Two For None

Racism and poverty are so closely connected that their reliance on each other create a bond as strong as a DNA molecule. Together, racism and poverty are the structural basis for the foundation of big business profits.

The only real threat to the success of the ultimate plan of “BB” is an educated populous.

An educated populous would stop fighting about superficial things like what one has or looks likes or wears. An educated populous would respect the beliefs and cultures of others and embrace their differences as we want others to embrace ours. An educated populous would know and understand and actually achieve the excellent education of its children and accept nothing less. An educated populous is powerful.

So, for hundreds of years, the goal of “BB” has been to make sure the populous in educated only enough to enjoy the action scenes in a movie but not enough to understand the plot, characterizations, or message.

The lack of an excellent education for children of color, of poverty, is definitely a plan of “BB” since an educated populous knows that the only way to come close to the elimination of racism and poverty is to totally reform education so that it considers the child, first as a human being and then as talented and capable.

“BB” must be taken out of public education and its negative influence on the uninformed must end. Most importantly however, the blatant mental, physical, and psychological abuse of children of color and poverty must stop now.

Public education was created to bring all of American society to a place of intelligence where we can see beyond the ignorance of race and social-economic class. It has not achieved its objective because big business has been allowed to overtake the system of education making race and social-economic class the major motivation for educational failure.

Big business has enslaved our children. Their only hope is for the government, the people, to rise up and save them from the evil that would destroy their future and our nation.

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The Price Of Humanity

Standardize: To cause to conform to a standard. To evaluate by comparing with a standard.

The original intent of the standardized test in education was to determine the college eligibility of students.

In 1965 ESEA was passed and President Johnson allocated $3 billion dollars for education. Title 1 was born of this initiative. Robert Kennedy demanded accountability for the money spent, but researchers “saw this as a “natural experiment” for identifying the most effective teaching methods.”

As soon as $3 billion dollars was allocated to the realm of standardized testing, big business rushed in to take advantage of the financial opportunity.

Americans for Educational Testing Reform reports, “The Big 3 testing companies make an average of almost two times the profit of America’s biggest nonprofit companies” and provides readers with a petition against these companies making huge profits from the mandatory requirement of taking their tests.

According to ProCon.org, “Following the passage of NCLB on Jan. 8, 2002, annual state spending on standardized tests rose from $423 million to almost $1.1 billion in 2008 (a 160% increase compared to a 19.22% increase in inflation over the same period).”

Standardized testing is a money maker, not a human evaluator. Standardized tests, by their very nature, test functional knowledge, and they don’t do that well. Standardized testing was not meant to evaluate the potential of individuals but their level of knowledge and understanding at the time of the test.

The controversy over using standardized test results as an indicator of student and teachers abilities and capabilities is as absurd as not wanting to consider student attendance in the formula for academic achievement and teacher effectiveness.

Make no mistake, the business of standardized testing is just that, a business, and they’re raking in the profits by dehumanizing children and belittling teaching professionals who derive absolutely no benefit from this testing yet can suffer immeasurable social, psychological, mental, physical, and emotional repercussions from their results.

We must stop playing into the hands of big business and begin to take the hands of our children, look into their eyes, and see them for who they are not how they perform.

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Why Have All The Children Gone

Why aren’t parents sending their children to school? Why don’t children want to go to school?

What is the point? Go to school, don’t go to school, you’re pushed through the system either way. School isn’t a place where you go to receive an education, it’s where you wait out your time until you’re released; sort of like prison. By second grade children learn that it doesn’t really matter whether you’re in school or not, you’ll get passed along anyway.

Teachers know that completing absentee paperwork is a lesson in futility as these letters have followed children for years with no real consequences for the parents. Chronically absent children have learned that a simple note or call from the parent makes their absence legal.

Yes, children must be in school, but even then they are not learning how and what they should in order to be successful in life. Ten percent of our children have come to the conclusion that an education will do them no good. One third, the district’s summer school population realize that they can skip school during the school year and enroll in summer school to pass. Even then they know they don’t have to actually participate in summer school to pass.

The truancy problem isn’t as simple as making students go to school. We have to understand why they don’t want to be there; not the excuses, the reality. School has nothing to offer. Not even free breakfast and lunch can entice parents and children to make the effort to go to school every day.

As long as we perceive and treat children as though they are less than capable of acquiring the skills necessary to learn what little we have to offer in the way of education, they will continue to “drop out” of a school system that holds no value in the intellectual property they bring to the process.

When we value the education we have to offer, parents and children will value the education they will receive.

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The Stage Is Set

In his article, “Starving the Future”, Charles Blow points out some startling realities about education in America compared to China and India.

It is unclear how our elected and appointed leaders in politics and education can continue to ignore the fact that this country is in peril because we have placed more value on the dollar than on the educational success of our children.

Our poorest paid professionals are those that are entrusted to provide our greatest resource, our children, with the skills necessary to become successful adults. Then, without batting an eyelash, we demean and vilify those very same professionals making what they say and do in the course of instruction, suspect and inconsequential to the student.

Teachers used to be seen as knowledgeable and wise. Masters of information and the delivery of that information. Today however, teachers are told by education experts, how to teach what they teach. They are told how much time to afford each subject and what to say in the delivery of instruction. Teachers are told how to structure their learning environment and how to properly interact with their students by people who have never and will never enter a classroom. Then, teachers are evaluated on their “performance” in the classroom by how well their students “perform” on standardized tests.

With the overwhelming failure of education across the nation, it is easy to point the finger at the individuals who have the least amount of power in the system of education, teachers.

Unfortunately, it is the voice of teachers, not teacher unions, the individual voice of teachers that is missing from the movement to effectively reform education. Teachers are allowing their unions to speak for them when they should be advocating for themselves and children.

All the world may be a stage but it is time to stop playing with our children’s educational future. If we are going to hold teachers accountable for the success or failure of their students then it is time we give them the freedom to teach.

When teachers love teaching, children will love learning.

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Don’t Enable Me – Educate Me

Currently in education, a child must be seen as incapable before receiving special education services.

First the child is identified as having a need. Then the child is tracked to identify the need. Once the area of need has been identified, the child can be classified. Once classified the child receives those services necessary to address the need and is either pushed in or pulled out of the classroom.

There is no attempt to access the strengths of the child, to create success for the child by understanding what excites the child, using the passion(s) of the child to inspire instruction.

Some children need to see the information, some need to hear it, some must interact with the information and still others require multiple modes of connection to the information, but All children require and deserve access to the information in as many modalities as there are.

The caveat to this however, is that the teacher must be passionate about teaching in order to role model the excitement that children must have in order for the learning process to be successful. This is what can and should be evaluated.

Ms. Remis is absolutely incorrect when she says “The Adams resolution is nothing more than a political stunt orchestrated by the teachers union as part of a national campaign to undermine public confidence in the new evaluation systems being implemented around the country as a result of parent and taxpayer cries for more accountability.”

Those who are engaged in the battle to stop standardized testing understand that it is detrimental to children. And, why shouldn’t parents and taxpayers rightfully demand more accountability in education. However, the measures used to evaluate teacher performance should be authentic, meaningful, and properly implemented and tracked they should not include the level of performance of another individual. As well, standardized tests should only be a determining factor in assessing a child’s level of academic understanding not learning potential.

Members of this community are taking a stand for our children. Our children deserve our best effort and support. Maybe then they’ll give us theirs.

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Damn The Children – Full Speed Ahead

Last night, Rock Center was purchased by big business to support Mitt Romney for president. While the show was seemingly about the Mormon religion and their belief in helping those less fortunate, at the end of the show the hosts engaged in a discussion about Governor Romney, his connection to the Mormon faith, and how magnanimous he is in his personal life.

Throughout the presidential campaign, big business has supported Romney by donating millions of dollars while Obama supporters donate hundreds in comparison.

What does this have to do with education?

There are movements across this country that are calling for education reform. Everyone understands that our children are failing to meet even the most basic of competencies.

However, big business has their own ideas of how to reform education and they have the money power to make things happen “behind the curtain” that the average American does not.

In the wake of the Bush administration, middle class income has decreased 7% and “according to the census data, those losses disproportionately hit the lowest 60% of Americans, while the richest 40% actually gained wealth”.

Again, what does this have to do with education?

The only power strong enough to fight against big business enslaving our children through their efforts to privatize and standardize education is the power of the people.

The American system of government allows for the people of the United States to demand that our elected officials veto the will of big business to purchase our children’s educational future.

Unfortunately, the influence of “BB” is so deeply entrenched in our government that the people have become complacent and jaded, unwilling to exert their power to force our political leaders to listen to their constituencies.

The only hope our children have is us!

The collective voice of the people, not pleading or begging, but demanding that education reform concentrate on the needs of children.

We, the people of the United States, must demand that our elected officials speak with our voice and enact education policies that will benefit ALL children.

Join the Movement to Save Our Children!

Who They Are – What We Want

The poem was written and performed by Jasmine Ownes.

This is the level of excellence of which our children are capable, one that we are dismissing from the educational experience.

Through her poem, this young lady exposed the ignorance of hate, and used her voice to show support for Gabby Douglas while admonishing those who disrespected her.

Unfortunately, education does not attempt to uncover the gifts, talents, and voices of our children but merely seeks to produce an enslaved workforce of mis-educated, low-level thinkers, that “do” without question.

The current system of education causes children to reject their natural inclination to learn by force feeding them unrelated facts and figures, disconnecting them from the learning process, making them angry, insatiable, beggars at the tables of big business.

Child centered education concentrates on the strengths of the child and uses those strengths to compensate for their weaknesses. Effective early childhood education helps the child discover their individual talent(s) and uses the academic disciplines to ignite their passion.

Research shows that in order to successfully educate children you must, begin at an early age, limit class size, promote investigative learning, and provide access to real life educational experiences.

Federal, State, and local governments feel that increased class size at the elementary level, influencing social class structures through private and charter school operation, teaching to the test, and hiring more administrators and fewer teachers, will properly educate children.

The tentacles of “big business” have so thoroughly invaded the body of education that their cancerous lesions have almost completely acquired their target, our children.

Our children are dying at an alarming rate while we allow our leaders in education and politics to ignore the facts of the research and data which they profess to venerate as they blame teachers and close schools, all the while making money from our children’s failure.

Once we believe that ALL children are gifted and talented, and teach children to believe in themselves, our system of education will begin to inspire, and therefore, properly educate, our children.

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With A Child’s Heart – Not A Business Plan

Anchor: Why would I want to add charter schools into my portfolio?

DB: Well I think it’s a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a very high-demand product. There’s 400,000 kids on waiting lists for charter schools … the industry’s growing about 12-14% a year. So it’s a high-growth, very stable, recession-resistant business.

This is an excerpt from a CNBC interview with David Brain, president and CEO of Entertainment Properties Trust.

This is the way we are and have been thinking of education for more than one hundred years. Education is big business with high financial returns and little risk. Unfortunately the risk is suffered by children not portfolios.

In what type of society is a child part of an industry? How can we call ourselves enlightened when we consider the education of a child valuable because of the financial yield? Have we become so greedy that we are willing to sacrifice our most valuable resource, our children, for nothing more than making money?

The American Association of School Administrators reports, “The ratio of employees to executive, administrator and/or manager is higher in elementary and secondary schools (12.8 to 1) than in any other business or industry.”

Given the above, it should be evident that education is not about children, it is about adults making money from the failure to educate children. Education is about the rich getting richer off the poor they keep poorer by mis-educating our children and properly educating theirs.

The most unfortunate aspect of this reality is that the larger community, those who fall below the “rich and famous” level, have the power to change education so that it actually educates all children. In America, the people have the power, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. In America, if the people don’t agree with what their government is doing or allowing to happen, the people have the right and responsibility to stand up and say “No”.

There are people in our government that are duty bound to listen to the voice of the “common” man. Where is our voice?

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Another Drop Of Lorenzo’s Oil Please

Once there was a truck stuck under a bridge. A team of experts was called in to remove it. After many hours, a young boy said, “Why don’t you let the air out of the tires and pull it out.”
This happens to be a true story that proves it doesn’t take expertise to solve a problem, just common sense.

According to Presidential decree, there will be yet another Commission on education but this time at the federal level. With so many learned individuals working on solving the problem of education, we, as a nation and as a community, should be much farther along than we are currently.

While we would like to think that the problem of educating children is overwhelming, it isn’t. As a nation, we have replaced common sense with expertise and in becoming experts in a particular field of study, we have become myopic in our vision to solve the problem of educating our children. The experts in the field of education have dissected the learning process into so many parts that learning is unrecognizable.

Each field of study ELA, Math, Science, Social Studies, Art, Music is separated from the other and each has to beg for money in order to maintain their existence in the classroom. The experts are so concerned with fighting for money for their field that they are in contention with the experts of the other disciplines.

Life doesn’t come is separate packages and learning doesn’t either. Solving problems means looking at the situation from all sides, employing every discipline available to insure a successful outcome.

Education cannot educate because it has been disassembled and therefore cannot function. It lies in pieces in rural, urban, and suburban towns and cities across America. It has no life because it has been dissected, with all the fun parts removed and thrown away.

Critical thinking, common sense, is on life support and fading rapidly because the experts are not seeing the child when they discuss education, they are only seeing the problem from their point of view.

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Is There A Little Red Hen In The House

It is quite possible that our children do not read because they aren’t used to sitting and listening to stories being told and therefore, to sit and read a story is boring compared to watching a movie or playing a video game.

Everyone, prior to a certain generation of children, knows the story of the Little Red Hen. The dog, cat, and duck all wanted to eat the bread that the Little Red Hen baked, but none of them wanted to do the work that was necessary in order to partake in the finished product.

The moral of the story is, “if you don’t do the work, you don’t deserve the rewards.”

Recently President Obama sent out a “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans”. It is unfortunate that the President of the United States feels it necessary to federally order the educational excellence of any group of citizens in the United States. We are Americans and our children are the future of America. At the end of WWII most Americans understood the importance of that statement.

Today, unfortunately, most Americans would rather meet and discuss the state of affairs in America than actually get up and “do” something to change the course of this great country in which we live. It is so much easier to find fault than to offer solutions and then roll up your sleeves and work to change things when change is as simple as getting out, one day every two years, and voting. In 2010, George Mason University found that, “only 32.1 percent of the 13.4 million who were eligible — actually voted.”

The people of this country have become complacent and lazy which means the government of this country is complacent and lazy. Waiting for someone else to do the work in order to sit back and reap the benefits of our guaranteed rights has become the “American” way.

President Bush convinced this nation that terrorists were trying to destroy America. Indifference and greed are destroying America.

Every child in America must be educated, not properly, exceptionally!

Join the Movement to Save Our Children!