Forty New York Superintendents: Cuomo’s Law Can’t Work

Forty New York Superintendents: Cuomo’s Law Can’t Work.

When superintendents do a better job sticking up for teachers than NYSUT, do we have a problem?

QUOTES FROM DOING THE RIGHT THING: A Teacher Speaks.

I have been asked to appear on a Web based talk show called Shindig on http://www.edcircuit.com in early June. I will provide more information when I get it.

The hosts ask me to come up with a few quotes from my book so I thought I would share them with you in advance.

• Barbara Tuchman, in her 1984 book, The March of Folly, from Troy to Vietnam, defines folly as the “pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest, where people pursue the same failed policies and expect different results.” What better example of folly is there than current public education policy?

• Reformers live by the standard of industrial America developed a full century ago by Frederick W. Taylor. Captains of industry (robber barons) supported scientific management, as it was called, in order to make their employees more productive. Today’s policy makers want to turn teachers into industrial employees, churning students out like Ford workers churned out Model T’s.

•  Students of all ages are not challenged. They are bored. They are being tested to death. The love of learning is instilled in far too few students of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Policy makers do not listen to parents, teachers, and students.

• Our nation’s media, conservative and liberal alike spread misinformation. They vilify the teaching profession, regardless of how successful many teachers are with children of all ages. Our politicians implement laws and plans based on that misinformation. Foundations give huge sums of money based on that misinformation. Corporations profit from that misinformation.

• Instead of “getting rid of bad teachers,” more good and excellent teachers are leaving. Teaching colleagues, who three years ago said they loved their job and would stay until someone carried them out, are now saying they can’t wait until they are eligible for retirement.

• Teaching must be more of a profession for our most creative and ambitious 20-somethings. We must market the opportunities to become an autonomous, creative professional with room for growth.

• Teachers who offer working solutions have been ignored because they have been lumped into being part of “The Union,” and therefore positioned by politicians and the media as the enemy opposed to education reform. What the policy makers refuse to see is that many teachers don’t care about choosing sides. They are on the side of the kids and have successfully worked with them for years. In short, policy makers need to listen to teachers, and stop fighting with “The Union.”

• The best kind of education is about distinctive and impassioned teaching, the kind that will engage and excite students. Often, it is the least orthodox that are the greatest teachers.

• Well-trained classroom professionals can more than adequately decide what techniques and methods to use to reach a wide variety of students based on authentic and varied assessments.

• We need wise teachers, not scripted robots. “A wise person knows when to improvise. And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims.” – Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom

• To its credit, TFA has started to get more of our best and brightest to become teachers. But, how do we get them to stay?

• As a result of all the powerful endorsements and huge sums of money TFA has been granted, as its collective organizational ego grows, its collective head becomes bigger than its collective brain.

• “Temping” is a word I’ve been using to describe what school districts now seem to want to do, using budget crises and taxation issues as excuses, and then making the changes permanent.

• A look at TFA’s website indicates how they distort the truth. TFA implies that 67 percent of Corp Members stay in education after two years.

• TFA must be forced to provide schools with people who see teaching as a career, not just a stepping-stone or an altruistic act of community service.

• My work allowed me to mentor Teach For Americans in a major urban area. I have seen their tears, fears, anxieties, and heartaches. I have seen their moments of joys, successes, and achievements. Unfortunately, the latter are far fewer. Too often, they are thrown into classrooms and “supervised” by people who cannot teach them how to teach, because they don’t know how.

• Assessments of all types, not just fill-in-the-bubble, multiple-choice tests, must be analyzed to see how students progress with particular skills of various levels and content. Essays, projects, group projects, research, and class participation are all assessment, as well as teaching tools.

• Who remembers their favorite test from school? You know, the one that inspired you to become who you are now, or saved you from the wrong part of yourself? Who remembers the test that made you want to come out of your shell? Which test gave you the courage to try new things and challenge yourself? For me, it was the 1966 Regents Comprehensive Examination in Social Studies.

• One of the most consistent findings in the research is that over the past thirty years, schools have moved to teaching methods that favor how girls learn. Add this to the increasing data about how boys are faring less and less well in school, and you have an understanding about how much of a crisis this is within education, especially among minority males, our most failing demographic.

• I am the seed she planted. Little did we know as seven-year-olds entering Rita Stafford’s class 2-1 in PS 66, Bronx, in September of 1956, that we were to become the happy guinea pigs for a life dedicated to helping children with all kinds of personalities and abilities. My life as a teacher was dedicated to her.

• Great teaching is an art, not to be controlled and censored by scientific management. Teaching is to be cherished, not lost and mummified. Our students should not become guinea pigs in a Fahrenheit 451 world of mathematical schema and “data-driven” engineering.

• What did you do your senior year of high school? I bet you barely remember.

• In tomorrow’s world, we need adults to think like intelligent adults, not programmed children. Those with only the skills produced by today’s minimal Common standards and standardized assessments will not have the techniques and tools they need to escape poverty, even working-class poverty.

• A Good teacher always self assesses. A great teacher asks great questions

• The best teachers are communicators. They are listeners. They can figure out in a heartbeat how to help a student who is dumbfounded, misconstruing, or misspeaking.

• We can’t fall in to the “Standards” trap. So many teachers say, I don’t teach to the test; yet don’t realize that they actually do out of habit.

• Why are the voices of many of the best teachers ignored, or worse, chastened by non-teachers? What other profession does that happen in? Law? Medicine?

• The best school atmospheres are supportive and self-directing and that develop a sense of professionalism and camaraderie among colleagues.

• The most successful districts are not that way simply because they have the “best” students. They draw and hire the best teachers. These districts have common characteristics: supportive administrations, mentor-teacher programs, inter-visitation, collaboration, academic freedom, higher pay with good benefits, and mentoring by master teachers and supervisors in their areas of study.

My hope is to provoke thought and conversation. I hope you do both, and maybe, if you like the ideas, investigate more in the book.

A WISE PLAN FOR COLLEGE AND LIFE

Tags

@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, children, education, Educators, Elizabeth Green, students, teachers, WISE Services

“TWENTY years ago, kids in preschool, kindergarten and even first and second grade spent much of their time playing: building with blocks, drawing or creating imaginary worlds, in their own heads or with classmates. But increasingly, these activities are being abandoned for the teacher-led, didactic instruction typically used in higher grades.”

“Nevertheless, many educators want to curtail play during school. ‘Play is often perceived as immature behavior that doesn’t achieve anything,’ says David Whitebread, a psychologist at Cambridge University who has studied the topic for decades. ‘But it’s essential to their development. They need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions. Kids learn these things through playing.’”

“Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, ‘The trouble with over-structuring is that it discourages exploration,’ he says.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/let-the-kids-learn-through-play.html?_r=0

I posit that what is true for 4-5 year olds is as true for 17-18 year olds. As kindergarten is a transitional year from pre- school in whatever form it takes to formal school, so is the senior year in high school a transition to the more advanced learning of college and life. They too “need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions.” “Kids learn these things through playing.” The difference is in how we define playing. “The trouble with over-structuring is that it discourages exploration.”

Too bad high schools, more often than not, don’t let their students play meaningfully.

So many students are overly stressed in college because they cant answer this question.How do college and life differ from high school? Colleges provide orientation materials to incoming students that will, in theory, help them successfully adjust to life in college. For example SMU tells incoming freshmen that the basic difference is that in college they choose responsibility as opposed to following the rules in high school.

Who learns actions by reading them or listening to someone read them to you?

HIGH SCHOOL                                                                   COLLEGE

* Your time is structured by others.	* You manage your own time.
* You need permission to participate in extracurricular activities	* You must decide whether to participate in co-curricular activities.
* You can count on parents and teachers to remind you of your responsibilities and to guide you in setting priorities.	* You must balance your responsibilities and set priorities. You will face moral and ethical decisions you have never faced before.
* Each day you proceed from one class directly to another, spending 6 hours each day–30 hours a week–in class.	* You often have hours between classes. You spend only 12 to 16 hours each week in class
* Guiding principle: You will usually be told what to do and corrected if your behavior is out of line.	* Guiding principle: You are expected to take responsibility for what you do and don’t do, as well as for the consequences of your decisions.

* Guiding principle: You will usually be told in class what you need to learn from assigned readings.	* Guiding principle: It’s up to you to read and understand the assigned material; lectures and assignments proceed from the assumption that you’ve already done so.
* Guiding principle: High school is a teaching environment in which you acquire facts and skills.	* Guiding principle: College is a learning environment in which you take responsibility for thinking through and applying what you have learned.
* Guiding principle: Mastery is usually seen as the ability to reproduce what you were taught in the form in which it was presented to you, or to solve the kinds of problems you were shown how to solve.	* Guiding principle: Mastery is often seen as the ability to apply what you’ve learned to new situations or to solve new kinds of problems.

http://www.smu.edu/Provost/ALEC/NeatStuffforNewStudents/HowIsCollegeDifferentfromHighSchool

How many high school seniors can say they have learned, though experience, that they are ready and already capable of the college challenge? How many schools can truthfully say they prepare students?

I know which students and which schools can honestly say yes: Students who have done a WISE project and schools who offer it. It is that simple.

“For 42 years, WISE seniors of all ability levels have created individualized real-world experiences (WISE projects), exploring their passions outside the traditional classroom.  Over 40,000 WISE graduates at over 100 high schools have learned to collaborate and to work independently, developing organizational, research, writing, and presentation skills as they ignite a lifetime of personal growth.”

Says Nicole Sharpe, Woodlands class of 1988 and now Director of the Black Male Donor Collaborative administered by the Schott Foundation, “I believe WISE was one of the most in valuable experiences in my life,” said Nicole. “I believe that young people need to be taught to think independently, and WISE does that. WISE prepares them for life.”

During her WISE project, Nicole was involved with the Rainbow Coalition and the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. She ran weekly registration drives targeted at college students and canvased the communities for the campaign from Maine to Virginia. Over the entire project, she raised $10,000 through her fundraising efforts.”

Was she ready for college and life? You bet she was. Now she helps others.

INVASION OF THE PUBLIC EDUCATION SNATCHERS

Tags

@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, common core, education, Educators, High Stakes Testing, opt out, teachers, urban education

I just figured out who the “Deformers” really are: We are suffering through an “Invasion of the School Snatchers.” Maybe “they” are really a 21st manifestation of the pod people and “body snatchers” and we are all the Kevin McCarthy Character?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFnSxeDfENk

ON ED POLICY AND MENTORING

Tags

@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, children, education, Educators, Elizabeth Green, Inner cities, Joe Nocera, students, teacher, urban education

“As one gang member told an interviewer working for the sociologist Deanna Wilkinson:

“I grew up as looking for somebody to love me in the streets. You know, my mother was always working, my father used to be doing his thing. So I was by myself. I’m here looking for some love. I ain’t got nobody to give me love, so I went to the streets to find love.”

Teachers provide that love through mentoring. However recent education policies have diminished the time teachers have to do this loving role.

I can probably say that unofficially I have been someone’s mentor since I was still in high school working as a camp counselor in local day camps.

You can’t say what a mentor is as simply as it is defined, nor can you just arbitrarily decide to be one. There are some people who will never be able to become mentors. Mentors know that with each person you play a different role. Do you give advice to someone with less experience? Sure. Do you counsel them? Sure. Do you help them learn to prepare for upcoming situations and events in their lives? Sure. However most of all you have to listen and develop a trusting relationship. Without that, whatever the extrinsic circumstances, you are not a mentor. You are a bore.

You might be in a situation where mentoring is called for and thus you naturally do it. That’s what happened with me. Kids already know who are natural mentors and choose them because of who they are.

Difficulties naturally arise with mentoring. Psychologists know that you often can’t reach people who don’t want to be reached or helped. So each time I couldn’t reach a student I thought I needed to reach more than I did, it felt like failure. But for me, the worst time I had was with a high school senior I never had in class but with whom I was working with on a senior class play came to me for help.

At first it was just about playing his role, but it developed into a more important relationship, as I got involved with his family issues and his fears both of them and graduating high school. Soon it evolved into me talking him out of suicide with the help of his girlfriend and his shrink. We thought we were doing well. The play was a hit and he was the star, but a few days prior to graduation I received a call from his girl friend saying she thought he was going to do it and that he had a gun. She begged me to call him to stop him. I did call: about a minute too late. Compared to that, what’s difficult?

The first, and most important thing I have learned from students is how to be a better mentor. It is a natural process. Obviously, I have learned much about how kids function and how they learn. They have also taught me about things I never thought I would learn about, for example…DNA slicing…but content is far inferior to process.

Finally, as far as advice goes, to be a better mentor, become a better listener. Learn how to focus on the needs of your mentees rather than procedure or your own. Be flexible, but be yourself. They came to you because of who you are. Understand that you are the mirror, not the subject in the mirror. See? It isn’t simple.

• Why don’t education policy makers understand how mentoring is one of the biggest non-data driven things teachers do to foster success?

• Why do they force schools to end programs based on mentoring?

• Why do they add so many data driven tasks that lessen the opportunities and time to do this incredibly necessary teaching role?

• Why should kids have to turn to the streets for love?

http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Right-Thing-Teacher-Speaks/dp/1460225481

Stevie Wonder knew: The Real Problem With How People View America’s Inner City Public Education

Tags

@anthonycody, @valeriestrauss, education, Inner cities, politics, stereotypes, students, teacher, urban education

“Wow, new york, just like I pictured it

Skyscrapers and everything

 [Verse 5] Hey hey brother, hey come here slick
Hey you look, you look hip man

Hey you wanna make yourself five bucks man

You look hip

Run this across the street for me right quick
Okay, run this across the street for me

 [Verse 6] What? Huh? I didn’t know!

Put your hands up you punk!

I’m just going across the street

Lay down, shut your mouth

Hell no, what did i do?

Okay, turn around, turn around, put your hands behind your back, let’s go, let’s go….

A jury of your peers having found you guilty, ten years.
What?”

– Living for The City, Stevie Wonder (1973)

I have read more than my share of books, blog posts, essays, social network comments, and tweets about public education. Some of them are by people who have done extensive research on how the history of public education differs from place to place. Unfortunately though, too many are from those who choose to ignore or are ignorant of the wide range of variables that affect both the students and the schools in socioeconomic and ethnically diverse areas regardless of geographic location.

Suburban districts tend to be less diverse than urban. Some are very homogeneous both socioeconomically and ethnically, but most are also more diverse than stereotypes note. If we also add special education needs as a factor, the results are even more uneven.

Most suburban commenters are aware of that, but many also look at other suburban districts through a lens colored based on where they live or grew up. But, since they live in suburban districts, they generally believe they have a better idea of the truths that exist in most suburban districts.

We can say exactly the same about rural districts. Here too there are some consistencies and variations. What happens, for example in “hyphenated” districts made up of two or more rural localities that may or may not be similar to each other?

Let’s face it. The real issues in education revolve around the urban poor. When you take poverty out of the equation when comparing American students to those of other countries taking the PISA exams, we are at the top. For example notes The National Association of Secondary School Principals, when you look at the number of US schools with < 10% of their students receiving free lunch (the poverty factor) the US overall average is 551, and betters #2 Finland by 15 points. When you look at the number of US schools with between 10 – 24.9% s of their students receiving free lunch, the US overall average is 527, and only behind Finland by 9 points.

The real problems exist in poverty schools. Those US schools with 50 -74.5% score 471. Those with a rate of >75% poverty scored 446, the second lowest of major nations. The shame is that as a result of the very real and very specific problems students and schools in those finite areas everyone in the nation has been subject to bad education policy.

Far too many people stereotype urban areas through the narrow lens of their own experiences. All sorts of euphemisms and misinformation are thrown around by people justifiable pissed off at those one size fits all policies. Experience means a lot in how we see “truths” and work to solve problems.

When I was raised in the Bronx as a poor white kid among Black and Puerto Rican schoolmates, friends, and neighbors, I didn’t know there was an “achievement gap” except between my abilities and how well my mother and teachers told me I should be doing.

When I taught in the Bronx, the only achievement gaps I sought to rectify were the individual needs of individual kids to achieve their potential. That was the only gap worth noting. Nothing brought greater satisfaction than to see a mislabeled Special Education student get AP credit for college. That is what I call closing the achievement gap. What made it easier for me, as that tall crazy white dude, was that I didn’t have to learn BS terms like “racial justice pedagogy” or better terms like cultural pedagogy, because I lived them.

The real need is to take this out of academia, and give new SUBURBAN white teachers a more meaningful urban experience. I used to not believe in telling workers where to live, but in this case, maybe its time to be that crazy white dude again and tell new white suburban bred teachers to live where they teach. That will cure them of that pedagogical psychobabble.

I based some of my book on the writings of sociologist Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street where Anderson stresses the importance of the ability to code switch for both students and teachers to be successful in poor inner city schools. He states in an interview, “Like many black Americans who become upwardly mobile, I am capable of code switching, that is, speaking the language of the community and the language of the wider society. I guess that’s part of what it means to be an educated person regardless of what group you come from. Some who are brought up in strictly upper-middle-class situations are unable to code switch effectively, but I think most of us can.”

To me that is the key to success. Those who can will be successful as students or teachers.

On May 9th, Orlando Patterson of Harvard, author of The Cultural Matrix, wrote an essay in the NYT titled “The Real Problem With America’s Inner Cities.” In it he reflected on the unrest in Baltimore and how many people have attempted to define the problems regarding racism and police behavior.

I believe there is a parallel between those situations and in how people have stereotyped the problems in “urban” schools based on assumptions about “inner city” populations. As Patterson says, “First, we need a more realistic understanding of America’s inner cities. They are socially and culturally heterogeneous, and a great majority of residents are law-abiding, God-fearing and often socially conservative.”

“According to recent surveys, between 20 and 25 percent of their permanent residents are middle class; roughly 60 percent are solidly working class or working poor who labor incredibly hard, advocate fundamental American values and aspire to the American dream for their children. Their youth share their parents’ values, expend considerable social energy avoiding the violence around them and consume far fewer drugs than their white working- and middle-class counterparts, despite their disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates.”

I find that true in the urban districts and neighborhoods I have worked in and with.

The problem is that there is a “problem minority” made up of disconnected youth between 16-24. Most are on the street. Their gang/thug culture is real. Patterson interestingly compares it to the “wild west” culture where kids like Billy ran wild. There is a long tradition of this culture in the inner cities. (One Hundred fifty or so years ago, on the lower east side on NYC the gangs were Irish. One didn’t enter the area called 5 Points carelessly.)

There is however a larger majority of children who do not run with the gangs, or are working as hard as they can to escape the street culture, trying to follow Anderson’s concept of code switching. To survive where they live you must. To get ahead in our society you must. There are numerous studies that show that minority females are far more likely to succeed than males.

What must we do? First we have to stop thinking that one size fits all works even if policy is directed only at inner city schools like those in NYC, Baltimore, or Rochester, NY. These schools are also heterogeneous, if not racially, but in so many other factors ignored by policy makers, and I might add, well meaning commenters.

What Patterson says regarding violence is as true regarding education, “In regard to black youth, the government must begin the chemical detoxification of ghetto neighborhoods in light of the now well-documented relation between toxic exposure and [poor results in schools]. Further, there should be an immediate scaling up of the many federal and state programs for children and youth that have been shown to work: child care from the prenatal to pre-K stages, such as Head Start and the nurse-family partnership program; after-school programs to keep boys from the lure of the street and to provide educational enrichment as well as badly needed male role models; community-based programs [WISE] that focus on enhancing life skills and providing short-term, entry-level employment.”

I disagree with his additional view that this includes “ continued expansion of successful charter school systems.” After all he is a Haaaarvaad guy.

This quote is poignant and right on the money. “As one gang member told an interviewer working for the sociologist Deanna Wilkinson: “I grew up as looking for somebody to love me in the streets. You know, my mother was always working, my father used to be doing his thing. So I was by myself. I’m here looking for some love. I ain’t got nobody to give me love, so I went to the streets to find love.”

Teachers and public schools have and can continue to do that if we allow them and find non data driven, non standardized, non commonized, and non one sized fits all ways to improve rather than replace them.

Dear Earthlings, why do you torture your children? #2nd attempt

Tags

@anthonycody, @valeriestrauss, common core, education, politics, students, teachers

I don’t think enough of  you read the first version. I guess it was too long.

I bet you didn’t think I was still around. I guess I “egged” you all on to believe I left Earth in 1982, but I have been here all these many years masquerading as a series of your loser presidential hopefuls. I thought I was rather funny as Michael Dukakis. The tank looked so much like a rove ranger on my native planet, Ork.

My apologies for being elected president in 2000. Who knew Chad could be so important. I thought it was a nation in Africa.

Remember, I was sent here by the BIG GIANT HEAD to evaluate you. What did I find? Folly. I believe one of your fine historians defined that as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.”

I have to report that you are the most foolish group of beings from another world I have ever come across.

How odd you are. You test children so if 10% know 95% of the information asked of on a “norm-based” test, and they get the lowest score (say a 95), they automatically are labeled failures. So too those who scored below an arbitrary “cut score” of, let’s say 97%.

So rather than saying how smart these children are and how creative and innovative their teachers, educational institutions may have been, they are all failures. These are the results of psychometrician-developed exams. That is incredulous.

I am shocked to learn that you grade these tests to emphasize speed and recall as opposed to careful thought and problem solving over time as demanded by long term projects that ask students to solve real problems.

I am more shocked to see how fundamentally primitive you are in believing that these one size fit all tests are suitable for everyone because I know how important it is for all children to have what you call an Individual Education Plan for only a very few students, and what Orkans call nurturing. Why are these plans only for those you call “Special?”

I wonder why, in the USA, you want everyone, everywhere, to be the same. In our most primitive times, a hundred “krell” ago, we progressed past that point and recognized the value of the individual. Our society learned how to bring out the best of each future adult to ultimately succeed by stressing what they can do, not what they can’t.

Ultimately I have to ask, why do you “American humans” exist? Why do you choose leaders that make these asinine decisions that hold back your society? Look what happened when you elected me. As a joke, I tried to sell you a bill of goods I called No Child Left Behind, and you took it seriously.

Why can’t you create education laws without someone you call a corporation profiting. (I still don’t understand how your laws call them individuals with all the rights of humans.) Why is your major concern finance and not child welfare and/or morality?

You guys crack me up. No reference to that other Orkan, Humpty Dumpty though.

Your predisposition to think that anything futuristic (in your quest to be like us) is based on the idea that neuroscientists, biometric specialists, economists, and computer operators using “Big Data” should rule your world, especially in how we educate our children is ludicrous.

We are so over that primitive and barbarian idea. It seems to me that this testing craze and what you call Common Core is at the heart of this.

Your society will not survive if you cannot answer these questions:

• “Why are you doing this to yourselves and your kids?”

• Why aren’t the children of the wealthy subjected to the same inhuman forms of testing and this Common Core thing as the children of the working classes?

• Why do you not respect the children of the working people on whose shoulders your society is carried?

• Why is finance more important than intellect, human life, and intellectual creativity?

“Geezba.” I pity you. All I can finally say is for you to look what you do to your own children.

Your cruel testing schemes only prepare your children to be robotic servants while those barbarians among you who author Tom Wolf sarcastically called “masters of the universe” continue to defile your society.

Finally, I am totally disgusted with your bad behavior towards each other, your ill tempers, your inability to listen and learn from each other, and your avoidance of what matters most: a meaningful life.

After 37 years my final report is this:

Save your children or you are not worth the effort to save.

“Shazbot.”

Mork

 Dedicated to the memory of Robin Williams.

On the CNBC Interview of Gates, Munger, and Buffett about Education.

What if all schools were public and integrated racially and economically?

 

Three people are interviewed. Two come off as fools. Only Buffett speaks about a hard truth.

 

Bill Gates sounded foolish. He said NYC and Chicago have had superior results because of Mayoral takeovers. He obviously doesn’t see the facts. He thinks public schools must use charters’ “best practices.”

Such drivel. All schools can learn form others best practices…We have been doing that for a century.

 

More from Gates: This is most difficult area in all our foundations’ work because there are some entrenched practices, a very big system… very resistant to change. His version of change!

 

Munger thinks McDonalds does a better job educating than charters, and Buffett implies, for all practical purposes, that McDonalds is a school to make happy smiling servants.

 

But Buffett is interesting. He understands the underlying problem: That private schools exist:

 

He says: If public schools were the only choice, we’d have great public schools, but the wealthy have opted out in many cities…and send their kids to private schools.

 

Most importantly, he admits the existence of a two class system. He points out that the rich get the education they want for their kids. Some are philanthropic but they don’t try the same way they would as if their kids were in those public schools. They will not care as much about those schools as the ones who have no choice.

His dad was on Omaha public school Board and cared about the schools because his children went to the public schools. Both he and Munger were products of Omaha Public schools.

That is a big truth. Affluent public school districts do not have public education problems, do they?

What if all schools were public and integrated racially and economically?

Watch and decide.  http://finance.yahoo.com/video/gates-munger-buffett-were-education-122000967.html

An Alien Evaluation

By Mork the Orkan

I bet you didn’t think I was still around. I guess I “egged” you all on to believe I left Earth in 1982, but I have been here all these many years masquerading as a series of your loser presidential hopefuls. I thought I was rather funny as Michael Dukakis. The tank looked so much like a rove ranger on my native planet, Ork.

My apologies for being elected president in 2000. Who knew Chad could be so important. I thought it was a nation in Africa.

I have to admit I still actually read print newspapers like the New York Times. It makes me a bit anachronistic, but I like having multiple ways of accessing information. I was trained to learn foreign languages to save my life, so I can say I am multi-lingual, and now I can also say I am “multi-medial”.

The past few days I read three articles that taken together add to my frustration understanding of some issues I have noticed you attempting to deal with the past few years. Unlike many of you, I try to read pieces from all sides of the ideology spectrum so I have a wider range of ideas and facts to form my own opinions. I know to some humans (what I would label myself here, I suppose, if one must be labeled) that might be anathema, but it is what I was taught in Orkan schools.

Richard Atkinson and Saul Geyser’s The Big Problem With the New SAT, David Brooks’ What Is Your Purpose?, and Eduardo Porter’s What Debate On Inequality Is Missing and my observations of your society for the past 37 Earth years have led me to some rather dramatic conclusions.

Says Porter, “Over the last four decades the debate in Washington about poverty and inequality has been bogged down in a somewhat pointless, often surreal debate about the size of government and the amount spent on behalf of the poor.”

Says Brooks, “Public debate is now under moralized and over politicized. We have many shows (I guess TV?) where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.”

Practical wisdom should always rule knowledge, not the other way around.

Finally, says Atkinson and Geiser, “Norm-referenced” exams [are] designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the middle and with sharply descending numbers at the top and bottom.”

“Shazbot.” Is that a test or a roller coaster?

“Test designers accomplish this, among other ways, by using plausible-sounding “distractors” to make multiple-choice items more difficult, requiring students to respond to a large number of items in a short space of time, and by dropping questions that too many students can answer correctly.”

That is “Namnulicy”. (Idiocy.)

Remember, I was sent here by the BIG GIANT HEAD to evaluate you. What did I find? Instead of understanding the best of humanity and trying to find ways to maximize everyone’s personal potential and personal satisfaction, you debate about power and money and as a result do exactly the opposite. I believe one of your fine historians called that folly. She defined that as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.”

I have to report that you are the most foolish group of beings from another world I have ever come across.

How odd you are. You test children so if 10% know 95% of the information asked of on a “norm-based” test, and they get the lowest score (say a 95), they automatically are labeled failures. So too those who scored below an arbitrary “cut score” of, let’s say 97%.

So rather than saying how smart these children are and how creative and innovative their teachers, educational institutions may have been, they are all failures. These are the results of psychometrician-developed exams. That is incredulous.

I am shocked to learn that you grade these tests to emphasize speed and recall as opposed to careful thought and problem solving over time as demanded by long term projects that ask students to solve real problems.

I am more shocked to see how fundamentally primitive you are in believing that these one size fit all tests are suitable for everyone because I know how important it is for all children to have what you call an Individual Education Plan for only a very few students, and what Orkans call nurturing. Why are these plans only for those you call “Special?”

I wonder why, in the USA, you want everyone, everywhere, to be the same. In our most primitive times, a hundred “krell” ago, we progressed past that point and recognized the value of the individual. Our society learned how to bring out the best of each future adult to ultimately succeed by stressing what they can do, not what they can’t.

Ultimately I have to ask, why do you “American humans” exist? Why do you choose leaders that make these asinine decisions that hold back your society? Look what happened when you elected me. As a joke, I tried to sell you a bill of goods I called No Child Left Behind, and you took it seriously.

Why can’t you create laws without someone you call a corporation profiting. (I still don’t understand how your laws call them individuals with all the rights of humans.) Why is your major concern finance and not humanity and/or morality?

You guys crack me up. No reference to that other Orkan, Humpty Dumpty though.

Your predisposition to think that anything futuristic (in your quest to be like us) is based on the idea that neuroscientists, biometric specialists, economists, and computer operators using “Big Data” should rule your world, especially in how we educate our children is ludicrous.

We are so over that primitive and barbarian idea.

I am totally disgusted with your bad behavior towards each other, your ill tempers, your inability to listen and learn from each other, and your avoidance of what matters most: a meaningful life.

Will your society survive, I often ponder, if you cannot interact more personally, and ask, “Why the hell are you doing this to yourselves and your kids?”

Finally I examined your bizarre and obviously restrictive class structure. Surely you cannot continue to have so few exist so lavishly at the expense of so many. Surely you must recognize what rapidly growing class inequality and inequity has done to your society. It seems to me that this testing craze and what you call Common Core may be at the heart of this.

• Why aren’t the children of the wealthy subjected to the same inhuman forms of testing and this Common Core thing as the children of the working classes?

• Why do you not respect the working people on whose shoulders your society is carried?

• Why do you revere those who make huge amounts of money and nothing else?

• Why do you care more for corporate foundations than workers unions?

• Why is finance and real estate more important than intellect, human life, and intellectual creativity?

“Geezba.” I pity you.

• Will you not learn from your own history and not follow the path of folly?

• Why do you pass laws to protect the few members of your society that profit from them while you fool the people into thinking these laws (that actually limit them) are to maintain freedom?

• Why do you not pass laws to allow for regular individuals to “live long and prosper” (as my Vulcan buddy, Spock, used to say)?

• Why don’t your institutions pass laws to better distribute wealth rather than limit the opportunities for 90% of you to gain it?

• Why don’t you pay attention to truly futuristic and knowing humans like Anthony Atkinson of Oxford University when he proposes, “strengthening unions and creating a ‘social and economic council’ where representatives of labor and civil society could have a say in policy, offering a counterweight to corporate power”?

Atkinson is right when he says of your kind, “We are stuck in a narrow set of ideas.”

All I can finally say is for you to look what you do to your own children.

Your cruel testing schemes will only prepare your children to be robotic servants of the universe while those barbarians among you who author Tom Wolf sarcastically called “masters of the universe” continue to defile your society.

After 37 years I must finally leave you. My final report to THE BIG GIANT HEAD is that unless you quickly change your ways you are not worth the effort to save until you learn to save yourselves. “Shazbot.”

Dedicated to Robin Williams.

Can We Still Make It If We Try? Why views on Social Mobility matter.

Economic inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the 1930s, yet most Americans remain relatively unconcerned with the issue. Why, asks Michael W. Kraus, Shia Davidai, and A. David Nussbaum in May 3^rd’s New York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/american-dream-or-mirage.html)

Why is the information from these studies important to us? Perception is reality. Politicians and political campaigners know that because of these false beliefs in social mobility people can be swayed to think along certain lines and thus they can avoid fixing the reasons the social mobility we used to have no longer exists.

They found that Americans, regardless of what economic quintile they belong to, severely overestimate the ability to be upwardly mobile in the good ole US of A. They deduced that there was a self-serving reason for this across the board. Those at the top justified their wealth and even those at the bottom thought it would lead to a brighter economic future. In fact, when compared to actual mobility trends reported by the Pew Research Center, “Participants in the survey overshot the likelihood of rising from the poorest quintile to one of the three top quintiles by nearly 15 percentage points. (On average, only 30 percent of individuals make that kind of leap.)”

In a Cornell study entitled, Building a More Mobile America—One Income Quintile at a Time, Shia Davidai and Thomas Gilovitch found that “Americans seem willing to accept vast financial inequalities as long as they believe that everyone has the opportunity to succeed.”

Additionally they found, “(a) people believe there is more upward mobility than downward mobility; (b) people overestimate the amount of upward mobility and underestimate the amount of downward mobility; (c) poorer individuals believe there is more mobility than richer individuals; and (d) political affiliation influences perceptions of economic mobility, with conservatives believing that the economic system is more dynamic—with more people moving both up and down the income distribution—than liberals do.” (file://localhost/(http/::pps.sagepub.com:content:10:1:60.abstract)

In another study, “Americans Overestimate Social Class Mobility” by Michael Krauss and Jacinth J.X. Tan, (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115000062), the authors found respondents substantially misjudged the rate (5 times greater) at which families from the lowest quintile of our population attended college. And when Krauss and Tan asked them to predict the upward mobility of “those like them” they were even more likely to overestimate social mobility.

Interestingly, “For those lower in income or educational attainment, lower standing was associated with greater overestimation of upward mobility. Those with the most room to move up were more likely to think that such movement was possible.”

When examining this phenomenon by variables other quintiles the Times article not surprisingly went on to say, “Across both sets of studies, political liberals were less likely to overestimate upward mobility relative to conservatives.” and “that members of ethnic minority groups tended to overestimate upward mobility more than did European Americans. This result indicated that those with the most to gain from believing in an upwardly mobile society tended to believe so more strongly.”

These findings explain why some of our poorest Americans are some of our most conservative. It explains why Republican candidates still win across huge portions of America by still yapping about “tax and spend socialist Democrats” and worse.

As long as Americans believe we can “still make it if we try”, American politicians from both parties (although especially Republicans) can still tell us the status quo works for most Americans, and blame some Americans for not trying hard enough.

They can also say there is no need to reexamine the role of government in leveling the playing field, or supporting measures like increasing the minimum wage to a real living wage, or investing in building our infrastructure, or finding ways to lower education and medical costs, or overturning Citizen’s United, or reducing the influence of banks, hedge funds, and corporations on all of our governments- from local to national.