EduShyster’s guest blogger Patrick Hayes, a fifth-grade teacher from Charleston, South Carolina, asks a simple question: “If you could ask Arne Duncan just one question what would it be?”
Try this one: “what would you get Bill gates for Boss’s Day? The man has everything.”
But he actually has a bunch more questions, which Duncan can answer with pre-packaged non-responsive answers.
Like: why do you push states to adopt value-added measurement, when your own department shows it has a failure rate of 36%?
Or, why do you promote merit pay, when it has failed everywhere?
Or, why do you keep bragging about Tennessee and D.C. when the other 11 states “using the same playbook… had below-average, flat, or negative growth?”
Lots more good questions to ask Arne, but Patrick does give us the answer to his first question:
“So Arne…whaddya’ get Bill Gates for Boss’s Day? Maybe you could ask your chief of staff and deputy secretary.
They used to work for him.”
Patrick, by the way, is the Director of EdFirstSC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy group working to empower people who care about public schools. If you live in South Carolina or care about it, join EdFirstSC.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would give Bill Gates an “Apple” for boss’ day.
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The same apple that Snow White took a bite from.
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I think they got it wrong saying Arne Duncan works for Bill Gates. Arne works for Beelzebub unless Bill Gates is the Antichrist.
My question would be: What did Mammon promise you to destroy democratic public education in the United States and possibly the world?
A. Immortality
B. one hundred virgins
C. both A & B
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Come on Lloyd, that’s not a valid multiple guess question. You need at least one more choice:
D. all of the above.
And as in the tradition of all standardized tests this queston happens to have anywhere from none to four answers. What Mammon promised was:
E. A job working for the Gates Foundation
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I was up at 3:30AM to drive my wife to the airport. In a few hours, after the cobwebs clear away, I might have come up with more options. Any help with more choices is appreciated at this PST hour.
:o))
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On the day of the Seattle protest against Gates and his educational malpractices I tried to give him (or at least drop off) a copy of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error and Compte-Sponville’s “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues”. The security guard wouldn’t let me in the building and told me I had to mail it to him. One of these days, soon I promise, I’ll get around to doing that. I had to settle for dropping off leaflets of my summary of Wilson at the Foundation’s “Ode to Billy and Melinda” museum/exhibition hall wherever I saw lies and fallacies about public education.
Speaking of “Ode to Billy. . . ”
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Dropping off leaflets is a start.
I got asked to sing the Madonna “Gone” tonight at a pro-public school event in Asheville. Aim Higher Now NC. That’s what were doing before all the teachers are gone. . .that’s my message with the song.
My question to Arne would be: Did your mother sing to you when you were little? What did she sing?
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My question to the Dunkster:
From whom did you get so much hubris?
Follow up:
Do you know what “hubris” is?
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“What’s it like to be the world’s largest single-cell organism?”
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You’re ba-a-a-d! 🙂
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Alan… laughing hysterically!!!!!!!!!!! AmoebaCORE could be the new name for Arne “single cell” Duncan’s policy….
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How does Ted Mitchell take his coffee?
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One question for Arne? It would have to deal with BBall; Arne is not qualified to speak to much else.
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“democratic public education ” has a nice “ring” to it. When “The task of analysis is to
focus on the “signal”, not the “noise”, the “ring” may become clear.
Democratic? Public Education suffers from concocted authority. The “vote free” aspect
of “Democracy”…APPOINTED POSITIONS
A show-down, if you will, of “Marks” and Votes…
Mr. Willson: “So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
Considering I lack the “mark” of a teacher, and my voice may be muted, I will still ask,
Is democratic public education a cultural habitus ? Was it established to complete the
circle, or break it? What functions as the “recruitment agent” for our culture, our society,
or our values?
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No Brick,
Is democratic public education a cultural habitus?
A democratic public education means that the watchdog of U.S. public school districts is democratically elected by local communities to represent the interests and values of that community as guided by state and federal education codes/laws.
It’s easy to find flaws with the democratic process where the people usually have a public voice without fear or retaliation—and this means we hear from the extremes, who often make the most noise.
Therefore democracy is not perfect, but it’s better than all the other choices. At least with democracy when a mistake is made, the people may organize a resistance and cause a course correction: For instance, The Chinese Exclusion Act, Prohibition, and McCarthyism.
However, those loud extremists often can’t stand losing and being ignored by the majority, so those in the minority with the most money tend to spend that money to make end runs around the consensus of the people and force their political/religious beliefs on everyone else, which threatens the people’s democracy.
The public schools watched over by local, democratically elected school boards, are an important element of the foundation of democracy.
Because the public schools are part of the democratic process, if an ed code or law that pertains to public education becomes unpopular, it can be changed through the democratic process where the people may debate it and then vote. The power of the ballot box hasn’t gone the way of the Dodo yet.
If the public schools are turned over to corporate for-profit or non-profit private sector organizations, then the democratic process and the people’s consensus means nothing. Then a small number of people—for instance Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family—have control over what the children are taught and the people can do nothing about it. Resistance will be futile without bloodshed and rebellion.
In addition, historical evidence shows us what happens when a few powerful people have control of what kids learn: Germany’s Hitler’s youth and Communist China’s teenage Red Guard under Mao.
Do we really want that threat in the United States?
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Yeeee Haaaa! An ally in the Quixotic Quest of ridding the world of educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students (as if they were some “product” that needed to be pidgeon-holed for an end “consumer”).
Welcome aboard, NoBrick!
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Duane, I’ve been aboard all along, dropping a pedo (ventosidad)
now and then to frack the myths. It’s not de pedo or al pedo.
Willson hits the nail on the head, again.
Carlos Castaneda hit it
The special “mark” anthropology tribe hit it.
Hamlet hit it too.
Business as usual, relies on keeping
certain MYTHS alive.
“The Structuralist school of anthropology argued that myth is the means by which we organise our world. Some anthropologists stressed the social aspects of this; others emphasize the fact that mythic or symbolic structures were important in shaping our perceptions.
Social structure as mythic or symbolic is easy to imagine. As Hamlet says in a moment of lucid madness: “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body.” The king is a social or symbolic function, not a physical thing. A particular king – say, James II – is no different biologically from his fellow men, yet he puts on a crown, sits on a throne and assumes a symbolic position of authority. It is from this place, backed by a mythic structure (divine right, for example), that the social structure itself borrows its substance.”
“true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience
(SEEING)
that contradict the story”(MYTH)…
Then again, the inevitable “Threat” looms and Thatcher’s TINA.
.
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Do you value public schools, and if so, what do you value about them, specifically?
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If a chid is in seventh grade, reading at a preprimer level, and increases to 4th grade, is he, the teacher and the school a success or a failure because he isn’t proficient?
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Cap Lee,
Who is the most responsible for a child’s literacy level, education and standardized test results?
The child’s environment outside of the school is the most responsible. The child isn’t. It’s the parents/guardians, the home environment, etc.
Since the 1960s, the unchallenged formula—supported by one study after another with no study to disprove it—for who is responsible for a child’s education breaks down like this: the teachers and school environment are responsible for about one third of a child’s education. The other two-thirds is from the child’s environment outside of the school.
When we focus on test results, a teacher’s responsibility shrinks even further after every aspect of a child’s life is taken into consideration.
For standardized tests, we can only hold teachers accountable for between 1 percent and 14 percent of a child’s standardized test results.
For instance, comparing my and my older brother who was illiterate his entire life and died that way at age 64. We had one mother but my brother and I had maybe forty or more teachers K to 12. My brother was twelve years older than me. My parents gave up on him because he resisted learning to read. My mother did not give up on me and resorted to corporal punishment with a wire coat hanger to teach me to read
There is no comparison between the time and dedication a parent can spend with their child or children and a teacher who has twenty, thirty and sometimes even forty students for about an hour at a time before the next class pours in.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: not to forget that even the most ferociously zealous accountabullies of VAMania will ruefully ‘fess up under the implied threat of being cut off from their Gates Foundation [and similar institutions] grant checks that teachers are—at max—the most important “in-school” factor in student “achievement” [why are we so stuck on using a psychometric term?] and that “out-of-school” factors still trump ‘em.
Often in fine print, dontchaknow, at the back of very impressive looking “objective research.” But that’s not what catches the headlines…
Take away the scores from high-stakes standardized tests, and VAM and other numerical chimeras of the “new civil rights movement of our time” die a deservedly quick and hunger-filled death.
Why such a fascination with fantastical numerical constructions and such a scathing contempt for human judgement?
Is it only those for a “better education for all” that know a very old, very dead and very Greek guy blasted these edubean counters out of the water before there were even edubeans to count?
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” [Plato]
Guess Plato won’t be consulted for the next MET study. I wonder why…
😎
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Limiting Duncan to “yes or no” answers, creates greater efficiency. The evidence to refute, is less complicated. For example, “Are Gates’ assumptions proven?” ,
“Do shareholders expect to make a profit from the Pearson/Microsoft partnership to develop Common Core Curriculum?”, “Does money spent on the copyrighted materials of multinational corporations siphon money from the community?” “Is accountability and transparency of charters guaranteed in all states?” “Is the potential loss of tax dollars to fraud, from the corporatization of education, greater than $100,000,000?” “Were the number of teachers engaged in writing standards greater than the number of people associated with the financial and tech industries?” “Do lobbyists have more access to the Department of Education than the parents of students enrolled in public schools?”….
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I would ask good old Arne if he could just talk out a lesson plan broken down into its parts from the warm up, intro, etc including how it links to content area and common core and to address how he would differentiate for students with IEP’s and Ells (add a touch of UDL too) and to include the written objective and word wall he would have as well as any follow up and extension activities. It is one question as it pertains to just one lesson plan. And since he supposedly taught and it must have been a while ago … surely he could remember one of his lessons and just make the adaptations as he is now so familiar with all those curricular reforms he so adamantly supports. I suspect I know the answer… we all know that he never taught in a classroom but had outward bound like experience … ughh
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“When will your personal bio-software receive an upgrade, so that you are no longer restricted to vocalizing such a limited buzz phrase loop?”
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Why are you not totally embarrassed, Arne?
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I would ask him….Arne, I have some great ideas about public education. Can you help me get my right to post my comments on the site of my public radio station in st. Louis? Their writiers are good, but hardly anyone comments…..I used to stir up numerous comments………surely public radio and public television would never, ever, under any circumstances discourage people from talking about public education, would they?
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They are doing a great job of reporting about the Normandy School system, which….sadly…..lost all their money paying fransfers to allow more choice, and had to be taken over by the state…….after their last 7 articles….they have a total of three comments….
Would-Be Teachers Flock To Normandy Job Fair…0 comments.
Missouri School Board Loosens Normandy Transfer Rules…0 comments…
Progress Report: Normandy School Hiring Hits 80 Percent; Will Try ‘Flipped’ Classrooms…..1 comment (msblkwidow)…
Will Normandy Students Be Able To Attend U. City?
Despite Policy Change, Answer Not Clear….0 comments…
Teachers Learn To STEM-itize Their Lessons…0 comments…..
Nixon Vetoes Armed Teacher Bill, Signs Common Core Changes…..1 comment(Nick)….
Normandy Parents Sue For Students’ Right To Transfer Out…..1 comment(PMR)……….
7 articles………3 commnts. That is real public participation.
There used to be more…….it is much more tidy since……
Kjoe
Quote:
My opinion is……
We are unable to post your comment because you have been blocked by St. Louis Public Radio. Find out more.
That happens no matter what I post, which is often complimentary to their writers. The boss got really upset about my asking who gave them 3.6 of their 4.4 budget as reported on their their 990 tax return. The person who gave them the money was listed as “person”.
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3.6 million…..of 4.4 million in 2010….when they were still the beacon, now in partnership with public radio….not sure who is out sourcing who in st. Louis. But money still has a very loud voice.
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Joe,
Keep up the pressure on them. Have you written to the station’s board of directors?
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If the Common Core is so great, why has Virginia (the state where your children attend public school) opted out of it?
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I would like to ask him why he insists on averaging the scores of Special Education Students with those of regular Ed Students. Third grade students do not understand algebra any more than I did when I was in third grade. I learned all of that as a freshman in High School. You are just pushing these students too hard. Even now they still teach algebra in 9th grade.
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One question?
“Dear Secretary Duncan,
What do you perceive there to be in your upbringing that has made you such an idiot?”
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I would ask Arne Duncan: “Would you please teach my 3rd Period class from last year? Since, Mr Duncan, you have such vast experience, you must be able to do a better job than I. I’m not asking you to teach the other four, just one.
Maybe I should tell you that the 3rd period class from last year was actually a split class of Art I students who ranged from 9th-12th graders and Mixed Media students who were 11th & 12th graders who hated art but had been put in this class because of how the numbers worked out. They had no place else to go. Of the 28 students, a few came to class to seriously learn. A couple were actually quite brilliant and did wonderful work but it was difficult for them to fight the mainstream. Because overall, most students came to class to eat chips, drink sodas, play video games on their phones, and socialize. Most didn’t bring a backpack or even a pencil–though a pencil was required every day to do work. One student (bless his heart), shouldn’t even have been in this class without an aide because he couldn’t comprehend or read past kindergarten level but he tried most days–when he showed up.
All of this I could have dealt with if I had a principal who would support me in my goal to make the classroom a safe place to learn. But when fights broke out early in the year, I was told by the principal herself (over the intercom so all the students could hear) to “deal with it” before she hung up. She never sent a security guard. I made a pact with the security guard to walk by my room every day so I wouldn’t have to call the office and be undermined in my authority. At the end of the year, when a majority of students failed, I was told I couldn’t give failing grades because I didn’t motivate them enough.
Tell me, Mr. Duncan, how you would motivate and inspire my class to see the beauty of the world around them? How would you teach them to think critically and analyze the TV and computer ads, video games, and movies the students are inundated with so they could become world leaders instead of third-class followers? Would you please teach my class?
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My question: Have you picked out your job title for your next place of employment at Pearson?
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