Obama’s education policies

Official photographic portrait
of US President Barack Obama
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just as Romney fans back fake choice that means privatization, so Obama boosters rally around public education which currently does not allow the public any real input or control whatsoever (and charters are ok, too).  One thing done and little remarked on, has been to raise the compulsory attendance age meaning police will be used to ensure attendance, which generates income. And, following suit, truancy actions against kids and families have grown apace.

Note: This blog argues that really public public schools means every family in every school should start having choices; schools should be meeting the many needs of their districts, from preschool to extra-curricular, afternoon, and evening classes and support by working with parents in a cooperative manner. Schools should be a resource for parents and children instead of manufacturing credentials and striving for uniformity of knowledge. This has not been done because compulsory attendance laws have created an enforcement and anti-family approach that is the opposite of how a public system should work.  Homeschooling isn't the experiment: mass schools are a new institution and homeschooling is a grassroots response to institutional overreach.  Whenever there's a problem, the system uses its legal arm and that is a real problem for democracies. The system doesn't learn to work and build with families or communities to grow the mediation services, program changes, and and innovations that would grow naturally strong if the power relationship was different.  Schools that are open source, citizen-access resource centers for learning services are not on any political party's agenda.

 Obama, GOP duel over rising college expenses - US News and World Report: "WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama would make tax credits for college expenses permanent and expand Pell grants for students from lower-earning families. The Republican team of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would emphasize the need to curb rising tuitions and federal education spending that are burdening families and the government."

Obama Campaign Emphasizes College Affordability | Inside Higher Ed: "Although the student loan interest rate crisis of the summer has been resolved, college affordability has continued to play a role in President Obama's campaign. In an event Tuesday at Capital University, in Ohio, Obama focused on his administration's support for the Pell Grant and criticized his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, for telling college students concerned about tuition prices to "shop around," according to The Plain Dealer. The Obama campaign has sought to emphasize its student loan and Pell Grant policies in recent days, as the entrance of Representative Paul Ryan as Romney's running mate has renewed debates about federal education funding: also on Tuesday, the campaign introduced a website about income-based student loan repayment."

Talk About Poverty: Mariana Chilton's Questions for Obama and Romney | The Nation:  "2) Before the recession, 70 percent of households with food-insecure children had at least one parent that was employed full-time. Such a high percentage of “working hungry” American families suggests that US corporations and businesses are not paying adequate wages for American families to keep food on the table. As president, what will you do not only to increase the number of jobs available, but to improve wages in order to help Americans feed themselves, their children, and afford basic necessities?"

Obama’s Education Policy: "TAYLOR: I think Obama's policy can be characterized as a policy anchored by a big 800 pound gorilla and a couple of small midgets. The 800 pound gorilla is the Race to the Top Policy, which essentially oscillates around what we call high-stakes testing. And that's based on the idea in principle that the way in which you can evaluate standards, whether or not kids are reaching standards and whether or not you can determine the effectiveness of teachers and the effectiveness of schools, is through a process of high-stakes testing. And how kids perform on these tests, which are for the most part designed by states, or how they fare on those tests will determine whether or not the schools become what they call persistently low-achieving schools, or PLAs. And if they become PLAs, it means that their schools can be put on probation, undergo radical transformations and changes, or they can be forced to close. At the same time, based on the performance on these tests, the quality of instruction at these schools will be determined, and that could impact in a very negative way. Teachers and/or principals can be eliminated. That's the heart of it."

'via Blog this'

JAY: Okay. So is there anything in President Obama—Henry, just a quick take—anything in President Obama's education policies you liked?

TAYLOR: Absolutely. I think I said that it's characterized by an 800 pound gorilla and a couple of midgets. The midgets are the choice neighborhood initiatives and the promised neighborhood initiatives. I think those are two exciting programs that create the connection between schools and neighborhood reform that have enormous promise. And in a certain odd sense of the word, these two initiatives have created grave diggers for Race to the Top. Now, these two gravediggers are very weak, very fragile, and very frail, but nonetheless they exist, and they create opportunities for neighborhoods and communities to work together to come up with some very innovative ways in which to alter the process of schooling and education.

Are the President's Education Policies Helping Our Kids? | | AlterNet: "Educators alone simply cannot fix such entrenched social problems. But they might make better progress with equitable school funding to ensure that schools needing the most help get more money. Unfortunately, President Obama’s corporate reform measures do just the opposite."

Selling out public schools - Salon.com: "That vision, however, is now under assault by both political parties in America. On the Republican side, the Washington Post reports Mitt Romney just unveiled “a pro-choice, pro-voucher, pro-states-rights education program that seems certain to hasten the privatization of the public education system” completely. On the other side, Wall Street titans in the Democratic Party with zero experience in education policy are marshaling tens of millions of dollars to do much of what Romney aims to do as president – and they often have a willing partner in President Barack “Race to the Top” Obama and various Democratic governors."

"Funded by corporate interests who naturally despise organized labor, both sides have demonized teachers’ unions as the primary problem in education — somehow ignoring the fact that most of the best-performing public school systems in America and in the rest of the world are, in fact, unionized. (Are we never supposed to ask how, if unions are the primary problem, so many unionized schools in America and abroad do so well?) Not surprisingly, these politicians and activists insist they are driven solely by their regard for the nation’s children — and they expect us to ignore the massive amount of money their benefactors (and even the activists personally) stand to make by transforming public education into yet another private profit center. Worse, they ask us also to forget that in the last few years of aggressive “reform” (read: evisceration) of public education, the education gap has actually gotten far worse, with the most highly touted policies put in place now turning the schoolhouse into yet another catalyst of crushing inequality."

Here is the link to the Democratic Party Platform  An Economy that Out-Educates the World and Offers Greater Access to Higher Education and Technical Training. Democrats believe that getting an education is the surest path to the middle class, giving all students the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and contribute to our economy and democracy. Public education is one of our critical democratic institutions. We are committed to ensuring that every child in America has access to a world class public education so we can out-educate the world and make sure America has the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. This requires excellence at every level of our education system, from early learning through post-secondary education. It means we must close the achievement gap in America’s schools and ensure that in every neighborhood in the country, children can benefit from high-quality educational opportunities.

Education | The White House: "To prepare Americans for the jobs of the future and help restore middle-class security, we have to out-educate the world and that starts with a strong school system."

Romney's education positions

Mitt Romney (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Romney's education plan is embedded below. Obama's plan will be up next and then third party plans.

Note: Privatization means money siphoned from local schools and choice of charters isn't much of a choice. This blog argues that real choice means every family in every school should start having choices and that schools should focus on meeting the many needs of their districts. Schools should be democratic and supportive. Schools should be a resource for parents and children instead of manufacturing credentials and striving for uniformity of knowledge. This has not been done because compulsory attendance laws have created an enforcement and anti-family approach by schools that is the opposite of how a public system should work.  Mass schools are a new institution and homeschooling is a grassroots response to institutional misdesign and overreach. One example of this is the way choice is framed as being between schools only: choice within each and every school is not even on the radar on any political party.  


From the transcript (snippets are out of order):

Now, the interesting thing about the Romney philosophy is allegedly the Republican party is a party of small government. This policy involves more mandates and conditions attached to more federal funds than under President Obama. But all of this is used to put more resources in the hands of parents to make choices, which will then also involve religious schools, private schools, and online schools.

JAY: So what's wrong with that? I mean, Mitt Romney would probably argue that the government-run system's dysfunctional, so why not let the parents pick winning and losing schools and let schools kind of be run by a marketplace that parents get to run?

NAISON: Well, my argument is public education in the United States is not broken. Our social system is broken. If you look at—if you take out poverty as a factor, our public schools compare favorably with those—with almost any other nation in the world. It's our unconscionably high child poverty rates, it's our high rates of imprisonment, it's our astronomical rates of youth and minority unemployment which create a context where schools in poor neighborhoods are under intolerable pressure. And by decentralizing education money, you're going to make the problem worse, because whenever you privatize in the United States, what you do is de-skill professionals and increase the wage gap between CEOs and workers. So in communities which desperately are trying to hang on to their middle class, you destroy public education and privatize and you're going to end up with the black and Latino middle class further diminishing, with wages and work conditions for all teachers to diminish. And that produces not only bad consequences for those neighborhoods; it produces bad consequences in terms of consumer demand for the whole of society. ...

TAYLOR: With the Romney's choice piece, it's not just school choice. But it's the key element to that is that it's not real choice, because you have to pass examinations, you have to meet other standards in order to get into these schools. So when you take the resources away from schools and you give them to parents, you're creating—you're worsening the school system, you're not making it better, because you don't have real authentic and legitimate choices for everyone.   ....

NAISON: The difference will be enormous. And I want to go back to something I said about what the difference between a non-unionized private or charter school is in terms of the administrative structure. You look at charter schools, their executive salaries are twice that of a school principal, and their staff salaries are lower, and there's huge turnover in the staff. This is what happens every time you privatize a public resource: CEO wages go way up, worker wages and security go down. And it's that process which has created the economic crisis we're in. There is not enough consumer demand in the society, because of wage compression. And this will intensify the very conditions that—above and beyond its consequences for education, it will intensify the conditions which created this economic crisis.

Romney unveils higher education platform | Inside Higher Ed: "The platform strongly criticizes the Obama administration’s “gainful employment” rule, which seeks to tie eligibility for federal financial aid for vocational programs, especially at for-profit colleges, to repayment rates on federal student loans and students’ incomes after graduation. While Romney does not promise outright to repeal the rule, he says his Education Department would focus on collecting and disseminating data -- not on “complicated and unnecessary” regulations. (Nonprofit colleges would welcome the repeal of some of those regulations as well, particularly the federal definition of a credit hour and the state authorization rule, which many fear will limit online programs.)"

Business - Jordan Weissmann - Romney's Plan to Save Higher Ed: Let the Private Sector Handle It - The Atlantic: 
Of course, there are some regulations that do stifle innovation. Consider the government's decision in 2010 to formally define a credit hour. That appears to be the rule Romney is suggesting we eliminate, when he argues that colleges need more leeway to award degrees based on demonstrated skills rather than the time spent in a classroom.  ....
The problem, which Romney's paper articulates rather well, is that time is an expensive and ineffective way of measuring achievement. Here's his take:

The current emphasis on time to degree, rather than measured competency, discourages more innovative learning solutions and continues the frustration of employers who are unable to fill high-skilled positions. Forcing students to complete a fixed term of study also drives up the costs for those who might need less time, while graduating those who have not yet obtained market-ready skills. Federal regulations and aid rules must change to facilitate instead of obstruct models that recognize and address this reality.'via Blog this'

The Romney Education Team by Daniel Luzer | Washington Monthly: "Well the system maybe “failing too many of our kids” but many of these people are very familiar to the GOP education types. These guys have “charted a new course that emphasizes school choice and accountability” before; a number of them are veterans of the last Bush administration and were architects of the No Child Left Behind Act."

120523-Education White Paper FINAL for PDF

criminalizing failure

Education Radio: Criminalizing failure: How high stakes testing warps identities, opportunities and communities: 

"In this week’s program, we take a closer look at how high stakes testing is impacting what happens in classrooms, how teachers see students, how students see themselves, and the kinds of society we are building through how young people are being educated. The impact of high stakes tests is both broadly social and intimately personal. Socially, high stakes testing re-segregates our schools, marginalizes black and brown children, young people who live in poverty and children who do not learn in traditional ways. High stakes testing tells us who we will value, and who we will not value, and makes room for us to criminalize youth, especially black and brown youth, opening the path to the school to prison pipeline. It operates within and builds on white supremacy, and exploits long standing privileges and oppressions. And, as with any dominant discourse, high stakes testing enters our consciousness and begins to structure how we see ourselves, each other, and the kind of world we want to build."via Blog this'

A sensitive look at the full ramifications of high stakes testing and the way it impacts kids. Much of this would also apply to most forms of grading practiced in the US though teachers do have somewhat more control over that process. The schools are a service for families and kids and schools should support every child. And doing this fully and fairly would strengthen our social relationships and build our human capital. We cannot have a sift and sort approach to children: we can provide services that are supportive and helpful to families. We might be astonished at the variety and depth of the many skills and talents that human beings possess were we not so bent on invasive shaping and sorting, all based on disproved science and all extremely anti-social in design.

This is one of the best shows I have heard recently on this topic but I want to point out that testing links two different worlds together: the world we hear so poignantly about in this show and a another world, a world of good schools and clean suburbs, corporate campuses, and top colleges. The ones who pass these tests are also affected: they may feel smarter than they are and they may assume they know more than they do. Those who test well and get the grades and achieve may come to accept many aspects of this coercion and sorting system as beneficial. They may become comfortable with social and institutional practices that are overly punitive and destructive. They may not actually know what they think they know. 

How could so many top-level economists not see the global financial crisis? How could so many economists follow groupthink and not question the models they learned? How could Europe actually try an austerity that is so vicious on its surface? How could anyone think that was the way to go forward? How much intellectual energy is expended on trivial activities that could have tackled more meaningful work? Why do we have so many poorly built and designed houses, suburbs, services and products? Why is there so much waste generated? The systems we raise our children within affect us all.

Those who do well on standardized tests may pose even greater challenges to all of us than those who fail.


background posts
side effects of the literacy factory model
school to prison pipeline
training passivity
social deficit
creeping institutionalization
socialization
the Prussian model
grading in the stone age
Howard Wainer on testing
better living through testing
the language of control: achievement

related
Over 230 Texas School Systems Pass Resolution to Rein In High Stakes Testing 

china: ed reform & homeschoolers

Horse and Groom, handscroll after Li Gonglin by Zhao Yong, China, Yuan dynasty, 1347, Freer Gallery (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An article by Yong Zhao discusses how China wants to move past an education system that emphasizes rote learning and extensive testing. Zhao has written before about how ed reform wants to change aspects of US education that are admired by other countries, like China. Zhao also mentions a Chinese homeschooling association.

  Reforming Chinese Education: What China Is Trying to Learn from America | Solutions:

The aim is to quickly transform a low-level manufacturing economy into one based on knowledge. But a well-educated workforce does not mean simply more years in school, or more testing—as China’s history of training innovators shows. There is currently a surplus of college graduates unable to find work in innovative but elite private firms or oversubscribed government agencies. Meanwhile, the Chinese service industry, the mainstay of the U.S. economy, remains tiny. Unlocking the potential of that industry is going to take a radical overhaul of how the Chinese think about education.

"Homeschooling in China 

Mr. Xu Xuejin, a 39-year-old owner of an international trade firm who retired to homeschool his children in 2009 is behind a controversial national movement in basic education. In December 2010 Mr. Xu established the China Homeschooling Association, which now has nearly 4,000 registered members and its website receives over 200,000 visits daily.10 Homeschooling was unheard of just a few years ago but has become a growing trend that is spreading fast in China.11 The reason behind this movement is widespread dissatisfaction with the test-driven education system that places a heavy burden on students. Although homeschooling in itself is not necessarily a solution, it represents a grassroots movement to seek alternative forms of education, which in turn could drive the Chinese government to loosen control over the school curriculum and hasten the reforms it has been pushing."     via Blog this'

This House Believes in Homeschooling - Caixin Online: 
"Yao Jinghai, an English teacher at the New Oriental School of Jiangsu Province's Yangzhou City opted for homeschooling when his daughter began first grade. "My daughter didn't have many chances to participate in a large class," said Yao, adding that he noticed she had particular needs that weren't being addressed. Compared to her classmates, she excelled at math but required more time on handwriting.

Two years later, Yao says several of his friends also began to homeschool their children after seeing improvements in his daughter. Like many homeschool parents, Yao developed a curriculum based on popular school textbooks and online education materials. Working as a team with his wife, Yao says the method of study is guided primarily by his daughter's own interest in subjects." 


Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » A Discussion on China’s Recent Education Reform on CCTV 9:

previous posts 
yong zhao on testing security
zhao's mass localism: let's get really local
school centralization in China
related
AtoZHomeschooling: China homeschooling page

celebrating john holt

John Holt's writing has a deceptively simple eloquence that is not easy to achieve. In essays like "Schooling and Poverty" and "Deschooling and the Poor" or "Schools Against Themselves" from Freedom and Beyond, Holt grapples with the same issues that surface today in pieces like Dana Goldstein's shock bait "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids" where Goldstein advises parents to ignore the progressive activism of the past 30 years as well as their own child's needs in support of ed reform. (Perhaps we should stop growing organic and remain within the industrial food model, too.) Holt long ago wrote about these dilemmas with clarity and he offered a simple method any family could use to move outside mass institutions and toward a more humane way of relating. Homeschoolers have since changed the laws in almost all 50 states.

April 14th was John Holt's birthday and Lefty Parent has a very nice tribute to Holt up at his blog:

Happy Birthday John Holt – “Patron Saint” of Unschooling | Lefty Parent: 

"I think Holt is still the “patron saint” of the homeschooling movement to many parents and others in the progressive community. He framed the movement broadly as applying full human and civil rights to children, not just as an alternative venue for school. He represents a continuing thread in our culture carrying forward ideas of more egalitarian rules of engagement between adults and youth from his philosophical predecessors, including A.S. Neill, Homer Lane, Will Durant and Bronson Alcott. 

Here is Holt counseling parents on how to homeschool their children (and a bit of Nancy Wallace, as well), from 1984, in that bastion of left-wing extremism, Mother Earth News:

How to Home School: Home Schooling Requirements and Information - Modern Homesteading - MOTHER EARTH NEWS: "Find out what your state laws say about school attendance, the legal alternatives to it, the possibilities of home instruction or tutoring, and the requirements for setting up a private school. There are several ways to get this information, all of them good." 

One method is to look up the laws yourself. It's easier than you think. Most good-sized public libraries, or law libraries, or lawyers will have a set of all the laws of your state. Look under "Education" in the index of one such collection . . . most or all of what you want will be in this section. Read carefully and copy, if possible, everything dealing with attendance, home schooling, private schools, etc. Also, read and copy everything in your state constitution concerning education and the rights of parents and families.  

Looking up the law yourself is a good exercise. It will help cure you of thinking that the law is a mystery known only to lawyers. Also, since you'll know the regulations yourself, you can speak to school officials with the authority of an expert and can correct them if (as often happens) their incorrect or incomplete version of the law fails to mention some of your important rights. 

And this:

You may also wonder, particularly if you did not do well or go far in school yourself, whether you know enough to help your children with their learning. Again, in my journal you will hear from people without much schooling who are doing a wonderful job of helping their children, mostly because they have been able to discover from the children themselves what the schools have never been able to realize: It is the interest, ingenuity, and activity of the learner, not the teacher, that is primarily responsible for creating learning. 

Another interview with Holt is linked to at the end of the Mother Earth News article:
John Holt: Homeschooling Advocate:

The truth is the home-schooling movement is good for the schools. We provide, among other things, extremely important educational research. Besides that, if-in the long run schools are going to have a future, they will eventually have to function as learning and activity centers which more and more people come to voluntarily . . . and the sooner our institutions begin to move in such a direction, and some community schools already are moving that way, the better off they'll be.

Home schooling is good for society as a whole, too. Most young people come out of high school today with feelings of alienation, self hatred, bottled-up anger, and the sense that life is useless. Such emotions constitute a largescale and potentially dangerous social problem. I don't entirely blame the schools for this situation, of course, but they have pretty well demonstrated that they can't change it . . . and I don't expect home-schooled teenagers-since they've grown up in contact with serious adults who take young people seriously-to have the same problems.

John Holt: Unassuming Reformer «: "By the early seventies, Holt was reluctantly coming to see that the school reform he had so fervently worked towards for so long was not ever going to come because the system was fundamentally flawed. Inspired by his contact with Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society, Holt’s books from this period show his thinking moving from the classroom and school system to an analysis of children’s place in society. School reform, he said, was “doomed from the start, simply because nobody really wanted to make the schools better. You can’t believe how much I hated facing that truth.”" 

John Holt by Sandra Dodd
A Reluctant Guru by Wendy Priesnitz
John Holt and the Origins of Contemporary Homeschooling: by Pat Farenga



Partial Transcription/Summary
In this segment, Holt talks a lot about teachers. Holt recounts the frenzy about math and science and back to basics ...  he mentions the closing of small schools to make big ones ... he talks about howreforms have the result of "reducing the independence, the authority, the autonomy, and the responsibility of the classroom teacher, and more and more making the teacher into a factory worker"  ... "we run education as if it was a quasi-industrial process" .... "as if we were running a bottling plant and the kids are like empty bottles" ... "all these assumptions are wrong, learning is an activity carried out by learners" ... "the only experiments that will ever improve education are the experiments done by teachers in their own classrooms" ....  "learning can't be quantified ... it can be observed .... but you can't measure it in numbers" .... Holt is critical of testing and merit pay ....  the lack of reading happening in schools ... he discusses possible changes ...  "and it wouldn't cost more money" (Holt thought the sums spent were outlandish) .... "cut down the non-teaching personnel"  .... "I do think a decentralization of power and authority is essential"  .... "it's a day jail for kids, preventive detention"  ....  "school is basically a machine for putting winner labels on a few and loser labels on the rest" ...  "as long as schools have those tasks [day jail, grading and labeling, and ... teaching them that life is tough, they aren't going to do anything else]  ... it ends with Holt saying "I am a teacher."

occupy education actions

Privatization is underway and we are hearing that austerity is necessary for everyone but the 1% for whom no bonus is too big. Privatization has been tried and it has proved a failure in Chile.  The centralization of schools has made them remote from the people they serve and vulnerable to political machinations and corruption and corporate schemes of control.

March 1 was occupy education day but actions will continue in some places through the 5th or the 8th.

Feeds and information at occupy education.

uprisingradio.org » Students Across the Nation Organize Day of Action on Education: 

"We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits.” Nationwide, public school students are seeing an average tuition or fee hike of 8 percent, while their counterparts at private universities are facing a 4.5 percent average increase. California has been a national hub of education activism, with protests ranging from marches to actions aligned with the Occupy movements that have resulted in police brutality against students. Since 2004 the cost of attending a California State University rose 191% and students attending University of California schools are paying 145% more than 8 years ago. Today’s national day of action will be continued in Sacramento and on many campuses in the state next week with 4 days of protest and walk-outs from March 5th – March 8th."

March 1, 2012: Galileo Drum Corps Perform @ San Francisco's "Occupy Education" Rally (below)




(below) Over parent protests, school board in Chicago closes 17 schools.
Full multi-part series is here.



Occupy Education: Teachers, Students Resist School Closings, Privatizations, Layoffs and Rankings:

"As students across the country stage a National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, we look at the nation’s largest school systems—Chicago and New York City—and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city’s unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools."

educating progressives

Homeschooling and unschooling among liberals and progressives. - Slate Magazine:

"Despite our conflicting perspectives, I agree with Taylor that school ought to be more engaging, more intellectually challenging, and less obsessed with testing. But government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing."

This writer seems unfamiliar with alternative schooling, democracy and children's rights as well as basic homeschooling history. Why isn't there a more widely known progressive position on education?

The progressive vision America needs - Salon.com:

"Economic vision and economic realities do not arise out of thin air. Rather, they depend on the efforts of activists, thinkers and citizens to be articulated, developed, refined — and attempted. The current economic crisis caught progressives off guard. After decades of willfully absorbing conservative criticisms of the welfare state and defenses of free markets, progressives had let their own alternative values and vision atrophy. Until it remedies that failure, progressive politics will continue to fall short, despite particular electoral or policy victories. If progressives succeed in doing so in 2012, then the repercussions will last well beyond this one election." 

There is a progressive position on education.

The counter to right-wing calls to close the government schools is not "less testing" but a fully public system that is under citizen control providing learning services instead of semi-public factories attempting to manufacture human beings with a set of skills to specifications of corporations. Our current system uses police to ensure that parents send their children to school and that design mistake has created a system that does not allow input from its users.  Public schools in a democracy should not use police but should offer services and support in a democratic and humane way to families.  In many cases, this means an expansion of service. We were headed that way 30 years ago before neoliberalism came to the fore.

Humane education would not rely on grading and testing but on relationships. Young people can work toward career goals and credentials by building a portfolio as homeschooling families have done for years. A progressive position means providing a free path to a college education or rolling back requirements for a BA in government jobs since there is no free path available and we do not want to exclude citizens from their own government.

As an activist who left the system, I now see school reform as building on the knowledge gained by many of us outside of mass coerced schooling.

• Homeschooling was started by progressive education activists though this article shows that after 30 years of neoliberalism, few know much about progressive homeschool activists like John Holt or John Gatto, and the many voices of the historically strong alternative education movement. Activist progressives have been on the ground in homeschooling since the 1970s.
• Progressives raised within the school system may not be able to imagine new ways forward if they do not get involved in some sort of progressive education change movement. 
• The public schools are not controlled by the public in any meaningful way nor do they provide a strong support for working-class families. The use of police on families is rampant and the entire system relies on coercion. The schools have never built the habit of working with the users of the system. 
• Change that does not address this fundamental misallocation of power will never work. Schools cannot be in charge of education: families and kids must be the ones making choices. Schools can only provide a service.
• Education won't fix income inequality and the schools themselves ensure that power flows upward away from people and communities.
• The public schools have a long history of corporate ties to questionable programs and we have yet to free our schools from anti-democratic and coercive control. 
• It has been critically important to build a group of people outside the education system in order to affect real change by having people with real experience that can actually counter the pervasive influence of mass schooling in our own lives. 
• In order to step outside the system, homeschoolers have changed compulsory attendance laws in most of the 50 states. This has grown a large base of citizens who understand the disenfranchisement of families is at the core of a progressive position on education. The family in the US often lacks healthcare, time off, and a living wage. 
• It is not that families should replace schools but that families should be the involved in deep ways that compulsory attendance laws made impossible. Schools have grown without learning the skills of deep democracy. Schools have not evolved into democratic and citizen-based institutions as public libraries have done because of the guaranteed income stream generated for administration and increasingly corporations. This private sector coalition prevents grassroots change because the grassroots have no voice at all. 
• Wealthy families may want schooling to be privatized but the majority of families in schools would want services even if they could choose not to have any. I think the majority would want flexible services but they have never been given this choice.
• If schools could become learning service providers, whole communities could change. Instead of working against mass socialization pressures, schools as learning centers could help provide more positive social encounters while minimizing the negative.
• Families with choice can begin altering their social experiences, ensuring that kids avoid stress and stay healthy as well as fundamentally changing the social experience within schools. The social experience within schools is one of the most negative parts of the whole system: from acculturation to authoritarian practices to peer-dependency as many communities and families have changed their way of life from 100 years ago. Using a user-driven model of providing services will allow kids and families to control this social process and transform it at the grassroots level.
• The current structure of mass coerced schooling has created a guaranteed income stream in a system that has no mechanism for accountability and so all change is about capturing that income stream. Only by changing this fundamental structure can real change be done.
• An equitably-funded, fully public system would focus on providing all families with learning resources that families could choose and use as they need since citizens in a democracy have no need of militaristic system of education. Working families should have as many services as they want and all families should be allowed to tailor their schedules, courses, and activities as they see fit.
• The factory model that manufactures credentials is a relic: we can provide learning services and allow children and parents to work toward credentials they choose. 

• Schools do not do a good job of providing daycare for working families which are often single-parent. Most working families struggle to find ways to coordinate the transportation and activities needed for kids in a system that doesn't allow parents to request services like extended classes or activities. 
• Schools do not provide early childhood services nor do they even track data about what the people in their districts want or need. School schedules are not correlated with work schedules nor do working parents have choices in scheduling or access to transportation services.  All of this is considered outside the factory model that does not require schools to listen and serve their district. 
• Food services are repellent and kids often have scant time to eat or they are not allowed to talk.
• Schools do not provide meaningful counseling for college and careers and these services should be exponentially expanded to include credential and job training resource nights for families to understand the choices out there. Also, in school mediation and counseling services to facilitate usage should be large since schools should be people-centric organizations. 
• Schools charge escalating fees that are a growing and real burden to the working class. These fees along with district manipulation of funding show the disintegration of the system and only by understanding how compulsory attendance has tied funding to the child can we move toward a system that is fairly funded and provides resources that allow working and lower class families the same dignity of choice and control over their children that upper-class families have now.
• Schools bully and threaten parents with increasing truancy fines. Schools do not allow much sick time and many kids return to class when still ill. This is because of funding tied to attendance and the lack of childcare services. 
• Parents are required to provide extensive homework time instead of having family time, a practice that impacts poorer families harder than many others, and another way schools override families and their needs. Families that need more classes and more activities cannot get them, however, as they are supposed to substitute for that themselves. Plenty of working-class families would choose extended services if they were given any choices.
• Community colleges and large numbers of state colleges cannot graduate students at a rate of 90% or more but still increase tuition and increasingly, cater to out-of-state and foreign students who can pay more. Schools survive on the money that families spend for remediation services for kids whom the schools themselves have caused to need remediation.
• Putting your kids in public schools in order to work does help some families get a second income and depending on the school journey, may also benefit the kids, but it does not make anyone a progressive.
• Income disparities in my local high school ensure that the more affluent kids pack into IB and AP programs which kids must test into. Often these families could afford to pay for private schooling (though some would feel as strapped as the working class does in public schools) but they maintain they are progressive in attending public schools. 
• Those who benefit from high test scores or stronger local funding, also benefit from a system that oppresses others with those same tools: testing, sorting, and funding. 
• The intense peer-orientation of mass schooling harms poor families the most, creating kids with less strong family ties. Families with more resources can handle that easier but all mass schooling for extended periods is running into this problem.
• Democratic values are non-existent in our schools since compulsory attendance laws ensure that families comply by using police, a common tactic in less well-off schools. This use of policing and coercion affect even well-off kids in nice schools who become more accepting of authoritarian methods.
• Just as copyright and patent laws were originally about ensuring a strong public domain after a brief period of compensation for a creator, so schools were originally had a brief period of required attendance and the strong provision of resources for the public good. The strong provision for the common good means viewing schools as places that could have strong social and community impact if they were run as a social services that treated families with dignity.
• The school-to-prison pipeline has been well documented and the role of mass coerced schooling in creating the institutional mindset is underrated. Schools are a part of this mass system that does not adjust or listen to the needs and concerns of kids or young people and their families. 
• Those who maintain that we must compete to win support an education-industrial complex that grows the institution itself instead of happy families, communities and sustainable work. Just as the military-industrial complex has managed to generate war after war, so the educational-industrial complex generates credentials and programs, from the remediation windfall to stackable credentials to the textbooks Pearson provides to schools as well as prisons. But education, kids, relationships and communities are diminished: they are required to be part of guaranteed income stream that has no voice. 
• The public schools and public universities that were once provided for the working class are now too expensive for the working class. Growing numbers of citizens cannot work in our millionaires-only government since the required BA is now unaffordable to the majority of working people. When the high school degree began to be required, a free and public path was provided. Not for the BA: it may be required for most government jobs but there is no free and public route.
• The so-called public system allows funding for schools is a hybrid system, part local money allowed to piggyback on public money to create upscale districts that use their police to prevent the theft of education while expanding the use of police in school districts where funding has been cut.
• Corporate money seeds charters which, along with vouchers, provide few citizens real choice or involvement. The case of Kelley Williams-Bolar provides a horrifying example of a so-called public system that is in fact acting more like an adjunct to a growing prison system. Williams-Bolar shows the limits of the current funding model.

There really is a progressive position on education but, like organic farming twenty years ago, many cannot believe you can grow smart children and happy workers without coercion, sorting, grading, testing, and punishment. But families of all sorts have done this and we can do this in our communities, too.

And we are not all rich.

Oh, that’s rich. « The Bitter Homeschooler:

"Regardless of what else you think of homeschoolers, please keep in mind that we’re not any more likely to be rich than any other group. We just don’t mind being broke for a good cause. "

background posts

• real school reform (and a changing view of attendance)
• homeschooling is the real legacy of holt, kohl, et al and why compulsory attendance laws are limiting our ability to change schools
• Blaming parents, blaming the family
• voluntary attendance
• understanding school funding
• the compulsory attendance mindset
• semi-private clubs called schools
• update on williams-bolar
• make public schools truly public
• what's wrong with the schools?
• understanding school funding
• school to prison pipeline
• how is requiring a BA legal?
• the demise of the public university

common core is not core

As a homeschooling mother and a citizen who attended public schools, I can easily see that one major problem with the Common Core is that it is not a core.  The core was written for the antiquated current operating system: the factory production model. The core is not device-independent. The core doesn't have to be efficient, for example. The committee cannot let go of anything. The core does not revamp coverage and format in any way.

These are fill-in-the-blank standards.  We have 12 years, 180 days. Fill it up. And while a country can do a good job on that (Finland), the massively struggling system in the US really needs an efficient core because many schools need to expand services while conserving resources. Schools need time and space for customization which should proceed from more real choices made by kids and families at every school. Schools could make a run at that with a substantial and efficient core that took less time and allowed for families and kids to make real choices about their time and focus.

A three-hour a day core could allow gardening, bike repair classes, projects in school and in the community, drama, art, math clubs, tech stuff, counseling, group support, teacher support, field trips, time to eat and play, and whole lot of other stuff that research clearly shows helps kids be smart. The way homeschooling families do. Unschoolers are probably right that we do not even need this but schools could transition to deep customization by getting breathing space and efficiency from a core.

A real core would be optional and would let go of stuff and let schools begin supporting and helping families and kids.

Up at the Daily Riff,  this video sums it up and is hilarious. Watch for the iphone designed by ed reform.

Presentation by Paulo Blikstein http://paulo.blikstein.com is Assistant Professor at Stanford University School of Education where his research focuses on how new technologies can deeply transform the learning of science, engineering, and mathematics. 




Can You Solve This Puzzle?
On the Common Core Myths vs Facts page,  the Mathematics paragraph does not correlate with the English-language arts paragraph if they were meant to be stylistically related. I am trying to think what would be the equivalent of classic myths, Founding documents, literature and Shakespeare:  maybe geometry, computation, algebra and calculus?

In English‐language arts, the Standards require certain critical content for all students, including: classic myths and stories from around the world, America’s Founding Documents, foundational American literature, and Shakespeare. Appropriately, the remaining crucial decisions about what content should be taught are left to state and local determination. In addition to content coverage, the Standards require that students systematically acquire knowledge in literature and other disciplines through reading, writing, speaking, and listening. 

In Mathematics, the Standards lay a solid foundation in whole numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals. Taken together, these elements support a student’s ability to learn and apply more demanding math concepts and procedures. The middle school and high school standards call on students to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges; they prepare students to think and reason mathematically. The Standards set a rigorous definition of college and career readiness, not by piling topic upon topic, but by demanding that students develop a depth of understanding and ability to apply mathematics to novel situations, as college students and employees regularly do.

Another viewpoint:
Education Reform: An Order-of-Magnitude Improvement | Truthout: 

"It won't. If all the reformers' flawed assumptions are corrected, but the traditional math-science-language-arts-social-studies "core curriculum" remains the main organizer of knowledge, the truck may creep forward a few inches, but it won't take the young where they need to go if we care about societal survival. The mess from this generation's political paralysis and refusal to address looming problems can't be cleaned up using the same education that helped create it."

just babysitting

Ida May Fuller first social security recipientpublic domain image via WikipediaCareer Ruin: Homeschooling | Penelope Trunk Blog:

"So in the middle of realizing that school is really just a babysitting service, I became militant. I realized that public school is like Social Security. There is no money to do what we are pretending we are aiming to do. We should just grow up and admit that we cannot have effective public schools for everyone. Just like we cannot have Social Security for everyone.

But parents in the middle class can have one parent working and one parent home with their kids. 

I'm not sure where blogger Penelope Trunk gets her information on social security. Robert Reich, Dean Baker/CEPR, William Greider and Jim Luke disagree.

Many feel that shifting from things like the predator drone program to school funding would be a good way to fund plenty of stuff. The idea that the economy of the US is like the household economy, just bigger, is a false analogy so it is not really clear what we can afford, as a collective group of people in the administrative unit called the nation-state. And there's even wage slavery  as steep inequality creates many issues.

But I am quite sure we cannot afford to lose the valuable skills and talents of so many human beings in system that relies on coercion instead of working with citizens to provides services. Families would be a real check on corporate and curricula overreach. Even John Holt thought we could spend less if we understood the difference between schools and learning. But Trunk makes this statement as well:

Believe me. There is absolutely no evidence that middle class kids from college-educated parents should be sitting in a classroom. Find me some. Really. Put it in the comments. Because if I could have found some, my kids would be in a classroom today. 

True enough. Except I'm not sure there is any evidence that sitting in school helps working-class kids all that much either. We seem to have very low social mobility in the US and prolonged education has contributed to that. Poor kids would benefit the most from an emphasis on making their lives better where they are, as activist John Holt wrote many years ago in his essays on schooling and poverty. (Holt also said we can't create more good jobs at the top to fix our problems: we must find ways to make all jobs good jobs.)

But Trunk is nothing if not honest. She is a working mother and Trunk's post shares her struggles:

But you know what? I can’t figure out how to get my work done and do homeschool too. I can’t figure out: Should I work more to pay for more childcare so I can work more? I know I don’t want the pressure of trying to have a big job and be a mom. I want to be a mom and I want to have an interesting job. And, I guess, I want to figure out how much more I have to work in order to pay for somehow getting a break from the kids.

A blue-ribbon achiever like Trunk may feel torn between achieving at work and achieving at competitive mothering.

Care Work Live:
"Employers have changed, too since the 1960s. The caricatures of status-conscious ladies of the “league” have been replaced by harried, working professionals. Their concerns have changed as well. The wife in the “companionate marriage” of the 1950s and 1960s concerned herself primarily with enhancing her husband’s status at work by being a hostess and by improving her family’s social status through engagement in civic and volunteer organizations. Mothering was an important, but lesser concern. Contemporary women, by contrast, are judged by the upward mobility of their children, not of their husbands. Evidence of “competitive mothering” is everywhere from Baby Einstein to enrichment classes for one-year-olds, to the long waiting lists for the best pre-schools. Demographer Susan Bianchi has shown that the at-home mothers of that golden age of the nuclear family actually spent less time with their children than do the working mothers of today."

The Daycare Function of Schools 
Acknowledging the importance of care work is a tenet of feminism. Families rely on the much maligned daycare function of schools for time to work. And kids need places to go in communities where we are bowling alone.  Walkable neighborhoods with adequate parks and nearby services are not common. Schools provide lots of community spaces and we could use schools to help transition communities in reclaiming more public spaces.

We could provide these services more honestly and comprehensively by understanding the dual function of daycare and learning that schools provide. We could allow families to have access to services for both of these reasons. And allowing parents and families real flexibility and choice could transform the factory school into a place where real and meaningful social ties could develop just as allowing kids time for food, exercise, and grade-free learning experiences could allow each child to make choices that help them grow and contribute in the ways they choose.

Mass schooling hides the fact that learning is natural and work is also something human beings engage in naturally. If central planning is over, then we must recognize the inherent ability of communities to make schools social spaces and learning zones. Corporate exploitation and legal codes that redline poor neighborhoods and use sorting techniques to cull children out instead of offering learning resources and letting children sort themselves in, well, that will have to end.

We need open access learning centers that allow real choices to be made by every single child and family.

background posts
what real choice would look like

redlining

public domain image via WikipediaHOLC's 1936 security map of PhiladelphiaWhy Is Congress Redlining Our Schools? | The Nation: Redlining was the once-common practice in which banks would draw a red line on a map—often along a natural barrier like a highway or river—to designate neighborhoods where they would not invest. Stigmatized and denied access to loans and other resources, redlined communities, populated by African-Americans and other people of color, often became places that lacked businesses, jobs, grocery stores and other services, and thus could not retain a thriving middle class. Redlining produced and reinforced a vicious cycle of decline for which the residents themselves were typically blamed.

.....

In the new vision for ESEA, these schools, once identified, will be subjected to school “turnaround” models that require the schools to be closed, turned into charters, reconstituted (by firing nearly half the staff) or “transformed,” according to a complicated set of requirements that include everything from instructional reforms to test-based teacher evaluation. The proposed array of punitive sanctions, coupled with unproven reforms, will increasingly destabilize schools and neighborhoods, making them even less desirable places to work and live and stimulating the flight of teachers and families who have options.

.....

"There is no plan in the current or proposed ESEA or in other federal legislation to stem the rapid slide of families into poverty, homelessness and food insecurity; to address the inequitable distribution of state and local funds to schools; to improve teaching and learning conditions in underfunded, high-poverty schools; or to recruit and train expert teachers who will stay in these schools and stop the revolving door of untrained novices who leave children further behind. There are no significant investments in training to better prepare teachers to teach new English learners, students with disabilities and others with a range of needs."

 .....

The racial and economic segregation that sets the stage for redlining is now firmly in place. One in four American children lives in poverty, nearly 60 percent more than in 1974, and the number of people living in severe poverty has reached a record high. A national study released in 2009 found that one in fifty children in America is homeless and living in a shelter, motel, car, shared housing, abandoned building, park or orphanage. The proportions in some school districts exceed one in ten, and the number is growing rapidly.

The schools are not just lacking in investment: the schools themselves take money and resources out of communities and actively breakdown local social ties.  Schools have never become interactive with their environments, they haven't built skill at that level of interaction.  In an effort to at least show some ability to care about schools that will never be a happy cog in the machine grinding out big jobs, schools try the turn-around. Some schools can crank into gear and achieve the now stale wonder of multiple moving parts, at least to some degree, but many schools cannot manage the charade and these districts need the positive social networking and interaction with schools that provide real services. I do not mean corporate curricular programs or remote control testing. Indeed, the one weakness in this strong Darling-Hammond piece is her link to the Common Core Standards.  Acceptance of the Common Core Standards is the part that anchors schools to the factory model in its totality. This is because the Core is not core, meaning concise, smaller than what we have now.  If schools are to move beyond the factory model, they will need a smaller core curriculum, a lot more focused, to allow time for many other things like health and exercise and sleep as well as other activities they choose. This core is needed because the vast majority of families, if given the choice, will still want their kids to attend and get some core subjects, though, in time, many would begin to stray into other activities and classes. If the Core were a core, then three or so hours a day would be the core everyone wants, and schools would be able to handle many other activities and classes as well.

background posts
real school reform (and a changing view of attendance)
voluntary attendance
the compulsory attendance mindset
centers for continual learning
reforesting the commons
blaming families, juvenile justice edition