How Many People Care About Kids?

This is a screen shot of the White House petition, taken on the day before the petition ended. And to think that the petition to make the opening day of baseball season a national holiday did reach 100,000+ signatures. What does this say about us as a people?

The Time for Talk is Over!

From the Facebook page of a retired school teacher.

"I've nearly completely extricated myself from my daily reading and commenting on Facebook and Twitter. I'm a retired public school teacher. I've virtually stopped writing about education and the continuing destruction of our public schools. I live it everyday now as a consultant in the classrooms. I've been traveling a lot over the last few months. Now and then I see the same great and not so great stories, links, and comments. Brilliant people making brilliant observations. Making effulgent, even quite luminous and pithy remarks.

Progressives are aware of Achieve Inc. Michael Cohen has been around the education game in the Beltway for some time. They know Intel and IBM. They know Bill and Melinda Gates. Progressives are aware of a poll in Georgia showing a cooking show host as being more popular than Martin Luther King Jr. But they are living within the corporate dominant body politic.

Notice will be served to all those regardless of which side they take when all the commenting and daily reporting regarding this group or that, this small protest or that, change tenor. That is, the time for talk is over. Speak truth to power? The power already knows the truth. They discourage media from reporting on what's real. Like an interview of a career politician, there are few sources that don't deflect each question, each remark. Defying the truth. The time for talk is over.

Teachers. Stay in your classrooms if you must. What's happening in Chicago is clearly a harbinger of what's to come for teachers---nationwide. What's happening in Detroit is a message like some kind of back to the future Orwellian time machine. Corporate control beyond the atrocities of buying children for placement and profit. Like some John Hersey novel ("The Child Buyer") gone even more insanely dystopic as Wall Street and its largest beneficiaries concoct "no excuses" institutions for the poor to stay poor, and increase insulation from the new feudalism for the progeny of the wealthy.

The authoritarian power elite know that people are not truly defined by numbers. But they do know that the complete corporate occupation of schools requires a facade of unproven benchmarks and testing so it appears that they are preparing people for a future. Indeed.

Until there is a movement of such insane capaciousness, linked together throughout all stratum of people and groups, all of one accord and in motion against the tyrannical private-corporate-government complex and its will to seize all that can be profitized and measured, leveraged by indebtedness. Then will there be meaningful action beyond the words and mien of a scattered, austeritized public. Each interest group appending a whole. With singularity and solidarity in commitment. Truly revolutionary.

Not a million or two people marching upon Washington, D.C., but 50 million or more. Susan Ohanian said it in one word: Revolution. Put thought into action or live the regret of continuance in a gone world."

If Ten Percent Refuse the Test it's Over!

This was written by Pennsylvania parent Michele Gray. Be sure to check out her blog .

If we can just help parents overcome their fear of saying No to testing, their fear of what will happen if their school doesn't make AYP, we can end this all now. Only 10% of parents and/or kids have to decline testing and it's over. The 10% isn't some mystical 100-monkeys number.

According to psychometricians, if the tests fail to test the same percentage each year, all the stats are invalid. That's why there is extreme pressure on schools to test 100% and why there is the threat of failing if the percentage for the whole school OR for any measurable subgroup falls below 95%. In fact, for small rural schools, their scores are statistically meaningless anyway, but they still have to take the test, or else we could all sue under the equal protection clause.

[U.S. Education Secretary] Arne Duncan said earlier this week that the Dept of Ed predicts 82% of schools will fail this year no matter what we do. So why not force the schools to fail because parents and kids say NO to testing rather than putting the burden and the blame on kids with special needs, living in poverty, struggling with English, and so on. That's just wrong. In fact, it's evil.

I also highly recommend the book "Making the Grades" by Todd Farley. It's been recommend by Alfie Kohn and Jonathan Kozol. It's very readable, very funny and after reading it no parent in their right mind will ever let their child be subjected to these tests ever again.

It's insane that we are allowing our children to be subjected to a full two weeks or more of these pointless tests that only enrich the private for-profit testing industry. I remember taking the SATs or GREs took a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, back when it was just ETS [Educational Testing Services]. Now it's multi-national companies like Pearson (in which Qaddafi is major investor; Qadaffi and NCLB Testing ) or McGraw-Hill or DRC that are draining millions of education dollars into the pockets of CEOs while our kids tests are scored by temps. [Read: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer ] Farley recently sent this to me:

"Last summer, before she lost her job, [D.C. Chancellor of schools, Michelle] Rhee was arguing for even MORE standardized tests in the DC schools. As a parent, she said, she "wanted to know how her kids are doing...." To me, that is the fundamental problem with standardized testing: In my opinion, we don't know anything about the kids at all. We score their open-ended responses in sweatshop like conditions, bored out of our skulls, item by item. We never, in other words, get a feel for a whole human being, just random words on a page.

The multiple choice questions are either too simplistic or pretend they are too complex, as if you could get some understanding of a child's understanding about literary characterization (or whatever) in multiple choice format. As far as I'm concerned this whole thing is a great deal for big business, but that's it.

If Michelle Rhee really wanted to know "how her kids are doing," all she needs do is ask the friggin' human being standing at the front of their classroom, the person who hears her kids' answers (and thought processes) every day, who knows how hard those kids work or how they play together, etc etc."

Michele also has a blog called: Leaving Behind the PSSA Here's an excerpt from a recent letter to Michael Hardy,  superintendent of State College Area School District.

"We are told that private for-profit companies can do a better job than you and others who are committed to public education because of the free market. The free market resulted in scandals ranging from Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq, to the Enron debacle, to the recent outrage in our own backyard with private for-profit prisons for kids.

When our tax dollars are involved, greed and corruption run rampant in the “free market.” Please think about your role in this and if there is anything you can do to take a stand against the Big Lie that is NCLB and high-stakes standardized testing which threatens the future of the kids you serve."

Visit her Facebook page: NCLB Testing: Stop the Madness Know the Truth