Culture & Society Blog

"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington

Mar 14, 2013

The Fall Of Educational Standards & Rise Of Child Abuse In the USA Can Be Traced To Texas!

Background {Added 11 April}:

The Invisible War (Military Rape) & The Violence Against Women Act

"Proven: GOP / Republicans Support Rapists & War"

A GOP Woman Caught Lying Or She Thought USA Is India!

Background: Book Review: Lies my Teachers Told Me

Observation on teaching standards in the US (as they develop from kindergarden to elementary)...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

At 3 mins- Stewart is right. All this proves is teaching standards go down from class 1 so by class 3 all the early gains are lost. The brain is still going in class 3 even by 19th Century science standards. What the hell is going on? BTW, this bad teaching techniques/effectiveness data fits my other research on this subject

Comedy Relief: Texas School's Textbooks

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Since no one knows who Oscar Romero is, the Texas school board decides not to include him in the curriculum.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Loyola Law School inflates grades, Texas can't afford new science textbooks, and Wal-Mart helps its workers get college degrees.

Going deeper in Texan living...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

RANT Based On Above Video: [1:30] Why is Texas constantly cutting child services? The US is already the top child abuser in the western world according to BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15288865 ! Why even put child care in the sequester? Why cut child health in the State with the highest child abuse? i.e. "Compared to Other States, Texas Has a Higher Rate of Child Deaths from Abuse and Neglect" http://www.cppp.org/files/4/427_Child_Deaths.pdf I mean think about it. Each party put stuff in the sequester that's supposed to hurt them, but cutting child services is the main trend in Texas anyways, i.e. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/19/347115/perry-child-abuse-funds/ , so how is putting cuts to child health services for Texas a motivation factor? The government there probably welcomed these cuts.

From Dallas News: Texas child abuse, neglect deaths soar 31 percent

From the "Center for Public Policy Priorities": PDF Document showing that "Compared to Other States, Texas Has A Higher Rate Of Child Deaths from Abuse and Neglect"

Stimulus-Hating Gov. Rick Perry Used Stimulus to Balance Texas Budget
Gov. Rick Perry used federal stimulus money to pay 97 percent of Texas's budget shortfall in fiscal 2010--which is funny, because Perry spent a lot of time talking about just how terrible the stimulus was. In fact, Texas was the state that relied most heavily on stimulus funds, CNN's Tami Luhby reports.

"Even as Perry requested the Recovery Act money, he railed against it," Luhby writes. "On the very same day he asked for the funds, he set up a petition titled 'No Government Bailouts.'" It called on Americans to express their anger at irresponsible spending.

Thanks to the stimulus funds, Texas didn't have to dip into its $9.4 billion rainy day fund. Still, now that the stimulus is spent, Texas, like many other states, is facing severe cuts--$31 million must be carved from the budget.

In other words, Governor Perry CONSISTENTLY used money to balance the budget while cuttng child services even as child abuse increases showing that this policy doesn't work. there can be only one explanation...

Paul Ryan's War On Oldsters, Poor Families & Children

A sign of which direction Florida is heading...

Florida Child Abuse Deaths Rise in Bad Economy

Florida Gov. Rick Scott Slashes Rape Counseling During Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Introduction

Every five hours a child dies from abuse or neglect in the US.

The latest government figures show an estimated 1,770 children were killed as a result of maltreatment in 2009.

A recent congressional report concludes the real number could be nearer 2,500.

In fact, America has the worst child abuse record in the industrialised world. Why?

A recent incident: Mom accused of killing daughter with scissors

Why is the problem of violence against children so much more acute in the US than anywhere else in the industrialised world, asks Michael Petit, President of Every Child Matters.

Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. That is nearly four times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada's and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year. Why is that?

Downward spiral

Part of the answer is that teen pregnancy, high-school dropout, violent crime, imprisonment, and poverty - factors associated with abuse and neglect - are generally much higher in the US.

Further, other rich nations have social policies that provide child care, universal health insurance, pre-school, parental leave and visiting nurses to virtually all in need.

In the US, when children are born into young families not prepared to receive them, local social safety nets may be frayed, or non-existent. As a result, they are unable to compensate for the household stress the child must endure.

In the most severe situations, there is a predictable downward spiral and a child dies. Some 75% of these children are under four, while nearly half are under one.

Geography matters a lot in determining child well-being. Take the examples of Texas and Vermont.

Texas prides itself in being a low tax, low service state. Its per capita income places it in the middle of the states, while its total tax burden - its willingness to tax itself - is near the bottom.

Vermont, in contrast, is at the other extreme. It is a high-tax, high-service state.

From The Guardian: When this financial crisis began nearly four years ago the story seemed simple. The banks were broke and they told our leaders that unless the taxpayers bailed them out and took their private debts on to the public account, then the world would end. Our politicians believed them. We took on huge debts and bailed out the banks. Right or wrong, at least the story seemed straightforward: they owed us huge sums of money. Then as the crisis continued, a new group most of us had never heard of appeared – the bond holders. It turned out the banks owed huge sums to the bond holders too, and so did we. The story of who owed whom began to change. Gradually the story became less about the banks owing us money and more about owing the bond holders. It seems to me that our governments and their financial advisers from the banks have a double standard when it comes to debt and its repayment; one which greatly benefits the financial world and punishes the taxpayer. On the one hand, the debts of private banks and those who own that debt, the bond holders, are being protected from any losses by the publicly funded bailouts. Public debt, on the other hand, at the insistence of the same banks and bond holders we have bailed out, is being paid down at breakneck speed, no matter what the cost in unemployment and the destruction of social services.

Paul Ryan's War On Oldsters, Poor Families & Children

The following interviews, and the information below the interviews, provides a great overview of the problems with the 'No Child Left Behind' act plus the problems with the attempts to try and "fix" it (fixing that's already broken is called a "patch job").

Interview 1

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Notes:
1. Congress wouldnt move against the 'no child left behind act' i.e. they like it!
2. The focus is on 'race to the top' = goal is to make students 'college and career prepared' focusing on better teachers and want to bring more parents in and give parents more flexibility
Focus for the education department is about working within the already set plan as the only way forward despite the evidence.

Interview 2

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Notes:

1. Once again, congress refuses to change the broken 'no child left behind act' so the new 'race to the top initiative is meant to alleviate its problems, i.e. its meant as a fix to a broken plan

2. Amazing creativity coming from States Stewart: Teachers say the structure set up is more confining because they have to teach to the test for grant money. The result is that this system is frustrating.

[Again the focus is on fixing a structure that's already broken. Problem is the Education Department is beginning to think that this broken system with variations/waivers is the way out]

3. At 7 minutes: 'Our college graduation rates have dropped dramatically and we have to increase this' [With a broken system!]

Interview 3 (Most important interview - read the links in the notes)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Notes:
1. To educate you need to create curiosity and interest. People hate testing. How easy is it to teach a kid who is bored or hates his or her school work?

2. "Schools have been turned into testing factories" [Is the new school format a kind of 'war on kids']

3. Finland is doing really well in schooling and it doesn't use standardized tests. Its governmental, strong teachers unions, teachers are encouraged to be independant. Teachers design thier own tests. [i.e. we have an example of a system that works and STILL we use a broken education plan!]

4. Teachers across the country are demoralized (getting blamed for all test score problems) thus this is a great way to get rid of talented teachers. ALL the problems of schools are being blamed on teachers![Bad educational policy was blamed solely on the teachers by Bush and it continues with the GOP]

Book Review: NY Times: Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice. “At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools. Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer. Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum. But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism. Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school. Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

January 4, 2010 Research is first to find causal link between NCLB and increased student achievement EVANSTON, Ill. --- A new study by Northwestern University researchers for the first time establishes a causal link between the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and improvements in student achievement. The research finds that NCLB raised math achievement by six to nine months over seven years for the nation's fourth graders and by four to 12 months for eighth graders. It did not find statistically significant effects for fourth-grade reading achievement. Eighth-grade reading was not assessed because adequate data were unavailable. "Our study is the first to confirm that NCLB has a statistically significant positive effect on students' fourth- and eighth- grade math achievement," said Thomas Cook, sociology professor in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) and co-author of the study. Only a handful of studies to date have examined the effects of No Child Left Behind -- currently the centerpiece of U.S. education policy -- and study results have been mixed.
[Note: By 2012, some teachers have found creative ways to deal with the horrible constirctions imposed by the 'no child left behind act']

‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency. Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Growth scores give schools No Child Left Behind alternative The Clark County School District isn't a success under No Child Left Behind, but that's not the full story, said Ken Turner, special assistant to the superintendent. Clark County students learn at a rate on par with other Nevada schools, according to the growth model's tracking of fourth-graders through eighth-graders in math and reading. The model compares students' annual test scores from 2009-10 to 2010-11. The state plans to join others in applying to the U.S. Department of Education in September to replace No Child Left Behind measures with the growth model, a "monumental shift" in education, said Keith Rheault, Nevada superintendent of public schools. But the growth model remains a work in progress. At this time, the state growth model shows no schools as passing or failing because that bar hasn't been set yet. Information from the pilot program just shows the different rates of learning achieved at public schools. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that won't be allowed to continue if the model is to replace No Child Left Behind. Schools must be held accountable. those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it A conservative effort emerged to remove accurate information from many textbooks because it was 'gloomy', i.e. lies (which automatically indoctrinate children) became preferred to actual facts.

The American Textbook Wars: The Revised Edition As chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cheney had once embraced their work but then found that radicals had gone too far in producing a gloomy, “politically correct” view of the national past. It only helped that Cheney made her public break with the standards in the Wall Street Journal, and that her husband was a gruff former secretary of defense. Interpreted differently, FitzGerald’s theory has served different groups well. To many liberals, reforms begun in the 1960s represented an effort by blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, and others to reclaim their past from a national narrative that distorted or ignored their experiences. Scholars and teachers who took part could then cast themselves as successful rebels for the causes of social justice and historical truth. To conservatives who rallied behind Cheney, these same minority groups had finally “hijacked” the national story. The price of a misguided effort at inclusion was a fragmented and incoherent history curriculum. Opponents of the standards could then lump questions of history teaching into a broader assessment of that misbegotten decade. That assessment, still with us today, is captured succinctly by a promotional line for Woods’s Politically Incorrect Guide, posted on his publisher’s website: “[T]he liberalism of the 1960s discouraged all the right things and encouraged all the wrong ones.”

Textbooks and History Standards: An Historical Overview Meanwhile, in 1995,James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and professor, published his best-known work, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). The book reflected his two-year survey of 12 leading high school textbooks of American History including the venerable The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, and Triumph of the American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti. Loewen wrote that his study revealed a dull Eurocentric history presented with a mix of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation. Loewen wrote, “We need to produce Americans of all social classes and racial backgrounds and of both genders who command the power of history—the ability to use one's understanding of the past to legitimize one's actions in the present. Then the past will seriously inform Americans as individuals and as a nation, instead of serving as a source of weary clichés." His book offered ideas on how teachers can build lesson plans about difficult topics such as the American Indian experience, slavery, and race relations. In the revised 2007 edition of Lies, Loewen updated his earlier findings and added comments on other books. He concluded that history textbooks still repeat lies. He stressed that history texts must challenge students with actual chronological history, and with images and comments from diverse viewpoints, leaving each student to come to their own conclusions.

Conclusion:

Better textbooks need to be combined with better teaching methods in an environment that encourages learning and creativity in education NOT focusing everything on test scores with grants(money) as the incentive.

Schools are about educating children NOT creating a corporate work environment.
How education has historically worked effectively (and the learning method used) is explained here.