Betsy Davos, super-wealthy Dominionist, is the current nominee for Secretary of Education.  She is rabidly anti-public education, which is pretty odd since neither she nor anyone she knows, including her children, have ever been involved in any kind of public school.  Ever.  Not one.

Instead, she champions that rightwing shibboleth of “competition,” because competition makes everyone better, right?  You know, like when you line up the whole class of children and make them all race to the other end of the playground, and that one chubby kid just keeps getting faster and faster every day?  Just like that?

That’s right, boys and girls, if you let “the money follow the child,” then if a child is in a “failing” school, his parents can “choose” to send that child to any other [charter/private/religious] school of their choice, and presto! their child can now “succeed” instead of being “trapped” in a “failing” school.

OK, let’s look at that, because there’s a lot of sleight of hand going on here.

First of all, who decides when a school is “failing”?  That’s an easy one: we have standards set by a variety of levels of government from local to federal, and if a school doesn’t meet those standards, they are “failing.”  It is unusually curious that those standards for the most part align with the socioeconomic status of the students in any school.  A recent study (the link to which I cannot find; you’re just going to have to trust me) found that you didn’t need to run students through all those tests: you could get the same results by tabulating their parents’ income and education level.  THE SAME RESULTS, KENNETH.

Second, Davos is militant that those standards should not apply to her charter/private/religious schools.  Is that incredible to you?  Go see for yourself.  That’s a pretty sweet deal: enforce standards that make it impossible for certain schools to “succeed,” then suck their funding dry for your for-profit schools while evading those same standards.  I’ve written about this before.

And here’s the biggest sleight of hand of all: Everyone has been convinced to keep their eye on the charter/private/schools and argue about whether they are “succeeding” enough to justify draining public schools of their funding and students.  But that’s not the question.  The question is whether all this “healthy competition” is actually causing the “failing” schools to suddenly succeed.  In other words, is the chubby kid getting faster and faster every day just because you took some of the faster kids off the playground?

I submit to you that he is not, and that the whole “school choice” plan is a con of the most blatant and disgusting sort.  At no point are these people actually concerned about improving all schools for all children.  Davos has never presented such a plan, nor will she.  She wants to kill off public education once and for all, and the only reason I can think why she would want to do this is to take the money and run.  Oh, and that whole Dominionist thing.

Keep your eye on the lady, folks.

It seems that in the sovereign state of North Carolina, your tax dollars earmarked for charter schools are far more likely to go to a religious charter school than not.

I keep thinking that if I work hard and focus on the end result, I can one day kill off my morals and scruples and get in on these Jebus dollars like the shysters to the north of us are doing.^[1]

But Dale, I hear you asking, what religion will your school promote?  This is a good question and I will now attempt to answer a completely different one.

The philosophical/moral/ethical foundation of the Lyles Charter School will be as follows:

• The 10 Principles of Burning Man
• The 9 Precepts of Lichtenbergianism
• The Big 6
• The Golden Rule

 

 

Let’s examine the prospect, shall we?

The 10 Principles of Burning Man

Those ten principles are:

1. Radical Inclusion: Everyone is welcome, all types, all kinds, friends, strangers, and in between.
2. Gifting: Gifts are unconditional offerings, whether material, service oriented, or even less tangible. Gifting does not ask for a return or an exchange for something else.
3. Decommodification: Hand in hand with gifting, burns are environments with no commercial transactions or advertising. Nothing is for sale – we participate rather than consume.
4. Radical Self-Reliance: You are responsible for you. Bring everything with you that you need. Burns are an opportunity for you to enjoy relying on yourself.
5. Radical Self-Expression: What are your gifts, talents, and joys? Only you can determine the form of your expression.
6. Communal Effort: Cooperation and collaboration are cornerstones of the burn experience. We cooperate to build social networks, group spaces, and elaborate art, and we work together to support our creations.
7. Civic Responsibility: Civic responsibility involves the agreements that provide for the public welfare and serve to keep society civil. Event organizers take responsibility for communicating these agreements to participants and conducting events in accordance with applicable laws.
8. Leave No Trace: In an effort to respect the environments where we hold our burns, we commit to leaving no trace of our events after we leave. Everything that you bring with you goes home with you. Everyone cleans up after themselves. Whenever possible, we leave our hosting places better than we found them.
9. Participation: The radical participation ethic means you are the event. Everyone works; everyone plays. No one is a spectator or consumer.
10. Immediacy: Experience things right now. Live for the moment, because that moment is fleeting, and you never get another chance.

Also the 11^th Principle, Consent.

The 9 Precepts of Lichtenbergianism

You already know these:

1. Task Avoidance
2. Abortive Attempts
3. Successive Approximation
4. Waste Books
5. Ritual
6. Steal from the Best
7. Gestalt
8. Audience
9. Abandonment

The Big 6

We haven’t really talked about these in a while.  Here’s the main site.  Essentially, it’s a curriculum structure for finding and using information, aka research.

Here’s the original language:

1.Task Definition

1 Define the information problem

1.2 Identify information needed

2. Information Seeking Strategies

2.1 Determine all possible sources

2.2 Select the best sources

3. Location and Access

3.1 Locate sources (intellectually and physically)

3.2 Find information within sources

4. Use of Information

4.1 Engage (e.g., read, hear, view, touch)

4.2 Extract relevant information

5. Synthesis

5.1 Organize from multiple sources

5.2 Present the information

6. Evaluation

6.1 Judge the product (effectiveness)

6.2 Judge the process (efficiency)

Here’s my elementary version:

1. What’s the job?

1.1 What are we trying to do?

1.2 What do we need to know?

2. Where will we find the information?

2.1 Where could we look?

2.2 What’s the best place to start looking?

3. Find it.

3.1 Find the sources of information: books, encyclopedias, Internet, cd-roms, etc.

3.2 Look up the information in the sources: use the index, etc.

4. Deal with it.

4.1 Read through all the information.

4.3 Get just the information we need: take notes!

5. Show it!

5.1 Put all the information we found together.

5.2 Present the result.

6. How did we do?

6.1 Did we do a good job?

6.2 Were we good at finding information?

The Golden Rule

Here.  Read it for yourself.

That’s it.  Unless I’ve missed something.

Wait, you want me to explain all this?  Geez, who has time for that?  What do you think I am, an educator?

Let me put it like this: if people want me to explain how this foundation would make a perfect school, they can request me to do so in the comments below.  So there.

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^[1] And if Nathan Deal has his way, I won’t even have to move to Asheville to do it.

I know everyone must be shocked—shocked—to find that charter schools in general don’t live up to their promise and in some cases are actually run by grifters.  I mean, no one could have predicted that a school run by a for-profit organization might not have its focus completely on the educate-the-kids thing.

(side note: Am I the only one to whom it has occurred that if it were possible to make a profit from running a school, we educators would be rolling in it?  Or states would be able to fund the rest of their budgets with the profits from the public schools?)

Still, let us agree that the basic principle behind the charter school movement is a valid one: if you allow these people to avoid standardized tests and/or “restrictive” rules and regulations, then Step 3: Profit!  Or at least highly educated, self-motivated learners.

If this is all it takes to lift children of poverty out of their slough of despond, then I’m all for it.  And so I propose the Lyles Accountability Trigger Law [LATL].

It is a very simple law.  Any time that a charter school is approved in any school district, whether by the district or by the state, then whatever terms are approved for the charter automatically apply to every school in the district.  See, that’s easy, right?  If freeing the charter school from <insert talking point here> will improve the education of its students, then why would you withhold that benefit from the rest of the children?  Ethically, how could you withhold from the majority of your students the great and glorious good that universally obtains to any charter school student ?

It is literally win/win/win for everyone everywhere!

Honey please.

This morning’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a story (sorry, premium content/no link) about how students in Georgia and the nation are no more interested in careers in science, math, and technology than they were a decade ago.  Quelle horreur!

A key finding of a U.S. News & World Report study was that interest had actually fallen between 2009 and 2013.

Hey, you know what else had fallen between 2009 and 2013?  FUNDING FOR K-12 EDUCATION IN THE STATE OF GEORGIA, you freaking morons.

Between 2000 and 2011, I watched my media center’s budget shrivel to $0.  That is Z-E-R-O dollars.  The only money I had to buy books with was raised by the PTO’s book fairs.  That’s it.  So whatever I was supposed to be doing to help turn our children into wonks and geeks wasn’t getting done.  At the same time, the overwhelming focus on reading and math meant that science was barely taught at the elementary level.

Between 2003 and 2013, I watched the budget for the Governor’s Honors Program [GHP] go from about $1.6 million to about half of that.  Our science classes had to scrounge discarded computers from VSU to do their lab work.  They had to trek down to the library to do even the slightest bit of web research.  Purchase of spiffy materials or equipment was out of the question. Experimental work that took longer than two and a half weeks was not doable within our crippled four week program.  Our technology and design classes were coasting on computers we bought years ago.  We were “significantly different from the regular high school classroom” only in being significantly behind.

So don’t come wringing your hands to me, Powers That Be.  If making sure that more of our students desired careers in the STEM fields had been important to you, you would have bloody invested in making sure it bloody happened.  You didn’t.  Fuck off.¹

update: I need to clarify that our GHP science/tech/design classes were “significantly different,” of course, because of the incredible instructors and their ability to focus on the process, but boy it would have helped if I had been able to, you know, buy stuff for them.

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¹ Apologies for the language.²

² Not really.