Nancy Bailey posted this great piece last May, but I missed it then. It remains super-timely.
She writes.
If you’ve ever worried what the future will hold without public schools, watching legislators destroy those schools in Florida and Tennessee this past week was gloomy.
But there they were with smiles in Florida, and a little less jubilant in Tennessee.
These policymakers, who are supposed to represent everyone, seem to take no interest in the research surrounding the importance of democratic public schools and the lack of any evidencesupporting vouchers or charter schools.
There’s not even proof that private and parochial schools are great.
But before those of you who care about kids and public schools get too gloomy, there’s always hope! One just needs to know where to look.
Nancy lists 35 ways that policy makers have dumbed down America.
Feel free to add your own to her list.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great list–abbreviates but encapsulates the whole argument. CBK
LikeLike
The lack of logic and refusal to accept facts are all products of so-called reform. All of these factors Bailey cites show that “reform” is more about private companies gaining access to public money than any civil rights or other ideological argument. The high minded rhetoric is a smokescreen for all the dirty dealing surrounding privatization including busting unions and enhancing segregation.
LikeLike
I posted the article itself, at Oped News, where I write about education in my series. with comments that have links to this site
. The links at Oped are embedded, https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/35-Ways-They-Dumb-Down-Ame-in-General_News-Dumbing-Down-Students_Evidence_Future_Legislators-190919-33.html#comment745307
My comment:
Another way to dumb us down… replace experienced teacher-practitioner of pedagogy, with TFA trained novices. Faced with low test scores in Providence, Central Falls, and other districts, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo wants more teachers from Teach for America, who have only five weeks of training. She is a deep-dyed Corporate Reformer who believes in the magic of privatization by charter schools and inexperienced, ill-trained TFA. This will not end well for the students.
If the experienced professional doctors were removed from the hospitals and replaced with the trained medics who drive the ambulance, the pattens would die.
Knowing how learning takes place, when one faces children.. 30 or more at a time, for ten months, requires a professional who knows what learning LOOKS LIKE and who knows how the brain acquires crital thinking skills.
Over 2 decades– They removed over 300,000 authentic professional teacher-practitioners from the schools around America, in the most egregious way, even as the media they owned blamed teachers for the mess that resulted! The national conversation inthe media became one about ‘teaching,’ not LEARNING! It was their conversation.
They de-funded public schools, began a testing program that blamed teachers for not teaching, and because they knew public schools would fail. Then, the billionaire power-elite corporations, hoodwinked the people in the 15,800 separate school systems in 50 states, as the sold misinformation which they published and which their lobbyists sold. This was not reform.It was deform!
Look at how they are using public money in DC to train the lobbyists to end public schools. Laura Chapman: The New Line on Private Charters as Spelled Out by the D.C. Establishment”article is an example of the relatively new strategy for selling ideas, marketed by Frameworks Institute.org with a focus on inventing stories, and forwarding narratives calculated to distract attention and elicit favorable responses to hidden-from-view power players. Many of the same “philanthropies” who have promoted failed policies for schools in the last two decades are still at it with Dintersmith trying out a refreshed story line.”
I also posted this comment:
The Perfect Storm [Disaster] of Education Reform”by dianeravitch. This is an excellent article about “The Perfect Storm of Education Reform” by three scholars: Sheryl J. Croft, Mari Ann Whitehouse, and Vera Stenhouse. It begins like this: No Child left behind (NCLB), Race to the Top (rt3), and now Common Core embody over a decade of federal and state education reform purport-edly designed to address inequities for global majority and low-income students.
However, these policies have in fact expanded inequities and exacerbated a discourse of failure regarding teachers, public schools, and teacher preparation programs. Consequently, public confidence in teachers, teacher preparation pro- grams, and student performance is at an all-time low.
We contend that current reform initiatives (i.e., high-stakes testing and teacher evaluation from K-12 through higher education) are not, in fact, discrete singular efforts. Instead, they represent a confluence of systematic and orchestrated education reform efforts that are akin to storm fronts. These fronts comprise a perfect storm that is eroding the bedrock of public education in the United States through neoliberal policies.
LikeLike
Thank you, Diane.
LikeLike
For those of us who regularly look at Nancy’s lists, this one is a good exemplar. She always boils things down to a to-do list of real ideas. Thanks for your blog, Nancy
LikeLike
Thank you, Roy.
LikeLike
#36: the “skills”-instead-of-knowledge curriculum is breeding mass ignorance.
LikeLike