Education in America: right or privilege?

Reblogged from @ THE CHALK FACE knows SCHOOLS MATTER:

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So, is schooling in America a right or privilege?  Do we hold sacrosanct our hopes and wishes that what still remains is a free and public right to education in America? 

Read more… 903 more words

Breaking News! California Democratic Party Blasts Corporate Education Reform: UPDATE

Breaking News! California Democratic Party Blasts Corporate Education Reform: UPDATE.

Stay the Course, Revolution in Progress

Stay the Course, Revolution in Progress.

Teaching is more than all that

Kris Nielsen said: [...] “Teaching is supposed to be a journey, where you get to join several young people as they move through the complexities of the world, stepping in to help them correct the path or encourage them to keep moving.” [...]. This phrase brought memories back of all those years I loved so much. In the classrooms. Lunch time with the kids. Laughter and heartache going on all at once. We learned to help each other.

I retired earlier than planned. Before, I couldn’t wait to get to school and get going with the kids. And most all teachers know well how it all starts as soon as you set foot on campus. Most times I’d take my van and pick up students on the way. Their parents welcomed me. I’d go right in and wake them up and tell them to get it together and let’s go. These kids were living in high poverty. Most on probation. Most disconnected with school. But full of potential and so often exhibiting huge amounts of talent.

So, with five or six kids in the van, I’d pull up at the nearest small diner and I’d get them breakfast. While they might have been cranky when I got them up, they loved the van ride. I was also the school counselor. And my aide was a therapist as well. We’d do group counseling before school. It was a juvenile court and community school. It was not a locked up school. Open to anyone in the community. Many attended only because they were court ordered.

Too many of our kids were dying from drug use. It was so often their means of escape from lives filled with torture and abuse. My aide and I developed a non-profit to help kids on campus and in the community, with a total buy-in from everyone, even our superintendent of schools in the county. We didn’t save the world, but it made a difference. Well, after awhile, kids, kids in trouble, hurting kids, got wind of the school and came because they wanted to. So often hanging around well after the late afternoon bell.

All the staff gave the school to the kids and the kids responded so gracefully. Something to hang on to. And that’s what I miss most of all.
I could have worked there until I fell into that final sleep as I leaned on a board with marker in hand. And then came No Child Left Behind. It destroyed relationships between administration and teachers, befuddled the kids, and frustrated the teachers.

I took NCLB for four years, feeling so badly on my drive home each evening. The new models were attempting to put round, wonderful pegs into empty, meaningless holes. And the testing began. And the scripted reading programs. And any mud program that would stick on the wall. And when it slipped off, there came another program. Slap. On the wall and on the faces of the kids.

My kids and I cried together when I told them I was leaving. All of the staff had been there long enough to be teaching through two generations of kids. It was truly a family affair. We found that hearts and minds must be mended before real learning can begin. And that went for kids, staff, everyone.

Like Simon and Garfunkel sang: Time it was and what a time it was.

I now work for DOEs in California and Hawaii. Teaching the teachers. I’m mostly in the classroom. I insisted that this would be the best way to provide instruction and guidance for new teachers. The program is ending in California soon. The new normal of teaching in a world where corporations are contending for total market share of our great public assets, public schools, has shifted, as you know, to a new testing rubric and teaching has been altered so that much of the student-teacher-school connections are disappearing.

Here in Hawaii, we generally catch up with what’s trending on the Mainland within a year or two. I don’t want to claim it, but things appear to be headed in the similar directions I find out about through all our group friendships online. At least for me, as the activism is just beginning here. Hawaii has been holding $75 million in RTTT funding. It has begun to spin it’s darkness as teachers are waking up to what value added really means for them. The lights will be slowly turning off. And the first casualties are the very ones who need the light the most. The most help, consistency, support, guidance and caring. The most patience and human interaction which brings the learning and discovery. Those schools in the high poverty areas on O’ahu. Ripe, low hanging fruit for privatization. The new age in education is using a community with the least amount of resources to oppose the onslaught of harm.

I would return to my old classroom in a heartbeat. Room 8. So much living was there. I miss the kids. I will soon substitute teach as much as my schedule allows until the conditions of CCSS and VAM, and the ridiculous HST regime is fully implemented here in the islands. After that comes, there will be little need for teaching teachers. And I am just not cut out as a teacher who could work in such onerous settings. The kids smell it in the air. You can’t hide it from them. You can’t fool them into thinking everything is alright. I will refuse to participate. To do no harm. Not a new phrase, but one Kris Nielsen brought out to remind us of our influence as teachers on the lives of young minds and hearts. [Nielsen's latest book, "Children of the Core,." paints with fine lines. A great description of what schooling is becoming and its effects on our children, our communities, lives.]

Jimi Hendrix once said: “I’m the one who’s got to die when it’s time for me to die. So let me live my life the way I want to.” I feel most teachers agree: those of us who love the living in the moments of discovery, learning, bringing all together in moments, would prefer, above all else, to speak to eternity, to love, to share, in a flash, in any classroom, as time goes by.

Prompted by a Blog on Children’s Privacy

Prompted by a blog comment from a parent regarding his children’s privacy and the law (See:  dianeravitch.net).  The takeover of public education is a picture of a contrived perfect storm.  Starving the beast.  Creating poverty and disruption in communities throughout our cities and states, the world, through the works of reactionary forces funded with limitless means.  The privatization of a country.  A recherche of finality.  An ascendancy  of governance as leveraged as the most toxic of derivatives,

Supremacy of markets designed to consummate the aggregation of wealth for the few,  while expelling the civil rights, the rights to equality of opportunity of at least the 47% who serve no economic viability, who are only seemingly considered an unconscionable approach on capital accumulation.  That half a country’s population pay no taxes is of little concern to the ownership.  This condition is bankrolled and endorsed by the ownership class.  Starve the beast.  Shipping markets and capital offshore, devitalization of employment opportunity continues the stagnation of markets, chewing away at the prey until capture is complete.  Cripple the public interest ensures orderly annexation of the wealth of nations.

The appropriation of our public schools by big capital is but one terminus of the “vampire squid.”  The overclass want it all.  As more availability to markets, economic improvement, are being held in the vaults of Wall Street banks to big to jail, a country, continues to die a slow death.  Countries are people.  And the greatness of them is determined by the level of the quality of life held within the common weal.

The latest NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), like NCLB, scaffolding for a later cabal created for the taking of all worldwide markets is the overarching contrivance under which RTTT is but a small tool of additional acquisition.  The elitists’ ultimate goal for education, worldwide, is to decrease the costs of labor, fixed capital, and liability to minimal efficiencies, while providing unlimited leveraging for their crowning glory: One World Bank.

The people?  The ultimate goal is to create angst at such a level as to isolate thought and interpersonal transaction.  To have the lowest castes, the middle classes, so concerned for survival that while they appear to be talking they know not what they say as their minds have been conditioned to consider their own survival as the empyrean of hope of a heart still beating.

The rentier class, Wall Street, has been able to bilk America out of $20 trillion over the last few years. Without anyone spending a minute behind bars. At least we’ve seen Madoff, and some Enron folks be herded off to prisons. Patsies. How fast things do move, yet stay the same. A president who bought an election by petitioning the Supreme Court. Wars waged on lies. Corporate provisioning and fomenting destabilizing revolts of both friend and foe to American interests. Homeland security? Give me a break.

As they, the ownership class, move in on other public assets, public schools and the testing industry, GERM, the rewards of huge profits encourage continued investments. Leveraged dollars by banks too big to be regulated. Everyone gets rich. At the expense of those same people from whom extractionist vulture capitalism had just recently robbed trillions of dollars of personal wealth.. What makes anyone think these 21st Century robber barons will heed anything as inconsequential as a few lawsuits?  FERPA and privacy?  There are always provisions and loopholes built into any social documents in the contours of a convoluted corporate dominion over a corrupt government.

Except for one thing. A letter from one person unwilling to allow their children’s personal information be placed in corporate data banks can become as important as a video of a charlatan that changed the course of a presidential election. May a letter, a letter of complaint from a Louisiana parent, be duplicated and in such great numbers that the hedgefund buyout of public schools is taken down as their bubble bursts.  A break in the wall.  One sector of private good able to continue, to flourish.  Hopefully allowed to live within its own economies as those of more concern to the pandemic occupation of capital and meaning move over pieces of freedom, ignoring them temporarily, as their insatiable desire for predominance and prestige continue circling the globe.  In skies where even birds can’t sing without a numerical assignation held in data banks far below.

They Want the World

I remember the Little Hoover Commission’s report on charter schools. 1992, I think. According to the latest info at that time, charters were not just for the neediest kids, but for those who were possibly needy in that they and their parents were looking for options to the local schools’ district curriculum. My son attended a charter school in California. The purpose of the charter was to provide increased depth and enrichment to curriculum and related activities.

Of course, add politics, money, vulture capitalism, corporate extractionist policy, and attorneys and you get today’s charter schools, in the main. Most of today’s charter schools are far removed from the original intent and purpose of development of flexible curriculua and operation.

Of course, I am basing my comment on one school, a few reports, and a specific geographic and socio-economic environment. But, I would argue that the original intent might have provisioned for the more needy school aged population, needy in terms of needing remedial intervention, opportunity of access to other unique programs, as well as providing other support that was insufficient for the local community’s and students’ needs.

I was also aware of how charters served a multitude of purpose.  The main thing is that they were connected to the public school districts.  And funding, at least in the fundamental sense, was by the same means available to those districts. Having billionaires fund charter chains while demanding additional funding from states for teachers who are already funded, salaried; funding for other operation costs?  Nope.  Didn’t find that back then and long ago.  Then, my understanding was very narrow then.  And, while I remain at the inchoate level of understanding charters, even public education policies (after teaching in public schools for over 35 years), I fear I needn’t any further information on how the extraction of wealth by the elitist class who continue to ignore the desperate inequality …… wait…… the rentier class, this uberclass of politicos, money, and corporate profiteers, they ignore nothing, they capitalize on it.  They want the world.  And they want it now. [hear scream of Jim Morrison here.  Add face of Gordon Gekko.]

Power Comes From Everywhere: Hearing the Sound of Resolute

Keith and Cenk left MSNBC. They uncovered the stories beyond the allowable corporate dictum. And these two became marginalized from cable television and a larger viewership. I was up on a friend’s farm in Squamish, B.C., Canada a long time ago while I was living in the area doing organ transplants down in a lab at a university in Vancouver. My friend and I met up with Little Richard at the QE II Theatre while we were all taking in Miles Davis (he being no less than perfect). We got to talking and, as it turned out, we invited Little Richard to use the farm that summer to put on a concert. While we were all standing in the kitchen just before he went out to do his thing, I remember him saying, staying in that fabulous showman character of his, “Yeah, man, I’m Little Richard. And where you’re at, I’ve been.”

He had been castigated by most TV producers as too radical to air. They were beholden to corporate ownership and big money deals with advertisers as well as admonishments from some congressional people who were concerned about promoting anything that might be considered remotely anti-war-establishment.

Maybe it’s the Saturday coffee, a Fred Klonsky morning reverie thing. I’m not sure why I’m sharing this. But I just read Diane Ravitch’s blog with Pelto. Our voices are being bought up. Like Little Richard, an icon of R&B and Rock & Roll, like many of the other famous entertainers who spoke truth to power, they who could command large audiences, their voices dimmed into the background of time. Sure, time and popularity counts. But the message of freedom became a primary target of the elitist overclass. By the time we slipped into the late 70s, protesting truth to power became a thing of the past, at least in the mainstream. I heard Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” on an elevator the other day in downtown Honolulu, no less. I mean, wouldn’t you expect some slack key guitar and voices as sweet as pikake blooms?

I remember being in a Penny’s Department store and was going through their record rack. And, lo and behold, there was a vinyl of Country Joe and the Fish’s ” Electric Music for Mind and Body.” In Penny’s? The corporate ownership hadn’t even a slight grasp as to what was happening around them. I’m sure they would not have allowed such an anti-establishment album in their stores. And, likewise, the Beltway in DC has no greater understanding as to what’s going on all around them. It’s all about the money and there is little to no time to consider much else. The Beltway is a river of money, bipartisan money, combined with personal fortunes of those who are in the mutual privatization game.

We, the people, are being marginalized by big money. I saw a mention of Bill Gates and his maniacal attack on the planet as if it were his own toy land. (Kudos to S.DuFresne, I think). Then I re-read Tim Slekar ‘s FB piece on how we must push back into the faces of the Melissa Harris-Perrys, Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, etc. Even the super hero Chris Hayes. They are just on the edge of telling the viewers how it really is, but don’t quite get there. They are not allowed to get there. They hold the corporate line that Cenk and Keith stepped over.

Okay, so now that @the ChalkFace has embarked on a furious new push to speak and act out, to revolt to the tyranny of the moneyed elite, I’m thinking…… we need people, lots of people, money, maybe even some well-healed sponsors.

The overclass has no interest in what we are yelling at them. To hell with public good, they say. The seemingly most liberal media continue to avoid an issue which subsumes all other issues: the development and education of our children in a free society. Public schools open for everyone to attend. Being the greatest public good a nation can create.

I’ve been a public educator all my life. I stand for and believe in a system of governance that includes all the people to the rights of not only free speech, but the right to housing, nutrition, medical care, public schools and universities—–gratis. Just because we are. So, like Little Richard did, we too must keep banging out the message. We are perched on a massive and revolutionary change in the collective consciousness of a population beyond CNN, beyond corporatism.