Thomas Ultican left a good job in Silicon Vally to become a teacher of high school math and physics in a school where half the students are English learners. He discovered that teaching was much harder than anything else he had ever done.
In his reading, he was struck by the long-standing charge that American public education is failing. He remembered hearing about this in the 1950s, the 1960, and so on until “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. Since then, the drumbeat of criticism has been unending, and is still untrue. He never understood how a nation whose schools were always “failing” could rise to become the most powerful nation in the world.
He came to the conclusion that the claims of the reformers are a myth, an illusion. Teachers and schools are facing steep challenges, then blamed for the challenges they are working to overcome. None of this makes any sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Makes perfect sense if our leaders fear asking the voters for tax increases to fund schools adequately.
Has anyone ever taken a cold, hard look at what privatization is costing? Charters waste taxpayer money advertizing, often a bloated corporate structure at the top, buying canned materials, and rent, and that does not account for all the fraud and failure. Has anyone tracked the human cost of disruption?
I think my comments point to a combat strategy that is worth pursuing. We need to make the case that charters are wasteful of taxpayer dollars, and overall, they are not delivering any solutions. When you consider that they duplicate fixed costs, and lots of the leadership is ineffective. Charters are a lot less efficient than public schools, and they have been shown to be about 17% effective. Is this a good use of tax money? The public needs to hear about some of the outrageous cases of fraud.
Diane has…jsut search for Charter corruption here.
Krugman, in the NY Times explains how the powers that control this mess, need to invent failure to fix it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/opinion/krugman-inventing-a-failure.html
cross-posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Thomas-Ultican-The-Illusi-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Myth_Public-Good-150131-976.html
with this comment:
Paul Krugman wrote a wonderful essay in the NY times about the need to invent failure, in order to fix things.
This is what the oligarchs did to end public education. They added mandates that were anti-learning, made the conversation about those bad teachers and the need to evaluate them, and then sold magic elixirs to FIX the problem like VAM and PARCC and the common core crap, and sure enough, when the professionals were removed,t he schools failed… Now they get to use public money for schools that do no better than our public schools.
Instead of funding the building go new schools and more teachers so there scan be smaller classes, the one thing that the real research shows WORKS, they put the states on austerity, and the first thing starved were the schools.
I f you have not seen the grassroots film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman on Vimeo, for goodness sakes go there
and witness what happened to NYC so charter schools could take over on our dime, and exclude the poverty stricken impoverished kids who need it most.
OMG…this video shows the horridness of charter schools. Why would any parent/guardian set their child(ren) up to be bullied and victimized. This is most disturbing.
Here is the grand question… “Is it failing public schools or is it failing democracy due to a lack of “checks and balances” leading to an ever-increasing impoverished class”???? The only constant seems to be that poverty adversely impacts learning.
“Dollars and Sense”
Makes no sense
But lots of dollars
Seeking rents
Instead of scholars
I like Stephen Toulmin’s distinction between an argument and an assertion. An assertion only makes claims, it does not support them. An argument supports its assertions with evidence. I do not think argument works any more, at least not in the traditional sense. We have become a nation of assertions that can no longer follow an argument and the more complex the issue the more true this is. Advertising, political campaigning, bumper stickers, and transforming us into an overly simplistic and simple minded people. As H. L. Mencken once said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” I think people take a bit of comfort in simple solutions because they enable them to feel they have addressed problems and not ignored them. And the more costly the real solution the more desirable is the less expensive simplistic solution appears. That may be a bit too cynical, it may also be that people want to understand problems and complex problems with difficult solutions are often hard to understand. But whatever the case may be it is essential if democracy is to succeed for all sides to be able to talk together respectfully and make an honest effort to see the other side’s point of view. This is a value that an effective education nurtures and sustains (though not everyone who is educated, necessarily practices it). If we cannot tell the difference between honest argument and rhetorical manipulation (political or otherwise) democracy has an uncertain future. Ray Bradbury suggested it was not necessary to ban books to kill a culture, just to get people to stop reading them. Perhaps that is true of other things, perhaps it is not necessary to suppress political views to kill democracy, just get people to stop taking an interest in understanding them.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Everyone should read the book “The Manufactured Crisis” to learn how and why the illusion of public school failure was created.
My humble offering, after spending quite a few years researching the assault on public schools and teachers that began at least in the 1930s and coalesced during the Reagan years with Milton Friedman’s free market ideology, is my book entitled The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy:
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-origins-of-the-common-core-deborah-duncan-owens/?isb=9781137482679
I published this book with a scholarly press that would provide a thorough peer review and editing, so I apologize for the current steep price. However, it represents more than ten years of my life while teaching elementary school, working on my Ph.D., and teaching full time first as an elementary teacher and then as a professor of education. I am deeply committed to public schools and wrote the book in that spirit.
WHY? If they knew?
THAT is the crux of it… people are sold easily because they don’t know poop form shinola, and because the corruption we read about here, and that goes on in almost sixteen thousand districts is unknown to them. To quote Willingham: “The field of education is awash in conflicting goals, research “wars,” and profiteers” Unfortunately, distinguishing between good and bad science is not easy. evaluating whether or not a claim really is supported by good research is like buying a car. There’s an optimal solution to the problem, which is to read and digest all of the relevant research, but most of us don’t have time to execute the optimal solution” … it’s hardly news that an educational reform idea attracted serious attention despite the fact that there was no evidence supporting it.”
it is not surprising that ALL the policies and anti learning methods that go on in charter schools are unknown to the public, which are very busy watching club news, and ‘getting and spending’, and listening to lies form the media.
Thank you for that…. I have read many books by brilliant people like you, but THE PUBLIC HAS NOT. I will try to read yours when time permits, and I appreciate your effort.
I read the manuscripts for this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl8e6OKjj3U&feature=youtu.be▶ and for this by Professor Joel Shatzky which is a satire that predicted the debacle now ongoing at the higher education level
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/152362
and this one by Karen Horwitz,
http://www.whitechalkcrime.com/wcc/ which tells the story and the well-researched facts about the lawlessness in Chicago,
http://www.whitechalkcrime.com/karen-horwitz/karen-horwitz-story/
Finally, there is this wonderful piece about Venice,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121014
Just wonderfully written, researched and so interesting a Freeland uses 14th century Venice and its downfall (called the Serrata), as the metaphor for what we are seeing today. FABULOUS
Thanks for taking the time to write here. You voice is important.
The myth of failing public schools was funded and promoted at first by the Walton family. They have been relentless for decades in their ruthless goal to brainwash our children and make America into a privately controlled Walton fiefdom.
The only difference is that today they are not alone. In the last few years, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Eli Broad and a few other single digit billionaires have joined the assault on democracy.
Thomas Ultican rightfully notes in his blog post that ‘A Nation at Risk’ was political document that lacked substantiation.
But he says not a word about the Sandia report, which pulled the floor out from under the allegations made in ‘A Nation tr Risk.’
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), took a hard, empirical look at the claims made in A Nation at Risk and concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
But nobody seemed to know. Or care. Decades after ‘A Nation at Risk,’ school superintendents and administrators and school board members still refer to it. The Business Roundtable – avid supporter of the Common Core – has even resurrected its “rising tide of mediocrity” myth.
Meanwhile, educators of all stripes still laud goofy tests (the ACT, the SAT) that do little if anything to measure or predict ability or achievement. These tests and products related to them (like the AP program) are all tied tightly to the Common Core, and to the notion of “reform” that was embedded in ‘A Nation at Risk.’
It’s a recipe for educational hash. Yet, like lemmings headed for the cliff, educators march to the ACT/SAT/AP cadence.
And they wonder why American public education is headed in the wrong direction.
“It’s a recipe for educational hash. Yet, like lemmings headed for the cliff, educators march to the ACT/SAT/AP cadence. . . And they wonder why American public education is headed in the wrong direction.”
Quite correct, democracy, quite correct. GAGA*ers the vast majority of teachers and administrators.
*Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along (see GAGA). The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.