-- Reduce four 1st-grade classes (Saya's grade) to three.
-- Fire a dozen teachers, including my daughter's original 1st-grade teacher, someone she liked very much.
-- Cancel many traditional school parties, dances, and festivals.
-- Reduce once-a-week school assemblies to once-a-month.
-- Eliminate the 6th-grade (with plans to eliminate the 5th-grade next school year).
-- Reduce the school lunch program, with an increase in cost.
-- Reduce ESL instruction.
-- Eliminate after-school care.
-- Eliminate the breakfast program.
-- Reduce extended-day instruction for struggling students from five days per week to three.
Oligarchy's pimp Mike Bloomberg then appointed someone named Dennis Walcott to replace Black, a man with all the "education background" Black lacked, but who's just as committed to devolving what was once the best public school system in the country into a wealth = education formula.
Chris Hedges today has a beautiful column about what is being done to our children and why.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.In a tribute to Robert Frost spoken one month before Dallas, John F. Kennedy presented his vision of a civilized America.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.
