In my humble opinion, Jo Boaler's, recent Education Week column, Where Has All the Knowledge Gone?
The Movement to Keep Americans at the Bottom of the Class in Math, is one of the most important pieces of education journalism in some time.

Is this just a coincidence? Can President Bush really have been so badly advised as to ignore almost all of the research that could have informed the report, or was there something more deliberate at work? How acceptable is it for a government to control the forms of knowledge that are released to the public?

Dr. Boaler is a former Stanford University Mathematics Professor who clearly and succinctly documents how "science" and "research" are used as a blunt weapon by the United States Department of Education. Boaler describes how the President's National Mathematics Advisory Panel was constrained from publishing the best advice for improving mathematics education. Such ideological interference in mathematics education is consistent with the Reading First mess at the center of No Child Left Behind.

As parents, teachers of conscience, and students flee the public schools that have been strong-armed into becoming abusive testing factories, rightwing pols and oligarchs like Gates and Broad and Dell are eager to step in to save the public schools by killing the public in them. And of course, where bareknuckled politics and philanthrotarianism fail, the bloodsuckers of the education industry are ready to exploit children for their market potential, rather than as the source of our future civilization.

Gary Stager believes that the real key making schools better has a lot to do with the power of parents. Here is a clip from his informative piece in Good. All of it is worth reading:

. . . .Eli Broad, a Los Angeles billionaire, is another kind of philanthropist. Broad funds a narrower range of interventions and has demonstrated less willingness to experiment than Gates. Broad’s efforts advance a very specific model: top-down school management based on business principles. Over the first five years, Broad has committed over $500 million to his notions of school reform. He even runs an academy that trains school leaders in precisely this kind of management.

Broad’s money supports more standardized testing, a longer school day, scripted curricula, merit pay, the replacement of school administrators with managers, support of charter schools, and mayoral control. In Broad’s worldview, incentives drive everything, including education. The annual Broad Prize for Urban Education gives a total of $1 million dollars to five urban school districts that do the most to raise student test scores. The award also grants college scholarships to students in the district. That sort of money and the press it attracts has a domino effect: All of a sudden, others want to get tough and adhere to the Broad manifesto, too.

In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his newly appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein, seized control of New York City’s public schools, disbanding local school boards and reducing community involvement. Under Klein and Bloomberg, test scores may have risen, but chaos has ensued as the organizational structure of the district changes continuously. Now, policies similar to Broad’s educational blueprint are being followed in the city’s public schools. Last year, New York City earned the coveted Broad Prize.

Broad and his followers also embrace charter schools. Charters are quasi-public schools that receive public funding but don’t have to play by the same rules; they have more latitude than public schools, including the freedom to use different curricula, employ non-credentialed educators, change the school calendar, ban unions, and be selective in student enrollment. In some cities, affluent parents use the charter laws to create private schools with public money. In others, like the New City Schools in Long Beach, California, innovative educators with a coherent vision of edu-cation teach in ways they believe will benefit children in their community.

It is natural for parents to want the best for their children. Unfortunately, the charter laws may create greater educational inequity—rich, involved parents get their kids into the best charter schools, leaving only the poor students behind in the slowly deserted public schools. This forced choice could be avoided if every school was shaped by its teachers, parents, and community, with all children free to attend the school best-suited to their needs or interests. For example, the Montclair, New Jersey, public schools have experienced decades of success with mandatory school choice. Each elementary school is distinct and parents are required to choose the best option for their child. . . .

Here is a crisp excerpt from that interview:

MJ: What education changes do you think we'll see after the 2008 presidential election?

DM: Things will be worse with McCain and better with Obama, but I don't know how much better. Because it's all bipartisan. If you define yourself as someone fixing education, there's nothing short-range you can do to fix education directly. It's labor intensive. You have to change the way people act. You have to convince people, and change people. Mindset changes are not happening from change in legislation. Like desegregation. We legally got rid of legal segregation, but schools are still segregated. You can demand people have better math understanding, but it depends how you interpret math understanding, and what you want it for, and if you think everybody can and should have that.

MJ: You don't sound like a big fan of federal education legislation.

DM: I'm not in favor. [Federal legislation] can do something about poverty and resources for schools. And the president can play a psychological role. When the president is a dummy, putting down smart people, it makes it harder for kids to know he is serious. I don't want pedagogy and curriculum decided on the federal level. Bush was a dumbing-down model about what it means to be an educated person. Another way the president can play a role in education is by modeling it, by not telling lies and not making up history. But directly, the federal government can do something about resources for more well-educated teachers, more leisure time for kids and families, and time for teachers to think. If we want to leap forward, we need to rethink what schools are like as institutions. If you walk into a school, do you taste and smell education? Is it a place that respects education, or is it a factory looking for higher test scores?

MJ: How is Bush tied to the legacy of education as it stands today?

The rapacious and callous uncaring of the neolib/neocon test-and-punish ed reformers has reached a new level of depraved prominence as school starts back once again with more children suffering under the burden of poverty, no health care, and neglect. The hollow rhetoric by the accountability and testing crowd can no longer mask the devastating realities of struggling families as recession grinds on and the spectre of depression looms. While the wishful thinking liberals and the bare-knuckled conservatives continue to pitch their bankrupt notion of world-class standards and no-excuses accountability plans for American schools, the schools, themselves, are going bankrupt and the children of the foreclosed are dumped on the streets. What will be next, a bowl of soup for a passing score?

From Sam Dillon at the NYTimes:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — With mortgage foreclosures throwing hundreds of families out of their homes here each month, dismayed school officials say they are feeling the upheaval: record numbers of students turning up for classes this fall are homeless or poor enough to qualify for free meals.

“We’re seeing a lot more children in poverty,” said Lauren Roberts, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County school system, a 98,000-student district that includes Louisville and its suburbs.

At the same time, the district is struggling with its own financial problems. Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.

The Jefferson County system is typical this school year.

As 50 million children return to classes across the nation, crippling increases in the price of fuel and food, coupled with the economic downturn, have left schools from California to Florida to Maine cutting costs. Some are trimming bus service, others are restricting travel, and a few are shortening the school week. And as many districts are forced to cut back, the number of poor and homeless students is rising.

“The big national picture is that food and fuel costs are going up and school revenues are not,” said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association. “We’re in a recession, and it’s having a dramatic impact on schools.”

Louisville’s pain is minor compared with the woes of some cities. Detroit has laid off at least 700 teachers, Los Angeles 500 administrators and Miami-Dade County hundreds of school psychologists, maintenance workers and custodians.

Schools in many states have cut bus stops to save diesel. Districts in California and Ohio have gone further and eliminated bus service either completely or for high schools, leaving thousands of students to find their own way to school.

In Maine, officials worried about the cost of heating their classrooms this winter have restricted travel for field trips to save money. Districts in Louisiana, Minnesota and elsewhere have taken a more radical measure and adopted four-day school weeks. Hundreds of districts, responding to higher food prices, are charging more for cafeteria meals.

In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory. Two charities in suburban Detroit announced in August that they would hand out student backpacks, attracting hundreds of families.

“They went through all 300 backpacks in three hours, boom, and that was that,” said Kathleen M. Kropf, an official in the Macomb Intermediate School District. “We’re seeing a lot of desperate people.”

There were no giveaways for Jacci Murray, 28, a single mother in West Palm Beach, Fla., who said she lost her job six months ago. Ms. Murray bought pencils and crayons for her son, Cameron, who is in the second grade, from a discount bin at Office Depot. Saying she felt “cheap and broke,” she pored fretfully over her school supplies list, afraid to waste gas by making more than one shopping trip.

“It’s been tough this year,” Ms. Murray said. “I’m depressed about school.”

And so are many educators.

West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.

The Caldwell Parish School District, in northern Louisiana, took a more sweeping approach to saving fuel by eliminating Monday classes. The district joined about 100 systems nationwide, most of them rural, that in recent years have adopted a four-day schedule.

The district’s superintendent, John Sartin, said the move should save $145,000 in a $15 million budget. The decision, made in June, came after crude oil prices had risen for 29 consecutive days, Mr. Sartin said.

“People here worry that they won’t have enough money to last through the month,” he said.

Similar concerns in the Southern Aroostook Community School District in Maine have delayed adoption of the budget.

“We’ve tried to pass it twice, and we’re trying a third,” said Terry Comeau, the superintendent, who has restricted field trips and taken a bus off the road.

“People are saying, ‘I don’t want my taxes to go higher; I need the money to pay my bills,’ ” said Mr. Comeau, adding that one worry is that heating costs will soar this winter.

The problems in many districts can be traced to battered state budgets. According to a July report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 31 states had budget gaps totaling $40 billion, and many had cut school financing.

California still has a $15.2 billion budget gap, although many districts there have made cuts, including Los Angeles Unified, which sliced $400 million from its $6 billion budget in June partly by laying off 500 administrators and secretaries, though no teachers.

Many districts are serving increasing numbers of needy students. In Mobile, Ala., the number of homeless students tripled to about 2,500 at the end of the last school year from 850 in the 2006-7 term.

“And our numbers are going to be a whole lot higher this year,” said Larissa Dickinson, a school social worker there. “We’ve had phone call after phone call from families evicted over the summer.”

Officials in districts in a half-dozen states reported similar surges. . . .

Kevin Carey, of the "independent" and "innovative" Education Sector, didn't have the decency to defame me by name when he attacked the cover story, School Wars, I wrote for the current issue of Good Magazine.

It's ironic to be accused of "policy juvenalia" in a blog oh so cleverly entitled "Bad Magazine."

In a time when smart people of good faith occupy both sides of many heated and complex education debates, it makes sense occasionally to pause, take a deep breath, and denounce things like the incoherent mishmash of policy juvenalia, useless sentiment, and blatant lies found in this article, published by GOOD Magazine, in which we are told that NCLB "requires all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests," Bill Gates and Eli Broad are spearheading the corporate conspiracy to privatize K-12 education, and standardized tests come with instructions about what to do if students throw up on them. It's sort of a perfect distillation of woolly-minded HuffPost-type conventional education wisdom, and in that sense is oddly valuable, because you can read it and know everything that a not-inconsequential percentage of people know (or rather, don't know) about education.

It's not "useless sentiment" to care about children.

Ever since President Bush told me to "use the Google," I have found it to be an indispensable tool for learning all sorts of interesting things. One thing I learned when I clicked on the "Who We Are" link on the Education Sector web site was that the "independent" and "innovative" Education Sector is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as Eli Broad.

It is awfully refreshing to see such "independent" and "innovative" analysts strenuously defending their sugar daddies. It's kind of sweet.

For the record, my article was carefully fact-checked by Good Magazine. In fact, a good deal of my juiciest stuff about Eli Broad was left on the cutting-room floor. Stay tuned, keep reading and don't forget to follow the money!

The Broads, the Dells, and Bill and Melinda have launched another salvo in their 60 million dollar fear-mongering propaganda campaign against America's public schools. New flag-waving ads are already in the can, ready to launch as NBC prepares extensive coverage of the Genocide Olympics.

And, of course, the big money has the big media in its pocket, as evidenced in today's uncritical adver-porting of the propaganda smear in the Washington Post, a dull hatchet job that even a dolt like Jay Mathews knows is entirely misleading, one-sided, and without merit.

Here is Bracey's letter to WaPo, which will never find its way into print. Much too honest, even if it were not, Jerry doesn't have enough cash to buy the news space. Thanks, anyway, GB:

From: GERALD BRACEY
To: chandlerm@washpost.com ; mathewsj@washpost.com ; valerie strauss ; haynesv@washpost.com ; Fred Hiatt
Cc: ombudsman@washpost.com
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 11:09 AM
Subject: crap

It's bad enough that Roy Romer, who used to be pretty smart when I knew him in CO, has become the most irrational of school critics, but it's worse that page C7 of today's Post gives his his latest fear mongering crap--let's call it what it is, shit, and see if that gets through the filters--free publicity. In God's name, WHY? Who put the Post up to this story?

I think the Post owes it to schools to base a piece at least as long on U. S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology which was just issued by the RAND corporation. We're #1, says RAND. It's a much more reasoned document though it, too, makes some errors when talking about school performance. It at least credits U. S. kids on international tests where they do well. If you look around at the fear mongers, you'll notice they mention PISA ranks and nothing else. That's because, as RAND observes, on TIMSS and PIRLS we look good. Of course, even RAND's study considers that there might be a link between test scores and competitiveness, which no one has ever demonstrated. In fact, in his epilogue to a recent book about PISA (see below), U of Vienna professor Stefan Hopmann notes that PISA rests on two assumptions: that it assesses important knowledge, and that it assesses knowledge important to the economic future of a nation. There is no research, says Hopmann, to support either assumption. So why does the Post accept PISA at face value?

Last week, I sent in an oped, Getting It Backwards, that begins with a quote from an English economist. He takes the proper perspective. Critics in this country look at test scores and worry about competitiveness. He looks at America's #1 economy and impugns the validity of the test comparisons. Prais' argument appears in a book I recently received edited by three profs at the U of Vienna but with chapters from researchers all over Europe that virtually demolishes PISA, the international study that is used in Romer's ads (I know, the article mentions Marc Lampkin as CEO, but if you go to their site you immediately see that Roy is the driving force). Why do American media accept these studies so uncritically?

Gerald W. Bracey

There is some interesting discussion going on at Education Policy Blog, instigated by a post by Ann Flanagan: GET OUT YOUR POM-POMS: PREP ASSEMBLY.

As a subject that is dear to my own spleen, I have had a good deal to say, some of which has not been universally acclaimed by other readers. John, in NC, took umbrage based on some of my remarks related to the capitulation by liberals on NCLB in 2001. I am posting his comments here, with my response, because his remarks bring to the surface a deeper current that is poisoning the progressive stream of ed reform:

john in nc said...
While Jim Horn's historical perspective is useful, it's certainly a mistake to write off all support by progressives of NCLB as political capitulation. Many school reformers outside the beltway (yes, there are reformers outside the beltway) with long track records as advocates for "disadvantaged students" -- some going back to the 1960s and the birth of ESEA -- supported NCLB because they were convinced, after many years of pushing reforms at the school and district level, that the barrier of low expectations would never be diminished without putting pressure on teachers who harbored such attitudes. Their goal was to force schools to achieve more with students in poverty. Thus the subgroup accountability strategy. These progressive reformers were naive, of course, to think we will ever engineer better teaching and schools by simply issuing top-down edicts (the highway of history is strewn with that roadkill) but they were not capitulators.
__________________________

Thank you, John, for making an important point about progressives, those not-so-long-ago liberals who have self-inflicted a new label to disguise the visible liberal traits that are ridiculed regularly, along with their fearlessness, by the Right. And in this era of “change,” who doesn’t want to be seen as a progressive, especially if the tag can be helpful in avoiding the political flak that usually follows from taking positions of conscience against those without any?

You must know, John, that it was not my intent to paint all progressives, or liberal progressives (which is it?) as capitulators. Not everyone knew of the Bush/Rove plan to use testing to get to privatization. In the Congress, this includes those who, because of more pressing priorities, didn’t care to know. The bliss of ignorance.

More numerous, though, were those, inside and outside of Congress, swept away by the liberal, er, progressive school of reform based on wishful thinking and self-imposed blindness, which, in combination, yields a most dangerous form of self-delusion. It is the kind of thinking that allows, otherwise, caring individuals to set aside the bigotry of low expectations in favor of the callous and cynical racism of impossible demands (see NCLB proficiency goals).

It is the kind of thinking that ennobles the hapless hope of those who come to ignore the devastation that NCLB has wrought to focus, instead, on the visible-if-you-look-hard narrowing of the achievement chasm between the poor and the privileged.

It is the kind of thinking that allows, otherwise, sensible humanitarians to focus on the handful of poor schools that are surviving the educational genocide, while entirely ignoring the fact that the teachers and students in those lighthouse schools are starved for real education (see Linda Perlstein’s TESTED . . . (2007)).

It is the kind of thinking that encourages its proponents to turn their backs on those children rejected because they can’t hack the 60-hour school work week or because they won’t bow to the philosophy of the KIPP schools, the philosophy that begins and ends with “WORK HARD, BE NICE,” the mantra that is emblazoned on the identical t-shirts that children wear in these model reform schools for the poor.

And finally, it is the kind of dangerous delusional thinking that allows people to come to believe that schools and teachers, top down or bottom up—whichever way you prefer to organize them—can get done what poverty has disallowed for much longer than the brief span of time that we have had tests to tell us what we already knew—had we bothered to adjust our “progressive” blinders in order to see around us.

If all the education reformers were to shift their focus and their influence and their efforts to ending poverty and discrimination, rather than putting band-aids on school books, then the achievement gap, which mirrors the family income gap, would not constitute the economic divide that we must yell across while pretending it doesn’t exist. To extend your own road kill metaphor, John, some of those reformers never even saw the truck coming—they simply thought that bright light was the dawning of yet another beautiful day (see Wilkins and Haycock at Education Trust).

Having wasted the last thirty years of ed reform with making kids stupid with tests and eager to escape school, undercutting support for public schools, demonizing teachers, and getting tough on oversight and accountability for everyone on the other side of the corporate board room door, the same elite know-nothings who brought you the most recent three decades of school misery are planning the next three.

From Monty Neill at FairTest, who offfers this summary of some interesting docs that recently came across his desk.

I received in the mail today a document - Intergovernmental approaches for strengthening K-12 accountability systems - which is a transcript of a meeting of Oct 29, 2007, sponsored by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Lynn Olsen of Ed Week wrote a summary, available here.

Part I
Intergovernmental Models for Setting Academic Standards, with Checker Finn and Michael Cohen as panelists. The lead presenters in part II are Bob Linn and Tom Toch, but most of that section is actually discussion. In panel one also, most of the time is spent in discussion among the 40 participants.

I would note that based on names I recognized, the list of names, and the photos sprinkled throughout, there appeared to be one person of color (black). No union person and no person from a K-12 education association (principals, subect area groups) was present, nor community activists or parents. The discussion involved some academics, mostly people from government and even more from the non- and for-profit private sectors; measurement experts were fairly prominent.

What these folks are doing is working out how to construct a system of national standards and assessments. There was no discussion of whether such a system is desirable - some on feasibility, far more on various ideas of how. Interestingly, at this point there was little push for attaching real stakes. Rather, the basic conception is that of the American Diploma Project: build standards that states will adopt in common (maybe with federal support, but not federal mandate); then construct assessments. Lack of current quality was certainly mentioned – but in part 2 there is the pretense that the MA MCAS test is a good exam, and a defense of the NY Regents tests from an NY official. The claim is this system will provide signals on what education should accomplish. The prototype is an ADP Algebra II test. Hard to see how stakes would not soon follow, though the problem at least in the short term is that if the assessments could actually assess pretty comprehensively and accurately what students needed to do in college, vast numbers of students would not be "proficient."

People raised lots of issues, from whether or what stakes to quality of tests to opportunity to learn - but, again, no one questioned the underlying premise as to whether to work toward some sort of system, despite a few questions about its effectiveness to date. For example, Susan Traiman of the Business Roundtable asked: " Five years from now, approximately 2013, the United States will then have been at this whole process of standards, graduation requirements, for about 30 years. So what makes you think that the historians won’t look back and say, 'The country has spent 30 years fiddling around with standards and assessments and graduation requirements, and no more kids were college- and work-ready?'"

But, given who was there and that ADP is working in many states on this project, we can certainly see from this document a direction being taken on standards-based tests that I expect will become increasingly powerful. Note that the direction here is largely end-of-course exams, which more states are talking about doing and some actually implementing.

Note also that ADP has worked from first-year-of-college expectations back to grade 1 to craft standards, grade by grade. Presumably these will not be national, but they are likely to be increasingly common. Whether tests are common, still state-based, purchased by states from companies, or whatever, this group seemed less clear on - no one model of how to do the assessing emerged. Finn strongly argued for keeping NAEP separate, as did some others.

Part II
More dismal in that it sank into the mire of testing details. Of course those are important if the tests are made important, but the pretense was that the chimerical "good test" can be constructed and used – if only enough money were spent on it. As the measurement people took over the conversation for a while, they pulled off the trick of taking what was posed as a problem and surrounding it with enough fog that the problem seemed to disappear – all is well.

While, again, truly fundamental issues were either not raised or quickly dismissed (as with 'opportunity to learn'), there were arguments, and many clearly believe that NCLB is either having a harmful effect or no real positive effect, that it won’t get the US to high-quality schooling.

Many in this room did convince themselves that a national test is on the table politically, though others very much disagreed.

The idea of a complex system of low-stakes assessments feeding into school improvement seems to have pretty much escaped this group.

Conclusion: While Part I showed this push toward commonality, Part II seemed far more mired in particulars and with far less generality. It was less focused, more all over the place. It is in that sense less relevant to understanding the push toward a common national set of standards and assessments.

PS – there are assorted other materials in the last 50 pp of this 15-page document.

Everyone committed to education reform at the beginning of the 20th Century wanted to be known as a progressive. Progressive meant forward thinking, science minded, backwards shunning, philosophy scoffing, utility seeking, elitist enabling, common people patronizing, business friendly, efficiency driven, waste avoiding. A great deal of the inspiration of the time came from Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Prinicples of Scientific Management, still in print today and still hailed by many CEOs as the best book on management ever written. It was Taylor's little book that inspired time and motion studies, assembly line techniques, and the fixation on the elimination of waste in organizations.

His book came at a critical time for the early education reformers, who were busily trying to create respectability in 1911 for a new academic discipline to train superintendents and other school administrators to run America's public school system, then experiencing explosive growth. John Franklin Bobbitt, Elwood P. Cubberley, and Joseph Mayer Rice borrowed Taylor's ideas to create a "scientific management" of school systems, thus assuring that the future of schools would be guided more by economic concerns than by pedagogical ones. A history of schools done on the cheap went all the way back to Colonial times, and the new quantifiable management strategies of the early 20th Century offered a future that would be fixated even more on efficiency. It also set the stage for a long war with the teachers, who saw children as people rather than units or numbers, and who saw themselves as educators rather than production workers.

We can look back from 2008 to 1908 and see, in fact, the same 19th Century economics and science guiding education reform today as it did then. The biggest difference today is that business is not only interested in schools preparing future employees and assuring social control among the populace, but now business would like to assure that the charter school business does the preparing, with taxpayers to foot the bill for what was once a civic responsibility of elected representatives. Today's corporate socialism offers another example of corporate excess driven by corporate feeding on the jobs that cannot be exported. If not checked, it promises to gobble up the civic and civil space required for a democratic republic to exist. And it seems that Obama and Clinton, both, are oblivious to the reality of the corporate charter solution and the enabling that results when urban schools are turned over to mayors' offices to run.

And so the new generation of efficiency zealots are so similar to the ones at the beginning of the last century. For yesterday's Taylorism stands to be replaced by a 2.0 version inspired by Marc Tucker, whose connections to the Democrats promises him a shot at imposing his new efficiency model if Clinton or Obama is elected.

Today in Colorado there are signs that Tucker has found a petri dish to grow his own culture of 21st Century Taylorism that he spelled out in the fear-mongering Tough Choices or Tough Times, offered in a summarized form for the Kappan last year. (Here is the critique of Tuckerism offered by EPI. Read it!!).

Essentially, the Tucker solution aims to use, what else, testing to eliminate waste in school systems of the 21st Century. Better tests, of course!! Tuckerism envisions a P-22 curriculum designed for the corporate state, with testing as the trigger for moving through the system. In fact, 10th graders may test out of high school if they can pass a test, which will guarantee them acceptance into a state college or a vocational school. This test is for the low fliers, especially those who are at risk of dropping out. Solution here: test students out of school before they can drop out. And if they can pass the test, then they will not need remedial courses in college--more efficiency.

Now for those who are more capable and more ambitious, they can pass the same test in 10th grade at a higher level to stay IN high school, thus assuring them a Gold Plated honors diploma and a spot in the Research One universities or the exclusive liberal arts colleges. In other words, students have to score higher to stay in high school, where one can imagine then an unending series of AP exams to get them ready for college--and to eliminate the necessity of taking intro level college courses. More efficiency. Of course, family income (the gold), as it always has, will continue to determine who gets the Gold.

And this is the basis for the big talk of education revolution in Colorado. I am still wondering what happens to the 11th graders who don't pass the test low enough to get into trade school or who don't pass it high enough to stay in high school.

If this is the best that Democrats can do in terms of education improvement, they should never have been elected or they should never be elected. This is The Old Sham Redux, perpetuating the same stupidity based on the same old thinking and inept notions that seriously threaten our future as democratic republic. It would be better to let the entire current structure crumble than to put under it a new foundation made of the same faulty foundation materials, while hoping for different results. Unfortunately, Colorado parents, teachers, and children seem on the verge of a new edifice based made from the same sand.

Here is a bit from the Daily Sentinel last week to give you an idea of the same tired old crap, recycled for Colorado audiences:

Monday, February 25, 2008

The governor’s office and state lawmakers plan to unveil a comprehensive education reform proposal this week aimed at fundamentally rewriting the state’s content standards and standardized tests.

Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, said the bill will work in three phases: first, to strengthen Colorado’s course content standards; second, to mesh the new standards with the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests and “deal with the very real deficiencies in CSAP” tests; and, third, to create a new diploma for advanced-level students.

Penry said the proposal, co-sponsored by Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, and Rep. Rob Witwer, R-Golden, will mark a revolutionary alignment of curriculum standards from preschool through high school.

“It will attempt to create a new philosophy, a belief system that in order to succeed in the 21st century marketplace, all kids need something beyond high school,” said Evan Dreyer, spokesman for the governor, “whether that’s vocational education or certificate training or traditional college.” . . .

And here is a very sensible commentary from the Denver Post last week by someone concerned with children. It reminds us that "quality doesn't depend on doing the wrong thing better":

By Angela Engel

Article Last Updated: 02/24/2008 08:30:21 PM MST

In 2000, Citizens for Quality Public Education published "Senate Bill 186 and The Truth About Colorado Educational Reform," a report warning about the consequences of grading schools based solely on standardized test scores.

Under the leadership of Gov. Bill Owens, SB 186 was passed anyway. At that time, my daughter, Sophie, was 4 months old. The following year, the federal No Child Left Behind was enacted.

Since then, everything the report cautioned concerning high-stakes testing has come to pass: narrowing curriculum, negative school climates, disenfranchised teachers, frustrated parents, and children who quickly losing sight of the value of their own education.

Not only were the Citizens for Quality Public Education correct, but all of the outcomes associated with education reform over the past decade have demonstrated failure. Consider the following:

• Dropout rates have increased significantly. Since the implementation of high-stakes testing, including NCLB and SB 186, Colorado's dropout rate has nearly doubled, from 2.4 percent in 2003 to 4.5 percent in 2006.

• Students now have fewer course electives. A survey by the Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of NCLB and high-stakes testing, 71 percent of the nation's school districts have reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects.

• Recess has been reduced or canceled. According to the National Parent Teacher Association, nearly 40 percent of U.S. schools have either canceled recess or are considering doing so because of the time constraints of standardized testing and budget cuts. Over the past 12 years, DPS has decreased physical education time by an average of 40 minutes per week.

• More than a dozen schools have been closed down. High-stakes testing promised to close the achievement gap, but instead districts are closing schools predominantly in low-income areas. Cole Middle School is on its third conversion in a decade, now that KIPP has abandoned its students. Before SB 186, Cole was a thriving school for the performing arts.

By all indicators, the state's version of school reform has not worked. Even test scores have remained mostly flat, despite the millions spent on McGraw-Hill tests, curriculum guides, and after-school tutorials. Littleton and Cherry Creek, some of the highest performing districts in the state, haven't been meeting federal guidelines for "adequate yearly progress."

The biggest complaints of parents include large class sizes, too much homework, insufficient time for our children to eat lunch or play outside, decreases in programming, and stressful learning environments. These complaints are echoed in the appallingly high turnover of teaching staff.

Assessments aren't the problem; high-stakes testing is. And there is a difference. In very simple terms, the problems we are facing today are the result of an education system that has been redesigned to serve the state. We need a system that serves our children.

Standardization and high-stakes testing rest on a paradigm of uniformity and conformity. If we graduate an entire generation proficient on a single skill set and mindset, we will have failed because our future will depend upon adaptability, imagination and collaboration.

The danger of this game is that it reinforces the misconception of a failing educational system, when what we really have are failing priorities and policies. We can no longer afford to defer the responsibility of our children to a one-size-fits-all test, or "all or nothing" reforms.

This session, Sen. Mike Kopp will introduce Sernate Bill 61, requiring exit exams for 11th-graders. Sen. Peter Groff is sponsoring Senate Bill 130, establishing a two-tiered system for accountability while maintaining the real barrier to innovation: CSAP.

It didn't work in Florida and it won't work in Colorado. Quality doesn't rely on doing the wrong thing better.

Before adding more layers of legislation, our government representatives first need to clean up the mess they've already created.

Sophie is 8 years old now; our children simply can't afford to wait any longer for the legislature to come to terms with its mistakes.

Angela Engel is project director for the Children's Action Agenda.

It is really the saddest and most persistent reality in the long history of urban education reform : as one foundering reform is replaced by another lined up to take its place, each high-sounding plan remains persistently blind to the effects of poverty that assure its failure beforehand and the failure of each subsequent reform.

Now in school systems where only half of the students graduate in four years, plans are underway to turn all these schools in college prep academies. Another grandiose sweet smelling illusion that ignores the unassailable truth that continues to be stringently denied by those hoping to staunch the hemorrhage with a never-ending supply of expensive band-aids.

ENDING POVERTY WILL ALLOW EDUCATION REFORMS A CHANCE TO SUCCEED, WHEREAS IGNORING POVERTY WILL ASSURE THEIR CONTINUED FAILURE. Hoping to end poverty by improving education places the cart exactly in front of the horse.

Another blind example from the NY Times:

BOSTON — At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.

And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.

Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.

In affluent suburbs, where college admission is an obsession, some educators worry that high schools, with their rigorous college preparatory curriculums, have become too academically demanding in recent years.

By contrast, many urban and low-income districts, which also serve many immigrants, are experimenting with ways to teach more than the basic skills so that their students can not only get to college, but earn college degrees. Some states have begun to strengthen their graduation requirements.

“This is transformational change,” said Dan Challener, the president of the Public Education Foundation, a Chattanooga group that is working with the area public schools. “It’s about the purpose of high school. It’s about reinventing what high schools do.”

What is required, educators say, is nothing less than revolutionizing schools built for another century, when a high school diploma was a ticket to social mobility in a manufacturing economy, and students with only basic skills could make it into the middle class. But the task is daunting, and the outcome uncertain, experts say.

“We don’t know yet how to get everyone in our society to this level of knowledge and skills,” said Michele Cahill, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, which, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is financing many of the new efforts. “We’ve never done it before.” . . . .

ENDING POVERTY WILL ALLOW EDUCATION REFORMS A CHANCE TO SUCCEED, WHEREAS IGNORING POVERTY WILL ASSURE THEIR CONTINUED FAILURE. Helloooooooooooo.