Betrayal of public education

http://www.truthout.org/121708R

In spite of what Duncan argues, the greatest threat to our children does not come from lowered standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes or the lack of rigid testing measures that offer the aura of accountability. On the contrary, it comes from a society that refuses to view children as a social investment, consigns 13 million children to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to massive testing programs, promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health and public services and defines rugged individualism through the degrading celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports and the spectacles of violence that permeate corporate controlled media industries. Students are not at risk because of the absence of market incentives in the schools. Young people are under siege in American schools because, in the absence of funding, equal opportunity and real accountability, far too many of them have increasingly become institutional breeding grounds for racism, right-wing paramilitary cultures, social intolerance and sexism.<13>


We live in a society in which a culture of testing, punishment and intolerance has replaced a culture of social responsibility and compassion. Within such a climate of harsh discipline and disdain for critical teaching and learning, it is easier to subject young people to a culture of faux accountability or put them in jail rather than to provide the education, services and care they need to face problems of a complex and demanding society.<14>

What Duncan and other neoliberal economic advocates refuse to address is what it would mean for a viable educational policy to provide reasonable support services for all students and viable alternatives for the troubled ones. The notion that children should be viewed as a crucial social resource - one that represents, for any healthy society, important ethical and political considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation of social provisions and the role of the state as a guardian of public interests - appears to be lost in a society that refuses to invest in its youth as part of a broader commitment to a fully realized democracy. As the social order becomes more privatized and militarized, we increasingly face the problem of losing a generation of young people to a system of increasing intolerance, repression and moral indifference. It is difficult to understand why Obama would appoint as secretary of education someone who believes in a market-driven model that has not only failed young people, but given the current financial crisis has been thoroughly discredited. Unless Duncan is willing to reinvent himself, the national agenda he will develop for education embodies and exacerbates these problems and, as such, it will leave a lot more kids behind than it helps.

I have been saying this for YEARS. Until we value children in our society, they won't be educated any better than they are now. Until we see the connection between emotional health and strong families with education, we are wasting our time. Until we understand that a child with a toothache who can't afford to see a dentist has other needs as important as learning to read, we are wasting our time.

I am getting ready to go to school, to my classroom in a 96 year old building with boiler heat. It's 10 degrees outside but my classroom will be 90 degrees until I open the one window that still opens and let the cool air in. In the summer with no air conditioning it is also 90 degrees. And yes, school lets out in June but it can get damn hot here in June and August. What other industry in this country conducts its daily business in non air conditioned buildings heated by ancient boilers in the winter? But yet we think this is okay for our children.

In the winter when the leaves are gone from the trees, I can stand on the playground in front of my school and see Arrowhead Stadium, where The Chiefs play. It is beautiful. The taxpayers here just agreed to remodel it. My school is 70 years older but no one is asking the taxpayers to pay for its remodel.

Where THE FUCK are our priorities in this country? We value football (and teams with losing records at that) more than we value our children.

Makes me so angry I could spit.

Wake up America.

And no, testing them over and over and over is NOT the answer. Let's try teaching them - of course after honoring them by giving them the best we can afford.

And no I ain't holding my breath. :banghead:

over and over again to improve a child's retention and learning is reduced class size, or increased teacher to pupil ratio.

Unless you start there, you have nothing.

You are red flagged! "We live in a society in which a culture of testing, punishment and intolerance has replaced a culture of social responsibility and compassion."

And then stubbornly stood by the story when it was obviously wrong?