A reader comments:
“I do the alumni newspaper for Normandy High School in suburban St. Louis, a school which has lost its accreditation and gotten nothing but grief from the state education folks and certainly no realistic help. I think, however, that is about to change. The state people finally brought in experts who told them no school district serving needy communities anywhere in this country has managed to get its test scores up where the standards demand they be. What is needed is not this myopic obsession with standardized teaching and test scores but an educational philosophy where the talents and dreams of each and every child are identified and educated with that in mind and communities get help TO help children who come from one-parent homes, broken homes, multigenerational homes and blended homes and start school with almost none of the cultural equipment kids in the well-to-do-suburbs have, not to mention parttime parenting, nourishment problems, health problems and emotional problems. The parents are often working multiple jobs to keep a roof over their families’ heads and food in the kids’ mouths and it drives me nuts when THEY are blamed as the problem. They are doing the best they can. I’ve written extensively about this. I am a journalist and a teacher in his 50th year of teaching (look me up on google).”
Wayne Brasler
With the emphasis on test scores, we are all–including the kids–set up to fail. It’s despicable.
In DISD on Monday, teachers will again be set up to fail. Instead of allowing us to work in our rooms to get ready for the students, DISD teachers will be sitting in meetings reading repetitive power points. The district will not issue a directive to principals to limit meeting time on Monday, so some teachers will spend the entire day in meetings.
DISD students will burst through the doors Tuesday morning and their teachers, classrooms and lessons won’t be as prepared as they could be because DISD is going to make teachers sit through meetings.
We’ve appealed to our local newspaper, the pro-“reform” Dallas Morning News, for help. So far….nothing.
Great comments, but I don’t see any large numbers of reformers blaming low SES parents. It’s worse than that. They are ignoring them. They are ignoring poverty and its toxic stressors and blaming teachers and the public ed “monopoly”.
In Dallas, they use the low-income parents. The charters tell the parents that the charter schools are private schools. The reformers don’t want the parents informed or engaged.
Wayne, who are the intelligent people that the state education folks are lisrening to?
And what help, Wayne, do you hope is coming and from what source?
There has been a lack of rhetorical return…”Shared sacrifice”? Okay, for decades now the middle and lower class have sacrificed to inflate the liquid AND speculative wealth of the very uppermost. “Accountability”? DEAL…if and ONLY if: the market and those who have gamed it are taken to task: tested measured and made to face the consequences from those outside their class and field, inexperienced and unfamiliar with what they do on a day to day basis. No more bonuses, parachute clauses, etc. “Let them eat cake” is unacceptable.
Of course, ” ‘Let them eat cake’ is unacceptable,” but so is tax the rich into equality. You will never eliminate entirely the equity gap without a government which cancels freedom. The real answer is the old Reagan cliche: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The tax the rich crowd are keeping the tide from rolling in. That’s no solution. Proletarian revolution always leads to dictatorship. Deregulate. Lower taxes. New jobs from an expanding economy. That’s the “only” way, short of revolution.
Your Reaganisms have long since been debunked. We’ve tried 30+ years of supply-sided nonsense and look where it’s gotten us (and the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans, so don’t go blathering about socialism).
If you want an expanding economy, get money into the hands of people who will spend it – the poor, working class and middle class. Capital does not create jobs. Demand creates jobs. If the people don’t have money, they can’t have demand.
Sorry. JFK did it. Reagan did it. We haven’t been trying it because Democrats have stood in the way with their tax and spend counterproductive economics, Dienne. Yes, demand creates jobs, but NOT if demand is based on mere transfer of wealth. First there has to be capital invested, which creates jobs and then those workers increase demand. YOUR Obamaisms have been discredited at this very moment. Have you ever run a business? This Keynsianism has been discredited. But the bureaucrats, among which I include public school teachers, keep screaming for more, more, more because it is THEIR salaries at stake. Rethink it.
Supply side economic theory has proven to be defective in approach and outcome. Where have you been for the last 30 years Harlan?
And who ever said they wanted to ‘tax the rich into equality’? Those are your words and not what anyone else here is saying. No one is saying that equal opportunity is the same as equal outcomes.
It is a simple and verifiable fact that those with vast amounts of wealth do not stimulate and expand the economy and create jobs. It has been proven time and again that the economy does not expand in a way that benefits the majority, or in a way that supports a middle class, when there is an extreme level of wealth disparity in the system.
Two different questions, Betsy. Disparity is one thing. Supply side is another. Supply side DOES work. It has NOT been found defective in approach. It worked for John F. Kennedy, the last old time Democrat in the White House. It worked for Reagan. Just look at the expansion numbers after their tax cuts.
If extreme wealth disparity is the problem rather than the symptom then your ONLY remedy is redistribution from the wealthy to the poor, from the workers to the shirkers. I claim that that is what you are arguing for, taxing the rich into equality. If it’s not that, then it’s mere venal “we teachers want more of the pie and we’re going meow like hungry kittens until we get it.” In the economic cliche, the pie must be made bigger and that’s only through growth, and THAT is only through investment by capitalists which creates jobs.
Other than that it’s Jimmy Carter’s stagflation, or Barak Obama’s deficit spending and debt expansion, which will have to be paid at sometime in the future. Kicking the can down the road, in the Washington cliche.
Harlan Underhill: “Lower taxes. New jobs from an expanding economy. That’s the “only” way, short of revolution.”
G.W. Bush cut the capital gains rate and lowered tax rates on the wealthy early in his administration. Could you point out how many new jobs were created as a result? And is there a way to know that the created jobs specifically resulted from those tax cuts?
On the other hand, George H.W. Bush raised taxes and Bill Clinton kept his policy going and seemed to enjoy some phenomenal economic growth. Why didn’t the economy stagnate as a result?
All I can say, Harlan, is that you’re living in a different universe – something other than reality. Everything you keep spouting has been disproven time and time again. There is now growing proof (as if needed) that Keynes was right all along overall – far more right than that dangerous psychopath Milton Friedman that you worship. You can keep trying more of the same upward transfer of wealth if you want (which, despite your constant denial, is exactly what Obama is doing), but you’re still not going to be one of them. Your corporate masters will have you living in a cardboard box eating out of dumpsters and you’ll still be singing their praises.
Just one question, though: since nothing is going to persuade you otherwise, why are you slumming around this blog? Just trolling?
Hate to pile on, Harlan, but I’m still waiting for my boat to be lifted. Most recent figures I could find show that in 2009, tax receipts were 14.8% of GDP, a full 5 pts behind Hauser’s average, & this has been going on for a while– which I take to mean we don’t collect enough to run the gov. Top income brackets in our heyday, when we were building infrastructure & sending people to the moon, ranged 79%-90%. (Today, maybe 40%?) Today’s wealthy make 275% what they did 40 yrs ago whie middle & poor incomes have stagnated; meanwhile the tax on investments (where most of the 1% income comes from) were halved decades ago. Put this picture together & it should mean that many, many jobs have trickled down to the middle: where’s the beef?
“..parttime parenting, nourishment problems, health problems and emotional problems.”
What part of these enormous challenges do people, reformers not understand? Perhaps the ” reformers” have a comprehension problem and not the students!
There’s a recent documentary (2012 or 2013) worth checking out, _A Place at the Table_. It explains what hunger looks like in America (why it doesn’t look like an Ethiopian famine), and also how it affects kids in school. This is one clip from the documentary:
I think we are sick in our soul … we do not know each other, nor do we have the energy nor the resources to care. We need to infuse our beings with reminders of what it means to be human. If this is all there is, then this really is all there is. We have but one chance to be kind and good.
I don’t disagree, but how? How do you get people away from their devices, away from their own insular concerns, away from their own insecurities, and get people to connect?
There are times I fantasize about sabotaging the power grids of major urban centers just to force people to get outside their own little bubbles. Of course I’d never do that (I wouldn’t even know how to do it), and even if someone did, it would probably be more Lord of the Flies than Kumbaya. But I really think it’s going to take something major to shake people out of the high-fat/high sugar food coma/electronic hypnosis that we’ve all been under for the past several decades.
BTW, I don’t say any of this to judge. Here I am posting on the internet while scarfing down a chocolate and nut mix while my husband is eating pizza in front of the TV and the kids are hanging out with their grandparents. Guilty as charged.
Yes and no. Yes, people distract themselves to the nth degree to avoid unpleasant truths. If your family still has enough dough to bury themselves in iphone games & cheap-but-filling food, that will help them put off the moment of truth. That moment may come when the kids can’t find anything but minimum-wage jobs despite having gone into hock &/or spent the family capital to get BA’s– AND– the parents are looking down the maw of a pension-less retirement, buttressed by a 401k that lost 40% to the financial collapse…
I do think Americans will move off the dime when their backs are to the wall.
Regardless of all the dysfunctions that led to this problem, the only way we can stop the madness now is to keep our children home and not allow them to be tested. We can Opt them Out of the tests and the practice test. Otherwise, we are participating in the abuse to our own children.
I am helping to organize the parents at my son’s Plano ISD school to sign a group petition that states we are choosing to Opt Out our children because we consider the STAAR child abuse. We are not worried that our children might fail the tests, but we are worried about how they are being abused for this testing insanity and the anxiety it has created. Plano ISD is not a low socio economic area, in fact our school district scores among the highest in the state. However, the STAAR and all the practice tests and related performance enhancing methods are abusive to elementary school children.
We value our children’s health more than we value a performance measure that was determined by “unqualified” politicians who are ignorant about how children learn.
On test days, we are planning activities that include: take our children to work with us, have an organized event at the local library, park, or field trip. Our Opt Out events will allow the children to enjoy learning, as opposed to being tortured by STAAR.
I would strongly recommend that parents around the country use this approach to stopping the madness. If our local political leaders are faced with a widespread petition drive conducted by the voters, perhaps real progress can be made. We MUST convince the parents to take the lead in this effort!
I am saddened to realize that we put more care, effort and “individualization” to cultivating the flowers in our gardens than our society seems willing to put in to “growing” our most precious varieties of our children.
I find it interesting that the corporate education reformers tend to allow school accreditations to expire. It must have something to do with the fact that the myopic approach to teaching to the tests create curricula that are not good enough to continue with accreditation. It’s just another way to kill public education.
To answer the question of the post:
Any and everything!!!
How rare to see a happy child:
http://unofficialalpine.com/?p=1250
And no test scores? How can he be college and career ready?