Big money is turning public schools into test-prep centers. Why? To control teachers. To prevent teachers from raising the expectations of working class children (failure rates are built into the design of MCAS and scores are highly correlated with family income.) To prevent teachers from doing the very thing they became teachers to do in the first place. And to make our children blame themselves, instead of the wrongful inequality of our social system, for the low-paying jobs or unemployment that await them. Click here for our leaflet to teachers about this.
In every local community, the people who value equality and mutual aid (the very great majority, whom we call "egalitarians") should be the ones--and the only ones!-- who decide policy for the schools of the community. No agents of a higher level government or (as is the case today) rich people like Bill Gates will be allowed to dictate how we choose to educate our children.
The "Common Core" standards promoted by Bill Gates and his agent in the government--Secretary of Education Arne Duncan--are designed to make our children believe that our capitalist society based on competition and buying and selling (for profit) with some rich because they are smarter and work harder and the rest poor because they are not so smart and don't work hard, is the natural order of things. It is designed to make our children unable even to conceive of a society based on sharing according to need (instead of buying and selling for profit) and mutual aid and equality with no rich and no poor. This accusation against the "Common Core" is proven by (among many other examples) the educational materials being developed for first graders in New York City. These materials are called ReadyGEN and are produced by the Pearson School company, which says: "ReadyGEN is being designed from the ground up to address the ELA Common Core Standards, the Publisher's Criteria and the City's specific requirements." Susan Ohanian discusses how awful ReadyGEN is in great detail here.[The link is broken but another article also discusses this here.] Ohanian points out, for example, that ReadyGEN lists the following words as the vocabulary first graders need to learn in their first unit of study: goods, services, want, needs, collects, taxes, producers, farmers, consumers, earn, income, sells, saves, choices, cash register, inventory, groceries, average.
For more discussion about what's happening in our schools, please click here for a collection of articles and especially click here to read an extremely good analysis of why our children are being subjected to high stakes standardized testing. Click here for a letter to the editor about the elite Boston exam school. Click here to read "DEAR MAYOR EMANUEL: I RESIGN MY POSITION AS PRINCIPAL OF THE #1 RATED NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL IN CHICAGO."