This is a message to the billionaires, the hedge fund managers, and the politicians–and their paid spokespersons in think tanks and academe— who continually complain about our public schools and their teachers. They think that the solution to America’s education problems is to privatize public schools. They are wrong. They need to expand their horizons and look elsewhere for the causes and the solutions to the problems in our schools and our communities.
Please urge any reformers you know to watch this video. It will change their world view.
It is a TED talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. Dr. Harris is a pediatrician in California who has a master’s degree in public health in addition to her M.D. She is an expert on the relationship between childhood trauma and life outcomes.
Listen to her wisdom. She is on the frontline of addressing our nation’s must urgent problems.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Depends on what kind of “reformers” we’re talking about. While I think there are maybe some left with their heart in the right place who genuinely believe the propaganda, I think most left are opportunists of one sort or another. The evidence is just too broad and deep at this point that privatization is not the answer for people to believe it unless they personally are benefiting somehow.
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Absolutely, Dienne: the game has been going on too long, it’s terms too well known, for insiders to be unaware.
Subtract a small portion of naifs and willful self-deluders, and you’re left with a majority of predators, opportunists and their many enablers.
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I found it interesting that this video had more than 5,300 up votes versus 53 down votes.
It is estimated that 1% of the population are psychopaths. 53 is 1 percent of 5,300
Studies also show that the most popular career for psychopaths is to become a CEO, and becoming a CEO is the number one choice of psychopaths.
Bill Gates was the founder and CEO of Microsoft for most of his life.
How many billionaire oligarchs/CEOs belong to the Gates Cabal that work together with an agenda to punish public school teachers, destroy teachers’ unions, and destroy the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools where professional, highly educated teachers are mostly high in empathy?
I think that explains why Bill Gates and his cabal of billionaires support autocratic, dictatorial, child abusing, bullying, often fraudulent and inferior, robotic, scripted, publicly funded private sector corporate charter schools.
Watching this video will not move Bill Gates a fraction of inch away from his misguided agenda education agenda, because he is a psychopath.
Know your enemy.
What to look for in a psychopath:
Psychopaths are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.
When committing crimes, psychopaths carefully plan out every detail in advance and often have contingency plans in place. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, psychopathic criminals are cool, calm, and meticulous. Their crimes, whether violent or non-violent, will be highly organized and generally offer few clues for authorities to pursue. Intelligent psychopaths make excellent white-collar criminals and “con artists” due to their calm and charismatic natures.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201401/how-tell-sociopath-psychopath
If Bill Gates watched the TED video, I think he would vote it down.
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Seriously? Does anyone still believe that the corporate raiders of public education haven’t always known exactly what their game is?
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In light of this information, their game has one less leg to stand on. This is one more pull back on the curtain Jon. They should be getting very nervous.
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First line of help: pediatricians with this degree of insight and a much larger data base for generalizations about life-time outcomes.
The example of the bear and fight or flight response put me right into a Success Academy classroom with no-nonsense discipline beginning in the earliest years of school.
I hope she can get some people to work on high stakes testing as a producer of stress, not just in children, but adults.
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Reblogged this on Matthews' Blog and commented:
I wished policy makers make out time to read this piece and watch the video.
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Reformers don’t believe that charters are the panacea – they KNOW that they will profit, largely, and don’t care about anything else. Andre Agassi, with Rocketship, is profiting 8% to 10% from every deal he and his investors make. Period.
Its all about the constant flow of taxpayer dollars into their bank accounts and portfolios – they don’t give a rat’s rear about the children, or education, and certainly not “those children” – their children go to posh private schools, because their children are privileged. Period.
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There is much info out on the web about Adverse Childhood Experiences and their affect on health. One blog with great links and posts is on acestoohigh.com. As teachers we are aware of the impact of adverse lives of kids on their learning. Glad to see that some in the health field are giving it some attention. There is a link to the ACE score as well as a resiliency assessment to see if one has offsetting factors to the adversity. I know some think adversity is needed to build character or develop grit or implement rigor, blah, blah so its nice to see some balance.
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“As teachers we are aware of the impact of adverse lives of kids on their learning. ”
Indeed, this is the sentence from the video that confirms this explicitly by naming the part of the brain(function) that’s affected.
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Watching the video, I was thinking that it’s very much possible that a no-excuses school would cause severe childhood trauma to many of its students.
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My thoughts, exactly. No escape.
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I thought the same thing. The way these no excuses, publicly funded, private sector, autocratic, opaque/secretive, often fraudulent and inferior corporate charter schools treat children will cause permanent damage. These schools have no one watching them to stop abuse. They don’t have to obey any of the laws that came about through the democratic process for almost s century to protect children, and this has created a perfect storm for severe child abuse and trauma.
What kind of parents/guardians do these children have to allow this? What has gone wrong in the United States to allow this to happen?
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I too would like to think Dr. Harris’s talk would persuade the “reformers” of their folly and ignorance. These people have never struck me, however, as respectful of expertise in research and the evidence it produces.
The reformers’ game is ideology, alas, and no amount of scholarship or empirical data will change their minds. My profuse thanks, though, to Nadine Burke Harris for her efforts.
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I don’t believe that the people who profit monetarily will pay much attention to this video. At best I think they want simple solutions that will bring the best bang for the buck off the backs of “the little people”.
But I’m hoping some supporters of the movement who have bought into the propaganda (decades of nothing but in the mainstream media) might pay attention.
I am a public school teacher. I have from 8:00am to 3:00pm to make a difference in my kids’ lives. I do everything I can to do what’s right for them academically, socially, physically, and emotionally.
Then they go home.
Despite all our efforts to reach out to the parents of these kids (and we do reach out), much of what happens at home is beyond our control. I can’t stop the gang warfare that keeps the children inside, away from the violence. Or draws them outside to take part. I can’t force the parents into rehab or make them stop beating their child.
Blaming the teachers is a ploy. It’s a ridiculously simplistic solution to a very large and complex problem.
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The recent conversations and awareness about ACE’s are providing a vocabulary which expresses what many teachers, especially those working with marginalized populations, have long observed in our classrooms. Some kids never seem to catch a break – there’s instability at home, unaddressed and puzzling behavior from both child and adult, untreated mental illness, chronic and debillitating illnesses like asthma or what Latinos refer to a “los nervios”. Add poverty, fear about the status of undocumented family members, parents who don’t speak English well and it’s certainly a toxic mix.
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The “reformers'” cannot directly attack public education on principled grounds (because we happen to live in a democracy where education of “we the people” is an essential public good). And so, in the long term, the more general plan is, first, to “starve the beast”; that is, to make PEd look so bad (bad teachers, bad test outcomes, bad graduation rates, etc.), that privatization sounds like the only alternative–to those who don’t understand what’s going on behind the curtain of self-serving political movements.
The short term came forward in Romney’s 47% speech, and current attempts at voter suppression that are aimed at both black and the poor–a bigger and bigger pool as the middle class empties out in the US. The irony is that their thinking is bad for them too, in the long run. Need i say “Trump followers” whose “reality show” minds cannot recognize the danger looming on the horizon?
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