Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, says some of the public’s negative views come from frequent criticism from policymakers and in news reports.

“It’s become a throwaway line: ‘Oh, sure U.S. schools are lousy,’” said Cuban. “I think we have schizophrenia in the U.S. that we believe all U.S. schools are lousy except the schools we send our kids to.”

Thirty years of intensive marketing bank-rolled by the richest families in America has paid off in a general sense. Much like the denizens of the Scooter Store Revolution collecting government assistance while demonstrating against government assistance for an amorphous group of ‘others’ sucking on the entitlement tit, Americans are all for punishing lazy teachers working in predominantly urban areas far from their comfortable suburban oases but seem quite satisfied with their teachers and schools.

Second, while I can’t speak for big urban districts like Chicago and NYC, the whole issue is a bunch of horse manure. You show me a lazy, good-for-nothing teacher [and they're out there... I've worked with them] working in a school and I’ll show you an administrator who is failing to do his/her job. For the majority of school districts, there are procedures in place for getting rid of dead weight. What unions offer teachers is the right to due process and that is it. Living in the South I’ve witnessed many occasions in which due process saved teachers [usually biology teachers] from the pre-Enlightenment influence of local churches intent on ensuring children do not learn the basic knowledge informing many of the medical procedures keeping church elders alive to do God’s work.

Perhaps the most important take away from all of this is that the long term strategy of the elite in creating politicized think tanks, policy centers, and foundations to ’shape’ the body politic to their benefit are now reaping the rewards of their investments. The commonsensical ‘center’ of American politics has now shifted so far to the right that the public commons is now being offered up to the highest bidder in the name of liberty and equality.

If you want to understand where public education reform is heading, look south and east to Florida, where the governor-elect, Rick Scott, is talking about a new funding student formula that is more likely to destroy the public school system than accomplish anything else.

Scott wants to expand a voucher program that allows low-income and disabled students to use public money to go to private schools to ALL students…

Once upon a time in America, it may have sounded preposterous not only in concept but in chances of implementation.

But the Republicans in Florida, who just tightened their control in the state capital in the last election, are making in clear that they are determined to push for such a system in the state legislature next year.

There are legal, constitutional and other hurdles, but in today’s political and education atmosphere, no bad idea is impossible to implement.

That Rick Scott is a veteran of the largest Medicare fraud scheme in US history speaks volumes as to how dysfunctional our political system has become, but that he is now poised to set up yet another form of public looting in a legalized form should give everyone pause before blindly accepting the entreaties of public education reformers like Scott’s new useful tool Michelle Rhee.

Ultimately, the rot at the core of our political structure will break the American system that emerged from the upheavals of early 20th century, and this kleptocratic ’success’ is made possible by the common sense understandings that have been under construction for the past 3 decades. From Rush Limbaugh to the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post, the individuals who make up the American body politic have been conditioned to see themselves as atomistic entities who will achieve ‘liberty’ only through the rejection of social action and community.

Social Darwinism and the “life is like the jungle” attitude that are so pervasive in our society have a single purpose: to convince you that you are an antelope. The only thing you can do is run away. You’ll be OK so long as there are other people around who are even more vulnerable. You could try to stop them, but why? Every time they eat the poor, the geezers, and the kids who are defenseless, you live another day. Don’t try holding your ground against the big, strong predator. Don’t stick together or they’ll eat all of you.

Just imagine how much different our politics and society would be if we were less eager to say “As long as they’re eating someone else, I don’t care” and more apt to get in a big group and ask the lion if it feels lucky.

Scorers often emerge from training more confused than when they started. Usually, within a day or two, when the scores we are giving are inevitably too low (as we attempt to follow the standards laid out in training), we are told to start giving higher scores, or, in the enigmatic language of scoring directors, to “learn to see more papers as a 4.” For some mysterious reason, unbeknownst to test scorers, the scores we are giving are supposed to closely match those given in previous years. So if 40 percent of papers received 3s the previous year (on a scale of 1 to 6), then a similar percentage should receive 3s this year. Lest you think this is an isolated experience, Farley cites similar stories from his fourteen-year test-scoring career in his book, reporting instances where project managers announced that scoring would have to be changed because “our numbers don’t match up with what the psychometricians [the stats people] predicted.” Farley reports the disbelief of one employee that the stats people “know what the scores will be without reading the essays.”

My observation from hiring both Chinese and Western graduates is that with Chinese graduates, you get a much better guarantee of someone who will actually work hard at their task for 8 hours a day, but, you will need to supervise them and give them a great deal of guidance. With Western graduates, about 75 percent of them are completely useless because they are so undisciplined and lacking in basic knowledge. The remaining 25 percent, however, and pure gold. They attack problems creatively, are eager to show you their best and rapidly take to new tasks and challenges.

For instance, systems that were poor-to-fair tended to rely on incentive funding for teachers and schools for meeting high performance targets. Those systems in the midlevel ranges had teacher salaries at a level comparable to gross domestic product per capita, while those in the great-to-excellent range tended to have salaries that far outpaced GDP per capita.

Similarly, lower-performing countries tended to use many more interventions based in accountability, like standardized student assessments, but systems in the good-to-great performance category and beyond, even those that had previously had formal accountability systems, reduced their frequency. And teacher evaluations gradually became less standardized as the teaching force got better and as teachers held one another accountable, through collaboration and demonstrations, for helping students to learn.

Fair enough… That said, since the US ranks as an average nation in terms of educational achievement, this study would appear to be telling us that our relentless march toward increased standardization and accountability built on a clearly behaviorist model is wrong-headed. In fact, the study seems to be in line with much of what sociologists and political economists have been trying to tell us for quite some time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In reality, you should prepare yourself for heavy doses of the new status quo masquerading as a challenge to the entrenched interests of the… wait for it… status quo.

Moon-Pies and RC’s for all, Clive! We’ve done lost our minds!

There’s a frustrating paradox in Chinese education. On the one hand, millions of college graduates cannot find a job — at least a desirable job that pays substantially more than what a migrant worker makes. On the other hand, businesses that want to pay a lot more can’t seem to find qualified employees.

Multinational companies in China are having a difficult time finding qualified candidates for their positions. According to a recent survey of U.S.-owned enterprises conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, 37 percent of the companies that responded said that finding talent was their biggest operational problem. A separate study by McKinsey Quarterly found that 44 percent of the executives in Chinese companies reported that insufficient talent was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions.

The explanation: a test-oriented educational environment…

[The Confucian civil service exam] Keju is dead now but its spirit is very alive in China today, in the form of gaokao, or the College Entrance Exam. It’s the only exam that matters since it determines whether students can attend college and what kind of colleges they can attend. Because of its life-determining nature, gaokao has become the “baton” that conducts the whole education orchestra. Students, parents, teachers, school leaders and even local government officials all work together to get good scores. From a very young age, children are relieved of any other burden or deprived of opportunity to do anything else so they can focus on getting good scores.

The result is that Chinese college graduates often have high scores but low ability. Those who are good at taking tests go to college, which also emphasizes book knowledge. But when they graduate, they find out that employers actually want much more than test scores…

Chinese educators are well aware of the problems with the gaokao system and have been trying to move away from the excessive focus on testing…

I had an interesting conversation with a Chinese education scholar on a long airport shuttle ride this past October, and he shared with me an observation that I found to be [let us say] enlightening. I asked him about recent efforts in China to move away from a test-based education system in light of our hell-bent determination to create our own on this side of the Pacific. His response was: “China is becoming the US, and the US is becoming China.” That just about sums it up…

The point of this long-winded introduction is that I was cruising through Tom Hoffman’s place and came across this post on how the foundational ideas of educational conservatism would be dismissed by today’s conservatives as being a fascistic-socialist plot to indoctrinate our children, or something like that.

I’ve taken a little closer look at Dorothy Sayer’s 1947 essay The Lost Tools of Learning, which subsequently became a touchstone for “Classical,” “Christian Classical” or really it should be “Neo-Classical” or something, and conservative school design after being reprinted in The National Review in the early seventies. The essay is typical of its era, when public intellectuals of all stripes were engaged in a question of immediate, visceral urgency: Can we educate our children in such a way to avoid the next Hitler, Stalin, Mao, World War III? And while it does seem like the kind of thing William F. Buckley would have liked back in the day, the appeal to contemporary American conservatives is more of a stretch.

You should really click through an read Tom’s post and the essay. What really caught my eye is that Sayer’s prescription is strikingly similar to what I’ve been saying on this blog.

I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.

The primary goal of public education should be directed away from the delivery of ‘dead’ curricular content toward classrooms that impart to students the “Tools of Learning.” That’s it. Let universities and the private sector train the next generation of intellectuals and employees. Public schooling should prepare young people with the tools they will need to succeed as human beings.

I feel quite certain that I’ll be coming back to this essay… Thanks for the find, Tom!

While shilling for Teach for America, Friedman frames the de-professionalization of teaching through strict adherence to reductive standardized assessments and linking teacher pay to student scores on those very reductive assessments as being just the kind of professionalization that will help attract the best and brightest college students into the teaching field.

If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”

Indeed, Finland and Denmark did bring the teaching profession into the ‘knowledge economy’, but the real questions is how did they do so. The answer stands in stark contrast to the ‘wisdom’ being propagated by Friedman. First, they created a high bar for entry into the profession requiring teachers receive a Master’s in education, that they demonstrate competency through an extended period of student teaching, and that they are capable of engaging in classroom-based research to increase student learning. Second, individual teachers were given a high degree of professional autonomy on how to reach national curricular goals, and they were allowed significant time for planning, research, professional development, and collaboration. Third, teachers were empowered to be the engine of assessment. In Finland, for example, there are no national mandated assessments for all students; the overwhelming majority of assessment is of the formative variety and is constructed by teachers themselves in relation to student needs. In short, they made significant investments in teacher training and then empowered their teachers to use that training in their classrooms. They professionalized teaching. When you compare these reforms to what Friedman is selling the differences are apparent.

Teach for America participants receive only five-weeks training prior to entering the toughest classrooms in America, and their performance reflects their inexperience. When they enter the classroom, they more often than not work in charter schools employing scripted curricula closely tied to standardized assessments, and they have little to no autonomy in how to organize their classrooms. And, most importantly, the vast majority of Teach for America ‘teachers’ leave the field after their two year commitment is up. In short, Friedman is using the example of two highly successful education systems to justify his own pet policy project when the underlying reality contradicts the very thing he is selling, and this is presented to the public as being thoughtful commentary. He’s been doing this crap for years, and he suffers no consequences for it.

[UPDATE] Schools Matter has more here…