Reblog: Ewww Michigan

So with the bad economy and government budget shortfalls many states have cut their funding for education.  It's the standard less teachers or aides with larger class sizes, less extracurricular activities, even worse special education, and sometimes closing and combining schools.  This has happened everywhere, from California to Maryland and unfortunately (and obviously) it means worse education for children. Currently Michigan is in the lead for horrific cuts. Gov. Rick Snyder released his plan in April and it contains an "unprecedented push toward for-profit schools, dubious online curricula, and budget cuts and anti-union measures that would make the public teaching profession ever more insecure."  Read the Mother Jones article Michigan's Radical Assault on Public Education for more information.

Personally I just can't wrap my head around the logic of defunding education.  It's a necessary service that when done well substantially improves not just the individual, but all of society.  Also we can look at history and other countries to see what happens when we fund, or don't fund education, and a lack of funding is never a good thing.  Or at least it's never a good thing in the long term or for the majority of society, short term it saves governments money and creates a poorly educated working force for cheap labor in factories/corporations.  Is that really what the majority of our states and politicians want?


By the way, I swear at some point I'm going to get back to book recommendations, and lists, and providing information of educational techniques and jargon.  There's just all these time sensitive things going on between politics and education that I feel needs to be addressed. 

Re-Blog - News on High Stakes Testing

Recently Marion Brady, a teacher, administrator, and curriculum designer wrote an article for the Washington Post When an Adult Took Standardized Tests Forced on Kids. In it she shares information she received from a friend who took the 10th grade test (this is the one that determines graduation, college potential, and of course teacher and administrator pay, and school funding).

The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”... “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate."...“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

In the article Marion Brady also discusses the recent New York Times story Principles Protest Increased Use of Test scores to Evaluate Educators by Michael Winerip.

"President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals’ revolt in history.As of last night, 658 principals around the state had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.Their complaints are many: the evaluation system was put together in slapdash fashion, with no pilot program; there are test scores to evaluate only fourth-through-eighth-grade English and math teachers; and New York tests are so unreliable that they had to be rescaled radically last year, with proficiency rates in math and English dropping 25 percentage points overnight.Mr. Kaplan, who runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, has been evaluating teachers since the education commissioner was a teenager. No matter. He is required by Nassau County officials to attend 10 training sessions, as is Carol Burris, the principal of South Side High School here, who was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State.“It’s education by humiliation,” Mr. Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Re-Blog - Occupy Wall Street and Education

I've been very into the Occupy Wall Street movement recently.  I've spent an hour or two a day reading articles on it, re-posting them and commenting on social media to spread the word.  I've gotten into some adamant debates with libertarians and neo-liberals/conservatives.  I attended Occupy Wall Street last weekend.  But I haven't written about the movement here.  I felt there was a relationships between education and the economic injustice that OWS is protesting, but I wasn't certain how to write about the two.

Luckily Nicholas D. Kristof did and his Op-Ed for the New York Times Occupy the Classroom addressed this relationship.

"One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator."

Reblog

Shakesville: Educate the People - But Not So Much That Corporations Can't Still Exploit Them, Obviously

One of the topics at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference was on Education, specifically in relation to corporations.   Shakesville's creator and several other writers attended the Conference and this is one of their summaries on this topic.

"After more than an hour, I was left wondering: Who is education meant to benefit, and whose interests is educational reform meant to serve in this country? ... Strange how that works. One group—those making millions (billions? Bieberillions?) of dollars think education is important because at the end of the day, it benefits them. The other group—those slogging away, educating children, doing the so-called "dirty work" on the ground think education is important because it empowers the individual receiving the education to have some control over hir life's destiny. "

Unfortunately it's the model of children being future workers for corporations that dominates in many schools right now.  Jonathan Kozol's Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America discusses this at length, and provides many examples.  Many children, especially those in inner city, predominately POC, schools are taught to follow directions without question, recall, recitation.  They're not taught how to actually read and write and develop and explain their own thoughts.  They pick out vocabulary and understand it only in the exact was they were taught.  They summarize, but never critique.  So few students learn higher order thinking skills, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that pencil pushers and factory workers don't need to know how to critique and judge the worth of things.  They don't need the learning levels of Synthesis and Evaluations, in fact, it's easier for corporations if their workers don't have these skills.