Margaret Spellings Dirty Little Secret

There are numerous buried studies that refute the claim that America's schools represent a threat to our ability to globally compete or that our children are suffering some kind of miseducation at the hands of incompetent fools. They never get the traction they deserve because bad press about school performance is main stream media's (MSM) party line. It sells.

And, of course, the Departments of Education at the Federal and State levels genuflect and defer to the political impetus to promote these kinds of fallacies. But truth is a funny thing. The right-wing fanaticism about school performance is starting to be exposed for what it is and always was - bullshit.

This from the New York Times article, Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study by DIANA JEAN SCHEMO.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math.

The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.

It went through a lengthy peer review and includes an extended section of caveats about its limitations and calling such a comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.”

Its release, on a summer Friday, was made with without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were “doing an outstanding job” and that if the results had been favorable to private schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.”

“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning” to advance its political agenda, Mr. Weaver said, of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools.

Something that this report hints at is that "The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst."

I cannot help but wonder whether or not the complaints coming from Colleges and Universities about the need for remedial courses in reading and math are in fact an indictment of public school graduates and not more specifically certain private school graduate clusters pulling down public school graduate's accomplishments.

Anyone remember the The Middle Class?

The Washington Post ran an article the other day that talks about a study examining the disappearing middle class neighborhoods in American cities.

We all know New Orleans was and maybe still is America's poorest city but few know Connecticut's big cities are not far behind. Under Bush, we all make believe we need more data to identify "failing schools". Presumably this is a mystery despite over fifty years of knowing full well exactly where these schools are.

Yet our participatory Homerism prevents us from any objectivity here. We are living in the dark ages of belligerent belief systems that can call into question every obvious scientific and sociological truth we hold dear. So America pretends that No Child Left Behind metrics will somehow reveal more desirable truths than the fact that poverty and poverty neighborhoods cheat those children.

The manufactured truth America, white, black and otherwise want to prove is that their child is being shortchanged as though learning to read was a biological truth like growing a head. NCLB trivializes learning, children, and diminishes the professionalism of teachers.

So, out of the blue this article reports that:

"No city in America has gotten more integrated by income in the last 30 years," said Alan Berube, an urban demographer at Brookings who worked on the report.

"It means that if you are not living in one of the well-off areas, you are not going to have access to the same amenities - good schools and safe environment - that you could find 30 years ago," he said.

Let's repeat the important assertion that the Brookings Institute makes. That is if you are not living in one of the well-off areas, you are not going to have access to the same amenities - good schools and safe environment.

If Brookings doesn't need NCLB to establish this fact why is the Department of Education confused? After all, this is OBVIOUS. I mean it. You don't need NCLB or Brookings or some Libertarian think tank to figure this stuff out. This is remedial 7th grade social studies.

That is, except to the current regime.

Virtually Integrating Our Schools

I take the persistence of poverty in America as a given. Those who care about eliminating poverty and classism in America are powerless to change its inevitability and ubiquity. And the consequence of poverty is racism, benign bigotry, and poverty community schools hopelessly mired in failure.

Our society continues to condone and tolerate this phenomenon with a vengence. NCLB pogram advocates only obfuscate the tolerance and further nurturing of a convenient underclass. The political invention of "failing schools" neatly skirts the fact that poor children are hopelessly trapped in urban social warfare reservations.

Recent studies uncover the lie that a child in a failing school can simply transfer across to the next school to get out of a failing one. Failing schools are clustered in geopolitical constructs that may as well be prisons of poverty and violence for those trapped in the confines of these ghettos. To call the recent rash of shootings and killings in Hartford a tragedy is not enough. Even tragedy mourns when one tragedy begets another and another. Any conscientious human being is numbed by the slaughter of children randomly shooting children.

In the one-upsmanship of American society, racism and classism observe no color lines. Those who empower racism and poverty are as likely to be black or spanish middleclass citizens as white. In every case, the same arguments are made. The shiftless and lazy arguments that forty years ago slurred minority populations are now exercised without question toward helpless and politically impotent child populations. The arguments are so compelling that arming poor kids with guns so that they can thin the ranks is de facto social policy.

My words will not change a thing so I resign myself to the same profession that Jonathan Kozol endeavors to be, merely a witness. I have rarely found truth to be a worthwhile virtue but I exercise the reckless honor anyway, usually at my own expense.

Assuming that nothing changes [and very little has in my lifetime] these violent urban operas will continue to persist and feed the nightly news broadcasts with a profitable fill of blood and tears and empty homilies.

However there is something that liberal educational evangelists can do to at least virtually integrate the classrooms of urban fortress schools and that is to advocate for the wide adoption of collaborative educational tools. There is little or no expense involved. Numerous online tools exist that can allow students in suburban school sto collaborate on a like assignment in an urban school.

For example, an English class reading the same book, might ask students to individually be teamed up with a counterpart at another school and write an essay or produce a dialogue about what they read. Recent studies indicate that a student is more likely to communicate with a person online than a student sitting next to them. while many lament this phenomenon, it offers opportunity to teachers to use it to broaden discussions beyond their school walls.

I created a writeboard here and sent it to some random educators. Let's see if they're saavy enough to respond.