Orwell Award Announcement SusanOhanian.Org Home


Notable Quotes

"Common Core literacy standards will seriously damage the 15,783,462 high schoolers who have no inclination to become English majors."

—Susan Ohanian, Twitter, Aug. 31, 2010

"Doesn't "turnaround" remind you of "shock and awe," "blitzkrieg," and other tactics designed primarily to demoralize an opponent? Cost savings are incidental. Collateral damage is integral to the plan. "

—California teacher, Aug. 15, 2010

"If new laws or policies specifically require that teachers be fired if their students’ test scores do not rise by a certain amount, then more teachers might well be terminated than is now the case. But there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains. "

—Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper, Aug. 29, 2010

"If people want higher test scores, they'll get higher test scores. I just hope they don't complain when that's all they get. "

—Richard Mandl, letter Los Angeles Times, 8/26/10

"The planned release by the Los Angles Times of the test score standings of individual teachers in your system is one of the worst acts of journalism I've run across in a half century in the trade. It's unfair, cheap and disgusting.

It is a sort of yuppie version of the anti-gay, anti-Muslim or anti-latino movements, but instead of going after someone because of their gender, religion or ethnicity, you pick on some of the weakest people in the economic system and blame them for your troubles.

It's mean, ignorant and selfish."

—Sam Smith, Undernews. Aug. 23, 2010

"What the children in America's failing schools need is direct policy intervention to reduce inequality, to provide broader public services and to connect residents of very poor neighborhoods to jobs that pay a living wage.

What they are getting are Duncan's questionable market-oriented reforms--reforms that often involve assaults on the public sector and organized labor. It's a predictable shame when such nostrums are peddled by Republicans, a tragedy when embraced by Democrats."

—David Moberg, In These Times, Aug. 23, 2010

"A perfect storm--fueled by the outmigration of young adults and rising poverty and strengthened by a declining economy and loss of jobs--swirls across rural Alabama. In its wake lie communities struggling not only tomaintain a certain standard of living, but just to exist. And the most notable victims are the smallest among us, the children. Nowhere does this show up as starkly as visiting a school lunchroom.Here you find that six out of ten students in Alabama's rural public schools are receiving either free or reduced meals. http://agi.alabama.gov/uploads/r7/5w/r75wkW1B6Dsr2VVuI5hx2w/LessonsLearnedRuralSchools2009.pdf?mc_cid=14be37a5e5&mc_eid=81c002752d"

—Lessons Learned from Rural Schools

"President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top grant program is the most promising education initiative in decades, giving the nation an opportunity to take a hard look at raising standards and closing achievement gaps in public education."

—Juan Rangel, Trustee, Common Core, Huffington Post, 1/21/10

"Don't forget October 7th."

—Rich Gibson, Aug. 22, 2010

"We may all be created equal, but we're all wired differently looks at the Myers-Briggs personality preferences for 103 teachers at the 10 schools. The intent was to see if successful teachers have commonalities in personality traits. The results were surprising in some instances.
•While the population as a whole is 50-50 between Introverts and Extraverts, 63 percent of the teachers in these schools are Introverts. This could have implications when teachers are hired, especially considering that a number of principals stated that they look for 'passion' or 'spark' when hiring.
http://tinyurl.com/2atuly9"

— Lessons Learned from Rural Schools

"Aperfect storm–fueled by the outmigration of young adults and rising poverty and strengthened by a declining economy and loss of jobs–swirls across rural Alabama. In its wake lie communities struggling not only tomaintain a certain standard of living, but just to exist. And the most notable victims are the smallest among us, the children. Nowhere does this show up as starkly as visiting a school lunchroom.Here you find that six out of ten students in Alabama’s rural public schools are receiving either free or reduced meals. http://agi.alabama.gov/uploads/r7/5w/r75wkW1B6Dsr2VVuI5hx2w/LessonsLearnedRuralSchools2009.pdf?mc_cid=14be37a5e5&mc_eid=81c002752d"

—Lessons Learned from Rural Schools

"If I were assigning reading to staff members at the U.S. Department of Education, I would ask them to study Richard Rothstein's Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right(Teachers College and Economic Policy Institute; $19.95, paper). Rothstein and his colleagues explain in plain language why current accountability policies, which focus only on basic skills, are making education worse, not better, by narrowing the curriculum. With apt examples, they also show how the pursuit of numbers distorts more important goals and how schools may get higher test scores without supplying better education. "

—Diane Ravitch, Washington Post, Aug. 22, 2010

"The War on Public Education: Data Drone Duncan supports release of teacher test scores."

—Sam Smith, Undernews, Aug. 17, 2010

"According to the mythology of 'Data Driven Management,' anyone who can read the bottom line of a spreadsheet is fit to run a major urban school system — and tell teachers and principals, some with decades of experience, not only what to do but how to do it."

—George N. Schmidt, www.substancenews.net, 8/16/10

"During the 19 months since Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed him Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools, Ron Huberman has refused to provide the public with his organizational chart. In the Proposed Budget 2010 - 2011, Huberman finally provided the chart (which appears on Page 314 of the print edition of the Proposed Budget for those who can get one). The chart shows a major expansion of the "Area Offices" and the appointment of people without any educational experience, credentials, or training to virtually every key post. "

—George N. Schmidt, www.substancenews.net, 8/16/10

"I want to be a good constructivist, but we are immersed in a behaviorist setting. It is not my job to transform or challenge that culture. I understand that. I am doing what I need to do to be a team player. I tell them to pull up their pants and tuck in their shirts (sometimes). I monitor for horseplay, but I will not be getting any students suspended if I can help it. I think the tardy policy is draconian and calling Child Protective Services (CPS) for students being late for class is a great way to make parents distrust authority figures even more."

—Lori, My Student Teaching Year blog, Aug. 14, 2010

"A call for national standards is a political veneer, a tragic waste of time and energy that would be better spent addressing real needs in the lives of children-safe homes, adequate and plentiful food, essential health care, and neighborhood schools that are not reflections of the neighborhoods where children live through no choice of their own."

—P. L. Thomas, Education Week, Aug. 11, 2010

"Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives."

—Dana Milbank, Washington Post, Aug. 15, 2010

"[I]f Duncan really wants to stop the biggest bully in America's schools right now, he'll have to confront his boss, President Obama. In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers. "

—Dana Milbank, Washington Post, Aug. 15, 2010

"The parallel between health care and education keeps coming to mind: both systems are being strained by growing economic inequalities and the insistence of corporate players and their ideological allies on market solutions in a domain where the market has proven to be harmful. Most developed societies agree that the market is not the best way to deliver public services in areas like schooling or health. In the free market the rich and more knowledgeable tend to get richer and the poor get poorer. Just as everybody needs a doctor or fresh water, there should be a decent school near every family, not because of income but as a matter of right and democratic, civilized values. Our society must begin to strike a different and more equitable balance between public and private realms. In health care we have seen how difficult it has been to nudge the system toward the more universal one we need, in which every person has a right to care. In education, we already have the outlines of a universal system, however flawed; this democratic legacy is too important to entrust to the market."

—Joseph Featherstone, The Nation, Aug. 12, 2010

"the call for college- and career-ready standards as necessary for the 21st century global economy does not meet two somewhat different criteria. First, it does not reflect the actual workforce needs of the nation and, second, it is a vague and all-encompassing term that while appearing to be definitive, is anything but that."

—William Mathis, EPIC/EPRU study on standards, July 2010

"Beyond entry-level training and on-the-job training, 70% of United States jobs do not require more than a high school education, 20% require a college education, and only 10% require technical training."

—Richard Rothstein, April 7, 2008 CATO Unbound

"Beyond entry-level training and on-the-job training, 70% of United States jobs do not require more than a high school education, 20% require a college education, and only 10% require technical training."

—Richard Rothstein, April 7, 2008, April 7)

"Mr. B, he's a handful -- he teaches us but we teach him -- he's not just a regular teacher -- he is un-ordinary."

— 5th grader at PS 22 describing Gregg Breinberg

"The Feds are feeding our young to the corporations. Teachers are reduced to waiting on the tables while our young are the meals. "

—an undisclosed teacher, Aug. 6, 2010

"A foolish quest for spurious precision is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I will swear on a dictionary, or a copy of Moby-Dick, that, so far, I have only looked at three of the released DC-CAS items for the 8th grade in math. And, to be quite honest, each one sucked."

—G. F. Brandenburg's blog, http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/

"he current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them [fads and ill-considered ideas in American Education], for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?"

—Diane Ravitch, The Death & Life of the Great American School System

"The 'turnaround' models in the Race to the Top, the Title I School Improvement Grants, and the President's Blueprint for the ESEA reauthorization epitomize thinking that is mechanistic, with the buildings, the principals, the teachers, and the students all just moveable parts that can be switched around without attention to the value of human relationship."

—United Church of Christ, July 31, 2010

"The Gates program and the Arne Duncan program are pretty much the same program."

—Sen. Nancy Detert, Educ. Committee, Florida Senate, 10/28/09

"The most ridiculous statement in Duncan's speech is "Competition isn't about winners and losers. It's about getting better." That might be true of professional sports where even the losing team gets paid for participating, but it certainly isn't true of war, starving people fighting over food, or, in this case, starving schools.

I'm tired of writing letters, signing petitions, and sending money to candidates. I want to join with people who are ready to fight for schools and make enough noise so that Duncan and Obama will have to listen. I¹m not an organizer, and I don¹t know who such people are, but I do show up and I do hang in there when the going gets tough."

—Joanne Yatvin, online discussion group, 7/29,10

"The most ridiculous statement in Duncan's speech is "Competition isn't about winners and losers. It's about getting better." That might be true of professional sports where even the losing team gets paid for participating, but it certainly isn't true of war, starving people fighting over food, or, in this case, starving schools.

I'm tired of writing letters, signing petitions, and sending money to candidates. I want to join with people who are ready to fight for schools and make enough noise so that Duncan and Obama will have to listen. I¹m not an organizer, and I don¹t know who such people are, but I do show up and I do hang in there when the going gets tough."

—Joanne

"You can look back at the president as a candidate speaking before the unions making it clear about his support for charter schools, his support for things like performance pay. It was not a closeted agenda. And for people to act right now like they feel betrayed by this president only suggests that they were not paying attention when he was speaking.)"

—Joe Williams, Democrats for Ed Reform, NPR, 7/7/10

"I'll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the secretary of Education."

—Rep. David Obey, interview, The Fiscal Times, July 16, 2010

"The Gates Foundation's agenda is very much aligned with the Obama Administration agenda. We partner with them on a whole host of things."

—Peter Cunningham, Arne's spokesman in Bloomberg Business Week, 7/15/10

" It's conceivable you could get a value-added score to work at an elementary level, but how can you do it at a high school?" he asks. "How should my physics gain score match against your French score? Was Mozart a better musician than Babe Ruth was a hitter?"

—Howard Wainer, Wharton statistician in Bloomberg Business Week 7/15/10

"We are in control of so little. "

—Trauma surgeon on ER

"In February 2010, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced 15 grants worth $19.5 million to support the development of math and English/language arts materials for the Common Core Standards"

—Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, February 24, 2010

"Kids and their teachers need to know about General John E. Hull. He was in charge at the American Air Force base at Iwakuni, Japan, on a May morning in 1955 when twenty-five Japanese women, badly crippled and disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima, were to begin their trip for medical help in America. They were already aboard the U. S. Air Force plane when an aide dashed up to General Hull with an urgent cable from Washington. Not wishing to risk repercussions should the Hiroshima women encounter medical complications, a committee at the State Department had ordered the flight canceled. For a long moment, General Hull said nothing. Then he handed the cable back to his aide. "Unfortunately, I don't have my reading glasses with me," he said. "Be sure to remind me to read this later." And the plane took off."

—Susan Ohanian, Who's In Charge: A Teacher Speaks Her Mind

"I used to ask teachers, 'What would happen if you were shut up in a room with thirty of your colleagues and not allowed to leave until you'd all read the same book?'

Now they are locked up in a school and required to teach the same lesson."

—Susan Ohanian

"[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. "

—Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

"Are you saying not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"

—Joseph Turner (Robert Redford), Three Days of the Condor

"I don't think in terms of 'why,' only in terms of when. . . and occasionally where. . . The fact is what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay. "

—Joubert, a contract assassin, Three Days of the Condor

"[S]ome people, including I think the Obama administration, have it in their head that eliminating schools and firing staff are the way you're going to bring about improvement. Well, the record doesn't show that. "

—Jack Jennings, Center for Education Policy, on NPR, 7/6/10

" The public library is the most dangerous place in town. "

—John Ciardi

"I think testing gets a bad rap sometimes. Consistently assessing our kids is going to lead to more information about what they are learning and mastering and what they are not."

—Michelle Rhee, Washington Post, July 8, 2010

"My teaching has changed ... because I'm so regulated, and my students are doing worse and worse and worse every year. My kids are doing okay on the tests, but I can't reach them anymore because I'm not allowed to do what I know works. That's what breaks my heart."

—Nancy Velardi, Pinellas Park H.S. Eng teacher, St. Petersburg Times, 1/10/1

"I think this [Race to the Top] is a brilliant idea, a race. America loves competition. And our schools need modernizing. "

—Eleanor Clift, The McLaughlin Group, 8/29/2009

"Standards and assessments are the core of our agenda- common, career and college ready standards, and the assessments that measure them-these are the bedrock on which the rest of the reforms are built."

—Joanne Weiss, Director Race to the Top, 9/10/09

"While the National Education Association Representative Assembly supports and appreciates the significant increase in federal funding for education, the NEA takes a position of no confidence in the US Department of Education’s Race to the Top competitive grant policies and guidelines as a basis for the reauthorization of ESEA and similar initiatives and policies that undermine public education."

—National Education Association Convention vote, 7/4/10

"For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."

—Frederick Douglass, 4th of July Oration, Rochester, NY, 1852

"I didn't come here to be Arne Duncan's congressman. Who do people think put the money into these programs in the first place? I did ... Welcome to Washington and welcome to hard choices. "

—David Obey, House Appropriations Committee Chair, 6/25/10

"In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. "

—George Orwell, Politics & the English Language, 1946

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery."

—Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774

"Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?"

—Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government

"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school “reform,” with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom’s after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture."

—Doug, Borderland, http://borderland.northernattitude.org, 6/16/10

"[W]hen poor children go to public schools that serve the poor, and wealthy children go to public schools that serve the wealthy, then the huge gaps in achievement that we see bring us closer to establishing an apartheid public school system. We create through our housing, school attendance, and school districting policies a system designed to encourage castes—a system promoting a greater likelihood of a privileged class and an under class. These are, of course, harbingers of demise for our fragile democracy."

—David Berliner, Washington Post Answer Sheet blog, 6/29/10

"Is it possible to organize a teacher's strike AGAINST the Union for agreeing to this kind of contract? "

—Joel Shatzky, Independent Community of Educators (NYC), 6/25/10

"The most useful thing Congress and state departments of education can do is abandon authoritarian, centralizing initiatives and legislation that dictate what’s taught. By propping up an obsolete, dysfunctional curriculum, they’re making a very bad situation much worse."

—Marion Brady, Truthout, June 25, 2010

"[When watching children play], there are always more questions to ask. I so often have the feeling in a classroom that I am interrupting the play just as something important is about to be revealed."

—Vivian Gussin Paley, The Boy on the Beach, 2010

"The Washington Post article on a report that finds KIPP students outscore public school peers (June 22, 2010) is another example of the cold fusion approach to the sharing of scientific information. The study is shared with the media, and the media reports it to millions before the scientific community is allowed to even read it. No peer review. Scientific review is now performed by journalists, who may or may not be experts, but who practice educational research without a license. "

—Stephen Krashen, Washington Post comments, 6/22/10

"The nation's unionized public school teachers are in a race for survival, whether they know it or not. Their worst enemy - the one that can do them and the public the most harm -- was not George Bush, the white Republican, who called teachers' unions 'terrorists.' It is Barack Obama, the Black Democrat, who has taken the corporate education agenda farther than Bush could ever dream of."

—Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report, 6/15/2010

"You learn a lot more from trying to defend your policies when not preaching to the choir. "

—Norm Scott, Education Notes Online, 6/17/10

"

Eat.

Sleep.

Read.

"

—Vermont Book Shop bag, Middlebury, VT

"If we are willing to learn from top-performing nations, we should establish a substantive national curriculum that designates the essential knowledge and skills students need to learn."

—Diane Ravitch, American Educator, June 2010

"Few speak easily to billionaires. Even the gods hesitate. "

—Richard A. Gibboney, Commentary, June 13, 2010

"STANDARSTRATO: teacher whose professionalism is cut off by the corporate-politico imperative, the latest display being the Common Core."

—Susan Ohanian, Twitter, June 11, 2010

"Just what will the test to assess eighth-graders' knowledge of 21st-century skills, which include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, innovation and use of technology, look like?

Name one question."

—Susan Ohanian, 6/10/10

"In 1983, A Nation at Risk misidentified what is wrong with our public schools and consequently set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm than good.

The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation's other social and economic institutions for learning."

—Richard Rothstein, Cato Unbound, 4/7/2008

"Mr. Bourdain tells us about becoming a father for the first time. Hoping to instill a lifelong aversion to McDonald's in his small daughter, he convinces her that Ronald McDonald has head lice."

—Review of Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw, 6/10/10

" The Obama administration and Gates Foundation are orchestrating an effort to get every state to adopt a set of national standards for public elementary and secondary schools.

These standards describe what students should learn in each subject in each grade. Eventually these standards can be used to develop national high-stakes tests, which will shape the curriculum in every school.

National standards are a seductive but dangerous idea. People tend to support national standards because they imagine that they will be the ones deciding what everyone else should learn. Dictatorship always sounds more appealing when you fantasize that you will be the dictator."

—Jay P. Greene, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 4/11/10

"An honest explanation of the value of college acknowledges that when college accomplishes what it can, a good part of that achievement is teaching students how to play with ideas in thoughtful ways and follow up that play in a reasonable, rigorous manner. This is neither a comprehensive nor exclusive way of thinking about college: formal schooling doesn't guarantee this result, and there are plenty of wise people in this world who can play with ideas without having finished secondary school, let alone college. But you're far more likely to get adults who can play with ideas in a productive sense if some critical mass of them have attended formal schooling where that was one of the outcomes."

—Sherman Dorn, Value of College III, June 8, 2010

" I've argued very clearly, and so has the president, that our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short.

We're simply being outcompeted by children in India and China. They're not smarter than our children. They're just working harder."

—Arne Duncan, Dylan Ratigan Show, 1/27/10

"Fortunately, we know what works when it comes to good education. We know how to teach children to read. We know what a well-trained teacher does. We know how an outstanding principal leads. We know how to run outstanding schools. We have plenty of examples, including schools that succeed with extremely disadvantaged youngsters."

—William Bennett, Diane Ravitch, et al, Nation Still at Risk, 1998

"So if it looks like we are unabashed supporters of the Common Core Standards, it's because we are."

—Randi Weingarten, National Governor's Conference, 6/2/10

"Adopting NAEP achievement levels would be a multifaceted, unmitigated disaster. . . .

The National Academy of Sciences put it this way: 'NAEP's current achievement-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.'"

—Gerald W. Bracey, The School Administrator, June 2008

"It has become conventional to say that holding educators accountable and paying for higher test scores will improve performance. When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced the city would pay teachers bonuses where scores increase, he said, 'In the private sector, cash incentives are proven motivators for producing results. The most successful employees work harder, and everyone else tries to figure out how they can improve as well.'

Real estate developer Eli Broad, whose foundation promotes incentive pay for teachers, added, 'Virtually every other industry compensates employees based on how well they perform. We know from experience across other industries and sectors that linking performance and pay is a powerful incentive.'

Yet the two billionaires' statements were misleading about how other industries and sectors behave. In the private sector, pay is almost never based primarily on quantitative performance measures. Fewer firms than in the past now use commissions and piece rates for sales and production workers, and more firms award bonuses to professionals based largely on subjective supervisory evaluations. "

—Richard Rothstein, The School Administrator, June 2008

"I found out that the math I learned in school had the same relationship to mathematics as a log has to a blueberry.

Mathematics wasn't about mastering rules; it was about discovering the elegance of a well-stated problem. Further, science is not about mastering the periodic table and a series of formulas, it is about seeking answers to the mysteries of the universe. Likewise, social studies isn't about dates and events, it is about understanding the human condition, and literature is a way of coming to understand more about ourselves."

—Paul D. Houston, The School Administrator, Nov. 2006

"Teaching is a profoundly intellectual activity, and this applies to kindergarten as much as to Advanced Placement Physics. Most people will grant the brain work in physics, but what is neglected is the intellectual chops it takes to teach any subject to any age. "

—Mike Rose blog, June 4, 2010

"Christopher Haney, co-creator of Trivial Pursuit (estimated sales: $1 billion), dropped out of high school at 17 and later said that he regretted it -- that he should have dropped out at 12."

—New York Times obituary, June 3, 2010

"[The flawed theory behind pay for performance is that] student achievement is not as high as you'd like it to be because teachers, to use the economists' term, are shirking, are not doing as well as they could, so they need incentives to work harder or better. That assumes that reason student achievement is poor is that teachers know what to do and just aren't doing it. The assumption is that all our problems are due to teachers, so we don't need to pay attention to social conditions students come from.'"

—Richard Rothstein. Ed.Magazine, Jan. 2010

" NY state RTTT proposal will fatten state bureaucracy. Lots more data & testing. Trash for cash. "

—Diane Ravitch, Twitter, June 2, 2010

"At some point, it might occur to the president that he allowed Duncan to push an education agenda that was not sound and that will leave public schools in no better shape than they are now. Here’s hoping it's not too late."

—Valerie Strauss, Washington Post blog, 6/01/10

"Military Maintenance Law: If it moves, oil it. If it doesn't move, paint it.

Duncan Reform Law: If it moves, test it. If it doesn't move, test it some more."

—Susan Ohanian, May 2010

"Art Linkletter to 7-year-old boy whose dog died: 'Don't be sad because your dog is up in heaven with God.'

7-year-old boy: 'Mr. Linkletter, what would God want with a dead dog?'"

"Evil comes from obedience without introspection."

—Reader comment at NY Times, 5/27/10

"If we toughen up preschool, will there soon be pressure to toughen up (and require) toddler programs to prepare for preschool? And then what? Prenatal literacy training?"

—Stephen Krashen, Schools Matter, 5/24/10

"Existing Laws:

Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Godwin's Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Segal's Law: A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

"[T]he so-called experts on education go through the motions of hearing teachers, but not really listening. Our expertise is discounted or ignored, and our criticisms are held against us like so much self-interested complaining. If an architectural firm were designing a new workplace for you, wouldn’t you appreciate having the architects asking you about your work, trying to understand your needs? Well, at the architectural firm of Arne Duncan and Co., they tell you what they’re going to do about your workplace, then they offer you a chance to respond to their plans – for about 15 minutes – and then proceed with their designs regardless of what you actually need."

—David B. Cohen, InterACT, May 25, 2010

"Duncan's collusion with the growing corporatization and militarizing of public schools, along with the increased use of harsh disciplinary modes of punishment, surveillance, control and containment, especially in schools inhabited largely by poor minorities of color, reveals his unwillingness to address the degree to which many schools are dominated by a politics of fear, containment and authoritarianism, even as he advances reform as a civil rights issue."

—Henry Giroux, Truthout, May 25, 2010

"Almost all of Duncan's polices are indebted to the codes of a market-driven business culture, legitimated through discourses of measurement, efficiency and utility. This is a discourse that values hedge fund managers over teachers, privatization over the public good, management over leadership and training over education. Duncan's fervent support of neoliberal values are well-known and are evident in his support for high-stakes testing, charter schools, school-business alliances, merit pay, linking teacher pay to higher test scores, offering students monetary rewards for higher grades, CEO-type management, abolishing tenure, defining the purpose of schooling as largely job training, the weakening of teacher unions and blaming teachers exclusively for the failure of public schooling."

—Henry Giroux, Truthout, May 25, 2010

"10 years from now, we will look back with regret and even shame on this misuse of federal power [Race to the Top]. Books will be written analyzing where these ideas came from and why they were foisted on the nation's public schools at a time of fiscal distress. And we will be left to wonder why so much money and energy was spent promoting so many dubious ideas. "

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, May 25, 2010

"They [Sec. Duncan and his aides]seemed to think we had questions, and their job was to answer them. We had actually approached the conversation from a different place. We thought perhaps they might want to ask US questions, or hear our ideas about how to improve schools."

—Anthony Cody in Teacher Magazine blog, 5/24/10

"What would it be like if the U.S. Department of Education took the 'mass localism' approach to distributing the 4.3 billion dollars? For sure, we will get a lot more innovative, locally produced and owned, and effective solutions than what has been prescribed."

—Yong Zhao blog, May 23, 2010

" Our children won't read better because Congress serves as the national school board. Nor will they learn more mathematics with the president as the national superintendent of schools. We risk making things worse across the country by giving up more policy control for education to the federal government. By centralizing our system of education, we put the whole nation at risk, should Beltway bureaucrats and policy pundits guess wrong about curriculum, instruction, and the range of policy decisions associated with public education."

—Al Ramirez, Education Week, April 28, 2010

"I have yet to meet a teacher who favors No Child Left Behind and the Teacher's Union wants to increase funding for No Child Left Behind?"

—Rand Paul, NEA Questionaire, 5/19/10, The Answer Sheet

"Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. "

—Lucy Parsons, Freedom, Equality, & Solidarity

". . .the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians. . ."

—Robert Hayden, Frederick Douglass, 1947

"We object to Duncan's political pressure to force our state to raise the cap on charters, without any protections in place to prevent financial corruption and abuse of power. He has said that there is 'zero' opposition to his policies, and yet more than two thousand people have signed our petition against raising the charter cap in the last two weeks. We also resent the way the charter lobby is spreading disinformation, including the false claim that the 'Race to the Top' funding can be used to prevent layoffs at schools. As Kathleen Grimm pointed out at City Council hearings last week, the use of this federal grant program is very restrictive and cannot be used for these purposes."

—Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters, May 18, 2010

"Increasing the number of charter schools without acknowledging the growing list of complaints and concerns, AND without providing remedies, is irresponsible at least, and even more so when supported by the Secretary of Education. Today, I waited in the rain until I could ask Secretary Duncan when he would talk to charter parents to hear their concerns. He politely responded that he does talk to parents and was willing to meet with us. But when I asked how we could arrange this, I immediately became invisible, as he turned his back, walked away and shut his car door. Now I understand how it is that Secretary Duncan says there is zero opposition to his charter school proposals. Today, Secretary Duncan deemed me a zero."

— Leslie-Ann Byfield, charter school parent, May 18, 2010

"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. "

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

"It is wonderful to be back here with the men and women of the Business Roundtable. Over the last year, we've worked together on a number of issues -- from economic recovery and tax policy to education and to health care. And more often than not, we've found common ground . . . . To train our workers for the jobs of tomorrow, we've made education reform a top priority in this administration. We are not interested in just putting more money into our schools; we want that money moving toward reform. And last year we launched a national competition to improve our schools based on a simple idea: Instead of funding the status quo, we will only invest in reform -- reform that raises student achievement and inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans. I just met this week with the nation's governors, and education reform is one of those rare issues where both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastic."

—Pres. Barack Obama, Remarks to Business Roundtable, 2/14/10

"It is wonderful to be back here with the men and women of the Business Roundtable. Over the last year, we've worked together on a number of issues -- from economic recovery and tax policy to education and to health care. And more often than not, we've found common ground . . . . To train our workers for the jobs of tomorrow, we've made education reform a top priority in this administration. We are not interested in just putting more money into our schools; we want that money moving toward reform. And last year we launched a national competition to improve our schools based on a simple idea: Instead of funding the status quo, we will only invest in reform -- reform that raises student achievement and inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans. I just met this week with the nation's governors, and education reform is one of those rare issues where both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastic.—President Barack Obama, address to Business Roundtable, Feb. 24, 2010"

—Pres.

"It used to be that Bill Gates was the most powerful education philanthropist in America. Thanks to the Race to the Top, that mantle has passed to Arne Duncan. Do we want to make that the permanent status of U.S. secretaries of education?

The legislative process is messy, but we are better served in the long term by allowing our elected representatives to decide on the education policies we are to pursue as a nation, rather than having them dictated to us by the executive branch under the guise of a grant program to reward reform and innovation."

—Grover J., Russ, Whitehurst, Education Week, 4/28/10

"Good teachers find a way, despite all obstacles, to obtain these gains in student achievement "

—Michelle Rhee, New Teacher Project, quoted NewSchools Summit 5/5/05

""We use the word 'academic entrepreneurs.' We are expanding what it means to be a knowledge enterprise. We use knowledge as a form of venture capital. "

—Michael Crow, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/9/2001

"Whether it's textbooks, supplementary educational services, tests, testing programs and testing guides, packaged curriculum, data aggregation systems, scripted programs for teachers, corporate-sponsored university research, bringing advertisements into the classroom, or renaming university and public school centers after commercial brands, whether it's for profit universities or the explosion in online degrees or "branding" schools, whether it's the commercialization of college sports and cultural resources or the surrender to the ratings game of U.S. News and World Report, whether it's the student loan scandal or the scandal over Reading First, or it's the privatization of schools in New Orleans and Chicago, there is overwhelming evidence of the intrusion into education of for-profit corporations. Most teachers and educators know this, but, in their daily life in school, they are aware of it as something outside themselves, something done to them or imposed on them or their schools. Teachers, teacher educators, and administrators know that corporations are slowly gobbling up the very market in education those corporations have created. And yet there seems very little resistance.

Academics have certainly eloquently described teh "neoliberal assault on education." A substantial body of scholarly work now exists that critiques the corporatization of Education. [extensive book list follows]"

—Peter M. Taubman, Teaching by Numbers, 105

"Fort Monroe, VA — The United States Army Accessions Command (USAAC) commends the leadership of 48 states, the District of Columbia and two territories in committing to a process to adopt common high academic standards in mathematics and English language arts for our Nation's public school students."

—Commanding General US Army Accessions Command

"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. . . No amount of school reform can undo policies that redirect wealth generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses."

—Richard Rothstein, Grading Education, p 166

"If you're doing the wrong thing well, you're still doing the wrong thing."

—Marion Brady, EDDRA2, 4/21/10

" Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me --won't get fooled again. -- George W. Bush So many times they fooled us -- so many times that the Bush library in Dallas could have a wing devoted just to deceit."

—John Young, Cox newspapers, 4/20/10

"In 2009, when Klein announced the expansion of charter schools, he didn't mention that of 51,316 public school students in the city who were homeless, only 11 were enrolled in charter schools."

—Valerie Strauss, Washington Post blog, 3/19/10

"The Department’s 500-point system [for Race to the Top Grant proporals] is needlessly complex. Its implied precision makes the results seem less affected by human judgment than is the case."

—William Peterson & Richard Rothstein, EPI Briefing Paper, 4/20/10

"Despite widespread use of testing in education and employment, there is no US agency (analogous to the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration) that independently audits the processes and products of testing agencies. The lack of oversight makes errors difficult to detect. Individuals harmed by a flawed test may not even be aware of the harm. Although consumers who become aware of a problem with a test can contact the educational agency that commissioned it, or the testing company; it is likely that many problems go unnoticed. "

—Kathleen Rhoades & George Madaus, 2003

"Today those who take and use many tests have less consumer protection than those who buy a toy, a toaster, or a plane ticket. Rarely is an important test or its use subject to formal, systematic, independent professional scrutiny or audit. Civil servants who contract to have a test built, or who purchase commercial tests in education, have only the testing companies' assurances that their product is technically sound and appropriate for its stated purpose. Further, those who have no choice but to take a particular test -- often having to pay to take it -- have inadequate protection against either a faulty instrument or the misuse of a well-constructed one. Although the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council for Measurement in Education have formulated professional standards for test development and use in education and employment, they lack any effective enforcement mechanism. "

—The National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, 1991

" One of the things that concerns me is that --while I admire the work that Teach For America does and many of these other groups do--sometimes there's an implication that their work is required because existing teachers are terrible. That bothers me, because the evidence doesn't support that.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'll make this prediction: The achievement gap is going to grow substantially in the next few years, despite the fantastic work that people like you are doing to try to prevent that. The reason is that we are in a near economic depression. The unemployment rate for black families--young families with school-aged children--is now 40 percent. When you have 40 percent of the community experiencing the instability that comes from unemployment, constant mobility from not being able to afford housing, lack of access to adequate health care--I don't care how much we improve the schools, those children are going to be affected by the deterioration in the circumstances and security of the homes from which they come. . . .

[Teachers] should be lobbying for a job stimulus program. A job stimulus program that was effective--and that was many times greater than the one we have now--would have a lot more to do with the achievement of disadvantaged children than anything we can do in the near-term in schools. They should be lobbying for mixed-income housing developments in suburban communities, for funding for school-based health centers. If the achievement gap grows--as I am afraid it will because of these broader economic circumstances--and if this means that teachers have to take more on their shoulders and feel more like failures, then that's just going to compound the tragedy. We need socialpolicy to correct these things, as well as good teaching. . . . "

—Richard Rothstein, One Day, Spring 2010

"Obama isn't a socialist. He's not even a liberal.

He's the president whose main goal is to protect the wealth of the richest 5 percent of Americans"

—Billy Wharton, co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, CNN, 4/15/10

"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."

—Donald Campbell, Evaluation & Program Planning 2: 67-90, 1979

"It is only a slight exaggeration to describe the test theory that dominates educational measurement today as the application of twentieth-century statistics to nineteenth-century psychology."

—Robert Mislevy, Test Theory for a New Generation of Tests

"No Child Left Behind was the most advanced civil rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act."

—George W. Bush, Bush-Cheney Alumni Assoc. breakfast, 2/26/10

"Any test can be used to predict anything in the future. Whether it predicts the future or not is an empirical question. We use the SAT (which used to be called a test of developed abilities, adding further fog to the confusion) to predict college grade points. We could just as well use the Iowa Tests of Educational Development, which are high school achievement tests.

The prediction is a mere statistical manipulation: We give one test at one point in time and then correlate that test with our other measure at some later point in time. We could use high school grade point average to predict college grade point average. We could use nose length to predict college grade point average. Any two variables can be correlated. "

—Gerald W. Bracey, Reading Educational Research

"Principle of Data Interpretation: Do the arithmetic.

Corollary: Check the arithmetic."

—Gerald W. Bracey, Reading Educational Research

"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. Over the last few decades, wages of college graduates overall have increased, but some college graduates -- managers, executives, white-collar sales workers -- have commandeered disproportionate shares, with little left over for scientists, engineers, teachers, computer programmers, and others with high levels of skill. No amount of school reform can undo policies that redirect wealth generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses."

—Lawrence Mishel & Richard Rothstein, The American Prospect, 10/12/0

"We should understand what we are up against: not that tests are arbitrary, but a class society that requires such tests. No attack on these rites of passage can be finally successful unless it overturns bourgeois culture, itself, and the rule of our dominant classes."

—Richard Ohmann, English in America, 1976

"It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly."

—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Vatican City, March 7, 2003

"I could give you 30 minutes a day to play outside, but I care about you and want you all to pass the FCAT test."

—Broward County Florida teacher, January 2010

"[M]ost American kids are unwilling to work all that hard. The slacker mentality would not be tolerated in China. Here it is a dominant style."

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, June 11, 2007

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. "

—John W. Gardner, Secretary of Education, 1965-68

"All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard. "

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

"We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. "

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

"Education can democratize access to the labor market, but education cannot eliminate labor market tyranny. . . education can't create good jobs. . . and we in education have to say this. . . . We need to say to to the Democrats: If you're willing to bail out the banks, you have to be willing to bail out the schools. . . . Teachers must realize that you're swimming against the tide. Everything is set up to subvert us. "

—Lois Weiner, Radical Film and Lecture Series. 3/26/10

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts."

—Senator Patrick Moynahan

"The proper attitude toward a criminal government is not deference and respect, however much some at The Nation might love a smooth-talking Democrat, but defiance and rebellion -- of the non-violent variety."

—Charles Davis, False Dichotomy, 4/25/10

"I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court."

—Cynthia McKinney, who left Democratic Party in 2007

"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."

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

School destruction is reform"

—George Orwell, 1984, with Obama/Duncan update

"War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength "

—George Orwell, 1984

"Data! Data! Fly back to Gates.
The school is on fire.
And the children all gone."

—Susan Ohanian, April 9, 2010

"He is marooned, in case you have not noticed, on that balmy tropical isle pronounced Selador, spelled cellardoor. . . . Do you know a committee of Language Hump-type professors put out a committee finding back in 1936 -- most beautiful word in the English language is cellardoor."

—Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam?

"Why is the education of a disadvantaged child in a very poor rural community worth only half as much to the federal government as the education of a disadvantaged child in a very poor urban community?"

—Rural & Small Schools, April 7, 2010, www.formulafairness.com

"As the husband of a public-school teacher, I am happy that Ravitch has finally seen the light on the folly of universal proficiency standards in the public schools. Setting classroom standards is something that every teacher should do individually; mandating them across a wide range of geographical, economic, and biological variations has always made little sense to me.

Teachers are not miracle workers. Anyone who expects an intelligent child of educated and committed parents to meet the same standards as a child with a learning disability raised by a drug-addicted single parent—well, they should have to spend a few weeks in my wife's classroom and see for themselves how all of the 'extracurricular' factors in a child's life impinge upon what happens there. Every child can be taught, and every child can learn, but they cannot all be taught at the same rate, or learn the same things, or meet the same standards."

—Prof. James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/6/10

"Dear Arne Duncan, . . . How about spending some money to solve the problem and not just measure it? "

—Stephen Krashen letter to web forum, April 6, 2010

"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

—Keith Richards, The Sunday Times. 4/4/10

"Teachers will work no harder when their tenure or their salary depends upon their students' test scores, but the kind of work they do, if such plans are adopted, will not resemble the work of the attentive gardener tending these tender tendrils of humanity that constitute our future."

—Jim Horn, Washington Post Answer Sheet, 4/4/10

"While Duncan is evidently prepared to spend part of his days bending the rules for the rich and powerful, he seems to relish spending the rest of the day terrorizing public school teachers across the country, demanding that they strictly adhere to a whole array of standards, no matter how insidious these standards are in terms of undermining quality education, demoralizing teachers, and forcing students to devote themselves to a boring curriculum. But if the teachers do not comply, Duncan wants them fired. There is no mercy or rule-bending here. "

—Ann Robertson & Bill Leumer, IndyBay.org, March 28, 2010

"So the Volunteer State volunteered to throw the teachers under the school bus."

—State School News Service, March 30, 2010

"Race to the Top may be the sickest, most cynical thing I've seen pulled in education by a progressive administration ever.

Why not put the money in a booth and let governors square off, greased and naked, in some sort of game show format? It would make as much sense and be more fun to watch. "

—Michael Paul Goldenberg, EDDRA2, March 29, 2010

"No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush's education law, had so many harmful, though unintended, effects on American education that even the law's name has become 'toxic.' So says President Barack Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But Duncan has failed to learn from his predecessor. . . ."

—Richard Rothstein, Newsday, March 26, 2010

"The federal stimulus money that's being offered now to the states is being offered on the condition that they raise charter school caps, that they tie teacher evaluations to students' test scores, that they close what they call failing schools, that they turn them over to private turnaround operators. So we have a neoliberal project nationally, which was tested out in Chicago and then is now being pushed out nationally."

—Pauline Lipman, Democracy Now!, March 26, 2010

"Parents, students and community members must come to terms with what it means to be 'educated.' Until this happens, the agenda will revert to the numerologists looking to make a fast buck on our kids while controlling the curriculum from 'surveillance watch towers,' the panopticon of learning!"

—Danny Weil, Daily Censored, March 25, 2010

"Suppose we give a high school test to everyone in Congress, with scores listed in rank order and serious penalties--including deselecting the bottom 10 percent?"

—Deborah Meier, Bridging Differences, March 25, 2010

"I am sure the state ed people will be back--to see if we've dismantled our learning stations, found an appropriate reading system, and written up all our objectives. I wouldn't dare be caught with my cloze down. I have a list of standard objectives for all those things that seem to matter to evaluators: the rules about the silene e, dropping the y, the apostophe before the s, and so on. I'm hoping that after I produce the list the wit and whimsy with which I try to fill our classroom will be forgiven. If it isn't, I'll console myself with this silent prayer: Yea, though I walk in the shadow of conglomerate criterion referenced curriculum, I will fear no evil, the children they will comfort me."

—Susan Ohanian, Learning Magazine, November 1981

"I had to reassure my third grader yet AGAIN this morning that there was no, absolutely no, chance that her principal would get fired if she did poorly on the MCAS."

—Massachusetts mother, CARE listserv, March 24, 2010

"Attempting to explain its controversial decision to revamp its history textbooks, The Texas State Board of Education issued an official statement today.

The one-sentence statement reads as follows: 'If you were the state responsible for George W. Bush being elected President, you'd throw out your history books, too.'"

—Andy Borowitzy, The Borowitz Report, 3/18/10

"The higher-performing schools will be left alone, which will make a lot of people happy. But the lower-performing schools, particularly those in the bottom 5 percent, and then an additional 5 percent to 10 percent to 15 percent, are going to be very unhappy, because they're going to worry about falling into that bottom 5 percent.

The punishments there are draconian. What they're -- what the federal government is saying is, the lowest-performing schools, regardless of the reasons for their low performance, will fire the principal, close the school, turn the school into a charter school, turn the school over to the state, turn it over to a private management organization."

—Diane Ravitch, The News Hour, March 17, 2010

"What are the things that (define) college and career readiness? Do you mean welding at the community college or astrophysics at MIT?"

—William Mathis, former VT superintendent, Times Argus, 3/16/10

"I had the opportunity last night to download and look at the blueprint, and my concern as I read through it is the number of times competition and competitive grants is mentioned in it -- that monies would be allocated by competition. Whenever we have competition, we have winners and losers. I don’t believe that we can afford to have losers in education."

—Gary Anhalt, Cedar Rapids Board of Eduation, 3/14/10

"Dear NCTE

For many years, you were my professional organization, and I was proud to participate in the annual conventions. . . .

But you betrayed me. NCTE, by sitting at this table, you have colluded with the very people whose motives are diametrically opposed to what education in a democracy must be. . . . "

—Cindy Lutenbacher, former NCTE member, 3/12/10

"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."

—David Brooks, New York Times, March 12, 2010

" 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? "

—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 12, 1852

"We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand. Our possibilities are endless.”"

—Desiree Roger, Wall Street Journal, 4/30/2009

" 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."

—Elise Stack, comment on Newsweek article, 3/10/10

"
What do you hope members of this book club will take away from your book?

I hope this book helps readers to rethink their assumptions about other people. If you begin with the premise that human beings are fundamentally passive and inert--that but for the threat of a stick or the enticement of carrot, they wouldn't do much--that points you toward one set of policies and practices. But if you begin with another (to my mind, more accurate) assumption--that it's our nature to be active and engaged--that leads you down a very different road, one that's actually more effective.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2010/02/five-questions-for-daniel-h-pink.html#ixzz0hgZqbA9v "

—Daniel Pink, New Yorker, Feb. 28, 2010

"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.

And I think that with the proliferation of charter schools, the bottom-line issue is the survival of public education, because we're going to see many, many more privatized schools and no transparency as to who's running them, where the money is going, and everything being determined by test scores.

So the whole picture, I think--I just wish that people wouldn't refer to this as reform, because when we talk about Race to the Top, we're talking about a principle that is antithetical to the fundamental idea of American education. The fundamental idea, which has been enshrined at least since the Brown decision of 1954, was equal educational opportunity. Race to the Top is not equal educational opportunity. It is a race in which one or two or three states race to the top to have more privatized schools, more test-based accountability, more basic skills, no emphasis on a broad curriculum for all kids, and no equal educational opportunity. I think that's wrong. I think it's also not the role of the federal government to do what's being done and to call it reform. "

—Diane Ravitch, Democracy Now, March 5, 2010

"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. "

—Jim Horn, Schools Matter, March 8, 2010

"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. "

—John J. Castellani, Pres. Business Roundtable, 12/16/08

"I never dreamed we would have to protect our kids from President Obama."

—Comment at Huffington Post, http://tinyurl.com/ye79opd

"'I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.
Starbuck in Moby Dick

'I will have no teacher in public schools who is not afraid of being fired because of test scores.'
U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
President Barack Obama
Business Roundtable"

—anonymous

"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."

—Valerie Strauss, Washington Post blog, 3/1/10

"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.

No matter what's going on in the news, the secretary of the treasury would never say the U.S. economic system is a failure. The secretary of defense would not say the U.S. military is so terrible that it loses all its wars. This is not the case with the U.S. secretary of education, who loves to talk about the horrible problems in U.S. education."

—Daniel Lazur, Washington Monthly blog, March 2, 2010

"Central Falls could be--ANYWHERE. . . but, obviously, it's a hell of a long way from Wall Street: "

—Borderland blog, http://borderland.northernattitude.org/

"We no longer wonder 'Who are you?' but instead decide quickly 'What can we do to fix you?'"

—Vivian Gussin Paley, A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play

"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?"

—Bill Ferriter, Why I Hate Interactive Whiteboards, Teacher, 1/27/09

"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."

—Democrats for Education Reform, 2010

"Common Core Standards. Plato's "Allegory of Cave" for 11-year-olds. Bipartisan is euphemism for unilateral oppression."

—Susan Ohanian, Twitter, Feb. 24, 2010

"...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...."

—William Wordsworth, Common Core Exemplary Text, 9th grade

"...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.... "

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, Feb. 23, 2010

"What I cannot understand in this 'jobs creating' President is why gutting teachers and ruining so many lives, is not important enough to halt. . . ."

—Sarah Puglisi, blogspot, Feb. 19, 2010

"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? "

—Mari Ann Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/18/10

"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."

—Zoniedude, Is Democracy Doomed?, Daily Kos, 2/8/10

"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."

—Marion Brady, Florida Thinks, Feb. 11, 2010

"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.

Many stories matter."

— Chimamanda Adichie, TED, Oct. 7, 2009

"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.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking. ~Albert Einstein~"

—Albert Einstein, Posted on 2nd grade teacher's door

"[G]rowth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.--Edward Abbey

Testing for the sake of the federal government has the same cancerous etiology."

—Susan Ohanian

"Let's call it: Formative Assessment Techniques for Achieving Student Success (FAT-ASS). "

—Stephen Krashen, Feb. 9, 2010

""

(A test)

"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.

It is also important to note that these same two ostensibly state government-associated groups (NGA and CCSSO) developing RTTT also produced America 2000 under the Bush 41 administration that morphed into Goals 2000 in 1994 under President Clinton. Goals 2000 and that year's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act combined for the first time to require that states and school districts comply with federal standards listed in Goals 2000 in order to receive federal education dollars."

—EdWatch, Feb. 5, 2010

"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.

How about one standard: Question the status quo and authority. "

—Yvonne Siu-Runyan, EPATA, Feb. 6, 2010

"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."

—Martin Luther King, Jr, Congressional Record, 4/9/68

"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."

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, Feb. 2, 2010

"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.'"

—Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine, Feb. 8, 2010

"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"

—Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine, Feb. 8, 2010

"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."

— Roger D. Hodge, Mendacity of Hope, Harper's, Feb. 2010

"'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.' "

—T. H. White, The Once and Future King

"[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.'"

—Paul Krugman, NY Times blog, 1/26/10

"[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.'"

—Paul Krugman, NY Times blog, 1/26/10

"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."

—Comment on The Nation blog, Jan. 26, 2010

"I would like to know who in our country would like their pay to be based on the actions of a group of children. "

—Laurie, in response to R. Weingartner, On Point, 1/26/10

"Education policy does not solve economic problems. Economic policy solves economic problems."

—Lois Weiner, UC Santa Cruz, 1/23/10

"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.' "

—Carlo Rotella, Profile, New Yorker, Feb. 2, 2010

"In order to understand school reform one need remember only two words: Standardistos lie."

—Susan Ohanian, after I. F. Stone speaking of governments

"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 "

—Ralph Nader on Supreme Court decision, Jan. 22, 2010

"Readers concerned about the paper's journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com. "

—New York Times

"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. "

—Junot Diaz, One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief, New Yorker, 1/20/10

"The standards movement, sad to say, morphed long ago into a push for standardization. The last thing we need is more of the same."

—Alfie Kohn, Education Week, Jan. 14, 2010

"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."

—Priscilla Gutierrez, Huffington Post comment

" 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."

—Diane Ravitch, Wash. Post, Answer Sheet, 1/19/10

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. "

—Sir Winston Churchill, British prime minister during WWII

"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"

—Jean Anyon, Theory & Educ. Research: Toward Critical Social Explanation.

",,,Most of the claims Duncan has been making are simply not true. Not a question of interpretation: Not True. As in 'He lies.'"

—George Schmidt, www.SubstanceNews.net, part 1, 1/15/10

"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. "

—George Schmidt, www.SubstanceNews.net, part 1, 1/15/10

"...I spend as much time worrying about the crap in kids' imaginative diet as I do fretting over their eating habits. "

—Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

"Who blames teachers? Obama, Duncan, Bush, Spellings, Rhee, Klein, the Education Equity Project. A chorus of economists: Bad teachers!"

—Diane Ravitch, Twitter, Jan. 21, 2010

"What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while."

—Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

"'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."

—David Sirota, TruthDig, Jan. 14, 2009

"If you torture data long enough, it will tell you anything you want."

—Unknown

" Has any student ever actually USED a protractor?"

—Dave Barry, Twitter, Aug. 31, 2009

"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."

—Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality

"The state in its efforts to control beyond where it can effectively impose itself, destroys everything. "

—Simone Weil

"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?"

—Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences blog, Dec. 15, 2009

"In the last 30 years the range of independent mobility for North American 12-year-olds has shriveled from one mile to 550 yards."

—Elizabeth Goodenough, Green Money Journal, Winter 2009/10

" 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."

—Poor Elijah, aka Peter Berger, 2010 Education Wish List

"Afghanistan has become Absurdistan. "

—Jim Hightower, Dec. 21, 2009

" 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.'

Duncan's advocacy of the Renaissance 2010 plan alone should have immediately disqualified him for the Obama appointment. "

—Henry Giroux & Kenneth Saltman, Obama's Betrayal of Public Education? Trut

"People who know who they are make trouble for schools."

—John Taylor Gatto, Yes! Magazine, Sept. 2009

"Why is it that education 'reformers' feel obligated to idealize education elsewhere and demonize it here? "

—Gerald Bracey, Huffington Post, Aug. 22, 2007

"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."

—Grover J. Whitehurst, Bookings Inst. blog, Nov. 4, 2009

"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."

—Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences blog, Dec. 17, 2009

"Lining up for Duncan's corporate-politico RttT funds, like Soviets lining up in a bread line.

Duncan and his corporate politico backers insist that replacing individual teacher talent, expertise, and initiative with colletivized standards will produce the workers needed for the Global Economy.

In the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of those who opposed collectivization were executed or sent to forced-labor camps.

What's Duncan's plan? "

—Susan Ohanian

"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. "

—Susan Ohanian

"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!' "

—David Berliner, AERA speech, Montreal, May 2005

"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. "

—Richard Rothstein, NPR, Jan. 8, 2006

"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. . .""

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871

"Race to the Top relies on old GOP agenda of accountability, choice, merit pay. Nothing new. Which Dems if any will fight it?"

—Diane Ravitch, Twitter, Dec. 12/19/09

"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."

—Aristotle, De Mirabilibus, 4th century B. C.

"Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Toni and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?"

—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

"Everywhere, nowadays, the sole ruler is money. . .
Money loves the government and fears pennilessness. . .
Money advises those who sit at council. . .
Money buys and sells, what it gives it takes right back,
Money is an adulator but later becomes a traitor,
Money always lies, only rarely is it sincere,
Money makes a perjurer of both healthy and sick. . .
Money makes more thieves than there are stars in the night sky,
If money is put on trial, rarely does it lose. . .
With money, even the evil feel at ease.
Above all, it's money that rules, and reigns everywhere supreme.
Only wisdom flees from and distains it. "

—Carmina Burana, Verses on Money, 1230 AD

"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. . . . "

—Cicero, First Oration Against Cataline, 218 BC--84 AD

"The Business Roundtable says, 'Be still and know that we Rule.'"

—Susan Ohanian

"Life is complicated, so think small."

—Garrison Keillor, Life Among the Lutherans, 2009

"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."

—Paul Street, ZNet, You Can't Be President, Dec. 18, 2009

" 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.'"

—Paul Street, ZNet, You Can't Be President, Dec. 18, 2009

"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up. "

—Lily Tomlin

" 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."

—Lucia French, Developmental Psychologist, Wired, 12/14/09

"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. "

—Mikita Brottman, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/13/09

"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"

—Lloyd Blankfein, Sunday London Times, Nov. 8, 2009

"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."

—Stephen Krashen, Sacramento Bee online, Dec. 8, 2009

"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? "

—Geoff Berne, Barbarians at the Schoolhouse,CounterPunch, Dec. 4, 2009

"The Obama White House is morphing into the Bush White House with frightening speed. Its transparency is already fogged up."

—Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Dec. 5, 2009

"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! "

—Marilyn in Richmond, CA, Dec. 3, 2009

"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."

—Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality

"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."

—Sean Cavanagh, Education Week, Dec. 1, 2009

"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. "

—Stephen Krashen, Dec. 1, 2009

"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."

—Diane Ravitch, Ed Week blog, Dec. 1, 2009

"This machine kills fascists. "

—Written on Woody Guthrie's guitar

"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."

—Mark Morford, S.F. Chronicle, 11/25/09

""

"Competition brings out the best performance. That's true in athletics and in business, and it's true in education."

—H. E. Ford Jr., L. V. Gerstner Jr. & Eli Broad, WSJ, 11/25/09

"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! "

—Yong Zhao, http://tinyurl.com/y8gvrsd, Nov. 16, 2009

"Whining is not the same thing as doing something. Whining is whining. Action is something else."

—Susan Ohanian

"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 "

—Jack Kerouac , letter to Ed White 7/ 5/50; Apple Ad 1977

"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.

By the way, a masters degree in Archives Management? What does that mean? 'Oh I can archive things alphabetically or numerically'. What?! Alphanumerically? Slow down, I don't have a doctorate! There you have it, 4 years of undergrad, 2 years of graduate school and now you can spend your days picking blotter acid coming out of Phil Lesh's underwear from the Blues for Allah tour."

—Jon Stewart, 11/12/09

"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. "

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birimingham Jail, 1963

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. "

—Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom

"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."

—Cormac McCarthy, interview Wall Street Journal, 11/13/09

"America cannot test and punish its way to better schools, no matter how good its standardized tests might become. "

—Monty Neil, Testimony in RTTT Boston Hearing, Nov. 12, 2009

"Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer. "

—David Berliner, Our Impoverished View of Ed. Reform, Aug. 2005

"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."

—William Blum, Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

"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. "

—Richard Mellor, Negotiating our lives away, AFSCME Local 444

"[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."

—Karl Marx, Capital, a Critique of Political Economy

"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."

—Susan Ohanian

"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? "

—Jim Horn, Schools Matter, http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/

"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. "

—Erich Fromm, On Disobedience

"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.

But we don't protest official reading lists. When governors and industrialists announced their concern for excellence in the schools, my professional organization, instead of pointing out that these emperors of excellence were naked, issued an excellence sweatshirt.

I worry that at this very moment they might be appointing a joint subcommittee to figure out ways to turn such William Bennett favorites as The Scarlet Pimpernel, The yearling, Ivanhoe, and The Virginian into memo pads. Or a bumper sticker.

As for me, I want my T-shirt to read 'Literature Has No Uses.' Certainly it is foolish to call on literature to redress the trade deficit, increase the gross national product, and help kids say no. Worse than foolish, it is wrong."

—Susan Ohanian, Literature Has No Uses, Who's In Charge?

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, Who's In Charge?

"'Can I see the lesson plans for a unit?'

--We have none.

'How does a teacher teach without plans?'

--You put the materials out and see what children do with them. When children ask a question or need something, you help them."

—Roland Barth,Open Education & American School, 1972

"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!"

—CalifTeacher to Bill Gates, USA TODAY, 10/30/09

"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). "

—Japanese Teachers' Network in Kitakyusha

"From Maryland to Michigan to Montana, reading is reading and math is math. . . .We want 100 percent of our kids to pass this test."

—Pres. Bill Clinton to MD General Assembly, 2/10/97

"Math Skills Show Little Growth

Oh, no. All of our high-paying jobs differentiating between parallelograms and rhombuses are sure to go to the Chinese. "

—--Ann Gaddis, Fan-Blade Aligner, The Onion, 10/21/09

"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. . . . "

—Julie Otsuka, When The Emperor Was Divine

"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')."

—Thomas Newkirk, Education Week, 10/21/09

"Turnaround is the deadliest reform of all.... "

— George N Schmidt, Editor, Substance

"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."

—Gerald Bracey, e-mail, Sept. 28, 2009

"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. "

—Jeorge Munoz, security guart, quoted in Steinmetz Star, 9/09

"Your 401(k)'s are not dying because not enough kids took calculus. "

—Gerald Bracey, EDDRA discussion list, 2/14/09

"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."

—Michael Fiorillo, Gotham Schools

"Schools never 'fail' where the SUVs roam. But where hubcab theft is the only growth industry, schools can't get anything right. Right?"

—John Young, Cox News, Sept. 22, 2009

"The next time you see a full-face picture of Arne Duncan, cover everything but the eyes and judge what he's about."

—Gerald Bracey, EDDRA, Sept. 22, 2009

"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. "

—Arne Duncan, Speech to IES, June 8, 2009

"Myth #5: 'Subjective assessments of performance can't work.'

Try telling that to music and art teachers, sports coaches, movie reviewers or wine tasters. "

—Arnold Packer, SchoolNet, Sept. 21, 2009

"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.

Aspira, the controversial charter school operator has recently been in the news over confirmed allegations that they strip search students, illegally change grades and attendance records, and have fired another teacher, this one a whistle blower who tried to bring the grade changing and strip searching to the attention of the Chicago Board of Education. . . ."

—Jim Vail, Substance, Sept. 2009

"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. . . .

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."

—George N. Schmidt, Data Driven Drivel, Substance, 9/09

"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. . . ."

—John Kugler, Substance, September 2009

"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.

They desperately want the freedom to teach well. . . .These honest, thinking delegates have, at the moment, no organization they know about prepared to challenge the NEA leadership, so they see nothing to do but gripe and to try to be more active in state and local groups that take sharper positions. . . ."

—Rich Gibson, Report on NEA Convention, Substance, 9/09

"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. . . .

The teacher is assigned a mentor My mentor is the lead special education teacher and TAP coach at our school, and she comes to my room 300 minutes a week. . . While I've learned some good methods from my mentor, I've come to realize that it is intended to encourage a teacher to quit rather than to uplift and encourage good teaching. . . . I have heard one compliment since I've started this process and nothing positive has been written down. . . ."

—Jean Schwab, Substance, September 2009

"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."

—George N. Schmidt , Substance, September 2009

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, Substance, September 2009

"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.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
"

—Bertolt Brecht, From a German War Primer

"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."

—Susan Ohanian

"Even a fool, when he is holding standardized test scores, is counted wise by the U. S. Secretary of Education."

—Susan Ohanian

"Well, Cindy, if we had a Broad Prize for charter schools, KIPP would certainly be the winner."

—Eli Broad, EdWeek District Dossier, 9/18/09

"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."

— Jim Broadway, State School News Service, 8/18/09

". . . 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.'

What the sociologists and Hitler are telling us is that by the time facts become clear, people are emotionally wedded to the beliefs planted by the propaganda and find it a wrenching experience to free themselves. It is more comfortable, instead, to denounce the truth-tellers than the liars whom the truth-tellers expose. The psychology of belief retention even when those beliefs are wrong is a pillar of social cohesion and stability. It explains why, once change is effected, even revolutionary governments become conservative. The downside of belief retention is its prevention of the recognition of facts. . . ."

—Paul Craig Roberts, When Propaganda Trumps Truth

"They Say Cutback

We Say Fightback "

—Rouge Forum, http://blogs.ubc.ca/ross

"I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination. "

—Eudge Debs, Presidential candidate on Socialit ticket

"Scientific achievement is not standardized. The natural world is diverse, and productive human inquiry takes many forms. . . ."

—Jonathan King, MIT Professor, letter to Boston Globe, 9/10/09

"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."

—David C. Berliner, Rational Responses to High-stakes Testing. . . .

"Hippocrates once said that the chief function of medicine is to entertain patients until they heal themselves."

—Frank Vertosick Jr., MD, When the Air Hits Your Brain

"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"

—Lynn Stoddard, Co-Founder Educating for Human Greatness

"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."

—Michael Lind, Can Obama Be Deprogrammed? Salon.com

"The Obush administration. . . . The Obush administration is not just threatening public education, it is more like a threat to the entire concept of democracy."

—Michael Martin, EDDRA list, Sept. 4, 2009

"In order to go on with our lives, we are always making the ominous into the merely strange."

—Deo in Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder, 2009

"[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]"

—Michele McNeil, Education Week, Sept. 3, 2009

"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."

—Valerie Strauss, on middle schoolers, Wash. Post, 9/2/09

" Any time a kindergarten class needs an online system to track assignments, that's a sign that school has gone too far."

—Donna Metler, Sept. 3, 2009

"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."

—Mark Slouka, Harper's Magazine, Sept. 2009

"Show me the spreadsheet on skepticism."

—Mark Slouka, Harper's Magazine, Sept. 2009

"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."

—Mike Rose, Why School? 2009

"[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."

—Mike Rose, Why School? 2009

"Education is learning how to spin your own web, not how to climb someone else's ladder."

—Joanne Yatvin, longtime educator

"The final test:Kaplan passes

Stanley Kaplan, the man who fueled the industry that taught people how to take the tests supplied by the industry that fueled standardized school admissions testing, has died."

—Improbable Research, http://improbable.com

"What if we asked where it was written that all 16 years olds are ready sit their exams on exactly the same day?"

—Ian Gilbert, Independent Thinking LTD

"What if the qualifications with which children leave school don't actually count for very much beyond the world of education?

What if they count for nothing?"

—Ian Gilbert, Independent Thinking LTD

"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?"

—Ian Gilbert, Independent Thinking LTD

"What if math is not as important as, say, art or music?"

—Ian Gilbert, Independent Thinking LTD

"[T]he impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country. "

—Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality, 2009

"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."

—John Holt, How Children Fail, rev. ed 1982

"I will show you Obama's birth certificate if you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma."

—Bill Maher, Tonight Show, Aug. 24, 2009

"In Arne Duncan's world, if standardized test scores aren't the answer, you've asked the wrong question."

—Susan Ohanian

"I dream of schools where days are not scripted by those who could not find the Post Office in your town."

—Lester Laminack, www.lesterlaminack.com

"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."

—Susan Ohanian

"Send in the Clowns: 3 Stooges Hit Road for Corporate School Reform. http://tinyurl.com/naskao "

—Bruce Dixon, August 2009

"Are education policymakers deeply religious? Why are they always in search of miracles?"

—Diane Ravitch, Twitter, Aug. 21, 2009

"What is Green Dot's record? Why are 'reformers' rushing to open Green Dot schools with no proof of anything?"

—Diane Ravitch, Twitter, Aug. 21, 2009

"[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."

—Steve Lendman, The People's Voice, 8/19/09

"Obama plans to reinvent a failed policy, give it a new name, and claim it will fix NCLB's shortcomings."

—Steve Lendman, The People's Voice, 8/19/09

"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. "

—William Greider, The Nation, August 18, 2009

"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.

I am deeply pissed. "

—Gerald Bracey, Aug. 17, 2009

"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."

—Mark Slouka, Harper's Magazine, Sept. 2009

"[S]hould there be some sort of T-shirt for the Arne, Newt, and Al Tour? "

—Alyson Klein, Education Week blog, 8/13/09

"Why Does Barack Obama Follow The George W Bush Playbook?

. . . Yup, many of us seem to have been fooled again. You betcha.

The only people who are not disillusioned are those who had no illusions to begin with. Isn't it obvious that power may seem to reside in the White House but it is effectively constrained by the real power centers-a cautious Bureaucracy, an overblown Military, avaricious Big Industries and the fraud factories on Wall Street?"

—Danny Schechter, ZNet Daily Commentary, 8/12/09

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, Twitter, Aug. 12, 2009

"First Arne Duncan says the tests we have stink, then he says evaluate teachers and schools based on stinking tests."

—Diane Ravitch, Twitter, Aug. 12, 2009

"When we stop playing, we start dying."

—Stuart Brown, M. D., Play

"[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."

—Stuart Brown, M. D., Play

"A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem."

—Shanti Goldstein, I Am My Own Best Casual Acquaintance

"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."

—Susan Ohanian

"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.
(One Size Fits Few, p. 31)

It looks like many of the professional organizations are only interested in debating about what will be on the menu."

—Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen

"The earlier [that schools try] to inculcate…academic skills, the deeper the damage & the more permanent the achievement gap." "

—Deborah Meier

"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 teacher 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."

—Susan Ohanian, Ask Ms. Class, p. 75

"A hyperactive parent inquires how his child is doing more than twice a year."

—Susan Ohanian, Ask Ms. Class, p. 75

"The first rule of Standards is that if you don't see what the problem is, you are the problem. "

—Susan Ohanian

"Boredom was born on a day of uniformity."

—Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog,

"They may prefer stories to theories, anecdotes to concepts, images to ideas--that doesn't stop them from philosophizing."

—Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

"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."

—Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

"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. "

—Michael T. Martin, Eggs or Eggheads, AZ School Boards Assoc. Journal

" Basing bonus or merit pay on test scores is like giving auto workers a bonus based on people’s driving skills."

—Kathy McKean posted on Facebook, 8/4/09

"What else was being a teacher but trying to respond as humanly as possible to problems that would not wait for an expert."

—Phillip Lopate, Against Joie de Vivre

" 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?"

—Diane Ravitch, intervidw with John Merrow, 8/4/09

"Apostrophe Advice, Part 1
Every morning on arising, repeat to yourself: "Lord, help me accept those things I cannot change." If a teacher takes apostrophes seriously, she will surely go mad.

Since Piaget did not address the developmental aspects of apostrophe control, Ms. Class will. She has a modest proposal: forbid apostrophe use by children until they reach the age of sixteen. When teens get their driver's licenses the distinction between possession and plurality sometimes becomes more apparent. There are exceptions, of course. The distinction eludes some people forever.

If you would like information on a grass-roots movement to eliminate apostrophes from administrative memos, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Apostrophe Advice, Part 2
Teachers would do well to learn from the lessons of history: Emily Dickinson did not use apostrophes. George Bernard Shaw referred to them as 'uncouth bacilli' and advocated using one only when omitting it would cause confusion--such as making a distinction between he'll and hell."

—Susan Ohanian, Ask Ms. Class

"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. "

—David Berliner & Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis. 1995

"[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."

—David Berliner & Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis. 1995

"[Chicago] teachers citing fact after fact to show what a lying, cheating, stealing corporate stooge Arne Duncan is."

—Labor Notes Film: http://susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=574

"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."

—Susan Ohanian

"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]."

—Phil Cullen, http://primaryschooling.net/?page_id=41

"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."

—Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report

"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. "

— Lauren Braun Costello & Russell Reich, Notes on Cooking

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit."

—Aristotle

"[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."

—Melinda Gates, National Council of La Raza, 7/25/09

"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."

—Melinda Gates, National Council of La Raza, 7/25/09

"After working my butt off to get this man elected, I am more than disappointed. These policies are truly bad for public education. "

—post on Daily Kos, 7/25/09

"Standards plastered on her door. Standards, benchmarks, tests and data Plastered on the classroom door. Only these, and nothing more. "

— Jenni Davis, Standards, http://susanohanian.org, 7/25/09

"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)."

—Sean Black at StopNationalStandards.org

"The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they’re learning it. "

—Emperor Bill Gates, Nat. Conf. of State Legislatures, 7/21/09

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, website, July 22, 2009

"Either we fight back as one class or its death by a thousand cuts. "

—Rich Gibson, Rouge Forum,

"Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head "

—Martin Espada, Advice to Young Poets

"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.) "

—Pres. Bill Clinton, State of the Union, Jan. 27, 2000

"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."

—Pres. Bill Clinton, State of the Union, Jan. 20, 1999

"[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. "

—Edwin Battistella, letter, NY Times Magazine, 7/19/09

"Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail."

—Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, 6/2009

"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."

—Michael J. Petrelli, Fordham Education Gadfly, 7/16/09

"'Still Life' translates into French as 'nature morte.' 'NCLB' translates as 'les enfants morts.'"

—Susan Ohanian

"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."

—Bob Mislevy, Knowing What Students Know, 1993

"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."

—Richard Gibboney,in Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality by Bracey

"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. "

—Susan Ohanian, Education Review, June 2009

"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.

Teachers who have left teaching for another profession are amazed by workplace luxuries at their new jobs: being able to check email, return phone calls, or use the bathroom at will throughout the day. Back in their teaching days, these ordinary tasks normally would have to be put off until lunch (unless the teacher had lunch duty) or until the end of the school day."

—Sheila Tobias & Anne Baffert, Science Teaching as a Profession:. . .

"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."

—Walter Kirn, New York Times Magazine, 6/5/09

"Prefer to participate in a happy education revolution rather than a heated debate about education reform?"

—Maya Frost, The New Global Student: Skip the SAT. . .

"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. "

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, June 28, 2009

"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. "

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, June 28, 2009

"I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been that we now have, in this administration, a leader in Secretary Duncan."

—Lou Gerstner, former IBM CEO, Carlyle chair in Bloomberg News, 6/26/09

"Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

—Bob Herbert, New York Times, June 23, 2009

"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."

—Edward Hayes, Chicaco Public Education Examiner, 6/23/09

" 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.

Whenever you hear the phrase zero tolerance, remember, someone is bullshitting you"

—George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

"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."

—Charles Barone, Democrats for Education Reform, 9/28/07

"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.

We fully expect the role of Race to the Top with regard to standards and assessments to be determined and informed by the success the Gates-led effort has in achieving its goals and meeting its timelines.

We recommend that the Race to the Top be used to spur implementation of the Gates/ACHIEVE/NGA initiative, to fill in any gaps that emerge, and compel states and districts to adopt standards and assessment"

—Democrts for Education Reform, June 17, 2009

"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."

—Democrats for Education Reform, June 17, 2009

"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.

Wasn't it the race to the top gotten us into this mess? What kind of message is the Obama administration sending to the next generation when his title for education reform implies millions of children who won't make it to the top will be left at the bottom?"

—Jim Horn, Schools Matter, http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/

" 'Hungry children are distracted children. We want to make sure nothing gets in the way of our children performing well academically, including hunger.
--Arne Duncan

Hungry children should be fed because they are hungry. Period.

That children's academic performance will improve when their most basic, fundamental life needs are met is truly secondary. NOT unimportant, but secondary."

—This Little Blog http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com/

"They fuck you up, the Standardistos."

—after Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse

"Bill Gates has paid tens of millions of dollars to have his childhood bullies tracked down and killed."

—David Letterman and Late Show Writers, Fun Facts

"Grade 4

Advanced: An advanced student evaluates and integrates concrete academic/workplace knowledge and skills for different careers.

Proficient: A proficient student identifies and applies concrete academic/workplace knowledge and skills for different careers.

Basic: A basic student has limited acquisition and comprehension of the academic/workplace knowledge and skills for different careers.

Below Basic: A below basic student has not developed the academic/workplace knowledge and skills necessary for different careers. "

—Wyoming State Standards, Career/Performance Descriptors

"A Standardisto has Van Gogh's ear for classroom nuance."

—Susan Ohanian

"There are two Standardistos drowning and you can only save one. What do you do? Take a nap or go shopping?"

—Susan Ohanian

"I performed badly in the Civil Service examinations because evidently I knew more about economics than my examiners."

—J. M. Keynes, British economist

"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."

—Pearl Fryar in film A Man Named Pearl

"National Standards are something you can't use at a price you can't afford."

—Susan Ohanian

"Standardistos like answering questions nobody asked them."

—Susan Ohanian

"One has to suppose that Standardistos were children once."

—Susan Ohanian

"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."

—Peter Hessler, of Peace Corps experience, New Yorker, 1/12/09

"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."

—Cary Tennis, Salon.com, June 19, 2009

"How do you know when Arne Duncan is lying?

His mouth is open and words are coming out. "

—George N. Schmidt , Editor, Substance

"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.

During the luncheon one wealthy matron got up to make her testimonial. "I have 18,000 acres in the Adirondacks," she said. "I'll fly some of these cats up there in my private jet." I kept thinking about the homeless families in West Palm Beach sleeping in cars. It is stunning to me how far out of the crucial concerns of our country so many of these people are. There is desperate need across the Inland Waterway, but that is another world, and most of these people intend to keep it that way. It's a story writ large in wealthy enclaves across America."

—Laurence Leamer, Madness Under the Royal Palms, in Huffington Post

"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. "

—Diane Ravitch, Huffington Post, 6/13/09

"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. "

—Priscilla Gutierrez, Literacy for All, June 12, 2009

"As long as there are content-based standards, there will be machine-scoreable standardized tests.

This Power Point highlights the issue:

http://www.marionbrady.com/Powerpoint/LearningPassive-Active.ppt "

—Marion Brady, June 12, 2009

"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. "

—Susan Ohanian, responding to Arne Duncan's spiel on NPR, 6/9/09

"If we kill you, you are a terrorist. "

—Paul Craig Roberts, Information Clearing House, June 6, 2009

"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"

—Arne Duncan, Speech to IES, June 8, 2009

"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. "

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, 2/24/09

"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.

The standard for what is offered to students should be what is held high. Then and only then can expectations for student achievement be raised-- but we still should never expect children to be standardized in their achievements. God didn't make them that way! Families don't facilitate standard school outcome.

Much can be done to improve things, however, so that each student gets the chance to reach his or her potential. "

—Juanita Doyon, Parent Empowermemt Network

"Frank Sullivan says that “half of our stock of maxims is designed to quell children….children are, of course, sitting ducks for proverbs."

—Frank Sullivan, A Watched Proverb Butters no Parsnips

"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."

—William Stafford, explaining how he managed to be so prolific

"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."

—William Astore, TomDispatch.com, June 1, 2009

"Dear Mr. Obama,

Please send my vote back."

—source unknown

" 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. "

—Sam Smith, Undernews, May 28, 2009

"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."

—Helen Epstein, New York Review of Books, June 11, 2009

"When you're a teacher, you have to own every word you say."

—Susan Ohanian

"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. "

—Josiah Swampoodle, Undernews, May 19, 2009

"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."

—Timothy Konold & James Kauffman, Handbook of Data -Based Decision Making

"On the Medical Model of schooling. Being a student is not an illness."

—Gert Biesta, Educational Theory, Vol. 57 No. 1, 2007

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, Phi Delta Kappan, June 2003

"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)."

—Gert Biesta, Educational Theory, Vol. 57 No. 1, 2007

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. "

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878

"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. "

—Wendell Berry, Home Economics

"Take away the right to say 'f---' and you take away the right to say 'f--- the government.'"

—Lenny Bruce

"They were that new kind of Democrat who didn’t seem to know any working people. They were limited to their own breed"

—Jim Harrison, The English Major

"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."

—Thomas Dee, Education Week, April 29, 2009

"WARNING: Objects In the NCLB Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear"

—Susan Ohanian

"Researchers have yet to discover any clear evidence that High School Exit Exams benefit anyone except the companies that make and sell them."

—Stephen Krashen, Letter to LA Times, 4/23/09

"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."

—Joseph P. Viteritti, Education Week, April 8, 2009

"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."

—Wendy Kopp, Teach for America, Broad Foundation Report 2008

"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."

—Patrick Shannon, Reading Poverty, 1998

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."

—Emma Goldman

"'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."

—Cindy Sheehan, Myth America, cindysheehansoapbox.com

"I think Joel Klein and Mike Bennet and Arne Duncan are some of the best superintendents around, and they were never teachers. "

—Michelle Rhee, Atlantic.com, Oct. 3, 2008

" Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci.

He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace."

—Sicilian proverb

"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. "

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, March 11, 2009

"How did that performance pay thing work out for the American financial system?"

— Education Notes Online, http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com

"Meanwhile, NEA mis-leaders joined AFT, the Business Roundtable, and other employer groups to promote national teaching standards,

Why national standards? It is not possible to split foreign policy and domestic policy. The education budget is a war budget. The crux of the US education project is to produce students so witless, docile, loyal, yet useful, they will support the poor of their home nation going off to fight and die for the rich. Bill Blum noticed this recently when he reminded us of this quote from the song about racism from the Broadway classic show, "South Pacific" ­ "You've got to be taught" ...

You've got to be taught
from year to year.
It's got to be drummed
in your dear little ear.
You've got to be taught
before it's too late.
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8.
To hate all the people
your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught.
"

—Rich Gibson, the Rouge Forum, March 11, 2009

"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. "

—Herb Kohl, Teachers College Record, 1/9/09

"No is simply no."

—parent Sylvia Martinez opting daughter out of CSAP

"Is it really so startling that those who call themselves progressive are generally as incapable of critical thought as those who label themselves conservative? "

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, 2/3/09

"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 )"

—Robert Hutchins, quoted in A Great Idea at the Time...by Alex Beam

"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."

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, 1/21/09

"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. "

—Ann Marie Corgill, Of Primary Importance

"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."

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, 1/14/09

"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles, 1841

"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."

—Castle Freeman, Jr. My Life and Adventures

"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.' . . . .

The Pentagon has been enjoined by both by national lawmakers and international institutions to stop pandering to children. When children's bodies are invaded, we call it statutory rape. Do we have a tidier phrase for the invasion of their minds?"

—Penny Coleman, AlterNet, Dec. 19, 2008

"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."

—Henry Giroux & Kenneth Saltman , Truthout, 12/17/08

""What do you do?" "What we can.""

—Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

"Algebra When Ready

Only when students exhibit demonstrable success with prerequisite skills-not at a prescribed grade level-should they focus explicitly and extensively on algebra, whether in a course titled Algebra 1 or within an integrated mathematics curriculum. Exposing students to such coursework before they are ready often leads to frustration, failure, and negative attitudes toward mathematics and learning."

—National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)

"We want beans, not goals."

—Mexican steelworkers’ banner, World Cup soccer championship, 1986

"You begin to die the moment you are born, and you really, really begin to die the day your child goes to school alone. "

—Eleanor Guiton, letter, New York Times, 11/30/08

"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."

— Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, Pediatricts January 2007

"[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."

—Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque

"Never! Never! Never! Never! Never!"

—King Lear

"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.'"

—Michelle Rhee, D. C. schools chancellor, Atlantic 11/08

"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.'"

—Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few

"School Takes 13 Years Because That’s How Long It Takes to Break a Child’s Spirit."

—bumpersticker on novelist Carolyn Chute's pickup

"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."

—Thomas Merton, letter to Vietnam War activist, 1966

"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. "

—Bill Moyers, Council of Great City Schools, Oct. 17, 06

"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?"

—Bill Moyers, Council of Great City Schools, Oct. 17, 06

"You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both."

—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

"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."

—Bill Moyers, Moyers on Democracy, 2008

"How much disrespect will you tolerate?"

—Ralph Nader, The Good Fight

"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. "

—Susan Green, parent, St. Petersburg Times, 10/25/08

"She may be dead.

Or she may be following Reading First scripts.

Hard to tell the difference."

—Susan Ohanian

"If somebody will fund it, 83,473 researchers will submit grant proposals to do it. And 82,029 will be from Texas and Oregon."

—Susan Ohanian

"You don't have to change the world. Just keep the world from changing you."

—Colman McCarthy

"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."

—Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong

"A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves."

—Edward R. Murrow

"Closing the school would be better than breaking their hearts. "

—Father O'Malley in Bells of St. Mary's

"Technology to wipe out truth is now available. not everybody can afford it but it's available. when the cost comes down look out!

Toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last round-up."

—Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong

"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? "

—Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War

"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. "

—Ellen Brantlinger, Who Benefits to High-Stakes Testing?

"More and more people are talking about national standards."

—Cynthia G. Brown, Center for American Progress, with ties to Obama

"When test companies sell things and call them formative, these vendors are being disingenuous —we used to call it lying."

—W. James Popham, Education Week, Sept.17, 2008

"Question: What do you think is your own best novel?

Answer: I don’t answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them."

—Gore Vidal to NY Times interviewer, 6/15/08

"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.'

Any statement.

Any comment.

Anything. I just respond with this great instruction and walk off. It accomplishes nothing other than to confuse th hell out of everyone. And I love confusion. "

—Lionel,,,,,,, Everyone's crazy Except You and Me...

"We introduce the whole alphabet, but emphasize 'A' through 'D' since they come up most for the multiple-choice standardized test. "

—Hillary Price, cartoonist, Rhymes with Orange

"Unfortunately, all evidence of your son's intelligence is purely anecdotal."

—New Yorker cartoon

"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."

—Paul Lawrence Dunbar, The Tattler, 1890

"(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."

—Press Release, Sept. 11, 2003

"More than anything else, the corporate-politicos have charged teachers to educate for civil obedience."

—Susan Ohanian

" Politicians' Syllogism:
Step One: We must do something
Step Two: This is something
Step Three: Therefore we must do it "

—Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay in Yes, Minister

"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."

—Huey Long

"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©."

—What Works Clearinghouse, US Dept. of Education

"In short, we must organize. Writing a book will not do it. Writing a paper will not do it. "

—Abu-Jamal, Mumia, The Industry of Fear, Social Justice, Fall 2000

"[S]tudents do perform or ventriloquize what teachers request. . . ."

—Erica Meiners, Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, & Making Public En

"Poverty is the single greatest risk factor for almost every 'life-smashing' condition a kid might be at risk for, save perhaps compulsive shopping."

—Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Se

"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."

—Anne Trudeau, Portland parent

"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. "

—Don Perl, Colorado educator & organizer at www.nationalreadingfirst.org

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. "

—Bertrand de Jouvenal

"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. . ."

—William Greider, The Nation, August 18, 2008

"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."

—Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Truthout, July 18, 2008

"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."

—Isaac Asimov, autobiography I Asimov

"....................for
too long you had carried your life
like two suitcases heavy enough to kill
you. "

—Elizabeth Spires, from The Snowy Day

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

—Voltaire

"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."

—reported by Sam Smith in Undernews, online report of The Progressive Review

"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."

—Sam Smith, Undernews, July 14, 2008

"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. "

—Walt Whitman on Democratic convention

"With California requiring 8th graders to know algebra, it might be a good time to start a Kindergarten Kalculus movement."

—Stephen Krashen, July 10, 2008

"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. "

—Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament, MAA 2008

"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.'"

—Cary Tennis, Since You Asked Column, Salon.com

"In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. "

—Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize acceptance, 1981

"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."

—John Adams

" We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started"

—T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"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. "

—Michael Martin, Research Analyst, AZ School Boards Assn.

"No matter what happens, just keep shopping.
--the corporate-politico economic policy

No matter what happens, just keep testing.
--the corporate-politico education plan"

—Susan Ohanian

" High-stakes Testing: Brainboarding"

—Rich Gibson

"Anger is always the self-selected moral choice when cowardice is the only perceived alternative."

—Jim Horn , www.SchoolsMatter.blogspot.com

""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.""

—Shannon Burke, Black Flies

"I pledge allegiance to the children
of the Earth,
and to the books that bring them pleasure
a library
of diversity
in the classroom
With joyful interpretation for all. "

—Susan Ohanian, after Gary Snyder

"I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all."

—Gary Snyder, from For All

"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!"

—Tauna Rogers, teacher, http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com

"Indeed, one PERFECT resister is enough to win the battle of Right against Wrong."

—Mahatma Gandhi, Satyagraha

"Fright destroys the possibility of good teaching."

—Susan Ohanian

"The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good."

—George Orwell

"So displeased am I with the direction public education is going, I have chosen to make this my last year."

—Don Perl, who refused to administer the state test, 2001

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. "

—Theodore Roosevelt

"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. "

—Parent and teacher, Atlanta, Georgia

"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.' "

—Stephen Krashen, in Language, May 2008

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. "

—Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

"It is the duty of the teacher to protect her students from the overreaching of the government."

—Susan Ohanian

""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."

"SILENCE!" The Secretary of Education barked back. . . ."

—Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle

"Moderation in temper is always a virtue. But moderation in principle is always a vice. "

—Tom Paine

"Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me 20 times, I’m a democrat. "

—Stephen Krashen, Santa Monica Daily Press, May 9, 07

" . . .the hearse is parked in the halls of the high school

recruiting black, brown and poor. . ."

— Andrea GIbson, For Eli

"Schools run by the market will favor the haves, not the have-nots. "

—Diane Ravitch, School Board News, March 2008

"We don't have a money problem, we have a values problem. "

—Marian Wright Edelman, School Board News, March 2008

"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."

—Schools Matter Blog, April 25, 2008

"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."

—Farmily Parenting @ DisneyFamily.com

"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."

—Jim Trelease retirement letter, January 2008

"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."

—Carl Chew, explaining his refusal to give WASL, KIRO TV

"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."

—14-year-old daughter of Carl Chew, WASL refuser

"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."

—Nicholas Von Hoffman, The Nation, 4/15/08

"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. "

— Marilou Johanek, Toledo Blade, April 11, 08

" The testing system also forces teachers out, Linda McNeil and Sherrie Matula say. 'We're killing the brand-new teachers,' Matula says. says."

—Margaret Downing, Houston Press, April 8, 2008

"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. . . ."

—Garrison Keillor, column, April 9, 2008

"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."

—Miriam Silver, letter, Naples Daily News, 4/4/08

"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?"

—Susan Ohanian, in Knowledge & Power in the Global Economy

"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.'"

—Susan Ohanian, What Happened to Recess?

"Teachers
Long on humility
Short on hubris,
Dreaming in beautiful echoes
Of all the lessons once possible
A teacher breathes carefully.

Stranded in a school desert
With only corporate scripts.
Show-and-Tell
Regulated by
State Decree
Molding diverse spirits
Into obedient parrots.

No matter how paranoid a teacher may be,
What they're doing to children
Is far worse than anyone can imagine,
A pedagogy of submission requires denial
and emotional bulletproofing.
"

—Susan Ohanian, When Childhood Collides with NCLB

"Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes."

—Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, in Life of Galileo

"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."

—Sara Paretsky, Interview, The Progressive, 3/1/08

"When my friends at The Nation asked what MY nation was, I replied simply: Indig(Nation)."

—Jim Hightower, populist and Nation writer

"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. "

—Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story

"We will never close the achievement gap if all we do is measure it."

—Howard Miller, New York Times, letters, 3/23/08

"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."

—Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross, Counterpunch March 2008

"Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get 8 cats to pull a sled through the snow."

—Jeff Valdez

"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?)"

—Alfie Kohn, March 2008

"If I can stop on heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.
"

— Emily Dickinson (1864)

"13.6 million of America's children live in poverty."

—Every Child Matters

" 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.

Nonetheless, with the current curriculum madness, I drop my support of compulsory schooling. I can't support forcing children to endure an oppressive behaviorist curriculum that demeans and diminishes them. I can't support forcing kids into schools that have abandoned kindergarten playhouses, school music programs, P. E.. I can't support forcing kids into schools that award prizes for reading books.

I won't support compulsory attendance until schools adopt a Happiness Index. A caring index. How about rating helpfulness, perseverance, patience, ingenuity? Where's the curriculum of caring? "

—Jo Coe & Susan Ohanian, Interview

"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."

—http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=118

"What is a teacher to do? Subversion or victimhood. "

—Edgar Schuster, English Journal, Nov. 2004

"This law has turned my sweet, happy classroom into a test-prep mill. "

—Monica Hart-Nolan, Half Moon Bay teacher

"Uniform Curriculum is a euphemism for teaching to the test. "

—Susan Ohanian

"Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too."

—Judy Willis, M.D., Educational Leadership July 2007

"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."

—Judy Willis, M. D., Phi Delta Kappan, Feb. 2008

"Not every state will meet the core principles that are required. This is complicated stuff that requires sound data systems, good reporting systems."

—Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education

"Our children are unique, creative creatures, not McNuggets, and they need to be inspired, not standardized."

—Eric Fried, Fort Collins Now, March 11, 2008

"Our public education system should be allowed to educate children, not merely test them."

—Michael Stevens, superintendent, Amarillo Globe News, 3/10/08

"Politicians are like diapers. They need to be changed often and for the exact same reasons."

—Tom Dodd, from the movie Man of the Year

"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."

—Proposed Amendment to US Constitution, not ratified, 1916

"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."

—Alan Scher, Jewish News Weekly, 2/22/08

"Dear Education Week,

I suppose that one may dub Quality Counts as unbiased reporting if one considers Fox News 'Fair and Balanced.' It's time for Ed Week to locate some integrity. "

—Cindy Lutenbacher, Mother of public school children

"Rules take us only so far, even good rules."

—Kurt Vonnegut, Man without a Country

"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."

—Leila Christenbury, former president NCTE

"Delta's Law

There are three sides to every story.

The Greek letter delta is a symbol for change in formulas. This triangle can be taken personally to create a philosophy that can be used as laws. For example, the 3 points of a triangle create a possibility space for change. Two points in a debate provide nothing more than a tyranny of dichotomies, whereas adding a third possibility is always more interesting, and closer to the true complexity of life. This rule of favoring 3s instead of 2s also works in any design to please the eye, such as three pictures on a wall instead of two. A couple become more interesting when they go beyond their own twosome to create a third focal point, whether a child, a book or a business. As Yale paleontologist Dolf Seilacher put it, Symmetry is boring. The next time you are confronted with only two choices, create a third, and see the possibility space expand."

—Delta Willis, Edge Annual Question 2004

"Kai's Exactness Dilemma

93.8127% of all statistics are useless."

—Kai Krause, software artist and user interface designer

"Sapolsky's Third Law

Often, the biggest impediment to scientific progress is not what we don't know, but what we know."

—Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences & neurology at Stanford

"Davies' Second Law

Never let observation stand in the way of a good theory. "

—Paul Davies, theoretical physicist

"Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate

When two incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal intensity, the truth does not lie half way between them."

—Richard Dawkins, Edge Annual Question 2004

"Quartz's Law of The Primacy of Feeling

In everyday life, one's anticipated emotions regarding a decision is a better guide than rational deliberation. Brain science is increasingly appreciating the centrality of emotions as guides to life, and emotions are typically more in line with one's wishes than rational deliberation, which can be easily disconnected from one's desires and goals. The upshot: deliberation is cheap, emotions are honest."

—Steve Quartz, California Institute of Technology

"Campbell's Third Law

The probability that a Powerpoint presentation will fail is proportional to the technical sophistication of the institution at which you are presenting it. (And by the way, where the failure is total, your talk will be all the better for it.)"

—Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief, Nature

"Anderson's Law of Causal Instinct

Humans are engineered to seek for laws, whether or not they're actually there.

Anderson's Law of Skepticism

Most proposed laws, including this one, will probably turn out to be vacuous."

—Chris Anderson, Edge Annual Question 2004

" Devlin's First Law

Buyer beware: in the hands of a charlatan, mathematics can be used to make a vacuous argument look impressive.

Devlin's Second Law

So can PowerPoint."

—Keith Devlin, Senior Researcher, Stanford University

" Myers' Law of Self-Perception
Most people see themselves as better than average.

Nine in ten managers rate themselves as superior to their average peer. Nine in ten college professors rated themselves as superior to their average colleague. And six in ten high school seniors rate their "ability to get along with others" as in the top 10 percent. Most drivers–even most drivers who have been hospitalized after accidents–believe themselves more skilled than the average driver. "The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background," observes Dave Barry, "is that deep down inside, we all believe that we are above average drivers." Excess humility is an uncommon flaw."

—David G. Myers, professor of psychology, Hope College

"Minsky's Second Law
Don't just do something. Stand there."

—Marvin Minsky, cofounder, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

"Kellys' First Law
Power, understanding, control. Pick any two."

—Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick at Wired magazine

"Lykken's First Law
The quality of one's intellectual productions is a function of the product of talent (e.g., intelligence) times mental energy. Although there are many and varied tests for assessing intelligence, psychologists have not as yet even attempted to construct a measure of individual differences in mental energy."

—David Lykken, behavioral geneticist, Edge Annual Question 2004

"Schank's Law
Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal."

—Roger Schank, Edge Annual Question 2004

"O'Donnell's Law of Academic Administration
If it feels good, don't do it.
Because if it feels good, it's going to be because it eases some frustration you're feeling from all the constraints and hassles of the institution; or because it really shows up so-and-so; or because it makes you feel you really do have a little authority around here after all. It won't, it won't, and you don't. Better to calm down, make sure you know all the facts, make sure you've talked to all 49 stakeholders, and sleep on it, then do the thing you have to hold your nose to do. "

—James J. O'Donnell, Provost, Georgetown University

"Gardner's First Law
Don't ask how smart someone is; ask in what ways is he or she smart.

Gardner's Second Law
You can never go directly from a scientific discovery to an educational recommendation: all educational practices presuppose implicit or explicit value judgments."

—Howard Gardner, 2004 Edge Annual Question

"[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. "

—Raphael Kasper, physicist, Super Collider Laboratory

"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."

—Nell Noddings, Educational Leadership Feb. 2008

""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. . . .""

—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

"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."

—John Holt, How Children Learn

"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."

—John Holt, How Children Learn

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. "

—John Kenneth Galbraith, Letter, March 2, 1962

"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."

—Matt Taibbi, The Chicken Doves, Rolling Stone, 2/ 21/08

"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."

—Thomas Paine, The Crisis, Dec. 23, 1776

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

—Susan Ohanian, in What Is Authentic Educational Reform? 2008

"You can't bullshit your way through this."

—Chris Newton, Walden Project senior

"These [standardized]tests [required by NCLB] should be a gnat on the windshield. . . a good teacher will just cruise through them."

—Amy Wilkins of Education Trust on NPR Diane Rehm show, 1/3/08

"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.

The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts to the tune of $4.3 trillion over ten years. This adds up to $287,000 per millionaire. "

—from Greg Palast

"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."

—Richard Rodriguez, interview with Jo Scott-Coe, Narrative Magazine

". . . I trust doubt; it keeps you on the journey."

—Richard Rodriguez, interview with Jo Scott-Coe, Narrative Magazine

"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."

—Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, Forbes.com, 1/23/08

"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion"

—Democritus

"Test publishers are hawking anything they can. It’s absolutely a fraud."

—James Popham, Bloomberg Markets, Dec. 2006

" Maybe the Feds should appoint a few teachers to a Homeland Security Best Practices Panel. "

—Susan Ohanian, website, Sept. 20, 2006

" 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."

—Peter Henry, Minnesota Teacher, Jan. 20, 2008

"If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star."

—William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other

"One person's 'partisan political influence' is another person's good old fashioned democracy. I will take partisan politics over unfettered corporatism any day."

—Sue Allison, Director, Marylanders Against High Stakes Testing

"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."

—Barbara Ehrenreich, Huffington Post, Jan 15, 2008

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it."

—Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birimingham Jail, 1963

"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."

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birimingham Jail, 1963

"We used to think our future was in the stars. Now the federal government is trying to convince us it's in phonemic awareness."

—Susan Ohanian

"No Child Left Behind is at its heart very simple: every kid on grade level by 2014 in reading and math."

—Sec. of Ed. Margaret Spellings to Chicago Tribune editors, 1/7/08

"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."

—Michael, Pollan, In Defense of Food

"I know No Child Left Behind has worked."

—George W. Bush, Chicago, Jan. 7. 2008

"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."

—Steve Rendall, FAIR Extra! Sept/Oct. 2007

"As first lady of Arkansas, Hillary had an education plan long before she had a health plan."

—Susan Ohanian, in Knowledge & Power in the Global Economy

"Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you'd find the allspice next to the ant poison."

—Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

"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."

—Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools

"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."

—George Miller & Russlynn Ali, S. F. Chronicle, 3/18/03

"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."

—Howard Zinn, It's Not Up to the Court, Nov. 2005

"[The] demand for ‘standards and accountability’ has been a diversion from a campaign for economic and social justice for the children of the poor. "

—George Schmidt, editor, Substance

" The journey to learning cannot be planned in advance and controlled like a journey to the moon. "

—Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence: Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classroom

".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"

—Thom Hartmann, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class

"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. "

—Bruce Kluger, No Child Left Alone, USA Today, 12/19/07

"

NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized -- not this year, not ever.

"

—Richard Rothstein, American Prospect, 12/17/07

"It's winter in the classroom
I'm tired and I'm cold
I am just a teacher
I do what I am told
We are the armies of the empire
It's winter in the classroom."

—apologies to Billy Joel

"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!"

—Chicago mother

"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."

—Gore Vidal, Lowell Lecture, April 20, 1992

"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."

—Mary Tedrow, Teacher Magazine, Dec. 12, 2007

"Stop treating teachers as potted plants."

—John Edwards, campaigning in Iowa

"I wish I'd made a lawnmower."

—Mikhail Kalashnikov, former Red Army officer, creator of the A K-47

"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 an equal disservice to both the 5% and the 95%. The other day a principal in Orlando told me about a Haitian kid who had to pass up a full music scholarship this year because he couldn't pass the FCAT. The gap between our rhetoric celebrating "individual differences" and our actual practices is appalling."

—Marion Brady, EDDRA, 12/8/07

"It's broke. Don't fix it."

—Susan Ohanian, website, December 2003

"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. "

—Fred Barton, Lansing State Journal, 12/5/07

"When people ask no questions, it is because they think they have all the answers."

—Georgia Hedrick, working for bilingual education in Nevada

"'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."

—Alyson Beahm, teacher, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/2/07

"Dear Mr. President,

What do you do when you see all the homeless on the street? . . .

How can you say no child is left behind?
We're not dumb and we're not blind."

—Pink, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eDJ3cuXKV4

"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?'"

—Ralph Nader, The Seventeen Traditions

"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."

—Gerald Bracey, EDDRA, Jan. 8, 2003

"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."

—Charley Reese, King Features Syndicate, 11/26/07

"Advice for the creators of No Child Left Behind: Leave me alone and let me do my job."

—Terri Vest, Vermont Teacher, Burlington Free Press, 11/28/07

"Teach to Mastery

When you give a quiz, have kids 'do it over/take it over' until they get 100% correct. "

—Hopkins County [Ky] Schools

"Max Apple prefers plain and simple sentences. He is anti-adverb; he thinks a verb shouldn't need any help."

—NPR, Nov. 28, 2006

"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."

—Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Nov. 19, 2007

"The child that you send over is nothing like the child that comes back to you. "

—Christine Delisa, mother of a wounded soldier, NY Times Quote of Day

"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. "

—Dennis Loo, Impeach the President

"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."

—Rural School & Community Trust, Nov. 2006

"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. "

—Samuel Adams, Founding Father and hellraiser

" 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. . . .

There are those who would steal our profession and its practice from us. I believe they are afraid of a profession that leads from the inside. I believe they fear what we bring to the conversation. And, we bring a lot to the conversation. "

—Doug Christensen, Nebraska Commissioner of Education

"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! "

—Aly L , New York Times article comments

"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."

—Releah Cossett Lent Literacy Learning Communities

"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."

—Manfred Max-Neef, Economy, Humanism and Neoliberalism

"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."

—Wendy Kopp, TFA after meeting with candidate George W. , 2000

"External exams and projects -- no matter who endorses them from afar -- are teacher bashing.

Either the assessment I give after working with a kid for 39 or 40 weeks is more meaningful than something that McGraw Hill is overpaid to utilize and provide for the "bottom line" -- or it isn't. Grafting something like "portfolios" on to multiple-choice standardized tests still leaves the "bottom line" external and in the hands of the people who never are accountable for what they've created for us to face in the classroom. "

—George Schmidt, publisher, Substance

"In America you can say anything you want -- as long as it doesn't have any effect."

—Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd

"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."

—Dr. Stuart Brown, M. D., founder The Institute for Play

"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?

We're just curious."

—Jim Broadway, Publisher, State School News Service

"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."

—Melissa Lafsky, NY Times Freakonomics blog, 9/24/07

"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."

—Amir Efrati , Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 2007

"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."

—Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein, American Prospect, Sept. 2007

"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."

—Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein, American Prospect, Sept. 2007

"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."

—Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein, American Prospect, Sept. 2007

"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. "

—Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein, American Prospect, Sept. 2007

"Teaching is a labor of love."

—Janice Fitzsimmons, NJ Teacher of the Year, Nov. 1985

"[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."

—Prof. Chester Finn, Vanderbilt University, NY Times, 9/9/84

"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. "

—Kenneth Winetrout, NY Times letter, Aug. 16, 1983

"Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words .... Is that all you blighters can do?"

—Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady

""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.'"

—Kathryn Sihota , 3rd grade teacher, Sooke, BC, Canada

"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."

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, 9/9/07

"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."

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog, 9/9/07

"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. "

—Loudoun County School Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III

"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."

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review, Sept. 08, 2007

"I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it."

—Gov. Bill Richardson, USA Today, 9/07/-7

"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? "

—Sam Smith, Undernews, 9/5/07

"It may be time to reflect on the possibility that a nation of good test-takers is not necessarily a well-educated nation."

—Diane Ravitch, Huffington Post, 9/4/07

"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."

—Garrison Keillor Homegrown Democrat

" 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."

—John Young, Waco Tribune-Herald, Aug. 30, 2007

"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."

—Fred A. Strine, The Spokesman-Review, 8/28/07

"No pupil under the age of fifteen years in any grammar or primary school shall be required to do any home study."

—California Civil Code, 1901

"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. "

—Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 2006

"Fetching objects for people
who are too lazy to fetch
them for themselves is never
a pleasant task, particularly
when the people
are insulting you."

—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."

—Antoine de SaintExupery

"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. "

—Sam Smith, Progressive Review. Aug. 20, 2007

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. "

—Voltaire

"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."

—Lynn Stoddard, The Secret of Education

"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. . . .

The gender gap did not widen because girls are reading more in 2004 than in 1980; they're not. In fact, girls are slightly less likely to read in their spare time today than they were in 1980. But roughly nine out of ten boys have stopped reading altogether. Why? "

—Leonard Sax, M. D., Ph.D, Boys Adrift

"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? . . .

Leone was also concerned [that] one class read at their desks, another on the carpet. One teacher used a green witch's finger as a pointer to lead children through the story, which Leone thought would be distracting. When she had gotten to third grade, she was pleased to see each of the three classes working on the same BCR at the same time. . . .

In fifth grade she was dismayed to find some of Mrs. Williams's students sitting at their desks reading books while others finished a test. She encouraged [the principal] to come up with a school-wide protocol for spending time after completing a test, one that didn't include free reading."

—Linda Perlstein, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade

" 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). "

—Medlisa Cabe, July 25, 2007

" 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."

—Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, Sept. 15, 2003

"When you are told, 'It was meant to be,' ask, 'Who meant it?' "

—Amy Tan, Commencement speech Simmons College, 2003

"I hat my sof Be cus I Dw Not No how to Rit."

—Marquis, a kindergartner in Tested by Linda Perlstein

"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. "

—Sam Smith, Undernews, July 17, 2007

"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."

—Lester Laminack, children's book author and teacher of teachers

"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!'

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. "

—after Bertolt Brecht

"This document printed on recycled paper."

—The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests

"A favorite Standardisto metaphor is School as a race. How about school as a beehive? A song? A handshake? Possibilities abound."

—Susan Ohanian

"It's all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget—
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bee
Which in the Clover dwell.
"

—Emily Dickinson

"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.

Recently I visited an Atlanta middle school and glimpsed the future and I recoiled. At first I thought the student art work signified a good trend, often missing in middle and high school – visible student essays, pictures, and materials. However when I studied the documents they were rigid displays of charts, paragraphs, and drawings all geared toward standardized state tests. In fact a recent middle school instructor at a local Georgia state university, said she tells her perspective students her world of teaching from the eighties and nineties is gone – it is now test scores under the guise of 'accountability.'

I am not saying I was the best teacher in my second of now 37 years as an educator. However, I am claiming that I influenced lives, even changed lives. A student who believes he or she can’t spell and then learns Supercalifraglisticexpialidotious gains confidence.

I am signing the Educator Roundtable petition against renewal of NCLB not because I am against accountability. Nor do I deny that too many public schools, where I have concentrated my career, have failed to educate challenging students. I am signing because the result of compliant test-driven schooling goes against all that I believe.

Now forty years later, I have seen the future so I am going to follow the vision and approach, which have sustained my professional life. Creative and caring effort works with students. I will continue to exemplify the root meaning of 'educare,' that is, leading out of each student his or her best in order to reach his or her potential and hopefully help others. "

—Tom Keating, Project Clean, June 24, 2007

"Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts. NY Times headline, 6/27/07

Why is payola illegal for disk jockeys but business as usual for medicos?"

—Susan Ohanian

"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.

And, of course, we insist the plumber be trained. How could we entrust our pipes to somebody who isn't? But we don't insist all child care workers be trained. This is not logical, it's pathological. And we have to look at why we have such a distorted system of values driving our economic system?"

—Riane Eisler, AlterNet, June 27, 2007

"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.

Maybe that IS the progression - from scream to siren."

—Tom Keating, Project Clean

"If I do say so modestly, [NCLB] is the jewel in the crown of President Bush's domestic achievements."

—Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education, Baltimore Sun, 6/18/07

"When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion. "

—Ethiopian proverb

"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. "

—Karen Horst Cobb, Common Dreams, 6/11/07

"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. "

—James Crawford, Education Week, June 6, 2007

"The No Child Left Behind Act has worked for America's children and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law."

—George W. Bush, State of the Union speech, 2007

"Just because your smoke alarm went off doesn't mean your trout's done."

—Nancy Cohen, What I Learned About Cooking Last Night

"Under No Child Left Behind, states and school districts have unprecedented flexibility in how they use federal education funds."

—U. S. Department of Education, NCLB, Introduction

"I can't stand giving kindergartners timed standards tests and watching tears trickle down their cheeks. It's just not right."

—unidentified teacher who is quitting, Los Angeles Times

"Don’t say data equals children. Equals learning. Say something gentler. Say No Child Left Behind."

—Jo Scott-Coe, Swink Magazine

"Throw away your red pencils.
You cannot mark people into existence."

—Robert Frost, Plattsburgh State Teacher's College

"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. "

—Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy, The Art of Learning

"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."

—Barmak Nassirian, Inside Higher Ed, 5/11/07

"The world's five hundred wealthiest people have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million."

—Nicholas Kristof, N. Y. Review of Books, 5/31/07

"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. "

—Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right?

"I am a war president."

—George W. Bush, Meet the Press, Feb. 8, 2004

"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."

—Margaret Spellings. U. S. Secretary of Education, 5/7/07

"Question: Your anecdotes. . . .

Answer: I'd like to call these data."

—David Berliner, C-Span, April 28, 2007

"When I raised my hand in class,
It didn't mean I knew the answer.
Far from it.
I was hoping the answer might float by,
And I could catch it like a butterfly."

—James Stevenson, Just Around the Corner

"There's not a thing wrong with teaching to the test.

Margaret Spellings, Education Writers Assoc. conference, 5/3/07"

"Always there is something worth saying about
glory, about gratitude

Mary Oliver, "Mockingbird""

"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."

—Diane Ravitch, Education Week blog

"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the commissioner of education . . . Amen."

—John Young, Waco Tribune, April 29, 2007

"Yes, we accept as a given that we need better teachers."

—Melinda Gates, Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

"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. "

—Don Perl, adjunct professor of Spanish

"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."

—John von Neumann

"Cut scores on tests, determining who is proficient and who is not, are political decisions. They are not scientific or psychometric decisions. "

Collateral Damage, Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner

" Are we sure we want to live with the consequences of high percentage of minority students not finishing high school? "

—Sharon L. Nichols & David C. Berliner in Collateral Damage

"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."

—Stephen Raudenbush, Schooling, Statistics, & Poverty

"Viewing teaching as a moral endeavor filled with uncertain and inevitable dilemmas positions the teacher always as an inquirer."

—Celia Oyler in Learning to Teach Inclusively

"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."

—Susan Ohanian

"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."

—Lynn Stoddard, Educating for Human Greatness

"The NCLB federal law, scheduled for reauthorization this year, expects everyone to stay the course on the wrong road."

—Lynn Stoddard, Educating for Human Greatness

"It should be spelled Reading FUrst."

—Stephen Fisher, teacher

"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."

—Jack Dale, Supt. Fairfax County Schools

"Silence, indifference, and inaction were Hitler's principal allies."

—Baron Immanuel Jakobovits

"The consequences of NCLB are far more damaging to our National Security than Iraq ever was."

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #24,432: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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. . . ."

—Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch, Dec. 16, 2006

"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."

—Molly Ivins, who will be missed. (1944--2007)

"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. "

—Sam Smith, Undernews , http://prorev.com/indexa.htm

"The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed. "

—Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, 1/31/63

"THe emperor who
was tricked by the tailors
is familiar to you.

But the tailors
keep on changing
what they do
to make money."

—Kay Ryan, "New Clothes" in Elephant Rocks

"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. . . ."

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951

"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."

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #23,963: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

" 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."

—Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940

"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."

—George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War," 1943

"Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. "

—Jacob Bronowski, MIT lecture March 19, 195r3

"Poetries is nots for all the peoples, it is for the ones that listens."

—Gabriela, first grader in Sarah's classroom

"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.' "

—Sarah Puglisi, California first grade teacher

"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."

—Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize physicist

"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. "

—Oscar Wilde, Fortnightly Review. Feb. 1891

"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. "

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Emile, or Education, 1762

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, apologies to Carl Sandburg

"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."

—Robert Scheer, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/27/06

"When a rich man's dog died, everyone commiserated. When a poor man lost his mother, no one noticed. "

—Punjabi proverb

"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. "

—Carl Jung, On the Psychology of th Unconscious

"Liberal: a power worshipper without power."

—George Orwell

"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. "

—Bertolt Brecht, German War Primer

"A lot of people say a lot of things, which doesn't make what they say true."

—Art Buchwald, Washington Post, 12/21/06

"...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." "

—Alfred North Whitehead, Pres. Address, Mathematical Assoc. of England 1916

"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 "

—Allan Luke, Literacy and Education 2005

"I wonder what the NEA actually disagrees with?"

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #21,088: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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."

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #21,147: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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! "

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #21,078: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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. "

—Betty Olson-Jones, anti-NCLB Petition signer

"Death to DIBELS."

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #20335: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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.'"

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #20370: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"About Damn Time! "

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #20434: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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. "

—Dr. Steve Davidson, organizer, www.EducatorRoundtable.org

" I do what I have to do."

—1st Grader, when asked, 4 months into year, "How's school?"

"I'm glad I never attended school under the present conditions - age: 72 years."

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #18561: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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?"

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #18505: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"NCLB breaks children's hearts. "

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #17788: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

" 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"

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #16465: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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. . . ."

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #13918: http://www.EducatorRoundtable.org

"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."

—Anti- NCLB Petition signer #15462: http://www. EducatorRoundtable.org

"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. "

—Anti- NCLB Petition signer #14800: http://www. EducatorRoundtable.org

"The No Child Left Behind Act should read, 'No Child Left Behind, Unless They are Really Smart. Then They Can Fend For Themselves.'"

—Anti- NCLB Petition signer #14323: http://www. EducatorRoundtable.org

"Think For yourself. Question Authority. Read banned books! Kids have the same constitutional rights as grown-ups!!! Don't Forget to boycott standardized testing!!!"

—Dav Pilkey in The Adventures Of Super Diaper Baby (Captain Underpants)

"I do wish we had something in education like AA, our own Test-a-holics Anonymous."

—Sarah Puglisi, first grade teacher

"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."

—Joe Navarro, first grade 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."

—Anti- NCLB Petition signer #12,529: http://www. EducatorRoundtable.org

"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."

—Jill Kerper Mora, signer # 11,996, The Petition

"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."

—Howard Zinn, Madison, WI, Oct. 5, 2006

" 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."

—Signer #9047, The Petition, http://EducatorRoundtable.org

"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."

—Katherine Alatalo, anti-NCLB Petition, http://educatorroundtable.org

"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]"

—Folasade Oladele, Buffalo associate superintendent

"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?"

—Anti- NCLB Petition signer #3943: http://www. EducatorRoundtable.org

"Senator Kennedy, this Act Sucks!!!"

—Anti-NCLB Petition signer #3576: http://www. EducatorRoundtable.org

"Senator Kennedy this Act Sucks!!! "

—Anti- NCLB Petition signer #3576: EducatorRoundtable.org

"Let a thousand flowers bloom. Give us some money for fertilizer. "

—Marion Brady's alternative to NCLB, 11/26/06

"Political, not scientific, considerations continue to explain NAGB's stubborn refusal to abandon achievement level cut scores which have no scientific or scholarly credibility."

—R. Rothstein, R. Jacobsen, & T. Wilder, 11/06

"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."

—R. Rothstein, R. Jacobsen, & T. Wilder, 11/06

"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)."

—R. Rothstein, R. Jacobsen, & T. Wilder, 11/06

"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."

—R. Rothstein, R. Jacobsen, & T. Wilder, 11/06

"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."

—R. Rothstein, R. Jacobsen, & T. Wilder, 11/06

"I'm angry as hell about NCLB."

—Doug Christensen, Nebraska Comm. of Ed at NCTE conf. 11/19/06

"There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all. "

—Gerald W. Bracey

"Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. "

—Plato, The Republic

"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."

—Phyllis Wingard, Mobile, AL kindergarten teacher, 11/12/06

"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."

—Phyllis Wingard, Mobile, AL kindergarten teacher, 11/12/06

" Justice cannot be won without organization."

—Rich Gibson, The Rouge Forum, November 2006

"Action engenders hope."

—Studs Terkel, quoted by The Nation editor 11/8/06

"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."

—Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones May/June 2006

"The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs."

—Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)

"[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 "

—Andy Stern, president, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

"McGraw-Hill's tests
Poison the nation.
They're the Halliburton
Of Education"

—Stephen Krashen

"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. "

—Norman Scott, The Wave, 10/20/06

"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."

—Grant Wiggins in D. Taylor, Beginning to Read & the Spin Doctors of Science

"Who's worse: The people who produce the goods that harm children or the people who use them?"

—Susan Ohanian

"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. "

—Ron Kovac, TruthDig.com, 10/10/06

"A time comes when silence is betrayal. "

—Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

—Howard Aiken, primary engineer, IBM Harvard Mark I computer.

"If you want a green light for government spending in America, just say the word defense.

It's next to impossible to wrestle free enough federal money for education, health care, or rebuilding New Orleans. But when the Air Force says it needs tens of billions of dollars for newer model fighters or the Navy wants to upgrade destroyers - in an era when America's most dangerous enemies have no ships or planes of their own - Congressional appropriators and members of the taxpaying public don't even bother asking hard questions."

—David C. Unger, NY Times Editorial Board, 9/20/06

"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 America's children through an inside-the-school management strategy of increased productivity rather than providing resources and support for the individuals who will shape children's 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."

—National Council of Churches, 10 Moral Concerns, 9/14/06

"Play--it's by definition absorbing. The outcome is always uncertain. Play makes children nimble--neurobiologically, mentally, behaviorally--capable 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 play--the challenges, the dares, the races and chases--model the struggle for survival. Think of play as the future with sneakers on."

—Hara Estroff Marano, Psychology Today, May/June 2006

" 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."

—Sam Smith, Undernews

"All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky. . . "

—W. H. Auden, 1939

"DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards. "

—P. David Pearson, The Truth About DIBELS

"Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this 'progess.'
So is the cowardice that calls it 'inevitable.'"

—Wendell Berry, "Some Further Words," in Given

"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. . . .

We are here to demand: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!""

—Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, on day of President's visit 9/06

"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."

—William Mathis, District Administration, June 2005

"Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom. . . . http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/#060830b"

—Keith Olbermann blog

"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."

—Margaret Spellings, U. S. Sec. of Education, 8/30/06

"I've got an ekuletic reading list."

—George W. Bush, to Brian Williams, New Orleans, 8/3/06

" Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world."

—Francis Church,

"With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system. "

—Herbert Hoover, 1928

"Reading First has demonstrated once again that politics and greed trump research and benefits to at-risk children every time."

—Robert Slavin,

"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."

—Antoine de Saint-Exupry

"L'essential est invsible pour les eaux. (What is essential is invisible to the eyes.)"

—Antoine de Saint-Exupry

"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?"

—Susan Ohanian

"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."

— Beppe Severgnini, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind

"Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give . . . .

—Opening of UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959

" 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 cliches of a long series of story conferences."

—Raymond Chandler, Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1945

"I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

—John Updike, Select Education House of Rep. Committee, 1978

"They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem. "

—Humphrey Bogart, On House Un-American Activities Committee

"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! "

—Norman Mailer, THe Naked and the Dead

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny.""

—Isaac Asimov

"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts
Absolutely."

—Edward Tufte, "Power Point is Evil," Wired, Sept. 2003

"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."

—Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955

"Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still."

—T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," 1943

"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."

—Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age, 1915

"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?"

—Paul D. Houston, The School Administrator, August 2006

"There are three possible explanations for the Administration's publishing a good-day-for-bombing color guidebook.

1. God is on Osama's side.

2. George is on Osama's side.

3. Fear sells better than sex.

A gold star if you picked #3."

—Greg Palast, August 14, 2006, e-mail

"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."

—Mario Savio, University of California, Berkeley, 1964

"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."

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. "

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary. . . ."

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"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."

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"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."

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"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. "

—Noam Chomsky, In American Power and the New Mandarins

" 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? "

—Jessie B. Rittenhouse, My House of Life

"'Give us this day our daily bread' is probably the most perfectly constructed and useful sentence ever set down in the English language. "

—P. J. Wingate, Wall Street Journal, 8/8/77

"Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there's an opening convey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner. "

—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

"David Barsamian: Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

Gore Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn't take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state legislatures. That's what Madison always said. I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian."

The Progressive August 2006

"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 government--not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty."

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the New York State legislature, Jan. 1931

"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."

—Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/06

"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."

—Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/06

"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."

—Sigrid Nunez, The Future Dictionary of America, McSweeney's

"Maximum Wage: n. the highest wage paid or permitted to be paid, usu. set at seven to ten times the minimum wage."

— Nick Flynn in The Future Dictionary of America, McSweeney's

"You need to be aware
That there is a single answer
That works for every possible question.
The answer too every question in nature is this: It Depends"

—Matt Cook, "The Right Tool for the Job," In the small of my backyard

"The first star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft."

—Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 1942

"When the need is strong there are those who will believe anything."

—Arnold Lobel, Fables,1980

"All oppressors attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty."

—Edmund Burke, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field."

—Niels Bohr

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."

—Bernard Berenson, Notebook, 1892

"The Task Force:
Promotes the need for higher standards and higher student achievement in U.S. K-12 public schools and supports effective implementation of the landmark No Child Left Behind Act."

—Business Roundtable Education & the Workforce 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. "

—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz

"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. "

—Ashley Atkinson, dir. accountability & assessment, Dist. 5 (SC)

"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?"

—Ellen Guiney, executive director, Boston Plan for Excellence

"A final concern with the federal law is that it is so driven by state testing that there's 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."

—Michael Winerip, New York Times, 7/12/06

"We boil at different degrees. "

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Eloquence," Society and Solitude

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's 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 didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't 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."

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22. 1961.

"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."

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).

"The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?"

—Michael Winerip, New York Times, 7/12/06

" High stakes testing is like gum on the bottom of my shoe!"

—Lizzie Allison, almost 10 years old

"Your life is your life. don't let it be clubbed into dank submission. "

—Charles Bukowski,

"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."

—Jim Hightower, "Agitation: The Essence of Democracy" Alternative Radio

"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 can't close the gaps in income, health and housing, there is little prospect of equalizing achievement."

—Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools

"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 bases--the teachers unions--and provide vouchers to let students attend private schools at public expense. . . .

Even if every contention in the previous paragraph were wrong, NCLB is to education as Katrina was to New Orleans. The law mandates that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Projections of failure range from 99 percent of all schools in California down to 85 percent in high-scoring Minnesota. Of what use is a program that fails everyone?"

—Gerald Bracey, Stanford Magazine, July/August 2006

"Sometimes people ask me how to get
to Judevine Mountain.

I can tell you how to get to where
the road ends, but when

you get to there, you've only just begun.
After that I can't be

any help at all. It takes years to find
the way. And anyhow you

don't need me. I'm lost most of the time
myself. Besides,

how would I know what direction
you are headed in?"

—David Budbill, "Directions" in While We've Still Got Feet

" 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. "

—Primo Levi, "Zinc," The Periodic Table

"When you say a word,
you enter its vocabulary,
it's got your home address, your phone number
and weight. . . ."

—Tony Hoagland, "Hearings" in Donkey Gospel

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."

—William Faulkner

"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."

—Philip Kovacs, Common Dreams, 6/28/06

"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."

—Philip Kovacs, Common Dreams, 6/28/06

"Great doubt, great enlightenment.
Little doubt, little enlightenment.
No doubt, no enlightenment."

—Zen observation

"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."

—Ken Goodman, Language Magazine, December 2005

"The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody."

—Mother Teresa, The Observer, 10/3/71

"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."

—Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science

"Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove."

—Jeremy Bentham

"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."

—Trish Konzak, teacher, Heather Farm Preschool

"[NCLB] is like another Iraq war, with inadequate funding, nave notions about the ease of success, and no clue about the eventual casualties."

—Marty Solomon, retired University of Kentucky professor

"Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be."

—William Stafford, from "Scars" in An Oregon Message

"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain. . . ."

—Emily Dickinson,

"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."

—Peter Campbell, http://www.transformeducation.blogspot.com

"All their fences
All their prisons
All their exercises
All their agendas
All their stanzas look alike . . . ."

—Thmas Sayers Ellis, from "The Maverick Room"

"And I, how have I taught myself to educate the children? "

—-Nora, in "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen

"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."

—John Atlas and Peter Dreier, Common Dreams, 4/15/06

"Art teachers who pose nude should wear helmets. "

—Letter to Austin American-Statesman, 6/16/06

"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."

—Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2006

"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."

—Sam Smith, Undernews: Progressive Review, 6/15/06

"You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note."

—Doug Floyd

"If you can't convince them, confuse them."

—Harry Truman

"I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could."

—Orson Welles

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. "

—Dr. Martin Luther King

"[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?'

'Look,' blustered Stoppard, 'I said I was interested, not obsessed.' "

—William Langley, The Telegraph, 6/11/06

"School is a very 'weak treatment' for the conditions of poverty."

—Source unknown

"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."

—Robert Redford, June 12, 2006

"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."

—Frederick Douglass, Canandaigua, NY, Aug. 4, 1857

"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. . . ."

—Eli Broad, co-publisher of "Better Leaders for America's Schools"

"We are either for kids or we are not. There is no retirement for that. "

—Georgia Hedrick, retired teacher giving books to kids in laundromats

"You can get all A's and still flunk life. "

—Walker Percy

"We test kids because we love them."

—Rod Paige, addressing Frederick Douglass Republican Club, 6/06

"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."

—Patti Harrington, Utah State Supt. of Public Instruction, 6/1/06

"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. "

—American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition

"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. "

—Frank Smith, Ourselves: Why We Are Who We Are

"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. "

—Princeton prof. Theodore M. Greene, in LA Times, 1946

"The moon gives you light,

And the state and the test gives you scores,

And my heart, O my students, my children,

My heart gives you love."

—Susan Ohanian, apologies to Walt Whitman

"At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. "

—Prof. Samantha Power, Amherst College, Class Day, 2006

"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 . . . "

—Vaclav Havel

"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."

—Dr. Danielle Ofri, attending physician, internal medicine, Bellevue

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

—Anais Nin

"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."

—Prof. Walt Haney, Boston College

"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)."

—Artuto Gonzalez, plaintiff lead attorney against CA Exit Exam

"IS BUSH A LUNATIC?"

—Molly Ivins, AlterNet, May 17, 2006

"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."

—Shelby Patrick, Hirschi High School chemistry teacher

"Teachers are far better judges of how students are doing than standardized tests."

—Sue Montabello, principal, British Columbia

"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.

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB."

—Greg Palast, May 12, 2006

"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."

—Jay Mathews, Washington Post, 11-23-04

" 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. "

—Jay Mathews, Washington Post, 4/10/05

"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."

—Molly Ivins, Common Dreams, 5/11/06

"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."

—Jim DeBrosse, Dayton Daily News, 5/12/06

"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."

—Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry

" 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."

—Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards

"NCLB has to be dumped into the Potomac next year, and it will no doubt take civil disobedience to make it happen."

—Jim Horn, Schools Matter blog, 5/10/06

" 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. "

—Heidi Perlman, MA Dept. of Ed, Public Relations, 5/10/06

"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"

—Kelley Perez, Florida mom, on MSN.com

"ANOTHER $6 BILLION THAT WON'T BE GOING TO NEW ORLEANS

After decades of upgrades to a fleet of notoriously cramped Sikorsky VH-3 Sea Kings, the White House has tasked Lockheed Martin with a dramatic, $6.1-billion makeover of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, starting this summer. The goal: to fit a mobile Oval Office into the tight quarters of a chopper. The new fleet will consist of 23 VH-71 aircraft, each of which will have 200 square feet of cabin space, nearly double the Sea King's 116. "

—Jonathon Keats, Live Science

"I had to buy (and pay for) my own stopwatch last week to finish DIBELS testing within the required time frame."

—Liz House

"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!"

—Liz House

"Those who can't find anything to live for,
always invent something to die for.

Then they want the rest of us to
die for it, too."

—Lew Welch,

"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."

—Mo Willems, Caldecott Medalist, in USA Today, 5/8/06

"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."

—Marla Reyes, Kings/Tulare Uniserv Unit, fighting NCLB

"Why are the bad guys so much better at naming things? Especially legislation. Especially bad legislation.

No Child Left Behind. Healthy Forests. Clear Skies. The PATRIOT Act.

They have a special gift for coming up with monikers that are easy to remember and easy to get behind. Sure, they're deceptive, but they're also very effective."

—Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post, 5/6/06

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you. "

—Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse

" In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he 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. "

—Alfred North Whitehead

"There are not enough good jobs for the college educated . . . .

Faced with layoffs, one president after another, starting with Jimmy Carter and running through George W. Bush, has either facilitated layoffs or acquiesced to them, or both. There is no loyal opposition. I set out to tell the story of our acquiescence and in doing so ran into a festering national crisis. Until we recognize it, an effective opposition cannot form."

—Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences

"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. . . .

This story's other lesson is hope. If a group of people who described themselves as 'nobody really, just housewives' could endure so much without breaking, if they could bear the meanness of their nation without becoming mean-spirited themselves, if they could come away with a passion for justice instead of revenge, then ordinary people are better than they are generally thought to be. . . . I did not invent these women; they invented themselves. What happened to them could happen to you, or me, and perhaps sometime it will. For better and for worse, this is a story of what could become of us."

—Barbara KIngsolver, Holding the Line

"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.'"

—Jane Smiley in Horse Heaven

"The first thing many observers noted about scientific management was that there was almost no science to it. "

—Matthew Stewart, "The Management Myth," The Atlantic, June 2006

"The No Child Left Behind Act has brought out the best in our teachers. "

—Margaret Spellings, Celebrating Teachers Week, 5/2/06

"May the fleas of 1000 camels infest your armpits. "

—Anonymous

"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."

—Stephen Colbert, about George W. Bush, 4/29/06

"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."

—Jim Hightower, April 2006

"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."

—V S Naipaul, Interview in Literary Review, April 2006

"If you put out another's candle, you will also be in the dark."

—German proverb

"The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it."

—Wendell Berry, "Some Further Words," in Given

"In the history of language the first obscenity was silence."

—Christina Davis, from "The Primer"

"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."

—Ken Goodman, discussion list, 4/23/06

" 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'. "

—Sir Arthur Eddington

"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.'"

—obituary in New York Times, 4/21/06

" 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? "

—Peter Henry in Becoming Mr. Henry

" 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...

I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD. "

—William Lloyd Garrison

"Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing."

—Philip Pullman, ISIS speech, April 1, 2003

"Failure to pass the AIMS test should not make them educational lepers."

—Editorial, Arizona Republic, 4/15/06

"Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. [Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking)"

—Antonio Machado, Spanish poet exiled by General Franco

"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."

—Abraham Lincoln

"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."

—Michael Martin, AZ School Boards Assoc. Research Analyst

"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."

—Uwe Reinhardt, Princeton political economist, in Washington Post

"I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination. "

—Eugene Debs

"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 "

—Deborah Meier, Education Sector, 3/10/06

"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."

—Dorothy Hatch, Charles County MD, in Washington Post

"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."

—Missouri Senator Bill Stouffer, on test prep passage about vegetarianism

"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."

—International Code of Medical Ethics

"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."

—Jeffrey Zorn,

"I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did. "

—Yogi Berra

"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. . . .

Poor kids received an education that prepared them for McDonald's, McMilitary, and Mc-Prison. "

—Elizabeth Jaeger

"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."

—Garrison Keillor, "Love Will Outlast Bush," 4/5/06

"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."

—Stan Karp, Rethinking Schools, Spring 2006

"[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."

—Stan Karp, Rethinking Schools, Spring 2006

"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."

—Stan Karp, Rethinking Schools, Spring 2006

"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."

—Diane Flynn Keith, interview with Jo Scott Coe, 3/31/06

"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."

—Mary O'Brien, Ohio parent activist

"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."

—Katrina Vanden Heuvel, The Nation, 4/1/06

"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?"

—Joni Balter, Seattle Times, 4/02/06

"Bourgeois scientists make sure that their theories are not dangerous to God or to capital. "

—G. V. Plekhanov

"Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it."

—Henry David Thoreau

"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. "

—Susan Ohanian, Interview with Peter Campbell 3/28/06

"And we all remember those desperate people on those rooftops [during the Katrina disaster] holding up signs, 'Send educational software!' "

—Bill Maher, on Barbara Bush gift to Katrina-impacted schools

"Everyone in this school is doing government work, not schoolwork. "

—Kayla Elmore, Colorado high school test refuser

"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.) "

—Carl Sagan, Parade 2/1/1087

"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."

—Paul Krugman, New York Times, 3/24/06

"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."

—Peter Henry, Becoming Mr. Henry

"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."

—Peter Henry, author Becoming Mr. Henry

""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. "

—Jeff Faux, The Global Class War, p. 184

"I was so micromanaged that they were telling me how to pronounce syllables of words. "

—Bob Edwards, of his former employer, National Public Radio

"Capitalism: The name of a religion based on the worship of money."

—Nicholas Von Hoffman, A Devil's Dictionary of Business

"I'm the commander in chief. I'm also the educator in chief. "

—George W. Bush, Wheeling, WV, 3/22/06

"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."

—George W. Bush, Wheeling, WV, 3/22/06

"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."

—Bruce Poch, Admissions Dean, Pomona College, 3/23/06

"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. "

—Walt Gardner, in Baltimore Sun, 3/21/06

"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."

—Donald C. Orlich, Pacific Northwest Inlander, 3/15/06

"The problem with the NAEP achievement levels is that they are no damn good."

—Gerald Bracey, Reading Educational Research

"I don't think there is any data that assessments at the third grade harms anyone."

—G. Reid Lyon to the Hartford Courant, 3/17/06

"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."

—Samuel Freedman, Gotham Gazette, 3/14/06

"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."

—Samuel Freedman, Gotham Gazette, 3/14/06

"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."

—a kindergarten teacher, 3/14/06

"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."

—Jay Mathews, Washington Post, 3/14/06

"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. "

—Rich Gibson

"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."

— L.J. Williamson, LA Times, 2/27/06

"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 . . . ."

—Jack OConnell, State Supt, Elementary Ed. Newsletter, winter 2006

"Let me assure you that today's rigorous kindergarten aims to prepare youngsters to succeed in the hard academic work that begins in first grade. "

—Betty Ann James, California Teachers Assoc., 3/6/02

"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. "

— Richard Cohen, Washington Post, 3/9/06

"We have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it. "

—Fred Rogers

"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. "

—Bruce Dixon, blackcommentator.com editor

" I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured."

—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth. "

—George Orwell, 1984

"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. "

—Susan B. Anthony

"What gets measured gets done."

—Margaret Spellings, U. S. Sec. of Education, 2/22/06

"Si se puede! (Yes, we can do it!)"

—Cesar Chavez

"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.

We dont have to invent the revolutionary movement. The movement already exists. It exists in the little things that people do for each other everyday; it exists in the help people give each other on the shop floor and their resistance to the company and the union; it exists in the love of husband and wife for each other and the support they give their children; it exists in the efforts of teachers to teach, and in the resistance of students to much of what they are taught. It exists in this room, in our efforts to figure out the world and how we can help change it. Are all these relationships of human solidarity perfect? Does friendship and equality and resistance to capitalism shape everything in society or everything we do? Of course not. Thats why we need a revolutionbecause everything that we value is under attack. But the revolutionary movement that we are part of is already a powerful force for change which the ruling class spends its every waking minute trying to control."

—Dave Stratman, New Democracy

"Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music. "

—Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths

"[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."

—Erik Ericson, Child and Society, 1950

" It will take a village to reform schools." "

—Lorie Smith Schaefer, kindergarten teacher

"Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer."

—David Berliner, Arizona State University

"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. "

—George Schmidt, editor, Substance

"Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. "

—Maya Angelou

"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."

—Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights Project report

"We see only what we expect to see."

—Alberto Manguel in A Reading Diary

"I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room."

—George W. Bush, House Republican Caucus in Maryland

"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."

—Art Rainwater, Madison, WI superintendent of schools

"[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."

—John Dewey, 1922

"Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can do is take a complete rest."

—Unknown

"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."

—Marian Wright Edelman, Children's Defense Fund

"One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision--incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in thirty-three American children--and one in eight African American children--goes 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."

—Nell Bernstein, All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated

"I wouldn't be slitting my wrists because I couldn't have a bilingual program."

— T. Shanahan, Chair, Nat. Lit. Panel for Lang. & Minority Children & Youth

"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.' "

—Jeff Faux, "The Party of Davos, The Nation, 2/13/06

"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."

—Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

"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."

—Steven W. Simpson, Ph.D. , Simpson Communications

" 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. "

—Gore Vidal

"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."

—Children's Defense Fund

"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."

—Andy Peterson, 12th-grader, Austin, Texas

" 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."

—Martin Luther King, Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

"I want to thank you for your leadership, Margaret. You're doing a heck of a job as the Secretary of Education."

—George W. Bush, celebrating NCLB 4th anniversary

"Margaret Spellings, the former Margaret La Montagne, has been Bush's alter ego on education issues for more than a decade."

—SourceWatch: Center for Media & Democracy

"I do not know how to weight or measure a man, the mistake is when someone thinks such task is possible. "

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"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."

—Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 1/10/06

"A little stress is good."

—Deputy Chanceller Carmen Faria, NY City's top instructional official

" 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.

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."

—Richard Rothstein on NPR Weekend Edition

" Crime once exposed has no refuge but in audacity."

—Tacitus

"There are places in the world where librarians and libraries are considered even more directly related to education than football."

—Rick Casey, Houston Chronicle, 1/6/06

"Now we'll have science testing, mandated by NCLB. So much for test tubes--now kids will just have tests."

—Judy Rabin, Monmouth University

"We should be encouraging rigor in our schools, not backing away from it."

—Jim Lanich, pres., California Business for Ed. Excellence

"Don't do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come."

—Hugh Thompson, pilot; rescued civilians at My Lai

"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."

—Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

"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."

—Joseph C'de Baca, Denver teacher, in USA Today, 1/5/06

"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."

—Editorial, Anniston Star (Alabama)

"To date there is no consistent evidence that high-stakes testing works to increase achievement."

—Sharon Nichols, Gene Glass, & David C. Berliner, EPAA/ASU

"I have the feeling that 60% of what you say is crap."

—David Letterman to Bill O'Reilly, 1/03/06

"Schools alone can't 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. "

—Gerald Bracey, Rotten Apple in Education Awards, 2006

"Our children have been hijacked and shackled by bad policy and bad politics. "

—Marian Wright Elderman, president, Childrens Defense Fund

"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.'

We were dealing with a poem and it was called--the poem was called 'My Papa's Waltz.' You're always telling the kids, 'Look for the deeper meaning,' and then there would be a test. But I said to the kids, 'Let's get inside the poem. What's going on in here?' And there was an explosion for me at that moment because we were doing it together. I wasn't a teacher anymore, as in 'I know everything and you're just out there. I tell you what you need to know.' Instead I said, 'You tell me what's happening. Tell me what's going on in here.' That was a turning point that colored my whole teaching career. "

—Frank McCourt, Interview, Academy of Achievement, 6/19/99

"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. "

—Gary Ravini, President, Petaluma Federation of Teachers

"I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. "

—Harriet Tubman

"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 wasn't 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 school's AYP. The test is actually interfering with his education. "

—Michelle Mader, Teacher, Waukesha School District

"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. "

—Jan DeGaetano, Teacher, Waukesha School District

"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? "

—Jerry Fults, Teacher, Stanley-Boyd School District

"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."

—Pete Knotek, Speech-Language Pathologist, Racine School District

"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. "

—Wade Heinen, Teacher,Sheboygan School District

"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, it's just on to the next one. Graduates, Milwaukee Public Schools"

—Emma Mullins & LaDarrin Johnson, 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. "

—Ruth Noble, Teacher, Madison Metropolitan School District

"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). "

—W. James Popham, Educational Leadership, 9/05

"I could understand if test prep was part of the curriculum, but test prep was all of the curriculum."

—Middle class parent on removing child from NY City public school

"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.

In other words, they are arbitrary slices of the scale that have nothing to do with 'shoes on the ground' reading and math expertise. NAEP 'Proficency' has no more reality than Saddam's WMDs. The difference is we now know the WMD deceit, and we don't yet know the NAEP deceit. If you read the NAEP fine print, it includes a description of how the distribution is divided. But who has read the fine print?"

—Dick Schutz, 3RsPlus

"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. "

—President Bill Clinton, Education Summit, IBM Headquarters, 3/27/96

"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 haven't learned to do basic reading and math or much less learned to think. It's a national shame."

—Marian Wright Elderman, president of the Children's Defense Fund

"An editor who taught me a lot once said: 'If you piss off both sides you're doing your job.' "

—Sam Smith, Undernews from the Progressive Review

"One brave deed is worth a thousand books."

—Edward Abbey

"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?"

—Susan Ohanian, Phi Delta Kappan, January 2000

"For Standardistos, diverse standards are an oxymoron. For me, standard standards are both an insult and an impossibility."

—Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards

"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 children's healthy development."

—Alliance for Childhood, December 2005

". . .for English class
I was assigned to Miss Ruth Stevenson
who closed the classroom door and said, "Ladies,
let's have ourselves a hell of a good time!"
And we did, reading Austen, Dickinson,
Eliot, Woolf, until we understood
we'd come to train--not tame--the wild girls
into the women who would run the world."

—Julia Alvarez, from "Abbot Academy"

"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."

—National Public Radio Morning Edition

" 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 America's children through an inside-the-school management strategy of increased productivity rather than providing resources and support for the individuals who will shape children's 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."

—National Council of Churches

"In a time of war, telling the truth is a treasonable act."

—anonymous

"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."

—Administrative memo, Greeley-Evans School Dist., CO

"("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")

I went over to the sargent, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington."

And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar."

—Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant

"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. "

—WEB Du Bois, The Education of Black People, 1930

"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. "

—John Ralston Saul, "The Doubter's Companion"

"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."

—Frederick Douglass

"Horrible example of numerical goals in public places."

—W. Edwards Deming, on America 2000

"Merit Pay, aka Principal's Pet Pay"

—anonymous

"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."

—Kurt Vonnegut, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 9/22/03

" 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."

—Bill Marvel, Dallas Morning News, 11/6/05

"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]."

—Colin Diver, Pres. Reed College, in The Atlantic

"I don't think we have the luxury of focusing on things other than those that produce results."

—Margaret Spellings, U. S. Sec. of Ed, NY Times, 11/3/05

"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."

—Gerald Wheeler, Ex. Dir., NASTA

" 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."

—Walter Dean Myers, NY Times, 10/16/05

"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."

—Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 2005

"How do we reach corporate dynamos to buy girl scout cookies?
How do we call when we want to rent a bus for the school picnic?
How do we call when the soup kitchen's out of soup?
How come big bucks stuff so few pockets?"

— Martin Steingesser,

"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."

—Jo Scott-Coe, on ATP Innovations in Testing conference, 2005

"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."

—John Young, Waco Tribune, 10/23/05

"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."

—John Young, Waco Tribune, 10/23/05

"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."

—Bill Maher, New Rules

"You have been in the village a few days and already think you know everything better than everyone here."

—Franz Kafka, The Castle

"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. "

—Clifford Hill, Teachers College Record, 12/7/2000

"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."

—Gerald Bracey

"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."

—Doug Soderstrom, a psychologist , Common Dreams

"I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. "

— Harriet Tubman

"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."

—Jennifer Booth Reed, News-Press

"Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. "

—Garrison Keillor

"DIBELS: Demonically Inspired by Evil Lord Satan."

—Richard Allington, IRA keynote address

"Everyone is looking at the DIBELS even though we know this is not a true measure of our kids."

—Jennifer Lopez, kindergarten teacher, New Mexican

"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. "

—Molly Ivins, AlterNet, Oct. 14, 2005

"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."

—Gerald Bracey, Rotten Apple Awards, 2000

"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. "

—Kenneth Goodman, Education Week, 9/12/05

"The Department of Homeland Security said that the recent terror threat to New York City was "specific but non-credible."

So is NCLB."

—Susan Ohanian

"'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.' "

—Peggy Sue in film "Peggy Sue Got Married"

"Remember, you are allowed only three exclamation points in a lifetime. "

—Sam Smith, Undernews from the Progressive Review

" 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."

—Julia Steiny, Providence Journal, 10/2/05

"A preschool near the Stanford campus had the purposeful name 'Knowledge Beginnings,' whereas a preschool near a university in Switzerland was called 'Vanilla-Strawberry.' "

—Marina Krakovsky, Stanford Report, 2/2/05

"Clearly there are more college graduates than unfilled jobs requiring their credentials. "

—Louis Uchitelle, New York Times, 10/2/05

"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. "

—Jonathan Kozol, Interview, Salon.com, 9/22/05

"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.

So even when school systems sometimes boast that they've reduced the learning gap between the races, in fact they have increased the cultural gap between the races. And these test score gains are always spurious and temporary. It means nothing; this is the result of teaching to the test, and in some cases, like Houston, it's the result of cheating. If these were real gains -- learning gains, not testing gains -- you'd see the results four years later when they get to eighth grade. But I meet the same kids four years later and they can't write a cogent sentence and they can't read a social studies text, and by the 12th grade the difference is catastrophic. The numbers that come from the Education Trust say that the average 12th grade black and Latino student in America reads and does math at the level of the typical seventh grade white student. George Bush says his testing plan is working, and it is a flagrant lie; it's a deadly lie because it's deceiving the parents of the poor, and it's the worst possible crime because once these years are taken from the kids you can't ever give them back."

—Jonathan Kozol, Interview, Salon.com, 9/22/05

"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 direct result of this is that even the best principals and teachers -- and I write this book with tremendous empathy for them -- in poor inner-city schools, as compared to the suburbs, feel totally compelled to teach to the tests. They feel compelled to exclude from the curriculum anything that will not be tested, which means the children must be trained to give predictable answers and the teacher cannot indulge an unexpected answer. If one little boy, in the middle of a lesson on consonant blends, insists on telling the teacher about a visit to the zoo with his uncle, the teacher has to cut him off. She can't let him get to the end of his story. The child who wants to ask the teacher about something he finds funny or something that brings him close to tears, she has to cut him off. In many of these schools teachers have to hold timers in their hands -- especially schools using the Success for All classes -- every minute has to be directed toward something that will be on state exams."

—Jonathan Kozol, Interview, Salon.com, 9/22/05

"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."

—Ecclesiastes update

"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.

Even proponents of a growth model seem to miss this point. No single indicator is sufficient. Moreover, the proper use of multiple indicators is to evaluate, diagnose, and then take informed action. It is not to trigger interventions from a statutory list that may or may not have any bearing on the problem. "

—Rick Pratt, Assistant Executive Director, California School Employees Assoc

"Republicans won't fund No Child Left Behind, and Democrats say they will. We don't know which is worse."

—anonymous teacher

"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."

—Gerald Coles, Comprehending DIBELS, FairTest Examiner

"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. "

—Denny Taylor, working in Baton Rouge, 9/11-14.05

"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."

—The United States Constitution, Tenth Amendment

" 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 one's rank a fool's errand. In the process of pursuing a higher rank, educational leaders are ignoring deeper and more important purposes of education."

—Howard Gardner, Education Week, 9/14/05

"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."

—David C. Bloomfield, The Politics of Education Association

"'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."

—Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 2005

"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."

— William Swor, Detroit lawyer (ACLU website)

"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."

—Jonathan Rowe, blogger, OntheCommons.org

"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."

—Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 2005

"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."

—Nancy Braus, Odyssey, Fall 2005

" 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). "

—W. James Popham in Educational Leadership, Sept. 2005

"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."

—Annette Fuentes, The Nation, 9/19/05

"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."

—Annette Fuentes, The Nation, 9/19/05

"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."

—Matt Entenza, Minnesota house Demratic-Farmer-Labor leader

"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 law's mandates."

—Gerald Bracey

"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 image of all those people left with nothing in New Orleans is the perfect metaphor for the effect of NCLB."

—Gerald Bracey

"The kind of testing we are doing today is sociopathic in its repetitive and punitive nature."

—Jonathan Kozol

"{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."

—Jo Ann Behm, California Education News, 8/22/05

"We have learned that it is NCLB that should be on the 'needs improvement' listnot our schools. The NCLB game is not winnable"

—Members of Hailey & Bellevue Elementary PTA (Idaho)

"Hasn't anyone noticed that these [assessment]systems are the same as that silly Donald Trump stuff --'You're fired!'

As long as you give them the metrics (to use Donald Rumsfeld's term) to rank and sort children and teachers, you are giving them the ammunition to kill you and democratic public schools. Let's start talking about decent democratic public schools for all children in this country and stop talking about 'tests,' 'ASSESSMENTS,' or any other form of ranking and sorting. Next thing you know, someone will suggest that eugenics also makes some sense."

—George Schmidt, editor/publisher Substance

"I've had all I can stand, I can't stands no more!"

—Popeye the Sailor Man

"The Daily Prophet is bound to report the truth occasionally, if only accidently. "

—Dumbledore in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince

"Estimated amount spent lobbying Congress last year: $3,000,000,000"

—Harper's Index, July 2005

"We could buy three pages in a book with the money per student we got for [the library] last year[71 cents per student]."

—Sharon Talmadge, library media teacher, La Costa Canyon High School (CA)

"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."

—Peter Domencic, board member, Avonworth PA School District

"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. ^%$%#$$@^%$*^%&^!!!!"

—Oregon teacher

"The [NCLB]law is sounding the demise for public education as we know it. . . . the law was enacted to grease the skids for vouchers."

—Elizabeth Grouse, Ludlow , KY Schools Superintendent, in Sunday Challenger

"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 country's agendas. Their managing of the nation's 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.

Encouraging people to deny their own experiences and crushing people's aspirations--that's power. Using police, militias, courts and jails to limit people's ability to exercise rights collectively (such as speech and assembly) they cannot exercise as individuals--that's mastery. "

— Richard L. Grossman and Ward Morehouse, Intro. Elite Consensus

"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."

—Dave Barry, Miami Herald, August 4, 2005

"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. "

—Mary Shanklin & Leslie Postal, Orlando Sentinel, 8/7/05

"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 Recovery.If 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."

—Prof. Richard Allington, President, International Reading Association

"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. "

—Robert Andrzejewski, Red Clay, Delaware Superintendent of schools

"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. "

—Prof. James Horn, in "NCLB Testing Hysteria at Full Maturity"

" FCAT is an acronym standing for '(Very bad word) Comprehensive Assessment Test.'"

—Dave Barry, Miami Herald, Aug. 4, 2005

"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. "

—Steve Jobs, founder, Apple Computers, Stanford Commencement 2005

"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."

—Garrison Keillor, Salon.com, Aug. 3, 2005

"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."

—Wendell Berry, "Word and Flesh," Vermont Commons, July 2005

"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. "

—Stan Karp, Rethinking Schools Portland area meeting, Nov. 7, 2003

" 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."

—Lea Alpert, school superintendent, in Hawaii Advertiser

"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. "

—Greg Palast, e-mail list, July 22, 2005

"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."

—Andi Nofziger, math teacher in a newly-formed Gates Small School

"Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. . . ."

—Billie Holiday

"No matter how cynical you become, it is never enough to keep up."

—Lily Tomlin

"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. "

—Paul Krugman, "Karl Rove's America, NY Times, 7/15/05

" 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. "

—Gerald Bracey, 7/15/05

"Loved Bush's speech to the nation on the Iraqi War. 'The war is going according to plan.' Well, then it's a shitty, shitty plan."

—Daily Dose of Durst, The Progressive

" '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."

—Steve Orel, Director, World of Opportunity (WOO), Birmingham, AL

"Science is ever evolving.... And as we learn more, we apply the knowledge."

—Mike Johanns, Secretary of Agriculture, on mis-diagnosis of mad cow disease

"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."

—Susan Ohanian, Caught in the Middle: NonStandard Kids and a Killing Curricu

"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. "

—Asa G. Hilliard, III, in Intervention in School & Clinic, 11/1/2004

"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."

—Roland Barth

"[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.

Today Sartre is still as troubling and annoying as ever. He demands that we see a world seemingly out of control as made up of human choices and the structures these create. When he demands that we take responsibility for our lives, for the shape of our world, for the situation of the least favored - for others as well as ourselves - he is expressing decisively important conditions for learning to live as responsible citizens in this globalized world. This is no outmoded radicalism, but the message of one of the most challenging and contemporary philosophies.""

—Doug Ireland, on 100th anniversary of Sartre's birth, 6/22/05

"If you don't disagree with me, how will I know I'm right? "

—Samuel Goldwyn

"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.

Their fear: Less and less time will be allotted for physical activity and even recess, in turn fueling the obesity epidemic in American children and teens. Some critics have taken to calling the act 'No Child Left Without a Big Behind' or 'No Child Let Outside.'"

—Kathleen Doheny, Forbes.com, June 5, 2005

"We can educate our children and continue to strive for excellence without a federal noose around our neck."

—Arlen Gould., Wheeling, IL School Board Member, voting to reject NCLB

"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."

—Reinhard Ludke, structural engineer, in S. F. Chronicle, 6/15/05

"My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast. "

—Miguel de Unamuno

"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.

We need you to walk the earth, so that other nations can see the beauty of American youth, rather than seeing our young in combat fatigues behind the barrel of an M-16."

—James McBride, Pratt Commencement, June 2005

"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. "

—Gerald Bracey, June 2005

"The real question for the future is whether, after this barrage of mindless and endless assessment, there will be any inquiring minds left."

—Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, June 13, 2005

"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."

—Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

"More Americans already work in art, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors."

—Daniel H. Pink in the New York Times, 6/4/05

"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."

—W. James Popham, School Administrator, 3/05

"Everything--
a bumptious, stuck-up word.
It should be written in quotes.
It pretends to miss nothing,
to gather, hold, contain, and have.
While all the while it's just a shred of a gale.

from Monologue of a Dog"

—Wislawa Szymborska, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996

"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. "

—E. M. Forster

""Stand up for your fucking rights!""

— Sam Shapiro in "Bread and Roses," directed by Ken Loach

"But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?"

—James 2:20, King James Bible

"We need to stand up for what we are supposed to be doing in public education."

—Tom Kelly, Westchester superintendent

"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."

—Antoine de Saint Exupery

"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 . . . ."

—Dana Stevens, Slate.com, 5/3/05

"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."

—Lasso, blog, American-Statesman, 4/29/05

"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. "

—Sherrie Bjurstrom, longtime Ohio teacher, 5/2/05

"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. "

—Ilene Davies, Utah teacher

"We don't need people who can spit back facts. We've got Google."

—Prof. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

"Free the markets. Screw the people."

—Arundhati Roy, "The Checkbook & the Cruise Missle"

" 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."

—Tom Horne, Arizona Superintendent of Schools, April 2005

"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. "

—Bill Powell, Superintndent, Strasburg School District, Colorado

"He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back."

—Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

"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."

—Noam Chomsky, NY Review of Books, 1968

"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make--it would hope--put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see."

—George W. Bush, Washington, D. C. 4/14/05

"Reliable data should enter the language as a new euphemism for budget cuts to programs that serve the poor."

—Susan Ohanian

"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. "

—Mickey VanDerwerker, Parents Across Virginia United to Reform SOLs

""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.'"

—Joseph Polisi, president, Julliard School

"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."

—Reg Weaver, NEA President, on filing lawsuit 4/20/05

"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?"

—Utah State Senator Thomas Hatch (R), 4/19/05

"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."

—Robert Wright, Slate, 4/19/05

"If No Child Left Behind means for us to look at the problem of poverty, let's look at it. "

—Times Argus editorial, 4/18/05

"Would we be better off simply telling the federal government to drop dead and not accept the NCLB money?"

— James H. Dillard, Republican delegate, VA General Assembly, 4/17/05

"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."

—Frank Bryan, Going It Alone: The Case for Vermont Secession

"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."

—Patrick Welsh, teacher, to Jay Mathews in Washington Post

"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."

—Patrick Bassett, president, National Association of Independent Schools

"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. . . .

In several states teachers can become "highly qualified" by presenting a B.A. and a passing score for an online exam of teaching which Chester Finn developed with a 35 million dollar grant from the Bush administration."

—Lois Weiner, New Politics Winter 2005

"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."

—Lois Weiner, New Politics Winter 2005

"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."

—Lois Weiner, New Politics, Winter 2005

"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."

—Philip Kovacs, CommonDreams.org, April 6, 2005

"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. "

—Philip Kovacs, CommonDreams.org, April 6, 2005

" Let's quit calling it public EDUCATION. It's more like compulsory public "Jeopardy.""

—David A. Gabbard, Assessment Reform Network e-mail list, 4/8/05

"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."

—Editorial, Palm Beach Post, 4/9/05

"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."

—Indidn Country Today, April 8, 2005

"If you ask the rich why you're not capable of supporting yourself, they'll tell you it is your fault. The ones who make it to the lifeboats always think the ones in the water are to blame. "

—Iain Levison, A Working Stiff's Manifesto

" 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. "

—Sam Wineburg, Journal of American History, 4/05

"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. "

—Sam Wineburg, Journal of American History, 3/05

"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."

—David Elkind, professor of child development, Tufts Univ.

"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. "

—Margaret Spellings in the Washington Post

"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.

For the past decade, I have taught at an alternative public high school in Dallas, working with so-called "difficult, at-risk, delinquent" young people. Effective teaching and learning are based on relationships not rules. Every good educator realizes this eventually. Only active teachers and parents can teach this lesson to our school board."

—John Fullinwider, teaches at Otto M. Fridia Jr. Alternative School

"[NCLB] is ill-fitting and doesn't follow the values we have with regard to teaching and testing and learning." "

—Betty J Sternberg, Connecticut Education Commissioner

"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."

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"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."

—Ahab in Moby Dick

"In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes."

—John Kenneth Galbraith

"5/4 people dont know how to do fractions."

—Adeil

"Make our high school more like a school and less like a prison. They have us on lockdown."

—Veronica, 11th grade Denver student

"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."

—Sam Smith, Undernews, 3/21/05

"Sure, call me any ugly name you choose
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again, America!... "

—Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again

"[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 it's 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. "

—Patrick Hayashi, retired associate president, Univ. of California

"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.

What the rather dreamy Billy Faulkner gave himself in place of schooling was a narrow but intense reading of fin-de-sicle English poetry, notably Swinburne and Housman, and of three novelists who had given birth to fictional worlds lively and coherent enough to supplant the real one: Balzac, Dickens, and Conrad. Add to this a familiarity with the cadences of the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Moby-Dick, and, a few years later, a quick study of what his older contemporaries T.S. Eliot and James Joyce were up to, and he was ready armed. As for materials, what he heard around him in Oxford, Mississippi, turned out to be more than enough: the epic, told and retold endlessly, of the South, a story of cruelty and injustice and hope and disappointment and victimization and resistance. "

—J. M. Coetzee, NY Review of Books, 4/7/05

"Recent reforms are to the SAT as:

(A) polish: turd

(B) rearranged deck chairs: Titanic

(C) dress: pig

(D) all of the above

"

—Kerry Howley, reason.com

"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."

—National Academy of Sciences panel looking at NAEP

"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."

—Campbells Law, cited by Sharon L. Nichols & David Berliner

"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."

— Sharon L Nichols & David Berliner, EPSL research, March 2005

"Momma, don't let your baby grow up to be a Standardisto."

—Susan Ohanian

" 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."

—Frank Rich, The New York Times, 3/13/05

" 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.

No matter how deceitful, stupid, ineffective, and criminal executives act the accepted wisdom in the United States is workers should be more cooperative, work harder, take pay cuts, pension cuts, benefit cuts, and smile."

—Gregg Shotwell, Stay Solid, UAW Local 2151

" 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."

—Roberta Tenney, N. H. Dept. of Education, in Christian Science Monitor

"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. "

—Torri Chappell, parent and tutor

"Hidden line items [in NCLB] betray the law's 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."

—LynNell Hancock, Columbia Journalism Review, 3/05

"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 Bush's twin philosophies of accountability and market competition to bear on the messy business of education."

—LynNell Hancock, Columbia Journalism Review, 3/05

" [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."

—Clifford Hill, Co-author Children & Reading Tests, Dayton Daily News

"This is the first year that the TAKS is implemented at its intended rigor.1



1rigor:
# Strictness or severity, as in temperament, action, or judgment.
# A harsh or trying circumstance; hardship. See Synonyms at difficulty.
# A harsh or cruel act.
# Medicine. Shivering or trembling, as caused by a chill.
# Physiology. A state of rigidity in living tissues or organs that prevents response to stimuli."

— Debbie Graves-Ratcliffe, Texas Ed . Agency spokesperson, 3/2005

"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."

—Alex Wilson, 15-year-old Denver high school student & test refuser

"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!

Too long have we stood by while our six-year-olds hit the books instead of the backyard. . . .

No more, I say, no more! Let's give our kids the freedom we ourselves enjoyed. Let's turn them loose in the ``great cathedral space'' of childhood, as Virginia Woolf once put it. Let's fly the flag of freedom and fun over our humble homes. Let's join our hands in solidarity and just say "No" to homework."

—Kelly Patterson, Ottawa Citizen

"At this proximity
you are deleterious to my tranquility."

—Vocabulary Accelerator CD from Kaplan & Defined Mind

" 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. "

—Elsa Hornfischer , MetroWest Daily News, 3/10/05

" 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.'"

—Royal Government of Bhutan

"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."

—Daniel Okrent, Public Editor, NY Times, 3/6/05

"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."

—Stephen Krashen

"Weighing the pig more often will not make it grow faster."

—Stephen Krashen

"How much longer will educators at all levels continue to poop on the paper the corporate-politico ed biz whizzes set down for them?"

—Susan Ohanian

"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."

—Tom Grieve, Salon.com, after minimum wage defeat, 3/05

" 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."

— Utah Republican state senators in letter to Pres. Bush, 3/05

"Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor!"

—James Forbes, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City

"Don't place so much emphasis on your child's test scores that you lose sight of his well being. "

—U. S. Department of Education

"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."

—Prof. Gregory E. Stone, University of Toledo

"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?"

—Vicki L. Newell, Capitol QIPS, (Parent perspective on Colorado)

"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."

—Utah State Senator and rancher Thomas Hatch

"We take the output of the schools, the students, as a source of employees for the business community."

—Marvin Schoenhals, chair, Delaware Chamber of Commerce

" 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."

— Bill Hirschman , Orlando Sun-Sentinel, 2/4/05

"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."

—Howard Gardner, in The News Journal, 3/5/05

"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."

—Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schoo