See this NYT article.   NYC schools, and soon Baltimore too, are giving kids monetary incentives to excel on standardized tests.   This is actually great news, because it blatantly exposes the once “hidden curriculum” of disciplining students to be capitalists.  Hey kids, dodgeball is the new class war.

Some random ideas:

1. Pay teachers in poor (hard to staff) schools 50% more
2. Poor schools should get at least 50% more funding to make up for how much harder the job is, and the fact they can’t fundraise
3. universal healthcare for children
4. Eliminate local control and funding. School boards are staffed with people unqualified to make these decisions. Fund schools at the state level and harmonize standards across districts. If poor schools can’t produce the same quality of education that means they need better people and more money
5. Streamline administration to reduce overhead so money goes to education, not administration
6. Allow wealthy public schools to charge means-tested tuition(crazy idea) to make up for their lower funding…either that or tax rich people more
7. Accept that education actually helps everyone (and the economy)
8. ignore libertarians
9. universal preschool
10. higher education should be free for students that can’t afford it
11. stop spending three quarters of a trillion dollars a year on warfare

Yeah. And get on this, its an emergency.

Check out the all-star cast of the “In Defense of Academic Freedom” conference (University of Chicago, 12 October 2007). Listen to the recordings in mp3 here.
Introduction — Tariq Ali — Talks by Dr. Noam Chomsky, Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Dr. Tony Judt, Dr. John Mearsheimer - - Q & A with Mr. Evan Lorendo, Dr. Mehrene Larudee, Dr. Neve Gordon, Professor, Dr. Norman Finkelstein.

http://uofmhungerstrike.com

Check it out! -> info, updates, videos, interviews, pictures, articles, etc.

By commenting on the blog, you can enter the discussion with the hunger strikers about how we students can remind the UofM administrators that they are supposed to be serving the public good - starting with a fair contract for the AFSCME workers who keep our school running.

The website is run by the hunger strikers and their support collective, which is open to all - if you’re in the Twin Cities, please come talk with them and lend a hand at their encampment on the east end of the Washington Ave. pedestrian bridge.

During the impending strike of the AFSCME union at my school, I’ve been collaborating with some grad students to support the workers by organizing A People’s Conference: Rethinking the University of Minnesota within the Moment of Crisis.  This forum will facilitate discussion about how workers, students, and faculty can take back the soul of their university and downsize the greedy administration.

…leave your spirit of free inquiry at the door as we lobotomize our universities and take a banal ride back to the dark ages!

In this article, “Reverse the Firings: Purge of Professors Accelerates Suppression of Critical Thinking,” Reggie Dylan discusses the recent, politically motivated firings of two radical professors, Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein, and he connects these with another event: “the trustees of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio—long known for its radical and open-minded approach to education—announced the school’s shutdown, despite fierce opposition from students, faculty and alumni groups around the country.” These events are all related to the general campaign of conservatives, particularly David Horowitz and Anne Neal, to redress a supposed “liberal bias” in universities. While Horowitz’s “Academic Bills of Rights” called for colleges to institute certain principles that state governments could enforce, Neal’s “intellectual diversity” acts generally require only that colleges report to legislative committees (see Scott Jaschik, “Intellectual Diversity or Intellectual Insult?”). Opponents, particularly the Association of American University Professors (AAUP), argue that such reports would create ideological litmus tests, since college administrators would feel pressured to classify professors, campus groups, and invited speakers as “conservative” or “liberal.” Such labeling encourages a simplistic, bipolar view of the world, in opposition to the more nuanced and subtle debates that we need for grappling with contemporary problems. Further, they argue that this is reminiscent of McCarthyism, and could have a similar type of chill effect on faculty.
But we can resist! - not by hiding in our disciplinary caves, but by militantly organizing into a democratic university… Read the rest of this entry »

As Eli says (and Vijay commented earlier), one of the difficulties in “fixing” education in the US is dealing with what Eli calls the Ideology of Meritocracy. Which I think is as good a name as any for what I think of as “protestant values”, the idea that hard work and virtue will bring success. I think many Americans deal with the reality of inequality by rationalizing: “I am a success because I deserve it, those who fail must also deserve their fate”. I have been reading more about the problems in California schools, specifically the deep inequality that exists there. Not only are poorer districts actually funded less (about 20% of school funding in California comes from property taxes in the district) but poorer schools and to a greater extent, schools with high numbers of black and latino students are actually funded less* in the same districts. (despite legislation that prevents this) Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s story, Elite Colleges Open New Door to Low-Income Youths, seems to have its heart in the right place. It’s an uplifting story about an African-American kid from a poor family in Miami who got a full scholarship to Amherst, and did well there, eventally being nominated for the Rhodes scholarship. With his 1200 SAT score, he would not have been admitted had it not been for Amherst’s new policy of taking into account economic background in admissions decisions.

Although these programs of affirmative action on the basis of economic class are a step in the right direction, I think that they do more to reinforce an ideology of meritocracy than to address the deeper problems of economic inequality. Read the rest of this entry »

At least 27 colleges have challenged the US News college rankings reports by refusing to fill out their surveys. I know that Reed had done this awhile ago, and maybe a few others had, but now it seems like a movement is underway. According to an InsideHigherEd article, two weeks ago, 12 college presidents called for their colleagues to stop filling out the institutional reputation part of the survey. Then a few days ago, 15 more colleges, particularly some historically black colleges, decided to do the same, arguing that the rankings have been inherently unfair to them. Read the rest of this entry »

Riffing off Eli’s post, the “education problem” is really complex. But Eli is right about the equality issue. In California schools are effectively segregated. My wife teaches in East Oakland. She teaches in a segregated school. Which is to say, there are no white students. Zero. Around 90% of her students receive free and reduced lunch.

Her classroom is a portable in poor repair. The door fell off a closet in the room a month ago and it hasn’t been fixed. Many of the lights are burned out (when she arrived in the room all of the lights were burned out and the heater didn’t work, she had to fight to get those). The school has no internet access. The computer lab is locked because there is no technology teacher. The computers in the lab are all first generation iMacs…around 9 years old. Their are bars on the windows, the doors have metal bars in addition to locks and there is graffiti on the walls.

Her students had no teacher at all for the first semester, just a revolving set of substitutes, which was lucky, because when teachers are sick there are so few subs in the district they usually don’t get one so they just spread the kids out into other classrooms.

The kids are going on their first field trip of the year tomorrow. The district has no money for buses, so the kids will be bringing money to take the city bus to the Chabot Science Center.

There is no PE teacher or facility. For PE, my wife takes her class out to the playground and has them run around or play games. There are only a few balls, a few worn out jump ropes and one cone. Read the rest of this entry »