It is never too soon to start Racing to the Top. It is never to soon to warn your toddler about the utter irrevance of studying useless subjects like Art History, Philosophy, or Literature.
Ask EduShyster. She will explain it to you.
“Chetty, chetty bang bang
“Chances are, your career-ready kindergartner LUVS his or her teacher. [Brief pause while writer shakes her head slowly and dramatically for effect.] You see, it may be time for a tough little talk with your youngster in which you explain that a *nice* teacher and a *highly effective* teacher are not one and the same, no matter how sweet she was when you had that little problem at nap time. Using brightly colored blocks (or the virtual equivalent on your at-home Amplify tablet), quickly and carefully demonstrate the Chetty principle to your youngster. See the great stack of yellow blocks? Those are your future earnings under a *high value teacher.* And that small tower of blue blocks? That’s the actual apartment building where you’ll live in your higher *SES* neighborhood, also home to the very bank at which you’ll amass savings at a higher rate.”
Read carefully for good advice from a billionaire who used to work at Enron.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ll bite. What is the “Chetty principle”?
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Chetty is a Harvard economist whose non-peer reviewed report of research keeps being re-released, quoted and used as evidence to ramp up the firing of teachers based on VAM.
Per Diane’s post a few weeks ago, Chetty claims that “teachers who produce higher test scores in fourth or fifth grade have miraculous lifetime effects on students… Among other things, …an entire class will increase its lifetime earnings by $250,000 a year!”
“Bruce Baker explained that an increase of $250,000 for a class works out to about $5 a week, maybe a cup of coffee at Starbucks or a couple more plus a donut at Dunkin Donuts.”
See: That Chetty Study: Fire More Teachers with Flawed Data
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Perhaps this is why we are raising generations of children suffering from stress, bi-polar, etc, etc. We don’t let them learn and develop in the early years the way they are supposed to…by experiencing the world and each other. Learning how to get along with each other, learning about the earth and so on. These are the things preschoolers should be learning. They should NOT be worrying about test scores and what college they’ll get into.
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There is no nap time in kindergarten, there are no yellow or blue blocks in kindergarten. Certainly not in Elmhurst New York. Little cutie pie kindergarten is a factory now. Turn and talk on cue, no playtime, lots and lots of work. And very developmentally inappropriate.
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Madame, products (after all, what else does VAM make children out to be?) must be prepared for market.
End of Informational Text.
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There is also no nap in pre-k. The blocks are there but not much time to use them in higher order thinking activities. We have so much else going on that it’s often a struggle to fit in playdough
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Ms. Ravitch, did you have any idea going into this fight, how appropriate a topic ed reform would be for the high arts of sarcasm and satire?
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I had no thought of satire.
But when reality and satire become indistinguishable, you know there is a problem
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Indeed, it’s become almost impossible for satire to exceed reality, just as it’s hard to parody the so-called reformers, since they do such of job of it themselves.
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Michael Fiorillo: exactly!
I let the edufrauds and edubullies do all the heavy lifting, then throw in a comment or two and an aphorism.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of heavy lifting going on, well described by an old dead French guy not known for conventional piety:
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” [Voltaire]
😉
But then, keeping in mind the recent comments here by the adherents of Eva M and Success Academy, why is poking fun at edufrauds and edubullies so effective? Is it because they are so thin-skinned? Not so much that as—
“A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.” [G. K. Chesterton]
😃
For when it comes to the mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$, there is one and only one inviolable rule—no, not a Marxist dictum, but rather—
“If a thing is worthy doing, it is worth doing badly.” [G.K. Chesterton]
😜
There’s a 98% “satisfactory” chance that a 13th percentile will get you a 90th—
Rheeally!
Keep posting. I’ll keep reading.
😎
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Or, to riff on Chesterton, “That which is not worth doing, is not worth doing well.”
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I almost fell out of my chair laughing. If some idiot pulled that on the kids from the community where I taught, they would zone out in the first ten seconds and that idiot would be lucky to survive a day teaching in one of the schools in that area.
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not bad enough, my pre-k children are supposed to know where they are failing and what they need to do to improve
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I hope they’ve ended sharing in kindergarten. We want kids to learn early about how to be out for yourself in this competitive age of career and college readiness. Since we are all racing against each other to the top it is best to be selfish and out for oneself.
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The privatizers may expect kids to move out by age seven and buy their own home or rent an apartment.
And if the seven year old can’t afford to buy their own home or rent an apartment, they may indenture themselves like poor parents did to their kids back before the federal child labor laws and labor unions existed to act as a buffer to protect worker rights.
In fact, if the GOP and the Koch brothers (and all the other libertarians) had their way and shrunk government to their satisfaction, they’d roll the US back to the late 19th century where there was no minimum wage, no health or retirement benefits, no Social Security or Medicare; women didn’t have the right to vote or own property and children could be sold into prostitution or to work in factories and the coal minds as young as seven.
We could also roll back on-time high school graduation rates to 6% of 17/18 year olds when only the wealthy could afford to send their kids to high school or college.
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I meant to say coal mines—not coal minds.
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I think they would like “coal minds” as well, i.e. accept the Kochtupus view of energy resources and climate change as well. Illinois just recently pulled a pro-coal propaganda website aimed at elementary school students.
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