A reader, noting the plan to privatize 40% of the schools in Philadelphia, had this to say:
| WILLIAM PENN is rolling over in his grave, I’m sure. |
It occurred to me that :
John Dewey must be rolling over in his grave as he sees our national leaders using standardized tests to impose rankings and ratings on students, teachers, principals, and schools, while many abandon the arts to reach their targets.
Horace Mann must be rolling over in his grave as he sees corporations descending on the schools to make a profit and to privatize as many as possible.
Henry Barnard must be rolling over in his grave as he sees a Democratic governor in his home state of Connecticut handing public schools over to private managers and calling it “reform.”
Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave as he sees Bobby Jindal giving public funds to voucher students to attend religious schools in Louisiana.
Lyndon B. Johnson must be ruling over in his grave as he sees his beloved Elementary and Secondary Education Act, meant to equalize resources and help poor kids, turned into a club to impose testing and privately managed schools.
Martin Luther King, Jr. must be rolling over in his grave as he sees Wall Street hedge fund managers and billionaires say that they are leading the civil rights movement of our day, as they attack unions and privatize public schools.
Who else is rolling in their grave?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
……All deceased teachers and the rest of us they would like to put out to pasture…remember what happened to Boxer in Animal Farm.
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Socrates is rolling over in his grave as he sees true teachers publically pilloried by sophists and demagogues, in a way all too familiar to him.
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Maria Montessori, who developed her learning program in Italy for poor and disabled children but which is mostly only available to wealthy and advantaged kids in America.
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Hang down your head, John Dewey, and cry …
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Wow, don’t know how that happened. I just wanted to put in the URL.
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I think it may have something to do with the
feature=player_embeddedparameter tacked on the address string.LikeLike
We needed a musical interlude! Thanks! 🙂
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Classic. Gotta find the humor in these outrageous times! Love this.
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All of the Progressive Education teachers that taught the people in power today who have opted for their own children to have that same kind of schooling, and who have the ability to provide that model to the general population as well, but refuse to do so and give them outdated carrot and stick Behavioral circus training instead.
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Also, John Locke. In his essay concerning Human Understanding in the Epistle to his readers he has some excellent ideas about the acquisition of knowledge:
I HAVE PUT INTO THY HANDS what has been the diversion of
some of my idle and heavy hours. If it has the good luck to
prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half so much
pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little
think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed. Mistake
not this for a commendation of my work; nor conclude,
because I was pleased with the doing of it, that therefore I
am fondly taken with it now it is done. He that hawks at
larks and sparrows has no less sport, though a much less
considerable quarry, than he that flies at nobler game: and
he is little acquainted with the subject of this treatise—
the understanding—who does not know that, as it is the
most elevated faculty of the soul, so it is employed with a
greater and more constant delight than any of the other.
Its searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting,
wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure.
Every step the mind takes in its progress towards
Knowledge makes some discovery, which is not only new,
but the best too, for the time at least.
For the understanding, like the eye, judging of objects
only by its own sight, cannot but be pleased with what
it discovers, having less regret for what has escaped it,
because it is unknown. Thus he who has raised himself
above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily
on scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on
work, to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights
on) not miss the hunter’s satisfaction; every moment of
his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight; and
he will have reason to think his time not ill spent, even
when he cannot much boast of any great acquisition.
I think would sum up quite nicely his thoughts on Value Added Measures, accountability, and teacher effectiveness.
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I don’t know about Locke. He gave the Western world the notion of tabula rasa/blank slate/empty vessel, which would later lead to Behaviorism. That’s contrary to contemporary understandings of complex cognitive processes and the learner’s propensity to interpret experience, relate new information to prior knowlege and try to make sense of the world –not just soak everything in like a sponge.
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Prof W, I don’t deny your point. However, consider two things. 1. I was comparing some of his thoughts to measuring learning, value added measures, accountability, and so forth. 2. Learning is still pretty mysterious and still based on theories. Granted the behaviorist model is antiquated in many ways, but we’ve come a long way with our modern understanding of cognitive development, neuroscience, psychology, psychometrics. We have new ways to monitor brain function through MRI and other technology as well as data collection and analysis (if done properly). With 17th century technology and competing contemporary theories, I’d still say he had some remarkable thoughts for the time. Not to mention his thoughts on liberty and freedom…but that is another story.
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Brain function and learning are not the same thing. Education can’t be measured with MRI.
Diane
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Diane, true that they aren’t interchangeable terms. However, by having a better understanding of how the brain functions, aren’t we provided with additional ways to approach our understanding of learning? After all doesn’t learning involve some brain function? Don’t they have some sort of a symbiotic relationship of sorts? I think I kinda know where you might be going. I certainly wouldn’t want to go around monitoring brain function to assess learning and drive instruction and then collect more data by administering standardized tests. As long as Bill Gates stays out of the MRI business…..
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Most teachers’ unions (with the exception of Chicago’s) are rolling over while not yet even in their graves.
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Joseph: a most astute comment, and a major reason for all this mess.
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In Oklahoma, Henry Bellmon, a Republican governor who worked with teachers and political leaders to craft legislation that limited class sizes, required teacher professional development, but paid teachers for that PD…we still are required to do the PD, but have never seen any bonuses, and class sizes are rising here as they are all over…Little by little all the protections in that law have been eroded, while all the requirements are still in place. This is not what he wanted.
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Patrick Henry would be rolling in his grave, as he saw public tax money being sent to private schools at which the people have no representation.
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FDR is rolling over in he grave: “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism –ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.”
Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-23/wall_street/30011966_1_financial-reform-private-power-fdr#ixzz23LW7zrgu
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Wow! Deja vu all over again.
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Susan Elizabeth Blow (June 7, 1843 in Carondelet, St. Louis, Missouri – March 27, 1916 in New York City, New York) was a United States educator who opened the first successful public Kindergarten in the United States. She is known as the “Mother of Kindergarten”.
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That information is from Wiki.
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Albert Shanker
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Marie Clay
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Lucy Sprague Mitchell too.
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Pestolozzi, “learning by head, hand and heart”, as well as Froebel, father of Kindergarten.
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In Philadelphia, 44% of all public school teachers send their own children to private schools. Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/sep/22/20040922-122847-5968r/?page=all
No one knows more about how good or bad Philadelphia’s public schools are than the teachers who work at those schools. So the fact that 44% of them send their own children to private schools means that Philadelphia’s public schools must be absolutely, horribly dreadful.
No child should be forced to stay in a bad school.
I don’t care if it’s a public school, a charter school, a private school, or a religious school. Every child should be allowed to get a quality education.
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I would venture to say my elementary school teachers and any teacher I had in Junior High, High School and at Rutgers .
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Piaget must be beside himself. Ages and stages of child development, curriculum practices and materials tied to what is known about learning, and saving the more abstract concepts until children have moved past certain developmental stages has all been cast aside. Now we have kindergartners sitting for minutes on end struggling through workbooks and second graders “reading” Harry Potter.
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AND–even more testing coming down the pike for our youngest students. Forget that “the work of children is play.” Now the work of children is prepping for tests and taking tests. There is NO time allowed for “child development.”
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The moms of special needs children who fought for their children’s right to be educated alongside their typically-developing peers, and who succeeded in having the first federal special ed law enacted in the late 1970s — since special needs children are usually not admitted or served by, and are counseled and kicked out of, charters. Inclusion is on its way into the dustbin of history.
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I’m sorry, but not all of those early “fathers” of public education would be rolling over in their graves…
truly, they would find nothing wrong with what is going on at all, because their intention never was to educate all children…
please watch this video of readings from the writings of those early people: http://sahilachangebringer.blogspot.com/2011/03/rage-against-machine.html
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They have one thing in common: they wanted free public education. Public education, not a system for profit or controlled by private management.
Diane
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but public education was always, by their intention, meant to exist solely to contribute to private profit…
and by wanting it to be “free”, I think they were shifting their costs into the public sector….
for an example of how that transfer of costs has been achieved in other arenas, consider this perspective: http://sahilachangebringer.blogspot.com/2012/07/abolition-was-con.html
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Not at all, unless you consider giving people opportunity to be “contributing to private profit”
Diane Ravitch
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Not to be perverse AND I dont read a lot of altruism with regard to the masses, in many of the writings of the founding fathers… I think there was a very strong sense of “class” and “place” with little intention of softening those lines to allow for upward mobility; and hasnt it always been the case that the rich have paid less in taxes than the middle class and the poor, so hasnt it always been the middle class that has been funding public education, not the rich – which really is a shifting of the cost burden…
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Jane Addams, although not in schools, her advocacy for local solutions to place-grounded challenges is completely lost…not to mention Hull Houses closure, which is perhaps related to that loss of reliance on the local.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be rolling in his grave..
“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
German Protestant theologian & anti-Nazi activist (1906 – 1945)
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Vygotsky is flipping like a 10 meter diver right along with his acquaintance Dewey. It is remarkable that only those who know virtually nothing about how children learn – isn’t that the point? – determine how to test for what they call ‘success.’ Warning, cheeky moment: The only comparable is the flip I did when Diane R. rejected the dark side.
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Gerald Bracey.
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I don’t know how many of you have read Ivan Illich but here’s a quote that’s relevant to this discussion: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472400559451932&set=a.288593214499335.79533.288460991179224&type=1&ref=nf
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extrapolate the ideas about the decimating of public universities in this article to the decimating of public schools… http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/
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W.E.B. Dubois who said that the “right to learn” declared as the most important human right in the struggle.
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Hubert H. Humphrey as he watches the ideological descendants of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society form an alliance with billionaires—most of whom are vastly more wealthy than Howard Hughes, then the richest man in America—to find a new way to deceive and exploit the minority communities of our country; this time through bribery, mendacity, and a false narrative that blames neighborhood schools and their teachers for their economic and social struggles.
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And let’s not forget Abraham Maslow, who must be spinning and saying, “Basic needs must be met before expecting anything more.”
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Whew…I thought was the only one who saw reformers comparing their agenda to the civil rights movement disgusting, to put it nicely.
Taffy
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did anyone say frederick douglass yet?
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