My Thoughts Exactly

I couldn't agree more with Jim Horn:

How Obama Became a One-Termer

Continuing the idiocies of the Bush education policy is one thing, but continuing and accelerating the Bush evisceration of the Constitution is quite another kind of thing, one that will not stand with enough of those of us who put Obama where he is. Scrape your bumper--this honeymooner just moved for annulment.

Go read the rest. I am disgusted with this. Obama, listen to those who got you elected: Prosecute war crimes, roll back wiretapping, and nationalize the banks. Or, enjoy your one and only term.

Tuesday Cartoon Fun: Gay Midwest Edition

I Meant What I Said, And I Said What I Meant?

Very well said, no?

Today President Obama declared,

Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.

I couldn't agree more. And that's exactly why President Obama must tell Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate torture, warrantless wiretapping, and other egregious crimes of the Bush Administration.

Otherwise rules are not binding, violations are not punished, and words mean nothing.

h/t Newshoggers

Education: What Is It Good For?

Peter Henry, another great edublogger, has a wonderful post up about the purpose of education. He seems to think we have ventured away from the purpose of education. In fact, Peter contends that we don't even ask the right question about education and its' purpose. Read it!

The Purpose(s) of Education
Posted April 4th, 2009 by Peter Henry

The great existential question of my youth, thanks in large part to Woody Allen: What is the meaning of life?

And now, the great existential question of my adulthood, thanks in large part to standardized testing: What is the purpose of public education?

I will answer both in this post, I hope, but it should be very clear at this point that if we don't ask good questions, we will never get quality answers. And also, if we don't get quality answers, especially to question number 2 above, we will never know how, when or if we have been successful in the job of educating young people.

So, at the risk of delaying the readers sense of gratification, let me move to the second question first: What is the purpose of education?

And, right off the bat, we can see the limitations of not asking a good question. By asking, "What is the purpose" of eduction, we have, ipso facto, limited the answer to one thing. And, if education has more than one purpose, we would spend the rest of our days trying to figure out which of its multiple purposes is the "right" one.

Now, we know what the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce think is the purpose of education: to increase the math and reading scores of young people. We could get into a rather lengthy debate about "why" these two groups are pumping this particular feature of education, but that's not where I want to go. Just realize that for them, there is one purpose, they have identified it, and now so has the Federal government and most states as well, bent as they both are on testing our young people ad nauseum in math and reading.

And, don't get me wrong. Math and reading are definitely in the mix. Reading is the most fundamental skill that I ever developed in my days at school. (Though, I have to say, besides doing my taxes and balancing my checkbook, until very recently, math has not been the deciding factor in my overall success, either professionally, emotionally or interpersonally, in broad terms for my life.)

Anyway, let's get back to the question at hand: What is the purpose of education? But this time, let's phrase it correctly: What are the purposes of education? And maybe more so, since we are such a myopic and ahistorical nation: Historically, what are the purposes of education in the United States?

Well, now that is something worth answering, isn't it? You see how a better question puts you in a better position to get quality information from answering it.

Here they are then, the historical purposes of education in the United States:

1. Basic academic knowledge and skills
2. Critical thinking and problem-solving
3. Appreciation of the Arts and Literature
4. Preparation for skilled employment
5. Social skills and work ethic
6. Citizenship and community responsibility
7. Physical health
8. Emotional health

In one way or another, in one form or another, if you listen or look closely enough, you will find various of these mentioned in conjunction with questions about our schools, about why children learn, about what outcomes are worthwhile. We expect a lot from our schools, or at least, hope for a lot, and are frequently disappointed when we don't get one or another of these from one or another of our students.

And, really, who can argue with this list? Anyone?

And yet, as is now obvious, we have let a broad range of purposes for eduction get subverted, reduced and diminished down to essentially one thing: basic academic knowledge. That's what standardized testing is all about. That's what "standards" are all about. That's what accountability, in the final analysis, is all about.

Now, of course, this is stupid. Or really "stoopid" if you will. As mentioned, over and over again, at this site and many others, testing measures a very narrow range of human abilities. It also measures only one of the eight fundamentally important purposes for education. Is it even the most important purpose? That's debatable.

But, the point is this: we have arrived at this crucial moment of human history, where critical thinking and having a purpose in life, more than anything, determines a young person's success and happiness. And yet, we are completely letting our kids down because the only thing they can see about learning and education is that it is dumb, boring and useless--because in the end, it is all about filling in bubbles on standardized tests. Not even good standardized tests, mind you, but lousy ones.

Getting out of this mess, liberating our schools and our public understanding about the purposes of education will not be easy. But, it is possible.

It is possible if we return to the original question of this short essay, the one that I grew up with in the 1960s, and that seems to be the basis for most of the oeuvre of Woody Allen: What is the meaning of life?

If what gives a person meaning, or happiness, or joy, or fulfillment can be identified, then we can move ahead on the list of the eight purposes of education listed above. And, I submit, the answer to that question, like the answer to "What is the purpose of education?" is also multiple, multi-faceted, contingent, and above all subject to individual disgression.

The meaning of life is what you believe it to be. Don't look to find agreement or confirmation for your particular take on this question on a billboard or in a TV commercial.

Moreover, there might not be so much as a "meaning" for life, as there is "the experience of meaning". In other words, it is not an objective response to the question; it is the act of response itself. We may seek a meaning of life for assurance, but in reality, we create the meaning of life by what we do. Every. Single. Day. That is the meaning of life, whether we like it or not.

And thus, the fact, that some people, nay, most people, spend their lives in boring, useless or otherwise unstimulating jobs is what brings us full circle here. You see, they too, have been taught to believe that the only real purpose in life is to ... what? ... accept what others tell them is the purpose of life. Namely, to make as much money as you can, even if working a boring, lousy, detrimental job in an industry that may very well be destroying everything you believe in--like the environment, like community, like spirituality.

And how did they come to believe this? Well, because that's what they were prepared for by their upbringing, a good part of which was what they learned about in school.

Which is why it is so crucial to understand: there is not a single purpose for education. There are mutliple purpose. And these cannot be reduced to a number or a set response on a test paper. Or even just one purpose that is most important, can be easily measured and recorded in a box.

No. Like the life you live representing the meaning you derive from life, it is engagement itself in education that makes up its purpose. We do education so that we can engage the world. And how we teach kids to engage should not be limited to reading and math, but by the form of engagement they find most exhilarating, stimulating, fun, profound and fulfilling.

TFT Is On Vacation!!

The Frustrated Son and I are visiting the Frustrated Grandmother this week. Blogging will be light, if at all. Now would be a good time to check out all the links in my sidebar, or peruse the archive. Or maybe go outside and play!

The Achievement Gap Is Neurological?

Hmmm...

"Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement," wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You can read the article here. By posting this, I am not making excuses, or claiming that schools have no role to play; it's just that we haven't been honest about the problem, yet. With this research, maybe we can get to the root of the problem (poverty) and make some headway!

Robert Reich: "It's A Depression"

It's a Depression

The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who'd rather be working full time, it's now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can't find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.

All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still moving out the door. But today's bleak jobs report shows that the economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money will be needed.

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

Energy independence and a non-carbon economy should be the equivalent of a war mobilization. Hire Americans to weatherize and insulate homes across the land. Don't encourage General Motors or any other auto company to shrink. Use the auto makers' spare capacity to make busses, new wind turbines, and electric cars (why let the Chinese best us on this?). Enlarge public transit systems.

Meanwhile, extend our educational infrastructure. So many young people are out of work that they should be using this time to improve their skills and capacities. Expand community colleges. Enlarge Pell Grants. Extend job-training opportunities to the unemployed, so they can learn new skills while they're collecting unemployment benefits.

Finally, accelerate universal health care.

The Beginning Of The End Of Public Schools

Jim Horn keeps warning you about the demise of Public Schools, and here is proof you should worry!

Stealth Bill in Oklahoma Set to Blow Up Public Schools

The conservatives are at it again. You have to wonder which wunderkind from the right-wing sludgetanks came up this newest strategy to dismantle public schools by destroying the state statutory system that maintains standards and practices for public schools--everything from state curriculum frameworks to rules for class size, teacher credentialing, to school libraries, to the qualifications of school nurses and bus drivers. The legislation, Senate Bill 834, just sailed through the Oklahoma Senate on a party line vote, and has passed the first committee hurdle in the House. Unless Oklahoma parents and teachers act quickly, this coming fall will bring the beginning of the end of the state system of public education in Oklahoma.

What the legislation does is give local boards all the jurisdiction and discretion that now resides at the state department of education. It would give local boards the same discretion as charter schools, except that local boards would have to accept all students, which, of course, charters do not:

A school district identified by the State Board of Education for participation in the School District Empowerment Program shall be exempt from all statutory requirements and State Board of Education rules from which charter schools are exempt as provided for in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, except that the district shall continue to be required to enroll all students who are residents of the school district.

So how is a school district "identified by the State Board of Education for participation" in this dismantling? Beginning in the Fall of 2010, all school systems with any schools on the NCLB hit list of "needs improvement" will be eligible for deconstruction. Then from 2011 to 2014, 20 percent of districts each year that meet a particular enrollment criteria will be randomly selected by the State Board for meltdown. At the end of 2014, there will be no state level governance of public schools in Oklahoma.

With changes coming to NCLB that threaten the scheduled dismantling of public schools that NCLB required, the conservatives have come up this new strategy to hasten the end, thus erasing the gains in public education and taking us to the middle of the 19th century in terms of standards and governance of public schools. If you think that fascists like Grover Norquist have taken a holiday, think again. Here, in Oklahoma, is their agenda about to burst into bloom.

STATE OF OKLAHOMA

1st Session of the 52nd Legislature (2009)

SENATE BILL 834 By: Ford

AS INTRODUCED

An Act relating to schools; establishing the School District Empowerment Program; stating purpose; exempting certain districts from certain statutory requirements and rules; specifying certain requirement; identifying districts for participation and implementation of program; specifying method of selection of remaining districts and timeline for implementation; providing for codification; and providing an effective date.


BE IT ENACTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA:
SECTION 1. NEW LAW A new section of law to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes as Section 3-129 of Title 70, unless there is created a duplication in numbering, reads as follows:

A. There is hereby established the School District Empowerment Program which shall be administered by the State Board of Education. The purpose of the program is to empower locally elected school board members to govern school districts and make decisions based on the needs of their students and circumstances.

B. A school district identified by the State Board of Education for participation in the School District Empowerment Program shall be exempt from all statutory requirements and State Board of Education rules from which charter schools are exempt as provided for in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, except that the district shall continue to be required to enroll all students who are residents of the school district.

C. School districts which include a school that has been identified for school improvement for the 2009-2010 school year by the State Board of Education pursuant to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended, 20 U.S.C. 6301 et seq., shall be identified for participation in the School District Empowerment Program and shall implement the program beginning in the 2010-2011 school year.

D. 1. By September 30, 2010, the State Board of Education shall randomly select twenty percent (20%) of districts from each of the following categories for implementation during the 2011-2012 school year:

a. districts with an Average Daily Membership (ADM) of less than two hundred fifty (250),
b. districts with an ADM of less than five hundred (500) and greater than or equal to two hundred fifty (250),
c. districts with an ADM of less than two thousand (2,000) and greater than or equal to five hundred (500), and
d. districts with an ADM of two thousand (2,000) or more.
2. The selection of districts as directed by this subsection shall:
a. occur during open meetings of the Board,
b. occur each year thereafter, for implementation by the districts selected during the following school year, until all districts have been selected to implement the program, and
c. be applicable to the number of districts in each category as of September 30, 2010, to allow for all districts to be selected by September 30, 2014.

SECTION 2. This act shall become effective September 1, 2009.

52-1-11 KM 1/14/2009 4:54:26 PM

Thursday Cartoon Fun: GM Trouble Edition

Thursday Cartoon Fun: Hope Revised Edition

Thursday Cartoon Fun: Black Hole Edition

I Now Officially Teach The Test

That's right. In staff meeting today we were treated to a discussion about how we are going to prepare our 2nd graders for the upcoming CST (the California version of the high=stakes test) test. We discussed the fact that the test items are beyond many's grasp, some of the test items are not even part of our standards in 2nd grade (recognizing paragraphs), and the test actually tests the teachers, not the students. And since this is the way it is, the principal indicated, in so many words, we'd better get on board and figure out how to make the test meaningful, not an exercise in panic, and just shut up about how useless and damaging it is. Ok!

The principal was concerned that the kids may be emotionally unable to cope with all the bubbles, and the stuff they have never seen. We said, Why yes! How true! Then the principal asked how we could ameliorate that sense of fear. I said that I tell my kids that the test is actually to test how well the teacher is teaching, so don't worry about it. The principal both liked it, and made a disgusted face. I think her duplicity is causing great cognitive dissonance for her (though it may simply be confusion, as ascribing cognition to her seems silly. She doesn't think, she reacts.)

What makes me mad, angry, enraged, is the fact that we teachers know the test is not a measure of student achievement, especially this young, yet we still (well, not me!) all seem to stay close-lipped about our outrage.

Unless and until teachers take a stand, the reformers and their systematic takeover of public education will continue, unchallenged.

Stand up! Rail against the unfairness, shallowness, narrowness and danger of "The Test"!

Wednesday Cartoon Fun: Bank CEO vs Auto CEO Edition

AG Won't Investigate War Crimes? Huh?

Jonathan Turley offers his thoughts on Eric Holder's decision not to investigate war crimes. I am very, very disappointed.

Attorney General Eric Holder Announces Justice Department Will Not Investigate War Crimes Due to Prosecutorial Misconduct

In a major decision, Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that he has found that the Justice Department has acted improperly in barring any criminal investigation of well-documented war crimes committed by the Bush Administration in the torture program. To punish the failure of the Department to act in a timely fashion, he has announced that no criminal charges will be pursued regarding torture to teach prosecutors a lesson that “justice delayed is justice denied.”