Chomsky Interview on Education By Noam Chomsky and Jennifer Pagliaro

Noam Chomsky

I saw that you were quoted as saying "education is ignorance" --

Well, that's what it often is in practice. It shouldn't be.

I'm just wondering if you can speak to this idea of education being mostly something that teaches obedience rather than critical thinking.

I didn't say that's what it mostly is. I said that's what it's becoming. There's strong pressure to turn it into that. There's a major attack on public education going on everywhere, which is shifting the nature of the educational system towards test passing, obedience, discipline, cutting back individual initiative and so on. For example, in the United States, the teaching to test programs -- what's called No Child Left Behind, and similar programs in other state capitalist democracies. I haven't looked at Canada specifically, but I'm sure if you look you'll find something similar.

I know that there's been a lot of discussion lately in that undergraduate degrees are really losing their value because of the number of people that are now being accepted into university. Do you see the system as lowering its standards?

The problem is the opposite I think. It's fine to accept more and more people into the university. For example, take a poor country: Mexico. There's a city university in Mexico funded by the city, which is open admission.

They have programs to assist students that don't have the right background and so on. There's high quality teaching as students are taken through. I'm not saying that Mexico is any kind of utopia, but I think they have the right idea.

They don't have a fraction of the resources that we do. Considering the economic level of the country, considerable resources are going into it. I think it's kind of scandalous in my opinion that we have to look to Mexico for something like that. It's much easier for us.

In terms of elite universities versus the state college system, does it make more sense to have this more open system for higher learning?

I think there should be an open system, period. But it should be adapted to the needs and interests of the students. If somebody wants to become an engineer, let's say, they're going to have different educational opportunities than someone who wants to be become a philosopher.

I think education should be free. And there are a lot of ways of organizing it, but it should be geared to the ideal of helping each person, each student, achieve their goals in the best way.

As a student especially, you hear a lot of complaints from students that the system doesn't work for them. What's the fix? How does a student direct their own academic career?

There's no single magic answer for that. There can be a lot of problems. I got into college at age 16. By age 17 I was ready to drop out because it was so boring. Then I sort of found my own way. But there's no single answer to what is the failure of the university system to address your own needs, concerns and wishes.

What do you see as some of those major issues that stand out to you in the American system?

The major issue, which varies from place to place of course, is the tendency to move towards a model of teaching, which sort of back a couple centuries ago, used to be called filling a vessel with water instead of encouraging students to be creative and independent and develop their own interests and concerns. Now that's not everywhere.

For example, my own university, which is a science-oriented university, is quite different. Students aren't expected to regurgitate what they heard in a lecture. They're expected to challenge, to innovate, to question and so on. Science couldn't survive without that. But that's unfortunately not the general pattern.

And you said that you yourself were bored. What were you able to do to convince yourself to keep pursuing a degree?

I did pretty much drop out of college. And one quite friendly professor sort of induced me back into college by suggesting that I take some of his graduate courses. And I did and then I went on to start taking a scattering of graduate courses in other fields and I sort of put together an individual program.

Actually, I'm not professionally qualified in any field. My own colleagues could tell you that. But it's just a strange collection of interests that I was lucky enough to be able to pursue. Not everyone has that good fortune.

I'm wondering what you think about students having a say in the way universities are run at the administrative level or governing level.

There should, in my opinion, be student participation. Ultimately there can't be student decision about some matters, because they infringe on personal rights.

We had a situation here last week. Our group of Students Against Israeli Apartheid was protesting the university's continued investment in certain companies, which this group feels are involved in war crimes. And they basically stopped a Board of Governors meeting from taking place. I'm just wondering what you think about this sort of clash between students and governing bodies.

I think students should have a perfect right to pressure their university to avoid participating in what they regard as criminal activities. They should have a right to take that position and to present it to a university-wide audience and to try to gain a support for it if they can.

Exactly what tactics they should use, well you know, that depends very much on the particular circumstances. They can't be involved in things that have personal rights, like the right to privacy of another student. That wouldn't be fair. But on questions of endowment investment, that's a public matter.

If you were to go back and start your undergrad again now, what advice would you have for students that are in that position?

You know, I get hundreds of letters every day and a great number of them are kind of like that, from people asking for advice. And it's kind of frustrating because there's no way to answer.

It's a highly personal matter. There are a lot of opportunities. They just have to decide. I didn't try to give advice like that to my own children who I know well. And if I had given them advice they would have rightly disregarded it.

They had to find their own way. You can try to help out if you can, but these are highly personal decisions. My own particular experience, I could go through it in detail, but it's not going to generalize to anyone else.

It was highly peculiar to my own particular concerns and interests. And I happened to be lucky enough to find an odd way through that morass so that I never really did have to face the problem of professional qualifications. But not everybody's going to have that luck.


Z Magazine Monday, July 18, 2011

Private schools? Want em? Pay yourself. Every single cent. by Catherine Deveney

Catherine Deveney

I'VE wanted to write about the social apartheid and false economy of private schools for a while. And the Government's "privatisation by stealth" of the education system. So a few months ago I hunted down the speech that writer Shane Moloney made to Scotch College. Reading it, I cheered, thumped the table and yelled "hallelujah" at the sheer brilliance and balls of Moloney. I then slumped in a heap thinking, "Well, there's no point me writing anything because he's said everything that I want to, but much better."

A recent chance meeting with Moloney had me gush about the speech and explain my quandary. He encouraged me to basically "just say it all again". So Shane Moloney, if you're out there, this one's for you. And for the 70 per cent of parents who send their children to government schools. And for the 70 per cent of students who attend them.

Here's something in the budget that you may have missed: federal funding for private schools will increase from $5.8 billion to $7.5 billion over the next five years. Funding to public schools will rise from $3.1 billion to $3.4 billion over the next five years. Shame on us.

Here's where I stand: private schools should not receive funding. That's it. We have a police force funded by the Government. If you want a bodyguard or private security, you pay for it out of your own pocket.

The same should go for schools. If you want your child to go to a school where they wear blazers so you can get over your own insecurities, or the chip on your own shoulder, you should pay for it. Every single cent.

And it should be compulsory for all politicians to send their children to government schools. And use only public health care.

It's liberating not to be worried about where my young sons will be going to high school. It will be one of the closest government high schools. If things don't work out, we'll try somewhere else. It's not their education. It's their school. Not the same thing. The school a child attends has no bearing on their future success or happiness. I'm disgusted by parents' nauseating obsession with the perfect school for their perfect child. Parents panic that any "wrong" decision may mess up their kid's potential trajectory. They seem to believe that kids can simply be programmed by their parents' desires. Here's a tip: instead of both working full time just so you can send your kids to a private school, cut down your work, be less stressed, stop outsourcing your life, send them to the local secondary and be home more. Teenagers need, and want, their parents to be around.

Sending children to private schools seems to be less about parents doing what they think is best for their child and more a case of parents wanting their children to have something better than every other child. Education is the entire community's responsibility and the outcome affects us all.

I am torn between saying that the public schools desperately need more funding and writing about how wonderful they are. Both of which are true.

The lessons kids learn in government schools — resilience, motivation, community and tolerance — hold them in much better stead than hand-holding, spoon-feeding, mollycoddling and segregation.

When I think of kids less fortunate than my own, I think of kids stuck in middle-class, single-sex, white ghettos from the age of five (or four if they're "gifted").

The independent and Christian schools are divisive, discriminatory, reliant on hand-outs and implicitly teach children that some kids deserve nicer playgrounds than others. Even within their own tribe. The preps at Burke Hall surely don't deserve better facilities than the preps at St Gabriel's in Reservoir. Give me a child when they are seven and I'll show you an invoice for $12,477 (excluding uniforms, excursions and music lessons) for something they could get around the corner free.

I added up the cost of fees for what it would cost to send my three children to a middle-of-the-range private school for six years. Not counting uniforms, excursions, transport, building funds etc. And it was about $330,000, give or take. My first thought? No one can be getting value for money. My second thought? I could buy my kids a degree for that amount of money, and I might have to if education keeps heading the way it is. But I'm hoping that my kids will all be tradies. Because the happiest blokes I know are the tradies. People say, "Stop funding private schools? It's not as easy as that."

Yes it is. Like smoking in hospitals, gender-based pay and taking babies away from unmarried mothers, funding private education is something we will look back on and be ashamed of.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

http://www.catherinedeveny.com/about/

Gillard plans for education counter-revolution By Graham Matthews

Lesser evilism — whereby one votes for a party defensively, because at least they are not as bad as the alternative — is a three-card trick that the Labor Party is very skilled at using.

In this election campaign, the very real threat of a Tony Abbott Coalition government is allowing Labor to establish the framework of a very harsh second term while scaring voters with the warning that the alternative would be even worse.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is not just filling her days warning working people that an Abbott government would be a very bad one. She is also outlining a framework for the kinds of “microeconomic reform” she promised a second-term Labor government would carry-out in her July 15 National Press Club speech.

And the bosses love it.

At the heart of Labor’s pitch for support from the big end of town is the promise to “reform” the areas of the economy that the Hawke and Keating Labor government of 1983-‘96 failed to. Specifically, Gillard promised to take the axe to health and education.

Gillard’s support for education “reform” is well-known to public school teachers. Standardised, national testing of all students across the country in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 (the National Assessment Plan — Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN tests) is the cornerstone. Students and schools are to be regularly assessed against each other and publicly ranked.

League tables, which list schools’ apparent achievements, will be published. The poor performers will be pilloried.

Poorly performing schools may be given extra funding (initially) to improve marks. But where a similar regime has been installed in Britain, ongoing failure to meet “benchmarks” (such as 30% of pupils achieving the benchmark of five A-C grades, including English and maths) renders a school liable to being closed, the British Guardian said on January 13. The article said 247 schools faced the threat of closure.

Gillard has not yet produced the big stick of school closures, but it’s a slippery slope.

On August 9, Gillard announced that from 2014 schools would compete nationally to receive one of 1000 reward payments of $100,000, for “improvement” in their test scores. Such payments — available to public and private schools — are most likely to benefit the wealthy, said Christine Cawsey, president of the NSW Secondary Principals' Council, reported the August 10 Sydney Morning Herald.

“We know that student growth in performance is often highest in affluent communities and we would be concerned that the model did not discriminate against students from low SES [socio economic status] backgrounds”, Cawsey said.

She also said she would be “worried” if no account were taken of “schools that select their own enrolments” — private schools and selective high schools.

A re-elected Gillard government would use competition for extra pay to break down solidarity among teachers. From 2014, 25,000 “top performing” teachers would receive one-off bonus payments of up to $8100.

The scheme would set “teacher against teacher”, said New South Wales Teachers’ Federation president Bob Lipscombe on August 9.

“A similar controversial scheme, using very similar and equally flawed criteria to assess teachers in Washington DC, has recently resulted in nearly 1000 teachers (representing 25% of Washington's teachers) either being dismissed or put on one year's notice. Like the proposed Australian scheme, the Washington scheme misuses NAPLAN-type student data to assess teacher performance.”

On August 10, Gillard announced that a re-elected Labor government would spend $16 million in a scheme to train “professionals” as teachers. Engineers, accountants and others would be given an eight-week training course, and then installed in schools for two years, ABC Online reported.

It is a move that mirrors what has happened to teachers in the technical and further education sector. Teaching qualifications would be watered down by the employment of such poorly trained “professionals”.

“The skills required to teach children cannot be learned in such a short period of time”, Australian Education Union national president Angelo Gavrielatos said on August 11.

“The focus should be on addressing the things that make it hard to recruit people into teaching and to keep our best teachers in the classroom: high workloads, large class sizes and inadequate career paths.”

Labor, however, is not interested in giving every child an equal opportunity for a rounded education. Labor will continue to ensure that the wealthy have all the access to education they need. Its decision, announced on August 4, to extend Howard-era funding guidelines for private schools until at least 2014 ensures that.

For the rest of us, the US and British system, where school closures, teacher sackings and funding cuts are the norm, is our future.
E
Green Left Weekly Saturday, August 14, 2010

Dismantling Public Education-The Widening Rift Between Teachers and Democrats by SHAMUS COOKE

The corporate media are honest on rare occasions. Take for example a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, titled The Teachers’ Union’s Last Stand (05-23-10). The title itself admits that the nation’s teachers are being targeted for attack by the Obama Administration, through his “Race to the Top” education reform. And although the article has an inherently corporate bias, it contains many revelations that have been otherwise ignored in the mainstream media.

The article outlines the two contending forces behind the national education “debate”: the corporate “reformers” and the “anti-change” teacher unions. Who are the reformers? The New York Times answers: “…high-powered foundations, like the [Bill] Gates Foundation… and wealthy entrepreneurs, who have poured seed money into charter schools.” Other reformers include: “… a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country — including President Obama — who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.”

Top on the list of objectives for the reformers — Democrats and corporate groups — is the creation of charter schools, which stand in total opposition to public education. The New York Times article speaks at length about the biggest obstacle to the charter school “movement” — the teachers’ unions.

Examples are given on a state-by-state level where teachers’ unions have stalled or defeated attempts of the corporate-backed “reformers” to shift public funding towards private charter schools. But the article also mentions instances where teachers’ unions have made shameful concessions to the reformers, such as in Washington, D.C., Tennessee, and Rhode Island. The main concession is the job security of teachers. How is the job security of teachers and the creation of charter schools related? Because teachers’ unions are the biggest obstacle to the creation of private charter schools, unions must be undermined. Unions are powerful because union members cannot be fired for engaging in political activity. Union workers are thus able to help organize their workforce and communities to pursue political objectives — such as saving public education — without fear of being fired.

Destroying teacher seniority is thus the primary goal of the corporate education reformers. This is the hidden motive behind all the media attention towards “firing bad teachers.” The reformers want the ability to fire any teacher at any time, consequently undermining teachers’ unions. Thus, teachers are supposed to be rewarded — by keeping their jobs or with raises — based on their students’ abilities to achieve high test scores, regardless of the number of children in the classroom, or the poverty level of the students, or whether or not enough classroom materials exist to do the job.

Sadly, the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randy Weingarten, has agreed to abandon teacher job security in recent bargaining negotiations. The New York Times reports: “ [The Washington, D.C.] contract…now makes it possible… to fire any teacher with tenure…if the teacher is evaluated as “ineffective” for one year or “minimally effective” for two years. The criteria used to define “ineffective” or “minimally effective” are, according to another clause, “a nonnegotiable item” determined solely by [school administrators].”

Language like this will be used to destroy teachers’ unions. School administrators will determine that union activist teachers are “ineffective,” those teachers that criticize work conditions will be labeled “minimally effective,” etc.

If Weingarten thinks that making this kind of concession will quiet the demands of the “reformers,” she will need to think again. Giving sharks tidbits merely sends them into a feeding frenzy. ndeed, the frenzied demands of the corporate groups to privatize public education are more than Weingarten can keep up with. The other, larger national teacher union, the National Education Association, has yet to make the large concessions Weingarten’s AFT has.

The Democrats demanding these concessions are creating conflicts between the unions to an unheard of degree. If a complete break happens between the unions and Democrats — as it should — the repercussions would be enormous. The New York Times explains: “If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections…. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns… and they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.” Teachers’ unions cannot continue to support a political party that aims to destroy them.

Even Weingarten was forced to admit “deliberately or not, President Obama, whom I supported, has shifted the focus from resources and innovation and collaboration to blaming it all on dedicated teachers.”

The Democratic Party is dismantling public education on a state and municipal level, picking each target at different times to hide the enormity of the attack, while confusing teachers, parents, students, and community members about the overall agenda. Only an organized and aggressive response can stop the privatization of public education. Both national teachers unions — along with regional teacher’s unions — must adopt common positions on the total defense of fully funded public education, while also demanding that teachers’ job security be protected. A campaign that involves rank and file teachers, students, parents, other public workers, the labor movement as a whole and the larger community can be united around the slogan: fully fund public education by taxing the rich and corporations!

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (http://www.workerscompass.org/).
 He can be reached at shamuscook@yahoo.com

The Anti-Teacher Hysteria, Why Teachers' Unions Matter By SHAMUS COOKE

Nowadays a newspaper cannot be opened — or a TV turned on — without one being subjected to anti-teacher misinformation. The anti-teacher hysteria looks diverse on the surface, but underneath, this public controversy seeks to dislodge teachers unions: the right-wing trashes teachers’ unions outright, while the “liberal” media takes a more subtle, sophisticated approach, blaming the state of public education on “bad teachers” who must be fired and replaced. Both styles are the same in essence.

The bi-partisan goal is to undermine and dismember public education, so that public funds may be instead channeled into paying debts racked up by multiple wars and corporate bailouts. Also, as public education is gutted, rich investors parasitically benefit from it by opening for-profit “charter schools,” curriculum corporations, or the bevy of new companies that "certify" teachers for a fraction of the cost or time of universities, ready to serve at the new corporate McEducation institutes.

Obama’s Race to the Top campaign enshrines these odious goals into governmental policy, picking up where Bush’s anti-teacher union policies left off, and racing frantically in the same direction, to the bottom.

The schools that Bush’s No Child Left Behind labeled as “failures” are to be shut down under Obama’s Race to the Top. These schools are almost entirely in poor neighborhoods, where the social disease of poverty is an easy predictor of a child’s poor test scores.

But Obama ignores this obvious fact and blames poor grades and test scores on the teachers, exclusively.

Thus, Obama cheered when every teacher at a Rhode Island “failing” high school was fired. He praised the past closures of dozens of public schools in both Chicago and New Orleans as examples for others to follow. Indeed, Detroit and Kansas City each have plans to close dozens of schools, while California is set to fire thousands of teachers. Under Obama’s plan, federal money is awarded to states that fire the most "bad" teachers and close the most “failing” public schools.

Charter schools are to fill the void, where the rich will have access to all the amenities offered at public schools, while the poor will be warehoused in a drab environment lacking resources - without sports and other extracurricular activities, no art or music, no counseling or psychological services, etc. The two-party system envisions education “reform” to mirror free market ideology, where services once deemed “essential” are now to be sold as commodities to those who can afford them.

The right-wing has made it clear — for years — that teachers’ unions are the biggest “obstacle” to this education “reform,” and they are right. Consequently, the very existence of teachers’ unions are in jeopardy with Obama’s Race to the Top.

If teachers’ unions cannot keep schools open, or teachers from being fired, their power is undermined. If any teacher can be fired when they are labeled “bad,” then one of the fundamental concepts of unionism, seniority, is crushed. If teachers cannot be protected by seniority, then pro-union teachers will be targeted and fired, and the union will evolve into a paper tiger. And if union-protected teachers can suddenly be fired arbitrarily, then union-protected workers in other fields will soon find their seniority destroyed, and with it their unions. The struggle of the teachers is thus the struggle of all union workers. But unions benefit more than just union workers.

Anyone involved in politics — from the rank and file “activist” to those working for liberal-minded causes — understands that unions are the ONLY source of consistent resources for progressive campaigns, from money donations, TV advertisement, to door knockers and phone bankers, etc.

For example, the two recent progressive tax measures passed in Oregon — that increase taxes on the rich and corporations — would have been impossible were it not for the support of the teachers’ unions. Unions are the only social force capable of combating the constant anti-worker measures pushed by business groups all over the country, state by state. They are the only real check to the power of the wealthy and corporations.

Additionally, U.S. unions are strongest in the public sector, making them a special target of the organized corporate elite. Amongst public sector workers, teachers are the best organized and most cohesive. The corporate cross-hairs are thus steadily aimed at the head of the teachers’ unions, with Obama’s Race to the Top acting as a high-caliber rifle.

The economic crisis acted as the trigger to Obama’s assault on education: the financial woes of every state were seized by Obama as a tremendous opportunity to “reform” education; thus, Race to the Top forces money-hungry states to compete for a measly $4 billion of federal money. The winners are those states that inflict the most self-harm by firing “bad” teachers and closing “failing” schools. Obama is accomplishing more in one campaign than the anti-public education right-wing has accomplished in decades.

This anti-education carpet-bombing was going unchallenged until recently. On March 4th, demonstrations across the country were organized to defend public education. It’s no coincidence that the biggest demonstrations were organized in San Francisco. There, unions took the lead in organizing a downtown rally, using their resources to turn out 15,000 people. The non-union led protests elsewhere paled in comparison, showcasing again the extreme political relevance of unions.

A central demand in the San Francisco protest was “tax the rich and corporations.” This demand is crucially important, for it not only insures that public education will be adequately funded, but applies to the sufficient funding of the entire public sector — social services, transportation, etc.

Taxing the rich and corporations must be the rallying call for the entire public sector workforce, which remains the bedrock of American labor. If this demand were to be promoted by the biggest public employee unions, the vast majority of the community would support it, as happened in Oregon. The progressive tax victory in Oregon proved that the corporate media lies about “cuts” being the only solution to the economic crisis. The corporations and wealthy must pay for the crisis they sparked.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action. He can be reached at shamuscook@yahoo.com

Obama's Education Reform Push is Bad Education Policy by Diane Ravitch

One simple solution for our schools? A captivating promise, but a false one.

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.

Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum.

As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.

Our era is no different. We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.

Once again, I find myself sounding the alarm that the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed. But this time my warning carries a personal rebuke. For much of the last two decades, I was among those who jumped aboard the choice and accountability bandwagon. Choice and accountability, I believed, would offer a chance for poor children to escape failing schools. Testing and accountability, I thought, would cast sunshine on low-performing schools and lead to improvement. It all seemed to make sense, even if there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope.

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform -- codified in its signature Race to the Top program -- that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better.

Those who do not follow education closely may be tempted to think that, at long last, we're finally turning the corner. What could be wrong with promoting charter schools to compete with public schools? Why shouldn't we demand accountability from educators and use test scores to reward our best teachers and identify those who should find another job?

Like the grand plans of previous eras, they sound sensible but will leave education no better off. Charter schools are no panacea. The nation now has about 5,000 of them, and they vary in quality. Some are excellent, some terrible; most are in between. Most studies have found that charters, on average, are no better than public schools.

On the federal tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from 2003 to 2009, charters have never outperformed public schools. Nor have black and Latino students in charter schools performed better than their counterparts in public schools.

This is surprising, because charter schools have many advantages over public schools. Most charters choose their students by lottery. Those who sign up to win seats tend to be the most motivated students and families in the poorest communities. Charters are also free to "counsel out" students who are unable or unwilling to meet expectations. A study of KIPP charters in the San Francisco area found that 60% of those students who started the fifth grade were gone before the end of eighth grade. Most of those who left were low performers.

Studies of charters in Boston, New York City and Washington have found that charters, as compared to public schools, have smaller percentages of the students who are generally hardest to educate -- those with disabilities and English-language learners. Because the public schools must educate everyone, they end up with disproportionate numbers of the students the charters don't want.

So we're left with the knowledge that a dramatic expansion in the number of privately managed schools is not likely to raise student achievement. Meanwhile, public schools will become schools of last resort for the unmotivated, the hardest to teach and those who didn't win a seat in a charter school. If our goal is to destroy public education in America, this is precisely the right path.

Nor is there evidence that student achievement will improve if teachers are evaluated by their students' test scores. Some economists say that when students have four or five "great" teachers in a row, the achievement gap between racial groups disappears. The difficulty with this theory is that we do not have adequate measures of teacher excellence.

Of course, it would be wonderful if all teachers were excellent, but many factors affect student scores other than their teacher, including students' motivation, the schools' curriculum, family support, poverty and distractions on testing day, such as the weather or even a dog barking in the school's parking lot.

The Obama education reform plan is an aggressive version of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math. This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of "failing school" that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation. Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores -- a key feature of Race to the Top -- will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.

Frustrated by a chronic lack of progress, business leaders and politicians expect that a stern dose of this sort of competition and incentives will improve education, but they are wrong. No other nation is taking such harsh lessons from the corporate sector and applying them to their schools. No nation with successful schools ignores everything but basic skills and testing. Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help their students and strive together for common goals, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses.

Having embraced the Republican agenda of choice, competition and accountability, the Obama administration is promoting the privatization of large segments of American education and undermining the profession of teaching. This toxic combination is the latest Big Idea in education reform. Like so many of its predecessors, it is not likely to improve education.

Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

Published on Sunday, March 14, 2010 by The Los Angeles Times

I Was a Charter School Teacher By JULIA STEIN

Charter schools are proposed as fixes to poorly running public school but they don’t work out that way. I briefly taught in a charter school. Though I met lively, likable students, the big problem was the administrators who set up the school’s curriculum were ignorant of what they’re doing and set the students up for failure.
I was hired by a junior college in Los Angeles, and then asked to teach college-level freshman composition to high school students at the Charter School. During my last semester in high school I taken two classes at UCLA, so I at first thought it good to give college classes to high school students.

I showed up to the Charter School and met my very small class of seven, and they weren’t 12th grade seniors but to my surprise 10th graders. They were very good in grammar but I was teaching not grammar but writing. At first their writing was with simplistic sentences and vocabulary, not like college freshman—but like 10th graders!

I was told that Charter School was a new high school of about 300 students and the highest grade was 11th grade; they still hadn’t a 12th grade senior class. I was also told that when Charter School developed a 12th grade, they would have few or no 12th grade classes on site. No physics or chemistry. The students would do an independent project and be encouraged to take college-level classes while in high school. My freshman composition class was part of this promise.

For the first month I had to learn how to deal with school sites at once: where the parking was, where to put in paperwork at both schools; etc. Then, I discovered my students were already taking 10th grade English, and my class, held after-school, was their second English class they were taking that semester. They were a little hungry and tired in my class, but I thought that normal as they had already put in a full school day.

What my 10th grade students writing lacked was 11th and 12th grade. While they took freshman composition in their 10th grade, I have first finished all my high school classes in 11th and 12th grade English and history before taking freshman composition at UC Berkeley. At a Fairfax High public school I had taken in 11th grade American history, American literature, and an introduction to British Literature; in 12th grade I took Advance Placement European history, Senior Composition, and then a choice in my last semester to take World Literature class in high school or at UCLA but I choose UCLA. These classes give any student a vocabulary and knowledge of historical cultural terms—what is the Industrial Revolution or the Age of Enlightenment? who is Shelley?—invaluable for all university-level social science and humanities classes. My Charter students lacked wide exposure to history and literature from 11th grade and 12th grade classes they hadn't taken. Charter School had given them a class they weren’t prepared to take. But they could tell parents their children were taking a college level class already in 10th grade!

I was told that most of the 11th graders at Charter School had flunked the previous college-taught composition class. What the administrator was doing was given these students inappropriate college classes setting them up for failure. The administrators seemed to be well-intentioned but ignorant of English curriculum.

Let me explain. Universities want students who can write essay. I learned in my 12th grade Senior Composition class. UC gives students an English placement test, and for all of the 20th century about 60-70% percent pass, taking freshman composition, while 30-40% fail, taking “remedial” composition. The remedial composition is taught at most colleges as two classes; remedial 1 goes over 10th/11th grade grammar, paragraphs, and simple writing; remedial 2 is supposed to be equivalent to 12th grade Senior Composition focusing on the essay. When taught at colleges, the college instructors have little time to focus on literature , forced to quickly teach grammar and writing as these are speeded up classes. Most students don't find grammar interesting, and now they had to learn grammar very quickly. Hopefully the student is taking other college class learning vocabulary, concepts etc.

What the Charter School had done is given Remedial 1 to 11th grade students, promising it was a college class. It wasn’t. It was college instructors teaching 10th /11th grade grammar/writing in a speeded-up style inappropriate for 11th graders. What should the Charter School have done instead? Teach the best 11th grade history and English classes and add 12th grade history, literature, and senior composition. Without 12th grade classes Charter School is shortchanging it students as the school is not preparing them for universities at all. There’s a certain wisdom in the tradition developed over decades. Any good public high school with a 12th grade was five times better academically than Charter School.

However, I’m also for innovation. If Charter School wanted innovated they could have had creative writing as an after-school project—something different and fun—with the students producing their own literary magazine. Or the students could take journalism.

A month ago my almost-fifteen year old niece showed me her articles for her school newspaper—she said and I could see that her writing had improved tremendously by that old high school standard, writing articles in journalism class for her school newspaper. She was spending extra hours on fun kind of writing about her trips to New York or about independent record shops. She was learning writing was fun and her published articles were getting her recognition both in the school and the community. It would have been damaging for her to be forced to do Remedial 1—all that extra grammar would have bored her silly as it probably did Charter School students.

Charter School should junk the “so-called” college English classes as they were inappropriate for the students. It wasn't the students fault nor the teachers' fault but administrators had made a mistake. A lot of Charter School administrators, unfortunately, lack the knowledge and experience to run the schools. Many Charter Schools fail because of bad administration. After being nationally tested for seven years, Charter School students test as badly as public school students. Many Charter School students do worse. Putting inept administrators in charge doesn't help education.

Julia Stein lives in Los Angeles. She can be reached at: juliastein@sbcglobal.net

How Sports Attacks Public Education by Dave Zirin

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." - Frederick Douglass

On Thursday, I was proud to take part in a student walkout at the University of Maryland in defense of public education. It was just one link in a National Day of Action that saw protests in more than 32 states across the country. I am not a student, and haven't been since those innocent days when Monica Lewinsky mattered, but I was asked to come speak at a post walkout teach-in about the way sports is used to attack public education. It might sound like a bizarre topic, but it's the world that students see every day.

At the University of Maryland, as tuition has been hiked and classes cut, football coach Ralph Friedgen makes a base salary of 1.75 million bucks, which would be outrageous even if the team weren't two-steps past terrible. Friedgen also gets perks like a $50,000 bonus if none of his players are arrested during the course of the season.

Ground zero of the student protest movement is the University of California at Berkeley. Over at Berkeley, students are facing 32% tuition hikes, while the school pays football coach Jeff Tedford 2.8 million dollars a year and is finishing more than 400 million in renovations on the football stadium. This is what students see: boosters and alumni come first, while they've been instructed to cheer their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business.

The counterargument is that college athletic departments fund themselves and actually put money back into a school's general fund. This is simply not true. The October Knight Commission report of college presidents stated that the 25 top football schools had revenues on average of $3.9 million in 2008. The other 94 ran deficits averaging $9.9 million. When athletic departments run deficits, it's not like the football coach takes a pay cut. In other words, if the team is doing well, the entire school benefits. If the football team suffers, the entire school suffers. This, to put it mildly, is financial lunacy. A school would statistically be better off if it took its endowment to Vegas and just bet it all on black.

If state colleges are hurting, your typical urban public school is in a world of pain with budgets slashed to the bone. Politicians act like these are problems beyond their control like the weather. ("50% chance of sun and a 40% chance of losing music programs.")

In truth, they are the result of a comprehensive attack on public education that has seen the system starved. One way this has been implemented is through stadium construction, the grand substitute for anything resembling an urban policy in this country. Over the last generation, we've seen 30 billion in public funds spent on stadiums. They were presented as photogenic solutions to deindustrialization, declining tax bases, and suburban flight. The results are now in and they don't look good for the home teams. University of Maryland sports economists Dennis Coates and University of Alberta Brad R. Humphreys studied stadium funding over 30 years and failed to find one solitary example of a sports franchise lifting or even stabilizing a local economy. They concluded the opposite: "a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area....Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city's economy." These projects achieve so little because the jobs created are low wage, service sector, seasonal employment. Instead of being solutions of urban decay, the stadiums have been tools of organized theft: sporting shock doctrines for our ailing cities.

With crumbling schools, higher tuitions, and an Education Secretary in Arne Duncan who seems more obsessed with providing extra money for schools that break their teachers unions, it's no wonder that the anger is starting to boil over. It can also bubble up in unpredictable ways. On Wednesday night, after the University of Maryland men's basketball team beat hated arch-rival Duke, students were arrested after pouring into the streets surrounding the campus. In years past, these sporting riots have been testosterone run amok, frat parties of burning mattresses and excessive inebriation. This year it was different, with police needing to use pepper spray and horses to quell the 1,500 students who filled Route 1. In response, students chanted, "Defense! Defense!" At the Thursday teach in, I said to the students that I didn't think there was anything particularly political or interesting about a college sports riot. One person shot his hand up and said, "It wasn't a riot until the cops showed up." Everyone proceeded to applaud. I was surprised at first that these politically minded students would be defending a post-game melee, but no longer. The anger is real and it isn't going anywhere. While schools are paying football coaches millions and revamping stadiums, students are choosing between dropping out or living with decades of debt. One thing is certain: it aint a game.

Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by The Nation

Dave Zirin is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and the newly published A People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated.com, New York Newsday and The Progressive. He is the host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

When education favours division over diversity JOHN PILGER

Public education gave John Pilger his start, but as he told Sydney Boys High School this week, success in life is more than winning prizes.

It is strange for me to be standing on the stage where I last stood in 1957 as a member of the Sydney High first eight that had just won the GPS Head of the River. I was so proud. We had shown that High, a state school, could deploy the determination and skill, the spirit and intelligence that are often claimed as the monopoly of money and privilege. Most of our supporters on the river bank were not finely dressed. They did not drive smart cars. They were not always confident and assured. But they represented the way we were.

Yes, High is an elite school - it comes eighth in the government's new performance tables, but that is not the point. Public secondary education in NSW was pioneered at Sydney High; and as Australia has changed its Anglo-Irish characteristics for a nation drawn from all corners of the earth, this amazing diversity is celebrated at High in common with most public schools which, unlike the private sector, speak for the wider Australian community.

The Rudd government's recent publication on the My School website of school league tables is an attack on this wider community and the very essence of "fair go". The hidden message of these lists is one of division and hopelessness to many young people not fortunate enough to be at a school like Sydney High.

For example, I looked up the primary school I attended - Wellington Street, Bondi. It rated No.564 out of 1100. Wellington Street is an excellent school, but it was never fashionable. The parents of kids who go there often have to struggle. However, not far away, Bondi Beach Primary is fashionable. Middle-class parents fight to get their offspring in. And it is more than 400 points up the list from Wellington Street.

In the west of Sydney, schools that have the responsibility of teaching students with English as a second language, and dealing with the poverty that inevitably comes with refugees, find themselves way down in the list.

In the country, Boggabilla is near the bottom of the list. Its students come from the indigenous community: the First Australians. According to a recent United Nations report on 90 countries, the Aboriginal people of Australia are so disadvantaged they have the worst life expectancy of any indigenous people in the world. This is shocking.

What will happen now to schools like Boggabilla that are named and shamed? The students, teachers and parents, for all their admirable often heroic efforts, may now feel more alienated from the Australian community than ever as a campaign of attrition is mounted against so-called failed schools.

What is the real aim of these lists? Is it to cut back state education and harness teachers to a dictated curriculum? Is it to replace a democratic system with a primitive corporate version?

I have watched this happen in Britain and the United States, disastrously. A New York model which has besotted the politically born-again Julia Gillard is a sordid exercise in failed extremism: of turning schools into competing businesses for no purpose other than ideological.

In Australia, this false debate serves as a political distraction from the scandalous fact the federal government bankrolls private schools at the expense of public schools. A wealthy private school like Knox Grammar gets an aquatic centre while the poorest schools beg for funds for a library. By 2012, Australian taxpayers will have given $12 billion more to obscenely wealthy private schools than to the schools where the majority of our children are educated. This is wrong by any moral measure.

There is nothing more precious in a democracy than a well-resourced public education system that provides opportunity for all youngsters, regardless of income, race and class. Without it, I would have failed. Without it, the esteem and confidence of our youngsters is just another commodity.

The great American historian and teacher Howard Zinn, who has just died, was a champion of public education. His textbook A People's History of the United States challenged the propaganda of established power that claimed democracy as a gift from the top, not fought for by us.

"I wanted my students," he wrote, "to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

In congratulating all school leavers, I urge you to remember success in life does not necessarily come from prizes. What is important is the person you are, the kindness you express, the compassion you feel and the courage you show. Go into the world and relinquish the safety of silence and make trouble - remembering that the most important trouble is calling to account those who assume power over our lives.

This is an edited extract of an address by journalist and filmmaker John Pilger to the Sydney Boys High School annual speech night.

Feel-Good Education-Styling: the Charter School Look By DANIEL WOLFF

It only makes sense that the article appeared in the Style section of the New York Times. Sure, it’s about hedge fund managers supporting New York City’s charter schools. But if we are to believe the breezy slant of the piece (Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009, “Scholarly Investments”), these young turks pick out charters the way their fathers shopped for the latest fedora. Cause it’s fashionable. Cause it reflects their inner selves. Cause it makes them feel good.

The author, Nancy Hass, admits that thirty-something multimillionaires embracing public education “may seem odd.” Their kids, after all, are far more likely to go to Greenwich Country Day. But the explanation is simple enough if you know what she calls “the sociology of Wall Street.” These guys from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have a certain level of “nerdiness,” and charter schools appeal to their “maverick instincts.”

According to this benign scenario, the same analysts who spend all day in cut-throat financial competition toss away their Blackberries come dusk and do the right thing by joining the boards of charter schools. Privately run and often non-union, charters are seen by their advocates as the free market alternative to traditional public schools. Or, as the article puts it, “an entrepreneurial answer to the nation’s education woes.”

Typically, we’re told, a charter board consists of a dozen or so members who are asked to donate or raise $1.3 million over three years. Let’s see … that’s around $36,000 a board member per year. Certainly sizable but not gigantic given their annual “eight-figure incomes.” Especially since donations to organizations like Democrats for Education Reform are tax deductible.

Whitney Tilson, on the board of a company that manages charter schools, says they “present the kind of opportunity that ‘electrifies’ hedge fund managers.” Tilson calls it “the most important cause in the nation, obviously.” He adds, “With the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged.”

Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere. New York State provides 75 to 90 percent of the per-student cost at a charter school. That’s because schools like the Harlem Success Academies are still technically public and draw from public funds. So if the young analysts look at their donations as an investment – which the article insists they do not … or not that kind of investment – then their dollars are heavily backed by tax dollars. That is to say, by our dollars.

Ravenal Boykin Curry IV of Eagle Capital Management has co-founded two girls prep schools and is head of the board of a third. He explains that he’s been “knee deep in educational issues” since his 20’s. Almost in passing he adds that these schools are: “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on, with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.”

So maybe the Blackberries and the financial acumen don’t disappear at night? Perhaps charter schools appeal to the investors’ “maverick instincts” because they look a lot like the instruments these guys fight over (or in Mr. Curry’s more benevolent term “stumble on”) during the day? That has certainly proven the case across the country, where start-up management firms see charters as prime, for-profit ventures. Through various real estate deals and cost-cutting practices (like paying teachers less), these private/public schools have already shown themselves to be potential money makers. One real estate trust recently sunk $170 million into 22 charters. Said its CEO: “The charter public schools offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”

The young turks may not profit directly from their board work. But as the Style article makes clear, New York City’s charter school network is the new country club. It’s where the elite meet, where potential business connections are made. And even if these Masters of the Universe don’t “get any” from the schools they back, they’re in on the ground floor of a growth industry. Their experience in New York City may well influence their financial recommendations and investments elsewhere.

“The underlying drive,” as John Petry, partner at Gotham Capital and member of the Success Charter Network, puts it, “is to build something that can spread, can be recreated in different cities; otherwise it’s not as meaningful to us.” Only 2.5% of the city’s public school students are in charters, the article states, but that’s more like 20% in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn. And the movement gets that much more “meaningful” in New Orleans, for example, where over half the kids are in newly formed charters. A national string of hedge-fund-backed, privately run schools begins to look like a real option: a chain competing with and siphoning funding from standard public schools. As Robert Reffkin, a vice president at Goldman Sachs, puts it his peers now “understand what’s at stake and what the return can be.”

Except the educational return is still unclear. There’s no conclusive evidence that charters do a better job than traditional public schools. Meanwhile, the investments these young tycoons have made are already changing public education – and changing it to more closely resemble the financial models they work with during the day. Those models, as we’ve learned over the last couple years, don’t always pan out.

If they don’t? If the charter bubble bursts? Where does that leave the kids who’ve switched over from the less sexy, less well-funded, regular system? Charter schools, the article states, are today’s “hot cause.” But what happens tomorrow, when styles change?

Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return." He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net

from CounterPunch 14-12-09