Arthur Camins writes in response to Marc Tucker’s article about the failure of annual testing:
“One of the contributors to the problem that Mark Tucker identifies is cynicism.
“Few appear to believe anymore that government will do anything more than the meager attention effects of annual testing to address inequity. As a country, we have forgotten that it was the collective action of the labor and civil rights movements that has mediated inequality, not punishment regimes or the individualism inherent in the so-called choice notion behind charter schools. It’s not federal overreach that’s the problem, but reaching for the wrong things. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/01/13/u-s-education-policy-federal-overreach-or-reaching-for-the/
“It doesn’t have to be this way. We Can Be Better than the Audacity of Small Hopes: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/we-can-be-better-than-the-audacity-of-small-hopes_b_7284458.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
“Since the Reagan era, the Democrats have been on the defensive, and have run away from collective action for equity. It’s time to re-embrace community responsibility rather than selfish-individualism.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Since the Reagan era, the Democrats have been on the defensive, and have run away from collective action for equity.
Americans ran away from collective action for equity, along with the belief that we are all in this together, right after federal courts and federal legislation required the American community to include African-Americans. One thing we have learned over the last fifty years is that the vast majority of white Americans will do almost anything to make sure that their children do not go to school with African American children.
Yes, we have lost this social innate intelligence known as collectivism, but it’s not completely gone.
Collectivist thinking lives vividly and robustly in the world of opt-out.
A-h-h-h, yes! Opt-out!
Parents don’t want their children to be harmed by big bad plutocrat Uncle Corporation and Aunt Government. Parents have banded across the nation, and this is just the start.
Now can we do the same for APPR, single payer healthcare, and taxing the rich?
Fast food workers are uniting to demand higher wages (not that I would recommend that anyone eat, metaphorically speaking, the toxic sludge from MacDonald’s) and now in Los Angeles, workers make the new $15.00 an hour, up from $9 something an hour.
Collectivism still exists, and but is is a matter of enough people coming to consensus as to how society should be set up. Americans are slow but not disabled to learn. They watch too much TV and eat too much refined sugar. Who cares about dancing with a star? Who needs to know about how Bruce and his new life have impacted Chris? Kim and her new see-through couture? Letterman’s last show? What a bunch of cognitive crap that dumbs people down and distracts them from the real issues.
I felt like telling Dorie Greenspan, who lives part time in Paris and part time in Manhattan, that she should be more interested in bringing back French healthcare systems to the States than bringing back the latest patisserie concoction for American adaptation.
The French are very collectivist, thank goodness.
(Dorie, you’re a wonderful baker, but not exactly a friend to the politically serious and the diabetic community. Can you for once, just give us something more substantive from French culture than a pate a choux?)
Thank goodness for social media . . . .
If one can predict the test scores/school grades by the census, then we have to conclude that the “accountability” motive of testing is to punish poor communities. We also have to conclude that the politicians want to blame schools/teachers for the ills of society. This is NOT a partisan issue – both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastically pursuing this fake “reform” agenda. Statements like: “It’s not federal overreach that’s the problem, but reaching for the wrong things.”, are naive. If we are looking to Washington for a “solution,” we have already lost. Closing the Department of Education down and denying people like Arne Duncan a venue to practice their brand of coercive malfeasance will give public education a chance to serve the communities they represent. The dysfunctional communities will NOT be transformed by public school. The problems do not emanate from the schools; they migrate into the schools.
Well, it’s self-perpetuating, right? The more they fragment and privatize public entities and services the less capacity or possibility there is for collective action.
The policy itself destroys the capacity and infrastructure for collective public action.
We’ll all just choose our school services provider, as individuals. It’s a consumer decision like any other, except this one is publicly-paid. Think of it like choosing a health insurance plan on the exchanges- regulated private companies providing a service for a fee. Not much capacity-building for “collective action” there.
“The more they fragment and privatize public entities and services the less capacity or possibility there is for collective action.” i think this is true.
The reductive thinking that everything is a matter of consumer choice among providers of goods and services has been carefully nurtured in the body politic by persons who embrace so-called free-markets as a panacea. The hitch, of course, is that the markets of interest are those sustained by tax subsidies.
Maybe this is part of their strategy. The more dispersed we are, the easier we are to hoodwink and conquer. This may partly account for their loathing of organized labor. Billionaires can pick us off more easily if we are “disorganized” while ALEC and company are single minded in their pursuit of greed and crushing everyone else.
The more they make government look incompetent and wasteful, the less likely people are to support it.
A cynic would say that this is no mere accident.
Failure is actually success.
“One of the contributors to the problem that Mark Tucker identifies is
cynicismMarc Tucker ”There.Fixed.
Here’s hoping that those who believe that the government can and should provide equitable opportunity for all children get behind Bernie Sanders and disabuse voters of the notion that they have to pick between the lesser of two evils… Since Mondale’s thumping in 1984 the Democrats have been afraid to speak against the Reagan mantra that “government is the problem” and run on the “I’m not as bad as the Republican” platform… Sanders is not only better than any Republican candidate, he stands for something different: an activist government.
I agree it is cynicism that is driving test. Frankly I also believe it to be laziness by legislators. Rather than dissect the problem to find the root causes it is much easier to use fear based methods to whip things into shape. The only problem is the PTS disorder that is sure to come afterward. Our children pay for our shortcomings.
So we turn our education system over to private providers. Who in their right mind thinks that resources will be more equitably divided in a “free market” system? Who in their right mind thinks that opportunities will be equally available to all children? Capitalism is not about equity. It is about winning and losing. Eva Moskowitz is not about providing education for all children. She is not about preparing children for meaningful and productive lives contributing to a democratic society.
Chris Hedges always puts things in perspective and helps us see the big picture.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/karl_marx_was_right_20150531