There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

– Isabel Paterson

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

Randi Weingarten, the New Yorker who is rising to become president of the American Federation of Teachers, says she wants to replace President Bush’s focus on standardized testing with a vision of public schools as community centers that help poor students succeed by offering not only solid classroom lessons but also medical and other services.

…“Can you imagine a federal law that promoted community schools — schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need?” Ms. Weingarten asked in the speech.

“Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities and homework assistance,” she said. “And suppose the schools included child care and dental, medical and counseling clinics.”

How has nobody thought of this before? We’ll simply place all economic and social activities under the purview of these “schools.” Services will be allocated according to the discretion of “teachers.” Workers (everyone) will be told what jobs they must do within the “school.” In order to ensure fairness, private economic activity will be strictly prohibited. Besides, money will be abolished anyway.

I have a good feeling about this.

I’ve often wondered what it would take to dislodge the government monopoly on education. Apparently it takes a catastrophic natural disaster:

NEW ORLEANS The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found “kids just watching movies” in classes where “low expectations were the norm.”

Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.

For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers — critics call them opportunists — seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.

“Opportunist” is intended to be an insult, but I think it should be considered praise.  It is a good thing that people are looking for an opportunity to provide quality education where previously government monopoly ensured there was none.

…Some critics call the charter invasion of New Orleans a challenge to democratic values. Writing about New Orleans in a new book, Leigh Dingerson, education team leader for the Center for Community Change in the District, says Louisiana school authorities have “opened a flea market of entrepreneurial opportunism that is dismantling the institution of public education in New Orleans.”

You know what I call “dismantling the institution of public education?”  Progress.

One of the problems with government run education is that, without any built-in, systematic mechanism for holding schools accountable, all kinds of half-baked, feel-good policies get propped up by educrats. It is rare, however, to find policies so blatantly racist as those currently being promoted in San Francisco.

…A new grading system will expose schools – even the popular, high-scoring ones – that are failing to address the institutional racial inequities within their walls.

“The issues we’re dealing with are capital D Democracy issues,” said Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice, and the plan’s architect.

The question, however, is how to solve those deep-rooted societal problems that are playing out in schools. So far, no urban district has bridged the achievement gap or created schools of equal quality for children regardless of their race or income.

The solution, according to the superintendent’s plan, starts with a top-down acknowledgment that the schools are contributing to the inequities in society, Smith said.

Each school will be judged by how well it “serves each and every student based on that school’s ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes,” according to the plan.

Deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice? Barf.

The real objective here is not what it seems. Educating children is not this educrat’s goal; advancing an agenda is. Notice where he contends that the first step is to admit that education is institutionally racist. This is a classic ploy to get one radical assumption accepted by default by advancing a completely different proposal. Once that proposition is accepted, they are then free to engage in all manner of social engineering, all in the name of correcting this “historic racism.”

Furthermore, this policy is inherently racist. What has individual performance to do with the larger averages of some identity group if there is no causal relationship? Unless we are to believe that different races are more or less capable of performing than other racial groups, it makes no sense to focus on something as irrelevant as race. All students should be held to high standards, not some to lower standards than others because they belong to a certain race. This policy, like so much of identity politics, will dice people up into little groups and exacerbate racial distinctions for no reason. So much for the color-blind dream.

Further illustrating the descent of our government run schools into rampant moonbattery, a 13-year-old boy has been suspended for doodling that most vile of images, that of a gun!

Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.

The boy’s parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

“The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good,” said the boy’s mother, Paula Mosteller.

The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he did not intend for the picture to be a threat.

…Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was “absolutely considered a threat,” and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

The only thing that should be considered a threat here is the continued attempts by educrats to criminalize the childhood behavior of boys.

Hat tip: Moonbattery

Some hysterical UK educrats claim their students are “in state of panic”. Their brilliant solution? Abolish testing!

All national exams should be abolished for children under 16 because the stress caused by over-testing is poisoning attitudes towards education, according to an influential teaching body.

In a remarkable attack on the government’s policy of rolling national testing of children from the age of seven, the General Teaching Council is calling for a ‘fundamental and urgent review of the testing regime’. In a report it says exams are failing to improve standards, leaving pupils demotivated and stressed and encouraging bored teenagers to drop out of school.

Testing is not exactly a new development in education. Here’s a novel thought: If tests are causing stress, maybe it’s because feel-good teaching methods that emphasize self-esteem over performance have left students entirely unprepared to meet the challenge. It’s not the test that is stressful, it’s being put in a situation where one lacks the knowledge and skills to perform. And while you can eliminate school testing, you can’t eliminate life’s tests (though big government welfare states certainly have tried). What students need is better preparation and teaching, not coddling that will only harm them in the long run.

I’m not a fan of the No Child Left Behind, but it has served to demonstrate something that many educrats simply have trouble accepting: accountability works.

The nation’s students have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since President Bush signed his landmark education initiative into law five years ago, according to a major independent study released yesterday.

The study’s authors warned that it is difficult to say whether or how much the No Child Left Behind law is driving the achievement gains. But Republican and Democratic supporters of the law said the findings indicate that it has been a success. Some said the findings bolster the odds that Congress will renew the controversial law this year.

. . .The report, which experts called the most comprehensive analysis of test data from all 50 states since 2002, concluded that the achievement gap between black and white students is shrinking in many states and that the pace of student gains increased after the law was enacted. The findings were particularly significant because of their source: the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, which in recent years has issued several reports that have found fault with aspects of the law’s implementation.

My objection to No Child Left Behind is based on two points, the principles of federalism and my belief that market forces would be much better at introducing accountability than government, certainly more so than the federal government. Nevertheless, it has at least introduced some measure of accountability into a system that has long existed with next to none.

This is what happens when government is put in charge of…well, anything.

. . .The controversial expulsion stems from an incident on Nov. 15, when Ryan and another student heard there was a gun stashed in the boys’ bathroom at their Plainfield school. They found it in a garbage can, and Ryan put the gun in his pocket and handed it over to an assistant principal 10 minutes later in a cafeteria.

Audrey Morgan, the student’s mother, has argued that expulsion was “too harsh” and that her son was not being given credit for turning over the gun.

But the school board contends it followed the state law in this case.

“In a situation where a student has possessed, used or controlled or transferred a weapon on school grounds, the school code requires that the student be expelled for one calendar year and no more than two calendar years,” said Joanne Schochat, the assistant superintendent for the school district.

Just another of many problems that wouldn’t exist if government extricated itself from its educational quagmire.

Twenty-five seventh grade students were presented with a website about a fictitious creature, a “tree octopus”, and asked to rate its credibility. All but one found it “very credible”, and none recognized it as a hoax.

The Locker Room comments on the website’s obvious clues:

These kids need a Baloney Detection Kit or something; a little close reading would have revealed several obvious leg pulls, such as:

* “booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and sasquatch”. . .

* Related links at the end of the page to such things as “Save the Mountain Walrus” and “The Rock Nest Monster” and organizations such as “Greenpeas.org” and “People for the Ethical Treatment of Pumpkins.”

That not one of twenty five seventh graders knew that octopuses don’t live in trees is troubling. I think, however, that the public schooling indoctrination regarding “endangered species” also left the students incapable of properly evaluating information presented in that context. I suspect that more would have caught on to the hoax if the tree octopus had been presented as a possible pet, instead of an endangered species.

If there’s one thing kids learn in school, it’s the importance of buzzwords. And no ritual phrase is uttered more solemnly than “endangered species”. Upon hearing this sacred utterance, students are expected to lower their heads in shame and mutter to themselves about the folly of man. The last thing they are supposed to do is ask critical questions.