Matt Farmer, a lawyer and public school activist in Chicago, wrote a brilliant satire of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top. You may recognize Matt Farmer as the brilliant litigator who cross-examined and tried billionaire Penny Pritzker in absentia. At the time, Pritzker was a member of the Chicago Board of Education, merrily cutting services for the children in public schools while raising money for a glorious library at her children’s private school. Last year, President Obama appointed Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce. She was a major Obama fund-raiser.
In this new post, Farmer tells us that Arne Duncan has discovered that American kids spend too much time eating lunch.
Other countries spend less time in the lunchroom, he says gravely. We must beat the international competition!
Farmer writes:
“Secretary Arne Duncan’s April 15, 2014, remarks to employees and diners at the National Place food court in Washington.
Today we cross an important threshold in school cafeteria reform by releasing draft guidelines for states to apply for the $3.6 billion dollar Graze to the Top fund. We gather here today at Washington D.C.’s National Place food court to announce – and celebrate — a new Graze to the Top in schoolhouses across America.
For too many years, our nation’s public school students have been trapped for nearly 20 minutes a day in under-performing school cafeterias. Simply put, kids are spending too much time in lunchrooms and not enough time in classrooms. In today’s global economy, a country that eats lunch in less time than America will out-compete us.
And what we now know from international assessments is that students in countries such as Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic spend far less time eating school lunches than do their U.S. peers.”
Surely, spoiled suburban moms will complain. But don’t listen to them. We can’t afford to waste another minute!
“Save, save the minutes!” You have to be a historian of American education to recognize that this phrase was associated with the early 19th century Lancastrian movement, the first effort to standardize education for the children of the poor so that it would be cost-effective. Arne Duncan, the Joseph Lancaster of the 21st century.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I found it funny that this article was posted the same day I found this article comparing other historical events to CCSS. This was my favorite line from this one ‘But the brute force and directness required for adopting national standards makes its effective implementation in a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country impossible.’ He sure got that one right!
: http://educationnext.org/paradoxical-logic-ed-reform-politics/
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“U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker will discuss how the public and private sectors can work together to best equip workers for the jobs of the future in a “keynote interview” at the 2014 ASU+GSV Education Innovation Summit on Wednesday, April 23, 2014. \
As such, Secretary Pritzker has made skills development a key priority for the Department, becoming the first Secretary of Commerce to do so. She is working with Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Vice President Biden on ways to align employers with job-training initiatives.
Co-hosted by Arizona State University and GSV Advisors from April 21-23, the 5th Annual Summit has become to education innovation what Davos is to global economics and Sun Valley is to media. Unlike other conferences that focus specifically on education policy or technology, the GSV Summit is unique both in composition and mission. It is bringing together over 1,800 key stakeholders – educators, investors, policy makers, foundation leaders, business leaders, social and commercial entrepreneurs, and philanthropists – in one place to collaborate and drive change, and serves as a launch pad for new ideas and ventures.
In addition to Secretary Pritzker, other notables headlining this year’s event are former Governor of Florida Jeb Bush; NBA legend and global social entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson; Deputy Secretary of Education James H. Shelton III, former Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham, and Netflix co-founder and CEO, investor and philanthropist Reed Hastings.”
Jeb Bush and Reed Hastings. Again. It is LITERALLY the same 15 people, over and over and over again.
They all sound the same because they ARE the same. They’re the same group of people. There is only one view of education permitted in the Obama Administration, whether it’s K-12 or “retraining workers”.
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In for a Penny, in for a pound.
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When satire meets reality, it’s frightening. We were tasked with adding as many instructional minutes as possible this school year. “Students need more time on task!” Our schedule was extended in both the morning (15 more minutes – 7:10 start) and afternoon (5 more minutes).
But we also adopted a universal daily breakfast program and universal snack 3-4 afternoons each week. We always had breakfast available in the cafeteria and because we are a high-poverty school, more than half of our kids ate there before coming to their classrooms each day.
But with breakfast in the room, we can have instruction whilst the kids wolf down their federally approved breakfast of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts, Keebler Elf Grahams and other high carb/calorie name-brand junk foods with a side order of fresh fruit (because corporations haven’t yet figured out how to brand fruit off the limb, vine or stem – except banana growers and a few others).
Imagine a kinder classroom with all the sticky messes, crumbs and spills. Can I instruct during breakfast? Not really. Can or should they pay attention to a lesson or their milk carton? Do we spend LOTS more time than was ever spent in the cafeteria cleaning up during and after eating? Of course! Did teachers warn that this would happen? Yes, but we were not told about breakfast in the classroom until the mandate was already in place.
Snacktime is similar, but usually without brand labels, except for the ranch dip. We’ve had all kinds of wonderful fruits and veggies, including jicama, watermelon, strawberries and baked potatoes. And my kinders DO need a snack (and some downtime in the afternoon). But the mess factor once again trumps the time-on-learning factor.
That extra 20 minutes each day is literally and figuratively eaten up.
Here’s an idea. Give me back all the time wasted in progress monitoring and benchmarking in mClass/Amplify. That should give my kids plenty more instructional minutes.
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In my many school visits and observations I noticed that teachers are sending along wipe-off cards with fluency math facts (+ – x) to be completed in the cafeteria before kids could eat. Then peer pressure was used to make sure the entire class finished to earn recess. Since I was there to observe special education students, the anguish and pain for those munchkins was unbearable for them and for me to watch. Many times, those students would not eat, cried and shut down. About half of the children were in ADHD meds who then experienced meltdowns shortly after lunch because ‘it was their fault’ that the entire class lost recess. Those children were trying to learn and thrive in surary breakfasts, no lunch and who knows what they had for dinner? 180 days per year!
I raised He** about it, but with little change. The entire school was on a RTTT treadmill.
Thanks Obama, Gates & Duncan. Wonder if their kids have to do that?
It pains me to even write about this as I am reliving these observations.
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Horrifying. I can’t wrap my head around the abuse that those beautiful children suffer, both at the hands of students AND teachers.
Ironic, considering the new-found attention to bullying, that we are training bullies with policies like this.
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A 7:10 am start? FOR KINDERGARTEN??????????
What are we doing to our children?
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Many HS students start at this time, and it is way worse for their teen bodies and brains than it is for the younger kids.
http://www.cehd.umn.edu/research/highlights/Sleep/
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I know. My 10th grade son’s school starts at 7:20. He’s in the jazz band, which is early mornings, so he begins at 6:00 am every other day. It’s horrifying then, too.
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Louisiana Purchase: and the difference between this and institutionalized child abuse is…
¿?
😡
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It’s a rhetorical question, KTA, I know. But of course, the answer is: NONE!
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GSV advisors are affiliated with KIPP and TFA, according to their site. I mean, God forbid an Obama official should hear something that doesn’t fit the ed reform script:
“Our founders have spent the past two decades focused on the Megatrends that are disrupting the $4 trillion global education market along with the innovators who are transforming the industry.
Beyond just the company we keep, it’s the company we’ve kept— ongoing strategic relationships that go back 20 years or more.”
I think I know how the Ed Dept and Labor Dept “working retraining” initiative will go, and who will be running it. The same 15 “thought leaders” that are running K-12. How can they say “cage busting” with a straight face when all they talk to are ed reformers?
http://gsvadvisors.com/
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In addition to Matt’s cross examination of Penny Pritzker (during the May 23, 2012 Chicago Teachers Union rally at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater), Matt had fun with Rahm Emanuel a few months before Rahm moved into the mayor’s office in Chicago. During the mayoral election campaign, Matt did a song called “Too Big to Fail” which was a great send up of Rahm’s pretensions and clout — and in light of the Robert Redford Rahm Love-in (“Chicagoland”) it’s as relevant today as it was in February 2011. It’s still up on You Tube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScYHLfdV8u8
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Is this a joke? If it is it is a bad one. I didn’t realize that Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic had the highest scores in the world and that those scores were tied to shorter lunchtimes. Ugh.
What adult can go through an entire day of work that takes concentration and attention without a decent break for lunch or downtime or just staring at a wall to let the brain rest so that it is refreshed to do other tasks.
Where are the child psychologists that say small children can handle approx a 20 min lesson? How can one learn that life consists of not only work, but enjoyment of the small things, such as eating leisurely and talking with a friend? What is life about anyway?
When I was studying piano as part of my college curriculum, after practicing for a long time, sometimes my fingers did a worse job. If I took a small break, my results when I started practicing again were much better.
Where does Arne Duncan, who does not strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, come off saying that no breaks equal more learning? Does he have the hard data to back that up? Most telling is the answer to the question ” does the school Arne’s kids go to operate in the same fashion. Let’s find out, shall we.
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Though the phonetics of “Graze to the Top” work well, it’s not quite the correct analogy.
Pigs at the trough works better, I think.
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Michael Fiorillo, some have called the program “Dash to the Cash” or “Race to the Trough.”
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Indeed, Diane, both work for me.
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This is both literally and figuratively stomach-churning. Can anyone say “child abuse”? When is the last time that we used the mames of the countries cited as models of anything positive? Better yet, when is the last time that Arne Duncan took a twenty minute work lunch? By the way, “work lunch,” to me, even as an adult, is an oxymoron. This is our new form of child labor. Somebody needs to find out what and publicize the schools of Duncan’s and Obama’s children, in terms of the issues raised in these articles.
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http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk Martha Payne’s blog about school lunches went viral and global a couple years ago. If you don’t know about her, check out what a 10-year-old can accomplish.
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So the Fed’s next move is…, proposing “Blaze to the Pop” as a new lunch menu at school cafeteria? Don’t wanna know what kind of food is that.
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