“…I discovered then, in my early teaching career, that learning is best driven by ideas, challenges, experiences, and activities that engage students. My experience over the past 45 years has confirmed this.

We have come far from that time in the ’60s. Now the mantra is high expectations and high standards. Yet, with all that zeal to produce measurable learning outcomes we have lost sight of the essential motivations to learn that moved my students. Recently I asked a number of elementary school students what they were learning about and the reactions were consistently, “We are learning how to do good on the tests.” They did not say they were learning to read.

It is hard for me to understand how educators can claim that they are creating high standards when the substance and content of learning is reduced to the mechanical task of getting a correct answer on a manufactured test.” (Summer 2009)

For additional information on high stakes testing, Arne Duncan, merit pay and RTTF, check out:
http://seattle-ed.blogspot.com/

Education schools are mostly bad, and for many reasons. There’s the old saw about TC and Columbia, and how “120th Street is the widest street in the world.” When I went to grad school in TESOL at NYU, it was appalling, but not for the reasons given by most ed deformers. It was awful largely because, of the 12 classes I took, all but two were taught by part-time TAs who ranged from OK to dreadful. It was a clear indication of the university’s disrespect for teaching, and it was obvious that the ed school was little more than a profit center for the university.

Why was this? Sorry, deformers, you can’t blame this one on the union. The program was academically impoverished, despite it exorbitant cost, because of the revenue-intensifying labor relations policies of the university, which valued the hiring of cheap part-timers instead of full-time tenured faculty. It is also testimony to the fact that, as I’ve pointed out here before, NYU is a real estate development company with an academic subsidiary.

So yes, the ed schools are pretty bad, but that’s not what this is about. No, this is about the fact that the college education programs, despite their many shortcomings, are still holdouts, where the values of teaching humanistically and teaching the whole child still control some physical and ideological space. The ed schools have not fully joined the New World Order in education, have not fully embraced the market, and must be brought on line and on message. Money aside, this is also a reason why senior teachers are often targeted, since they are less likely to be entranced by the Magic of the Marketplace in education.

Sure, corporate ed deform is about current and future profits/compensation, but it’s also about control and the social engineering that education inevitably involves. The schools are there to replicate the kind of society the overclass wants, one filled with alienation, tedium, stress, insecurity, overwork, and under perpetual monitoring and surveillance by its managers. This is also the society where they reap most of the benefits. The kids are being socialized and prepped to endure the same conditions their parents face, if they’re lucky enough to be employed at all, and the schools and teachers are on a forced march to take them there.

And by the way, while we’re busy blaming universities and teachers for the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, where’s the outrage at the MBA programs, which have trained the looters and sociopaths who have cannibalized the US economy and brought it to its knees. But then again, look offstage while Duncan and Co. do their cheap soft shoe routine, and in the wings you’ll see many of the same people preparing to cannibalize the public schools.

Oh, right – you can’t just shut down or fire a parent.

Must be the teachers’ fault.