A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.
This insight inspired me to write Reign of Error to show that the "reform" narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.
Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation's most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The "miracle school" usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some "miracle schools" have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn't stop the claims and boasting.
There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.
There is nothing that angers me quite as much as watching this undermining of our education system and the attacks on our teachers.
The assault has come from numerous points of attack. Reducing taxes that fund education, promoting charter schools, insults leveled at the teaching profession, and of course NCLB and standardized testing, which has nothing to do with improving education, and everything to do with sabotaging and ultimately ending government run public education.
The only thing that will stop this, and it has been going on for decades now, is to provide our teachers with the freedom to actually teach. We need to provide the materials, and the training, and then sit back and watch the magic.
Some of the best teaching I have every witnessed was provided by teachers who were excited about their jobs, and could perform it without the administration breathing down their necks, and without the pendulum of constant, unnecessary testing hanging over their heads.
Public education was not broken, until those who claimed to be trying to fix it, broke it.
Agree, IM! I'm sick and tired of all the damage Republicans (Teabaggers) are doing throughout our country. Education, voting rights, anti women's rights, etc.
ReplyDeleteNationally, Republican dominated states and at local levels. Way past time that voters pay attention for whom they mark their ballots in upcoming elections.
Gryph, there are good teachers and bad teachers, in public school (as well as in all other types). Experiences may vary. I ended up homeschooling my oldest daughter 33 years ago because both the local public school and Catholic elementary school sucked. I am not kidding. Right around the same time (mid to late 70s), I watched my nephew get good grades in his public high school classes by turning to the back of the textbook to find the answers for his homework questions. He said he was told to do this if he couldn't figure it out himself. He grew up to be an incredible ignoramus.When I was in school the only textbook that had the answers was the Teachers Edition.
ReplyDeleteI am a supporter of public education and feel it's vital to the country. But not all schools are equal, so please don't fault parents for doing what they need to do (private, charters, homeschooling, etc) in their various individual circumstances.
I had those same textbooks.
DeleteOnly *I* followed the teachers directions.
I did my work and after I was done I checked my answers. They only had the odd numbered answers so if I got all the odd ones correct I assumed I also got the even ones correct. If too many of the odd ones were wrong, I figured the even ones were too and I needed to go back and "relearn" the lesson until I got them right.
It all has to do with the character of the student.
You can't fix lazy.
BTW I went on to graduate from college and I have two masters degrees.
George Zimmerman releases a video to show what an awesome guy he really is (for a murdering son of a bitch, that is...)
ReplyDeletehttp://freakoutnation.com/2014/03/12/george-zimmerman-releases-a-video-to-show-what-an-awesome-guy-he-really-is/
I work as support staff in a city elementary school in NY. Last week our students took a practice math test in preparation for the upcoming state tests, based on the new Common Core curriculum.
ReplyDeleteThere were 72 questions, most with 2-3 parts and each of those parts had 2-3 steps. Counted individually, that added up to almost 200 questions. EVERY SINGLE QUESTION was a word problem, which essentially made it a reading test, not a math test. For any students who struggled with reading or with English, this was a disaster before they even began.
One of the questions took 1/2 hour for my student to finish, even with support from a teacher who works with him individually. The question involved comparing measurements and required the students to convert back and forth between feet/inches and yards several times withing each of the 3 parts. When he found the answer to the last part, the teacher told him he was correct. I suggested that, although his answer WAS correct, it would still be marked wrong. The answer was 4 yards, 1 foot, but the question instructed him to "express the answer in yards". Therefore, he would be marked wrong because he did not write the answer as 4 1/3 yards even though NOWHERE in the question did it mention anything about using fractions.
There were questions that both the teacher and I had trouble figuring out, and we have 2 bachelor's and 3 master's degrees between us. The students taking the test are in 5th grade.
The Powers that Be in NYS have recently agreed that the tests are written so poorly, and the implementation of the CC curriculum was so bad, that it would not be fair to use to test scores against the schools or the students. However, they are still planning to use THOSE SAME INVALID TEST SCORES as part of the teacher evaluations.
As much as I love our President and many of the wonderful things he's done for our country, I will never forgive him for choosing Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, and allowing him to take the damage done by the NCLB and turn it into the complete destruction of our education system.
Ditto on my no confidence in Arne Duncan.
DeleteDitto on my disappointment in our president's education policy.
Ditto on my disappointment NCLB wasn't repealed.
Ditto on my extreme disappointment our president doubled down with Race to the Top.
I think Common Core is an improvement over the previous haphazard patchwork of standards. However, standardized tests, ANY standardized tests are not a true measure of learning. Never have been. Never will be. Evaluating teachers based on how the students score? Why not evaluate doctors on how many of their patients get sick or die? If we did that, no one would work in trauma, cancer or geriatrics.
mlaiuppa -
ReplyDeleteIf you've never read this column by John Taylor, titled "Absolutely the Best Dentist", please check it out. It's an essay about taking the basic premise of the teacher evaluation system currently being used and applying it to dentists. It shows very clearly how absurd it is to use an arbitrary measurement system utilizing factors the teachers cannot control to evaluate their work.
https://www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=14246