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Notable Quotes"I don't know if Reading First can teach children to read, but I am confident that it can teach children to hate to read. " "We know that the more children read, the better their literacy development. There is now overwhelming research showing that free voluntary reading is the primary source of our reading ability, our writing style, much of our vocabulary and spelling knowledge, and our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions. It has also been confirmed that those who read more know more: They know more about history, literature, and even have more 'practical knowledge.' " "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. " "It is the duty of the teacher to protect her students from the overreaching of the government."
""SILENCE!" The King of the Turtles barked back. "I'm the king, and you're only a turtle named Mack. You stay in your place while I sit here and rule."
"Moderation in temper is always a virtue. But moderation in principle is always a vice. "
"Fool me once, shame on you.
" . . .the hearse is parked in the halls of the high school "Schools run by the market will favor the haves, not the have-nots. " "We don't have a money problem, we have a values problem. " "If teachers had a union that honored its own Code of Ethics, the inhumane and unethical use of tests and the warping of children's futures would not be something that teachers, students, and parents all had to lose sleep about." "Understand that you, as a parent, have the right to request your child opt out of the tests. This is a little known, but very important, fact. School districts are required by law to inform parents of this right, but it's not widely advertised. There have even been cases where principals have pressured parents to not opt out because their child's score is needed to bring up the school's overall ranking." "The biggest disappointment in 30 years of education work was the No Child Left Behind Act. It did (and does) more damage to schools and children than anything short of war. Indeed, in my opinion, it's a war on childhood. Created by lobbyists for the textbook-testing industry and a Congress that never sees the inside of a school except for photo-ops, it has driven out thousands of the most experienced teachers (who refuse to practice intellectual child abuse) while disillusioning thousands of the youngest teachers — all in the name of testing that makes hundreds of millions for the testing industry. Beyond profits, NCLB's only other accomplishment has been to create hundreds of thousands of school children who associate reading with dry-boned textbooks, boredom, pain, and the threat of failure. A strange way to create a nation of readers! Saddest of all, it was built on a hoax — there was no Texas education miracle. They cooked the books the Enron way and that's been documented time and again." "I believe strongly, in this country, that I ought to be able to stand up and say "No" to something that I believe in my soul is bad for kids." "Yay, my revolutionary papa! But remember, no one should try to do something like this in a vacuum. Rosa Parks did not just sit on that bus by herself. She had hundreds if not thousands of people backing her up and giving her courage. Go out and let people know what you are doing so you don't feel alone." "This year, the politicians are back with their speeches about how they are going to arrange for vocational classes so the voters will be able to compete in the twenty-first century. The first decade of the twenty-first century is already almost over. Time to drop that line, lest the small-town people turn bitter." "Yep, I was all for more tests and more sanctions on schools that didn't measure up. How could they hurt? That's what I thought until, as a parent, I was exposed first-hand to the disturbing transformation in school instruction caused by the federal education mandate. " " The testing system also forces teachers out, Linda McNeil and Sherrie Matula say. 'We're killing the brand-new teachers,' Matula says. says." "1st Place is not a good observation point. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. There is grace afoot in the world and it will find you. You don't have to be first in line: It will be diligent in pursuing you and passing on its gifts, which are faith, hope, love and a sense of humor. The harder you strive for a gift, the more it eludes you. . . ." "Teachers, stand up and insist that you be allowed to be a professional instead of a pawn in a system that is destroying your profession. Your voices together can make a difference and move mountains." "Whose good is being served when once-venerable professional organizations like the National Council of Teachers of English are no hawking corporate flimflam called 21st-century skills?" "Ask a dozen people for a detailed list of information that kids should know, and you'll get a dozen different lists. We may well agree on fundamentals, but the devil is in the details. And in the end the details are arbitrary, which is why the Code of Hammurabi appears in sixth grade in some standards and high school in others. Only William Bennett puts it in second grade. Education Trust trumpets that "College Begins in Kindergarten." On the topic of the failures of African-Americans and Hispanics taking the New York Regents exam, Education Trust CEO Katy Haycock made one of the most outrageous, cruel, and asinine statements imaginable: 'At least they failed something worthwhile.' That one is worth reading again: 'At least they failed something worthwhile.'"
"Teachers "Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes." "I don’t know if I can find the words for it, but if this country ever recovers, it will not be in my lifetime. If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there." "When my friends at The Nation asked what MY nation was, I replied simply: Indig(Nation)." "Ding Wenyu always had a relatively half-assed attitude toward exams, loads of students registered for his classes precisely because they wouldn't have to worry too much about tests. Ding Wenyu never once took grading exams seriously: he simply piled them up and gave out marks according to his own random formula. The highest grade Ding usually gave was a 90 and the lowest grade would be a 70. Naturally the first exam on the top of the pile would get a 90; Ding would then subtract two points from each following test until he got down to 70.At that point he would start all over again. His preposterous grading method was always a big joke around campus, but Ding Wneyu was never concerned with what other people think-even if they were all laughing about him behind his back. He felt that since taking exams was not the objective of education, there was no reason to use them as a means to measure his students. Test scores could never truly represent the level of a student's performance. " "We will never close the achievement gap if all we do is measure it." "Then there is an elite private system where the rich go to school as in Mitt Romney’s lovely alma mater, Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where rolling hills, a carefully kept landscape, swimming pools that appear to be small lakes, hockey rinks, an art colony and museum, an observatory, set up the view of those who, unthinkingly perhaps, are schooled to glaze at a globe and think, 'this is ours, let us set about seeing how we make it work,' quite distinct from the employee mentality, 'tell me what to do and I will do it,' imposed by most NCLB schooling." "Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get 8 cats to pull a sled through the snow." "Why would we persist in a practice whose value isn't supported by research? How can we justify making all the students in a class do the same homework? And, given that almost all kids regard homework as something they can't wait to be done with so they can move on to activities they enjoy, why in the world would we assume it's beneficial? (Do we regard children as so many vending machines, such that you put in an assignment and get out learning?)"
"If I can stop on heart from breaking "13.6 million of America's children live in poverty."
" For my whole professional career I was a strong advocate of compulsory schooling. I was vigilant and relentless about getting every kid on my rolls into my classroom. For example, when I asked 7th graders, "Where's Tom?" kids told me he hadn't shown up to school since the second half of first grade. I found Tom, using legal means to force him into school. And this was a story with a happy ending. I adored Tommy and he ended up excelling in school.
"M. F. K. Fisher once pointed out that a three-minute egg took about the same length of time to boil in 1922 as it did in 1722. And things are no better in 2008: still three minutes. Eggs can dawdle, but kindergartners can't." "What is a teacher to do? Subversion or victimhood. " "This law has turned my sweet, happy classroom into a test-prep mill. " "Uniform Curriculum is a euphemism for teaching to the test. " "Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too." "The brain-research evidence for certain instructional strategies continues to increase, but there still is no sturdy bridge between neuroscience and what educators do in the classroom. But educators’ knowledge and experience will enable them to use the knowledge gained from brain research in their classrooms. For example, choice, interest-driven investigation, collaboration, intrinsic motivation, and creative problem solving are associated with increased levels of such neurotransmitters as dopamine, as well as the pleasurable state dopamine promotes. Novelty, surprise, and teaching that connects with students’ past experiences and personal interests and that is low in threat and high in challenge are instructional strategies that appear to be correlated with increased information passage through the brain’s information filters, such as the amygdala and reticular activating system." "Not every state will meet the core principles that are required. This is complicated stuff that requires sound data systems, good reporting systems." "Our children are unique, creative creatures, not McNuggets, and they need to be inspired, not standardized." "Our public education system should be allowed to educate children, not merely test them." "Politicians are like diapers. They need to be changed often and for the exact same reasons." "All acts of war should be put to a national vote. Anyone voting yes has to register as a volunteer for service in the United States Army." "As an educator, I am sure of one thing, above all others: the difference adults can make in the life of a child. One need not be a prophet to transform a student’s life; one need only be present, consistent, loving, challenging and exemplary."
"Dear Education Week,
"Rules take us only so far, even good rules." "I also trust you will find what I found: that teaching can be a marriage of soul and mind, that the classroom can be a place of discovery, passion, and very real joy. While not every class is wonderful every day--for there is occasional bitterness and pain and disappointment in this business--teaching is, for me, a consuming and deeply satisfying profession. Once I emerged on the other side and realized that I was a teacher, had become a teacher, I realized that I had also found, in essence, my calling, my life's work."
"Delta's Law
"Kai's Exactness Dilemma
"Sapolsky's Third Law
"Davies' Second Law
"Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate
"Quartz's Law of The Primacy of Feeling
"Campbell's Third Law
"Anderson's Law of Causal Instinct
"
Devlin's First Law
" Myers' Law of Self-Perception
"Minsky's Second Law
"Kellys' First Law
"Lykken's First Law
"Schank's Law
"O'Donnell's Law of Academic Administration
"Gardner's First Law "[T]he rush to get more information faster almost forces people to avoid the act of thinking. Why stop and try to make sense of the information we’ve obtained when we can click on that icon and get still more data? And more. " "Occupations such as food preparation and service worker, retail salesperson, customer service representative, cashier, office clerk, and laborer and material mover will employ about five times more people than the computer/high-tech fields requiring a college education. No matter what we do in schools, most of our high school graduates will work at such jobs." ""Believe me, my young friend," said the water rat solemnly, "there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing…nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular. . . ."" "All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand. Not only must we cross the line many times, but in the words of the old spiritual, nobody else can cross it for us, we must cross it by ourselves. Being shoved or dragged across does no good." "We teachers like to think that we can trans- plant our own mental models into the minds of children by means of explanations. It can’t be done." "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. " "The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what's to come if they win the White House. And if we don't pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there's still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame." "THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God." "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." "You can't bullshit your way through this." "These [standardized]tests [required by NCLB] should be a gnat on the windshield. . . a good teacher will just cruise through them."
"In his State of the Union address, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. With the official count at 15 million children in America living in poverty, this comes out to $20 per child.
"I feel that writing is a moral responsibility. I don’t know how else to put it. Take, for example, when I write about illegal immigration. I’m tired of the issue, and I don’t want to get involved in it. But I see and I hear the injustice, the way immigrants are demeaned in this country, the disrespect many Americans have for them. I did a piece on National Public Radio about immigrants, and the only thing I said, essentially, was, 'Thank you.' Nobody has thanked these people for working so well and so hard. The inhumanity of the disrespect is just appalling to me. Here is not the America I love. There’s something in this country right now that is so fierce, so unloving, that I want to protest. I feel responsible for speaking against it." ". . . I trust doubt; it keeps you on the journey." "The essence and elegance of No Child Left Behind is that we are going to peel back the onion and hold ourselves accountable. We really mean it--every kid on grade level by 2014, and obviously that causes some discomfort, particularly as we come closer and closer to that date." "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion" "Test publishers are hawking anything they can. It’s absolutely a fraud." " Maybe the Feds should appoint a few teachers to a Homeland Security Best Practices Panel. " " If you go along with the most tepid aspects of education reform, you run the risk of not being able to bar the door, and they will run their agenda right over the top of you."
"If you don't know the kind of person I am "One person's 'partisan political influence' is another person's good old fashioned democracy. I will take partisan politics over unfettered corporatism any day." "Black civil rights weren't won by suited men (or women) sitting at desks. They were won by a mass movement of millions who marched, sat in at lunch counters, endured jailings, and took bullets and beatings for the right to vote and move freely about. Some were students and pastors; many were dirt-poor farmers and urban workers. No one has ever attempted to list all their names." "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it." "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." "We used to think our future was in the stars. Now the federal government is trying to convince us it's in phonemic awareness." "No Child Left Behind is at its heart very simple: every kid on grade level by 2014 in reading and math." "As I write, the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system. So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food." "I know No Child Left Behind has worked." "Why so little coverage of poverty? For one, journalists like a story to have a resolution, preferably a happy one. Often journalists see poverty as a sad, intractable fact of life, a story that never gets better and generates little interest or news." "As first lady of Arkansas, Hillary had an education plan long before she had a health plan." "Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you'd find the allspice next to the ant poison." "Family income of children below 5 years of age has a bigger impact on whether these children complete high school than their family income later when they are actually in high school." "Some of the confusion about NCLB is understandable. The U.S. Department of Education has been slow to issue guidance and in many cases has offered conflicting information about what the new law entails. But most of the misinformation is cleared up by even a cursory reading of the law or the available research literature." "The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king." "[The] demand for ‘standards and accountability’ has been a diversion from a campaign for economic and social justice for the children of the poor. " " The journey to learning cannot be planned in advance and controlled like a journey to the moon. " ".The cons see education as just another commodity. And if it’s just a commodity, like shoes or carrots, there must be a simple way to measure it. So instead of measuring its impact on society, they say, “Let’s just see how well our kids are doing at memorizing some of the things that we think are important" "As we earnestly try to fix what's broken, we are, in the process, turning an entire generation of children into a giant flock of canaries in the coal mine. " " NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized -- not this year, not ever."
"It's winter in the classroom "My son is in a 'good' kindergarten, but they are obsessed with skills. He works so hard at school (for five hours and 45 minutes) to "be good" that by the time he comes home he can't do anything but have temper tantrums!" "We are like people born in a cage and unable to visualize any world beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That Opinion the Few create in order to control the Many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate. Even so, a number of prisoners are testing the bars." "Witness the effect of the five-year-old Newsweek rankings on the school nearest you. Mathews' rankings formula leans heavily on a school's involvement in the College Board's Advanced Placement program. As a result, thousands of local dollars are now being spent on AP curriculum and tests so that Any Local High School will make an appearance somewhere in Newsweek's list. The College Board, in essence, is now writing the curriculum for many of America's secondary schools-with little debate among educators and parents about what we hope our children will know and be able to do at the end of their high school years. These days, we just hope we're on the list." "Stop treating teachers as potted plants." "I wish I'd made a lawnmower."
"At most, only a relatively few of America's students (let's say 5%) will actually end up in the kinds of math and science jobs the Gates and Broad types think will save us from India and China. So how much sense does it make to drag the other 95% through that regimen?
"It's broke. Don't fix it." "Lansing Public Schools will spend $1.25 million over two years to hire a firm from Arizona to explain how to teach kids in Michigan. Actually, this comes closest to compliance with AYP, which is basically a full employment law for consultants. " "When people ask no questions, it is because they think they have all the answers." "'Good' teachers are the ones who teach to the test, rather than those who employ creativity, excitement and a positive learning environment. At my school, a specialist has created a rigorous 'bell-to-bell' schedule, in which each minute of our day is mapped out. We are told what and how to teach, what to put on our walls, and what interventions to provide."
"Dear Mr. President,
"At age ten, I came home from classes and my father asked me: 'Well, Ralph, what did you learn in school today, did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?'" "NAEP achievement levels have been rejected by everyone who has ever studied them: UCLA’s Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing, the GAO and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as by individual psychometricians such as Lyle Jones of the University of North Carolina. . . . There is no good reason to use the NAEP achievement levels except to beat schools over the head and that is what will happen. Critics will take the discrepancy between the state results and the NAEP results as evidence that the schools are still failing and that the states are lying to their citizens." "One of the things the next president should do is ax the No Child Left Behind law. It is based on a false premise. . . . It is wrong to set low expectations, but it is infinitely crueler to burden children with high expectations beyond their ability to achieve." "Advice for the creators of No Child Left Behind: Leave me alone and let me do my job."
"Teach to Mastery
"Max Apple prefers plain and simple sentences. He is anti-adverb; he thinks a verb shouldn't need any help." "Tom Friedman single-handedly did more than anyone else to convince liberals and Democrats to support the invasion of Iraq; the only competitors for that ignominious distinction are Colin Powell and Ken Pollack. And while he has spent the last year or so feigning angst over his years of pro-war cheerleading, he has not changed in the slightest." "The child that you send over is nothing like the child that comes back to you. " "There is a phenomenon that sociologist Noelle Neumann calls ‘The Spiral of Silence.' This occurs when people silence their own feelings because they believe that their opinion is in the distinct minority; they’re outnumbered, and there is no hope of their opinion carrying the day. They may actually be in the majority, but if they think they are outnumbered, they will sabotage (censure) themselves.” Major political figures and media have been carrying out a campaign to create the impression that the sweeping and dramatic public policy changes we have seen in the last few years are a product of a popular mandate and that popular sentiment is driving these changes in our society. In a sense, this impression management is not brand new, it is forceful, planned and purposeful to control an image that the public is allowed to view. It is then, the mainstream media, that is in control of news worthiness. " "The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is fundamentally flawed and provides neither an efficient, nor an effective path to improving schooling for all students. Some provisions in the law are actually harmful for students." "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. "
"
This external testing model (state testing) is a model of standardization. Standardize everything—the standards, the curriculum, the instruction, the teachers, the schools . . . like fast food chains where customers are generally guaranteed, no matter the location, what they will receive. . . .
"Right now I'm taking 3 AP classes and i WISH I had time to sleep. Parents should let kids at least get sleep when they are young--they won’t get it in high school! " "I have been in schools were the reading coach is used as a data repository, spending most of her time in an office lined with bookshelves filled with unused young adult novels. Such coaches spend their time manipulating and remanipulating the reams of data that cross their desks daily. Education has become so data driven that we sometimes forget that human beings are more than data suppliers." "If you were in an open field with an angry rhinoceros about to charge at you, the silliest thing you could do would be to imagine you were a rhinoceros too. The outcome would be obvious. What can you do, faced with a rhinoceros, to get the better of it eventually and come away unharmed? What is the only thing; in this case, that is more powerful than a rhinoceros? Why, a swarm of mosquitoes." "Everyone came out of that room glowing, He really understood education and cared about what we did. He sounds like us, one of our teachers told me."
"External exams and projects -- no matter who endorses them from afar -- are
teacher bashing.
"In America you can say anything you want -- as long as it doesn't have any effect." "What is shared by mass murderers, felony drunk drivers, starving children, head banging laboratory animals, anxious overworked students and all reptiles? . . . They don't play. What do most Nobel Laureates, historically renowned creative artists, successful multi-career entrepreneurs and animals of superior intelligence have in common? . . . They are full of play throughout their lives."
"Question: If a kid is asked on a test to “give an example of a stereotype” and he answers, 'Sony,' does he really deserve no credit at all for that response?
"Every year, thousands of law school graduates leap into the nerve-wracking and costly process of preparing for the bar exam. The bar consists of two days of testing (three in California) on memorization and comprehension of specific areas of law. Failure is hardly uncommon: various estimates place the passage rate at roughly 70 percent, while the failure rate in California was a whopping 56 percent in 2004." "The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt." "College graduates are, in fact, not in short supply. . . . In plain language, many college graduates are now forced to take jobs requiring only high school educations." "American middle-class living standards are threatened, not because workers lack competitive skills but because the richest among us have seized the fruits of productivity growth, denying fair shares to the working- and middle-class Americans, educated in American schools, who have created the additional national wealth." "Rising workforce skills can indeed make American firms more competitive. But better skills, while essential, are not the only source of productivity growth. The honesty of our capital markets, the accountability of our corporations, our fiscal-policy and currency management, our national investment in R&D and infrastructure, and the fair-play of the trading system (or its absence), also influence whether the U.S. economy reaps the gains of Americans' diligence and ingenuity. The singular obsession with schools deflects political attention from policy failures in those other realms." "The Tough Choices report bemoans the fact that "Indian engineers make $7,500 a year against $45,000 for an American engineer with the same qualifications" and concludes from this that we can compete with the Indian economy only if our engineers are smarter than theirs. This is silly: No matter how good our schools, American engineers won't be six times as smart as those in the rest of the world. " "Teaching is a labor of love." "[T}oo much external regulation will turn schools into regulated utilities. All the research on effective schools shows that the success of a school is unique and home-grown." "This facile suggestion [in "A Nation at Risk"] that we need to extend the school year is but one example of the rampant shortsightedness growing out of the recommendations of this commission. It must be obvious to anyone who cares to make an inventory of our nation's troubles - and this a nation at risk - that it is not our uneducated, our low SAT scorers, our dropouts who have brought us into this time of trouble, but rather our leaders who have enjoyed an excellent education, both at the secondary and professional levels. To cite but one example, those million-car recalls are the fault of well-educated engineers. " "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words .... Is that all you blighters can do?" ""I've administered the test for years and I'm not going to do it anymore. The last time I gave the test, a child dissolved in tears from anxiety. I'd put her in a situation I didn't want her to be in. My gut feeling as a teacher made me say, 'I'm going to take a stand here.'" "About 18 months ago, I was invited to meet Eli Broad in his gorgeous penthouse in NYC, overlooking Central Park. I hear that he made his billions in the insurance and real estate businesses. I am not sure when he became an education expert. We talked about school reform for an hour or more, and he told me that what was needed to fix the schools was not all that complicated: A tough manager surrounded by smart graduates of business schools and law schools. Accountability. Tight controls. Results. In fact, NYC is the perfect model of school reform from his point of view. Indeed, this version of school reform deserves the Broad Prize, a prize conferred by one billionaire on another." "Living in NYC, I see what happens when businessmen and lawyers take over a school system, attempt to demolish everything that existed before they got there, and mount a dazzling PR blitz to prove that they are successful." "We don't want public education to become a 13-year course in how to take a test. I want the testing called for by No Child Left Behind to become a reflection of how a progressive curriculum is being taught. " "The first rule of media survival is use it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment, a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions. Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere else." "I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it." "Why does the media always refer to people defending our civil liberties and the Constitution as "activists" or 'advocates?' Wouldn't 'citizens' do just as well? " "It may be time to reflect on the possibility that a nation of good test-takers is not necessarily a well-educated nation." "When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal." " Somehow we have decided to hand more and more power to far-off educrats and executive-branch power mavens. In the process we’ve taken something — teaching — that ought to be personalized and creative and made it into something mass-produced, programmed and copyrighted." "Teachers drill, drill, drill until students follow the exact format of proven WASL responses. Practice forms duplicate WASL templates. Past WASL questions become new writing prompts. Precise WASL vocabulary is practiced weekly." "No pupil under the age of fifteen years in any grammar or primary school shall be required to do any home study." "Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball, or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. The room is different because I was in it. The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed. "
"Fetching objects for people
"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral." "The greatest sin of NCLB is to make what should be a lifelong joy into a tedious, bureaucratic exercise - making words far harder to learn and infinitely harder to love. Kids need more words in their lives - and fewer tests. " "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. " "Above all, we must stop worshiping curriculum. Setting higher standards and describing what all students should know and be able to do is not the way to improve education. Indeed, to continue on this path is the sure way to destroy our society. The more we try to standardize children, the more we encourage violence, crime, drugs, and other problems. When we try to stuff children into a common mold, we destroy feelings of self-worth on a grand scale."
"In order for high school kids to understand many of the topics we expect them to grasp, they have to be reading a wide range of material. Kids need to be reading in their spare time. Kids need to read for fun. . . .
"Lorna Leone [a director of school performance for Anne Arundel County] emphasizes uniformity--at quite a detailed level. . . . [She] was concerned that each classroom in each grade didn't have the same number of vocabulary words displayed on their Word Walls. Why aren't they all the same size? Why do some teachers post the words on the wall and some on a flip chart? Why does one fifth-grade teacher have parts of speech on the wall but the other doesn't? . . .
" I've been teaching K-1 for 11 years. I have my Masters, and am Nationally Board Certified. I've spent the last 2 days in a DIBELS training class with fellow teachers. I am absolutely horrified! I can't imagine anything that could be more detrimental to the reading development of young children (not to mention insulting to professionals). " " The most striking thing about the sweeping federal educational reforms debuting this fall is how much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued that efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed, and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no widget would be left behind. Now we have "No Child Left Behind," in which Congress has set up a complex apparatus of sanctions and standards designed to compel individual schools toward steady annual improvement, with the goal of making a hundred per cent of American schoolchildren proficient in math and reading by 2014. It is hard to look at the new legislation and not share in its Fordist vision of the classroom as a brightly lit assembly line, in which curriculum standards sail down from Washington through a chute, and fresh-scrubbed, defect-free students come bouncing out the other end." "When you are told, 'It was meant to be,' ask, 'Who meant it?' " "I hat my sof Be cus I Dw Not No how to Rit." "WHY IS IT safer to say "fuck" than to say "fascism?" One of the curiosities of post-cold-war rhetoric is that we no longer have a term for those who practice ideologies antithetical to democracy. Current American foreign policy seems aimed at turning incompetent communists into competent fascists. One American politician once put it this way: 'The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.' Would such a radical be allowed on Sunday morning talk shows today? Probably not, even though his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. " "I am on a mission to help teachers reclaim their professional knowledge, their common sense and to maintain the dignity and integrity of each child in their presence."
"The first time it was reported that one child vomited on a high stakes test, there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred vomited. But when a thousand vomited and there was no end to the tales of young terror, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'
"This document printed on recycled paper." "A favorite Standardisto metaphor is School as a race. How about school as a beehive? A song? A handshake? Possibilities abound."
"It's all I have to bring today—
"In 1967 my second year of teaching in Atlanta, I emptied the room before the students returned in August. My five periods were full of kids who hated school and hated English, the subject Itaught. We created U.S.A. G.E (United States of America Grammatical English). Gradually with ideas from students we designed our classroom with furniture, books, and other equipment. The Atlanta public library had started a telephone service answering research questions. When we requested a telephone the principal, a rigid nun, put her foot down. Imagine schools without telephone computer hookups now. I was able to eliminate quizzes and tests, and the students let me work them to death. Some still hug me forty years later when we see each other in a local post office.
"Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts. NY Times headline, 6/27/07
"We have this bizarre situation where people pay $50 to $90 to the plumber, to whom we entrust our pipes. But according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the child care worker, to whom we entrust our children, averages $10 an hour, no benefits.
"Some teachers say kids these days only respond to shouting. Guess I am getting old, but. . . . First the parents scream, then the teacher shouts, then the assistant principal uses a bull horn, and then the guards yell over a PA system when these kids graduate to prison, and finally the ambulance siren signals their death.
"If I do say so modestly, [NCLB] is the jewel in the crown of President Bush's domestic achievements." "When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion. " "We are well past the time for leaders to show us the way. We know the way! We just need to be committed to it. " "Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among [NCLB's] goals; equal educational opportunity is not. In fact, the latter term—which had been prominent in previous versions of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act—appears nowhere in NCLB. " "The No Child Left Behind Act has worked for America's children and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law." "Just because your smoke alarm went off doesn't mean your trout's done." "Under No Child Left Behind, states and school districts have unprecedented flexibility in how they use federal education funds." "I can't stand giving kindergartners timed standards tests and watching tears trickle down their cheeks. It's just not right." "Don’t say data equals children. Equals learning. Say something gentler. Say No Child Left Behind."
"Throw away your red pencils. "I think in the learning process it’s really valuable for people to go very, very deeply into one thing at one point in their lives and touch quality. And then they can, like you’ve described, translate that quality into other things, because I believe these principles are the same. They transcend specific disciplines. " "The disingenuous nature of the Spellings gospel of accountability becomes all the more apparent in light of her post facto reaction to the scandal. Her press releases and disavowal of authority and responsibility are ample enough proof that the thought that accountability applies to her as well has yet to cross the secretary’s mind." "The world's five hundred wealthiest people have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million." "There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes. " "I am a war president." "If there is one thing that I have learned throughout my travels, it's that education is not a 'one-size-fits-all' enterprise. Through the No Child Left Behind Act, our teachers can fine-tune instruction to make sure that every child is learning. They have more tools to measure student progress and better data to identify which strategies are most effective."
"Question: Your anecdotes. . . .
"When I raised my hand in class,
"There's not a thing wrong with teaching to the test.
"Always there is something worth saying about
"People go into teaching because they want to teach. Teaching is not like a business or corporation where managers jump from job to job and where people have to be incentivized to work harder or longer hours. Teaching is hard work, and the rest of us should not do anything to make it harder. State and local education authorities should focus on improving the conditions in the schools so that teachers can do the job they prepared to do." "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the commissioner of education . . . Amen." "Yes, we accept as a given that we need better teachers." "We have to counter the mentality of such mantras as 'competition for this century' and 'closing the achievement gap.' We have to raise our voices in harmony with the human need for community, co-operation, and compassion. Without these elements, we'll turn our planet into a cinder. " "There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." "Cut scores on tests, determining who is proficient and who is not, are political decisions. They are not scientific or psychometric decisions. " " Are we sure we want to live with the consequences of high percentage of minority students not finishing high school? " "High-stakes decisions based on school-mean proficiency are scientifically indefensible. We cannot regard differences in school-mean proficiency as reflecting differences in school effectiveness. . . . To reward schools for high mean achievement is tantamount to rewarding those schools for serving students who were doing well prior to school entry." "Viewing teaching as a moral endeavor filled with uncertain and inevitable dilemmas positions the teacher always as an inquirer." "Novelist Tom Sharpe said, 'There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk.' He'd never heard a corporate politico making laws about how teachers should do their jobs. Of course, some of them are introspective drunks." "The Utah State Core Curriculum, the Utah Performance Assessment System for Students (UPASS) accountability system, and the Reading First program of NCLB, all make curriculum a business and effectively prevent teachers from performing as true mentors and professionals. Teachers are slaves to the required curriculum, scripted teaching and state testing, all of which cause many students to develop an aversion to learning." "The NCLB federal law, scheduled for reauthorization this year, expects everyone to stay the course on the wrong road." "It should be spelled Reading FUrst." "The last thing I'm going to do is subject some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over them saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it." "Silence, indifference, and inaction were Hitler's principal allies." "The consequences of NCLB are far more damaging to our National Security than Iraq ever was." "The problem America faces is not a lack of educated people, but a lack of jobs for educated people. In the 21st century, the U. S. economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic services, such as waitresses, bartenders, and health and social services. The vast majority of these jobs do not require a college education. . . ." "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was." "Today almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government. " "The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed. "
"THe emperor who "What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler. . . ." "As a student in the new education system produced by the NCLB, I have obtained six perfect scores on my states form of standardized testing. It is not an accomplishment that I esteem highly and I had no desire to include it on my applications to college. The reason why? Those test are destroying everything that is basic and good about education. There is no longer a desire to learn, There is no longer a desire to teach. If this law is not done away with their will be no hope for democracy in America let alone in Iraq. Without knowledge there is no democracy." " Today democracy, liberty, and equality are words to fool the people. No nation can progress with such ideas. They stand in the way of action. Therefore we frankly abolish them. In the future each man will serve the interest of the state with absolute obedience. Let him who refuses beware." "To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself." "Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. " "Poetries is nots for all the peoples, it is for the ones that listens." "My District sent out a flyer to offer a Stress Reduction Workshop If they allowed us the joy of teaching free of the joke of mandating and scripting, the poetry that we would write with our children would, believe me, do more to salve the stress than any kind of 'training.' " "As we know, there is not really such a thing as education. There is only helping somebody to learn, and the learning process is a complex adaptive system; fooling around, making mistakes, somehow having contact with reality or truth, correcting the mistakes, assuring self-consistency and so on--in short, messing about." "Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is mans original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. " "Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? it is not to save time, but to squander it. " "Ordering a child to write a CTB/McGraw-Hill writing prompt in the narrative, informative, or persuasive mode is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child." "Because the arms industry is coddled by political parties and the mass media, their antics go largely unnoticed. Our politicians and pundits argue endlessly about a couple of billion dollars that may be spent on improving education or ending poverty, but they casually waste that amount in a few days in Iraq." "When a rich man's dog died, everyone commiserated. When a poor man lost his mother, no one noticed. " "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. " "Liberala power worshipper without power." "GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect It needs a driver. " "A lot of people say a lot of things, which doesn't make what they say true." "...no educational system is possible unless every question directly asked of a pupil at any examination is either framed or modified by that actual teacher of that pupil in that subject." " "Literacy is a malleable repertoire of practices, not an unchanging or universal set of skills. Learning to be literate is like learning to be an artisan in a guild, to play an instrument in an ensemble, like acquiring a craft within a community whose art and forms of life are dynamic, rather than a robotic acquisition and authorization of core skills. Once we understand this we can find the resources, grounds and normative purposes for teaching literacy not from textbooks and skill taxonomies, but by attending closely to what children and communities actually do with texts, old and new, print and multimodal, traditional and radical. This requires something more than common sense, and that we get out of the staffroom, get away from the teachers guidebooks and draw upon all skills as teachers and intellectuals, psychologists and sociologists, linguists and ethnographers. The systematic engagement with these everyday texts, discourses and practices is at the heart of teaching and learning. And it is in these artifacts and practices that you will find the generative domains, text and practices for lessons, units and classrooms events " "I wonder what the NEA actually disagrees with?" "I have been an NEA member for 6 years, and am furious about their misrepresentation of this. NCLB is destroying public education at the very foundation. The purpose is to privatize education with vouchers and school choice. This is wrong. I want to be held accountable, but not like this." "NEA opposes this petition... that will NOTstop me from signing ..in fact that enrages me as much as this idiotic Act. I am a veteran teacher of 23 years and am so disgusted with the state of education today that it makes me want to leave te classroom. Get with it NEA! Get on board before I start a petition against your stance on this! " "As President of the Oakland Education Association and a veteran teacher, I call on Congress to dismantle NCLB. It is far too flawed to be fixed. We can't allow public education to be hijacked by corporate interests who don't have the first clue about truly educating a child. " "Death to DIBELS." "I think this a part of a plan to reshape the good old USA for people who do not believe in 'by and for the people.'" "About Damn Time! " "Organizations (NEA, state boards of ed, and others) keep pushing and pushing for funding and complaining that the problems with NCLB are caused by lack of money, especially all the money promised by Congress that has not been delivered. I have news for them -- if the entire federal budget were allocated to NCLB, it would not "fix" it! Where does anyone get the idea that full appropriations will do anything to make this work? Money is NOT the issue. " " I do what I have to do." "I'm glad I never attended school under the present conditions - age: 72 years." "NCLB is a thinly disguised program designed to open our educational system to corporate interests. The real goal of NCLB is failure of our public school systems, paving the way for privatization through the charter school concept. We will be training our children to acquiesce to a future with no possibilities, cannon and service industry fodder and nothing more. The funds being used for one more failed Bush policy is also money generated from our taxes. I don't want to pay for it. Clear enough?" "NCLB breaks children's hearts. " " I have voted in every election since 1980, and will continue doing so until I die. I will always vote AGAINST anyone who FAILS to vote against NCLB" "I am well on my way to becoming an embittered and mediocre teacher, who heretofore, considered teaching to be a profession, not a job. I once loved what I did. I do not now, nor do my students; school has become a rather grim and joyless place for all. By "McDonald's-izing" education we have done a grave disservice to those we serve, our children. I despair. . . ." "I would be willing to give up part of my salary to help cover the Federal money lost if our district told the Federal Govt we are not going to comply with the onerous NCLB standards." "NCLB testing discriminates againist special education children who cannot function on grade level due to their handicapping conditions. Our brilliant brain surgeons throughout this nation cannot get everyone on grade level by 2014. Why blame our teachers who are working themselves to death? My oldest son struggled for years to meet the NCLB laws. As a parent, I hurt inside due to my son telling me he will hurt his school because he cannot do it. Someone discriminated against my son's rights. Please dismantle this monster so other children will not be labeled failures as my son was labeled by your NCLB. " "The No Child Left Behind Act should read, 'No Child Left Behind, Unless They are Really Smart. Then They Can Fend For Themselves.'" "Think For yourself. Question Authority. Read banned books! Kids have the same constitutional rights as grown-ups!!! Don't Forget to boycott standardized testing!!!" "I do wish we had something in education like AA, our own Test-a-holics Anonymous." "I became a teacher because I want to serve struggling students who need a little extra motivation and exposure to rich learning experiences. But my options are being narrowed down by a restrictive curriculum and a scripted phonics-limited reading program. I feel as though I am becoming a learning technician instead of a teacher." "Children have souls. Teachers do, too. Help us return heart, soul, and love back to our classrooms, without fear of retribution when our young charges cannot meet unrealistic standards." "This law must not be reauthorized. It is having a devastating impact on public education. We must return to the wisdom of the framers of the Constution who did not create a federalized education system in our country. NCLB is unconstitutional, unwise, destructive, unimplementable and illogical. It is the shame of our nation to make a law with high-sounding and noble rhetoric about educational equity that accomplishes just the opposite: more discrimination and reduced opportunities for our most disadvantaged students to realize their full human potential. I strongly support this effort to dismantle NCLB." "One of the things we can learn from history is that history is not only a history of things inflicted on us by the powers that be. History is also a history of resistance. It's a history of people who endure tyranny for decades, but who ultimately rise up and overthrow the dictator. We've seen this in country after country, surprise after surprise. Rulers who seem to have total control, they suddenly wake up one day, and there are a million people in the streets, and they pack up and leave. This has happened in the Philippines, in Yemen, all over, in Nepal. Million people in the streets, and then the ruler has to get out of the way. So, this is what we're aiming for in this country. Everything we do is important. Every little thing we do, every picket line we walk on, every letter we write, every act of civil disobedience we engage in, any recruiter that we talk to, any parent that we talk to, any GI that we talk to, any young person that we talk to, anything we do in class, outside of class, everything we do in the direction of a different world is important, even though at the moment they seem futile, because that's how change comes about. Change comes about when millions of people do little things, which at certain points in history come together, and then something good and something important happens." " This law represents the federal takeover of America's public schools and completely undermines the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Congress should be ashamed of themselves." "I scored quite poorly on the SAT and now I am a Ph.D. student in astrophysics at Berkeley. I can't imagine how different my life would be had the SAT been the most important indicator of my intelligence, as it obviously was not an accurate indicator." "We move on data We're moving on scientifically based research. We're not going to rely on creativity to support these children. We're not looking for [teachers] to do their own thing.[describing Open Court]" "No Child Left Behind is harming my child, I have watched him change from an engaged, excited student to a passive student. Is this really the next generation we are looking for?" "Senator Kennedy, this Act Sucks!!!" "Senator Kennedy this Act Sucks!!! " "Let a thousand flowers bloom. Give us some money for fertilizer. " "Political, not scientific, considerations continue to explain NAGB's stubborn refusal to abandon achievement level cut scores which have no scientific or scholarly credibility." "What NCLB has done is the equivalent of demanding not only that 'C' students become 'A' students nationwide, but that 'D' and 'F' students also become 'A' students. As noted above, this confuses two distinct goals that of raising the performance of typical students, and that of raising the minimum level of performance we expect of all, or almost all students. Both are reasonable instructional goals. But given the nature of human variability, no single standard can possibly describe both of these accomplishments. If we define proficiency-for-all as the minimum standard, it cannot possibly be challenging for most students. If we define proficiency-for-all as a challenging standard (as does NCLB), the inevitable patterns of individual variability dictate that significant numbers of students will still fail, even if they all improve. This will be true no matter what date is substituted for NCLB's 2014." "Under NCLB, children with I.Q.s as low as 65 must achieve a standard of proficiency in math which is higher than that achieved by 60 percent of students in Taiwan, the highest scoring country in the world (in math), and a standard of proficiency in reading which is higher than that achieved by 65 percent of students in Sweden, the highest scoring country in the world (in reading)." "the conceptual basis of NCLB is deeply flawed; no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. A standard can either be a minimal standard which presents no challenge to typical and advanced students, or it can be a challenging standard which is unachievable by most below-average students. No standard can serve both purposes this is why we call 'proficiency for all' an oxymoron - but this is what NCLB requires." "There is no date by which all (or even nearly all) students in any subgroup, even middle-class white students, can achieve proficiency. Proficiency for all is an oxymoron, as the term 'proficiency' is commonly understood and properly used." "I'm angry as hell about NCLB." "There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all. " "Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. " "Before, if my kids wrote, 'Apples are red,' I was excited. But if they write that same sentence in the week when we're writing narratives, they get a low grade. It's descriptive, not narrative." "Before, if my kids wrote, 'Apples are red,' I was excited. But if they write that same sentence in the week when we're writing narratives, they get a low grade. It's descriptive, not narrative." " Justice cannot be won without organization." "Action engenders hope." "IF THE $5.15 HOURLY minimum wage had risen at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would now stand at $23.03." "The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs." "[E}ducation is not going to be the answer to our economic crisis. It is clearly an answer to every single individual -- they should get every piece of education, we should pay for it, give our kids the skills, the training, the college education. But here's the problem: only 1 percent more of all jobs by 2012 will require a college education. So if everybody went to college, and only 1 percent more require a college education, that's going to be a problem. Only eight of the 30 fastest-growing jobs in America require a college education. On top of all of that, college-educated kids in the last five years have lost the same amount of money in wages as blue-collar people. So if college education was the answer to America's problems -- yes, we need it, but we should not be fooled by people that say, 'Well, if everybody just gets an education, then America will redistribute its wealth.' It will not do that.--Changing How America Works "
"McGraw-Hills tests "First they came for the senior teachers near retirement; then they came for the non-tenured; then they came for the people who could not produce the results they wanted; then they came for those who could not turn straw into gold; when they came for me, there was no one left. " "Every test, every grade affects the learner. Every dull test - no matter how technically sound - affects the learner's future initiative and engagement. No, even saying it this way does not do justice to the consequences of our testing practices: every test TEACHES the student." "Who's worse: The people who produce the goods that harm children or the people who use them?" "Have we become so complacent, so coward and intimidated by this government that we have forgotten our own revolutionary birthright of rebellion and dissent? Have we become so paralyzed by the eleventh of September that we would give up our liberty and freedom for the promise of a security that does not exist by a government that now threatens our very lives? What will it take before we finally realize the true reality of this crisis? How many more terrorist attacks, senseless wars, flag draped caskets, grieving mothers, paraplegics, amputees, stressed out sons and daughters before we finally begin to break the silence of this shameful night? Let us open up our hearts and speak in a way we have never spoken before knowing that lives now depend on it, and the very survival of our nation is now at stake. Let not our silence in this crucial moment betray us from our destiny. " "A time comes when silence is betrayal. " "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
"If you want a green light for government spending in America, just say the word defense.
"Christian faith demands, as a matter of justice and compassion, that we be concerned about public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act approaches the education of Americas children through an inside-the-school management strategy of increased productivity rather than providing resources and support for the individuals who will shape childrens lives. As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings to be nurtured and educated. We call on our political leaders to invest in developing the capacity of all schools. Our nation should be judged by the way we care for our children." "Playit's by definition absorbing. The outcome is always uncertain. Play makes children nimbleneurobiologically, mentally, behaviorallycapable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world. That makes it just about the best preparation for life in the 21st century. Psychologists believe that play cajoles people toward their human potential because it preserves all the possibilities nervous systems tend to otherwise prune away. It's no accident that all of the predicaments of playthe challenges, the dares, the races and chasesmodel the struggle for survival. Think of play as the future with sneakers on." " One reason the Democrats lose so many elections is that they seem to care more about who said what about Valerie Plame and who said what on an ABC TV show than they do about healthcare, pensions, or jobs or how much it costs to own a house."
"All I have is a voice "DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards. "
"Science
"Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.
A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating President. . . . "All of a sudden, the federal government and Bill Gates have decided that high schools are in need of reform. Anyone who has been around schools for some time can see the familiar political task force pattern emerge. They declare a crisis, have a conference, put out a report with a bunch of homilies and vague 'motherhood' recommendations, cop a trivial amount of money for 'lighthouse' projects, take pictures of themselves in front of the schools, and run around to the media to say what a great thing they've done. That's nonsense. Reform is hard work and it's not glorious. Schools do not improve through political opportunism." "Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom. . . . http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/#060830b" "I like to talk about No Child Left Behind as Ivory soap. It's 99.9 percent pure. There's not much needed in the way of changes. . . . As much grist as there was for the mill five years ago on various fronts . . . we've come a long way in a short time in a big system affecting 50 million kids." "I've got an ekuletic reading list." " Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but thats no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world." "With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system. " "Reading First has demonstrated once again that politics and greed trump research and benefits to at-risk children every time." "If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." "L'essential est invsible pour les eaux. (What is essential is invisible to the eyes.)" "Who bears more responsibility: the people who produce the high stakes tests and scripted curricula, the people who demand they be inflicted on children, or the people who use them day in and day out?" "Obedience is boring. We want to think about it. We want to decide whether a particular law applies to our specific case. In that place, at that time." "Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give . . . . " " The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichs of a long series of story conferences." "I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. " "They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem. " "He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, 'Give me the co-ordinates.'... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog! " "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny.""
"Power Corrupts.
PowerPoint Corrupts "First you establish the traditional "two views" of the question. You then put forward a common-sensical justification of the one, only to refute it by the other. Finally, you send them both packing by the use of a third interpretation, in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory. Certain verbal maneuvers enable you to line up the traditional 'antitheses' as complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and the 'accomlished philosopher' may be recognized by the ingenuity with which he makes ever-bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings."
"Words strain, "It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up." "It would seem prudent to address the issue of the hard bigotry of high expectations with inadequate resources. It is not merely whether the mandates of NCLB were fully funded it is clear they weren't but whether the social capital is provided to schools, families and communities to overcome years of racism and neglect. This leads to the need to examine the goal of closing the achievement gap. Is it a real goal and does it even makes sense?"
"There are three possible explanations for the Administration's publishing a good-day-for-bombing color guidebook. "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part; you cant even passively take part, and youve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and youve got to make it stop." "Must the citizen even for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." "It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. " "Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary. . . ." "If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations." "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." "Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony. " " There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides! There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it? " "'Give us this day our daily bread' is probably the most perfectly constructed and useful sentence ever set down in the English language. " "Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And theres an opening convey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner. " |
