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Friday, January 1, 2016

Children are more than test scores: My 2016 Walking Man Resolution of Resitance to 124 years of failed education reforms

Children are more than test scores: My 2016 Walking Man Resolution of Resitance to 124 years of failed education reforms:

My 2016 Walking Man Resolution of Resitance to 124 years of failed education reforms

In 2014 Dean Paton Executive Editor of YES magazine wrote an important piece about the roots of privatization taking over our public schools. Two years later it is well worth the read people.http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/the-myth-behind-public-school-failureHis is a brief history of education reform since 1980.

However the roots of privatization go back over a hundred years. We can't separate commerce from wealth and power. What if there is a method to the insanity of returning to the same failing policies over and over again?
In the nineteenth century America’s academic elites feared American students were not college-ready. Thus in 1892 The National Education Association created the Committee of Ten to create uniform college admission requirements based on new content standards using common entrance exams.  From the beginning the standards established America’s wealthy, powerful and connected were never rooted in principles of democracy or morality, but on content knowledge measure through uniformed testing. 
Now let us include standards obsession with our history of school inequity. In 1896 four years after America’s love for standards found itself further supported by Plessey v Ferguson. Establishing segregation as the law of the land for nearly 6 decades. In 1954 Brown v the Board of Education ends jurisprudence segregation. For the first time in public education history the wealthy, the powerful and the connected status quo found their policies threatened. Hiding behind their trusted mantra of “standards and exam uniformity” gave cover to “de facto” segregation. Now standards and testing uniformity policies continued to make our public schools segregated and unequal places of learning.
I have come to accept that after 124 years inequity in our public schools “equity” was never the 
Children are more than test scores: My 2016 Walking Man Resolution of Resitance to 124 years of failed education reforms: