I have no interest in defending ineffective teachers, but we also have to talk honestly about what schools can and can’t do to help students. I don’t doubt that the effectiveness of a teacher is the single largest factor in determining a student’s success, but this is only in terms of the factors schools can actually control. If we include all the relevant factors, the data seems clear that socio-economic status dwarfs every other factor. Until policy-makers acknowledge this fact, educational policy will continue in its teacher-punitive path to the detriment of all.

I think the brevity of the essays work against the purpose of the text. This is a thin volume, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to criticize it for a lack of depth. That said, I expected this to be a series of essays that attempted to explain how each of the three founders (Adams, Washington, Jefferson) defined independence. And there is some of this, but I also found much more biography than I expected. And with a volume so thin, any biographical details must of necessity be short and shallow. Still, Morgan does draw out some helpful points.

Adams - Of Adams we learn the least, with more focus on his biography than his philosophy. In the main, we learn that he distrusted political parties and felt that the virtue of the individual was the key to a successfully independent nation: “the ability of the American republic to sustain its independence rested on the ability of its citizens to sustain their virtue” (20).

Washington - We get more of Washington’s philosophy, with Morgan setting out two keys to Washington’s approach to government: honor and interest. For Washington, “honor required a man to be assiduous and responsible in looking after his interests. But honor also required a man to look beyond his own profit …” (33). These values were important for individuals and nations, and affected Washington’s approach to foreign policy. He felt it was vain to “appeal to the honor of any country against the interests of that country and its people” because such appeals would not hold over time (46). This also implied that America should pursue its own interests, in an honorable fashion, without getting caught up in the interests of other nations, leading to Washington’s famous neutrality.

Jefferson – Jefferson—the most controversial of the three, the most hypocritical from a modern perspective—is also the most radical in arguing that the rights of the state outweigh those of the national government and that the rights of the individual outweigh both. For Jefferson, “liberty was always an attribute of the individual, and the state at best a means of securing it.” In addition, he believed that “one generation is to another as one independent nation to another,” meaning that twenty years was the maximum amount of time that any law or constitution could be considered to have the consent of the people or that any public debt could be contracted. He also sought protection of individual liberty from the influence of the church and protection of national liberty from the burden of debt and foreign obligation. The goal, a government limited enough to provide every possibility of liberty to the individual, but powerful enough to protect that liberty. Though, significantly, Jefferson’s conception of the “individual” was confined ideally to well-educated, land-holding farmer-philosophers (which, in modern terms, would translate to “the elite”).

Overall, the Jefferson essay makes it worth the read, but even then you’ll need to look elsewhere for historical context, nuanced interpretations, or scholarly controversy.

In the blink of an eye, Rhee’s budget deficit turns into a $34 million surplus. All this book-cooking so Rhee could violate the collective-bargaining agreement and fire 266 teachers at will.

Mike Klonsky

Here’s the WaPo article.

There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us [public education buildings] empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.

Anyone who can’t see the relationship to No Child Left Behind and the push for charter schools and vouchers isn’t looking hard enough. The basic plan is this: starve the system, prove that the starving system is inadequate, punish the system for its inadequacy, repeat until you have enough support to destroy the system completely.

This is my own tangent to the story of what’s happening in Florida right now, the background of which is detailed in this letter.

The charter movement began as an effort to strengthen public education, but it has turned into a movement to get rid of public sector unions and to turn public schools into private schools funded by public dollars.

Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0

Step 1: Hire a lot of Teach For America rookies and people who agree with you.

Step 2: Put in place impossible-to-meet standards for teacher performance to make anyone a target for sacking.

Step 3: Announce there has been a budget shock and a reduction in force is unavoidable because of the economic downturn. Pretend you somehow didn’t understand in July 2009 how bad our budget situation would be in just two months. The teachers to be reduced will be selected out of those with less than stellar “performance” (and practically everybody will be vulnerable).

Step 4: Get rid of whoever you want, sidestepping due process and remaking the teaching force in your image.

Mass Teacher Layoffs in D.C. Amount To One Hell of a Power Play by Michelle Rhee

What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As the U.S. rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what American citizens, voters, and taxpayers need by way of knowledge and skills to form reasonable conclusions about the hottest domestic policy issue of the day.

Health Care and an Educated Citizenry

The short answer includes decent skills across a range of disciplines with a healthy dose of background knowledge and sound analytical skills. An effective education is, in large part, about becoming an informed citizen … which means more than just passing some standardized tests.

1) starve public services of necessary resources and support (because, you know, taxes are always bad and deregulation is always good)

2) criticise the services for performing poorly and set up other services as monitors (ignore the contradiction of deregulation here, we’ll pay private entities to do the monitoring)

3) punish the services when they don’t improve the way the monitors want (who, after all, would be out of a job if the services did improve)

4) privatize the public services, channeling public funds into private organizations that are supposed to meet public needs (because any government-sponsored program is demonstrably and hopelessly inefficient)

5) call any attempts to reverse this process “socialism” and government takeover (never mind that a corporate takeover has already happened and public funds have been redistributed out of public accountability)

I’ve seen this first-hand with education. It’s one area in which I strongly disagree with the Obama administration’s policies so far.

Is any charter school better than any public school? As we learned from the Stanford CREDO study of charters a few months ago, only 17 percent of charter schools are superior to comparable public schools; the rest were either no better or worse. Yet the Obama administration wants to open up the nation’s public schools—especially in urban districts—to massive privatization.

The Start of an Interesting and Dangerous School Year

And yet, he’s accused of wanting government take-over for every other sector. This particular inconsistency really bothers me.