Petrilli's Embarrassing Post about Poor Mothers Being "Bad"

This post is embarrassing—both for the content and the fact that Petrilli appears unaware how embarrassing it is.

Single-mothers are not "bad"; they are overwhelmed.

Education is not to create economically self-sufficient people (that serves the privileged who feed off the economy). Education's goals are much BIGGER than that—self-awareness and complete autonomy, within which economic self-sufficiency is a part.

Petrilli and his ilk will not and possibly cannot admit that poverty is the product of either the negligence or intent of the powerful in any nation.

Poverty is not the product of those in poverty, and cannot be the result of the powerless.

And to continue to focus the gaze about poverty on those trapped in poverty and on education as the only or main mechanism for eradicating poverty is ultimately the greatest failure of all—and a disturbing lesson about the failure of the privileged as capable of addressing equity from their positions of privilege.

Petrilli needs to add to his reading list:

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-Much/dp/0805092641

And:

http://mattbruenig.com/2013/06/13/whats-more-important-a-college-degree-or-being-born-rich/

http://mattbruenig.com/2012/08/17/the-biggest-enemy-of-poverty-reduction/

http://mattbruenig.com/2013/09/21/education-and-poverty-again/

How Bill Gates Views the World (And Why It’s a Problem)

Money is power.

Power is money.

Bill Gates has too much of both.

Valerie Strauss gets it—that Bill Gates is not what education needs: “Education reform should not be driven by private philanthropists with their own agendas, however well-intentioned.”

Ultimately, the problem is Gates’s view of the world. And there is no better way to express that view than the chess scene in Mel Brooks’s History of the World Part I:

To Gates, this is a game; he has no real consequences before him.

To students, parents, and teachers, this is our lives.

It isn’t funny, and it isn’t justifiable.

Are Americans reading less?

Sent to the New York Daily News, Sept. 27, 2013

The Daily News reported that "Less than half of Americans read for fun last year, National Endowment for the Arts survey shows" (Sept. 26).
This is not quite accurate.
The NEA reported that 54.5% of those surveyed said they read at least one book last year, nearly identical to the results of the 2008 survey.  About 47% said they read at least one work of "literature" (novels, poetry, plays) last year, about a 3% dip from 2008; much of this was a decline in reading poetry.
It is not clear in the NEA study if "book" reading included e-books. There has been an astonishing increase in the percentage of adults owning e-book readers in the US: According to Pew 26% of adults in the US now own an e-book reader, up from 2% in 2009.
When we consider the constant defunding of libraries, and the increase in poverty, it is amazing that people are still reading so much. 

Stephen Krashen

Source: Pew Internet Mobile: http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/February/Pew-Internet-Mobile.aspx. Updated, Sept 18, 2013.
original article: http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/09/less-than-half-of-americans-read-for-fun-last-year-national-endowment-for-the-arts
this letter posted at: http://tinyurl.com/lplmbqq

K-12NN Founder's Open letter to the President, entreating him to read Professor Ravitch

You would come to allow — or steer — some of the worst policies to undermine, weaken, and privatize public education through your appointee, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Those babies and toddlers you kissed grew up some, and are now entering kindergarten and first grade. In some states, children as young as first grade might be taking tests on art instead of actually creating art, or doing worksheets for "homework". — Dr. Cynthia Liu

Dr. Cynthia Liu is one of the Los Angeles region's best kept secrets. It's not that her K-12 News Network site isn't read nationally, or that she hasn't won awards for her blogging and innovative social media work. Yet somehow, inexplicably, she's often left out of the conversation about prominent writers opposing corporate neoliberal education reforms. That's tragic, because Liu is one of our profound thinkers on these issues. Moreover, her ability to write for a more moderate audience gives her cross-over appeal. Audiences that many leftist writers like myself inevitable turn off by quoting favorites like Bruce Dixon, Jonathan Kozol, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire. Liu has read all of those people too, she's just judicious on where and when she cites them.

Liu's latest essay entitled Open Letter to President Obama — The One Book You Should Read on Public Education: Reign of Error, By Diane Ravitch is masterful in that rather than skirt the fact that Barack Obama's policies have been disastrous, she calls them out while simultaneously giving the administration an opportunity to save face. She's not the only author to do that, our very own Dr. John Thompson frequently writes from that perspective as well, but this Liu piece is particularly effective. It's something I could send to my liberal friends that they wouldn't find offensive — the same folks that have told me my work offends them.

The essay artfully ties together a number of threads, and entreats the President to read Professor Diane Ravitch's latest book. About halfway through we're presented with a review of the book, written from the perspective of being a pedagogy for the President. Nice too, is that Liu's pointed criticisms of the charter sector that go even further than Ravitch's. It's an interesting way to write a review, in that there's a sort of exphrasis tailored to telling one of the chief architects why the structure isn't sound.

Her "open letter" to the President angle is actually a viable approach. While I personally voted for Cynthia McKinney in 2008, Dr. Jill Stein in 2012, and would proudly wear one the Too Left for Obama (2L4O) T-Shirts sold on the Black Agenda Report site, I'm not your typical voter. We need a broader base of people critiquing these policies, and writers like Liu are more likely to reach them. If you know any liberals, or misguided progressives, who are wrong on education issues, send them the link to the essay. It can't hurt to try.

Why SAT scores have declined.

Sent to the Christian Science Monitor

There are two possible reasons for the decline of SAT scores ("As college-prep test scores falter, how the US can respond," Sept. 26).

One possibility, suggested by FairTest, is that the massive invasion of high-stakes tests that began with No Child Left Behind has not worked.

Another, according to an analysis by Seton Hall Professor Christopher Tienken, is poverty: Tienken has demonstrated that students coming from wealthier families achieve higher SAT scores. As we all know, poverty has been increasing in the US.

Most likely, both factors are at work.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California


Sources:
Fair test: http://fairtest.org/fairtest-news-release-release-2012-sat-scores
Poverty and SAT scores: Christopher Tienken, 2010, Strong Correlations, AASA Journal 7(2). http://www.aasa.org/jsp.aspx
Increase in poverty: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/inequality/research-roundup-post-recession-america-poverty-rate-stays-high#

Education Carnage in the City of Brotherly Love

Now the slow starvation has become a complete denial of life support for Philadelphia’s public schools. - Ken Derstine, Philadelphia Education Crisis Highlights at pa.ed.crisis@gmail.com 

Here's a glimpse of what it looks like in cities and towns across the country as public schools starved for funds and resources are taken over and privatized by for profit charters. Different faces, different places, same story. 

Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. (center) said he wants to rehire more counselors once the district gets more money. (File Photo from Philadelphia Inquirer

Here's some reporting you won't find on the evening news. 

By Ken Derstine:

Editor Comment: Having attended Monday night’s School Reform Commission meeting, I have several observations I would like to share.

It is clear that the privatization juggernaut is moving full steam ahead unimpeded in Philadelphia. It feels like the corporate forces that have invaded Philadelphia are like a giant icebreaker plowing through the district unimpeded leaving us to futilely throw rocks at it as a protest.

The words “union contract” were not mentioned in the SRC meeting. If a stranger attended the SRC meeting, they would have no clue that there is a stalemate with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the SRC is content to let the  school district employees twist in the wind with an uncertain future even has school employees must daily deal with horrendous conditions of huge class sizes over the contract limit and no counselors and other support staff. 

Outright violations of state and federal law are becoming routine in such areas as Special Education.

The meeting was poorly attended. Only twelve speakers signed up to speak and four of them did not attend. There were two excellent speakers, a leader of school counselors and a parent who shouted in the darkness to no affect. 

The counselor spoke of the absurd conditions the few remaining itinerant counselors must work under with no support whatsoever. Most serve eight schools and must go to two schools each day. Just the travel time of moving between two schools in the same day makes their job absurd. Each counselor is supposed to serve thousands of students. She mentioned that the counselors are given no laptops or cell phones to keep in contact with their schools and record information. 

Superintendent Hite picked up on this one comment to mumble something about maybe they could look into technology for the counselors. About the conditions the school must deal with since there are no counselors there was no comment. The parent voiced her frustration at parents being ignored and shut out of the any input into what is happening to the schools. There was not comment from the SRC. The demeanor of the SRC members was cold-hearted indifference and an attitude of we are on course, full steam ahead.

Most of the meeting was spent on business matters such as thirty-five minutes devoted to a discussion of which real estate tax abatement program would be best to save the district a million dollars (as if this made any difference in a district with a $300 million deficit). Multi-million dollar contracts were allocated for testing companies such as $4,259,115 to Pearson Learning and Renaissance Learning for technical support and staff development for “Universal Screeners for Response to Instruction and Intervention” (no public explanation given). The meeting was all about business and technology. Actual education was never mentioned.

Five years ago Superintendent Arlene Ackerman announced Imagine 2014. It was presented as some benign expansion of charters. It is now clear that this was a five-year plan for an undemocratic seizure of the public schools of the Philadelphia School District by private interests done in great secrecy and with deception. Since the state takeover in 2001, the Philadelphia pubic schools have been starved for funding even as the charter sector was increasingly built up, until we now arrive at this year’s “Doomsday budget”.

Now the slow starvation has become a complete denial of life support for Philadelphia’s public schools.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan infamously said the Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans because it allowed the privatization of New Orleans public schools which are now 90% charters. Eli Broad is notorious for saying, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The difference between New Orleans and Philadelphia is that our crisis is completely man-made. This has been a crisis deliberately created by corporate education reform to advance a privatization agenda.

The only way to turn this around is for an informed citizenry to rise up against it. 

The problem in Philadelphia is that the majority of people are uninformed due to corporate media. Yesterday I linked an interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer with the head of the SRC Pedro Ramos. It was a pathetic pandering article praising him for the job he is doing despite being opposed by a vocal minority of teachers and students. This Inquirer column typifies the problem in Philadelphia. If people do not seek independent sources of information on the internet they are clueless about the reality of the disaster unfolding in Philadelphia public schools.

In the last few weeks the Philadelphia Inquirer has reduced its Opinion and letters pages by 50%. In its place we get journalism such as the interview with Ramos which can only be characterized as propaganda advancing a corporate agenda. In the case of philly.com, the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, it must be kept in mind that one of the co-owners, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, is an outspoken supporter of charters. His son, Brook Lenfest, is heavily invested in the Mastery charter management company. In 2009, H.F. Lenfest’s Lenfest Foundation announced a $10 million matching grant to expand Teach for America in Philadelphia over ten years. TFA said it was “the largest grant offer a regional Teach for America program has ever received”.

This is the reason why I must continue to do the Pennsylvania Education Crisis Highlights digest. It is my attempt to shine a light into the darkness we are living in.

***************

We Are Required By Law to Report Suspected Child Abuse

Diane Ravitch posted a father's letter about his daughter's first test in kindergarten, a letter I hope everyone will read.  

It seems to me to require action that is mandated by law, which will prove to be a very effective strategy for bringing this insanity to an end.  

I have been wondering for a long time where are the health professionals, who should be calling this out for what it is: child abuse. And are we not required by law to report to the authorities when we suspect that children are being abused? When will parents and teachers start reporting this abuse? After all, the state is required to investigate each report. How long would it take for these fools to get the message that this is unacceptable?

In Tennessee, which is now Ground Zero for CorpEd extremes, the State is now paying for 85 percent of the state's kindergarten children to be administered the SAT-3 before most of them can read or count.

As Dr. King said in a somewhat different context, "a time comes when silence is betrayal." Can we continue to sleep at night as our children are miseducated and abused? Really?  

Research proven: School Libraries and Free Voluntary Reading. Unproven and expensive: CCSS and iPads

Research proven: School Libraries & Free Voluntary Reading. Unproven and expensive: #CCSS & iPads. #LAUSD @skrashen pic.twitter.com/Cg2z5Z7uxM

— Robert D. Skeels (@rdsathene) September 26, 2013

The former means engaged critical thinking, but the latter leads to more corporate profits and increased market share for PSO, AAPL, MHGE, NWSA, and others.

• The Power of Reading : Insights from the Research
• Common Core [sic] Standards (Susan Ohanian Speaks Out)

Bill and Melinda Gates Money at Work

 by Susan Ohanian

He's back!

 Who knew that Jonah Edelman is alive and well--and pumping the Common Core! I stumbled on this information by way of a Tweet by Vicki Phillips, Director of Education - College Ready at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who issued two shout outs in praise of Edelman's work--a Huffington Post piece One Thing All Parents Should Know about the CommonCore, in which Edelman is humping a new film made by Stand for Children.  She'd already declared her love of the film: #CommonCore 'Building Dreams' - great video explaining #CCSS from @Stand4Children | http://bit.ly/18cUaji

We'll get back to this film.


I find it interesting that putting his foot in his mouth at Aspen in 2011  , and  bragging what a great political maneuverer he was, doesn't seem to have dimmed Jonah Edelman  and Stand for Children's bulb much at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They continue to shovel buckets of money his way. Since 2009, the Foundation has awarded $9,267,796 to Stand for Children--for general operating expenses, to support expansion, to enable their national office to "deliver state of the art organizing programs to other states, to establish "educator panels," to organize parents and teachers in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. And to make films.

Gates gives the money and  Jonah Edelman, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Stand for Children, rightly billing itself as a neo-liberal organization, delivers.  Here's the Common Core work  Stand for Children is doing for Gates this week.  When he's not making a pitch for Stand for Children films, Edelman finds other ways to promote the Common Core, Tweeting, "Great piece on Kentucky's quietly successful implementation of the new #CommonCore standards: http://ti.me/16bl90O--this sent to the article's author, Amanda Ripley. Of course this  article  in the Sept. 20, 2013 issue of Time starts out by claiming that teachers and researchers wrote the Common Core.

Just coincidentally, Ripley,  author of Smartest Kids in the World and very hot on the corporate school deform front right now, is featured in one of 38 short videos made by Stand for Children. In it she promotes her work. Hmmm. Was this book subsidized? Ripley acknowledges that she interviewed Bill Gates, Aug. 18, 2010, and she certainly echoes his proclamations about what's wrong with US education. In the Stand for Children film she concludes  a pitch about US teachers just not being smart enough by declaring,  “When everyone has different standards, there’s no way to measure success.”

Ripley was listed as an  Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation,  with this identifier: Ripley is working on a book about what it is like to be a child in the world's new education superpowers. Now that the book is published, New America features events, starring Ripley, Wendey Kopp,  and the Deputy Editor of  Bloomberg Businessweek.

Between 2009 and now, the New America Foundation has received $5,860,002 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Meanwhile, back with the  mid-September Edelman pitches on Twitter:

•  Easy, interactive tool to learn more about how #CommonCore will affect you:

           Common Core: What it means to you:  http://get2core.org/learn

•   One Thing All Parents Should Know [About the Common Core]

 He’s really pushing this film—sent call-out  to Co-CEO of Teach for America, to @dropoutnation, to  Lauren Bowles, a TV actress, and  to the world in general.

•  @dropoutnation I'd love your help getting eyes on our new #CommonCore video. 13K views and counting! http://youtu.be/6M9208ZrlMU

• Have you spent two minutes learning about the #CommonCore yet? http://youtu.be/6M9208ZrlMU

Edelman seems really proud of this film. It opens with a girl carrying her Pearson Common Core textbooks. Apparently at Stand for Children there’s no sense of shame.  Not even any sense of irony. None. Wouldn't you think they'd have been smart enough to find a library book for the kid to hold? Of course the strong possibility is they shot the film in a Common Core school stocked only by Pearson textbooks. 

One of the other 38 short videos features John Legend trying to sound wise. They have disabled the comments but indicate that one person like this film.

One more ugly thing about this whole Stand for Children operation. On one of their sites, they feature a map, so the viewer can click on her state and see how kids are doing. I clicked on Vermont and was told  Common Core in Vermont: 42% of Vermont's college freshmen aren't ready for college-level work and spend their tuition gaining remedial skills they should've received for free in high school.

They reallly throw in the fear:

• Arkansas:  72% of Arkansas' college freshmen aren't ready for college-level work and spend their tuition gaining remedial skills they should've received for free in high school.

But then it gets interesting:

• Mississippi:  39% of Mississippi's college freshmen aren't ready for college-level work and spend their tuition gaining remedial skills they should've received for free in high school.

• Connecticut: 81% of Connecticut's college freshmen aren't ready for college-level work and spend their tuition gaining remedial skills they should've received for free in high school.

•  New Mexico: 47% of New Mexico's college freshmen aren't ready for college-level work and spend their tuition gaining remedial skills they should've received for free in high school. 

Where are they getting these numbers?

Bill and Melinda Gates money at work.

Cash Cow $tate $tandards

With all due respect to Joanne Yatvin, who has made important contributions to NCTE and to literacy (notably her work confronting the flawed National Reading Panel), this is why we cannot be fatalistic about Cash Cow $tate $tandards:

CC$ advocacy is being driven by corporate interests, the allure of money to be made.

If no one could profit from CC$ or the tests, if no one could build political capital off CC$, how many advocates do you think would remain?

I suspect around none.

It is not too late. Even DC political insiders believe the fate of CC$ is deeply in question.

To reclaim the teaching profession, it is time for non-cooperation and that must start with CC$. As Bill Ayers (who did not write CC$) implores us in To Teach:

Teachers are not mindless bureaucrats or soulless clerks. Teachers must become inventors and creators, thinkers and doers.... 

The collective, ongoing conversation about teaching allows us to glimpse something of the depth of this enterprise, to unearth the intellectual and ethical implications beneath the surface. This conversation is the responsibility of each of us. Talk back, speak up, be heard. (xiv, xv)