This harangue is part of a left wing effort, largely sponsored by the teachers’ unions, to do away with Common Core and testing. THE MEME IS THAT WE DO NOT NEED SCHOOL REFORM BECA– USE THE SCHOOLS (i.e. the teachers) CAN NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF POVERTY.
This spin, like all good spin, is built around a fact that is largely irrelevant to the problem. The cockamamie estimate by the unions is that 90% of test grades come from the parents’ wealth. This 90% manipulated statistic that says nothing about the part of the kid’s problems that can be addressed by better schools.
In an era where our best kids are being groomed for STEM or careers in banking, really smart kids with a desire ot learn the humanities, make art, or learn history end up driving cabs. The ed schools do not attract the ambitious kids. Ed school grads who enter the public school labor pools, no matter the grads’ ambitions and drives, are put in a union designed labor system that rewards longevity rather than achievement. The lack of better teaching is obviously NOT wages. Private schools have no problem attracting really great teachers with wages well below the wages in pubic schools. Remember those cab drivers with degrees in history, art, or English? …and the fiftyish folks laid off during the great recession? What about ex military looking for jobs to supplement their pensions? These folks can’t teach because the system, like any good union system, is built on a union shop. The union shop protects the union members. The problem faced by pubic schools recruiting top talent is that bright people do not want to work in an environment where ability and motivation are not paths to recognition and pay advancement.
The other part of the problem the author of this piece ought to see is classism. While rightly arguing that high tech does not create job paths for the lower classes, i.e. the poor. the author does not ask whether the public schools themselves provide such a path. Union membership, irrespective of race, is dominated by middle class folks who are not part of the chronically poor. That community neds to be represented!
Education won’t fix inequality and in fact, inequality is the real problem for education Hyung Nam, activist, educator, musician
There remains a plausible solution to rising inequality that avoids those polarizing ideas: strengthening education so that more Americans can benefit from the advances of the 21st-century economy. This is a solution that conservatives, centrists and liberals alike can comfortably get behind. After all, who doesn’t favor a stronger educational system? But a new paper shows why the math just doesn’t add up, at least if the goal is addressing the gap between the very rich and everyone else.] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/upshot/why-more-education-wont-fix-economic-inequality.html?smid=tw-nytimes&abt=0002&abg=1&_r=0Smarter But Poorer: Low Wage Workers by State, 1980 and 2000
Even though workers are more educated now, poverty has grown. In fact by 2010 in OR, those with some college education and high school grads are more likely to be in poverty than those with less education. Get a clue OEIB and drop your corporate ed deform, achievement compacts, 40 40 20 bs and fully fund education at all levels while pushing for living wages for all, including academic workers. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/external?link=http%3A%2F%2Fpublic.tableausoftware.com%2Fshared%2FQB5WBTZK8%3F%3Adisplay_count%3Dyes&prev=http%3A%2F%2Fscalar.usc.edu%2Fworks%2Fgrowing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality%2Fchartbook
Education won’t fix inequality and in fact, inequality is the real problem for education http://public.tableausoftware.com/profile/chuntlyg#!/vizhome/shared/QR5596Y4F
[The figure below shows the most recent data on average hourly wages by education. Here we find reinforcing evidence that there is no sign of a technologically related demand for more-credentialed workers. The workers with the credential that should be in high demand—four-year college graduates—have not done that well, especially in the last year. In fact, among education categories, the greatest real wage losses between 2013 and 2014 were among those with a college or advanced degree. Workers with a four-year college degree saw their hourly wages fall 1.3 percent from 2013 to 2014, while those with an advanced degree saw an hourly wage decline of 2.2 percent. If demand for high-skilled workers were driving wage inequality, we would expect to see these workers’ wages increasing, or at the very least, falling less than their low-skilled counterparts.] http://www.epi.org/publication/even-the-most-educated-workers-have-declining-wages/
[Annual high-stakes testing has not resulted in equity gains. The alleged benefit of annual high stakes testing was to unveil the achievement gaps, and by doing so, close them. All that has been closed are children’s neighborhood schools. In a powerful piece in the Huffington Post, Fairfield University Professor Yohuru Williams argues that annual high-stakes testing feeds racial determinism and closes doors of opportunity for black and brown children. Last year, Alan Aja and I presented evidence on how the Common Core and its tests are hurting, not helping, disadvantaged students.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/19/principal-there-comes-a-time-when-rules-must-broken-that-time-is-now/
[If the primary mission of the educational system is to preserve the stability of the existing economic system, then the schools must assist in providing a rational basis for the relegation of a large portion of the population to the “surplus” pile. If only a third to a half of the students graduating from our schools will find success in the job market, how can our schools help make this a process that is perceived as rational and above all fair?
Cue Arne Duncan, who said this a few years ago:
We should be able to look every second grader in the eye and say, ‘You’re on track, you’re going to be able to go to a good college, or you’re not,’
And now we have a system of tests, reaching down even to kindergarten and earlier, which is designed to do just that.
Our educational system is being used as a means to rationalize the economic marginalization of a growing number of students. That process will hit those already marginalized by class and race the hardest. Take a look at the numbers from New York, as shared by Carol Burris and Alan Aja:
…the percentage of black students who scored “Below Standard” in third-grade English Language Arts tests rose from 15.5 percent to a shocking 50 percent post-Common Core implementation. In seventh-grade math, black students labeled “Below Standard” jumped from 16.5 percent to a staggering 70 percent. Students with disabilities of all backgrounds saw their scores plummet– 75 percent of students with disabilities scored “Below Standard” on the Grade 5 ELA Common Core tests and 78 percent scored “Below Standard” on the 7th grade math test. Also, 84 percent of English Language learners score “Below Standard” on the ELA test while 78 percent scored the same on the 7th grade math exam.
These are the children that our educational system is being prepared to look in the eye and say “you are not going to be able to attend a good college.” In fact, many of you may not even graduate from high school if plans proceed to use these tests as graduation exams.
So the students who have been labeled as “not ready for college or career” will be released into society, to join the permanently unemployed or underemployed, the low wage service sector, their jobs vulnerable to computerization.
And what will the story be that explains why will this is their fate? It will not be because jobs have been sent overseas. Not because technology is increasing productivity and reducing the need for labor. Not because the economy is delivering ever more wealth to an ever smaller number of oligarchs. No. The story will be that they are surplus because they did not achieve the education needed to make themselves indispensable to some company’s bottom line. They are surplus because they are not needed to make the machinery of our society run.
We could apply a different logic to this challenge. We could look at the fact that we only need 130 million people working, and we have another 70 million that would like to work and say let’s lower the work week to 30 hours and increase fulltime employment. We could re-invest in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and put people to work doing a thousand much needed things. But our oligarchs have decided that “taxes are for little people,” and their companies will only be sustainable if they get tax breaks and subsidies. Schools for future surplus workers are not a worthwhile investment, so budgets are cut to the bone.
Geographically, our nation is being divided into winners and losers as well. If your area is a technology hub of some sort, like the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area, then real estate is booming and unemployment is low. But if you are in Franklin County, Massachusetts, or Franklin County Tennessee, you are being left behind. And state leaders will offer tax breaks to try to lure businesses to these economic backwaters, which will leave public schools and services without the support they need to survive.
Teachers are caught in the middle – especially those working with the children who are being looked in the eye and told they have fewer chances at a bright future. It is not an accident that the push to standardize education and rank and sort our students is accompanied by attacks on seniority and due process. These rights give the profession stability and individual teachers the ability to speak out.]
http://www.livingindialogue.com/will-schools-sort-societys-winners-losers/
[The deeper problem with joblessness today isn’t that there aren’t enough skilled workers — it’s that there aren’t enough jobs.
The myth of the skills gap: There is the popular narrative that greater access to education provides a clear path to employment. On an individual level, it makes sense: A skilled worker has more options in the job market than an unskilled one. But skilled workers tend to compete against each other in the same sector, and so it is not only their skills that matter, but the demand for someone with their skill set.
If you break down the workforce by industry, the evidence suggests that the labor market isn’t suffering from a cancerous skills gap but a shortage of jobs for people who possess industry-specific skills. This 2014 chart from the Economic Policy Institute shows that, in every industry measured, there were fewer job openings than unemployed people within those industries, often by a great margin:] http://mic.com/articles/108934/the-one-huge-problem-that-free-community-college-will-do-nothing-to-fix
[Too Much: Let’s talk a bit more about your work on the achievement gap between black and white students and high- and low-income students. Fifty years ago, you’ve noted, the achievement gap between black and white students was almost twice as wide as the gap between high- and low-income students. Today’s income-achievement gap is more than 50 percent larger than the racial achievement gap. How directly do you think income and economic segregation is at play here?Reardon: I think that many different forces, acting in concert, are determining these broad changes in racial and income achievement gaps. Economic segregation plays a role, but so do big changes in how much families invest in their young children’s education and educational experiences, growing disparities in family structure and family resources, maybe even the quality of schools.So the growth of economic segregation may be part of the story, but I suspect there are many other parts of that story as well.] http://truth-out.org/news/item/29421-segregation-s-insidious-new-look
And the real problems? – Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think The great divide between our beliefs, our ideals, and reality http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequality-it-s-far-worse-than-you-think/
[The scene she described is an uncomfortable one given San Francisco’s status as a center of innovation and wealth, a description that extends to the Bay Area in general, taking in Silicon Valley, the fabled home of the technology industry. This, after all, is a part of the country in which 43 percent of households make more than $100,000 a year, compared to 21 percent in the rest of the country. The Bay Area has the fifth highest concentration of millionaires in the US, and the median home price is $500,000. Down the 101 in Palo Alto – near where you’ll find Google, Facebook, Stanford University, and top-shelf venture capital firms – the average sale price of a home is $2 million.It is also a place, however, where the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The median household income hit an 11-year low in 2011, according to the 2013 Silicon Valley Index, at about $85,000 a year (although that was 45 percent above state levels). The share of households bringing in less than $35,000 a year increased two percent compared to three years earlier, hitting 20 percent. The nonprofit Insight Center for Community Economic Development has estimated that a family of four needs to make $74,000 a year just to cover basic needs. And while most Silicon Valley residents saw their incomes increase in 2011, African Americans and Hispanics saw their incomes drop by 18 percent and 5 percent respectively.
A separate study by Working Partnerships USA, meanwhile, has shown that Silicon Valley hasn’t added any net new jobs in 16 years; that about 31 percent of jobs in Silicon Valley pay $16 an hour or less; and that from 2000 to 2010, the portion of middle class households in Silicon Valley dropped from 62 percent to 55 percent. In the same period, the number of households making less than $10,000 more than doubled, and the cost of every major household expense category increased faster than wages.
The consequences of this inequality are exhibited in plain sight throughout the Bay Area. A tent city popped up in San Jose. Google’s security guards have been protesting inadequate pay and unreliable hours. In the middle of San Francisco, Twitter employees sit on artificial grass laid out on their office building’s rooftop and eat free gourmet lunches in the sun, while the desperate and destitute self-medicate with hard liquor on the grimy street nine storeys below.] http://pando.com/2013/07/08/silicon-valleys-ugly-rich-poor-gap-whats-the-tech-world-gonna-do-about-it/
[But while there’s evidence that some large tech companies have exacerbated income inequality in both the Bay Area and across America at large, the reasons why may be far more complex than this irresistible narrative suggests.
Lazonick argues that the above programs drive income inequality in America by creating a system where corporate profits — which in America are higher than ever before — do little to enrich all but the most well-compensated stakeholders of an organization. This is true of individual organizations but also true on a macro level. According to the New York Times, citing research by the US Commerce Department, “Corporate profits are at their highest level in at least 85 years. Employee compensation is at the lowest level in 65 years.
Not necessarily. A new investigation by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Cohn looks to identify which California tech firms invest the largest percentages of their revenue in self-serving stock buyback schemes. And while San Francisco activists have focused the lion’s share of their rage against Google over buses, there are some less visible Silicon Valley heavyweights that arguably do far more damage in terms of income inequality.] http://pando.com/2015/02/20/big-tech-companies-cause-income-inequality-but-in-the-ways-you-think/