Deconstructing Education

On Democracy Now, Lois Weiner identifies the origin of standardized testing regimes such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. She traces one of the first such efforts to the Pinochet regime in Chile who instituted it under military rule. Obama's technique has been to exploit the ingrown greed of local government's to cut the throats of its children and taxpayers to get federal funding for standardized testing programs.

The teacher's unions have spent a decade playing along with this nonsense largely because they could stick their heads in the sand because although it adversely affected the students, it caused no ripples in the mass march toward retirement.

And even today, as can be heard in Karen Lewis's criticism of Arne Duncan, the teacher's representatives do little more than demonize-the-other with personal attacks on Duncan and claims that the data is "unscientific", that Duncan is unfit, and so on. These are shrill and empty arguments.

This leave the system alone (don't blame us) or change it badly (standardized testing/teacher performance) shouting match leaves everyone stuck with a dysfunctional duality of choices.

As a longtime critic of both NCLB and RTTT, I am forever disappointed in the response of teachers unions to the challenge of improving schools. The knee-jerk solution is inevitably "more money" with less evidence for the assertion than charter schools can provide for their arguments. And so the public and weary taxpayers are held hostage to this siren song knowing full well that the last increase in spending was no more effective in improving education than throwing money to the wind.

It seems to me that if teachers union representatives are going to argue for scientific evidence that the Obama/Bush policies are failing then they need to honor the scientific evidence that class size has little or nothing to do with student success in school past grade four.

To claim that Obama/Bush are attempting to de-professionalize teaching is true. But the argument needs to demonstrate some more veracity. A teaching profession content to perpetuate non-scientific myths that are comfortable for union purposes also expose the problem of actually teaching scientific method, ethics, good citizenship, and so on. If teachers can ignore fact then why not students, government officials, and special interests?

It is not enough to complain about de-profesionalization when the teachers unions prevent the possibility for re-professionalization. Teachers have for too long allowed union lawyers whose only interest is a larger paycheck to define what professionalism means.

Can it mean that industrial revolution ideas of unionization can give way to an enlightened set of working engagement? Can't teachers unions suggest better models than the Obama/Bush dross? If so, when will they present such arguments?

Teachers unions have yet to become part of a better solution. They have yet to arrive with better ideas. And this is largely because they have cultivated a siege mentality that fosters the idea that any change is a 'concession'. And a union that has long entitled its longest standing members special privileges and treatment is as unlikely to improve the profession as the Obama/Bush policies will.

Teachers unions need to reinvent themselves as agents of intelligent change based not on profitable myths about children and education practice but on innovative and meritorious alternative pedagogies.

We Not Only Lost the Race...

Connecticut's legislators sold out whatever shreds of integrity were left in the education system to -cough- compete for Race to the Top extortion money dollars. Our legislature licked the heels of Obama and Duncan and didn't even get a tip.

They convinced school boards across the state that they'd split the money up if everyone just shut up and played along. Having done the math, I knew and published what a load of malarkey that was. It was probably a key as to why Connecticut "lost" funding. The reason of course is that the state would have to live up to its deal and distribute the money.

Trouble is that the money is political funny money that is being directed at certain insiders but being laundered through the states to make it look like its going to, well, the other usual education crooks.

So the Feds instead did a back-door deal with CT funneling millions into the state in a side transaction that went unreported. That money has no strings attached.

Here's what the Courant reported;

Educators and legislators predicted that the state's failure to win a penny in the $3.4 billion Race to the Top education funding competition could delay some of the landmark educational reforms that the state legislature passed this spring.

Legislators and education leaders were uniformly disappointed to learn that Connecticut — for the second time — did not place among the 19 finalists announced Tuesday for federal school reform money.

The state had asked for $175 million, and is now worried that plans that include instituting a new high school curriculum and building a data system to track student achievement by grade will have to be postponed.

"It's obvious if the economy doesn't turn around and we continue to have dire fiscal straits in Connecticut, we will have to push back various reforms," said State Rep. Andrew Fleischmann, D-West Hartford, co-chairman of the legislature's education committee.

"We're going to have to find the dollars to implement this. We cannot create some kind of unfunded mandate for cities and towns that are already strapped."

Well, instead of feeling good that we dodged this steaming pile of education reform, all the knee-jerk idiots who passed L.E.G.I.S.L.A.T.I.O.N. that now encodes this stuff into CT law are wringing their hands about the inevitable TAX INCREASES this will bring and pretending that they "can't create some kind of unfunded mandate".

THEY ALREADY DID! Idiots! Our Bryan Hurlbert crowed in a recent mailing that he voted for money for education data collection. GEE. THANKS. I guess you never received the memo telling you to vote no because its a bait and switch scheme. We could use leadership with a backbone, not doormats for bad Obama policy.

Repeal these laws NOW.

Deconstructing NCLB

The New York Times reports [Obama Seeking Sweeping Change in 'No Child' Law by Sam Dillon] that the Obama administration is revising No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I suspect such changes are more the result of reality finally catching up with the mean spirited political fantasies that NCLB marketed to an all too gullible public.

"The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.

“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.

The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.

A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career."

Imagine a plan from the Bush administration being labeled 'utopian'. No, expecting every school to qualify as non-failing in a rigged system is not utopian - it is blissfully and maliciously devoid of reason.

And the secondary goal of NCLB that we magically close the education gap is equally insane yet remains intact in Arne Duncan's Big Adventure called Race to the Top.

Children will continue to be mis-educated in America because it is politically profitable to do so. Obama and Duncan are no less dependent on the public's gullibility than Bush was.

Like Bush, Obama and Duncan's social engineering experiments are the usual American lab rats, the poor. Unfortunately, NCLB and its succeeding educational cancer, Race to the Top are beginning to deform all American schools and that is not a good thing.

By myopically treating the symptoms of urban poverty as if all American schools were the disease, we are overdosing on standardized tests, memorization, and militaristic behaviors of conformity. Our children can barely breathe without special services and they certainly are not allowed to play, think, or mature without first asking permissions.

Urban school reform enthusiasts who profit from the deception that schools can fail are the buffoons that Washington embraces to dictate school 'reform' policies. It will not end well.

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 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 False Learning

I have repeatedly blogged about the wholesale failure of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to address the needs of children and society. NCLB is little more than a thinly disguised national policy to destroy public school education that has succeeded.

The ubiquitously accepted and promoted meme that high-stress, high-stakes testing of memorized (and largely worthless) factoids is a pseudo-religion among the educated and uneducated alike. Chances are this policy will not change under Obama ensuring the intellectual collapse of our nation along side its economic bankruptcy.

A better policy would be to promote learning for learnings sake. This is not as altruistic a venture as might be assumed.

In a Telegraph article called, Learning by heart is 'pointless for Google generation' by Murray Wardrop, he summarizes the revaluation of meorization.

...for today's youngsters, tedious rote learning is pointless because such basic facts are only a mouse click away via Google, Wikipedia and online libraries, according to writer and businessman Don Tapscott.

Tapscott, author of the best-selling book Wikinomics and a champion of the "net generation", suggests a better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online.

The Canadian business executive said: "Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

"Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don't need to know all the dates.

"It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google."

Tapscott dismissed the idea that his approach is anti-learning, instead arguing that the ability to learn new things is more important than ever "in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed".

And he believes that the old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today's schools, involving remembering facts 'off pat', was designed for the industrial age.

He said: "This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn't deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the 'net gen' mind.

"Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time."

Tapscott added the brains of today's youngsters work differently to their parents', and that multi tasking with digital devices, such as using the internet while listening to their MP3 players, can help them to develop critical thinking skills.

Ofsted has reported that pupils' knowledge and understanding of key historical facts is not good enough to enable them to "form overviews and demonstrate strong conceptual understanding".

Shadow Schools Secretary, Michael Gove, has recently attacked "the move away from fact-based learning", arguing that "knowledge, intellectual capital, is what makes educational progress possible".

What Employers Like in a Student

Brilliant.

Dumbed Down Democrats?

I'm confused. Last night the Governor of Massachusetts spoke to the Democratic Convention and made a fiery speech making fun of Republican stands on Education.

"They [Republicans] want to get rid of the Department of Education! And we need full funding of NCLB!"

Have the Democrats lost their minds? Fully fund NCLB! Why not just brainwash kids at Guantanamo and call it an education?

NCLB shouldn't be funded. It's proponents should be tarred and feathered and NCLB destroyed forever as the worst idea of the new century.

And eliminating the Department of Education is change I can believe in. I can't think of a more miserable lot of idiots in Washington deserving to be shown a pink slip. One can only hope ending NCLB and eliminating the Department of Education is in McCain's plans.

And I'm wondering why it isn't a Democratic goal as well. It's one way to reach across the aisle and actually perform a national service.

Whoever is advising the Democrats on Education should be locked away. This stuff is so out-of-touch and reactionary that McCain is looking like a visionary.

And this article in Slate, Dems Rally Against Unions!OK, teachers' unions. Still ... by Mickey Kaus makes me scratch my head as well.

One panelist--I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children's agenda meets the adult agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often." Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically--and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention! "The politics are so vicious," Booker complained, remembering how he'd been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice, how early on he'd gotten help from Republicans rather than from Democrats. The party would "have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education." Loud applause! Mayor Adrian Fenty of D.C. joined in, describing the AFT's attempt to block the proposed pathbreaking D.C. teacher contract. Booker denounced "insane work rules," and Groff talked about doing the bidding of "those folks who are giving money [for campaigns], and you know who I'm talking about." Yes, they did!

I have many issues with teachers unions but the D.C. teacher contract is misguided and the AFT is smart enough to have figured that out.

Teacher Confessional

The Progressive website carries an interesting article by an elementary school teacher, Susan J. Hobart, who documents the demoralizing effect of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In part:

While I still connect my lesson plans to students’ lives and work to make it real, this no longer is my sole focus. Today I have a new nickname: testbuster. Singing to the tune of “Ghostbusters,” I teach test-taking strategies similar to those taught in Stanley Kaplan prep courses for the SAT. I spend an inordinate amount of time showing students how to “bubble up,” the term for darkening those little circles that accompany multiple choice questions on standardized tests.

I am told these are invaluable skills to have.

I am told if we do a good job, our students will do well.

I am told that our district does not teach to the test.

I am told that the time we are spending preparing for and administering the tests, analyzing the results, and attending in-services to help our children become proficient on this annual measure of success will pay off by reducing the academic achievement gap between our white children and our children of color.

I am told a lot of things.

But what I know is that I’m not the teacher I used to be. And it takes a toll. I used to be the one who raved about my classroom, even after a long week. Pollyanna, people called me. Today, when I speak with former colleagues, they are amazed at the cynicism creeping into my voice.

What has changed?

No Child Left Behind is certainly a big part of the problem. The children I test are from a wide variety of abilities and backgrounds. Whether they have a cognitive disability, speak entry-level English, or have speech or language delays, everyone takes the same test and the results are posted. Special education students may have some accommodations, but they take the same test and are expected to perform at the same level as general education students. Students new to this country or with a native language other than English must also take the same test and are expected to perform at the same level as children whose native language is English. Picture yourself taking a five-day test in French after moving to Paris last year.

No Child Left Behind is one size fits all. But any experienced teacher knows how warped a yardstick that is.

I spent yesterday in a meeting discussing this year’s standardized test results. Our team was feeling less than optimistic in spite of additional targeted funds made available to our students who are low income or who perform poorly on such tests.

As an educator, I know these tests are only one measure, one snapshot, of student achievement. Unfortunately, they are the make-or-break assessment that determines our status with the Department of Education.

They are the numbers that are published in the paper.

They are the scores that homebuyers look at when deciding if they should move into a neighborhood.

They are the numbers that are pulled out and held over us, as more and greater rigidity enters the curriculum.

I was recently told we cannot buddy up with a first-grade class during our core literacy time. It does not fit the definition of core literacy, I was told. Reading with younger children has been a boon to literacy improvement for my struggling readers and my new English-speaking students. Now I must throw this tool away?

Jailing Our Children

Sunday's Courant features a great opinion piece called Criminalizing Kids by Abby Anderson. While many states are reconsidering treating kids like adults, others allow tasering of even elementary school students. Connecticut having jailed its black minority population is now mining the next judicially impotent population - children.

NCLB coupled with the advent of a laissez-faire, zero tolerance for inalienable rights police state is parading children through the court system with a gusto Anne Frank fans will immediately recognize.

From the article:

Schools have strong incentives to jettison "problem children" and few incentives to help them. Their low test scores decrease federal funding. Their behavior means that teachers have to spend more time helping children develop socially and less time drilling for standardized tests.

Children can be removed from classrooms through arrest, suspension or expulsion. More than 3 million children are suspended or expelled from U.S. public schools every year. During the 2006-2007 school year,Connecticut children missed 152,850 school days — 418 years — because of suspensions and expulsions. Kids who aren't in school can't keep up academically. Suspension and expulsion are, therefore, predictors of school failure and of eventual incarceration. Most suspensions and expulsions are not for violent behavior, but for school policy violations such as truancy. (Yes, the punishment for truancy is being made to stay home.)

Children of color, boys and students in urban districts are at greater risk of suspension, expulsion, arrest or dropping out. In the nation's largest urban school districts, fewer than half of students graduate. A report by Johns Hopkins University labeled 9 percent of the schools in Connecticut "dropout factories" because they had a yearly promotion rate of 60 percent or worse between 2004 and 2006. That spells devastation for those communities.

High school graduates make far more money than peers who don't complete 12th grade. Higher educational attainment is associated with better health by a number of measures. And graduation means a sharply decreased likelihood of ever ending up in prison, where more than two-thirds of inmates lack a high school diploma.

Contrast the zeal for prosecuting children with the apathy that Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution has received and it is obvious that America cares little or nothing for justice but secretly enjoys inflicting pain compliance techniques to anyone of any age who might not click their heels to the plutocracy.

I have no doubt the no tolerance pleasure principle will not go quietly back into the neo-con madhouse that spawned it.

When Times Get Tough, The Tough Get Weird

The title of this entry is a Dr. Hunter S. Thompson quote but it applies to an article in today's Courant called, High School Doesn't Have To Take Four Years by Lewis M. Andrews.

The argument Andrews makes is based on Leon Botstein's argument:

Botstein's original case for early graduation was based on academic and social concerns, not fiscal issues. With a rigid structure inherited from the 1830s, he argued that the "traditional high school is an out-of-date strategy and system" that accommodates neither fast nor slow learners, leads to boredom and even delinquency, ignores the relative physiological maturity of modern adolescents and fails to take advantage of new learning technologies.

But today we can add to Botstein's list of reasons the tax savings that could flow from providing high school students with incentives to voluntarily graduate early. Consider:

With per-pupil costs for high school ranging from a low of $9,000 in distressed cities like Bridgeport to nearly $18,000 in wealthier suburbs, the Yankee Institute did a study in 2007 ("Free College for High School Students," available at www.yankeeinstitute.org) showing how much each Connecticut town could save by paying its students to graduate in three years.

Using the latest available census and per-pupil expenditure data from the Connecticut Department of Education, the Institute found that if just 25 percent of all the state's secondary students received a full, two-year community college scholarship (or $5,000 cash equivalent) for finishing high school early, more than $58 million would be left over annually to reduce property taxes.

Like most other states, Connecticut sets high school graduation requirements in terms of courses met, not years attended, and towns as diverse as Middletown, West Hartford and Westport already have written policies on early graduation, although none yet offer an incentive.

-snip-

Unfortunately, the political price for enacting most dual-enrollment programs has been the creation of a redundant payment system. Municipalities still include money in their high school budgets to pay for the places of students who have skipped their senior year and gone to college with the funding provided by taxpayers. For property taxpayers to benefit, the school budget must reflect the reduced cost when a student has either graduated early or, if still technically enrolled in high school while taking a full college course load, is no longer receiving district services. A school will not realize any saving until a large enough number of students skip senior year to allow for a reduction in classes.

True, some school districts might initially resist rewarding early graduation because of the state's Education Cost Sharing program, which supplements education budgets in distressed cities on a per student basis. The fear would be that graduating a substantial numbers of students early could mean a loss of revenue from the state. Prosperous towns get little ECS money, but might worry about damaging popular athletic programs, if some students left after three years.

In fact, Connecticut education statutes give school boards considerable flexibility in offering credit for outside learning. A senior could theoretically move on to the first year of college while remaining technically enrolled in high school at no instructional cost and even participate in sports programs — much the way home-schooled students are currently entitled to participate.

While the national education debate focuses on such contentious issues as vouchers and national testing standards, a simple policy of incentivizing Connecticut high school students to effectively graduate early could expand educational opportunity, combat classroom boredom and help the most disadvantaged afford at least two years of college — all the while providing tax relief to hard-pressed homeowners.

What I find fascinating about almost all the education arguments that are heatedly discussed in the public forums of the Main Stream Media is that the discussions virtually never involve the argument that something might be good for the students except as a co-incidental by-product of a let's save money argument.

Here, the argument that the "traditional high school is an out-of-date strategy and system" that accommodates neither fast nor slow learners, leads to boredom and even delinquency, ignores the relative physiological maturity of modern adolescents and fails to take advantage of new learning technologies." is entirely accurate yet it is not until real estate prices in wealthy suburbs are threatened that anyone from the Department of Education on down uses it.

What's important is that high schools are out-moded but largely because of government policies that treat children like prisoners of war in a battle between neo-con iron-fist tactics and sensible and humane education theory.

A front page story in the same issue of the Courant examines the code of silence among the medical profession when it comes to charges of pedophilia against a professional peer. Entitled Reardon Victim Goes Public, Blasts St. Francis Hospital it describes the nod-and-wink collusion:

There are much higher stakes than money here — like truth, accountability and healing. That's why I'm handing in my John Doe card today. Too much of the money, unfortunately, goes to the lawyers.

"This," one of them told me, testily, referring to their legal assault on St. Francis, "does not concern you."

What a coincidence. St. Francis Hospital has been taking the same dismissive tone for years. I know what the lawyer meant; I'm not the one who filed the sworn statement. But my mother, now 75, may well be the lawyers' winning Powerball number because her testimony could elevate the 100 or so lawsuits already filed against the hospital into a monster payout.

Going public with my story, I hope, will mean substantially more than money for all the victims ignored or discredited for so many years — all those afraid to speak up or whose stories were rejected, sadly, by parents too horrified and shamed to admit they delivered their child to a pedophile.

The deluge of child pornography discovered last year behind a false wall in the basement of Reardon's former home on Griswold Drive in West Hartford isn't the only evidence to corroborate the horrors of the past four decades. Among the hidden reels of film and boxes of slides, West Hartford police also discovered a manila envelope, in a brown cardboard box, containing incriminating documents that, until a month ago, I did not know existed.

My name is on those documents.

They include: the sworn complaint filed by my mother, Marcia Hunt of Wethersfield, detailing the afternoon Reardon photographed me and another boy; a formal letter to Reardon from Joseph S. Sadowski, then a St. Francis neurosurgeon and chairman of the Hartford County Medical Association's Ethics and Deportment Committee, who handled the complaint; an undated "memorandum" from Sadowski summarizing the complaint in greater detail; Reardon's 15-page rebuttal; and, finally, a terse statement from my mother's attorney, the renowned Hartford criminal lawyer James N. Egan, saying criminal charges would not be filed.

A boy's word against a prominent physician would have had no chance in court in 1970. Sadowski, who died in 2001, assured my mother Reardon would be stopped. My mother trusted Sadowski. He was her doctor, a respected neurosurgeon who had operated on her back recently. She told him what happened to me as she sat in his office adjacent to the hospital at 1000 Asylum Ave. during a follow-up visit after her surgery. He's the one who suggested she file a complaint with the ethics committee.

Sadowski was a prominent, powerful physician at the hospital and within the Hartford medical community. My mother believed she had taken the ultimate action — until 1979, the medical association was the top agency governing physicians.

Only in 1993, after multiple complaints against Reardon prompted state health department hearings, did we realize the hospital's chief of endocrinology and growth-study mastermind had gone unchecked for decades.

We were devastated. But without the documentation of our complaint, what could we do? How do you avoid losing when you know you can't win?

Professional educators in this country are in a similar predicament today. Complaints about NCLB are largely ignored because too many in the education profession play the collusion game with the demented but all-powerful Bush administration.

Our high school students and taxpayers are being mis-served but money isn't why. It is this country's children who bear the brunt of this society's conditioned reflex to distrust the schools by blaming them for all of society's ills.

Schools need to change, yes... a thousand times yes but because it is right, because the system is dysfunctional as nothing more than a test dispenser, because our children are being intellectually and psychologically maimed by it.

Our political system is broken when today, just as years ago with the medical profession, educators can ignore good practice and continue to cover up the cancer that is NCLB because it's easy... no one will know... it will never happen again... it will go away on its own...

When I think about wasted money I think about the profession I care about turning its back on the facts, on the children, and on their own integrity.

Public Math, Private Math

Here's yet another study of the differences between public school results as opposed to private school results in math scores. The article is called, Public schools as good as private schools in raising math scores, study says

Students in public schools learn as much or more math between kindergarten and fifth grade as similar students in private schools, according to a new University of Illinois study of multi-year, longitudinal data on nearly 10,000 students.

The results of the study appear in the May issue of the influential education journal Phi Delta Kappan.

“These data provide strong, longitudinal evidence that public schools are at least as effective as private schools in boosting student achievement,” according to the authors, education professor Christopher Lubienski, doctoral student Corinna Crane and education professor Sarah Theule Lubienski.

The new study is the first published study to show that public schools are at least as effective as private schools at promoting student learning over time, they say.

Combined with other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings, “we think this effectively ends the debate about whether private schools are more effective than publics,” said Christopher Lubienski, whose research has dealt with all aspects of alternative education.

This is important, he said, because many current reforms, such as No Child Left Behind, charter schools and vouchers for private schools, are based on that assumption.

The debate essentially began three years ago with the publication in Phi Delta Kappan of a previous study by the Lubienskis, which challenged the then-common wisdom – supported by well-regarded but dated research – that private schools were superior.

In that 2005 study, they found that public school students tested higher in math than their private school peers from similar social and economic backgrounds.

In another, more-extensive study in early 2006, they built on those findings, and also raised similar questions about charter schools.

Both studies were based on fourth- and eighth-grade test data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

The conclusions of the husband-and-wife team seemed “crazy radical” at the time, Sarah Lubienski said, and generated significant controversy. They were supported, however, later in 2006, with similar findings in U.S. Department of Education studies comparing public schools with privates and with charters, which looked at NAEP test data on both math and reading.

(Unlike literacy, math is viewed as being less dependent on a student’s home environment and more an indication of a school’s effectiveness, Sarah Lubienski said.)

Critics of these previous studies, however, have cited the lack of longitudinal data showing the possible effect over time of different types of schooling. The studies of NAEP data were only snapshots, they said, showing student achievement at a single point in time. The studies did not address the possibility that some students may have entered private school at a lower level of achievement.

The new study was designed, in part, to address that issue, the authors say in their PDK article.

The data for the new study came from the database produced by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (or ECLS-K), administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education.

The ECLS-K database includes both student achievement and comprehensive background information drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 21,000 students, starting with their entry into kindergarten in the fall of 1998.

The most recent data available for the U. of I. study was gathered in 2004, in the spring of the students’ fifth-grade year. The sample used for the study included 9,791 students in 1,531 schools (1,273 public, 140 Catholic and 118 other private schools).

To better determine the effects of attending different types of schools, the sample included only students who had stayed in the same type of school – though not necessarily the same school – throughout the years covered.

As in the previous studies, the researchers used a statistical technique known as hierarchical linear modeling to control for demographic differences between students, as well as schools. Among the demographic variables included in looking at students were measures of socioeconomic status; race and ethnicity; gender; disability; and whether the child spoke a language other than English at home.

Among the variables included in looking at schools was the average socioeconomic level of its students, its racial or ethnic composition, and its location (urban or rural).

The NAEP data had included similar information, but its quality and controls on its collection were not as strong as for ECLS-K, according to Sarah Lubienski, who studies math education and specializes in statistical research. “It’s one reason this study feels more definitive than the NAEP studies,” she said.

After controlling for demographic differences among students and schools, the researchers’ found that public school students began kindergarten with math scores roughly equal to those of their Catholic school peers. By fifth grade, however, they had made significantly greater gains, equal to almost an extra half year of schooling.

The American public has yet to be told that even conservatives who had previously advocated for school vouchers are now admitting that it is an exteremely bad idea. And although NCLB continues its reign of intellectual deprivation of American public schools it is only because of the continuing and unrelenting masochist policies of the Bush administration led by education dominatrix , Margaret Spellings.

Until the current administration is voted out of office into the jailcells they more rightfully deserve the pox of NCLB will continue to stain the reputation of public schools that in study after comprehensive study demonstrate competent, superior results before Bush denigrated their good name.

Carl Chew: American Hero

A few months ago an excellent LA Times editorial talked about the degradation of the concept of heroes. Rosa Brooks in a piece called Heroism and the Language of Fascism
laments...

...it's a big mistake to mix up the idea of service -- or the idea of sacrifice and suffering -- with the idea of heroism.

As most dictionaries explain, true heroism involves "extraordinary courage, fortitude or greatness of soul." So firefighters who take unusual risks to save others can legitimately be called heroes -- but just showing up for work and turning on a fire hose when required isn't quite enough. Similarly, suffering doesn't magically turn an ordinary person, however beloved, into a hero. Some of the office workers who died on 9/11 were truly heroic, sacrificing their own chance of escape to help others. But many of those who died never even got a chance to be heroic.

Distinguishing heroism from service and suffering is important for two reasons. First, it's always worth fighting the Lake Wobegon effect because, in a world where "all the children are above average," the truly special child gets no recognition, and genuine acts of exceptional courage are trivialized.

Take Jason Dunham, a 22-year-old Marine corporal who, in 2004, threw his helmet and then his body on top of an Iraqi insurgent's grenade, saving the lives of the Marines around him. Dunham died of his wounds and became one of only two soldiers in the Iraq war to be awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States. But in a world where every service member is a "hero," how many Americans have heard of Dunham's fatal courage?

There are plenty of other genuine heroes whose names will never be recorded, like the utility workers described by a Cornell University research team: On 9/11, "they went into the flooded Verizon building just north of World Trade Center 6, risking electrocution in chest-deep water and kerosene to shut off the building's massive circuit-breakers by hand." But when each of the thousands of stockbrokers and secretaries in the World Trade Center qualifies for the "everyone's a hero" award, why bother to identify those whose actions were unusually selfless?

But there's a deeper reason to be wary of the "everyone's a hero" rhetoric. Simply put, it fits neatly alongside other terms beloved of the powers that be, such as "warrior" and "the Homeland": It's part of the language of fascism.

For a chilling account of another society in which "the devaluation of the concept of heroism" was "proportional to the frequency of its use and abuse," check out Ilya Zemtsov's "The Encyclopedia of Soviet Life." In 1938, Zemtsov notes, the Soviet Union instituted "the title 'Hero of Socialist Labor'. . . . Thousands of those heroes emerged. . . . The hero was supposed to die in the name of Stalin during wartime [and] give his or her all in labor on communist constructions. . . . [But] a person upon whom the title 'hero' is bestowed has often performed no heroic deed whatsoever, but may receive the title . . . merely in return for displaying loyalty and/or diligence. . . . With time, the awarding of the title came to be used as a token to be disbursed or withheld according to political considerations. . . . "

In other words, comrades, whenever it seems as if they're handing out "hero" medals for free, look out: There's usually a hidden price.

I am a fan of Rosa's observations. Heroes are very special people usually acting on a higher plane of consciousness. In education its a rarity but I found one.

Carl Chew, a Seattle teacher refused to administer federally required standardized tests. His insubordination, an act of true heroism, cost him a nine day, unpaid suspension. ABC NEWS covered the story:

Chew, who is 60, said his act of civil disobedience will cost him about $1,000 over his nine-day absence. He knows it will go on his permanent record and he could ultimately be fired.

"It took me a few moments before I decided to do this," he said. "I did protesting around the Vietnam War and marched for civil rights in the '60s. But this was the first time I did something against a seemingly huge machine."

"I feel so strongly about this -- that it's bad for the kids and I have to do it," he said. "But I know from my own experience, I have to accept the consequences."

Good Lord, I thought everyone with a conscience and the courage to stand up to the government was dead. At Seattle PI Chew explained his reasoning:

"On April 15, I refused to give the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to my sixth-grade students at a Seattle Public Schools middle school. I performed this single act of civil disobedience based on personal moral and ethical grounds, as well as professional duty. I believe that the WASL is destructive to our children, teachers, schools, and parents.

"It is important for me to note that my disobedient action was not directed at any individual. I love being a teacher; my students are fantastic; my fellow teachers collaborate with and help me every day in numerous ways; and my school administration has always shown a willingness to listen to and support the teachers. I understand that my action has caused people pain, and I am truly sorry for that, but I could no longer stand idly by as something as wrong as the WASL is perpetrated on our children year after year.

"Though my act of civil disobedience was individual, I do not stand alone in my strong beliefs. Any Internet search for high-stakes testing will reveal highly regarded educators, distressed parents and sensitive teachers with a wealth of thoughtful writing and case studies supporting my views.

"The WASL is bad for kids.

"To my mind the measure of successful childhood is that each child learns about who she or he is and how the world works, gains an assertive and confident self image and feels safe, well fed, and happy. Schools, along with parents and communities, need to contribute wisely to this goal. Unfortunately, the WASL creates panic, insecurity, low self esteem and sadness for our children.

# It is written in the language of white, middle-and upper-class students, leaving all others behind.

# It is presented to children in a secretive, cold, sterile and inhumane fashion.

# There is no middle ground --children either pass or fail, which leaves them confused, guilty, and frustrated.

# Numerous questions on the test are unclear, misleading or lacking in creativity.

# It tests a very narrow definition of what educators know children need to become well-rounded human beings.

# The WASL is given at a prescribed time regardless of a child's emotional or physical health.

"The WASL is bad for teachers.

"For meager pay, teachers are asked to work in extremely challenging situations, keep absurdly long hours and, when it comes to the WASL, function in an atmosphere of fear.

# A majority of teachers loath the WASL but feel unable to speak out freely against it due to their fears of negative consequences for doing so.

# Because administrators are constantly pushing to meet federal guidelines for yearly score improvements, their relationships with teachers can become strained and unpleasant.

# Administrators and teachers suffer under the knowledge that if they do not achieve improvement goals (measured by WASL passage alone) they can be sent to retraining classes, lose their students to other schools, or have their "failing" school handed over to a private company.

# Before administering the WASL teachers mandatorily sign a "loyalty" oath promising they will not read any of the test questions.

# Teachers feel devalued by the amount of time most of them have to devote to test practice and proctoring --upwards of four weeks for actual testing and many more weeks for WASL prep in many cases.

# Teachers feel used and depressed when, half a year after the test is given, they are presented with dubious WASL results --amateurish and misleading Power Point charts and graphs telling them next to nothing about their students' real knowledge and talents.

# Teachers' relationships with parents are compromised because they cannot talk freely with them about opting their child out or other WASL concerns.

:The WASL is bad for parents and families.

# Parents have been shut out of this costly process.

# Most of them are misled by official statements about what the purpose of the WASL is.

# Many of them do not realize that they have the right to opt their children out of testing with no consequences, though in practice schools have illegally put inappropriate pressure on parents and children who have opted out.

# Many of them do not realize that teachers are, in many cases, not allowed to discuss any reasons why they might want to opt their child out. (Teachers in California went to court to secure the right to inform parents of their right to opt their children out of that state's testing.)

# Like children, parents suffer from the same feelings of guilt and unhappiness when their children fail.

# Parents are not informed that the test is biased, culturally insensitive and irrelevant and not a real measure of anything.

# The WASL graduation requirement has kept thousands of families from knowing whether or not their students will be allowed to take part in graduation ceremonies and celebrations -- the culminating reward for 13 years of public school attendance and achievement -- with friends and families.

"The WASL is bad for schools.

"Even in the best of times purse strings are rarely opened adequately to public education. Where a private school needs to charge $20,000-$30,000 to educate a child well, public schools are given a third or less of that for each student. Simply, schools are strapped for cash, many of them struggling each year to fund their needs with an ever- shrinking pot of money.

# While schools are generally underfunded, Washington will spend a projected $56 million in 2009 to have a private corporation grade WASL tests. These tax dollars are needed right in our schools providing more teachers, smaller classes, tutors, and diverse educational experiences for our students.

# While the federal government requires that school districts use high stakes testing to qualify for federal dollars, tests are not fully funded by the federal government.

# WASL is one of the most difficult tests used to fulfill the federal requirements, with one of the highest failure rates.

# Instead of safe, exciting and meaningful places for our children to spend half of their waking hours, schools have become WASL or test mills bent on churning out students who are trained to answer state-approved questions in a state-approved manner.

The WASL is just bad.

# Most, if not all, teachers will agree that assessment is vital. Wise teachers know that assessments which are also learning experiences for students and teachers are the best. The WASL categorically is not a learning experience.

# I believe that individual students are entitled to their own learning plans, tailored to their own needs, strengths and interests. Teachers know it is definitely possible to do this in the context of a public school. The WASL categorically treats all children alike and requires that they each fit into the same precise mold, and state-mandated learning plans based on WASL scores fail to recognize individual strengths of students.

# Passing the WASL does not guarantee success in college, placement in a job, a living wage or adequate health care.

# WASL will decrease the high school graduation rate. Thousands of students who have completed all other requirements and passed all required classes will be denied diplomas because of WASL failure.

# High-stakes testing has not proven beneficial to students, teachers, schools, or communities.

In the real lives of students, teachers, and parents the WASL is an ongoing disaster.

# When I was a teacher at Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, a number of my students received their WASL scores to find that they had "failed". When I looked at the notices being sent to their parents I saw that each student had come to within just a few points of actually passing and that their scores were well within the gray area, or "margin of error," for the test. The "test scientists" aren't sure whether the student passed or failed, yet the school tells the student he or she failed. These students cried when they saw the results.

# When I first started teaching, Graham Hill could afford Americorps tutors, numerous classroom aides and had money for field-trip buses and ample supplies. By the time I stopped teaching there, Americorps was gone, there were no classroom aides except for parent volunteers, and everything else was in short supply.

# Teaching and testing during my last year at Graham Hill was challenging. I was on my own in a room with 29 students, 10 percent did not speak English, 50 percent of them spoke another language at home, several of them were homeless, and many of them had severe emotional challenges due to parental pre-natal drug use, violence and abuse.

# No one ever asked me or any of the teachers I know whether high-stakes testing was a good idea. In fact, we teachers are made to jump through seemingly endless hoops to prove our worthiness to be professional, certificated educators. Public school teachers are responsible for the educational lives of over a million students in Washington state, yet, in the end, no one actually wants to listen to what teachers have to say about what is best for the students in our care.

Wow! Professional ethics! Professional Duty to children and parents! Moral introspection!

I want to vote this guy to Head the Department of Education in Washington.

Hat tip: Schools Matter

Race as a Dodge

The Sacramento Bee uncovered an interesting new (or heretofore undiscovered) way that schools are making an end run around NCLB requirements. Of course there is no honor in any of this because the schools are playing the NCLB game. After all, they aren't conscientiously objecting to NCLB, they just aren't passing the metric under certain data alignments like, say, is a student black or white?

This is just another example of how the Feds are compromising the integrity of the system and corrupting the profession in addition to making a mockery of racial background.

From, Sacbee.com - Schools reclassify students, pass test under federal law by Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese:

Will C. Wood Middle School faced a vexing situation when last year's test results came out in August. Most students had met the mark set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students' math scores fell far short of it, bringing the school into failing status in the eyes of the federal law.

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn't count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

"You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble."

Over the past two years, 80 California schools got "out of trouble" with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.

The state allows school officials to comb through test results every August, changing students' demographic information to correct mistakes that can happen, for example, when clerks register new students or when districts swap student files.

Thousands of schools make demographic corrections, and the majority have no bearing on their No Child Left Behind status. But the correction process may allow some schools to escape the scrutiny intended by No Child Left Behind, The Bee found.

Read the rest of the article for graphics and extended analysis - definitely worth a read.

The End of the Republic? Bush's NCLB Poison Pill

A recent entry in the Educational Justice blog caught my attention. I responded with this comment.

"Another reason to revamp the accountability system is the new testing program that will be launched in high schools in the 2011-12 school year. Beginning with ninth-graders that year, students will be required to take a dozen end-of-course exams through high school and get a passing score in each subject area to earn a diploma."

This has me concerned. Connecticut's new Dept of Education administration is recommending this identical thing. It is as if the states no longer exist in a republic in which each state gets to decide what's best for that population.

The horrifying thing about this additional testing is that by 2011, NCLB is supposed to eliminate failing schools and if it doesn't then high-stakes, high-stress testing is a failure. Yet, it looks as though the Bush administration's plan is to create 50 state NCLB's to carry on the nightmare.

Can we get a head count of states plagiarizing each others future plans? there may be an unconstitutional intrusion of federal tyranny at work in the states educational responsibilities. Where's these 2011 testing plans coming from?

Every indication is that the Bush administration is preparing a surprise for America after they leave office and that is the perpetuation of their insipid educational pogroms by migrating their legislation to all 50 states. This is a wholesale subversion of the principles of the republic, the brazen theft of states rights, and the denial of the next democratically elected administration to administer their desired education policies and directives. State legislatures may not even be aware of the federal high-jacking of their jurisdiction.

This collusion of dictating testing policies in each state may have criminal implications if bribery or corruption is involved. At face value, the co-incidental similarities are highly suspicious.

Neil Bush: Ignite's Formula - Bait, Switch, Deposit Tax Dollars, Repeat

The truth about the curriculum that is sold by Ignite is obfuscated by the lack of review of the product's content and the persistence of misconceptions about the quality and attributes of the course-ware as well as a complete misunderstanding of the worth of a machine that has no internet connectivity.

After all what school system would be dumb enough to spend $4K+ on a fancy slide projector instead of investing in, say, 10-15 laptops/COW expenditure?

Some schools do and the this is somewhat understandable. In July 1999 Ignite, Inc. purchased a University of Texas incubator business, Adaptive Learning Technology, a company dedicated to individualized learning courseware.

Adaptive Learning founder Mary Schenck-Ross said the software's interactive lessons allowed teachers "to get away from the mass-treatment approach" to education. When a student typed in a response to a question, the software was designed to react and provide a customized learning path. "The original concept was to avoid 'one size fits all.' That was the point," said Catherine Malloy, who worked on the software development.

"It breaks my heart what they have done. The concept was totally perverted," Schenck-Ross said.

Mary Schenk-Ross left Ignite! in September of 2001 and the remarks are worth paying attention to not for their hyperbole but for their factual basis.

Neil Bush's proclamation that, "Ignite! is designed to make learning fun for "hunter-warrior" kids who don't like reading." could make any person concerned about education wince. And recent studies that question the educational effectiveness of presentation style slide shows like Microsoft's PowerPoint only serve to legitimize the concern.

Coupled with quality of content and methodology concerns is the bottom line cost of buying/pushing such a product into cash strapped school districts.

At a standard price of $3,800-$4,200 per unit, the COW is a very expensive device with limited use. A recent New York Times article about the use of the COW in Spotsylvania, Virginia, put the cost into perspective: each school in the district receives $1,000 "to cover all the lab supplies, equipment and other expenses connected with science for an entire year." Adding to the initial expense, schools must pay an annual $1,000 licensing, upkeep and upgrade fee in order to retain the COW for more than one year.

My guess is that the $1K/year cited in actuality is $1K per subject per COW per year expense.

But here is an actual lesson that should make every American alarmed. The subliminal message of this one is that the loss of a republic to an emperor is no big deal - in fact, things are good for centuries.

This unit on American and Canadian Art manages to completely avoid actually taking about any artists, attributing abstract expressionism to Canadians, and talking more about arts funding than art.

Viewing the YouTube vault of sample lessons shows us exactly why critics are alarmed. By basing an entire curriculum on lessons such as this, reading is minimized and middle school learning material is reduced to near moronic levels of understanding. This is bullet-point information that may reflect the testing industry's idea of high expectations but clearly this represents a dumbing down of American children, teachers, and society.

Numerous videos in this series celebrate war, war spending, and the suspension of human rights simple as that. Media Mindfulness expresses concern about the Habeas Corpus video, "...view the sample lesson from their COW (Curriculum on Wheels) system in the above video. It’s on the history of “Habeas Corpus”; you may agree the lesson is in dire need of some media literacy. It’s curious how it repeatedly justifies the suspension of the law."

The subliminal perversions do not stop there. The content and delivery intended to educate Jr. High school students is more appropriate for an elementary grade student struggling with reading or having a learning disability. But to treat entire Jr High school social studies, science, and math classes to a steady, unrelenting battery of this stuff is to believe these kids are all morons or worse. Neil Bush's dream of developing graduating classes of "hunter-warriors" who "hate reading" may be fulfilled in Houston before too long.

Another aspect of Ignite's presentation that I find disturbing is the implicit racism of the characters who narrate the information. Instead of intelligent, well-dressed teachers presenting the information children are treated to sugar-coated, hip-hop, jive-talking and singing characters who not only distort the content into labored jingoisms but promote an idea that minorities in America cannot be viewed by white America as anything more than modern-day caricatures of persistent, racist stereotypes.

The Adaptive Learning Technology courseware was dedicated to individualized learning, adaptive learning, multiple intelligences, and so on. That continues to be the marketing rhetoric despite the bleaching out of any such high-minded educational development ideals. By September of 2001, Ignite!'s business model first pursued selling itself as an aide to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) and more recently as a political NCLB compliance testing inoculation.

One Size Fits All is Back!

Individualization and self-pacing are gone except as cosmically co-incidental mishaps. Ignite's agenda is NCLB's agenda. And that agenda is best summarized by Gene Hickock, the under-secretary of education, "One of the virtues of NCLB is leverage, leverage at the state. . . at the local level . . . We don’t mind being the bad guys... I am very concerned that we will . . . underestimate the potential that we have to redefine everything."

And "redefine everything" means writing laws compliant to the testing and educational lobbyist's desire. Education is no longer driven by the needs of children or the desire of taxpayers to provide a cost-effective public education.

As Bill Gates discovered at Microsoft, he who writes the specifications can near monopolize the procurement of product by consumers who must comply. The perfect storm of corrupt politics and more corrupt corporate interests is creating a manufactured market for ineffective but highly profitable testing monopolies and accessories.

That the Bush family has a hand in that multi-billion dollar tax swindle is no surprise.

next - soon

Previous: Neil Bush and the Origin of Ignite!

Neil Bush and the Origin of Ignite!, Inc.

Barbara Bush has long milked the posture of a doting, innocent granny goodness character when campaigning for her sons and husband. She understands her audience.

Neil Bush needed a legitimizing reason for starting an education company in 1999. The resulting heart-wrenching tale of young Neil's difficulty in middle-school would be attributed to being diagnosed with dyslexia. And soon, Neil's story became decorated with tales of momma Bush's struggle to help Neil become a reader. The fact that Barbara Bush failed in making either Neil or brother George Jr a reader is a fact that never enters the conversation.

From my reading of the public record, aside from a smoky anecdotal diagnosis, no evidence or documentation seems to exist to prove that Neil, in fact, is dyslexic. What is clear is that the political meme that Neil was/is dyslexic was so compelling an explanation for George W.'s shocking public speaking gaffs that both brothers were suspected of having learning disabilities with W. having to insist he needed no disability to function as he had.

All of which raises the suspicion that Neil's diagnosis may be wrong. The Bush's may simply have raised at least two sons who were not the sharpest tools in the family shed. And the dyslexia meme, real or imagined conveniently serves a marketing purpose that sells well. And I bring up this topic because the dyslexia meme later becomes a smokescreen for the Ignite product.

The 1999 Assault on America

One can choose to believe that Neil Bush's heartfelt compassion for the children of America suffering from learning disabilities was his motivation for starting Ignite, Inc. And Neil's commitment to improving the lives of these poor afflicted children was so myopic that luring investors - any investor no matter what their background became his calling.

And in the activity by Neil's investors we find a pattern of investment that seemingly contradicts and transcends Neil's pithy dyslexia story.

In 1999, Bill Bennett's educational venture K12, Inc. received $4M of taxpayer NCLB funding. The controversy is documented here:

Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, drug czar, and conservative author and pundit, founded K12 in 1999 as an option to traditional brick-and-mortar schools.

Furthermore...

The publication also reported that ED awarded the grants despite the fact that the Arkansas project scored lower on a series of independent reviews than at least one other program that wasn't funded--a highly unusual occurrence, ED insiders said, and one that raises the question of whether the program received preferential treatment as a result of the political ties among Bennett, Arkansas state officials, and Bush administration officials.

The key to our discussion is the 1999 timeframe. This is the year that the American election is stolen in Florida with Gore and the Democrats not knowing what hit them.

Yet, neo-conservative forces like Bennett and Bush's brother are being heavily financed to profit from the education industry (variously reported to be a multi-billion dollar market) a priori of the election results.

And who financed Bennett?

Bill teamed with a Virginia company backed by the education firm Knowledge Universe that is Michael Milikin's(sic) money to start up k12.com his home / cyber learning for profit school which is also commodisizing educational products.

Millkin, of junk bond fame, re-appears in 2006 as an investor in Ignite! whose original investors include Neil's parents and "Neil Bush had raised about $23 million from more than a dozen outside investors, including Mohammed Al Saddah, the head of a Kuwaiti company, and Winston Wong, the head of a Chinese computer firm."

Now, after five years of development and backing by investors like Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and onetime junk-bond king Michael R. Milken, Neil Bush aims to roll his high-tech teacher's helpers into classrooms nationwide.

This perfect storm of foreign investment did not happen overnight. The assault on the American public education system started much earlier and its history is as seedy as anything this series will cover. All such evidence is in the public record.

What is important is that by 1999, a coup of American education is being poised to take control. Not only does it shock and awe progressive educational initiatives, it violates the rhetoric of conservatism that is enlisted to empower this takeover.

And even in 1999, like a bad Austin Powers movie script, the scope of ambition in controlling the education of students everywhere with a uniform and politically correct curriculum of compliance and servitude is obvious to international observers.

In a paper by Angela C. Siqueira presented to the Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society called "The World Bank New Discourse and the 1999 Education Strategy", secret documentation is examined that already describes global education policies that will be applied to education initiatives around the world that eerily predict the form and deployment of NCLB in America.

Based on the 1999 education sector strategy and World Bank documents... -snip- ...it seems that the main target is to create intellectual dependence and impose a one-sided solution and view of the world, by eliminating the possibility for the emergence of alternative perspectives.

In summary, the Knowledge Management Bank and its Education Knowledge Management System seem to be an attempt to foster the commodification, sterilization, and standardization of knowledge. Therefore, it constitutes a serious peril to democracy, which presupposes diversity and not homogeneity.

Ignite!, Inc. is created from the seeds of a long-simmering desire on the part of globally controlled media conglomerates and mideast players with politically incestuous ties to the Bush clan and the neo-con factions of the Republican party to prototype in America a closed, tightly controlled public school curriculum that would uniformly classify its graduates according to the needs of these international power brokers.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. In the end, Neil Bush emerges as little more than an errand boy. The Bush presidency little more than a well-compensated political ratchet with which to implement a brilliant swindle that brings America's education system to its intellectual knees and under the jackboot of right-wing dogmatists.


Previous: Neil Bush: Igniting an Investigation
next: Neil Bush: Bait, Switch, Deposit Tax Dollars, Repeat

Neil Bush: Igniting an Investigation

Prologue:

To understand why Neil Bush's educational firm is under investigation is only a provincial part of the story of the alleged misuse of NCLB funds.

The larger scope of scandal is not so much global as a surgical subversion of the American system of education by foreign interests who may be seeking to institutionalize a curriculum to undermine democracy in this country. If 9/11 demonstrated the kind of physical threat a hostile outside agent could muster then imagine the potential to disrupt this country's ability to instill trust in law, government, and to revitalize its workforce in maintaining a strong, free-thinking society.

And, like 9/11, by tricking the existing system into financing and implementing the scheme is the well-known irony of the original tragedy.

An outside enemy need not be particularly ingenious to imagine just such a scheme. From afar, the purchase of curriculum materials is often dictated by the buying decisions of the largest state consumers, say, Texas. That same outside agent would need to simply control Texas' most influential political agent. Conveniently that agent might also wholly control the nation's education laws, practice, and funding.

Own Texas' local power broker and in time that outside agent can PWN the curriculum of the planet's strongest democracy.

What would it take to accomplish a speculative feat as just described. The foreign interest might have no interest in the American dollar as that interest might see the currency as worthless wallpaper. So "investing" in a certain American's provincial special interests would be one way of achieving a degree of control.

Another might be to compromise the integrity of that local agent assuming that integrity existed in the first place.

Let's put this narrative aside to look at actual facts to see if any of this might be a concern.

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In early November of 2007, a watchdog consumer group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general of the Department of education to investigate whether or not $1M of No Child Left Behind Funding was inappropriately used to purchase Ignite, Inc's product suite. The issue being that NCLB funding requires stringent compliance to certain educational criteria that this group believes is not being met.

A New York Times report by Marilyn Thompson documents the event:

The citizens' group obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request showing that the Katy Independent School District west of Houston used $250,000 in state and federal Hurricane Katrina relief money last year to buy the Curriculum on Wheels.

The district's director of special education, Fred Shafer, supported the purchases, telling other officials that "all the kids love the Cow, and it really meets the needs of the students with disabilities," according to an internal e-mail message obtained by the citizens' group. Mr. Shafer did not return calls for comment.

Neil Bush has assertively marketed the Cow and, according to the company, the product has been placed in 22 states. This summer, Ignite announced plans to expand into China.

The citizens' group says it has documented only a small part of the federal money spent on Ignite products. Ignite has had strong support from districts in Texas, President Bush's home state. This week, the Houston Independent School District is set to consider whether to authorize schools to spend an additional $300,000 from various financing sources on the Curriculum on Wheels.

Jay Spuck, a former curriculum director for the district, has criticized spending on the Ignite product, saying: "It's not helping kids at all. It's not helping teachers. The only way Neil has gotten in is by his name."

Much of the product's success in Texas dates from a March 2006 donation by Barbara Bush, who gave eight units to schools attended by large numbers of hurricane evacuees.

Neil Bush followed up with an e-mail message telling the district that "in order for the schools to keep the Cows in subsequent years they will have to pay an annual fee of $1,000," according to documents obtained by the citizens group.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of the group, referring to No Child Left Behind, said: "A constant principle of N.C.L.B. is that children must be taught using scientifically proven methods. Ignite's Cows simply don't meet N.C.L.B. standards. This suggests that the real reason N.C.L.B. funds are expended on Ignite is because the founder and C.E.O. is the president's brother."

The cost for each COW unit is approximately $4,200 and a simple calculation of Barbara Bush's "donation" (see below) comes out to $33,600. This means that the Texas school district spent an additional $226,400 on additional units.

The accusation that the units were sold on influence peddling by Neil and Barbara Bush is an obvious suspicion and it is repeated in both liberal and conservative publications reporting on this event. The Bush's largely attribute such criticism to jealousy and celebrity sniping on the part of critics. The fact that their family is self-insulated from oversight or accountability is an unspoken subtext.

The content of a Walter F. Roche, Jr. article in the LA Times has become mysteriously inaccessible on the LA Times site. However this important documentation was found preserved here.

In Houston, where Neil Bush and his parents live, the district has used various funding sources to acquire $400,000 in Ignite products. An
additional $240,000 in purchases has been authorized in the last six months.

Correspondence obtained by The Times shows that Neil Bush met with top Houston officials, sent e-mails and left voice mail messages urging bigger and faster allocations. An e-mail from a school procurement official to colleagues said Bush had made it clear that he had a "good working relationship" with a school board member.
Another Ignite official asked a Texas state education official to endorse the company. In an e-mail, Neil Bush's partner Ken Leonard asked Michelle Ungurait, state director of social studies programs, to tell Houston officials her "positive impressions of our content, system and approach."

Ungurait, identified in another Leonard e-mail as "our good friend" at the state office, told her superiors in response to The Times' inquiry that she never acted on Leonard's request. Leonard said he did not ask Ungurait to do anything that would be improper.

Houston school officials gave Ignite's products "high" ratings in eight categories and recommended approval.

Some in Houston's schools question the expenditures, however. Jon Dansby was teaching at Houston's Fleming Middle School when Ignite products arrived. "You can't even get basics like paper and scissors, and we went out and bought them. I just see red," he said.

In Las Vegas, the schools have approved more than $300,000 in Ignite purchases. Records show the board recommended spending $150,000 in No Child funding on Ignite products.

Sources familiar with the Las Vegas purchases said pressure to buy Ignite products came from Sig Rogich, an influential local figure and prominent Republican whose fundraising of more than $200,000 for President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign qualified him as a "Bush Ranger."

Rogich, who chairs a foundation that supports local schools, said he applied no pressure but became interested in COWs after Neil Bush contacted him. Rogich donated $6,000 to purchase two COWs for a middle school named after him.

Christy Falba, the former Clark County school official who oversaw the contracts, said she and her husband attended a dinner with Neil Bush to discuss the products. She said Rogich encouraged the district "to look at the Ignite program" but applied no pressure.

You'll notice that Houston alone has spent at least $640,000 on the devices and that coverage of the expense for this product is repeatedly under-reported as a result of the piecemeal purchasing audit trail.

You'll also notice that unquestionably NCLB funds (your tax dollars) are being funneled into Bush coffers. The question of whether or not the practice is legal is the contention.

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"Donation" Money

As you read previously most of the media both left and right described Barbara Bush's donation as a private act of charity.

Amy Goodman's interview of Joe DeRose sets up the context of the donation;

AMY GOODMAN: Joe DeRose, on a side note, I remember when the President’s mother, the former First Lady, Barbara Bush, went to visit the Katrina survivors in the Houston Astrodome, and she promised to make a contribution to charity. I’m looking at the Houston Chronicle, the piece that wrote about that and said, “Katrina funds earmarked to pay for Neil Bush’s software program. Former First Lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil. Since then, the Ignite learning program has been given to eight area schools that took in substantial numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.” That was in Houston. Do you know more about that? At the time, we didn’t know that she was saying that her charitable contribution would go to pay for her son’s educational software.

JOE DeROSE: No, I don’t know anything about that. But I think the point is that that really needs to be looked at very hard, is that a lot of money has been allocated, maybe not enough, but certainly billons of dollars have already been allocated by the federal government, and I think it’s pretty important to look at where that money is being spent.

But Barbara Bush's earmarked donation is the tip of an iceburg. The diversion of charitable donations toward the Bush's product includes this 2006 tidbit from the Houston Chronicle:

Two years ago, the school district raised eyebrows when it expanded the program by relying heavily on private donations.

In February 2004, the Houston school board unanimously agreed to accept $115,000 in charitable donations from businesses and individuals who insisted the money be spent on Ignite. The money covered half the bill for the software, which cost $10,000 per school.

The deal raised conflict of interest concerns because Neil Bush and company officials helped solicit the donations for the HISD Foundation, a philanthropic group that raises money for the district.

Quid pro quo tax-deductible political contributions in the form of charitable donations? As the Borat character might say, "NICE!"

Previous: Neil Bush, The UnTold Story - Preface

Next - Neil Bush and the Origin of Ignite!, Inc.