Adam Kirk Edgerton is mad. He is mad at President Obama because he acts like a Republican.
Edgerton runs the Upward Bound program at Salem State University in Massachusetts. His students are losing their scholarships. Many students are losing scholarships.
Edgerton writes:
” I woke up mad today because when it comes to education policy, there is little daylight between a national Democrat and a national Republican. Dismantling civil-rights era social programs and replacing them with market-based reforms is what truly brings President Obama and the Republicans together.”
He adds:
“What I will argue is this: a Democratic administration is deliberately funneling funds away from direct services to poor people and towards administrators and consultants and bureaucrats. Race to the Top pays some pretty good grant-funded salaries to curriculum writers in Central Offices. It puts on a good conference (I’ve been to one). What it doesn’t do is teach kids, or shelter them in safe homes, or feed them healthy food.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ever since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 we have as they say, ‘tacked’ center right with a neoliberal approach towards social and economic policy. What is especially disappointing is that America’s first African-American president is so hell-bent on dismantling so many of the 1960’s social, civil rights/liberties, and economic policies and replacing them with policies that favor the elite. Although, we weren’t warned. Just look at the past 4 year term. There are two Obama’s in play here. The fiery and campaigning Obama who makes one feel good and says all the right things to pacify and uplift our spirits, and the other Obama. One who nominates an idiot to run education and a tax challenged billionaire to run CPS and now, the Commerce department to name just a few. One has to wonder why his highest profile nominees: 2 at Defense and now one for the FBI are Republicans.
Time folks to start organizing a new party that actually listens to their constituents and takes polling data seriously. Time for our politicians to stop going through the motions and start governing.
If not, it will only get worse.
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The irony and the truth is that liberal policies that prevent the removal of incorrigible students from our public schools have led to the mass exodus of the children of liberal upper middle class parents. It’s just one of the reasons that school segregation is now at its highest point since the 1960s and it’s being fueled by Obama’s Race To The Top golden goose..
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So my question for you, and anyone that supports suspension/expulsions, is where do these students get educated? They deserve an education as much as anyone else.
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Jesse,
That is the “rub”, as they say. In theory, yes. But mainstreaming everyone has led, in many cases, to no one getting the best education. Just have your child be part of a classroom where a child with an IED is present – one with self control issues – where ALL the children are removed from the class when the one child has lost control, and you will see how things can break down when applied in the real world.
Most of us want what is best for all children, but we suspend that to some degree when our own child may be suffering the negative consequences of this lofty and noble goal. It is not the individual child’s fault or the parents’ fault or the teacher’s fault. It is the deck that you are given to play with and the hand that you are dealt.
If no one ever speaks up to say, “this isn’t working”, nothing changes. It doesn’t help that now that people are starting to speak up, they are being labeled Republicans (no offense Republicans); the point is that it is an insult the way it is delivered. The same way that Republicans use the term Liberal as an insult.
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Make that IEP. Good, Lord, these education wars are now playing out in my subconscious mind.
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As a teacher with experience in alternate high schools, I can say that it is not logical to mix the “incorrigible” with those students who are not disruptive to the learning environment. And I loved my “bad” kids as much as my “good” kids–probably more. And I will say that I learned more from the perpetual miscreants than from the kids who were always on task. .
When you say that the incorrigible kids “deserve” an education as much as anyone else, then that is where I disagree. I believe that our young people do not “deserve” an education as some sort of unalienable right but that the “free” public education provided by our society is a privilege and not a right.
This is not to suggest, however, that such “incorrigible” kids should be kicked to the side of the road. Alternate programs are available and if not, can be implemented.
If students and parents are unable, for whatever reason, to understand that their rights end where another’s begin, then the vast majority of non-disruptive students should not have their educational opportunities compromised or degraded.
This is where the charter movement saw it’s niche and unfortunately all the hucksters are swarming for the public education dollars.
Lord help us now.
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In order to save money, school districts started to interpret “least restrictive environment” as the mainstream classroom. However, if a child cannot function in that environment it is not the appropriate least restrictive environment for them or for their classmates who are also entitled to an education. The mainstream classroom is considered the default placement and despite legal requirements to expedite other placement decisions the process can be glacially slow. RtI (response to intervention) has been used by some districts to almost completely stall decision making. If used appropriately, a child is more likely to be placed where he/she is most likely to receive the necessary services without disrupting the learning of others.
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For some reason I can’t reply to the people who replied to me so here it is above. I teach in a school and sometimes kids freak out just as described. My son will go to this school when he is old enough. It is fine if students have IEP’s(not IEDs haha) and are next to him. I often think that teachers who complain so much about student behavior might be happier at charters where it is all handled for them and those students on IEPs are shuffled out. I think it is important that my son is exposed to all sorts of kids so I don’t mind if he has a year in a class with a kid who freaks out. If you don’t believe everyone deserves an education than you shouldn’t be a teacher, sorry to be rude, but seriously. I have collegaues that say this crap and I just want to strangle them. The rights of the minority should always be protected and as teachers we should not just make decision based on what is best for the majority.
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It is interesting that IEP is used as a shorthand for students with some learning impairment. In my state, along with some others, all students who are out of the mainstream, including gifted and talented students, have an IEP.
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Obama campaigned on his support for charter schools. That helped me make my decision on who to vote for on the primary. Although, I did support him in the general & hoped to see what I believed would be traditional Democratic party principals come from his White House, I’ve been terribly disappointed. The national Democratic party has left me & it did begin years ago with Clinton. I can no longer support Democrats on a national level. My vote has been held hostage by them for too many years.
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Me too. If the next candidate is like Obama, I won’t vote for him/her. I’ve had enough. I’m sick of Obama. He is clueless about education.
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I know exactly how he feels. I wrote a piece recently about why I am a woman without a party: http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/ctnj.php/archives/entry/a_woman_without_a_party/
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I knew we were in trouble when he couldn’t give a speech in ’09 without at least two Ronald Reagan quotes.
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Incorrigible kids should be put in alternative schools or classrooms. It does no good to anyone to have out of control behavior allowed to continue in regular classrooms. I just read an article stating that Obamaphones have increased in cost to taxpayers to 2 billion a year. Most goes to a phone provider in Mexico. I don’t believe in extreme handouts or in extreme tolerance.
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http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/cellphone.asp
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Obama for 5 yrs now and Hilary 5 yrs from now, will never deliver the just and humane society so many of us want. Of course an independent popular party is needed which speaks and acts for the 99%. Only road to ousting the parties for the 1% is continual consolidation into mass movements, building coalitions at every opportunity, finding common ground for allies to act together at election time and all the many months in-between. In the latest education war, the terms of coalition are clear—campaigns for small class size with professional career educators and a child-friendly curriculum, against high-stakes testing and the privatization of school budgets and assets.
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Some students may always be incorrigible, but I’ve long felt that if the funds poured into standardized testing, consultants, etc. were put toward creating diverse, robust curricular paths–college prep, vocational, business, arts, etc.–there would be far fewer discipline issues.
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Bingo.
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The latest estimate for spending on standardized testing put the cost at 1.7 billion dollars out of a total expenditure of 610 billion dollars on public K-12 education.
The 1.7 billion dollar figure is reported here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/11/29/13testcosts.h32.html
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Oh baloney – Texas alone spends $500 million per year on standardized testing.
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Just reporting the estimates that are out there. Do you have a different number with a source?
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Do you have access to the entire article?
I do not.
From the first few paragraphs it seems to only include $ spent on grades 3 – 9.
I can attest to a lot of “Pearson” type testing of grades 10-12..at least in GA.
Also, wonder if figures include $ spent at the school level (work hours, pencils and special calculators to be provided to students, test prep/ review materials etc.) and “extras” at the district level (computers, networks, software, databases, consultants, etc.) all directly related to the mandatory, high stakes tests and costly.
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You can download the Brookings report here:http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/11/29-cost-of-ed-assessment-chingos
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What’s in Texas’ $500 Million Testing Contract with Pearson?
http://www.kutnews.org/post/what-s-texas-500-million-testing-contract-pearson
From this article:
“A report last year from the Brookings Institution tabulated the average cost of testing per student, and Texas ranked somewhere near the middle – in between a frugal $7 per-pupil in New York, and the whopping $114 per-pupil in the District of Columbia. (This is a separate figure than Texas’ total spending per pupil, which is near the bottom, ranking 49th out of 50 states.)
But those numbers are misleading. Washington D.C. is relatively small, as a testing district, and in New York, much of the cost of testing is borne by local school districts instead of an outside company like Pearson. Those costs did not show up in the Brookings report.”
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The cost of administering tests is different from the costs resulting from testing… As we spend more and more time teaching-to-the-test and less time on things like science, social studies, the arts, PE, etc. that are not tested we are paying a very high price…
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The Brookings study attempts to estimate the administrative costs af testing, but does not try to measure the opportunity cost of lost class time.
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Dienne — that’s $500 million over 5 years, not per year.
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President Obama has been of little help in this regard… http://askingquestionsblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/education-needs-bravehearts.html
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It’s a little late to get mad at Obama now that he’s been elected for the last time in his life. Many of us were begging people to get mad back in November, but you can’t get mad at the “lesser of two evils”, I suppose.
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Unless, as Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report says, Obama is the more effective evil.
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The President recently travelled to NJ and went out of his way to distance himsel from and embarrass the Democratic challenger to incumbent Governor Chris Christie.
Amazing!
Barbara Buono is running a campaign that top Democrats in NJ and in the Oval Office are working against!
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The Bromance continues in Jersey. Not a fan of RW blogs, but this is interesting:
http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/28/did-obama-blow-off-private-meeting-with-christies-new-jersey-opponent/
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Galton, I agree. I can’t remember anything like this happening before in NJ political history where so many Democrats are backstabbing the Democratic candidate for governor. Maybe it did happen but I’m not aware of it. Obama is reaching so far across the aisle in the cause of almighty bipartisanship that he might as well go the whole way and become a Republican. The current crop of NJ Democrats are pathetic. Barbara Buono has the guts to take on a very popular governor (not to me, I never voted for him) and her reward is lack of support from her own party. She will get my vote.
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It would be great if she won like Ratliff.
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A Christie loss would be astounding and might signal the beginning of the end for the attack on public education.
The odds though are very, very long. Barbara Buono has courage though, so…
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It has become clear that Capitalism hates Democracy as much as it ever hated Communism. Indeed, it enjoyed the sort of mutual understanding with the Stalinesque strains of late Soviet autocracy that only top-down totalitarian projects can share with each other.
We can be sure that corporate crony capitalism, a.k.a. neoliberalism, will continue to do its utmost to destroy what we already have in order to make us need what it wants to sell us.
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Good points.
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Very true. Capitalism is an economic system not a governmental system, that can function very well in a fascist country such as Franco’s Spain or in a communist police state such as China. Capitalism (especially laissez-faire so called free market crony capitalism) has nothing to do with freedom, justice or democracy.
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Ditto Duffrense!
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It’s not just Obama, folks. There isn’t one single politician that I can think of who isn’t for “education reform.” This isn’t about having an unruly child with an IEP in your classroom. It’s not about a problem with LRE (least restrictive environment) for special needs kids. It’s not about the public school model not working.
It’s about starving the public school model until it collapses, blaming it, and privatizing it. How this has become the one unifying priority in the vast bipartisan divide we live in now is astounding. But I think it has a lot to do with the rhetoric of “saving children” and “increased rigor,” which everyone can get behind. That, and the loud voice of potential billions in profit for people in high places.
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I think the billionaires have bought the process. Too many of the billionaires either trash and blame teachers or want to make money off of public ed. Many of them have no clue what public schools are really like.
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Anger is fine, but many people get angry and do nothing. And emotion is a fleeting motivator, so those who act in anger need to be careful not to react but to respond– to plan and consider best courses of action– and to realize that the fight continues beyond feelings. I could be angry one day, and tired the next, and scared the next– I still need to follow through with my commitment to fight this privatization machine.
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I concur with what Brutus and 2old2tch said. There are realities which can’t be boiled down, distilled, and then packaged as Republican and Democrat; especially, it seems, when talking about education.
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With regard to Obama, who I voted for, and his constant non-stop lusty pecuniary intercourse with corporate funders, sponsors, and privatizers:
I’m as mad as hell and I’m NOT going to take it any more!
He is a major fraud and is a mockery of even the notion of “democrat”. . . . He is no Democrat.
He’s more like “Demo-crap”.
But we cannot look alone to him.
We must look at all the bought-and-paid-for GOP’s and and donkeys who he pleases on a daily basis. The Obama who poses as a progressive for working class people is a lascivious opportunist who is slated to be rewarded with the $35 million dollar ocean front manse Penny Pritzker is giving him, paid for with half of her own money and half that she is fund raising. Pritzker herself has slammed down against the unionized workers who run her Hyatt Hotel chain and was an owner of Superior Bank, which was fined more than $600 million dollars by the Federal government for issuing toxic sludge sub-prime mortgages, throwing tens of thousands of people out of their homes through illegal foreclosures. She ended up paying about $400 of the original fine after pressuring Obama and company to get the fine reduced now that she was funding his election campaign.
These people are depraved.
There are few people, save for Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, who really represent the interests of the 98% to 99% that makes up the average working class population.
But anger is only effective if all of us, even from different camps, consent to unite and form grassroots movements to change the status quo. . . .
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Disgusting. I can’t stand him and all of the other bought out phonies.
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Correction: Pritzker paid about $400 million of the $600 million dollar fine. . . . .
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A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and the next thing you know you’re talking about real money.
That’s Economics❣
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” I woke up mad today because when it comes to education policy, there is little daylight between a national Democrat and a national Republican. Dismantling civil-rights era social programs and replacing them with market-based reforms is what truly brings President Obama and the Republicans together.”
…and across the globe (e.g. UK, Australia, NZ) what brings New Left, and Right, together.
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Robert,
Do you have anyone specific in mind worth supporting?
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Cindy,
I very much owe you a call!
Warren, Sanders, or Kucinich are my candidates. . . . but I think only Warren may have such ambitions. Sanders is 68, Kucinich is approaching 65. . . . Warren is only 63.
Follow Bernie Sanders from Vermont. The reason why I advise this is because Vermont will the the FIRST state to implement a single payer state-wide healthcare system, pretty much like Europe, as general profiles go. I don’t know how many years of state residency one has to have to participate in the system, and it is NOT at all the healthcare exchanges that are being set up in Obamacare. It may be an option to it or replacing it altogether. It will rely, in part, on private insurance companies that want to bid out services to provide the healthcare. It will be completely paid for state tax dollars, and will be grown and maintained as a public trust for the common good. It will have its challenges, granted, but it will also deliver superior care and monitor costs at all levels so that the most goes directly to the patient. Given the amount of obesity in Vermont, I can’t see it not having a preventive medicine component to it that may test for lipids and blood sugar, nicotine levels, etc. . .
Sanders is also an unwavering, unrelenting advocate of Social Security, and he, like myself, wants to have it taxed on all incomes, even those above the $113,500 threshold so that it remains well dunded for all future generations.
Sanders is truly interested in average working class people, He is a true democrat, and he is the antithesis of Obama. As a real democrat (there are not too manhy left presently!), he has had many unkind words toward the president, and rightfully so.
CIndy, I truly appreciate your awareness and pro-active reflections on this blog! Parents like you who advocate for their children and always want to be in the know are priceless!
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