[Vision2020] Could this now happen in Idaho? Luna's end game: Lunacy

[Ted Moffett]

Jen Sorensen's Slowpoke Comics "The Schools of 2020"

http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/futureschools.html

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  Gail Collins, also from the NY Times:
>
> May 11, 2011
> Reading, ’Riting and Revenues By GAIL COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> American education is going to be reformed until it rolls over and begs for
> mercy. Vouchers! Guns on campus! Just the other day, the Florida State
> Legislature took a giant step toward ending the scourge of droopy drawers in
> high school by upping the penalties for underwear-exposing pants.
> Today, let’s take a look at the privatization craze and the conviction that
> there is nothing about molding young minds that can’t be improved by the
> profit motive.
> Enrollment in for-profit colleges has ballooned to almost two million,
> propelled by more than $25 billion in federal student loans, many of which
> are apparently never going to be repaid. More than 700 public K-12 schools
> around the country are now managed by for-profit companies. Last week, in
> Ohio, the State House went for the whole hog and approved legislation that
> would allow for-profit businesses to open up their own taxpayer-financed
> charter schools.
> “It takes the public out of public education,” complained Bill Sims of the
> Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
> This exciting new plan, which seemed to have been inserted into the state
> budget bill by a magical invisible hand, would also reduce oversight. It got
> a rave review in The Columbus Dispatch from an op-ed contributor named
> Thomas Needles, who cheered legislators for trying to end the “drip-drop of
> wrongheaded regulation” of charter schools.
> Needles is a consultant for White Hat Management, the largest company
> currently managing charter schools in Ohio — and with none too great a
> record, according to the National Education Policy Center, which said that
> only 2 percent of the schools White Hat runs have scored well on yearly
> progress tests. The owner of White Hat is a gynormous donor to the state
> Republican Party. Not that that would make any difference. Just saying.
> So that’s the pathbreaking privatization news in Ohio. Now let’s take a
> look at Texas, which has been leading the way in putting for-profit
> companies in charge of certifying teachers.
> “Very interesting and very disturbing,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a
> professor of education at Stanford who studies teacher certification issues.
> Darling-Hammond says that when the federal government began demanding
> certified teachers in every classroom, Texas was among the states that
> responded by creating alternative certification programs, some of which have
> requirements slightly less rigorous than those for the trainers at
> neighborhood gyms. Most of the new teachers in Texas — particularly at
> schools in poor neighborhoods — come from alternative certification
> programs.
> Then, the Legislature invited for-profit businesses into the game. “Ever
> since then, the innovation and competition has been phenomenal,” claimed
> Vernon Reaser, the president of Texas Teachers, the largest of the state’s
> alt-cert companies.
> Here is one indicator of how innovative things are getting. Texas is
> currently considering — although not with any great intensity — a bill that
> would require that people who go through these programs spend a couple of
> days practice teaching before they are turned loose in their own classrooms.
>
> The sponsor is Representative Mike Villarreal of San Antonio. Villarreal
> first came to my attention as the legislator who proposed requiring that the
> course content in public school sex education classes be medically accurate.
> The man is a positive genius for coming up with bills to make the Texas
> education system do something we really had assumed it had been doing all
> along. None of which make it out of committee.
> At a public hearing on Villarreal’s bill, Reaser vigorously denounced the
> idea of requiring would-be teachers to actually get classroom experience as
> part of their training: “Practice teachers in front of kids that aren’t
> practice learning!”
> To get an alternative teaching certificate in Texas you need to take
> coursework and have 30 hours of “field-based” experience, 15 of which can be
> spent watching videos. Villarreal says some programs fill up the other 15
> with things like chaperoning field trips.
> It’s not clear how many people get hired as full-time teachers without ever
> having stood in front of a classroom for a single hour. The $4,195 Texas
> Teachers program (its ubiquitous billboards read: “Want to Teach? When Can
> You Start?”) is a little opaque. For instance, Reaser assured me in a phone
> conversation that his students were required to have a variety of in-person
> interactions with their instructors even though the Web site says you can
> opt for “fully online instruction.”
> “On our Web site, we intentionally don’t say everything,” Reaser explained.
> “It’s basically to get you to call us and ask us.”
> When we all started clamoring for more investment in education, I don’t
> think we envisioned it going into corporate profits. We have seen the
> future, and the good news is that the kids in Florida will be wearing belts.
>
>
>
> Ron Force
> Moscow Idaho USA
>  ------------------------------
> **
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>               http://www.fsr.net
>          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20110512/49d21ed0/attachment-0001.html