Surprise, surprise, those Republican candidates who drone on about Donald Trump not really being a conservative may be right. But the perplexing question for them becomes, “So what if Republican voters really don’t care about that?”

Trump is popular, much more popular that any of the candidates pleading for conservative purity in their nominee. This is a shock to them as well as conservatives, including those on Fox News, the man named “Rush,” and “the conscience,” Glenn Beck.

Greg Sargent writes on-line for the Washington Post on Friday, January 29, 2016, “What if a lot of GOP voters don’t really care if Trump is a ‘real conservative’?” He writes:

Trump supporters aren’t particularly ideological. They are frustrated because they think America is in decline economically, culturally and militarily, threatened by other nations on the world stage and by foreigners here at home. They don’t care about economic arguments in favor of free trade or constitutional arguments for executive restraint. They don’t bat an eye when Trump touts the importance of government seizures of private property for non-public use or the virtues of single-payer healthcare….

A recent post on CNN politics, focuses on the words of Trump supporters. For many, the first thing that they mention is that he is the anti-Political Correctness figure in America. Actually, I’m not quite sure how many of these Trump supporters even know what political correctness is. I have a sense that they are feeling more of a visceral opposition to so much of what is considered proper, or “the right thing to do.”

I have previously written about how our schools and the educational system that we have in the United States tend to be factories for conservatives. Maybe I should have better said factories for alienated and disenfranchised people. For so many in our society, school meant being told what to do, when to do it, and actually what they should think (perish the thought of student’s own critical thinking or creativity). All the teachers in the schools who put down students for being “stupid” or just not knowing “how to be” may have created a “revenge movement” which Trump may be riding to the Republican nomination. This is not the revenge of the nerds; it’s a kind of backlash from the former students who were angry on a daily basis at the teachers and administrators at schools who wanted the kids to fit into a tight rigid box. All this sounds a little like rebelling against political correctness.

Oppression is school is much more of a common experience for students than anything else that may move students to be politically conservative or liberal. Frankly, I don’t know why it has taken so long. Perhaps it has been with us for fifty years or more, but it took a Trump to bring the water to a boil. He is showing a side of the American people, of our body politic, that has not been previously visible.

If you don’t like this apparent direction that our country is moving in, you might want to talk with teachers and administrators in schools about letting up on the homework, the humiliation, and the invisible pressure. Liberals are as much responsible for this as conservatives. We all have to clean up this house so that we don’t have runaway Trumps.

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When the next school year starts, if Missouri teachers become legally sanctioned, gun-toting secret agents, they’ll be able to shoot bad guys with 90% accuracy–or so claims Shields Solutions, the shooting school that Missouri has hired to train them. Is that supposed to make us feel better about sending our kids to school where teachers have [probably loaded] guns stashed in their desks?

According to the Raw Story:

Shield Solutions training supervisor Don Crowley vowed that his students would have an accuracy of 90 to 95 percent at the end of five days of training. Teachers who aren’t at least 90 percent accurate don’t graduate.

And in an effort to make sure that the wrong students do not get shot, teachers will be using a special type of bullet that is intended to lodge inside the soft tissue of the first body it hits.

So absolutely no plus-P rounds,” Crowley insisted, referring to high-powered ammunition that could pass through more than one person.

So, they’ll be able to kill, maim or injure someone [perhaps the “bad guy,” but perhaps not–perhaps a child who gets in the way] with a high degree of  accuracy? Now, there’s a teaching skill that can really make a difference. If only we could count on teachers to be 90 to 95% accurate in their knowledge of science and math. [Instead, too many are 100% sure that the earth is a couple of thousand years old, that people are not creating climate change, and that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. But that’s another post–with a low percentage of actually happening–for another day.]

By the way, speaking of percentages, that claim of 90% accuracy may be 30 to 50% too high–or perhaps even more. Figures that I’ve read say that highly trained police officers–who get more than Shields Solutions’ five days of training– are significantly less accurate than 90%. A recent article in Time reported that:

According to a 2008 RAND Corporation study evaluating the New York Police Department’s firearm training, between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate during gunfights was just 18 percent. When suspects did not return fire, police officers hit their targets 30 percent of the time. The data show what any police officer who has ever been involved in a shooting can tell you–firing accurately in a stressful situation is extremely hard.

Similarly, the New York Times has reported that:

New York City police statistics show that simply hitting a target, let alone hitting it in a specific spot, is a difficult challenge. In 2006, in cases where police officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, they discharged 364 bullets and hit their target 103 times, for a hit rate of 28.3 percent, according to the department’s Firearms Discharge Report. The police shot and killed 13 people last year.

In 2005, officers fired 472 times in the same circumstances, hitting their mark 82 times, for a 17.4 percent hit rate. They shot and killed nine people that year.

In all shootings — including those against people, animals and in suicides and other situations — New York City officers achieved a 34 percent accuracy rate (182 out of 540), and a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away.

Can we really expect teachers, with five days of training, to have a better “hit rate” [what a term!] than New York City cops? And even with more training, many other factors play a role:

Bad marksmanship? Police officials and law enforcement experts say no, contending that the number of misses underscores the tense and unpredictable nature of these situations. For example, a 43 percent hit rate for shots fired from zero to six feet might seem low, but at that range it is very likely that something has already gone wrong: perhaps an officer got surprised, or had no cover, or was wrestling with the suspect.

“When you factor in all of the other elements that are involved in shooting at an adversary, that’s a high hit rate,” said Raymond W. Kelly, the New York police commissioner. “The adrenaline flow, the movement of the target, the movement of the shooter, the officer, the lighting conditions, the weather … I think it is a high rate when you consider all of the variables.”

So, how much better do I feel about teachers–whatever their accuracy rate may be–having guns in schools? Zero percent.

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Another NRA-backed, bonehead idea has passed the Missouri legislature. On the last day of the 2014 session, the Missouri legislature passed a bill that would authorize school districts to allow selected teachers to keep guns in their classrooms. The identities of the selected teachers would be kept secret, presumably to make it harder for intruders to know who to kill first, and to enable teachers to be surprise heroes.

According to the Kansas City Star:

Under the Missouri legislation, a school board seeking school protection officers would hold public hearings but then could act behind closed doors. Teachers or administrators would apply to the superintendent, submit to a background check, show proof of a conceal carry permit and completion of a school protection officer training program.

Parents would NOT have to be notified as to which teachers are carrying.  I’ve put that in bold type, because it is such a shocking aspect of this bill.

What’s wrong with this thinking? Let me count the ways:

-All the the regulations and ostensible safeguards won’t guarantee that a teacher would be in the right place at the right time to prevent gun violence. And, by the way, don’t teachers have enough responsibility as it is? Do they need to be armed cops, too?

-As a parent, I would absolutely want to know if my child’s teacher had a concealed weapon in his/her classroom, and I would absolutely want my child transferred out of that classroom. Under this law, parents would be kept in the dark, as schools put their children at risk.

-The risks of having a concealed weapon in a classroom would far outweigh the so-called advantages. We have all read the sad stories that show how many children are injured or killed every year in accidents involving guns ostensibly kept for self-defense. The likelihood of a classroom invasion by a “bad guy” is much smaller than the likelihood of a child discovering the teacher’s gun and pulling the trigger.

-More guns are not the answer. We have enough guns. Passing a bill that adds more guns in more public places does not make anyone—especially our children–safer. The argument touted by the NRA—that the “only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”—is not about safety, it’s about selling more guns and ammo. How about: The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is for people not to have access to so many guns. You can put as many locks on classroom doors as you want; you can limit visitors to your school; and you can have a lockdown drill every week, if you want. But as long as people have easy access to guns—and use them for what they are designed to do—there’s going to be gun violence. Bottom line: We need fewer guns and less access to them, not laws that expand gun ownership and turn schools into armed camps.

Did I mention that this bill also lowers the age limit for concealed carry permits from 21 to 19, and that is prohibits health care workers from asking patients whether they have access to a firearm, even if the person shows signs of mental illness?

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has not yet signed this gun-crazy bill. He—and, I think, most of the people who voted for this misbegotten idea—must know, deep down, that it’s the wrong thing to do—but they’re all so afraid of the NRA that they just go along. Let’s hope that Governor Nixon stands up for sanity and vetoes it.

UPDATE: September 11, 2014:  Nixon vetoed the bill. But today, the Missouri legislature has over-riden Gov. Nixon’s veto.

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In light of recent successes in passing marriage equality bills, the movement for equality seems to be slowing down. Under the misperception that everyone now has the same legal standing, we forget how much remains undone. There cannot be true equality until there is social equality—when and it is no longer permissible for any person to make derogatory comments in the streets or use homosexuality as an insult.

Even after the passage of the 13th amendment, racism still existed; we have no problem admitting that even after African-Americans successfully accomplished legal equality, the Jim Crow Laws still made the lives of thousands of black people in America wretched. It was not until the revolutionary Civil Rights Movement made social inequality by race incomprehensible that African-Americans truly began to experience equality in this nation. It is important to keep in mind that these results came about not simply because of the law. Rather, it is because of a pervading sentiment that discrimination by skin color was “uncool.” Until similar sentiments become widespread concerning sexual orientation, homophobia will persist, regardless of anything Congress passes.

My next point is addressed to two high school juniors whom I overheard using each other’s fanaticism over male actors and/or male athletes as a way of figuring out one another’s sexual orientation. Although they haven’t (in my hearing) used homosexuality as a slur, I can hear the voices in our hallways doing exactly that. And although (I hope) more students than just me wish to confront these voices regarding their bigotry, there are too many other students who simply don’t care. Until these apathetic citizens muster a sense of responsibility, we cannot change the distressing lack of equality in this supposedly egalitarian country. More is left to be done.

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I was walking down the hallway of my high school, casually reading the instruction sheet for my upcoming graduation when something stopped me in my tracks. My mouth twisted in outrage and I shook my head silently. What little phrase had caused such utter frustration?

“Females – dress or skirt (no shorts or slacks.)”’

This little pink piece of paper made me angry. Because I was in possession of a vagina, I wasn’t allowed to have material between my legs. Because society labeled me as “female” I wasn’t allowed to make decisions for my own body. Because at my own high school graduation I was going to be defined by my sex organs and not my accomplishments.

As the proud owner of several Hillary Clinton-esque pant suits, I was already planning on wearing formal slacks to graduation. However – because I was not in possession of male genitalia I was going to be denied the privilege to chose what I could and could not use to cover my body.

Time and time again in the patriarchy in which we live, women are being denied the right to make choices for their own body. As I stated to a teacher minutes after receiving the form “It’s the 21st century – you’d think we’d stop corseting women into sexualized roles and clothing.”

I was very vocal that day – expressing my thoughts to anyone who would listen. Several people commented that I chose to wear a dress the day I received the form – and therefore my position was hypocritical. However – they missed a crucial piece of information – wearing a dress had been my personal CHOICE that day- not a preordained and sexist demand of a patriarchal institution.

A few minutes of internet research validated what I had already suspected – the school’s inane “rule” was actually illegal. Title IX forbids public schools from making gender specific dress codes. Forcing young adults to conform to a gender binary is not only close-minded, but highly offensive and inappropriate.

My school isn’t the only place in the country stripping young women of the right to make choices for their own bodies – in fact, it’s not the only place in St. Louis. A number of private schools in the area such as MICDS and Visitation Academy have young women wear floor-length white gowns for graduation – which families purchase at bridal shops, often costing several thousand dollars.

On the day when high school students symbolically pass from childhood to adulthood – we’re telling girls that their “adulthood” or “future” is going to consist of an archaic and oppressive gender schema. We’re labeling them as “brides” and teaching them that it’s not their education that’s valuable – it’s their ability to be a wife.

I’m not opposed to women wearing dresses or being feminine – however, I am diametrically opposed to institutions forcing females to wear bridal gowns. This attitude towards women is something I had hoped our country had outgrown in the 60s and 70s.

Not only was it illegal for my high school to demand that I wear a dress – it was evident of a dangerous attitude towards gender that still permeates our country. The desire to force people into neat little defined boxes implies that gender isn’t fluid – an assertion that flies into the face of modern science and psychology and directly contradicts the general consensuses in those respective fields.

Someone asked me the other day why we still needed feminism. They argued that feminism was “no longer relevant” because women had achieved objective equality in their eyes. However, until a woman is allowed to make choices for her own body – objective equality has not been reached.

Situations such as gender specific dress codes prove to me that feminism is still relevant – and today, society needs it more than ever.

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Citing the need to “prepare children for college and career,” the interim principal of Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, NY has canceled the 2014 kindergarten end-of-year school play. Here’s the text of the letter parents received, as published in the Washington Post. It was signed by the principal and all four of the school’s kindergarten teachers:

April 25, 2014

Dear Kindergarten Parents and Guardians,
We hope this letter serves to help you better understand how the demands of the 21st century are changing schools, and, more specifically, to clarify, misperceptions about the Kindergarten show. It is most important to keep in mind is [sic] that this issue is not unique to Elwood. Although the movement toward more rigorous learning standards has been in the national news for more than a decade, the changing face of education is beginning to feel unsettling for some people. What and how we teach is changing to meet the demands of a changing world.
The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers and problem solvers. Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never be able to please everyone. But know that we are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.

Did anyone bother to notice that these are five-year-old children? What happened here: Did the children not perform well on a standardized test, and this is their punishment? Did some administrator decide that dressing up as a flower, singing a springtime song, and/or learning a little dance might not look good on a five-year-old’s college resume and could prevent her from getting into the Ivy League? Do the school and parents really believe that a few more hours of rote memorization and test prep will make a difference in these children’s lives? This kind of thinking is the height of absurdity. But, unfortunately, it’s just an extreme example of the way thing seem to be going in what passes for education in 21st century America.

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At a time when we are spending more and more taxpayers’ money on standardized tests and technology to enable us to take those standardized tests (and using the results of the tests to determine whether teachers are succeeding), the reformers are not letting a major fact stand in their way- the tests are worthless. During my years as a teacher, I saw far too much time devoted to meetings in which administrators had teachers pore over the results of poorly written standardized tests to determine what they were going to teach and how they were going to teach it. It was time that would have been far more productive had it been used to to work with individual students or fine tune lesson plans.

An article in the Washington Post addresses the problem of educational data:

Standardized tests given to K-12 students are not without merit. They can function as clear indicators of basic academic competencies. And they can play an important role as diagnostic tools. But they capture only a fraction of life in schools. Built almost exclusively around multiple-choice questions, such tests tell us nothing about a student’s ability to think or write or persuade, to perform experiments or conduct research, to paint, or to play an instrument. They provide no insight into a school’s social climate, its academic orientation, or its general culture. And, as any teacher can explain, the testing and accountability movement has also been plagued by a number of unintended consequences. The school curriculum has narrowed. Test-prep now takes up an inordinate amount of instructional time. And teacher autonomy has withered.

Missouri is diving even further into data at all costs with the recent decision by the State Board of Education to not only buy standardized tests from McGraw-Hill, but also to buy the company’s practice tests, called Acuity. It guarantees that Missouri children will spend more and more time compiling more and more useless data, at the expense of learning. We are reaching the point where education will no longer hold any joy for teachers or students, and that’s when the game is over.

Reprinted from The Turner Report, by permission of the author.

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Georgia state prosecutors have indicted 34 teachers, administrators and principals for altering students’ answers on standardized tests in the Atlanta public school system. Is that shocking? Maybe it shouldn’t be.

First, the facts. According to the New York Times:

After a 2 ½ year investigation, Beverly L. Hall, a former district superintendent who won praise for her job performance, was charged with racketeering, theft and other crimes in the doctoring of students’ test answers.

…[One teacher] admitted that she was one of seven teachers—nicknamed  “the chosen”—who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and then making them right. She agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers.

Why are we so surprised? Admittedly, teachers going undercover and wearing wires to turn state’s evidence, avoid prosecution and rat out their co-conspirators is a bizarre educational scenario that sounds more like a “Law and Order” episode than a day in the life of a third-grade teacher. But while it may seem strange, this development is merely the latest in a long series of similar standardized-test cheating scandals that have characterized the test-happy No Child Left Behind ideology since its inception.

Since No Child Left Behind became law. cheating charges been leveled in Florida, California, Illinois, Indiana, Delaware, Michigan, New York, Nevada, Maryland, Ohio and South Carolina, among others.

Cheating comes in many creative forms. According to FairTest:

• In El Paso, Texas, a superintendent went to prison after removing low-performing children from classes to improve the district’s test scores.
• In Ohio, several urban districts may have intentionally listed low-performing students as having withdrawn, even though they were still in school.

• A Brooklyn, NY, elementary school kept copies of previous years’ exams and gave them to teachers and students to prepare for new exams.

• Teachers at a Manhattan elementary school were accused of urging parents to label their kids “learning disabled” to obtain more time to finish a high-stakes third-grade reading exam.

•  A principal of a school serving low-income students in Worcester, MA, resigned after the percentage of students scoring proficient on the state test suddenly jumped from 17 to 76 percent, in one subject and grade.

• An eighth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania was suspended after being accused of providing students with answers to the state test.

•   A Boston principal was accused of sending a teacher out of a fourth-grade classroom and then insisting that students redo their tests.

It seems that, in many of these cases, the moral question of cheating, and the fear factor of being caught may have added  up to less of a threat than the fear of missing out on a financial reward or losing one’s job. (Personally, I’m conflicted about whether any of these tactics is absolutely wrong, given the essential wrongness of the testing concept itself. But that’s another post.)

In fact, the whole No Child Left Behind concept has been marinating in cheating since day one. Proposed during the 2000 presidential election by George W. Bush, it was based on the “Texas Miracle” that, in reality, was a fraud. By making school officials accountable for the success of their students, the program purportedly resulted in a zero dropout rate among Houston high-school students. Until, it turned out later—after the damage had already been done via the nationwide adoption of No Child Left Behind, it didn’t. Motivated by financial incentives to reduce the school district’s high dropout rate, school officials had fudged the data. So, actually George W. Bush and his Secretary of Education were technically correct in saying that the “Texas Miracle” inspired the program: It’s just that what it actually inspired was cheating, not educational improvement.

From the outset, too good to be true was, indeed, too good to be true. The Houston dropout rate looked miraculous, but it was falsified. Similar “phenomenal” results in other school districts’ test scores have also—often– proven to be bogus. And, once again, this is the case in Atlanta in 2013.

The New York Times reports:

At Parks Middle School, which investigators say was the site of the city’s worst cheating, test scores soared right after the arrival of a new principal—who is one of the 35 named in the indictment.  His first year at Parks—2005–, 86 percent of eighth graders scored proficient in math compared with 24 percent the year before. 78 percent passed the state reading test, versus 35 percent the previous year.

The falsified test scores were so high that Parks Middle was no longer classified as a school in need of improvement.

And, although the concept of accountability sounds nice, that too has been corrupted by over-reliance on test scores and the lure of financial gain and personal fame. In the latest instance, Atlanta’s school superintendent earned more than $500,000 in performance bonuses for bringing up test scores.

The testing never stops. It’s metastasizing to lower grades, getting more high-stakes every school year, and, it appears, perpetuating—even escalating—the perceived and rewarded need to cheat.

And so, like the students subjected to the absurdity of test-driven schools, we’re just not learning. We’ve all been hoodwinked by the testing-industrial complex and by the lure of easy answers to complex educational issues.

So, stop feigning surprise and shock. Cheating has ceased to be a scandal and has become an embedded norm in American schools.

Can we hope for change? I’m skeptical. We can’t even get Congress to pass minimal gun-control legislation even after 20 kids have been killed in a school. What makes us think that we’re going to get rational about education?

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Here’s a riddle: What’s big, bright, and yellow, rides on four wheels, and markets junk food to kids five days a week?

If you guessed a school bus, you’d be right.  That’s because in many states a school bus is no longer just an old-fashioned, box-on-wheels transporting kids from home to school and back again. From one coast to the other, school buses are now rolling billboards.

 Gone are the days when a school bus was just a mode of transportation.  Gone too are the days when Johnny and Sue hopped off the bus and raced into classrooms to learn the basic curriculum of “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic.”  All that started to change in 1993 when Colorado passed legislation allowing advertising on school buses.

To date, nine states –Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Tennessee—allow advertising on the exterior of school buses.   Today when Jamie and Sophie take their seats on the bus, they become a captive audience for sophisticated, corporate messaging that aims to encourage early-childhood brand-name recognition and budding consumer loyalty.

Eight more states—New York, Rhode Island, California, Washington, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky—hoping to jump on the corporate bandwagon considered, but failed to pass, legislation in 2012 legalizing advertising on buses.

Who sent out the invitation?

So who’s responsible for inviting corporations into our educational system?  It’s easy to lay the blame for commercial creep solely on the corporate world and its quest for ever-younger consumers.  After all, there’s a reason why many of America’s largest corporations have seized the opportunity. McDonald’s, Nestle, Staples, and CVS pharmacy are just a few competing for kids’ attention, both inside and outside the classroom. Small businesses are climbing onboard as well. They’re taking advantage of advertising opportunities on school buses to sell their brand to kids on the bus as well as adults sharing the road with the yellow fleet.

Corporations, however, are not the sole players, nor the most culpable, in the new, competitive world of free-market solutions to funding education.  Taxpayers and elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels share the responsibility—and blame—for the perfect storm that has pushed many cash-strapped school districts into the waiting arms of the corporate world.

The truth is when curriculum, staffing, benefits, and administrative costs outpace funding revenues, when federal and state funding are flat or falling, and the financial and philosophical commitment to public education is on the wane, what’s a cash-strapped school district to do?  When infrastructure–buildings, classrooms, computer and science labs, athletic programs and facilities–is substandard or needs refurbishment, where does the money come from? When property owners, state legislators, and governors declare “no more” to property-tax increases that stagnant wages and fixed incomes cannot possibly keep pace with, where does a school district turn for help?

The corporate world and privatization interests were primed to pounce on a new avenue for marketing to school-age kids. And pounce they did.

 How can school districts say “no”?

In states where advertising, promotion,  and sponsorships are allowed in and around schools, the revenue stream can be significant and hard to resist. In New Jersey, ads are expected to generate an annual $1,000 per bus.  According to Alpha Media, a company selling and managing ads on school buses in Texas and Arizona, districts with two hundred fifty buses could generate $1 million in revenue each year.

In Pennsylvania, where state law prohibits advertising on the exterior of school buses, in September 2012, five districts voted to allow advertising in the interior of their buses.  One district, although limiting advertising to health, safety, wellness, recreational and educational topics, estimates it will still generate $150,000 in revenue from advertising on the inside of the district’s forty-six buses.

 Give marketing interests an inch, and they’ll take a mile

Nothing in the school experience seems to be beyond the pale anymore.  In Newton, Massachusetts, schools are considering selling naming rights to the school buildings themselves.  In Peabody, Massachusetts, district regulations permit business-card-sized ads to be printed on the backs of notes to parents sent home with elementary schoolchildren. (Pretty darn clever.  Why worry about finding minimum-wage workers to hand out promotional flyers? Just use the kids instead.)

In Los Angeles, the largest school district in the country, administrators have agreed to sell the naming rights to cafeterias, football fields, and other extra-curricular teams—with potential revenue of up to $18 million. Four Albuquerque, New Mexico, high schools located on highly trafficked streets now lease out space for electronic billboards.  And how much is that space worth?  A tidy $40,000 annually.

And that’s not all. Corporate advertising has made inroads onto the backs of report cards and back-to-school supply lists (courtesy of Staples, coupons gratis), into interior hallways, on school rooftops, in sports stadiums, and—the most insidious of all—into the curriculum itself.

Disguising ads as learning opportunities

If you want to see just how much kids have been sold out to corporate interests, look no further than to the big daddy of children’s publishing: Scholastic, Inc. (publisher of the Harry Potter series and the largest publisher of children’s books in the world).  Just how deep is the reach and influence of this publishing giant? The publisher has books and educational materials in nine out of ten classrooms in the U.S., and the company has admitted that, of those materials, up to 10% come from corporate sponsors.

Scholastic’s lofty mission, according to their own website, is “to encourage the intellectual and personal growth of children” and to “help inspire a love of literacy.”  Those are laudable goals, indeed.  And Scholastic has some powerful and surprising helpers working with them to meet those benchmarks.  Some of Scholastic’s major corporate partners “helping to inspire literacy” are Nestle, Dreamworks/Paramount, the American Coal Foundation, Sunny Delight, Dairy Queen, and the pharmaceutical manufacturer Schering-Plough.

Working in partnership with Scholastic’s InSchool Marketing division, these helper corporations provide sponsored content that the marketing division then packages and distributes.  These promotional materials are then branded by the Scholastic sales team as “learning opportunities” to improve reading and math skills.

And what are some of those learning opportunities?  Nestle’s “Creativity Power Push” promotes the company’s push-up ice cream.  The “Sunny D Book Spree” encourages classroom parties serving the corn-syrupy and sugar-laden Sunny Delight juice drink. Dreamworks/Paramount uses characters and story lines from their films in teaching and reading materials (including branded worksheets) to promote their films, such as “Megamind.”  And Dairy Queen sponsors “DQ Tycoon,” a video game distributed by the Scholastic Book Club that teaches kids the vital skill of learning to “help Emily manage a local Dairy Queen.”

Surely the most outrageous of these corporate-sponsored programs should be called out for how inappropriate they are in an educational setting.  To that end, I nominate pharmaceutical manufacturer Schering-Plough for a Golden Marble Award for Chutzpah. Believe it or not, Schering-Plough’s Children’s Claritin, in partnership with Scholastic, distributed materials to in-school programs promoting their over-the-counter allergy medication. Who could have imagined when we were kids that you could go to school and learn not just your multiplication tables but what medications your parents should “ask your doctor” about as well?

I also nominate the partnership between Scholastic and the American Coal Foundation for the Bottom-of-the-Heap Award. Together these two produced a free, pro-coal curriculum for fourth graders called “The United States of Energy.”  The so-called facts in the curriculum downplayed the scientifically proven health and environmental impacts of coal-powered energy.  After protests from parents, children’s educational-advocacy organizations, and environmental groups, the curriculum was pulled from distribution in 2011.

Score one victory for objective, non-commercialized education for kids.  But what about all the rest of the messaging garbage kids are seeing on their buses and in their schools everyday?  Can’t we do better than this?

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The “real” NFL officials are back, but that doesn’t mean that all will be well.  One of the key areas of contention in the dispute was evaluation of the referees’ work. Sound familiar? It has a certain parallel to the Chicago teachers’ strike in September.

As a society, we love to measure just about anything, whether it lends itself to quantification or not.  A clear example would be the yearly rankings of U.S. universities and colleges by the magazine U.S. News & World Report.  Is Harvard really better than Yale?  Is it better than your local community college?

It all depends on what your criteria are and to whom you are applying it.  For many students, the local community college is a far better fit than Harvard.  But for U.S. News & World Report to acknowledge this fact would undermine what they are doing in their best-selling issue of the year.

Every play in a football game is full of actions that require subjective evaluation by officials, or at least assessment that is tainted with uncertainty.  Did that offensive lineman really grab the defensive tackle by the jersey?  Did the defensive back hold the wide receiver five or six yards downfield from the line of scrimmage?  When the quarterback released the ball, was he throwing a pass or fumbling the ball?

All of these are variables subject to interpretation.  There will be many occasions when the best of referees will make “damned if you do; damned if you don’t” rulings.

The same is true for teachers.  However, most officials who “run” schools be it from the federal government or the local school board and administrators are fixated on assessing teachers based on the scores of their students on standardized tests.  As Chicago teachers said, the performance of their students is affected by numerous variables other than the quality of their teaching.  This includes the socio-economic background of the students, the crime rate where the students live, the nutritional value of the food they eat, the violence in the home and any other number of factors.

Recently Rebecca Mieliwocki, America’s most recent “teacher of the year” (that too, a rather subjective designation) was interviewed by Ray Suarez on the PBS NewHour.  She teaches English to 7^th graders in Burbank, CA.

At the very least, we can say that she is an experienced and well-versed teacher.  The video of the interview clearly shows that she cares about students and is highly invested in her work.  Consider her words about the value of standardized testing:

SUAREZ:  If I looked at the results of standardized tests from your students, would I find something measurable in numbers about what you’re doing in the classroom?

MIELIWOCKI: Well, you know what, the numbers tell a picture; the numbers tell a story, but just part of the story like the beginning or just the middle or just the end.  It definitely does not tell you the whole of what great teachers do with kids.  It would be like going to the doctor and having your temperature taken and the temperature telling us everything we need to know about you.  It doesn’t.  It gives us one number on one day and it tells you something about your health and wellness at one moment, but it’s not really that useful a piece of information taken in isolation.

Watch 2012 Teacher of the Year on What Helps Students Succeed on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

 

It’s good that the best of the best NFL referees are back on the job.  It’s also good to know that our classroom have teachers as good a Rebecca Mieliwocki.  But regardless of how good they are, they’re not perfect.  Let’s praise them for what they do well, but also be willing to cut them slack when everything does not go as planned.

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