Re: moratorium on sanctions?

[Csubstance@aol.com]

In a message dated 8/9/07 9:07:23 PM, kber@earthlink.net writes:

<< no chance the president would sign a bill that had a moratorium on 
sanctions.  And not clear you even get a majority of Dems to vote that way -  afraid 
of being demagogued as not willing to have strong standards for minority 
children.  I am quite sure Miller would never let something like that out of 
committee  >>

The raw and brutal facts out of Chicago are that sanctions hurt the children 
more than anything else. This is what I mentioned at Kos and what we've been 
publishing about since they began in the form of retention ("ending social 
promotion") ten years ago and school closings (which began in Chicago five years 
ago, in April 2002). 

The sanctions against children, teachers, principals, and schools have failed 
because, as we've all discussed here ad nauseum, they use the wrong 
instrument (secret, multiple choice, computer scores so-called "standardized" tests) to 
diangnose a problem where it isn't a cause (i.e., in the schools) and then 
blame victims.

Anybody who is interested in our bringing forward more and more of the data 
from Ground Zero here should ask.

But nobody should claim that the sanctions have "helped" the poor and 
minority children whom they are supposedly designed to help.

More than 20,000 Chicago children (all of them black, all poverty) have been 
pushed around from the schools that have been closed here in Chicago since 
Chicago's "Renaissance" began in 2002. And most of them have been hurt by the 
experience. This is that same pattern we saw during the late 1990s, when the 
primary form of sanction was against children (retention) and less so against 
schools and teachers (a few "reconstitutions").

The only reason this evidence is ignored is that the people who have been 
providing analysis have been paid to prop up each successive iteration of these 
failed programs, from Reconstitution and Retention on, and have been promoted 
to the media as the only interpretation of what has happened. 

George Schmidt
Editor, Substance<BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> Get a 
sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
</HTML>