For the sake of a few thousand votes in the last Governor election, Minnesota has mercifully avoided the summer war on education raging across the country. I think it is important that we understand and appreciate what is happening in the rest of the country, because it is making subtle inroads even here. We have had mostly good news with a Governor and Education Commissioner supportive of public education.
We have finally implemented all day kindergarten. With this simple stroke we have fallen in line with one of the most common sense education reforms there is. Our leaders are finally focusing a more critical eye on substandard teacher preparation programs. A scrutiny the law has always required, despite the dishonest protests of the lawmakers who actually wrote the law. We have avoided the demolition of due process protections for veteran teachers, despite the mythical cry that due process just protects an army of poor teachers.
The tragedies that are befalling education nationwide are so close to our borders. One of the largest online newspapers in our state has become the de facto publicist and apologist for all things in modern reform. Editorials in our largest dead tree media are printed without comment or rebuttal. They use the same language and propaganda as we had in the run up to Iraq war. If you are against their idea of reform, you are against kids. If you believe other reforms are more effective, you are almost unAmerican.
What is most appalling is that the movement edu-celebrities backed by the most powerful elites in America are treated as underdogs. People with the ideological and financial backing of the Waltons (WalMart), the Kochs, A.L.E.C., and the Broads are considered underdogs speaking “truth to power”. The TFA publicist at MinnPost who gets to moderate “debates” for audiences of thousands gets to refer to herself as a humble, aw-shucks blogger. The easiest thing the Waltons and Kochs could do for education reform would be to pay parents a living wage to bring more of our students out of poverty. They could do it tomorrow. Instead they fight tooth and nail against living wages, while being the largest financial backers of corporate education “reform.”
All that being said, Minnesota has been able to stave off for now the Privilege Protection Program of some of the most powerful families in America. It is important to understand that the local media is pushing what our government has heroically slowed down. The pieces are in place. I am pleading that you read on after the break as to what is happening in other states. Our mission, our only mission, needs to be a quality school in every neighborhood for neighborhood kids to go to school. Thank you for your time.
There is also a growing group of folks, little folks, standing together to stand up to the Privilege Protection Program and their unwitting foot soldiers. We are called BATS.
Chicago
Today Chicago teachers are peacefully protesting ALEC, and possibly trampled in the process. Teachers are protesting the intellectual foundation of modern corporate education reform, A.L.E.C. The policy agenda of A.L.E.C. is almost identical to that of the Orwellian named StudentsFirst.
This summer Rahm Emmanuel closed dozens of schools in the most needy neighborhoods. This is the Agenda of reform. In the Privilege Protection Program it is the disadvantaged who always have to switch schools, have their schools closed, have their lives disrupted and relationships shattered. Instead of fixing their schools, it is easier for the privileged just to move them to new places. It is as American as manifest destiny.
The much vaunted Teach For America program also gave up all pretense of trying to fill hard to staff schools. The Mayor of Chicago laid off thousands of credentialed teachers. Immediately following that, hundreds of Teach For America candidates were hired to replace them. There were obviously credentialed teachers to fill those spots, some of the vaunted award winners. Cheap, and malleable labor willing to follow any order are much more to the liking of the Privilege Protection Program.
Indiana
Charters had such a noble and promising intent. It is hard to argue against giving kids whatever route might help best. Sadly, the corporate reformers have turned a worthy and noble experiment into a cudgel to destroy strong neighborhood schools. One needs look no further than Indiana. They came up with a convoluted grading scheme to make public schools look like failures. Then there scheme came to bite them when their cherished charters, run by high buck donors, had poor grades under their system. No worries, they just changed the numbers and criteria until their charters and donors looked good.
New York
That brings us to New York and the mega powerful reformers like Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein. They just released test scores showing an abysmal drop in student outcomes. A superintendent from a successful, affluent district explains so beautiful how this was intentional. What do you do when you want public schools to look bad and create an outcry? You just change the cut scores. Hundreds of thousands of kids that would have passed in previous years are now failures. Case closed. And don’t let anyone see the tests. Just change the cut scores after the tests are scored to make sure you get the horrible results you want.
North Carolina
We know that the one common thread among nations with successful education reforms is a high regard and treatment of teachers as a profession. A teacher’s working conditions are part of that treatment. A sense of respect, like or not, is part of that treatment. Like other states, North Carolina eliminated due process protections for quality and experienced teachers. Pay is never the biggest motivator of professional workers( this is why merit pay schemes never work and are a waste of money), but less than professional pay can be demoralizing. Teachers deserve to paid as professionals. Not rock stars or CEO’s, but at least like professionals. North Carolina has now reduced teacher pay to almost the lowest in the nation.
How can diminishing working conditions and lowering pay be seen as a reasonable education reform? Well, because they just relaxed the rules for credentialing in charter schools so that only 50% of the staff needs to be properly trained. I cannot possibly enumerate the crazy things North Carolina is doing to education. I will let a professor from Wake Forest do it:
Instead of collaborating with educators to implement public policy, you and your colleagues seem convinced that ending teacher tenure, eliminating class size caps, cutting teacher assistants, adding armed guards, increasing funding for standardized tests, and encouraging recruitment of teachers with limited preparation will be some sort of saving grace for North Carolina schools. While I cannot possibly speak to each of these policies in such a limited space, I hope to highlight a few that seem the most perilous.
Please visit the whole article.
This is a partial list. This is coming to Minnesota. The propaganda is in place. The wheels of power are in place. You are warned.