A 401K Under Every Teacher's Tree

One of the few advantages of the noblest, yet most disrespected and under-funded, profession in America is the public pension benefits that have assured a modicum of security for retired teachers over the years. Now the America' Choice privatizers that make up The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce have joined the larger privazation effort to try scare up support nationwide for ending defined benefit pension plans by states. There is this today at Huffington Post by Gerald McEntee. A clip:

Despite this year's victories at the ballot box and against Social Security privatization, a recent article in The New York Times made clear that right wing attacks on Americans' retirement security continues.

The story itself was overly alarmist. It omitted key facts about a San Diego public pension case and failed to mention that, by and large, public pensions are well funded and backed by law.

The truth is, public employee pensions overall are fiscally sound and subject to strict oversight.

But these inconvenient facts mean nothing to right wing ideologues who want to gut Americans' retirement security. And they think the public will go along if they gin up a false crisis about the state of public pensions today.

Sound familiar? It should. That's exactly the strategy that Social Security privateers pursued last year. They failed miserably. But now they're back with a new plan to gut retirement security: pick off public employee pensions, then raid pensions in the private sector.

Their ultimate goal, of course, is to make pensions altogether a thing of the past; to promote a society in which the wealthiest continue to horde huge resources while the American Dream is dismantled for everyone else. To real people, that means risking financial turmoil just by getting sick or growing old. . .

Then there is this news today from Morgan Stanley on an all-time, anywhere, record-setting $40,000,000 holiday bonus for CEO, John Mack. How long do you think Americans will put up with this madness? What will be the tipping point to send an enraged public into the streets?

America's Choice Redux

Want to guess the origin of this document?:

The task force, composed of 34 individuals from all sectors of business and education and co- chaired by two former secretaries of the U. S. Department of Labor, argues that improving productivity is the only chance the country has to raise, or even maintain, its current standard of living. However, in the past two decades, real productivity growth has slowed to a crawl, relying almost entirely on women entering the workforce and creating two- wage- earner families in order to maintain current standards of living. The commission concludes that if productivity continues to falter that the country can expect only one of two futures: either the top 30 percent of the population will grow wealthier while the bottom 70 percent becomes progressively poorer, or all will slide into relative poverty together.

This is from the first circulation of Master Tucker's reform agenda 16 years ago in 1990. It would appear that the the major change from then and now is that an exclamation point has been added to the end of the title, AMERICA'S CHOICE: HIGH SKILLS OR LOW WAGES. It is interesting to note that the 1990 dire warnings about falling productivity were followed by the most sustained decade of economic growth in the history of the world. Wonder if we can expect a similar boom following this year's do-it-or-we're-cooked rhetoric.

Next post: Is Marc Tucker America's Choice?

America's Choice: Schools of Educational Reform or Educational Reform Schools

First came A Nation at Risk to scare the be-jesus out of us about the schools. Then a generation later came Rising Above the Gathering Corruption, er, Storm, an apocalytic tale of educational doom that called for an oversupply of scientists and engineers and, more importantly, for public universities to take over the costs and responsibilities of R&D for corporations. Now comes, alas, a new blue-ribbon panel report, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!, this time calling explicitly for the destruction of public schools as we know them. If you thought that A Nation at Risk was based on some scary lies, try this one from Panel Seer, Marc Tucker:

“This report basically says, if we don’t find a whole new formula, what we can confidently look forward to is a declining standard of living, probably not for everybody, but for most people. And that could create a kind of social instability that could be the undoing of the United States.”

Is this from the Pat Buchanan school of educational reform?? Or is that educational reform schools.

Here are some of the highlights of the new report recommendations, none of which is based on any research findings, or even crude experimentation. This over-reaching piece of undocumented dreck is destined to be the deadest on arrival of any blue-ribbon report in the history of American education. And if this is not the last and final encore of Privatizers Gone Wild Club, I cannot imagine what they might have in store that could hope to top this exhibition of full-frontal, embarrassing stupidity:

• Out are elected school boards and local public control. In are state-paid private contractors like Edison and White Hat. In short, the charter model on a national scale: "Schools would have complete control over staff hiring, school organization and management, their program, and how their funds were spent, as long as they provided the curriculum and met state testing and accountability requirements."

• Out are university teacher education programs that Reid Lyon has so long wanted to "blow up." In are "Teacher Development Agencies, established by the states, [to] write performance contracts with a range of providers interested in preparing teachers . . . . providers that met the state’s performance requirements would get a larger number of slots than providers whose graduates performed less well." Test scores by each teacher candidates' future students will then determine which teacher prep programs get funded.

• Out are low salaries and local salary schedules for beginning teachers. In are 401Ks to replace state guaranteed benefit retirement plans. In, too, are cuts to retired teacher health plans and retirement funds. Hey, someone has to pay for those high starting salaries and those other high salaries that are earned by producing good test takers.

• Biggest money-saver idea: let 10th graders take a state exit exam and go on to community college or tech school, thus saving all that cash spent on lower-performing students in their junior and senior years. Those who stick around would have to qualify of AP or IB courses that are intended for the less economically-deprived high flyers. Savings: $67 billion a year nationwide.

• Out is the traditional husk of Head Start. In mandatory schooling for all 3-year old low-income children (the psychological programming cannot start early enough).

• Finally, there are to be accounts established at birth for future job training: "Through Personal Competitiveness Accounts, created for each child at birth by the federal government, and supplemented with $100 each year up to age 16, people would accumulate money for continued education and training."

Wonder if that money could be used when a child grows up to buy a boat ticket to India or China, where working and living conditions are likely be better.

Ed Week closes its summary piece with this final quote from the sage, Marc Tucker:

If something like this doesn’t happen, we’re cooked.

I would suggest that if something like this does happen, we may avoid the cooking and simply be eaten raw.

NCLB and Staying the Course

Spellings and the testocratic press are going right along pretending that everything is on track for reauthorization next year of the NCLB political fraud--despite a storm that is building that could rival the one that is now swaying our foreign policy equivalent of NCLB in Iraq.

Spellings declares 99. 44% purity for this policy train wreck, despite overwhelming disapproval among parents and teachers who know anything more about NCLB than they are offered by the cheerleading, the omissions, and the half-truths pumped out by a complicit media.

Here are a few reminders from the Gallup/PDK poll earlier this year of how the public feels about NCLB, even before the unearthed corruption and law-breaking within the Education Department's Reading First program.

• Two out of three respondents (69%) this year and a similar proportion in 2005 say that the use of a single state test as NCLB requires cannot provide a fair picture of whether or not a school needs improvement.

• NCLB bases performance on testing in English/language arts and math only. Four out of five respondents (81%) say that this will not give a fair picture of a school and that other subjects should be included.
  

• Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) say they are concerned that the focus on English/language arts and math will mean less emphasis on art, music, history, and other subjects. This is down 4% since 2005.
  

• Four out of five respondents (80%) prefer offering help to students in schools in need of improvement. Only 17% prefer transferring those students to a different school.

• NCLB requires that test scores be broken out by race and ethnicity, English-speaking ability, and poverty level. A majority of respondents (54%) oppose this strategy, up 6% from 2005.
  

• The test scores of special education students are included in determining whether a school is in need of improvement. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (62%) say the scores of special education students should not be included. This percentage is unchanged since 2005.
  

• NCLB requires that nearly all special education students be tested against grade-level standards. Three-fourths of respondents (75%) believe these students should not be tested against the same standards as other students. This figure is up 7% since 2005.
  

• Four-fifths of respondents (81%) say the proper measure of performance is the improvement made by students during the school year. This figure is down 4% from last year.

• The half of the respondents who claim to know a great deal or fair amount about NCLB disagree with the strategies of the law with percentages slightly higher than those of the total group. . . . The responses of those who claim knowledge of the law bear out this poll’s 2003 conclusion that greater familiarity with NCLB was unlikely to increase public support.
  

Four out of five Americans believe that it makes more sense to measure academic growth than an arbitrary benchmark that all schools must meet, despite huge disparities in teacher quality, funding, family income, etc. Some, in fact, hold out hope that Spellings' purity remarks conceal a fall-back position that she plans to move to when push comes to shove, a position that includes growth models.

The kinds of growth models that the ed privatizers are interested in, however, do not waver from the impossible and failure-assuring 100% proficiency target that all schools are asked to achieve by 2014. To do otherwise would undercut ideological purpose of NCLB to begin with--the demonstrated manufactured failure of public education and the dismantling of public schools for preferred market models.

So growth model advocates, keep this under your pillow as you dream about a more flexible and compromising ED who is willing to entertain an alternative to "staying the course":

This summer [2005] my department convened a working group to explore how states could use growth models for state accountability plans under No Child Left Behind.

We met with experts, researchers and policymakers, including many of you who have used growth models as part of your state accountability systems for years. We discussed what's required to implement a growth model and how they can show how schools and students are improving from year to year.

At the same time, we're not just looking for any level of improvement. We're working to meet specific goals within the next decade, as laid out in the law. A successful growth model under No Child Left Behind must put all students on track to be on grade level by 2014. That means when a student is behind, one year of progress for every year of instruction is not enough to close the gap. We will expect more. We must not—and I will not—back away from this important goal.

NSTA and the Educational-Industrial Complex

A clip from Laurie David's post at Huffington, a follow-up to her outing of NSTA's cozy relationship with Big Oil and its snubbing of An Inconvenient Truth:

The scandal at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) just keeps getting worse.

Since the Washington Post published an op-ed I wrote asking if NSTA's puzzling decision to reject 50,000 free DVDs of Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth might - just might - have had anything to do with more than six million dollars the organization has accepted from ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute, the muck keeps piling up.

ExxonMobil, of course, remains the standout among a large group of fossil fuel companies that have done everything in their considerable power to delay, deflect, and derail any serious effort to cut global warming emissions. Funding scientific disinformation has long been one of their favorite tactics.

New evidence flatly contradicts statements NSTA has made in defense of its suspect partnerships, and efforts appear to be underway to wipe out online evidence showing that what the oil industry got in exchange was the group's imprimatur on classroom videos, teaching guides, and other "educational" materials that play down threats like global warming and play up the glories of continued oil dependence.

We also learned that NSTA is willing to sell direct access to America's schoolteachers to any Tom, Dick or Exxon that shows up with a checkbook.

And here's the icing on the cake: NSTA Executive Director Dr. Gerry Wheeler - a top figure in the world of science education, remember - confessed to at least one reporter this week that he hadn't actually bothered to see the acclaimed film before he turned it down.

Cuddling Up to Conoco

NSTA's initial rejection e-mail included comments from a staffer worried that accepting the offer would "place unnecessary risk upon the capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters."

Now NSTA is arguing that distributing An Inconvenient Truth to teachers would violate their 2001 policy against endorsements. But that policy didn't stop them from shipping out 20,000 copies of a whopping 10-part video funded by ConocoPhillips in 2003.

In fact, Gerry Wheeler himself is listed as executive producer of the film series, alongside a ConocoPhillips corporate PR man named Ron Stanley. His interest in cinema apparently didn't extend to An Inconvenient Truth, however. At least not until it landed him in the paper.

Wheeler says this is OK because NSTA had editorial control of the project. If that's true, then maybe he can explain why the only scientist cited in the largely dismissive global warming section appearing in chapters six, nine and ten of the teaching guides is Dr. Robert Balling - a well known global warming skeptic who has acknowledged taking more than $400,000 from the fossil fuel industry (others say the figure is higher).

Shredding the Evidence

We also discovered that somebody somewhere is meticulously shredding the online evidence of NSTA's cozy corporate partnerships.

NSTA now says it is no longer partners with the American Petroleum Institute, asserting that the project ended five years ago. Yet it looks as if the curriculum was alive and well until reporters started asking about it these past few weeks.

As of November 26 - the day the Post article appeared - both NSTA and API were promoting the course materials they produced together on their web sites. Immediately after the article appeared, however, we noticed that references to the joint "Science of Energy" program were quickly disappearing from the web.

The 'Science of Energy' website itself is now gone altogether, and API has rewritten language touting their relationship with the science educators. But we captured some telling links before they started vanishing.

To see the disappearing documents, go here.

Democracy v. Religious Fundamentalism

Daniel Dennett in WaPo:

This week’s question could not be more important. Events around the world in recent years amply demonstrate that the religious freedom we enjoy in the United States is one of the essential building blocks of our democracy.

What we tend to lose sight of, however, is the price we must pay for this religious freedom: we must commit ourselves to the First Amendment principle of separation of church and state even when the principle works against the interests of our particular religion.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This wise maxim, applied to the First Amendment principle of the separation of church and state, has permitted the principle to drift into disrepair. People are encouraged to think that while there may be all sorts of borderline cases and vexing conundrums about just where to draw the line, examining them will only arouse anxiety and discord--so let’s just cover everything with a fine fog of pious, presumed consensus. We all honor the First Amendment and that’s that, and that’s fine. So it would be, if it weren’t for the steady pressure of those who would exploit our benign neglect, encroaching gradually on what makes the principle work–to the extent that it does.

For instance, the Christian conservatives in the country who wish to declare that this is a Christian nation are becoming bolder and bolder in their willingness to impose their own viewpoint on those who disagree. Fortunately, there are the beginnings of an organized resistence to this takeover, such as the Interfaith Alliance, chaired by Walter Cronkite. I enthusiastically support this effort, even though I am myself an atheist. Atheism is one of the live rails of American politics-touch it and you're toast. Fair enough. Those are the current facts of life. Not so long ago, you couldn’t be elected if you were Catholic, or Jewish, or African-American. But shouldn't we install another live rail, on the opposite side of the religious spectrum? . . .

The rest here.

Movement Against Charter Schools

From the Times Union:

ALBANY -- Officials from the City School District, its PTA and teachers union rallied at the state Capitol Tuesday to urge state lawmakers to set a moratorium on new charter schools in the district. . .

Spellings and testocratic press are going right along pretending that everything is on track for reauthorization next year of the NCLB political fraud--despite a storm that is building that could rival the one against our foreign policy equivalent of NCLB in Iraq.

Spellings declares 99. 44% purity for this policy train wreck, despite overwhelming disapproval among parents and teachers who know anything more about NCLB than they are offered by the cheerleading, the omissions, and the half-truths pumped out by a complicit media.

Here are a few reminders from the Gallup/PDK pollearlier this year of how the public felt about NCLB, even before the unearthed corruption and law-breaking within the Education Department's Reading First program.

• Two out of three respondents (69%) this year and a similar proportion in 2005 say that the use of a single state test as NCLB requires cannot provide a fair picture of whether or not a school needs improvement.

• NCLB bases performance on testing in English/language arts and math only. Four out of five respondents (81%) say that this will not give a fair picture of a school and that other subjects should be included.
  

• Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) say they are concerned that the focus on English/language arts and math will mean less emphasis on art, music, history, and other subjects. This is down 4% since 2005.
  

• Four out of five respondents (80%) prefer offering help to students in schools in need of improvement. Only 17% prefer transferring those students to a different school.

• NCLB requires that test scores be broken out by race and ethnicity, English-speaking ability, and poverty level. A majority of respondents (54%) oppose this strategy, up 6% from 2005.
  

• The test scores of special education students are included in determining whether a school is in need of improvement. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (62%) say the scores of special education students should not be included. This percentage is unchanged since 2005.
  

• NCLB requires that nearly all special education students be tested against grade-level standards. Three-fourths of respondents (75%) believe these students should not be tested against the same standards as other students. This figure is up 7% since 2005.
  

• Four-fifths of respondents (81%) say the proper measure of performance is the improvement made by students during the school year. This figure is down 4% from last year.

• The half of the respondents who claim to know a great deal or fair amount about NCLB disagree with the strategies of the law with percentages slightly higher than those of the total group. . . . The responses of those who claim knowledge of the law bear out this poll’s 2003 conclusion that greater familiarity with NCLB was unlikely to increase public support.
  

Four out of five Americans believe that it makes more sense to measure academic growth than an arbitrary benchmark that all schools must meet, despite huge disparities in teacher quality, funding, family income, etc. Some, in fact, hold out hope that Spellings' purity remarks conceal a fall-back position that she plans to move to when push comes to shove, a position that includes growth models.

The kinds of growth models that the ed privatizers are interested in, however, do not waver from the impossible and failure-assuring 100% proficiency target that all schools are asked to achieve by 2014. To do otherwise would undercut ideological purpose of NCLB to begin with--the demonstrated manufactured failure of public education and the dismantling of public schools for preferred market models.

So growth model advocates, keep this under your pillow as you dream about a more flexible and compromising ED who is willing to entertain an alternative to "staying the course":

This summer [2005] my department convened a working group to explore how states could use growth models for state accountability plans under No Child Left Behind.

We met with experts, researchers and policymakers, including many of you who have used growth models as part of your state accountability systems for years. We discussed what's required to implement a growth model and how they can show how schools and students are improving from year to year.

At the same time, we're not just looking for any level of improvement. We're working to meet specific goals within the next decade, as laid out in the law. A successful growth model under No Child Left Behind must put all students on track to be on grade level by 2014. That means when a student is behind, one year of progress for every year of instruction is not enough to close the gap. We will expect more. We must not—and I will not—back away from this important goal.

Educator Roundtable Announces Petition

The Educator Rountable issued a formal press release today announcing the petition calling for the repeal of No Child Left Behind. To date, the petition has nearly 20,000 signatures. If you have not yet signed it, please do so and pass it along to parents and teachers:
PRESS RELEASE

A Petition Calling For the Dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act

December 13, 2006

Thousands of educators, parents, and concerned citizens are participating in a coordinated movement to end the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Spearheading the effort is the Educator Roundtable, which has issued a petition calling on legislators to vote against reauthorizing the law. In its first week the petition received over 12,000 signatures. For the full text of the petition see http://www.educatorroundtable.org.

Longtime educator Marion Brady—one of the petition’s authors—explains that opponents of the legislation are “fed up with the law's simplistic approach to education reform and how it wastes student potential, misallocates teaching resources, shrinks the curriculum, and threatens the future of our democratic republic by undermining public education.”

News of the petition has spread with great enthusiasm among parents and teachers, who often leave poignant commentary along with their signatures. Writes one teacher, “I am retiring early. We feel we are fleeing a sinking ship, after giving our entire lives to our students and our profession. It is a sad way to end a career.” And a parent offers, “I feel like my little boy is being groomed for a life on an assembly line rather than being taught how to think and be creative.”

“When Congress passes No Child Left Unfed, No Child Without Health Care and No Child Left Homeless,” notes Susan Ohanian, one of Roundtable’s founders, “then we can talk seriously about No Child Left Behind.”

The Educator Roundtable petition cites several arguments against NCLB. Chief among them are:

• NCLB misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

• NCLB uses pseudo-science to justify policies and programs that are damaging public
education—including diverting taxes away from communities into corporate coffers.

• NCLB rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all “failures” by creating unrealistic Adequate Yearly Progress goals, which set schools up to be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.

Up for reauthorization next year, the legislation had bipartisan support when President Bush signed it into law in 2002. The Educator Roundtable seeks similar bipartisan support to end the increasingly controversial act. According to Dr. Philip Kovacs, a lead organizer of this national effort, “individuals from both political parties were sold a false bill of goods, and it will take individuals from both political parties to stop NCLB from doing any more harm.”

In its place they call for formal state-level dialogues led by working educators, rather than by politicians, ideology-bound "think tanks," or business and industry activists who have little or no direct experience in the field of education.

CONTACT: Dr. Philip Kovacs, Assistant Professor, Department of Education, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville AL 35899, 678-612-9242, philip.kovacs@uah.edu

KIPP and other "eloquent discourses full of deceit"

In a reflection on reading from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), a student has reminded me of this great quote that speaks volumes to Bill Gates and the other privileged boosters of KIPP who see this preppy reform school model as the solution to the poverty and racism that we choose to ignore:

". . . the dominant class insists, in eloquent discourses full of deceit, that what is important is not class, but the courage to work and be disciplined, and the desire to climb and grow. Therefore, those who triumph are those who work hard without complaining and are disciplined; that is, those who do not create problems for their masters."

The KIPP motto: Work hard, be nice.

Thanks, Corrie.