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BACK TO BASICS: The Neo-Liberals Are Stealing Public Education
Submitted by Susan Ohanian on Mon, 08/24/2009 - 7:25pm.
President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are giving Bush a third term of education policy. Only now it's Bush on steroids.
In July and August, I've spent my Fridays in Burlington trying to alert the public to the very real threat this administration offers public schools. Often I start by asking people to take the infamous DIBELS test, a test required of every child in a school receiving federal dollars. The object is to see how many nonsense words the child, starting in kindergarten, can pronounce in one minute.
Let the Public Beware
Give it a try. This test represents your tax dollars at work, not to mention whether your child's teacher and school are rated successful or not.
yiz wan zoc ful mik
zum nuf kun ruv fod
vep ij op juj sug
zuz ov vit wam buk
lef luk tev lov kom
juf tam nol rez kec
pum poz mum ol kav
riv kic kis kem vak
tek ut riz aj vej
yil jev neg som jup
In order to obtain No Child Lef Behind dollars, the Vermont State Department of Education followed federal orders and put DIBELS into the schools. This federally mandated test offers proof to children that reading, when it's not a bore, is torture. And makes no sense.
Hard as it is to believe, under Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, things are about to get much worse. Teachers will be given merit pay and schools judged successes or failures depending on how their students do on quite dubious standardized tests. All students will be under the thumb of what Duncan and his corporate cronies are calling "college ready" national standards. ALL students will face the same academic standards whether they want to become lawyers or lumberjacks.
Writing in Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald said that the Obama strategy is to become "more indispensable to corporate interests" so that corporate monies will go to Democrats instead of the GOP. And to hell with progressives. We see plenty of evidence in terrorism policy, Afghanistan, and health care, as well as education, that the Administration is now replicating many Republican policies in order to remove that issue as a political weapon.
Surely, this is not how democracy is supposed to work--ignore your constituents once you're elected. For the sake of the children and the very concept of public education, we need to hold this administration accountable. Don't let them steal our schools.
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Hi Susan,
Thanks for the heads-up. But... I was told by local parents that the local public school already forces the kids to master nonsense syllables rather than learn the language. Am surprised to see this as new news.
It's a major sacrifice to put our young'un into private school (seems as if we're the only parents there who don't have a trust fund), but worth it.
Those folks running public education here in Vermont ought to be deported after Independence. Our local public school (which I'm forced to financially support through sky-high property taxes) treats the kids as nothing but cannonfodder. Bigger kids pick on smaller kids, as the pecking order is established. I'm sure that the many superintendants, commissioners, flunkies and educational consultants on the Vermont public payroll will stop at nothing to get the Obama Cash.
DIBELS reminds me of when I went to college, another worthless experience in regurgitative learning. When studying a language, they forced the student to learn their 'system', on which one was graded, rather than actual proficiency with the language. This stretches the actual learning process over many semesters, in which one learns the textbooks for grades but would be utterly lost in a country where the language was spoken.
I didn't publish DIBELS as "new" news. I've written extensively about it in the past, including writing a small book about it. In my vigil in Burlington, I use the DIBELS test as an opener to show parents and concerned citizens what federal policy looks like. My column is an alert about the coming federal insistence on national standards.
We have many fine public schools here in Vermont, and I want to keep them that way--without federal interferance.
...and will check out your book.
I'm aware that _some_ of the public schools in the Vermont system are good. My personal objection to a public school system, is that it is a system. How can I summarise my thoughts in a tiny web posting? I'll begin with anecdote...
Our local public school soaks up most of the town budget, but the money doesn't make it into the classroom. The money goes to contractors; e.g. for secondary and backup water purification systems (for a well), athletic fields, all the other things that have been decreed by Montpelier as must-haves. I object to this. I object to the Town taking the money for this out of my pocket through property taxes--- no choice, no vote. I object to the Town not taxing absentee landowners or resource extraction, putting the tax burden squarely on homesteaders.
Our town's huge monolithic public school exists solely because the various little one-room schoolhouses were considered 'not good enough', not standard, not modern. Montpelier take higher taxes from the middle class on earned income than New York State and New York City combined --- yet Montpelier finds it necessary to close schools annd downsize public transport. Where is my hard-earned money going? This is why I believe that education should be private. I don't trust the hordes of parasitic administrators in Vermont to do anything but attach themselves to the flow of Obama Cash and cheap petrol.
Yes, Susan, that is how 'democracy' works today; they actually do ignore us once elected. But instead of faulting the Town Meeting system, I fault public education for the abject passivity of the constituency. I believe that there is an intrinsic fault in public education. At a state level, standardisation is an industrial monoculture, intended to produce good soldiers and tractible employees with mediocre aspirations, who will keep their place. Public education acts as a giant lawnmower, encouraging the growth of slow learners (providing free marketing for pharmaceuticals) but chopping off the heads of the bright for mulching.
After a minimum of public education, the child faces various other institutions such as the police, the courts, the IRS and the jails to keep the gun to our heads and to warehouse anyone for whom public education did not foster a state of blind obedience. What country keeps the largest percentage of its population in jail?
As for accountable... Montpelier, not Washington need to be held accountable. Washington is beyond hope of repair. Montpelier is not. In the Collapse, most of our large, suburbanised drive-only public schools will be unsustainable. Each community will need to provide small private schools, within walkable distance. Either that, or simply assume an infinite supply of cheap petroleum, and happily provide the cannonfodder to secure that supply.