Lake Dubyabegone
I reply below to these excerpts from:
"The Divide In Education" by David S. Broder
Sunday, August 14, 2005 - in the "Columbus Dispatch"
It took me a while to catch up with her, but I reached Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently just before she left town for vacation. I was pursuing her because of an extraordinary outpouring of e-mails and other messages from teachers and principals -- triggered, I'm afraid, by a column in June in which I'd questioned the educators' commitment to the goal of improving school performance.
The column was prompted by a survey for the Educational Testing Service by the polling firms of Peter D. Hart, a Democrat, and David Winston, a Republican. In it, three-fourths of high school teachers had unfavorable views of No Child Left Behind, the four-year-old Bush administration initiative that Spellings helped design when she was on the White House staff.
More troubling, as I said, was the fact that teachers seemed skeptical of the basic premise of that law -- that students, teachers and schools should be rigorously judged by a single standard. They were asked to choose between the statement that everyone should be held to the same standard of performance, because it is wrong to have lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the contrary view that they should not be held to the same standard because we should not expect teachers working with disadvantaged students to have them reach the same level of performance on standardized tests as teachers in more affluent schools.
I suggested that the teachers' attitude spelled trouble for the effort to improve the schools -- and the teachers let me know they thought I was dead wrong.
I knew that Spellings's response would be a lot more significant to these teachers than my own, so I pursued her for an interview. Her first comment was that she was sure the excerpts I just quoted came from "good-hearted and well-intentioned teachers," but then -- employing the president's favorite phrase -- she said, "I hear a lot of 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' in there."
Dear Mr. Broder,
I am a retired teacher in Ohio with 31 years’ experience in both a high school and several junior highs – both urban and small town.
We have “benefited” quite a few years from the Ohio Proficiency Test, a precursor to Bush’s “No Child” plan. It has been a costly fraud, but Bush’s plan is even worse.
Aside from skepticism over whether Republicans are truly interested in reducing bigotry – soft or otherwise (see Willie Horton and the black-baby smear of McCain) – the plan is insane on its face. Just one example: after 12 years EVERY student is expected to be significantly above average (as are the children of that little town in Minnesota).
Consider this: in what other field of endeavor would one rationally assume that if only the “instructors” – the coaches, advisors, consultants, ministers, pundits, etc. – REALLY cared and REALLY expected uniformly superior results from their team, politicians, businessmen, congregations, or audience, that in twelve years everyone would perform at the same high level?
When such a scheme is attempted with football, I will eagerly await the “new fuzzy math” that explains how EVERY team could win 75% or more of its games and lose no more than 25%.
“No Child” is a political con job. The problem isn’t “soft bigotry” exercised by educators; it is hard-line hypocrisy exercised by dissembling politicians and their lackeys. It is not a failure by educators to diligently address the problems presented by economic, racial, and class discrimination. It is rather the refusal by our government and our society to eradicate economic, racial, and class discrimination.
Scapegoating is a lot easier and a lot cheaper.
- Uke Man
"The Divide In Education" by David S. Broder
Sunday, August 14, 2005 - in the "Columbus Dispatch"
It took me a while to catch up with her, but I reached Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently just before she left town for vacation. I was pursuing her because of an extraordinary outpouring of e-mails and other messages from teachers and principals -- triggered, I'm afraid, by a column in June in which I'd questioned the educators' commitment to the goal of improving school performance.
The column was prompted by a survey for the Educational Testing Service by the polling firms of Peter D. Hart, a Democrat, and David Winston, a Republican. In it, three-fourths of high school teachers had unfavorable views of No Child Left Behind, the four-year-old Bush administration initiative that Spellings helped design when she was on the White House staff.
More troubling, as I said, was the fact that teachers seemed skeptical of the basic premise of that law -- that students, teachers and schools should be rigorously judged by a single standard. They were asked to choose between the statement that everyone should be held to the same standard of performance, because it is wrong to have lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the contrary view that they should not be held to the same standard because we should not expect teachers working with disadvantaged students to have them reach the same level of performance on standardized tests as teachers in more affluent schools.
I suggested that the teachers' attitude spelled trouble for the effort to improve the schools -- and the teachers let me know they thought I was dead wrong.
I knew that Spellings's response would be a lot more significant to these teachers than my own, so I pursued her for an interview. Her first comment was that she was sure the excerpts I just quoted came from "good-hearted and well-intentioned teachers," but then -- employing the president's favorite phrase -- she said, "I hear a lot of 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' in there."
Dear Mr. Broder,
I am a retired teacher in Ohio with 31 years’ experience in both a high school and several junior highs – both urban and small town.
We have “benefited” quite a few years from the Ohio Proficiency Test, a precursor to Bush’s “No Child” plan. It has been a costly fraud, but Bush’s plan is even worse.
Aside from skepticism over whether Republicans are truly interested in reducing bigotry – soft or otherwise (see Willie Horton and the black-baby smear of McCain) – the plan is insane on its face. Just one example: after 12 years EVERY student is expected to be significantly above average (as are the children of that little town in Minnesota).
Consider this: in what other field of endeavor would one rationally assume that if only the “instructors” – the coaches, advisors, consultants, ministers, pundits, etc. – REALLY cared and REALLY expected uniformly superior results from their team, politicians, businessmen, congregations, or audience, that in twelve years everyone would perform at the same high level?
When such a scheme is attempted with football, I will eagerly await the “new fuzzy math” that explains how EVERY team could win 75% or more of its games and lose no more than 25%.
“No Child” is a political con job. The problem isn’t “soft bigotry” exercised by educators; it is hard-line hypocrisy exercised by dissembling politicians and their lackeys. It is not a failure by educators to diligently address the problems presented by economic, racial, and class discrimination. It is rather the refusal by our government and our society to eradicate economic, racial, and class discrimination.
Scapegoating is a lot easier and a lot cheaper.
- Uke Man
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