Hartford's Prison March

Today, Colin Poitras of the Courant reports Tougher Graduation Requirements Proposed In Hartford.

The assault on education by education hate mongers continues unabated. Hartford has managed to hire yet another sock-puppet administrator who has sold the city into the hard child slavery of high expectations, high-stress testing, and the moving of graduation goal posts even further from an urban student population whose drop out numbers on the existing prison march nears 70%.

it reflects Adamowski's belief that the district's recent reorganization — with its focus on smaller schools, special fields of interest provided by new magnet schools and proposed increases in academic support — will enable Hartford's students to perform as well as their peers anywhere in the state.

"I believe our city has been limited by a psychology of low expectations," Adamowski told The Courant. "That just because our students are poor ... or because their parents can't give them the support they need, they can't perform. But I believe when we do raise expectations, our students rise to meet them."

The problem with the argument is that students in the rest of the state aren't competing with inner city youth and NCLB has so diseased the public school system that these administrators are gaming the system to make it look as if the dysfunctional comparison of one intellectually poisoned population to another is significant and healthy.

These recommendations come at a price tag that inner city schools seem to have no accountability for. State funds flow into these schools as if the faucet is an unattended fire hydrant that has an endless supply of money for ever more teachers, ever smaller classes, and never improving students. And someday they'll "compete" with suburban students and "rise to the challenge".

What challenge? The insipid "higher expectations escalation" game that endears these administrators to the political sadists of our society?

The same business community that sheds crocodile tears for their fictional inability to hire qualified candidates routinely ax legions of qualified employees due to greed, avarice, and mismanagement - not lack of an available skilled workforce.

Education has become so dishonest, corrupt, and dysfunctional in the past thirty years that like the earth's ecology it is becoming a hopeless cause. The entire system needs to be fumigated and Hartford would be as good a place as any to start.

How about we raise the expectations of schools to include reasonable costs and respect for the individuality of students.

And how about the dissolution of Carnegie units, high-stakes tests, and the State Department of Education. Not a one of these things has served us well and not a one will be missed. How about raising the expectation of schools to open up their curriculum to involve the community and alternative classes, internships, and student-centric drivers.

How about the corporate community shutting the hell up about their phony employment "needs" and opening their companies to interns. And where are the corporate learning centers? Boarded up - passing the blame onto public schools and taxpayers.

This same philosophy has so screwed up the technical education system that it is creating a crisis in trades as students who've chosen trades are confronted with college-prep curriculum. The insanity just doesn't stop no matter how much empirical evidence documents the educational train-wreck that Bush has wrought.

How about flushing the current system because it sucks like the neo-cons who manufactured it? How about the low expectation that the Department of Education do their freakin' job and examine the empirical evidence?

I'm sure they're at least as smart as the army of dropouts inner city schools shed every year.