book thanks to Obama, Bill Gates, the Walton family, the Koch brothers and others.
Never before has a President been so antagonistic to the public schools through his appointed proxies. Even G. W. Bush wasn’t this bad and it is arguable that NCLB would have faded into the background if Obama hadn’t introduced Race to the Top.
But knowing the history of education helps me and possibly others like TE—although I personally doubt TE is capable of doing anything but asking questions—to understand how we got from there to here. It also helps offer more support and evidence that reveals the manufactured crises in education and the proper path public education should be on.
In fact, I think “The Teacher Wars” offers a historical perspective that reveals the endless mistakes that have been made. In addition, by reading your book among others on the topic that sets the record straight, it is obvious what the U.S. should be doing to not fix what isn’t broken but improve what we already have.
Lloyd…with you 100%. So what else is new?
The Manchurian Candidate, Obama, never lived in America’s black ghettos…and he only purchased his multi millionion dollar estate on the South Side of Chicago, with the help of a now jailed felon, when he ran for office and subsequently, after some Chicago-style politicking, won.
He was never subjected to the black ethos of someone of real valor such as the well respected and beloved John Lewis…or even the wonderful unionist Karen Lewis.
He grew up in Honolulu, in a modest neighborhood, but attended one of the most elitist schools in the US, Punahou. This school caters to the uber wealthy, with many generations of Hawaiian blood lines. He was an anomaly there. Then he went to Occidental College in Los Angeles…another mainly white and safe enclave…certainly he did even have to drive through the dangrous neighborhoods of the ‘hood’ as with students attending USC. Then off to Princeton and Harvard.
Who could be more elitist than Barry Obama?
Who could be more elitist than Obama? Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers, the Walton family, etc.
“In fact, the color of President Obama’s skin is blinding many black Americans to the fact that his Machiavellian agenda to destroy public education through Common Core are not going to beneift them in the long run.”
Well said, Lloyd
L.L,
I agree with most of what you have written but I do take issue with the 99% working class figure. There is a very large “class” of people living at or below the poverty level. Here in North Carolina one in four children lives at or below the poverty level. In my county the percentage of people living in poverty is 31%.
http://www.wral.com/wral-documentary-every-fourth-child-still/13272115/
That being said, democratically run public schools are the best solution for leveling the playing field a bit for our children.
Even though people living in poverty don’t vote in the same ratio as the more educated middle class,I didn’t specifically mention the 15.0+ percent (46.5+ million) people living in poverty because they are part of the 99%.
Generally, people of a lower socioeconomic status are more apathetic towards politics, have a low level of political efficacy, and participate less in the voting process. In the 2012 presidential election, for instance, less than 50 percent of high school graduates with no college voted compared to more than 70 percent for voters with a BA or higher.
The Southern states are home to 37.3% of all Americans but 41.1% of the country’s poor people.
In addition, although children age eighteen and under represent 26 percent of the United States population, they comprise nearly 40 percent of the poverty population.
In the 2012 presidential election, for instance, less than 50 percent of high school graduates with no college voted compared to more than 70 percent for voters with a BA or higher.
In fact, The Atlantic reported: “low-income citizens are far less likely to vote. According to the U.S. Census, 47 percent of eligible adults with family incomes of less than $20,000 a year voted in 2012 and just one in four voted in the midterm election of 2010. By contrast, those with annual earnings of $100,000 or more turned out at rates of around 80 percent and 60 percent, respectively.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/why-are-the-poor-and-minorities-less-likely-to-vote/282896/
By not voting, people who live in poverty are not there to represent their best interests, and I’m not talking about welfare or food stamps. I’m talking about a livable wage and medical care. In 2011, 28 percent of the total number of workers in the U.S. earned poverty-level wages.
There are more than 144 million employed workers in the U.S. That means 40 million are working at poverty wages. Most people who live in poverty are not deadbeats sitting letting someone else support them. They may collect food stamps to supplement their income so they don’t starve, but they are working. Most Americans who live in poverty are the victims of corporate greed. They are the working poor.
I stand better informed;^)
Cuomo, another CCSQ (common core status quo) candidate acting like a democrat.
So gratifying to read this. Really, the US education system is so important to the well being of our civil society. Those who want to dismantle it to disenfranchise citizenry are really engaged in a very dangerous game.