StudentsFirstNY
Because of #CommonCore, kids in Bed-Stuy will be able to compete in the same global economy as kids in wealthy suburban districts....
Silly me: I actually read stuff, so I was thinking maybe poverty and racism and inequity and poverty and poverty and poverty and poverty had something to do with the differences in outcomes between kids in Bed-Stuy and the "wealthy suburbs."
Thank goodness StudentsFirst has come along and disabused me of such nonsense!
Clearly, narrowing the curriculum to the two domains of the Common Core - math and language arts - is GREAT for poor kids! I'm sure those kids in Bed-Stuy will pick up the social capital suburban kids gain from a wide variety of learning experiences... somewhere. Because Common Core is sure to magically wipe away the hidden curriculum found in our "no excuses" urban schools! After all: "high standards" are so much more important than adequate funding...
Dear lord. How do these people sleep at night?
Oh, I sleep great, Oprah!
One more graph, just for you folks at StudentsFirstNY:
ADDING: Oh, my sweet, sweet lord:
If you "raise the bar," as the metaphor is commonly understood, you're saying kids can clear it; they can jump over it, like in high jumping or pole vaulting.Hundreds of parents come out to#SupportTheCore at SED town hall on#CommonCore. Raise the bar. Our kids can hit it! pic.twitter.com/wekknX7Spx
So we really don't want the kids to "hit it," do we?
"Hit me!"
The education deformers who advocate for "higher standards" are applying the exact same "logic" as conservatives who claim that food stamps make people lazy. The assumption is that people are lazy, and if they'd just work a little harder everything would be fine.
ReplyDeleteThat is, of course, horsepoop, and anybody who thinks it so lacks human empathy and decency that I don't respect them even a tiny bit.
Just wanted to connect with you offline since I see that you're a fellow Stata user in the realm of education. Drop me a line sometime
ReplyDeletewilliam.r.buchanan
AT
$jsums.%edu
(sorry for the junk in the email addres, just trying to avoid any webscrappers searching for fresh meat to spam).
RE: Seth Kahn
ReplyDeleteIt isn't necessarily that people are lazy but that we allow ourselves as a society to be satisfied by mediocrity rather than having an expectation of excellence. Is it realistic that everyone will be the best at everything? Absolutely not. However, if we enter the educational world with the mind set that it is attainable for everyone and that we should do any/everything in our power to support children reaching those goals then it can help us to better define how we approach learning and instruction as a whole. Too often we fail children by not accepting that children fail when the adults, environment, and institutions around them fail to provide the necessary support in the medium that is most efficient and effective for that child.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying Students First and their ilk believe that people are lazy, and that if we just demanded more of them (Common Core, No Child Left Alive, etc), they'd rise to the occasion. But that's a rationalization. What they're really saying is that teachers and students are trying enough (they're "satisfied with mediocrity"), and they need some "tough love" to get them to try harder.
ReplyDeleteWhich is bunk. People who are hungry and tired (students), and who work in environments where their professionalism is challenged at every turn (teachers), are already busting their butts, and people like Students First simply refuse to acknowledge that.
There is an all out war against public education fueled by a right wing ideology which wants to privatize everything and destroy the commons. The reform movement portrays our schools as failing and that the causes of "ourfailingschools" are mediocre, ineffective teachers, tenure, seniority, LIFO and the unions which protect them. Though the anti-public school teacher movement is largely right wing inspired, both parties are gung ho for school deform, charter schools, school "choice," vouchers and all the BS from Christie, Cerf, Obama, Duncan, Emanuel, Gates and Broad, etc.
ReplyDelete