Trouble in Standardized Paradise

DIANE RAVITCH has had a long, distintuished career in education, her specialty being the History of Education. She was an assistant secretary of education for awhile under Bush, and she went along with all his highly questionable federal government education reforms, collectively called, you will recall, "No Child Left Behind". In this scheme the federal government steps in, and mandates standardized testing across all the land, so that we might know how students in one part of the country stack up against those in another, and can identify, label, and fix students, schools, and teachers who don't measure up. Enter Barrack Hussein Obama, and its mo' of the same, piled higher and deeper, in what his administration calls "Common Core", referring to the idea of universal standards of learning for all American students. Really, its much ado about very little, and has the primary effect of burdening teachers and students with large amounts of paperwork, the value of which is, to say the least, difficult to ascertain. On her way to Damascus Diane Ravitch was struck by a bolt of lightening, and has since been a staunch and outspoken opponent of all for which she formerly stood. No Child, Commor Core, the whole kit and kaboodl, she dumped it all. She has a blog innovatively titled "Diane Ravitch's Blog", onto which she types many interesting comments, but for which, what with her presumably busy schedule, she seems to have insufficient time to compose well written, articulate, structurally unified essays. Oh well. You can't have everything. She also wrote a book titled "Reigh of Error", and you can just feel the harsh and cogent analytical critique of Bushian and Obaman educational policy even before you look beyond the cover. It turns out that a high percentage of today's teachers are unhappy with current educational policy, No Child and Common Core in particular. A middle school teacher named Randy Turner, known for being highly effective in the classroom, has written intelligently, persuasively against the system, and thus is controversial. He too has a blog, "The Turner Report" (where do they get these names) and a book entitled "No Child Left Alive". Another good read, "Who's The Teacher Now", by high school teacher Tex Trumbo, carries the same message: the kids are great, we educators are tired of having our students, teachers, and schools labeled "failures" by some bureacracy in Washington, and we'd like to be left alone to do our best, even in the face of an insane ambient American culture. According to Trumbo, the problem isn't what happens inside the classroom, where good teachers en masse do good work with good kids, the problem is in Washington D.C., and in a general culture diseased with the love of money, violence, and cheap, tawdry escape entertainment, a culture which disdains the intellect. The foxes are in the hen house. Our corporate masters want to give (sell) all students high tech teaching tools, tablet computers and so forth, and replace teachers with these divices. They say it will save the public enormous amounts of money. They do not say that it will make enormous amounts of money for the corporations. If we're not careful in this country (U.S.A.), our traditionally excellent public school system will be swarmed under and crushed by an avalanche of government bureaucrats, corporate marketing executives, and a conservatively brain washed public's unwillingness to sacrifice and pay for good public schools. Better learn as much as we can, while we still can.