This comment was written in response to a post I wrote about Tom Friedman blaming lazy students and parents for America’s education woes:

“To echo everything you said about the current state of affairs and add one important thing you did not explicitly mention, there is the child; the child entering kindergarten, moving onto middle school and with great hope graduating high school and going on to college. The child developing through adolescence and onto young adulthood. Twelve incredibly dynamic years for which we have come over the past generations to a fairly good understanding of what works best in terms of his or her education. And now in the space of ten years all of this has been turned on its head and every child in a public or charter school in the USA is being cheated by greed. Class size? Who cares! The Arts? Unnecessary. Foreign language instruction? Es eso un problema? PE? Who has the time? A well paid and motivated group of teachers. Why? Isn’t there TFA? Children who should all be well fed, clothed, with quiet and safe spaces at home in which to work, spaces where they are loved and encouraged to love school by their loving families, are now asked to learn more with less!! Students told their teachers are failures, that they are failures, that they will never make it in the competitive global economy without longer school days, less summer vacation, math for which they are not developmentally ready, books chosen by lexile analysis, classes where the teacher is presented via the internet. And more tests, harder tests, longer tests. For the most part children are no longer being hit in schools across the nation, but right now the powerful are wielding a heavy and awful hand against them.”