Teacher FAILS Obama on Ed "reform". And honesty.

[Smarmie Doofus]

The crux of the matter here:

>>>Are you saying Obama is lying?
Yes, I am saying Obama is lying.
But I sense my words are not allowed full entry into the minds of these men. Something inside them is refusing them. These guys do not want to hear it. Like many decent people, they want to believe our handsome, eloquent and elegant young president has their backs and the backs of their children. I understand this desire. I too want to believe it. But I cannot. I see that it is a lie every hour of every day of my professional life. I see it in the hollow eyes of my students and the fearful eyes of my colleagues.>>>>>>




The argument, in context, here:








>>>>Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Deceit
February 2, 2014


As it happened I had two brief if revealing conversations with fellow parishioners of my church this morning concerning President Obama‘s words on education in his State of the Union address.

The two men who approached me are fathers of young NYC public school children with whom I have had many conversations about what is pleasantly referred to as “education reform.” Both men are intelligent, educated professionals, decent men deeply concerned and engaged with the upbringing of their children. From prior conversations both men know exactly where I stand on said “reform” and both men assumed I would be as happy as they were with what the president had to say this time around. After all, how could I not be? Here was the president speaking scornfully of an education based on “bubble tests.” Here was the president wisely embracing the wisdom of universal pre-k education for our kids. Wasn’t Obama addressing precisely the kind of things I had found so awful and destructive or absent in the “reforms?” Wasn’t pre-K this exactly the kind of program I had said was needed to begin to adequately deal with the horrific effects of poverty? Wasn’t the president getting this mess straightened out?

Well…no, I had to tell them, the president was not. In fact, contrary to what the man was telling the nation, those working in schools knew that he was having his people doubling down on what they have been doing since the man foisted Race To the Top on our bankrupt nation. And a Race to the Top for Pre –K , as Obama put it, was nothing short of obscene. The president, by far the most radically corporate executive we’ve ever had in terms of education, has been saying similar sounding things in every times he speak of the subject.

Are you saying Obama is lying?
Yes, I am saying Obama is lying.
But I sense my words are not allowed full entry into the minds of these men. Something inside them is refusing them. These guys do not want to hear it. Like many decent people, they want to believe our handsome, eloquent and elegant young president has their backs and the backs of their children. I understand this desire. I too want to believe it. But I cannot. I see that it is a lie every hour of every day of my professional life. I see it in the hollow eyes of my students and the fearful eyes of my colleagues.>>>>>

The link, and the article in its entirety, here: http://raginghorse.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/barack-obama-and-the-rhetoric-of-deceit/

[LuvNewcastle]

1. LOL!

[kelliekat44]

2. But did you tell the students that Obama could not accomplish his goals alone? And did you define

"lying?" If I say I am working hard to improve my child's education and somehow my child's education doesn't improve because there are no good text books etc. or for several other reasons out of my control, am I a liar? Can you prove that I am lying?

[liberal_at_heart]

3. I don't understand how our President can honestly think his education policy is working.

Normally I am very angry, but I find myself right now as I'm writing this just tired and sad. Deeply sad that this is the kind of education my children are getting.

[Scuba]

4. Two words: Arne Duncan

[Smarmie Doofus]

11. I try not to use that kind of language. n/t

[woo me with science]

5. K&R

[Igel]

6. I don't think he was "lying."

Misinformed, misguided at times. But he's out of his league. He's spouting talking points, some of which are out of date, some of which are partial because of perceptual filters and confirmation bias. We hear what we want to hear. And we say what we think the audience wants to hear.

Take the "working poor have no opportunity for upward mobility." In the worst states, a kid born in the bottom 20% has a 9% chance of making it to the top 20%. In the best it's 12% or a bit higher. (If it was all random, you'd expect 20%.) Somehow the middle 60% has vanished--but isn't going from the bottom 20 to the middle 20 "upward" and "mobility"? And social mobility has flatlined in the last 10 years--but it's the same as it's been for the last 50, in all likelihood, so "flatline" doesn't imply a change. The number of days in the year has flatlined, I guess--not that it's changed in the recent past.

But even having a 20% chance wouldn't be good enough. We'd prefer a system where the children of the rich have a piddling chance of maintaining their status mostly because we think of fairness in a funny way. In many cases we'd rather see a kid born in a rich family be poor than a poor kid become rich.

Again, take the universal pre-K "stuff."

Studies show that pre-K intervention has a significant effect on high school graduation rates and college attendance.

That's what people hear, and it's true. As long as you know what the study says and what has been left out of the sentence. Most people carefully filter those bits out, even when they're stated explicitly.

For kids in poverty, there's a statistically significant effect of quality pre-K interventions on those kids' high-school graduation rates and college attendance. Oh. That's both the same and completely different. Depends what you filter out.

"Poverty": For lower-middle-class through upper class kids, there's no effect. It's free daycare. If we want to offer free daycare, let's not be disengenuous and call it "education"--even if that's what a lot of schooling is.

Significant: For kids in poverty, the effect on high-school graduation rates of *high-quality* programs is detectable but small. Just a couple of percentage points in graduation rates. Smaller in college attendance. "Statistically significant" =/= "large" or even "important."

Quality: Most pre-K programs don't qualify as "high quality." They have weaker effects. And when you're looking at 2-3% as the best case, "weaker" starts looking pretty pathetic. Of course, if you're the mother of the one kid in 2 years of a program that it makes a difference to--and every mother would assume that her kid is *the* kid--the $100k spent on your kid probably sounds like a deal. And you latch onto the idea that $100k now prevents $200k or more in spending later. You don't want to hear that there are better uses of public monies that would help perhaps 50 kids and your kid may not be one of them. Hope springs eternal.

But politicians can't say these things. "Sorry, middle-classers, we're not going to help your kids because, frankly, the programs we want you to pay for wouldn't help your kids anyway." No, no, no. That's political suicide. Pre-K programs are *interventions*, they make up for gaps and lacks in the kids' family lives. (You can't say that, though. Some truths are too harsh for utterance.)

Even closing down crappy pre-K programs in high-poverty areas provokes a backlash. They're pointless, a waste of money. But if you close them down it means that you hate minority kids and are racist (because poor white kids are typically not the poster children for these programs). Or you're anti-working class, esp. anti-single parents, because they do offer free daycare.

So we have a politician calling for fairly useless universal pre-K. He has to be doing something. Anything. Now. Even if it is meaningless, as long as it's perceived to be "doing something" he needs to be seen doing it. We all need saviors.

That's how it goes with research. It's fairly narrowly defined (if it's decent research). But then we pull overarching, Big Picture conclusions out of the narrowly defined research.

Or we have weak observational studies with piss-poor controls, and bill them as rock-solid and awesomely significant. If we want to believe what they say.

[DeSwiss]

10. ''Misinformed, misguided at times. But he's out of his league.''

- I'm not so sure that's not worse than lying. Because if he's lying at least he knows what's right! Geeze.....

Whenever someone tells you that we've got to accept the system we've got now. And that there are no other systems that are better than the one we've got, always look at the person who is telling you this. It's usually someone who benefits from the existing system and would lose a lot if it was changed. It's like them saying: ''We've checked all the other systems and this is the best one of all of them -- the one with me in the castle.''

~Russell Brand

[Smarmie Doofus]

14. If the president is going to plead ignorance....

... and everyone agrees that public education is something about which he knows very little ( some would say "nothing&quot .... he has to explain why he then would appoint someone like Arne Duncan as Sec of Ed.

Duncan may be the only individual in America with *less* direct experience w. public ed than Obama himself. Why Duncan, and not an ed heavyweight?

[DeSwiss]

16. I have no idea why not a ed heavyweight.

- Other than the fact that the real good ones tend to be anti-corporate types. So maybe he can't relate to such people?

Or maybe it'd be different is he and/or his family members were actually affected due to having to attend a poorly funded, rundown public school in some inner city area that nobody cares about anymore?

I don't know why he is like he is. I have a few theories. For one, he seems to use corporations and their well-being as his metric in valuing things. What I know is that he didn't in this case, he hasn't in others, and I have no reason to expect he ever will propose we do anything that doesn't factor-in corporate benefit(s) -- first and foremost.

Which theory kind of holds with his recent statement purporting that education ain't everything it's cracked up to be. Or maybe that was simply an acknowledgement on his part that the era of good jobs that require educations are now a thing of the past. Either because they're being farmed out to cheaper locales under TPP, or because soon computers and robots will do pretty much everything corporations used to have to pay people for. And it's only a matter of time before that becomes painfully apparent to everyone.

I don't expect the truth coming from the government, and I don't think anyone should. They're main concern is their own pockets and most of them haven't a clue about what should be done about the problems we have today. They just do mostly as they're told. Like everyone else.......

''The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself.'' ~Herbert Gerjuoy

[Enthusiast]

7. Kicked and recommended a whole bunch.

[LuvNewcastle]

8. K&R

[DeSwiss]

9. ''Are you saying Obama is lying?''

- ''Yes, I am saying Obama is a liar.''

K&R

[Rex]

12. Arnie Duncan is the reason we have a horrible national agenda.

He is actually worse than Bill Gates imo.

[Smarmie Doofus]

13. But..... doesn't he serve at the pleasure of the president? n/t

[Rex]

17. He does indeed.

nt.

[Stuart G]

15. Yep, on this one he is not telling the whole truth...no text..

[dionysus]

18. scores a perfect 10 for melodrama. nt