Thanks to Robert Shepherd for sharing this great quote:
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I stole that quotation from Susan Ohanian’s delightful website.
Einstein goes on to say that people like Henry Ford, who push the standardization of people as well as automobiles, do not realize that the adulation they receive is due to the power of their pocketbooks on the force of their personalities.
There’s a dark back story there. Einstein was, of course, Jewish. And he lived through the era of the Nazis. Well, here in the U.S., Ford was a big financial backer of eugenics programs. He wanted to cleanse the gene pool of those who were not, well, Henry Ford. You can read all about this incredibly dark period in our history, about American eugenics, in War Against the Weak, by one of our finest historians, Edwin Black.
100% in ageement. Recognize that you can’t individualize and standardize at the same time. Which side are you on? http://www.wholechildreform.com
That is the cognitive dissonance that really bugs so many teachers. Teach the students with differentiated instruction. Test the students as if they learn in the same manner. It doesn’t work well.
Kids are not machine parts to be identically milled. Standardization is for screw threads, not children.
You hit the nail on the head. You can’t standardize and individualize kids at the same time. Outcomes determine the direction of a school. Read my last 2 blogs for more details. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nina-rees/2013/09/23/diane-ravitchs-book-reign-of-error-has-education-reform-all-wrong
As you predicted – you are being taken very seriously and garnering the attention you deserve.
I salute you for your admirable work……
From a Parent
Marjorie Israel
The heartening thing about that piece is that the vast majority of the commenters recognized it for the hatchet job it was.
Marjorie Israel Chayette & Dienne: I applaud your info and comments. I strongly urge every supporter of a “better education for all” to read both the article and the comments.
REIGN OF ERROR is beginning to elicit reactions right from the leading charterites/privatizers themselves. Among the disturbing common features: their inability to get their facts straight, their tortured logic, and their dishonorable distortions of other people’s very public and readily available viewpoints.
Anyone think that this blog and others like it aren’t having a major impact?
Again, click on the link provided by Marjorie Israel Chayette and read all the comments.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” [Mahatma Gandhi]
They are not ignoring us anymore. They are not laughing at us anymore. They are fighting us with almost trick in their play books—and they are losing ground every time they speak and write.
It is slow going. It is painful. Tomorrow will not see the end of this complicated and difficult endeavor. But who in their right mind thought that a skinny vegetarian in homespun clothes would lead a successful struggle against the [then] ‘greatest empire ever known’?
🙂
KrazyTA,
I had just finished imagining Diane as “a skinny vegetarian in homespun clothes” and was having trouble seeing the struggle against privatizing public education (among other things) as a struggle against “‘the greatest empire ever known'” when I realized you were talking about Gandhi. 🙂
Time for bed.
It was nice to see the overwhelming support for Diane in the comments.
Sorry, Dienne. I am just parroting you. I should finish reading comments before opening my mouth.
If you click on the columnist’s name in the article, Nina Rees, you will see that she is a supporter of all things corporate education reform: parent trigger, Common Core, Tony Bennett apologist and more. You must always keep in mind with U.S. News its Chairman and Editor in Chief Mortimer Zuckerman (he is also the publisher of the New York Daily News), is on the board of the Broad Foundation.
http://tinyurl.com/pmqm2k3
Philaken,
Nina Rees worked in the George W. Bush administration, where she was education advisor to Vice President Cheney.
When I talk to non educators who are looking for quick fixes I explain that when a door is falling off Fords you might be able to adjust some bolt or something (a quick fix) on the assembly line but that’s because all the cars coming off that line will be exactly the same – not so when dealing with human minds!
Here’s my personal favorite, which as an early childhood teacher educator, I include in my email signature:
“Play is the highest form of research.” ~Albert Einstein
Love that quote!
I like this quote; I have started a list of “vomit” words and phrases with my friends. In particular I despise this term “roll out”…. that is what you do when you want to send a marketing ploy out to offer the new car .
Jean…please add in bold face, ‘awesome’ as one of the most nauseating words.
Einstein left Germany when the Nazis came to power. That is the lesson we should take from him. We should have the courage to leave our country and take our knowledge and skills somewhere else. If you remain a teacher in America, your life will be terrible, let’s face it. You won’t face death or imprisonment, but you will experience slavery working for a big box retail store for minimum wage when you are let go. There will be no changing this in our lifetime, maybe longer. There are still countries that are free and just: Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada. Take your pick. Have the courage to do what Einstein did!
I respectfully disagree. I say stay in the fight because if we all join together we can look the Corporate Giant in the face and take it down. Diane’s book gives us fodder,motivation and directives to do just that. It takes courage to stay and fight the good fight. I will go teach in Australia when I retire!
Sorry to disillusion you John, but many of the countries you mention do not want us. They let us come as tourists and spend dollars, but then they insist we go home.
Guests and fish stink on the third day!
Am off to Colombia as we speak http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
I do hope everyone posting here will be as enthusiastic about treating each student as an individual in the next post that argues in favor of assigning students to a school based on nothing but the street address of their official residence. Is a student being treated as an individual when the kids on the north side of a street are all sent to a Waldorf school and the kids on the south side of the street are all sent to a progressive school?
You know, you continue to bring this same thing up, over and over and over. Within a specific building, you can have schools within the schools, programs that would meet all those needs. You also talk about “in a perfect world” such and such should happen. Well, to me, it makes more sense to develop programs within the community that meet the needs of those students living there, than to allow private companies to “invest” in schools that create the need for students to be bused all over the city or county, that prevent a feeling of school community, that create difficulties with parent participation. Those who can afford to send their kids away to some school will always exist. There are benefits and deficits to doing so. If and until the entire public decides that they wish to send their students across town, I think we are remiss to try to “solve” the problem with these charter schools.
If these so-called “humanitarian” investors are truly so, then they would contribute to the schools that exist, lower class size for those who need it, or for everyone (since everyone could use more attention), and make the public schools work for everyone. But, they want a financial return on their investments, not an educational return the improves society.
You would advocate for a Waldorf school in a school, a Montessori school within a school, a progressive school within a school building? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a Waldorf school, a Montessori school, a progressive school and bring the students to the school rather than trying to bring small versions of the school to every neighborhood? How many students would there have to be in a school catchment area for you to authorize a language immersion program in language XXX ?
It does not seem like a perfect world, it is the world of the moderately well to do in my town, those with enough income to send their students to private schools. It is only the relatively poor that do not have those options.
Perhaps what the humanitarian investors should do is provide more scholarships to private schools, a sort of privately funded voucher program. That would allow the children of the poor access to a Montessori education. I know My spouse saw a scholarship to a private high school after graduating from a public high school as a life changing experience. No doubt it could be replicated for the few lucky enough to be chosen for these scholarships.
Deb, Good try, but might as well give up. TE is a Johnny One Note. Most of us have said what you said and just ignore him now.
Actually I have viewpoints on many different aspects to education. It just seemed to be inappropriate to advocate for peer evaluation of teachers or for increased access to online classes for rural schools in this thread. Was I mistaken and do you think those positions to be relevant here?
I would very much like to see the development of more alternative track high schools within the public school system and the continued development of reasonably priced private alternatives that do not take taxpayer dollars. It is quite important that there be alternatives. Within schools, within programs within schools, it must be taken as a given that children differ. We need alternative curricular tracks within public schools and mentoring systems for parents and students to help them to make decisions about those. One possibility is the development of high-school “majors” of the kind that one has in undergraduate college programs, but with core subject-area courses tailored to those majors, in recognition of the fact that at this age, fundamental knowledge and skills are still being developed. This idea would have the benefit of concentrating focus on knowledge domains within courses in the primary curricular areas.
My hesitations about implementing, say, a combination of a straight-up voucher program and lots of charter schools are these:
the public schools, for all their faults, have served us extraordinarily well (the truth there is precisely opposite from what the deformers would have us believe);
charters siphon off needed funds from public schools;
charters cherry pick students and leave behind terrible blight that acerbates the extreme isolation-in-poverty that already exists in our cities an rural areas; and
in the current system, there is too much opportunity for crony capitalism, for exploitation of such a system by profiteers with the right connections. We have seen a LOT of this and of kids getting hurt by it.
All that said, creative thinking about how to nurture alternatives that enable children to develop their differing potentials is important, very important, and we should definitely continue discussing the possibilities there. If Gates and the Waltons and Broad and Bloomberg and the others in the billionaire boys club REALLY just want to improve education via innovation, then let them fund the creation of private schools with innovative, experimental curricula and pedagogy, scholarships to attend those, and means for getting the word out about how these work. And let them fund giving teachers more time for lesson planning and Japanese-style lesson study with an eye toward autonomous, bottom-up continuous improvement. And let them fund open forums for sharing of best practices among teachers and administrators.
It’s interesting that we have two camps in this education deform/reform debate.
I have long thought it bizarre that so many deformers are enamored of “choice” and “innovation” and yet want to impose invariant, top-down, mandatory national standards and assessments and student response databases and teacher evaluation systems on everyone. It’s only fair, TE, that you should continue asking your question and raising this very real issue for those of us on the other side of this debate to consider.
Kids differ. They differ a lot.
I recently saw an extraordinarily moving interview–part of a program called The Elders Speak–in which one chief whose name I do not know said, “Watch the kids. Have a look at them. You will see, soon enough, which are the leaders. You need to take special care with those kids.” Wise words.
Here’s the most damning thing that I can say about our current school systems: A child can have perfect pitch and go through the entire system and never have anyone notice that. This is not the problem, of course. It is a symptom of a problem, a very, very deep one.
And no, I am not talking the meritocratic party line here. Merit is multiform. There aren’t seven or eight “multiple intelligences,” there are innumerable numbers of these, at all sorts of levels of hierarchy in the embodied mind. Schools should exist to serve the child and his or her parents; to help find and nurture his or her proclivities, abilities, potentials; to provide opportunities for the explorations that will enable that discovery; to do deep diagnostics to assist in channeling those explorations productively; to provide mentoring and resources for realization of unique potential.
Sometimes Robert you’re just to logical and common sensical!!
Well said, especially @ 2:09
make that a dobble o to go on that t
A couple of thoughts about your advocating low cost private schools but opposing charter schools.
In my state, at least, state funding for education depends, in part, on student head count. If private schools pull students out of the public system, funding for the public system will fall, though perhaps by less than if the students attended charter schools. Is there a reduction in funding of public schools that you are willing to tolerate in order to expand the varieties if schools students might possibly attend?
On the issue of skimming, it seems to me that private schools do a great deal more skimming than charter schools, say in NYC, that are required to hold a lottery if there are more applicants than seats available. Doesn’t your objection to skimming apply even more forcefully to private schools?
and make that a double and not a dobble
Alternatives like this? http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
If you go to http://www.wholechildreform.com or my blog http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/, you will see a design for schools that individualizes, not standardizes. However, it is not allowed. Help me get it allowed. It would take a different assessment system that also individualizes. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
One word: ARGH!
We’re opening the film with that quote! Dan Hornberger
Awesome, Daniel!
I simply would not want my child in constant transit across town in all kinds of weather. 5 year olds don’t need to be transported in that manner. The cost of fuel is prohibitive, also. Our school had three schools within a school and it worked. We changed principals and she tore it all apart, forcing “sameness”. Mistake.
No doubt the advisability of such a system would depend on local circumstances. Many school districts in my state cover the county and have a single high school. Transportation is an issue there. In more densely packed districts with rich public transit infrastructures it is less of a concern.
It seems to me that parents who find transportation a large issue would simply send their students to the closest school and not care exactly what approach to education the school takes.
Perhaps you could say more about these school within schools. Were they open to only the students in the schools catchment area? How many students were in the schools? I do think scale plays a very important role in all this.
You would have loved the school commute I took with my daughter for 4.5 years (and also my son for 1.5 years): a bus and two trains, and then a 10 minute walk
I should add that the middle school my home is assigned to is 2.1 miles away, the closest middle school is only 1.5 miles away and a much safer walk. The high school my home is assigned to is 3.6 miles away, the other high school in town is 2.1 miles away. Proximity is not the only factor that goes into determining catchment areas.
Our district is 2.5 townships in size. Coordinating transportation, providing schedules, and safety of students is a huge responsibility. But if one kid wanted to get bused to a specific school that is 20 miles away, I don’t see why the home district would have to pay transportation costs.
What if it is not 2o miles away, but only 1.5? My school board has assigned residents of my house to a school that is 1.5 miles further away than the closest school. They clearly believe that the added transportation costs are worth it to fulfill their goals. Why should it not be worth the added cost for a better fit between student and school?
I don’t like gravity much either!
Good one!
Gravity: it’s the law!
A small tribute to the Quixotic quest to convince people to not confuse standardized test scores with genuine learning and teaching:
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” [Albert Einstein]
🙂
Hopefully in my lifetime the Quest will have been accomplished.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, I fear that too many innocents will continued to be harmed by the darkside’s quest for the Holy Edumetrics Grail.
But every place isn’t Nirvana.
This looks like a joke.