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Education

"School Reform and the Attack on Public Education" - the text of a speech by Dave Stratman delivered to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute in July, 1997. Still must reading for parents and teachers today!

• Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools by Susan Ohanian
• A Democratic Critique of the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) Standards. Nicholas Tampio (Fordham University)
• Video: Do schools kill creativity? Sir Ken Robinson

Susan Ohanian on Education is a terrific website by an outstanding educator, that has up-to-date criticism of the "Education Reform" establishment.

Guy Brandenbug's Blog on education is also terrific.

The "Common Core" curriculum is one of the key elements of the ruling class's education reform in the United States, and it is aggressively promoted (and funded) by Bill Gates with his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation has a blog called "Impatient Optimists" with an article that says:

"I am pleased to see the excitement in the business community for the common core.  Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance."

The ruling class (Bill Gates et al) view our children as things to be "consumed" by business, as products that are the "output" of schools the way widgets are the output of a factory, as means to an end--specifically the end of maximizing the profits of the "business community."

The "Common Core" standards promoted by Bill Gates and his agent in the government--Secretary of Education Arne Duncan--are designed to make our children believe that our capitalist society based on competition and buying and selling (for profit) with some rich because they are smarter and work harder and the rest poor because they are not so smart and don't work hard, is the natural order of things. It is designed to make our children unable even to conceive of a society based on sharing according to need (instead of buying and selling for profit) and mutual aid and equality with no rich and no poor. This accusation against the "Common Core" is proven by (among many other examples) the educational materials being developed for first graders in New York City. These materials are called ReadyGEN and are produced by the Pearson School company, which says: "ReadyGEN is being designed from the ground up to address the ELA Common Core Standards, the Publisher's Criteria and the City's specific requirements." Susan Ohanian discusses how awful ReadyGEN is in great detail here. [The original link is broken but another article discusses this here.] Ohanian points out, for example, that ReadyGEN lists the following words as the vocabulary first graders need to learn in their first unit of study: goods, services, want, needs, collects, taxes, producers, farmers, consumers, earn, income, sells, saves, choices, cash register, inventory, groceries, average.

More excellent articles/videos:

• Educating for the Status Quo, by Shawn Gude
• How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution, by Lindsey Layton
• How Leftist Criticism of America's Rulers Plays Right Into the Hands of Rush Limbaugh
• The "Almost Outrageous" Opposition to Bill Gates' Market-Based Ed Reform, by the Washington Badass Teachers Association
• Video:Toxic Culture of Education: Joshua Katz at TEDxUniversityofAkron
• Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools, by Joanne Barkan
• Chicago Teachers Union joins growing national opposition to deeply flawed Common Core Standards
• Why Are Parents Revolting Against the Common Core? Start With the English Curriculum by Nicholas Tampio
• This article by Guy Brandenburg shows that charter schools in Washington D.C. have just as bad a drop-out rate as the public schools, despite all the claims that they don't.
• The Problem With the Common Core by Stan Karp [The Common Core is a set of K-12 public school curriculum standards (objectives) developed by people funded by Bill Gates. It is known as the "Common Core State Standards" or CCSS but this is a deliberately misleading name meant to suggest that these standards emerged from the bottom up, by the states, when in fact the process was entirely from the top down. The article immediately below this one gives a detailed look one example of the terrible content in the CCSS.]
• "One more way that Bill and Melinda Gates use the CCSS to abuse first grade children": this is my title for this article by Susan Ohanian
• Martin Luther King Jr. and the Common Core, A critical reading of “close reading” By Daniel E. Ferguson [One of the things advocated by the Common Core is "close reading," which means that students are instructed to pay attention only to the words of the text before them, and not consider the larger context and their own relevant experiences in and knowledge of the world. This does two things: 1) It prevents students from challenging ideas put in front of them based on their own experience and knowledge and 2) It makes it easy to create standardized tests to measure "how well" students say what they are supposed to say about a text.]
• Do Bill and Melinda Gates have the right to affect our childrens’ lives for an eternity?
• Paul Horton: Why the Common Core is Unlike Standards of the Past
• Saucedo teachers to boycott the ISAT by George Schmidt
• The Billionaires War Against Higher Education, by Peter Dreier
• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chooses private school for kids by Valerie Strauss [This describes how the same politicians who impose child abusive high stakes standardized testing on public school children send their own children to schools that do nothing of the sort. This indicates that these politicians are lying when they assert that their "educstion reform" is intended to improve the education of our children. On the contrary, it is intended to make our children feel inferior and less deserving than the children of the wealthy and powerful, and to make them blame themselves instead of our unjust social system for their lot in life at the bottom of a very unequal society. Go here for another similar article.]
• Video: A student explains what's wrong with our school system and why we mistrust teachers. [The education reformers, such as Bill Gates who is funding and promoting the Common Core curriculum, know that their reforms are bad educationally, but they don't care because their aim is not to improve education but rather toturn many working class children into cheap laborers who, instead of blaming the inequality of our society, will blame themselves (for not working hard enough in school or being smart enough) for being undeserving of a job that provides a decent life and dignity equal to all others. The student in this video comes close to saying this, but not quite.]
• Turn It Around! [A school succeeds by NOT doing what the Ed Reformistas say to do]
• The Crocodile in the Common Core Standards, by Susan Ohanian [the Common Core Standards are policies that the ruling class is imposing on public school teachers; the purpose is to make our children be the kind of obedient and docile workers that the ruling class wants them to be.]
• Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal by Matt Taibbi
• Calling Out the Testing Bullies, by Peter deWitt (about how standardized testing of public school children is child abuse)
• United Opt Out National: A Movement to End Corporate Education Reform
• Video: 2nd grade teacher reads his resignation letter, which says he'd rather leave his $70,000 per year job and tutor children for free than be part of a system that is diametrically opposed to everything I believe education should be.
• Current Education Reform Perpetuating, Not Curbing, Inequity, by P. L. Thomas
• Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools by Susan Ohanian
• "School Reform and the Attack on Public Education" - the text of a speech by Dave Stratman delivered to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute in July, 1997. Must reading for parents and teachers!
  
• "Report Cards" by Robin Kirkpatrick (January 31, 2005)
• "Educating Kids for Jobs for the 21st Century" by Susan Ohanian (first published in Substance) A hard-hitting expose that begins: "'Standardistos'--business leaders calling for 'high standards' for students--blather about schools preparing kids for jobs for the 21st century at the same time they are outsourcing jobs overseas faster than we can count."
• "Capitalism, Calculus and Conscience"  by Susan Ohanian (a link to Phi Delta Kappan)Ms. Ohanian accuses the Standardistos of child abuse and urges readers to call them on it.
• "Federal Education Reform In Arizona: An Open Letter to the Tucson School Board"by Debbie Niwa, October 28, 2002 (not previously published)
• Higher Education Free For All?" by John Spritzler -- taking Jim Hightower to task for promoting big business's lies about education (NDN* May-August 2002)
• "Teachers, Parents, Students Rip MCAS, Education Reform" by Dave Stratman. (NDN* January-February 2001).
• "Falsifying History and Ourselves": Anti-Democratic Propaganda in the Classroom" by John Spritzler (combining the following four documents into a single document:  A critical look at the "Facing History and Ourselves" phenomenon, Part I by John Spritzler (NDN* May-June 2000), Part II (NDN* July-October 2000), Part III (NDN* March-June 2001), Sources )
• "Umm Yeah, So I'm The Valedictorian." - Don't miss this gutsy speech against the high stakes MCAS test by a Hudson, MA. public school graduate. (Copied from an Internet discussion list with the author's permission). 
• "MCAS: Why Is This Being Done To Our Kids?" - The Boston chapter of  New Democracy has distributed this flyer by the thousands as resistance to MCAS/high stakes testing grows throughout Massachusetts.
• "Take This Test And Shove It" by John Spritzler. (NDN* July-August '99).
• "You'll Never Be Good Enough: Schooling and Social Control" by Dave Stratman. (NDN* Sept.-Oct. '98)
• "Corporations Meet Resistance Inside Boston's Schools" by John Spritzler. (NDN* March-April '98).
• "School Reform and the Attack on Public Education" - the text of a speech by Dave Stratman delivered to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute in July, 1997. Must reading for parents and teachers!

  * "NDN" indicates that the article is from the New Democracy Newsletter.

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• Guest Commentary (February 21, 2001): "Problems Of Test-based School Ratings" by Craig Bolon.
• Guest Commentary (January 25, 2001): "DOE Calculates Performance Standards...Incorrectly!" by Paul Phillips.
• Guest Commentary (August 4, 2000): "Corporate-sponsored Tests Aim To Standardize Our Kids" by Dennis Fox.
• MORE ARTICLES FROM THE PAST
• Click here to see articles about education with useful information, though not necessarily reflecting the views of New Democracy.

Articles by Dave Stratman

Articles by John Spritzler

Turn the World Upside Down (John Spritzler's blog #1)

End Class Inequality (John Spritzler's blog #2)

Books

We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life by Dave Stratman

The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II by John Spritzler