When Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, he touted the idea that every student should be college ready. There has been considerable debate about which was Arne’s most memorable utterance. Some say it was his claim that Hurricane Katrina “was the best thing that ever happened to the schools of New Orleans,” despite the deaths of over 1,000 people. Others think it was his crack that the reason suburban moms hated Common Core was because it showed that their child was “not as brilliant” as they thought. The Common Core, he believed, was the key to “College and Career” readiness, and it was never to soon to start.
My favorite line is his statement when he visited a New York City public elementary school and said, “I want to be able to look into the eyes of a second-grader and know that he was on track to go to college.” It seemed to me that the typical second grader would have more immediate concerns and dreams (a cowboy? A fireman? An astronaut? A doctor? A prince or princess?).
Our blog poet, SomeDAM Poet, wrote here:
College Ready in Kindergarten
College Ready in Kindergarten
Bachelor’s in First
PhD in Second grade
A life that’s well rehearsed
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And let’s not forget his put-down
And set off the alarm
About the test-induced hysterics
Of every soccer mom.
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Glad to see another joining the ranks of Poets of the Resistance!
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A life that’s well rehearsed
A “fit” if you will, for those that choose to spend their life institutionalized…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“You can define a FREE person precisely as someone whose fate is not
centrally or directly dependent on his (institutional) peer assement. IOW,
people are free only if they DON’T have to worry about the (institutional)
opinions of their putative peers…
Channeling Illich (1971):
Under the authoritative eye of the (institution), several orders of value
collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality and
personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each
transgression is made to be felt as a multiple case. The offender is
expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved
immorally, and that he has let himself down ( p32).
Mandatory institutions prepare for the alienated institutionalization of life by
teaching the need to be institutionalized. Once this lesson is learned, people
lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find
relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises
which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional
definition…
Channeling Wilson:
The acceptance of institutionalization (classifications and exclusions),
both by those who apply them and those who are their recipients, are dependent on the
precision and truth of the institutionalized standards. Without these qualities the whole examination
exercise becomes exposed as a political ploy to order and control, to reward and
exclude, to hold in place vast structures of inequity. In short, it becomes exposed as a
hatchet job.
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Students are not trains that need to be on a “track” in early elementary school. Students mature at different rates. Some students that struggle in elementary school do very well later on. Some bright early elementary students fall apart academically later. Let’s stop trying to program students. Let’s provide them with a comprehensive program that allows them to develop with options for their futures. Let’s turn education over to educators, and stop billionaires from imposing their agenda on students and schools.
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“Some bright early elementary students fall apart academically later”
Indeed, I have seen elementary school budding Einstein’s who ended up on skid row in 7th grade.
I don’t believe we should draw definitive conclusions about kids’ potential until at least 7th grade.
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The harshest punishment brought by testing is that children who test well are then often then pushed ruthlessly into specific “college ready” academic courses, while music, art, and gym are removed. No wonder so many who test high at a young age give up on school.
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Yes, “let’s stop trying to program students” because the human brain is a great deal more complex than a microchip. The two are not even similar. Don’t get me started. …Too late. The highly evolutionarily advanced prefrontal cortex doesn’t even begin to develop until about age 14. Does a microchip have a prefrontal cortex? Does it have an amygdala? A hypothalamus? If a human being has a limb amputated in an accident, the phantom sensations of the missing limb migrate from one part of the cortex to another because the brain has plasticity. Do microchips have that?
It is so ridiculously dumb to assume that human neurological development takes place on a linear trajectory. So dumb. We wind up telling seven year-olds to choose a college and a profession, when they don’t even understand what high school is, what the “future” is. Technophiles pretending to be neurologists. Stupidity.
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The computer “scientists” (who are not real scientists or even engineers, but technicians) pretend to know everything about everything.
They have glommed onto science with the name to gain credibility.
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The other group that pretends to have a misplaced sense of superiority: economists.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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SDP:
Nice meter
Clever Rhyme
focus on the poignant
Almost every time.
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Elegant.
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Well said, Roy!
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Something is missing here. The bit about College-Ready in kindergarten is ok but you forgot about Career-Ready beginning in Kindergarten.
For some time people advancing these memes as if aims of education could not make up their minds about whether to propose “college AND career” versus the alternative “college OR career” (with military service an option. Early work that became the common core said that there was no read distinction. Any worthy career required some college.
That was before Jobs for America began throwing money at schools and corporate America was on the move to get employable kids who have mastered their curriculum, earning “sackable” credentials in some cases. Here ia an excellent discussion. It came to my attention from a website called Naked Capitalism.
How Corporations Are Forcing Their Way Into America’s Public Schools
Posted on February 11, 2020, by Yves Smith Yves here. Yet another illustration of the ongoing effort to repurpose schools solely for workplace skills and not, say, being a citizen. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/02/how-corporations-are-forcing-their-way-into-americas-public-schools.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
By Jeff Bryant, a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm. Produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
In the expanding effort to privatize the nation’s public education system, an ominous, less-understood strain of the movement is the corporate influence in Career and Technical Education (CTE) that is shaping the K-12 curriculum in local communities.
An apt case study of the growing corporate influence behind CTE is in Virginia, where many parents, teachers and local officials are worried that major corporations including Amazon, Ford and Cisco—rather than educators and local, democratic governance—are deciding what students learn in local schools. ( I have removed links to the specific programs of Amazon, Ford, and Cisco).
CTE is a rebranding of what has been traditionally called vocational education or voc-ed, the practice of teaching career and workplace skills in an academic setting. While years ago, that may have included courses in woodworking, auto mechanics, or cosmetology, the new, improved version of CTE has greatly expanded course offerings to many more “high-demand” careers, especially in fields that require knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
If you can, read the rest. I know that at least one Cincinnati Public school is in the orbit of the retired Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands one of the world’s largest restaurant companies with over 45,000 restaurants in more than 135 countries and territories. Some of us are trying to determine why he was seeking the names of teachers at this school.
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And yet, time and time again, the Obama/Duncan duo continues to get a pass!
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They got and get no pass here, I can assure you of that.
“The Maestro”
Chetty picked his VAMdolin
At Nobel-chasing speed
Duncan played the basket rim
And Rhee, she played the rheed
Coleman played his Core-o-net
Moskowitz, the lyre
Billy Gates played tête-à-tête
With Duncan and with higher
Sanders beat his cattle drum
Devalue Added Model
Pseudo-science weighted sum
Mathturbated twaddle
John King played the slide VAMbone
But Maestro was Obama
Who hired the band and set the tone
For Betsy’s grizzly drama
(William Sanders, an economist, applied his
“cattle growth model” to students to create VAM for teacher evaluation . Brilliant, no?)
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Fan-Dam-tastic
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