It's Time To "Get Uncomfortable"

“Get uncomfortable, challenge your own perceptions to find clarity, be fearless, be kind, meet someone new.”

Those words were spoken by Mandy Manning, newly elected National Teacher of the Year. More on her below...

Time to focus on the little stuff

In a recent NY Times interview, Joan Baez said of her own activism, "I don't think we can think in big terms now, or we'll just get under the covers and never get out. The little stuff almost becomes more important right now, because you have a chance at it. The world we are living in is being made horrible and is going to need every little victory—that your family and friends feel some kind of support, some kind of goodness." 

It was like she was reading my mind.

With the advent of the current administration regime, education activism has become much more than fighting against vouchers, charter schools and standardized testing. It now also includes gun violence, immigration rights, racism, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, an education secretary who is a religious zealot, and the overall fight for the survival of our democracy. As our nation veers toward a Constitutional crisis, I want to focus—as Joan says—on "the little stuff"—our students, because that's where this all started. 

Time to challenge perceptions

In a recent open letter to Betsy DeVos on the current national wave of teacher strikes, I included some pictures of the horrendous conditions in which children in the wealthiest nation on earth are expected to learn. Far too many of our students also live in these—or worse—conditions. In another post, I called out the current keepers of the ideals of this once great nation for abandoning her most precious resource: our future, our children. The wealthiest nation in the history of humanity has turned its back on its children because tax cuts for the wealthy are supposed to magically cure our nation's ills. 

These posts are but drops of water in the vast ocean of education activists who, for more than a decade, have been challenging our nation's leaders on their failed and profit-driven education policies. But every drop combines to create great waves that batter the established shoreline—right on up to the White House—like this one last week:

On Wednesday, EdWeek reported that, at the State Teachers of the Year meeting with Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, National Teacher of the Year, Mandy Manning, staged a silent protest. She "wore several buttons on her dress, including one that said Trans Equality Now, one for the Women's March, and one of a rainbow-colored apple." She also presented him with letters written by her students. 

Manning said on a press call that the pins were meant to convey her message of support for all of her populations of students. "[Our students] are wanted; they are loved; they are enough; they matter," she said. 

Manning teaches newly arrived immigrant and refugee students in Washington state. She told Education Week that she had her students write letters to the White House to share their stories—from bureaucratic red tape splitting up families to being told to "go back to Africa." 

She was prohibited by Trump from giving her speech, which focused on the plight of her students, but later gave it on CNN's Van Jones Show:

 


Thank you, Mandy, for being a powerful voice for all your students, especially those whose voices have been silenced for far too long. I look forward to your advocacy this coming year.

The other State Teachers of the Year sparred with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over a host of issues including vouchers, school funding and the current wave of teacher strikes, to which DeVos responded with her tired script about teacher protests being "at the expense of kids and their opportunity to go to school and learn."

Montana's Teacher of the Year, Melissa Romano told reporters, "For her to say at the ‘expense of children’ was a very profound moment and one I’ll remember forever, because that is so far from what is happening."

Time to name names

Among the most moving memorials I have ever seen are the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, and the placards outside the late Senator Frank Lautenberg's DC office that listed the names and pictures of all our brave service men and women killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They remind us not only of profound events, but forever memorialize the individual human beings whose lives were ended by man's inhumanity to man. 

For far too many children in this country their home life is as horrendous as—or worse than—the conditions in their schools. It's easy for anyone (myself included) on either side of the education fight to speak of these children in terms of statistics and/or generalizations. Sometimes we need to. But we also need to give a name to these statistics. We need to hear their stories in all their heartbreaking detail, we need to confront our own fears, admit our misconceptions, and, as Mandy said, "get uncomfortable" with the reality they face, because that is what really matters.  

To that end, going forward I will be devoting much of this blog to telling your stories of individual students and the education professionals who are their greatest champions. The series will be called "Educating 'Reformers'". As always, student and teacher privacy and confidentiality are my number one concerns. Unless I have written permission from teachers and students, all names and locations will be changed.

If you have a story you would like to share, please contact me at mcorfield610@gmail.com.

NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia has no time to be diplomatic – Part II

(UPDATE: Please see the addendum at the end of this post.)

Part I of this series on the round table discussion between NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia and NJ education bloggers and activists focused on the devastating effects of high-stakes testing on special needs children, and how edu-preneurs are profiting from the testing boom. 

Part II focuses on the mainstream media blackout.

As with Part I, unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are Lily's.

When you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth* 

*Attributed to both Vladimir Lenin and Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

"Everything [Secretary Duncan] said, everything [he's] advocated for says there must be a consequence for not having your quota of kids hitting your cut score...  

"[He] needs to see teachers being evaluated by students' test scores, students being labeled by their test scores, schools being called 'failures' by student test scores...

"Let's call it what it is; it's not 'accountability'...

"The fact is that standardized tests won't tell you if kids are college and career ready, yet they say it and the mainstream press prints it. And that has to end." (emphasis mine)

In the past six years or so education blogging has exploded. My blog roll is but a small sampling of the highly educated and well informed citizens who are writing about what's happening. Lily blogs and Tweets: here's her account of her NJ trip. Diane Ravitch's blog alone gets thousands of hits a day. Ed bloggers are doing incredible investigative work connecting the dots between Wall St., Silicon Valley billionaires, charter schools, test prep companies, 'charities' such as The Broad, Walton and Gates Foundations, ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) and Washington, DC. They're writing books, too. Years from now, when this house of cards falls, I hope somebody will be giving out awards for all their efforts.

"The bloggers and the educators are the only ones asking, 'Why are we basing so much of education funding on something that benefits the testing industry?'"

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know about the ongoing feud some of us have with The Star Ledger editorial board including director, Tom Moran (here, here and here for starters). Despite numerous attempts to educate him on the facts, he simply refuses to do his homework. It's no wonder Lily didn't want to meet with them. They're not alone. Other Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers are equally inept in their reporting, preferring to shill for those setting the policies or, like The Los Angeles Times, resorting to McCarthy-era tactics like publishing teachers' evaluation scores (the newspaper's reasoning being this is public information). A short time later a teacher who was rated ineffective took his own life. "Family members have guessed that the rating contributed to his death." 

Why the dearth of factual reporting? Much has been written about the incestuous relationship between the mainstream media and the billionaires who fund ed 'reform', but a good place to start is this David Sirota piece. For example, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp owns The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox Broadcasting Co. as well as Amplify, the company that was awarded a $12.5 million contract from the Obama administration to develop Common Core assessments. 

Is it any coincidence that Fox News comes down squarely on the side of 'reform'? There is so much wrong with this Tucker Carlson piece it's cringe-inducing, and my own appearance on Fox and Friends had me wondering how anyone in their right mind could believe that garbage. 

The traditionally 'liberal media' isn't entirely innocent. Although MSNBC's Morning Joe generally has a balanced roster of panelists and guests, Joe Scarborough has a personal ax to grind with teachers unions. (And I'll talk about NBC's Education Nation in Part III.) As I've said before, with all the excuses we hear from students about why they didn't do their homework, educators are experts in B.S. detection, and there's a whole lotta that being shoveled at the uninformed general public by media outlets that fan the flames, beat the war drums and call for teachers' heads on platters because "it's all about the children profits."  

Sirota writes (emphasis mine):

"Though it is rarely mentioned, the truth is that the largest funders of the 'reform' movement are the opposite of disinterested altruists. They are cutthroat businesspeople making shrewd financial investments in a movement that is less about educating children than about helping 'reform' funders hit paydirt. In that sense, they are the equivalent of any industry leaders funding a front group in hopes of achieving profitable political ends (think: defense contractors funding a front group that advocates for a bigger defense budget). The only difference is that when it comes to education 'reform,' most of the political press doesn’t mention the potential financial motives of the funders in question. 

"While I’ve written about this reality before, recent news perfectly exemplifies how the 'reform' movement is really just a sophisticated business strategy."

(Note to Tom Moran: Is David Sirota a 'conspiracy theorist', too?)

Rutgers University Professor and blogger Dr. Bruce Baker weighs in (emphasis mine): 

We've entered a bizarro world I never could have imagined when I started out doing this stuff back in the mid-1990s. And this Bizarro world is being promoted from the supposed highest echelons of our highly stratified society.
[...]

This idiocy - cast as lofty super-intellectual progressivism that us poor common folk simply can't grasp... has to stop.

We are being led down a destructive road to stupid - by arrogant, intellectually bankrupt, philosophically inconsistent, empirically invalid and often downright dumb ideas being swallowed whole and parroted by an increasingly inept media - all, in the end creating a massive ed reform haboob distracting us from the relatively straightforward needs of our public schools.

Lily gets the last word:

"It's just incredible that Campbell Brown and Silicon Valley [billionaires who are financing Vergara] are all very wealthy and most of them have Wall Street ties. Isn't it just a coincidence that all these really wealthy billionaires woke up and said, 'I want to make the world a better place. Let's fire more teachers.' Not 'let's find better ways to train or hire teachers.' If you fire a bunch of people but have the same hiring practices, you're still going to get the same people, so how serious are you?

"What they're really saying is, 'We need a really fast, easy way to get rid of a bunch of teachers.' And replace them with... what? Teachers who never taught pre-NCLB. [Teaching to the test] is the only way they know how to teach."

... and not doing their homework is the only way mainstream media knows how to report on education.

That's it for Part II. Stay tuned for Part III:

The false invitation to educators and what happened when one said, "No more!"

ADDENDUM:

The following two excellent blog posts on the ways ed 'reformers' are buying the media and shaping the message were brought to my attention after I originally posted this piece.

First is Mercedes Schneider's post about how Bill Gates purchases messaging, particularly via NPR:

Those with the obviously-declared education privatization agenda have appointed themselves the “keepers of the education conversation.” They will publicize what they decide “works.” After all, they are above actually doing the educating, and since those of us doing the educating are “too busy,” we need for them to cement the narrative that what they pay for (test-driven reform, charters, vouchers) is what “works.” As Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton reports:

Bruce Reed, president of the Broad Foundation, said the idea for Education Post originated with his organization but that other philanthropic groups had recognized the need years ago. …

One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education, Reed said.

“Administrators, school leaders and teachers have papers to grade, schools to run, and they don’t have time to get out and talk about this,” he said. “This is an effort to help spread information about what works both inside the field and outside.”

Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, [former Arne Duncan communications shaper] Cunningham said. [Emphasis added.]

Information control, my friends. And, of course, the controlled narrative will feed the idea of corporate reform “success”:

While there are myriad nonprofit organizations devoted to K-12 education,none are focused solely on communication, said Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the successes of education reform around the country,” Wolfson said. “You have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere. And there is a lot of success. There is also an awful lot of misperception around what ed reform is, and there hasn’t been an organization . . . focused on correcting those misimpressions.” [Emphasis added.]

I’m sorry, but the “misimpression” of corporate reform as being punitive and destructive to the community-based school and the career teacher and friendly to a grossly-under-regulated privatization is beyond “impression”; it is a reality fostered not only by years of a failed NCLB but one that continues to be fostered by NCLB waiver-yanking US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

How funny that those keen on promoting the traditional public education “failure” narrative now want to shape it into a “success” designed to conceal their own failure.

Second, Anthony Cody writes about the overt ways corporate money buys messaging. Please read the entire post and share. This is the next wave of ed 'reform':

We have some brand new players entering the field. Peter Cunningham, former PR agent for Arne Duncan at the Department of Education, has convinced billionaires Bloomberg and Walton to give his new Education Post $12 million to “shift the conversation” about education reform, away from the polarized place it has been.

In an early post on the Education Post, Cunningham wrote,

With the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, we are launching a new organization called Education Post to provide a strong voice for those who believe the current education system needs to get better.

We will spread the word that in communities around the country progress is being made. All across America, there are countless success stories where states and districts had the courage and determination to put aside politics and work together to improve education.

And coming soon, with funding from the Gates Foundation and others, Edreports.org,

a new, independent nonprofit designed to improve K-12 education in the United States, will launch in winter 2014. EdReports.org will provide free, web-based reviews of instructional materials series focusing on alignment to the Common Core and other indicators of high quality as recommended by educators, including usability, teacher support and differentiation. These Consumer Reports-style reviews will highlight those instructional materials that are aligned to the higher standards states have adopted so that teachers, principals and district and state officials charged with purchasing materials can make more informed choices.

How does this represent bias?

This week, some in the media have begun to take notice of the effect money attached to an agenda can have. Areport in Current describes what has become the elephant in the editorial room, especially in what is now inaccurately called “public” media:

The [Gates] foundation has supported public radio and TV journalism for years, backing coverage of global health, another priority for its philanthropy, as well as education. Within the past year, it has extended that commitment with $1.8 million in support to NPR for expanded education reporting. It also gave $639,000 to American Public Media for multiplatform coverage of education technology, to be featured on Marketplace’s broadcasts and website. In previous years, the Gates Foundation has also supported Frontline, PBS NewsHour and Teaching Channel, a nonprofit producer of public TV programming.

NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia has no time to be diplomatic – Part I

"This is a test. This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency..." Yea, you know the drill. More on this later...

This is Ethan Rediske and his parents. Ethan is an 11-year old Florida boy who was born with cerebral palsy. He is also blind and brain damaged. He is perhaps the poster child for all that is toxic and outright dangerous in education 'reform'—especially standardized testing. More on him later...

"I don't have time to be diplomatic."

This is Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, newly elected President of the National Education Association.

What do all three have in common? Keep reading...

A woman on a mission

Lily is on a mission to energize fellow education professionals and parents to fight high stakes testing and she's taking it to the streets. As part of her 50-state Back-to-School tour, she declined a meeting with the Star Ledger's editorial board, citing the fact that mainstream media is woefully out of touch and misinformed about education 'reform'. Instead she chose to meet with New Jersey education bloggers and activists Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman), Ani McHugh (TeacherBiz), Darcie Cimarusti (Mother Crusader), Melissa Katz (The Education Activist), Melissa Smearer-Tomlinson, Susan Carlsson of Save Our Schools NJ, and me, along with Rosi Efthim, editor of the progressive blog, Blue Jersey, parent activist Rose Jorgensen, and educator and media consultant, Ronen Kaufman.

As the president of the nation's largest labor union, Lily is a woman of the people, with legions of adoring fans both inside and outside the association. Why? 

1. She has empathy. As a former educator in a low income school in Utah and now as a national figure, she can relate to people all across the socioeconomic spectrum, especially those who live on the margins. 
2. She connects to individuals. She is more about listening than speaking, and she has that rare gift of remembering people even if she's only met them once or twice.
3. She gets it. After several years of wondering which side of the 'reform' debate our association was on, she is a breath of fresh air. She understands that the corporate takeover of public education is not a conspiracy theory. It's real, it's happening at an alarming pace, and it's flat out wrong.

With Lily at the helm, I am optimistic about the direction the NEA is heading. After several years of effort, we finally drew our line in the sand this summer by passing a resolution calling for the resignation of Arne Duncan—not an improvement plan, as AFT did. No, this was a flat-out call for his resignation. 

She listened to our call and she's taking action.

The meeting

The focus of our 90 minute round-table conversation was the devastating effects of high stakes testing on students, educators and public education as a whole and how to stop it. 

With so much meaningful input from all who were present, it took a while to translate it into a user-friendly format. What follows is a quote or paraphrase from our discussion followed by some informational text for clarification. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are Lily's.

Who really should be held 'accountable'?

"I am on a crusade against this toxic testing. It's not whether the test is good or bad. It's not whether the standards are good or bad. It doesn't matter. If there's some kind of standardized test that's about 'hit your cut score' otherwise you're going to get punished, they can turn something perfectly good and wonderful into something toxic in a school. I haven't talked to anyone who supports it, and by the way that includes secretary Duncan. But I don't see him saying, 'lets stop that'."

Let's cut to the chase here: the overemphasis on standardized testing serves three purposes:

1. Funding: If districts meet their quota of students hitting their cut score, they get money.
2. Getting rid of educators: Test scores are a quick and easy way to get rid of 'bad teachers' reduce payroll. It's like an assassin's bullet from a roof top: clean and impersonal, and nobody takes the blame.
3. Money: This is what happens when testing giant, Pearson, gets exposed for its influence and profiteering at the expense of our children.

"This madness has corrupted teaching and learning."

What kind of crazy punishments and/or carrots and sticks is your school district dangling in front of educators and students? We spoke about administrators denying students recess or promising to abolish the dress code if students hit their cut scores. This is not best practice! This is bribery! And the bribery starts at the Department of Education. School districts across the country are being bribed: increase your test scores or you don't get your funding.

But perhaps the cruelest story of all is the deplorable and downright inhumane treatment of special needs children, especially Ethan Rediske. His mother describes what he went through because of standardized testing and how she fought back (emphasis mine):

Not only was the Florida Adapted Assessment inappropriate for the level of my son’s abilities, it endangered his health – the long, stressful testing sessions requiring him to sit in his wheelchair caused pressure sores, fluid to pool in his lungs, and increased seizures and spasticity that contributed to his deteriorating health. 

Only after climbing a mountain of paperwork and garnering media attention was Ethan granted a medical waiver for the FAA. Despite assurances at his IEP meeting that the waiver would be granted again for this school year, the school district demanded paperwork proving his continued medical fragility. The insult to this injury was that he was on his deathbed – the school district and the state of Florida required a letter from hospice care stating he was unable to take the FAA.

This incident caused anguish to my family and his teacher, and shows a stunning lack of compassion and even common sense on the part of the Department of Education. His exceptionally talented teacher faced threats and sanctions because she continued to work with him even though he wasn’t preparing for the FAA. I wonder if these administrators are more concerned with policy, paperwork, and their bottom line than the children they have been elected to serve.

There is nothing in any state or federal law that says kids should be denied recess or a child on their deathbed should have to take a standardized test. So when parents and students are put in that position, they need to "just say No". Lily called for educators and parents to organize push back and keep pushing back until someone takes responsibility because no one is taking responsibility for insane practices such as these.

"The one who is ultimately accountable is Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and he's not taking responsibility for what has become toxic in our schools, so who do we hold responsible when no one will?"

On edu-preneurs and big money

"That Value Added voodoo number has tied us in knots. Districts that don't have enough money for librarians and ESL teachers now have full time Test Compliance Officers who only monitor test scores and whether or not a district is hitting its cut score of students passing standardized tests." 

"The billion dollar edu-business has benefited from this insanity. Just like Wall St. sold toxic bundled mortgages, they're now bundling test prep and scripted reading because [states] are invested in fear."

Some time earlier this year, my school email started filling up with spam from vendors selling all sorts of miracle cure-all CC$$ products: test prep, lesson plans, Core-aligned 'assessments', you name it. Since the start of this school year, which is only a couple of weeks old, that number has increased significantly. 

Test prep companies are making out like bandits because the Common Core and its related tests are fear-based. Their products have nothing to do with making students 'college and career ready'. A well-rounded curriculum that includes the arts, health and physical education, foreign languages and a variety of electives and clubs will. But in our dysfunctional ed 'reform' culture, there's no time or money for that. If a school district's students don't hit their cut scores, they risk losing millions in federal funding. It really is that simple. And the irony is that the vendors are invested in their failure because they want to be there to create the next thing.

"Oh Marie," you say, "you really can't be serious. We're talking about children! These companies would never do that." Take your heads out of the sand, folks. The primary goal of education companies—like any other for-profit company is to make money, and once the Obama administration green-lighted Race to the Top, it opened the floodgates for them to design and sell all sorts of "new and improved" test and curriculum products.

It's Advertising101. Nike expects sneakers to wear out so they design new ones. Apple designs a new iPhone every few years. Supermarket shelves are overflowing with "new and improved" junk food. Edu-preneurs are no different. These companies have always made a profit, but the difference now is that parents and school districts are scared. And fear is a powerful purchasing motivator.

"Who would have thought the Reagan years were the glory years of education?"

Now, about that Emergency Broadcasting System test: 

"If this had been an actual emergency, the signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions..." 

There is no public education emergency, folks. But those in charge don't want you to know that because the real life or death emergency is poverty. And a new pair of Nikes new standardized test can't fix that, but it sure looks good to the naive. 

In Part II, we talk about the dearth of mainstream media reporting, the false invitation to educators to be part of the discussion, and what Lily learned when she visited a Camden school.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week: How China and the US are swapping education philosophies

UPDATE! After a good night's sleep I dug some more and found a terrific article from The Atlantic that I incorporated in this post. 

Chinese students are saddled with enormous amounts of homework.

Early on in my teaching career I taught elementary art in the Bernards Township School District in Somerset County. The township is about 83% white with the largest minority being Asian at 14%. With a median family income of $153,000 and poverty below 3%, the children don't want for much. Many parents take an active role in their children's education, encouraging and even demanding they be involved in several after school activities. They expect the schools to offer top-notch curriculums including the arts, foreign languages, plenty of AP classes, sports and extracurricular programs because they pay top dollar in property taxes and they want their children to attend excellent colleges and universities. And the schools deliver.

US News and World Report gave the only high school in the district, Ridge High School, a gold medal in its annual rankings of US high schools. It placed 177th in the country overall, 7th in the state, 136th in the country for STEM education, with almost 100% of its students proficient in math and language arts, and a College and Career index of 65%.

This is an excellent school fed by excellent elementary and middle schools.

My story is about a 3rd grade girl whom I taught there. I don't remember her name, but she was Chinese American. Her father worked at one of the big pharmaceutical companies for which New Jersey was once famous. (Many are pulling up stakes and leaving the state.) She was very bright and eager to please.

She was done with her project and was doing some free drawing when it was time to clean up. She begged me to let her finish her drawing. I couldn't let her stay because I had another class coming in. She was really pushing me on this. When I suggested she take it home and finish it, she told me she couldn't; she didn't have any time. I jokingly told her I found that hard to believe, to which she replied, "I have no time at home. I have violin lessons and soccer practice after school, then I go to Chinese school Saturday mornings, and I do that homework on Sundays."

I was shocked. This child was 8 or 9 years old and had that much of a work load. She clearly had little time for play or creative thinking and being. But as my teaching career progressed, I came in contact with more students like her—and not just students of Asian or Indian descent. I have seen plenty of Caucasian students whose parents are so fixated on academic success that they push their children to the point of exhaustion.

So does China—but not in what education professionals in the US consider a healthy way. The Chinese education system is a highly competitive group activity with the teacher clearly in control. Students sometimes spend more than 10 hours a day in school and have enormous amounts of homework starting in first grade. If an individual student in a Chinese classroom is struggling, the teacher and the other students work together to help him or her. Teachers are greatly respected and pay no income taxes. College entrance exams, the gaokao, are an all-or-nothing event. As this article  The Atlantic written by Helen Gao, a Chinese immigrant who came to the US in her junior year in high school describes: 

Sitting for nine hours over two days, students are tested on everything from Chinese and math to geography and government. The intense, memorization-heavy, and notoriously difficult gaokao can make the SAT look like a game of Scrabble. How they do on the test will play a big role in determining not just where they go to college but, because Chinese colleges often feed directly into certain industries and fields, what they do for the rest of their life. It's an enormously important moment in any Chinese student's life, which is part of why high schools here dedicate months or even years to preparing for the test. (emphasis mine)

If a student fails the exam—the only criteria for getting into a college—their educational career is basically over. Once they are admitted, they must pass a high stakes test to advance to the next grade. This is an extremely stressful time in the life of not only the student, but the entire family because oftentimes the hopes of several generations rest on this one student. Because of limited space, only about 1/3 of all students in China will be admitted to institutions of higher learning. 

But all this testing comes at a cost. Gao continues:

China's gaokao-style education system has been great at imparting math and engineering, as well as the rigorous work ethic that has been so integral to China's rise so far. But if the country wants to keep growing, its state economists know they need to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity, neither of which is tested for on this life-determining exam. (emphasis mine)

...

I was used to strictly formatted Chinese argumentative essay topics, for which I had memorized hundreds of paragraphs that I could organize like jigsaw puzzles. Western-education-style papers on, for example, the significance of symbols in a novel was not the sort of expressive, creative thinking for which my Chinese teachers had prepared me. 

In the US, public education focuses on the whole child. A struggling student will get more individualized or small group instruction. Teachers are encouraged to be facilitators of learning rather than the sole source. Hands-on, kinesthetic, differentiated, brain-based and whole child teaching and learning are the norm. The best teachers will teach students to think creatively, experiment and take risks; to work to their individual potential. Building healthy self esteem is just as important as teaching academic subjects. Children are given many and different chances for success, even if they drop out of school. College is looked at as a means rather than a means to an end. And as for educator salary and respect, well, if you're reading this, you don't need me to tell you how fantastic they are.

A quick Google search of the differences between the Chinese and US education systems resulted in many articles with the words 'bad', 'unequal', 'expensive' or 'mediocre' in their titles. I passed them by. But I did find this interview of two former Chinese students. The female guest was educated in New Zealand. Her parents moved her out of China because they wanted to give her a better, more diverse education. Notice at the 3:50 mark when talking about her mother's education in Taiwan she says, "You're taught to take tests; not necessarily how to think."



The host then continues by saying, "I think that's becoming more of a thing in the US... Now it does very much seem like it's all about tests." And at about the 4:30 mark, the male guest says, "In China if you have a photographic memory and you can memorize a textbook, then you'll do really well." He goes on to say that in China, education is everything. Parents drill the value of hard work and a good education into their children's heads from a very early age.

But while it's more than admirable that China places such a high value on education (something more American parents must do) and produces some of the top test takers in the world, they have yet to produce a Nobel Prize winner. The country's overemphasis on wrote memorization, drill and skill and standardized tests leaves little room for creativity, independent thinking and kinesthetic learning, things about which the world leader in Nobel Prize winners—the United States—knows a great deal.

But that tide is turning. According to a report in the New York Times:

The United States State Department does not break down its data on visas by age and school type, but anecdotal evidence here suggests that increasing numbers of middle-class families are looking for a way out of China’s test-taking gantlet.

“I didn’t want my son to become a book-cramming robot,” said 15 year old Zhang Ruifan’s mother, Wang Pin, explaining why she sent him to live and learn halfway across the world in the United States. American educators and politicians have been warning for years that rising powers like China and India are poised to overtake the United States in science achievement. On a 2009 standardized test that drew worldwide attention, students in Shanghai finished first in the sciences among peers from more than 70 countries, while the United States came in 23rd (right behind Hungary).

However, as Diane Ravitch points out, according to research (you know, that little something reformy types fail to acknowledge), "The U.S. has never been first in the world, nor even near the top, on international tests. Over the past half century, our students have typically scored at or near the median, or even in the bottom quartile." (emphasis mine)

The Times article continues:

But even many Chinese educators are dismayed by the country’s obsession with stellar test results. Last fall they convened a conference on the topic in Shanghai.
 

“When American high school students are discussing the latest models of airplanes, satellites and submarines, China’s smartest students are buried in homework and examination papers,” said Ni Minjing a physics teacher who is the director of the Shanghai Education Commission’s basic education department, according to Shanghai Daily, an English-language newspaper. “Students also have few chances to do scientific experiments and exercise independent thinking.”

... 

The ministry said the systemic fixation with testing “severely hampers student development as a whole person, stunts their healthy growth, and limits opportunities to cultivate social responsibilities, creative spirit, and practical abilities in students.” (emphasis mine)

So, as China realizes the value of creativity and self expression in education, the United States is moving toward more and more standardized high stakes testing. As school budgets all across the country are slashed and total emphasis is placed on passing standardized tests, phys-ed, art, music, library, computer, foreign language and other related arts programs are being scaled back or eliminated. The cost to the United States will be incalculable because entire populations of learners are being marginalized. The creative side of education, the art of teaching and the joy of learning—things the US excels at—will die unless educators fight to save them.

And as high stakes consequences are increasingly tied to high stakes tests, it won't be long before US teachers go the way of Chinese teachers. In China, Gao says, "Teachers and headmasters, whose reputations and salaries are tied to their students' exam scores, have more of an interest in maintaining a good average than in, say, dedicating extra time to a struggling student."

Before humans spoke they created art. Humanity cannot exist without creativity. Great public education won't either.

How does Gov. Christie sleep at night?

As governor, Chris Christie has done a lot of truly awful things to the people of New Jersey in the past 5 years, but even more egregious than promulgating the myth of ‘failing schools’, demonizing teachers and other public employees, leaving Sandy victims sinking without a life boat, calling a Navy Seal an ‘idiot’, telling the press to ‘take a bat out’ on a 78-year old grandmother (who just happens to be the Senate Majority leader), turning his back on the poor, minorities, the middle and working classes, seniors, the LGBT community, commuters, and the homeless, surrounding himself (there are still no dots connecting him) with irresponsible, vindictive, selfish and, dare I say anti-semitic, staff who would put millions of George Washington Bridge commuters at risk for juvenile, political sport, is the report out of the New York Times and picked up by Rachel Maddow Tuesday that he actually gave away pieces of the World Trade Center as political carrots to the top 20 mayors on his  ‘must-get’ endorsements list.

Governor Christie cares so much about winning that he’s willing to trade off pieces of hallowed ground—a burial site—for political favors. It's like FDR giving away pieces of The USS Arizona.

Everyone who lives in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut metro area has a 6-degrees of separation story about 9/11. Everyone knows someone who knew someone who lost someone or saved someone. When that anniversary rolls around, millions of emotional scabs get ripped off. On any given day, the site of the two reflecting pools, edged with the names of all the victims is quiet and somber. Flowers and other mementos are left on the perfectly engraved names by friends and family who never forget and who will never fully heal. For all intents and purposes, it’s a sacred site for many who never got closure, whose loved one’s remains were never found. And every piece of wreckage should be treated as if it, in some way, is imbued with their spirit.

Ever walk past FDNY Ten House? Engine Company 10 Ladder Company 10 is right across the street from the World Trade Center site. They lost 5 members on 9/11. On the front wall of the newly re-built firehouse is this enormous bronze tribute to the fallen heroes of that day: New York's bravest.  Wonder how they feel knowing that the governor of New Jersey has treated their fallen brothers and sisters with such disrespect?

                                

Three years ago while on the campaign trail, I stopped at a firehouse in the 16^th district where, unbeknownst to me, a piece of the World Trade Center had been presented a few days earlier. (I'm trying to find out whether that mayor was on Christie’s list.) I walked into the room and saw a hulking piece of twisted steel and immediately knew what it was. That’s the kind of unconscious hold those buildings had on the tens of millions of us who took them for granted every day. They were our beacon on the Turnpike, guiding us home from a long day’s journey or a long day’s commute. They were the watchtowers of the tri-state, standing guard over commuters and travelers alike. They were our Mt. Everest and K-2. They simply were… Until they weren’t.

I took this picture back in the '80s. It's been on my refrigerator for years.

And in a slow motion split second, they were replaced with smoke and ash and fire, and screaming and running, and tangled piles of twisted steel and broken glass, broken bodies and broken hearts, fighter jets chasing after ghosts, the acrid smell of jet fuel mixed with so much death… and all that fluttering paper.

And then came the eerie silence that enveloped us like a tomb. With so many airports, the sound of airplanes is like white noise to those of us living in this part of the country. When it stopped for several days afterward, the silence was deafening. And with it came the smoldering pile, the shattered lives, the numbness, the nation at war, and the thousands of brave men and women who would sacrifice their lives—and continue to do so—in a war that was started in the wrong country for the wrong reasons.

I grew up in the shadow of the World Trade Center. I watched it get built every day as I walked to St. Stephen’s School along Chestnut Street in Kearny, rising higher and higher over the New York skyline before the view of lower Manhattan was partially obscured by the garbage dumps that claimed the meadowlands.

My very first day of teaching ever was 9/11. I sat at the front door of the school signing students out all day. From where I sat, I had a clear view of rt. 78, and I watched as police, fire and rescue vehicles raced east to an unknown fate. I wonder how many of those brave men and women made it back home to hug their spouse or their children?

Governor Christie gave away pieces of our collective souls to win political favor, to win an election. How can anyone in their right mind call this leadership? How does Gov. Christie sleep at night?

Excuse me, as Rachel Maddow suggested, I have to go take a shower.

Note: I did an online search to find the list of mayors, and emailed Matt Flegenheimer, one of the writers of the NYT story, to see if he has a copy. As of this posting I have not heard back.