President of the Chicago Teachers Union Karen Lewis and New Jersey City University professor of education Lois Weiner spoke today with Democracy Now!
Re-reporting, editing, notes, minor comment by Carolyn Bennett
The Obama administration’s education secretary, in effect, the nation’s superintendent of schools is not unlike the G. W. Bush administration’s Brownie at FEMA; and, as the Brits would say, he is “unfit for purpose.” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a creation of nepotism, a sports jock; skids greased by the notorious Daley family, the gentleman slipped uneducated into Chicago’s top education office and from there into Obama’s White House.
According to a February 1, 2010, New Yorker article, the esteemed Arne Duncan “has played basketball with [U.S. President] Barack Obama for nearly two decades.” At Harvard Duncan “co-captained the varsity basketball team and was named a first team Academic All-American. He went to Australia (1987-1991) and played professional basketball with Melbourne’s Eastside Spectres of Australia’s National Basketball League, a Wikipedia article notes. Too bad he didn’t remain down under.
Ignoramuses purport to “reform” education
Mr. Duncan is no educator and never had any experience, says Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis. The man “would be arrested if he went into a classroom and tried to teach, because he is completely uncredentialed,” she said. “His [Chicago] legacy is: ‘I don’t know what to do. Let me just give it over to the privatizers’.…
“Basically, under his aegis, the [Chicago] Board of Education abrogated their responsibility towards education and gave it away, because he literally had no idea, and still has no idea, what to do.”
There is no question that the U.S. education system is broken. It has not changed basically since the 1900s—1800s, for that matter, Lewis said; and as a result, it has never been able to absorb real innovation. There is also no question about the need for accountability, she said.
“That’s not the issue. … We know that, basically, high-stakes testing (the ‘reformers’ main strategy) tells us more about students’ socioeconomic status than it does anything else.” We have failed to be honest about that and refused to deal with the fact that “we have neighborhoods in our cities and across the nation that have been under-resourced and for decades have been devalued for some reason or other, and that the schools are supposed to fix all that and change it.”
The easy and educationally unsound strategy is “to test, test, test children using a narrow curriculum of reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, math, math, math, reading, reading, reading, reading, math in which elementary kids are bored to tears. There is no joy, no passion, and pupils begin hating school at an early age.” The results bear this out.
Big picture of regress:
Child left behind races to the bottom
The Obama administration’s ‘Race to the Top’ gimmick “is not unique to the United States and what Arne Duncan did in Chicago is not unique to Chicago,” Education Professor Lois Weiner says. “The contours of this program were carried out first under [military junta leader and Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet. [This] program was implemented by force of military dictatorships and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Latin America.
“[The] results have been verified by researchers there. They produced increased stratification. … [What] we are seeing right now are the results of that increased stratification, an inequality of results … [issuing from the G.W. Bush program] ‘No Child Left Behind’ now almost a decade old …
“The results are a growing gap between poor minority, achievement of poor minority kids — and of kids who come from prosperous families who live in affluent suburbs and attend suburban schools.”
Almost anything that you can point to that’s being done in Chicago or New York or San Francisco can be found, has already been done in another place in the world. “We can look at those results and they are not good.”
Dumbing down in lieu of jobs policy
It is important to understand, Weiner says, that the current “focus on educational reform is a substitute for a jobs policy. Education can democratize the competition for the existing jobs but it cannot create new jobs.
“When most jobs being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything about that. We need to look critically at ‘Race to the Top’ and understand the way it fits into this new economic order of a so-called jobless recovery:
What’s really going on is a vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids, so that they [must] take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth grade education. Those are the jobs that are being created in this economy.
“They are doing career education in first grade, if you look at these standards; preparing kids for the workforce when they’re in first grade. Foundations, the right-wing foundations, including the [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation, are absolutely driving this. They’re funding it and funding the media campaign to persuade people that this is necessary.”
Destroying teaching profession
“These reforms are driving teachers out of their jobs. Principals are terrorizing young teachers. Schools in which new, activist teachers work, very often the most vulnerable schools —because that’s where the jobs are — are being shut down.”
The fundamental thinking, Weiner says, is that “teaching really is not a profession, does not have to be a skilled profession — because we’re not going to ‘educate’ kids to do anything more than work in Wal-Mart or its equivalent. Kids need only a seventh or an eighth grade education— at most, a ninth grade education” — the thinking goes; “so we don’t need teachers who are more than … ‘good enough.’ ‘Good enough’ to follow a scripted curriculum and teach to standardized tests; and if you need only ‘good-enough’ teachers, you do not have to pay them very much. That’s the project.”
So, kids, what we must do is
support the educators and
sack the fakes and ignoramuses.
Welcome back!
Sources
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_rotella
Educators Push Back Against Obama’s "Business Model" for School Reforms September 3, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/3/educators_push_back_against_obamas_business
Michael Brown was the George W. Bush administration’s director/administrator of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.
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