Denis Ian, a reader of the blog, has contributed several excellent comments which I have turned into post. Here is another that strikes a chord for its insight and thoughtfulness. American society has long been celebrated for individual freedom blended with civic responsibility. We take care of one another. We volunteer to help. We pitch in. But we don’t see why bureaucrats and legislators are forcing us to do things to our schools and our children that harm them. And we are responding.
Denis Ian writes:
Why should the parents of New York be out of step with what’s happening all across the nation?
Of course, this opt-out resistance is about education. But it’s also about what’s boiling folks from coast-to-coast … this never-ending, ever-intrusive, arrogant, and ruinous involvement of government to be front and center in the lives of every man, woman, and child.
This test-refusal effort is a scream at the federal and state governments to back off … retreat … and leave folks alone to craft the sort of society that will be … not the society envisioned by a few.
Parents want their schools back … among other things. This current effort … withholding kids from academic assessments … is way more complex than just a pile of lousy exams spawned by a wretched educational reform. That’s the surface stuff. The roots are much deeper. Only the daring will squint hard to see the links that are so obvious.
This society is set to explode … one way or another.
These tests are serious stuff for parents … and more serious stuff for children. This resistance has fired up lots of pretty ordinary folks into becoming very active managers of their own lives … and it will carry over into other issues soon enough. This election season is already the most bizarre of my long life … and it looks to get even more memorable in the months ahead.
Why? Because government … and a slender class of autocratic fops … has made it their business to be in everyone else’s business. We have these self-appointed wind-bags who have this neurotic, messiah complex that results in chaos for everything they touch.
They’ve ruined healthcare, border and homeland security, law enforcement, illegal immigration, the economy, education, and just about everything else they’ve knocked up against. Why are folks so surprised that people are fit to be tied?
The new Know-It-All class … the self-anointed oligarchs … have imposed their norms and values and programs and reforms with absolute ease over the last several years … but the breaking point is here. The signs are all about … just look at the sort of political figures who have captured the attention of the people. They’re not oligarchic types at all .. in fact, they’re the antidotes to the giant itch that troubles this nation.
The really amazing thing about this reform/test counter-action is the resistance to the resistance. The educational oligarchs … just like the social and political absolutists … will not admit what is underfoot. They will not concede that the agitation is THEIR fault … caused by THEIR ineptitude and THEIR arrogance. That is a sure-fire fuse that will easily flame up. Nothing pisses off good people more than being played for dummies.
And the people are plenty pissed off.
This moment … in education … is an early prelude to what’s in store for this political season. I’m certaint these parents … who stood tall for their children and their neighborhood schools … won’t vanish for a long while. They’re just warming up.
The oligarchs have blown it … big time. And it all began with the biggest dummy of all … Arne Duncan … that mother-bashing fop who lit that fuse.
This Duncan quote about suburban moms might be the most memorable educational gaffe of recent decades: ” … “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
Duncan is still in search of the world’s largest vacuum … but those words have stuck in the craw of every parent from Long Island to Los Angeles. And now those moms … and dads … are the first in battle against the snob class. And they’re winning.
Denis Ian
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This piece by John Oliver about misuse of science is brilliant.
What he talks about — eg, chetty picking studies* that support your claims (*which chetty picked the data to begin with) — is exactly the sort of thing the “know it all class” (made up primarily of billionaires, politicians and pundits) does all the time.
John Oliver is simply amazing. The piece he did on testing was also brilliant. I don’t know whether he researches and writes his own stuff, but the attention to fact is remarkable and puts him in a category that even very few investigative journalists inhabit.
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Here’s the link for anyone who missed his piece on standardized testing.
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I think it’s more like the ALBOKIADT class —
(a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing)
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The ironic thing about know-it-alls is that they just think they are.
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☞ Dunning–Kruger Effect
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There is another irony here: Dunning and Kruger seem to suffer from their own disease, believing that they somehow discovered a phenomenon that has been recognized for ages.
Why else would they allow (if not encourage) people to name the effect after them?
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SDP,
Perhaps, they recognized their own shortcomings in quoting Darwin in their first paper “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”
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Duane,
That actually makes it worse.
They are allowing their names to be forever associated with an idea that they know they did not originate.
That’s just shameless.
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Denis writes, “Of course, this opt-out resistance is about education. But it’s also about what’s boiling folks from coast-to-coast … this never-ending, ever-intrusive, arrogant, and ruinous involvement of government to be front and center in the lives of every man, woman, and child.”
When government does the bidding of the super-rich whose fault is that? Are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, civil rights legislation, consumer, environmental, workplace safety and financial regulations all examples of “know it alls” tell us what to do? I understand the point. People who know little about education are imposing know-nothing solutions on education. However, anti-government rhetoric has historically been the calling card of those who seek to protect excessive private wealth accumulation and thwart social justice. Current education policy is not so much about federal overreach as it is about reaching for the wrong things.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
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Interesting use of the words “excessive” and “social justice”. Spoken like a Know-It-All who feels entitled to define such concepts.
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Rick, are you a supporter of the autocratic, opaque, for-profit, corporate public education reform movement?
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Funny, I feel pretty anti-government these days, and I am not anything close to someone seeking to protect my private wealth accumulation OR thwart social justice.
I’m just a plain old mom, in a plain old family, with my plain old kids, working harder and harder to keep up with the craziness.
Education reform was my tipping point.
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Ian captures the frustration and anger of so many Americans which explain the rise of outliers like Trump and Sanders this election cycle. People are tired of government that works for billionaires, but not ordinary people. People are tired of billionaires and corporations’ manipulations to make laws work in their favor. This is not a free market; it is a rigged market that allows oligarchs to pull the strings of all the puppets in Washington to make money for a few at the expense of many. We have seen these manipulations with Monsanto, the oil and gas industry, and Obama trying sell his toxic trade bill to Europe.
With education these maneuverings are a bridge too far. Most people are happy with their public schools, and they love their children. Parents are tired of haphazard testing policies that turn children into guinea pigs. Schools should not be a marketplace. They are an essential democratic, public service. This is what people want for their children. People do not want to see people like Gates and Zuckerberg pushing products that are not in the best interests of students on schools. Parents are angry that these non-educators are being given free access to public schools. That is why parents are opting out. The only way to have a say is to vote out complicit representatives and work to change laws that incentivize subjecting students to “the marketplace.”
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Free market economics has become a religion. And like a religion, the practitioners depend heavily on faith and dogma. The trouble comes when economists try to portray conclusions as based on sound scientific method and axiomatic reasoning. Economics is far too new a discipline and more closely related to alchemy than chemistry. And just like a religion, if you challenge the beliefs of free marketers and market theorists, the response usually veers towards insults and dismissal, not reasoned argument.
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Some of us remember the opening salvo against teachers from Rod Paige, Secretary of Education, who called teachers terrorists. That was not long after 9-11. Last night I heard Michelle Obama give a commencement address at Jackson State University. The message caught my attention for its eloquence and cogency for this institution. The illusion was smashed when she sought to inspire the audience by mentioning how Jackson State’s former coache rose to the position of Secretary of Education– Rod Paige. Paige is also remembered for cooking the books to make his tenure as superintendent of Houston Public Schools look as if he has produced a miracle in student achievement. Then there was Margaret Spellings, no credibility as an educator, now President of the state university in North Carolina. Arne is not the only disaster.
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I read the NY Times each day, and although it can be a propaganda tool, it offers a window on current events — and shows, that it is not just eduction that is being mismanaged. Look at the way the lobbyists have taken over the Pentagon.
“For nearly a decade after 9/11, the Pentagon had a virtual blank check; the base defense budget rose, in adjusted dollars, from $378 billion in 1998 to $600 billion in 2010. The caps are supposed to restrain domestic and military spending equally, but defense hawks have insisted on throwing more money at the Pentagon. That doesn’t encourage efficiency or wise choices. The panel took $18 billion from a $59 billion off-budget account, which has become a slush fund. The move will underwrite the purchase of more ships, jet fighters, helicopters and other big-ticket weapons that the Pentagon didn’t request … It also means the war account will run out of money next April. The Pentagon can do with far fewer than the 1,700 F-35s it plans on buying. It should pare back on President Obama’s $1 trillion plan to replace nearly every missile, submarine, aircraft and warhead in the nuclear arsenal. Defense officials recently reported that 22 percent of all military bases will not be needed by 2019. ”
IMAGINE, IF THAT MONEY had been turned to education or to fix our infrastructure or turn our nation to renewable energy.
Charles Blow weighs in:
on the current madness– which goes beyond the morass that is education:
“Trump has used a toxic mix of bullying and bluster, xenophobia and nationalism, misogyny and racism, to appeal to the darker nature of the Republican Party and secure his place as the unlikeliest presidential nominee in recent American history. That paved his path, coupled with what Jim Clifton, chairman and C.E.O. at Gallup, called earlier this year “a staggering” three-fourths of Americans believing “CORRUPTION IS WIDE SPREAD’ in the U.S. government.” As Clifton emphasized: –“Not incompetence, but corruption.”
YA THINK?
YEAH , Mr Blow… in the microcosm of the larger culture, destroyed by insider corruption, the institution of public education is gone. Diane’s site, and the NPE NAILS THE REALITY, day in and day out,– but the public hears nothing about the devastation, as the ‘reality’ show that is this primary season and election cycle sicks up all the air (time.)
Krugman also points to this astonishing moment in our history, where people in this nation are not merely choosing an incompetent to run the schools:
“Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.”
I love the line “chattering classes,” and this one too: ” He says, ” The reaction from everyone who knows anything about finance or economics was a mix of amazed horror and horrified amazement.”
The reaction of teachers, academics parents and people who remember schools that worked is also ‘a mix of amazed horror and horrified amazement.’
In a previous column, I loved Krugman’s description of people who are ‘impervious to evidence.” In the education arena, the people who run the show in our legislatures are ‘impervious to the evidence’ that our children are not learning, and that the NCLB, the Common Core, VAM are leaving all children, and thus our future in the dustbin of history.
I watch in horrified amazement as Duncan and clones bamboozle the people, just as Trump does.
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SLS,
Killing the Host (Michael Hudson) explores the tactics of
deception and ideological camouflage through the marshalling
of history.
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It’s fundamentally class warfare, masquerading as “meritocracy,” and it’s based on a worldview that seeks to monetize absolutely everything, from childhood (and schooling) to old age, infirmity and death.
Yes, death is rapidly being turned into a profit center. There’s still some money to be made off us geezer Baby Boomers, even with our depleted 401ks and underwater mortgages. With death, you can make a killing.
Think I exaggerate? Then check out the 12/26/14 Washington Post article entitled “Dying and Profits: The Evolution of Hospice,” which relates how the ghouls at the Carlyle Group, Kolberg and Company, and others, not content with having outsourced American industrial production, are seeking to gild the toilets in their newest Hampton’s estates by extracting every last nickel from the terminally ill and their families.
These are the same class of people behind so- called education reform, whom we’ve been told for years are “the best and brightest,” and who don’t even bother to conceal their contempt for the millions of people whose interests and assets they gobble for sport.
Bloodsuckers, every single one…
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A perfect example of end of life exploitation is the expensive drug, Opdivo, designed to extend the life of terminally ill cancer patients up to six months. It costs about $14,000 per month and is rarely covered by insurance. It sounds like a way to access boomers’ potential estate ahead of the dying person’s children.
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My own sci-fi prediction: There will be a resurgence of the debate over the ethics of assisted suicide — not as a way to relieve chronic physical suffering, but as the most viable retirement plan for most Americans.
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FLERP,
Suicide rates have been on the rise for almost every group between 10-75
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/22/health/suicide-rates-rise/
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It’s certainly the best retirement plan I have at this moment.
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Edit: Obdivio is a drug…
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FLERP
Do you know if Obamacare covers that?
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Cancer Treatment Centers of America -great ads- lots of emotion.
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While I wouldn’t want to lay all of this on the Republicans – we wouldn’t be in the straits we are if the Democrats were not complicit in this process over the years – House member Alan Grayson was on the mark when he said that Republican health care policy amounted to a directive to “die faster.”
Die faster, but not before Blackstone, Carlyle Group and Kolberg, Kravis and Roberts get every last penny.
Then there was former (Democratic) Governor Dick Lamm of Colorado, who magisterially stated that the elderly and terminally ill have a “duty to die and get out of the way…”
And these social lampreys wonder why people are so cynical and incensed?
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I read the initial announcement that the district made about how it was reducing testing, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. If a district were actually reducing testing in a meaningful way, I think it could draft a press release that communicated that very plainly.
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“Why should the parents of New York be out of step with what’s happening all across the nation?”
If I recall correctly, New York moved to Common Core testing at least a year ahead of the rest of the country and — even compared to how badly these things go generally — had a particularly rushed and lousy implementation first year. On top of everything else, they’re just a bit ahead of the curve for that reason.
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“The new Know-It-All class … the self-anointed oligarchs … have imposed their norms and values and programs and reforms with absolute ease over the last several years” mostly using stealth, lies and bribery of public officials.
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I don’t know if Trump is an indication of some brewing rebellion but I feel like the Donald Trump “change” may be vastly overstated:
(New York, NY) May 9, 2016 – Today Donald J. Trump announced Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) will serve as Transition Team Chairman. Mr. Trump is the presumptive Presidential nominee for the Republican Party and continues to take critical steps to gear up for the general election against potential Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, or whoever.
Mr. Trump stated, “Governor Christie is an extremely knowledgeable and loyal person with the tools and resources to put together an unparalleled Transition Team, one that will be prepared to take over the White House when we win in November. I am grateful to Governor Christie for his contributions to this movement.”
Chris Christie is 1. a horrible governor and 2. I don’t know why he qualifies as some “bold” outsider.
Trump will just hire all of the same people we have now. These are the people Trump knows-Christie brags they’ve been friends for 14 years.
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Napolitano is the president of the public University of California. She is featured (as is Rumsfeld) at the Gen Next Foundation site. Gen Next is linked to Walton-funded “Seventy Four”, which works to privatize public education.
Gen Next’s objectives are 3-pronged (1) privatize public education (2) advance the social Darwinism of free enterprise and (3) grow the U.S. defense apparatus.
Julian Assange exposed, the machinations of Gen Next, in about the 30th paragraph of his book chapter, “Google Is Not What It Seems” (posted on-line).
Denis Ian’s point is illustrated by Gen Next.
Short of violent over throw, one option to explore, is nationalization of the fortunes of the Waltons, Gates, Pete Peterson, John Arnold, Art Pope, Eli Broad, Whitney Tilson, Dan Loeb, etc.
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Time to bring back the tax rates – especially for capital gains and “carried interest” – in effect under the Old Bolshevik, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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Too moderate a response for where we are.
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“Short of violent over throw, one option to explore, is nationalization of the fortunes of the Waltons, Gates, Pete Peterson, John Arnold, Art Pope, Eli Broad, Whitney Tilson, Dan Loeb, etc.” Wouldn’t that be theft by the government, sort of a socialist thing? i.e. Bernie?
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Not theft. No way. Confiscating their ill begotten wealth because of their attempt to subvert the U.S. Constitution by buying the government. In fact, they should all be in prison serving multiple life sentences alongside Bernie Madoff. His big mistake was ripping off members of the 0.1%. If he had ripped off the 99% instead, he’d still be free and rich.
Taking money away from frauds and crooks is not theft. It justice.
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As long as they get due process, who can object?
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The alternative is, revolutionary “people’s courts”, whose punishments have historically been kind of dicey, literally.
Currently, the 6 heirs to the Walton fortune have wealth equivalent to 40% of Americans and, the income inequality is accelerating. When families can only get educations for their kids, at 30% of their incomes (for-profit Bridge International Academies, promoted by the World Bank, to the exclusion of public education), the slow down in velocity of money will stagnate the economy beyond recovery, if it hasn’t happened before.
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Thomas Frank, in LISTEN, LIBERAL, refers to them as “the professional class.” They’re upper-income professionals, mostly educated at Ivy League schools, who are convinced their level of education qualifies them to dictate how everyone else should live. In his book, he specifically targets the modern Democratic Party, which has swing right of center because neoliberal policies are more comfortable to the top 20%.
The condescending arrogance displayed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign toward Bernie Sanders and his “uninformed” supporters is a case in point. So is the general belief encouraged by the media that those “ignorant young people” need to learn the realities of life. Interesting that a large segment of those supposedly ignorant young people are the product of “education reform” (or perhaps in spite of it). They are angry. They are not ignorant or “uninformed,” and they are not going to sit down and shut up anytime soon.
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Politicians and others are making a huge mistake when they behave in a condescending manner toward the younger generation, dismissing them as either ignorant or naiive.
Statements like “I feel sorry sometimes for the young people who believe this [Sanders’ claims about her], they don’t do their own research” may come back to haunt Hillary Clinton in November, perhaps even making the difference between winning and losing.
The irony is that Clinton herself has not done her research or she would appreciate how critical the youth vote was to Obama’s win and she would not be singling out young voters the way she has.
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Young people understand something that many of us in older generations seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never knew: that this world does not belong exclusively to us. It also belongs to future generations.
Clinton would do well to read the piece by Kate Aronoff (,a href=”http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/millennials-non-voting-habits-explained/”>Millennials’ non-voting habits, explained) which busts some of the myths about the motives and actions of the younger generation.
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Millennials’ non-voting habits, explained
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I love reading Denis Ian’s prose. He is a wordsmith and articulates beautifully what parents are feeling.
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I am surprised Diane chose to give Denis Ian emphasis, since as I read him he is explaining why Trump has gained such a following and approving the Republican revolution Trump is leading.
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Wrong, Harlan. You won’t find anyone more anti-Trump than I.
Denis Ian is a wonderful writer. I could post anything he writes.
There is a lot of discontent in this country. That’s a fact.
All the candidates need to see that.
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Thanks for clarifying, Diane.
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Is this the “know-it-all class,” or the “smash-and-grab-it-all class?”
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