Republicans are Supporting the Federal Takeover of Education. How to Register Your Displeasure with the Republican Leadership.

This picture of Obama, Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush illustrates the bipartisanship present in the current educational reforms pushed by the current administration.  

We keep asking the question: Why are Republicans backing the federal centralization of education?  Aren't Republicans supposed to be the party of small government and individual liberty?  Haven't we heard the Republican politicians on the state and national level state decry Obamacare because of the mandates impinging on individual choice?  Aren't Republicans supposed to be from the party not aligning itself with increased centralization?  What's the difference between the takeover of healthcare and the takeover of education?


Why are Republicans such as Jeb Bush wrapping themselves in the educational mandates in Race to the Top or the Educational Reforms Formerly Known as Race to the Top?  These mandates are from Arne Duncan and are nothing but the Federal Government directing public education on all levels to the point where local school districts are ruled impotent and useless.  This impotence and uselessness of legal institutions and officials reminds me of the current stance of state legislators.  They state, "Oh, it's all the Board of Education's doing.  Oh, it's all the governor's fault.  Oh, it's not OUR fault we have mandates the state can't afford.  Oh, we think centralization is a good thing, don't you worry about it, it will all be fine".  

They refuse to act on not implementing the standards or refuse to fund unconstitutional programs that plunge us into more debt.  They look at voters and shrug their shoulders.  I'm thinking we might as well have mandates to do away with the state legislature since it can't apparently have any influence or power in standing up against federal regulations and mandates.  Taxpayers might as well save the money paying state legislator salaries as they aren't apparently interested in protecting the state constitution from federal intrusion.

Many of our legislators want to expand charters and expand Teach for America which will take school decisions out of local districts' hands (and taxpayers) and give them to private companies and DESE.  Once again, public money is being used to fund education via agencies and companies unaccountable to the taxpayers.  Are you feeling good about this scenario?  Why aren't the legislators on the state level acting to keep us out of debt and increased federal control? 


This lack of action has been noted by a former teacher and writer in California.  Doug Lasken has written a great piece calling Republican politicians to task for their refusal to confront this educational nightmare head on.  It's time to call these politicians to task for supporting this administration's disastrous educational policy:

Stop the Department of Education’s Power Grab

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Doug  Lasken

Here’s my bio: I am a retired LA Unified teacher of 25 years, currently coaching debate at a private school (I also teach writing in Korea each summer through the UCLA Writing Project) and I have consulted for a number of research institutes, including Fordham, Pioneer, and WestEd .  I have been politically active in the “education wars” for many years, starting in the 80′s when, as a classroom teacher, I was told never to teach English to Hispanic students (per so-called “bilingual education”), never to teach grammar, spelling or phonics (per Whole Language), and never to use direct instruction for science (per “constructivist” philosophy).  I have freelanced many articles across the county on these subjects and am now engaged in opposing the Common Core standards, a colossal cash cow that will do virtually nothing for American education..  This petition represents my current level of frustration with the GOP for not acting as the opposition party it is supposed to be against Obama’s corrupt and ill-advised education initiatives..

Best, Doug Lasken

We the undersigned do not agree on all things, but we are in close agreement on education, and in particular these five propositions:

1.  The federal government is barred by the United States Constitution from imposing academic standards and public school curricula on the states, the very thing it is attempting to do through the Obama administration programs Race to the Top (RttT) and the Common Core Standards(CCS).

2. In addition to imposing standards and curriculum on the states, RttT mandates that states collect extensive and detailed personal information on students, and that this information be submitted to the federal Department of Education, from which it will be available to other agencies.  We oppose this on Constitutional grounds.

3. The national price tag for CCS is estimated at $30 billion (and perhaps as much as $210 billion) most of which cost is to be borne by the states. This money will enrich special interests- publishing and testing empires- but will do virtually nothing to save America’s bankrupted public schools. The undersigned believe that spending $30 billion on standards is like painting a car before junking it- good for the painters, a useless expense for the car owner.

4.  The news media has decided that since conservatives object to spending money, and since conservative views are represented in the Republican party, then people who object to RttT and CCS must be represented by the Republican party.  The undersigned have found, however, that the Republican party, as distinct from individual candidates, does not represent those seeking sound education policy.  Time and again, at all levels from local to federal,the undersigned have encountered ignorance and indifference regarding RttT and CCS from the Republican party and the people it has helped to achieve office.  Republicans as much as Democrats have been seduced by the $30 billion and slick sales talk into acquiescence to RttT and CCS.  The news media is oblivious to this.

5. Therefore, we the undersigned here state that the Republican party does not represent our views on American education, that the Republican party is in fact aligned with the Democratic party in pushing through wasteful and highly problematic Democratic programs, and that we therefore disavow allegiance to and support of the Republican party in its policies towards education, and we ask that the media acknowledge that this diminution of Republican support has occurred.

If you would like to sign this petition, write to Doug Lasken at dlasken514@aol.com

An Educational Insight: Purple Ponies and the Other Ponies Masquerading as 800 Pound Gorillas

We are pleased to publish Doug Lasken's latest article on some current problems in education. Enjoy his educational description of purple ponies. Regarding the remaining educational issues he writes about in public schools today, we'll call them the "800 pound gorillas" in the room:

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The Purple Pony

By Doug Lasken

A political epiphany came to me recently at Fairyland , the enchanting Oakland theme park for young children where my wife and I took our 2 ½ year old granddaughter, Vera. We spent the first half hour at the merry-go-round because that is her favorite ride, which she needed to experience repeatedly. Rules require that children get off their diminutive horses after each turn, get in line again, then find a new mount. After a few repetitions I noticed that Vera raced each time to a particular purple pony, the only pony of that color. Once, when a speedy boy snagged the purple pony, I heard her cry, “I want the purple pony!” I mentioned this to the attendant and she told me that kids always fight over the purple pony. I suggested that they paint all the ponies purple and achieve world peace, but even as I spoke the epiphany came: It is only the rarity of the purple pony that makes it desirable, and it came to me that what I here dub the Purple Pony Effect (PPE) is well know to political operatives.

Here is a mea culpa: I have been subject to the PPE in my writings on education. There has been for me but one purple pony on the merry-go-round of federal education policy: the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT) and its attendant Common Core Standards (CCS), and I, like a toddler given one choice which I lunge for in simulation of free-will, have grabbed it, in my case in opposition. I’ve spent two years arguing against the proposed national standards, in terms of cost and necessity, which RTTT and CCS entail, and the whole time I had forgotten the real, more difficult story unfolding in education. Yes, I had fallen for the old Purple Pony trick!

So I have dismounted my purple pony and am walking around looking at other ponies. They are pretty familiar. In fact I’ve been thinking about two of them for years:

1. Social promotion. This is the practice of advancing children to the next grade level even when they are not proficient in required subject areas. The evils of social promotion are great. No other factor so obscures and perpetuates the failure of our schools, yet there has been no obvious remedy, because if social promotion were ended our schools would come to a crashing halt, even without the current financial calamity. When I taught 5^th grade, the gateway to middle-school, I could justifiably have retained 80-90% of my students. What if I had done so, and what if all the other 5^th grade teachers had also? For starters, we would have had 80 students in our classes the next year instead of 40, and in a couple of years every grade level at every school would be crammed with hundreds of kids per class. So we didn’t do it. Over the years public policy has briefly acknowledged the issue and once in a while tried a remedy. California developed the high school exit exam, which in theory keeps seniors who have not achieved at grade level from graduating. In my high school career as an English teacher I discovered, however, that the exit exam measures basic literacy at a much lower level than California’s demanding academic standards do. We are graduating thousands of kids who earn a D in English and squeak through the exit exam by a hair, and these kids are functionally illiterate (that is, unable to read a newspaper article). Thus the exit exam is a partial fix at best, as English professors of college freshman know well.

2. Discipline. In American public schools, kids can disrupt a class as much as they want with little consequence. Disruptive behavior from students not only halts instruction (often destroying entire lessons), it also sets an anti-academic tone for the class. Generally speaking the honors kids, the ones we’re not worried about, behave better than the “regular” kids (“regular” being our euphemism for the vast majority of students who range from able though unmotivated to functionally illiterate). Thus the great civil rights issue in our schools turns out not to be funding or integration or new standards, but the effects of uncontrolled disruption caused by the very children we are trying most to help. In 25 years with Los Angeles Unified I had my share of disruptive children. High school is different from elementary only in style. I had a 2nd grader who killed the pet mice in our classroom and terrorized all the students- none of which got him expelled- but at least elementary kids didn’t call me a “mother f***er” when I asked them to open their books, as many of my “regular” high school students did. Again, such colorful language did not result in expulsion. The normal procedure for behavior problems is to first call the legal guardians. If a call home proves ineffective, as it often does, the teacher sends the student to the dean, who also has few options. In some cases involving violence or drugs there may be expulsion, but more commonly a student is subject to an “opportunity transfer,” which is a transfer to another high school where the mayhem continues, while the receiving school ships out its difficult kids in like fashion. In minor cases, such as students cussing out teachers, the dean writes “Counseled” on the referral slip (indicating, one surmises, such advice as “Don’t call your teacher a “mother-f***ker”) and the student returns, chastened minimally if at all. The solution? Who knows? This is not a “sexy” issue. It has no obvious remedy, since expulsion, the only approach that comes readily to mind, would involve so many kids that it would need a solution of its own.

Because social-promotion and discipline have no obvious solutions, we never hear about them. Politicians don’t like problems with no clear solutions, because they do not entail votes or money. Thus we get the administration’s Purple Pony Race to the Top, a diversion that does little more than make consultants with Democratic ties rich. Without a smart GOP attack, Obama's education game will pay off (literally). Absent GOP attention to the issue, how can the administration resist this easy way out, since it doesn’t know how to solve the tough problems anyway?

As indicated, I don’t know how to solve them either. My suggestion here is that we get off our purple ponies of easy, irrelevant albeit lucrative approaches, and look at what we really face. Whoever the GOP candidate turns out to be, he or she should speak openly about what’s really happening in American schools. This could be the kind of new discussion that puts America, and the GOP, back on the map. There might even be some votes in it.

Doug Lasken is a retired Los Angeles Unified teacher, current consultant and debate coach. Read his blog at: http://laskenlog.blogspot.com/

It's Good to be the Good Guy: Teaching in Korea...by Doug Lasken

Doug Lasken is an educator whom I admire for his writing and view of education and its various challenges and mandates, many of which have been detrimental to student learning. He and I have been corresponding about educational issues, and he is a thoughtful writer, teacher and mentor. The educational community is richer for a teacher like Doug.

Below is his account about his recent teaching experiences in Korea that notes the differences in the view of teachers in that country vs. the United States. We hope to have more of his stories about his time in Korea. Welcome, Doug!

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IT'S GOOD TO BE THE GOOD GUY: TEACHING IN KOREA


For a while now I've had to get accustomed to the characterization of my 25 year teaching career with the Los Angeles Unified School District as a series of reprehensible acts on my part. As a teacher, I've been the bad guy.

First, over the 16 years I taught elementary, I wanted to teach immigrant children how to speak, read and write in English. Prior to 1997 when the passage of Propostion 227 mandated that immigrant children in California should learn English, my views were considered reactionary and contrary to the best interests of Hispanic children. I was told bluntly that by refusing to teach exclusively in Spanish I was destroying the children's chances of success. One coordinator told me I was perpetuating "English as King." And here I thought I was after English as the common language!

It seemed to me also that I should teach the content of core subjects. In elementary, I thought kids should know their times-tables, the decimal system, elementary science (I had great lessons from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasaden), and the fundamentals of reading: phonics, spelling and basic grammar. In my 10 years as a high school English teacher, I believed that students should know grammar and should read some novels. I found I was wrong on all counts. It seemed that memorization of the timestables damaged a child's ability to do critical thinking in math, that concepts like measuring one's distance from an object using parallax should never be taught, rather children should "discover" or "construct" such concepts for themselves (an approach called "constructivism" which pressuposed that human knowledge is not cumulative), again to preserve "critical thinking skills." And with the coming of Whole Language I was advised that the teacher should sit back while the children teach themselves to read, which they will do if the stories are engaging and have nice illustrations, and I was directed in no uncertain terms to immediately cease all instruction in phonics, spelling and grammar, as these would- you guessed it- destroy all hope of reading with criticial thinking skills. And two years ago, as if to ensure fond memories after my retirement, Los Angeles Unified decided that reading novels is a pointless exercise for today's students. Elitist professors, we were told, had forced novels on the high school curriculum at the turn of the last century, and it was time to recognize that we are an information age now and kids need expository reading. So much for Brave New World. Let's assemble that hammock!

Every one of these pedagogical oddities was endorsed at every level of California's adult administrative empire, from local school board and superintendent to state board and state department of education, up to and including the federal Department of Education. Never before has so vast an assortment of adults been so completely in the thrall of critical thinking skills without apparently having any themselves. Test scores tell the story: American high school graduates' proficiency levels have fallen and are falling in all areas. No wonder the Obama administration is suddenly against all current testing (though wants to spend billions on brand new testing). Let's shoot the messenger.

In the years leading up to my retirement in '09 (and intensifying after) I faced another set of negative characterizations, this one pertaining to the practical aspects of my profession. It seems that the nation's failing economy has been largely my fault because my motive for entering the teaching profession was to enrich myself at the public trough. To help me in this nefarious quest I joined a teachers union, my partner in crime. The union and I conspired to jack up my salary over 25 years to about $70,000. I must confess further that my union buddies and I saw to it that I will receive a pension of about two-thirds of my highest year's salary for the rest of my life, plus...oh the shame...I will have medical coverage! Have you ever heard of anything like this in any other sector? No wonder the state and federal governments are going bust! You need look no further for an explanation.

Let me hasten to add that I'm no apologist for teachers unions. Clearly my perspective diverges from the current vilification of unions on the financial side, but let's be clear that the unions have been complicit in the destruction of American public school pedagogy. In Californina, the United Teachers of Los Angeles and its parent, the California Teachers Association, as well as the national unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, were 100% in support of the prohibition of English instruction of immigrant children (known euphemistically as "bilingual education") and the abandonment of direct instruction of content entailed in Whole Language and "constructivist" dogmas in science and math.

Well, as it happens retirement has opened some interesting doors for me. I am writing from Seoul, on my second tour through the UCLA Writing Project, teaching at South Korean private academies. I'm crazy for Korean food- it really clears the nasal cavaties- but the compelling benefit of this job is that I've gone from bad guy to good guy. I love when that happens. Firstly, no one is asking me to stay clear of English because the kids don't know it. In fact, it seems that their status as English as a Second Language (ESL) students is considered a reason to teach them English. Who would have thought? I'm being paid fairly, and no one seems to begrude me that. Forget constructivism here: they want information, skills and methods. Here's another bonus: a special bond between teacher and student is prized. I will transliterate it roughly as "cho." I am encouraged to interact with my students in a number of ways, for instance by going out to lunch with them (sometimes the company pays), by staying after class to tutor, and by discussing essays late at night via email. Last night the students, the school director, another teacher and I went out to see the new "Harry Potter" movie (this morning my class will read David Denby's review of it in the New Yorker). This stands in stark contrast to the morbid fear in the US of going beyond tightly restricted boundries, where the supposition is that teachers (especially males) in addition to being lazy and self-serving, are predatory. In fact it seems that in Korea the teacher is prized as a key element in enhancing civilization and culture.

Not to say teachers get a free ride here. In the realm of the private academies the moms see to it that a teacher who does not deliver disappears pronto. But the default position is that teachers are a key element in the human endeavor. Would that not seem to be the rational view for any civilization?

Doug Lasken is an English teacher, debate coach, and freelancer. Reach him through his blog at http://laskenlog.blogspot.com/