Steven Singer says that anyone in search of understanding education today should turn to teacher-written blogs, not the corporate media. The teachers know what they are talking about. The corporate media, with a few exceptions, recycles the talking points of their corporate owners.
He begins by explaining that everyone has a perspective, even though they seem to be objective:
“Let’s get one thing straight right from the get go: I am biased.
“But so are you.
“So are the parents, students, principals and school directors. So are the policymakers, the corporate donors and professional journalists.
“Everyone involved in education policy is interested in one side or another of the debate. It’s just that some pretend to practice a kind of objectivity while others are open about their partiality.
“It’s unavoidable. I’m a public school teacher. Not merely someone who’s taught in a public school for a few years – I’m an educator with more than 15 years experience in the classroom. And I’m still there.
“I’m not a Teach for America recruit who committed myself to three years in front of children after a few weeks crash course. Where I am now was my goal in the first place. I’m not doing this to get the credentials for my real dream job, being an education policy advisor for a Congressperson or Senator. Nor do I plan to become a Superintendent, Principal or school administrator someday.
“All along, my goal was to have a classroom of my own where I could help children learn.
“Moreover, I’m a public school parent. My daughter goes to the same public school my wife and I both attended as children. We could have sent her to a charter or private school. But we made the conscious choice not to, and we’ve never regretted it.
“Our local district serves a mostly high poverty population. More than half of the students are minorities. The facilities aren’t as up to date as you’ll find in richer neighborhoods. Class sizes are too large. But we decided that being a part of the community school was important, and much of what my child has learned there simply isn’t taught at schools where everyone is the same.
“So when you read one of my blogs (even this one), it comes from a certain point of view. And I’m okay with that. You should be, too.
“However, when you read an article in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Pittsburgh Tribune Review, there is a presumption of detachment and neutrality. But it’s bogus.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Listen to Singer. He’s right. Love his blogs.
There is so much truth in these remarks…thanks!!!
Diane Singer says: “Let’s get one thing straight right from the get go: I am biased. But so are you.”
Biased is one thing, but informed or misinformed is another. Ideas of objectivity as having a blank slate (without being informed) are a fictional rehash of the faulty “scientific” view that seeing and knowing are equivalent (they are not). The point of being honest and informed is to know for yourself which “background” questions have already been settled in your own mind and being willing to “air” them openly. For the Koch brothers (and many others), for instance, they already are settled about democracy and public education and are doing everything they can to destroy that 200+year relationship. In that sense, they are “biased.” But the term is really outdated wherever it is applied, e.g., “teachers are biased” is really a misnomer.
“The point of being honest and informed . . . ”
Or what Comte-Sponville describes as a “fidelity to truth” attitude.
I don’t think there would be any debate at all without the teacher bloggers.
Listen to a congressional hearing sometime on education. It’s depressing. They all sound the same- you could put whole phrases in a Duncan or DeVos speech and no one would notice.
Republicans state their broad ideological goals and then Democrats propose technocratic “solutions” which end up reaching Republican’s broad ideological goals, but it’s all the same.
In a weird way Democrats have accepted a lesser role- like they’re the mechanics or the production people and conservative lawmakers are the shift supervisor and CEO’s.
They spent last month fixing “the skills gap”. The skills gap is an economic theory, one of many. They don’t even debate if these things exist. They don’t care. One Party says “skills gap is the problem!” and the other Party says “okay! we’ll fix it!”
“The Brain Gap”
The brain gap’s very real
And Congress is the proof
The gap has broad appeal
In Congress, it’s the truth!
Here’s something Betsy DeVos won’t mention:
“And its especially noticeable in private schools, where the rate of inflation was about three times higher than in public schools.”
Private schools have more grade inflation than public schools. If it’s “grade inflation”- I would need more than a study by the people who sell the SAT, frankly 🙂
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly-half-hs-seniors-graduate-average/485787001/
I always wonder why the K-12 teachers are assumed to be wrong on grades. Isn’t it just as likely colleges could be wrong placing students into remedial courses? Arguably more likely, I would say, since they’re basing the whole placement on a cheap standardized test.
Wouldn’t that be a hoot? 20 years of ed reform dogma based on looking in the wrong place.
” Isn’t it just as likely colleges could be wrong placing students into remedial courses?”
And not only because of placement via cheap stzd test. Also because colleges make more tuition & fees on remedial students, who have to stay on longer to make up time lost to no-credit courses. And remedial courses, now that they are ensconced & SOP, are a money-making sideline which tends by inertia to perpetuate itself, even as evidence mounts that it may be counter-productive.
Our individual bias is one of the reasons justice is never blind and why there is a glass ceiling for women. It is the reason thousands of rape kits sit on shelves waiting to be tested, and why the victim’s clothing is on trial in a rape case. It is also one of the reasons that many more minority drivers are stopped for driving an expensive car, failure to use a turn signal or for making a rolling stop. It is also why our justice system hands down harsher sentences to minorities. It is entertaining to watch Supreme Court hearings in which the prospective candidate claims to be impartial, but once in office generally votes as expected. We all carry a certain amount of bias.
Diane, on a somewhat related topic, would love your take on the following Education Week article:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/07/19/for-schools-improvement-demographics-arent-destiny.html
Truth or corporate media?
Also, for fans of AP courses and all that goes with them, I would like to call to everyone’s attention a new book on the Palo Alto Gunn High School suicide cluster that I wrote about in my blog:
Regarding AP: the people who need to get the word are the people who run universities. The day universities wake up and say “no more AP credit” is the day the house of cards falls down. Some universities, to their credit, have or are in the process of reducing the impact of AP. But I just visited University of Illinois School of Engineering with my oldest daughter and we were told, quite clearly, that if you think you’re getting in, you’d best be taking AP. I imagine U of I is not alone in that regard.
My thoughts exactly, dienne77!
The universities to which my daughter applied all discounted scores from 5 for an AP “A” down to a 4 and recalculated GPA. And that was 10 years ago.
Dienne
I agree that colleges need to change their tune, but not just on AP.
They have pretty much created the current pressure cooker situation that high school students find themselves in.
All the emphasis on AP and excellerated courses is totally unnecessary.
And regarding engineering (and science) specifically.
Several of the best engineers I have known never even took calculus until they got to college and they did fine.
You actually learn calculus much better if you are simultaneously taking courses (like physics) in which you can apply it. Otherwise, you are just memorizing a bunch of stuff that seems to have little or no relation to the real world.
Colleges have created unnecessary pressure not just with their emphasis on AP but also with their emphasis on SAT, ACT and all the other crap tests.
It’s actually very ironic that our colleges and universities are supposed to be places where conclusions are based on evidence, but their whole admissions process is pretty much based on hearsay from College Board.
P.S. – Regarding the book, Strange Contagion, I live on the San Francisco peninsula and our local public high school has also lost three students to suicide over the last few years. As the details are always hushed up, one often has nothing other than hearsay to go on as to possible causes. In our local cases, I doubt that AP classes were the predominant factors though.
I was certified (what a joke of a process that was, basically a how to teach to the test seminar for 3 grad credit hours, even more of a joke) to teach AP Spanish. I refused to do so.
Yep. They might be catching on. A reporter called me recently about the abysmal reporting on the Los Angeles school board elections–after they were over.