Common Standards?

NOTE to READERS: You may wish to "start at the end" - in other words with the first blog way down the list. The blogs have information that "builds" from simpler to more complex in many cases, so the top one is the latest one. Make sense? Thanks for reading!
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"Common Standards"
Has there ever been a more appropriate name for making every state and child the same as "Common Standards"? Perfect. Let's go back to the factory-inspired schools of the industrial age when we needed mostly compliant drones to run all the factories so that the fat cats could get fatter. Sure. Let's just make everyone common and boring and mundance and drones again. But for what reason now? There ARE no factories needing drones anymore. They could at least have called them Clear Standards, but maybe that is not what they mean. Common standards in a Race for the Top. If you read Arne Duncan's set criteria for who is going to be in the Race for the few billions the government is giving to states to boost their educational systems, it is going to be the ones MOST COMPLIANT. Common and Compliant. Holy Cow, how obvious can they be, and what scares the crap out of me, is that states are already prepping to go after it by pretending to be the MOST compliant rather than saying, "Here's the truth: You institute universal, non-personalized standards and make them more "rigorous" and "higher" - which may sound good to some - but you have 500,000 kids a year who cannot meet the standards that exist, much less higher and more rigorous ones. Wake up! What do you think happens when kids cannot reach the heights required? They drop out. Quit. And my prediction is that any benefits garnered by this maneuver will be sadly outweighed by the increased dropout rate. What is the human cost? Dramatic will be the cost of even more at-risk kids, more crime, violence, mental illness, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and the list goes on.

I am, sometimes sarcastically asked, "Well, what would YOU do? Simple. Spend the money getting great teachers to work with the kids who need compensatory help. Deliberately aim at keeping kids in school with more experienced and caring teachers, and extra aides and materials, in order to give potential dropouts encouraging personal compensatory education until they catch on and can fend for themselves. Help them succeed, no matter what. Recruit educators who love them, believe in them and know what the hell they are doing. Get a crop of go-getter educators that will never give up, who respect kids for exactly who they are and are willing to look past symptoms and aim at enhancing the abilities of children rather than push them out the door so they can work with already college-bound kids. Use that money in the WORST schools with fresh eyes and attitudes; send in a busload of angel/warrior educators that run towards the school and outlast the janitors before the lights go off.

"Where are you going to find that kind of educator," people will say. "There are NO teachers like that!" You want to bet? I know teachers who have been in my at-risk education classes that I KNOW for a fact you could airdrop into a batch of shadow children with nothing more than a pencil and they would fire those kids up like you wouldn't believe! Come get them from our DIAL Master's Program at Marian University because they are there! Park your ass in the parking lot next week at the Summer Institute in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and I will introduce you to over 30 of them at once. I worship the ground they walk on, and they know it. And they will never, ever, ever quit --- and it is not just because they know I would break into their house at night and retrieve their diplomas if they did. It will be because we attract great educators and make them into greater professionals.

They are out there Mr. Duncan. But you gotta go find them. Here is a very practical idea that I know would work: For one year hire some recruiters to go find the angel/warriors, and offer them $100,000 a year for six years and they will clean up and create schools of greatness in whatever schools you put them in. And you will still have one year left in your second term to evaluate how many lives you just saved and/or made better, and everyone will call you a hero when you leave the White House. A REAL Hero. You got the money, use it well.
Just Do It!