Smelling the Coffee

With the President's recent barnstorming among Arabs, er, Muslims in India and Pakistan, the argument was renewed, yet, again that more American engineers will somehow cure the coming flood of outsourcing. Even so, the veil finally seems to be lifting on the grand diversion of blaming the schools for callous econonic decisions by greedy corporationists:

"One could be educationally competitive and easily lose out in the global economic marketplace because of significantly lower wages being paid elsewhere," said Sheldon E. Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, an umbrella group that represents most of the nation's major colleges and universities.Some analysts think that something like what Steinbach described is
already underway.

Starting in 1975, the earnings difference between high school- and college-educated workers steadily widened for 25 years. But since 2000, the trend appears to have stalled. Census figures show that average, after-inflation earnings of college graduates fell by more than 5% between 2000 and 2004, whereas the earnings of those with only high school degrees rose slightly.

Most studies suggest that beyond the manufacturing sector, the "offshoring" of jobs has been comparatively modest. But some analysts say the ground has been laid for a substantial pickup. In a recent paper, Blinder offered a rough estimate tha suggested that as many as 42 million jobs, or nearly one-third of the nation's total, were susceptible to offshoring.

These analysts warn that more education alone will do little to stop the flow of jobs to other countries.

Student Teachers Left Behind

A Schools Matter reader sent this article along by Doug Selwyn at Rethinking Schools Online . It is time for schools of education to step up to the plate and educate the nation's young teachers who will be faced with the oppressive, unjust, draconian policies of a corrupt government more interested in the short-term bottom line of corporations than in real and meaningful education reform. The dialogue and the conversation has to begin somewhere. What better place than where the nation's future educators and leaders are currently being trained?

The negative impact NCLB is having on student teaching is another example of why this law must be repealed. Selwyn points to the increasing difficulty ed schools face in placing student teachers because of adminstrators' fears that a new and inexperienced teacher may not possess the skills associated with teaching to the test. In the world of accountability and punitive sanctions, student teachers are viewed as a liability when it comes to raising test scores and avoiding sanctions.

How much more damage will be done in the name of accountability? It's time to hold those who hide behind the empty rhetoric and drumbeat of accountability to be held accountable for the destruction being inflicted on the education profession. Educating teachers about NCLB and public policies in general that will impact their careers, their lives and the welfare of their students should be a core requirement of any teacher education program.
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We are not satisfied with our ideas about how to be most effective in this climate. We asked our current students how we could best prepare them (and those students who will follow them) to deal with the NCLB environment. They had the following suggestions:

Really push students to get to know the law. I know you push us to become familiar with NCLB, and to realize that education is political, but I never really read it. Give us the assignment to get to know the law so that we can be more aware of what it really says.

Have more conversations about the realities of the politics of schools. As depressing as it is, it is helpful to have these conversations, and to develop strategies together to both survive and to serve our students.

Bring theory and practice together in a practical manner so that students can learn how to satisfy both NCLB and their souls. Many students felt excited and inspired by the constructivist, child-centered approaches that focus on social justice advocated at Antioch, and then betrayed when they entered schools only concerned with following scripts and meeting cut scores. They felt a strong need to know how to survive in the NCLB system long enough to bring change to it.

It is a large challenge that we face in teacher education, but it is one we must face; we really have no choice if we wish to save public education and the teaching profession.
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March Second

March Second

With clouds filled
with hail and sunset,
shocks of forsythia
amplify an amber
not of day or nite
to the surrounding wood
of greys sprinkled
with redbud
indelibly memoried
of green.

Kati Haycock and Wish-Based Reform

It is not uncommon for the oppressed to take on the characteristics of their oppressors as they adopt strategies to escape their own oppression. Such is the case with the Color-Blind Sorority Sisters of the Education Trust, who have made it their mission to make wishful thinking the basis for a national education policy intended to maintain white privilege and subjugation of the poor.

Like do-gooders from previous generations, Kati Haycock and Amy Wilkins continue to function as mouthpieces for an all male Board of Directors who stupidly promote social policies based on the ideology that treating people the same, regardless of how they different they are. In doing so, they function as the post-affirmative action poster ladies whose blindness has very pre-affirmative action effects on the poor and the brown children of America. Their joint blindess to racism and economic exploitation works to maintain the same historical power structures that are now reforming urban schools into mindless and emotionless test-preparation camps.

You see, Kati and Amy, if I may address you by first name, poverty among families is a most reliable predictor of children's (and adults') test scores, a fact that you continue to ignore in your ignorant and misguided insistence that somehow the same demands for all students will produce the same results. While this kind of self-imposed blindness will guarantee you a chair at the table of the elite educational know-nothings owned by Bill Gates, there is nothing good in it for the poor that you purport to help, except more and more draconian re-education that will multiply the past failures, while providing a moral fig leaf for white elites (and the Booker Ts who join them) to continue a practice of apartheid and economic subjugation. The result, of course, will turn the differences that you ignore, and that poor children feel, into a predictable self-loathing that will, no doubt, show up in pathologies that we cannot yet imagine. We can only wonder what strategies will be selected to deal with the next generation of victims that outfits like yours would prefer to cure.

The denial of inequities based on a psuedo-egalitarian premise inevitably must lead to distortions of a reality that poor people have been clear about since the beginning. These distortions, now embedded in the wish-based No Child Left Behind, lead to yet new layers of failure that necessitates yet subsequent layers of cures. We only have to look a hundred years back to see how this kind of visionary blindness can lead to the "scientific" cures of eugenics that we otherwise would have recognized as the sadistic seeds of a philosophical necrophilia aimed at extermination of differences.

So while we wait for Kati's and Amy's unlikely enlightenment, we must contend with a never-ending supply of studies inspired by the education privatizers and the chain gang model schoolers that show the public schools as failures for not accomplishing what no school can (Primary Progress, Secondary Challenge pdf).

Kati's response to Ed Trust's latest study that shows a continuing chasm between rich and poor test scores : “If there are huge differences, you need to ask, ‘Is our state really expecting enough of our kids?”

Or as she quipped to ABC News, in a line that shows clearly what she believes about public schools, "States worry about how much truth the public can handle without losing confidence in public education."

Kati--how much truth can you handle? Do you know you are helping to destroy that confidence?

Are you, a) a dupe, b) a dunce, c) a dope, or d) just devoted to your own advancement?

More Outsourcing + More Engineers= Cheaper Engineers

While our President has just made it clear that supports the continued exporting of American jobs to India, it now becomes even more more obvious why his corporate handlers are pressing hard for more homegrown engineers. An oversupply, which is sure to result if Bush's initiatives move forward, will keep domestic salaries low, perhaps even low enough to compete with the outsourcing that our President supports. Besides, if all the engineers can't find work, we can always make them teachers, right?

Inside Higher Ed has a nice update on all the malarky surrounding the latest manufactured failure of American schools and colleges to somehow stop the flood of skilled jobs overseas. How long will the American people buy these lies and diversions?

Honey, I'm Home

The pudgy little brother was on hand earlier this month just down the road from Disneyworld to bless a new venture in Christian living. It is inspired by $250 million Domino's pizza money, and its theme is Catholic purity. In this Pleasantville, there will be no pornography, no birth control, and no abortion. I wonder what won't be in the school library.

The town of Ave Maria is being constructed around Ave Maria University, the first Catholic university to be built in the United States in about 40 years. Both are set to open next year about 25 miles east of Naples in southwestern Florida.

The town and the university, developed in partnership with the Barron Collier Co., an agricultural and real estate business, will be set on 5,000 acres with a European-inspired town center, a massive church and what planners call the largest crucifix in the nation, at nearly 65 feet tall. Monaghan envisions 11,000 homes and 20,000 residents.

During a speech last year at a Catholic men's gathering in Boston, Monaghan said that in his community, stores will not sell pornographic magazines, pharmacies will not carry condoms or birth control pills, and cable television will have no X-rated channels.

The Silent, Silent Epidemic

Updated 03.03.06

They're calling it "The Silent Epidemic." It's the latest study, courtesy of Civic Enterprises and funded by the Bill and Milinda Gates Foundation, being used to push the pro-voucher, faith-based attack on public schools. This time, the new spin on this groundbreaking study is students are dropping out because public schools are too boring and don't expect enough of them. The Christian Science Monitor , like the other herd of sheep that now constitute the news media, regurgitates the Civic Enterprises press release masquerading as a news story:

Now, a new survey, released Thursday, suggests that the problem, while deep, can be fixed. Most students don't drop out because they can't do the work. Nearly 90 percent had passing grades when they left school, according to the survey of dropouts by Civic Enterprises. Their major reason for opting out? The classes were too boring.

"We've gone in and talked face to face with kids who have dropped out of school. What they're telling us debunks popular assumptions," says John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises and one of the authors of the survey. "The problem is solvable."

The headline in USA Today reads, "Dropouts Say Their Schools Expected Too Little of Them." It's got that soft bigotry of low expectations echo that's been working like a charm.

The real silent epidemic, however (not the fake one being used to put fear in the hearts and minds of the American public) is the dangerous right wing fascists working diligently to place that last nail in the coffin of public school education.

What's Jay Greene's solution for these poor black and hispanic kids? Yes, you guessed it, more accountability (tests) and more choices (private and parochial school).

"It is a mistake to treat the dropout problem as a fundamentally different kind of problem than other problems in our schools - it's a different symptom of the same disease," says Jay Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas and author of several dropout studies. Professor Greene believes the only way to significantly lower the dropout rate is to raise academic skills - whether through accountability or school-choice programs.

Dropouts are now a symptom of the disease and the disease is public schools. What the Wal-Mart professor, Jay Greene, does not say is his own research shows that the ten states with the highest dropout rates all have high-school exit exams, and 9 of them have had the tests for more than 10 year.

You've got to hand it to these guys--they are relentless in their attacks and always coming up with new and creative ways to destroy and bash public education. And, of course, the remedies they offer are most often the cause of the problem to begin with. Did I mention that all the 20 states with high school exit exams are the highest in populations of black and brown people? Here are some numbers for you, Jay:

Of the 10 states with the highest percentage of African-Americans, 9 have high school exit exams.
Mississippi (1989)
Louisiana* (1991)
South Carolina* (1990)
Georgia* (1994)
Maryland (1982)
Alabama (1985)
North Carolina* (1982)
Virginia (1986)
Delaware* (No HS Test)
Tennessee (1986)
* 5 of these states are among the 10 states that use tests to determine promotion in other grades.

Of the 10 states with the highest percentage of Hispanics or Latinos, 8 have high school exit exams.
New Mexico* (1990)
California* (2006)
Texas* (1987)
Arizona (2006)
Nevada (1981)
Colorado (no test)
Florida* (1979)
New York* (1980)
New Jersey (1985)
Illinois (no test)
* 5 of these states make up the remainder of the 10 states to use tests to determine promotion in other grades.

Of the 10 states with the highest percentage of whites, 1 has exit exams. None uses tests to determine promotion in other grades.
Maine (no HS test)
Vermont (no HS test)
New Hampshire (no HS test)
W. Virginia (no HS test)
Iowa (no HS test)
North Dakota (no HS test)
Montana (no HS test)
Kentucky (no HS test)
Wyoming (no HS test
Minnesota (2000)

Of the 10 states with the lowest graduation rates, all 10 have high school exit exams. Nine (9) of these states have had exit exams for more than 10 years.
Georgia (1994)
Nevada (1981)
Florida (1979)
Arizona (2006)
Tennessee (1986)
S. Carolina (1990)
Mississippi (1989)
Alabama (1985)
North Carolina (1982)
New Mexico (1990)

Leininger vs. the Public Schools

While ultra-rich fundamentalists like James Leininger of Texas fume about any federal assistance for the poor who actually need it, Leininger has made it his life work to force taxpayers to fund religious and corporate welfare vouchers for private and religious education. Here is today's commentary on Leininger by Kathy Miller from the Dallas Morning News:

James Leininger is teaching Texas schoolchildren a sad civics lesson this year: When wealthy special interests can't get lawmakers to give them what they want, they just buy new lawmakers.

The San Antonio businessman has already given or pledged more than $2.5 million to back Republican candidates who support his obsession: tax-funded tuition vouchers for private and religious schools. About $1.8 million of that total is funding the campaigns of just five state House candidates in the Republican primary March 7. Those five are challenging GOP incumbents who dared to vote against a Leininger-backed voucher scheme in the 2005 Legislature.

Also Online

James Leininger: Wants parents to have choices about education

Dr. Leininger says his contributions are an "open record." Yet he is funneling most of the money through brand-new political action committees he created. Researchers had to dig into campaign finance reports to track the money from him to the PACs and then to consultants supporting the campaigns of pro-voucher candidates.

Dr. Leininger wants to hide his fingerprints. After all, most Texans don't take kindly to one-man special interests trying to buy elections.

But the fact is that Dr. Leininger is almost single-handedly financing and running the campaigns of those five handpicked candidates. Frankly, candidates should be embarrassed when more than 90 percent of the money supporting their campaigns comes from just one man.

Of course, Dr. Leininger has spent millions of dollars over the past decade trying to buy a Legislature that will pass a voucher scheme. In 1998, he even began funding a pilot voucher program in San Antonio's Edgewood Independent School District.

Schools in Edgewood, one of the state's poorest districts, have improved over the past decade. But that progress began long before the voucher program was in place. In 1993, the Legislature moved to equalize funding between poor and wealthy school districts. According to Texas Education Agency records, Edgewood had nine "low-performing" schools that year. By 1997, Edgewood no longer had any low-performing schools. Two schools had even managed a to earn a "recognized" rating. That was a year before the Leininger-funded voucher program was created.

You have to wonder whether Dr. Leininger ever really understood the challenges faced by Edgewood's students. If he cared, he would ask the teachers and parents of students who attended schools there. He would learn about the crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms, poorly paid teachers and the lack of library and technology resources before school funding was equalized. Challenges remain, to be sure, but they are not so steep as before 1993.

Dr. Leininger, however, arrogantly declares that the solution to such challenges is to take millions of dollars from neighborhood public schools to subsidize private and religious schools. To most Texans, that's just nonsense, which is why the Legislature has refused year after year to pass a voucher program.

Unfortunately, students in other states haven't been so lucky. Voucher programs in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin have siphoned tens of millions of dollars from public schools. What taxpayers got in return were private schools that could pick and choose which students to accept. They got private schools that didn't have to meet state standards set for public schools. And they got private schools that eagerly took tax-funded vouchers for kids with special needs but didn't offer special-education programs.

Texas started down a different path two decades ago. Lawmakers here passed reforms such as class-size limits, early reading intervention programs, strong teacher certification standards and, eventually, equalized funding. Even Gov. Rick Perry – whose campaigns have received mountains of Leininger money – acknowledges that students' test scores have been going up.

Tax-funded vouchers would threaten all of that progress. But don't bother telling that to Dr. Leininger. He's too busy buying the Legislature.

Kathy Miller is president of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan organization that supports public education, religious freedom and individual liberties. Her e-mail address is tfn@tfn.org.

UAE as Partner in Democratic Education

What do the UAE government censors have against Silver Burdett school texts? This from ASCD NewsBrief:

Finding Silver Burdett Ginn's World Cultures textbook to be racist and unbalanced, the UAE Ministry of Education confiscated 100 copies of the book from an upscale American school in Abu Dhabi Monday. The textbook notes that the Middle East is one of the world's most explosive areas, mentions that Syria has sponsored terrorism and calls Israel one of the few democracies in the region. Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates)

NCLB Immoral AND Unlawful?

Connecticut's Blumenthal continues to hammer away at the obvious:

. . .The U.S. Department of Education has suggested that Connecticut streamline its test and offer a less expensive version that would include only multiple-choice questions, but Blumenthal said even a simpler test would cost about $4 million more than what the federal government provides.

"No matter how you mince words or rework the math, the federal government is breaking the law - grossly shortchanging Connecticut in education funding," Blumenthal said. . . .