Attacking apartheid education

[proud2BlibKansan]

<skip>

Yeah, we saw it in Houston, where the "Texas Miracle" turned out to be a lie. And the fudging of the graduation rates has taken place in Chicago and New York as well. But the typical inner-city high schools I visit, if they have 1,500 ninth graders, typically if they're lucky they'll have 400 twelfth graders, and of those maybe 200 graduate, and of those maybe 80 get into four-year colleges. So what happened to all those other children? Did they die in the interim? No, they either dropped out or they were pushed out, and the systems cover that up by saying they're going to take GEDs or something like that.

These aren't just bad statistics, these are plague statistics. President Bush is lying to the nation when he keeps promoting his plan. His worst sin, I think, is when he attacks the teachers in these schools. If the AYPs-and I hate the language of school accountability because it's junk jargon, but you have to use it, I guess-don't go up by the right number of percentage points to make Mr. Bush and his acolytes happy, if they don't meet their "benchmarks" or their "rubric," the president says if your scores don't go up, even if you have 40 kids in a class, the classroom's smelly and you don't have any real books in your class, it's the teacher's fault. She's guilty of "the soft bigotry of low expectations." And he keeps repeating it. I sometimes think once he finds a phrase he can pronounce, he just won't give it up. But what an outrage. Most of the teachers I meet have the highest expectations. They don't need George Bush to tell them they have to strive for excellence. He says that, too. It's as if we teachers came into this profession because we had a secret genetic predilection for mediocrity. Thank you, Mr. Bush. Excellence-we never thought of that.

Q:When you have Bill Bennett's comment recently about the aborting of all black babies, are we nearing a backlash against this mindset, that will be spurred on to some extent by what you're writing?

I think so. I think there's a tremendous backlash coming. I go on what I see. I can tell you, in the past approximately three-and-a-half weeks, I've probably talked to about 10,000 teachers, and at least 1,000 of them have been able to talk back to me. They're the ones that keep me up all night sitting and talking. Sometimes when they close the lecture hall, these young teachers-and some of the older teachers, too, including many of the wise and seasoned African-American teachers who have been in the trenches for a long time-are in a state of outrage at the distortion of curriculum, at the sociopathic and repetitive nature of the testing agenda, at the fact that these high-stakes tests are of no use to them anyway because the results never come back until the end of the school year, at the persistence of fierce inequalities, at the implacable segregation of these schools, but more than anything else, at the fact that their own profession has been degraded by an ideology and lexicon that come straight out of the world of technocratic business management and corporate priorities. I can't tell you how many teachers are outraged when the principal of the school has been so intimidated by the so-called corporate partners that she no longer calls herself the principal but announces to visitors, "I'm the CEO of this school."

more . . .
http://www.paper-clip.com/curriculumreview/qa.asp

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. NCLB is up for renewal in the fall

Please contact your congress critters and ask that it be amended and funded or thrown out.