This Teacher's Alarming Resignation Letter Shows How Much Schools Have Changed Since You Were A Kid

[ipaint]

41. no.

I am saying that public accountability (public power) is not an item to be traded-off no matter how wonderful the supposed advancement. Public education is not a prize to be won by whatever billionaire can bid highest and saturate the media with the necessary barrage of PR and feel good "it's no different than any other standard" propaganda.

I am truly amazed that people will willingly jump a cliff for such small immediate gains. You are looking at the final chapter in the history of public education.

Common core is a means to an end. Testing. That's the goal. That's where the money is.

And I am not referring to "people making money at it" as if I were criticizing a mom and pop entrepreneur. The people I'm am referring to own the supreme court, most politicians and increasingly your profession.

They want to own, control and corruptly profit from your kid's lifetime of work productivity.

The attack began with Reagan's "Nation at Risk" report that said public schools where failing and the Sandia study that proved scientifically just the opposite but was never publicized and has continued non stop until today. Now we have democrats declaring that the a few billionaires setting national education standards (by buying off states one by one) for profit is o.k. with me because my kid learns fine or my school is coping or the standards are good enough so what could be wrong?

There is a history, they lied then, they have lied since then and they are lying now.

"One section, for example, analyzed SAT scores between the late 1970s and 1990, a period when those scores slipped markedly. ("A Nation at Risk" spotlighted the decline of scores from 1963 to 1980 as dead-bang evidence of failing schools.) The Sandia report, however, broke the scores down by various subgroups, and something astonishing emerged. Nearly every subgroup -- ethnic minorities, rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, top students, average students, low-ranked students -- held steady or improved during those years. Yet overall scores dropped. How could that be?

Simple -- statisticians call it Simpson's paradox: The average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing. Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.

By then, however, catastrophically failing schools had become a political necessity. George H.W. Bush campaigned to replace Reagan as president on a promise to confront the crisis. He had just called an education summit to tackle it, so there simply had to be a crisis.

The government never released the Sandia report. It went into peer review and there died a quiet death. Hardly anyone else knew it even existed until, in 1993, the Journal of Educational Research, read by only a small group of specialists, printed the report."

http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk

You really want to let the same people who have attacked public education for 3 decades buy the system, set the standards and profit from the results. All because the standards are ok.

There is a 500 billion pot of taxpayer money out there and the vultures are circling.

"Although the marketplace for education services and products is strong on the margins, the structure of the American educational system creates considerable obstacles for companies that would like to offer complete kindergarten through 12th grade services: entrepreneurs attempting to open schools face regulatory barriers and competition from “free” government schools supported by state funds.

Policymakers interested in improving America’s education system should eliminate financial biases against edupreneurs by adopting policies, such as tax cuts and universal tuition tax credits, that would return education purchasing power to individuals. Such policies would begin to loosen the government’s monopoly on education and allow the natural growth of a vibrant education marketplace."

http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/edupreneurs-survey-profit-education