To: From: "Gerald W. Bracey" Date sent: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 22:01:35 -0400 Send reply to: wa-ed-deform@egroups.com Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] Bracey on Baldridge Evil [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] Mr Hall I certainly hope you don't have any control over the fate of children. Your idea that the principal justification for school is economically productive people is itself an abomination. I think it the utmost arrogance of the state to force children to attend school for 12 years or go to jail or for their parents to go to jail or both, if the state does not like what it sees at the end of this enforced servitude. A vast waste of money indeed. I would also note that you cannot spell and hope that this does not impede your economic progress. ----- Original Message ----- From: John Hall To: wa-ed-deform@egroups.com Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 9:34 PM Subject: RE: [wa-ed-deform] Bracey on Baldridge Evil Well, I concur with Mr. Parker that there is absolutely no reason to suspect nefarious motives on behalf of corporations and business. I also don't have any reason to suspect nefarious motives on the part of Mr. Bracey. He has made a career out of saying that our kids are, in fact, doing well. He supports that position very well. Yet Mr. Bracey should also be aware that most of our society believes that the educational system is in crisis as a matter of faith. Since business men are also part of our society, I see that as a sufficient reason for their efforts. Although I agree with Mr. Bracey that human life has value outside of economic production (in contrast to Marx) that hardly means that being economically productive is not something the students will find alien to their future life. It is in fact the major justification for school, both for an individual recieving an education and for stealing money from the population at large to pay for said education. An unemployeable student with a High School Diploma is evidence of a) educational failure and b) a vast waste of money. Emotion laden jargon like "high performing drones and docile, even enthusiastic, robots" does not reflect the reality of what employers are asking for from the schools, and doesn't enhance the discussion. I think employers can justly feel cheated by the value they recieve for minimum wage jobs and what Mr. Bracey considers "lousy working conditions". A teenager working 2,000 hrs flipping burgers earns at least $10,000 (actually more, since he will get raises if he keeps showing up for work on time). In 1900, the average manufacturing wage for over 2,500 hrs a year was $8,500. (Inflation adjusted, of course. Per capita income was $4,800.) I'm quite sure that the skills demanded of that teenager are lower, while the working conditions are better. The teenager can not justifiably claim he is 'worth' the difference. And, of course, the people who actually made the difference possible were not menial laborers. They were scientists, engineers, and (drum role please) businessmen. Indeed, that minimum wage worker is ripping us all off due to the accident of his birth (here) and a conspiracy of well armed people (INS) to limit his competition and drive up demand for his 'skills'. People who justify such redistribution almost always manage to ignore how this effects people far less fortunate that the Americans they are considering. -----Original Message----- From: Gerald W. Bracey [mailto:gbracey@erols.com] Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 11:20 AM To: wa-ed-deform@egroups.com Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] Bracey on Baldridge Evil Let me provide some facts to go with Mark Parker's and Jim Woodhill's "devil's advocacy". 1. American students finished second among 31 countries in the most recent int'l study of reading. No one claims there is a global literacy crisis although they might if American kids do well in the next one (ongoing now). I'm convinced that if there were an international comparison with only Japan and the U.S. and the American kids scored higher than the Japanese kids, headlines would read "Japanese students second, American kids next to last." 2. The proportion of students scoring above 650 on the SAT math rose from 7.1% in 1981 to 12.4% in 1995, a gain of 75%. Most of this gain is NOT attributable to increasing numbers of Asian-American students. With the Asian kids removed from the sample, the gain was still 57%. ETS calculated the proportion for me in 1996 and 1997 using the old scale (something I cannot do). The proportion remained stable at 12.4%. I plan to go back to ETS this year for a 1999 figure (2000 will be too late for my next report). 3. Scores on NAEP have been rising in reading, math and science. This is most clearly seen when the scores are analyzed by ethnicity--the proper way to analyze them. It is the proper way because the proportion of minority kids has increased greatly since NAEP trend data started in 1977. Their improving-but-still-lower-than-white scores attenuate the national aggregate average because they constitute a larger portion of the total. 4. The proportion of students taking 3 and 4 years of math has risen dramatically. 5. The number of kids taking AP exams has soared from 98,000 in 1978 to over a million. The data just don't conform to Parker and Hill's characterizations. Mark Parker's comment about Intermediate Algebra might be misleading in one regard and is definitely off the mark (pun intended) in at least one. Parker cheacterizes Intermediate Algebra as "essentially 9th grade". If the latter were true, why isn't it Beginning Algebra? More importantly, we can easily eliminate the remedial courses. Simply roll admissions policies back to the era when I was in college--when only 70% of students graduated from high school and only 20% of those went on to college. Now the figures are 87% and 65%, respectively. You dig that much deeper into the talent pool and you're bound to find many students whole can't run the academic equivalent of the 4 minute mile. Part of the "remedial" problem is the colleges' own damn fault--the number of 18-year-olds decreased virtually every year from 1977 to 1994. You would think that with a declining number of potential students, colleges would have trimmed faculty, staff, and classes. College admissions in this period rose from 11 million to 13 million. As for corporations spending billions, better check to see what those billions go for--and how many they are. My school district's budget topped one billion for this next year. Both the Sandia Report and the SCANS report found that 90% of money went to people who were college educated and highly skilled. Very little goes for basic skills training. It is possible that more has needed to than in the past: with a rising proportion of students going on to higher education, employers of high school graduates are looking at a smaller, and probably less able, talent pool. They only have access to the 13% of those who drop out and a third of the graduates who don't go on to college. It is also true that employers want a great deal from employees for minimum wage jobs and lousy working conditions. If they are disappointed, it might be because the schools have done their job too well: the kids are smart enough to see that they're getting screwed in the work place. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mark Parker To: wa-ed-deform@egroups.com Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 1:49 AM Subject: RE: [wa-ed-deform] Bracey on Baldridge Evil Let me play devil's advocate by supposing that there is no sinister motive on the part of corporations and businesses... I don't think many of you would disagree that kids are coming out of our educational system with very low reading, writing, and math skills. To help bolster that view, consider that at the community college where I taught math for 18 years, the math class with the highest enrollment, by far, was (and may still be) Intermediate Algebra, essentially 9th grade algebra. At the college level, this is remedial math. From what I have read, corporations spend billions annually to train their employees in classes that should have been taught in high school. Having said that, I have read Hirsch's "The Schools We Need (and Why We Don't Have Them)," and am in close agreement with his goals for education, particularly getting rid of schools of education. -----Original Message----- From: Arthur Hu [mailto:arthurhu@halcyon.com] Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 1:26 PM To: 'wa-ed-deform@egroups.com' Subject: [wa-ed-deform] Bracey on Baldridge Evil Anybody care to help Bracey out on this? -----Original Message----- From: Gerald W. Bracey [mailto:gbracey@EROLS.COM] Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 12:21 PM To: ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU Subject: I just came from a seminar on the Baldridge In Education Initiative, which shortens to BiE IN, pronounced, Buy In. I don't yet know enough about the system to draw firm conclusions, but the saying that formed in my head was: Buy Into Baldridge, Sell Out Democracy and Freedom. The people, two principals from Florida, one official from Raytheon, one from GTE Directories and one from the National Alliance of Business, kept talking about "empowering kids", but all of their descriptions of what really happens seemed to do just the opposite. The principals said things like: "Businesses OWN what we are making kids for." Really. That's a direct quote. "Kids are the workers in the system." The Raytheon and GTE people sounded like it never occurred to them that schools might have purposes other than to prepare children to be high performing drones and docile, even enthusiastic, robots in the work place. Everything is part of one system. The job of any part of the system is to satisfy the customers. For elementary schools, this means preparing kids that middle schools find skillful; middle schools need to get kids ready for high school. So far, not bad and I don't know of any schools that don't do this. But, here's the kicker: Each level of the system assumes that the next level of the system has rational and desirable goals. Thus the high school principal said that his "customers" that he tried to satisfy were the district, the state, universities and employers. But he accepts that it is his job to do whatever these customers tell him to do. Thus, even though many in Florida are mad as hell about FCAT and Bush's grading system and want the whole thing done away with, this guy just assumes that whatever the state tells him to do, he has to do and do with enthusiasm. The customer is always right. Orwell would be thrilled, no doubt. This operation, always having given rise to a well-viewed teleconference put on by the National Education Goals Panel, makes OBE look tame. I can't imagine that conservatives, much less us old liberal arts heads, are going to buy into it. Anyone out there able to tell me more about this system? It comes out of the TQM legacy (so the story goes anyway), but somehow I imagine Deming in spinning in his grave. On the positive side, the approach to pedagogy seems as anti-Hirsch as one can imagine. The kids are allowed to "take charge of their learning." It's just that what they are permitted to take charge of is totally prescribed by the next level of "customer". My head was spinning so much that as I read their literature, I missed my subway transfer point by four stations. Jerry ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----