When Mayor Rahm Emanuel is talking about youth crime, he assigns responsibility to parents and families for the values and attitudes and behavior of what he calls “gang bangers.”
When he talks about schools, however, he forgets that parents and families have any influence on how students behave and the effort they are willing to expend on their studies. All of a sudden, teachers alone control test scores, no one else.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And what exactly is Rahm responsible for? When is he held accountable? What does he do every day besides shoot his mouth off and blame others for his failings? Despicable human being!
When he is up for reelection?
Not until 2015. In any case, it’s going to be as hard to defeat him as it ever was to defeat the Daleys – he’s got all the money and power behind him. Best start organizing now.
Exactly! Everyone does that. We see kids do something crazy (like the Jacksonville, FL high school kids who “flash trashed” a Walmart) and you see comments very critical of their families. However, if negative test score data is released on these same kids the next day, all of the blame would fall on the teachers.
Very good insight.
Obama and Duncan have made it clear, they want social justice. They have even brilliantly dubbed this agenda, the new civil right.
THe CPS document also makes a cry for social justice in their own document: http://www.ctunet.com/blog/text/SCSD_Report-02-16-2012-1.pdf
Did I miss something? Is the new purpose of public education : Social Justice?
I”m on blog after blog with parents who are fed up. Fed up with the lack of academic excellence. They want their kids reading, writing, adding and subtracting. They want a disciplined environment for their children so they are safe.
We have the Social Justice elites (Obama/Rham and Duncan) fighting with the Social Justice union. No where in this mix am I seeing a cry for academic excellence.
What is the BEST way to move a child out of poverty? EDUCATE THEM. Offer them the best education in the country.
Diane, you once championed this cause when you stood up to the progressives who wanted to push SCANS or 21st Century skills when the kids didn’t have basic skills to begin with.
Go back to championing for the kids. Go back to focusing on academic excellence and put down Karl Marx’s agenda. It will ultimately fail the teachers!!
What’s the best way to move a child out of poverty?
Provide their family with a middle class job, something politicians have not been able to do for the last many decades.
The data speaks very clearly – our middle and upper class kids perform exceedingly well in multiple measures across their schooling career. The nagging problem is that we have more children in poverty now than we ever have – an inexcusable 25%.
As politicians have outsourced our middle class jobs to cheaper labor over seas, our child poverty rates have skyrocketed – more than doubling – since the 60’s. And then we wonder why our students can’t perform?
Quit placing the destiny of this country and its children on the backs of our schools and teachers and place the focus where it ought to be – the family unit. The number of female, single-headed families is astonishing, especially the rise of them since the 60’s. Female, single-headed families are 5 times more likely to be poverty stricken and send their kids to school a couple of grades behind.
And what do you mean “ultimately fail the teachers”? We’ve already done that as the modal teacher experience across the nation has dipped from the 15 year mark in the late 80’s to the 1 year mark at the present time. We lose 50% of our teachers within their rist five years because of people that blame them for why a kid can’t get a job, make it through college, or read or write.
Do you call having more 1st year teachers “championing for kids”?
MwaB,
Please point us to the blogs that you referred to. I’d be interested in reading them.
Thanks,
Duane
Duane: Click on OP’s name and you’ll get an idea. It’s the Republican brand of education bashing, and social justice are dirty words to them.
Oh whoopee, Karl Marx, my hero, I worship him, I genuflect before his 10 feet tall granite bust in my living room, I pray to his graven image and burn incense to his memory and greatness. Whoops, my bad, I meant to say Groucho Marx, not Karl Marx.
Karl Marx was, of course, given a great Classical education in excellent private schools.
I listened to a story about the strike on NPR this morning. The thrust of it was how the schools would be open for a few hours so kids could get breakfast and lunch. So the school’s job is to somehow take care of kids’ basic survival needs, but also turn them all into Einsteins? How is this at all reasonable?
It’s not. Many in Title I schools just come for the food. They don’t care about learning, and who could blame them?
I think you have some confusion here: social justice and academic excellence are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, you might achieve social justice through academic excellence. However for profit, test-driven, narrowly focused companies that attempt to “de-professionalize” certified teachers do not achieve either. What they achieve is a better bottom line for the corporate office.
Here’s hoping Rahm is one and done. What does he believe in ? Money and pandering.
It’s not what he says, it’s what he does.
Here is an excellent summary of what he’s done during the bit more than a year he has been in office. From the blog, Mayorial Tutorial.
“While you are digesting the fact that the very concept of unionized public service is under attack, that our “free” public education system is grossly underfunded and that education does not respond like a business and cannot/should not be treated like business or a market; know that there are people who champions of a world view that does all of the above. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is one of them. … The Mayor’s point of reflection is that teachers are just workers not civil servants. This makes them obstacles to be overcome not crucial to the functioning of a civil society.
As a result everything the Mayor has done since taking office has been designed to eliminate them from the field of play and to demonstrate to them that they are powerless. He took their 4% raise. He just broke the agreement and stole the money from them. He marshaled out of state help and jammed SB7 down their throats, just like famous weasel Jonah Edelmen said in public on tape. He launched an aggressive campaign of charter expansion, teacher firings across the system via a growing number of Broad Academy-trained principals using redefinition to eliminate problematic and tenured teachers while putting in place “value-added” schemes and turnaround schools at a clip that would shame Richard M. Daley.
His aggression was calculated to show all the unions that the biggest union in the city was powerless to contend with him. The message was simple enough… get on the bus or get run over by it because if he can do this to teachers, firefighters and police officers had better believe that they, not even being able to strike, would be treated to deals only marginally better because at present the public doesn’t believe they should be privatized… but give our neo-liberal friends time and it could happen right here in America soon enough.”
http://mayoraltutorial.com/articles/a_striking_context_rahm_vs._the_ctu
mayoraltutorial.com
This will become the center of education debate and the focal point for real change. God Bless Karen God Bless the C.T.U. and the members of the C.T.U. who are making tremendous sacrifice for the sake of our nation, and our nations core values. Barack Obama, Arnie Duncan, and Rahm Emmanuel should be listening to this and asking one question. How are my policies going to benefit the core values which I profess to believe in? It is time for all children to have the quality education and support services they need to be the best people they can be, and to stop playing a blame game. Our support of politicians with dubious qualifications and ideals should stop. Stop playing politics and support education properly.
This reminds me of an excellent editorial written by a teacher some years ago…
http://www.examiner.com/article/in-what-other-profession
“If that entire attitude weren’t bad enough, what other profession is legally held to PERFECTION by 2014? Are police required to eliminate all crime? Are firefighters required to eliminate all fires? Are doctors required to cure all patients? Are lawyers required to win all cases? Are coaches required to win all games? Of course they aren’t.
For no other profession do so many outsiders refuse to accept the realities of an imperfect world. Crime happens. Fire happens. Illness happens. As for lawyers and coaches, where there’s a winner there must also be a loser. People accept all these realities, until they apply to public education.
If a poverty-stricken, drug-addled meth-cooker burns down his house, suffers third degree burns, and then goes to jail; we don’t blame the police, fire department, doctors, and defense attorneys for his predicament. But if that kid doesn’t graduate high school, it’s clearly the teacher’s fault.”
It’s clear that Rahm Emanuel believes in following the money in hopes that some of it will end up in his pocket.
Those who want to privatize public education have it. Teachers and students don’t.
Are the parents responsible? Maybe some are, but the level of poverty in parts of Chicago and the lack of jobs is a huge problem that parents can’t resolve by themselves. When is the US going to get real about employment and work?
31% of Chicago children live in poverty, 10,000 are homeless. The homeless children and parents must change shelters every 6 months. Think of the added hardship for them, because they often have to change schools, too.
Straw man, again. — We have to either blame the teachers or parents. We could just recognize that both play a significant role even without the other, but our kids go the farthest working together. I’ll chose to not blame the parents or the teachers, but I know that the teachers I know are making all the difference — a life changing difference.
Not sure I can fully agree, although I respect this insight.
One father is as 100 schoolmasters.
Emanuel is for Emanuel…nothing else.
FIRE DUNCAN! Hire Ravitch!
Karl Marx received an excellent classical education in Germany’s state-supported public schools, which had been reformed by Humboldt and Niehammer. Sheesh.