Board Of Education Campaign Errata

The Ashford Democrats have sent a mailer around that contains a piece of information that is untrue.

Under my credentials the claim is made that I was a"teacher of the year". I never was a teacher of the year nor have I personally made such a claim.

The error is simply a matter of campaign literature that went without a thorough proof-reading. I take full responsibility.

My guess is that in a conversation I said that I "taught high school for one year" was later transcribed that I had been a teacher OF the year.

So, I ask forgiveness of those who may believe this is intentional deceit - certainly I'm not perfect and believing any politician is lying is understandable.

For those who are more understanding of the situation I want to reassure them that I would have loved to be a Teacher of the Year - it's a noble honor and something a lot harder to achieve than running for office and getting elected.

Shamelessly Flogging Public Education

Thomas Friedman's latest op-ed piece called The New Untouchables seems synchronized to reinforce the disinformation being propagated nationwide by Business and Industry Associations across the country.

Friedman's thesis is summarized by someone he quotes;

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor.

Along the way Friedman intimates that there's some truth in the idea that "our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession."

And if that weren't enough, Friedman claims;

"A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education."

Friedman's intellectual sin is in his editorial hypocrisy and absence of even the effort to present proof for his assertions. In lecturing his readers about the virtues of imagination and critical thinking, and the dangers of just showing up, Friedman exercises no critical examination of the tired and dreary lies about education that are lorem ipsum filler for such knee-jerk and pedestrian "observations".

What this column represents is a false entanglement of many complex and nuanced social issues, all of which are claimed to the causal effect of [American public] education. If he were a student, his paper would fail based on faulty logic. Let's examine his ideas.

First, is education responsible for the "the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness". Friedman gleefully assumes so. He ignores cheap labor, international job piracy, indiscriminate business practices in foreign labor markets, child, slave, and prison labor, totalitarian working conditions, subsistence living conditions, ecological and social malfeasance, and so on. None of that seems to matter to Friedman.

Friedman's concept of the New Untouchable is a blend of Ayn Rand super-global-person and self-sufficient, perpetually sustaining futurist.

Yet everyone with a brain and an ounce of real world work experience knows that TF's claim that the people "who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained" is wholesale fiction. The people being retained are often refereed to as sheeple - docile, compliant, safe players clinging to safe jobs by their fingernails - the go-along gang.

The finest reflection of what corporation value in workers is already codified and ruthlessly enforced as public school curricula. No Child Left Behind has everything to do with absolute compliance of students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Deviate or perish.

Go to any corporate function where the authority figures ask for questions about policy, goals, or corporate objectives. The only hands raised are to ask the Pollyanna questions.

"Is it okay if we jump higher than you ask?"

Will the cafeteria be open for those of us who work weekends?

It is not the educated, intelligent, or creative who are usually retained - it is the clever, devious, ingrown, and ruthless who do. Confusing one for the other is an disservice to the former and undeserved by the latter.

Friedman's untouchables don't exist except as a romantic, fictional entity who, if they existed, would be first fired, last hired, and marginalized. Not even IBM promotes the concept of "Think" anymore.

And Friedman libels those who are unemployed by characterizing the victims of down-sizing and economic deflation as worthless slackers waiting for work to be handed to them.

Education is not responsible for the shared greed, duplicity, and brazen criminal behavior that saturates the corporate world today. It is just an easy target. like a magician redirecting the attention of the audience, Friedman and his cohorts want America to punish the innocent yet again while the lying thieves make a back-door escape scot-free.

The CBIA's Anti-Education Agenda

Today's Courant carries yet another in the endless litany of Connecticut Business and Industry Association's assault on education practice. No doubt they have a right to their own opinions. Sadly, these opinions are are profoundly ignorant of what education is, can be, and should be.

Today, it was John Rathgeber's turn to lip synch the propaganda that the CBIA has been repeating during good business times, bad business times, while they were irrationally exuberant, after they nearly melted down the entire financial system of global banking, and so on, Whatever ails society is education's responsibility and fault!

Some Rathberger quotes...

Connecticut is at risk of losing its advantage, as other states and countries are more effectively dealing with the demands of a global, knowledge-based economy. If we are to maintain our state's competitiveness and vitality, our education system must measure up.

If we are to keep pace, much of the burden — and opportunity — rests with our schools. We need to train today's students for tomorrow's jobs.

From preschool to high school and to our public universities, Connecticut must demand more for its investment in education by strengthening the curriculum and graduation requirements for all students — making certain they enter the workforce with the professional and technical skills they need.

The achievement gap between our high-performing schools and those that serve predominantly low-income and minority students must be eliminated.

Connecticut must strengthen its education system to anticipate and respond to employers' needs while emphasizing lifelong learning. That means more collaboration, greater coordination, better aligned curriculum and stronger awareness of the expectations of each level of education. It means parents, teachers and communities, businesses and nonprofits, every segment of our society coming together to ensure our progress.

It also means making postsecondary education an expectation for more of our young people, regardless of where they live or their family's income. Only then can we truly ensure today's youth a secure future, no matter which of the yet-to-be-invented jobs they may find themselves doing.

Never does Rathgeber offer a single piece of evidence to substantiate any of his claims. That would require research, an open-mind, and a wholesale turnabout in opinion. In fact it is this lack of veracity in the CBIA and their national counterparts claims that may be the reason that Connecticut and America's businesses are melting down.

It is easy for the CBIA to want to get into the affairs of education but what are their qualifications for doing so? If they are so sure of what businesses need then why not list those qualifications and where the businesses who he claims needs them are so that the tens of millions of us who are searching for work can apply?

The truth is that the bromides the CBIA is advocating are whole cloth fiction.

There is not a shred of credible evidence that CT is falling behind, above, around anyone.

And the fact of the matter is that job titles and responsibilities are changing so fast and furiously that a student entering college with one idea about a job may leave college only to find that job is obsolete for one reason or another.

Schools are not where we should train anyone for jobs, businesses have to hire smart, fungible, confident people to keep up and change with the times.

And the knee-jerk, obligatory "We need higher expectations, standards, blah, blah, blah" AND "we need cheaper, unionized, and disposable teachers who are all "great" teachers" rhetoric has been disproven over and over and over. If Rathgeber read this blog he'd see study after study refuting such claims.

The best thing the CBIA can do for education is to go out of business. It is a prime example of an enterprise that ignores factual data, repeats the same mistakes repeatedly, and doesn't learn.

The late Dr. Gerald Bracey wrote Nine Myths About Public Schools recently. It's worth reading. Here are some highlights that refute Rathgeber's assertions.

4. The United States is losing its competitive edge. China and India ARE Rising. As economies collapsed all around it, China's economy grew a remarkable 7% last year. On just humanitarian grounds, we should not wish China and India to remain poor forever, but the more they grow the more money they have to buy stuff from us. As China and India prosper, we prosper. The World Economic Forum and the Institute for Management Development have consistently ranked the U. S. economy as the most competitive in the world. Education is only one part of multi-factor systems in rankings. WEF is especially keen on innovation. Our obsession with testing makes testing a great instrument for destroying creativity.

5 The U. S. has a shortage of scientists, mathematicians and engineers. This was a myth started oddly enough by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s in a study with assumptions so absurd the study was never published, but the myth lingers on. In fact, Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University found that we have three newly minted scientists and engineers who are permanent residents or native citizens for every newly minted job. Within 2 years, 65% of them were no longer in scientific or engineering fields. That proportion might have fallen during the current debacle when people are more likely to hang on to a job even if they hate it. An article in the September 18 Wall Street Journal reported that before the economy collapsed, 30% of the graduates of MIT--MIT--headed directly into finance.


7 The fastest growing jobs are all high-tech and require postsecondary education. "Postsecondary education" is a weasel word. A majority of the fastest growing jobs do, in fact, require some kind of postsecondary training. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they account for very few jobs. It's the Walmarts and Macdonald's of America that generate the jobs. According to the BLS, the job of retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing jobs combined.

8 Test scores are related to economic competitiveness. We do well on international comparisons of reading, pretty good on one international comparison of math and science, and not so good on another math/science comparison. But these comparisons are based on the countries' average scores and average scores don't mean much. The Organization for Economic Cooperating and Development, the producer of the math science comparison in which we do worst has pointed out that in science the U. S. has 25% of all the highest scoring students in the entire world, at least the world as defined by the 60 countries that participate in the tests. Finland might have the highest scores, but that only gives them 2,000 warm bodies compared to the U. S. figure of 67,000. It's the high scorers who are most likely to become leaders and innovators. Only four nations have a higher proportion of researchers per 1000 fulltime employees, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Japan. Only Finland is much above the U. S.


Consider Japan, the economic juggernaut of the 1980's. It kids score well on tests and people made a causal link between scores and Japan's economy. But Japan's economy has been in the doldrums for almost a whole generation. Its kids still ace tests.

9 Education itself produces jobs. President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan have both linked any economic recovery to school improvement. This is nonsense. There are parts of India where thousands of educated people compete for a single relatively low-level white-collar job. Some of you might recall that in the 1970's many sociologists and commentators worried that America was becoming TOO educated, that they would be bored by the work available.

HOPE for ARIANG

I got the following email from Nicole Waicunus and it's worth sharing:

Caitie Parmelee is a senior this year and she is working with Gabriel bol-Deng, from Ariang, Sudan. One of the “Lost Boys,” Gabriel has returned to his village, Ariang, and has decided to dedicate his life to helping his friends and family. He is in the process of building a school for the children of Ariang and he has finished his documentary, “Rebuilding Hope.” The premiere of this film will take place here, at E.O. Smith on Friday, November 6th at 6:30pm. Many of the seniors are helping Caitie to make this event a success for Gabriel. We hope that you will join us in celebrating the progress that has been made and the promise of the finished school and education for the children of Ariang.

HOPE for ARIANG

Helping Offer Primary Education for Sudan

You are invited to the Premiere of





Friday, November 6, 2009 E. O. Smith Atrium/ Auditorium 6:30 - 10: 00 p.m. Tickets: $5

Kristof, Democrats, and Schools

New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an opinion piece called, Democrats and Schools in which largely blames Teachers, union protection, and specifically 'bad' teachers for the real and imagined woes of public education.

And Education Secretary Duncan and President Obama are using teachers and teacher unions as their version of welfare queens. By ripping a page out of the Clinton playbook that reformed welfare in the nineties, Obama hopes to break the back of teacher's unions after Bush failed. Kristof opines:

Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers’ unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.

President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that — and one test for the Democrats will be whether they embrace administration reforms that teachers’ unions are already sniping at.

It’s difficult to improve failing schools when you can’t create alternatives such as charter schools and can’t remove inept or abusive teachers. In New York City, for example, unions ordinarily prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence — so the schools must pay failed teachers their full salaries to sit year after year doing nothing in centers called “rubber rooms.”

But Kristof fails to do the homework required to understand the problems in education. In fact he makes assertions that are wholly false in his arguments to indict teachers as a primary culprit for so-called failing schools.

Kristof claims,

A devastating article in The New Yorker by Steven Brill examined how New York City tried to dismiss a fifth-grade teacher for failing to correct student work, follow the curriculum, manage the class or even fill out report cards.

The "devastaing article" makes the claim that,

Test scores and graduation rates have improved since Bloomberg and Klein took over, but when the law giving the mayor control expired, on July 1st, some Democrats in the State Senate balked at renewing it, complaining that it gave the mayor “dictatorial” power, as Bill Perkins, a state senator from Manhattan, put it. Nevertheless, by August the senators had relented and voted to renew mayoral control.

On the same day of Kriftof's op-ed piece, the New York Times in a piece called, U.S. Math Tests Find Scant Gains Across New York by Jennifer Medina fond the article's assertion to be fiction.

“What this amounts to is a fraud,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian who has been one of the most vocal critics of both the state exams and Mr. Klein. “This is a documentation of persistent dumbing down by the State Education Department and lying to the public.”

Ravitch is responding to the disparity between bloomberg and Klein's assertions that plutocratic, dictatorial powers over education have raised student competencies in reading and math.

The second assertion Kristof makes is based on yet another dubious claim. Kristof:

Research has underscored that what matters most in education — more than class size or spending or anything — is access to good teachers. A study found that if black students had four straight years of teachers from the top 25 percent of most effective teachers, the black-white testing gap would vanish in four years.

The study he refers to is Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job by the Hamilton Foundation.

So let's take a look at what it says.

1.) Teacher certification is irrelevant>

To put it simply, teachers vary considerably in the extent to which they promote student learning, but whether a teacher is certified or not is largely irrelevant to predicting his or her effectiveness.

2.) If we suspend reality and speculatively project the idea that minority students studying under the very best teachers for four continuous years will close the achievement gap measured by high-stakes, high-stress testing methodologies.

While certification status was not very helpful in predicting teacher impacts on student performance, teachers’ rankings during their first two years of teaching does provide a lot of information about their likely impact during their third year. The average student assigned to a teacher who was in the bottom quartile during his or her first two years lost on average 5 percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographics. In contrast, the average student assigned to a top-quartile teacher gained 5 percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographics. Therefore, the average difference between being assigned a top-quartile or a bottom-quartile teacher is 10 percentile points.

Moving up (or down) 10 percentile points in one year is a massive impact. For some perspective, the black-white achievement gap nationally is roughly 34 percentile points. Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile
teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.

Kristof never bothers to think about what the study implies and that is that if we can identify the very best teachers in the country, force them to teach in the most challenging schools in the country for four consecutive years AND subject the rest of the country's schools to less than the best teachers that we, AS A COUNTRY, would finally close the "education gap".

I would like somebody to explain why this is remotely possible, desirable, or a worthwhile pursuit. It should be noted that the Hamilton Project pretty much is the same -cough- think-tank that created the Clinton welfare reform program in the nineties and is a thinly veiled neo-con social policy venue.

School Under Siege For Singing Obama Song

The New York Post is reporting that a class of students who were visited by an Obama biographer and who sang an Obama song with him are at the center of yet another Tea-bag manufactured crisis.

From Protester sights on song kids by Associated Press:

Conservative groups plan to rally tomorrow [October 11, 2009]near a New Jersey school where students performed a song celebrating President Barack Obama.

The planned rally has school district officials planning to beef up security at the B. Bernice Young School in Burlington Township, which houses kindergartners through second-graders.

The song drew national attention last month after a video of the performance was posted on YouTube. Conservatives say it shows how schoolchildren are being indoctrinated to idolize Obama, allegations school officials have denied.

-snip-

Citing concerns for the safety of students and staff, Superintendent Christopher Manno has asked organizers to reconsider the protest because classes will be held that day. Manno said protesters will not be allowed on school property and additional district staffers will be on hand.

Here's the video:


Ooooooooooooooo... scary!

"At some point, people in positions of power need to protect the public"

The video that surfaced recently of a school policeman assaulting a learning disabled teenager because his shirt wasn't tucked in has cost the officer his job. And for most observers that's the end of the story.

But that set of events exposes the dysfunction of the school system in general. Starting during the Reagan administration, educational reform consisted in the escalation of war rhetoric as a remedy of what was wrong with schools. With the fall of the iron curtain and the retirement of military personnel looking to dip into the public coffers yet again, school reform encouraged the introduction of police and military into the administration of schools - usually urban schools.

And so, the segregated school experiment was allowed to continue with a new and revitalized passion; urban schools could be regimented in such a way as to pacify the unruly masses attending those institutions with boot camp discipline, metal detectors, drug sniffing dogs, educational black-ops, and so on. You can never be too tough.

And just as the night follows the day, what America succeeded in creating was an ever more violent school environment. Tough became the petri dish for tougher and that self-fulfilling stupid loop continues unabated today.

But after 911, tough went exponential. The country became more forgiving of violence from law-enforcement to the extent that cover-ups for law-enforcers committing crimes are standard practice.

In Chicago, the intersection of rogue policeman being used in the most delicate institution played out.

You see, the policeman who assaulted the student had a history of violence. that violence s documented in this follow-up Chicago Tribune story; Dolton cop in beating case has troubling history.

A Dolton cop caught on camera allegedly breaking a 15-year-old special needs student's nose for failing to tuck in his shirt has a troubling history that includes killing a man in a case of disputed self-defense.

The officer is now in an Indiana jail on an unrelated rape charge.

The video in that link shows multiple school teachers or administrators who seem to accept such treatment of students akin to waiting for apiece of toast to pop. No one asks what is going on. No one calls 911. No one seems to care if the kid lives or dies.

None of this is surprising. There is no way for schools to know the quality of police officers being assigned to schools. The practice of police cover-up is so pervasive and accepted that in this case an officer with a profoundly violent incident in his past (shooting a man 24 times) and a rape allegation just weeks ago is allowed to treat a dress code violation as if the teen were an armed robber.

Yes, at some point people in positions of power need to protect the public. Who will watch the watchers and how do we keep sociopaths with badges under control?

Why Art Matters

The New York Times has published a very interesting article called, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect by Benedict Carey.

The article discusses scientific speculation that people exposed to disruptive information are capable of recognizing a broader range of patterns when problem-solving. The author uses the term nonsense to describe disruptive information and then uses many examples of art to illustrate the theory.

As far as I can tell, the use of the term nonsense is, well, nonsense. It seems to me that this theory is reinforcing the idea that exposure to art broadens the mind in ways that schools and the public care little about (probably because you can't test it ad nausea).

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

The author's conclusions are an intellectual cop-out. A broader teaching of art is neither premature nor radical nor is it a touchy-feely appeasement.

The study of art and the participation in art exercises broadens the mind in significant and important ways and experiments like those described in this argument are beginning to quantify and formalize just how.

Unknown American Heroes: Rep. Alan Grayson

This is the first of a new series of posts that celebrate critical thinkers with chutzpah. We need more of these people. make sure he gets your support.

The Global Competitiveness Narrative

Just a few days ago, the Obama administration advocated more time in school as a remedy for public school's mythical failure to create a globally competitive workforce.

Libby Quaid reports in More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP. "I want to just level the playing field."

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it's not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

As a Democrat, I'm ashamed that Duncan is leading this charge. The article goes on to perpetrate even more misinformation and false claims including the assertion that studies show more time is effective.

In contrast, Larry Cuban in an article entitled The Perennial Reform: Fixing School Time appearing in Phi Delta Kappa International exposes the truer problem:

If the evidence suggests that, at best, a longer school year or day or restructured schedules do not seem to make the key difference in student achievement, then I need to ask: What problem are reformers trying to solve by adding more school time?

The short answer is that for the past quarter century -- A Nation at Risk (1983) is a suitable marker -- policy elites have redefined a national economic problem into an educational problem. Since the late 1970s, influential civic, business, and media leaders have sold Americans the story that lousy schools are the reason why inflation surged, unemployment remained high, incomes seldom rose, and cheaper and better foreign products flooded U.S. stores. Public schools have failed to produce a strong, post-industrial labor force, thus leading to a weaker, less competitive U.S. economy. U.S. policy elites have used lagging scores on international tests as telling evidence that schools graduate less knowledgeable, less skilled high school graduates -- especially those from minority and poor schools who will be heavily represented in the mid-21st century workforce -- than competitor nations with lower-paid workforces who produce high-quality products.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates made the same point about U.S. high schools.

In district after district across the country, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II, while low-income minority kids are taught how to balance a checkbook. This is an economic disaster. In the international competition to have the best supply of workers who can communicate clearly, analyze information, and solve complex problems, the United States is falling behind. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world.15

And here, in a nutshell, is the second reason why those highly touted reforms aimed at lengthening the school year and instructional day have disappointed policy makers. By blaming schools, contemporary civic and business elites have reduced the multiple goals Americans expect of their public schools to a single one: prepare youths to work in a globally competitive economy. This has been a mistake because Americans historically have expected more from their public schools. Let me explore the geography of this error.

For nearly three decades, influential groups have called for higher academic standards, accountability for student outcomes, more homework, more testing, and, of course, more time in school. Many of their recommendations have been adopted. By 2008, U.S. schools had a federally driven system of state-designed standards anchored in increased testing, results-driven accountability, and demands for students to spend more time in school. After all, reformers reasoned, the students of foreign competitors were attending school more days in the year and longer hours each day, even on weekends, and their test scores ranked them higher than the U.S.

Even though this simplistic causal reasoning has been questioned many times by researchers who examined education and work performance in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany, and other nations, "common sense" observations by powerful elites swept away such questions. So the U.S.'s declining global economic competitiveness had been spun into a time-in-school problem.

But convincing evidence drawn from research that more time in school would lead to a stronger economy, less inequalities in family income, and that elusive edge in global competitiveness -- much less a higher rank in international tests -- remains missing in action.

The Obama Department of Education is a prime example of a road to hell paved with good intentions.

What some studies have shown is that poor, urban minority students who don't have access to summer learning activities that follow through on the inertia of school learning during the existing school year fall behind academically. And anecdotal evidence would suggest that the intensity of being poor in unsafe, anti-intellectual situations is more compelling a life experience than, say, reading a book.

To misinterpret this finding with a multi-million dollar initiative to increase already stressed education resources and budgets is madness.

Obama's propensity to accept without question the No Child Left Behind legislation, the reactionary bromides of urban pseudo-educators who insist on draconian more-harder-higher-louder solutions, and the continued intellectually-suicidal dependency on high-stress, high stakes testing is a political sin and an embarassment to Democrats who expected "change".

Obama has lost my confidence in education policy.

The Totalitarian Impulse

The massive and, IMO, unethical exercise of force without provocation against University of Pittsburgh students is an indictment of the worthlessness of our mythological Constitutional rights.

The following video is inexplicable:



A student is "arrested" by thirty to forty fully armored, militia and forced to pose on her knees for a trophy photograph as if these ever-vigilant soldiers had captured Osama Bin Laden.

It is pointless to complain about such behavior. The militia is immune from criticism or accountability. The silliness of the slaps on the wrist reprimands only embolden these thugs to push the envelope further the next time.

The G20 militia exercises need to be understood for what they are and that is training exercises that use unwilling college students as crash-test dummies for the latest technological advances in civilian warfare. Like so many of our military campaigns, this is child's play.

Demonize an urban civilian population as anarchists and socialists and then practice your best baseball swings on their bodies. Enjoy it. Take pictures as if they were illiterate teenagers in countries too poor not to be considered terrorist states. It's a reality show for the sado-masochism that has become our modus operandi.

There is no excuse for any American city to become a theater of war. There is something sociopathically wrong with a government response that cannot distinguish between civilian protest of an event and urban warfare. There are plenty of techniques for crowd control that don't result in confrontation and state-sponsored police brutality.

The overwhelming show of force tactic is an act of war not social management. To apply Colin Powell's shock and awe military intimidation schemes into the hearts and minds of American citizens is an exercise in creating further distrust of government.

And this government has already drifted far and wide of what used to be a democracy that ensured the Constitutional rights of citizens to exercise those rights.

The question of what happened to America is more than an academic musing. Restore this country or stop lying to our children that there's something left of it worth being proud of.

Two University of Pittsburgh Students Spank Sean Hannity

Talk show blithering idiots: dime a dozen

Hate speech: ubiquitous

Intelligent beat down: priceless

Science is Real

They Might Be Giants, a rock band who's been around for a long time are releasing a new set of children's songs that clarify the differences between science and belief systems.

This is the best thing I've heard in years and I hope parent groups embrace this as part of heir children's collection of music.

Courage

Little Boy Heroically Shoots, Mutilates Burglar

What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Education?

Paul Freundlich and I are long suffering fellow Knick fans as well as observers of the education process in America. Paul has contributed work in this space before.

He has just re-released a film called Questions Not Answers on YouTube. He introduces the work:

If you have some time and want a real blast from the past, I've posted my 1969 film, "Questions Instead of Answers," on YouTube. It tells the story of an extraordinary black education program developed by the folks who launched Upward Bound in the '60s - a team of black educators who realized that African American youth had been badly prepared for the educational opportunities that were opening. In the process they rewrote the curriculum and redefined the relationship between teachers and students in a program that changed the lives of thousands of students attending thirteen, mostly southern black colleges.

It has been a matter of both amazement and sadness that the brilliant methodology they developed didn't rewrite public and private education in this country - not only for people of color, as the fully realized program applies to anyone with a spark of curiosity. And it's not that the program was a secret. The Institute for Services to Education,was funded by the US Department of Education, Ford and Carnegie. Elias Blake, who was President of ISE, went on to be President of Clark College, then headed a national task force out of Howard University.

The film was originally over an hour and is now in seven sections, each 8-10 minutes long.

I just finished watching it and found it to illuminate the seeds of an alternative educational universe that was snuffed out by a society that made a wrong turn and have continued a descent into educational malfeasance.

Paul and I and a few others aren't done yet. Part of saving education is not the dysfunctional "reform" that's marketed today but a return to sanity - that every child is unique and has a right to be without being judged by their deviation from the norm. In a society dumbed down by test-taking idiots, we need critical thinkers, geniuses, rebels, and malcontents.

Paul's film reminds us how to get there.

Unknown Artist: Tim Minchin

Slightly blue, but good for you:

Bagging the American Dream

As I examine the shouting match of Tea-Bagger arguments, complaints, and assertions across he internet and Twitter, it occurs to me that America has unwittingly perfected the teaching of ignorance more effectively than the teaching of knowledge.

It is frightening that large populations of the American public are so willingly persuaded by the political and religious carnival barkers whose only lectern is a talk show on radio or television. If we are to believe that nationalized test scores reflect the skills of American children to read and write (and I don't) then we would have to admit that Sesame Street and children's programming was wholesale failure when it comes to helping children with the three 'R's.

A letter responding to an opinion piece in the New York Times written by Timothy Egan called Working Class Zero caught my attention. Mary Romeo responded to Timothy's confusion as to why so many Americans advocate things that adversely affect them.

Neither of my parents graduated from high school. My father went to work at 12 to support help support his mothers and sisters after his father died — he worked on a milk truck and sold chewing gum at the subway stations in East Harlem — and, during the depression, my teenage mother was for a short time the sole support of her parents and three younger siblings. All four of my grandparents had been immigrants, and all four died before age 60.

In the nineteen fifties, my uncles became union members. My mother, an office worker, benefited from ILGWU contracts at the department store at which she was employed. All had good hourly wages, benefits and retirement pensions and, as a result, my sister, cousins and I grew up in decent surroundings and attended college, and our parents had comfortable, if not affluent retirements. I have graduate and professional degrees from an ivy league college. We all became middle class.

Despite their lack of education, my parents and their siblings never engaged in the ignorant, delusional and hate-filled behavior that I have witnessed among right-wing working class protestors over the past few months. They were not civil rights activists — theirs was the wrong generation for that — but they were not racists, either. African-Americans worked side by side with them in the transit, sanitation, police, carpenters, longshoremen’s and other unions, and my family respected that work and those fellow Americans by whom it was performed. Nor were my parents, aunts and uncles deluded as to their best interests. They also knew, as my mother often told me, that “The Republicans were for the rich people; we’re poor, and we vote Democrat.” They knew those who were on their side, and those who were not.

I have witnessed the ecnomic decline of people like my parents with horror and dismay. Even more troubling has been the descent of such working Americans into an ignorance that my parents never knew — a decline abetted and encouraged by the Republican Party. There appear to be no progressive organizations in our era that can harness the anger and despair of the working class so as to help rather than harm these good people. Instead, we have crazy talk show hosts, corrupt politician, and the cynical corporate interests that finance them.

Were it not for unions and other progressive movements, my parents’ generation would have never climbed out of the numbing poverty that killed my grandparents, and my own generation would not be enjoying those middle-class benefits that we now have. Who will rescue the working-class this time around? President Obama is trying, but the forces of reaction and greed bar his way, and there is no organizational structure — no working class movement — to help the poor save themselves.

It is a heart-breaking, frustrating situation. Last Saturday, I watched working-class America march itself into perdition.

— Mary Romeo

My parents too never graduated high school. My mother an atheist with only an elementary school education. My father a Catholic who as a teen joined the Marines to fight in WWII and worked in a factory all his life. Yet no one in my family was ever brain-washed into believing the kinds of nonsensical fictions that pass for facts that can be debated.

It is as if a psychiatric ward of severely brain damaged individuals were set loose upon society and we are too polite to suggest treatment. And not only do we fail to treat them, we invite them into our town halls so that they can guide our civics!

The media has become a powerful teaching tool for this population. What's troubling is why the same medium is so ineffective with teaching kids reading, math, and critical thinking skills.

A Rachel Maddow interview with Frank Schaeffer offers some clues;

The Civil Majority Speaks

Last night I attended the Ashford Democratic Town Committee meeting. I'm an active member and I'm running again for the Region 19 Board of Education so there are always details about getting elected that need to be understood.

But at tonight's meeting I had asked if anyone was interested in drafting a letter of support for the public option. I had passed along a liberal critique [smirking chimp article] of Obama's political progress - a scathing commentary.

At our meeting, James Boster authored a letter that the committee by an overwhelming majority voted to send Rep. Joe Courtney, Christopher Dodd, Joe Lieberman, Nancy Pelosi, and others.

It is an letter of unequivocal support for Joe Courtney's work on health insurance reform and the inclusion of a public option in any bill to be considered.

I am both proud and humbled to be living in a community where the thinly veiled hate speech of a loud and intimidating minority is answered by an unwavering commitment by dedicated, tax-paying citizens to ensuring that Washington hears the convictions of a civil majority.

It is about time for all people of like-minded devotion to solving the health care reform crisis to speak out civilly and without compromise - pass comprehensive healthcare legislation with a public option that ensures cost containment and quality assurances.

New 911 Footage

In remembrance.

The Algebra of Health Care

Obama's wish list for Health Care governance was an exercise in good algebra and, quite frankly, a relief.

THIS IS WHAT I VOTED FOR.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I want health care to provide a universal safety net of care for every citizen. Schools cannot remedy children's poor health care or no health care care at all. Obama's plan as outlined will remove one of the key poverty related handicaps many students face. And that's a key to reducing family stress and personal insecurity in so many lives.

But something that critics fail to realize is that for such a plan to work, we cannot afford to cherry pick elements that are politically popular and dispose of the rest. Obama's plan recognizes the importance of algebraic planning.

Preventative medicine can balance the cost of reactionary and remedial treatment. That saves money.

Regulating insurance to eliminate health care caps and refusing service due to existing conditions yields a surprising by-product. That is that malpractice lawsuit awards will be reduced in scope because the victim of unanticipated circumstances will not need to worry about proper life-long care to the degree that they do today. The regulation will help balance the drivers of expensive settlements.

And critics (including MSM pundits whose shows are financed by drug companies) have been trashing the public option of a government insurance plan as a leftist concoction. This back-handed slander of the political left thinly veils the agenda in play.

The public option is first and foremost a government program. But so is the post office and FedEx makes a tidy profit nonetheless.

But aside from the non-profit nature of the exercise, there is gold in the details. The public option will for the first time establish a baseline set of standards for consumer protections. And that is key. This will eliminate the fine print gotchas that so dictates our current frustrations with health care. That alone eliminates needless bureaucracy and delayed payments as well as reduces the care-givers paperwork.

The whole is better than the parts as far as I can tell. Thinking parents will support this with enthusiasm. Healthier kids and peers mean fewer headaches for parents and fewer head-cases in schools.

Eloquent Review of the Obama Speech

This says it all.



This, too, says it all:

Obama Indoctrination Revisited

Here's a student response to the pre-emptive critics of Obama's school speech. Why aren't these kids on the air?

Jim Greer in a Nutshell

I spent a little time researching Florida GOP chairman, Jim Greer's complains and background. What I found is something that is quite different from the controversy that is being played out in the Main Stream Media. That is, the media has fallen for the bait - a series of absurd and unsubstantiated allegations about President Obama's address to school-children on Tuesday.

By taking Greer's charges at face value, the national media has been duplicitous in aiding and abetting in a GOP campaign to push the buttons of the most fragile sociopaths in America. Some of these people are parents as well as myopic paranoids. By the time the "controversy" has been identified as a lesson plan line item contributed by a teacher to the Department of Education as a suggested classroom topic, the broader lynch mob had saddled up and were in full gallop.

A Marc Murphy editorial cartoon perfectly captured the debate:



It is Barack Obama's turn to offer America's schoolchildren a Horatio Alger meme to live by.

So, it came as a shock to the Obama administration that they would be attacked on this front given the severity of the wars, healthcare reform, and the economy. In fact it came as a low blow primarily because it was an attempt to pre-empt Obama altogether as if he were not the President and as if he were a messenger rather than an author. And it came as a low blow because Obama's education policy is a rehash and escalation of the same old Bush policies that have produced a thirty percent dropout rate from American high schools.

A clue to the mystery of this sneak attack reveals that it was politically pre-meditated and wholly disingenuous. An anonymous poster to a Florida newspaper covering this story discovered a subtle political plagarism:

Anonymous said:
Two quotes complaining about the President giving the speech to schoolchildren: "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," . . .."And the president should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera, action.'" And a second quotation, referring to the speech to school children as: "the arrogance of power," and that the White House should not be "using precious dollars for campaigns" when "we are struggling for every silly dime we can get" for education. The first quote is atributable to Rep. Richard Gephardt, then the Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives. The second is from Patricia Schroeder, then a Democratic member of Congress from Colorado. Both were made as part of a Democratic complaint against President George HW Bush speaking to schoolchildren in 1991. How positively hypocritical huh? Funny and humorous to say the least.
posted on: 9/5/2009 8:27:36 PM

The problem is that Greer never acknowledges that he's throwing the words of Gephardt and Schroeder into the faces of an unsuspecting media, nation, and political base. In a single act of political bloodsport, Greer makes a fool of the media by brazenly manipulating and humiliating the commentators like Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, and even Fox News.

And how must the Republican base feel as he uses them as unwitting rubes repeating Democratic objections to a Republican presentation over a decade ago? Nor does Greer ever demonstrate the intellectual capacity to have authored this language. This was scripted with outside assistance.

In other words, the Obama administration was sucker punched with the unwitting aid of a MSM that craves these petty political food fights. And American schoolchildren are dragged into it as window-dressing and sympathetic "victims".

You might be wondering why Gephardt and Schroeder objected to Bush's speech. The Palm Beach Post blog documents Reagan and Bush's act:

By all accounts nobody called Bush a socialist or organized a boycott, and The Associated Press’s coverage of the speech appeared to be a neutral description of what the president had said, according to a Nexis search.

On the other hand, a story the next day in The Washington Post dwelt on the theme that the speech had been arranged in such a way to make the president look good:

The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props yesterday as President Bush delivered a live television address to America’s schoolchildren, the latest administration effort to demonstrate the president’s interest in domestic issues.

The administration had even more control over the highly telegenic speech — carried live from Alice Deal Junior High School by Public Broadcasting Service and Cable News Network — than it does over most presidential events.

Unlike most presidential addresses, such as last Friday’s arms control speech from the Oval Office, yesterday’s was handled not by the television networks but by a private firm paid by the U.S. Department of Education, administration officials said. The White House selected the camera angles and decided which pictures would be sent out, officials said.

The students in Cynthia Mostoller’s eighth-grade American history class said they were advised to wear soft-soled shoes so they did not make too much noise. They were told to pay attention to the president as he perched on a stool in front of Room 112’s blackboard, not the teleprompters in the back of the room from which he read his text.

Greer is a piece of work. But the story doesn't end there.

Greer himself has addressed school children and he did so mercilessly. Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel gives us a whiff of Greer's own educational screeds:

There once was a political operative who loved to tell crowds he had a simple way of explaining to children the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

"Republicans get up and go to work," he would tell his son. "Democrats get up and go down to the mailbox to get their checks."

This man not only talked to his son about Republican values, he went into public-school classrooms and talked about them as well.

That man is Jim Greer — the same Jim Greer who, as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, just threw a nationwide hissy fit, claiming that the classroom is no place for politics and Barack Obama's "indoctrination."

One Seminole County mother, Barbara Wells, remembers the day Greer spoke to her son's sixth-grade class. "My son said he made some sort of Hillary Clinton joke," she recalled.

But you know what? Wells didn't pitch a fit.

She didn't call up the local TV station to scream about Republican indoctrination.

Instead, she advised her son: "Whatever you are told in life, remember there are two sides to every story."

In fact, Wells didn't even think much about Greer's foray into her son's classroom until she saw him on TV complaining about Obama.

There's no longer any question: Greer is a hypocrite.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether mainstream Republicans in Florida will allow him to drag them deeper into the divisive and irrational fringes of their party.

Mainstream conservatives, after all, are being left behind.

While they want to talk about real issues, like out-of-control spending, they are forced to watch their state "leader" make a buffoon out of himself in the national spotlight. This just two weeks after a former House speaker was allowed to rack up $170,000 in GOP credit-card bills on Greer's watch.

This country needs a healthy two-party system with smart debate.

But there's nothing healthy or smart about Greer's claim that the president's pep talk about succeeding in school was really an attempt to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda."

Presidents have been talking to schoolchildren ever since we've had schools.

Now, what about that GOP credit card debt? The debt that Greer likes to dismiss as no big deal - that debt. Let's just call it junket debt.

Well, that debt may have to do with GOP presidential campaign spending habits. In an article in the Miami Herald's NakedPolitics called, No room on the Palin plane, Greer charters his own, we get some insight into Greer's relationship with the Palin -cough- team.

Determined not to be left out of the party, RPOF Chairman Jim Greer flew a chartered plane to Sarah Palin's events in Clearwater and Southwest Florida today.

You see, Greer first realized that the Katie Couric interviews were political poison.

Greer told the NYT that: “I think the Katie Couric interview shows that she needs to be briefed more on certain aspects. She continues to be viewed very positively by the base of the party, but she needs to demonstrate that she’s got the knowledge and ability to be president should the need arise.”

Flash forward to a hockey arena in Estero, Florida, near Naples, where Greer just finished speaking to the crowd gathered to see Palin and he's now singing the praises of the Alaska governor. He called her "dynamic'' and said she understands what working Americans are going through "She makes more decisions in one day than Sens Obama and Biden make in a whole year."

RPOF spokesman Erin VanSickle doesn't want us making too much of this. "Lots of folks understandably want to travel with Governor Palin, and Chairman Greer is participating in her Florida events as part of the pre-program,'' VanSickle responded to an email.

Greer was treated like a leper by McCain and Palin and learned his lesson. A costly lesson for GOP donors but a lesson nonetheless.

On the day Sarah palin became dynamic day, the Republicans had a new spokesperson willing to say anything to ride with the big boys. Is it surprising that such a willing student would not be chosen for this act of political cowardice?

I'm not shocked.

Literacy Like the Greeks

As a well-known opponent to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and high-stress, high-stakes testing this report by Clive Thomson of Wired Magazine called Clive Thompson on the New Literacy is a refreshing point of view.

Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it's also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions.