Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for 'Superman'" Heroes and Myths

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.counterpunch.org/tolu10212010.html

By TOLU OLORUNDA

His latest, Waiting for “Superman”, far from the revolutionary-work-of-righteousness mainstream media reviews have unanimously lauded it to be, only stops an inch away from insisting upon total razing of the public school system. The premise is laid down with little substance—but, oh, much style and flash. Students who would rather attend Princeton than Prison seem to have only one option: escape whatever public schools neighboring their homes, win a lottery ticket into a charter school or private school at which Science and Math feature prominently, graduate, attend college, graduate, fall in line to compete in the global economy (possibly for non-existent jobs), reflect on a fulfilled life, and ultimately slip into a coffin.

The man and his material don’t differ a dime. Guggenheim loves to chant corporate slogans of all inner-city schools being “dropout factories,” as though teachers and principals and other employees work steadfastly—intentionally—to push students off the attendance list. Reform is needed, Guggenheim repeatedly insists, and thankfully, as he explained to MTV News on September 7 this year, the last decade has ushered in “a new generation of reformers who are doing an amazing job, in every city across the country. They’re starting to break the code on how you can educate kids, even in the toughest neighborhoods. So there’s a lot of hope if we focus on these reforms and smart reforms, and put away all the adult problems, we can actually start helping kids.”

<snip>

On September 23, when CBS News host Katie Couric raised the issue of critics who’ve pinned down his claims of a delusionary-evil-conspiracy by the unions to murder the darling dreams of reformists, Guggenheim, twitchy and half-way coherent, shot back, sputtering: “I’m a big believer in unions. I think the teacher’s union should be alive for a long time.” He explained his union, the Directors Guild of America, sternly protects his rights and keeps him in good financial shape; but, with the teachers’ unions, “contracts have become so stringent, that they’ve gotten in the way of running a school.” Called for at this precipice of history are “unions that are flexible,” union leaders obediently “rethinking things like tenure, and rethinking things like how … you assess and evaluate teachers.”

<snip>

A day before his interview with Couric, ABC’s Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos, no Trotskyite, had stunned Guggenheim’s hitherto flawless basic cable promotional rounds, swinging at him with queries about the failed promises of merit pay for teachers and the “awful lot of evidence out there that charter schools do no better than most public schools.” A flustered Guggenheim, against the ropes, could only admit that, yes, “only one in five are successful.”

A long article that details the racism and paternalism that is being fostered in the underpinnings of the whole premise of "reform", please do take a few moments to read the whole thing when you get a chance.

[leftstreet]

1. Charter schools really are being sold to us just like Iraq War propaganda

Someone here on DU said that. It's really true.

K&R

Long article, but definitely worth reading

[Starry Messenger]

4. Really excellent point, leftstreet, and thank you for reiterating it.

I had a hard time deciding what to excerpt. I found this part below horrifying and need to dive a little more into the fevered neoliberal ravings of this fellow Fryer that John Legend is such an unexpected fan of:

Legend landed his logic upon “five universal, research-based, successful school strategies” that make charters work—the brain babies of Roland Fryer, a neoliberal economist and CEO of the Harvard-based Education Innovation Laboratory, a research agency hoping to “transform education by using the power of the scientific method” with sound business concepts inspired by “Nike, Motorola, MTV.” The five strategies:

1. Effective Principals and Teachers in Every School (while getting rid of the ineffective ones).

2. More Instructional Time (An extended school day and year).

3. Use of Data to Drive Instruction (Always be aware of students’ strengths and weaknesses, and when the students don’t learn it, re-teach!).

4. High-dosage, Individualized Tutoring (so every child in the classroom can learn).

5. A Culture of High Expectations for All (no excuses for failure).

Fryer, subject of a New York Times Magazine profile and the youngest ever tenured Harvard Black professor, confessed his dilemma in March 2005: “I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong.” Unfortunately, “As soon as you say something like, ‘Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?’ everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn’t that be on the table?” he wondered. Also among Fryer’s unanswered inquiries, as documented in a July 2003 paper, “The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names,” co-authored with fellow economist Steven D. Lewitt, is whether ethnic-heavy names like “DeShawn, Tyrone, Reginald, Shanice, Precious, Kiara, and Deja” hinder Black kids from more prosperous futures. Better luck with “Connor, Cody, Jake, Molly, Emily, Abigail, and Caitlin,” he hints.

[leftstreet]

6. That's one of the creepiest things I've ever read

:wtf:


HB noted it below also

For a second I thought I was reading an article from THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO!

:puke: :scared:

[Starry Messenger]

8. Seriously.

I'm surprised these guys haven't resurrected phrenology, quite frankly.

[Gabi Hayes]

12. fwiw, it's Levitt, the more and more rw-leaning economist who wrote freakonomics, and its sequel,

superfreakonomics, which included a WIDELY disparaged defense of climate change science

one of the fun parts of freakonomics was the section trumpeted by Bill Bennett, in which he quoted the book, discussing the relationship between lower crime rates and the advent of Roe v Wade

remember that?

I read the freakonomics, and while it seemed hard to disagree with much of the research cited in it (one interesting thing that stuck with me was their contention that the best predictor of educational success is the number of books per household, claiming the data show that money spent per child, class size, and other factors commonly assumed to affect classroom performance are irrelevant, basically)

[Starry Messenger]

17. I never read Freakonomics, I'll have to look it up.

Looks like some twisty free market stuff, I see Levitt is from the economics department of University of Chicago. They should rename that school "Sell your Grandmother".

[LWolf]

14. I am so sick of hearing the "data to drive instruction" mantra.

You'd think we never looked at how our individual students, or our students as a group, were doing before the current "reform" efforts.

Interestingly enough, I can spend a few weeks with my class in September, and by October I know what I need to know about each student's strengths and weaknesses without administering any mandated or standardized formative assessments, without actually crunching any numerical data at all. How? Informal formative assessment: observation and interaction.

By then I'll already be making shifts and adjustments in lesson plans, in instruction, and in what I ask individuals and groups to do to practice skills and demonstrate learning. It happens automatically, every year.

My district thinks this is important enough to spend state grant money on pulling teachers out of classrooms to be "instructional coaches" while we are laying off people and upping class sizes because of budget cuts. Those instructional coaches head mandatory "data teams" at each school, meeting with grade level and/or subject-matter groups of teachers to supply us with reams of "data" based on district, state, and federal-mandated tests, and to "lead" us through the process of analyzing that data, setting "SMART" goals (Within ___________weeks, _______% of _________________ will improve by ________percentage points on the _________________ assessment targeting _________________________________(insert state standard,) and "planning instruction" around that data and those goals. These meetings take about an hour a week before school that we WOULD have spent planning lessons that...you guessed it. Differentiated for the demonstrated needs of our students. Now we have LESS time to plan the actual instruction, because we're busy walking through a formalized, standardized process in our "data teams."

Our district is now requiring that our state-required annual professional development plan be developed around "SMART" (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) goals. "Measurable" is the key word here, since it's all about the data.

It sounds reasonable to expect to have some evidence of growth. Of course, we can do that without the bureaucratic crunching of numbers, without our "data team" being required to keep a large binder of documentation based strictly on number crunching.

I don't know about the rest of the teaching profession, but I don't plan many lessons or activities that addresses a single skill or standard. There's not enough time in the day to isolate things like that. I do some mini-lessons on specific skills, and I have students do something to engage in whatever that mini lesson was about, but generally, the things my students spend their time doing require the use of multiple skills and standards that we're working on. Teachers call it "integration."

I prefer integrating curriculum into a whole that makes sense to disintegrating it into bits and pieces that aren't useful in isolation. That disintegration is what has been happening for more than a decade now under "data-driven" instruction, and it's getting worse, not better.

I'm bitching about my district, but they are a hell of a lot more reasonable in their demands for "data-driven instruction" than the district I left behind in CA 6 years ago. In that district there were a few schools that didn't make AYP or API for a few years, forcing an "improvement plan." Which, of course, involved the whole district, not the 2 schools in question. Part of that plan involved staff development for the whole district by DataWORKS, a private company approved by the state of CA as "external evaluators" to be used when an "improvement plan" was mandated. What did I learn from DataWORKS? In their words, paraphrased from memory:

Quit looking at the students as individuals. Look at the numbers. Which students are most likely to push your school's scores to where they need to be to make AYP and API? Those students whose scores are within a reasonable range. Don't worry about those whose scores are so low that, no matter how much they grow, they won't make a passing score. Don't worry about those who are already passing. Target those students who have a chance to pass with extra time, resources, and attention."

The infamous "bubble" children strategy, baldly stated to an entire very large district.

[Gabi Hayes]

18. you're describing my district almost to a T. EVERYTHING must now be

DATA-SUPPORTED. all curricula, all lesson planning, ALL the myriad assessments, supposedly including non-testing assessments, but, in reality, narrowed down to weekly or bi-weekly assessments, and tri-annual MAPP testing (know anything about that? computerized, instantaneous feedback testing designed to determine where each child stands in relation to the group. we're doing it now with the KINDERgartners!!)

can't believe I'm even doing this today. must get away!

[LWolf]

19. I suspect I'm describing districts all over the nation.

A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing of helpful substance. :(

[maryf]

22. Sheesh

and they say "it's all about and for the kids" ... sigh...

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. That's so very true.

[Hannah Bell]

2. The youngest-ever Harvard professor asks why a genetic explanation for black school performance

isn't on the table.

Wow, we can see why he got to be the youngest-ever black Harvard prof.

The school deformers are in bed with this crap.

[Starry Messenger]

9. They hate it when you point out the racism and classism in this stuff.

I guess that's why the unrecs.

[maryf]

21. I recall

when they unrecc'd a Glen Ford article as racist...it gets into their comfort zone...

[Starry Messenger]

24. Oh look, another unrec.

I guess the harsh reality does strip away some comforting illusions. Access to privilege in the capitalist structure does not bring equity to the oppressed, that is for certain. Well, when the rubber hits the road, class unity is the only thing that matters.

[maryf]

25. So many don't want to admit

That their class self identification is wrong...what was the "racist" term Malcolm X referred to of these types? (I'd say it, but afraid it might cause another unrec for you...)

[Starry Messenger]

26. Or a shitstorm.

Oh well. Reformism is a strange thing. I guess it's a time-absorbing substitute for actually getting things done.

[KossackRealityCheck]

28. ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_G._Fryer,_Jr.

The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March 2005 that dealt extensively with Fryer's rough upbringing: Fryer's mother left when he was very young, and his father, who beat his son, was convicted of rape,<2> effectively leaving Fryer to fend for himself. Fryer became a "full fledged gangster by his teens".<3>

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20HARVARD.html?pagewanted=all

He works so hard because his career goal is so audacious. Fryer's heroes are not contemporary economists like Glenn Loury or James Heckman or Gary Becker, even though he admires their work on racial issues and has been mentored by all three of them. Nor are his models the estimable crowd of Afro-American scholars assembled at Harvard by Gates, who happens to be Fryer's next-door neighbor. There is only one forebear whom Fryer aspires to emulate: W.E.B. DuBois, the fiercely interdisciplinary black scholar and writer who helped to pioneer the field of ethnography.

I thought the genetic stuff was either about (1) a predisposition toward hypertension and salt sensitivity and (2) disproving any genetic basis for differences in academic performance? Is that wrong?

One paper that Fryer and Levitt wrote suggested that the gap in early test scores between black and white schoolchildren is largely caused by the fact that most black children attend worse schools.

At the same time, Lacey and Ernestine and some of their children were running one of the biggest crack gangs in the area. They would drive down to Miami to buy cocaine and then turn it into crack in their kitchen. As a boy, Fryer used to watch. In a frying pan -- the same one Lacey used for pancakes -- they mixed the powdered cocaine with water and baking soda, then cooked off the liquid until all that remained were the little white rocks. The family processed and sold as much as two kilograms of cocaine a week.

One day when Fryer was planning to visit Lacey and Ernestine -- Ernestine told him she would be making pork chops -- he decided to stop by the dog track first. He wasn't old enough to bet, but he loved to watch the greyhounds run. When he got to his aunt's house, it was surrounded by federal agents. Almost everyone in the family was sent to prison. Lacey got a 30-year sentence and died in prison; Ernestine was sentenced to a little more than three years. Fryer's favorite cousin, Wendy, got a long term; his cousin Vaughn got a shorter sentence, but upon his release he went back to selling crack and was murdered.

Fryer loved Vaughn and Wendy. ''They seemed like pretty decent people,'' he said. ''If you had put them in the schools that a lot of these people came up in'' -- here he gestured toward the apartment buildings that border Central Park -- ''they probably would have been fine.''

How many of his close family members, I asked him, had either died young or spent time in prison? He did a quick count: 8 of 10. ''Suppose you can separate people into two camps: geneticists and environmentalists,'' he said. ''Coming up where I came up, it's hard not to be an environmentalist.''

[Starry Messenger]

13. He's a gold mine of privileged crap. No wonder Harvard loves him.

He has his own "Education" department. I'm looking for a link to the study he did on the "cognitive differences" between black and white babies. (hint, there isn't any, but it took a study by this guy and his well-funded Harvard dept. to make that clear for some reason...)

Here's another recent "study". I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of this guy in the lefty press. He's a massive tool.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:0ILuUbAVWBEJ:www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf+fryer+harvard+cognitive+differences+infants&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjaXLjwMInI2OLFc7aft1d6dy1Yuhnw87PuXSpsDD46oyoPcXaiv6Hvh_ez2F_m3TdtKTGbkV-5yFDwDpjBBuvLVnbUkHZrUulf23zRpZY5-cZSRLbdGZ7ii28-KN1N23oLFZos&sig=AHIEtbREF_dRS9zQnoPEBz5cc9tiYwJOug

Racial Inequality in the 21st Century:
The Declining Significance of Discrimination (!!)
Roland G. Fryer, Jr.∗

Harvard University, EdLabs, NBER
June 18, 2010

“In the 21st Century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.”

President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address (January 27, 2010)

Introduction

Racial inequality is an American tradition. Relative to whites, blacks earn twenty-four percent less,
live five fewer years, and are six times more likely to be incarcerated on a given day. Hispanics
earn twenty-five percent less than whites and are three times more likely to incarcerated.1 At the
end of the 1990s, there were one-third more black men under the jurisdiction of the corrections
system than there were enrolled in colleges or universities (Ziedenberg and Schiraldi, 2002). While
the majority of barometers of economic and social progress have increased substantially since the
passing of the civil rights act, large disparities between racial groups have been and continue to be
an everyday part of American life.

Understanding the causes of current racial inequality is a subject of intense debate. A wide
variety of explanations have been put forth, which range from genetics (Jensen, 1973; Rushton,
1995) to personal and institutional discrimination (Darity and Mason, 1998; Pager, 2007; Krieger
and Sidney, 1996) to the cultural backwardness of minority groups (Reuter, 1945; Shukla, 1971).
Renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that a potent interaction between poverty and
racial discrimination can explain current disparities (Wilson, 2010).

Decomposing the share of inequality attributable to these explanations is exceedingly difficult, as
experiments (field, quasi-, or natural) or other means of credible identification are rarely available.2
Even in cases where experiments are used (i.e., audit studies), it is unclear precisely what is being
measured (Heckman, 1998). The lack of success in convincingly identifying root causes of racial
inequality has often reduced the debate to a competition of “name that residual” – arbitrarily
assigning identity to unexplained differences between racial groups in economic outcomes after
accounting for a set of confounding factors. The residuals are often interpreted as “discrimination,”
“culture,” “genetics,” and so on. Gaining a better understanding of the root causes of racial
inequality is of tremendous importance for social policy, and the purpose of this chapter.

This chapter contains three themes. First, relative to the 20th century, the significance of
discrimination as an explanation for racial inequality across economic and social indicators has de-
clined. Racial differences in social and economic outcomes are greatly reduced when one accounts
for educational achievement; therefore, the new challenge is to understand the obstacles under-
mining the achievement of black and Hispanic children in primary and secondary school. Second,
analyzing ten large datasets that include children ranging in age from eight months old to seven-
teen years old, we demonstrate that the racial achievement gap is remarkably robust across time,
samples, and particular

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. He lost me at the very beginning when he talked about driving his own kids to private school

He never explained WHY they went to private school.

Then he told us about these poor suffering children whose parents had no choice but to try to get them into charters. Again, for most of the kids, no explanation. We were just supposed to assume those public schools were evil places.

[Starry Messenger]

7. I wonder what private school they go to.

I know he's married to Elizabeth Shue, I guess their children are too special to expose to the hoi polloi.

[LooseWilly]

11. Maybe you've stumbled onto the "reform" of this movement...

All the parents who've given up on the public schools are now trying to find a way to "graciously" help all the parents of public schools to send their kids to private schools too... but on a public school budget. Voilá—charter schools on the public dime suddenly seem like a wonderful and reformatory idea!

Somehow it never occurs to these a--holes that proper funding (to get class size down so that teachers can teach rather than just disciplining... allow them to get some real experience teaching... etc.) would make the public schools work just as wonderfully as the precious private schools that they so admire...

[Starry Messenger]

20. The "reform" is to deregulate education.

The ensuing chaos is a boon to the privateers.

[Starry Messenger]

10. More from Roland Fryer, cited by musician John Legend

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:cDdXsG4_Q2AJ:citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.169.4115%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf+fryer+harvard&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjEzVJRs5LICkC8U7z8rnM81JxB7LLF_ijdZ5xAH0nF8mh1_mNbXxdCO3RMqIZSthcdsrpANnWOKdaRbk0gDIGKG4KZo6IeG63DBrzbv1r7h05ZuxEfj0bd-mJ32yaK5NvA1TS6&sig=AHIEtbRGwVY2AZLSXwo8mu-HcT82XUD2dQ

Affirmative Action and Its Mythology

Affirmative action policy regulates the allocation of scarce positions in education, employment, or business contracting so as to increase the representation in those positions of persons belonging to certain population subgroups. Such policies are highly controversial. For more than three decades, critics and supporters of affirmative action have fought for the moral high ground – through ballot initiatives and lawsuits, in state legislatures, and in varied courts of public opinion. The goal of this paper is to show the clarifying power of economic reasoning, when it is used with a healthy dose of common sense, to dispel some myths and misconceptions in the racial affirmative action debates.

Charming. I didn't know there was a Cosby Chair of Economics at Harvard.

[Gabi Hayes]

16. freakonomics, that's what it is. love of statistics, with which they (THEY say),

can prove anything (in the hands of a clever, agenda-driven proponent....they claim to have no such agenda, but read the following to see what you think)


this is off topic, but, with regard to Fryer/Levitt/etal's approach to the ills and reform of education, it's interesting to see just how cavalier with facts and interpretation of said "facts" they have been shown to be

of course, it can boil down to whom one believes, and when I'm not sure, I look to see where the butter for the bread comes from, or what axes are on whose grinding wheel:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/16/091116crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=2

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

“The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them,” he observes. “The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking.” Pierrehumbert carefully dissects one of the arguments that Levitt and Dubner seem to subscribe to—that solar cells, because they are dark, actually contribute to global warming—and shows it to be fallacious. “Really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you,” he writes, that this claim “is complete and utter nonsense.”

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain. Meanwhile, as long as the concentration of atmospheric CO2 continued to rise, more and more sulfur dioxide would have to be pumped into the air to counteract it. The amount of direct sunlight reaching the earth would fall, even as the oceans became increasingly acidic. There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.

[maryf]

15. K&Rnt

[Pisces]

23. No idea is all evil or all good. All these posts are to denigrate anyone with

a different idea. I do not think all charters are created equal. Just like all public schools are not pristine environments of learning. Why can't we get together on this thing.

Why can't we agree that what is happening in urban, inner city schools is not a good model?
That we are creating a cycle of poverty and failing certain children??
That these schools invariably get the worst teachers??

That public schools with parent participation are rated the best.
That most public schools are not failing our children.
THat most teachers are doing a great job with little funding.

This all or nothing attitude from some on this board is disheartening. We are not talking about the entire public system, we are trying to discuss how best to help children that for the most part will
not have a chance in the current system.

I think Corey Booker said it best if we keep pulling left and right we will get nowhere, we need to move forward, not side to side. The constant drumbeat against a new idea is not swaying most on
this board, in fact I think more have been completely turned off. Rethink your strategy or continue to lose support for your agenda.

At the end of the day the children are my agenda.

[proud2BlibKansan]

27. Platitudes and empty talking points don't cut it with me

I think what is largely absent in all of these discussions is the history of reform, especially its failures to fix anything in our schools. Most of us who are educators are very familiar with this history, as this is OUR field and we are well schooled on its history. From Dewey and Montessori to Hunter and the latest guru, whose name escapes me at the moment, we've been there and done that.

In the 50s we were lambasted for not teaching Science. So we built labs, watched the astronauts go up in space and invented a new way to teach Math. But alas, that cost way too much money so back to basics we went.

In the 60s they told us open classrooms were the answer. Millions were spent, walls were torn down and we all held hands and taught in a communal everyone can learn if we do it together approach that is laughable today. But very popular in China. Go figure.

Then in the 70s we were made to feel guilty that not ALL of our children were being given equal access to education so we needed to desegregate our schools. The dept of education was created, laws were passed, but money did not accompany them. There was also the underlying sentiment embraced by many that it was okay to advocate desegregation as long as MY children weren't forced to sit in classrooms next to children who didn't look like them. So in a few short years, the whites fled to the suburbs and the once successful urban schools were abandoned.

An interesting side note is that our children in urban schools are often the guinea pigs for wild and crazy radical reforms that would never fly past parents in suburban districts but that is another topic entirely.

In the 80s, under our middle class destroying president Rayguns we were told our nation was at risk and our schools were failing. Interestingly, the research upon which this assumption was based was almost immediately discredited, but the damage had been done and the path to a new era of reform was set. Since then, we have been bombarded with tuition tax credits, vouchers and now charters (none of which actually REFORM what happens in classrooms, where the real change needs to take place). In the meantime, there has been a real revolution in instruction which has been largely ignored. But alas, it has come from teachers and not outside reformers.

The point I am trying to make is that one voice has been left out of all of these reform efforts. The voice of teachers. In the 60s, Kozol emerged as a teacher who understood the need for societal reform but he was ignored. That was the beginning of our decades long battle to be heard. I can still remember my teachers in elementary school quietly including traditional Math in their new Math lessons, as they knew what worked and what did not. Teachers knew back in the 60s that tearing down walls and creating a large open space for learning was an absolutely ridiculous idea but no one listened to teachers. In the 70s teachers knew that all children could learn provided there was equal access to resources (and white children are not resources). But money that enriched lawyers and eased consciences was waiting to be made so teachers were ignored.

I find it interesting that the same arguments that were made against tuition tax credits in 1980 are being made by teachers today against charters. And no, we don't need a new argument. We still know what works.

So if the teachers here seem arrogant on this reform topic, it's because we have been there and done that and are tired of being ignored. I could have told you in 1980 that removing poor African American children from their communities (where they are the hope for a better future) and from their families was a ridiculously insulting idea and I still believe that today. Education is a large part of the answer to reducing poverty and I would have made that same statement in 1975. Likewise, I would have said in 1965 that we need to fund our schools adequately. I believed then, as I do now, that our children are worthy of our best. Sadly, we have yet to offer it to them.

[Gabi Hayes]

29. excellent answer, wasted on someone who begins with a very dishonest premise.

typical projection, in which they accuse anyone who dares disagree with their dissent as denigrating their POV

what a bunch of crap

by your very own argument, the mere stating of your own position denigrates the views of those with whom you disagree? follow your own logic (along with some of the decent points you make--outside the very broad brush comments you included)

disagree all you want, but I'd like to see some provision of cogent arguments instead of corporatist/teacher/union bashing talking points

quit whining when someone disagrees with your precious disagreements!