StickWithANose

I’ve been posting on the stupidity going down in Texas over its new curriculum standards for some time, and the madness now looks poised to go into overdrive. The genius behind this push to introduce conservatism into the social studies curriculum, Don McLeroy, has proven to be too crazy for even his evangelical base and has lost his re-election bid in a recent primary. However, he still plans to push ahead with the madness in the 10 months he has left on the state board, and now he has nothing to lose.

There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.

The amendments are also intended to emphasize the unalloyed superiority of the “free-enterprise system” over others and the desirability of limited government.

One says publishers should “describe the effects of increasing government regulation and taxation on economic development and business planning.”

Throughout the standards, the conservatives have pushed to drop references to American “imperialism,” preferring to call it expansionism. “Country and western music” has been added to the list of cultural movements to be studied.

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.

“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.

The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.

This matters to us because Texas is such a large state that it wields disproportionate influence on the content of  social studies textbooks for the  entire nation.

Former Assistant Secretary of Education under George H. Bush and Bill Clinton and noted think tank scholar Diane Ravitch has undergone a conversion of sorts from being a strong proponent of charter schools to a fierce opponent. The impetus for her conversion is the mounting evidence that, despite their popularity on both sides of the political aisle, charter schools are not effective tools for raising student learning, and that charters pose a threat to the public character and democratic accountability inherent to the institution. Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ is a race to the privatization of public schooling and to the looting of public treasuries by private interests. Here are some key quotes from a recent interview on  NPR:

“I was known as a conservative advocate of many of these policies,” Ravitch says. “But I’ve looked at the evidence and I’ve concluded they’re wrong. They’ve put us on the wrong track. I feel passionately about the improvement of public education and I don’t think any of this is going to improve public education.” [...]

“There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch says. “Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what’s [been successful] for them. They’re not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block.”

“The basic point about charter schools is they’re about 5,000 of them today and they range across the board from very, very fine schools to absolutely horrible schools, and the only national study that’s been done said that 17 percent of the charter schools did better than the local public schools with which they were matched and 83 percent were either no different or worse. So we dont have any evidence that this is going to make it any better…”

Kudos to Diane for making a stand based on her allegiance to empirical evidence as opposed to clinging to partisan ideology! More of this please…

The idea that a social structure built around the ideal of “I’m gonna get mine, screw everybody else” is somehow just or even stable over the long-run boggles that mind. However, the evidence that we’re further fragmenting along racial, class and cultural line continues to mount, and the results of this process will be just as ugly this time around as they were a century ago. One of the most successful school integration programs in the nation is coming undone, and the driving force behind it is as predictable as it is sad.

When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the local public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.

Don’t believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.

“Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city,” said Ms. Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.

So she vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake’s nationally recognized income-based busing policy…

So, what we have here is movement by the wealthier side of town to keep their children close to home and damn the larger community, which the research tells us benefits from an integrated public school system.

Across the country, research shows that students of all races and backgrounds perform better in diverse schools, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Diversified schools typically have higher graduation rates, more college acceptances and fewer students in the criminal justice system, Ms. Mickelson said.

Some experts say that having middle-class students in a classroom raises the scores of poor students more effectively than increased per-pupil spending, more experienced teachers or lower student-teacher ratios.

Who cares if the society as a whole benefits from economic and racial integration? I’m looking out for me and mine!

Talk about history repeating itself… The first era of segregated schooling (& really society as a whole) was a human tragedy for which we paid a dear price, and this farce that we are now repeating will lead us toward yet another tragedy. The question is what form will it take?

We’ve long had to endure the hollow narrative of the “Liberal Media” from the noise machine, and it was always a load of manure. However, it is a narrative that has burrowed deeply into the republican psyche with little evidence that it might go away any time soon. So, here’s one to save for those special moments when one of your republican friends dismisses an inconvenient reality or apparent contradiction with the “liberal media” narrative. [Not that they won't just dismiss this piece as well... but it is still worth the time!]

Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials–people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests–have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens–and in some cases hundreds–of appearances.

For lobbyists, PR firms and corporate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on the most widely cited source of news in the United States. These appearances also generate good will and access to major players inside the Democratic and Republican parties. For their part, the cable networks, eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way. At times, the networks have even disregarded their own written ethics guidelines. Just about everyone involved is heavily invested in maintaining the current system, with the exception of the viewer.

While lobbyists and PR flacks have long tried to spin the press, the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996 and the Clinton impeachment saga that followed helped create the caldron of twenty-four-hour political analysis that so many influence peddlers call home. Since then, guests with serious conflicts of interest have popped up with alarming regularity on every network. Just examine their presence in coverage of the economic crash and the healthcare reform debate, two recent issues that have engendered massive cable coverage.

Diane Ravitch has reached the same conclusion as I in regard to where current trends in education reform are leading us. The “free marketeers”  driving the education policies of BOTH political parties are not interested in capitalism and market competition; they seek to create and dominate politicized educational markets. Their primary concern is to establish a direct conduit to public funds, and where it will end is becoming all too clear.

I have a prediction to make: As hundreds and possibly thousands more charter schools open, we will see many financial and political scandals. We will see corrupt politicians and investors putting their hands into the cashbox. We will see corrupt deals where public school space is handed over to entrepreneurs who have made contributions to the politicians making the decisions. We will see many more charter operators pulling in $400,000-500,000 a year for their role, not as principals, but as “rainmakers” who build warm relationships with politicians and investors. When someday we trace back how large segments of our public school system were privatized and how so many millions of public dollars ended up in the pockets of high-flying speculators instead of being used to reduce class size, repair buildings, and improve teacher quality, we will look to the origins of the Race to the Top and to the interlocking group of foundations, politicians, and entrepreneurs who created it.