In his recent post Beat Up the Black Lady Booman wrote:
The entertainment wing of the Professional Right has been beating up MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry over one of her “Lean Forward” promos. The promo invited controversy, I guess, because Perry talked about a need for people to think about “our children” and support more funding for education. She said that we should think of children as belonging to the community, not just their parents or families. This obviously did not sit well with the home-schooler audience for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin called it “unflippingbelievable.”
Now beside the fact that this whole teapot tempest is simply one more revenue-producing media dustup between the entertainment wings of both the Professional Right and the Professional Left, Booman immediately slipped in the rapidly growing centrist/left media meme about right-wing “home-schoolers.” This is how the Professional Left…yes, Booman, I mean you…demonizes any and all efforts by people to decentrify our already much too large central government. It makes no difference whether the effort comes from “the right” or “the left”…whether it’s the supposed “home-schooler audience for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh,” alla them shiftless young hippie-types who simply didn’t have their centrist political act together in the Occupy movement or Berrigan Brothers-level PermaGov whistle blowers like Bradley Manning. They’re all a bunch of losers and Central Casting’s PermaGov representatives are the only way to go.
Clomp clomp clomp.
What horseshit.
The article below (Education on Steroids-Atlanta’s Pitiful Hypocrisy, by David Macaray) describes what centralized education investment really produces. It’s about one city, but what happened in Atlanta is merely a snapshot of what is happening in every city, town and rural public school system in the United States. Bet on it. The only difference is that these fools got caught. They took it one step too far and they got busted. It remains to be seen how many of them will feel the force of justice. My bet? A couple of people will be thrown under the bus, but…and you can bet on this, too…those same people will miraculously reappear from under said bus’s wheels in a cushy think tank job of some kind within a year or two. The revolving door thing doesn’t just work at the top of the system; it’s in place everywhere
Read on.
Education on Steroids-Atlanta’s Pitiful Hypocrisy, by David Macaray
By now most of us have heard the gruesome details of how Atlanta’s elementary and middle school teachers (and principals) conspired to falsify the scores on state proficiency tests. The investigation not only implicated teachers and administrators, it reached all the way up the ladder to Atlanta’s celebrated district superintendent at the time, one Beverly L. Hall.
Dr. Hall was not only lionized by the media as the savior of Atlanta’s school system, she was named superintendent of the year by the American Association of School Administrators, she was invited to the White House by Secretary of Labor Arne Duncan, and she received more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. While those first three things now qualify as embarrassments, that $500,000 is being treated as a felony.
The level of cheating (not to mention the audacity and nonchalance with which it was done) was mind-boggling. Teachers raised scores a whole magnitude at a time by simply erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right ones.
Apparently, teachers got together after school in little groups (with full approval of their principals), and set about re-discovering America, believing there was no way they’d get caught. After all, who really wanted to catch them? Who wanted to ruin a good thing? As long as the test scores were top-notch, no one asked questions.
According to investigators, Atlanta’s Parks Middle School was one of the most flagrant cheaters. Its scores began to improve immediately after the new principal, Christopher Waller, arrived on the job. During Waller’s first year (2005), math scores went from 24-percent proficiency to 86-percent proficiency, and reading scores went from 35-percent to 78-percent.
Any educator in the country will tell you that proficiency improvements as dramatic as these are scarcer than hen’s teeth, and that when they do occur, they usually take decades to reach those numbers. Yet Parks Middle School managed to pull it off in what–one year? Really? A complete reversal in one single year? And yet no one bothered to investigate? The hypocrisy was suffocating.
—snip—
Now…do parents have to be members of the “home-schooler audience for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh” to immediately begin thinking about alternatives to such a system once it dawns on them what is really happening? Especially when they also consider the almost universal mainstream U.S. educational system’s dependence on behavior-altering drugs to control rebellious and/or otherwise unhappy kids?
Hardly.
However, the alternatives are few, far between and usually quite expensive.
What to do, what to do?
About the only viable answer for people of less than upper middle class economic status is some form of home schooling…possibly a cooperative “home schooling” system of some sort. They certainly aren’t going to be able to take over their local school systems and fix them, because they will face massive amounts of resistance from a deeply entrenched, very well funded corporate PermaGov system. Been there, saw that just north of NYC in Westchester County over 15 years ago. The situation has only gotten worse since then.
Now, Mr. Macaray gets himself in some deep water later in the article when he starts lauding the actions of various national “teachers’ organizations” in opposing what was happening in Atlanta because almost all of those centralized organizations are on the PermaGov take as well. If they are whistleblowing, it’s because the extreme stupidity of the Atlanta situation threatens their own profitability. (Extreme stupidity. Yup. Dare I say the stupidity of entitlement? Betcha. I have spent a great deal of time in Atlanta. Entitlement Central, up and down the board.)
Home schooling?
It ain’t just for the right wing.
It’s a reaction against the wrong wing.
The corporatist central wing.
These days I am increasingly more often reminded of the classic Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man.”
An alien race visits earth and provides startling improvements in the climate, the food supply, energy sources, technology…the works. They have a written language that earth people cannot decipher and a holy book the title of which is “To Serve Man.” When someone does decipher the language, it turns out to be a cookbook.
UH oh!!!
Is our goose already cooked?
i think not.
But those of us whose asses are not yet too thoroughly encased in PermaGov plastic insulation can already feel the heat.
Bet on it.
What to do? What to do?
Wake the fuck up is what to do.
Please.
Let us pray.
AG
