From the most recent Deducation post

from http://www.deducation.us

Jonathan Alter, Union Buster

Jonathan Alter, an unlikely candidate for enshrinement in the right-wing Hall of Fame, seems to be buying into the anti-labor, anti-education, anti-humanistic rhetoric of the far right with his latest editorial in Newsweek. , entitled "Obama's No-Brainer on Education."

He should know better. A regular contributor to the Huffington Post, a sometimes guest of Al Franken, the journalist who broke the "chads" story in the 2000 Florida Presidential election, the blogger who wisely counsels that the way out of the mess W. has led this country into is to "Listen to Gore," Alter adopts a disconcerting display of "no brains" by parroting right-wing lies and drivel about the NCLB. "Blah blah blah accountability blah blah teachers unions blah blah blah liberal blah blah blah outcomes blah blah blah assessment blah blah blah."

His reasoning would provide a course in logical fallacies and unexamined premises for any college freshman. Maybe we can even get a question on it on some state's NCLB test: In Jonathan Alter's piece ""Obama's No-Brainer on Education," how many logical fallacies does he commit? A. 5 B. 10 C. 15 D. More than 15

Let's take a couple. First, the famous sports analogy, much prized by conservatives. Quoting Bob Wise, president of an organization disingenuously calling itself the "Alliance for Excellent Education" which believes that the NCLB is not mean enough because it's only authorized to withhold federal funds form high schools that don't get its students to do well enough on the multiple-choice tests ("it lacks teeth at the high school level").

But I digress. According to Alter (the quotation is uncited, i.e., plagiarized), Wise says, "If I told you your basketball team finished in 25th place, you'd be outraged." Well, no, I wouldn't. Winning large numbers of basketball games just isn't that important in the larger scheme of things. Education is not a competition for first place, a basketball game writ large; it's a process that ensures all our citizens will be able to think and communicate effectively. Basketball isn't life; basketball isn't even very much like life. Many sports have a clear winner and a clear loser, no ambiguity, either-or, black and white. How is that like real life? Faulty analogy--one of the prime abuses of logic.

Another one: According to Alter (again, an uncited source), teachers unions should listen to one Andy Stern. Well, why should we listen to Andy Stern? Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't, but Alter doesn't really give us any reasons. We apparently should take Alter's word for it--listen to Andy Stern because he agrees with me on this.

Andy Stern, according to Alter, has said "Education is like any business. You need a return on investment. Outcomes do matter...." Well, no, education is not like a business, nor should it be. ExxonMobil is a business, Halliburton is a business, FreddieMac is a business, Enron was a business. Education is not a business. False analogy again, but even worse, it's another logical fallacy as well: the unproven minor premise. It's like saying "All white-tailed deer must die; Socrates is a white-tailed deer; therefore, Socrates must die." The goal of education is not to increase its shareholders' profits at all cost.

The conclusion Alter and Stern try to lead us to--teachers unions are bad--thus falls apart. But let's examine it even more closely. Union-busting is the oldest pastime for profit-hungry corporations. Unions fight to maintain civilized treatment for workers, a work environment where workers are free to contribute to the best of their abilities, receive a decent wage for their efforts, and remain relatively free of harassment and exploitation. Now more than ever a strong teachers union is crucial for this nation--they seem to be the only ones willing to stand up to a Congress and a President and a Secretary of Education who know nothing about education yet are more than willing to mindlessly impose their benighted ideologies on this nation's schools.

I have a challenge for Alter and Stern and Bush and Spellings and all the union-busters in Congress. Find an incompetent teacher and name him or her; lay out explicitly your criteria for the judgement of "incompetent" so we can see exactly where you're coming from and we can examine your criteria. Let's see who, according to you, deserves to be fired, and why. No generalizations, no abstractions, no easy pandering characterizations of "incompetent teachers." Name one.

The Return of Deducation

After a long hiatus, in which the NCLB has not been re-funded and I have taken the time to redesign the site using Wordpress, Deducation.US has returned. I'm back with weekly news and interpretation of forces destructive of American education. I'll try to keep up with my original pace of a new posting every week.

The fact that NCLB is temporarily unfunded should not lull us into sleep over it. It will return, perhaps in a slightly improved form, perhaps in a more dangerous form. But it too will be back.

If You Can't Beat Them, Test Them: NCLB as Child Abuse

In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I'm re-reading Shame of the Nation again, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make by blood boil. Just in passing, I'd like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). I suspect not one, surely not one of the Republican candidates, all of whom seem not to get it when it comes to education. But how interesting would it be to make them all read it and then respond in detail, in depth. How can anyone read this book and not immediately want to go out and dismantle NCLB? I'd be interested--really!--to see how supporters of the NCLB would respond. What kinds of arguments would they offer up in the face of this powerful book?

But that's not what I want to talk about today. In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, "Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain...." (page 3). Now it's no surprise that corporal punishment has been used extensively throughout history, but, thankfully, more enlightened times have seen the almost total abandonment of the practice in this country. Even though "Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia" and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes "... during the past 30 years ... a growing outcry [has] emerged condemning such practices [i.e., corporal punishment] with school children as well." Reports of corporal punishment in our schools have declined.

Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as "[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation." It should be clear that schools qualify as "caretakers," so the only point of dispute would seem to be the "emotional harm" specification. While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the "restoration of apartheid schooling." And its results--tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music--seem to me to qualify as "serious emotional harm." You could make a strong case that the NCLB meets the federal criteria for child abuse.

So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I've noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission. The NCLB is the new vinegar-dipped whipping cane.

The Silence of the Dems

There's a lot going on in our country today, and the Presidential candidates have a lot to think about and a lot to talk about. Ending the war is number one, as well it should be. But that's just a short term goal--in a year or two we will not have the war to kick around anymore, though we have decades of recovering from this abomination mentally and spiritually to get through. We haven't even gotten over the Vietnam war. Health care and Social Security, a looming recession/depression, pervasive racism, the increasingly large gap between the rich and the poor, terrorism, and (my other most pressing issue) energy independence: all these are getting at least some attention from the candidates.

Yet the one issue that has crucial long-term implications for this country--the repeal of the NCLB--seems to be sliding into the background. The NCLB is a ticking time bomb planted by the Bush Administration, and its ticks are beginning to be increasingly ignored by the Democratic candidates. Edweek, in its November 6 article "The Next Education President?", writes, "But with the campaigns for the 2008 presidential nominations in full swing, few of the current candidates have laid out detailed strategies for improving the quality of American schools and increasing the knowledge and skills of the nation’s elementary and secondary students." And "Many political analysts expect education issues to remain a low priority during the primaries and in the general-election campaign."

Over the summer, it seemed as focus on the renewal of the NCLB and especially during the NEA Convention, when the candidates were trying to curry some favor with educators, there was a certain amount of awareness and lip-service from the candidates. I just searched YouTube for some candidates' video from the NEA convention and found a couple of interesting ones: Senator Clinton: "The test is becoming the curriculum"; and Senator Obama: "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test." I confess that, for those few moments, at least, Hillary seemed to be more on top of what's wrong with the NCLB. But since then, in her public pronouncements and on her website, mostly silence on the matter. And the same with most of the other Democrats.

So what's the appeal of the NCLB for the voters or the constituencies or the financial backers that the major candidates are afraid to come out and say, with minor candidate Bill Richardson, "Scrap it!"?

When the Bush-NCLB timebomb goes off in 10 years or so, when today's sixth graders are beginning to enter the workforce, the voting ranks, major positions of power and authority and decision-making, we'll all look at each other, and say "how come everyone is so stupid? Why can't they think or imagine?" Because the NCLB has made us a nation of test takers, capable only of giving memorized answers that were correct ten years ago.

Wake up and speak up, Sens. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama.

Where the Candidates Stand

I've been away from the blog for a few weeks. Seems like nothing's happening on the NCLB front, with the exception of Jonathan Kozol's Hunger Strike. (By the way, the most distressing development in this is that Senator Ted Kennedy, a longtime friend of Kozol, is refusing to even return Kozol's calls now.)

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZvZd8_wNm2c"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZvZd8_wNm2c" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object> But a colleague recently sent me a link to a YouTube clip of John Edwards speaking on the NCLB, saying that this video had swung him over to the Edwards camp. It's powerful stuff, and Edwards is saying most of the right things. He's not saying repeal the NCLB, which he should be, but he seems to understand the immense problems the Act has occasioned and he's got a lot of good, if still rather vague, ideas about what to do.

He calls the NCLB "intrusive," and speaks of the absurdity of rewarding good schools that fall in their results but stay above the minimal competencies while punishing the underfunded and underperforming schools that make huge gains in their performances. Of the technocrats' mania for testing, he says, "the parameters of what we are measuring need to be more diverse."

So I decided to do a quick investigation of the other major candidates' positions on the NCLB.

First, Hillary Clinton does not explicitly mention it on her website. A summary by Margaret Paynich in the January 22, 2007, EdWeek says, "doesn't support school vouchers, supports types of performance pay, one-time testing for teachers - but no word yet on National Standards. My advice - don't hold your breath." In Clinton's publicly-released statement, she says, "While I firmly believe in the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, the under-funding of this crucial law makes it impossible for teachers and schools to reach these goals." As I've noted previously, the only good thing about the NCLB is that it's underfunded, thus slowing down its rampage through American schools. So it seems that she's firmly behind the NCLB, not only its stated goals, which are indeed laudable, but its methods, which are dangerous. But in reality she is mostly vague, having chosen health care as the cornerstone of her candidacy.

Most disappointing to me is Barack Obama, whom I've supported from day 1 without, I guess, clearly seeing his position on the NCLB. Susan Ohanian's website (which, I should note in passing, is an excellent and thorough critique of NCLB--she has, I believe, coined the word "standardista" for people who maniacally preach standards). In her depressingly full section entitled "Outrages," she includes an article by Obama, "created by the Center for American Progress," which plays into the hands of the corporate technocrats who see the only function of education as enabling students to more fully participate in the "competition" for "global jobs." "Countries who are out-educating us today out-compete our workers tomorrow," he (or rather the Center for American Progress) writes. This is disappointing in two ways: first, that Senator Obama, as intelligent and articulate as he is (the two qualities I have admired in him), either isn't bold enough or wise enough to stand up to the corporate types who want to take over our educational system. Perhaps, it's just politicking, fence-sitting so as not to offend any powerful donors. Second, why is he allowing the Center for American Progress to write his position statements? Granted, the Center for American Progress is often progressive, and certainly sees itself as such, but its agenda is clearly economically-based--making good little workers out of our students. Its "State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness" is jointly written by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and contains troubling conclusions like "too many of our nation’s schools and students are unprepared for the demands of the 21st century’s knowledge-based economy" and "These shortcomings are unacceptable and spell trouble for the economic prospects of individual Americans and for the competitiveness of the country as a whole."

Then there's Governor Bill Richardson, who doesn't stand a snowball's chance of getting nominated. He writes, "I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it." Hooray for a voice of sanity.

And Dennis Kucinich, an original supporter of NCLB, who has seen the damage it's doing and has changed his position: "Yes, I would [throw it out now]. I would replace it with [...] a new educational structure where the focus would be on helping to bring forth the creativity of our children in stressing arts and language, music; to invite the participation of educational philosophers and psychologists and administrators and teachers and parents and children; to take a new focus on our education, to stop this incessant direction of trying to make us a nation of test-takers, of putting the pressure on teachers to teach to the test, and then school districts depending on the results of those tests for their funding."

It's trendy for the leading candidates to support the NCLB in general and bemoan the fact that the Bush administration's major failing is underfunding it. Only the second-tier candidates, who presumably can speak their minds without fear of losing the support of the wealthy corporate donors, can speak the truth about the NCLB's emperor and his garb.

Can either Clinton or Obama be shown the light before it's too late? Or can John Edwards actually win the nomination?

NCLB and the Commoditization of Education

One of the issues bound up with the conservatives' view of education is "commoditization, " the belief that something has become so commonplace and unremarkable that it can be mass-produced, packaged and sold, like potato chips or ten-penny nails or Windows computers. Originally the person who invented potato chips had something new and remarkable; over time the process for making them became so refined and streamlined and advanced that almost anyone could make them, and the only difference between potato chips became price. The item in question thus became a commodity. As Thomas Friedman has shown in The World is Flat, when an item becomes commoditized, it can be outsourced to Asian workers who will do it more cheaply or it can be computerized, mass-produced by algorithms that can be programmed, measured, and assessed.

In some ways it seems that education is in danger of becoming commoditized. And I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect. Probably some of each. You see this happening already, and, even worse, in the way in which education is talked about, you have to fear that it's only going to get worse. The forces of rampant capitalism are closing in on American education.

Item: In the book Many Children Left Behind, Stan Karp makes the point that, "critics see NCLB as part of a calculated political campaign to use achievement gaps to label schools as failures" (page 54). Anyone who knows the first thing about probability and bell curves knows that in any group of people, by any measure there will be gaps. Since there will always be gaps between the best and the worst, this means there will always, inevitably, be "failures" which opens the door for "market measures, vouchers, and other other steps towards privatization" to move in and "reform" public education (58). It's either planned from the start (which I sort of doubt, knowing that at the very least Ted Kennedy was one of the co-authors of the original No Child Left Behind legislation), or a lucky break of cosmic proportions for the free-marketers. But the door is open.

Item: Blogger TeacherJay has noted that some schools are beginning to pay their students for attendance and achievement, thus making good little consumers of all their students. Get and A and earn a hundred bucks! Can there be anything that makes a clearer link between education and commoditization?

Item: Educational corporations are jumping into the NCLB game with both feet. It's getting to be big business--there's lots of money (LOTS of money) to be made by declaring some children, teachers, and schools to be failures. Special privatized schools, charter schools, commercial after-school programs--veritable cash cows.

But even worse, I think, are the pre-packaged "Pass state-mandated tests" programs, sold over the Internet and also increasingly hawked by large publishing houses. These are often the worst kinds of education imaginable, flash-cards, rote drill and kill memorization, phonics (don't get me started on the futility of phonics!). Often these are computerized, the CD version of flash cards. Mass-produced, pre-packaged education. Reading as a salable, measurable commodity: a thing.

Real education--the kind that requires attentive and informed intervention by real teachers--can't be commoditized, so it apparently must be sacrificed to mindless computer programs and state tests of trivia. For they can be commoditized. And sold at Walmart.

NCLB NIMBYism

A new study co-sponsored by "Education Next" from Stanford's Hoover Institution and the "Program on Education Policy and Governance" at Harvard reveals some interesting insight into the turmoil surrounding the re-authorization of NCLB. The study, a survey entitled The 2007 Education Next—PEPG Survey, shows that a slim majority of surveyed Americans favor re-authorizing the NCLB with few or no changes, with the strongest support registered for "accountability" in the abstract, whatever that means. Most interesting to me, however, was the disparity in respondents' view of their own school vs. other schools: nearly all respondents graded their own school much more highly than other schools. My school is fine; all those others out there are failing. This suggests to me a kind of lurking NIMBYism.

A NIMBY, you might remember, is one who is in favor of such and such social or political reform, but Not In My Back Yard. Yes, I favor nuclear power to help solve the energy crisis, but I don't want a nuclear reactor in My Back Yard (i.e., my town). Build it, but build it somewhere else. Yes, we need to lock up more criminals, but build those prisons somewhere else. In New England right now, we are seeing the same attitude regarding the "wind farms" proposed off the coast of Cape Cod, a large collection of huge wind-powered turbines that would make a dent in our region's energy crisis. Yes, we want renewable energy sources, but Not In Our Back Yard. Build those windmills, but build them somewhere else.

I remember in the energy crisis of the 70s, when the national speed limit was reduced to 55 mph. Surveys showed that the nation was overwhelmingly in favor of the mandate (in the abstract), yet studies showed that the lower speed limit was being overwhelmingly ignored. Yes, I want all you other people to drive 55, but I don't have to. Those surveys were poorly worded: they should have asked, "Are you in favor of a national law whereby YOU will receive a speeding ticket the minute you drive over 55 mph?" Then we would see how much support there was for a national 55 mph speed limit.

But I digress, sort of.

One of the interesting tangential conclusions of the survey was that support for the NCLB's "if it breathes, test it" accountability policy rises if the phrase "NCLB" is not mentioned, just referred to generically as "federal accountability legislation." Which shows that "No Child Left Behind" is for whatever reasons beginning to lose its conservative-manufactured halo (this is good) but that "accountability" in the abstract is still a god-word. I want to make all those other schools toe the line that I set--that's the meaning of "accountability," in more concrete and understandable terms.

Another tangential finding from the survey is the disparity of results between educators and non-educators. The professionals and the competents in the field of education, those who know and understand the challenges of modern education, oppose the reauthorization of the NCLB. Those who don't know favor its re-authorization. A telling finding, I think.

But cut through the abstractions, the words with an aura around them that allows you to interpret them any way you desire, the mother-apple-pie words that mask the realities. What if the survey had asked concrete and specific questions which clearly highlighted in personal terms the impact of the NCLB? I'd like to see the Education Next-PEPG survey re-done, asking the question, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that requires that your child fail the entire grade if he or she doesn't pass a specific multiple-choice test at the end of the school year?"

Or how about, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that allows wealthier parents to remove their children from the public schools and send them to private charter schools with support from your tax dollars?" Or maybe "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that may identify your school as not good enough and then withdraw federal support from your school as punishment?" Or perhaps, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that has the effect of forcing your school to lower its standards in order to keep its funding?"

Or, given that 68% of African-Americans support vouchers, ask, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that would allow students from poor black school districts to attend your child's school instead at taxpayer expense?"

Hey, wait a minute....I'd support that.