I have been hoping that professors would step up and join the struggle to save our nation’s public schools from the stealth attacks on them. I don’t know if I can use the word stealth any more. It’s out inrt he open, as the privatizers grow bolder and more confident. What other political movement can claim bipartisan support, even as it seeks to destroy a basic public institution?
Rodney Clarken, a teacher educator in Michigan, stepped up to the plate. He was outraged by the constant attacks on his students, his graduates, and the schools they work in. He wrote the following comment, which includes a link to his book refuting the attacks. I urge you to read it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, in Orlando, we have a community college (now state college) professor occasionally publishing op-eds in the Sentinel bashing the system that supplies him with most of his students.
Here’s his latest one:
articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-06-10/opinion/os-ed-homeschool-oped-061012-20120608_1_school-choice-public-education-home-schooling
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There need to be more profs like him who will step up and speak out. We can’t do it alone.
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Professors HAVE been stepping up but they go ignored. Look at the critique by Prof. Stotsky and Milgram on the English/Math Common Core Standards. Look at the numerous professors who’ve been fighting to get rid of fuzzy math and Constructivism in the schools but the Progressives push on!!
Good luck fighting the Education Mafia.
It is people like Marc Tucker and Bill Gates who is now driving this ship for Arne Duncan. This is about transforming education to create worker-bees. This isn’t about educated kids.
This is about social engineering and not about educating.
Just look at how everyone falls over themselves when it comes to the International Baccalaureate Program. It’s a Values Based program full of United Nations political propaganda.
Good luck finding any journalist willing to address what this so called highly respected program is all about.
IB is good for instilling global/UN values and indoctrinating students with a UN political agenda.
And this is what is praised as a quality education.
Give me a break.
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I keep wishing our university colleagues would become more active as well. Over the past several years I have committed myself to being a voice against “bad reform” and the consistent attacks on schools, teachers and colleges of education. I think most of my colleagues just think I’m a pain. As a department chair I’m trying to get my department and School of Education to take a public stand on the uses of testing and VAM scores. I keep working on it…but I’m not holding my breath about such a statement coming anytime soon
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Clarken: “Educators are beginning to feel like soldiers under attack, and we are not prepared for the attack we are receiving, as it is coming from the very government we have pledged ourselves to serve.”
This statement at the very beginning of Dr. Clarken’s book, itself prefaced by the “time-honored” device in political discourse of agreeing with some statements of our adversary (in this case, the Michigan governor) for the sake of seeking an ersatz common ground before one “departs” from agreement is precisely the kind of reply our class enemies in the Twin Parties of War and Plunder would hope for Us to make. There Is No Common Ground; either with sentiment or statement by the proponents of class warfare on working people, their children, and the educators dedicated to serving their interests. Any further arguments opposing the Michigan governor’s, President Obama and his henchman Arne Duncan, or any other educational proponents of the capitalist 1% will simply be dismissed as nuance and details of “minor” difference, no matter how eloquently or vehemently stated. As long as we accept this framework of social stratification, the right to plunder (read profit) economy, and make war on the rest of the world in service to those ends, we can never hope to challenge the capitalist framework for the education of our society’s children. Every aspect of policy–liberal or conservative–will serve the opposite of the interests of the vast majority of children in our public schools.
To be sure, the professors of teacher education, almost to the individual, engage in the preparation of new teachers with the end toward creating an egalitarian system of educating children. I make this assumption on the basis of Roger’s notion of “unconditional positive regard” simply to assume the best in intentions despite any evidence to the contrary (for which there is sadly too much available). However, the sad truth is that every effort at “reform”, based on the notions inherent in Dr. Clarken’s ceding that we are “soldiers” pledged to serve a government whose interests are antithetical to working people and the poor, has resulted in dismal failure; both in failing to remove academic disparity from a historically unequal education system and in preparing every child to learn how to change the oppressive nature of the society they inherit. Instead, the very best our education system seems to offer is the conference of privilege to the historically privileged and of lack of such privilege to the vast majority of children whose apparent lot in life is to serve the labor, and intellectual, interests of profit, segregated social existence, and war–on other peoples and among ourselves. It can almost categorically be stated that every program of teacher education has helped to create the educational disparity rampant in our moribund system of education by preparing teachers to engage in the practices, traditions, and policies that have created these historical disparities. This can be said both of “progressive” and “conservative” education programs; the adjective serving only to demarcate cliques of different camps pretending to be different from each other, but whose outcomes create the “yin and yang” of an oppression-generating form intellectual thought in our country’s children.
We Cannot Even Begin To Arrive At True Solutions to Education Disparity–and, Therefore, Systemic Failure–Without Understanding This Essential Nature of the Education “Enterprise”. We Cannot Even Begin To Promote A New And Different Answer to This System of Education Plunder of Our Youth Without FIRST Recognizing That The “Liberal” and “Conservative” Education Policies Promoted by Our Local, State, and National Governments Are Completely Bankrupt and Must Be Overturned With a New Totally Democratic Version of Popular Democracy. A Democracy That Can Only Be Begun Through the Intransigent Opposition To the Attacks on Teachers/Educators and Their Organizations.
It is true that teacher unions and professor unions along with the unions of classified and other professional staff must be defended. However, the best defense if for us to unite with the most oppressed communities to demand complete and total community control of our schools and having the courage and “unconditional positive regard” that teachers working with parents and students in oppressed and working class communities–yes, even if such communities may be too conservative at the outset–will provide not only the best solutions but the most democratic ones. Such a vision is likely very difficult to grasp for higher educators–and teachers. That is most likely because “we” have been schooled in the nature of this society as the “best of all possible worlds”; a convenient “truth” promoted from the very inception of our early education. Such a vision is, however, the only way to assure we can be successful in transforming the education of children and countering the assault by enemies who count on Us “agreeing” with “some of their points”.
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[…] I have recently started following Diane Ravitch’s blog. I highly recommended it for those interested in education. She is one of the most influential and insightful voices speaking for education as she combines the virtues of truth, love and justice in a powerful way. She recently made a comment on her blog to my book, Education Under Attack, which has lead a lot of people to look at it. You can read below or by going to https://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/24/a-scholar-in-michigan-defends-the-schools/ […]
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Thank you for sharing your book.
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