Congress to Attack Poverty

In a rare move, Congress is giving children, teachers, and public schools across the nation a break rather than a black eye by passing a mandate to end poverty. Children will be required to do a much better job of selecting their parents and the circumstances into which they are born. Public school teachers will be held strictly accountable for seeing to it that every child has developed the critical thinking skills necessary for making sound birth decisions. A failing teacher will face salary and benefit reductions and be the subject of a scathing editorial by a wealthy, outraged pundit.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Offer Orthopedic Shoes to Failing Public School Teachers

For Immediate Release
Washington, D.C.

Newsspoof: Gates Foundation & DOE to Fund High-Performing Footwear Initiative


Whenever edu-philanthropreneur Bill Gates gets down and out about the state of public education, the severe economic downturn we are all are experiencing, and the staggering inequalities incurred on the nation by poorly performing public school teachers, he visits some exceptional schools to lift his spirits. On a visit to a KIPP school in Houston, Gates witnessed an "unbelievable thing" about its teachers, a phenomenon apparently unheard of in traditional public schools.

Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. What's going on?" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board.

And the more the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation apprised itself of top-notch research, the more apparent it became that the key to closing the achievement gap was to turn the nation's attention to teacher effectiveness as quantified by children's standardized test scores:

The more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away! So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers.

"I'm a huge fan of Bill Gates," reported Ed Secretary Arne Duncan, whose department has filled key posts with officials having strong ties to Gates.

"For decades, critics old and new in the education reform industry have known and rightly warned Americans that our public schools are failing the nation. Well-meaning ed reformers have bravely and unselfishly pushed reform after reform. And it's like we've been sort of looking around for the silver bullet and it turns out the answer has been right under our noses the whole time!"

However, until such time as all the teachers in the nation's 3.7 million K-12 classrooms are top-quartile teachers, Gates opines that we are left with "what to do" with the nation's corp of tired, old, less visionary teachers.

While it's certainly no panacea, we do know that great teachers are on their feet constantly for hours every day, engaging and re-directing the most challenging students. In conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, the Gates Foundation will fund a high-performing footwear initiative in the nation's traditional public schools. Teachers who choose to take advantage of the offer will receive vouchers to visit to a podiatrist of their choice to be fitted for custom orthotics. Teachers already wearing orthotics may want their doctor to see if they're wearing the right type of orthopedic shoes. No pun intended, but we really do want to give teachers fair and balanced support in their efforts to improve.

"I'm a huge fan of orthopedic shoes," raved Duncan. "When I played pro-basketball, the quality and comfort of my shoes made a huge difference."


--news spoof brought to you by staff at This Little Blog

Tutoring Bonanza: No Child Left Behind Act Highly Profitable, Except for Children

from New York Daily News
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
by Juan Gonzalez

Department of Education Paid Private Tutor Firm 21M in 2 Years, Most of It In Overhead

In its drive to improve school reading and math test scores, the city's Department of Education paid a private company more than $21 million in two years to tutor thousands of public school pupils at home.

But most of that money - more than twice the amount the DOE originally budgeted - went for overhead, management and profit for the company, Champion Learning Center.

Champion got $79 an hour to tutor each pupil for up to four hours per week, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Daily News.

That adds up to almost $320 a week in tutoring costs per child.

Champion paid its part-time tutors, mostly college students with no teaching experience, an average of $17 an hour.

That's right. The company received an astounding $62 in overhead for every hour its employees spent tutoring a child.

Champion is one of dozens of private companies with state approval to provide tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act.

"We received very little training in our orientation," said one college student hired by Champion. "They just told us to follow the instructions in the test prep workbooks they gave us."

Read the rest of the article here.

This is sad and it is obscene. Wild profiteering while subjecting children to such a narrow and impoverished view of education....tutoring to artificially pump up test scores. The obsession with standardized testing and data-driven instruction is resulting in the dumbing down and numbing down of our children. I think it serves the interests of the oligarchs controlling ed reform to keep it that way.

That the plight of poor children is being exploited in this way is the true nature of the No Child Left Behind abomination. The unrelenting failing public schools propaganda that ultimately led to this law, and the increasing imposition of business models in our schools, have succeeded in lining the pockets of business interests while simultaneously undermining support for public education.

More devastating, however, failing public schools propaganda has served brilliantly as a convenient scapegoat to divert national attention away from the condition of childhood in this nation, a way to avoid the difficult but necessary task of confronting this crisis directly. Far easier to blame the schools and teachers and charge them with fixing it. See the State of America's Children 2008 Report.

It is unjust and beyond irresponsible to charge that public schools and teachers are to blame because achievement gaps exist and that they alone can close them. Evidence is mounting on the impact of poverty and societal ills on the developing brain. School reform, decidely not the harsh kind of "reform" disadvantaged children are now being subjected to, must be combined with social and economic reforms.

I think the more we learn, the more the shamefulness of this Dark Age of Oligarchical Ed Reform will be laid bare. Mark it down for the historical record, the war on public education.

Check out what NCLB and high-stakes testing have accomplished for disadvantaged children.

Meanwhile, as vast inequities continue to expand in our society, increasing waves of difficult to educate children pour into our schools from circumstances they have no control over. For more related commentary, see the Perimeter Primate's post, "Where Sociology, Criminology, and Charter Schools Converge".

The Politics of Disaster Ed Reform in the United States (with apologies to Robert Frost)

Two roads converged in a dense wood
And sorry I took not only one but both,
Which merged into one, long I stood
Pressing schools down as hard as I could
With truth kept hidden in the undergrowth.

Taking the easy road as just and fair
I bought the fear and assigned the blame.
Posturing for poor children wanted no wear -
Framing the issue covered evidence there -
The ruling class wanted more of the same.

And on that morning hidden lay
The leaves that I had trodden black.
Oh, I kept that knowledge for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever turn back.

I shall be telling this with regret and a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads in a wood merged into one, and I -
I took that road so easily traveled by,
And for poor children it made little difference.