All the "good people"

"And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take." - Ta-Nehisi Coates

What are we willing to tolerate in our schools? Which behaviors are we willing to "accept" because otherwise, it gets too hard?

I'm not talking about kids. I'm talking about the adults that we employ. What guides our decisions when we consider teachers and other educators? And what does that choice of guides tell us about how we value children?

I am a huge supporter of American educators... teachers, principals, librarians, counselors, bus drivers, the people in the cafeteria, custodians, everyone. I believe in paying these people well, treating them like the incredibly valuable professionals they are, in tenure, in due process, in unions - all of that. It makes me sick that we live in societies in which stock brokers - who are nothing more than bookies in better suits - get paid more than teachers - who are in charge of our future. It speaks to a level of warped priorities that is hard to fathom, but...

Not everyone belongs in our schools. Not everyone who currently works in our schools should be in our schools. Not everyone who can graduate from a teacher education program is capable of being a teacher, nor is everyone who can write a cute essay and be accepted into Teach for America. These jobs are too difficult, and they are far too important.

We know that certain school paradigms (like KIPP - above) are racist and based on
false assumptions instead of research and knowledge, but too often we allow similar
nonsense to go on down the corridor.

Over the past two months I've listened very carefully to what educators, challenged to change, say. I've listened carefully because (a) that is my job, (b) this is my research question of the moment, and (c) because I am fascinated. And quite often I hear educators who deeply wrestle with how to make schools better for kids, and who wrestle with that every day. But sometimes I hear others. I hear the "yeah, buts..." as I've come to call them.

The "yeah but" response sounds like this, "I know this teacher is a problem, but she's really nice and she's been here a long time." Or this, "I know I should learn that, but its just easier to do what I've always done." Or this, "You know, you're right but we can't make our teachers uncomfortable." Or this, "Well, we're really trying to work on this, and he is trying to change a little."

What the "yeah but" response means is that the educator saying that has chosen to value the adults more highly than the children they work for. It might be themselves - their own comfort, their own laziness, their own lack of professional commitment - or it might be their "adult community" that they value more than kids - workplace harmony, an easier job as an administrator, the desire not to have the really difficult conversations. But whatever, the "yeah but" response indicates that the person giving it has divided the world into first and second class citizens, and then has placed the children in the "second class" position.

"I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people," Coates writes in the Op-Ed piece quoted at the start, and I want to ask the same questions in education. How often is it acceptable for students to say, as I've heard teachers say, "its easier for me if I don't learn that"? How often is it acceptable for students to say, as I've heard a few school librarians say, "its better for me if I have a few hours of quiet time by myself each day"? How often is it that an individual student gets to set the noise level in a classroom, a corridor, a cafeteria? How often do we accept children who, not doing anything near what we think is their best work, choose to continue to do that completely unchallenged?

Simple answer is, "we don't." Which means that if we "tolerate" answers like that from our adults, we have made a choice not to value our kids as what is most important. Often, yes, we are actually "saying" that a school employee's right to be lazy is more important than a child's right to the best education we can offer. Is that a sign we're ready to put up over our schools' entries?

If not, maybe we need to start saying something else...

One thing which must be unacceptable among adults in our schools is an unwillingness to be not just active learners but professionals who adapt their practices based on new learning. We literally know a million times more about the human brain and the universe than we did a generation ago, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone involved in the education of children has not changed what they do and how they do it.

glia cells, ignored a decade ago, now show us remarkable things about learning
and FMRIs have revealed the teenage brain in incredible new light

Ten years ago, for example, most of the cells of the brain - how our brains work - was completely ignored. Five years ago we were only beginning to understand how playing video games not only boosts learning, but boosts "traditional" reading. If you attended college even this year, your understanding of the teenage brain is probably completely wrong, based in outdated, non-evidence-based assumptions which live on in textbooks written based on decade-old knowledge bases. Imagine going to your doctor and having her or him treat you based solely on knowledge and opinion gained in medical school in 1975.

That  "old doctor," the one who might not believe in MRIs and contemporary medications, might be a hell of a nice guy. He might have coached Little League for years, helped his neighbors, been a pillar of his church. He might be helping grandchildren get through college. But still, I don't want him in my hospital, I don't want him treating my family, or anyone else.

Coates builds his argument against "good people" around the racist incident at a New York City delicatessen involving actor Forrest Whitaker, "The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked." Well, I'd ask the same question. If this was your child, would you want this "professional" teaching them? leading them? working in their school?

If your answer is "no," then, you have a responsibility to act, from whatever position you are in. And you have a responsibility to act with just one guiding question, "What is the right thing to do for our kids - all of our kids?" All the other questions? Those are just excuse-makers.

- Ira Socol

The Racism of Brian Williams and NBC News

I understand that Americans - at least white Americans - have a very hard time with the concepts of "Colonialism," thinking, as they seem to inevitably do, of funny three-cornered hats and Williamsburg, Virginia and George Washington and stuff.

But Colonialism is not that.

Colonialism is what NBC Nightly News celebrated last week in their "Making a Difference" series. Colonialism is the racist assumptions which lie behind the piece of journalism described below, and it is the racism while lies behind the actions of NBC News, their anchor Brian Williams, their "Education Nation" series, as well as the efforts of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (and British Minister for Education Michael Gove), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and just about everything which comes out of the mouths of Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and their supporters.

British Empire, 1897 (above) American Empire, 1898 (below)

Colonialism, simply put, is the belief that a culture which has become dominant via military or economic force, has not just the right, but the duty, to convert all others into copies of themselves in order to make life for the dominant culture more pleasant and efficient. It works toward hegemony in ways both physically and economically forceful, as well as in complex forms of persuasion. Most effectively, it works via schools - by separating the young from their culture, their communities, their families, in order to make conversion easier.

Listen now, in the year of the Queen's Jubilee, as NBC Correspondent Shoshana Guy describes a 19th Century British widow deciding to devote her life to the poor and wretched children of British Colonial Africa...

"In the weeks after her husband died of leukemia, leaving her with three small children to raise, Deborah Kenny sought solace in books. 

“After he died I, like most people, couldn't sleep at night and so I started reading,” said Kenny.  

"Of all the books she read during those sleepless nights, it was the one written by a doctor who survived a concentration camp that changed the trajectory of her life.

“In ‘Man's Search for Meaning,’ [author] Viktor Frankl had this one line in the book where he said, ‘We had to teach the despairing men that it's not about what life has to offer you but what is life asking of you,’” said Kenny, 48. “That was the thing that uplifted me, because I thought, ‘Well, life is asking something of me.  I have to do something.’"

Oops, yes, wrong Queen on the throne at Buckingham Palace, wrong Diamond Jubilee, even, wrong Empire, and we're talking about 21st Century colonial Harlem in New York City, not Kenya, Tanganyika, Nigeria or Rhodesia in British Colonial Africa... but nothing else has changed one bit for NBC News and Nightly News Managing Editor Brian Williams. Nothing at all. Watch the story as it unfolded the evening of 6 June 2012... watch the visuals, watch the iconography, listen for the code words... There is nothing presented here which wouldn't gladden the heart of Cecil Rhodes. Not since Anna arrived to tutor the children of the King of Siam have we seen such selfless devotion to converting "the other" into someone "just like me."

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"The process of colonization involves one nation or territory taking control of another nation or territory either through the use of force or by acquisition. As a by-product of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies. Two scholars on colonial education, Gail P. Kelly and Philip G. Altbach, help define the process as an attempt "to assist in the consolidation of foreign rule" (Kelly and Altbach 1).

No longer a colony, but still learning to be white...
Saint George's Grammar School, Obinomba, Nigeria. Circa 1966
"In December 1965, We went to Agbor motor park and market to purchase school related items: uniforms, plates, spoon, fork, knife, Biro ball point pen, Bournvita (advertising slogan "Sleep sweeter, Bournvita"), Nescafe coffee, St. Louis sugar, Peak milk, Cabin biscuits, M & Ms Candy ("The milk chocolate melts in your mouth - not in your hand"), Horlicks ("Horlicks guards against night starvation"), towel, comb, Omo washing powder ("Omo adds brightness to whiteness"), a pair of sandals, tennis shoes, cutlasses. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven."

"The idea of assimilation is important when dealing with colonial education. Assimilation involves those who are colonized being forced to conform to the cultures and traditions of the colonizers. Gauri Viswanathan points out that "cultural assimilation (is)...the most effective form of political action" (Viswanthan 85). She continues with the argument that "cultural domination works by consent and often precedes conquest by force" (85). Colonizing governments realize that they gain strength not necessarily through physical control, but through mental control. This mental control is implemented through a central intellectual location, the school system. Kelly and Altbach state that "colonial schools,...sought to extend foreign domination and economic exploitation of the colony" (2). They find that "education in...colonies seems directed at absorption into the metropole and not separate and dependent development of the colonized in their own society and culture" (4). The process is an attempt to strip the colonized people away from their indigenous learning structures and draw them toward the structures of the colonizers.

"Much of the reasoning that favors such a learning system comes from supremacist ideas of leader colonizers. Thomas B. Macaulay asserts his viewpoints about a British colony, India, in an early nineteenth century speech. Macaulay insists that he has "never found one among them [Orientalists, an opposing political group] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". He continues stating, "It is, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England". The ultimate goal of colonial education might be deduced from the following statement by Macaulay: "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." While all colonizers may not have shared Macaulay's lack of respect for the existing systems of the colonized, they do share the idea that education is important in facilitating the assimilation process." -  John Southard, Fall 1997, Emory University

Dress white, speak white, sit white, act white...
Mission School, Ft. Totten Indian Agency, 1881 by F. Jay Haynes.

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here we go: White woman teaches African-American children the "proper" ("white") way to chant, the "proper" way to sit, to dress, to be quiet, to fold their hands in obedience... (sorry about NBC's embedded adverts)

The conversion process, the "winning over" of a certain vulnerable group within the colonized happens many ways. It isn't just Deborah Kenny and her school and its celebration by Brian Williams. It's everywhere.

Here's a blogger discussing J. Crew advertising:

19th Century imagery

 "Whites saving Africans in danger. White school teacher saves the black kids from the ghetto, because you know black kids are always from the ghetto. White man steps onto an Indian Reservation and stumbles into a sweat lodge and discovers he’s a shaman and saves the tribe. White girl exposes the horrible work conditions of nannies in the mid-century South. The list goes on, and probably you’ve come to the conclusion that the image of the “White Savior” this is a personal pet peeve of mine. But the point of the story is there is a classic theme of Whites being the center of the story, in the J.Crew catalog you have White tourists being the center of what appears to be a celebration or a special occasion." Or, rushing back in time, "In South Africa in 1801 there was only one Hottentot who could read. Travellers thought that to civilise such savages was an impossible task. The missionary going forth to obey his Master's command " to preach the Gospel to every creature "has proved that the Word of God can reach and raise the lowest. It was not long, we are told, before " the Hottentot was seen poring over a tattered portion by the roadside, and the Kaffir shepherd on the veldt carried in his skin wallet a Testament, which he valued more than gold and silver."

21st Century imagery

Whether it is the Christian God, or the ability to read Roman alphabetical text (and thus be held more fully accountable for following the colonizers rules), or just buying the right clothes, "we" - the colonizers - make the wide world safe for trade and tourism and profit.

If Harlem is to truly be the fantasy land shown on Food Network Star - a Disney-like slightly ethnic space for the white and wealthy - Deborah Kenny's school is essential. "...education in ... colonies seems directed at absorption into the metropole and not separate and dependent development of the colonized in their own society and culture." The process is an attempt to strip the colonized people away from their indigenous learning structures and draw them toward the structures of the colonizers."


Colonies are, of course, not all external. The same intent which drove the English to outlaw the Welsh language in schools, the Irish language in schools, the Zulu or Swahili languages in schools, drove the Russians to try to wipe Ukrainian and many other internal languages during the Soviet era, drove Americans to attempt to drive out Native American languages in the "Indian Schools," drove Francisco Franco to attack Catalan and Basque during his Spanish dictatorship. And it is the same intent which drives the derision of indigenous speech patterns in contemporary America, from Spanglish to Black English.  That intent is to ensure that groups out of power begin school behind, and stay there. The cultural genocide is a by-product.

As Michelle Foster noted in 1992, the Kenny/KIPP/TFA model is designed to shatter the connection of African-American students to their community, while guaranteeing that these students remain behind the children of the dominant culture. "A failure to employ, "a culturally congruent approach to teaching" (King, J.E. 1991, King, S.H. 1993) that leads to what is then described as a "failure to learn" (King, 1991)."1

There are, despite what those in power suggest, other choices. There is what might be called "The Black Panther Model," but which, in a bid for less controversy, I call "The Bank of America Model." (a SpeEdChange Post) That is, the creation of parallel system for out-of-power groups so that wealth can be re-circulated and power developed. There is the George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion model (another SpeEdChange Post), the ability to see the attempted colonization and to break free from it. There is the forcible liberation through Romantic Nationalism - the opposite of the "Common Core" - as in Ireland's embrace of the ancient Irish language and Gaelic Games, or Israel's embrace of the even more (at the time) antiquated Hebrew.

But Deborah Kenny, Brian Williams, and Arne Duncan will deny all this, they will not even acknowledge it as possible, because it suggests the possibility of a much more complex world in which, perhaps, their skills and their genetics do not get a free ride.

I haven't expected any response to my complaints from Williams or NBC, or from Kenny. If any were to come it would be in the form of angry indignance anyway. How dare I challenge a saintly missionary... a widowed saintly missionary at that. She is, "making a difference," though they will have a tough time explaining what that difference is, beyond scoring well on tests designed by their friends.

In my Pygmalion post I began with this... "Wendy Hiller is brilliant in the 1938 film of [George Bernard] Shaw's play when she realizes exactly how she has been played by Higgins and the British establishment. "Am I free?" she asks. When you have traded who you are for entrée into another culture, are you ever able to be free again?"

I might ask Brian Williams to go back to Kenny's colonial outpost and ask the kids that question, or better yet, find them in 15 years and ask...


The Wind that Shakes the Barley, opening scenes

- Ira Socol

1. Foster, M. Sociolinguistics and the African-American Community: Implications for Literacy, 1992

"Fried Chicken 'n Watermelon" at The New York Times

"As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show."

Both The New York Times and "reporter" Matt Richtel are at it again. The Times in their battle against technology in education, Richtel in his war against poor children. [see Class War at The New York Times]

Technology is "not a savior" says The New York Times... except for their own kids

The general idea is that while rich kids will use technology well, poor kids - a dangerous alien population - will not, so rich kids should be connected to the world and this century, while poor kids need to be carefully watched and trained to "be white."

Let us tear apart one key section of Richtel's reporting on this so-called "Digital Divide" crisis:

The study found that children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.

Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.) 

It doesn't take an "expert researcher" to see the nonsense in the above. First, the kid with the TV on and the mobile phone in hand is not spending 11 hours a day, but 5.5 hours doing... um, whatever they may be doing because these categories are absurdly broad. At the moment, in this hour, I am spending 3 hours "wasting time on media." The television is on - HGTV, I'm writing on my computer - this post, I'm tracking mail on my mobile. In just a few hours I'll have used up more than my full day, and jump right to tomorrow.

Second, the giant gap? It comes to 1.5 hours a day - which might actually be 45 minutes, or 30 minutes, or - to be honest - who the f--- knows? Richtel has built a career out of misusing third-rate statistical analysis (he has a Pulitzer Prize for "proving" what is provably untrue - that mobile phone use has made driving in America much more dangerous), and here we go again.

Then, using the "anecdote as fact" structure which has defined Richtel's education reporting, the "reporter" finds the most connected poor child in America:

Policy makers and researchers say the challenges are heightened for parents and children with fewer resources — the very people who were supposed to be helped by closing the digital divide.

The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a thoughtful 12-year-old in Oakland who loves technology.

At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops [obviously with broadband - IS], an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for Facebook, YouTube, texting and playing games.

He particularly likes playing them on the weekends. 

Ummm, Matt? I've worked with a lot of poor kids, most are almost completely disconnected at home - except for their phone. When New Rochelle, NY began their 4G laptop initiative in their poor neighborhoods, they could barely find anyone with broadband, much less other laptops at home or connected video games. When I ask, whether in Michigan or Virginia, I find the poor with very little access, outside of the (often shared) smartphone. So Markiy is quite the "thoughtful" find for The Times, a find who makes "poor" parents look lazy, and poor kids - even those described as "thoughtful" poor kids - look irresponsible.  This is the - please excuse the racist expression here but I believe the connection is valid - "Lazy Darkie" theory, the idea, still expressed by the Republican Party in the United States, that African-Americans fail to succeed because they are only interested in "lazing around," dancing, and eating "fried chicken 'n watermelon" (which, honestly, has been expressed more, ahhh, bluntly in the circles of American power).

James Gee on how gaming supports learning

You know Markiy is irresponsible because he plays games on weekends and he isn't doing well in school. I could suggest reading James Geeto Matt Richtel, but information on how children develop and what they need in terms of interactive language, is not The Times goal here.

If it was, they might have reached back to their own paper two years ago:

James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University who grew interested in video games when his son began playing them years ago, has written several seminal books on the power of video games to inspire learning. He says that in working through the levels of a complex game, a person is decoding its ‘‘internal design grammar’’ and that this is a form of critical thinking. ‘‘A game is nothing but a set of problems to solve,’’ Gee says. Its design often pushes players to explore, take risks, role-play and strategize — in other words putting a game’s informational content to use. Gee has advocated for years that our definition of ‘‘literacy’’ needs to be widened to better suit the times. Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems using that knowledge.

Once again The New York Times could be looking at educational funding equity, or providing technology access in real ways, or about making schools function as relevant learning spaces instead of as worksheet factories... but they choose not too.  Once again they have turned their most anti-poor reporter loose on American schoolchildren and their parents, to degrade them, to attack them, and to help ensure that the legislators The Times influences will not give these "irresponsible" kids what they need.

Shame. Again.

- Ira Socol

Who's Behind the Curtain?

I ended up in two big educational debates this past week. One was about "clickers" - those "Classroom Response Systems" that are increasingly infiltrating our classrooms. The other, about Washington, D.C. Schools' Chancellor Michelle Rhee and "the reform agenda for schools" coming from America's financial elites.

In these debates I was abrupt, and cruel (sorry, David Brooks, I know you are only doing your job keeping Wall Street Republicans reading The New York Times, I shouldn't have gotten personal - and a very big apology to Roger Cohen, another NYT columnist, who I blamed in bizarre mix up), and perhaps, in a few moments, coherent and convincing. I read wonderful stuff from passionate people too.

But stepping back, I want to bring both these debates together, because, in the end, they are both about power, about who gets to control education in the United States (and thus who the "winners" in education will be), about who is pulling those levers from behind the curtain.

Michelle Rhee is riding the broomstick, but it is a different Wizard of Oz image I'm interested in...

We have two tidal events occurring here, but these are not natural tides, they are invented ones. And when people seek to create tides, I think we should always ask why.

So, in a higher educational establishment which, for example, has refused to even load their computers with free universal design software technologies, much less invest in those systems which might transform education for a vast array of students now failed by the system, we see broad adoption and massive spending on "clickers."

And, in a climate of broad K-12 system failure, with hundreds of fascinating alternative success examples from around the world, the US media establishment (Disney, Time-Warner, GE, Viacom, NYT Company) has declared one "leader" - a leader with no measurable accomplishments and a confrontational style which seems to drive almost everyone away - as education's messiah.

hero worship

But let's start with the "clickers." Michael Bugeja, a friend and technology in education sparring partner (and the Director of the Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University) wrote a piece this past week in the Chronicle of Higher Education - a paid publication I rarely read and a paid website I rarely visit. His commentary, Classroom Clickers and the Cost of Technology, tracked the adoption pattern of these one-way communication systems on university campuses.

"Marketers seem to know our business better than we know theirs. That was apparent a few years ago, when publishers introduced infrared clickers bundled with specific textbooks or series of textbooks. In a class of 400 students, each of whom would spend $40 for a clicker, many institutions paid for the purchase and/or installation of receivers, in effect helping to sell the company's products. Companies suggested clickers for multiple-choice questions based on a book's content, an easy adaptation from previous instruction booklets with answer keys — not exactly innovative, but cost-effective, making books appear interactive overnight."

Bugeja - who I often debate regarding technology adoption in the classroom - but whom I deeply respect on the subject, even when we disagree - is concerned with the cost/benefit calculations behind the "clicker decision" as well as the key question of who is pulling the strings.

I have been "clear" about my position on clickers - calling them "Instant Anachronisms" and "Coercive Technology." Even when I see some possible benefit - bad lectures may be marginally better with clickers than without - I regard this technology as "insufficiently transformational" - that is, not worth the costs in a nation where students already can not afford higher education.

But the key issue here is "why"? Who has pushed this technology, and to what end. I joined in a fascinating debate on this at the blog of Derek Bruff, a math professor and director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, and major "clicker advocate). If you follow that debate, you'll see where it leads. Why is Turning Technologies selling clicker receivers cheaply? Is it because it hopes to tie Vanderbilt's faculty to the textbooks of its partners? Those partners? Thomson Learning, Glencoe McGraw-Hill, Dell Computers, Steljes Group. Oh. The primary distributors of the $150 textbook are "giving away" (sort of) systems which will seemingly guarantee the continued sale of $150 textbooks.

Those marketing Universal Design Technologies - Freedom Scientific, Text-Help, Kurzweil, etc, can't afford to "persuade" universities this way, but Thomson Learning (or is it Cengage now?) sure can. And thus we find "clickers" everywhere, and struggle to discover transformational technologies on our campuses.

Dr. Bugeja would want me to suggest that we always follow these trails. And when I sat in a meeting with Google's Jeff Keltner regarding Google Apps for Education this semester, I heard all the questions. Why would Google give away a campus email and collaboration system (stripped of the advertising which is Google's only real revenue stream) for free? What's the catch? Keltner (as Google execs tend to be) was blunt. People who use their tools tend to use their search engine and, quote, "we're pretty good at monetizing that." And, "we see students as future leaders, if they become comfortable with our tools now, they'll tend to use them later in their lives."

Yes this is insidious seduction, it sure is, but let's consider this cost/benefit balance. What does your university (or school) spend on email? If that email system was free, could you not raise tuition? Could you hire more faculty? Could you put WYNN on more campus computers? But here's the thing, Google will seduce, but they won't bribe. They won't hand a toy to a faculty member at a conference which transforms that prof into "a techie" in the eyes of his or her peers. They won't give out free books either. So their "leverage" in campus decision making is limited. As we may deduce from observing the number of campuses spending their own and student dollars on "clickers" vs. the number cutting costs by adopting Google Apps for Education.

The Universal Design Tech companies? Without the profits from 700% textbook markups, or the alternative revenue stream of Google, they struggle to bribe or seduce. Even when their products are free, they remain of little interest to universities - despite, well, what's the cost/benefit relationship there?

Which brings us back to Michelle Rhee. Who's marketing her, and why?

Rhee is part of a broad push by America's true "old guard" to ensure that education doesn't really change. The same folks at Harvard and Penn who offer our minorities the lowest educational expectations possible through Teach for America and KIPP Academies, are selling you Rhee, and lowered expectations for all schools - except of course, for the schools attended by the children of those elites.

There is a reason the television networks and New York Times and Time-Warner love TFA and Rhee. These organizations are run by people with power, and by people who would rather not share power.

So they have adopted the ultimate in reductionist standards. "If we had even decent education - or even enough teachers of any kind - in most of the places it places its students, then [TFA] would be a step down," a commenter on this blog said yesterday. Right, so here's the standard: Teach for America, or Michelle Rhee's DC school system, is better than not having schools at all.

Rhee's own words: '"People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job."'

No, she doesn't give a crap. She wants her African-American students prepared for the lowest possible jobs on the economic ladder. That way (perhaps, in her unconscious thinking) they will not threaten the success of her small minority group - a group which has found itself accepted by the powers-that-be because it isn't big enough to be threatening.

Of course I have a different view of reading than Rhee, and of language itself. First, I know that there are lots of ways "to read," and second, I know that when children are inspired to learn about things, they tend to want to learn to read (in one form or another). As opposed to the Joel Klein-Michelle Rhee-KIPP Academy-George W. Bush notion that reading is a skill which should be learned outside of the context of interest-based education.

But then, my goal is opportunity, and my belief system - not being market-capitalist in nature - doesn't think an underclass is a good idea (to hold down upward pressure on wages).

Rhee is not important, of course. She's racist in her expectations and racist in her strategies, she's not an educator at all in the real meaning of that term, she talks a great deal but has little actual impact in her job. But Rhee being hailed as the educational messiah is important.

Like those who favor TFA solutions - the Rhee idea is to NOT change US society. Yes, we'll make impoverished minority groups marginally more competent - thus improving profits at the top and reducing the cost of the dole. But no, we will not empower those groups by empowering their children. Teaching them to be creative 'will have to wait' (forever). Teaching them to find their own learning styles - thus accepting cultural change instead of social reproduction - is dangerous (as it always is for those at the top).

We lower expectations. We test meaningless things (Time: "The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher. But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few. And in schools where kids are struggling to read and subtract, it is a prerequisite for getting anything else done." Really? Anything? You can't teach the physics of a bouncing ball to a non-reader, or the love of literature?). We strip time away from what is precious to children and force them into chanting. We enforce white majority cultural norms and deny identity. We argue that teachers should be paid according to the "short term gain" rules that worked so well for traders at Citigroup and AIG.

And this is all brought to you by the wealthiest people, and the largest old-line corporations in the country. Because, I'll say it again, they have no incentive to allow those below them to succeed.

Follow the money my friends. When information flows freely to as many people as possible, Google makes money. When information is expensive, those who sponsor "clickers" make money. When the kids in Washington, D.C. schools fail, there are fewer challenges to the children of New York Times and Time editors for slots in Ivy League schools. When Washington, D.C. schools focus on "the basics" students from there will not beat out the son of a GE exec for a spot at Carnegie-Mellon.

When you see invented trends, pull back the curtain, see who's pulling the levers. It is important.

- Ira Socol