A reader sent this wonderful analogy, which was published today in Undernews:
No high school basketball player left behind
If a team does not win the championship, it will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their basketballs and equipment will be taken away until they do win the championship.
All players will be expected to have the same basketball skills at the same time, even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. No exceptions will be made for lack of interest in basketball, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents.
All students will play basketball at a proficient level
Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in basketball, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like basketball.
Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad basketball players.
– Author unknown
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Try the same comparison to Special Olympics. All students with intellectual disabilities MUST participate and compete in the international Olympics. If the coaches coached them well enough, they can win and win the Gold!? If you don’t think this is achievable, you are selling those students ‘short’ and you will be evaluated poorly. All things are possible! Come on people, we have been keeping our SWD out of the true competition. Kennedy Family, what were you thinking? Those children were short-changed for years. Just pay attention to the trend in the US. If highly educated politicians and people with Big $$ say it, it has to be true. Afterall, NCLB and RT3 are working beautifully. Test scores are through the roof, teachers are respected and empowered, charter schools are getting big $$, US is at the top internationally, educators are at the table when making sound decisions, Finland has fallen to 2nd place. Fabulous! And, SWD are training for the Summer and Winter Olympics, and are on cereal boxes. Don’t be a Debby Downer!
Sadly, no matter how many wonderful analogies there are, the people who most need to hear them refuse to. Bill Gates, Alice Walton, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and all the others don’t want to hear it. They’ve set an agenda and they are sticking to it. They want to privatize education and help these other companies reap the profits. Any sane or open minded person would hear these arguments and might begin to listen. These people never will.
In their corporate and political worlds if someone is performing poorly on the job they can fire them. We can’t exactly fire students who are performing poorly. What employer in their right mind would go to the same lengths to save an employee’s job that teachers and schools go to in their desire to help poorly performing students? The answer is not one of them would.
But in the corporate school (charter) world, if a student is doing poorly, they can and do “fire” them. They send them to the public school.
Agreed that Gates, et al will never hear us.
You hit the nail on the head — and posed one of the few questions that the privatizers/charterites have never been able to answer. They rely on the public schools to do the work they don’t want to do, refuse to do, and can’t do.
They use every excuse possible to avoid even dealing with this point. In other words, their cherished mantra of “no excuses” and their philosophy of ‘impatient optimism’ only applies to others — but heaven forbid they should be held to their own standards!
Diane is right — these folks have no shame.
It seems obvious that the edu-reformers plan to spend as little money as possible on the most difficult to teach children and SPED.
There have been a few corporate reformers who have been truthful in revealing their plans for children who don’t meet the continuously more difficult standards. Rahm Emanual told Karen Lewis that he wasn’t going to waste money on 25% of the kid’s who will never accomplish anything. Jamie Woodson (TN CEO of SCORE an “independent” education commission) told a teacher who asked about the unreasonable expectations of the standards that they weren’t going to spend money on those kids.
Tests scores are for sorting the royalty from the serfs and allocating money accordingly.
Sad but true! Our SpEd, ELL kids and children in poverty will be the serfs – a throw-away society according tomUS standards. Parents of SWD should rise up and respond to the future of education. Soon, there will be few students left for collaborative education/inclusion or with typical students. Public schools may be the only option for them, because charter and private schools are very selective, to assure high test scores. All about $$ from test scores.
I am uncomfortable speaking about charter schools as if they are all alike. I think Dr. Ravitch was quite correct when she said “Charters vary dramatically by design. Some function very well. Some are run by incompetents. Most are not different from traditional public schools.”
So terribly sad, but true! We need some Big$ folks to begin supporting teachers and children. I know they are out there. Please have a heart and step forward.
Well, one of the things l learned in doing fundraising among the very wealthy is to remember to simply ask. Just ask.
People like to play “follow the leader”. And we know who The Leader is. His last name is Gates. He’s now obsessed with this “Education Reform” idea, based upon absolutely nothing beyond his own obsession and the hope that he can leave a “legacy” beyond Windows and Office.
However, the wealthy elite are not a monolith. And, among them, there are others who see things differently and would like to leave their own mark.
Surely, among all of us, there MUST be a few of us who have direct connections to the very wealthy, one or two degrees separated. And some of them might like to be known as part of a new departure—and finding a way to create their own legacy.
Contrarians among the wealthy do exist. If anything, such types exist in higher numbers among the very wealthy than they do among we average income types.
As I write this, I’m thinking about some of the people I went to college with, and their membership in those elite circles. How good it would be if “Parents Across America”, for instance, had a few of these “contrarians” as a funding source, as a counterweight to the BBC that is the ultimate source of money for all of these organizations.
Right! One example is Warren buffet’s daughter, Susie, putting money toward early childhood education. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/warren-buffetts-daughter-susie-buffett_n_962542.html
Terrific analogy!
So, today there were three posts using the same analogy to critique reformers who ignore actual realities in schools.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/11/john_thompson_baseball_analogi.html
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2012/11/bruno-is-teaching-like-baseball.html
Now this is finally something that Arne and our President can understand!
Oops! Diane has made a critical error in her opening analogy. In order to synthesize a state championship into the NCLB comparison, she should have allowed that the criterion would not be on a playoff setting . . . rather that
ALL teams could be the State champs, by virtue of an evaluation system established by a “board of basketball”, who, by – the – bye, can also adjust the criterion for state level performance annually. This would necessarily, then, allow that ALL players would be All – staters.
Loved this analogy. I can tell you that there is a significant groundswell of opposition to current accountability systems in Texas and it appears the politicians are taking notice. Our state legislature begins its biannual session in January, but the first day to file bills was last week. Already, bills are being filed to drastically reduce the impact of high stakes testing on both students as individuals and schools.
Here’s another analogy that draws an interesting parallel: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxuZWxzb253Y291bHRlcnxneDoyZGJlOTg3MDczYjNjNjNl
Enjoy.
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