Howdee.

My name is Philip Kovacs, and I am a former teacher who teaches teachers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Inspired by this community, and with the help of one of its most prominent members, I helped start an organization dedicated to dismantling the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which has been a boon for corporate America, and continues to harm students, teachers, and schools.

You may have seen our petition, which now has 34,000 signatures. That may not seem like many, but if we could all gather in your front yard, you’d take notice.

Please jump with us, we have something we’d like to share with you.

As I have written elsewhere, children must be prepared to become individuals who can realize and then maintain a participatory democratic social order.

Below the fold, you’ll find our 15 point plan for realizing a system of "public" education that has the potential to help communities implement curricula more favorable to life, liberty, community, and happiness.

I’d love to hear how this plan complements the work of your preferred candidate.

We will never have a participatory and egalitarian social order until we have adults with the language to imagine and articulate such an order.

But where do those adults come from?

Our schools?

Doubtful... Leaving education up to corporations, we have basically ensured America's children will have to wait until after school...if they are lucky....to appropriate the language necessary to free themselves, and each other, from various isms...

Here are a few important words children need to know to become the type of critical citizen necessary for identifying and checking power, the type of critical citizen necessary for genuine democracy to obtain and maintain.

Read it to your kids, and then your neighbor's kids...if you don't have kids, have kids, and then read it to them.

Each of these words should be printed upside down on bibs, that way, instead of reaching out for Disney, they'll reach out for democracy.

From Wikipedia:

Propaganda is a type of message aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of people. Often, instead of impartially providing information, propaganda can be deliberately misleading, or using fallacies, which, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid. Propaganda techniques include: patriotic flag-waving, glittering generalities, intentional vagueness, oversimplification of complex issues, rationalization, introducing unrelated red herring issues, using appealing, simple slogans, stereotyping, testimonials from authority figures or celebrities, unstated assumptions, and encouraging readers or viewers to "jump on the bandwagon" of a particular point of view.

This Diary will attempt to flesh out the first five tenets of a democratic education as called for last Saturday. If you want a much more detailed explanation (and sources for all of the quotes), you can download and read the third chapter of this document.

The first five tenets:

1. Authority for shaping goals lies in the hands of the people.

2. Education is political.

3. Democratic participation requires a specific type of voice and literacy.

4. Justice, while elusive, is worth striving for; injustice, when discovered,requires action.

5. Education is more than job training.

Your op/ed in yesterday's Washington Post indicates a serious misreading of what is going on in America's classrooms. While your goal of helping all children is noble, the way you have chosen to go about doing so harms children of all races and socio-economic levels. For example, over the past five years dropouts have increased and segregation approaches pre-1954 levels.

Testing will not solve these problems.

The increased testing you call for rests on misguided assumptions (at best) and will only create more problems for our schools, as we've shown here.

xposted at educatorroundtable.net

During my first year of graduate school I read 2 books that changed my life forever: John Dewey's Democracy and Education and George Counts' The Education of Free Men in American Democracy.

For those of you who don't have the time to read both, I can soundbyte them for you: if we don’t educate with democracy in mind, we’ll never have democracy.

If we wish to have perpetual terror, perpetual fear, perpetual rat-racing towards faster cars, thinner women, longer/harder erections, less respect for the elderly, less respect for children, less-competent representatives, fewer rights, fewer freedoms, and genuinely more of what the Bush administration gives us, then our schools are doing fine.

If we want something much different for our children, for our communities, and for the world, then it is time to do as teacherken suggests and realize a radical different approach to how we teach, how we learn, and who we trust to help us with both...

Free and in the south on March 17th?

We have invited educators from across the country to join us in discussing how to free schools from a myopic focus on testing and data, replacing a standardized model with one that allows for the diversity and innovation that this country once valued.

Towards that end, we’ll be asking:

1. What would our schools look like if we listened more to students and teachers?

2. Where do we draw the line between responsibility and accountability?

3. How do we reconnect schooling with our communities?

4. Why should we have public schools in the first place?

5. Can there be "public" schools without private schools?

6. Why, exactly, can’t we have vouchers?

7. If not NCLB, then what?

8. How do we make that happen?

Last week the Aspen Institute issued a report suggesting that what the country needs is more of the same: tougher standards, harsher penalties, more private ownership of public schools. No major publication questioned whether or not tougher standards have been scientifically proven to raise test scores.

They haven’t.

No major publication questioned whether or not scientific studies show that tougher sanctions for failing schools helps those schools improve.

They don’t.

No major publication questioned the science behind the Aspen report's call for "failing" public schools to house private tutoring firms.

There isn't any.

No major publication questioned the Aspen report’s attack on teachers, as if teachers are the only problem in America’s schools.

They aren’t.

My dream school sits at the headwaters to the Tennessee River. It’s called the Downstream Academy.

Or better yet...my dream school sits on the seventh story of a building in the middle of downtown Atlanta. Perhaps above a restaurant or an auto mechanics shop.

The "school" on top of the "restaurant."

In 3 weeks the Educator Roundtable has collected over 20,000 signatures on its petition to end No Child Left Behind. We are extremely grateful to this community for its support in our endeavor. Our organization continues to gain support and to make progress.  

Today I want to extend my last diary entry, which focused on one teacher’s story about the conditions of her school. I want to argue that the architects and supporters of this legislation intended to drive teachers such as her out of schools. In case you missed that: NCLB was crafted to drive certain types of teachers, such as those willing to complain about corporate dictates, out of schools.

I hope you will stick with me, as we cannot have anything remotely resembling a participatory democracy without citizens prepared to maintain it, and we will not have citizens capable of maintaining this country in a state of integrity and usefulness if we don’t have highly-qualified, critical, passionate, and engaged teachers raising them to do so.

I’m an idealist, what can I say? I believe in this country; I believe in the power of people; I believe in change, democracy, empowerment.

I also happen to believe in the power of teachers and teaching. In this tiny little head of mine I believe that extraordinary teachers have the ability to help children effect significant, lasting change in their lives.

This isn’t willy-nilly belief mind you. I’m a former teacher, a teacher of teachers, and a scholar in the field of educational policy studies. I know about lead in the drinking water, about asthma, about poverty, and I am under no illusions about the effects of reality on learning. But given these problems, there are amazing things going on in our classrooms...or at least there were...because there are amazing teachers doing their best to engage their students despite rats, poverty, and standardization.

Undoubtedly NCLB is having multiple negative effects on our schools; today I want to foucus on two: silencing teachers and stamping out individuality...

It is time for us to acknowledge that No Child Left Behind is a false bill of goods.

It is a like Iraq is a lie.

It is a lie like "social security is failing" is a lie.

It is legislation based on neoliberal faith in the power of markets to force change rather than a progressive faith in the power of people to co-create their democracy, and it is time for it to go.

I represent a group of teachers, administrators, scholars, activists, parents, and concerned citizens who see this law as

a clever long-range political ploy to discredit public education by branding good schools as 'failures' and to drive American education toward vouchers, charter schools -- and even resegregation.

This community could play a large roll in making democratic school reform a real possibility, and I hope many of you will do so today.

There are so many falling Republicans that I have run out of metaphors and analogies to describe the situation.

And I am a former High School English Teacher...

Today I received a letter from Gary Ruskin, who runs the organization Commercial Alert.

Commercial Alert's mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.

You can, and should, sign up here to support this organization.

Funny to start a post about commercialization with a commercial eh? It's for democracy by golly, go by and sign up for their mailing list, and if you can, give them some love...

To the letter...

I know us democrats have not always been an inclusive party, hell, we have a past that isn't always something to brag about.

But unlike some who would hide or obfuscate what they did yesterday, we have taken a long hard look at ourselves, and I think, I think we are starting to like what we see.

At least I am liking what I see here.

Fact is, we've been working on this party, working hard in all 50 states, which some elites thought was a bad idea, rubbing elbows with country folk and all.

I say screwem (and I say that from Huntsville AL); all sorts of folks are thinking about coming to the party, and the more the merrier.

Who are you inviting?

A recent report came out condeming teacher's colleges. You can read one reporter's take on it here.

There is a larger assualt on education in America, perpetuated with the use of fear. I recently diaried about it here.

If diversity, democracy, and the preservation of individuality, distinctiveness, and creativity don't concern you...skip this.

What follows is a letter to the editor of my local paper...

I'm making a movie see. The movie is called The Schools Are Failing. You can see parts of the movie almost everyday in your newspapers, on your televisions, and on your internets. The movie is made and produced by individuals who do not believe in democracy: they are both neoconservative and neoliberal, and they believe in market or religious fundamentalism...sometimes both.

They do not want a population that thinks or questions, as this would challenge their hegemony. If you want to stop a population from thinking critically you raise its children to produce and consume without question.

Fill-in-the-blank test tomorrow.

What's funny, not ha-ha funny mind you, is that these people want you to believe schools aren't working so they can take them over when in reality...wait for it...schools are working for many Americans. I know...you want proof.

How many of us went to public schools? 89% if we follow the national average, but since Kossacks are all above average, I'd say we are closer to 95%. Take the poll, after you give the screenplay a once-over...