"...let us slay him....we shall see what will become of his dreams."

[Searcher44]

That's from Genesis 37:18-19

18) And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him.
19) And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.
20) Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.

I can still get weepily emotional when I think back on Spring and Summer 1968 when they killed Dr. King,
and the final blow to what was supposed to be my summer of romance, the wonder year of my wonder years, they killed Bobby.

I guess I've turned into one of the most cynical s.o.b's around. On first noticing the blurb topping Dr.Kings digital archives;

The Archive - Digital Archive brought to you
by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

the first thought that flashed through my skeptic's brain was. "Yeah, I bet those motherf%^&@!$ hope that all the protests against poverty and inequality are conducted by MLK rules of nonviolence." His hope for peaceful civil disobedience is plastered all over the site. I don't know what Dr. King would preach today when all the metrics he marched against are worse in many ways than they were back then. There seems to be a vitriolic backlash against his hopes. What would he think of the demonization of Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter of 1968?

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. Outraged by the city’s response–in what was a long history of neglect and abuse of its Black employees–1,300 African American men from the MiamaMANemphis Department of Public Works went on strike. This struggle soon captured national attention as Martin Luther King, Jr. took his “Poor People’s Campaign” to Memphis in an effort to fuse the movements for racial and economic justice. At one march for the sanitation workers, more than 200 strikers marched through Memphis carrying placards with the message, “I AM A MAN.”

Martin Luther King never got to see the outcome of this Movement, he was murdered on April 4,1968.

There is a new movement today that is infused with the spirit of Dr. King.

This movement is not just for the future of Black Education, it's for the future of education itself. Traditional education is under assault by the same forces that are assaulting right to vote and the right to Unionize and fight for worker rights and the freedom for woman to make their own decisions about their bodies an health. They want to crush Teachers Unions and farm kids out to test factories. Eventually they'll want to stick them in front of an LCD screen for 8 hrs. and impregnate them with Koch Bros. knowledge all day long. ALEC is getting privatize education Bills passed all over the country. Be afraid, be very afraid, maybe you'll act.

 

[Blackrook]

They're trying to save black kids from failing public schools that don't teach them how to read, write or do math. Why would you want black kids to stay in failing public schools? It seems you are an enemy to your own people.

 

[Searcher44]

They're trying to save black kids from failing public schools that don't teach them how to read, write or do math. Why would you want black kids to stay in failing public schools? It seems you are an enemy to your own people.

want black kids to stay in failing public schools

Obviously you don't think I want any kids, black or white or whatever to stay in "failing schools". I would love to see those schools improved. Education of youth is one of the most important duties of any community. This has been known since at least the Greeks. I'm going to give a few quotes that will summarize my feelings about what a "Good" education is and the value to a society.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - William Butler Yeats

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. - Benjamin Franklin

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education. - Zhuangzi (Ancient Chinese philosopher)

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. - Thomas Jefferson

I haven't heard of any admired thinker or Philosopher who values an education focused on teaching kids how to "test" well.
Or say that learning facts by rote to be held in the mind long enough to answer a multiple test question is an adequate education. Do you know much about Henry B Adams? His father was the son of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, and the grandson of John Adams, second president. Henry is an underknown American. (that's probably not a word, an awkward way of saying he should be much better known). He was one of the great American Educators and historians. He taught at Harvard and emphasized student participation, not lectures. His modern and innovative methods strived for critical understanding not memorization of names and dates. He was the type of teacher my kids were lucky to have and of whom Aristotle said "those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” In other words, parents just make babies. It’s teachers who turn them into people. Instead of trying to crush teachers and their unions we should be involved in the process and do what we can as parents to help. There seemed to be parent-teacher things going on every week at the kids bi-lingual school. We both went when possible, one of us if necessary. I was serious when I said letting private, for profit corporations take over the attention of my kids for hours per day would scare the hell out of me.

Through ALEC, corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers' unions by:

• Promoting voucher programs that drain public schools of resources by using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school profits, and specifying that those schools must remain unregulated. Voucher programs have been pushed in the following ways:

• Offering private school vouchers with "universal eligibility" (using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private schools for the rich and others); "means-tested eligibility," (using poverty as the first domino in an effort to privatize public schools); and "universal eligibility with means-tested scholarship." (Here, "scholarship" means using taxpayer dollars to pay private school tuition and/or profits.)
• Giving tax credits to parents who send their kids to private schools, (see this bill, this bill, and this bill) and to corporations that donate to scholarships for private schools.
• Creating a scheme to deem public schools "educationally bankrupt" to rationalize giving taxpayer dollars to almost completely unregulated private schools, rather than addressing any problems.
• Back-dooring privatization by creating voucher programs to subsidize unregulated, for-profit schools or religious schools for specific subsets of students, such as foster children, or children of military families.

I'm sorry to clip and paste so much but I think this is important stuff. And if you have kids school-age I'm sure you do too.
This is from Jesse Hagopian's I Am An Educator blog. He' a very dedicated teacher and a leader in the fight against "high stakes testing" which if it continues to expand will destroy traditional education.

One important alternative to standardized testing is performance based assessment, which promotes inquiry, problem solving, and critical thinking. My colleagues and I at Garfield High School have began collaborating with the New York Consortium for Performance Based Assessment (The partnership is portrayed in one section of the new documentary, Beyond Measure). As Gail Robinson writes of the Consortium:

"While most New York students must pass state exams in five subjects to graduate, the consortium’s 38 schools have a state waiver allowing their students to earn a diploma by passing just one exam: comprehensive English. (An additional nine schools have a partial waiver.) Instead, in all subjects including English, the students must demonstrate skill mastery in practical terms. They design experiments, make presentations, write reports and defend their work to outside experts".

The performance based assessment model is very similar to the process a PhD candidate undergoes in preparing a dissertation and defending it to a panel of experts. Multiple choice standardized tests are good at demonstrating students’ ability to spot what are called “distractor questions,” and students with the resources purchase test prep classes that are able to train students to eliminate wrong answer choices better than their peers. However, the ability to eliminate wrong answer choices is not authentic to most real life situations students will face. In the world outside of corporate education reform, students will need to be able to research issues, work collaboratively in groups, develop arguments, solve real life problems, and more. Performance based assessments at the Consortium schools allow students to engage in those real life skills–much the same as a swimming test.

The superiority of authentic assessment over multiple choice, standardized testing can be seen in part by the outcomes of the Consortium schools. A recent study shows that 77 percent of students who started high school at a Consortium school in the fall of 2010 graduated in four years, compared to 68 percent for all New York City students. Last year, 71 percent of students learning English at Consortium schools graduated on time, compared to only 37 percent of English learners around the city. Eighty-six percent of black students and 90 percent of Latino students at the Consortium schools are accepted into college, compared with the national numbers 37 percent and 42 percent respectively. Moreover, longitudinal studies show that Consortium school students complete college at higher rates–likely due to the emphasis on the very inquiry and critical thinking skills that are valued in college.