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Notable Quotes"Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency." " The gods can never afford to leave a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here. They will at once send him packing. How can you walk on ground when you see through it? " "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand. Our possibilities are endless.”" " Thomas and Wingert, you are totally, utterly socially irresponsible. How dare you write such a rag of a (poorly researched) story and reinforce the notion that only the bottom of the barrel of individuals would want to be a thing as lowly and ignoble as a teacher? Only lazy, boorish imbeciles would deign to spend their life in the classroom, cleaning up all the messes that you can't imagine sitting in your policy-making offices. But, I digress. I have to get ready for another day of being lowly and mediocre."
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"The Obama administration appointed somebody from the NewSchools Venture Fund to run this so-called Race to the Top. The NewSchools Venture Fund exists to promote charter schools. So, what we're seeing with the proliferation--with this demand from the federal government, if you want to be part of this $4 billion fund, you better be prepared to create lots more charter schools. Well, it's all predetermined by who the personnel is. And, you know, so we see this immense influence of the foundations.
"If Obama is willing to go in the dark where even Bush feared to tread, and if Arne Duncan is reckless enough to proceed where even Margaret Spelling drew the line, you can bet that there is enough corporate-government money in the current reform school agenda to buy the media and the research and the politicians needed to push forward with the continued demolition of American public education. " "Business Roundtable member CEOs congratulate President-elect Obama on the selection of Arne Duncan as the next Secretary of Education. The selection signals that the Obama administration believes that aggressive efforts are needed to raise U.S. student achievement. Mr. Duncan has a strong record of working with the business community to improve schools in Chicago. " "I never dreamed we would have to protect our kids from President Obama."
"'I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.
"Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security."
"It's always been a little odd the way that there is only one U.S. federal department that uses its ineffectiveness as a major speaking point.
"Central Falls could be--ANYWHERE. . . but, obviously, it's a hell of a long way from Wall Street: " "We no longer wonder 'Who are you?' but instead decide quickly 'What can we do to fix you?'" "I'm willing to argue that even with time and training, interactive whiteboards are an under-informed and irresponsible purchase. They do little more than reinforce a teacher-centric model of learning. Heck, even whiteboard companies market them as a bridging technology, designed to replicate traditional instructional practices (make presentations, give notes, deliver lectures) in an attempt to move digital teacher-dinosaurs into the light. I ask you: Do we really want to spend thousands of dollars on a tool that makes stand-and-deliver instruction easier?" "When it comes to education warriors, Rep. George Miller is a warrior's warrior. DFER is proud to recognize Congressman Miller's impressive work as chair of the Education and Labor Committee, especially in drafting and fighting for the 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) act. Rep. Miller’s steadfast dedication to serious results in education is what makes him an effective leader in reforming America's education system. His tendency to side with the reform-disruptors rather than the reform-incrementalists makes him an recipient especially worthy of our Education Reformer of the Month." "Common Core Standards. Plato's "Allegory of Cave" for 11-year-olds. Bipartisan is euphemism for unilateral oppression." "...I am sensible, that there would be something like impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially different from those upon which general approbation is at present bestowed...." "...I have a prediction to make: As hundreds and possibly thousands more charter schools open, we will see many financial and political scandals. We will see corrupt politicians and investors putting their hands into the cashbox. We will see corrupt deals where public school space is handed over to entrepreneurs who have made contributions to the politicians making the decisions. We will see many more charter operators pulling in $400,000-500,000 a year for their role, not as principals, but as 'rainmakers' who build warm relationships with politicians and investors.... " "What I cannot understand in this 'jobs creating' President is why gutting teachers and ruining so many lives, is not important enough to halt. . . ." "What if we insisted that doctors be paid based upon the relative health of their patients regardless of whether those same patients smoke, are overweight or have a prior illness? " "Children under NCLB are to learn only what the New Aryans want them to learn. To this end they created 'standards' and high-stakes tests that put such great emphasis on two subjects, reading and math, that nothing else gets taught. Professional educators lament the "narrowing of the curriculum" but are studiously ignored. Yet even they never seem to grasp that the narrowing of the curriculum is precisely the point of the illogical testing program in the first place." "If education policymakers knew what they were doing, instead of demanding national standards and tests keyed to a curriculum generated in an era long past and no longer relevant, they'd be calling for an emergency national conference to rethink what's being taught, and why."
"The single story creates stereotypes. The trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. . . . The single story robs people of dignity. . . stories matters.
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
"[G]rowth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.--Edward Abbey
"Let's call it: Formative Assessment Techniques for Achieving Student Success (FAT-ASS). " ""
"The absolute requirement of RTTT is that states must adopt national standards. Forty-eight of the fifty states, with Alaska and Texas being the only exceptions, have signed on to the Common Core Standards Initiative. This initiative is funded and promoted by the National Governors' Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). They are developing common core standards in math and English that are 'internationally benchmarked.'
Although touted as "state-led" and "voluntary," all of these severely cash-strapped states (41 as of the January 19th deadline) that hope to receive RTTT funds MUST adopt these standards (national curriculum). Part of the competitive application process requires states to show the largest number of school districts agreeing to take on these national/international standards. That is not voluntary. Rather, depending on one's point of view, it is either bribery or economic and ideological blackmail.
"We still live a classist, racist, sexist, homophobic, religionist society. Civil rights is still a huge issue in this country. When teachers can't exercise civil disobedience, then something is truly wrong in this "so-called" land of the free. We ain't free and it is getting worse. The way the standards are right now, they promote complacency.
"On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right." "It is odd that school leaders feel triumphant when they close schools, as though they were not responsible for them. They enjoy the role of executioner, shirking any responsibility for the schools in their care." "Most researchers in the field of childhood development agree that the minds of nursery-school children are far too raw to be judged. Sally Shaywitz, author of Overcoming Dyslexia, is in the midst of a decades-long study that examines reading development in children. She says she couldn't even use the reading data she'd collected from first-graders for some of the longitudinal analyses. 'It simply wasn't stable,' she says. I tell her that most New York City schools don't share this view. 'A young brain is a moving target,' she replies. 'It should not be treated as if it were fixed.'" "When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that's supposed to be qualitative at a young age,no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents' anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there's a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it's beginning at an age that's criminal. -- Steve Nelson, Head of Calhoun School, a school that includes "progressive" in its identification" "Admirers of the president now embrace actions they once denounced as criminal, or rationalize and evade such questions, or attempt to explain away what cannot be excused. That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past. Even as many casual supporters begin to show their inevitable displeasure with his 'job performance,' and his poll numbers decline, the character and motivations of the president remain above question. He is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing." "'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewer of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.' " "[A spending freeze] is a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view --and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, 'I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.'" "[A spending freeze] is a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view --and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, 'I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.'" "Right now I'm just marveling at the ability of both the Obama White House and the leadership of the Democratic Party to have rehabilitated both the direct fortunes and the ideological outlook of the Bush Jr. / Reagan II Republican Party in 1 year." "I would like to know who in our country would like their pay to be based on the actions of a group of children. " "Education policy does not solve economic problems. Economic policy solves economic problems." "Republicans who otherwise have little use for the Obama Administration's policies approve of Duncan's commitment to market-based reforms. John Kline, of Minnesota, the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, told me, 'In many ways, it's a Republican agenda.' " "In order to understand school reform one need remember only two words: Standardistos lie." "Perhaps Justice Kennedy didn't hear that the financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report titled: Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America " "Readers concerned about the paper's journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com. " "Losing the super majority won’t kill the Obama presidency. It’s his sudden inability to tell a good tale that will be his death-knell. If I were him, I’d have hired fewer Ivy League policy wonks and brought in a couple of storytellers. " "The standards movement, sad to say, morphed long ago into a push for standardization. The last thing we need is more of the same." "I think it high time Congress enact similar mandates for other professions that utilize a single measure to determine success. Dentists should be evaluated on how many teeth they save, doctors should be evaluated on how many patients they save, lawyers should be evaluated on how many cases they win, accountants should be evaluated on much money they save clients, and engineers on how many buildings they've designed get built. Congress should also enact national, comprehensive standards for each profession without any input from members of said professions since we know they can't be trusted to make informed decisions or contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way. Anyone who won't come on board should be fired and labeled a dissident. Conformity and control are a must, so teachers should be thankful they are first in the firing line." " Children can be trained to get the right answer, like parrots or seals, but the higher scores are not a measure of a good education or a good teacher." "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. " "No fact, investigation, or conclusion can be theory-free; as William James said, you can‟t pick up rocks in a field without a theory. The issue is whether you are aware of the theory you are using, and whether you are using it critically or uncritically" ",,,Most of the claims Duncan has been making are simply not true. Not a question of interpretation: Not True. As in 'He lies.'" "The Cliffs Notes to 'Race to the Top' are in Atlas Shrugged and the other radical economic theories of Ayn Rand. Arne Duncan isn't simply trying to privatize a little piece of public education, he really believes that public is bad and private is good. And anyone who doesn't look at Duncan's strange career with that viewpoint in mind is having a great deal of trouble figuring out why RttT is such a strange thing. " "...I spend as much time worrying about the crap in kids' imaginative diet as I do fretting over their eating habits. " "Who blames teachers? Obama, Duncan, Bush, Spellings, Rhee, Klein, the Education Equity Project. A chorus of economists: Bad teachers!" "What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while." "'War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength'—more than a quarter-century after those oxymorons were supposed to pervade an Orwellian 1984, today's media make such newspeak even more preposterous: On economic issues, we are often told that right is center, center is left, and left is fringe." "If you torture data long enough, it will tell you anything you want." " Has any student ever actually USED a protractor?" "When teachers are forced, against their better judgment, to focus on teaching test content to the exclusion of almost everything else, I can only conclude that the high-stakes testing movement nourishes totalitarian regimes." "The state in its efforts to control beyond where it can effectively impose itself, destroys everything. " "As soon as the central administration decides to close a school, it is a fait accompli. New York City has a rubber-stamp 'board' of 13, with a majority appointed by the mayor, serving at his pleasure; it approves every executive decision, with only a single dissenting vote (the heroic Patrick Sullivan, a public school parent). Public hearings are pro forma; no decision is ever reversed. Parents and teachers may protest 'til the cows come home, and they can't change a thing. Their school will be closed, the low-performing students will be dispersed, and either new small schools or charter schools will take over their building. Some of the schools that will close are, funnily enough, small schools that were opened by Bloomberg and Klein only a few years ago. Does anyone believe that this sorry game of musical chairs will improve education? Does anyone in Washington or at central headquarters grasp the pointlessness of the disruption needlessly inflicted on students, families, teachers, principals, and communities in the name of 'reform'? Do these people have no shame?" "In the last 30 years the range of independent mobility for North American 12-year-olds has shriveled from one mile to 550 yards." " Issue a gag order silencing all education experts who haven't taught in public school classrooms for the bulk of their careers. Offer these authorities – cabinet officers, commissioners, legislators, education professors, and think-tankers – the chance to reapply for an education preaching license after they've spent the next five years teaching on their own in a real classroom with real kids." "Afghanistan has become Absurdistan. "
" The purpose of Renaissance 2010 [in Chicago] was to increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of accountability - a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago's 2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district's alleged underachieving schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification. Most of the new experimental schools have eliminated the teacher union. The Commercial Club hired corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearney to write Ren2010, which called for the closing of 100 public schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more charters to circumvent state limits) and "performance" schools. Kearney's web site is unapologetic about its business-oriented notion of leadership, one that John Dewey thought should be avoided at all costs. It states, 'Drawing on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used across industries, we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge other large urban education transformations.'
"People who know who they are make trouble for schools." "Why is it that education 'reformers' feel obligated to idealize education elsewhere and demonize it here? " "Give the administration an A for motive, effort and reach. Give them an A+ for wiliness in getting states to change their policies toward those favored by the administration in order to qualify for a competition for $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funds that few will win. With state coffers empty and demands for education funding unabated, states have gambled on a long-odds bribe from Washington. Much of what the administration could hope to get from states on education reform has been gotten in the first year and before a dollar of discretionary funding has been spent." "President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's 'Race' has nearly $5 billion as a lure to persuade states to climb aboard the express train to privatization."
"Lining up for Duncan's corporate-politico RttT funds, like Soviets lining up in a bread line.
"With their advocacy of the LEARN (sic) legislation, the NCTE and IRA executives and lobbyists come perilously close to resembling the elite managers in Vonnegut's The Piano Player, living in their gated committees and keeping all due vigilance lest someone show any hint of disloyalty to the managerial system run by the corporate-politicos. " "It seems to me that in the rush to improve student achievement through accountability systems relying on high-stakes tests, our policy makers and citizens forgot, or cannot understand, or deliberately avoid the fact, that our children live nested lives. Our youth are in classrooms, so when those classrooms do not function as we want them to, we go to work on improving them. Those classrooms are in schools, so when we decide that those schools are not performing appropriately, we go to work on improving them, as well. But both students and schools are situated in neighborhoods filled with families. And in our country the individuals living in those school neighborhoods are not a random cross section of Americans. Our neighborhoods are highly segregated by social class, and thus, also segregated by race and ethnicity. So all educational efforts that focus on classrooms and schools, as does NCLB, could be reversed by family, could be negated by neighborhoods, and might well be subverted or minimized by what happens to children outside of school. Improving classrooms and schools, working on curricula and standards, improving teacher quality and fostering better use of technology are certainly helpful. But sadly, such activities may also be similar to those of the drunk found on his hands and knees under a street lamp. When asked by a passerby what he was doing, the drunk replied that he was looking for his keys. When asked where he lost them, the drunk replied 'over there,' and pointed back up the dark street. When the passerby then asked the drunk why he was looking for the keys where they were located, the drunk answered, 'the light is better here!' " "The health doesn't matter. The housing doesn't matter. The dysfunctional communities don't matter. None of these things matter. The only thing that matters is whether teachers have high expectations of children. I don't think we can make social policy on the basis of a myth. " "We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. . ."" "Race to the Top relies on old GOP agenda of accountability, choice, merit pay. Nothing new. Which Dems if any will fight it?" "Man say that tortoises, when they have eaten part of a viper, eat marojoram as an antidote, and, if the creature fails to find it at once, it dies; that many of the country-folk, wishing to prove whether this is true, whenever they see it acting in this manner, pluck up the marjoram, and when they have done so, the tortoise is presently seen dying."
"Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Toni and Charley,
"Everywhere, nowadays, the sole ruler is money. . . "WHEN. . . do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? . . . That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head. . . . For what is there that you can still expect, if night is not able to veil your nefarious meetings in darkness, and if private houses cannot conceal the voice of your conspiracy within their walls- if everything is seen and displayed? Change your mind: trust me: forget the slaughter and conflagration you are meditating. You are hemmed in on all sides; all your plans are clearer than the day to us. . . . " "The Business Roundtable says, 'Be still and know that we Rule.'" "Life is complicated, so think small." "During his short stop in New Orleans, Obama did manage to promote his and Arne Duncan's corporate-crafted schools privatization agenda by visiting the oxymoronically named "Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School" in the city's predominantly black, flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. "The school," Times reporters Peter Baker and Campbell Robertson noted, was "surrounded by boarded-up houses, empty lots with overgrown grass and dilapidated storefronts with for-rent signs." [9] Baker and Cambell might have noted that corporate education forces had seized on Katrina as a great opportunity, using the crisis to advance their privatization model on the reconstitution of New Orleans' school system." " One blogger wrote: 'More children died violent deaths in Chicago this year than in any other city in America. But all Obama cares about is bringing the Olympics to a city where basic services like water, sanitation and power often don't work. ... If Chicago does win the bid there will be plenty of police and National Guard on hand to protect the international visitors. That's more than they are willing to do for their own residents.'" "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up. " " There's a huge amount of data on the internet about normal developmental milestones -- when most kids start to crawl, say their first word, or learn the alphabet -- but such information often lacks the disclaimer that 50 percent of children will fall either above or below the average range." "I do not expect the students who take my courses to absorb any particular 'body of knowledge' or attain any new 'skills.' On the contrary, for the most part, they will probably develop new kinds of doubts and anxieties, concerns and hesitations. They will not learn anything that has any advantageous practical implications, nor will they learn anything that can be 'applied' to any other situation, except in the most oblique ways. They will not develop any new 'transferable benchmark skills.' They will not achieve any 'goals or outcomes.' Indeed, they will not have "achieved" anything, except, perhaps, to doubt the value of terms like 'achievement' when applied to reading literature. " "I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer. . . . We're very important. We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It's a virtuous cycle. . . .We have a social purpose. [I'm just a banker] doing God's work" "At a time when children are overwhelmed with tests, when NCLB has turned schools into test-prep academies, and when education is facing severe budget cuts, the last thing we need is Race to the Top with more standards and tests. If we are interested in picking up an extra 500 million, all we need to do is drop the state high school exit exam. Exit exams don't work: Studies have shown that that state exit exams do not result in improved academic achievement. In addition, recent research done by scholars at Indiana University has shown that state high school exit exams do not lead to more college completion, higher employment, or higher earnings by graduates. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam." "Do American parents want schools to be run like businesses and their children to be treated as employees? Will they accept the idea of delivering their children into the hands of specialists in financial deal-making and cutthroat competition, who may or may not have completed college themselves and who view students strictly as "human capital" to be schooled in skills narrowly tailored to niches in today’s ever-so-transient corporate job market? " "The Obama White House is morphing into the Bush White House with frightening speed. Its transparency is already fogged up." "Don't forget one of the obvious fallacies of Duncan's goal of turning around the 5,000 worst performing schools in the US in the next five years: As long as schools are ranked based on test scores, there will ALWAYS be 5,000 worst performing schools! It's an inherently impossible goal! " "When charters shut down, typically it's because they've cooked the books or engaged in actual criminal activity, not because they've failed the children." "The National Parent Teacher Association has received a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to begin organizing parental support for setting more uniform academic expectations in four states: Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina." "In section 3, 2A of Senate Bill 2740 it says that the LEARN Act is designed "to ensure that every child can read and write at grade level or above." Grade level means the 50th percentile. The education experts who wrote this either don't know basic educational terminology or need some remedial math. Getting everybody at the 50th percentile is possible only if everybody has exactly the same score. Getting everybody above the 50th percentile is possible only in Lake Wobegon. " "Nor do I admire their belief that schools will get dramatically better if they compete, just like businesses do. Maybe people in business win by competing, maybe competition produces better mousetraps, but that is not the way that schools function. Schools work best when teachers collaborate with one another to identify students who need extra attention or a different program or to mentor weak teachers; schools work best when they collaborate around common goals. Schools are not trying to build a better mousetrap. They are trying to educate our citizenry. Schools are not businesses, and we will continue to flounder so long as we put politicians and business leaders in the driver's seat on education policy." "This machine kills fascists. " "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Studies have shown that consuming foods grown using compost made from the pages of any book written by conservative politicians and/or Fox News pundits may result in bloating, brain damage, grammar mutilation and the mad desire to taxidermy your cat. Read more." "" "Competition brings out the best performance. That's true in athletics and in business, and it's true in education." "Stop paying teachers and principals a salary. Instead pay teachers and principals on a per standardized test point basis each day. At the end of each school day, students should be tested using a standardized test, what a teacher and principal is paid is calculated at the end of the day based on the growth of the student, i.e., how much has the student improved over the previous day. This is true accountability and will for sure keep teachers and principals on their toes! " "Whining is not the same thing as doing something. Whining is whining. Action is something else." "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvn_Ied9t4M "
"UC Santa Cruz is looking for a Grateful Dead Archivist. They're looking for someone who loves the Grateful Dead, and yet somehow has exceptional organizational skills. So basically what they’re saying… is that they need a miracle.
"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. " "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. " "People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different." "America cannot test and punish its way to better schools, no matter how good its standardized tests might become. " "Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer. " "Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize? Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He's holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize." "How rotten the Democrats are. This other big business party that the Union officials hitch our wagon to needs to be seen for what it is by working people. We can and must build an alterative independent worker's political party rooted in the communities in which we live and work. " "[A] schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." "Look at a picture of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Look at all the ribbons on their chests, ribbons for killing people. If Data Warehousing takes over your school, demand ribbons to spread across your chest, ribbons for killing children." "Arizona now has corporate prisons to house poor adult lawbreakers. Will nationalized corporate chain gang schools be the cheap solution to urban and rural poverty among those too young for prison? " "Only if a person has emerged from mother's lap and father's commands, only if he has emerged as a fully developed individual and thus has acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say "no" to power, to disobey. A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. . . . The organization man has lost the capacity to disobey, he is not even aware of the fact that he obeys. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. "
"Whom are we talking about when we talk about an eighth grader? The girl who spells her name "Sherri" and hides a copy of True Confessions in her binder? Or the "Sherry" who sucks her thumb and wants to listen to a tape of "Rumpelstiltskin?" Sherri/Sherry can't be pinned down to read the same book on different days of the week, let alone the same book as all of her classmates.
"I've nevermet a required book list I liked. Such lists are always prescriptive and retrospective. They keep us looking over our shoulders, maintaining a static rather than a dynamic notion of culture. And the worse part is that once you let a core list into your life, it's very hard to dislodge it. Asking a faculty to change a recommended book list and getting a new list approved by administrators and the board of education is like asking someone to move a graveyard. . . The same people who swap copies of Stephen King in the faculty room put Dickens on the core lists."
"'Can I see the lesson plans for a unit?'
"Bill- if you want to improve education, RECALL every X-box your company ever made and destroy them. Convince Sony, Apple and every other videogame producer to do the same. Next, make computers and printers FREE to schools. School budgets have increased dramatically trying to keep up with technology. Finally, give every school library lots of money to BUY books and pay for librarians. You were smart enough to create game systems, but too many parents were stupid enough to buy them!" "Obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). " "From Maryland to Michigan to Montana, reading is reading and math is math. . . .We want 100 percent of our kids to pass this test."
"Math Skills Show Little Growth
"You were right. You were always right. It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide…..I’ve been living here, quietly, beside you, for years, just waiting for Tojo to flash me the high sign. So go ahead and lock me up. Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. . . . Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. Too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud. Put it down in writing. . . . " "The closer you are to ground level in U.S. schools, the more you become aware of the deprofessionalizing power of complex educational systems and programs. Often, especially in more-affluent districts, these systems pile up on one another, creating an indigestible, incompatible mess: Christmas-tree schools, with lots of ornaments. Programs for the responsive classroom, comprehension strategies, guided reading, direct instruction, leveled book, differentiated instruction, focused correction, and writing workshop jostle for teachers' attention, all claiming to be aligned with state systems of evaluation (and all, of course, 'research-based')." "Turnaround is the deadliest reform of all.... " "I love Arne. He must have the most compartmentalized brain in the country. 'We have too many bad tests,' he says. He also says we need data bases to link student performance to teacher performance. And what will be in those data bases? Scores from those bad tests." "One of the books I read was Cities of Lonesome Fear: God Among the Gangs by Gordon McLean. It reminded me not to give up on the students. Even if they give up on themselves, we cannot give up on them. " "Your 401(k)'s are not dying because not enough kids took calculus. " "Do you want to improve the lives of poor and minority students? Then improve the lives of poor and minority students: provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate housing, medical, dental and mental health care and, yes, adequately funded schools with committed (sorry, TFA) and qualified teachers. Amen." "Schools never 'fail' where the SUVs roam. But where hubcab theft is the only growth industry, schools can't get anything right. Right?" "The next time you see a full-face picture of Arne Duncan, cover everything but the eyes and judge what he's about." "I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk. "
"Myth #5: 'Subjective assessments of performance can't work.'
"It was more than two years ago when headlines around the city screamed that the Aspira Haugen Middle School fired a racist art teacher who said Mexicans are only good for cleaning floors. Substance finally caught up with the former teacher and discovered that the whole story was a cruel fabrication, possibly prompted by the fact that the teacher had begun demanding union rights in a school that was actively anti-union: the Aspira Charter schools.
"The character most resembling Chicago Schools CEO Ron Huberman in "The Wire" is the corrupt Deputy Chief of Police, Chief of Operations, Bill Rawls. The role of the "data driven" tyrant is played with zest all the way through "The Wire." But "The Wire" and Deputy for Operations Bill Rawls are fiction. Ron Huberman's performance on the opening day of school is fact in Chicago as the 2009-2010 school year dawns. . . . "A preliminary review of the new executives of the Chicago Public Schools being appointed at the Chicago Board of Education's August 26, 2009, meeting shows that at least one of them has admitted to criminal fraud (in two other states) and others are being brought into CPS with no experience, training, or certification to lead public school systems in Illinois. . . ."
"These delegates are sharply opposed to the key things going on in schools: Regimented curricula (national standards). High stakes exams. Militarization. To some extent, privatization and charters. A culture of fear.
"In the Chicago Public Schools, remediation means that a principal, for various reasons (teacher is old, costs too much, uses 'old' methods, is too outspoken, or a supporter needs a job), has decided to encourage a staff member to quit or retire. . . .
"After 15 years of a corporate model of school governance in Chicago, Chicago's leaders were confident in 2009 that they could get away with Ron Huberman and his data driven nonsense without paying any serious political price. How many Chicago teachers and principals bend to the sheer stupidity and irrelevance of the new regime remains to be seen. During the past year there has been more resistance in Chicago to the Daley regime than at any time since 1995, when the Illinois General Assembly made Richard M. Daley dictator of Chicago's public schools." "When you see a car hurtling toward your child, you push him out of the way before you engage in conversation about Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Until we stop the abusive standardized testing i elementary schools, I refuse to talk about a better kind of test. We must stop harming the children presently in our care. Right now. Today."
"General, your tank is a powerful vehicle. "The Duct Tape Theory of Standardized Testing. If Duct Fails, it's because you haven't used enough. If standardized tests fail to close the Achievement Gap, it's because you haven't given enough of them." "Even a fool, when he is holding standardized test scores, is counted wise by the U. S. Secretary of Education." "Well, Cindy, if we had a Broad Prize for charter schools, KIPP would certainly be the winner." "There may come a time, a renewal of the spirit of society, a time such as that when the Preamble to the Constitution of the State of Illinois was drafted and ratified by the citizens, when policymakers' attention will turn again toward the external factors that educators know affect student learning. Until then, we can race to the top all we want and when we get there we will be joined by the young people who were smart enough to choose educated, affluent parents."
". . . In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the believability of the Big Lie as compared to the small lie: 'In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.'
"They Say Cutback "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination. " "Scientific achievement is not standardized. The natural world is diverse, and productive human inquiry takes many forms. . . ." "Today may actually be worse for poor children in the US than at any time in the last half century. This is because the lower classes are being kept from the liberal arts and humanities curricula by design. Using the argument that we must get their test scores up, we in the US are designing curriculum for poor children, often poor children of color but certainly, numerically, for poor white children, that will keep them ignorant and provide them with vocational training, at best. Their chances of entrance to college and middle class lives are being diminished, and this is all being done under the banner of "closing the gap," a laudable goal, but one that has produced educational policies with severe and negative side effects." "Hippocrates once said that the chief function of medicine is to entertain patients until they heal themselves." "Every teacher in America should be working to support the Baca Bill, the Save our Schools (S.O.S.) Act. http://www.susanohanian.org/show_yahoo.html?id=466" "Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama continues to tell American that to get higher wages they need to go to college and improve their skills, as though there weren't a surplus of underemployed college grads already." "The Obush administration. . . . The Obush administration is not just threatening public education, it is more like a threat to the entire concept of democracy." "In order to go on with our lives, we are always making the ominous into the merely strange." "[Arne Duncan] has asked all of his senior staff members to read some of the formal public comments submitted about the proposed Race to the Top Fund regulations so they can get a feel for how the education community has reacted. [emphasis added]" "Enough with 'academic rigor.' No more projects on the Chesapeake Bay (or whatever body of water you happen to live near.) Stop testing them into submission." " Any time a kindergarten class needs an online system to track assignments, that's a sign that school has gone too far." "You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there's something almost chess-like in the way the other side has narrowed the field, neutralized lines of attack, co-opted the terms of battle. It's all about them now; every move we make plays into their hands, confirms their values." "Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism." "Reformers need to incorporate rather than disregard the rich wisdom of the classroom, for the history of policy failure is littered with cases where local knowledge and circumstance were ignored." "[T]here is nothing in the standard talk about schooling--and this has been true for decades--that leads us to consider how school is perceived by those who attend it." "Education is learning how to spin your own web, not how to climb someone else's ladder."
"The final test:Kaplan passes
"What if we asked where it was written that all 16 years olds are ready sit their exams on exactly the same day?"
"What if the qualifications with which children leave school don't actually count for very much beyond the world of education?
"What if many people were to admit that if they had spent more time as a child learning to play the piano and less time learning algebra they would probably be spending more time as an adult playing the piano than they do using algebra?" "What if math is not as important as, say, art or music?" "[T]he impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country. " "Why don't they learn what we teach them? The answer I have come to boils down to this: Because we teach them – that is, try to control the contents of their minds. . . .I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything, that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts … we cannot give them our mental structures; they must build their own." "I will show you Obama's birth certificate if you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma." "In Arne Duncan's world, if standardized test scores aren't the answer, you've asked the wrong question." "I dream of schools where days are not scripted by those who could not find the Post Office in your town." "Remember, before the Race to the Top planned, funded, and decreed by the Obama/Duncan administration, the 3rd grade teacher heard why Tyrannosaurus X crossed the road, read Charlotte’s Web aloud, and comforted children who vomit. After the Obama/Duncan grand race, Tyrannosaurus X and Charlotte will be gone and the teacher will be vomiting along with the children." "Send in the Clowns: 3 Stooges Hit Road for Corporate School Reform. http://tinyurl.com/naskao " "Are education policymakers deeply religious? Why are they always in search of miracles?" "What is Green Dot's record? Why are 'reformers' rushing to open Green Dot schools with no proof of anything?" "[Race to the Top] pits one state against others to see which gets most and sacrifices quality education, local autonomy, and the interests of parents and youths doing it." "Obama plans to reinvent a failed policy, give it a new name, and claim it will fix NCLB's shortcomings." "Obama has always been more comfortable with the center-right forces within the Democratic party--Senator Max Baucus and the Blue Dogs--and the Clintonistas of DLC lineage who now fill his administration. His real political challenge was to string along the liberals with reassuring talk until they were stuck with lousy choices-- either go along with this popular president's pale version of reform or take him on and risk ruining his presidency. This sounds a lot like the choices Democrats faced during the Clinton years. Candidate Obama said it was "time to turn the page." We are still waiting to see what he meant. "
"How long will it take for people to realize that the education "reform"
proposed by Obama-Duncan is no different from the Weapons of Mass
Destruction from Bush (I say this as a depressed person who canvassed for
Obama, campaigned for him, donated for him, and voted for him (with my
entire family) in Virginian before moving to the blue-secure state of
Washington.
"That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn't surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism's success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for 'success,' the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. . . . By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we're well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe." "[S]hould there be some sort of T-shirt for the Arne, Newt, and Al Tour? "
"Why Does Barack Obama Follow The George W Bush Playbook? "Now that Duncan/Gates/Broad have coopted NCTE/IRA and NEA/AFT, who is left to accuse them? Teacher silence is killing us and the kids." "First Arne Duncan says the tests we have stink, then he says evaluate teachers and schools based on stinking tests." "When we stop playing, we start dying." "[T]he opposite of play is not work--the opposite of play is depression. Our inherent need for variety and challenge can be buried by an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Over the long haul, when these spice-of-life elements are missing, what is left is a dulled soul." "A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem." "Today I will strive to be omnipotent. I will start by condemning Standardistos, Common Core advocates, Racers to the Top, and their water carriers to an eternal SAT exam."
"Handing out standards in the name of preparing everyone to meet the high skills
that will be demanded for employment in the twenty-first century is as cynical
as handing out menus to homeless people in the name of eradicating hunger. "The earlier [that schools try] to inculcate…academic skills, the deeper the damage & the more permanent the achievement gap." " "Dear Ms. Class: What's the latest word on sugar and hyperactivity? --Independence, MO Dear Independence, Research is not complete on the effects of sugar on teachers' hyperactivity. One teach of Ms. Class's acquaintance, not content with Oreos and Twinkies, eats dry brownie mix right out of the box. Ms. Class admits she admires the efficiency: No dishes to wash. This teacher has had a brownie-mix lunch for fifteen years and has not been convicted of a felony." "A hyperactive parent inquires how his child is doing more than twice a year." "The first rule of Standards is that if you don't see what the problem is, you are the problem. " "Boredom was born on a day of uniformity." "They may prefer stories to theories, anecdotes to concepts, images to ideas--that doesn't stop them from philosophizing." "With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it was ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: 'Did you like this text/this book?' And yet that is the only question that could give meaning to the narrative points of view or the construction of the story. . . Let me explain: at my age, all you need is to talk to us about something with some passion, pluck the right strings (love, rebellion, thirst for novelty, etc) and you have every chance of succeeding." "Believing that public school should focus on providing workers for industrial corporations is very much to believe that children are nothing more than commodities to be developed for harvesting. It views children much as chicken eggs, to be taken from parents and standardized for commercial consumption. A broader understanding of education's purpose exists - nurturing children so that they will feel at home in the world. " " Basing bonus or merit pay on test scores is like giving auto workers a bonus based on people’s driving skills." "What else was being a teacher but trying to respond as humanly as possible to problems that would not wait for an expert." " If Arne Duncan knows exactly how to reform American education, why didn’t he reform Chicago’s schools? A report came out a couple of weeks ago from the Civic Committee of Chicago (”Still Left Behind”) saying that Chicago’s much-touted score gains in the past several years were phony, that they were generated after the state lowered the passing mark on the state tests, that the purported gains did not show up on the federal tests, and that Chicago’s high schools are still failing. On the respected federal test (NAEP), Chicago continues to be one of the lowest performing cities in the nation. I want to know why Washington is pushing “reform” ideas that have so little evidence behind them, ideas that might do serious damage to public education in America?"
"Apostrophe Advice, Part 1 "Above all, we should bear in mind that the best ways to improve our schools are those that enhance the dignity of parents and the autonomy and professional status of educators. . . . Our parents, and our teachers, indeed our whole nation, would have fewer problems if the goals we set for the nation included creating jobs with decent wages, restoring fair tax rates on corporations and wealthy individuals, providing universal coverage for high-quality health and day care, providing euitable funding for schools, and developing organizations to build more caring relationships among all members of our communities. . . . School improvement begins with concerns about the dignity and respect accorded to the adults in the community who care for our young. " "[T]he best ways to improve education are not those that are based on the factory model but rather are those that presume trust, grant autonomy, and seek ways to enlarge the lives of students and teachers. Perhaps the surest way to RUIN American education would be to expand the use of carrots and sticks with students and teachers." "[Chicago] teachers citing fact after fact to show what a lying, cheating, stealing corporate stooge Arne Duncan is." "A major problem of teachers' problem is that they haven't read Marx. They haven't read Marx for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of how to teach phonemic awareness or apostrophes. I feel I can say this because I'm a teacher and, consumed by what to do on Monday, I haven't read Marx." "There is a testing fixation controlling many, many authorities on this planet. The 3Es [Execrable, Emetic and E xcretal] activities in schools are replacing the 3Ls [Learning, Love and Laughter] and the 3Rs [Reading, Riting,Rithmetic]." "The president and his party have received more money from private insurers and the for-profit health care industry than even Republicans, with the president alone taking $19 million in the 2008 election cycle alone, more than all his Republican, Democratic and independent rivals combined." "Twenty-four cooks assigned to the same mayonnaise recipe--the same bowls, same spoons, same eggs. same mustard, same oil, same whisks, same peppermills, same measuring cups, same room, same time of day, same marching orders--will create twenty-four different mayonnaises. " "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit." "[W]e need two things we don't have yet. We need a common set of high standards so all teachers know exactly what their students need to learn. And we need to evaluate teachers based on how well their students are learning it. . . .We can't identify good teachers without measuring student performance." "Everyone in this room knows that high school is not high enough. We have to create a society that expects all students to go on to college and complete a degree—whether it's a certificate, associate's degree, or bachelor's degree." "After working my butt off to get this man elected, I am more than disappointed. These policies are truly bad for public education. " "Standards plastered on her door. Standards, benchmarks, tests and data Plastered on the classroom door. Only these, and nothing more. " "Just because the bar in the high jump is set at six feet, it doesn't mean EVERYONE can jump six feet (or should even try)." "The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they’re learning it. " "Arne Duncan and his accomplices aren't advocating the close examination of poverty data: health, tooth decay, presence of iron, family income. No, they declare test data is king. All you have to do is look at the really ineffective, misleading, inappropriate, and just plain stupid test questions on which they are basing all this data collection to know the data emperor has no clothes. Depending on McGraw-Hill, Pearson, et al student standardized test results is the most expensive, least effective, and most damaging way to evaluate teacher performance. Period." "Either we fight back as one class or its death by a thousand cuts. "
"Never pretend "We know charter schools provide real public school choice. When I became President, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. Today, thanks to you, there are 1,700. I ask you now to help us meet our goal of 3,000 charter schools by next year. (Applause.) " "When I became president, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. With our support on a bipartisan basis, today there are 1,100. My budget assures that early in the next century, there will be 3,000." "[T]here are two kinds of people who take the SATs: those who believe that they mean something and those who believe that they don't. The young aptocrats who think that the SATs measure their worth are perhaps more likely to be flummoxed when the real learning required by college is harder than choosing the right answer on a test or satisfying a teacher. Those students who have understood all along that tests are just tests and that teachers are just people may in the end be more well suited to the business of real learning. So perhaps we should be testing for attitude rather than aptitude. " "Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail." "Take a look at Duncan's speeches. Over the past six months, he's made nine major policy addresses that have been posted on his Department's web site. And in those speeches, he's mentioned "history," "literature," and "geography" exactly zero times. Meanwhile, there were seven instances of "accountability," and "charter schools" left his lips an astounding twenty-nine times." "'Still Life' translates into French as 'nature morte.' 'NCLB' translates as 'les enfants morts.'" "It is only a slight exaggeration to describe the test theory that dominates educational measurement today as the application of 20th century statistics to 19th century psychology." "For many critics, teachers have become the villains in the wealthy elite's panic over educational accomplishment and foreign competition. But teachers don't cause financial meltdowns, home foreclosures, climate change, or hurricanes. And they don't invade countries or outsource jobs. Teachers don't cause mind-numbing conditions of poverty that limit children's ability to learn. However, teachers are the ones asked to cope with the poisonous effects of poverty. Why? Because most of society doesn't give a damn." "Although the corporate-political alliance won't believe this, teaching is much more like a Chinese lyric painting than a bus schedule. You can't chart a kid's learning like the daily temperature. No matter how many tests you inflict on him. "
"What few people outside of the teaching profession realize is that a teacher’s
hours are very different from, say, an architect’s. Simply stated, there is
zero downtime. When that classroom door opens, in flood dozens of teenagers
with dozens of problems that need solutions. It is estimated that an average
high-school teacher makes more than 1,500 decisions each day. Some compare
their work to managing triage in a hospital, absent a support team.
"Only when I entered Princeton did I start to have doubts about the system that got me there. Some took the form of doubts about myself. My impressive performance on the SATs (whose supposed biases I was blind to, perhaps because I was a middle-class Caucasian and they operated in my favor) didn’t seem to count for much now that I found myself having to absorb volumes upon volumes of information rather than get the right answers on multiple-choice tests. Yes, I had a large vocabulary, and yes, I knew how to deploy it to good effect in classroom discussions and during professors’ office hours, but suddenly my prowess felt slightly fraudulent. Called upon to read whole books, many of them old, obscure and difficult, I discovered that I lacked stamina and insight. The little word puzzles I cut my teeth on were irrelevant to the daunting task of digesting Chaucer and Milton. My solution? I didn’t have one. Like countless college students before and since, I relied for my scholastic survival on a combination of verbal bluster, teacher-pleasing good manners and handy study aids." "Prefer to participate in a happy education revolution rather than a heated debate about education reform?" "The New Haven case is a mess caused by infatuation with the law, mistaking verbal dexterity for practical skill, and an obsession with examinations. It has protected neither people's safety nor their civil liberties. " "Barack Obama didn't kill liberalism; he's just doing a nice job of burying it. The end of liberalism as a meaningful ideology came with the nomination of Bill Clinton. The argument was - although hardly phrased so accurately - that it was far better for liberals to dump their policies and become the indentured servants of an elected Democrat than to continue to press for their beliefs and miss out on all the power and the parties. " "I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been that we now have, in this administration, a leader in Secretary Duncan." "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." "Arne was in town at the Hyatt Regency as a guest of an educational policy group. Inside the hotel they probably gave him an award for his wonderful achievements in education, while outside, C.O.R.E., Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. . . , was demonstrating against his wonderfulness. The Chicago teachers in the C.O.R.E. picket line were protesting the process by which a worm public school becomes a butterfly charter institution. Apparently the larvae stage is called: TURNAROUND."
"
I get weary of this zero tolerance bullshit. It's annoying. To begin with, it's a fascist concept; it's what Hitler and Stalin practiced. It allows for no exceptions or compassion of any kind. All is black and white--no gradations. But even more important, it doesn't solve anything. The use of such a slogan simply allows whichever company, school or municipality is using it to claim they're doing something about a problem when, in fact, nothing is being done at all ant the problem is being ignored. It's a cosmetic non-solution designed to impress simpletons.
"Without question, Bill Clinton was the single most important force in establishing the framework of standards, accountability, and testing that were put into law under NCLB."
"An unprecedented collaborative effort led by the Gates Foundation, ACHIEVE, and the NGA (National Governor’s Association) is underway now to establish a single set of national standards and to develop aligned assessments.i The project is on an ambitious timeline, with a full set of academic standards to be developed by the end of the year.
"The Race to the Top fund is the icing on the cake of more than $100 billion in federal education funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in February. This fund, which represents 5% of the recent historic investment in America’s schools, allows Secretary Duncan to establish clear reform priorities for states and to back those priorities up by funding only those states which are willing to break through the chains of a status quo which historically has failed too many students."
"Teachers must begin to speak out against dangerous and irresponsbile rhetoric like 'The Race to the Top.' It is disgraceful, immoral and plain wrong to frame education reform in this language. It is especially egregious in the midst of an economic depression.
"
'Hungry children are distracted children. We want to make sure nothing gets in the way of our children performing well academically, including hunger. "They fuck you up, the Standardistos." "Bill Gates has paid tens of millions of dollars to have his childhood bullies tracked down and killed."
"Grade 4
"A Standardisto has Van Gogh's ear for classroom nuance." "There are two Standardistos drowning and you can only save one. What do you do? Take a nap or go shopping?" "I performed badly in the Civil Service examinations because evidently I knew more about economics than my examiners." "Gardening books will tell you that some of these things in my garden can't be done, but I had never read them when I got started. Not knowing ahead of time that something is supposed to be impossible often makes it possible to achieve. I didn't have any limitations because I really didn't know anything about horticulture. I just figured I could do whatever I wanted with any plant I had." "National Standards are something you can't use at a price you can't afford." "Standardistos like answering questions nobody asked them." "One has to suppose that Standardistos were children once." "Many of my peers in China became teachers. It was partly because we had been educational volunteers, but it also had to do with the skills we developed--the flexibility, the sense of humor, the willingness to handle anything an eighth grader could throw at us." "Your rules are not unreasonable, but neither are they poetry or the will of God. They are just rules you made up. Surely it is good if a child respects and obeys the rules her parents make up. But it is also a rule that when a child becomes a teenager she has sudden, inexplicable needs, and it is assured that she will start trying to meet those needs in whatever improvised fashion she can come up with. This is normal."
"How do you know when Arne Duncan is lying?
"I attended a luncheon at the private Club Colette in Palm Beach a few days ago for feral cats. There are about 400 of these wild animals on the island and they are treated better than the 4,000 homeless across the bridge. The cats get fed regularly and are watched over by a number of dedicated society ladies. It costs several hundred thousand dollars a year to treat these cats in the fashion in which they are accustomed, whereas last year The Lord's Place [dedicated to helping homeless people in Palm Beach County] raised only $40,000 in Palm Beach.
"For some reason, first the Bush people and now the Obama people believe they know exactly how to fix American education. (Chicago, their model, is one of the lowest-performing cities in the nation on national tests, and Texas was never a national model for academic excellence.) Their answer starts with testing and ends with data and more testing. If children were widgets, they might be right; but children are not widgets, they are individuals. If reading and math were all that mattered in school, they might be right, but basic skills are not the be-all and end-all of being educated. " "I believe the impetus behind 'standardization' of students is the same as the "pay students for test scores" movement. Both seek to control the depth of learning that occurs as well as train children from a young age to get ready to be part of the labor force. "
"As long as there are content-based standards,
there will be machine-scoreable standardized tests.
"No, Mr. Duncan, the 'best and the brightest' are not the people we need in our schools: We need the savvy, rock steady, dependable, loving, forgiving people who have an enormous capacity for wait time and the psychological equilibrium to be able to enter the classroom every day not holding a grudge for what happened the day before. " "If we kill you, you are a terrorist. " "But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score" "I am sorely disappointed in Arne Duncan. I don't see any change from the mean, punitive version of accountability that the Bush administration foisted on the nation's schools. "
"Standards are currently rhetoric for holding children accountable for things they have no control over and things the adults in our state and national capitols do a poor job of demonstrating. We need new rhetoric-- some that matters and makes a difference to the quality of education we offer all children. The first standards we should set are standards of communication, standards of facilities and standards of human and monetary resources. And that doesn't mean the same amount or form for everyone. These things should vary with need.
"Frank Sullivan says that “half of our stock of maxims is designed to quell children….children are, of course, sitting ducks for proverbs." "Every day I get up and look out the window, and something occurs to me, something always occurs to me. And if it doesn't, I just lower my standards." "If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds -- a struggle against accepting the world as it's being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats, and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success."
"Dear Mr. Obama,
" The three institutions that most endanger the preservation of any culture are Wal-Mart, TV and law school. Each imposes its own style, values and habits on those it influences making it hard, as Harvard Law School grad Barack Obama has already proved, to retain one's roots. " "A high school diploma itself seems to help keep black men out of trouble. The likelihood of incarceration drops fourfold among black high school graduates compared to those who make it only to tenth or eleventh grade." "When you're a teacher, you have to own every word you say." "SWAMPOODLE REPORT The 2008 election was a hat trick of infidelity. One candidate's husband had cheated on her. Another candidate was found to be cheating on his wife. And the winner began cheating on his strongest supporters as soon as he was in office. " "When someone suggests that all children will be able to perform at __(>0) level, that all children will succeed, that all students will be proficient, or that no child will be left behind, he or she is contributing to unhelpful silly talk about schools and schooling. . . . NCLB is a prime example of absurd education policy that is divorced from data and reality checks about the meaning of data." "On the Medical Model of schooling. Being a student is not an illness." "We can hope that one day the media that now format as news items the publicity releases issued by the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc., will figure out that Appellate Justice Lerner is just stating baldly the marketplace truth that few dare speak aloud: 'An eighth- or ninth-grade education is adequate to provide the skills required to enable a person to secure low-level employment.' Maybe the media will one day acknowledge that our nation runs on low-paid employment. Maybe one day newspapers will publish a labor section next to the business section; maybe some reporter will point out that the global economy doesn't have jobs for hundreds of thousands of high-tech workers adept at algebra and calculus; maybe the reporter will even notice that this job scarcity and the fact that the Business Roundtable and their Standardisto cohorts have pressured schools into making higher math a prerequisite for a high school diploma are related. The global economy -- and the local one too -- needs plenty of service workers. The crime is not that people work at these jobs. The crime is that they are not paid a living wage to do so." "What is needed for education is a model of professional action that acknowledges the noncausal nature of educational interaction and the fact that the means and ends of education are internally rather than externally related. What is needed, in other words, is an acknowledgment of the fact that education is a moral practice, rather than a technical or technological one — a distinction that dates back to Aristotle’s distinction between phronesis (practical wisdom) and techne (instrumental knowledge). The most important question for educational professionals is therefore not about the effectiveness of their actions but about the potential educational value of what they do, that is, about the educational desirability of the opportunities for learning that follow from their actions (and what should be prevented at all costs is the situation in which there is a performative contradiction between what they preach and what they practice). This is why the 'what works' agenda of evidence-based practice is at least insufficient and probably misplaced in the case of education, because judgment in education is not simply about what is possible (a factual judgment) but about what is educationally desirable (a value judgment)." "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. " "Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who life, or who are privileged to think that they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work. " "Take away the right to say 'f---' and you take away the right to say 'f--- the government.'" "They were that new kind of Democrat who didn’t seem to know any working people. They were limited to their own breed" "I’m very sympathetic to the argument that we need to convey and find ways to enforce high expectations for students. But I’m uncomfortable with this form of doing it, because it targets very strong penalties on the most at-risk students. The pejorative consequences appear to be concentrated in populations and communities that lack the capacity to meet these standards. . . .The cynic in me worries that we're just going to continue to see these [exit exam] policies proliferate, because it seems like an obvious way to convey the expectations that we should have for students and the negative effects appear to be hidden from public discussion." "WARNING: Objects In the NCLB Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" "Researchers have yet to discover any clear evidence that High School Exit Exams benefit anyone except the companies that make and sell them." "Despite the best hopes of proponents, test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal that urban school districts run by mayors do no better in reading or math than districts run by traditional boards. School governance is not the same as school reform. Structure is not a remedy for failure." "Without the support of The Broad Foundation, we would not be where we are today. The foundation’s belief, not only in our particular model, but also in the importance of talent to the ultimate success of the education reform effort, has been catalytic. Time and again, we have turned to the foundation for its judgment, and we’ve come to expect that it will hold us to high standards." "We cannnot look our students in the eye and tell them that they should learn to read and write according to our directions because it will necessarily pay off for them in the future." "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." "'We're all in this together,' President Obama, March 24 press conference. No we're not, that's the point of this book. . . . We the ROBBED class are in this together. THEY the ROBBER Class are in it for themselves." "I think Joel Klein and Mike Bennet and Arne Duncan are some of the best superintendents around, and they were never teachers. "
"
Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci.
"For someone who taught constitutional law, Obama is showing striking contempt for some of the founding document's key provisions such as the division of powers between the legislative and executive branch and that between federal and state government. His hectoring of public school teachers - some of the hardest working and least well paid professionals in America - is not only disrespectful, it ignores the fact that how a state runs its school system is, constitutionally, not subject to the sort of federal interference that Obama and his predecessors have engaged in, using funds as the whip to drive their preferred policies. Further, if we applied federal standards to heads of school systems, Obama's own education secretary would be in trouble as he didn't do all that well in Chicago. " "How did that performance pay thing work out for the American financial system?"
"Meanwhile, NEA mis-leaders joined AFT, the Business Roundtable, and other employer groups to promote national teaching standards,
"I believe that the consequence of scripted curriculum, teacher accountability, continuous monitoring of student performance, high stakes testing, and punishment for not reaching external standards is that schools become educational panopticons, that is, total control and surveillance communities dedicated to undermining the imagination, creativity, intelligence, and autonomy of students and teachers. " "No is simply no." "Is it really so startling that those who call themselves progressive are generally as incapable of critical thought as those who label themselves conservative? " "Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum. Facts do not solve problems. . . . The gadgeteers and the data collectors have threatened to become the supreme chieftains of the scholarly world. Robert Hutchins )" "Obama has named a secretary of education who has been deeply involved in the corporate takeover of public school policy, which has left schools in poorer areas the target of urban developers, encouraged mindless emphasis on test taking designed to create obedient drones rather than critical thinkers, and which has even, in Secretary Duncan's case, resulted in several military academies antithetical to decent public education in a democracy." "Ask children. Hear them. Teach children to ask the questions they want answers to. Believe that what a seven-year-old has to say is important. Because it is. Just ask. " "If Obama really wants to associate himself with Lincoln, there is a far better place to start than apple cinnamon sponges, moldy old Bibles, and sucking up to conservative columnists: don't tell lies." "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." "The Norton Anthology of English Literature is seventeen hundred pages long. It's a fat and heavy book. It will stop a bullet, but it won't cover your nakedness."
"The Army Experience Center, located in the Franklin Mills Mall just north of Philadelphia, bills itself as a 'state-of-the-art educational facility that uses interactive simulations and online learning programs to educate visitors about the many careers, training and educational opportunities available in the Army.' . . . .
"Obama's call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse." ""What do you do?" "What we can.""
"Algebra When Ready
"We want beans, not goals." "You begin to die the moment you are born, and you really, really begin to die the day your child goes to school alone. " "Play is integral to the academic environment. It ensures that the school setting attends to the social and emotional development of children as well as their cognitive development. It has been shown to help children adjust to the school setting and even to enhance children’s learning readiness, learning behaviors, and problem-solving skills.22–32 Social-emotional learning is best integrated with academic learning; it is concerning if some of the forces that enhance children’s ability to learn are elevated at the expense of others. Play and unscheduled time that allow for peer interactions are important components of social-emotional learning." "[T]his is the hard truth – the blood-and-iron truth – that our age has taught us so well: war is always a win-win proposition for the corporate-militarist state that has devoured the American Republic. Even if the particular conflict itself ends badly or inconclusively, it always engenders vast profits and increased power and privilege for the corporate- militarist elite -- and the temporary managers they graciously allow the American people to "choose" from a rigorously sifted, highly circumscribed menu of "viable" candidates. So it doesn't matter if this war or that war is "ill-conceived" or "badly managed" or a "serious mistake" or "the wrong war at the wrong time," or if its public justifications are based on lies or ignorance or arrogance, or if it bankrupts the treasury, beggars the citizenry, and destabilizes the world. The small, golden, coddled circle still reaps dividends of profit and dominance." "Never! Never! Never! Never! Never!" "As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles. You can’t say, 'My students didn't get any breakfast today,' or No one put them to bed last night,' or 'Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.'" "What the education world needs is a few strong administrators and teachers and parents to join together, proclaiming, 'Enough is enough'-- people who know how to say, 'We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to do this any more.'" "School Takes 13 Years Because That’s How Long It Takes to Break a Child’s Spirit." "Do not depend on the hope of results. . . . concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself." "Teachers now are expected to staff the permanent emergency rooms of our country’s dysfunctional social order. They are expected to compensate for what families, communities, and culture fail to do. Like our soldiers in Iraq, they are sent into urban combat zones, on impossible missions under inhospitable conditions, and then abandoned by politicians and policy makers who have already cut and run, leaving teachers on their own. " "Just abut everywhere we turn the next generation is being indoctrinated to think of themselves narrowly as producers, employees, spectators, and consumers—everything but citizens. I have no solutions to the particular challenges facing urban schools—achievement scores, learning disabilities, teacher shortages—but I know we must change the curriculum in order to change the metaphor of our children from orphans of democracy to its rightful sons and daughters. Who will teach them that they, too, can mount a Boston Tea Party?" "You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." "The conservative movement stands intellectually and morally bankrupt while Democrats talk about a 'new direction' without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass." "How much disrespect will you tolerate?" "The government's Web site www.ed.gov/nclb claims the act holds schools accountable. All I see is the pressure that has fallen on children and their parents. Without the recognition that there are no one-size-fits-all teaching methods and the funding for a true education fix, NCLB is detrimental to my family. It undermines childhood pleasures and threatens to destroy my son's self-esteem. I want it to go away. "
"She may be dead.
"If somebody will fund it, 83,473 researchers will submit grant proposals to do it. And 82,029 will be from Texas and Oregon." "You don't have to change the world. Just keep the world from changing you." "Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg in a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you are destroying the peg." "A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves." "Closing the school would be better than breaking their hearts. "
"Technology to wipe out truth is now available.
not everybody can afford it but it's available.
when the cost comes down look out!
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? " "Although the United States is the largest imperial power in history, this fact rarely is mentioned. Nor do Americans refer to themselves as capitalists. As with typical neoliberal discourses, when capitalism is addressed, it is framed in democratic or Enlightenment terms as individual rights, freedom, and progress rather than as imperialism. This viewpoint ignores issues of power and does not name who is and who is not advantaged. Aijaz Ahmad claims that economic realities surround and saturate us; that corporate repressions, the rise of a compliant bourgeoisie [college-educated, managerial class], and strengthened market mentality regarding schools are interrelated. " "More and more people are talking about national standards." "When test companies sell things and call them formative, these vendors are being disingenuous —we used to call it lying."
"Question: What do you think is your own best
novel?
"Whenever I hear someone say something that is inarticulate, unintelligible, or just plain stupid, and I want to provide a retort that confuses them, establishes my disinterest, and cracks me up all at the same time, I respond with, 'Wear a long coat and nobody will notice.'
"We introduce the whole alphabet, but emphasize 'A' through 'D' since they come up most for the multiple-choice standardized test. " "Unfortunately, all evidence of your son's intelligence is purely anecdotal." "Your cry is, 'we must agitate, we must agitate.' So you must bear in mind that the agitation of deeds is tenfold more effectual than the agitation of words." "(Arlington, Va.)The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) honored State Farm Insurance Companies Chairman and CEO [and George Bush Education advisor, chair Business Roundtable Education Task Force, member of the board McGraw-Hill, member of the board Achieve] Edward B. Rust, Jr. for his contributions to advancing the teaching profession." "More than anything else, the corporate-politicos have charged teachers to educate for civil obedience."
"
Politicians' Syllogism: "Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen." "No studies of Open Court Reading© that fall within the scope of the Beginning Reading review meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Open Court Reading©." "In short, we must organize. Writing a book will not do it. Writing a paper will not do it. " "[S]tudents do perform or ventriloquize what teachers request. . . ." "Poverty is the single greatest risk factor for almost every 'life-smashing' condition a kid might be at risk for, save perhaps compulsive shopping." "I don't think there is such a thing as being 'apolitical' about NCLB. Enforcing it, not speaking out, adopting the language around it are all ways of supporting it." "The Reading First program's corruption is now legendary. Those who turn a blind eye to that corruption and its concomitant exploitation of our children are themselves participating in the corruption. " "A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. " "The bailouts are rewarding the very people and institutions whose reckless behavior caused this financial mess. Yet government demands nothing from them in return--like new rules for prudent behavior and explicit obligations to serve the national interest. Washington ought to compel the financial players to rein in their appetite for profit in order to help save the country from a far worse fate: a depressed economy that cannot regain its normal energies. Instead, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Democratic Congress and of course the Republicans meekly defer to the wise men of high finance, who no longer seem so all-knowing. . ." "We. . . get into these terrible dilemmas - where the big guys step all over everyone else and the victims are required to pay the hospital bills - because we refuse to recognize the connection between money and politics. This is the great denial in democracy that may ultimately mean our ruin. We just don't seem able to see or accept the fact that money drives policy." "When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."
"....................for
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." "One Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, compared the Obama campaign unfavorably to President Bush's administration. 'At least Bush waited until he was in the White House before they started ignoring everybody,' the aide said." "The only way to have reasonably decent politicians is to keep them humble, make constant fun of them and don't let them get away with anything. It is by ignoring such rules that we have ended up with the likes of George Bush and Bill Clinton." "The members who comprised it were seven-eighths of them, ...the meanest kind of bawling and blowing officeholders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contracts, kept-editors, spaniels well train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyists, spongers, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combinings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. " "With California requiring 8th graders to know algebra, it might be a good time to start a Kindergarten Kalculus movement." "There is surely no more reliable way to kill enthusiasm and interest in a subject than to make it a mandatory part of the school curriculum. Include it as a major component of standardized testing and you virtually guarantee that the education establishment will suck the life out of it. School boards do not understand what math is, neither do educators, textbook authors, publishing companies, and sadly, neither do most of our math teachers. " "Always you have been working in the system. Always you have been tied down by the struggle to make your payments. These payments are not just checks and cash. We make our payments when we knuckle under. We make our payments when we live in fear. We make our payments when we pretend the emperor is clothed in the finest raiments of the land. We make our payments when we 'buy in.'" "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. " "Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
"
We shall not cease from exploration "Since the symptoms of lead poisoning are irritability, distractibility, impulsivity, aggression and a loss of over seven IQ points, we should not complain when lead poisoned children are irritable, distractible, impulsive, aggressive and do not do well on academic tests. . . . It's not the parents' indifference that is the problem, it is society's indifference. "
"No matter what happens, just keep shopping.
" High-stakes Testing: Brainboarding" "Anger is always the self-selected moral choice when cowardice is the only perceived alternative." ""If you go too far from your natural manner it can be damaging," she warns. . . "Your good qualities aren't being used. They're getting beaten down.""
"I pledge allegiance to the children
"I pledge allegiance to the soil "The 21st Century Global Economy? Standards. Standardization. No! Children. Each a unique individual more precious than all the material possessions in the world. And wonderfully resistant to being standardized. Keep on loving the children and keep swimming upstream!" "Indeed, one PERFECT resister is enough to win the battle of Right against Wrong." "Fright destroys the possibility of good teaching." "The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good." "So displeased am I with the direction public education is going, I have chosen to make this my last year." "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. " "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 now 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 can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've 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. "
"David Barsamian: Q: What can people do to energize democracy?
"One of the duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others.... To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by governmentnot as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty." "The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white, and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive." "As a parent who has had children in public schools since NCLB began, I don't think so. The Frederick County (Maryland) schools our children have attended have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. 'I want to teach my students how to write,' he said, not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write.' He quit." "No Left-Behind Child Act, the: U. S. Congressional act disqualifying any person from holding the office of American President who has not passed a series of rigorous examinations demonstrating psychological and emotional maturity, as well as expert knowledge of a wide range of subjects, including American history, world history, government, economics, law, geography, political science, etc., and a strong command of the English language." "Maximum Wage: n. the highest wage paid or permitted to be paid, usu. set at seven to ten times the minimum wage."
"You need to be aware "The first star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft." "When the need is strong there are those who will believe anything." "All oppressors attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty." "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field." "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
"The Task Force: "Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbacks from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. " "Imagine a student with disabilities normally reading on a second grade level, being forced to take a test on a seventh grade level. They are most often distraught to the point of physical illness. " "I don't think innovation is what we need here. I know a lot of people think that is heresy. But education is like heart surgery. Do you want a heart surgeon to be innovative, to try something new?" "A final concern with the federal law is that it is so driven by state testing that theres too much time devoted to test prep, too much time spent drilling facts for survey courses, and not enough emphasis on finding something children will fall in love with for a lifetime the Civil War, repairing engines, science research, playing the trumpet." "We boil at different degrees. " "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for ones own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didnt, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didnt have to; but if he didnt want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle." "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail." "The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?" " High stakes testing is like gum on the bottom of my shoe!" "Your life is your life. dont let it be clubbed into dank submission. " "Wearing a button is not enough. It's not going to get it done. We canot be a nation of button wearers. I believe we're in another of those when-in-the-course-of-human-events moments that Thomas Jefferson wrote about. They're stealing our country from us. They're stealing what makes America America from us, displacing our democracy with their plutocracy. Sam Adams said it well. Sam Adams said, 'If ever a time should come when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats of government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.' That's us, that's today. We're in that moment." "We can make big strides in narrowing the student achievement gap, but only by directing greater attention to economic and social reforms that narrow the differences in background characteristics with which children come to school. . . . If the nation cant close the gaps in income, health and housing, there is little prospect of equalizing achievement."
"I have never believed that this law is the idealistic, well-intentioned but poorly executed program that many claim it to be. NCLB aims to shrink the public sector, transfer large sums of public money to the private sector, weaken or destroy two Democratic power basesthe teachers unionsand provide vouchers to let students attend private schools at public expense. . . .
"Sometimes people ask me how to get " Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and thats why youre not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. "
"When you say a word, "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." "Data worship results in a myopic view of what the world could and should be. Children, we might remind corporate America, are more than math and science scores. While math and science play important roles in our lives, there are other scores we might help children increase: their creativity score, their empathy score, their resiliency score, their curiosity score, their integrity score, their thoughtfulness score, their take-initiative score, their innovation score, their critical thinking score, their passion score, their problem-solving score, their refusal to follow leaders who lie to them score, their democratic engagement score...and so forth." "As Gates gives billions to schools, more schools must remake themselves in Gates' image. No remaking in Gates image, no money. Call it quality control."
"Great doubt, great enlightenment. "What makes DIBELS the perfect literacy test is that it takes total control of the academic futures and school lives of the children it reaches from the first day they enter kindergarten when they are barely five years old. It keeps control of their literacy development and indeed their whole school experience for four years from kindergarten through third grade. And the more poorly the children respond to DIBELS the more they experience it." "The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody." "The story is told that when B. F. Skinner of Harvard University was teaching, he used to walk back and forth along the lecture platform. Applying his ideas, the students agreed that whenever he walked to the left of the platform, they would look down and frown, and whenever he went to the right, they would look up and smile. After a short time they had him falling off the right-hand end of the platform." "Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove." "There are connections in children's brains that are usually not completed until between the fifth and sixth year of life, and they take another year or so to mature. These connections are essential for learning to read. When children haven't grown enough to be ready to read, they won't be able to do it easily. And if they can't do it easily, they will be stressed and frustrated in the process of trying to meet the unrealistic expectations of parents and teachers." "[NCLB] is like another Iraq war, with inadequate funding, nave notions about the ease of success, and no clue about the eventual casualties."
"Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
"If I can stop one heart from breaking, "The average KIPP teacher is in his/her early 20's, is single, and has no kids. They are clearly very dedicated young people who are not only willing to work longer hours and on Saturdays, but who are ABLE to work longer hours and on Saturdays. Teachers with families simply can't do this. They have to go home, fix dinner, do the dishes, walk the dog, and help with their kids' homework."
"All their fences "And I, how have I taught myself to educate the children? " "According to data assembled by the Luxembourg Income Study, an international group of social scientists that defines poverty has half of a nation's median income, the US poverty rate was 17% in 2000, compared with 11.4% in Canada, 8.3% in Germany, 7.3% in the Netherlands, 6.5% in Sweden, and 5.4% in Finland. (Among children, the poverty rate was 21.9% in the US and 2.8% in Finland). The poverty rate is significantly lower in these other nations because they provide a much wider and generous array of government-sponsored social insurance and safety net provisions to cushion the harshness of poverty, such as universal health insurance, family allowances, housing subsidies, and child care. The US's stingy social programs have only a minor impact in reducing the poverty rate, while programs in other countries have a dramatic impact in lifting children, low-wage workers, and the elderly out of poverty." "Art teachers who pose nude should wear helmets. " "At Kaplan, the biggest corporate tutor, the number of students in its test prep and after-school programs has more than doubled since 1998. . . .In all, Americans spend more than $4 billion a year on tutoring." "IF YOU'RE WONDERING WHY PBS seems so dull, it may help to know that its programming is under control of someone known as the Chief Content Officer. When people starting referring to their own efforts as content, they no longer appreciate what they're up to." "You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note." "If you can't convince them, confuse them." "I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could." "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. "
"[Sir] Tom Stoppard went to boarding school in Yorkshire, but showed only limited aptitude for learning, and left at 17 to become a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. He enjoyed the job, and later applied for a bigger one on the London Evening Standard. The editor, Charles Wintour, a chilly Fleet Street veteran, quizzed him sternly: 'I gather you're interested in politics,' said Wintour. 'Who's the Home Secretary?'
"School is a very 'weak treatment' for the conditions of poverty." "Democrats need to regain the courage that's lost with political compromises over the last few years. They've got to get it together. If they don't, it will not only be a tragedy for them, but a tragedy for the country." "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." "The Broad Foundation is pleased to be a sponsor of Better Leaders for America's Schools, which goes beyond the conventional wisdom and offers solutions to challenge the status quo. We appreciate the excellent work done by Chester Finn and his colleagues at The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the National Center for Education Information. . . ." "We are either for kids or we are not. There is no retirement for that. " "You can get all A's and still flunk life. " "We test kids because we love them." "It's not about what Utah says, it's about what good practice should demand. NCLB has been about public humiliation as opposed to standardizing good practice, and it should be about standardizing good practice." "Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism. " "Teachers know their own students best - or they should - and no outsider is qualified to prescribe the course of action to be taken for any particular student at any particular time. Learning and teaching are part of a social collaboration that can never be scripted in advance. " "I know of no college or university in the country that doesn't have to offer most or all of its freshmen courses in remedial English, beginning mathematics, beginning science and beginning foreign languages. Consequently, we give two or three years of college and the rest in high school work. Progressive education went too far. "
"The moon gives you light, "At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. " "You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society . . . " "We talk fast, we walk fast, we think fast, we write fast, and I think poetry and literature are a chance to stop for a minute and take a breath. To think about the metaphor in a poem is to really stop and look beneath the surface and see what else lies there. I'm just hoping the experience of doing that is helpful, and also trains (my medical students) to listen more carefully and listen for the metaphor in what patients talk about." "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." "There is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take." "I, too, was a low-income kid. I, too, am Latino. I, too, was an English learner, and I wasn't very good in math. If I had been born a little later, when good ol' (Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack) O'Connell was around to tell me you can't go to college because your math ain't too good, maybe I wouldn't have been able to go to UC Davis. Maybe I wouldn't have gone to Harvard and become the first Latino partner at this firm ( Morrison & Foerster on Market Street)." "IS BUSH A LUNATIC?" "You're getting more of a paint-by-numbers type of education. If it's not in the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills--state-mandated curriculum guidelines for teachers), you just don't teach it." "Teachers are far better judges of how students are doing than standardized tests."
"I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
"Students who struggle in an AP course with its college-sized reading list and flunk the college-level, three-hour final exam, I learned, are still much better off than if they had been denied a chance to take the course and the test. They have just played 72 holes with the academic equivalent of Tiger Woods, and although Tiger has beaten them, they have gained from the experience a visceral appreciation of what they are going to have to do to survive in college. That taste of academic trauma stays with them and helps them work hard enough to get their bachelor's degree." " If there is too wide a range of abilities in each AP class, why not put the students who are struggling in their own AP section? But don't deny them a chance to work toward an AP test, and get that taste of college trauma. " "As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic Shih Tzus* in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism." "Socks are cannibalistic. The stronger one devours the weaker one, hence the proliferation of unmatched singles. So how do they co-exist in pairs on store shelves? Clearly, repeated washing and drying unleashes their predatory instincts." "When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing." " Male baboons exchange greetings by yanking on each other's penis. I don't know how Fortune 500 CEOs, media pundits, and politicians greet each other, but I do know that only one percent of their DNA differs from that of baboons and that ninety-nine percent of what they say about public education is hooey. And worse. And if one hundred baboons sat in a computer lab, they'd produce Moby Dick sooner than one hundred CEOs would tell the truth about the relationship of their advocacy of one-size-fits-all educational standards to upsizing/outsizing their own salary packages, the sideswiping of middle- and working-class America, and the subsidy of state-of-the-scam sports stadiums with their corporate luxury suites, and the push for tax-supported vouchers to private education." "NCLB has to be dumped into the Potomac next year, and it will no doubt take civil disobedience to make it happen." " We feel pretty confident that a lot of the issues we're dealing with around MCAS protests and naysayers and all these people who were against it when we first rolled it out pretty much went away. MCAS is part of the landscape in Massachusetts. There are always going to be people against something like MCAS. But it has become more of the landscape than ever. " "They do timed tests in kindergarten to get the kids into testing mode for the FCATs, a standardized test that 4th, 8th and 10th graders take. MSN"
"ANOTHER $6 BILLION THAT WON'T BE GOING TO NEW ORLEANS "I had to buy (and pay for) my own stopwatch last week to finish DIBELS testing within the required time frame." "I just recovered from strep and double pneumonia, but it was not as bad as the DIBELS flu - for which there is neither vaccine or cure - YET!"
"Those who can't find anything to live for, "Schools and Sesame Street tell kids that everyone can be No. 1. That's statistically impossible. I'm not writing for No. 1. I'm writing for No. 2 to No. 2,977, which happens to be a much larger audience." "We're killing children's spirits and their souls. We're going to produce generations of sad, unhappy souls. That's not what public schools are about."
"Why are the bad guys so much better at naming things? Especially legislation. Especially bad legislation.
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad. " In England if something goes wrongsay, if one finds a skunk in the gardenhe writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift. "
"There are not enough good jobs for the college educated . . . .
"This (Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983) is a cautionary tale. Its lesson is: watch your back, America. Take civil liberty for granted at your own risk. Trust in leaders who arrive into power by means of wealth, and see what they protect when push comes to shove. . . . "A horse trainer says you can tell a horse man by his willingness to wait. 'A horse is no machine. . . but a living, breathing, opinionated beast. You've got to wait for them, and then wait some more.'" "The first thing many observers noted about scientific management was that there was almost no science to it. " "The No Child Left Behind Act has brought out the best in our teachers. " "May the fleas of 1000 camels infest your armpits. " "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday." "Jeb and George are twisting our education system to implement the corporate dream: a society of highly-skilled automatons who do not think to question authority." "The very idea of the university may be finished. In Oxford, for a long time, they were producing divines. Then it took a turn and the University began to produce smart people. The idea of learning came quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, and it went on some way into the twentieth. Now, apart from sciences, there seems to be no purpose to a university education. The Socialists want to send everybody to these places. I feel that these places ought to be wrapped up and people should buy their qualifications at the Post Office." "If you put out another's candle, you will also be in the dark."
"The machine economy has set afire "In the history of language the first obscenity was silence." "The notion that somehow what is happening now in education was brought on by what educators in general or some group within education did or did not do--curriculum theorists for example--is wrong . In fact I would argue that the broad spread of professionalism among teachers and the quality of the theory which underlay effective practice is what stimulated the reactionary attempt to impose methods and materials by law and to deprofessionalize public education." " We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about `and'. " "Asked why he had never become an astronaut, legendary test pilot Scott Crossfield said, 'I have a bad reputation for doing my own thing. I would turn off the radio if I didn't like the help I was getting from the ground, and the medicine men that were running the program thought that was too independent. They wanted medical subjects, not pilots.'" " What's wrong about teaching to the test is that life is not simply about deriving a 'right' answer. What is the right answer to being alive? What is the right answer to a Rodin sculpture, a Da Vinci drawing or a Picasso painting? What is the right answer to the existence of the universe, the language of whales, the process of entropy? What is the right answer to creativity, the emotions of opera, the love we feel for each other? "
"
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but is there not cause for severity? I will be harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not with to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to sound a moderate alarm...but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present...
"Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing." "Failure to pass the AIMS test should not make them educational lepers." "Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. [Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking)" "Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in few hands and the republic is destroyed." "The research evidence indicates that you can nail every high school teacher in the United States to a cross and flay them afterward but it won't have much to do with preventing dropouts because the problem occurs long before high school." "I have come to believe a lot of inefficiency is quite deliberate and supported by Congress. One person's inefficiency is another person's income." "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination. " "I think what's going on for our kids, and particularly the kids who have parents who are least powerful, is the worst education I've seen in 40 years. I don't have the same picture of what this increased attention has done. I've never seen so many frightened teachers. I've never seen so many frightened principals. I cannot imagine how you think that is going to help our race to the top, that the children in our most low-income schools are surrounded by adults whose overriding concern is these terrible tests " "Can't we put less stress on the children? My 10-year-old daughter was almost worried sick she was going to get her teacher fired if she didn't do well on the test." "Preparing for the MAP test is very important, but we should not have to sacrifice our values for a standardized test. We are spending tax dollars to administer test preparation that includes an obvious bias against our way of life, and that is just wrong." "A physician shall act only in the patient's interest when providing medical care which might have the effect of weakening the physical and mental condition of the patient." "Our schools proper business is not to fit students to pre-established slots in the workforce but rather to prepare them to thrive in whatever economic, cultural, and political institutions they choose to join or can themselves devise." "I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did. "
"Required by the district to spend two to three hours a day on Open Court instruction, teachers felt unable to include the literacy curriculum we had previously developed curriculum that more fully addressed the range of levels and the varied strengths and weaknesses of our students. These students full of energy and, by and large, eager to learn became victims of a system that refused to teach them in the way they learn best: actively, holistically, and cooperatively. . . . "Take the day off, dear reader, and ignore the world and let the president play his fiddle. Find the one who means the most to you and make yourselves happy. If that be ignorance, make the most of it." "As researcher Gerald Bracey has pointed out, NCLB uses the phrase "scientifically based research" 111 times, but has "zero" scientific evidence to support the sanctions it imposes on the schools to improve performance." "[The] overuse and misuse of standardized tests is only the start of the problems with NCLB. NCLB uses these test scores to impose sanctions that have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not really educational strategies at all. They're political strategies designed to promote privatization and market reform in public education." "Today, NCLB is almost as unpopular as the administration and Congress that created it. With the law coming up for reauthorization in 2007, debate is heating up about whether we need Band-Aids to "fix" NLCB or a bulldozer to bury it." "The only way that teachers and parents can change the status quo within the public school system is through outright rebellion. Refuse to administer tests. Refuse to teach to the test. Refuse to allow children to take tests. In California, Education Code 60615 allows parents to waive testing of their child just by requesting it in a letter to the principal of the school. More parents should do that." "Ohio PTA has bought into the No Corporation Left Behind, No Child Left Untested, hook, line, and sinker. The most help one could hope to receive from Ohio PTA would be tips on test taking days (i.e; get a good night's sleep, eat a good breakfast) or test bribery activities(i.e., pizza parties pep rallies, etc.) On rare occasion, one might come upon a particuarly bold PTO." "Maybe it's time more schools leave the $2.3 billion testing industry behind and move on from its fear-based, profit-driven, mind-closing culture." "I keep listening but I don't hear the same rhetoric or values applied to the war that have been put on, for example, school teachers and education. The No Child Left Behind law attempts to make sure federal education dollars are spent usefully. OK, so even if you buy the logic, you wonder, do people just call for fiscal responsibility on the particular topics they want accountability for?" "Bourgeois scientists make sure that their theories are not dangerous to God or to capital. " "Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it." "All I know is if teachers remain silent, they are going to lose their profession. In many cases, the profession is dead: when you're reading a script, you are not a professional. " "And we all remember those desperate people on those rooftops [during the Katrina disaster] holding up signs, 'Send educational software!' " "Everyone in this school is doing government work, not schoolwork. " "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) " "Ten middle-class guys are sitting in a bar. Then the richest guy leaves, and Bill Gates walks in. Because the richest guy in the bar is now much richer than before, the average income in the bar soars. But the income of the nine men who aren't Bill Gates hasn't increased, and no amount of repeating 'But average income is up!' will convince them that they're better off." "Put it down in capital letters and underline it in bold strokes. Effective teaching is all about love and modeling real care. Care for the world, care for your material, care for that one kid who is your personal pain-in-the-ass, like Gary Schultz." "The truly fundamental problem behind No Child Left Behind is this: What is joyful about learning, and what therefore makes us want to learn as much as we possibly can, are the intangible qualities of creativity, curiosity, compassion, wonder and joy. By reducing human effectiveness in education to paper, pencil and marking ovals, we are cheapening and even destroying the fundamental inspiration that drives learning." ""The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that of the thirty occupations that will grow the most over the next decade, only eight will require a college degree. " "I was so micromanaged that they were telling me how to pronounce syllables of words. " "Capitalism: The name of a religion based on the worship of money." "I'm the commander in chief. I'm also the educator in chief. " "Anyway, you'll be confronted with some stuff. Hopefully, our job is to make sure you're confronted with less issues, like being hooked on oil. One of the issues that we're confronting with now that I hope you'll not have to confront with is jobs going elsewhere because we don't have the math and science skills and engineering skills and physics skills that are taught to our children here." "This has just been handled in the most frustrating way imaginable. [The College Board and Pearson] are clearly not on top of their own mess.... I've not gotten my reassurance that everything is out on the table now." "Rather than persist in the fiction that the SAT performs any defensible educational function, it's time to put the test to eternal sleep. Doing so would constitute a public service long overdue. " "Studies in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Denver and Boston along with others in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales all show that poverty is a primary determinant of student achievement. High-stakes test scores are very highly correlated with family income." "The problem with the NAEP achievement levels is that they are no damn good." "I don't think there is any data that assessments at the third grade harms anyone." "One of the other problems the [New York City] Department of Education has had is that they have not adequately nurtured the talent within the system to create and bring along the next generation of great principals. They took a real bold and I think mistaken step -- again with a lot of private philanthropic money to create a principals academy aimed at taking people either from other cities with some educational experience or taking people with no educational experience and thinking that you could in short order turn them into quality New York City principals. And that was folly. In the course of doing that program, they jettisoned, out of their arrogance, an existing program for a fraction of the money that used experienced New York City principals to mentor young future principals and assistant principals and that had been really successful." "The problem is that you have this tail of this big grant from the Gates Foundation wagging this policy dog at the [New York City] Department of Ed. Because Gates has a big priority to start small schools, the Department of Education is jumpstarting 50 a year, year after year. It's just impossible to have quality opening up schools in that kind of frenetic way. It also means a lot of these schools get opened up with these ultra-niche academic orientations sports careers or architecture that I think are really preposterous for a ninth grader." "I have to pull 5 year olds every day to do things for which they aren't ready and things that I know are not developmentally appropriate." "Some scripted lessons are bad, but some work well. The research shows that Success For All and Direct Instruction are very effective. I have seen several Success For All classes in action, and they are not the least bit dreary. There is lots of activity, and kids seem to enjoy them." "To attack the Big Tests without attacking the social relations that require them (capitalism) is like trying to wash the air on one side of a screen door. " "MY SON ALREADY hates school, and he's just halfway through kindergarten. . . . Now kindergarten is a 30-hour-a-week job. There's nightly homework; finger painting is a rare treat; and as for naps, there just isn't time." "The 2005 Mathematics Framework describes the responsibilities that all stakeholders must meet for the effective implementation of a rigorous and coherent mathematics curriculum for kindergarten through grade twelve . . . ." "Let me assure you that todays rigorous kindergarten aims to prepare youngsters to succeed in the hard academic work that begins in first grade. " "Corruption of any kind corrupts. It costs us either money or confidence or both. But intellectual corruption is far more dangerous. It ruins and costs lives. " "We have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it. " "Shopping is what consumers do. Talking to each other is what families should do, and talking about building a movement that improves life for all our families is what citizens must do. " " I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured." "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth. " "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. " "What gets measured gets done." "Si se puede! (Yes, we can do it!)"
"Most people are already engaged in a struggle against capitalism to create a new world. The smallest acts of kindness and solidarity on the shop floor or in our classrooms or in our neighborhoods or our homes and the most public and collective acts of class struggle are all part of a struggle to humanize the world and make it conform to our idea of what it should be. The moral values present in peoples everyday lives--values of solidarity and commitment to each other--these are the real basis of every great movement for social change.
"Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music. " "[The] child's play is the infantile form of human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experimenting and planning." " It will take a village to reform schools." " "Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer." "This is still about democracy, tyranny and the rights of children in public schools. Those who support secret high-stakes tests for public school children are on the wrong side of this huge historical battle. And on this one there are two sides, one based on the best traditions of this country and the other rooted in the worst. " "Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. " "An Administration so strongly committed to the principles of a law [NCLB] it has consistently hailed as positive is now backing away from it by making compromises on many dimensions. The dangerously high levels of opposition at the state and local level will inevitably affect support for the law in Congress. In this situation, since Congress controls reauthorization, appropriations, and oversight, the law cannot be sustained as originally written." "We see only what we expect to see." "I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room." "There is an almost mathematical certainty that under the current system of identifying schools making inadequate progress, all of our nation's schools will eventually be on that list." "[W}e welcome a procedure which under the title of science sinks the individual in a numerical class; judges him with reference to capacity to fit into a limited number of vocations ranked according to present business standards; assigns him to a predestined niche and thereby does whatever education can do to perpetuate the present order." "Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can do is take a complete rest." "This nation has squandered away four years and billions of dollars in education funding. Our children have been tested to death, forced to regurgitate, and at the end of the day they haven't learned to do basic reading and math or, never mind, learned to think." "One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervisionincarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in thirty-three American childrenand one in eight African American childrengoes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society." "I wouldn't be slitting my wrists because I couldn't have a bilingual program." "It is. . . no surprise that the constitution of the world economy protects just one class of global citizen--the corporate investor. Given the influence of American elites, the model for this constitution is the North American Free Trade Agreement, conceived under Ronald Reagan, nurtured by George H.W. Bush and delivered by Bill Clinton. Among other things, NAFTA's 1,000-plus pages give international investors extraordinary rights to override government protections of workers and the environment. It sets up secret panels, rife with conflicts of interest, to judge disputes from which there is no appeal. It makes virtually all nonmilitary government services subject to privatization and systematically undercuts the public sector's ability to regulate business. Jorge Castaeda, later Mexico's foreign secretary, observed that NAFTA was 'an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies.' " "Any decision about a student's continued education, such as retention, tracking, or graduation, should not be based on the results of a single test, but should include other relevant and valid information." "A change in our perception of why kids are in school seems appropriate. Kids are not in school to learn how to memorize a bunch of stuff and spend an hour and a half spitting it back to us. They are not in school to see how much information they can cram onto two note cards they get to use during the test. They are not in school to learn to take tests. They are in school to learn to take life, and do something useful and fulfilling with it. So lets make something related to useful and fulfilling our final." " As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. " "Of all the members of the United Nations, the United States of America and Somalia (which has no legally constituted government) are the only two nations that have failed to ratify the U.N. convention on the Rights of the Child." "The notion that one test can work for thousands and thousands of students in Texas tells me how clueless some adults are about the needs of students." " 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." "I want to thank you for your leadership, Margaret. You're doing a heck of a job as the Secretary of Education." "Margaret Spellings, the former Margaret La Montagne, has been Bush's alter ego on education issues for more than a decade." "I do not know how to weight or measure a man, the mistake is when someone thinks such task is possible. " "Issues surrounding sleep -- who needs how much and when -- are usually given short shrift in efforts to improve student achievement. But modern brain researchers say it is time that more schools faced the biological facts." "A little stress is good."
" The notion that with schools alone you can create equal achievement for children of different social backgrounds is one that's not based in any research. It's not based on any experience. It's not based on any true understanding of what the many, many factors that contribute to student achievement are.
" Crime once exposed has no refuge but in audacity." "There are places in the world where librarians and libraries are considered even more directly related to education than football." "Now we'll have science testing, mandated by NCLB. So much for test tubes--now kids will just have tests." "We should be encouraging rigor in our schools, not backing away from it." "Don't do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come." "In all my years teaching at Stuyvesant High school [and talking to parents at parent conferences on Open School Day] only one parent, a mother, asked if her son was enjoying school. I said yes. He seemed to be enjoying himself. She smiled, stood up, said, Thank you, and left. One parent in all those years." "Teacher pay-for-performance is the latest reform idea sweeping the nation. The claims that these magic merit pay programs will improve teacher effectiveness and raise student achievement are a utopian illusion. Political grandstanding, teacher bashing and unfunded government mandates do not address any of the real problems facing the nation's public schools." "If there has ever been a classic example of lockstep, one-size-fits-all, individuality-out-the-door, ideological gobbledygook, this is it. If, indeed, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, No Child Left Behind is educational asphalt." "To date there is no consistent evidence that high-stakes testing works to increase achievement." "I have the feeling that 60% of what you say is crap." "Schools alone cant cure fetal alcohol syndrome, lead poisoning, low birth-weight-induced cognitive deficits, undetected hearing and vision deficits or asthma, rampant in some urban areas. Educators alone cannot insure that poor mothers-to-be get proper prenatal care or that poor children get the kinds of eye and dental examinations they need or treatment for ear infections, infections which if treated are nothing serious but if not can cause hearing loss, etc. Schools alone cannot eliminate dangerous working conditions, sub-poverty wages or erratic housing patterns. " "Our children have been hijacked and shackled by bad policy and bad politics. "
"One day in McKee High School I made a breakthrough of some kind, and for me there was kind of a white blazing light in the room and I went, 'Jesus, this is absolutely orgasmic in an intellectual and emotional sense.'
"There are stark and causal relationships between economic status and school "achievement" in the US and every other country that tracks the relevant data. Census Bureau figures show that between 1967 and 2001, the share of total income flowing to the bottom 60% of US households fell from 32% to 27%. The share of total income to the top 5% rose from under 18% to over 22%. The percentage to the group in the middle barely changed. Those percentages could easily be said to mirror test scores except, of course, the "achievement gap" has closed a bit in contrast to the economic gap. In that context the schools have been doing a bang-up job. For someone from the educated middle class to be pointing fingers at the lack of parenting skills of those living under the burdens of decades of grinding poverty, systematic racism, and governmental neglect is...well, insensitive doesn't quite capture it all. I'm not sure what does. " "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. " "I teach EBD and LD high school students. One of my students who is extremely bright but has a very slow processing speed was compelled to spend 26.36 actual hours (4.2 instructional days) on the WKCE, and even then he wasnt finished, so his score still will not reflect his true ability. There are reams of existing information on this young man from school and outside psychologists documenting his skills; nevertheless, he was taken out of 24 instructional periods BEYOND what the school had already allotted for testing so that he could achieve a score close to representative of his already VERY well-documented skills. Because of his unique learning style, this student struggles to keep up in school in spite of his above-average intelligence-he repeatedly questioned the value of a test that would cause him to miss the equivalent of three additional days of class beyond the time already missed by his classmates. Clearly, this test format is highly disruptive and very inappropriate for such a young man, but he would never qualify for that very small percentage of alternative assessment students because he is not cognitively disabled. The obvious practical answer would be to skip the extra-time accommodation, but then his scores would have been inaccurate AND harmful to the schools AYP. The test is actually interfering with his education. " "I teach Title 1 reading but had to cancel many of my classes to proctor students who are at risk. The students I tested struggled with the long, involved questions for the short answer questions. A simple question would have provided a much better assessment of whether the child understood what they had read. I thought the sentence structure used in all the testing indicated the question makers had never taught at-risk readers. " "As a special education teacher and school board member, I have seen how the education of children with special needs works from different perspectives. School districts should not be penalized for addressing the needs of their students. The way the testing is set up is very unfair to the diversity of students. Wisconsin is the top education system in the country. Why are we doing this? " "The one-size-fits-all mentality of the ESEA is incompatible with the spirit and intent of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). So we are left with the monumental task of trying to reconcile two federal laws that are inconsistent with each other. This conflict will have a devastating impact on children. To call ESEA No Child Left Behind is really an irresponsible and harmful use of language... the very children who need the most help are those mistreated by this law." "When the future of a student, or the future of our school, hinges on the result of an arbitrary test, then the teachers are forced to spend valuable classroom time teaching to the test. That means less time on critical thinking skills, less time on creative approaches to problem-solving, less time in general teaching the values and skills that will help students succeed in the future. Instead, well be spending that time teaching simple facts and formulas to help them succeed on a single test. Thats not the best use of our class time. " "Things are definitely different now. You can see it in our teachers and the way they do things in class. We spend a whole lot of time just getting ready for the next test, and a lot less time doing things that we actually find interesting or make us excited about coming to school. And then once the test is over, its just on to the next one. Graduates, Milwaukee Public Schools" "Why would a second grade class be bothered by testing that is not occurring at that level? Because nearly all of the special education & Title 1 teachers were re-deployed into the testing role, there was very limited support for handicapped children in all of the classrooms. " "Although I've never been a death-row inmate awaiting execution, I can imagine how such prisoners must feel as they watch their attorneys exhaust, one by one, all eligible appeals. Even though public school educators in the United States may not realize it, they are now facing a similar end-of-the-line scenario with respect to adequate yearly progress (AYP), the accountability cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). " "I could understand if test prep was part of the curriculum, but test prep was all of the curriculum."
"What everyone has missed is that the NAEP designation of 'proficiency' variants are simply segments of the normal distribution of test scores that are forced by the Item Response Theory that drives these and other standardized achievement tests. "I accept your premise; we can only do better with tougher standards and better assessment, and you should set the standards. I believe that is absolutely right. And that will be the lasting legacy of this conference. I also believe, along with Mr. Gerstner and the others who are here, that it's very important not only for businesses to speak out for reform, but for business leaders to be knowledgeable enough to know what reform to speak out for, and what to emphasize, and how to hammer home the case for higher standards, as well as how to help local school districts change some of the things that they are now doing so that they have a reasonable chance at meeting these standards. " "Our children have been hijacked and shackled by bad policy and bad politics. This nation has squandered away four years and billions of dollars in education funding. Our children have been tested to death, forced to regurgitate and at the end of the day they havent learned to do basic reading and math or much less learned to think. Its a national shame." "An editor who taught me a lot once said: 'If you piss off both sides you're doing your job.' " "One brave deed is worth a thousand books." "Why don't CEOs ever take out after the members of Congress the way they do teachers? Why don't members of Congress ever take out after CEOs the way they do teachers?" "For Standardistos, diverse standards are an oxymoron. For me, standard standards are both an insult and an impossibility." "WE ARE DEEPLY CONCERNED that current trends in early education, fueled by political pressure, are leading to an emphasis on unproven methods of academic instruction and unreliable standardized testing that can undermine learning and damage young childrens healthy development."
". . .for English class "Daniel Ferri says his work as a grave-digger, fork lift driver, assembly line worker and potter helped him mature enough to be a teacher. The most important thing he hopes to bring to his sixth-grade students is kindness." " 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." "In a time of war, telling the truth is a treasonable act." "If the child needs to throw up in the middle of the test, pull the trash can by his/her side, let them do their thing, and encourage the child to finish the test."
"("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?") "The truth is today, be good, be decent, be honorable and self-sacrificing and you will not always be happy. You will often be desperately unhappy. You may even be crucified, dead and buried; and the third day you will be just as dead as the first. But with the death of your happiness may easily come increased happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment for other people strangers, unborn babes, uncreated worlds. If this is not sufficient, never try it - - remain hogs. " "AMORALITY: A quality admired and rewarded in modern organizations, where it is referred to through metaphors such as professionalism and efficiency . . . Immorality is doing wrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing it because a structure or an organization expects us to do it. Amorality is thus worse than immorality because it involves denying our responsibility and therefore our existence as anything more than an animal. " "Find out just what people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." "Horrible example of numerical goals in public places." "Merit Pay, aka Principal's Pet Pay" "It must be kind of spooky to be a student or teacher in a university as great as this one, with its libraries and laboratories and lecture halls, while knowing it is within the borders of a nation where wisdom, reason, knowledge and truth no longer apply." " A little chaos is good for the soul, especially for the growing soul. It needs the sense of confidence that comes from meeting the unpredictable, the odd, the unexplained, the possibly dangerous. It needs the imagination and resilience and flexibility and above all the courage to get out and confront things. Because without it, the world really is a dangerous place." "By far the most important consequence of sitting out the rankings game, however, is the freedom to pursue our own educational philosophy, not that of some newsmagazine [U. S. News & World Report]." "I don't think we have the luxury of focusing on things other than those that produce results." "Science is not a dance card or jukebox where you can choose the songs you want. It's about what is the best explanation for the observations and the data we have. It's about the facts." " IT'S difficult to explain exactly what being poor is all about, or why access to books and ideas might be as important as a free breakfast." "This book is about the abolition of a national sin. So when people say, what do you expect us to do, I say, 'I expect you to rise up. as courageous people have done before in America, and raise hell.' I want to see our teachers develop a stronger political voice and find the courage to serve witnesses to the injustices of which they are more keenly aware than anyone else. . . . I do believe there will be another mass movement in this country, and I'd like to see it led by teachers."
"How do we reach corporate dynamos to buy girl scout cookies? "Handwritten essays can be shipped overnight to India, where they are transcribed at very low cost--with automated scores still returning to the teacher within a day! (Such transcription work was undoubtedly performed by some of the non-PhD caste in India." " People who haven't darkened the door of a public school in decades have no idea how accountability has robbed those institutions of vitality, of zest, and of the intangible elements that make children want to succeed. There's only so much brow-beating, only so much drilling, only so many test-prep worksheets a small mind can endure without zoning out. Later, when the option is availed, that uninspired child will drop out." "I fear an education bled of fascination, bled of gusto, bled of enrichment an education that's not really education but training. You will pass this test. That is all." "NEW RULE: Stop saying anybody or anything is like the Nazis. Republicans aren't like the Nazis. Neo-Nazis aren't even like the Nazis. Nothing is like the Nazis. Except for Wal-Mart." "You have been in the village a few days and already think you know everything better than everyone here." "In Japan, the morning after a high-stakes test, it's in the newspapers. The test makers have to defend the particular tasks they've set. The public can write in; there's public discourse around these high-stakes test materials. " "Some child thirty years hence will pen a book entitled Everything I Needed to Know about Sound-Symbol Correspondence and How to be a Burned-out Learner by Fourth Grade I Learned in Kindergarten." "Behaviorally, it is clear that citizens, from cradle to grave, are primed to conform to the dictates of those in power, instructed never to question the validity of what those who would like to take control of our lives have to say. Most Americans have no idea; that what we are fed by the news media (televised and paper-print news) is nothing more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations (those who pay the salaries of those who run mass media) want us to believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as not mere propaganda (e.g. that Americans are the good guys and their enemies are, without exception, always the bad guys), that what we learn in church may have very little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own personal biases no doubt a rather subtle modification of what they were taught by their parents. And through such a process, governments and nations around the world wield control as to what their citizens, believe, value, and do." "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. " "Kindergartners will see a new test that measures things such as their recognition of letters and sounds. They'll take it during their first month of school." "Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. " "DIBELS: Demonically Inspired by Evil Lord Satan." "Everyone is looking at the DIBELS even though we know this is not a true measure of our kids." "In fact, every one of us comes into this world naked and helpless, and most leave it in the same condition -- and we are dependent on one another every single day in between. The 'stand on your own feet and take care of yourself' attitude the right wing keeps pushing is not only cruel, but stupid, too. " "If William Bennett were a former secretary of defense rather than a former secretary of education, and had disparaged the military the way he has deprecated public schools, he would have been charged with treason and summarily shot." "DIBELS is so flawed and weak a test that, without the coercion being applied for its use by the No Child Left Behind Act enforcers in Washington, it would never pass review for adoption for the uses being made of it on any level by competent reviewers. "
"The Department of Homeland Security said that the recent terror threat to New York City was "specific but non-credible."
"'Well, Mr. Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra, and I speak from experience.' " "Remember, you are allowed only three exclamation points in a lifetime. " " The intensely myopic focus on testing inherent in the No Child Left Behind law is having the unintended (we hope) consequence of driving civic and social goals right out of the curriculum and school culture. This is happening despite the fact that for many of the original advocates of universal public education the goal was to have an educated citizenry, individuals equipped to take part in democracy." "A preschool near the Stanford campus had the purposeful name 'Knowledge Beginnings,' whereas a preschool near a university in Switzerland was called 'Vanilla-Strawberry.' " "Clearly there are more college graduates than unfilled jobs requiring their credentials. " "I didn't write this book [The Shame of the Nation] simply to provoke another incestuous and interesting debate among inert liberals. I wrote this book to ask my liberal friends to get up off their asses and deal with an injustice which is right before their eyes. There are too many books about the heroic struggles of the 1960s and the courage people showed then. Those books exempt us from summoning up the courage we need to face the injustices from which we still benefit today. "
"So many teachers in poor, inner-city schools have great personalities, but they have to deny them and adopt a rigidity, a false persona. A teacher who loves literature cannot say, "I read 'Winnie the Pooh' aloud with my class today, and they loved it." That would suffice in a good suburban school. But in the test-driven school in the age of George W. Bush, she can't do that. She has to say, "I used the story of Pooh and Piglet to deliver the following three proficiencies that will be on the state exam." And then she has to list those proficiencies on the blackboard with a number next to each of them, saying, "We used Pooh's disappointment about the honey pot to deliver the following three skills." What happens in these schools is not only that the children are treated as industrial products in preparation but that they're also subjected to a type of rote and drilled training that denies them almost all access to the joy of learning and to any form of cultural capaciousness.
"Principals and teachers in suburban schools don't like the testing regimen -- they find it to be a tremendous annoyance and distraction. But it doesn't create a sense of siege, because they're likely going to do well anyway. And besides, if the federal government penalizes them by withholding funds, they've got plenty. It's the inner-city schools where the principal is subjected to the threat of public humiliation -- because the lowest-scoring schools are named in the newspaper -- and the more specific threat of being penalized by loss of federal funds, that makes principals and teachers feel compelled to turn the school into an efficiency factory. And because a lot of these schools are so poor, they are deluded into creating partnerships with businesses. Corporations love to claim they have become school partners with inner-city schools -- so the very same banks that have redlined these kids into segregated lives then pose as allies to the children.
"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong nor riches to men of understanding nor success to those who ace DIBLES; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
"The assumption that a single number can tell us everything we need to know about what is happening in a school and the use of that number--not to make an informed decision about intervention--but to trigger action from a predetermined list of interventions--is absurd. My favorite counterexample is the Federal Reserve. Alan Greenspan does not look at only one indicator (for example CPI) and then act to raise or lower the prime rate. Instead, he looks at a variety of indicators--unemployment rate, GNP, GDP, CPI, factory inventories, etc.--and then makes an informed decision about what action to take. "Republicans wont fund No Child Left Behind, and Democrats say they will. We dont know which is worse." "What might have been an educational joke a few years ago has become, according to DIBELS promoters, 'the most relied upon assessment for meeting Reading First requirements. in No Child Left Behind." "In Sri Lanka after the tsunami children drew pictures, but in Louisiana and Mississippi NCLB has resulted in new lock step test prep curriculums that leave no room for traumatized children. Every day in every school, in every grade, every child is supposed to be on the same page, and if a child falls behind teachers are held accountable. Schools are ranked and carry high stakes for children who fail the tests. They are left behind. Mass trauma and post traumatic stress do not exempt them from the tests. " "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." " No doubt there are things to be learned from effective schools in countries like Finland or Singapore. And yet, the more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that the goal of topping the international comparisons is a foolish one, and the rush to raise ones rank a fools errand. In the process of pursuing a higher rank, educational leaders are ignoring deeper and more important purposes of education." "Like a 3-card monte player in pre-Disney Times Square, Mayor Bloombergs re-election spiel only draws attention to small schools, creating a favorable impression of innovation. But a look at his other cards shows a significant downside. By partially emptying large schools and transferring thousands of displaced students -- often the most at-risk -- to other, already overcrowded schools, Bloomberg has harmed more students than hes helped." "'If the road does not lead to Rome,' said a woman who was called the 'manager' of language arts for the Chicago public schools, 'we don't want it followed. Rome, she said, was the examination children would be given at the end of a specific sequence of instruction. . . . The purpose of these practices, according to the system's CEO ("superintendent" is no longer used to speak of the administrator of this system), was to guarantee that on a given day everyone is at the same place in the sequence. The Chicago CEO, when asked how he had been attracted to the uniformity of this approach, said that he first struck on the idea while scrutinizing training manuals for the National Guard." "As long as we're selling fear, and as long as we can hang that tag 'terrorism' on it, there's the invitation to the Government to reach farther, and farther, and farther." "It is the nature of evil to wear us down. The drip-drip-drip of injustice and institutionalized greed, leave us both resigned and numb. Or else it insinuates itself into our lives until it becomes a new normal, and we cease to notice. Dictators understand this; Hitler turned the screws slowly. So too do corporations, which push the boundaries of the acceptable inch by inch instead of all at once." "I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies. Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure." "I would much prefer my daughter have a teacher who helps her develop a broad range of problem-solving skills than a teacher who teaches her how to improve her score on state tests." " Although I've never been a death-row inmate awaiting execution, I can imagine how such prisoners must feel as they watch their attorneys exhaust, one by one, all eligible appeals. Even though public school educators in the United States may not realize it, they are now facing a similar end-of-the-line scenario with respect to adequate yearly progress (AYP), the accountability cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). " "Test scores, in truth, can never be an end in themselves--or proof that children are learning. That's why NCLB is phony education reform." "Community Education Partners (CEP)'s success represents the triumph of free-market ideology over sound pedagogy and the fallacy of the accountability-through-testing approach to teaching." "I trust the school board in Rochester and the superintendent and the teachers to understand they need to constantly understand they need to do better. But labeling entire schools - that's the big issue and I think we need to junk Leave No Child behind." "NCLB uses the phrase 'scientifically based research' 111 times and demands that such research support educational programs, but no scientifically based research--or any research--supports the laws mandates."
"I think NCLB is the perfect educational analog to Katrina. It's more subtle and insidious, but a lot of poor, black people are being consigned to the school house Superdomes.
"The kind of testing we are doing today is sociopathic in its repetitive and punitive nature." "{With its exit exam] the State is basically saying that the 12,000 hours students persevere in K-12 classrooms taking 40-50 courses from at least as many teachers over 13 years did not prepare them for squat not even to sweep up at night as a janitor for Oakland schools, deliver cases of Pepsi to retailers, sell shoes at Sears, collect boarding passes for Alaska Airlines or any other 30,000+ U.S. entry level jobs requiring a high school diploma. Without a high school diploma most scholarships, loans and grants for community and 4-year colleges get axed." "We have learned that it is NCLB that should be on the 'needs improvement' listnot our schools. The NCLB game is not winnable"
"Hasn't anyone noticed that these [assessment]systems are the same as that silly Donald Trump stuff --'You're fired!'
"I've had all I can stand, I can't stands no more!" "The Daily Prophet is bound to report the truth occasionally, if only accidently. " "Estimated amount spent lobbying Congress last year: $3,000,000,000" "We could buy three pages in a book with the money per student we got for [the library] last year[71 cents per student]." "If we start de-emphasizing music and art and those things that give life to education, then we are losing touch with the true purpose of education, which is to allow children to find the gifts that they have." "It makes me nuts to have Federal, State and district 'leaders' searching for their keys under the street lights, and worse, making us do that in our classrooms. The broken record is that if we were only highly skilled teachers with high expectations who taught Houghton Mifflin 'with fidelity,' all our problems would be solved and all our students would meet benchmarks. This year we'll have a reading coach, even though we haven't had a librarian since 2003. ^%$%#$$@^%$*^%&^!!!!" "The [NCLB]law is sounding the demise for public education as we know it. . . . the law was enacted to grease the skids for vouchers."
"Shill corporations like the Cato Institute, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the Heritage Foundation have spent years and billions of dollars fabricating idea deconstruction systems constantly spewing cockamamie that frames and reframes and reframes the countrys agendas. Their managing of the nations discussions can be seen in the ways Social Security, fast track legislation, global rights agreements like NAFTA, war in the Middle East, energy and health care policies, revelations of corporate usurpations and other issues in the news are mass-produced from coast to coast.
"At one time, the purpose of the public schools, at least theoretically, was to educate children; now it is to produce higher FCAT scores, by whatever means necessary. If school officials believed that ingesting lizard meat improved FCAT performance, the cafeterias would be serving gecko nuggets." "Luque's class, English III FCAT, is for 11th-graders who failed the reading exam the previous spring. It offers no lessons on novels, plays or poetry -- just constant drilling on reading comprehension, the heart of FCAT. Like other F-rated high schools in Florida, Evans has been forced to focus on boosting reading skills. " "It is wholly unclear to me, as a Reading Recovery outsider, how so many current state [NCLB] Reading First designs support the use of completely unproven interventions Voyager or Waterford Early Reading for instance while failing to encourage the use of federal funds to support Reading RecoveryIf evidence scientific research evidence was the true standard for decisions, then Reading Recovery and other tutoring interventions would be available for every child who could benefit from them." "I think the whole [NCLB] rating system is deceiving and doesn't reflect all the factors. If you want to talk about destroying the motivations of both students and staff, the state and federal governments are doing a great job of that. " "The effects of NCLB (clearly distinguished from the high-minded rhetoric) are inhumane, unethical, and dangerous to the future of our democratic way of life. " " FCAT is an acronym standing for '(Very bad word) Comprehensive Assessment Test.'" "You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. " "When I was in college, the smart people were going into engineering, which had solid long-term prospects, and only we dweezils majored in English, and look what happened: Engineers are being laid off, America is losing its capacity to manufacture things (my phone was made in China, of course), but every day we turn out trillions of words about ourselves, bloggers blogging, floods of memoir, day-dreaming, carpet-chewing, and when eventually the Chinese repo men come to collect on our debt, they will find a nation of highly articulate self-aware people who can't change an oil filter but maintain wonderful Web sites. A nation of English majors." "Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, the least of these my brethren. Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded." "The transfer and choice provisions of NCLB will create chaos and produce greater inequality within the public system without increasing the capacity of receiving schools to deliver better educational services. These same transfer and choice provisions will not give low-income parents any more control over school bureaucracies than food stamps give them over the supermarkets. " " I think the very first quality that a good teacher has is that they care deeply for children and they want to see them learn; they want to see all children learn and succeed and realize their potential. They have to have the heart, the caring." "Don't take economics lessons from George Bush. Or Milton Friedman. Or Thomas Friedman. What that means, class, is don't believe the big, hot pile of hype that China's zooming economy is the result of that Red nation's adopting free market economic policies. " "We have five different schools. We have to compete for eighth-graders. You have to get them to sign up, to market your school, so you don't lose staffing. We have to compete for rooms and for budget. Everyone [at Mountlake Terrace] acknowledges this is a business model, and it doesn't fit. It has become very divisive for staff." "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. . . ." "No matter how cynical you become, it is never enough to keep up." "We're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern. " " The easiest way to refute the claim that NCLB is responsible for the gains on NAEP is to look at the trends over time. Black 9-year-olds gained 34 points in math between 1973 and 2004. They had added 21 of those points by 1999, three years before Bush signed NCLB into law. Other trends were upward bound as well. " "Loved Bushs speech to the nation on the Iraqi War. 'The war is going according to plan.' Well, then its a shitty, shitty plan." " 'We've tried the best we can,' is NOT a solution around here......so we keep learning new ways to listen and extend a hand of encouragement." "Science is ever evolving.... And as we learn more, we apply the knowledge." "To be a teacher means to confront the dark ambiguity of not having clear landmarks of success and failure. To be a teacher means to do what you can." "I think NCLB is falling short because the intent was actualized mainly through bureaucracy that made some assumptions based largely on, I think, academics more than anything else, rather than practitioners and especially successful practitioners. I know very few people associated with the implementation who are themselves successful practitioners, or worse, that even know anything about who the successful practitioners are. And as a result, they fall back on things like the slogan "Research Based," which has come to mean cobbling together things that have been found in different research studies, as if the resulting configurations constitute a powerful approach. And so everybody's busy doing things that separately look good, but when collected together really don't look like what great practitioners do when they do their work. " "The knowledge base for improving schools is thought to reside in large-scale, social science research. There is another knowledge base of inestimable value to the improvement of our schools. Although often overlooked and at times hard to find, 'craft knowledge,' the vast collection of experiences and learnings which those who live and work under the roof of the schoolhouse amass during their careers, has much to teach us."
"[Jean Paul] Sartre teaches that we are constantly tempted to escape our responsibility for creating ourselves from what we have been made - there is something comforting, after all, in feeling that things are beyond our control. But, as he also teaches, to accept this is to enter into complicity with the powers that would dominate us. Sartre demands that we see ourselves as active agents, even when we might prefer the irresponsibility of seeing ourselves as victims. "If you don't disagree with me, how will I know I'm right? "
"Ever since the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 took effect, some health officials have worried about an unintended side effect as schools struggle to meet the law's mandates that all children measure up in reading, math and other basic skills.
"We can educate our children and continue to strive for excellence without a federal noose around our neck." "Our society needs to train young people for jobs and careers. Where are the painters, mechanics, insurance salespeople, carpenters, bankers and other professionals and technicians going to learn their trade? Not from the system supported by the California Teachers Association. A college education and a classroom-lecture learning environment are not for everyone. Look at the street corners where you see young people craving a useful and interesting learning opportunity. California's education industry needs to provide meaningful, beneficial, nuts-and-bolts vocational education for high-school students, so they have a future of success and not failure." "My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast. "
"If I were 21 I would walk the earth. I would go barefoot longer; I'd learn how to throw a Frisbee, I'd go braless if I were a woman and I would wear no underwear if I were a man. I'd play cards and wear the same pair of jeans until they were so stiff they could get up and strut around the room by themselves. ... So don't take the short road. Fool around. Have fun. ... You're not going to get this time back. Don't panic and go to graduate school and law school. This nation has enough frightened, dissatisfied yuppies living in gated communities, driving S.U.V.'s and wondering where their youth went.
"If someone in kindergarten today were to write a Fulghum type book as an adult it would be titled, Every thing I needed to know about phonemic awareness and how to be burned out as a learner by third grade I learned in kindergarten. " "The real question for the future is whether, after this barrage of mindless and endless assessment, there will be any inquiring minds left." "If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual." "More Americans already work in art, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors." "Regrettably, in all but a few of our states, NCLB tests chosen by their state education agencies are more influenced by students' socioeconomic status than by a school's instructional success."
"Everything-- "As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider. " ""Stand up for your fucking rights!"" "But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?" "We need to stand up for what we are supposed to be doing in public education." "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." "Laura's blithe assertion [in comedy skit at White House Correspondents' Dinner] that 'George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chainsaw. Which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well.' That comparison of the president's ranching style to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-one of her speech's better lines--was kind of cute, until you carried the analogy to its logical conclusion: The way Bush runs a ranch is similar to the way he conducts the business of state. The way Bush runs a ranch is clueless, absolutist, and wantonly destructive. Ergo . . . ." "Which takes longer: Form a new government in Iraq or fund schools in Texas? Three months ago, Iraq held elections and began the process of forming a government after decades of dictatorship. Three months ago, the Texas Legislature met with the primary job of finding a way to adequately pay for the states public schools. 90 days later and the Iraqis have a government. 90 days later, the Texas Legislature is seized up worse than a 69 Falcon with an empty crankcase." "Children have become faceless student numbers computer-matched to student scores, individuals being forced into the same mold with no recognition of their differences. School is monotonous drill instead of the creative, exciting, stimulating environment that it should be. " "The paperwork and meetings involved to support an IEP are intensive. They are also worthless, as these kids must pass the same test as "normal" students without all of the accommodations they are familiar with. It is like taking a deaf person's hearing aid away and expecting him to pass an oral quiz. " "We don't need people who can spit back facts. We've got Google." "Free the markets. Screw the people." " The Department has posted sample tests for students and parents to use, including the correct answers, so they can work on weak areas and be prepared for the test; for the first time the test questions are written by Arizona teachers so the questions will be a good match to what is taught in class; and the student reports will be sent to parents in early June as opposed to September in the event that a student may need any tutoring or other assistance over the summer." "The No Child Left Behind Act is the most damaging, intrusive piece of legislation to enter education in my 32 years as a public school administrator. " "He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back." "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." " We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will makeit would hopeput a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see." "Reliable data should enter the language as a new euphemism for budget cuts to programs that serve the poor." "If the federal government is forced to fund NCLB, it'll still be bad. Washington is defining accountability and achievement all wrong. Funding the wrong thing still leaves a wrong thing. " ""Institutions like Juilliard have the responsibility to differentiate between the marketplace and the art form. Knowing...that demand is not at its peak, you don't create an organ department of 50 majors; right now, we have nine. But [we] have a responsibility to educate individuals who can knowledgeably carry forward the traditions of this great instrument. If you develop everything based on the marketplace,you'll eventually have a school dedicated to 'American Idol.'" "The law requires Washington to pay for it [NCLB], and the fact is that Washington is not keeping that promise. As a result, our parents' tax dollars are getting steered away from the classroom and going towards boosting the profits of testing companies, instead of going towards their children's education." "The paramount question is who runs this show: Is it state and local government or Washington? Are we going to let the federal government contribute a very small percentage of the education budget and dictate what we can or cannot do, or are we going to maintain control at the local level?" "What do you call it when multinational corporations scan the world for cheap labor, find poor people in developing nations, and pay them a fraction of America's minimum wage? A common answer on the left is 'exploitation.' For Thomas Friedman the answer is 'collaboration'or "empowering individuals in the developing world as never before." "If No Child Left Behind means for us to look at the problem of poverty, let's look at it. " "Would we be better off simply telling the federal government to drop dead and not accept the NCLB money?" "When George Bush and Teddy Kennedy join forces to wrest control of our education system and place it in the hands of that intellectual cesspool we call a Congress, it is time for something different." "You have such a low opinion of teachers that you believe that they are incapable of challenging students without the College Board's Advanced Placement 'star to guide them.' That's nonsense." "The markers of true educational quality are far more difficult to quantify than the number of students enrolled in a particular class. . . . Ranking of schools encourages a destructive competitiveness, leading institutions away from offering rich alternatives and toward a stultifying sameness."
"Defining a "highly qualified teacher" as one who has knowledge of the content to be taught parallels the neoliberal stance that teaching can be defined as the transmission of content and that schools have no social or political responsibilities beyond providing an education that is de facto vocational training. . . . "The glue that held together the bipartisan endorsement of NCLB is the shared ideological support for neoliberalism's program for the global capitalist economy, a global transformation in education's character and role.1 NCLB enacts the program for education that neoliberal economists and governments pursue internationally." "NCLB draws on and encourages the powerful political mythology touted consistently in the media that schooling is the most effective way to overcome social inequality. This notion persists despite the overwhelming evidence that our educational system reproduces existing social relations a great deal more efficiently than it disrupts them." "Parents who want their children to grow up to be more than blindly obedient worksheet completers must challenge CEO classroom encroachment. Citizens who value democracy must join them." "When corporate leaders shape government institutions according to their needs, we move away from democracy and toward corporatism, a relative of, and arguably a precursor to, fascism. " " Let's quit calling it public EDUCATION. It's more like compulsory public "Jeopardy."" "Much of NCLB still falls on the other side of sanity. For example, President Bush has hatched the idea of denying development grants to neighborhoods where schools are having trouble with NCLB. Why is that nuts? There is a straight line between poverty and poor schools. To help the schools, help the neighborhood. NCLB, under this proposal, is No Child Leaves Blight." "Native American needs are at one end of a continuum, and NCLB exists at another. The law emphasizes the opposite of what is known about Native learning styles - that is, it rewards part-to-whole instead of whole-to-part learning, abstract thought instead of hands-on experience, and linguistic instead of visual teaching strategies." "If you ask the rich why youre not capable of supporting yourself, theyll tell you it is your fault. The ones who make it to the lifeboats always think the ones in the water are to blame. " " If ETS statisticians determined during pilot testing that most students could identify George Washington, 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' Rosa Parks, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, slavery as a main cause of the Civil War, the purpose of Auschwitz, Babe Ruth, Harriet Tubman, the civil rights movement, the 'I Have a Dream' speech, all those items would be eliminated from the test, for such questions fail to discriminate among students. So, when the next national assessment rolls around in 2010, do not hold your breath for the headline announcing, U.S. schoolchildren score well on the 100 most basic facts of American history. The architecture of modern psychometrics ensures that will never happenno matter how good a job we do in the classroom. " "Complex questions often require complex answers, but not here. Kids look dumb on history tests because the system conspires to make them look dumb. The system is rigged. " "There is no research that shows that early academic programs have a lasting positive impact on children. In fact studies show that the high pressure of early academic programs can result in children with higher anxiety levels and lower self-esteem who are not doing any better academically." "No Child Left Behind is the law of the land. My goal as secretary of education is to help states continue to implement it, and to stabilize and embed this positive change. . . . Annual assessments are nonnegotiable, because what gets measured gets done. "
"Policymakers may find rows of students dressed in identical new uniforms irresistible, but the mandatory school uniform is the biggest red herring in education today, distracting us from the real sources of effective schools. "[NCLB] is ill-fitting and doesn't follow the values we have with regard to teaching and testing and learning." " "From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop." "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up." "In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes." "5/4 people dont know how to do fractions." "Make our high school more like a school and less like a prison. They have us on lockdown." "ROD PAIGE, former superintendent of the failing (when it isn't cheating) Houston school system and inspiration for the disastrous No Child Left Behind act, has been named a fellow at Washington's prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center."
"Sure, call me any ugly name you choose "[The National Merit Scholarship Program's] way of creating the pool from which the National Merit Scholars will be selected is totally bogus. Using the PSAT in a way its never been validated for and then arbitrarily setting the cutoff score based on nothing but the number of applicants they want is not only fraudulent, but it has a devastating impact on underrepresented students and minorities. "
"Of formal education Faulkner certainly had a minimum. He dropped out of high school in his junior year (his parents seem not to have made a fuss), and though he briefly attended the University of Mississippi, that was only by grace of a dispensation for returned servicemen. ... His college record was undistinguished: a semester of English (grade: D), two semesters of French and Spanish. For this explorer of the mind of the post-bellum South, no courses in history; for the novelist who would weave Bergsonian time into the syntax of memory, no studies in philosophy or psychology.
"Recent reforms are to the SAT as: "NAEP's current achievement level setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results." "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." "The scores we get from high-stakes tests cannot be trustedthey are corrupted and distorted. Moreover, such tests cannot adequately measure the important things we really want to measure. Even worse, to us, is the other issuethe people issue. High-stakes testing programs corrupt and distort the people in the educational system and that cannot be good for a profession as vital to our nation as is teaching. We need to stop the wreckage of our public educational system through the use of high-stakes testing as soon as possible." "Momma, don't let your baby grow up to be a Standardisto." " Lynne Cheney has taken to writing and promoting triumphalist children's history books that, as she said on Fox News recently, offer 'an uncynical approach to our nation and to our national story.' (So much for her own out-of-print Deadwood-esque novel of 1981, Sisters, with its evocation of lesbian passions on the frontier.) That's her right. But when her taste is enforced as government policy that's another matter. The vice president's wife has used her current political clout, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered last fall, to quietly squelch a Department of Education history curriculum pamphlet for parents that didn't fit her political agenda."
" American is run by over paid, incompetent frauds who are served by hacks passing as editorialists. The hacks rely on analysts to do their thinking for them and the analysts always have the same advice: Make workers pay. " Charter schools are an experiment in public education. You put up a sign and you hope people will come. That's what the federal funding is for." "Many first graders are having a hard time adjusting to the full day in first grade, so the Standardista solution is to give them a full day of kindergarten. These first graders are six years old. Maybe we should look at what they are being asked to DO in first grade that makes their day feel so long--instead of making five-year-olds also stay longer. " "Hidden line items [in NCLB] betray the laws politically conservative agenda. Federal money to train history teachers can be used only for traditional American history, meaning a fact-based curriculum about national leaders, and not a multicultural approach about social movements. Sex education must emphasize abstinence even though no scientific data show that this curriculum approach helps reduce AIDS or teen pregnancy." "Old top-down reporting habits never adequate to begin with become even more dangerous when used to analyze the impact of such far-reaching, top-down reforms as the elimination of social promotion and No Child Left Behind, the landmark federal act that brings President Bushs twin philosophies of accountability and market competition to bear on the messy business of education." " [All the hooplah about new tests is] old wine in new bottles. We were told there would be new kinds of testing, but they are doing things no differently."
"This is the first year that the TAKS is implemented at its intended rigor.1 "Most (students) would rather eat a golf ball before they try to do well on the CSAPs. Students aren't idiots. We know what the CSAPs are for. They grade the school. They don't grade us."
"Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled children yearning to breathe free, set free the wretched hoards of your teeming home!''
Yes, after years of simmering unrest, the manifesto is finally out. And a
call to arms rings out across the land: Parents of the world, unite!
"At this proximity " In the midst of this era of an almost irrational 'rush to college' mentality, I hope that Gates' "rush to restructure high schools" includes a thoughtful, respectful, and intelligent look at vocational education and the important role it plays in the education of craftsmen and women. Just try to get a skilled, professional carpenter, electrician, plumber, mechanic, or craftsperson in 21st Century America. " " Bhutan challenges the conventional yardstick for measuring economic development and growth, the quantitative measure of gross national product (GNP). Bhutan has introduced and is working with the holistic, multidimensional measure of gross national happiness (GNH). According to the Royal Government of Bhutan, 'Gross national happiness comprises four pillars: economic self-reliance, environmental preservation, cultural promotion, and good governance. These four goals are mutually linked, complementary, and consistent. They embody national values, aesthetics, and spiritual traditions.'" "Hijacking the language proves especially pernicious when government officials deodorize their programs with near-Orwellian euphemism. (If Orwell were writing "Politics and the English Language" today, he'd need a telephone book to contain his "catalog of swindles and perversions. ") The Bush administration has been especially good at this; just count the number of times self-anointing phrases like "Patriot Act," "Clear Skies Act" or "No Child Left Behind Act" appear in The Times, at each appearance sounding as wholesome as a hymn. Even the most committed Republicans must recognize that such phrases could apply to measures guaranteeing the opposite of what they claim to accomplish." "Saying that the No Child Left Behind Act is a good idea that lacks funding is like saying that Concentration Camps would have been better if there had been more money to make the walls higher and hire more guards." "Weighing the pig more often will not make it grow faster." "How much longer will educators at all levels continue to poop on the paper the corporate-politico ed biz whizzes set down for them?" "Members of Congress, who now make about $160,000 a year, have given themselves at least five cost-of-living increases since the minimum wage last changed in 1997. American workers who still make $5.15 an hour will just have to wait." " At a minimum, we are looking for a written statement that assures the state of Utah full control of governance and accountability measures in Utah's schools. In addition, we need local control of our educator qualification, certification and licensure." "Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor!" "Don't place so much emphasis on your child's test scores that you lose sight of his well being. " "While it may have started out as beneficial, I would say the No Child Left Behind legislation's emphasis on standardized testing is actually the biggest disaster that education has seen in 50 years. We're teaching (students) what to think, but not how to think." "Education reform or renaissance? That is the problem in a nutshell. We got the word wrong. And, everything else that went with it. We went back several centuries to try to figure out how to improve education and came up with the idea of reform. The Reformation was a religious movement that dates back to the 1500's. Right then and there, the proponents should have remembered the separation of church and state issues in our Constitution and realized they had it wrong. The word they should have been looking for was Renaissance. The Renaissance thinkers studied humanity and different cultures. Do we want Education Reform--the amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved. Or, would Education Renaissance--a movement or period of vigorous artistic and intellectual activity be a better choice?" "This issue [NCLB] is a lot bigger than the details of teacher qualifications and student testing. This is about who controls education - the states or Washington." "We take the output of the schools, the students, as a source of employees for the business community." " Security [for the FCAT] is not a high priority simply to short-circuit cheaters. The state has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to write, administer and grade the test. The current multiyear contract with testing companies NCS Pearson and Harcourt Brace is $145 million." "It does not make sense to force all students into the same curricular pattern [or] mold. This is likely to yield many disaffected students, a lot of dropouts, and other unintended consequences. I think it is better to have some flexibility in courses, a variety of tracks, if you like." "Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group created after the 1996 Educational Summit of governors and business leaders meeting to firm up their curriculum regulations for the schools, hires out its 'benchmarking servcies' to individual states. These services are pricey, but Achieve is quick to point out that states don't have to pony up the money for educational overhaul. In a cozy rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul arrangement among business brethren, Achieve helps states find funding to pay off the consultants Achieve sends in. The Illinios Achieve Review, for example, was co-sponsored by the Illinois Buiness Roundtable, the Ohio Review by the Ohio Business Roundtable, and so on. There you have it: big business hires big business to pronounce judgment on the work of teachers. Big business hires big business to pronounce judgment on what children need. In Illinois the roving consultants announce that the state's children need more intensive phonics; in Ohio they call for children to learn about native son William Dean Howells; in New Jersey they call for a beefing-up of academic writing. Yes, if Achieve has its way, students who don't measure up in academic writing will be benched. Permanently. No high school diploma."
"There is a misapprehension of the scientific method, its elevation to an all-encompassing world view...Let me oversimplify this misapprehension and state it as briefly as possible...The secret is simply this: the scientist, in practicing the scientific method, cannot utter a single word about an individual thing or creature insofar as it is a individual but only insofar as it resembles other individuals. This limitation holds true whether the individual is a molecule of NaCl or an amoeba or a human being....We all remember taking science courses where one was confronted with a sample ofsodium chloride ora specimenof a dogfish to dissect. Such studies reveal the properties shared by all sodium chloride and by all dogfish. We have no particular interest in this particular pinch of salt or this particular dogfish. "Really, we try to leave the military everything out of it [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery]. We pretty much focus on that it's a career exploration program that we're doing for the schools. Which is what it is."" "Our tests and our testing program was developed to support instruction. There was never an accountability purpose attached to our test; that's never what we wanted them to be used for." " In other words, the tests are designed to measure students against our expectations of what students should know and be able to do. Teachers are teaching the standards, students are learning the standards and now were finally measuring student performance against the standards." "We are now beginning our Spring 2005 semester and we have news worth celebrating! Our first grade and kinder students TPRI scores are in and our students are soaring in Reading! The overall scores were on or above grade level in Reading. Teachers are now increasing homework Reading assignments and are also beginning ITBS practice sheets which will also be sent as homework. Please make sure that your child completes their homework daily. "
" Mr. Maley, the director of media relations for Ithaca College in New York, doesn't really have files; he has piles. He describes his system as a three-dimensional game of Concentration: "I can almost always find what I need or what someone else needs pretty quickly, by recalling which particular pile a certain piece of paper might be in, and figuring out how far down in the pile it probably is by the length of time since I received that piece of paper." "ANNALS OF IMPROBABLE RESEARCH - An editorial in the Winter 2004 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons reports that a toad provided more correct responses to Medicare policy questions than Medicare customer service representatives. A 2004 GAO study found that 96 percent of the time, customer reps gave the wrong answer to physicians asking how to bill Medicare. In response, Journal editor Lawrence Huntoon MD, PhD asked a toad a series of Medicare questions. A left jump meant a yes answer, a right jump meant no. The toad scored 50 percent." "My thesis is simple: The No Child Left Behind Act is a bad law, and a bad law is not made better by fully funding it." "You can go your whole life and not need math or physics for a minute, but the ability to tell a joke is always handy. " "A bipartisan panel of state lawmakers that studied the effectiveness of President Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative assailed it today as a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform effort that had usurped state and local control of public schools. " "In the fall of 2002, in Palo Alto, California, a group of academics were gathered at a party. They were discussing the NRC report and the current federal policy of privileging randomized field trials as the Gold Standard for educational research. One of the people in the room was a physician. He mentioned a report published in a medical journal that quoted a researcher who had worked for many years at the top laboratory for polio research, the Salk Institute. The medical researcher said that if knowledge development in polio research had had to depend only on conclusive findings from experiments, research on polio would today consist mainly of studies of the treatment effects of the iron lung." "Freedom of expression is not just about fighting for big issues but defending small issues, too. That's what we did." "War is a racket. The common folks die and get maimed, and the big corporations and the politicians prosper. Don't let the liars in Washington abuse your children and their patriotism." "Business learned the importance of data-driven decisionmaking a long time ago. Education is catching up and must achieve this in this legislative session." "It costs [New York] state about $32,000 a year to keep a person in jail. It costs the Bard Prison Initiative only $2,000 to provide a student with a year of college education." "I cannot do novels. We can't read books to [students] because they don't go with FCAT." "A party which is not afraid of letting culture, business, and welfare go to ruin completely can be omnipotent for a while." "If you have a fire in your home, you really don't care whether someone got a 99 on the exam. You want someone who's tough, courageous, strong, and willing to walk through a fire to save you. " "If ChoicePoint were a library, it might be the largest building on Earth. Its computers will soon hold 200 terabytes of information. Compare that to the Library of Congress, whose 18 million books would constitute a mere 20 terabytes. To manage the 17 billion records in its various databases, ChoicePoint employs 4,200 staffers in 70 offices in 28 states and Washington, D.C. The mountain of data that ChoicePoint amassed is headquartered inside two, 200,000-square-foot glass and brick buildings 30 miles north of Atlanta." "New Rule: Stop claiming you have an agenda. It's not an agenda. It's a random collection of laws that your corporate donors paid you to pass." "Those who savage the public schools tear at the heart of this country. Everything America is or ever hopes to be depends upon what happens to those 46.3 million students in public school classrooms. " "Look for the truth exactly on the spot where you stand." "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. That struggle might be a moral one; it might be a physical one; it might be both moral and physical, but it must be struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will."
"Those poor little guys [referring to the attempts by teacher unions to run ads accusing him of budget cruelties]. They're trying very hard. . . . They may have a wonderful dream about that. But the reality is very sad for them. The reality is that they're not going to get my numbers down.
"There does seem to be a campaign against public education in this state" "They had to make public education in the state look bad in that presentation. Yes, I'm calling the governor a liar." "If you're a younger person, you ought to be asking members of Congress and the United States Senate and the president what you intend to do about it. If you see a train wreck coming, you ought to be saying, what are you going to do about it, Mr. Congressman, or Madam Congressman?" " NCLB is the greatest intrusion into states' rights in education we have seen in probably 100 year." "Kindergarten Lesson: My favorite Word Learning Objective and Preparation "I can rattle off the fifty states in alphabetical order in seventeen seconds." "Teachers have a good handle on how children are doing and who is falling behind. Our kids have enough things to be stressed about without adding more tests." "Corporate rule must be challenged in order to revive the values and practices it contradicts: democracy, social justice, equality, and compassion." "Now, failing to earn a diploma courts catastrophe. A high school education has become a life necessity. This change profoundly affects the moral significance and practical consequences of current policies. What was once a voluntary 'achievement incentive' for the few, has become a universal 'minimum standard' for all, and not just for school but for surviving in our society." "Testing at high school levels will help us to become more competitive as the years go by. Testing in high schools will make sure that our children are employable for the jobs of the 21st century." "Anyone who keeps an eye on mainstream news is up to speed on the latest presidential spin. But the reporters who tell us what the president wants us to hear should go beyond stenography to note historic echoes and point out basic contradictions." "Imagine the United States without public education. That is the goal of many who are currently in positions of political power, along with numerous other advocates for vouchers and privatization of public education. Their vision, although clearly not in the public interest, will likely become a reality if we fail to respond forcefully. That response must provide a credible counter to the increasingly successful efforts to date of public education opponents to influence public and political thought in this country. Its our choice: We can stand by and witness the dismantling of our public education system, or we take effective action now." " Suppose you run your business and let me run mine." "Someone once said about great discoveries in science, "Accidents happen to those that deserve them." If the bird coming in the window is just a nuisance, you don't deserve it, and in fact it never happens. If you deserve it, the bird will fly in the window or there'll be a door that opens into the jungle. " "In thinking, the only important question is whether it's true or not, not whether it's practical. When you're making decisions about how you're going to behave, you may have to make compromises, but for heaven's sake, let's not start shading our beliefs in order to make an uncomfortable situation more comfortable. . . ." "A fundamental aim of education is to organize schools, classrooms and our own performances as teachers in order to help children acquire the capacity for significant choice. Learning is really a process of choice. If children are deprived of significant choice in their daily activities in school, if all their choices are made for them, then the most important thing that education is concerned with is simply being bypassed." "Bush doesn't just want to dismantle the 60's. He wants to dismantle the whole century - from the Scopes trial to Social Security. He can shred one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal and then go after other big safety-net Democratic programs, reversing the prevailing philosophy of many decades that our tax and social welfare systems should equalize the distribution of wealth, just a little bit. Barry Goldwater wouldn't have had the brass to take a jackhammer to that edifice." "I am going to talk over them; I am going to talk through them[teachers unions]." "Make the customer think he's getting laid when he's getting fucked." " What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." "People don't go to school to learn. They go to get good grades." "Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of Communism and socialistic influence is education of the people." "You don't teach comprehension through reading in the early grades; you teach comprehension through oral instruction. " "As hideous as Open Court is in English, just cube that in Spanish." "[Open Court] is boring. It stifles initiative and creativity and frustrates everyone--students and teachers. When they give the Teacher of the Year Award, they always give it to wonderfully creative teachers. They don't give it for reading a script--'This woman can really read like a metronome!'--and God help us, let's hope they never do." "[Scripted programs] take the professionalism out of the profession. You don't have to think; you don't have to modify; you just script. " "I have never been academically smart, ever, in the whole time I've been in school. I'm smart, but it's just not book smart. It's like hands-on-skills kind of smart." "Those who savage the public schools tear at the heart of this country. Everything America is or ever hopes to be depends upon what happens to those 46.3 million students in public school classrooms. " "In these times, caring about education means caring about the implementation of No Child Left Behind. " "The implicit message from the state to local schools [in their aiding and abetting NCLB] is 'send away your moderately to severely disabled students, dont include them in regular classes, and do everything in your power to discourage immigrants, minorities, and the poor.' A message of disgrace." "There's very little oversight of the testing industry. In fact, there is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take." "Teachers unions have become the largest single barrier to better American schools, and the political system needs to find ways to reduce their destructive influence." "I spent 20 years in the computer industry before becoming a public-school teacher five years ago. I had risen to become vice president at one of the world's largest software companies. I know business. And I know something about education as well. Education is harder." "I view offering a longer school day for those who need it as one of the last frontiers of education reform. " "Never since his assassination in 1968 have I felt the absence of Martin Luther King more acutely. Where are today's voices of moral outrage? Where is the leadership willing to stand up and say: Enough! We've sullied ourselves enough." "Teaching is one of the few professions where your performance is largely unrelated to your compensation. Teachers who are putting in extra time and work get no more than teachers who are getting the bare minimum. That's a real problem." "In judging whether Corporate America is serious about reforming itself, CEO pay remains the acid test. To date, the results arent encouraging. " "This is an artificial score, and I don't think it accurately judges a school system at all. No urban system is going to do well with No Child Left Behind. It's a joke." "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. . . .Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." "The supporters of NCLB may talk children, but they walk corporate." "The media in this country should be a sanctuary for dissent. Instead the media simply acts as a megaphone for the people in power."
"Words strain, "Don't mourn, organize." "The assistant principal Mr. D. understood the fact that the New York Mets were in the World Series in 1969 was an event of legitimate historical importance, and we should be witness to it. He allowed my class to watch the game on television. . .even though we were supposed to be learning fractions."
"
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.
"Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple. The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience. " "Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. The use of corrupt majnipulations and rhetorical ploys to advance an argument suggests that the presenter cannot be trusted. "
"THE WASHINGTON POST: Why do you think [Osama] bin Laden has not been caught? "Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school." "Democracy is meaningless if the people can't get accurate information." "Activism at its most contagious is always linked to celebration and joy." "I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational service is rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the educational establishment--a necessary pre-condition for radical improvement in our educational system.. . .The privatization of schooling would produce a new, highly active and profitable industry. . . ."" "It's [Harcourt Assessment mishaps] a concern to us on a number of levels. I've heard negative press reports on every test publisher we've ever done business with. There's no relationship you can have with a contractor who hasn't made a mistake."
"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for allregardless of station, race, or creed. "We strongly support the No Child Left Behind legislation because it works to create a K through 12 system that is more competitive with the educational systems of other industrialized nations and will lead to a better educated and more highly skilled American workforce in the future. " "Armstrong Williams' $240,000 contract was his cut from the Bush voucher Bagman, Rod Paige." "Any focus group could inform corporate media that Armstrong Williams is among the most despised personalities in Black America right up there with his old friend and boss, Clarence Thomas. That couldnt be good for ratings among the important Black demographic and Williams is so generally obnoxious we doubt that hes a big draw among whites, either. No, corporate media boosted Williams because he reflects the worldview of corporate executives, the people who really run the show. USA Today broke the Armstrong Williams scandal, but they previously ran his journalistically worthless column, week after week. He was speaking their language." "Testing is important. Testing at high school levels will help us become more competitive as the years go by. Testing in high schools will make sure that our children are employable for the jobs of the 21st century. ... Testing will make sure the diploma is not merely a sign of endurance, but the mark of a young person ready to succeed." "We have zero tolerance for cheating." "The No Child Left Behind legislation is really a very expensive ruse to keep from having to make the serious investment to make our schools really good schools. That's the biggest way the system cheats." "At a time when California faces a potentially catastrophic teacher shortage, Schwarzenegger wants to make it even more difficult for them to get tenure -- more difficult than it is to get tenure at Harvard or Stanford. Instead of more hurdles, Schwarzenegger should be giving teachers more help --that should be the starting point for Schwarzenegger's education plan. " "Today's education debates are poisoned by the insistence of partisans on finding a single cause, whether it be low standards, parental inattention, or lack of money, or continuing racial inequality, and to denounce remedies that address others." "If A equal success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut." "In my decade in the classroom, I witnessed several new policy initiatives. I felt like Lady Macbeth, wondering, What new hell is this? every time a legislature signed a new education law into effect. Almost all were anathema to the way I had been educated to teach and to what I believed was right for children. " "You know, No Child Left Behind--a lot of conservatives hated it; a lot of Democrats hated it. The only way you could get somebody to say something nice about it is pay them $240,000." "The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government 50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war (1) and the UK 6bn ($11.5bn).(2) The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half days spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war." "There is completely no trust in teachers when they try to make it so prescripted. If they want everyone to be on the same page, they should hire robots, not teachers. " " Great wrong doesn't just come out of the barrel of the gun; it also comes from the cynical rationalizations of those who are meant to know better." "For 20 years, Bates College in Maine has made it optional for applicants to submit SAT scores. College Vice President Bill Hiss was the architect of that testing policy, and he says that it's made the school stronger." "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." " Truth and belief are uncomfortable words in scholarship. It is possible to define as true only those things that can be proved by certain agreed criteria. In general, science does not believe in truth or, more precisely, science does not believe in belief. Understanding is understood as the best fit to the data under the current limits (both instrumental and philosophical) of observation. If science fetishized truth, it would be religion, which it is not. However, it is clear that under the conditions that Thomas Kuhn designated as " normal science" (as opposed to the intellectual ferment of paradigm shifts) most scholars are involved in supporting what is, in effect, a religion. Their best guesses become fossilized as a status quo, and the status quo becomes an item of faith. So when a scientist tells you that 'the truth is . . .', it is time to walk away. Better to find a priest." " The more we reward excellent teachers, the more our teachers will be excellent. The more we tolerate ineffective teachers, the more our teachers will be ineffective." "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. " "Go fuck yourself." " "Go fuck yourself." "Just once I'd like to hear someone say, 'These numbers are nonsense.'" "I think of teachers as manufacturers and students as products." "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." "Your child also needs a backpack or -- if you wish to have a truly modern, state-of-the-art schoolchild -- an actual airline-style suitcase with a handle and wheels. In my neighborhood I see elementary-school students hauling these things around, and I say to myself, 'They're in SECOND grade! What are they CARRYING in there? Fifty-pound Twinkies?' But that is not the point. The point is, American students may not have the best educational test scores when compared to foreign students, or even certain species of foreign plants, but by gosh our kids lead the world in cubic feet of academic carrying capacity. " "What if we say to Sammy Sosa, We will base your contract on how you bat on July 5, and what if he has a bad game that day? The problem is the NCLB system is based on a single, high-stakes test, and it does not even test what we are teaching. " "Standardized testing is the worst thing that could have happened. You're producing scientists that think every experiment has perfect answers." "And, whenever you checkout, before you checkout of a hotel or a motel, leave a tip for the maid. Always, always tip the maid. " "The Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, with a bachelor's degree in sociology, is not qualified to teach at all in a Chicago public school. Literally with no education qualifications, he can dictate what goes on in the education of 436,000 children and 50,000 employees in 600 different school communities." "Chicago Public Schools has embarked on an untested effort to charterize and privatize our schools, while giving them more money. The Daley team has had nine years to turn these schools around. They are now risking the futures of poor and minority students in struggling schools on an untested experiment. Renaissance 2010 will turn over entire schools to groups or businesses with no track record of turning around struggling, high-poverty schools." " Overall, the jobs of the future will require only modest skill growth. In fact, the demand for increased skills is increasing more slowly than in the past. School improvement may be a good idea, but we need better reasons than a false skills crisis. If we reform schools for the wrong reasons, we will reform them in the wrong ways." "The business man has, of course, not said to himself: 'I will have the public school train office boys and clerks for me, so that I may have them cheap';but he has thought, and sometimes said: 'Teach the children to write legibly, and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey, and not question why; and you will fit them to make their way in the world as I have made mine.'" "How quickly they point to the teachers when they wish to cast blame for a failing federal program. It, of course, couldnt possibly be that the testing program simply doesnt address the problems of education, could it?" "Even at the best, mini-schools can provide only a partial solution. Even if all 200 of the new or proposed ones flourish, a vast majority of New York's high school pupils will still attend large, traditional schools. The Klein and Bloomberg administrations cannot possibly succeed in their ambitious and admirable goals for public education if large high schools remain the stepchildren of the system, whether being closed or being overwhelmed." "Of course, Behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public. " "People have to remember that Iraq is the size of California and Baghdad is the size of Los Angeles. If the news reported all the deaths in Los Angeles on a daily basis no one would ever go to Disneyland." "School takover does not come with pixie dust and a magic wand."
"Recess retreats from the school landscape, and that is a sin. "You end up blowing 30 minutes of potential instructional time to gain the limited benefits of having recess. It's become a luxury we can't afford." "My sweet Lord, have we been a generous people when it comes to private enterprise. There has been a shift in welfare in this country, in case you missed it. Money doesn't trickle down. It trickles up." "Dead students do not do well in testing. " "The report card gives short shrift to play, to art, to all those activities that aren't narrowly focused on literacy and math. And by sending that document home, the strong message to parents is: These narrow skills are what we're after in kindergarten, not the whole picture of the child as a social being, an emotional being, as a member of a community. And this school is saying, `We're not willing to do that.'" "In concert with the other political directions this government is pursuing, we are witnessing a war on childhood. Schools are becoming 'work camps' and children simply compliant human capital to be equipped with marketable skills. To ensure attainment of governments 'deadening' goals and objectives, the establishment of which teachers have never condoned or been part of, supervision will be a key component." "Noticeably absent from this [government's] 'achievement' vocabulary is any notion of enjoyment, pleasure, or recreation. Instead there are accountability, data collection, and, most recently, supervision-supervision of teachers, conducted by principals who are themselves supposedly supervised by directors and superintendents who are in turn supervised by the deputy minister and the ministry. It is a top-down, paternalistic model of continuous surveillance ostensibly aimed at improving instruction (no longer teaching) and of course 'achievement' (as measured by tests)." "We're training our children to be the most anxious, stressed-out, sleep-deprived, judged and tested, poorly nourished generation in history. " "If there is one thing Democrats should have learned from Karl Rove during this years election, it is the value of relentlessly attacking day in and day out your opponents perceived strength. . . .The loyal opposition needs to finally start opposing this administrations most catastrophic failure and make it clear that standing up to its delusions and incompetence is standing up for the truth." "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. [If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said. If counter-arguments are put] in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far." "Look, when a president of the United States, any president, Republican or Democrat, says these are the facts, there is heavy prejudice, including my own, to give him the benefit of any doubt, and for that I do not apologize." "In these times, caring about education means caring about the implementation of No Child Left Behind. " "Cooperative learning 'is doomed to failure' because it conflicts with the American economic and social system. It goes against the American grain, the individualism that creates the entrepreneurship we as a people have historically espoused. In a utopia it would be wonderful. But education should prepare kids for life in a particular culture. In reality the name of the game is dog eat dog. Kids have to learn that you get something through your own smarts." "The Business Roundtable has been at the forefront of the effort to craft, pass and implement the No Child Left Behind Act." ""Basically, these 15-year-old children [in Finland, scoring at top in world] who have been involved in PISA, have never experienced any standardized testing. This is equally important for teachers, so that they can really focus on learning and teaching rather than preparing students for tests or exams." ". . .for those of you who are intimidated or threatened by No Child Left Behind, the world is actually going to become worse as we go along. I mean to say, more demanding. And it will look back at No Child Left Behind as kind of just an initial foot in the water, if you will, to the world were about to enter. " "Rather than getting away from No Child Left Behind, I think No Child Left Behind is going to drive us even deeper into more sophistication. Deeper into more robust data. Deeper into knowing exactly where each child is. And I think its good news but its going to be somewhat challenging and perhaps even threatening for those who are having a problem with No Child Left Behind. " "From the beginning play helps children learn how to control themselves, how to interact with others. Contrary to the widely held belief that only intellectual activities build a sharp brain, it's in play that cognitive agility really develops. Studies of children and adults around the world demonstrate that social engagement actually improves intellectual skills. It fosters decision-making, memory and thinking, speed of mental processing."
"Using MCAS test results as the sole basis for awarding free state college tuition just might amount to consumer fraud. "I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational service is rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the educational establishment a necessary pre-condition for radical improvement in our educational system." "The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart - a revolution which has to start with each one of us." ""In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now." Nobel Peace Prize winner, Environmental Activist. " "Individual teachers must take an active and prominent role in educating the public about the [NCLB] law and its negative impact. Public opinion surveys, such as the respected Phi Delta Kappan annual poll, conclude that teachers are the most respected voices in education. Teachers can help mobilize the public to support change. Educators especially need to reach out to parents, who are likely to turn to teachers for information." "How many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers." "NCLB usurps the power of local communities to choose their own policies and programs. It represents a power grab on the part of the federal government that is unprecedented in the history of U. S. education" " Above all, NCLB assumes that neither children, their families, their teachers, nor their communities can be trusted to make important decisions about their schools. It defines such parties as special biased self-interest, whose judgment is inferior to that of the bureaucrats at the Department of Education and the various testing services. " "If we lived in an alternate universe where income equality really was a goal of federal economic policy and an NCLB-like system of sanctions put pressure on the titans of industry and commerce to attain such a lofty goal, what might be appropriate remedies for such a dismal performance: "corrective action?" to borrow the language of NCLB sanctions, economic restructuring? reconstitution of our major corporations? How about "state takeover"?" "Already 28,000 of the nation's 90,000 schools have been warned they are candidates for 'the list,' and estimates indicate that ultimately over 75 percent of all public schools will be labeled 'in need of improvement.' The main effect will not be to promote school improvement or accountabiity, but to create a widespread public perception of systemic failure that will erode the common ground a universal system of public education needs to survive." "The keys to school improvement are not standards and tests, but teachers and students. And while teachers and students need a complicated mix of support, resources, motivation, pressure, leadership, and professional skills to succeed, the idea that this mixture can be provided by test-driven sanctions is simply wrong and is not supported by any educational research or real world experience."
"What is to be done? Educators, parents, and students need to come together to challenge what is happening to the daily quality of school life for our children as a result of the [NCLB] pressure on testing. We seem to have accepted these tests as a fact of life when in fact they are only a recent development with no proved history. And now we have for the first time a federal law that mandates this unproven measure of our schools as the arbiter of what counts as a quality education.
"NCLB is set up to penalize schools that actually do attempt to make a difference for our poor and minority students. . . . Schools with more diverse populations are being punished by NCLB. Called the "diversity penalty," this phenomenon occurs because the greater the diversity in a school the more likely the school will fail to meet AYP. (Remember that failing to meet AYP means that schools will be punished.) This is because of a specific feature of the legislation which says that if just one so-called subgroup fails to meet the standard, the entire school fails. For example, in one Florida school district a school previously judged to be outstanding suddenly found itself rated as failing even though 80 percent of its students were judged to be proficient in math and 88 percent in reading. The reason for the failing score was that a group of 45 special education students, out of a population of 1,150 students, failed to improve their test scores. But a neighboring school, with 39 special education students, did not have the scores of these students counted--because there have to be 40 students in any subgroup to be measured. Clearly the more subgroups a school tries to serve, groups that are defined by racial or income status, the greater the likelihood that the school will not make AYP." "Here are some of the things kids at Garfield/Franklin elementary in Muscatine, Iowa, no longer do: eagle watch on the Mississippii River, go on field trips to the University of Iowa's Museum of Natural History, and have two daily recesses. . . . Creative writing, social studies and computer work have all become occasional indulgences. Now that the standardized fill-in-the-bubble test is the foundation upon which the public schools rest--now that a federal law called No Child Left Behind mandates that kids as young as nine meet benchmarks in reading and math or jeopardize their school's reputation--there's little time for anything else." "In one stretch we do the scientific revolution, French revolution, revolution in Haiti, Simon Bolivar and Latin American independence movements, the Napoleonic period, nineteenth-century nationalism in Italy and Germany, Zionism, and back to the Industrial REvolution--it's a race to the finish."
"a girl in a cave "For the cost of 1 percent of the Bush administration's 2003 tax cuts or the equivalent of one week's combat costs during the war in Iraq, we could provide top-quality preparation for more than 150,000 new teachers to teach in high-need schools and mentor all of the new teachers who are hired over the next five years. With just a bit of focus, we could ensure that all students in the United States are taught by highly qualified teachers within the next five years. Now that would be real accountability." "Studies have linked dropout rates in Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina to the effets of grade retention, student discouragement, and school exclusion policies stimulated by high-stakes tests." "The popular ETS Praxis II test offers extensive testing of literary works by British and American males writing prior to 1950 and grammatical terms that connote a nostalgic charm to today's writers and educators. . . . If tests like the current ETS Praxis II test of literature, language, and composition have the expected impact on curriculum, tomorrow's teachers will be perfectly trained for schools of the nineteenth century." "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. "
"Remember in the movie 'Spinal Tap,' when the band cant afford a full-size replica of Stonehenge for a concert? Spinal Taps manager orders a miniature version--and to make the set look bigger, he hires midgets to dance among the fake rocks. "No matter how bad things are, things can always get worse." "Local control is an artifact of the traditional American education system. Unless you're going to do away with that, it's unlikely that you're going to have a national test." "I was told Congress does not have confidence in institutions of teacher preparation." "In the best courses, it's not where you arrive but what you do along the way." "Every minute of the day and every inch of a classroom is dictated. The arrangement of desks, the format of bulletin boards, the position in which teachers should stand. Teachers are demeaned, they're stripped of their professionalism and they are expected to behave like robots incapable of any independent thought." "Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. " "These are all our children and we benefit or pay for what they become." "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. " "Nothing you do for children is ever wasted." "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. " "The issue of education is close to my heart and on this vital issue there's no one I trust more than Margaret Spellings."
"Every time I hear the news "Detroit may just be the first major school district to just say, 'We can no longer afford to educate kids and we will close our doors.' " "A fact is not a truth until you love it." "I am told that the state is doing this [high stakes testing]with my best interests in mind, yet I cannot help but wonder if by No Child Left Behind they did not actually mean No Child Left Optimistic, Quite A Few Children Left Hurt, and A Whole Lot of Children Left Behind." "The very people who are crying poverty as they deny gyms and playgrounds to the city's schoolchildren--starting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, and the governor, George Pataki--are pulling out every stop in an effort to round up and hand over hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to their friend Woody [Robert Wood Johnson IV, owner of the New York Jets] so he can have the grandest, most luxurious, most expensive sports stadium the country has ever seen." "The bottom line is that standardized testing can continue only with the consent and cooperation of the educators who allow those tests to be distributed in their schools - and the parents who permit their children to take them. If we withhold that consent, if we refuse to cooperate, then the testing process grinds to a halt. What if they gave a test and nobody came? "
"We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. Unitarian church basements. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers. "What was it all about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? . . . We've done nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we? . . . There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.. . . Well, we'll know better next time." "I have served on the subcommittee that deals with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a long time, and the one thing I came to understand very quickly is that the day that we politicize NIH research, the day we decide which grants are going to be approved on the basis of a 10-minute debate in the House of Representatives with 434 of 435 members who do not even know what the grant is, that is the day we will ruin science research in this country. " "The question persists of why the [New York City] mayor and the chancellor would allow more and more and more students to pour into a demonstrably volatile school. The answer, so far as one can discern a single answer, lies in the Department of Education's preference for new, small, niche high schools." "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body " "My child has a name, a personality and her very own potentials. She is not a number, nor a group. She deserves much more than the clips of information delivered to her at jet-speed with a bureaucratic eye on her regurgitated data product. She deserves the time and attention to her questions and her pace, even if it conflicts with the schedule of predetermined disbursement mandatory in our school system." "Some arts groups and cultural institutions are already seeing the impact of raising a generation without a foundation in the arts, just as doctors can tell you about the impact of raising a generation with ever less physical education and activity. The decisions schools make to conform to a politically-driven testing agenda will have a demeaning effect on nearly every aspect of our lives. " "Yes, schools that try to maintain creative programs that don't fit the grim mold of No Child Left Behind are very much under the gun. They face accelerating punishments if their test scores don't rise sufficiently. But the really cynical trick behind NCLB is that the required levels of improvement rise inexorably over the next few years, to the point that many, if not most, schools will be deemed failing. And what will happen then?" "I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all." "Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there." "I hear things like research shows being thrown in our faces as an excuse to get us to buy into the concept of teaching to the test. Research doesnt show me a thing when people twist it into an excuse to micromanage my classroom." "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. " "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up. " "I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody. " "A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work. " "You will try. And try again. And again. And you will smile. Because it's so much healthier than crying or throwing up." |
