Re: Kozol - fasting

[aburke5054@aol.com]

 I could be wrong, but I do not believe that dieting against reading and math tests is going to serve as a compelling moral beacon to very many Americans.  Art


 

-----Original Message-----
From: George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>
To: ARN-l@interversity.org
Sent: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 5:49 pm
Subject: [arn-l] Kozol - fasting










      < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/>

      Kozol Fasting to Protest No Child Left Behind!

      Jonathan Kozol: Why I am Fasting: An Explanation to My Friends

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.html
      >
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.html

      >This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a

      >partial fast that I began early in the summer as

      >my personal act of protest at the vicious damage

      >being done to inner-city children by the federal

      >education law No Child Left Behind, a racially

      >punitive piece of legislation that Congress will

      >either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of

      >teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks

      >immediately ahead.

      >The poisonous essence of this law lies in the

      >mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon

      >our nation's schools and, in the case of

      >underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the

      >miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic

      >"teaching to the test" it has imposed on

      >teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from

      >these schools because they know that this

      >debased curriculum would never have been

      >tolerated in the good suburban schools that

      >they, themselves, attended.

      >The justification for this law was the

      >presumptuous and ignorant determination by the

      >White House that our urban schools are, for the

      >most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will

      >suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a

      >sword of terror just above their heads and

      >threaten them with penalties if they do not pump

      >their students' scores by using proto-military

      >methods of instruction -- scripted texts and

      >hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from

      >doing any thinking of their own There are some

      >mediocre teachers in our schools (there are

      >mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and

      >mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly

      >dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly

      >turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that

      >transforms their classrooms into test-prep

      >factories.

      >The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to

      >drive away the tens of thousands of exciting and

      >high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom

      >our urban districts struggle to attract into

      >these schools. There are more remarkable young

      >teachers like this coming into inner-city

      >education than at any time I've seen in more

      >than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit

      >them; it's to keep them But 50 percent of the

      >glowing young idealists I have been recruiting

      >from the nation's most respected colleges and

      >universities are throwing up their hands and

      >giving up their jobs within three years.

      >When I ask them why they've grown demoralized,

      >they routinely tell me it's the feeling of

      >continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind

      >of "state of siege," as well as the pressure to

      >conform to teaching methods that drain every bit

      >of joy out of the hours that their children

      >spend with them in school.

      >"I didn't study all these years," a highly

      >principled and effective first-grade teacher

      >told me -- she had studied literature and

      >anthropology in college while also having been

      >immersed in education courses -- "in order to

      >turn black babies into mindless little robots,

      >denied the normal breadth of learning, all the

      >arts and sciences, all the joy in reading

      >literary classics, all the spontaneity and power

      >to ask interesting questions, that kids are

      >getting in the middle-class white systems."

      >At a moment when black and Hispanic students are

      >more segregated than at any time since 1968 (in

      >the typical inner-city school I visit, out of an

      >enrollment that may range from 800 to 4,000

      >students, there are seldom more than five or six

      >white children), NCLB adds yet another factor of

      >division between children of minorities and

      >those in the mainstream of society In good

      >suburban classrooms, children master the

      >essential skills not from terror but from

      >exhilaration, inspired in them by their

      >teachers, in the act of learning in itself ...

      <
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.htm
      l>

      Read the rest at HuffingtonPost.com

      © 2007 < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/>HuffingtonPost.com, LLC

George Sheridan
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