Parents get 'choice' when it comes to charters, but not when it comes to choosing to opt out of dangerous testing and curricular hoaxes?
For the past several years, many Americans have heard about the importance of "choice" in education. Despite the fact that vouchers are always opposed by large majorities wherever they are imposed, the screaming is all about so-called "choice." The same goes when a school district -- almost always in a large city -- sabotages its real public schools and then presents parents and families with the "choice" of public schools with huge class sizes and shortages of everything including toilet paper. In those cases, like in Chicago, parents are told they have "choice" -- and the choice is always the local charter school.
But as soon as parents request other choices, things change. Take, for example, parents who want the choice to take their children out of the massive testing programs of cities like Chicago. More and more, principals and other administrators are told that it is "illegal" for parents to opt out their children, and only parents with the most astute lawyers have so far been able to exercise real choice.
No sooner had the 2013 - 2014 school year begun than principals across Chicago were telling parents that it was "illegal" for them to opt their children out of mandatory so-called "standardized tests", while at at least one school the principal was ordering teachers to fail children whose parents tried to opt them out by making a class grade so that it was based on the success on a so-called "standardized test."
From the point of view of the parent, no test that is going to be used on our children is "mandatory." The reason for this is that every so-called "standardized" test is in violation of the various rules of the American Education Research Association, the American Psychological Association, or the various subject area associations. At the very least, these tests are experimenting on human subjects, and at the worst they are designed (by psychometric rules) to rank and sort human beings.
The basis of all this stuff arose more than a hundred years ago in the anti-science called "Eugenics." Eugenics searched for a way of proving that all human beings could be ranked and sorted using some kind of science. You know what the results was on the European scale. But what is often left out of many history books is that the "scientific" claims upon which Eugenics was developed came from professors at Harvard, Yale, the other Ivy League schools, and the University of Chicago (one of the things they have covered up, for obvious reasons, see the next paragraphs).
It took World War II to defeat the European iterations of American Eugenics. The chief author of the most famous book based on Eugenics thanked the Americans who had been his forebears in that "science." As Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn show in the first chapter of their book The Mismeasure of Education, the acceptance of Eugenics as "science" went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Oliver Wendell Holmes was praising Eugenics for showing the ruling class how to eliminate the "unfit" in the case of a young lady named Carrie Buck (you can Google this without reading Horn and Wilburn) as we've reported in Substance. Carrie Buck, because she was "feeble minded," was sterilized by the State of Virginia, which did so by law.
Some commentators are saying this is the year of the "American Spring," where the resistance to the insidious reign of high-stakes testing -- what Diane Ravitch called the "Reign of Error" -- is finally brought down by a populist uprising.
For Substance, we want to know every principal and administrator who writes telling parents that we have to join this hoax another year. Meanwhile, through More than a Score, CORE, and others, we are organizing the Chicago resistance, and by January we will have major announcements of what we will all be doing.
By: Spike Nard
Have you heard anything about tomorrow's layoffs?
Hi George,
Have you heard anything about tomorrow's layoffs? Word is there will be 800-900 let go tomorrow? Any ideas? I am sure some of it must be the network restructuring.