Students Need Parenting To Succeed

Watch this short video of a grandmother's dedication to the education of her grandchild, then tell me how anyone can put the onus of "educating our kids" solely on teachers. Please.

Why So Few Posts?

I have a new job. Not enough folks have the money to hire me as a consultant, even with my sliding scale of fees, so I took a teaching job. Now that I am working for someone else I have much less time for blogging. It's kind of a bummer, but a steady income is not a bummer.

There does seem to be lots of movement in favor of questioning the current edreform policies and ideas spouted by know-nothings like Rhee, Gates and the rest (yeah, you too Tilson). Rhee's organization, StudentsFirst, is now touting partnerships with teachers because they realize that they need the support of teachers if they are going to get their agenda enacted. What they don't seem to realize is that hiring TFA quitters and former teachers who have chosen to leave kids and become policy gurus does nothing for Rhee and her organization's desire to become loved by actual teachers who have remained inside classrooms despite Rhee's unfounded vitriol against us.

Even Arne Duncan is trying to get on our good side by saying we should double teacher salaries. This sounds nice, but is just more of the same teacher-bashing--this time it's just veiled. There is no money to do such a thing, and even if there was enough money, higher-paid teachers cannot overcome the devastating effects of poverty on our low-scoring students. Hence, offering more money is a veiled claim that poorly paid teachers are slouching on the job. Um, no, we're not. Fuck you.

The movement to opt out of standardized testing is also gaining traction. We have seen some prominent educators publicly claim that they have opted their own kids out of the state test. If my kid's mom is cool with it, we will also opt our son out. The oligarchs don't need or deserve all that data on my kid. They are abusive as it is, and I don't need their abuse aimed directly at my son. Fuck those assholes.

My radio show on BTR is also suffering from my new job, as I can no longer do it in the afternoon. If I am to do more radio I must do it during prime-time, which requires a pro account that I cannot afford, hence the donation widget in my sidebar on your left there. I would love to do more radio, and if you want me to do more, I need your financial help to do it. Consider a donation, won't you? I am in contact with a few interesting education leaders who are interested in interviews, and I think they would be a valuable addition to the counter-reform movement that is gaining steam. Anyone who donates is invited to be a guest on the show!

Remember, poverty is the reason for the achievement gap. We've known it for 60 years, and we've been in denial for that long. The reformers have done a good job defeating this idea by saying poverty is not an excuse. They are right. Poverty is not an excuse, it's a goddamned diagnosis.

NAEP Scores Rising For 20 Years

This chart is from a Mother Jones article. Notice that the scores of our kids have been rising for 20 years, yet the gap persists. Why does the gap persist even though* scores are rising? Because child poverty in America is too high and rising. If you disaggregate* the data you see that the lowest-scoring* kids come from poverty and our highest-scoring* kids come from affluence. It couldn't be clearer, or more ignored by reformers.

*Edited cuz I'm stupid.

Interview With Diane Ravitch--An Hour Well Spent

Why Incentives Don't Always Work, Like Merit Pay, For Example

h/t Jersey Jazz Man

No, I Don't Work For You

Last night I was on Ken Pettigrew's radio show for an interview. It got ugly.

I was explaining the reform movement to these conservatives and they decided to say that since they were tax payers, I work for them. I told them I do not work for them, I work for a school district (I didn't bother to tell them I am out of the classroom now, but my points are about teachers and who they work for, not about me).

They then said no, I work for them.

So, I will do my best to explain my position on Monday July 11 at 3:30 Pacific time.

One angle is this: According to Ken's logic, the Secret Service also works for him. I am sure if they thought he was about to shoot the POTUS, they would shoot Ken, even though they work for him. Same with the MPs at the gate to any military base--if Ken wants to try to bust in, they'll either shoot him, or stop him, all the while "working" for him.

And if he were to come into a school uninvited and without checking in, the teachers would be right in surrounding him and stopping him until the police came (who also work for him).

It's a stupid angle, and one conservatives use all the time.

Education Reform's Big Lie Exposed!!

Exposing Education Reform's Big Lie: It Is Jobs and Political Mobilization, Not Schools, Which Lift People Out of Poverty

Dr. Mark Naison


Fordham University

Once again, a major cheating scandal has been uncovered in an urban school district. What happened in Houston ten years ago ( but not before it’s allegedly miraculous test score gains helped spawn No Child Left Behind) has happened in Atlanta. A state investigation has uncovered systematic falsification of test scores by teachers, principals, and district administrators in a district where careers could be made or broken by those results, leading to the resignation of the district superintendant and potential suspensions, and possibly criminal indictments, or scores of teachers and principals

To regard what took place in Atlanta as an exception to an otherwise unblemished record of probity in administering standardized tests would be like regarding Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme as an aberration in an otherwise healthy financial system. In each instance, unscrupulous individuals took the basic tenets of a flawed system to an extreme. In the case of Madoff, he provided clients with high returns based on non-existent investments, rather than flawed ones ( subprime mortgages packed into Triple A bonds); in the case of Atlanta, officials decided to invent impossible results rather than browbeat and terminate teachers and principals when they didn’t achieve them.

Let us be clear- the Atlanta scandal is the logical outcome of a national movement, supported by government and private capital, to radically improve school performance and hopefully lift people out of poverty, through a centrally imposed and rigidly administered combination of privatization, competition, material incentives and high stakes testing. You would think that a movement which commands such widespread support, and extraordinary resources, has a history of proven examples, either in the US, or other nations, to guide its implementation.

But the truth is that there is not a single time in American history- with the exception of the ten years following the end of slavery- where you can point to educational reform as a factor which lifted a group out of poverty, or allowed an important minority group to improve its status relative to the majority population. The kind of “heavy” lifting required to do that, with that one exception of the Reconstruction Era during which activists founded schools for a people once denied literacy, has come, not from top down educational reform, but from bottom up political mobilization, coupled with changes in labor markets which radically improve earning opportunities for the group in question.

Let us look at the one moment in the 20th Century where the African American population not only experienced a rapid improvement in its economic status, but improved its status relative to whites, the time between 1940 and 1950. During those ten years, black per capital income rose from 44% of the white total to 57%. This income growth was not only a result of wartime prosperity, and Black migration from the rural to urban areas, but a result of the protest movement launched by A Phillip Randolph in 1941 to demand equal treatment for Blacks in the emerging war economy, as well as the enrollment of Black workers in industrial unions. Randolph’s march on Washington Movement didn’t lead to the desegregation of the armed forces, but it did lead President Roosevelt to issue a proclamation requiring non-discriminatory employment in defense industries and to create a Commission to enforce this decree. While huge pockets of discrimination remained, African Americans, women as well as men, found work in factories throughout the nation producing ships, aircraft, and motorized vehicles and were enrolled in the unions that represented the bulk of workers involved in war production.

In Detroit, in Los Angeles, in Youngstown, in Pittsburgh, in Richmond California, Black workers, many of them newly arrived in the South were earning incomes four to five times what they would have made as sharecroppers or tenant farmers and had union protection in their places of employment. This economic revolution spawned a political revolution, with nearly 500,000 African Americans joining the NAACP, and a cultural one as well, with rhythm and blues becoming the music of choice for the emerging black working class, inspiring clubs and radio stations and small record labels to cater to this rapidly growing black consumer market.

Though educational opportunities for blacks did improve in this period, it was changes in the job market, fought for, and consolidated by grass roots political movements, reinforced by strong labor unions, that were the primary engine of change.

There is a lesson here that activists and educators should consider. If you want to improve economic conditions in Black and working class neighborhoods, then it would make more sense to raise incomes, either by unionizing low wage industries, or demanding that tax revenues be directed into job creation, rather than trying to legislate magical improvements in schools based on results on standardized tests.

Children living in impoverished communities cannot be magically vaulted into the middle class by pounding information into their heads and testing them on it relentlessly . However, their parents, and older brothers and sisters, can be lifted into the middle class through jobs that offer decent incomes and security coupled with opportunity for personal advancement through education.

School Reform is the American Elite’s preferred response to poverty and inequality, a strategy that requires no sacrifice, no redistribution nor any self-organization by America’s disfranchised groups. Every day, it is proving itself a dismal failure

It’s time that a new strategy be launched that focuses on jobs, economic opportunity and the redistribution of wealth, one linking civil rights groups, unions, and people living in working class and poor communities who have watched wealth and opportunity be siphoned out of their communities by the very wealthy- the same people, ironically, who are the biggest supporters of School Reform!

Mark Naison

Just one graph from School Finance 101 tells most of the story, which you should go read now.

If you're not sure what the graph is showing, it is showing that the neediest kids, described by how many free and reduced lunches are served, are under-represented at KIPP schools in the zip-code in the title of the graph.

This means that when charters claim they are doing better than the other schools around them they also need to mention that the population in the KIPP school is very different than the populations of the comparison schools, making the comparison moot, or useless, or spin. You can decide which it is.

Diane Ravitch Implores Australia NOT To Use America As An Education Model

From NSWTF.ORG

The Grand Coalition Against Teachers, By Joanne Barkan

Firing Line:
The Grand Coalition Against Teachers

Joanne Barkan - June 29, 2011

IN A nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers. Democrats from various wings of the party, virtually all Republicans, most think tanks that deal with education, progressive and conservative foundations, a proliferation of nonprofit advocacy organizations, right-wing anti-union groups, hedge fund managers, writers from right leftward, and editorialists in most mainstream media—all concur that teachers, protected by their unions, deserve primary blame for the failure of 15.6 million poor children to excel academically. They also bear much responsibility for the decline of K-12 education overall (about 85 percent of all children attend public schools), to the point that the United States is floundering in the global economy.

In the last few years, attention to the role of public school teachers has escalated into a high-profile, well-financed, and seriously misguided campaign to transform the profession based on this reasoning: if we can place a great teacher in every classroom, the achievement gap between middle-class white students and poor and minority students will close; all students will be prepared to earn a four-year college degree, find a “twenty-first-century job” at a good salary, and help to restore U.S. preeminence in the world economy.

Here is Barack Obama speaking at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Virginia on March 14, 2011:

The best economic policy is one that produces more college graduates. And that’s why, for the sake of our children and our economy and America’s future, we’re going to have to do a better job educating every single one of our sons and daughters…But when the quality of a teacher can make or break a child’s education, we’ve got to make sure our certified teachers are also outstanding teachers—teachers who can reach every last child.

This article will investigate the fix-the-teachers campaign of today’s “education reformers.” It’s not their only project. They also want public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses; they aim to replace as many regular public schools as possible with publicly funded, privately managed charter schools; some are trying to expand voucher programs to allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools. All this will reshape who controls the $540 billion that taxpayers spend on K-12 schools every year. It endangers the democratic nature of public education as well. But nothing affects children more directly in the classroom than what the reform movement is doing to teachers.

Some Necessary Context

Everyone who supports public education believes that only effective teachers should be in the classroom; ineffective teachers who can’t improve should lose their jobs. Accomplishing this requires a sound method for evaluating teachers and a fair process for firing. In the current system, school principals have the responsibility to assess teachers’ performance and dismiss ineffective ones. Making sure that principals do this well is the district superintendent’s responsibility (not the teachers’). The system works if administrators at all levels and school boards do their jobs.

Even with these assumptions stated, a productive discussion can’t begin without first addressing two questions: what accounts for variations in student achievement, and what is the overall state of K-12 education in the United States?

On the first question, research shows that teachers are the most important in-school factor determining students’ academic performance. But they are not the only in-school factor: class size and the quality of the school principal, for example, matter a great deal. Most crucially, out-of-school factors—family characteristics such as income and parents’ education, neighborhood environment, health care, housing stability, and so on—count for twice as much as all in-school factors. In 1966, a groundbreaking government study—the “Coleman Report”—first identified a “one-third in-school factors, two-thirds family characteristics” ratio to explain variations in student achievement. Since then researchers have endlessly tried to refine or refute the findings. Education scholar Richard Rothstein described their results: “No analyst has been able to attribute less than two-thirds of the variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics of their students” (Class and Schools, 2004). Factors such as neighborhood environment give still more weight to what goes on outside school.

Ed reformers have only one response to this reality: anyone who brings up out-of-school factors such as poverty is both defending the status quo of public education and claiming that schools can do nothing to overcome the life circumstances of poor children. The response is silly and, by now, tiresome. Some teachers will certainly be able to help compensate for the family backgrounds and out-of-school environments of some students. But the majority of poor children will not get all the help they need: their numbers are too great, their circumstances too severe, and resources too limited. Imagine teachers from excellent suburban public schools transferring en masse to low-performing, inner-city public schools. Would these teachers have as much success as they did in the suburbs? Would they be able to overcome the backgrounds of 15.6 million poor children? Even with bonus pay, would they stay with the job for more than a few years? Common sense and experience say no, and yet the reformers insist they can fix public schools by fixing the teachers.

On the second question—what is the state of education in the United States?—both critics and advocates of the reform movement agree that some public schools need significant improvement and that improvement is achievable. But in order to mobilize broad support for their program, ed reformers from Obama on down have pumped up a sense of crisis about the international standing of the entire education system. In reality, however, students in American public schools serving middle-class and affluent children surpass students in other nations in standardized test scores (which ed reformers use obsessively to define success).

The most recent data come from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, released in December 2010. PISA tested fifteen-year-olds in sixty countries (plus five non-state entities such as Hong Kong) in reading, math, and science. Consider the results in reading, the subject assessed in depth in 2009: U.S. students in public schools with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunches) scored 551, second only to the 556 score of the city of Shanghai, which doesn’t release poverty data. The U.S. students outperformed students in all eight participating nations whose reported poverty rates fall below 10 percent. Finland, with a poverty rate of just 3.4 percent, came in second with a score of 536. As the level of student poverty in U.S. public schools increased, scores fell. Because of the high overall child-poverty rate (20.7 percent), the average reading score for all U.S. students was 500 (fourteenth place). In short, poverty drags down our international standing (see this Department of Education site).

How Bill Gates Bought Public Education (or Go Linux!)

It's pretty scary, the way a rich guy can influence an entire nation to succumb to his whim. It's scarier that the public let him.

...

Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 “to influence the national education debates,” acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. “As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,” he said. “There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.”

“Everybody’s implicated,” he added.

Indeed, the foundation’s 2009 tax filing runs to 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. There are the more traditional and publicly celebrated programmatic initiatives, like financing charter school operators and early-college high schools. Then there are the less well-known advocacy grants to civil rights groups like the Education Equality Project and Education Trust that try to influence policy, to research institutes that study the policies’ effectiveness, and to Education Week and public radio and television stations that cover education policies.

The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million “to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.” It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place “strategic data fellows” who could act as “entrepreneurial change agents” in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions — as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them.

“It’s easier to name which groups Gates doesn’t support than to list all of those they do, because it’s just so overwhelming,” noted Ken Libby, a graduate student who has pored over the foundation’s tax filings as part of his academic work.

...
NYT

The Lie Re: Poverty And Education

Refusing to Confront Reality: The Great Harm in Pretending Schools Can Close the Poverty Gap

by William J. Mathis

Scientifically disproven years ago, the “Beat the Odds” myth is still the excuse of convenience for justifying claims that schools can single-handedly overcome poverty.

How it works is that statisticians comb through the test score distribution of high poverty and high minority schools, select those with the highest scores and exclaim, “See! Good teachers and schools can overcome the effects of poverty!”

In any reasonably large score distribution, there are tails (or outliers) of high and low-scoring schools. This is just elementary statistics. When researchers look at these outlier scores a couple of years later they almost invariably find the “beat the odds” schools are no longer exceptional. In Florida, Doug Harris found that only 1.1% of the so-called high flying schools were sustained high fliers. Marty Orland found that without comprehensive community support programs, high flier status is not sustained over time.

The “Beat the Odds” claimants have simply taken well-known statistical phenomena and called them “policy effects.”

Nevertheless, as late as March 2011, President Obama, and former Governor Jeb Bush used Miami Central High School as a “Beat the Odds” stage prop. Bush declared “high expectations for students, hard-edge policies that focus schools on learning and an array of choices for families” will raise student achievement. Unfortunately, Miami Central’s 2010 reading proficiency rate was 16% -- down from 21% in the previous year.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, touting his proposals claimed, “School districts and their local partners . . . are overcoming poverty and family breakdown to create high-performing schools.” Unfortunately, NBC Chicago says Duncan’s score gain claims were inflated and exaggerated.

Yet, a veritable industry has arisen founded on this myth. The Beat the Odds Institute sets forth their six principles of success and provides a glittering array of “Hosanna!” stories. McRel puts forth its recipe for success which includes the standard ingredients of orderly environments, challenging curriculum, leadership, use of data, professional development, collaboration and parental involvement. These notions represent a lot of “best practices.” But when presenting its success stories, McRel (like the others) is strong on anecdotes and weak on science. Schools that are well run do make a difference. But that is not the entire story.
While it is certainly true that many educators have been that pivotal person that turned a child’s life around, it’s a bit absurd to think that the effects of broken-homes, unemployment, impacted poverty and drug abuse will be cured by dint of a laser-like focus on improved teaching. The new phonics program (with accompanying standardized test) will not elevate the sights of the family struggling to put food on the table, pay the electric bill, buy gasoline and fling open the doors to higher educational opportunities.

There is great harm in this myth, that schools can do it all. It provides the excuse for politicians, vested interests and advocates to wrongly declare schools “failures.” It gives a false justification for firing the principals and teachers who work with our neediest. It tells us a complex society does not need to invest in its skills or its children. It serves as a moral cloak for actions that are technically unjustified -- as well as just plain wrong.

Instead, we must look with a broader vision. Former Bush assistant secretary of education Susan Neuman, an architect of the No Child left Behind law, does not extol the virtues of the law she helped create. Instead, in Changing the Odds for Children at Risk, she talks about the necessity of strengthening families, early childhood education, childcare, the community and after-school programs. We must combine inside-the-school excellence with companion outside-the-school efforts. Heather Schwartz’ study of economically integrated housing in Montgomery County, Maryland showed a forty percent of a standard deviation gain in mathematics scores by breaking down impacted poverty housing patterns. That’s a very large effect! When needy children were provided adequate school financial supports, large gains were registered.

There are many people that say we must continue the NCLB practice of “shining the light” on schools that have low scores for children of color and those with economic needs. Schools must continue to be held accountable for these children’s test scores, they insist. Otherwise, schools will cover-up the problem. Unfortunately, shining the light for the past quarter-century has not moved our collective social conscience enough to properly support these schools.

But to shine the light only on the schools is to leave the greater void in darkness. The achievement gap is more the symptom than the problem. The poor performance of our neediest children reflects the paucity and failure of our wage, labor, employment, tax and health care policies more than it does the effectiveness of our schools.

About That 'American Education Lags Behind Other Nations' Bologna...

Is there a crisis in science and math education?

Sent to the Boston Globe, March 4, 2011

I'm all for science education, but there is no crisis ("Schools work hard to fit lessons into busy day," 2/4).

American students are doing well in science and math. American children in low-poverty schools outscore students in nearly all other countries on international science/math tests. Overall scores are unspectacular because over 20% of our children live in poverty, the highest percentage among all industrialized countries.

The US produces more top science students than other countries: On the 2006 PISA math and science tests, 60,000 American students scored in the top category, compared to 34,000 Japanese students. Also, American students are already taking lots of math and science, more than the economy needs: For example, in 2007, 30% of college-bound high-school seniors had taken calculus, but only 5% of new openings require a math/science background.

There is no shortage of science/technology experts in the US: There are three qualified applications for each science/tech opening. Also, the US contributed 63% of the top 1% most-cited science/tech publications in 2004 and according to the World Economic Forum the US ranks second out of 133 countries in "quality of scientific research institutions."

Stephen Krashen (See link for list of references/citations)

[layout edited for clarity]

Results Of The Poll

WHAT CORRELATES WITH ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AS SHOWN IN THE RESEARCH?

Excellent work. Socioeconomic status, which includes both choices voted for here and excludes the choices not selected, is what correlates with student achievement as shown in the research.

To those who claim we need to educate these kids out of poverty (I'm looking at you Obama, Duncan, Gates, Rhee, DFER, Guggenheim, Canada, and the rest) I say, enough already.

Here's some data to back this up from Stephen Krashen:

Protecting Students

Why The Business Model For School Reform Is Nonsense

...American business models include the ability to specify the quality of products accepted into the production process. If my company is building battery powered, hand held drills, I can demand minimum quality specifications on all parts and materials my company obtains to produce that drill. As a result, I have far more control over the production process than any school system in America could dream of having over its student population. That's a fundamental difference and the reason many business models will never be applicable to schools....

From Living in Dialogue

Do You Want A Social Hierarchy Based On High School Test Scores?

The Myth Of The Bad Teacher

This myth is also seductive in its simplicity. It’s much easier to have a concrete – though vague – villain to blame for problems the school system faces. The fix seems easy, as well: all we need to do is fire the “Bad Teachers”, like controversial Washington DC school chancellor superstar Michelle Rhee has, and hire good ones, and students will learn. In this light, Gates’ effort to “fix” the bug riddled Public School Operating System by focusing on teacher development makes perfect sense. The logic feels hard to argue with: who would argue against making teachers better? And if as a teacher, if you do dare to, you must be “anti-student,” a “Bad Teacher” who is resistant to “reforms”, who is resistant to improvements, and thus must be out for himself, rather than the students.


The only problem with the “Bad Teacher” myth, as anyone involved with education is intimately aware of, is that problems in education are anything but simple. “The discourse of these so-called educational reformers is simplistic and polarizing,” as Henry A. Giroux claims in a recent, comprehensive essay on the subject in truthout. “It lacks any understanding of the real problems and strengths of public education, and it trades in authoritarian tactics and a discourse of demonization and humiliation.” The debate has been reduced to a superhero comic, a simplistic battle between good and evil, a cartoon version of a complex reality. The debate has been reduced to a minor plot point in this election cycle’s “anti-establishment” political narrative.

Adam Bessie at Daily Censored

Merit Pay For Teachers Doesn't Work

The most rigorous study of performance-based teacher compensation ever conducted in the United States shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay system had no overall impact on student achievement—results released today that are certain to set off a firestorm of debate.

Steven Sawchuck

Gerald Bracey On Education Myths

I am reposting this because....well...just because.

Nine Myths About Public Schools

None of this will likely strike you as particularly new, but it might be good to have a bunch of myths lined up and debunked all in one place.

1. The schools were to blame for letting the Russians get into space first. Granddaddy of all slanders and a great illustration of the absolute nuttiness with which people talk about education.

Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, launched on October 4, 1957. On September 20, 1956, Werner von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched a 4-stage Jupiter C rocket from Cape Canaveral. After the first 3 stages fired, the rocket was 832 miles in the air and traveling at 13,000 miles an hour. The 4th stage could have easily bumped something into orbit. The 4th stage was filled with sand. There were a number of reasons for this including the fact that the Eisenhower administration was determined to keep its weapons rocket program and its space exploration project separate and von Braun's rocket was clearly a weapon. Its primary intent was to incinerate Russian cities with nuclear warheads. Ike worried how the Russians might react. His Assistant Defense Secretary Donald Quarles actually said "the Russians did us a favor" because they established the precedent that deep space was free and international.

Most US engineers in the space program in 1957 would have graduated high school in the 1930s, but in the media, the schools of the 1950s took the hit for Sputnik. Ike was quite puzzled by this.

2. Schools alone can close the achievement gap. This is codified in the disaster known as No Child Left Behind. Most of the differences come from family and community variables and many out-of-school factors, especially summer loss. Some studies have found that poor children enter school behind their middle class peers, learn as much during the year and then lose it over the summer. They fall farther and farther behind and schools are blamed. Middle class and affluent kids do not show summer loss.

3. Money doesn't matter. Tell this to wealthy districts. Money clearly affects changes in achievement although levels of achievement are more influenced by the variables just mentioned. Most studies are short term and look only at test scores, a very foolish mistake. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger also found investments in school show a payoff in terms of long-term earnings of graduates.

4. The United States is losing its competitive edge. China and India ARE Rising. As economies collapsed all around it, China's economy grew a remarkable 7% last year. On just humanitarian grounds, we should not wish China and India to remain poor forever, but the more they grow the more money they have to buy stuff from us. As China and India prosper, we prosper. The World Economic Forum and the Institute for Management Development have consistently ranked the U. S. economy as the most competitive in the world. Education is only one part of multi-factor systems in rankings. WEF is especially keen on innovation. Our obsession with testing makes testing a great instrument for destroying creativity.

5. The U. S. has a shortage of scientists, mathematicians and engineers. This was a myth started oddly enough by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s in a study with assumptions so absurd the study was never published, but the myth lingers on. In fact, Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University found that we have three newly minted scientists and engineers who are permanent residents or native citizens for every newly minted job. Within 2 years, 65% of them were no longer in scientific or engineering fields. That proportion might have fallen during the current debacle when people are more likely to hang on to a job even if they hate it. An article in the September 18 Wall Street Journal reported that before the economy collapsed, 30% of the graduates of MIT--MIT--headed directly into finance.

6. Merit pay for teachers will improve performance. Bebchuk & Fried Pay Without Performance. Adams, Heywood & Rothstein, Teachers, Performance Pay, and Accountability. Bonus pay is concentrated in finance, insurance, and real estate. In most of private sector hard to determine and often leads to corruption and gaming the system. Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort the social processes it is intended to monitor."

7. The fastest growing jobs are all high-tech and require postsecondary education. "Postsecondary education" is a weasel word. A majority of the fastest growing jobs do, in fact, require some kind of postsecondary training. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they account for very few jobs. It's the Walmarts and Macdonald's of America that generate the jobs. According to the BLS, the job of retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing jobs combined.

8. Test scores are related to economic competitiveness. We do well on international comparisons of reading, pretty good on one international comparison of math and science, and not so good on another math/science comparison. But these comparisons are based on the countries' average scores and average scores don't mean much. The Organization for Economic Cooperating and Development, the producer of the math science comparison in which we do worst has pointed out that in science the U. S. has 25% of all the highest scoring students in the entire world, at least the world as defined by the 60 countries that participate in the tests. Finland might have the highest scores, but that only gives them 2,000 warm bodies compared to the U. S. figure of 67,000. It's the high scorers who are most likely to become leaders and innovators. Only four nations have a higher proportion of researchers per 1000 fulltime employees, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Japan. Only Finland is much above the U. S.

Consider Japan, the economic juggernaut of the 1980's. It kids score well on tests and people made a causal link between scores and Japan's economy. But Japan's economy has been in the doldrums for almost a whole generation. Its kids still ace tests.

9. Education itself produces jobs. President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan have both linked any economic recovery to school improvement. This is nonsense. There are parts of India where thousands of educated people compete for a single relatively low-level white-collar job. Some of you might recall that in the 1970's many sociologists and commentators worried that America was becoming TOO educated, that they would be bored by the work available.

Arne Duncan's Premise Is Faulty

Completely lifted and stolen from TYWKIWDBI:

The myth of the large upper middle class

Among the many theories exposed as fallacies by the Great Recession is the idea of the mass upper middle class. During the years of the American bubble economy, progressives and conservatives alike lauded the graduation of most citizens from the working class to a new elite that included the majority of Americans...

Elite progressives and elite conservatives share the assumption that the ideal society is one in which most Americans would be more like them, in owning educational credentials (progressives) or capital (conservatives)...

Progressives love to claim that education is the key to upward mobility. But this is based on an obvious fallacy. The "college premium" that results in higher incomes for college graduates is the result of the relative scarcity of college degrees. If everyone had a B.A., then the value of a B.A. in generating high wages would drop. We know this to be the case, because access to college has expanded more rapidly in Europe, where the gap in wages between the college-educated and the rest as a result is smaller than in the U.S.

Nor is there any basis to the claim, repeated by politicians and pundits of both parties, that most of the jobs of the future require a college education. On the eve of the Great Recession, the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified the occupations with the largest numerical growth in 2008-2018: registered nurses; home health aides; customer service representatives; combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food; personal and home care aides; retail salespersons; office clerks, general; accountants and auditors; nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants; and post-secondary teachers. Of these careers, only two -- accountants and auditors, and post-secondary teachers -- require a bachelor’s degree rather than on-the-job training or an associate degree, and only one -- post-secondary teachers -- requires a graduate degree (a doctorate)...

Conservatives of the bubble economy era had their own mass upper-middle-class fantasy. In their version, membership in the mass upper middle class depended not upon educational credentials but upon ownership of capital invested in the stock market...

A majority of Americans may have some money invested in the stock market, usually through employer pension plans or 401Ks, but it is very little indeed. Forty-three percent of Americans have less than $10,000 in retirement savings and 36 percent contribute nothing to retirement savings at all...

Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford...

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class. The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities, that now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.) And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party...

[Salon link to entire article (the above are snippets).]