Once Bill Gates, D.C. Supt. Michelle Rhee and the "Waiting for 'Superman' " crowd are done drawing and quartering teachers, are they going to come after us parents?
After all, we're just the flip side of the same coin.
What if, after all the millions of dollars that have been poured into marketing and movies promoting charter schools, turnaround companies, vouchers, mayors running the schools, etc., parents still refuse to play?
What if the public opinion polls continue to show, as the Gallup/PDK report did this year, that:
I can just see the "tough," "courageous" steps our city fathers may be forced to take:
It's not so far-fetched.
After all, they've already come after our children. It started here in Chicago under Paul Vallas, Mayor Daley's first non-educator schools CEO. To inflate test scores, Vallas began to exercise what he called "The Hammer," that is, using end-of-year standardized test cut scores as grade promotion bars. Children whose Iowa test scores fell even one-tenth of one percent below the district "standard" had to repeat a grade. Even some top students were banned from eighth grade graduation celebrations under that policy, a humiliating practice that Chicago schools still inflict on children.
They call it "holding students accountable."
Keep in mind that Washington D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee, famously featured on the cover of TIME magazine holding a broom and then in Waiting for "Superman" as, I suppose, Wonder Woman, is now also becoming known as the person whose motivational speech to this year's new D. C. schoolteachers included a tale of how, when a new teacher herself, she had her second grade class tape their mouths closed, and then -- as she laughingly relates in this video clip -- sees their little mouths bleed when they try to take off the tape.
So, if they don't flinch from being "courageous" with children, don't think they'll be afraid of us parents. Maybe they'll even get lucky and they'll be able to get parents and teachers feeling so bad that we'll go after each other.
Knowing who the real bad guys are
The organization I am a part of, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), was founded in 1989 in Chicago during a 19-day teacher strike by a group of parents and teachers. As they do whenever there has been a school strike, city leaders tried hard to pit parents against teachers in an effort to force teacher concessions. But PURE's founders knew where the pressure really belonged.
Parents and teachers have a common enemy -- the politicians and corporate leaders who refuse to fund and support our schools adequately. With a united front, PURE parents and teachers organized over 1,000 people to march on City Hall to get the school doors open. It worked, but we're still here 20 years later, fighting the same fight, this time on the national stage.
Parents, teachers, and students don't have the money and power that the corporate school privatizers have. But we have something better and stronger -- we have the truth on our side. If we stay together and stay strong, we shall overcome.
Follow Julie Woestehoff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pureparents
insight of their poor skills and inability to perform academic tasks. It’s a small death suffered every day by these students, as they see their dreams crashed on the rocks of reality. We ask students to come to school daily and give 100% to what they believe is an intolerable humiliation, and we get angry when they don’t smile and take school more seriously. We scratch our heads,wondering what we can do when half of our minority students drop out of school. If students can’t read, every thing else is moot. My raison d’erte is to never let a student pass through my class without teaching them to read period. We use the One Star Fish analogy, that sacrifices too many students to a devastating future. Students are not going to change unless we devise an effective way to change their outlook. I spend the first twenty days working on literacy nothing else, that may appear bizarre, impossible, or asinine; yet, it works for my kids. Students see it as perfectly logical and 'buy in almost immediately when they see their reading soar and realize they can read.
Absolutely. Argue the reasons why they have such an outlook, but this is still the fundamental shift which needs to take place in the equation.
"I spend the first twenty days working on literacy nothing else, that may appear bizarre, impossible, or asinine; yet, it works for my kids. Students see it as perfectly logical and 'buy in almost immediately when they see their reading soar and realize they can read."
Makes perfect sense to me. As I put it, kids don't hate to read; they are frustrated at not being able to read and the disdain is a masking behavior.
As with reading, so with other disciplines, their engagement increases with their belief that they can do the task (true belief, not empty self-esteem) and as they experience real evidence that they can, their confidence blossoms and their intrinsic motivation increases because doing well is simply more fun than not doing well.
Teach kids to catch and real progress can be made; fail to do so, and it's going to be endless rounds of bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
Do your research on Fethullah Gulen and his master plan.
http://www.charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com