Kellyanne Conway told an interviewer that the surveillance of the Trump campaign may have been more extensive than simply tapping telephones. It may have occurred through television sets and even microwaves.
Complaints like this are what you might expect to hear from losers, not winners.
Kellyanne Conway alludes to even wider surveillance of Trump campaign – http://www.northjersey.com
Leonie Haimson explains here the significance–or lack thereof–of the Senate’s decision to kill former Secretary of Education John King’s highly prescriptive regulations to implement the 2015 federal law called Every Student Succeeds Act.
There were some who reacted with joy to see the King regs killed. King was known for his love of high-stakes testing.
Others worried whether the death of the regs meant that the states would be free to ignore the neediest kids because of the withdrawal of federal oversight.
I worked in the U.S. Department of Education for two years. What I learned is there are very few educators who work for ED.
The Feds have two important roles:
1. Supplying extra money for equity purposes
2. Protecting the civil rights of children
The federal government has zero capacity to direct or measure academic quality.
The people who work in the Department of Education are clerks, not educators.
THE ED has no capacity whatever to assure or ascertain quality of education. Very few people who work there have a view about what education is or should be. That is not their job. Most have worked for ED for many years, regardless of which party is in power. They do not express their views. They do their job. They write checks, collect data, review contracts. They can tell you how many students are served in which programs. They can determine how much money is allocated and spent. The Department consists of clerks and bureaucrats. I was there. Nothing has changed. Educators are in schools, not at the U.S. Department of Education.
These days, in the Trumpian era, certain politicians are busy shredding the “social safety net” that sends “our” money to “those people,” who are undeserving.
Sheila Kennedy, a law professor at Indiana University Purdue Indianapolis, says we should rethink what we mean by “social safety net” and who it benefits.
She writes:
A “social safety net,” properly conceived, is the web of institutions and services that benefit all members of a given society while building bonds of community and cross-cultural connection. In this broader understanding, the safety net includes public education, public parks, public transportation and other services and amenities available to and used by citizens of all backgrounds and income categories.
Public education is a prime example. Even granting the challenges—the disproportionate resources available to schools serving richer and poorer neighborhoods, the barriers to learning created by poverty—public schools at their best integrate children from different backgrounds and give poor children tools to escape poverty. Public schools, as Benjamin Barber has written, are constitutive of a public.
Common schools create common cultures, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that attacks on public education have been at least partially motivated by that reality. While supporters of charter schools and voucher programs have promoted them as ways of allowing poor children to escape failing schools, the data suggests that most children—including poor children—are better served by schools that remain part of America’s real social safety net.
This point was recently underscored by Thomas Ratliff, a Republican member of the Texas Board of Education—a board not noted for progressive understandings of the role of education. After setting out the comparative data about costs and outcomes achieved by traditional public schools in Texas and those operating via various “privatization” programs, he concluded
When you hear the unending and unsubstantiated rhetoric about “failing public schools” from those that support vouchers or other “competitive” school models, it is important to have the facts. ISDs aren’t perfect, but they graduate more kids, keep more kids from dropping out and get more kids career and college ready than their politically connected competitors. Any claims to the contrary just simply are not supported by the facts and at the end of the day facts matter because these lives matter.
Recognition that “these lives matter” is the hallmark of a society with a capacious understanding of citizenship—both in the sense of who counts as a citizen, and what constitutes the mutual obligations of citizens to one another.
The actual social safety net is not limited to the (grudging and inadequate) financial assistance given to the most disadvantaged in our society. The true safety net consists of the many institutionalized avenues within which the citizens of a nation encounter each other as civic equals, and benefit from membership in a society built upon the recognition that all their lives matter.
Defining the social safety net that way allows us to see that the portion of our taxes used to assist needy fellow-citizens isn’t “forced charity.” It’s our membership dues.
Alternet’s Steven Rosenfeld interviews Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who is a specialist in the study of fascism and totalitarianism. Professor Snyder finished a boon “ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentith Century,” a week after the election.
The subversion of Dem racy moves fast, Snyder warns:
“Nazi Germany took about a year. Hungary took about two and a half years. Poland got rid of the top-level judiciary within a year. It’s a rough historical guess, but the point is because there is an outside limit, you therefore have to act now. You have to get started early. It’s just very practical advice. It’s the meta-advice of the past: That things slip out of reach for you, psychologically very quickly, and then legally almost as quickly. It’s hard for people to act when they feel other people won’t act. It’s hard for people to act when they feel like they have to break the law to do so. So it is important to get out in front before people face those psychological and legal barriers.”
He adds:
“Democracy only has substance if there’s the rule of law. That is, if people believe that the votes are going to be counted and they are counted. If they believe that there’s a judiciary out there that will make sense of things if there’s some challenge. If there isn’t rule of law, people will be afraid to vote the way they want to vote. They’ll vote for their own safety as opposed to their convictions. So the thing we call democracy depends on the rule of law. And the things we call the rule of law depends upon trust. Law functions 99 percent of the time automatically. It functions because we think it’s out there. And that, in turn, depends on the sense of truth. So there’s a mechanism here. You can get right to heart of the matter if you can convince people that there is no truth. Which is why the stuff that we characterize as post-modern and might dismiss is actually really, really essential.
“The second thing about ‘post-truth is pre-fascism’ is I’m trying to get people’s attention, because that is actually how fascism works. Fascism says, disregard the evidence of your senses, disregard observation, embolden deeds that can’t be proven, don’t have faith in god but have faith in leaders, take part in collective myth of an organic national unity, and so forth. Fascism was precisely about setting the whole Enlightenment aside and then selling what sort of myths emerged. Now those [national] myths are pretty unpredictable, and contingent on different nations and different leaders and so on, but to just set facts aside is actually the fastest catalyst. So that part concerns me a lot.
“Where we’re going? The classic thing to watch out for is the shift from one governing strategy to another. In the U.S. system, the typical governing strategy is you more or less have to follow your constituents with legislation because of the election cycle. That’s one pulse of politics. The other pulse of politics is emergency. There’s some kind of terrorist attack and then the leader tries to suspend basic constitutional rights. And then we get on a different rhythm, where the rhythm is not one electoral cycle to the next but one emergency to the next. That’s how regime changes take place. It’s a classic way since the Reichstag fire [when the Nazis burned their nation’s capitol building and blamed communist arsonists].
“So in terms of what might happen next, or what people could look out for, some kind of event that the government claims is a terrorist incident, would be something to be prepared for. That’s why it’s one of the lessons in the book….
“The things that he might do that some people would like, like building a wall or driving all the immigrants out, those things are going to be difficult or slow. In the case of the wall, I personally don’t believe it will ever happen. It’s going to be very slow. So my suspicion is that it is much easier to have a dramatic negative event, than have a dramatic positive event. That is one of the reasons I am concerned about the Reichstag fire scenario. The other reason is that we are being mentally prepared for it by all the talk about terrorism and by the Muslim ban. Very often when leaders repeat things over and over they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality.”
Snyder says that people don’t realize how quickly the political situation can change, how easily people can accept the unacceptable:
“Let me put it a different way. Except for really dramatic moments, most of the time authoritarianism depends on some kind of cycle involving a popular consent of some form. It really does matter how we behave. The danger is [if] we say, ‘Well, we don’t see how it matters, and so therefore we are going to just table the whole question.’ If we do that, then we start to slide along and start doing the things that the authorities expect of us. Which is why lesson number one is: Don’t obey in advance. You have to set the table differently. You have to say, ‘This is a situation in which I need to think for myself about all of the things that I am going to do and not just punt. Not just wait. Nor just see how things seems to me. Because if you do that, then you change and you actually become part of the regime change toward authoritarianism.'”
Snyder describes the importance of resistance, of refusing to obey, of believing in truth, of being courageous. He also talks about Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros.”
Snyder says:
“There are a few questions here. One is how to keep yourself going. Another is how to energize other people who agree with you. And the third thing is not quite “Rhinoceros” stuff, but how to catch people who are slipping. Like that CNN coverage last week of the speech to Congress, where one of the CNN commentators said, ‘Oh, now this is presidential.’ That was a “Rhinoceros” moment, because there was nothing presidential—it was atrocious to parade the victims of crimes committed by one ethnicity. That was atrocious and there’s nothing presidential about it.
“Catching “Rhinoceros” moments is one thing. I think it’s really important to think about. The example that Ionesco gives is people saying, ‘Yeah, on one hand, with the Jews, maybe they are right.’ With Trump, people will say something like, ‘Yeah, but on taxes, maybe he’s right.’ And the thing to catch is, ‘Yeah, but are you in favor of regime change? Are you in favor of the end of the American way of democracy and fair play?’ Because that’s what’s really at stake.”
David Hornbeck is a veteran education reformer, old-style, meaning he actually has experience running school districts and states. He was superintendent of the Philadelphia schools, state superintendent of Maryland and Kentucky, and led the implementation of KERA (the Kentucky Education Reform Act).
In this post, Hornbeck writes that he once believed that charter schools were “reform,” but he no longer does.
“As Philadelphia’s Superintendent of Schools, I recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools because I thought it would improve educational opportunity for our 215,000 students. The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong.
“Those advocating change in Maryland’s charter law through proposed legislation are equally committed to educational improvement. They are equally wrong. New policy should not build on current inequities and flawed assumptions, as the proposed charter law changes would do.”
I admire people who are willing to listen, Watch, learn, and change their minds. Why did Hornbeck change his mind?
He paid attention to evidence. Imagine that!
On average, charter schools don’t get better academic results than public schools.
Charter funding negatively affects public schools, creating opportunities for a few but inequities for the many. He writes: “Opportunity for the 13,000 charter school students in Baltimore City is in part funded by the loss of opportunity for the remaining 70,000 students without a commensurate performance improvement by charter school students.”
In addition, charters may harm the credit ratings of urban districts by creating inefficiencies: As Moody’s reported, “charter schools pose the greatest credit challenge to school districts in economically weak urban areas and may even affect their credit ratings.”
Contrary to the claims of charter advocates, “States with “stronger” charter laws are not doing better: Advocates say we need a “stronger” charter law, noting that Maryland ranks near the bottom. Pennsylvania’s law is ranked much higher, yet its charter growth is contributing significantly to a funding crisis that includes draconian cuts to teachers, nurses, arts, music and counselors in Philadelphia.”
The changes proposed in Maryland will make it harder to get and keep the best teachers:
“The proposed “stronger” law undermines collective bargaining that protects teachers from politics and favoritism and has been crucial to improvement in compensation and benefits. It would create a two-tiered system in which charter teachers would have to organize and bargain separately with each charter opting out of the larger system’s contract. Unionization is not the problem. There are no unions in many of the nation’s worst educational performing states. All schools, charter or traditional, must pay competitive salaries and benefits to attract experienced, skilled teachers who can succeed with all children.”
Charters do not serve the children with the greatest needs.
If Maryland passes the proposed charter law, it will make the education system incoherent and inefficient.
This is not reform.
Hornbeck describes what real reform is. His short list does not include charters.
In this article, the Washington Post tries to figure out where Steve Bannon has lived for the past three years.
He is now the most powerful advisor to the president. But who is he? Where does he vote? Where is his home? Does he have one?
In a debate about health care, Republican Rep. Shimkus asked why men should pay for prenatal care. Does he think all children are virgin births?
At the start, Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle (Pa.) was talking with Republican Rep. John Shimkus (Ill.) about Shimkus’s objections to the Affordable Care Act’s requirements for health-insurance plans. As a reminder, former president Barack Obama’s signature 2010 health-care law ordered that all health plans cover certain essential health benefits, such as doctor visits, hospital care and prescription drugs. The law also required plans to cover pregnancy and childbirth. That’s where the fireworks started in the Energy and Commerce Committee. “What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with?” Doyle asked Shimkus, using the formal parlance of congressional committees. “What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus said. At that point, one could hear the room start to stir. “I’m just . . . is that not correct?” Shimkus said. “And should they?”
Do women get pregnant all by themselves? Should they get prenatal care if they are carrying male babies?
This has hints of the school choice debate. Everyone pays for public schools, even if they don’t have children. Public schools are a public responsibility. When a state diverts funding to private and religious schools, it diminishes the funding for public schools. It also encourages the belief that individuals are responsible only for the services they personally need or use. Why should you pay to educate other people’s children? It is an investment in our society.
John Kuhn is an eloquent, wise superintendent in Texas who spreads truth to power.
In this address to the Association of Texas Professional Educators, he warned that the very existence of public education was under fire by a coalition of the rich and the greedy.
He is so brilliant, so eloquent, and so on target that it is hard to excerpt his speech. I urge you to read it in full. If you know anyone in Texas, share it. Send it to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the politician who wants to monetize and privatize the state’s underfunded public schools. That’s his game. That’s his shame. Be sure to tweet JOHN Kuhn’s speech to Dan Patrick @DanPatrick and @LtGovTX
Kuhn says:
“It all really comes down to vouchers. This has been the end-game the whole time. Going back through the decades from TABS to TEAMS to TAAS to TAKS to STAAR [the acronyms for successive state tests], it was never about assessing student learning. It was always about smearing teachers and manufacturing a crisis. Vouchers were always a solution in search of a problem, and the test-and-punish industrial complex arose to create that problem. In reality, testing has always shown us the same thing, always. Well-off and middle class American public school students academically outperform kids from private schools and kids from other nations, when matched socioeconomically. And poor American kids outperform poor kids in those other countries and in private schools, when matched socioeconomically. It is only when you lump all the kids together–because we have so many more poor kids testing than they systems they compare us to–that American public school results look bad. It is a trick. We don’t have an educational problem. We have a social inequality problem that politicians and privatizers dress up as an educational problem. And this statistical sleight of hand, this deliberate misdirection has one goal: to justify the need for vouchers and the dismantling of public education as a state responsibility.
“The voucher movement is about money and adult interests. It isn’t about children. It’s not even mostly about parents who want a discount on their private school tuition; it’s mostly about the interests of other adults, very wealthy adults. It’s about the interests of tycoons and political players who are funding school voucher campaigns across our state and nation not because they want to improve schools, but because they want to engineer a cheaper education so their property taxes will go down. They want to hobble teachers’ unions and reduce wages and benefits. And on top of cheapening a system that already has one of the lowest levels of per pupil spending in the nation, Texas privatizers also want to make money on theback end, they want a piece of the education pie, which billionaire school choice advocate Rupert Murdoch said was a $500 billion dollar industry just waiting to be “transformed.” He meant to say hijacked.
“They don’t really want a piece of the education pie. They want the whole thing. They want to convert a public good into a private enterprise. They want to take this public education system that was created by wiser and more selfless people long ago as a public trust, that belongs to the people—controlled by voters engaged in the Democratic process, free to attend, and open to all children—this is the vision of public education as we know it, and this is what is facing an existential threat….
Texas voters and Texas lawmakers have rejected vouchers over and over again. But the voucher lobby cynically repackages the idea under new and confusing names. Let’s call vouchers Opportunity Scholarships. The voters figured that out, time to change the name. Let’s call them Education Savings Accounts. Let’s call them School Choice. Let’s rebrand them over and over until everyone is thoroughly confused and don’t realize they’re voting for vouchers. The Dallas Morning News had a better term for vouchers in a recent headline: “Private School Vouchers are the Fool’s Gold of Better Education.”
Fool’s gold. Pyrite. A worthless material that is just shiny enough to trick the uninformed into believing that it has value. That’s exactly what vouchers are, even if you call them something else. And why would you call them something else? Why would voucher advocates feel the need to trick people by re-branding their pet policy?
Maybe it’s because vouchers are a terrible idea. Maybe they change the name because the research is in, and it’s clear: vouchers just don’t work. In fact, research shows unequivocally that vouchers don’t just fail to make student achievement better; they actually make student achievement demonstrably worse. Vouchers aren’t the civil rights movement of our time; they’re the civil wrongs movement of our time, hurting the children they pretend to help. Three different research studies published recently have found that voucher programs harm student learning—including one study sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation and the Fordham Institute, both proponents of vouchers. Students who use vouchers underperform their matched peers who stay in public schools.
You heard me right. I’m not just saying that vouchers don’t help very much. I’m saying voucher programs result in students learning less than if the voucher programs didn’t exist. Giving a student a voucher to improve his education is like giving a struggling swimmer a boulder to help him swim. The Walton Foundation study said: “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.” A study of the voucher program in Louisiana found very negative results in both reading and math. Kids who started the voucher program at the 50th percentile in math dropped to the 26th percentile in a single year. Vouchers are so harmful to children that a Harvard professor called their negative effect “as large as any I’ve seen in the literature.”
Vouchers should come with a surgeon general’s warning like cigarettes. The third study was of a voucher program involving over 10,000 students in Indiana—where our vice president was governor—and it found this: “In mathematics, voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement” and show no improvement in reading. Vouchers are not only not helpful—they’re harmful. And they are not only harmful—they are more harmful than any other educational initiative Harvard researchers have ever seen. They are the educational equivalent of smoking cigarettes to treat lung disease. And the voucher lobby treats research exactly like the tobacco lobby does, by paying think tanks to generate copious amounts of pseudo-science and internet content to try and generate support for the harmful ideology behind their business venture.
In the face of this data showing indisputably that vouchers make things worse for struggling students, why then are vouchers still the big focus this session from so many Texas and Washington political insiders? It’s simple really, and sad. It’s because the voucher push isn’t about student performance at all. That isn’t what this is about. It’s about money in the pockets of adults. Vouchers are not, never were, and never will be about kids….
So I ask what is worse? A government in 1836 so blind to the needs of its citizens that it failed to create a system of public education, or a government in 2017 so deeply held hostage by cronyism and corruption that it is actively, session after session, year after year, trying to dismantle a system of public education that has already been created, a system that was built by the treasure and efforts of many selfless generations of Texas taxpayers and teachers, a system that has expanded since 1836 to cover every square inch of the state, to educate every Texas child who wants to be educated, for free, children of every race and color and creed, regardless of ability or disability, regardless of which side of the tracks they were born on, regardless of their home language or any other personal characteristic. Public schools are for the children. Vouchers are for cronies and conmen. When rich elites refuse to invest in the education of the children of the poor, they sow seeds of disenchantment that eventaually unravel the social fabric. They don’t realize what a dangerous game they play.
The public education movement was and is and will always be about the interests of poor and middle class children and families who see education as their path to a more prosperous future. The voucher movement is about funneling tax dollars to schools that have the right to exclude kids that don’t fit their mold. Voucher schools will have academic entry requirements to keep out the riff raff. Voucher schools will have behavior contracts to keep out the riff raff. Voucher schools will have parent volunteering requirements to keep out the riff raff. The voucher schools will have fees for extracurricular activities, fees for books, fees for uniforms, fees to keep out the riff raff.
But they aren’t riff raff. They’re children, and they are all welcome in our public schools.
The voucher movement rests on a foundational lie that the free market will sort good schools from bad when parents choose. But this is smoke and mirrors, because they have no intention for the marketplace of schools to be truly free. The voucher movement wants to create a system in which public schools give STAAR tests—lots of STAAR tests—but the voucher schools give none. That’s not a free market. That’s the government picking winners and losers. And the voucher movement wants public schools graded with A-F grades based on those STAAR tests, but it doesn’t want the voucher schools graded on the same A-F scale, because A-F grades for schools are based on the STAAR TESTS that voucher schools will never ever be required to give. School vouchers are not a free market, they are the government picking winners and losers and guaranteeing that the winners will be private schools that are exempt from the crushing bureaucratic regulations that our state and federal governments have heaped upon the state’s public schools for decades.
It is a cynical ploy, a corrupt, self-serving campaign. Vouchers are not about children, they are 100% about adult interests.
And school choice is not really about giving students their choice of schools. The best private schools cost over $20,000 per year in tuition. The state is talking about giving out $5000 vouchers. That won’t get poor kids into leafy green academies, it will get them into pop-up franchises that some of the voucher lobby’s largest donors are going to launch all over the state. It will get them into online for-profit schools where one teacher at a computer will “teach” 400 kids clicking through modules online, and we will all pretend this is an education, that this clicking through modules is preparing those kids to be engaged, civically-minded, well-rounded citizens.
I’m just going to say that a real education should look a lot like real life, with flesh and blood encounters with teachers and classmates, face-to-face interactions with diverse friends and neighbors, conflicts and shared lunches, recesses and sports teams, student councils and class officers and mums and bonfires, parades down main street led by the band, and news clippings in the gas station about a buzzer-beater win. Letter jackets and class rings, kissing in the stairwell, loud stereos in the parking lot and quiet tears in the counselor’s office. This is the hum and rattle of community, the pulse, the heartbeat of our neighborhoods, this is public school.
Public schools are about the children. Public schools mold the future when they educate our kids, and they always have. When our politicians brag about how great Texas is and how strong the economy is, remind them that it was public school teachers, not politicians, who built Texas, and we built it by educating 95% of the students in this state.
Alex Molnar, research professor and publications director at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, writes here about the privatization movement and its sustained attack on public education.
He writes:
Today, politicians in thrall to neoliberal ideology seek to subordinate the democratic mission of public education to a theory of market-driven economic development and social organization. Policy deliberations are now dominated by of econometric modeling and production function research. This modeling and research is often used, inappropriately, to make decisions about the value of education reforms. The mathematical models used by researchers are made to “work” only by assuming away much of the real world in which people live and students learn. The phantasmagorical belief in neutral “scientific” expertise as the primary basis for policymaking has, therefore, profoundly antihuman as well as antidemocratic implications — a topic Sheila Dow takes up in “People Have Had Enough of Experts.”[5]
The major education reforms of the past 35 years — education vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and education savings accounts — all seek to remove public schools from the control of elected bodies; to subject them to the “laws” of the “market”; and to put them at the service of the economic elite. The world being called into existence is based on the belief that anyone, but not everyone, can succeed—a world of winners and losers, each of whom has earned his or her fate.
Of course, if the privatizers actually believed in science or evidence, they would have already abandoned vouchers, which has no research to support it, and whose results have been shown in some places to actually harm students. In effect, students are given a low-cost voucher to spend in a school where teachers are usually uncertified and the curriculum is based on 19th century ideas that have been long disproven. It is ideology, not science, that drives the voucher movement, and its wicked stepsisters, tax credits and education savings accounts.
Those who believe in evidence would also demand transparency and accountability from privately managed charter schools, which in many states are excused from such inconveniences and use their freedom to kick out and exclude students they don’t want.
Molnar examines the policies of the past 25 years and their neglect of the lives of people affected by them.
He writes:
Over the past two and a half decades, the poor in privatized urban schools have been successfully harnessed to the delivery of reliable profits to investors and munificent salaries to executives. At the same time, the working class has discovered that schools in their communities often cost more than they can afford to pay. The decades of wage stagnation, unemployment, and tax shifting have taken their toll. Teachers and the unions that had won them the relatively high wages, job security, and benefits that are a distant memory for many blue collar workers became a useful target for the ideologues and politicians pursuing neoliberal reforms.
The neoliberal argument is that public schools cost too much (the largest item in a school budget is for teacher salaries) and performed too poorly to justify the tax dollars they commanded. If “star” teachers could be freed from the union wage scale to earn what they were worth, the resulting competition would create incentives for better teacher performance. Mediocre teachers would earn less, and low performing teachers would be fired. The mechanism proposed for measuring teacher performance was assessing the performance of their students on standardized tests. So began the policy embrace of “Value Added Assessment” (VAA). In the kind of methodologically sophisticated, intellectually fatuous study that has become all too common, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff claim to have found long-term economic benefits for students whose teachers have higher “value added” scores.[22]
This is a valuable overview of the recent past, the present, and the likely future. Unless we fight back hard.
Reformers have grand ideas for shaking up the system. Blowing it up. Changing everything. Blowing up teacher education. Imposing national standards overnight. Turning schools into teacher-proof institutions. Teaching children the habits of highly effective scholars (age 7).
But, writes David Greene and Bernie Heller, teachers understand that real change is not in the Big Things. Real change happens because of “the process of little things.”
The reform of education is focused on the big changes as opposed to understanding that change is a step by step process. The educrats are playing for the big moment, yet they fil to understand that they can’t pull big moments out of thin air, consequently, their “big moments” exist in vacuums, totally disconnected and disembodied from reality.
From teaching students to be better writers, better students and better thinkers, to mentoring teachers to be better at teaching, to helping players to become better hitters or shooters, it was and is always about starting at step one and moving forward, step by step.
The reformers and the experts want to be able to say they did big things, that they changed everything, the only problem is, you can’t start out “big” – you have to start with the little things, and string them all together.
Are there poor teachers? Of course there are. There were bad teachers when I went to school, there were bad teachers when you went to school. If I were to ask you how many good or great teachers you had all the way through your college career, how many would you be able to list? I’d guess three or four- if you were lucky. Despite that fact, you are still successful today, you still survived. Good and great teachers don’t grow on trees and they are not “developed” or created in special teaching programs or institutes.
Good or great teachers grow and develop through experience and experience takes time and patience. Step by step. Slowly, based on little things strung together. When you marry that time and patience to extraordinary passion, you have a good or great teacher. Perhaps that is why there are so very few of them….
Reformers are impatient. It is good to be impatient. But it is even better to understand the consequences of what you propose and preferably to live with them.
Making education work is NOT as hard and as complicated as it is being made out to be. Education used to be about asking students to reach a little further than they would be comfortable reaching for on their own. It used to be about making sure that when a student received a passing grade, it was clear that grade honestly represented a percentage that symbolized that he/she had completed in that class as opposed to that grade representing a percentage identifying a teacher as competent or incompetent- it still is. It used to be about how graduation symbolized the preparation to move forward as opposed to an empty symbol that “proves” the reform being enacted is valid and viable.
The truth is that long before common core learning ever occurred, there was learning and that learning produced the computer, iTunes, iPhones, innumerable apps, Kindle, space travel, HIV medicines, etc., etc. The truth is we must look to what has always worked- not just for a year or two, or until it could make some corporation or hedge fund a profit- but what has been true about education since Socrates and Aristotle- that education must be respected, and not simply treated as some political exclamation point inserted into some campaign speech, that everyone must see and recognize its value.
We must return to the idea that learning is extremely dependent on the desire or curiosity of the learner to want to go further, to want to know more, to challenge him/herself. We need to stop “looking for the next magic bullet” or the “next big thing”.
I suppose the reformers mean well, (but like they say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”). The fact of the matter is that just because they mean well doesn’t mean what they are doing is right, just as simply because people disagree with what the reformers are doing doesn’t make those who disagree the anti-education or anti-student devil.
As former public school students and an educators with close to four decades of experience, we know the value of education. We know schools matter in students’ lives. We know education is the great equalizer, and we know PUBLIC schools work. They are not perfect- they never were. Nothing is. We also know that many public schools work quite well, and that those labeled as dysfunctional or failing can again. The people criticizing and castigating them must put in the same amount of energy and effort and enthusiasm in looking at all thelittel steps necedssary in fixing them as they spend trying to shut them down.
Stop looking at the next big thing and look at the elephant in the room: The process of little things.
