Progressive Education

[philunderwood]

The Blob That Ate Children

By John Stossel

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Shortly after I did my first TV special on education, "Stupid in America," hundreds of union teachers showed up outside my office to yell at me. They were angry because I said union rules were a big reason American kids don't learn.

The union is a big reason kids don't like school and learn less. Union contracts limit flexibility, limit promotion of good teachers, waste money and make it hard for principals to fire even terrible teachers.

But I was wrong to imply that the union is the biggest problem. In states with weak unions, K-12 schools stagnate, too.

Education reformers have a name for the resistance: the education "Blob." The Blob includes the teachers unions, but also janitors and principals unions, school boards, PTA bureaucrats, local politicians and so on.

They hold power because the government's monopoly on K-12 education eliminates most competition. Kids are assigned to schools, and a bureaucracy decides who goes where and who learns what. Over time, its tentacles expand and strangle attempts to reform. Since they have no fear of losing their jobs to competitors, monopoly bureaucrats can resist innovation for decades.

As one advocate of competition put it, the Blob says: "We don't do that here. We have to requisition downtown. We got to get four or five people to sign off; the deputy director of curriculum has to say this is OK, etc." Most reformers just give up.

The Blob insists the schools need more money, but that's a myth. America tripled spending per student since I was in college without improving student achievement.

In Los Angeles, they spent half a billion dollars to build the most expensive school in America. They planted palm trees, put in a swimming pool and spent thousands of new dollars per student.

The school is beautiful, but how's the education? Not so good. The school graduates just 56 percent of its students.

Three schools in Oakland that Ben Chavis started aren't as fancy, but the students do better. They get top test scores. And Chavis doesn't just take the most promising or richest students, as teachers unions often claim competitive schools do. Chavis' schools take kids from the poorest neighborhoods.

So what does the education Blob decide to do? Shut his schools down.

School board members don't like Chavis. I understand why. He's obnoxious. Arrogant. He probably broke some rules. For example, he's accused of making a profit running his schools. Horrors! A profit!

If he did profit, I say, so what? He still got top test results with less government money. Good for him!

But the Blob doesn't like success that's outside its monopoly. It doesn't matter that Chavis has now resigned from the school's board. Oakland may still close his schools. Think about that. As measured by student achievement, his schools are the best. But the Blob doesn't care. And the Blob has the power of government behind it.

In New York City, the union teachers protesting outside my office said: "Our rules are good and necessary, and if cities would let us train teachers and run schools, we'd do a great job. ... We have the expertise, intelligence, the experience to do what works for children."

They said if charter schools must exist, the union should run one, and they "would create a school where all parents would want to send their children." So New York City gave the United Federation of Teachers a charter school of its own. The union boss called it an "oasis."

But what happened? Today, the teachers union school is one of New York's worst. It got a "D" on its city report card. Only a third of its students read at grade level. And the school still lost a million dollars.

Yet it's the union's model school! I assume they tried their best, staffed it with some of their best teachers. The union knew we were watching. But with union rules, and the Blob's bureaucracy, they failed miserably.

I really want to ask them why they hate competition, but they won't come on my Fox television show.

[philunderwood]

Minority Student Needs

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Professor Craig Frisby is on the faculty of University of Missouri's Department of Educational, School and Counseling Psychology. His most recent book is "Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students." It's a 662-page textbook covering a range of topics from multiculturalism and home and family influences to student testing and school discipline. There's no way full justice can be given to this excellent work in the space of this column, so I'll highlight a few valuable insights he makes that would help educators do a better job with minority students.

Quack multiculturalism is the name Frisby gives to the vision of multiculturalism that promotes the falsehoods and distortions that dominate today's college agenda, sold under various names such as "valuing diversity," "being sensitive to cultural differences" and "cultural competence." He identifies different brands of multiculturalism such as boutique, Kumbayah, light-and-fluffy, and bean-counting multiculturalism. Insider language used to promote multiculturalism includes terms such as "practice tolerance," "celebrate diversity," "equity with excellence" and "differences are not deficits." Escalating costs and budget crunches don't stop colleges from hiring vice presidents, deans and directors of diversity.

Multiculturalism teaches that one set of cultural values is equal to another. That means if black students talk, dress and comport themselves in a certain way, to criticize them is merely cultural imperialism. Frisby cites college textbooks that teach: "Racism is what people do, regardless of what they think or feel" and "Institutional racism is characterized by practices or policies that systematically limit opportunities for people who historically have been characterized as psychologically, intellectually, or physically deficient" and "One can view the clock as a tool of racism that the monochromic dominant society uses to regulate subordinate groups."

All of this boils down to teaching undergraduate and graduate students and professionals in the fields of psychology and education to be non-critical and feel sympathy for blacks and other minorities. I might add that such sympathy doesn't extend to Japanese, Chinese and Jews, who are even more of a minority.

Frisby gives many examples of multicultural lunacy. One particularly egregious one was the 12th annual White Privilege Conference (WPC) held in 2011 in Minneapolis, Minn., and sponsored by the University of Colorado's Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity. The WPC is "built on the premise that the U.S. was started by white people, for white people." Among the 150 workshops offered during the conference were "Making Your School or Classroom a Force for Eliminating Racism," Helping Non-White Students Survive Academia — The Pinnacle of White Dominance" and "Uprooting Christian Hegemony." This vision of the mission of education might help to explain why students, particularly minority students, emerge from high school and college with little reading, writing and thinking ability.

Frisby turns his attention to school discipline and criminal behavior. He discusses the atmosphere at one New York school, which is by no means unique among schools. Teachers experience being pushed, shoved and spit upon by students. A male teacher transferred to another school after a student threatened to rape his wife. In this kind of atmosphere, should anyone be surprised that only 3 percent of the students were at grade level in English and only 9 percent in math?

The fundamental problem crippling low-income minority students is school behavioral disorder. Its visible manifestations are graffiti, broken and vandalized furniture, fights, sexual activity, drug use in the bathrooms and rowdy behavior. Frisby says we should tell students exactly how to behave and tolerate no disorder. That's not rocket science, except for today's liberal establishment who run our schools and colleges.

You say, "Williams, what Frisby says simply reflects the insensitivity of privileged white people." But what if I told you that Professor Craig Frisby is a black professor at the University of Missouri who has a record of fine scholarship? My read of his book is that it supplies more evidence that the actions of soft-minded, guilty white liberals have done far more harm to black people than racists of the past could have ever done.

[philunderwood]

Are We Serious About Education?

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Two recent events — one on the east coast and one on the west coast — raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children.

One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin "an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building."

The painful irony in all this is that the original Dunbar High School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that the school received.

By contrast, today's Dunbar High School is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington's record of having some of the country's highest levels of money spent per pupil — and some of the lowest test score results.

Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.

We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence. But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have even been undermined.

A recent example on the west coast is a charter school operation in Oakland called the American Indian Model Schools. The high school part of this operation has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation. Its students' test scores rank first in its district and fourth in the state of California.

But the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut down this charter school — immediately. Its students would have had to attend inferior public schools this September, except that a challenge in court stopped this sudden shutdown.

Why such a hurry to take drastic action? Because of a claim of financial improprieties against the charter schools' founder and former head, Ben Chavis.

Ben Chavis has not been found guilty of anything in a court of law. Nor has he even been brought to trial, though that would seem to be the normal thing to do if the charges were serious.

More important, the children have not been accused of anything. Nor is there any reason for urgency in immediately depriving them of an excellent education they are not likely to get in their local public schools.

What Ben Chavis and the American Indian Model Schools are really guilty of is creating academic excellence that shows up the public school system, both by this school's achievements and by the methods used to create those achievements, which go against the educational dogmas prevailing in the failing public schools.

If it seems strange that there would be a vendetta against an educator who has defied the education establishment and thereby improved the education of minority students, the fact is that Ben Chavis is only the latest in a long line of educators who have done just that — and aroused animosity, and even vindictiveness, as a result.

Washington's former public school head, Michelle Rhee, raised test scores in that city's school system and was demonized by the education establishment and politicians. She has left.

Years ago, high school math teacher Jaime Escalante, whose success in teaching Mexican American students was celebrated in the movie "Stand and Deliver," was eventually hounded out of Garfield High School in Los Angeles. Yet, while he was there, about one-fourth of all Mexican American students — in the entire country — who passed Advanced Placement Calculus came from that one school.

Marva Collins, who established a very successful private school for black children in Chicago, doing so on a shoestring, was likewise the target of hostility when she was a dedicated teacher in the public schools.

Other examples could be cited of educators who produced outstanding results for minority students — in New York, Houston and other places — and faced the wrath of the education establishment, which sees schools as places to provide jobs for teachers, rather than education for students, and which will not tolerate challenges to its politically correct dogmas.

[philunderwood]

neoneocon.com/2013/09/02/labor-day-thoughts-dont-be-stupidest/#comments

Labor Day thoughts: college for all

[Hat tip: Maggie's Farm.]

What ever happened to the skilled labor force? It went to college, and that’s not an entirely good thing:


When everybody’s special, nobody is. Getting everyone into college means you have to dumb down the curriculum until it is nothing but meaningless drivel that has no application in the real world…

Forcing everyone to become smart is like a countrywide affirmative-action plan. It doesn’t work…

The controversy that destroyed 11-plus [the British meritocracy exam system] is long and complex, but the CliffsNotes version is that some clueless politician saw educated siblings do better than uneducated siblings and thought, “They should all have the opportunity to do as well as their brother.” But the educated sibling didn’t thrive because he was educated. He was educated because he thrived. If you think his brothers got ripped off, tell it to God. He was the one who doled out the lower IQs…

I’m not denying that outsourcing and automation has made many jobs obsolete. Of course it has. But that doesn’t mean you abandon the entire concept of a working class. There is still a huge demand for skilled labor.

But our young people aren’t skilled (or interested) in hard labor, so we bring in illegal Mexicans. When you take away a young person’s ability to work, you take away their pride.

True, but we have to be careful not to promulgate the myth of the stupid-but-happy worker, singing joyfully at his/her trade no matter how menial. A lot of work is boring and nasty, and a lot of people who used to do it were crippled or broken by it and nourished the dream that for their children things would be better.

And to a great degree, it was. But the article’s author, Gavin McInness, is correct in asserting that the whole process of pretending everyone is suited for higher academic study and a job in the professions has gotten absurd, and has had the effect of lowering standards to an alarming degree.

If you think about it, it was kind of a no-brainer (pun intended) that this would be the result. No doubt there were sincere people who thought (and still think) that human beings are infinitely malleable, and that inherent differences in intelligence and personality and abilities either don’t exist or don’t matter and can be transcended through enough and better education. Or additionally, there are people who thought (and still think) that, even though education won’t equal everything out, it still is necessary to pretend that it will, and that this should be the highest and most pressing goal of a society no matter what the costs.

Not so bright, is it?