Response and commentary on series of articles on Michigan's being declined for "Ract to the Top" funding in the Oakland Press in "Fingers point over failure of Race to the Top application" which included comments from Republican Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and the MEA and and AP Story "Gov, Granholm ‘disappointed’ at Michigan being shut out in 'Race to the Top' education funds" on March 5, 2010.
A failed Governor and a gnarly power-grabber make one last attempt to achieve their legacy moment-Pin Blame on the State's Teachers.
Nothing short of desperation and the full realization that circumstances created by G.W. Bush's Great Job Killing Recession has forced the shotgun marriage of a marginalized governor (seeking a promising position in politics outside Michigan) and an old grumpy frump of a "public payroller," man with delusions of power and control over his fiefdom of Oakland County (replete with Brook's long history of "shot calling" as the GOP Godfather of Eastern Michigan) would have the power to produce this god-awful blames laying tag team: Brooks and Jenny.
Previously, here's how it was. " L. Brooks Patterson just wants to know: Is Gov. Jennifer Granholm trying to upstage him -- again?
"The 71-year-old Oakland County executive issued a press release Tuesday pointing out that, for the second year in a row, Granholm has scheduled her State of the State address on the same night of his State of the County speech." That highly annoyed Brooks. So what brings about this highly irregular, ugly marriage of pols?
THE GODFATHER’S SLAPDOWN: DEFEAT THE MICHIGAN EDUCATION ASSOCIATION'S RIGHT TO DEFEND TRADITIONAL PUBLIC EDUCATION
The teachers of Michigan, more exactly the Michigan Education Association, have so far succeeded in getting across the point to current "the powers that be" in Michigan and to the state legislature and also to the now-powerless, lame duck governor, that individuals, parents, local business people, and children are right to defend and protect the traditional public school in their community.
This is a desperate hour. The over-all long term decline of Michigan, first seen as a slight trickle in the earthen dam (Michigan's economic health) which held back the outsourcing and Chinese completion-a flood building behind it-expanded under John Engler indicated big trouble ahead. Engler ignored the distinct warning signs of that small fissure and now the dam is about to breech sweeping away what is left of Michigan's struggling economies.
THE BIG FIGHT: THE LOCAL ECONOMY VERSUS THE SELFISH INTRANSIGENCE OF BOTH BISHOP AND DILLON
Agriculture now takes a high place as Michigan's economic engine. Tourism is far more than a pastime part of the state's income. The local economic engine in every community across this great state is the public school. Forget the wingnuttery of the past, ignore the meanness of the Engler Revolution and the selfish intransigence of the politically hopeful "pretty boys" Bishop and Dillon. We consistently gain from our investment and returns drawn from traditional public schools' operations and purpose. It's blind economic ignorance to claim otherwise.
Never forget: Traditional education moves the local economy and consumes local supplies, education provides stable and dependable jobs and generates local dollars of great importance to our state's survival, while at the same time public school delivers the highest hopes we have for our children into a better tomorrow. It's our present local economic engine and our entire future promise for children. MEA and parents, local businesses, and informed citizenry support this fact. Back in September 2009 the Associated Press survey of the state showed that Michigan supported INCREASED TAXES FOR EDUCATION BY A 2 TO 1 MARGIN.
The deceptive politics and the chicanery connected to Proposition A of 1994 took a big part of the local authority that is needed to sanely run those local neighborhood schools and shipped it on a ladle to a huckster-bound Lansing. In Lansing school operations funding became a shuttle cock for the peacocks of the legislature and a "goodie bag" for the lobby corps.
ENGLER MADE ANTI-PUBLIC SCHOOLS HARANGUES FASHIONABLE : ENGLERISM STUCK.
Under Engler, local control was sold off. Like that biblical birthright local control was traded for a cold bowl of insider pap. This fact and the spirit it spawned is attested to by long-time observer, Tim Skubick: "Beating up on the MEA is a popular in-door sport in this town (Lansing). It was former Gov. John Engler who made it fashionable and others have picked up where he left off." One of those carrying on is Patterson: (Patterson said last Friday. "Of course it (RTTT funding) went under because the MEA opposed it, and one of the things they look for in Washington is collaboration, and we didn't have it here in Michigan... I'm holding the MEA strictly responsible for the loss of that money.") Patterson is senile or well off-his game. "Collaboration?" When did Patterson call for across-the-aisle cooperation during the last round of state budget quarrels? Brook's sentiment and attitude as historically been in line with that of former GOP/U.S. Rep. Dick Armey, who once characterized bipartisanship as a form of "date rape."
Please note, as a commentator on this topic has reported elsewhere: "Those (possible RTTT) funds weren't going to cover the long term costs of the program. The state would have simply spent all the money it got, and then be left funding yet another program.
"Brooks Patterson has addressed this many times, and that's why Oakland County won't fund programs once federal money runs dry. It's hit and run federal spending. They entice states to start programs by giving a large sum of money to get it started.
"Once that money is spent, where does the funding to keep these programs come from? This idea of spending money in order to receive partial funding from D.C. is a joke. It isn't just education either. The light rail system wreaks (sic) of this sort of thing. Wait until fed money runs out on that project."
COMMUNITIES WERE ROBBED OF THEIR RIGHT OF SELF-DETERMINATION
Communities, which would like to have the right to straight-line vote up or down on local operating millage to support and operate the traditional, historical schools in their jurisdiction, as they had for generations, possessed the privilege to decide, by voting, the future of their own schools. Now they stand like mendicants/ beggars, relegated to await the crumbs passed on to them by the panic-laced poppycockery of Lansing's stupid "political dog and pony show"-late night sessions and shutdowns of the state government- (fueled by a ill-begotten restraint on democracy-term limits-which has stupefied and undermined our state's entire political system).
THE EDUCATION COMMUNITY'S SUCCESS IN RAISING SUPPORT IN DEFENSE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS ANGERED THIS ODD COUPLE: BROOKS & JENNY
All this brings us to this moment. The MEA and other education groups have successfully kept the role and importance of traditional education before the people. This obviously has infuriated both Granholm and Brooks Patterson. In reprisal they are willing to come together in an arrangement that defies logic and all recent political standard practice-support of a new Democratic education program. Brooks would never normally commit support, much less advocate and champion, any Democratic device such as the so-called "Race-to-the-Top." RTTT is sponsored and created by Obama's Chicagoman, Erne Duncan. No right-minded Democratic governor would team up with the fire-breathing, super-partisan Patterson, knowing his cunning and ferocity in such MEA sentiments. Brooks is hopelessly addicted to spinning off political shenanigans and puffery-as he has for so long.
SO WHAT GIVES?
Both Brooks and Jenny are desperately needy. Thus all former partisan limitations or regard for former appearances or for either party's devices are canceled. If they can successfully project to the public that not they or theirs have created this funding crisis or hold any responsibility for it, they will succeed in protecting their own self-centered/fleeting ambitions, and those of that failed Lansing ring of duds.
THE "RACE TO THE TOP" IS A FRAUD & A MAJOR FEDERAL POWER GRAB
These two very different, very desperate individuals have married themselves into a relationship to attack one of the most important elements of local economy and an essential function in order to save some part of their own selfish interests. Jenny and Brooks are doing so in light of one of the greatest swindle/schemes of recent political history, the "Race-to-the-Top" lottery device. This Obama sponsored government program has coerced Michigan and other states into making major concessions and surrendering considerable state and local authority/powers of control to the federal government. What a queer arrangement!
There is no certainty in the "vague promise" of any real or "bail-out" cash. All these federally imposed demands (to which a harried Michigan legislature capitulated, which this highly panicked state legislature has rolled over for) are nothing other than a revenue "long shot" -indefinite, dangerous, and administratively garbled paperwork and red tape. As one common sense commenter has said, "Call it sabotage if you want, but I call it safe. It only makes sense to sign on to something if you know what it's going to be."
RTTT is an expensive gamble, hoping against hope. IT'S A PIDDLEY "FEDERAL BRIBE," ladled out arbitrarily as a "possible" source of funds in this time of the state's cash shortfall.
The budget imbroglio is a situation that was created and is already compounded and aggravated by Brooks Patterson's gang of fellow boneheads determined to prevent any new revenue sources.
Brooks will continue to "service starve" the state's richest county into compliance with his narrow idea of economic sanity, while having funded million dollar helicopters and doodads for his buddy Sheriff Bouchard.
So Brooks and Jenny: Do your voodoo dance over MEA's resistance to your political wills and watch your chances for self-aggrandizement and political prospects disappear.
Original Articles in the Oakland Press and AP.
Showing posts with label Race to the Top. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race to the Top. Show all posts
Friday, March 5, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
NEWS BULLETIN: Detroit News Endorses Obama's Federal "Socialist Take-over" or Michigan's Public Schools
Response to Detroit News Editorial ""Michigan must pass education bills or fall behind other states" on December 15, 2009.
Can we assume that this News sponsored crap shoot-a chance at federal dollars that "might" become available "if" Michigan can qualify for the federal dole from the Obama Administration-is worth the cost of towing under to "government coercion?"
If the changes insisted upon by the News are passed into law what do we get in return? We just get a chance to be "eligible to compete for the (Feds) money." Nothing more.
The Detroit News is asking the good citizens to lower the standards the vast majority of Michigan public schools hold high and achieve, just to qualify to take a chance/a long shot on a "federal grant/bribe" ? And if we get a portion of the dangled money, we get a boatload of new and much maligned "government red tape,” mandates, and paperwork, more bureaucracy.
"Without schools that work, the state is doomed to endless decline," wrote the editorial board of the News at the end of its impassioned pitch for the Obama plan.
Are we to assume the News is so deranged as to be dissatisfied with the achievement of the vast majority of Michigan's local neighborhood schools? Disaggregated from the majority of districts are those schools which have just been singled out by the News for the heaviest of condemnation and criticism.
Let's directly address that issue.
We know where the failing schools are and we know a good deal about why they fail.
We also know that we are at a loss to find a way to punish failing schools into excellence, Leave No Child Behind didn't do it. The last few decades are full of such punitive measures and executive take-overs.
There Must Be a Better Way
The dictates of Chicagoan Erne Duncan's new "magic" scheme are not the answer. The ingredients of The Race to the Top contain very negative and counter intuitive edicts that are designed to "reform" the most desperate of underachieving schools in the most recalcitrant and difficult socio-economic environments, but do nothing for the schools that do the job well. R2T will actually reverse and undermine the proven progress and standards of all those other healthy and highly achieving local public schools across this state, achieving districts will be undercut by many the many negatives in R2T.
The News Takes An Unbelievable Reversal of It's Own "Conservative" Ideology
The very fact that the Detroit News-always closely aligned with the News' cathouse "think tank" cohorts such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, the Mackinac Center and a whole host of national tax-hating cranks and would beg both Republicans and Democrats in the statehouse-to fall in line with the "socialist" Obama U.S. Department of Education on the their latest-and-greatest federal program-Race to the Top and push hard to pass it-defies almost every published tome and "conservative" principle the News has stood for in the last 30 years.
This national economic crisis and the failure of manufacturing in Michigan has created some strange bedfellows and this "marriage of convenience" to achieve, by way of the back door, certain long sought anti-MEA goals of the News has produced a lollapalooza of a nuptial arrangement.
Let's Get Down to Brass Tacks
All those teacher preparation courses and student teaching requirements practiced by Michigan's colleges and universities are a total failure and need to be wiped out.
Back in 2001 an article appeared entitled "The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them" postulated the following:
Every additional requirement for prospective teachers -- every additional pedagogical course, every new hoop or hurdle -- will have a predictable and inexorable effect: it will limit the potential supply of teachers by narrowing the pipeline while having no bearing whatever on the quality or effectiveness of those in the pipeline. The regulatory approach is also bound, over time, to undermine the standards-and-accountability strategy for improving schools and raising student achievement. The News:
"A better solution to the teacher quality problem is to simplify the entry and hiring process. Get rid of most hoops and hurdles. Instead of requiring a long list of courses and degrees, test future teachers for their knowledge and skills. Allow principals to hire the teachers they need. Focus relentlessly on results, on whether students are learning. This strategy, we are confident, will produce a larger supply of able teachers and will tie judgments about their fitness and performance to success in the classroom, not to process or impression."
Let's go for outcomes, not state credentials or legislated high standards.
In simple English, teacher certification requirements and the huge cost of candidates qualifying for accreditation and a credential is a total waste of money, if we follow the logic of R2T's non-certified instructor plan.
In fact, let's just let any person a specific principal likes, with a degree, come in and attempt to prove that she/he has the ability to effectively apply their knowledge in the public school class room, without certification or special training and an extended supervised internship (a total of 5 years of preparation).
Let's let un-certified individuals turn the pupils into "experimental education guinea pigs" as a novel way to solve, go for the quick-fix, or satisfy our objections about and critic's problems with organized teachers and all those "heads-in-the-clouds" academics in the state's premiere teacher training programs. It's cheaper and it'll be a super smack down for teacher unions.
The Road to Real Outcomes: Systemic Reform of School Administration and Governance
Systemic reform has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the legislature begins a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how Michigan's public schools are administered.
The Republicans' dirty little secret concerning school reform is they refuse to confront the real core problem in public school performance and operations: School Administration and Administrative Practices. The reason is simple and outdated, Republicans invariably take a management position on such issues.
The Michigan GOP would have the public believe that the problems which are connected with the community schools are created by the teachers. It's the teachers who resist change, who fail to give a full effort and who are lax on discipline, Republicans are fond of complaining.
A reality check would reveal that teachers don't hire, evaluate, or fire other teachers. They don't set policy, they don't allocate and spend funds, they don't approve the curriculum. These are the dominion of school administration.
Oddly enough, because the GOP has a steadfast, fixed management viewpoint and bias, after many years of trumpeting school reform, demonstrative "systemic reform" has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the Republicans begin a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how the public schools are administered.
Blamespeaking and bad mouthing the teachers by scapegoating is a cruel blow to our children's mentors.
Blame distances the teacher from the parent and child, demeans the profession in the eyes of the public and worsens the situations and conditions, created, compounded, and enforced by administration and their top-down industrial management strategies (largely unchanged since the 19th century).
But because the teacher cares enough to get involved in the public policy realm and financially supports politicians who most closely pursue the policies and practices which help children and families get an excellent education, they are feared and maligned by the bottomline: spreadsheet thinking of the mindless radicals now in control of the Michigan Republican party and a host of think tanks (state and national) chipping for some direct economic or political advantage from this present crisis.
If we want to see meaningful change in the outcomes for our children we are going to have to demand a meaningful change in public school administrative accountability and practices in Michigan.
Original Post.
Can we assume that this News sponsored crap shoot-a chance at federal dollars that "might" become available "if" Michigan can qualify for the federal dole from the Obama Administration-is worth the cost of towing under to "government coercion?"
If the changes insisted upon by the News are passed into law what do we get in return? We just get a chance to be "eligible to compete for the (Feds) money." Nothing more.
The Detroit News is asking the good citizens to lower the standards the vast majority of Michigan public schools hold high and achieve, just to qualify to take a chance/a long shot on a "federal grant/bribe" ? And if we get a portion of the dangled money, we get a boatload of new and much maligned "government red tape,” mandates, and paperwork, more bureaucracy.
"Without schools that work, the state is doomed to endless decline," wrote the editorial board of the News at the end of its impassioned pitch for the Obama plan.
Are we to assume the News is so deranged as to be dissatisfied with the achievement of the vast majority of Michigan's local neighborhood schools? Disaggregated from the majority of districts are those schools which have just been singled out by the News for the heaviest of condemnation and criticism.
Let's directly address that issue.
We know where the failing schools are and we know a good deal about why they fail.
We also know that we are at a loss to find a way to punish failing schools into excellence, Leave No Child Behind didn't do it. The last few decades are full of such punitive measures and executive take-overs.
There Must Be a Better Way
The dictates of Chicagoan Erne Duncan's new "magic" scheme are not the answer. The ingredients of The Race to the Top contain very negative and counter intuitive edicts that are designed to "reform" the most desperate of underachieving schools in the most recalcitrant and difficult socio-economic environments, but do nothing for the schools that do the job well. R2T will actually reverse and undermine the proven progress and standards of all those other healthy and highly achieving local public schools across this state, achieving districts will be undercut by many the many negatives in R2T.
The News Takes An Unbelievable Reversal of It's Own "Conservative" Ideology
The very fact that the Detroit News-always closely aligned with the News' cathouse "think tank" cohorts such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, the Mackinac Center and a whole host of national tax-hating cranks and would beg both Republicans and Democrats in the statehouse-to fall in line with the "socialist" Obama U.S. Department of Education on the their latest-and-greatest federal program-Race to the Top and push hard to pass it-defies almost every published tome and "conservative" principle the News has stood for in the last 30 years.
This national economic crisis and the failure of manufacturing in Michigan has created some strange bedfellows and this "marriage of convenience" to achieve, by way of the back door, certain long sought anti-MEA goals of the News has produced a lollapalooza of a nuptial arrangement.
Let's Get Down to Brass Tacks
All those teacher preparation courses and student teaching requirements practiced by Michigan's colleges and universities are a total failure and need to be wiped out.
Back in 2001 an article appeared entitled "The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them" postulated the following:
"We conclude that the regulatory strategy being pursued today to boost teacher quality is seriously flawed. "
Every additional requirement for prospective teachers -- every additional pedagogical course, every new hoop or hurdle -- will have a predictable and inexorable effect: it will limit the potential supply of teachers by narrowing the pipeline while having no bearing whatever on the quality or effectiveness of those in the pipeline. The regulatory approach is also bound, over time, to undermine the standards-and-accountability strategy for improving schools and raising student achievement. The News:
"A better solution to the teacher quality problem is to simplify the entry and hiring process. Get rid of most hoops and hurdles. Instead of requiring a long list of courses and degrees, test future teachers for their knowledge and skills. Allow principals to hire the teachers they need. Focus relentlessly on results, on whether students are learning. This strategy, we are confident, will produce a larger supply of able teachers and will tie judgments about their fitness and performance to success in the classroom, not to process or impression."
Let's go for outcomes, not state credentials or legislated high standards.
In simple English, teacher certification requirements and the huge cost of candidates qualifying for accreditation and a credential is a total waste of money, if we follow the logic of R2T's non-certified instructor plan.
In fact, let's just let any person a specific principal likes, with a degree, come in and attempt to prove that she/he has the ability to effectively apply their knowledge in the public school class room, without certification or special training and an extended supervised internship (a total of 5 years of preparation).
Let's let un-certified individuals turn the pupils into "experimental education guinea pigs" as a novel way to solve, go for the quick-fix, or satisfy our objections about and critic's problems with organized teachers and all those "heads-in-the-clouds" academics in the state's premiere teacher training programs. It's cheaper and it'll be a super smack down for teacher unions.
The Road to Real Outcomes: Systemic Reform of School Administration and Governance
Systemic reform has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the legislature begins a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how Michigan's public schools are administered.
The Republicans' dirty little secret concerning school reform is they refuse to confront the real core problem in public school performance and operations: School Administration and Administrative Practices. The reason is simple and outdated, Republicans invariably take a management position on such issues.
The Michigan GOP would have the public believe that the problems which are connected with the community schools are created by the teachers. It's the teachers who resist change, who fail to give a full effort and who are lax on discipline, Republicans are fond of complaining.
A reality check would reveal that teachers don't hire, evaluate, or fire other teachers. They don't set policy, they don't allocate and spend funds, they don't approve the curriculum. These are the dominion of school administration.
Oddly enough, because the GOP has a steadfast, fixed management viewpoint and bias, after many years of trumpeting school reform, demonstrative "systemic reform" has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the Republicans begin a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how the public schools are administered.
Blamespeaking and bad mouthing the teachers by scapegoating is a cruel blow to our children's mentors.
Blame distances the teacher from the parent and child, demeans the profession in the eyes of the public and worsens the situations and conditions, created, compounded, and enforced by administration and their top-down industrial management strategies (largely unchanged since the 19th century).
But because the teacher cares enough to get involved in the public policy realm and financially supports politicians who most closely pursue the policies and practices which help children and families get an excellent education, they are feared and maligned by the bottomline: spreadsheet thinking of the mindless radicals now in control of the Michigan Republican party and a host of think tanks (state and national) chipping for some direct economic or political advantage from this present crisis.
If we want to see meaningful change in the outcomes for our children we are going to have to demand a meaningful change in public school administrative accountability and practices in Michigan.
Original Post.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Detroit is Beautiful from Afar...
Detroit Is Beautiful From Afar, Just Don’t Live There - according to some pundits and nay-Sayers
A casual observer sitting on a riverfront bench in Windsor looking across to the skyline of Detroit, unaware of conditions on the ground there, would marvel at the visual appeal and the apparent delight of its location.
How long do you think we can go on ignorantly and stubbornly believing that the implosion of this major U.S. city is not taking place?
In answering this question, it really doesn't matter, conservative or liberal, how you view your ideals or harbor your political prejudices. In Detroit, the American dream has dimmed and may go out altogether. Of course, there have been efforts to reverse the downward trend but they appear to be off-set by such factors as: white flight, the business departures, the departure of the Catholic church from over two dozen parishes, the indifference of the state government, and the systemic corruption and spoils involved in Detroit city governance.
Detroit is not Chicago, with its Magic Mile and its elite condos and row houses in the heart of the that great city.
Walk the deserted streets of the core business district of Detroit at after close of business and pervasively sense for yourself the personal danger you are surrounded by. No one on the streets. The Motor City is not the Windy City.
In recent and very open and honest public comments to columnists and to editorials, a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit core city and in its schools and it isn't pretty.
The angst and despair expressed by Daniel Howes in this column is bone-cutting. Verbally graphic, and long over due.
What About Level of Educational Progress in DPS?
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.
When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the young social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine any desire to make better achievement.
It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.
Detroit's General Degradation & Its Corrupted Infrastructure Pollutes the Whole
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion...Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.
What is future the work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?
When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.
The disrespect for authority is not limited to "lost" youths, it pervades the comments of so many contributors to these opinion blogs also. It's a cynicism that has no positive bearing on attempting to resolve the multitude of problems at street level. Simply turning on teachers, police, and public officials will not suffice.
The News and the Legislature Believe in Fairy Tales: e.g. Alternative Teaching Credentials
Tell me how a man with great math ability (Let' say one recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?
There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.
Shocking Results of Detroit's NAEP Scores
We are told he school personnel "wept" a the results of the standardized testing for math. What were they weeping about?
Were they weeping over the fact that they had failed to try to do their best to instruct the pupils who got the failing grades?
Were they weeping that the proper materials necessary to achieve the scores by targeted curriculum were not available?
"They were weeping out of creeping despair: 'These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children,' said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of big city school systems that usually defends its members," as we read in Amber Arellano's recent column "Detroit hits educational bottom" in the Detroit News on December 08, 2009.
The school personnel are right to be weeping over those "externalities" which the harsh critics of public education have been red tagging Detroit teachers with for decades. The critics mantra, "You teachers can not blame the total environment the students come from for these poor results" you, the teachers, have failed. Don't whine to us about the home conditions and the degradation of the core city. We pay you for a job done. Objections we do not accept.
As Amber points out, "Then there is the usual defeatist Detroit mentality: 'We're different than other cities.'" It is possible that is a true fact? Where does the impetus for that feeling come from, today's street level conditions?
Michigan's Blacks Are Not Achieving Regardless of Location Detroit or Outstate
Actually, it's about black kids all around Michigan. In a real sense African American children's underachievement is a Michigan problem according to Amber's column: "Detroit is not the only poor performer in the state. NAEP scores released earlier this fall showed Michigan's African-American students are essentially the lowest-performing black students in the country after falling for years."
Playing Pin the Blame
There will be a rush to find a way to pin blame. However, there is a real anomaly here. Some of the low scores were from schools labeled "high-performing" NAEP officials ensured test takers "included some of Detroit's highest-performing schools."
The most common response is that there are teachers who do not perform to standards, lots of them. Mind you, we are thinking about teaching elementary school students where the staff is often at least 60 percent women. Do critics mean to say that there are large numbers of women, who have undertaken to teach in Detroit's schools (with all their associated problems and social/economic situations, including treats of assault), who are, of their own violation, not doing the job put before them.
Adults in Detroit Have Failed the Children
Actually, Allando's column doesn't go that far. The critic says, "These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children." The operative phrase here is "the adults in this city." That's very inclusive and does not wrongfully saddle the teacher with the total blame. Even though the old blamespeaking is there, as Michael Casserly, Council of Great City Schools opines, ""If you can't make it as a teacher, you're out."
Note that the under-performing schools included Detroit's much promoted charter schools. Putting a teacher out on the street is simple: At a charter, just find the teacher a box and then find them the door. So let's see the charter's conduct wholesale dismissals in response to the demands of R2T.
Race to the Top is the Super Solution?
We are told that the Race to the Top has the answers. O.K. lets see, we are going to sack a sizable number of teachers and replace them with people with an academic degree. Walk-ins who want to enter these dangerous and unruly failing schools and assume an equal responsibility with professional teachers, to be thrown out the door if they can't get immediate results (R2T's alternative certification) and that's the answer. NO SO.
Again, there's a rush to find a "quick fix" to move the problem off the political stage, off the front page. It is obvious that the stonehearted won't look into the deterioration and neglect, the political frauds, financial scandals, and the "territorial fiefdoms" imbedded in Detroit's present governance and social structure.
There is a reason Detroit's math scores are at the bottom. It's life in inner city Detroit. . No other single factor so strong, so important as the home and the parent(s) along with the spirit of the community in forming the mindset, determining the well-being, the welfare and academic achievement of Detroit's children. Where is the hope for a normal, happy and useful life?
We Know the Profile of the Underachieving in Detroit:
*They are the poor.
*They are homeless or have been foreclosed upon.
*They are on public assistance/welfare or their caregivers are unemployed without sufficient work and income.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often the mothers were children themselves when they gave birth.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter in their own places of abode and often they go to school without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation or a living wage.
*They are in large numbers, teenage boys of color who dropout of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, little or no pre-natal or insufficient post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat. lap out of bowls without utensils. .
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets as infants, in the early critically formative years of mental development, and may have therefore diminished capacities to learn.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams, blamespeaking, and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and enduring cynicism.
My God the Children
We aren't getting our minds around these kinds of pervasive problems, because frankly, they appear to be beyond our comprehension and our concern. We have done so little to assuage the decline, we may not be able to reverse the trend.
Detroit is at the bottom and may stay there. That's a sobering thought.
The kinds of efforts and inspiration it takes to overcome the creeping despair could start just as simply as immediately hiring workers to take down the some 80,000 abandoned homes and bringing back paying jobs to the city by commercial investment with a mind to stay the course. Jobs in the city! What a novel thought, in a city where so many individuals don't have cars or means to take them to the far away, outer suburbs where the few jobs there are, are located.
Give the kids something tangible to work toward and a visible goal to achieve "give them hope".
Original Post.
A casual observer sitting on a riverfront bench in Windsor looking across to the skyline of Detroit, unaware of conditions on the ground there, would marvel at the visual appeal and the apparent delight of its location.
How long do you think we can go on ignorantly and stubbornly believing that the implosion of this major U.S. city is not taking place?
In answering this question, it really doesn't matter, conservative or liberal, how you view your ideals or harbor your political prejudices. In Detroit, the American dream has dimmed and may go out altogether. Of course, there have been efforts to reverse the downward trend but they appear to be off-set by such factors as: white flight, the business departures, the departure of the Catholic church from over two dozen parishes, the indifference of the state government, and the systemic corruption and spoils involved in Detroit city governance.
Detroit is not Chicago, with its Magic Mile and its elite condos and row houses in the heart of the that great city.
Walk the deserted streets of the core business district of Detroit at after close of business and pervasively sense for yourself the personal danger you are surrounded by. No one on the streets. The Motor City is not the Windy City.
In recent and very open and honest public comments to columnists and to editorials, a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit core city and in its schools and it isn't pretty.
The angst and despair expressed by Daniel Howes in this column is bone-cutting. Verbally graphic, and long over due.
What About Level of Educational Progress in DPS?
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.
When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the young social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine any desire to make better achievement.
It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.
Detroit's General Degradation & Its Corrupted Infrastructure Pollutes the Whole
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion...Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.
What is future the work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?
When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.
The disrespect for authority is not limited to "lost" youths, it pervades the comments of so many contributors to these opinion blogs also. It's a cynicism that has no positive bearing on attempting to resolve the multitude of problems at street level. Simply turning on teachers, police, and public officials will not suffice.
The News and the Legislature Believe in Fairy Tales: e.g. Alternative Teaching Credentials
Tell me how a man with great math ability (Let' say one recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?
There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.
Shocking Results of Detroit's NAEP Scores
We are told he school personnel "wept" a the results of the standardized testing for math. What were they weeping about?
Were they weeping over the fact that they had failed to try to do their best to instruct the pupils who got the failing grades?
Were they weeping that the proper materials necessary to achieve the scores by targeted curriculum were not available?
"They were weeping out of creeping despair: 'These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children,' said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of big city school systems that usually defends its members," as we read in Amber Arellano's recent column "Detroit hits educational bottom" in the Detroit News on December 08, 2009.
The school personnel are right to be weeping over those "externalities" which the harsh critics of public education have been red tagging Detroit teachers with for decades. The critics mantra, "You teachers can not blame the total environment the students come from for these poor results" you, the teachers, have failed. Don't whine to us about the home conditions and the degradation of the core city. We pay you for a job done. Objections we do not accept.
As Amber points out, "Then there is the usual defeatist Detroit mentality: 'We're different than other cities.'" It is possible that is a true fact? Where does the impetus for that feeling come from, today's street level conditions?
Michigan's Blacks Are Not Achieving Regardless of Location Detroit or Outstate
Actually, it's about black kids all around Michigan. In a real sense African American children's underachievement is a Michigan problem according to Amber's column: "Detroit is not the only poor performer in the state. NAEP scores released earlier this fall showed Michigan's African-American students are essentially the lowest-performing black students in the country after falling for years."
Playing Pin the Blame
There will be a rush to find a way to pin blame. However, there is a real anomaly here. Some of the low scores were from schools labeled "high-performing" NAEP officials ensured test takers "included some of Detroit's highest-performing schools."
The most common response is that there are teachers who do not perform to standards, lots of them. Mind you, we are thinking about teaching elementary school students where the staff is often at least 60 percent women. Do critics mean to say that there are large numbers of women, who have undertaken to teach in Detroit's schools (with all their associated problems and social/economic situations, including treats of assault), who are, of their own violation, not doing the job put before them.
Adults in Detroit Have Failed the Children
Actually, Allando's column doesn't go that far. The critic says, "These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children." The operative phrase here is "the adults in this city." That's very inclusive and does not wrongfully saddle the teacher with the total blame. Even though the old blamespeaking is there, as Michael Casserly, Council of Great City Schools opines, ""If you can't make it as a teacher, you're out."
Note that the under-performing schools included Detroit's much promoted charter schools. Putting a teacher out on the street is simple: At a charter, just find the teacher a box and then find them the door. So let's see the charter's conduct wholesale dismissals in response to the demands of R2T.
Race to the Top is the Super Solution?
We are told that the Race to the Top has the answers. O.K. lets see, we are going to sack a sizable number of teachers and replace them with people with an academic degree. Walk-ins who want to enter these dangerous and unruly failing schools and assume an equal responsibility with professional teachers, to be thrown out the door if they can't get immediate results (R2T's alternative certification) and that's the answer. NO SO.
Again, there's a rush to find a "quick fix" to move the problem off the political stage, off the front page. It is obvious that the stonehearted won't look into the deterioration and neglect, the political frauds, financial scandals, and the "territorial fiefdoms" imbedded in Detroit's present governance and social structure.
There is a reason Detroit's math scores are at the bottom. It's life in inner city Detroit. . No other single factor so strong, so important as the home and the parent(s) along with the spirit of the community in forming the mindset, determining the well-being, the welfare and academic achievement of Detroit's children. Where is the hope for a normal, happy and useful life?
We Know the Profile of the Underachieving in Detroit:
*They are the poor.
*They are homeless or have been foreclosed upon.
*They are on public assistance/welfare or their caregivers are unemployed without sufficient work and income.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often the mothers were children themselves when they gave birth.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter in their own places of abode and often they go to school without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation or a living wage.
*They are in large numbers, teenage boys of color who dropout of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, little or no pre-natal or insufficient post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat. lap out of bowls without utensils. .
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets as infants, in the early critically formative years of mental development, and may have therefore diminished capacities to learn.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams, blamespeaking, and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and enduring cynicism.
My God the Children
We aren't getting our minds around these kinds of pervasive problems, because frankly, they appear to be beyond our comprehension and our concern. We have done so little to assuage the decline, we may not be able to reverse the trend.
Detroit is at the bottom and may stay there. That's a sobering thought.
The kinds of efforts and inspiration it takes to overcome the creeping despair could start just as simply as immediately hiring workers to take down the some 80,000 abandoned homes and bringing back paying jobs to the city by commercial investment with a mind to stay the course. Jobs in the city! What a novel thought, in a city where so many individuals don't have cars or means to take them to the far away, outer suburbs where the few jobs there are, are located.
Give the kids something tangible to work toward and a visible goal to achieve "give them hope".
Original Post.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Root Causes of Educational Underachievement
Before we involve our state, Michigan, in the rigors of the "Race to the Top" federal program, let's take a long look at the environment from which student under achievement is most consistently drawn.
WE KNOW WHO MOST OF THE STUDENT UNDERACHIEVERS IN MICHIGAN SCHOOLS ARE:
*They are the poor.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often children themselves.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation.
*They are in large numbers teenage boys of color who drop out of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, no pre-natal or little post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*Their caregivers are unemployed or on welfare.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat out of bowls without utensils.
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets in the early critically formative years of mental development.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and cynicism.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN WHEN IT COMES TO EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT?
Everything, if we comprehend the depth of the problem and nothing, if we shift blame and refuse to do what we can to correct this deplorable situation through a sustained, collaborate effort.
In a moment of pure honesty Grand Rapids former Public Schools Superintendent Jeff Grotsky said some of the best teaching takes place in our inner cities, predominately minority elementary classrooms, it doesn't show up in high test scores, but taken from where these students start out, how far behind educationally they come to us, the persistent progress that is being made reflects some of the finest teaching in the district. The love and dedication of these teachers is outstanding.
Our public schools rooms are "nurseries of our future and their wanton neglect entails a kind of social suicide."
Why are we squandering hope and help for a school generation moving through the inner city public schools while we repeatedly make public education the object of criticism and scorn, as the editorial board of the Detroit News is prone to do with its habitual harangues. When does the News become collaborative with teachers and go pro-active?
When are we going to hold the tax-hating Lansing pols responsible for their cynicism and neglect?
In spite of the many attempts to portray themselves as the promoters of "education reform" in Michigan, the Detroit News and the Michigan Senate's civic and social blindness about life in the abandoned squalor of the state's dead and dying cities ignores the root causes of educational underachievement. In the their blame-laying fixations on test scores and measurements, that simply confirm the plight of our urban and poor rural area children, they have not become the answer, they have become enlargers of the problem.
Posted on November 21, 2009 to the Detroit News Newstalk Forum.
WE KNOW WHO MOST OF THE STUDENT UNDERACHIEVERS IN MICHIGAN SCHOOLS ARE:
*They are the poor.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often children themselves.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation.
*They are in large numbers teenage boys of color who drop out of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, no pre-natal or little post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*Their caregivers are unemployed or on welfare.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat out of bowls without utensils.
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets in the early critically formative years of mental development.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and cynicism.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN WHEN IT COMES TO EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT?
Everything, if we comprehend the depth of the problem and nothing, if we shift blame and refuse to do what we can to correct this deplorable situation through a sustained, collaborate effort.
In a moment of pure honesty Grand Rapids former Public Schools Superintendent Jeff Grotsky said some of the best teaching takes place in our inner cities, predominately minority elementary classrooms, it doesn't show up in high test scores, but taken from where these students start out, how far behind educationally they come to us, the persistent progress that is being made reflects some of the finest teaching in the district. The love and dedication of these teachers is outstanding.
Our public schools rooms are "nurseries of our future and their wanton neglect entails a kind of social suicide."
Why are we squandering hope and help for a school generation moving through the inner city public schools while we repeatedly make public education the object of criticism and scorn, as the editorial board of the Detroit News is prone to do with its habitual harangues. When does the News become collaborative with teachers and go pro-active?
When are we going to hold the tax-hating Lansing pols responsible for their cynicism and neglect?
In spite of the many attempts to portray themselves as the promoters of "education reform" in Michigan, the Detroit News and the Michigan Senate's civic and social blindness about life in the abandoned squalor of the state's dead and dying cities ignores the root causes of educational underachievement. In the their blame-laying fixations on test scores and measurements, that simply confirm the plight of our urban and poor rural area children, they have not become the answer, they have become enlargers of the problem.
Posted on November 21, 2009 to the Detroit News Newstalk Forum.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Don’t let propaganda and fear prevent Michigan from winning 600 million for state education
There is a timeless quandary: What is more important to a child's, heredity or environment?
When it comes to children and their achievement in education, how does this question apply? We are learning, but as of yet we don't fully understand. But one thinks the News must know, look how assertive they are on all things related to public schools.
The Detroit News has launched out again against both the Detroit Federation of Teachers and the Michigan Education Association in a hamfisted manner. To the members of the MEA it asserts, "Don't let propaganda and fear prevent Michigan from winning." Nov. 12, 2009. To the Federation it demands, "Make student performance not teacher protectionism the top priority" Sept.23, 2009.
The News picked up on the phrase: Teacher quality is the No. 1 predictor of student achievement.
That is a non-holistic and incomplete statement of fact concerning how students achieve and why. But it is a neat silver bullet for winning an argument or nailing down another plank in an anti-public school effort. Common sense tells the astute observer there's much more to student outcomes that whatever "teacher quality" is, as defined by the originator of that, or yet another survey or academic study. Is it heredity, the "bell curve" or environment "unionized schools"? If the study comes from one of so many harshly critical think thanks such as the Heartland Institute, then consider the source.
Both of these incidents of hectoring come from the same chum bucket. As of today, there are published 38 of the 50 News requirements to "Fix Michigan" displayed in the paper. Approximately 13 of these demands are related to public education, in some form, and there are 12 more suggestions to go.
It's obvious that the Detroit News is expecting the teachers to solve the basic and gargantuan problems of our time.
If only the teachers would tow under, and follow the will of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the tax limitation teabaggers, and the intrepid corporatist/insurance endowed Mackinac Center for Public Policy, then progress could all be made.
The News, for years holed up in its headquarters with its window lights, architectural arches bricked in for security following the riots of 1967. One feels that has deeply influenced its own cynical quasi-Libertarian mindset.
It's easy to understand why there is disillusionment and angst in the News' editorial suite...but not excusable.
Let the News walk a weekday, 6 blocks, in a pupil's shoes.
Think of ones self as an innocent young girl walking to the neighborhood school past all those empty and sometimes burnt out, abandoned houses and structures. Buildings filled at times with rapists, druggies or squatters. What frame of mind would she have when she arrived at the classroom door? What fears or dread would haunt her as she contemplates returning home, latch key to her house, passing once again that gauntlet of neglect and criminal possibilities tolerated by Detroiters?
It has been reported that in some cases, even the Catholic church owns these kinds of properties. There aren't a few dozens of these structural hazards scattered about, there are hundreds and hundreds.
Time and again, the News has gone ballistic over picayune issues they conjure up to wedge their demands against teachers and work to take away the basis of commitment by the erstwhile supportive public.
In this time of national crisis, in this epoch of monumental manufacturing and industrial outsourcing to other states and third world countries, the News editors cannot bring themselves to step back and take a harsh and mind-boggling look at "real Detroit"-a dead and dying city in so many respects. One or two of the signal Detroit moments, historically of note in this regard, were: the exit of Hudson's from downtown and the summary closing of over two dozen Detroit area parish churches by the Catholic Bishops.
It's with great self-satisfaction that the Detroit News finds a "slam dunk" criticism in the offering of stimulus money in the form of $600 million in federal taxpayer monies, the state may acquire by compiling with the official guidelines for the Race to the Top's. "It is one of President Barack Obama's most innovative tools to spur states," chortles the News without in depth reflection.
Remember the News doesn't actually like stimulus spending, and says so. Several Michigan jurisdictions are loudly announcing they won't apply for stimulus cash or take it, if offered. At least one GOP Governor refuses all stimulus money to his state, irregardless of need.
So why is the News so hot to trot with the nascent U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his "new" trends? Duncan is that bureaucrat from what the wild right calls the "gangster" machine-run Chicago. In this case, if it suits the News' long range purposes, go with it. So it is with partisan politics. When a circumstance hits on an opponent, all prior principles are naught compared to the "kill." .
There are good and fundamental reasons to reject the U.S. Department of Education's current proposals, just as there were with the "Leave No Child Behind", that fiasco was cobbled together by G.W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy: LNCB continues to create more disillusionment and harm than good. Just ask Rep. Pete Hoekstra.
There are innumerable devils in the fine print details. At this point, seed money for this program is only about a year's worth. Just like several federal title programs, LNCB mandates, and other items the feds propose, the states and locals provide the ultimate costs and bear the burden of implementation and/or are threatened with huge penalties.
Nolan and crew don't see the fine line details and don't really care about the bottomlines either. "Race to the Top's a anti-teacher union zinger, let's push it.
In these financially troubled times as in all others, haste to radically change makes waste and further delays in real classroom outcomes and in the lives of children, captives/hostages to our failed thinking and our decaying infrastructure.
Every day, thank God, your next door neighbor, your fellow club member, member of the church down the block, leaves home to re-enter her or his classroom to do a precious job. Her/His ambition is to provide for the every need of her/His students, to keep them safe, on task, and learning in her room, sheltered for the day from the gunshots her/his students hear throughout the night and the carnage they see on local TV news nearly every night of the year.
Her/His task is oft overwhelming and without proper support and encouragement. If she/he wants to begin a day with a bright outlook, going in to school, she'll/he’ll not pick up the News until she/he needs to change the lining in her/his bird cage at the end of a long day.
Original Post.
When it comes to children and their achievement in education, how does this question apply? We are learning, but as of yet we don't fully understand. But one thinks the News must know, look how assertive they are on all things related to public schools.
The Detroit News has launched out again against both the Detroit Federation of Teachers and the Michigan Education Association in a hamfisted manner. To the members of the MEA it asserts, "Don't let propaganda and fear prevent Michigan from winning." Nov. 12, 2009. To the Federation it demands, "Make student performance not teacher protectionism the top priority" Sept.23, 2009.
The News picked up on the phrase: Teacher quality is the No. 1 predictor of student achievement.
That is a non-holistic and incomplete statement of fact concerning how students achieve and why. But it is a neat silver bullet for winning an argument or nailing down another plank in an anti-public school effort. Common sense tells the astute observer there's much more to student outcomes that whatever "teacher quality" is, as defined by the originator of that, or yet another survey or academic study. Is it heredity, the "bell curve" or environment "unionized schools"? If the study comes from one of so many harshly critical think thanks such as the Heartland Institute, then consider the source.
Both of these incidents of hectoring come from the same chum bucket. As of today, there are published 38 of the 50 News requirements to "Fix Michigan" displayed in the paper. Approximately 13 of these demands are related to public education, in some form, and there are 12 more suggestions to go.
It's obvious that the Detroit News is expecting the teachers to solve the basic and gargantuan problems of our time.
If only the teachers would tow under, and follow the will of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the tax limitation teabaggers, and the intrepid corporatist/insurance endowed Mackinac Center for Public Policy, then progress could all be made.
The News, for years holed up in its headquarters with its window lights, architectural arches bricked in for security following the riots of 1967. One feels that has deeply influenced its own cynical quasi-Libertarian mindset.
It's easy to understand why there is disillusionment and angst in the News' editorial suite...but not excusable.
Let the News walk a weekday, 6 blocks, in a pupil's shoes.
Think of ones self as an innocent young girl walking to the neighborhood school past all those empty and sometimes burnt out, abandoned houses and structures. Buildings filled at times with rapists, druggies or squatters. What frame of mind would she have when she arrived at the classroom door? What fears or dread would haunt her as she contemplates returning home, latch key to her house, passing once again that gauntlet of neglect and criminal possibilities tolerated by Detroiters?
It has been reported that in some cases, even the Catholic church owns these kinds of properties. There aren't a few dozens of these structural hazards scattered about, there are hundreds and hundreds.
Time and again, the News has gone ballistic over picayune issues they conjure up to wedge their demands against teachers and work to take away the basis of commitment by the erstwhile supportive public.
In this time of national crisis, in this epoch of monumental manufacturing and industrial outsourcing to other states and third world countries, the News editors cannot bring themselves to step back and take a harsh and mind-boggling look at "real Detroit"-a dead and dying city in so many respects. One or two of the signal Detroit moments, historically of note in this regard, were: the exit of Hudson's from downtown and the summary closing of over two dozen Detroit area parish churches by the Catholic Bishops.
It's with great self-satisfaction that the Detroit News finds a "slam dunk" criticism in the offering of stimulus money in the form of $600 million in federal taxpayer monies, the state may acquire by compiling with the official guidelines for the Race to the Top's. "It is one of President Barack Obama's most innovative tools to spur states," chortles the News without in depth reflection.
Remember the News doesn't actually like stimulus spending, and says so. Several Michigan jurisdictions are loudly announcing they won't apply for stimulus cash or take it, if offered. At least one GOP Governor refuses all stimulus money to his state, irregardless of need.
So why is the News so hot to trot with the nascent U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his "new" trends? Duncan is that bureaucrat from what the wild right calls the "gangster" machine-run Chicago. In this case, if it suits the News' long range purposes, go with it. So it is with partisan politics. When a circumstance hits on an opponent, all prior principles are naught compared to the "kill." .
There are good and fundamental reasons to reject the U.S. Department of Education's current proposals, just as there were with the "Leave No Child Behind", that fiasco was cobbled together by G.W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy: LNCB continues to create more disillusionment and harm than good. Just ask Rep. Pete Hoekstra.
There are innumerable devils in the fine print details. At this point, seed money for this program is only about a year's worth. Just like several federal title programs, LNCB mandates, and other items the feds propose, the states and locals provide the ultimate costs and bear the burden of implementation and/or are threatened with huge penalties.
Nolan and crew don't see the fine line details and don't really care about the bottomlines either. "Race to the Top's a anti-teacher union zinger, let's push it.
In these financially troubled times as in all others, haste to radically change makes waste and further delays in real classroom outcomes and in the lives of children, captives/hostages to our failed thinking and our decaying infrastructure.
Every day, thank God, your next door neighbor, your fellow club member, member of the church down the block, leaves home to re-enter her or his classroom to do a precious job. Her/His ambition is to provide for the every need of her/His students, to keep them safe, on task, and learning in her room, sheltered for the day from the gunshots her/his students hear throughout the night and the carnage they see on local TV news nearly every night of the year.
Her/His task is oft overwhelming and without proper support and encouragement. If she/he wants to begin a day with a bright outlook, going in to school, she'll/he’ll not pick up the News until she/he needs to change the lining in her/his bird cage at the end of a long day.
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