We learned from Eva Moskowitz that some of the five year old students in her schools are so violent that they throw chairs and must be expelled post haste.
Now Peter Greene has discovered a code of conduct for five year olds that grades them in accordance with their readiness to comply and conform. Those that don’t are anarchists. Really.
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/08/those-damn-five-year-old-anarchists.html?m=1
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Anyone that attended this guy’s workshop should ask for a refund. We already have politics everywhere in our society, and now we should see headstrong a five year old an anarchist?
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AMEN, retired teacher!
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People are rightly appalled by this oppressive approach to discipline and behavior control. I’m seeing at the end of Peter’s post that the superintendent is troubled that this system was planned for this school, and that the parents are seeing these posters and language without context. Well, yes, that is a problem. But is it too much to ask, what about the kids? They are having a meeting tonight because teachers and parents did not have a chance to weigh in. What about the kids? Do the participants in a democracy not have the opportunity—the responsibility, really—to participate in the development of the laws of their community?
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More disorder in the universe.
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Aaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhhh! That’s horrible. Some children live up to the labels that are placed on them. What a mess!
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Did anyone read Robert Pondiscio’s replies on that post? Recall that this is the same Robert Pondiscio who doesn’t have a problem with charter schools only being for the children the charter identifies as a “striver” (short for “kid will get good test scores and we’ll treat him well and make his parents feel happy and we don’t have to hire experienced teachers or specialists”).
Pondiscio says: “Nearly every interpersonal transaction that occurs in a place called a school is freighted with norms and values. And none of us have the right to impose our own. And increasingly, the presumption of “community norms” is precisely that–presumption. No school will ever be in complete alignment with a family’s values in a diverse (and divided) nation. This can only be resolved by letting families choose.”
Pondiscio just gave the very rationale that segregationists in the south gave for why they should be allowed to force taxpayers to pay for their schools for white Christian families and their very special “values”.
Pondiscio seems to have a bit of amnesia about the difference between public schools and taxpayer funded private schools (including charters) that target for removal all children who they decide don’t share their “values” . “Values” is the code word Pondiscio and company use to justify their nasty policies. After all, the huge number of supposedly “violent” 5 year olds and their parents and the kids that won’t do well on state tests obviously don’t share the “values” of a school that despises them for their inability to learn easily. If those kids shared Pondiscio’s values, they’d learn a lot quicker and perform a lot better on tests! That’s how he knows they don’t share his values!
Private and charter schools don’t have to worry about the students who don’t share their “values” because they excel at quickly identifying them — sometimes in the first few days of schools! And once they are identified and targeted for removal due to their “unshared values”, those schools then absolve themselves of all responsibility. Forever. That is why they are PRIVATE. Pondiscio has forgotten what “public” means – he thinks “public” means that taxpayers underwrite schools with whatever exclusive policies they want to have because they have board members who are politically connected and very rich.
Public schools are responsible for ALL children — even the ones who don’t share their “values”. Pondiscio has forgotten that in his haste to embrace the vision that the very rich people who pay his salary want for America.
Pondiscio represents the new America in which only the fittest and most worthy children and the fittest and most worthy Americans are rewarded with government largesse — with the richest Americans given that special privilege of identifying who is worthy and who is not, because being rich means you have that special brilliance that allows you to do so. And since you don’t want to pay taxes to support unworthy children’s public schools and unworthy Americans health insurance because they don’t share your “values” (as Pondiscio so aptly puts it), they have the justification for letting them rot. After all, the rich people are paying their fair share to help all the kids they deem worthy and why should they spend a penny on the others?
What an ugly view of America Pondiscio wants us to embrace.
In that Pondiscio represents the values of Donald Trump exactly and it is not surprising that his livelihood is dependent on lots of rich right wing billionaires who underwrite his organization and direct their foundations’ money to pay for his anti-American posts in which we only care for the Americans who are worthy of caring about (based on our “values”)
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“Oh– and before someone pipes up with, “But you public ed defenders hate accountability,” let me just say for the sixty gazillionth time, no, we don’t. That’s a story that reformsters tell themselves to explain why we’ve been so resistant to so many terrible accountability ideas. We are actually big fans of accountability; what we are not fans of are crappy measures based on imaginary data and fried baloney equations and counter-factual assumptions and just generally crap no more valid than bouncing a seven-sided die off the warts on the back of a one-legged horny toad under a full moon.”
That’s why I love Peter Greene.
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