It is now taken for granted by political policy makers that schools, administrators, and teachers must be held accountable. For most who consider educational reform that is a non debatable given. Of course, those who favor educational reform beg an interesting question- Do American schools need reforming?

The taken-for-granted answer to that question is, Yes, because our test scores are lower than those of other countries. Notice the circular reasoning. Do our schools need reforming? Yes. How do we know? Because our students score lower on standardized tests than students of many other countries. How shall we reform our schools? By demanding more accountability on the part of teachers and administrators. How will be hold them accountable? By doing more of what we are already doing, testing.

This whole game has been going on for close to thirty years (see the Nation at Risk Report ),  but no one seems concerned about the irrationality involved.

The “Measurements” of Accountability

Although policymakers give lip service to the idea that there should be multiple measures to determine accountability, the fact is student achievement, as determined by standardized test results, is all that really counts. In most cases, these standardized tests consist of multiple-choice questions assessing discrete facts. There is really no way to test for critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, writing or reading skills beyond the most rudimentary. But, as an old saying goes, “what counts is what can be counted.”

The Irony of Accountability

Thus, the one thing that is measured by standardized tests is one thing that contemporary education ought to be least concerned about. Just think about it for a moment. When you want to know a specific fact, what do you do? If you are like me, you “Google”it.
In the modern technological age, there is simply no point in memorizing the factual information that is readily available to anyone who has access to the Internet. The really problem in this age of “information glut” is what to do with the vast amount of facts we have at hand. A computer has already shown that it can beat any human “expert” at the quiz show, Jeopardy. That same computer could easily “ace” the student achievement tests that we use to measure whether or not our students are “educated”.
This point leads us to the real question- What does it mean to be “educated”, and what should schools be about?

What Then, Should Schooling Be About?

If the purpose of schooling is not to transmit a body of factual knowledge to a passive group of young people who are then required to memorize the knowledge and regurgitated on a standardized test, what might the purpose of schooling be? As John Dewey told us over a century ago, schools ought to be two things: 1) having “educative” experiences, and 2) learning how to participate in a democratic community. We have forgotten what both of those terms mean. We confuse learning facts with being educated and we confuse knowing facts about democracy and voting with participating in a democracy.

Educative Experiences

What are Educative Experiences?

• The opportunity for educative experience arises from an authentic problem or question.
• The problem or question must be one that a student is interested in and finds engaging.
• The problem should emerge from the student’s prior knowledge and experience.

The teacher’s job is twofold: provide the student with the background and information necessary to solve the problem; and provide the student with the critical thinking skills necessary to solve the problem.

Schools as Participatory Democracies

This is the most radical of Dewey’s ideas about education. Dewey believed that a critical role for American education was to provide a public space where young people could understand democracy by practicing it. For Dewey, a participatory democracy is one where those who are impacted by a decision have a role in making that decision. Not only are such experiences rare in today’s schools, there is no interest in assessing whether they take place or not.

Follow the Money

If you ask the question, “Whose interests are being served?” by the testing reform agenda’s the answer in obvious. It is not the students, their parents, or teachers and administrators interested in educating our children. Business interests are being served. Business and industry are not concerned with schools emphasizing citizenship education. They want a compliant work force, not one interested in participating in decision-making. Politicians advocating educational “reform” know who they are accountable to and who pays for their campaigns. This is true nationally as well as here in Idaho.

Organizers of a bid to dump the education and teachers union overhaul that passed the 2011 Idaho Legislature say they’ve gathered enough signatures to put all three repeal measures on the November 2012 ballot.

More than 48,000 people signed each of three petitions to put the new Idaho laws to referendum votes next year, Michael Lanza, an organizer of the petitions, announced Wednesday.

Of course, Idaho is just a small piece of the larger educational “reform” movement nationally intent on pushing a reform agenda that excludes educators and parents from the process. Who is behind this reform movement? As they say, follow the money.

In a New York Times article, Sam Dillon exposes how Bill Gates is using his billions to fund advocacy campaigns intended to convince policy makers to implement Gate’s ill-advised and debunked ideas about education.

In fact, the Times article just scratches the surface. Susan Ohannian has a well researched article naming names when it comes to the many ways Gate’s money has bought educational policy makers.

Real research refuting Gate’s agenda appears regularly, but almost never reaches the main stream media and is simply ignored by the “reformers”. For example, the National Sciences Association has just released a new report showing that a decade of America’s test-based accountability systems, from “adequate yearly progress” to high school exit exams, has shown little to no positive effect overall on learning.

The “reformers” continually claim that American education cannot compete with “High Performing” nations because we refuse to fully implement their preferred reform measures.  Ironically, The United States’ education system is not likely to see great improvements based on its current attempts at reform, a report released this week by the National Center on Education and the Economy concludes. The NCEE report attempts to identify what can be gleaned from education systems in top-performing or rapidly improving countries.

Among other measures, the report outlines a less-frequent system of standardized student testing; a statewide funding-equity model that prioritizes the neediest students, rather than local distribution of resources; and greater emphasis on the professionalization of teaching that would overhaul most elements of the current model of training, professional development, and compensation.

The report’s findings are in direct contradiction to the policies advocated by the Gates Foundation.

For instance, the report notes that no other country has grade-by-grade national testing, pointing out that such countries as Singapore and Japan tend to use such exams sparingly, only at the end of primary and secondary schooling. The tests are closely linked to curricula and carry stakes for students in terms of progressing, rather than being used for school or teacher accountability.

Such countries also have much higher entry standards for teachers and require greater content knowledge, which is better integrated with training in pedagogy. In general, the report states, such efforts have helped to elevate the status of the profession, which is reflected in higher pay, more autonomy, and additional career opportunities as teachers advance.

Finally, teachers’ unions are prevalent in top-performing jurisdictions such as Finland and Ontario, Canada [where teachers are] treated as professional partners, who are given autonomy and trusted to diagnose and solve instructional problems on their own.

George Carlin always spoke the truth. What he is talking about is hegemony; the process by which political, economic, ideological or cultural power is exerted by a dominant group over other groups. It requires the consent of the majority to keep the dominant group’s leaders in power. As Carlin pointed out, the dominate group in power is big business and one of those controlling the message is Roger Ailes of Fox news. For a view as to how hegemony works, go here.  For a view demonstrating how little power politicians really have over their “message”, go here.

Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction has a plan to “transform” education. Luna calls his plan “Students Come First”, a classic example of Orwellian double speak. Two key recommendations are increasing class size and requiring students to take at least eight credits of online courses to graduate.

He claims that his plan would only mean an increase in class size from an average of 18.2 to 19.8. This is a blatant example of “lying with averages”. Luna arrives at the figure by dividing the number of students enrolled statewide by the number of full time teachers. It is obvious how misleading this figure is. Consider a special education teacher with 8 students and a regular classroom teacher with 32 students. Divide 40 by 2 and you have an average of 20 students. As representatives from the Boise and Meridian school districts pointed out, there are no regular classrooms in those districts with 18 students. Luna’s plan would result in 4-6 grade classes of approximately 30 in Boise and 32 in Meridian.

Luna sidestepped the importance of class size on student success by claiming that “study after education study demonstrates that quality teachers and principals are more critical to success than class size”. Of course, what numerous studies have demonstrated is that both those variables, small class size and quality teaching, are critical to student success.

Luna’s statement implies that there have been no studies demonstrating the positive impact of small class size on student achievement. This is simply not true. Project STAR is a paradigm example of a rigorous experimental, longitudinal study showing the positive advantages of small class size. Interestingly enough, the STAR project defined small classes as 13-17 students per teacher and regular sized classes as 22-25 students per teacher. Who knows what the results would have been if class sizes of 30-32 had been part of the study?

After claiming that quality classroom teachers are the key to student success, Luna then proposes a plan that, by requiring students take a minimum of 8 online credits, removes the classroom teacher from the course. This is not something that will happen in the distant future. Ninth-graders in fall 2012 will be required to take at least two courses online each year and will need eight online course credits (out of 48 total) to graduate.

Luna makes no claims that studies exist showing online learning to be more effective than “face-to-face” classroom learning. That is because there is no evidence. If fact, online learning is such a new phenomenon, Luna is committing the state to an educational practice for which there is no definitive evidence that it will improve student success. In 2009, the Department of Education did a meta-analysis of online learning. The key finding was,

Few rigorous studies of the effectiveness of online learning for K-12 students have been published. A systematic search of the the research literature from 1994 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the learning effect of online versus face-to-face instruction for K-12 students that provide sufficient data to compute an effect size.

The meta-analysis did conclude that “blended classes” (combining face-to-face learning with online learning) had a modest effect size advantage over online alone or face-to-face alone. Of course, in those blended classes there was one classroom teacher utilizing online resources to supplement his or her teaching.

So, Luna’s loony logic:

1. If I increase class size (because having a quality teacher in the classroom is more important than class size)
2. And I reduce the classes where students are learning from classroom teachers by requiring them to take online courses
3. Then, students come first!

I think Luna’s real logical decision-making goes like this;

1. By eliminating 770 teaching jobs,
2. I can pay back the out-of-state online education providers who contributed $19,000 to my 2010 campaign
3. and insure that I will have the finances to get re-elected next time.

Seriously!

The IRS has just released the latest figures on America’s top 400 incomes. These are the figures through 2007, so they include the ultra-wealthy corporate CEOs, Hedge Fund owners and other Wall Street kingpins before the economy crashed. The average income was $344.8 million!

The typical American worker would have had to work over 11,000 years to equal the income the average member of the top 400 took home in 2007.

I think you can see why the top 400 (and the politicians they own) want to keep Bush tax cuts and why they are doing everything in their power to gut financial reform.

Evidently, the Tea Party rebels think that is just fine. No problem with that kind of inequality because it shows the free market at work.

Here in Idaho, Governor Butch Otter thinks any attempt to raise taxes on the wealthy is class warfare.

The only other means is to raise taxes, and I tell you, in this environment I believe there is little appetite in the state legislature,” Otter declared. He went on to directly criticize a proposal from Rep. Shirley Ringo, D-Moscow, for a temporary income tax surcharge on those earning more than $50,000 a year, as something that could “divide by class warfare,” and said, “I don’t want to see that happening in the state of Idaho. … Those who are successful ought to be celebrated and rewarded. … I resist the effort to start class warfare.

… and so it goes…

I admit I have a hard time taking the Tea Party movement seriously. Wacko-fringe is the term that comes to mind. But, after reading Frank Rich’s column, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged, I suffered a short, involuntary shudder of recognition.  Actually, it was not Rich’s column that evoked the shudder, it was an earlier article he linked to and that I had somehow missed reading. The article, by David Barstow, was an in-depth investigation of the tea party movement that brought back memories of Ruby Ridge, the Patriot Movement and the Aryan Nation.

SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

Barstow connects the dots between the Tea Party movement and the Patriot and Militia movements of the late 1990s.

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal — a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain.

A look at the Friends for Liberty web site show that Barstow is not exaggerating.  If you visit the site, note the “liberty organization” links. And, if you have the stomach for it, watch some of the videos of “Freedom Festival” speakers.

Who are the Tea Party leaders?

They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

Glenn Beck is serving the role of demagogue, steering the tea party folk ever closer to violence and armed rebellion.  Idaho’s own David Neiwert knows more than anyone about the history of the Patriot Movement in the Pacific Northwest. He has been watching Beck and has created a composite video of his hate rhetoric calling for the elimination of “Progressivism.”

Beck is one in a long line of media demagogues. As Joe Klien pointed out on the Bill O’Reilly show, Beck is the latest version of Father Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio.

“I think that your pal Glenn Beck is peddling a lot of hateful crap,” he said.

O’Reilly didn’t disagree — but tried to laugh off Beck’s antics. “But he is funny,” O’Reilly countered. “He is doing it in a funny way.”

“I thought the part where he described the president as intentionally steering the airplane into the ground was hilarious,” Klein said sarcastically. “And the stuff about Obama not being an American?”

O’Reilly cut him off. “He has a blackboard and phone to the White House. He is every man sitting on a bar stool. Why shouldn’t every man have a show?” he asked.

“No. No. No. No. No,” replied Klein. “He is Father Coughlin trying to delude and entertain the American public.” Klein was referring to Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest who attacked the New Deal, broadcast antisemitic theories, and expressed sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. Coughlin is now considered the father of hate radio.

Father Coughlin was forced off the airwaves in 1942. Beck is unlikely to meet the same fate.

He asked the question in response to right-wing reaction to a story New York representative Louise Slaughter told during the Health Care summit.

I even have one constituent — you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, but it’s true — her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit.

Do you ever believe that in America that that’s where we would be?

How did the right-wing respond? Fox News and Michelle Malkin thought the story was pretty funny. Rush Limbaugh called it the sob story of the day.

I mean for example, well what’s wrong with using a dead person’s teeth? Aren’t the Democrats big into recycling? Save the planet? And so what? So if you don’t have any teeth, so what? What’s applesauce for? Isn’t that why they make applesauce?

Obviously, right-wingers are not a separate species, but…  This got me thinking about what the latest research has to say about differences between individuals on the left and right of the political spectrum. There is some recent evidence that political orientation is related to how the brain functions.

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

There also appears to be differences when it comes to morality.

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

Studies have shown that Liberals are more inclined to break away from habitual responses, to think creatively and to be open to new experiences.

A study of American Christians found that, when it comes to religion, political conservatives operate out of a fear of chaos and absence of order while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness,  According to Dan McAdams, co-author of the study,

Political conservatives envision a world without God in which baser human impulses go unchecked, social institutions (marriage, government, family) fall apart and chaos ensues. Liberals, on the other hand, envision a world without God as barren, lifeless, devoid of color and reasons to live.

Liberals see their faith as something that fills them up and, without it, they conjure up metaphors of emptiness, depletion and scarcity. While conservatives worry about societal collapse, liberals worry about a world without deep feelings and intense experiences.

Two studies conducted recently at Cornell show that Conservatives are apt to make moral/political judgments based upon personal feelings of disgust rather than on whether an action might cause actual harm. This helps explain the seemingly intractable differences surrounding issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Liberals and conservatives disagree about whether disgust has a valid place in making moral judgments. Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something — gay sex between consenting adults, for example — is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm.

Social psychologists like John Mayer (who coined the term “emotional intelligence”) have tried to categorize the personality types “liberal” and “conservative”.

Liberals:
• View social inequities and preferred groups as unjust and requiring reform.
• Prefer atheists, tattoos, foreign films and poetry.
• Endorse gay unions, welfare, universal health care, feminism and environmentalism.
• Exhibit creativity, which entails the capacity to see solutions to problems, and empathy toward others.
• Tolerate complexity and ambiguity.
• Are influenced by their work as judges, social workers, professors and other careers for which an appreciation of opposing points of view is required.

Conservatives:
• Willing to defend current social inequities and preferred groups as justifiable or necessary.
• Prefer prayer, religious people and SUVs.
• Endorse the U.S. government, the military, the state they live in, big corporations and most Americans.
• Are more likely to be a first-born, who identify more with their parents, predisposing them to a greater investment in authority and a preference for conservatism.
• Have a fear of death, reflecting an enhanced need for security.
• Are conscientious – the ability to exert personal self-control to the effect of meeting one’s own and others’ demands, and maintaining personal coherence.
• Need simplicity, clarity and certainty.

Is there a positive correlation between intelligence and liberalism, atheism and monogamy?

The latest scientist to weigh in on this issue is Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her study found that more intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history.  Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence.

Based on his findings, he proposes the theory of “evolutionary novel” preferences.

Apparently, more intelligent people adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

Kanazawa explains that “Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess, while those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.”

Kanazawa said: “General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions.

“As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

The study argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends.

Hence, being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel.

Kanazawa further briefed that religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena.

Kanazawa said: “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid

“So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

If Kanazawa’s theory is correct, right wingers are not another species, they are just not as evolved as the more intelligent liberal, atheist and monogamist (this last applies to men only) among us.

As intriguing as they may be,  I am afraid that I don’t find these biological, neurological, evolutionary explanations ultimately convincing.  I tend to come down on the nurture side of the nurture/nature debate. Against the evidence of science and my own experience, I hold on to the hope the right-wingers can be educated.  If they are really evolutionarily stunted “lizard-brains“, hardwired to act as they do, it is too depressing to contemplate. So much for bi-partisanship.

If we lived in a rational world, Laura Silsby will have had her 15 minutes of fame and we could all move on. That, of course, will not happen. Nevertheless, I think that Timothy Egan has managed to have the final word on the whole Silsby affair in his commentary The Missionary Impulse.  In the article, Egan, rightly I believe, characterizes the case as one more example of Cultural Imperialism.

At the least, the curious case of Laura Silsby raises questions about cultural imperialism: what makes a scofflaw from nearly all-white Idaho with no experience in adoption or rescue services think she has a right to bring religion and relief to a country with its own cultural, racial and spiritual heritage?

Imagine if a voodoo minister from Haiti had shown up in Boise after an earthquake, looking for children in poor neighborhoods and offering “opportunities for adoption” back to Haiti. He could say, as those who followed Silsby explained on a Web site, that “the unsaved world needs to hear” from the saved.

Who says they are “unsaved?” And who says the world needs to hear from them? Haiti is a predominantly Roman Catholic country, and a nation full of passionate believers at that.

It is a good thing Dan Popkey is willing to interview the childish, petulant members of the Idaho Legislature for the rest of us. I don’t think I could resist laughing in their face.

The latest to throw a tantrum is Majority Leader Mike Moyle.

Things were supposed to be different this year. Facing a budget crisis and united against raising taxes, Republicans running the Idaho House and Senate would set aside bad blood built over a decade and get the job done. Swiftly.

A month ago, the House’s dominant personality, that affable hothead, Majority Leader Mike Moyle of Star, said all was forgiven: “The House and Senate leadership are more on line than we ever have been before because we have a common enemy, a common problem.”

But on Tuesday, Moyle was so mad he wouldn’t speak, telling me twice to turn off my tape recorder. His beef: The Senate caved to state- and local-government retirees and didn’t have the spine to follow through on a leadership plan to kill a 1 percent cost-of-living increase in their pensions.

Ahh- that “affable hothead” Mike Moyle- all upset because the Senate refused to follow the ultra-right wing cabal in the House who were determined to deny Idaho retirees their 1% cost of living increase.  He was joined by baby number two, Rep. Tom Loertscher,

This sets the stage for a budget wreck,” Loertscher said. “You have a few retirees show up out here on the steps of the Capitol and all of a sudden they get their way. It sends a signal that the way you ply the Legislature is go stand on the steps and holler a little bit and we’ll fold up.”

Fortunately, there were a few adults in the Senate who were unwilling to listen to Moyle, Loertscher and the other babies following the lead of the impostor Captain America.  I wonder if the House babies really understand how much they have upset the adults that elected them.

[the] 48 House Republicans who thought the Senate had their backs are subject to being called anti-retiree. Among the critics is Boise City Councilman Vern Bisterfeldt, a longtime Republican who says he’s “mad as hell” and wants to tell “every retiree in Idaho so they won’t vote for those jerks again.”

Vern Bisterfeldt is also a former police officer and not someone I would want mad at me. I hope he is serious about heading a movement to give the House babies a permanent “time out”.