Stupid In America…..

When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” - Albert Shanker, (President Teachers Union)

(John Stossel) School spending has gone through the roof and test scores are flat. While most every other service in life has gotten  faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy –  education — has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started  measuring it in 1970.

Why no improvement?  Because K-12 education is a government monopoly and  monopolies don’t improve.

The government-school monopoly claims: Education is too important to leave to the free market. At a teachers’ union rally, even actor Matt Damon showed up to deride market competition as “MBA style thinking.”

“Competition may be okay for selling movies and cell phones, but education is different,” says the establishment. Learning is complex. Parents aren’t real “customers” because they don’t have the expertise to know which school is best. They don’t know enough about curricula, teachers’ credentials, etc. That’s why public education must be centrally planned by government “experts”.

Those experts have been in charge for years. They are what school reformers call the “Blob.” Jeanne Allen from the Center for Education Reform says for years attempts at reform have run, “smack into federations, alliances, departments, councils, boards, commissions, panels, herds, flocks and convoys, that make up the education industrial complex, or the Blob.

Taken individually they were frustrating enough, each with its own bureaucracy, but taken as a whole they were (and are) maddening in their resistance to change. Not really a wall — they always talk about change — but more like quicksand, or a tar pit where ideas slowly sink.

And the most powerful part of the Blob is the teachers’ union.  (read more)

Video: U.S. Reading Scores Lowest in 40-Years

The Dumbing Down of America Series

h/t to Last Refuge

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Originally Posted on Apr 11, 2011

Photo illustration by PZS based on an image by Lin Pernille Photography

By Chris Hedges – Author of “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress”

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

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.

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.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

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. 

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

he 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.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

Source:  TruthDig  

The Dumbing Down of America Series

Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - E Book download is NOW FREE TO ALL!!!
Right click and "Save Link As"
Click here to begin download
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Flunking the Citizenship Test

One-Party Classroom  and Indoctrination U - Informative Reads, as well as: Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World

Expelled – DVD with Ben Stein

Michigan Teacher Threatens Tea Party's Children: Posted on CraigsList

Michigan Teacher Threatens Tea Party's Children

This is a message from a Teacher to all the Tea Bags here in Michigan. It was posted on Craigslist yesterday, during school hours.

Little tea bags (capitol)

Date: 2011-03-11, 10:46AM EST Reply to: comm-vzqqj-2259517268@craigslist.org

So you Tea Bags want to take away my hard earned blue ribbon bennies. Well guess what you scum sucking Tea Bags, I got your kids all day long in my classroom and with just a few slick questions I know who the little tea bags are! And you think you'll have the last laugh HA-Ha-Ha

Location: capitol it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 2259517268

Copyright © 2011 craigslist, inc.terms of useprivacy policyfeedback forum

This reminded me a bit of the Wisconsin Teacher’s Union consistently pushing the idea of their great concern for their students being the reason they weren’t in the classroom but rather out in the street protesting during school hours… and then we find out that 2/3 of 8th graders in Wisconsin could not pass their proficiency tests… and can’t sufficiently read.

Andrew Klavan: Behold! Your Public Sector Unions at Work

Video:  Andrew Klavan: Behold! Your Public Sector Unions at Work

h/t to Rose and Hello Michigan Blog

Credit bureau move creates 'secret' scores

Credit bureau Experian's recent move means lenders can see FICO scores that you can't. That's just wrong, and the law needs to catch up with today's credit scoring practices.

Experian wants to keep you in the dark.

There's really no other way to characterize the credit bureau's decision to stop selling FICO credit scores to individuals as of Feb. 14. Experian pulled out of its agreement with myFICO.com, which had been the only place where consumers could buy their FICO scores from all three bureaus.

Experian will continue to sell FICOs to lenders. That's big business, because the FICO is the leading credit scoring formula and the one used by most lenders.

But to consumers, Experian is pretending the FICO is no big deal.

"There is no one credit score that all financial institutions use to make decisions, and there is also no one credit score that consumers must use to help them understand and manage their credit," Experian spokeswoman Susan Hensen wrote me in an e-mail. "There are many reputable credit scores on the market that consumers can use to evaluate their creditworthiness before making financial decisions."

• Experian has been reciting this line for years. When consumers buy credit scores directly from Experian, they're sold what the bureau calls "educational" scores, Experian's PLUS or the VantageScore, a formula cooked up with the other two major bureaus that's gone over like a lead balloon with lenders.

So many consumers have been fooled by this gambit, thinking they're getting FICOs when they're not, that some consumer advocates refer to these other credit scores as "FAKO scores."

Why a FICO matters most

Experian's position is that a credit score is a credit score. But these non-FICOs have consequences:

• Mortgage brokers and other lending professionals have long complained -- even before the VantageScore was introduced -- that the bureaus' educational scores are often 30 to 100 points higher than consumers' FICO scores.

• The VantageScore's scale is so different from FICO's -- 501 to 990, compared with FICO's 300 to 850 -- that the same number means vastly different things. A 760 would be an excellent FICO score, for example, but a mediocre rating on VantageScore.

• The result is that would-be borrowers who bought something other than a FICO may think they're in a position to get a great rate, when they might not have a high enough score to get any loan.

Mortgages are also a prime example of why you need to see all three of your FICO scores, not just the two that are still available at myFICO.com.

That's because mortgage lenders typically pull all three of your FICO scores and use the middle one to determine your interest rate. If your FICO scores are 740 from Experian, 680 from TransUnion and 715 from Equifax, for example, most lenders will use the 715 score to set your rate.

If one of those scores is missing, you have no way of knowing what your middle score is or what rate you deserve. You're walking blind into one of the most important financial transactions of your life.

That's just scary.

No right to face your accuser?

In this particular case, consumers are the grass being trampled in a fight among the elephants: one of the credit bureaus and Fair Isaac, the company that created the FICO formula.

Experian Executive Vice President Peg Smith said the bureau didn't set out to cut consumers off from their FICO scores and in fact wanted to expand access to the scores by selling FICOs from Experian.com, something its agreement with Fair Isaac hadn't allowed.

But the terms of the new contract Fair Isaac proposed were "so unreasonable," Smith said, that Experian ended negotiations and decided to rethink its relationship with the scoring formula provider.

• Video: What Experian's pullout means

"This was never intended to disenfranchise consumers," Smith said. "They've been caught in the middle."

But what led to Experian's move isn't as important is that it happened.

And I say: Enough already. It's time that we stopped allowing our personal data to be seen solely as a profit center for big, faceless corporations. Your access to the information that's critical to your financial life shouldn't be left to the whims of credit bureaus or lenders or anyone else.

If anyone uses a score to evaluate you -- any score -- you should have the right to see that score and challenge the data that go into creating it.

Because FICOs aren't the only scores being used these days. Increasingly, lenders use all manner of proprietary formulas to judge you, as I wrote in "8 secret scores that lenders keep." Two of these secret scores are particularly important these days:

Bankruptcy scores purport to predict the likelihood that you'll throw in the towel on your debt. That's different from a credit score, which predicts the risk of default -- essentially, of missing one payment. As bankruptcies once again mount-- U.S. consumer bankruptcy filings rose 34.4% in January, after topping 1 million last year -- you can bet that every credit card issuer you have is applying its version of a bankruptcy score to your account.

If you don't score well, you can expect the consequences to be more drastic than if the issuer was concerned you'd merely default. You might face a much higher interest rate or even a frozen account as your issuers try to limit their losses.

But you have no right to see this number, know the calculations that went into it or challenge any errors in the data used.

Transactions scores, meanwhile, are applied every time you use your plastic. They're designed to predict the likelihood a transaction might be fraudulent, but they can also be applied to your spending patterns to hunt for signs you might be a growing risk. If you go from shopping at Saks and dining at Per Se to charging groceries at Wal-Mart and taking cash advances, you could be singled out for punitive action.

American Express apparently used transaction scores when it recently told customers it was cutting their credit limits in part because of where they shopped.

But once again, you have no right to see your transaction scores, even when they're used to take adverse action against you.

It's your score, and it's time to claim it

Clearly, federal law needs to catch up with lender practices.

Federal law has long guaranteed your right to see your credit reports. Companies that use your reports against you -- to deny your application for credit, insurance or employment, for example, or to take any other adverse action against you -- are supposed to explicitly tell you that's what has happened. They're also supposed to tell you which bureaus provided the reports and give you contact information so you can review your files and dispute any errors.

In 2003, you were also given the right to buy your credit scores from the bureaus. But the law doesn't specify you have to be given the same scores lenders use.

It's time to fix that and extend consumer protections to the other scores that are being used to evaluate you.

Simply put: If a score is used against you for any reason, you should have a right to see that score, know how it was calculated and protest any errors in the data used to calculate it.

If you agree, tell your lawmakers. This link will help you find your House representative, and you can find your senators here. Send them a link to this column, and let them know the days of consumers being kept in the dark about their scores must end.

By: Liz Pulliam Weston, MSN Money, Author of  Your Credit Score: How to Fix, Improve, and Protect the 3-Digit Number that Shapes Your Financial Future, 2nd Edition

Liz's latest Book:  Easy Money: How to Simplify Your Finances and Get What You Want out of Life" (Liz Pulliam Weston)

Columns by Weston, the Web's most-read personal-finance writer and winner of a Clarion Award for online journalism, appear every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. She also answers reader questions on the Your Money message board

Source:  Daily Though Pad