Académique Documents
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Plans
The United States federal government should end federal
requirements related to the Common Core State Standards
Initiative.
The United States federal government should end surveillance
in No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core
State Standards Initiative.
The United States Department of Education should end
surveillance in No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the
Common Core State Standards Initiative.
The United States federal government should national
educational tracking of students in the United States.
The United States Department of Education should remove the
surveillance and database requirements from the Race to the
Top grants.
The United States federal government should end the Common
Core State Standards Initiative.
The United States federal government should eliminate federal
testing and data collection requirements from the Common
Core State Standards Initiative.
1AC
1AC Inherency
The most dangerous form of government surveillance is the
federal education program known as Common Core. This
program seems benign, but is actually an institutional tracking
program that allows the government to control every aspect of
the American public for decades into the future.
Cook 13 Joshua Cook, MBA, reporter, writer for BenSwann.com whose work has
appeared on DrudgeReport, InfoWars, Breitbart.com, Daily Caller and
FreedomOutpost.com, 2013 (Common Core is the Most Dangerous Domestic
Spying Program, Freedom Outpost, September 2 nd, Available Online at
http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/09/common-core-dangerous-domestic-spyingprogram/#eBdFDCwK8D3U5h94.99, Accessed 06-22-2015)
Earlier this year, revelations about the Department of Justice spying on the
Associated Press were quickly followed by revelations that the NSA was collecting
phone data on all Verizon, and then all American cell phone users. Edward
Snowden's whistleblowing drew yet more attention to the issue, and domestic
surveillance programs have remained a top issue in people's minds ever
since.
While Americans focus on institutions like the CIA and NSA, though, programs
are being implemented which would lead to a much more institutional way
of tracking citizens. Obamacare is one of these, but Common Core Standards
the federal educational program is the most eyebrow-raising.
Bill Gates was one of the leaders of Common Core, putting his personal money into
its development, implementation and promotion, so it's unsurprising that much of
this data mining will occur via Microsoft's Cloud system.
Even the Department of Education, though, admits that privacy is a concern,
and that some of the data gathered may be "of a sensitive nature." The
information collected will be more than sensitive; much of it will also be
completely unrelated to education. Data collected will not only include
grades, test scores, name, date of birth and social security number,
it will also include parents' political affiliations, individual or familial
mental or psychological problems, beliefs, religious practices and
income.
In addition, all activities, as well as those deemed demeaning, selfincriminating or anti-social, will be stored in students' school
records. In other words, not only will permanently stored data
reflect criminal activities, it will also reflect bullying or anything
perceived as abnormal . The mere fact that the White House notes
the program can be used to "automatically demonstrate proof of
competency in a work setting" means such data is intended to affect
students' futures .
Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that data collection will also
include critical appraisals of individuals with whom students have
close family relationships. The Common Core program has been heavily
scrutinized recently for the fact that its curriculum teaches young children to
use emotionally charged language to manipulate others and teaches students
how to become community organizers and experts of the U.N.'s agenda 21.
Combined with this form of data collection, it's easy to envision truly disturbing
untruths and distortions making their way into the permanent record.
Like Common Core, states were bribed with grant money from the federal
government to implement data mining, and 47 states have now implemented some
form of data mining from the educational system. Only 9 have implemented the full
Common Core data mining program. Though there are restrictions which make
storing data difficult on the federal level, states can easily store the data and allow
the federal government to access it at its own discretion.
The government won't be the only organization with access to the information.
School administrators have full control over student files, and they can choose who
to share information with. Theoretically, the information could be sold, perhaps
withholding identifying information. In addition, schools can share records with any
"school official" without parental consent. The term "school official," however,
includes private companies, which have contracts with the school.
NSA data mining is troubling because it could lead to intensely negative
outcomes, because it opens up new avenues for control and because it is
fundamentally wrong. Common Core data mining and tracking students
with GPS devices is far, far scarier.
It gives the government the ability to completely control the futures of
every student of public education, and that will soon extend to private and
home schools. It provides a way to intimidate students who already
have a difficult time socially into conforming to norms which are not only
social, but also political and cultural.
1AC Plan
[Insert a plan text.]
cameras. Equally arrogant are school zero tolerance policies that punish serious
offenders of a school weapons policy the same as a child who draws a picture of a
gun, no matter what the parents or students have to say about the matter. The
result is a generation of young people browbeaten into believing that they
have no true rights, while government authorities have total power and
can violate constitutional rights whenever they see fit.
investigation from the state Attorney General's office for using its nonprofit wing,
the Pearson Foundation, to finance trips abroad taken by NYSED officials.
Yet, for the most part, by cloaking its aims in the guise of philanthropy the
private sector has successfully nuzzled its way into the sphere of public
education. And there are big bucks to be had.
When it comes to K through 12 education, Rupert Murdoch put it upon acquiring
Wireless Generation in 2010, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is
waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach
of great teaching. To help ensure that News Corp. gets its share of the education
pie (translation: "to extend the reach of great teaching"), the media baron tagged
an industry insider to do his bidding, taking on former New York City Schools
Chancellor Joel Klein as an adviser.
Government and for-profit education businesses are becoming ever more
inextricably inter-connected, commented Michael McGill, superintendent for
schools in Scarsdale, New York, upon learning of the state's plan to house his
students info with the Murdoch/Gates start-ups. This is a development that merits
public concern and close public scrutiny."
awarding grants to states that comply with the initiative. The standards have been
adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
The chart illuminates a larger corporate agenda that seeks market-based
education reforms and increased influence over public education in the
United States. With defense and security expenditures slowing ,
corporations are looking to profit from new cloud-based software used to
collect and mine information from student records to create individualized
education programs designed by third-party companies.
McDermott is a teacher-educator with more than 20 years of experience working in
and with public schools. McDermott also serves as a section editor for the Journal of
Curriculum and Pedagogy and recently published a book titled "The Left Handed
Curriculum: Creative Experiences for Empowering Teachers" with Information Age
Publishing. She is an administrator with United Opt Out National, a nonprofit created
by parents, educators and students who are dedicated to the elimination of highstakes testing in public education.
She researched and produced the information on her own, but the work is endorsed
and supported by the United Opt Out National network. McDermott told Truthout
she used a systems-based approach in her research to show the concepts in
relationship to one another, and that it's just another example of a different method
of teaching and learning.
McDermott says she works to fight standards and testing because they divert
funds and attention away from the real issue in education, which is
poverty. "The whole thing about better tests and if we had better standards
is like a bait-and-switch so nobody pays attention to the real issues," she
said.
McDermott mentions a number of corporations and organizations prying for
influence over the Common Core standards. Among them is Achieve Inc., a
company widely funded by ALEC members, including Boeing and State Farm, among
others.
McDermott also points to peer-reviewed academic research originally published in
the International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation by Fenwick English
titled "The Ten Most Wanted Enemies of American Public Education's School
Leadership." In his research English looks at many of the players involved in the
same network that McDermott maps with clarity, writing of the Eli Broad Foundation
that:
Broad money is sloshed behind the scenes to elect or select candidates
who "buy" the Broad corporate agenda in education. ... Broad's enemies are
teacher unions, school boards, and schools of education. What all three
have in common is that they eschew corporate, top-down control required
in the Broad business model.
According to McDermott, America's Choice, another part of Common Core's
corporate web, originally was founded as a program of the National Center on
Education and the Economy (NCEE), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. But in
2004, the group was reorganized as a for-profit subsidiary of NCEE.
McDermott cites a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Jay
Greene, who writes:
NCEE's scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates
Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000 - all
taxpayers' money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE's start-up and the development
of Common Core standards certainly helped America's Choice to put its key people
on Common Core's [English Language Arts] and mathematics standards
development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the
readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use.
It's all part-and-parcel to the larger neoliberal plan to "reform" public
education .
"What Race to the Top is doing to exacerbate the issues of poverty , for one
thing, in terms of school funding is it's even elevating the amount of money
that is funneled right through schools, like a sieve, and channeling it more
directly into the hands of testing companies, computer companies, online
companies and other corporate interests," McDermott said. "So for a state or a
district to say, 'Oh, we need the money,' my reaction would be, 'You're not going to
see a dime of it. They're going to hand you a check that's basically a coupon to buy
Pearson products.' "
Consider global warming. There is now much exuberance in the United States
about 100 years of energy independence as we become the Saudi
Arabia of the next century perhaps the final century of human
civilization if current policies persist .
That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security, certainly not
for the population. It also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary
Anglo-American state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren counts as
nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.
These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system. There is
a huge public relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite openly by Big Energy
and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either
unreal or not a result of human activity. And it has had some impact. The U.S.
ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming and the
results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the
interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.
The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia Journalism
Review, has an interesting article on this subject, attributing this outcome to the
media doctrine of fair and balanced. In other words, if a journal publishes an
opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of scientists, it must also run a
counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.
That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no fair and balanced doctrine.
Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin
for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece
pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case
today than the U.S. did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba,
including the countrys major port and rejecting the Cuban demand since
independence to have it returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The
actual media doctrine is fair and balanced when the concerns of concentrated
private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.
On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting and
frightening. It reveals very clearly that, from the earliest days, the security of the
population was a non-issue, and remains so. There is no time here to run through
the shocking record, but there is little doubt that it strongly supports the lament of
General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which was
armed with nuclear weapons. In his words, we have so far survived the nuclear
age by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I
suspect the latter in greatest proportion. And we can hardly count on
continued divine intervention as policymakers play roulette with the fate
of the species in pursuit of the driving factors in policy formation.
As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in
human history . There are many problems that must be addressed, but
two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction
and nuclear war . For the first time in history, we face the possibility of
destroying the prospects for decent existence and not in the distant
future. For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological
clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy
decisions are made , and what we can do to alter them before it is too
late.
I don't mean illiterate in the sense of not being able to read, though we
have far too many people who are functionally illiterate in a so-called
advanced democracy, a point that writers such as Chris Hedges, Susan Jacoby,
and the late Richard Hofstadter made clear in their informative books on the rise of
anti-intellectualism in American life. I am talking about a different species of
ignorance and anti-intellectualism . It is a form of illiteracy that points less
to the lack of technical skills and the absence of certain competencies
than to a deficit in the realms of politics - one that subverts both critical
thinking and the notion of literacy as both critical interpretation and the
possibility of intervention in the world. This type of illiteracy is not only
incapable of dealing with complex and contested questions ; it is also an
excuse for glorifying the principle of self-interest as a paradigm for
understanding politics. This is a form of illiteracy marked by the inability
to see outside of the realm of the privatized self, an illiteracy in which the
act of translation withers, reduced to a relic of another age. The United
States is a country that is increasingly defined by [an educational] deficit,
a chronic and deadly form of civic illiteracy that points to the failure of
both its educational system and the growing ability of anti-democratic
forces to use the educational force of the culture to promote the new
illiteracy. As this widespread illiteracy has come to dominate American culture, we
have moved from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting and in
doing so have restaged politics and power in both unproductive and antidemocratic ways.[11]
Needless to say, as John Pilger has pointed out, what is at work in the death of
literacy and the promotion of ignorance as a civic virtue is a "confidence trick" in
which "the powerful would like us to believe that we live in an eternal present in
which reflection is limited to Facebook, and historical narrative is the preserve of
Hollywood."[12] Among the materialized shocks of the ever-present
spectacles of violence, the expanding states of precarity and the
production of the atomized, repressed and disconnected individual,
narcissism reigns supreme. "Personal communication tends to all meaning,"
even as moral decency and the "agency of conscience" wither.[13]
How else to explain the endless celebration of an unchecked self-interest,
a culture that accepts cruelty toward others as a necessary survival
strategy, a growing economics of contempt that maligns and blames the
poor for their condition rather than acknowledging injustices in the social
order, or the paucity of even the most rudimentary knowledge among the
American public about history, politics, civil rights, the Constitution, public
affairs, politics and other cultures, countries and political systems?[14]
Political ignorance now exists in the United States on a scale that seems
inconceivable : for example, "only 40 percent of adults know that there are 100
Senators in the U.S. Congress," and a significant number of Americans believe
that the Constitution designated English as the countrys official language
and Christianity as its official religion.[15]
What is particularly disturbing is the way in which there has been a resurgence
of a poisonous form of technical rationality in American culture, or what I
call the return of data storms that uncritically amass metrics, statistics
and empirical evidence at the expense of knowledge that signals the need
for contextualization and interpretation in support of public values, the
common good and the ethical imagination. Data storms make an appeal to
a decontextualized and allegedly pure description of facts, and what Herbert
Marcuse called a "misplaced concreteness," one that was particularly "prevalent in
the social sciences, a pseudo-empiricism which . . . tended to make the objectivity
of the social sciences a vehicle of apologetics and defense of the status quo."[16]
This obsession with metrics feeds an insatiable desire for control and lives
in an eternal present, removed from matters of justice and historical
memory. The novelist, Anne Lamott, is right in arguing that the "headlong
rush into data is overshadowing 'everything great and exciting that
someone like me would dare to call grace. What this stuff steals is our
aliveness . . . Grids, spreadsheets and algorithms take away the sensory
connection to our lives, where our feet are, what we're seeing, all the raw
materials of life, which by their very nature are disorganized.' Metrics, she
said, rob individuals of the sense that they can choose their own path,
'because if youre going by the data and the formula, theres only one
way.'"[17]
Not only is this mode of rationality antithetical to other modes of
reasoning that recognize and value what cannot be measured as being essential
to life as well as democratic values and social relations , but it also carries
the weight of a deadly form of masculine logic wedded to toxic notions of
control, violence and ideological purity.[18] It is a form of rationality that
serves the interests of the rich and obscures modes of thinking that are more
capacious and reflective in their capacity to address broader conceptions of identity,
citizenship and non-market values such as love, trust and fidelity.
The cult of the measurable is enthralled by instant evaluation, and
fervently believes that data hold the key to our collective fate.
It bears repeating: reality is now shaped by the cultures infatuation with a
narrow, depoliticizing rationality, or what Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer
called instrumental reason. Bruce Feiler, writing in The New York Times, argues
that not only are we awash in data, but words and "unquantifiable arenas
like history, literature, religion, and the arts are receding from public life,
replaced by technology, statistics, science, and math. Even the most
elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the
list."[19] Historical memory and public space are indeed the first casualties
in this reign of ideological tyranny , which models agency only on
consumerism and value only on exchange value. The cult of the
measurable is enthralled by instant evaluation, and fervently believes that
data hold the key to our collective fate. John Steppling sums up the
authoritarian nature of this ideological colonization and monopoly of the present. He
writes:
Today, the erasure of space is linked to the constant hum of data information, of
social networking, and of the compulsive repetition of the same. There is no space
for accumulation in narrative. Emotional or intellectual accumulation is destroyed by
the hyper-branded reality of the Spectacle. So, the poor are stigmatized for sleep. It
is a sign of laziness and sloth. Of lassitude and torpor. The ideal citizen is one at
work all the time. Industrious and attentive to the screen image or the sound of
command. Diligence has come to mean a readiness to obey. A culture of shaming
and reprimand is based on a model of reality in which there is no history to reflect
upon. Todays mass culture only reinforces this. The "real" is a never changing
present. Plots revolve around the idea of disrupting this present, and then returning
to this present. Actual tragedy, Chernobyl or Bhopal or Katrina, are simply ignored in
terms of their material consequences. What matters are events that disrupt the
Empire's carefully constructed present reality.[20]
It gets worse. Within this reality, endlessly hawked by a neoliberal brand of
authoritarianism, people are turned into nothing more than "statistical
units." Individuals and marginalized groups are all but stripped of their
humanity, thereby clearing the way for the growth of a formative culture
that allows individuals to ignore the suffering of others and to "escape
from unbearable human dilemmas . . . . Statistics become more important
than real human life."[21]
Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyons have connected the philosophical
implications of experiencing a reality defined by constant measurement to
how most people now allow their private expressions and activities to be
monitored by the authoritarian security-surveillance state.[22] No one is
left unscathed . In the current historical conjuncture, neoliberalisms theater of
cruelty joins forces with new technologies that can easily "colonize the
private" even as it holds sacrosanct the notion that any "refusal to
participate in the technological innovations and social networks (so
indispensable for the exercise of social and political control) . . . becomes
sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag behind in the globalization
process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of society."[23]
Inured to data gathering and number crunching, the countrys slide into
authoritarianism has become not only permissible, but participatory bolstered by a general ignorance of how a market-driven culture induces all of us to
sacrifice our secrets, private lives and very identities to social media, corporations
and the surveillance state.[24]
What some critics find most troubling is not simply that corporate interests
are collecting student personal information, but how that information is
being used. As the anonymous programmer put it, I don't think a lot these
products are going to work. Teachers aren't going to like them, but that doesn't
matter. These are essentially accountability systems.
Some school districts have released statistical teacher evaluations as a way of
holding teachers' feet to the fire and to justify layoffs. In Los Angeles, one teacher
committed suicide after the city paper published his score. In New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia and elsewhere, data standardized tests results have been used to
shutter schools and replace them with charters, often sponsored by hedge funds.
There are other ways, of course, to improve schools, says the programmer.
Rather than shutting them down, giving teachers the slip and hiring corporate data
tracking firms, policy makers could invest in improving the quality of life in
the neighborhoods surrounding schools. Also, they could just hire more
teachers. He insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation from his employer,
because such comments could cripple the programmer's entire profession, if
heeded.
Increasingly, parents are refusing to feed the statistical machine. Over the last two
weeks, several hundred in New York opted their children out of Common Core tests.
In Chicago last week, parents also refused to allow their children to be tested. These
boycotts were inspired by a school-wide refusal by teachers at Garfield High School
in Seattle, Washington, to administer standardized exams to students.
Arne Duncan has called education in America today 'the civil rights issue
of our time', said Jesse Hagopian, a Garfield teacher who helped initiate
the school-wide test refusal last fall. And I agree with him. Only I think his
methodology is flawed. Because I know what the actual Civil Rights
Movement was built on.
Just as a bus boycott helped launch the Civil Right's Movement, Hagopian hopes
that a test boycott will help launch a grassroots education reform movement.
Parents, students and teachers need to band together, he says, and boycott tests
that are designed to rank and sort our children and label them failures rather than
provide them educational equity. These tests can't measure leadership, civic
courage, creativity, the things we're going to need to solve the problems
in the world today like endless war, mass incarceration and climate
change.
and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers.
Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants.
Petroleum engineers. Positive psychologists. Communications majors. Cadets.
Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no
history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of
stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliots the hollow men, the stuffed men.
Shape without form, shade without colour, the poet wrote. Paralysed force,
gesture without motion.
It was the careerists who made possible the genocides , from the
extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the
Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalins liquidations . They were the
ones who kept the trains running . They filled out the forms and presided
over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children
starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced
travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out
segregation. They enforced the law . They did their jobs.
Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into
useless wars , including World War I , Vietnam , Iraq and Afghanistan . And
millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice
us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on
both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal
Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of
Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at
Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goalas we did in Iraq when it
turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when alQaida left the countryand opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig won if more
Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000
more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals
are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his
eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crcy in 1337 during
the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too
late.
David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele
campaign, wrote in his memoirs: [Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks
Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the
drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots
where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they
were to Send no more of these ridiculous maps. Maps must conform to plans and
not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.
Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate
change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of
coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that
interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats
know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills
they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think
on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures . They
American people. Taking the Powell Memorandum seriously and understanding what Wolin has asserted about the
US political system does not involve embracing conspiracy theory. It is not the case that elites in the United States
developed a plan to recapture major institutions and bend them toward the interests of business and did so without
encountering resistance. As Marx was so fond of reminding us, capitalism always generates its own opposition and
in the period from the mid-1970s to the present, there has been considerable resistance bubbling underneath the
surface of American society. The long-term consequences of a successful cultural war by the right have been to shift
the balance of social forces and institutions in the direction of business and to marginalize social justice
movements. As the Occupy Movement illustrated, efforts by elites were unable to stamp out the opposition or
contain the outrage generated by running the country solely for the interests of mega corporations. As Antonio
between different social classes. However, probably the most insidious effect
which hegemony has had on American society is that it has shifted the
range of debate to the right and redefined the acceptable policy options
available to the major political parties. The Democrats now represent center/right policy
alternatives and the Republicans now represent right/extreme right policy prescriptions. Consequently, the political
The height of
hegemony is when even the form and content of the opposition has been
affected by the institutionalized thought structure. This is exactly what has happened
arena is structurally incapable of addressing the major problems facing the American people.
in the United States when social movements have been marginalized or repressed, and when critics of society have
no better example of this trend than the growth of for-profit universities that make bundles of money from
desperate students while strangling them with incredible levels of debt in pursuit of dubious credentials. However, it
is too easy to just put this at the doorstep of for-profit educational institutions, because they are doing what they
were created to do - make money and commodify education. Even more disturbing is that
universities and
budget cuts, hostile legislatures, university administrators who increasingly identify themselves with corporate
CEOs, and communities which have been buffeted by the forces unleashed by the economic crash, universities are
increasingly being run like mega corporations. In Giroux's words, " Casino
successful in this project will require going beyond the academic community and reaching out to students, parents,
We
must indeed see the university as an arena for struggle in order to revive
higher education and its ideals and to contribute to the larger struggle for
democracy and social justice. As someone who has worked in higher education for his entire career,
workers and community members who have been adversely affected by the direction the university has taken.
I sense a tremendous unease and decline in morale in academe. Some would say that this is normal because the
university has been subject to the same technological forces as any other institution and inevitably this leads to
changing the way people work. Surely, there is an element of faculty grumbling about having to do things
differently and being subjected to increased scrutiny. But there is more than just this going on in higher education.
Running a university like a business degrades all aspects of university life and negatively affects administrators,
Commodifying education
alienates people from each other, from the institution, from their work,
and diminishes people's expectations. Corporate logic changes priorities
and changes the allocation of resources for the institution. To argue against the
faculty, professional staff, workers, students, parents and the community.
corporatization of the university is not to harken back to the "good old days" in academe because, as Noam
Chomsky has argued, "we
should put aside any idea that there was once a 'golden
age.'" As Chomsky describes it, "things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect."
(Chomsky, 2014). He goes on to say that "traditional universities were for example, extremely hierarchical, with
very little democratic participation in decision-making." While his description is accurate, academe still maintained
The
university did provide a rather unique public space to think, debate and
criticize, and at least at one time, tried to teach students to be better,
more engaged, public citizens. It was also generally the case that those who worked in academe
relative autonomy from society, and also paid lip service to ideals that go back to the Enlightenment.
believed that the institution was exempt from some of the pressures which affected other institutions, and that the
university, despite what was happening in the larger society, would be successful in protecting itself from the
corrosive effects of capitalist society. To be sure, in a previous era, many sought work in academe to maintain their
independence, escape the restrictions imposed by capitalist society and work in a more humane and less
Instead of leading the fight against the decline of the public sphere and the erosion of democracy,
involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially research
During
the months leading up to and following the invasion of Iraq, university and
universities), intellectuals, scholars and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system
college campuses, which had been such notorious centers of opposition to the Vietnam War that
politicians and publicists spoke seriously of the need to 'pacify the campuses,' hardly stirred. The
Academy had become self-pacifying (Wolin, 2008:68). College has become "the great unleveler."
The seamless integration of higher education into the logic of corporate
capitalism has created a new natural order of things where critics of the
new social arrangements are chastised for not keeping up with the
requirements of the post-modern economy and holding on to the past as
the world passes them by. The university, it has been argued, had to reinvent
itself to adjust to the current circumstances or it would lose out in the
competition. The market would now dictate what the best practices would
be in higher education and the guidelines for leading the institution would
be adapted from the corporate world. What follows is an account of the
corrosive effects of embracing corporate logic on higher education.
Corporatization of higher education has taken its toll on an institution,
which previously was considered one of the great triumphs of the
American system. Combined with rampant inequality, a college education is now more the province of the
privileged and, as The New York Times recently pointed out, college has become "the great unleveler."
on the university: 1) the way in which universities are administered in this corporate age, 2) the state of academic
labor and how it has changed over time, 3) the redefinition of university education and the alteration of the
curriculum to meet corporate influences, and 4) the decline of public intellectuals and the diminished role of
universities as independent centers of thought and debate. Henry Giroux, in his piece entitled "Beyond Neoliberal
Miseducation," cites Debra Leigh Scott who points out that " administrators
now outnumber
faculty on every campus across the country." The top-down control of
university governance by administrators has severely compromised
faculty governance. Universities now recruit former CEOs of major companies or former prominent
politicians to run complex university systems. Many of these recruits have no prior experience in academe and are
not steeped in the traditions of the university community which they seek to lead. At Purdue University, the former
governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, now serves as president of the university. Almost immediately after Daniels took
the timetested way of doing things in a university system has been systematically
dismantled. Like the larger society, an illusion of democratic participation
in decision-making has replaced actual participation in university
over at Purdue, a firestorm of protest by faculty and students ensued. This is just one example, but
participation in decision-making has replaced actual participation in university decisions and dissenters have been
threatened with sanctions for questioning the current institutional arrangements. The area of campus in which the
harshest effects of corporatization can be seen is the organization of academic labor. More and more faculty these
days are hired off tenure-track in order to cut costs and establish greater control over academic labor. In 2007,
according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 70 percent of the faculty on college
campuses were adjuncts and other contingent employees. These trends continue as tenure-track faculty who retire
are replaced by adjunct faculty. The pay of adjunct faculty is deplorable and their working conditions are just as bad
as they travel between part-time teaching jobs and have little time - or even an office in which - to talk with their
students. As James Hoff and other critics of the current practices of utilizing adjuncts assert, the system of low pay
creates a hierarchy within academia and creates even more tiers within the system (Hoff, 2014). Ever mindful of the
instance, at the University of Vermont was $210,851 per year. This was more than seven times the annual salary of
maintenance workers at the university (Jacobs, Counterpunch, Feb. 21-23, 2014). As tuition and other fees on
campus skyrocket, the money generated is disproportionately allocated to the most privileged segments of campus,
while the lowest wage workers on campus often qualify for food stamps. In a piece in Salon, Keith Heller has called
the current practices at US colleges and universities "the Wal-Mart-ization of higher education." He argues that
more and more faculty are underpaid and undervalued. The
gaining increased attention nationwide as parents, students and the university community come to
grips with the skewed priorities of University, Inc. Some of the basic principles underlying
effective pedagogy, such as small class size, individual attention and the
importance of mentoring, are being sacrificed in order to increase head
the larger society, the college experience is being segmented by the kind of school that students are able to afford.
Students from the top tier continue to enjoy the benefits of practices which are now increasingly only found at elite
universities and colleges. In other tiers, for instance, a liberal arts education is devalued and in public universities
that are not in the top tier, the educational experience emphasizes finding an area of study that will yield a job.
Training has often been substituted for a broad liberal arts experience and
students influenced by the difficult job market also question why they
need to take subjects that are not directly related to what they will do
when they leave college.
the fate of higher education has not been decided and the
corporate restructuring of the academy is being resisted. Higher education and its
However,
professoriate have been targeted because they represent a major reservoir of resistance to corporate control and
the erosion of democracy. As Antonio Gramsci reminded us, hegemony is not easily accomplished. It involves social,
political and cultural struggle to produce and reproduce the dominant order. According to Gramsci, hegemony is
In the struggle for hegemony in American society, the university as traditionally understood is contradictory in
nature. On the one hand, it has the potential to be a very unique commodity - one which makes bundles of money
and one which helps elite ideas and elite ideology become hegemonic. On the other hand, it can play a crucial role
in questioning the dominant ideology and producing critical thinkers. The contradictory role played by universities in
Corporate elites
seek to enlist the university in its battle to impose its will on the rest of
society. They seek to blunt the critical impulses of the university and
reinforce its role as a defender of neoliberalism. The challenge to everyone in academia
American society has made higher education an arena for struggle over the last 30 years.
is to resist corporatization of higher education. We still have the capacity to imagine a different university that
contributes to the fight to create a different, more peaceful and more democratic society. The goal should be to
build a broader coalition for social justice, to reimagine the future and to create a counter hegemony. To do these
Roves Crossroads GPS. Photo There were, however, a few caveats when it came to
the way these groups could spend their money. Neither a 527 nor a social-welfare
group could engage in express advocacy that is, overtly making the case for
one candidate over another. Nor could they use corporate money for electioneering
communications a category defined as radio or television advertising that even
mentions a candidates name within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general
election. So under the old rules, the Club for Growth couldnt broadcast an ad that
said Vote Against Barack Obama, but it could spend that money on as many ads
as it wanted that said Barack Obama has ruined America call and tell him to
stop! as long as it did so more than 60 days before an election. (The distinction
between those two ads may sound silly and arcane to you, but thats why you dont
sit on the Federal Election Commission.) Citizens United and a couple of related
court decisions changed all of this in two essential ways, and each of them was
more incremental than transformational. First, the Supreme Court wiped away much
of the rigmarole about express advocacy and electioneering. Now any outside
group can use corporate money to make a direct case for who deserves your vote
and why, and they can do so right up to Election Day. The second change is that the
old 527s have now been made effectively obsolete, replaced by the super
PAC. The main difference between a super PAC and a social-welfare group,
practically speaking, is that a super PAC has to disclose the identity of its
donors, while social-welfare groups generally do not. Those who criticize the
effect of Citizens United look at these very technical changes and see an obvious
causal relationship. The high court says outside groups are allowed to use corporate
dollars to expressly support candidates, and suddenly we have this tidal wave of
money threatening to overwhelm the airways. One must have led to the other,
right? Well, not necessarily. Legally speaking, zillionaires were no less able to
write fat checks four years ago than they are today. And while it is true
that corporations can now give money for specific purposes that were
prohibited before, it seems they arent, or at least not at a level that
accounts for anything like the sudden influx of money into the system.
According to a brief filed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Floyd
Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, in a Montana case on which the Supreme
Court ruled last month, not a single Fortune 100 company contributed to a
candidates super PAC during this years Republican primaries. Of the $96
million or more raised by these super PACs, only about 13 percent came
from privately held corporations, and less than 1 percent came from
publicly traded corporations. This only tells part of the story. The general
election has just begun, and big energy and health care companies may still be
pouring money into social-welfare groups that dont have to disclose their donors.
The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported
last month, for instance, that Aetna anonymously contributed more than $7 million
to two such groups. We may never know precisely how much money is coming from
similar companies, which should alarm anyone who cares about the integrity and
transparency of government. But the best anecdotal evidence suggests that this
kind of thing isnt happening in nearly the proportions you might expect.
Kenneth Gross, an election lawyer who represents an array of large corporations,
told me that few of his clients have contributed to the social-welfare groups
engaged in political activity this year. They know those contributions might
become public at some point, and no company that sells a product wants
to risk the kind of consumer reaction that engulfed Target in 2010, after it
contributed $150,000 to a Minnesota group backing a conservative
candidate opposing gay marriage. If youve got a bank on every corner, if
youve got stores in every strip mall, you dont want to be associated with
a social cause, Gross told me. None of this is to say that Citizens United hasnt
had an impact. Gross and others point out that in the era before Citizens United,
while individuals and companies could still contribute huge sums to outside groups,
they were to some extent deterred by the confusing web of rules and the liability
they might incur for violations. What the new rulings did, as the experts like to put
it, was to lift the cloud of uncertainty that hung over such expenditures, and the
effect of this psychological shift should not be underestimated. It almost certainly
accounts for some rise in political money this year, both from individuals and
companies. Even so, the Supreme Courts ruling really wasnt the sort of
tectonic event that Obama and his allies would have you believe it was.
Id go so far as to call it a liberal delusion, Ira Glasser, the former executive
director of the A.C.L.U. and a liberal dissenter on Citizens United, told me. Which
leads to an obvious question: If Citizens United doesnt explain this billion-dollar
blast of outside money, then what does?
Carter Eskew, a longtime Democratic adman and strategist whose clients included
Al Gore in 2000, and asked him a simple question: How much did he think he would
really need for a candidate today, if he could have an unlimited budget to run a
national ad campaign, including all the outside money? Eskew paused before giving
a declarative answer: $500 million. Anything beyond that, he said, was probably
overkill. In other words, theres a threshold below which a presidential
candidate cant really compete effectively, and that number whether its
$500 million or something less is outlandish enough that it should give us
pause. But beyond that number, its not clear that spending an extra $200
million or $500 million will really make all that much of a difference on
Election Day. More likely, the two ideological factions are now like rivals of the
nuclear age, stockpiling enough bombs to destroy the same cities over and over
again, when one would do the job. You could even argue that whatever benefit a
campaign derives from all this money is balanced, somewhat, by the threat it poses.
Back in the days of soft money, a candidate had ownership of his partys
national apparatus and the accusations it hurled on prime-time TV. He was
responsible for the integrity of his argument, and his advisers ultimately
controlled it. What the reform-minded architects of McCain-Feingold
inadvertently unleashed, what Citizens United intensified but by no means
created, is a world in which a big part of the money in a presidential
campaign is spent by political entrepreneurs and strategists who are
unanswerable to any institution. Candidates and parties who become the
vehicles of angry outsiders, as Mitt Romney is now, dont really have control of their
own campaigns anymore; to a large extent, they are the instruments of volatile
forces beyond their own reckoning. Maybe that makes for a cleaner and more
democratic system than the one we had before, in the way the campaign-finance
reformers intended. Standing here in 2012, its just hard to see how.
minute, but Common Core and testing is certainly hurting everyones ability
to be excited.
other institutions, and undermined the role of educators, artists and other
cultural workers who are engaged and critical public intellectuals. Given
the importance of education in and out of schools in providing the
formative culture necessary for students and others to develop the
capacities for connecting reason and freedom, ethics and knowledge, and
learning and social change, progressives must reclaim education as an
emancipatory project deeply rooted in the goal of expanding the
possibilities of critical thought, agency and democracy itself.
Such a task is about reclaiming the Enlightenment emphasis on freedom,
reason and informed hope as well as engaging education as a crucial site
of struggle, one that cannot be frozen in the empty, depoliticizing
ignorance that supports an oppressive culture of instrumental rationality.
Near the end of her life Hannah Arendt argued that thinking is the essence of
politics because she recognized that no politics could be visionary if it did not
provide the foundation for human beings to become literate, critical agents.
Thinking is a dangerous activity, especially in dark times like the historical
moment we currently inhabit. But, for Arendt, what she called "nonthinking" is
the real peril in that it allows tyranny to take root , and history to repeat
itself again and again . She wrote:
And to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be
hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, general
convictions, et cetera. Everything which happens in thinking is subject to a critical
examination of whatever there is. That is, there are no dangerous thoughts for the
simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise. . . . nonthinking is
even more dangerous. I don't deny that thinking is dangerous, but I would say not
thinking, ne pas reflechir c'est plus dangereux encore [not thinking is even more
dangerous].[32]
No democratic society can survive with a configuration of power,
institutions and politics dedicated to keeping people ignorant while
exploiting their needs, labor, desires and hopes for a better future.
Dependency and vulnerability are now viewed as a weakness, even as the public
services and public servants that might alleviate people's distress are defined as
gratuitous costs by the neoliberal state. American democracy is losing ground
against an onslaught of neoliberal forces in every realm, not only in the realm of
politics. As historical memory is erased, critical thought is crushed by a
sterile instrumental rationality under the guise of mass information and a
data storm. The formative cultures and institutions that enable individuals
to learn how to become critically engaged citizens are being eviscerated. If
unchecked, neoliberal barbarism will strengthen its dominance over
everyday life, and the transition into authoritarianism will quicken . The
way out of this conundrum is not to be found in the use of data-gathering
technologies or in an uncritical faith in the expansion of new digital and social
media. Neither will it be discovered in a callous retreat from compassion and social
responsibility, or in reliance on a depoliticizing instrumental rationality.
It is only a rebirth of historical memory that will enable the merging of
dangerous thinking, critical knowledge and subversive action into a
everything these days. TED Talks, the headquarters of this movement, have been
viewed more than a billion times, and talks are ranked by views. The hottest
nonfiction book this spring is Capital in the 21st Century, a 696-page economic
tome by Thomas Piketty.
Every generation gets the gurus it craves. Ours include Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel
Kahneman, Bren Brown, Jim Collins, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Dan
Gilbert, Dan Pink, Dan Ariely and Nate Silver. What do they all have in common?
They use research to tackle issues that were once the provenance of poets,
theologians and philosophers. (Also, theres a 40 percent chance theyre named
Dan.)
SPORTS While sports fans have always loved statistics, the explosion of fantasy
sports in recent years means that the statistics, in essence, now play one another.
Fans assemble their own rosters of players from various teams, then those teams
compete based on metrics. Thirty-two million people play fantasy sports each
year. Offerings include baseball, football, rugby, professional wrestling, surfing, auto
racing, hockey and golf. (Theres even a Fantasy Congress.) The economic impact is
$4 billion a year.
LIFESTYLE The Quantified Self movement utilizes life-logging, wearable computing
and other techniques to assemble what it calls self-knowledge through numbers.
New York University just announced that it has teamed with Hudson Yards to create
the nations first quantified community. Electronic monitors will collect data on
such things as pedestrian traffic, air quality, energy consumption, composting
compliance, even the physical activity of residents in order to build a smart
community. The app Reporter pings you several times a day and asks you
questions like Where are you?, Who are you with? and What did you learn
today? The service then creates a graph of your life.
Theres even smart cutlery. HapiFork tracks how fast you eat. If you dont pause 10
seconds between each bite, the utensil turns bright red and vibrates to slow you
down.
Big Brother isnt our big enemy anymore. Its Big Self. That hovering eye
in the sky watching every move you make: Its you.
So what are the consequences of this new numerized world?
Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Everything
Is Obvious, welcomes the trend. He said all this new information enables better
decisions.
If you had to choose between a world in which you do everything based on instinct,
tradition or some vague, received wisdom, or you do something based on evidence,
I would say the latter is the way to go, he said.
The challenge is coming up with the proper interpretation of the data, he said. Did
you not get a full nights sleep because you were mindlessly flipping channels or
watching Internet porn, or because you were comforting a sick child or having a
night of great sex the way they do in New Mexico?
Coming up with the correct meaning is whats hard, Mr. Watts said.
Tony Haile, the chief executive of Chartbeat, which provides real-time analytics for
ESPN, CNN and The New York Times Company, agrees. (In addition to studying
readers habits, nearly every major news organization has invested in data
journalism, the use of computerized tools to scan digital records, cull big data and
the playing field for the districts in poverty. Teachers are mind-molders. When they embrace, create and implement
meaningful change with their students, they are helping every child reach his or her potential. Teachers embrace
constructive, researched change that result in better, meaningful learning. Resistance to the Common Core
standards should be understood in this context.
Initiative, which was created at the behest of the nation's governors and has since been enthusiastically backed by
the Obama administration, say it is critical to ensuring all of the nation's middle and high school students meet a
baseline in math and English. But while Common Core is not itself a curriculum, but a set of standardized tests,
private curriculum producers are marketing their materials as "Common Core-aligned." Critics of Common Core say
establishment of a national standard is simply a backdoor way of nationalizing curriculum. The root of the problem
with the Common Core initiative is that standards drive testing, which drives curriculum, Glyn Wright, executive
director of The Eagle Forum, a Washington-based watchdog group that has long campaigned against the new
curriculum, told FoxNews.com. The standards were created by private organizations in Washington, D.C., without
input from teachers or parents and absent any kind of study or pilot test to prove its effectiveness. In fact, the
only mathematician and the only ELA expert on the validation committee refused to sign off on the standards
because they are inadequate, she added, Yet, the standards have been copyrighted and cannot be changed, and
this is resulting in a loss of local and state control. Parent groups have criticized Common Core, and there are
anymore because we have so much other stuff to do that is based on the Common Core," she told FoxNews.com.
Topicality
Topicality Its
Its We Meet
Common Core is a federal program the USFG uses a
combination of aid and mandates to force the states to
conduct testing, data mining, and other forms of surveillance.
Newman 13 Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small
information consulting firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida,
foreign correspondent for The New American magazine, writes for several
publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 (Common Core: A Scheme to Rewrite
Education, The New American, August 8th, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16192-common-core-ascheme-to-rewrite-education, Accessed 06-29-2015)
Almost immediately following the public announcement on Common Core ,
the Obama administration and the federal leviathan it leads began the
push to ensure compliance nationwide . Indeed, widespread acceptance of
Common Core thus far has been almost exclusively attributed to the taxpayer
largess offered under various programs. One key element in getting states to
comply was the $50 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, part of the
2009 stimulus bill, which distributed funds to state governments that
agreed to adopt Common Core and create or improve systems to track
students (see Orwellian Nightmare: Data-mining Your Kids).
Obamas controversial and unconstitutional $10 billion Race to the Top
program was also crucial. Billions of federal dollars have been awarded to
state governments from a fund for the scheme, which was also established
with $4.5 billion under the 2009 so-called stimulus bill. With federal aid , of
course, comes federal control . And to be eligible for the massive grants,
state governments were forced to adopt Common Core or other
internationally benchmarked standards while creating data systems to track
students. Some $350 million was set aside to help fund common assessments for
states that adopt common international standards, the Department of Education
announced, referring to the national testing regime set to be rolled out as early as
next year.
Unveiled at a 2009 event at U.S. Department of Education headquarters was an
array of other federal grants worth billions of dollars much of it from the
stimulus bill aimed at usurping control over education and Americas youth
from families and communities. Among the programs outlined in a Department of
Education press release: a $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund, a $297
million Teacher Incentive Fund, and more. Another $3.5 billion in School
Improvement Grants was earmarked for states to support efforts to reform
struggling schools.
Another key element in getting state governments to agree to the national
standards was the issuance of waivers from the Bush-era No Child Left
Behind. Without authority from Congress, the Department of Education
announced in 2011 that it would grant waivers from NCLB to state governments in
exchange for obedience to various federal decrees and the adoption of Common
While Pennsylvania has become ground zero in the backlash against what is seen as
an increasingly invasive student tracking system, all 50 states are in the
process of expanding and digitizing their student records under the
direction of the U.S. Department of Education . The goal is to have all state
systems plugged into a centralized database storing sensitive student
information.
The contracts are huge, absolutely huge, to implement this system, Hoge said.
So you had to have a state department of education that was willing to take the
lead and set up the entire system.
Pennsylvanias former secretary of education, Gerald Zahorchak, was among
the first state education chiefs to take the millions in federal money and
run with the program. For his efforts, he received a national leadership award in
2008.
Pennsylvania was one of 20 states that initially received a combined $250
million in federal stimulus funds to develop and implement data systems
capable of tracking student progress from early childhood through college
graduation.
The Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grants will help deliver muchneeded data into the hands of educators and policymakers, according to a
Pennsylvania Department of Education press release from 2010.
All 50 states submitted applications for the database grants in late 2009.
Even with the backing of billionaire Bill Gates and the U.S. Department of Education,
the entire Common Core State Standards Initiative, as it is referred to officially,
was developed and rolled out with almost no serious media attention. The eerie
silence, of course, helped proponents avoid scrutiny in the early phases, when it
would have been much easier for critics to derail the scheme that will essentially
nationalize education along with the minds of Americas youth, and therefore, the
nations future.
Education and policy experts who spoke with The New American blasted the
standards themselves, the centralization and federalization of schooling, the longterm agenda behind the plan, and the nefarious tactics used to advance it. One
critic, Tennessee Liberty Alliance co-founder Glenn Jacobs, even suggested in a
column that Common Core proponents were seeking to produce what Russian
communists referred to as New Soviet Men. Others are calling the program
ObamaCore.
With the federal government handing out massive grants only to state
governments that comply , some 45 states and Washington, D.C., have
already signed up to implement the full plan. Among the few states that have not
jumped completely on the bandwagon, only Texas appears to be standing firm, with
Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia, and Alaska all reportedly flirting with various
elements of the scheme.
Even the states that refuse to join not to mention homeschoolers and private
schools may find themselves ensnared in the program due to national
testing, college admission requirements, and more. However, experts expect
resistance to accelerate.
standards in 2009, before the standards were even published, to be eligible for
federal bribes. Instead, as even establishment analysts have admitted, Common
Core is a set of national standards pushed by the federal government and
created by consultants funded by unaccountable billionaires.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky explained that when states signed on to common core
standards, they did not realize that they were transferring control of the
school curriculum to the federal government. Even if it were truly a stateled initiative, however, critics say it would still be a bad idea, as parents and local
school districts continue to lose control over education.
Are the standards voluntary? For now, the argument could be made that they are
technically not mandatory, since no state government can be forced to comply.
However, the fact that the federal government is bribing state
governments with taxpayer money to go along with the plan not to
mention the federally funded national testing regimes virtually ensures
that American students will have to submit to some elements of Common Core
whether they want to or not.
to the Top approval (thats Tennessees). As the Washington Post reported, the
term Common Core was written directly into Race to the Top mandates
until substituted for a definition that matched only them so people wouldnt get
suspicious.
Lastly, the federal government provides at least half the operating funds of
the two organizations that created Common Core, which are private
nonprofits with no authority to create any binding national initiatives or laws. So
either way, the feds were there at the beginning, at the request of Common
Cores creators, no less.
Topicality Surveillance
Surveillance We Meet
Common Core is government surveillance.
Schlafly 13 Phyllis Schlafly, American constitutional lawyer, conservative
activist, author, and speaker and founder of the Eagle Forum, 2013 (Backlash
Against Common Core, The Eagle Forum, May 15 th, Available Online at
http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/backlash-against-commoncore.html, Accessed 06-22-2015)
Common Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts
of private information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database
from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving government the
right to share and exchange this nosy information with other government
and private agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits
that. This type of surveillance and control of individuals is the mark of a
totalitarian government .
Common Core reminds us of how Communist China gathered nosy
information on all its schoolchildren, stored it in manila folders called dangans,
and then turned the file over to the kids employer when he left school.
The New York Times once published a picture of a giant Chinese warehouse
containing hundreds of thousands of these folders. That was in the pre-internet era
when information was stored on paper; now data collection and storage are
efficiently managed on computers in a greater invasion of privacy.
departments Workforce Data Quality Initiative, the SLDS will enable workforce
data to be matched with education data to ultimately create longitudinal data
systems with individual-level information beginning with pre-kindergarten through
post-secondary schooling all the way through entry and sustained participation in
the workforce and employment services system. When combined with information
from the IRS, ObamaCare, the NSA, and countless other federal data-collection
schemes, the picture that emerges has critics very nervous.
from afar instead of only from close observation, as the dictionary meaning
suggests. Satellite images and remote monitoring of communications via
highpowered infra-red technologies can be used for long distance surveillance
activities. Thus, governments and big corporations have made surveillance part of
everyday life, in that it includes, but is not limited to, hidden cameras in an ATM
machines, data bases of all employees in a particular company, scanners that picks
mobile phone communications, computer programs that monitor keystrokes, or key
words and video cameras that parents can use, to monitor, their children at a day
care centre.
Disadvantages
Education Competitiveness DA
Case outweighs
Competitiveness decline inevitable slow growth, small
businesses, economic inequality.
Porter 14 Interview between Chris Matthews and Michael Porter, who is Bishop
William Lawrence University Professor at The Institute for Strategy and
Competitiveness, based at the Harvard Business School. Porter is a leading
authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic
development of nations, states, and regions. Porter's work is recognized in many
governments, corporations and academic circles globally. He chairs Harvard
Business School's program dedicated for newly appointed CEOs of very large
corporations, 2014 (The slow decay of American economic competitiveness, The
competitiveness as
consisting of two things: You have to provide an environment in which firms operating
in the U.S. can win in the marketplace, but at the same time we have to do that in
a way that allows income and the standard of living of the average citizen to
go up. Fundamentally, competitiveness depends on doing those things
together. If youre doing one but not the other, its unsustainable. The big
finding weve seen in our surveys in recent years, and which was reinforced in this report, is the
divergence between the fate of businesses, particularly large businesses,
and the average worker. What weve been able to show in this work is that
actually its not only the difference between the high skill citizen and the
average citizen thats diverging; there are also big differences in
performance between large businesses and small businesses. Small
business is declining as a force for job creation in America, and were
seeing less new business formation in the economy . And I think the reason for this is
that small businesses are disproportionately affected by high regulatory
costs, legal costs, a deteriorating infrastructure, and high corporate taxes.
is going to grow and thrive in the long run, you have to be competitive. We define
The report shows that business leaders are concerned about the tax code, infrastructure, and worker skills in
America: all problems that require political solutions. Does the business community have a plan to address these
issues amid political gridlock? Corporate taxes are probably the single biggest issue
[in which] a policy change could make an immediate and substantial difference in the trajectory of the economy.
Its partly the corporate tax rate itself, which is the highest in the OECD,
but also this issue of repatriation, where we have so much capital stuck abroad
because of the international tax regime we have. Businesses are ready to do a deal
where you bring down the corporate tax rate to something reasonable in the mid twenties and you eliminate
virtually all or most deductions in a revenue-neutral way. The business community isnt holding out for lower taxes
overall. They just want a more rational tax code that provides certainty and makes it easier to invest in the U.S.
rather than elsewhere. Unfortunately, the political will isnt there. Is there anything the business community can do
to help end this gridlock in Washington? The business community is very wary of entering the political fray right
now. The business leaders I talk to are tired of Washington. They see more downside than upside when it comes to
speaking out and then getting criticized, so business kind of has a bunker mentality. But business right now isnt
presenting a very organized and forceful advocacy of the sort of policies we need and outline in this report, and
thats unfortunate. We believe that business must deal with some of these issues themselves as businesses, rather
than waiting for government. But, ultimately, government has to make some big changes too, and how to mobilize
business in that process is something were struggling with. Your report raises the issue of the so-called skills gap
in the American labor market. We hear from business leaders that American workers dont have necessary skills,
yet businesses also seem unwilling to raise wages or provide much training in order to encourage workers to build
those skills. Whats going on here? The stunning and disappointing [finding] from this survey was that businesses
will go to great lengths to avoid hiring full-time people. Theyd rather outsource, theyd rather use automation, and
the first question is why? I think the answer to that is the same structural competitiveness issues that weve been
talking about: high corporate taxes, high regulatory and compliance costs, and high healthcare costs. And there is
also a perception of this skills gap, but the discussion about this skills gap has been too abstract. In fact, the skills
businesses need are very specific to region and industry. Theres not one big labor market, but many different micro
markets for skills all across the country. The problem is that businesses dont communicate their needs very well, so
young people dont know what skills they need to succeed. Companies havent been doing a good job of workforce
planning and communicating their needs, and business has been a passive player in the market for skills. What this
report has found is yes, there is a skills problem, but its not something that you can deal with at the national level
because of all the micro markets. And its not something that can be solved just by the demand side or the supply
side. It seems like larger businesses are thriving and are much more optimistic than small businesses when it comes
to competitiveness in the U.S. Is this a new phenomenon? This is a relatively new finding since this is the first year
we grouped respondents by the size of the company they worked for. What we found is the smallest businesses
the most competitive economy on earth, with great infrastructure, an educated workforce, and a strong middle
depends largely on two factors: qualifications and price. All things being equal,
those who ask for a lower price for the same qualifications will get the job.
With over seven billion people living on Earth today, there is plenty of competition.
But due to the vast economic disparities in the world, there exists tremendous
differences in labor cost. The hourly compensation costs in manufacturing in 2010
varied from $1.90 in the Philippines to $57.53 in Norway, according to data released
by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2011 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). If a
Norwegian were doing exactly the same job as a Filipino, it is very probable that his
job would be gone soon. For the Norwegian to keep his job, hed better be doing
something that the Filipino is unable to do.
If all children are asked to master the same knowledge and skills, those
whose time costs less will be much more competitive than those with
higher costs. There are many poor and hungry people in the developing world
willing to work for a fraction of what workers in developed countries need. Thus for
those in developed countries such as the United States to be globally
competitive, they must offer something qualitatively different , that is,
something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing
countries. And that something is certainly not great test scores in a few
subjects or the so-called basic skills , because those can be achieved in the
developing countries. Yet the Common Core claims to be benchmarked
with internationally high-performing countries, i.e., countries with high
scores.
Can you be ready for careers that do not exist yet?
Old jobs are being replaced by new ones rapidly as old industries disappear due to
technological changes and existing jobs move around the globe. For example,
existing firms in the U.S. lost on average over one million jobs annually in the period
from 1977 to 2005, according to a report of the Kauffman Foundation, while an
average of three million jobs were created annually by new firms (Kane, 2010). As a
result, there is no sure way to predict what jobs our children will have to take in the
future. As the head of PISA, Andrea Schleicher, recently said: Schools have to
prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies that have
not yet been invented and problems that we dont know will arise (Schleicher,
2010). If one does not know what careers are there in the future, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to prescribe the knowledge and skills that will make todays students
ready for them.
Are the Common Core Standards relevant?
Jobs that require routine procedure skills and knowledge are increasingly
automated or sent to places where such skills and knowledge are
abundant with lower cost. As a result, as best selling author Daniel Pink
observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Rightbrained directed skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play,
and meaning, will become more valuable (Pink, 2006). Economist Richard
Florida noticed the increasing importance of creativity in the modern
economy ten years ago in his best seller The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida,
2012). And economist Philip Auerswald convincingly proves the case for the need of
entrepreneurs to bring the coming prosperity in his 2012 book (Auerswald, 2012).
new system, is it better? Im not convinced. Yet as the school year opens and students return to the sprawling Gothic building on a
hill with views of the Statue of Liberty, Curtis will be starting on another pile of 700-plus forms meant to tell her which of her
time to think about. But in many ways, the report has defined the careers of a generation of educators like her and the educations
examining American schools, and they were appalled at what they found. Standardized test and SAT scores were falling. The United
States was dropping behind competitors such as Japan. The public education system was so bad that not only were US students
unprepared to join an increasingly high-tech workforce, 23 million Americans were functionally illiterate. Worst of all, the report
concluded, Americans were complacent as their schools crumbled, threatening the very fabric of society. One of the most famous
lines in the report said: If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance
use in more than 40 states; in new teacher ratings based partly on standardized test scores; and in the invention and rise of charter
the
solutions offered in A Nation at Risk stoked a backlash among many on the left who argued that its
schools with longer school days and no union contracts. Initially embraced by a coalition of conservatives and liberals,
were over the top and that its solutions ignored poverty
and inequity in the system. But the Republican-driven revolution is being
driven home, as never before, by a Democratic president. The Obama
administration admits theres a connection. Education Secretary Arne
Duncan has said the report was influential in the administrations
education reform strategy. So why are ideas from a report that once provoked fury among many on the
criticisms of public education
left having their heyday now? Milton Goldberg, who was the executive director of the National Commission on Excellence in
Education, which issued A Nation at Risk, believes the answer is simple. When we did the Nation at Risk, we collected dozens
and dozens of research papers and recorded testimony all over the country, he says. We finally came to the conclusion that those
five things, theyre the essential legs of a five-legged footstool that you must address in order to improve education. The legs of
that stool havent changed very much. Whats changed is what you do about them, added Mr. Goldberg, now chancellor of Jones
International University, a for-profit institution in Centennial, Colo. Indeed, the fallout from A Nation at Risk has not always been
choice. Now, there are nearly 6,000 charters nationwide, up from 1,500 in the year 2000, and thousands of district schools
are being remade in the same image thanks to state and federal policies that borrow heavily from ideas in A Nation at Risk. But as
for students, and identifying and training better school leaders. For more than 30 years, U.S. education leaders have been like a
dog chasing its tail, Diane Ravitch, an education historian and assistant education secretary under President George W. Bush, wrote
in an e-mail interview. What
Risk.
While the American economy is adding jobs at a faster pace than at any
point since the end of the financial crisis and is growing faster than many
of its developed peers, its still not close to full strength. Harvard Business
Schools 2013-2014 survey on competitiveness queried thousands of Harvard alumni
to get a sense of what business leaders feel is holding the economy back,
and the findings were released Monday. Fortune spoke with Michael Porter, professor and lead
researcher on the competitiveness survey, about the surveys findings. The interview has been edited for length
and clarity. Fortune: Can you summarize the findings of this years survey? Michael Porter: The big message here is
if the economy is going to grow and thrive in the long run, you have to
be competitive. We define competitiveness as consisting of two things: You have to provide an
environment in which firms operating in the U.S. can win in the
marketplace, but at the same time we have to do that in a way that allows
income and the standard of living of the average citizen to go up.
Fundamentally, competitiveness depends on doing those things together.
If youre doing one but not the other, its unsustainable. The big finding
weve seen in our surveys in recent years, and which was reinforced in this report, is the divergence
between the fate of businesses, particularly large businesses, and the
average worker. What weve been able to show in this work is that actually its not only the difference
that
between the high skill citizen and the average citizen thats diverging; there are also big differences in performance
business leaders are concerned about the tax code, infrastructure, and worker skills in America: all problems that
require political solutions. Does the business community have a plan to address these issues amid political gridlock?
Corporate taxes are probably the single biggest issue [in which] a policy change could make an immediate and
substantial difference in the trajectory of the economy. Its partly the corporate tax rate itself, which is the highest
in the OECD, but also this issue of repatriation, where we have so much capital stuck abroad because of the
international tax regime we have. Businesses are ready to do a deal where you bring down the corporate tax rate to
something reasonable in the mid twenties and you eliminate virtually all or most deductions in a revenue-neutral
way. The business community isnt holding out for lower taxes overall. They just want a more rational tax code that
provides certainty and makes it easier to invest in the U.S. rather than elsewhere. Unfortunately, the political will
isnt there. Is there anything the business community can do to help end this gridlock in Washington? The business
community is very wary of entering the political fray right now. The business leaders I talk to are tired of
Washington. They see more downside than upside when it comes to speaking out and then getting criticized, so
business kind of has a bunker mentality. But business right now isnt presenting a very organized and forceful
advocacy of the sort of policies we need and outline in this report, and thats unfortunate. We believe that business
must deal with some of these issues themselves as businesses, rather than waiting for government. But, ultimately,
government has to make some big changes too, and how to mobilize business in that process is something were
struggling with. Your report raises the issue of the so-called skills gap in the American labor market. We hear from
business leaders that American workers dont have necessary skills, yet businesses also seem unwilling to raise
The
stunning and disappointing [finding] from this survey was that businesses
wages or provide much training in order to encourage workers to build those skills. Whats going on here?
skills problem, but its not something that you can deal with at the national level because of all the micro markets.
And its not something that can be solved just by the demand side or the supply side. It seems like larger
businesses are thriving and are much more optimistic than small businesses when it comes to competitiveness in
the U.S. Is this a new phenomenon? This is a relatively new finding since this is the first year we grouped
respondents by the size of the company they worked for. What we found is the smallest businesses were much
more pessimistic about the business environment than larger firms. Small businesses are absolutely the bedrock of
the American economy. They create more jobs than other businesses, and its a core aspiration of many Americans
to own their own businesses. And well before the beginning of the recession, we were seeing troubling trends that
run counter to the role small business has typically played in the economy. Small business has for years now been
accounting for a smaller share of new jobs.
nothings going to change, and so incrementally, if we want to invest, lets do it overseas where we dont have
these problems and growth is stronger. That said, there are some tailwinds out there, like the recent boom in
domestic energy production. U.S.-based businesses will see huge cost benefits because of this trend, which, by the
way, was set in motion because of American technology and innovation. Theres also a tailwind as a result of rising
labor costs abroad; in China, for example. So, we have the opportunity to be more cost-competitive because of
http://articles.latimes.com/print/1994-03-10/business/fi-32358_1_economic-policy,
Accessed 08-11-2013)
An American economy that cares a great deal about boosting domestic
productivity requires policy-makers who care very little about global
competitiveness.
A Zen koan for the nationalistic '90s? The sound of one Keynesian clapping? A lyric
for aspiring autarkists?
None on the above. It's the startling pronouncement of MIT's Paul Krugman,
one of the country's most brilliant young economists , a nonpartisan
academic with a reputation for intellectual honesty and a cruel tongue.
You might recall that Krugman was widely quoted criticizing industrial-policy
economist Laura D'Andrea Tyson's research when President Clinton named her
chairwoman of his Council of Economic Advisers.
Alternating between statistical scalpels and macroeconomic machetes,
Krugman bloodily eviscerates "competitiveness" as a policy doctrine
without any kind of economic validity.
What supply-side "economics" was to Reaganomics, Krugman asserts,
competitiveness has become to Clintonomics: a sort of psuedo-rational pastiche
that Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir once described as "pathological
science"--that is to say, no science at all.
"To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy," he says in his essay
"Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, "a
government wedded to the ideology of competitiveness is as unlikely to
make good economic policy as a government committed to creationism is
to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship
to the theory of evolution."
"Gee, we must be making progress," smiles Dan Burton, president of the Council of
(sigh) Competitiveness, which was formed by frustrated high-tech executives in the
wake of the Ronald Reagan Administration's rejection of its own presidential
commission on the topic. "In 1987, competitiveness was dismissed as a buzzword.
Today, it's graduated to being a dangerous obsession."
Might Krugman be the one with the dangerous obsession? Not after you see the
numbers. His arguments would command respect even without his
impeccable credentials . They're important because he takes the global
competitiveness champions like Tyson, U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor,
Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and health care guru Ira Magaziner on their own
terms , impatiently redoes their arithmetic for them and makes a strong
case that competitiveness issues amount to little more than a rounding
error in the $6-trillion U.S. economy.
theres a new form of issuedodging packaged as seriousness on the rise. This time, the evasion
involves trying to divert our national discourse about inequality into a
discussion of alleged problems with education. And the reason this is an evasion is that
whatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isnt about education; its
about power. Just to be clear: Im in favor of better education. Education is a friend of mine. And it should be
available and affordable for all. But what I keep seeing is people insisting that educational
failings are at the root of still-weak job creation, stagnating wages and
rising inequality. This sounds serious and thoughtful. But its actually a view very much at
odds with the evidence, not to mention a way to hide from the real, unavoidably
partisan debate. The education-centric story of our problems runs like
this: We live in a period of unprecedented technological change, and too many American workers lack the skills
to cope with that change. This skills gap is holding back growth, because businesses cant
find the workers they need. It also feeds inequality, as wages soar for workers with
the right skills but stagnate or decline for the less educated. So what we need is
happy to say, seems to be on the wane. But my sense is that
more and better education. My guess is that this sounds familiar its what you hear from the talking heads on
Sunday morning TV, in opinion articles from business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, in framing
papers from the Brookings Institutions centrist Hamilton Project. Its repeated so widely that many people
probably assume its unquestionably true. But it isnt. For one thing, is the pace of technological change really that
fast? We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has snarked.
theres no
evidence that a skills gap is holding back employment. After all, if businesses were
Productivity growth, which surged briefly after 1995, seems to have slowed sharply. Furthermore,
desperate for workers with certain skills, they would presumably be offering premium wages to attract such
workers. So where are these fortunate professions? You can find some examples here and there. Interestingly, some
of the biggest recent wage gains are for skilled manual labor sewing machine operators, boilermakers as some
manufacturing production moves back to America. But the notion that highly skilled workers are generally in
highest-skilled and highest-paid individuals have continued to increase steadily, the Hamilton Project says.
Actually, the
gone nowhere since the late 1990s. So what is really going on? Corporate
profits have soared as a share of national income, but there is no sign of a
rise in the rate of return on investment. How is that possible? Well, its what you
would expect if rising profits reflect monopoly power rather than returns to
capital. As for wages and salaries, never mind college degrees all the big gains are going to a tiny
group of individuals holding strategic positions in corporate suites or astride
the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isnt about who has the knowledge; its
about who has the power. Now, theres a lot we could do to redress this inequality of power. We could
levy higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families.
We could raise the minimum wage and make it easier for workers to organize. Its not hard to imagine a truly
serious effort to make America less unequal. But given the determination of one major party to move policy in
exactly the opposite direction, advocating such an effort makes you sound partisan. Hence the desire to see the
whole thing as an education problem instead. But we should recognize that popular evasion for what it is: a deeply
unserious fantasy.
STEM DA
2AC STEM DA
1. Squo solvesSTEM camps for young girls are solving for the
lack of female representation in the STEM field now
Yang 15 Sarah Yang, 7-16-2015 ("Camp gives middle school girls hands-on
experience in engineering," UC Berkeley News, 7-16-2015, Available Online at
http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/07/16/girls-in-engineering-camp/, Accessed 7-212015)
UC Berkeleys Girls in Engineering summer camps, middle schoolers go from
robots to cow legs to edible juice caviar, all in one whirlwind week. Girls assemble
and test their Pi-Bot at UC Berkeleys Girls in Engineering summer camp. (Video by
Roxanne Makasdjian and Phil Ebiner) The camps are part of a pilot program run
by the College of Engineering as part of an effort to narrow the gender
gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Each summer
there are two one-week sessions with 30 participants for each week. Instructors are
professors, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students,
covering topics ranging from nanotechnology to data science. By design, nearly all
instructors are women. In one workshop, instructor Lavanya Jawaharlal, a UC
Berkeley senior in mechanical engineering and co-creator of the Pi-Bot robotics kit,
insisted that the girls master the proper names and functions of the robotic parts
they were about to assemble. They went over terms like chassis, micro-controller
and breadboard, a platform used to build electronic circuits. I like how they dont
treat us like babies and water things down, said camper Maddy Jones, 12, a rising
seventh-grader at Montera Middle School. They talk to us like adults. The
program was launched last year with funding from the National Science
Foundation, UC Berkeleys College of Engineering and the Peggy and Jack
Baskin Foundation. This year, the program picked up support from Twitter
and SanDisk Corp. There is no cost to attend, but girls must apply. (This
year, the organizers received three applications for every spot available.) Interested
girls write short essays about which everyday problem theyd like to solve and how,
or what common object theyd like to improve. The process helps ensure that
participants come armed with an affinity for scientific thinking, even if
they have no prior experience with STEM-based camps. The trick is to
show how that problem-solving attitude can turn into careers in science
and technology. A number of studies have found that around middle
school, a lot of girls start to lose interest in STEM fields, said the camps
faculty director, Claire Tomlin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer
sciences. We have seen unbridled enthusiasm in 10-year-old girls, but by
high school, we start to have problems recruiting enough girls to
participate in engineering programs. Our goal is to keep the girls from
losing interest, to keep the momentum going. There are no easy answers as
to why interest among girls wanes at this age, but programs like this one are an
attempt to help plug the leaking pipeline to women in STEM fields. I liked that
everything was hands-on, said camper Sammy Rogers, 11, a rising sixth-grader at
Montera Middle School. We got to make food in a materials science class, and we
made robots in a robotics class. One that was really cool, but kind of gross, was an
engineering in medicine class where we touched the bones of a cow leg. The
camp also emphasizes the need for soft skills, such as communication
and presentation skills. At the beginning of the session, girls are grouped into
teams of five. They are then asked to identify a problem and discuss ways to solve
it. On the last day of camp, they give their presentation before camp staff and
family members. This summer, the campers spent a day at Twitter headquarters in
San Francisco, where they designed and created racing games, and met with female
interns, engineers and executives to get a sense of what a career in engineering
entails. Weve gotten feedback that it is exciting for the girls to be on campus,
working in labs, Tomlin added. We do show them an academic perspective, but
they also need to see the industry side of engineering, which is why we arranged
field trips to local tech companies. Kids dont usually get to see the insides of these
companies, so the field trips provide a visual of what they could be and do if they
pursued a STEM career. Organizers hope the effort will foster greater
retention of women in the STEM pipeline. While gender gaps continue in
salaries, federal statistics show that women in STEM jobs earn 33 percent
more than those in non-STEM occupations, and experience a smaller wage
gap relative to men. Yet in recent years, tech companies have released
survey results that show dismal representation of women and
underrepresented minorities in their employee rosters. Its important to
remember that engineers are choosing what problems to solve in our
society, said camp program coordinator Lizzie Hager-Barnard. We need the
different perspectives women bring to the table in order to maintain leadership in
innovation. This video is from the 2014 launch of the Girls in Engineering camp.
The program is part of the College of Engineerings longstanding commitment to
increasing the ranks of women in STEM fields. Campers and their parents are also
asked to participate in a broader longitudinal study about science education led by
the Lawrence Hall of Science. The study, which entails the completion of surveys
twice during the camp session, seeks to learn more about girls attitudes and
experiences in science education. Camp participants are recruited from a limited
number of local schools. This year, the girls were recruited from Bentley School and
Montera Middle School in Oakland, REALM Charter School in Berkeley and Stanley
Middle School in Lafayette. We try to pull in girls who may not have had
access to STEM-based camps before, said Hager-Barnard. Our goal is to
have a diverse group of participants. At least half the schools we picked
have a high percentage of kids who qualify for the free and reduced lunch
program. She added that the hope is to get additional funding to expand the
camp so more girls and more schools can participate in the future. It was nice
being all girls, said Sammy, who participated in the June session. That way its not
awkward. Sometimes it can be awkward with boys. We still wouldve applied, even
if the camp included boys, but I do like that it was all girls, said Sammys mother,
Maggie Rogers. As a bonus, the campus setting was familiar turf for Rogers, who got
her bachelors degree in English from UC Berkeley. I know that theyre really
trying to get more women to go into engineering, and Im grateful to Cal for
offering this, she said.
in
trigonometry, the math standards end after Algebra II, as James Milgram, professor of
mathematics emeritus at Stanford University observed in "Lowering the Bar: How Common Core Math Fails to
Prepare High School Students for STEM," a report that Milgram and I co-authored for the Pioneer Institute. Who was
responsible for telling the truth to the Colorado Board of Education when it adopted these standards in 2010? Who
should be telling Gov. John Hickenlooper, business executives, and college presidents today that Common Core
public how low Common Core's high school mathematics standards were. In 2010, Jason Zimba, a lead writer, said
the standards are "not only not for STEM, they are also not for selective
colleges." In January 2010, William McCallum, another lead mathematics standards writer, said, "The overall
standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [to] other nations, including East Asia, where math
education excels." There are other consequences to having a college readiness test in math with low expectations.
The U.S. Department of Education's competitive grant program, Race to the Top, requires states to place students
who have been admitted by their public colleges and universities into credit-bearing (non-remedial) mathematics
Selective public
colleges, engineering schools, and universities in every state will likely
have to lower the level of their introductory math courses to avoid
unacceptably high failure rates. Milgram and I were members of Common Core's Validation
(and English) courses if they have passed a Common Core-based "college readiness" test.
Committee, which was charged with reviewing each successive draft of the standards. We both refused to sign off
on the academic quality of the national standards, but made public our explanation and criticism of the final version
of Common Core's standards. It is still astonishing that Colorado's state board of education adopted Common Core's
standards without asking the engineering, science and math faculty at its own higher education institutions (and
the math teachers in our own high schools) to do an analysis of Common Core's definition of college readiness and
make public their recommendations. After all, who could be better judges of what students need for a STEM major?
We
Klobuchar, D-Minn., and others would immediately increase the H-1B cap to 115,000
(with no cap for those with advanced degrees from U.S. institutions) with the
potential to rise as high as 195,000 based on demand. A House bill introduced by
Judiciary Chairman Robert Goodlatte would immediately set the cap at 195,000,
though within that figure is a 40,000 set-aside for STEM graduates. Importantly,
whatever bill is introduced to alleviate the skills gap, we must ensure that all
employers can benefit equally from the skilled-worker program. For agricultural
workers, the Senate-passed bill and another measure introduced by Goodlatte are
good starting points, as both bills would create new visa categories allowing
farmworkers to stay in the U.S. for longer periods, and thus providing more certainty
for businesses while enabling some undocumented immigrants to eventually qualify
for legal status. For other temporary workers, the Senate-passed bill would exempt
returning seasonal workers from the annual 66,000 H-2B cap, while creating a new
visa category for longer-term temporary workers that would fluctuate between
20,000 and 200,000 workers per year. With the exception of a 15,000 annual cap on
construction workers, these common-sense changes to temporary worker-visa
policies can and should be adopted. Republicans ought to seize this opportunity to
sidestep the amnesty debate in order to focus on bipartisan issues around which
they can unite. Our Republican Party can drive real, beneficial immigration reform
by encouraging skilled and able foreign talent to fill the growing American economic
need.
and effective political institutions (rule of law and effective law-making bodies). Macro
foundations create the potential for long-term productivity, but actual
productivity depends on the microeconomic conditions that affect
business itself. A competitive nation exhibits a sound business
environment (including modern transport and communications infrastructure, high-quality
research institutions, streamlined regulation, sophisticated local
consumers, and effective capital markets) as well as strong clusters of
firms and supporting institutions in particular field s, such as information technology in
Silicon Valley and energy in Houston. Competitive nations develop companies that adopt advanced operating and
management practices. In a large country like the U.S., many of the most important drivers of competitiveness rest
at the regional and local levels, not the national level. Though federal policies surely matter, microeconomic drivers
Assessing
the U.S. through this lens, we see significant cracks in its economic
foundations, with particularly troubling deterioration in macro
competitiveness. Problems include levels of government debt not seen since
tied to regionssuch as roads, universities, pools of talent, and cluster specializationare crucial.
World War II; health care and primary education systems whose results are neither world-class nor reflective of the
competitiveness, eroding skills in the workplace, inadequate physical infrastructure, and rising regulatory
complexity increasingly offset traditional strengths such as innovation and entrepreneurship. Our HBS alumni
survey provided an original and timely assessment of overall competitiveness and the strengths and weaknesses of
the U.S. The findings were sobering. (See the chart Evaluating the U.S. Business Environment, in the article
Choosing the United States, HBR March 2012.) Respondents perceived the United States as already weak and in
decline with respect to a range of important factors: the complexity of the national tax code, the effectiveness of its
political system, basic education, macroeconomic policies, and regulation. Some current American strengths, such
as logistics and communications infrastructure and workforce skill levels, were seen as declining. Americas unique
strengths in entrepreneurship, higher education, and management quality were intact, but these strengths must
the U.S.
business environment is falling behind that of emerging economies , while just
overcome growing weaknesses in many other areas. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said that
8% said that the U.S. is pulling ahead. Overall, the picture that emerges is an American economy that has some
crucial strengths but is weakening, with problems especially visible in macro factors. How Did America Get Here?
to the point where it could not be reversed states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen
only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a
pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an
Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course.
This weak Algebra II course will result in fewer high school students able to
study higher-level math and science courses and an increase in credit-bearing college
courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new
education requirements, then back-mapped through upper and lower grades. But Richard P. Phelps and R. James
Milgram, authors of The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the
who pass Common Core-based tests in high school into credit-bearing college courses, said Phelps. The guarantee
came in return for states hoped-for receipt of federal Race to the Top grant funding. Many
students
will fail those courses until theyre watered down, he added. Perhaps the
greatest harm to higher education will come from the College Boards
decision to align its SAT tests with Common Core. The SAT has historically been an
aptitude test one designed to predict college success. But the new test would become an achievement test a
retrospective assessment designed to measure mastery of high school material. Many high-achieving countries
administer a retrospective test for high school graduation and a predictive college entrance examination. The new
test will also be less useful to college admissions officers, since information gained from the retrospective test will
duplicate data they already have, such as grade point average and class rank. David Coleman, the lead author of
Common Cores English language arts standards, is now president of the College B\\oard and announced the
standards. Since the Common Core math standards only end at a partial Algebra II course, nothing higher than
High schools
in low-income areas will be under the greatest fiscal pressure to eliminate
under-subscribed electives like trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus.
Algebra II will be tested by federally funded assessments that are currently under development.
Research has shown that the highest-level math course taken in high
school is the single best predictor of college success. Only 39 percent of the members
of the class of 1992 who entered college having taken no farther than Algebra II earned a college degree. The
authors estimate that the number will shrink to 31-33 percent for the class of 2012. Two of the authors of the
Common Core math standards, Jason Zimba and William McCallum, have publicly acknowledged the standards
claim the Common Core standards are internationally benchmarked, but compulsory standards for the lower
secondary grades in China are more advanced than any CCMS material. The highest-achieving countries have
standards for different pathways based on curricular preferences, goals and levels of achievement, and each
pathway has its own exit examination.A
represented in the sciences (or, more specifically women in science, technology, engineering, and math STEM) is
a complex topic, and there's been a lot of talk about it of lately. Eileen Pollack wrote a wonderful New York Times
Magazine piece on women in science, posted on Oct. 3. We've broken apart some of the points she made and added
Even at
the high school level, teachers and classmates sometimes stereotype girls
who are interested in advanced physics and math. Pollack spoke to Yale physics
some other sources to get a better grip on why there are so few women in science. 1. Teasing in school
undergrads and heard these stories: One young woman had been disconcerted to find herself one of only three girls
in her AP physics course in high school, and even more so when the other two dropped out. Another student was
the only girl in her AP physics class from the start. Her classmates teased her mercilessly: "You're a girl. Girls can't
These kinds of
reactions to their presence in these courses pushes young women out .
Studies have shown that countries with greater gender equity had smaller
gender gaps in math. When given the right support women do just as well
as men it isn't an inherent ability difference between the sexes. "When girls
do physics." She expected the teacher to put an end to the teasing, but he didn't.
see opportunities for themselves in science, technology, engineering and math, they're more likely to take higher
math in high school and more likely to pursue those careers," researcher Janet Hyde, from the University of
Wisconsin, said in a press release. 2. A Lack of Encouragement Lovelace herself was encouraged to pursue math by
her mother, to avoid the "dangerous poetic tendencies" of her father, the poet Lord Byron, according to The New
York Times' Bits blog. This could be why she shed the female stereotype and pursued her STEM interests. As Pollack,
herself a physics major who didn't go into academia, writes: "I didn't go on in physics because not a single professor
not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis encouraged me to go to graduate school." She
graduated at the top of her class, but none of her professors even asked if she was going to graduate school.
Studies have shown that when told that men score better in math tests
than women, women tend to score worse. When told that isn't true, the
two genders scored equally well. This might come from an "internal bias"
in the minds of young female scientists, who may naturally under-rate
their intelligence. Whether that's a cultural concoction or a difference in how female brain responds to
encouragement, we don't know yet. "Women need more positive reinforcement, and men need more negative
reinforcement. Men wildly overestimate their learning abilities, their earning abilities. Women say, 'Oh, I'm not good,
I won't earn much, whatever you want to give me is O.K.,'" Yale physicist Meg Urry told Pollack. 3. Stereotypes
Females playing STEM-literate characters are gaining more popularity in the movies for example, Natalie Portman
plays a physicist in the new "Thor" movie and Sandra Bullock stars in "Gravity" as a female Astronaut. But, in other
ways, women are being held back by stereotypes. In the hugely popular television show
"The Big Bang Theory," female scientists are forced into "weirdo" roles, while the non-scientist is the only "normal"
These
stereotypes also extend into how we portray male scientists. Research has
indicated that when females are exposed to nerdy white-guy stereotypes,
it discourages them from STEM fields. Studies have shown that when
young women hear about a non-stereotypical computer scientist, their
interest in the field increases. 4. Childcare Even if young women make it
through a bachelor's and enter academia, they often leave the STEM fields
early in their career. A frequently suggested reason for this is the lack of
maternity leave and childcare after having kids. This is also seen in the long-hour days of
female character. computer science stereotypes and women Cheryan, et. al, Sex Roles, 2013.
technology startups. Tenure-track academics face steep obstacles in reaching their goals, and taking a "time-out" to
have children is still a problem at many institutions. Astrophysicist and MacArthur "genius" grant award winner Sara
Seager, of MIT, says she will use her $625,000 award to pay for childcare to help her concentrate on her work. If
this wasn't an issue facing academics, she wouldn't need to put her winnings toward it. There are indications that
having children isn't the main reason women leave STEM fields mid-career after all, startups and academia allow
flexible days and plenty of work from home opportunities it does seem to become an issue for some research-
versus 20% of single women. 5. Competition Women are generally less competitive and aggressive than men, and
this could impact their desires to follow through with a career in the sciences at the academic level when
constant competition to publish becomes the major determinant of a successful career. The push to constantly
compete can wear on someone whose personality isn't naturally inclined to be aggressive. "While the women in our
study were undoubtedly high achievers, many felt that the competitiveness of science (e.g., to secure a grant and
post), and especially at the early career stages, results in less weight being given to integrity and meritocracy,
making academia an unattractive long-term career option for those who are less naturally competitive," according
to a study by the Wellcome Trust [PDF]. 6. Marginalization E ven
with identical lab manager resumes from either a John or a Jennifer both male and female professors tended to pick
the John as the better candidate, and offer him more money for the position. As Johnathon Mohr points out on
twitter, this bias is sometimes built into the "good old boy" network of tenured professors. If males are the majority
of researchers that make it into the later stage of a research career, then they are making the decisions of who will
get tenure, and hired for higher-level positions and awards. This also crops up in male-driven Silicon Valley, where
female entrepreneurs find getting funding hard to do because they aren't perceived as leaders, but as mothers.
Women only start about 8% of venture-backed tech startups. Hope ahead It's not all bad news; more women are
making it to college and graduate levels of STEM. "If you look at the students scoring in the top one in 10,000 in
mathematics in 1983, there were 13 boys for every girl," Steven Ceci of Cornell University, said in a press release.
"Since then, until 2007, that gap has shrunk to somewhere between 2.8 and four boys for every girl." A Berkeley
study found that women represented between 20% (engineering) and 71% (psychology) of UC system Ph.D.s in
science (51% of life sciences Ph.D.s). There have even been stronger efforts to encourage women to go into
sciences. "Marvel Ultimate Mentor Adventure," for example, is a new contest created by Marvel around the "Thor"
movie premier to encourage girls to reach out to STEM mentors in their area and interview them. The girls get a trip
Suzanne McCarron, president of the Exxon Mobil Foundation, who has said she wants to "inspire our nation's youth
to pursue STEM careers by capturing their interest at an early age."
Common Core, as Jason Zimba, its leading mathematics standards writer, explained at a videotaped board
meeting in March 2010, is to provide students with enough mathematics to make
them ready for a nonselective college"not for STEM," as he put it. During that
meeting, he didn't tell us why Common Core aimed so low in mathematics. But in a September 2013 article
published in the Hechinger Report, an education news website affiliated with Columbia University's Teachers
College, Mr. Zimba admitted: "If
Why
leaders of these organizations would endorse standards that will not
prepare students for college majors in mathematics, science, engineering
and mathematics-dependent fields is a puzzle. But no educational reform
that leads to fewer engineers, scientists and doctors is worthy of the
name.
Banneker Association, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and TODOS: Mathematics for ALL.
U.S. workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have been
important contributors to American innovation, job creation, rising
incomes, and global economic competitiveness throughout the years. And not
surprisingly, immigrants have played a critical role in American innovation
through STEM fields and all parts of the U.S. economy. A new report by Gordon
Hanson (University of California, San Diego) and Matthew Slaughter (Dartmouth) describes these important
relationships between talent, economic competitiveness, and immigration in the United States. In their paper, the
authors present data in support of three critical points: First, the contribution of talent to American innovation and
overall competitiveness is as important today as in the past: Talent
Third, the supply of and need for STEM talent in the U.S. includes
an opportunity for immigrants to continue to help meet that growing
demand: Even after the Great Recession, Americas need for more talent persists, as it did for decades before.
Americas demand for skilled STEM workers continues to grow and
immigrants continue to help meet this demand, both directly and more
broadly through their expansive contributions to Americas innovation
potential. Post-recession, unemployment in STEM occupations has been falling sharply as the STEM labor
market rapidly tightens. Immigrants make significant contributions to innovation throughout the country, from the
discovery of new ideas, research and development of new products, and patenting, to starting and leading new and
innovative companies that create thousands of jobs in the U.S. As the report reiterates, immigrants founded or cofounded 25 percent of all U.S. high-tech firms between 1995 and 2005. In 2005, those new companies employed
nearly half a million people and produced more than $50 billion in sales. Beyond the national level, cities and
regions within the U.S. that attract greater numbers of skilled immigrants tend to be more successful at innovation.
Furthermore, innovation-intensive metropolitan areas tend to have higher rates of patenting, lower unemployment
rates, and higher demand for high-skilled workers since patenting growth is correlated with job growth, population
growth, and increases in educational attainment. Americas past innovation grew in part from a robust education
system and an environment that allowed for the worlds most talented native- and foreign-born alike to thrive.
in the
longer term, substantial reforms will be needed if the US immigration
system is to facilitate, not impede, economic growth and competitiveness.
described in this paper by reducing employers' demand for immigrant workers in the short term. But
STEM fields in which men genuinely outnumber women are computer science and engineering. I created the
following graphs, based on NSF data, to show womens completion of bachelors degrees and PhDs in specific fields
women
have clearly achieved equity in the biosciences and social sciences , are
nearly there (40 percent) in mathematics and the physical sciences, and
are over-represented in psychology (78 percent). Again, the only fields in which men greatly
between 1991 and 2010. Graph courtesy of the author. Graph courtesy of the author. At the Ph.D. level,
outnumber women are computer science and engineering.. When we look at the actual workforce, we see the same
achieved equity in three out of five areas, with computer science and geoscience being exceptions. Cummins.Labor
force 2. Women and men are equally capable of doing STEM work One explanation
for sex difference in STEM fields is that women just dont have what it takes to succeed in the hard sciences,
computer science, or engineering. Some have even argued that women are not smart enough for these fields. The
fact is that men and women score equivalently on tests of raw IQ, with some studies showing women scoring
slightly higher. When it comes to mathematicsa core requirement for science and engineeringwomen score on
average only 32 points lower than men on the SAT a mere 3 percent difference. While men outnumber women in
the genius SAT math score range (700-800), the ratio is not that large (1.6 to 1). Men show only an insignificant
five-point advantage over women on the quantitative section of the Graduate Record Examination, and they score
one point lower than women on the analytic section. It is also not the case that more undergraduate men than
women are selected by top engineering programs. Of the top STEM programs in the country, most have male-tofemale undergraduate student ratios close to 1:1. 3. Sex-linked interest preferences are not mere artifacts of
socialization One interpretation of the sex difference in STEM careers (and the workforce in general) is that females
are pressured into areas that are more gender appropriate, not that they are choosing to study what is
intrinsically more interesting to them. For example, former American Association of University Women senior
researcher Andresse St. Rose, one of the authors of Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and
math and science careers than boys do (Turner et al. 2008), and among children identified as mathematically
precocious, girls were less likely than boys to pursue STEM careers as adults (Lubinski and Benbow 2006). Girls
lower reported interest in STEM may be partially explained by social attitudes and beliefs about whether it is
appropriate for girls to pursue these subjects and careers. The problem with this blank slate interpretation of
gender differences is that it doesnt jibe with results of developmental studies. Newborn girls prefer to look at faces
while newborn boys prefer to look at mechanical stimuli (such as mobiles). When it comes to toys, a consistent
finding is that boys (and juvenile male monkeys) strongly prefer to play with mechanical toys over plush toys or
dolls, while girls (and female juvenile monkeys) show equivalent interest in the two. (See this for summary of this
research.) These sex-linked preferences emerge in human development long before any significant socialization can
have taken place. And they exist in juvenile non-human primates that are not exposed to human gender-specific
socialization efforts. It is not difficult to see how such early emerging preferences can end up shaping career
choices later on: Women tend to gravitate toward fields that focus on living things and agents, men to fields that
male-dominated fields is that such fields are intrinsically more important and more valuable to society than fields
that traditionally appeal to women. So we must turn women into men so that women can achieve economic parity
with men. As Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg put it in her book Lean In, we need to set a goal
of getting more women in the door of male-dominated, prestigious, and high-paying fields, even if doing so
requires that women act more like men. But what happens when women follow this advice and follow the lure of
prestige and wealth offered by male-dominated professions? Kate Bahn, an economics Ph.D. candidate at the New
School, put it this way in her blog The Lady Economist: I sometimes wonder to what extent my desire to be taken
seriously, like one of the boys, played into my decision to become an economist over, say, a sociologist. and Do
other fields perceived as masculine also attract a certain type of woman, like me, who is drawn to the power and
seriousness connoted with masculinity? And what does it say about me, as a staunch feminist, if Im relying on
masculinity to convey my worth Yes, indeed, what does it say when women must adopt male values wholesale in
order to command real social, political, and economic power? Or perhaps the better question is: Why are the fields
that appeal to men so much better compensated than the fields that appeal to women? My answer to this question
is 5. Men earn more because they believe they are worth moreand women agree Nursing, a traditionally femaledominated profession surely has more intrinsic value to society than trading stocks, yet nurses make a fraction of
what high-frequency traders make. And nursing did not bring about a global economic crisis that the taxpayer was
required to bail out. Yet when the percentage of male nurses increased from a miniscule 3 percent in 1970 to 10
percent in 2011, something else very interesting developed: a gender pay gap in the field of nursing. In 2011, the
average female nurse earned $51,100, 16 percent less than the $60,700 earned by the average man in the same
job. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that male-dominated professions are high-status and well-paid precisely
because they are male-dominated, and female-dominated professions are low-status and poorly-paid precisely
because they are female-dominated. When men move into traditionally female-dominated professions, the salaries
and status levels of those professions rise because men demandand getmore for the work they do. When men
move into traditionally female-dominated professions, the salaries and status levels of those professions rise
because men demandand getmore for the work they do. This is more than just conjecture. The fact that women
undervalue themselves (and by extension, the work they do) has been amply demonstrated in carefully designed
experimental economics studies. The two most frequently studied economics games are the dictator and ultimatum
games. In the dictator game, one individual is given full authority to keep or share a sum of money with another
player. On average, women keep less for themselves than men do. In the ultimatum game, one person is allowed to
make an offer as to how the money should be divided, and the other party is given the opportunity to accept or
reject the offer. If the offer is rejected, no one gets any money. Both men and women make lower offers to women
than to men. Other studies have found that women negotiated harder when they were working on behalf of others
rather than for themselves, which implies a reluctance to push their own interests. Rather than rushing to
traditionally male professions to shore up our status and our income levels, perhaps we need to reject the implicit
belief that men and whatever men are doing must be important and valuable, and whatever women are doing must
be the career dregs that men fobbed off on us simply because they found that work intrinsically less interesting.
The bottom line Women are clearly capable of doing well in STEM fields traditionally dominated by men, and they
should not be hindered, bullied, or shamed for pursuing careers in such fields. But we also should not be ashamed if
our interests differ from mens. If we find certain careers more intrinsically rewarding than men do, that does not
mean we have been brainwashed by society or herded into menial fields of labor. Instead, we should demand that
greater intrinsic and monetary compensation be awarded to the work we like and want to do.
it was already
increasingly rare for even the most intellectually unusual children to be
exemptedwhether by acceleration, remediation, or placement in special classroomsfrom the course of
Core suit them? Even before the widespread adoption of the Common Core,
study followed by their cognitively typical peers. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act had schools focusing away from
the most academically advanced students (and requires no special programming for them); the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act required children with disabilities to be involved in
Last November, an issue of Education Week ran several articles on special-needs students and the Common Core.
content for all students, including Americas Founding Documents, foundational American literature,
and Shakespeare. And an appendix explains that sample texts, which include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for
eighth grade, exemplify the level of complexity and quality that the Standards require all students in a given grade
band to engage with. So, while one might supplement a text, say, with glossaries and storyboards, one cant adjust
the text itself to match the students reading level. Further showing what special needs students are up against are
the sample tasks. For R-L 8.2 above, we have: Students summarize the development of the morality of Tom Sawyer
in Mark Twains novel of the same name and analyze its connection to themes of accountability and authenticity by
comprehension, could get her through highly relevant sentences like this one, in which Tom takes a lashing from
Schoolmaster Dobbins for an infraction actually committed by Becky Thatcher? Inspired by the splendor of his own
act, he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr. Dobbins had ever administered; and also
received with indifference the added cruelty of a command to remain two hours after school should be dismissed
for he knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity was done, and not count the tedious time as loss,
either. What, short of simplifying the text or spoon-feeding its meaning to her, will it take for our language-impaired
14-year-old to grasp this 67-word sentence, with its complex syntax, words like flaying, indifference, and an
outdated sense of should, and the inference needed to grasp the contextual meaning of captivity?
One can
only imagine how tough things become once the student gets to
Shakespeareone author that the standards appear to mandate. Lets turn to
another eighth-grade reading goal, R-L 8.3: Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama
propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision. Now imagine the challenge for a student
with autismeven one whose vocabulary and syntax are age appropriate. Autism is largely a social disability, with
key deficits in understanding character and motivation and in drawing inferences from dialoguesin real life as
much as in reading. Where does the teacher of an autistic student even begin? Some special-education
professionals believe they have the answer. In an article entitled Core State Standards for Students with Autism:
the Challenge for Educators, published last year in the journal Teaching Exceptional Children, we find Stephen, an
eighth grader with Aspergers Syndrome (mild autism) who is struggling to meet the R-L 8.3. The authors describe a
goal-aligned text in which a boy stops going to school after being habitually bullied and ostracized. When asked why
such, and to grasp the emotional and behavioral effects on the boy. How, the
authors ask, can Stephens teacher help him meet R-L 8.3? By creating a comic strip that shows the characters
thoughts, including a thought bubble for Matt that reads "I am a loser. Everyone hates me. I am never going back to
school!" In other words, the teacher can help Stephen meet the standard by giving away the answer! But the
answer to one specific configuration of dialogue, action, and character does not teach a child with autism how any
particular lines of dialogue reveal traits or provoke actions in characters. If it did, wed have screaming headlines
about a simple cure for one of the core deficits of autism .
eighth grader who is four years behind in language to read texts with vocabulary and sentence complexity just
above her current skill level than to struggle through 67-word sentences in Tom Sawyer using story boards as
crutches. Far better for a student with autism to engage with simplified social scenarios that he can work through
on his own than to muddle through complex ones that need to be explained to him piecemeal .
As any of my
special-ed student teachers can tell you, and as research has shown,
restricting students to curricula beyond their cognitive capacities
substantially lowers their achievement. The purported goal of the
Common Core is success for all students. But success for all requires
openness towards cognitive diversity, and isnt so easily standardized.
considering opting out of the controversial Common Core-aligned exams, according to NYS Allies for Public
Education, a parent and educator advocacy group. LOHUD.COM View: Common Core hurting students outside
mainstream Cindy Rubino is a mother of four, including John, a second-grader at Lakeland's Benjamin Franklin
students
with special needs face social challenges that can challenge their
confidence and self-esteem. There was a time, for example, when Rubino learned that John was
Elementary School who is on the autism spectrum. Along with academic difficulties, John and other
sitting by himself at lunch every day. She sought help from the school's social worker, who promptly intervened. As
her son struggles to learn life skills, the last thing Rubino wants is for him be left "defeated" by state tests that she
says are not a true measure of his social or academic growth. "It's
the spirit of the federal law for children with disabilities, which guarantees
a "free and appropriate education." Kathryn Merrifield is a mother of three in the Rye Kathryn
Merrifield is a mother of three in the Rye Neck school district, including a son with special needs. These
tests do nothing but make him feel terrible. It does a lot of damage. (Photo: Submitted)
"He's a bright child but he has to work hard to keep his body calm and block out sound. How appropriate is it to
force him to sit in a chair for hours?" said Merrifield, who also plans to opt all three of her children out of the tests.
"These tests do nothing but make him feel terrible. It does a lot of damage." Students with severe cognitive
disabilities are exempt from testing. Students who are required by the state Education Department to take the tests
include those who have a learning disability such as dyslexia or ADHD or who are in the high-functioning range
on the autism spectrum. But they are at a disadvantage when taking the tests, said Jean Kerr, a special-education
teacher at Albert Leonard Middle School in New Rochelle. " Children
Teachers would have little control over their classrooms under Common
Core. They will be forced to comply with standards decided upon by
Common Core is a
one-size-fits-all education policy that assumes every students learns
exactly the same. A top down and centrally controlled standards will hurt
students creativity and learning. Good education policy realizes that all
students have different learning styles, preferences, and paces. 6. Common
Core Violates Privacy The Race to the Top Grants associated with Common Core
violates privacy by data mining information about students that will
follow them the rest of their lives. The information collected is more than
just test scores and academic progress. Common Core will track
information on religious practices, political beliefs, sex behaviors and
attitudes, and more. 7. Common Core Resembles Failed No Child Left Behind Program A main
criticism of the failed No Child Left Behind program is that teachers teach
the test. This means that students are memorizing rather than learning
and critical thinking about information. Common Core would resemble No
Child Left Behind by requiring students to take national standardized tests
to measure their progress. 8. Common Core is Unconstitutional The federal government
should not control education. Since education is not specifically listed in
the Constitution, the authority over education should be left up to the
states and the people. This allows localities from New York City to rural Alabama to design unique
curriculums that are best for their students. 9. Common Core Will Require Some States to Move Backwards Some
states have advanced standards that are designed with students and
parents in mind. Sandra Stotsky, a professor at the University of Arkansas, who served on the committee to
validate Common Core standards said, The standards dumb American education down
by about two grades worth. Some states would have to move their standards backwards to comply
with Common Core standards. 10. Common Core Is a Failed Education Approach
Washington has tried one-size-fits-all education approaches time and time
again. Centralized education programs have not worked and will never
work. The quality of education has only declined over the past few
decades. The solution is to get the federal government out of the
education business.
of money while not improving education quality. 5. Common Core is Bad for Students
Herald,
As Breitbart News reported in September, a new paper by assessment expert Richard P. Phelps and Stanford
University mathematician R. James Milgram refers to the promises made by the Common Core Math Standards
(CCMS) as empty rhetoric. Because
the CCMS are standards for all public school students in this country,
low standards, topping out at about the level of
a weak Algebra II course, the authors observe in their report published by the Massachusetts-based
Pioneer Institute (PI). And because this level is to determine college readiness as they define it (which is not
remotely what our public four year college and universities currently assume it to be), the authors continue, it
is
apt to mean fewer high school students taking advanced mathematics and science
coursework before they go to college, more college freshmen with even less knowledge of
mathematics than currently, and more college credit-bearing courses set at an
international level of seventh or eighth grade. As far as Shalalas claim that the Common
Core standards will narrow the gender achievement gap, especially for minority women, PI observes how
Common Core math will be further harmful to low-income, high STEM
ability students, because with these math standards nothing higher than
Algebra II will be tested by the new federally funded, multi-state assessments developed by consortia
PARCC and SBAC. High schools in low-income areas will be under the greatest
fiscal pressure to eliminate under-subscribed electives like trigonometry,
pre-calculus, and calculus, PI said in a press release. Shalalas claim that the Common Core
standards are more rigorous K-12 education standards is the same empty talking point that carries no weight
simply because no independent studies have been performed that prove this argument. In fact, in a recent report,
also published by PI, visiting Hoosier scholar and former senior policy adviser with the U.S. Department of Education
Zeev Wurman cited two studies conducted by Common Core Validation Committee members, who signed off on the
According to
Wurman, in both studies the research was poorly executed and failed to provide
evidence that the Common Core standards are internationally competitive
and reflective of college-readiness. Similarly, Wurmans research is consistent with another
study published by the Brookings Institution which found that the Common Core
standards will have little to no impact on student achievement. Brookings 2014
standards in 2010 and then later attempted to find post facto evidence to justify their decisions.
Brown Center report revealed that states whose standards were less like Common Core performed better on
Defense of the Common Core has too often come in the form of
platitudes and ungrounded assertions, writes McCluskey. This latest effort hasnt improved upon that.
The
College Board recently released data from fall Advanced Placement 2014 testing, and
computer science participation showed that boys dominated the students
taking the exam. Some minorities were more represented in 2014 than in 2013, but the gap is still
code. Despite these efforts, computer science is still most popular with boys. Computer science and AP
looming. Here's a look at who took the test this fall:Women: 20 percent (up from 19 percent in 2013), Black: 4
percent (same as 2013), Hispanic: 9 percent (up from 8 percent in 2013), Asian: 30, percent, White: 52 percent
Additionally, this percentage breakdown is a national average. In some states, such as Wyoming and Montana, no
Hispanic students took the AP computer science exam. Other states had virtually no black student representation.
Common Core and STEM The
If more states
adopt this approach, however, that still does not solve the issue of
demographics. "We believe low AP Computer Science A Exam participation
among traditionally underrepresented minority and female students has
been an encouragement and access issue, but are hopeful to see the focus is shifting,"
Katherine Levin, spokesperson for the College Board, told Education Week. "Twenty-five states now allow computer
science to count towards high school graduation requirements, and organizations like Code.org are helping to
introduce the subject in earlier grades."
federal R&D investments. It explored public-private collaboration to bridge the gap between government supported
research and private sector development. The most successful example was Sematech, which helped reverse the
countrys declining position in chip technology. The Defense Departments Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) came into its own as a unique organization focused on moving revolutionary technology from the
research to the development stage, playing a crucial role in creating the Internet and promoting multiple
generations of IT. New forms of capital support for innovation were developed, facilitating the birth of creative
startup companies. The dramatic growth of the U.S. economy in the mid and late 1990s rode on the IT revolution
that boosted productivity throughout the economy. Although excessive enthusiasm about IT fueled a stock market
bubble, the gains in productivity were real and translated into widespread societal gains in real income across
classes, record homeownership, and a decline in poverty rates. The next war The United States faces a very
different competitive situation now. Consider how the China of 2004 differs from the Japan of 1980. Japan, like the
United States, was a high-wage, high-cost, advanced technology economy. China is a low-wage, low-cost, advanced
technology economy, a much more complicated competitive mix. Japan held an advantage in collaborative industrygovernment activities, whereas the United States excelled in entrepreneurism. China provides a good environment
for entrepreneurs as well as wielding government power to capture advanced technology for use in its firms.
Whereas Japan had a reliable legal and intellectual property system, Chinas legal system is a work in progress and
its intellectual property regime is notoriously lax. China has adopted Japans technique of manipulating its currency
to gain advantage. The strategy is to undervalue its own currency to stimulate exports and to buy U.S. government
bonds to create leverage in U.S. policymaking. Japan was a national security ally, whereas China is a potential
competitor. Competition with China will be both very different and far more complicated and demanding than was
competition with Japan. On top of this, the United States faces new and growing competitive forces in India and East
Asia as well as continuing strong competition from Japan. India is a particularly interesting challenger, because
whereas China is pursuing a more traditional emphasis on manufacturing-led growth, India is pursuing the emerging
global services market. Of course, the emergence of China and India can provide benefits to the U.S. economy. As
so
far U.S. exports are dwarfed by its imports, and there is no evidence that
this situation will change soon. Not only are the competitors different than in the 1980s, but so are
they develop as markets, the United States should be able to sell goods and services to their consumers. But
the markets that are in play. In the 1980s the competition was over manufacturing, but now most sectors, including
services, face direct competition, and the increasing fusion of services and manufacturing is creating a new field of
battle. The focus is shifting from machines, capital plant, and natural resources to talent and knowledge. The
competition over quality has expanded to include customization, speed, and responsiveness to customer
that were once limited to products now incorporate knowledge management and services. A skilled workforce is no
longer a durable asset; workers must be periodically retrained to remain competitively productive. Whereas lowcost capital was once sufficient, success now requires first-rate efficiency in all elements of the financial system as
well as the ability to recognize and tap intangible knowledge assets. Is the United States ready for these new
challengers and new challenges? Economic growth and innovation A school of economic theory that has developed
during the past two decades argues that technological and related innovation accounts for more than half of
historical U.S. economic growth, which makes this a far more significant factor than capital and labor supply, which
are the dominant factors in traditional economic analysis. These economic growth theorists see a pattern shared by
important breakthrough technologies such as railroads, steamships, electricity, telecommunications, aerospace,
productivity boom that occurred in the mid-1990s following the IT revolution that spread through the manufacturing
and service sectors. The United States has been capturing talent worldwide for two centuries and must continue to
do so. Yet we are handicapped by this theory. Innovation may be the true growth god , but the
details of this new religion have not been fleshed out. Whereas we have almost a centurys worth of detailed data
on the old godscapital and labor supplywe have few metrics to understand the dynamics of innovation-based
know that some R&D investments are more vital than others, as are some members of the workforce. In addition,
these macro factors are imbedded in a spiders web of other connected and supporting strands that make up a
complex system. The federal government plays many innovation-related roles, such as in fiscal and tax policy,
industry standards, technology transfer, trade policy, product procurement, intellectual property protection, the
legal system, regulation, antitrust, and export controls. We have only a gestational idea of how to optimize this
complex network to spur innovation. And that is only the public policy side. There is the even more complex private
sector role in innovation as well as the interactions between the private and public sectors. Despite the lack of
innovation metrics, the underlying logic of growth theory is compelling. And if innovation is the big factor in growth
area can retain competitive advantage in that area for a period of time while it readies the next round of innovation
introductions. In a deeply competitive globalized economy, the length of that advantage period can become
progressively shorter, compelling an ever faster innovation flow. It would be easier to promote an innovation
A first
step should be to energize business, public policy thinkers, economists,
and data collection agencies to start identifying the data we need to make
better policy judgments about effective innovation systems . However, given the
revolution if we had the metrics and benchmarks to better understand a successful innovation process.
magnitude of the competitive challenge, the country cannot wait for the results of a perfected innovation model.
Enough is already known about the U.S. economy and federal policy to begin strengthening a few key links on the
public policy side of the innovation chain: R&D funding, talent, organization of science and technology, innovation
infrastructure, manufacturing, and services. R&D funding. Measured as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP),
federal R&D support has been in long-term decline ; it is now only half of its mid-1960s
peak of 2 percent of GDP. Federal support for the life sciences through the National Institutes of Health has been
rising, doubling between 1999 and 2003 to nearly $28 billion .
political action will be necessary to change the current trend. Much can be learned from the life sciences, which
have assembled a powerful mix of research institutions, industry, and grassroots patient groups working on a
common R&D funding agenda. Federal life science research has increased five-fold since 1970. The physical
sciences, despite steady deterioration in their research portfolios since the end of the Cold War, have yet to
organize a comparable advocacy effort, and we cannot assume that they will. Without a political movement to
wide variety of agencies and programs, the research budget is difficult to understand and manage. Many see this
decentralized system as a strength, because it provides diversity and more opportunities for breakthrough research.
However, given a growing pattern of research cutbacks, the fully decentralized system could result in what is
essentially random disinvestment. An alternative would be to focus research investments on the key niche areas
likely to be most productive, focusing on research quality not quantity. The United States has funded science niches
many times in the past, from high performance computing to the genome project to nanotechnology. However, this
has always been done within an overall strategy of funding a broad front of scientific advance to guard against
niche failures. If funding is not adequate to support research across a broad front, a niche strategy could be the
best option. This is certainly not the ideal approachindeed, it is potentially dangerous and riskybut it is
preferable to random disinvestment. It will be made more difficult by the fact that the country does not have a
tradition or mechanism for making centralized research priority decisions across agencies and disciplines. Given the
intensifying budget pressure and the political weakness of physical science advocacy efforts, the scientific world
needs to start a frank discussion of research priorities and the painful sacrifices of quantity of research that will
have to be made to maintain quality in key niches. The science community can begin preparing for this task by
carefully studying the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which is the nations largest current niche effort, to look
for lessons on how best to organize multiagency and multidiscipline research efforts. Talent. Growth economist Paul
Romer of Stanford University has long argued that talent is essential for growth. His prospector theory posits that
the number of capable prospectors a nation or region fields corresponds to its level of technological discovery and
innovation. Talent must be understood as a dynamic factor in innovation. A nation or region shouldnt try to fit its
talent base to what it estimates will be the size of its economy. Instead, its talent base, because of its critical role in
innovation, will determine the size the economy. In the simplest terms, the more prospectors there are, the more
discoveries and the more growth there will be. Other nations are not standing still. The forty leading developed
economies have increased their science and engineering research jobs at twice the rate that the United States has.
U.S. universities train an important segment of the science and engineering talent base of the nations developing
country competitors, and those nations are encouraging a larger proportion to return. Their own universities in
many cases are also rapidly improving. China graduates over three times as many engineers as does the United
States, with engineering degrees accounting for 38.6 percent of all undergraduate degrees in China compared to
4.7 percent in the United States. The United States now ranks seventeenth in the proportion of college age
population earning science and engineering degrees, down from third place several decades ago. Talent is now
understood globally as a contributor to growth, and a global competition has begun. Yet, despite decades of
discussion about the importance of educating more scientists and engineers, the percentage of U.S. students
entering these fields is not increasing. The technological opportunities of the coming century will require a different
type of infrastructure, and government can play a role. The government has been active in education policy
recently. The No Child Left Behind Act demands that schools demonstrate that their students are making adequate
progress, which should help make science and math courses more rigorous. However, the legislation needs to be
backed up with adequate funding if it is to succeed with its ambitious reforms. In addition, U.S. high schools need
more programs focused on science and more magnet high schools focused on science. Congress has passed Tech
Talent legislation, creating a competitive grant program to encourage colleges and universities to devise
innovative ways to increase the number of science and engineering graduates. Successful efforts could serve as
models for programs implemented on a large scale. If the percentage of undergraduates receiving these degrees
increases, it would create a larger pool from which to attract graduate students. By focusing on a later stage of
science education, the Tech Talent program provides a potential shortcut to increase the talent base. Because
turning around the science education system will take at least a decade, the United States must continue to rely on
a large number of foreign-born scientists and engineers. The United States has been capturing talent worldwide for
two centuries and must continue to do so to maintain the robustness of its innovation system. One third of the U.S.
citizens who have won Nobel prizes were born outside the country. It is thus cause for alarm that the number of
visas granted to foreign students has fallen sharply since September 11, 2001. A recent survey of graduate schools
showed a 32 percent drop in 2002-03 graduate school applications from foreign students, driven largely by a sharp
increase in visa denials. A much more efficient security review system must be implemented, and scientists and
engineers should be actively encouraged to stay. There are serious short- as well as long-term innovation
consequences to this contraction of the talent pool, and it must be turned around promptly. In addition, science and
engineering education must change. The innovation system and process need to become a part of the curriculum
so that students become motivated and prepared to play a role in innovation. Organization of science and
technology. The United States has had the same organizational structure for science since the 1950s. Until the
recent creation of the Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, President Eisenhowers DARPA in
1957 was the last major new R&D agency. Yet the science and technology enterprise has grown far more complex in
the past half century. Solo inventors have been largely replaced by complex organizational networks linking
industry, universities, and government research agencies. A web of communication networks are now available for
spreading, applying, and developing knowledge. Science and innovation are now collaborative activities that no
longer heed disciplinary, agency, or sectoral boundaries. The nations technology transfer mechanisms have not
kept pace with developments in the generation of knowledge. The federal R&D system is a prisoner of its history
even though changes in the way research is done demand changes in the way it is organized and managed. For
example, NIH is now struggling with strains on a management system that remained unchanged even as its budget
was quickly doubling in size. U.S. federal R&D agencies need to take a searching look at whether they are optimally
organized to contribute to innovation, consistent with their missions. The best innovation organizational models
need to be explored and evaluated, performance metrics for innovation contributions need to be sharpened, and
new approaches should be tested. The collaborative science we need for innovation demands new collaborative
organization models. Therefore, we also need to look at past niche science initiatives to determine which crossagency efforts have worked best and why. Legislation establishing a stronger coordination and budgeting role for
the Office of Science and Technology should be considered to promote this organizational review. Innovation
infrastructure. Technology seeds have to land on fertile fields. Research progress must be coupled with an effective
infrastructure to hasten the pace of innovation. For example, the Internet thrived because it was introduced into a
vibrant computer sector. For the Internet to continue to thrive, it will need to have a high-speed broadband
infrastructure. The Department of Defense (DOD) is now building a worldwide Global Information Grid, an integrated
fiber optic and wireless system including a dense satellite network that will provide the framework for the planned
network centric defense system. Its effort to move all transmissions from all locations at fiber speed might pave the
way for a civilian infrastructure able to capture the next generation of IT applications. As another example, research
into greener energy systems will yield the desired benefits only if the underlying power and transportation
infrastructure is able to integrate the new technologies. Infrastructure includes technology standards for new
products, accounting standards that capture the value of knowledge-based enterprises, and technology transition
systems that will smooth the introduction of revolutionary new developments such as nanotechnology into a wide
array of applications. Government has an historic role in supporting and encouraging infrastructure. Much of the
economic story of the past two centuries revolves around government support of transportation infrastructure, from
waterways to railroads to highways. The technological opportunities of the coming century will require a different
type of infrastructure, and government can again play a role. Future needs are not obvious, so government has a
responsibility to first assess likely developments and identify its infrastructure role. Competitive private sector
solutions must be the preferred infrastructure mechanism, but where public missions are involved, government
incentives should be considered to spur infrastructure markets. Accounting standards that developed in the 19th
century understandably emphasized fixed assets such as plant and equipment in measuring a corporations value.
For the 21st century corporation, value resides not only in physical assets but also in talent, intellectual property,
and the ability to launch innovation. Measuring the value of those intangible assets is critical to making wise
investment decisions. The European Union has begun a wide-ranging effort to develop new accounting
measurement tools. Some on this side of the Atlantic have been working on this issue of valuing intangibles, but
this effort needs to be expanded. The Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal agencies should spur
the accounting profession, economists, and business thinkers to develop the new metrics needed for an innovation
economy. Manufacturing and services. Dazzling prototypes are not sources of profit. Reliable and cost-competitive
products must be manufactured to reap the final reward of innovation. In the 1990s manufacturing comprised 16
percent of the U.S. economy but contributed 30 percent of U.S. economic growth. Manufacturing jobs on average
pay 23 percent more than service sector jobs, but the United States lost some 2.7 million manufacturing jobs in the
recent recession, and few of these have returned. In addition to providing a good salary, the average manufacturing
job creates 4.2 jobs throughout the economy, which is three times the rate for jobs in business and personal
services. As a result of the improved productivity of manufacturing workers, the sectors share of employment has
fallen far faster than its share of GDP. Although manufacturing has continued to increase productivity since 2000,
this hasnt translated into the economic gains we need. This is significant because manufacturing is a big multiplier.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis indicates that some economic sectors have a multiplier effect where growth in
one sector influences others; there is a 2.43 multiplier for manufacturing,compared to a 1.5 multiplier for business
services. Manufacturing remains the currency of the global economy. Selling high-value goods in international trade
is still the way nations and regions become rich. However, the U.S. trade deficit in goods is exploding: It reached
$482 billion in 2003 ($120 billion with China alone) and continues to growwithout causing significant public alarm.
For perspective, remember that the nation agonized over a $22 billion deficit in 1981 and a $67 billion deficit in
1991. The argument that only the low end of manufacturing is leaving simply is not true; key parts of high-end
advanced manufacturing are moving abroad. Manufacturing is also a dynamic factor in the innovation process.
Historically, manufacturing and the design and development stages of innovation have been closely interrelated
and kept geographically close to each other. This is particularly true for newer advanced technologies such as
semiconductors. When manufacturing departs, design and R&D often follow. In recent years, firms have been
developing a combined production and services model, carefully integrating the two to provide unique products and
services, and thus enhancing the importance of manufacturing. Without a strong manufacturing base, it is difficult
to realize economic gain from technological innovation. The talent erosion in the manufacturing base is a particular
concern. Economist Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School has argued that if high-productivity jobs are lost
to foreign rivals, long-term economic prosperity is compromised. John Zysman of the Berkeley Roundtable on the
International Economy believes that manufacturing is critical even in the information age, because advanced
mechanisms for production and the accompanying jobs are a strategic asset whose location can make a nation an
attractive place to create strategic advantage. Without a strong manufacturing base, it is difficult to realize
economic gain from technological innovation. Because technology innovation and manufacturing process innovation
are closely linked, the erosion of the manufacturing base will affect the innovation system. To avoid the hollowing
out of manufacturing, action will be needed on a range of policies from trade promotion and enforcement, to tax
policies to encourage new investment, to programs for improving worker skills, to DOD efforts to ensure strategic
manufacturing capability. Innovation in the manufacturing process, however, might be the most important: The
United States will be able to achieve comparative advantage in critical manufacturing sectors only if it updates the
process, substituting productivity for our higher costs. The nation needs a revolution in manufacturing that taps into
developments in distributed manufacturing, desktop manufacturing, simultaneous inspection and production, smalllot production that is cost-competitive with mass production, and the use of new materials and methods for
practical fabrication of devices and machines at the nano scale. Overall, the country needs new intelligent
manufacturing approaches that integrate design, services, and manufacturing throughout the business enterprise.
Because DOD would be a major beneficiary of the corresponding productivity gains, because it has long played an
important role in this field, and because it has a huge strategic stake in keeping advanced manufacturing leadership
in the United States, it makes sense for DARPA to take a lead in R&D for 21st century manufacturing processes and
technologies. DODs Mantech programs could support pilot projects and test beds for evaluating prototypes and
results in the defense industrial sector. The nation needs innovation in services as well as manufacturing because
we now face global competitiveness there, too. Services dominate our economy, yet we perform comparatively little
services R&D. We need a new focus on services innovation to retain comparative advantage, so that we are ready
for the upcoming global services challenge. From analysis to action In the 1980s, when the United States faced
significant competitive challenges from Japan and Germany, U.S. industry, labor, and government worked out a
series of competitiveness policies and approaches that helped pave the way for the nations revitalized economic
leadership in the 1990s. In the mid-1980s President Reagan appointed Hewlett Packard president John Young to
head a bipartisan competitiveness commission, which recommended a practical policy approach designed to defuse
ideological squabbling. Although many of its recommendations were enacted slowly or not at all, the commission
created a new focus on public-private partnerships, on R&D investments (especially in IT), and on successful
competition in trade rather than protectionism. This became the generally accepted response and provided the
building blocks for the 1990s boom. The Young Commission was followed by Congresss Competitiveness Policy
Council through 1997. These efforts were successful in redefining the economic debate in part because they built
on the experiences, well-remembered at the time, of industry and government collaboration that was so successful
in World War II and in responding to Sputnik. Those are much more distant memories in this new century, but we
should revisit the Young Commission model. The private sector Council on Competitiveness, originally led by Young,
has assembled a group of leading industry, labor, and academic leaders to prepare a National Innovation Initiative,
which could provide a blueprint for action. Legislation has been introduced in the Senate to establish a new
bipartisan competitiveness commission that would have the prestige and leverage to stimulate government action.
The U.S. economy is the most flexible and resilient in the world. The country possesses a highly talented workforce,
powerful and efficient capital markets, the strongest R&D system, and the energy of entrepreneurs and many
dynamic companies. That by itself will not guarantee success in a changing economy, but it gives the country the
wherewithal to adapt to an evolving world. Challenges to U.S. dominance are visible everywhere. Strong economic
growth is vital to the U.S. national mission, and innovation is the key to that growth. The United States needs to
fashion a new competitiveness agenda designed to speed the velocity of innovation to meet the great challenges of
the new century. Once that agenda has been crafted, the nation must find the political will to implement it.
literature. This open-endedness is captured within the GCI by including a weighted average of many different
components, each measuring a different aspect of competitiveness. In addition, Appendix A assesses statistically
the robustness of the GCI as an appropriate estimate of the level of productivity and competitiveness of an
example, owners of land, corporate shares, or intellectual property are unwilling to invest in the improvement and
upkeep of their property if their rights as owners are not protected.5 The role of institutions goes beyond the legal
framework. Government attitudes toward markets and freedoms and the efficiency of its operations are also very
important: excessive bureaucracy and red tape,6 overregulation, corruption, dishonesty in dealing with public
contracts, lack of transparency and trustworthiness, inability to provide appropriate services for the business sector,
and political dependence of the judicial system impose significant economic costs to businesses and slow the
process of economic development. In addition, the proper management of public finances is critical for ensuring
trust in the national business environment. Indicators capturing the quality of government management of public
finances are therefore included here to complement the measures of macroeconomic stability captured in pillar 3.
Although the economic literature has focused mainly on public institutions, private institutions are also an important
element in the process of creating wealth. The global financial crisis, along with numerous corporate scandals, has
highlighted the relevance of accounting and reporting standards and transparency for preventing fraud and
mismanagement, ensuring good governance, and maintaining investor and consumer confidence. An economy is
well served by businesses that are run honestly, where managers abide by strong ethical practices in their dealings
with the government, other firms, and the public at large.7 Private-sector transparency is indispensable to business;
it can be brought about through the use of standards as well as auditing and accounting practices that ensure
the national market and connecting it at low cost to markets in other countries and regions. In addition, the quality
and extensiveness of infrastructure networks significantly impact economic growth and reduce income inequalities
and poverty in a variety of ways.9 A well-developed transport and communications infrastructure network is a
prerequisite for the access of less-developed communities to core economic activities and services. Effective modes
of transportincluding quality roads, railroads, ports, and air transportenable entrepreneurs to get their goods
and services to market in a secure and timely manner and facilitate the movement of workers to the most suitable
jobs. Economies also depend on electricity supplies that are free from interruptions and shortages so that
businesses and factories can work unimpeded. Finally, a solid and extensive telecommunications network allows for
a rapid and free flow of information, which increases overall economic efficiency by helping to ensure that
businesses can communicate and decisions are made by economic actors taking into account all available relevant
that macroeconomic stability alone cannot increase the productivity of a nation, it is also recognized that
macroeconomic disarray harms the economy, as we have seen in recent years, conspicuously in the European
context. The government cannot provide services efficiently if it has to make high-interest payments on its past
debts. Running fiscal deficits limits the governments future ability to react to business cycles. Firms cannot operate
efficiently when inflation rates are out of hand. In sum, the economy cannot grow in a sustainable manner unless
the macro environment is stable. Macroeconomic stability captured the attention of the public most recently when
some advanced economies, notably the United States and some European countries, needed to take urgent action
to prevent macroeconomic instability when their public debt reached unsustainable levels in the wake of the global
financial crisis. It is important to note that this pillar evaluates the stability of the macroeconomic environment, so it
does not directly take into account the way in which public accounts are managed by the government. This
qualitative dimension is captured in the institutions pillar described above. Fourth pillar: Health and primary
education A healthy workforce is vital to a countrys competitiveness and productivity. Workers who are ill cannot
function to their potential and will be less productive. Poor health leads to significant costs to business, as sick
workers are often absent or operate at lower levels of efficiency. Investment in the provision of health services is
thus critical for clear economic, as well as moral, considerations.11 In addition to health, this pillar takes into
account the quantity and quality of the basic education received by the population, which is increasingly important
in todays economy. Basic education increases the efficiency of each individual worker. Moreover, often workers who
have received little formal education can carry out only simple manual tasks and find it much more difficult to adapt
to more advanced production processes and techniques, and therefore they contribute less to devising or executing
innovations. In other words, lack of basic education can become a constraint on business development, with firms
finding it difficult to move up the value chain by producing more sophisticated or value-intensive products. Fifth
pillar: Higher education and training Quality higher education and training is crucial for economies that want to
move up the value chain beyond simple production processes and products.12 In particular, todays globalizing
economy requires countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers who are able to perform complex tasks and
adapt rapidly to their changing environment and the evolving needs of the production system. This pillar measures
secondary and tertiary enrollment rates as well as the quality of education as evaluated by business leaders. The
extent of staff training is also taken into consideration because of the importance of vocational and continuous onthe-job trainingwhich is neglected in many economiesfor ensuring a constant upgrading of workers skills.
Seventh pillar: Labor market efficiency The efficiency and flexibility of the
labor market are critical for ensuring that workers are allocated to their
most effective use in the economy and provided with incentives to give
their best effort in their jobs. Labor markets must therefore have the flexibility to shift workers from
one economic activity to another rapidly and at low cost, and to allow for wage fluctuations without much social
disruption.13 The importance of the latter has been dramatically highlighted by events in Arab countries, where
rigid labor markets were an important cause of high youth unemployment. Youth unemployment continues to be
high in a number of European countries as well, where important barriers to entry into the labor market remain in
place. Efficient labor markets must also ensure clear strong incentives for employees and efforts to promote
meritocracy at the workplace, and they must provide equity in the business environment between women and men.
Taken together these factors have a positive effect on worker performance and the attractiveness of the country for
Eighth pillar:
Financial market development The financial and economic crisis has
highlighted the central role of a sound and well-functioning financial
sector for economic activities. An efficient financial sector allocates the
resources saved by a nations citizens, as well as those entering the
economy from abroad, to their most productive uses. It channels resources to those
talent, two aspects that are growing more important as talent shortages loom on the horizon.
entrepreneurial or investment projects with the highest expected rates of return rather than to the politically
connected. A thorough and proper assessment of risk is therefore a key ingredient of a sound financial market.
Business investment is also critical to productivity. Therefore economies require sophisticated financial markets that
can make capital available for private-sector investment from such sources as loans from a sound banking sector,
well-regulated securities exchanges, venture capital, and other financial products. In order to fulfill all those
functions, the banking sector needs to be trustworthy and transparent, andas has been made so clear recently
financial markets need appropriate regulation to protect investors and other actors in the economy at large.
that trade openness is positively associated with growth. Even if some recent research casts doubts on the
robustness of this relationship, there is a general sense that trade has a positive effect on growth, especially for
countries with small domestic markets.16 Thus exports can be thought of as a substitute for domestic demand in
determining the size of the market for the firms of a country.17 By including both domestic and foreign markets in
our measure of market size, we give credit to export-driven economies and geographic areas (such as the European
Eleventh pillar:
Business sophistication There is no doubt that sophisticated business practices
are conducive to higher efficiency in the production of goods and services .
Union) that are divided into many countries but have a single common market.
Business sophistication concerns two elements that are intricately linked: the quality of a countrys overall business
networks and the quality of individual firms operations and strategies. These factors are especially important for
countries at an advanced stage of development when, to a large extent, the more basic sources of productivity
improvements have been exhausted. The quality of a countrys business networks and supporting industries, as
measured by the quantity and quality of local suppliers and the extent of their interaction, is important for a variety
of reasons. When companies and suppliers from a particular sector are interconnected in geographically proximate
groups, called clusters, efficiency is heightened, greater opportunities for innovation in processes and products are
created, and barriers to entry for new firms are reduced. Individual firms advanced operations and strategies
(branding, marketing, distribution, advanced production processes, and the production of unique and sophisticated
products) spill over into the economy and lead to sophisticated and modern business processes across the countrys
The final outcome addresses a dog that hasnt barked: the effect of the
Great Recession on crossborder conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the
crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to
increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.19 Whether through greater
internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of
great power conflict, there were genuine concerns that the global
economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the
Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the
disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global public disorder. The
aggregate data suggests otherwise, however. A fundamental conclusion from a recent report
by the Institute for Economics and Peace is that the average level of peacefulness in
2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.20 Interstate violence in
particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis as have military
expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession
has not triggered any increase in violent conflict; the secular decline in violence that
started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.
raises the
virtuous circle: globalisation (trade) promotes peace, which in turn
promotes more globalisation. In this kind of world, we should not worry too much
about the big power shifts described in the previous section, since they are taking place against a
peace, all else equal. Since there is also even stronger evidence that peace is good for trade, this
possibility of a nice
backdrop of greater economic integration which should help smooth the whole process. Instead of ending this
The first is captured by that all important get-out-of-gaol-free card, all else equal. Its quite possible that the
peace-promoting effects of international commerce will end up being swamped by other factors, just as they were
in 1914. Second, perhaps the theory itself is wrong. Certainly, a realist like John Mearsheimer would seem to have
little time for the optimistic consequences of the rise of new powers implied by the theory. Heres Mearsheimer on
how the US should view Chinas economic progress, for example: . . . the United States has a profound interest in
seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead . . . A wealthy China would not be a status
quo power but an aggressive state determined to achieve regional hegemony. 62 Such pessimistic (or are they
tragic?) views of the world would also seem to run the risk of being self-fulfilling prophecies if they end up guiding
particular to take on its support in adversity... 64 Kindlebergers assessment appears to capture a rough empirical
regularity: As Findlay and ORourke remind us, periods
coincided with the infrastructure of law and order necessary to keep trade routes open being
a dominant hegemon or imperial power. 65 Thus periods of globalisation
have typically been associated with periods of hegemonic or imperial power, such as
the Pax Mongolica, the Pax Britannica and, most recently, the Pax Americana (Figure 9). The risk, then, is that by
reducing the economic clout of the United States, it is possible that the shift to a
multipolar world economy might undermine either the willingness or the
ability (or both) of Washington to continue to supply the international public goods
needed to sustain a (relatively) smoothly functioning world economy. 66 That in turn
could undermine the potential virtuous circle identified above.
tended to
provided by
Politics DA
not one
100 percent solution, theres one hundred 1 percent solutions , says Arielle Zern,
an algebra teacher at Boston Collegiate. I dont think there are just these few things
that we change at every school and we improve every single school in the
nation. Goldberg is happy about the recent progress on the main policy prescriptions of A Nation at Risk, but
hes also realistic that it isnt enough to realize the reports ultimate goals that could take several decades more
and ideas beyond the five solutions. I cant let go of the fact that we still have a high dropout rate, that we still
have a growing gap in college achievement and college attainment between whites and minorities, he says.
Theres a lot that we know that we dont do. Why dont we do it? Because its hard.
the benchmarks are so unpopular that leaders have tried changing the programs
name to boost its image (Arizonas College and Career Ready Standards and
Idaho Core). Although 45 states and D.C. adopted the Core, Governors like
Louisianas Bobby Jindal (R) are trying to stop the federal governments overreach.
We need Louisiana standards, not Washington, D.C. standards.
Common Core State Standards, the once low-key, bipartisan effort to improve math and literacy education
has quickly transformed into a major issue for many conservatives like Cruz,
now a Republican U.S. senator from Texas, as they believe it's just another example of
government overreach. It's also a way for Cruz and other politicians likely
to vie for the Republican Party nominationincluding Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal
and Scott Walkerto differentiate themselves from potential front-runner Jeb
Bush. The former Florida governor is a long-time Common Core supporter, a topic detractors
could seek to tie to his establishment credentials and political moderation. That combination of factors has virtually
assured that Common Core will be an important topic of debate ahead of voting in November 2016. "It will be a
major issue because of its symbolic importance," said Tom Loveless, who researches education policy as a fellow at
the Brookings Institution, a politically centrist think tank. "It's red meat for the kinds of conservative activists that a
number of the contenders on the Republican side want to appeal to." From bipartisan to blow up Until a few years
ago, Common Core seemed like a benign push to make sure American public school students were competitive in
English and math. Shaped by Democratic and Republican governors and education leaders, the benchmarks were
presidential primaries, according to experts. The key to that is Bush, a longtime supporter of improving educational
standards in his time as Florida governor from 1999 to 2007. As conservative opposition to Common Core has
grown, Bush has been forced to defend his stance. "Raising expectations and having accurate assessments of
where kids are is essential for success, and I'm not going to back down on that," Bush said during a congressional
fundraiser in Iowa in March, according to The Associated Press. That position has put him at odds with most other
likely opponents. Take Jindal, the Louisiana governor, for example. After initially supporting the standards, Jindal
sued the Obama administration in August over Common Core, claiming that the federal grants to states related to
the Race to the Top program were unconstitutional because they forced states to adopt the standards. (Program
grants were for general standards improvement, although much of the money distributed was related to Common
Core.) Like Jindal, several other big names initially supported Common Coreor gave it tacit approvalbut have
now turned against the standards or backed away from them. Examples include Wisconsin Gov. Walker, New Jersey
Gov. Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Besides Cruz, other likely candidates who are against
Common Core include Kentucky Sen. Paul, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. " They're
all sort of moving away from it," said Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for
Educational Freedom at libertarian think tank Cato Institute. " I don't think you want to be called
a flip-flopper, but even worse is to be associated with a policy that people
really don't like."
one word, it's Obamacore ," Petrilli says. "That is their argument, that this is to
education what Obamacare is to health care." As the issue of Common Core began gaining
traction among conservatives, the Republican National Committee succeeded in passing an anti-Common Core
resolution in April 2013, saying it "recognizes the CCSS for what it is an inappropriate overreach to standardize
even
staunch supporters of the standards have said that there's a need for
adjustment at least in the implementation. "When I said that the roll out of
these standards were worse than the roll out of Obamacare, that's a real
and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived 'normal.'" Since then,
problem, particularly since I'm a big believer in the critical thinking skills that this strategy is supposed to do,"
says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Conference of State Legislatures. While much of that legislation made or sought to make minor changes to the
Core standards,
entirely.
Jindal is just the latest Republican governor to publicly oppose the Core. In March, Indiana Gov. Mike
Oklahoma
Gov. Mary Fallin also a one-time Core supporter did the same. And
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley signed a bill last month to replace the
standards in 2015. Both North Carolina and Missouri could soon join the list of former Core states.
Pence signed legislation making his state the first to repeal the standards. Earlier this month,
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, has until mid-July to decide whether to sign a bill passed by the GOP-controlled
Legislature to drop the standards. And, in North Carolina, lawmakers are working to reconcile competing anti-Core
bills passed by the House and Senate. "The
a real concern," Hess says, "that no matter how well-intentioned, that in the
U.S. federal system increasing federal involvement just means the federal
government trying to write more rules for states, more rules for school
districts, and it is unlikely to work out as intended. " While resistance to Common Core
has been most visible among Republicans, particularly in the party's base, a new poll suggests that GOP voters are
evenly divided over the standards. Forty-five percent of conservatives support the standards, while 46 percent are
opposed, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week. Overall, 59 percent said they either
strongly or somewhat support the standards, while 31 percent said they strongly or somewhat oppose them. Hess,
of the American Enterprise Institute, says the wording used in the poll likely influenced those results. The poll
included no mention of the role of the federal government. "This is exactly like abortion for 40-odd years following
Roe v. Wade. If you ask about a woman's right to choose, you get 70 to 80 percent of Americans saying they favor
the choice," he says. "If you frame it about the vulnerable fetus, you can get 70 to 80 percent saying there ought to
be some restrictions."
on Capitol Hill in 2001, not only was the Republican administration not devolving power to the states, the No. 1
priority of the administration was a massive expansion of the federal Department of Education, recalled Mr. Pence,
who, as a congressman, opposed No Child Left Behind. The opposition to the Common Core also captures another
shift since the Bush administration: While long contemptuous of an expanding federal government,
some
Republican activists are growing wary of big business , too, including figures like Bill
Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder whose foundation supported the development of the standards. There
is a legitimate concern about large institutions, be they government or
others, who havent really delivered the America everybody thought we were on our way to, acknowledged
John R. McKernan Jr., a former Maine governor who leads the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. But, he said,
that fear is totally misplaced when it comes to the Common Core. But would-be presidential candidates are
paying more heed to the conservative activists holding packed meetings in their states and flooding them with
emails. The Republican Party is getting more and more responsive to the grass roots, and that is a very healthy
thing for the party and the country, Mr. Cruz said. Jeb Bush said the pivot seemed more like pandering. In remarks
this month during an event at his fathers presidential library, he affirmed his support for the Common Core. I
guess Ive been out of office for a while, so the idea that something that I support because people are opposed to
it means that I have to stop supporting it if theres not any reason based on fact to do that? he said. I just dont
feel compelled to run for cover when I think this is the right thing to do for our country. With a knowing grin, he
added, Others that supported the standards all the sudden now are opposed to it. Some other former Republican
governors who pushed the adoption of the Common Core agree with Mr. Bush. There is a great deal of paranoia in
the country today, said Sonny Perdue, a former governor of Georgia, who was also instrumental in creating the
program. Its the two Ps, polarization and paranoia. Supporters of the Common Core, which outlines skills that
students in each grade should master but leaves actual decisions about curriculum to states and districts, say that
it was not created by the federal government and that it was up to the states to decide whether to adopt the
standards. But opponents say Mr. Obamas attempt to reward states that adopt the standards with grants and
waivers amounts to a backdoor grab for federal control over what is taught in schools. Standards inevitably
influence the curricula being taught to meet those standards, Mr. Cruz said. It is not just conservatives who have
Tennessee, a Republican who supports the Common Core. But it is on the right that the anger is growing. A recent
forum on the Common Core in Columbus, Ohio, drew 500 people, most of them concerned parents, said Jane
Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, a conservative group opposed to the program. Such
meetings reflect discontent that is bubbling up at the local level, where some county Republican committees are
moving to punish legislators who do not oppose the standards. I think the establishment in the party has been slow
to recognize how big this is, Ms. Robbins said.
The poll
findings show that advocates for the Common Core face a major public
relations challenge as they seek to bolster support for the national
school districts decide how to teach the skills and knowledge that the Common Core describes.
academic standards, which have been adopted in more than 40 states but have become a target for
some conservatives and many parents across the country. People are receiving bad
information, said Blair Mann, a spokeswoman for the Collaborative for Student Success, a pro-Common Core
group that is funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated hundreds of millions of dollars
to develop the new standards. There are a million different Web sites that you can go to that have the truth about
American propaganda, revisionist history that ignores the faith of our Founders. Jindal also suggested in a recent
speech about Common Core that the standards address U.S. history lessons. What happens when American history
is not the American history that you and I learned about, but rather it becomes a history of grievances, of
victimhood? Jindal said. Asked to explain, Shannon Bates Dirmann, a spokeswoman for Jindal said: Governor Jindal
wasnt talking about current curriculum, but what type of curriculum to expect if the federal government continues
to control what our children learn from Washington. President Obama and bureaucrats in D.C. have proven over the
last several years that they do not believe in American exceptionalism, and if they continue to garner control over
K-12 education that view could be passed to our children. Paul has said he is a proponent of state and local control
when it comes to educational standards. Common Core is a prime example of federal overreach into academic
standards which have been traditionally set by the states and localities, said Sergio Gor, a spokesman for Paul. As
educators, parents and other experts are finding out, the standards of Common Core are just the tip of the iceberg
in a much larger federal education agenda. It would be dishonest to say that the Common Core State Standards do
not inform curricula, textbooks and assessments. A distorted and problematic view of American history is evident in
Common Core aligned textbooks and the readings it recommends and omits. The issue could play a role in the
upcoming 2016 presidential primaries, separating candidates like Jindal, Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
who recently changed from supporting Common Core to saying he has grave concerns about it from Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush, a longtime advocate for the standards who has maintained his support for them. Previous polls have
found mixed support , with wide-ranging results depending on question wording. In this poll, which described it
simply as the new Common Core Standards initiative, 17 percent approved while 40 percent disapproved. A
significant portion of respondents 42 percent offered no opinion. The wide uncertainty is unsurprising for an
issue that large swaths of the public, not having children in school, has ignored. Just more than half of respondents
said theyve heard just a little or nothing at all. But misperceptions were more common among those who said
they were paying more attention. Sixty percent of those who said they have heard a lot about Common Core
incorrectly said that the standards cover at least two of the four subjects that it does not cover. Among those who
report having heard nothing about the program, only 45 percent said Common Core includes at least two such
programs. Forty-four percent of all respondents incorrectly said that the standards address sex education, and
about the same share said that the standards include teachings on evolution, global warming and the American
Revolution. Fewer than one in five respondents correctly said that those subjects were not included in Common
Core. The poll found similar levels of confusion about Common Cores content among Democrats and Republicans,
supporters and opponents of the program and among people of different education levels. No matter their level of
misperceptions, more people disapprove of Common Core than approve. And even
among those who have the most misperceptions, disapproval is not especially steep. For instance, among poll
respondents who incorrectly thought the standards include all four subjects tested in the poll, 36 percent
disapproved of the standards, compared to 24 percent who approved. But the impact of Common Core confusion on
the programs popularity differed across political groups. Republicans who incorrectly believed Common Core covers
teaching on evolution, sex education and global warming were more apt to disapprove of the program. But among
Democrats and independents, support did not grow or fall with greater levels of knowledge. The Fairleigh Dickinson
Public Mind poll was conducted Dec. 8-15 by live interviewers among a random national sample of 964 adults
reached on conventional and cellular phones. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus three
percentage points, and is higher for results among subgroups.
Federalism DA
standards. Only 29 percent hold unfavorable views. Once voters are given a
straightforward description of the standards, 78 percent shift to a favorable view.
And opponents rarely criticize the actual standards. Most opposition is based on
innuendo, conjecture, misinformation and disinformation. It would be beyond
ironic if, in responding to the unfounded fears of a minority about federal
control, state lawmakers actually opened the door for far greater federal
control of Oklahoma schools while wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and
undermining teachers in the process.
Terrorism DA
2AC Terrorism DA
Education key to long term prevention of terrorism.
Council on Foreign Relations 12 The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
is an independent think tank dedicated to being a resource for its members in order
to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the
United States and other countries, 2012 (U.S. Education Reform and National
Security, CFR Independent Task Force Report No. 68, March 2012, available online
via http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618,
accessed on 7/8/15)//CM
The 9/11 Commission highlighted four U.S. shortcomings that opened the
door to the terrorist attacks. One of these was a failure of imagination on
the part of U.S. security agencies.113 In 2001, the failure to spot and
connect the dots was catastrophic for the United States. The Task Force
believes that all young peoplethose who aim to work in national security
and those who aim to work in corporations or not-for-profit organizationsmust
develop their imaginations from an early age. This is increasingly important as
information becomes more and more abundant and as the world becomes more
interconnected and complex. The United States has traditionally led the world
in patent applications, inventions, and innovation. The Task Force members
believe that to retain this important competitive edge, lessons in creativity
whether in the arts or in creative analysis or imaginative problem
solving, must begin in early elementary school. These vital skills should be
incorporated into extracurricular programs as well as woven into lessons
of math, literacy, language, science, and technology and tested through
interdisciplinary simulations. The same goes for civics. As detailed in this
report, students in the United States are not currently learning the basic
rights and responsibilities of citizenship, which is leaving them both
globally unaware and oblivious to the opportunities they have as U.S.
citizens. The Task Force believes that this fundamental knowledge set should
be integrated into students formal and informal instruction, starting in
the earliest days of their educations.
Counterplans
AT: States CP
the state budget crisis. Although the K-12 program was developed with state funding, the
state is not providing further support. In order to implement EEI, the program is soliciting $22 million in outside
funding from governmental, business, and philanthropic sources. Weve been looking into this issue out of concern
and the Environment Initiative will have a wide reach; it is being positioned to serve as a national model, and the
new standardized K-12 environmental curriculum will reach 6.2 million students statewide and countless families,
communities, and businesses in our state and beyond. In a previous post, we discussed the state energy reader
(The Energy Source Buffet), which downplays the impacts of burning fossil fuels and doesnt address climate
change. We received a response from the California EPA, and are continuing to research the program and the issue
Chevron Corporation is a large funder of science education and community engagement investments in California.
Through Chevrons California Partnership, an initiative announced in 2009, more than 20 nonprofit organizations
and multiple public school districts across California have received investments, totaling approximately $28
million. In one example, Chevron awarded $1 million to community development organizations in Richmond,
California, the site of one of its oil refineries that has been in high priority violation of Clean Air Act compliance
standards since at least 2006 and has had disproportionately high health impacts on Richmond residents. Chevron
is also a sponsor of the National Energy Education Development Project (NEED), a nationwide program working to
provide energy education curriculum and training to every appropriate classroom in the nation. The project has
been in existence for 30 years, and is sponsored by a range of energy interests, including large energy corporations
and industry groups like BP, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, Pacific Gas and Electric, and
Halliburton. Supported by a grant from BPs A+ for Energy Program, NEEDs California program provides educators
with access to grants, NEED training, and NEED curriculum. BP and NEED hosted seven Energy Conferences for
schools. The Energy4Me kit includes classroom activities and presentations, teaching aids, and speaker resources.
Materials are available free to teachers when an energy professional gives a classroom presentation, or when
teachers attend a science teacher professional development workshop, with substitute reimbursement provided.
Teachers can also be provided with the Oil and Natural Gas book, which
shows kids how petroleum and natural gas shapes our world , or an "Energy
Sources of the World!" booklet that discusses the pros and cons of different energy sources. Materials from this
energy education module were distributed by Chevron representatives at the recent California Science Teachers
Association conference. The front of the "Energy Sources of the World!" booklet reads: A Gift from the People of
Chevron. The ramifications of corporate energy funding in academic research have been studied and written about
recently, but to our knowledge the same scrutiny hasnt been extended to the influence of corporate money in K-12
education programs, at least outside of the professional education community. Should gifts from Chevron be
more nuanced cases like EEI, where corporate support will come after the program has been developed. Well be
continuing to write about EEI as an example of this dynamic in action, and welcome any feedback.
With the philosophical case for the central premise established, what are the
specific obligations individuals have to children? To answer this question, one must
understand the idea of a childs best interests and *his [or her] need for
nutritious food, clean drinking water, adequate sanitation, good
healthcare, decent shelter, a proper education, and love and guidance. It is
important to note these obligations are indivisible and can be fulfilled through time,
money, or in-kind donations.
[*Edited for gendered language]
2AC PreK DA
Status quo federal funding is key to maintain and broaden
access to early childhood education especially in minority and
lower income communities.
DOE 14 US department of education, internally quoting Arnie Duncan who
serves as the Secretary of Education for the Barack Obama Administration. 18
States Awarded New Preschool Development Grants to increase Access to HighQuality Preschool Programs DOE Press Release, Available at
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/18-states-awarded-new-preschooldevelopment-grants-increase-access-high-quality-preschool-programs. Accessedon
"Expanding access to high-quality preschool is critically important to
ensure the success of our children in school and beyond," said Secretary
Duncan. "The states that have received new Preschool Development
Grants will serve as models for expanding preschool to all 4-year-olds from
low- and moderate-income families. These states are demonstrating a strong
commitment to building and enhancing early learning systems, closing equity
gaps and expanding opportunity so that more children in America can
fulfill their greatest potential."
Under the grant program, states with either small or no state-funded
preschool programs were eligible for development grants, while states with
more robust preschool programs, or that have received Race to the Top-Early
Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grants, were eligible for expansion grants. Twelve
states that have not previously received funding from RTT-ELC will receive funding
from the jointly-administered Preschool Development Grant program (see list
below).
Through these Preschool Development Grant awards, more than 33,000
additional children will be served in high-quality preschool program s that
meet high-quality standards in the first year of the program alone. States
receiving grants will develop or expand high-quality preschool programs in
regionally diverse communitiesfrom urban neighborhoods to small towns
to tribal areasas determined by the state. Preschool programs funded under
either category of grants must meet the criteria for high-quality preschool
programs. To support states in planning their budgets, the U.S.
Departments of Education and Health and Human Services developed
annual budget caps for each state that is eligible to receive a Preschool
Development Grant. The departments developed grant funding categories by
ranking every state according to its relative share of eligible children and then
identifying the natural breaks in the rank order. Then, based on population, budget
caps were developed for each category.
The grants were part of more than $1 billion in new federal and private
sector investments in early childhood education announced by President
Obama during today's White House Summit on Early Education. The
President also announced a new public awareness campaign called "Invest in US" in
partnership with the First Five Years Fund.
Education has long been recognized as a good that has external effects
and public attributes. Without public support, the market will yield too few
educated workers and too little basic research. This problem has long been
understood in the United States and it is why our government, at all
levels, has supported public funding for education. (According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, for example, the United States in 1999 ranked high on public
funding of higher education.2 ) Nevertheless, recent studies suggest that one critical form of
education, early childhood development, or ECD, is grossly underfunded. However, if properly
funded and managed, investment in ECD yields an extraordinary return,
far exceeding the return on most investments, private or public. A convincing
economic case for publicly subsidizing education has been around for
years and is well supported. The economic case for investing in ECD is more recent and deserves
more attention. Public funding of education has deep roots in U.S. history. John Adams, the author of the oldest
functioning written constitution in the world, the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1779,
declared in that document that a fundamental duty of government is to provide for education.3 Publicly funded
of education because he realized the importance of educated voters to the well-being of a democracy. We suspect
Investment in human
capital breeds economic success not only for those being educated, but
also for the overall economy. Clearly today, the market return to education is sending a strong
signal. Prior to 1983, the wages of a worker with an undergraduate degree
exceeded a worker with a high school degree by roughly 40 percent.
Currently, that difference is close to 60 percent. The wage premium for an advanced
that he also understood the economic benefits that flow to the general public.
degree has grown even more. Prior to 1985, the wages of a worker with a graduate degree exceeded those of a
worker with a high school degree by roughly 60 percent .
not tell us where to invest limited public resources. Policymakers must identify the educational investments that
yield the highest public returns. Here the literature is clear: Dollars invested in ECD yield extraordinary public
The quality of life for a child and the contributions the child makes to
society as an adult can be traced back to the first few years of life. From
birth until about 5 years old a child undergoes tremendous growth and
change. If this period of life includes support for growth in cognition, language, motor skills, adaptive skills and
returns.
social-emotional functioning, the child is more likely to succeed in school and later contribute to society.4
However, without support during these early years, a child is more likely
to drop out of school, receive welfare benefits and commit crime. A wellmanaged and well-funded early childhood development program, or ECDP,
provides such support. Current ECDPs include home visits as well as center-based programs to
supplement and enhance the ability of parents to provide a solid foundation for their children. Some have been
initiated on a large scale, such as federally funded Head Start, while other small-scale model programs have been
implemented locally, sometimes with relatively high levels of funding per participant. The question we address is
whether the current funding of ECDPs is high enough. We make the case that it is not, and that the benefits
achieved from ECDPs far exceed their costs. Indeed, we find that the return to ECDPs far exceeds the return on
most projects that are currently funded as economic development. The question we address is whether the current
funding of ECDPs is high enough. We make the case that it is not, and that the benefits achieved from ECDPs far
exceed their costs. Indeed, we find that the return to ECDPs far exceeds the return on most projects that are
currently funded as economic development.Many of the initial studies of ECDPs found little improvement; in
particular, they found only shortterm improvements in cognitive test scores. Often children in early childhood
programs would post improvements in IQ relative to nonparticipants, only to see the IQs of nonparticipants catch up
within a few years.5 However, later studies found more long-term effects of ECDPs. One often-cited research project
is the High/Scope study of the Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., which demonstrates that the returns available to
an investment in a high-quality ECDP are significant. During the 1960s the Perry School program provided a daily 2
1/2-hour classroom session for 3- to 4-year-old children on weekday mornings and a 1 1/2-hour home visit to each
mother and child on weekday afternoons. Teachers were certified to teach in elementary, early childhood and
special education, and were paid 10 percent above the local public school districts standard pay scale. During the
Beginning in 1962,
researchers tracked the performance of children from low-income black
families who completed the Perry School program and compared the results to a control
group of children who did not participate. The research project provided reliable
longitudinal data on participants and members of the control group. At
age 27, 117 of the original 123 subjects were located and interviewed.7 The results of the research were
annual 30-week program, about one teacher was on staff for every six children.6
significant despite the fact that, as in several other studies, program participants lost their advantage in IQ scores
Therefore a significant
contribution to the programs success likely derived from growth in
noncognitive areas involving social-emotional functioning. During elementary and
over nonparticipants within a few years after completing the program.
secondary school, Perry School participants were less likely to be placed in a special education program and had a
Over 65 percent of
program participants graduated from regular high school compared with
45 percent of nonparticipants. At age 27, four times as many program
participants as nonparticipants earned $2,000 or more per month. And
only one-fifth as many program participants as nonparticipants were
arrested five or more times by age 27.8
significantly higher average achievement score at age 14 than nonparticipants.
Accessed 08-21-2015)
And at least in my opinion, a commitment to principles such as The inherent
worth and dignity of every person and Justice, equity and compassion in
human relations requires working for a shift from a Criminal Justice
System primarily characterized by Punitive Justice to one primarily
characterized by Restorative Justice that is, a focus less on punishment than
on rehabilitation, restoring right relationship for all concerned, and on repairing the
problems that contribute to crimes being committed in the first place. For
example, in the U.S., we spend more on prisons than police, but those
numbers were reversed before the rise of the Prison-Industrial Complex
began in this county. And communities such as New York City have been
able in recent years to decrease prison populations and crime rates
through increased police work, although those statistics are complicated
by use of stop and frisk rules that disproportionately stop and frisk
people of color.6 We relatedly need to do a much better job about teaching,
promoting, and protecting our Fourth Amendment rights: The right of the people to
be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause.... Disturbingly the trend in recent years has been many
court rulings that seem to many to undermine the Fourth Amendment and
encourage unreasonable search including rampant racial profiling,
contributing to a disproportionately high rate of incarceration for racial
minorities (63-64, 69). To name one further possibly response to The New Jim
Crow, as some of you know, many decades ago this congregation became a lifetime
member of the NAACP, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. I know that some of you have been involved at various points in
working with the NAACP. And we have invited the President of the local
branch of the NAACP to our discussion this evening. My understanding is
that he plans to attend, and that he has spread the word as well to some
of his contacts. I do not know whether other members of the NAACP will attend,
but if this congregation were to become serious about anti-racist work, a strong first
step might be for some of us to start attending NAACP meetings to hear from
people of color directly about their stories, their struggles, and their ongoing work
for racial justice.
Article published through Frederick Oversight.
to coach at-risk parents -- and these, too, are part of Obama's early
education program. ''Early education'' doesn't just mean prekindergarten for 4year-olds, but embraces a plan covering ages 0 to 5.
The earliest interventions, and maybe the most important, are home visitation
programs like Nurse-Family Partnership. It begins working with at-risk moms during
pregnancy, with a nurse making regular visits to offer basic support and guidance:
don't drink or smoke while pregnant; don't take heroin or cocaine. After birth, the
coach offers help with managing stress, breast-feeding and diapers, while
encouraging chatting to the child and reading aloud.
These interventions are cheap and end at age 2. Yet, in randomized
controlled trials, the gold standard of evaluation, there was a 59 percent
reduction in child arrests at age 15 among those who had gone through
the program.
Something similar happens with good pre-K programs. Critics have noted
that with programs like Head Start, there are early educational gains that
then fade by second or third grade. That's true, and that's disappointing.
Yet, in recent years, long-term follow-ups have shown that while the
educational advantages of Head Start might fade, there are ''life skill''
gains that don't. A rigorous study by David Deming of Harvard, for example,
found that Head Start graduates were less likely to repeat grades or be
diagnosed with a learning disability, and more likely to graduate from high
school and attend college.
Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We
can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait
and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a
choice between investing in preschools or in prisons .
And meanwhile the Department slyly alters and sets in stone the new definition of
what it will mean in their documents and funding formulas to be ready for college
and career.
See their official definition:
College- and career-ready standards: Content standards for kindergarten through
12th grade that build towards college- and career-ready graduation requirements
(as defined in this document) by the time of high school graduation. A States
college- and career-ready standards must be either (1) standards that are common
to a significant number of States; or (2) standards that are approved by a State
network of institutions of higher education, which must certify that students who
meet the standards will not need remedial course work at the postsecondary level.
(As far as I know, there is no state that has chosen to use option #2 which is using
higher ed to certify that state standards are college and career ready.)
So, college and career ready standards MUST BE COMMON to a significant number
of states?
Why? On whose authority? Since when is everybodys doing it a legitimate reason
to jump off a cliff?
What if every state in the USA had lousy standards and yours alone had good ones?
(Hello, Massachusetts!)
What if your state defined college and career readiness in a completely different
way than a significant number of states defined it? Why the choke-collar? Why the
peer pressure? If Common Core is so great, why the need for federal bullying?
Is bullying too strong a word? Read on.
Back in 2011, the Department of Education was already promising to
punish those who push back against Common Core, saying:
Beginning in 2015, formula funds will be available only to states that are
implementing assessments based on college- and career-ready standards
that are common to a significant number of states .
So if your state refused to administer a common core aligned test, youd
lose federal dollars.
them. And a new report out of Louisiana suggests a similar fate for the Bayou State
if sudden big changes are made to standards and tests.
Nor do such estimates include the cost to local school districts, which have
spent millions getting ready for the higher standards of the Common Core.
If states change their standards yet again, many districts will be
compelled, once more, to recalibrate their materials and professional
development -- and teachers will once again have to adapt to a new set of
standards. This does nobody any good.
More than 100,000 families across the Empire State have already opted
out of the standardized reading exams that began Tuesday, according to one
unofficial tally.
If those numbers are accurate, the federal government could move to enact a
penalty on the state to withhold funds worth up to $900 million for city
schools alone each year.
Top city and state educators are considering the possibility. "We're reviewing
things," said state Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. "But we hope the
federal government decides on another option."
Critics of the Common Core exams believe they are too difficult and should not be
used to evaluate teacher performance. They also believe the tests and prep take up
too much time.
If more than 5% of kids sit out the high-stakes reading and math tests this
week and next, a federal law could enable the U.S. government to begin a
process of withholding funds for New York public schools.
states, and the states' reluctance to raise new revenues, according to the CBPP
report.
"Cuts have been particularly deep when inflation and other cost pressures are
considered," the report added.
Seventeen states increased funding. North Dakota had the highest percentage
increase at 31.6%, at $1,329 per student. Alaska followed that state with a 16.4%
increase and had the highest dollar gain, at $1,351 per student.
"Most states are providing more funding per student in the new school year than
they did a year ago," the CBPP said in the report. "But funding has generally not
increased enough to make up for cuts in past years." New Mexico, for
instance, has increased its funding for per student by $124, or 1.8%, compared to
one year ago, but that is still 8.1% less than its 2008 level.
State funding cuts for k-12 schools have big consequences for local school
districts, which try to make up for the cuts by scaling back educational
services raising more local tax revenue to cover the gap, or both, according to the
CBPP. It's difficult for local school districts to find additional revenues after the
recession, the group said.
In addition, the cuts have slowed the economy's recovery from the
recession. Federal employment data show that teachers and other employees
have been cut since mid-2008. There have been 330,000 jobs cut in local
school districts between 2008 and 2012, the report found. These job losses
have also reduced the purchasing power of families, thus causing
problems for economic recovery.
More importantly, the cuts in educational funding have hindered education
reforms and high-quality education provided by school districts, according
to the study. When producing workers with high-level techniques and analytical
abilities are demanded in the future work place, such cuts in funding for basic
education will threaten the nation's economic future, the report concluded.
educators across the U.S., Fox has witnessed the way critical subjects have
been crowded out of schools or even eliminated entirely by the lethal one-two
punch of deep budget cuts and the singular focus on improving reading and math. In Los Angeles alone, onethird of the 345 arts teachers were given pink slips between 2008 and 2012 and arts programs for elementary
students dwindled to practically zero. The good news is that money has begun to trickle back into California, at
least. But slowly improving state budgets can only go so far. Breaking the nations fever over high stakes testing is
dynamic centers for learning, have been reduced to mere test prep factories, where teachers and students act out a
script written by someone who has never visited their classroom and where achievement means nothing more
than scoring well on a bubble test. NCLB has corrupted what it means to teach and what it means to learn,
explains NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garca. Teachers have to teach in secret and hope they dont get into trouble
for teaching to the Whole Child instead of teaching to the test. In July, NEA launched a national campaign to bring
an end to the testing obsession around the country, and to move real student-centered learning back to the
forefront of public schools. Its our job to bring back the arts and Social Studies and world languages and whatever
it is our students need to leave behind the corrupting, unconscionable testing culture of blame and punish by test
scores and move forward with an education that opens their minds to the infinite possibilities of their lives, Garca
many academic
subjects had been crowded out by an increased focus on math and language arts. About half
said art and music were being marginalized, while 40 percent said the
same for foreign language; 36 percent for social studies; and 24 percent
for science. The results were particularly striking at the elementary level, where 81 percent of teachers
says. The One-Size-Fits-All Agenda In a 2011 national survey, two-thirds of teachers said
reported that extra time devoted to math or language arts meant less time for other subjects. Over 60 percent of
middle school teachers and 54 percent of high school teachers reported the same in their schools. The culprit? More
than 90 percent of teachers blamed state tests in math and language arts. Ive seen students reduced to tears
from these tests, says Tom McLaughlin, a drama teacher in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Were robbing our students of the
joy and adventure of learning. It wasnt supposed to be this way. When NCLB was implemented more than a
decade ago, its promoters trumpeted promises about raising accountability and providing adequate resources to
lower income students in struggling schools. But the law, with its sweeping mandates for standardized English and
math tests in grades 4-8 and its crushing consequences for schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress,
merely created a toxic culture of teaching to the test in order to raise test scores. It wasnt long after its passage
many poor urban and rural students rely on their teachers to expose them to the kind of background knowledge
that is essential to subject mastery. It has been a disaster for social justice , wrote E.D.
Hirsch, a University of Virginia education professor who has championed the link between content knowledge and
reading comprehension skills, in his book The Knowledge Deficit. But the architects of these test-driven policies do
think they are addressing equityand thats frightening, says Richard Milner, a professor of education and director
of urban education at the University of Pittsburgh We should be appalled. Its tremendously short-sighted, says
Milner. They think they are being responsive to kids who are underserved. But theyre clearly not looking at the
lasting damage they are inflicting. While opposition to NCLB and testing has strengthened over the past few years,
Integrating DisciplinesBut at What Cost? Thanks to the burgeoning STEM movement (science, technology,
engineering and math), Brian Crosby believes science education may soon be removed from the endangered
curriculum list. Crosby taught science in the Washoe County School district in Nevada for more than 30 years,
recently leaving the classroom to become a STEM facilitator for the state. I do think there was what you might call
an oops moment, says Crosby. Decision-makers basically recognized that you cant educate students, especially
at-risk students, by hammering reading and math all day long. At least for science, theres some good news. Were
getting the curriculum un-narrowed if you will. Unfortunately teachers of other marginalized subjects cant say
the same. In January, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that, among other things, cut the graduation requirement for
social studies from four courses to three. The states social studies teachers protested, wondering aloud how they
would counsel their students to choose between classes: World history or world geography? Civics or U.S. history?
colleagues, a good thing, notes drama teacher Tom McLaughlin, he warns what might be lost in the long term. I do
think integration can be dangerous if (any one subject) becomes too consumed or morphed into reading or math.
We run the risk of putting these other subjects out of business. Social studies often falls victim to subject
integration with reading, notes Margit McGuire, director of teacher education at Seattle University and a social
studies specialist. It doesnt foster a very sophisticated treatment of the subject matter, she says. Lisa Steiner, a
social studies teacher at George Fischer Middle School in Carmel New York, also has seen her subject receive less
time, staff, and professional development opportunities compared to school districts chief priorities: math and
English arts. Still, integration can work, she says. Social studies as a discipline can reinforce core reading and
writing skills. I have a background and certification as a reading specialist, so I see the close relationship between
reading and writing in the content areas and it has influenced my teaching philosophy and approach. For many
music educators, the most compelling case to be made for music in schools is its value as a stand alone subjectto
bring the focus back to the benefits to students, not to their standardized tests. In April, the National Association for
Music Education (NAfMe) began challenge the assumption that music is merely a supplement to the core
curriculum, and said the organization would no longer frame the importance of music around its potential to raise
test scores. Every time we profess that students should have access to music so that their brains become better
wired to solve math equations, we provide ammunition to the camp of education experts who proclaim that music
is an interchangeable, or, even worse, expendable, classroom experience, explains Christopher Woodside of
NAfMes Center for Advocacy and Public Affairs. The Inconvenient Truth: Many Students Cant Catch Up While no
have had it stripped from their classroomsand they dont have other avenues available to them that students in
suburban communities have to at least partly supplant what is missing in schools. Brian Crosby recalls shaking his
head in disbelief when he would hear school discussions asserting that it wouldnt matter in the long run if certain
subjects for at-risk elementary students were suspended so they could focus on reading and math. The assumption
was, you could catch the students up in middle school because by then they would have a science teacher, Crosby
explains. But they couldnt just catch up. And by the time they got to high school many of these students were so
far behind they were put into remedial classes. And people would wonder why kids were dropping out of school.
What kind of citizens are these practices creating? Margit McGuire believes that
continually pushing aside U.S. History or Civics robs low-income students
of the opportunity to tell their stories and become invested in democracy.
We marginalize our students when we dont allow them to bring their own lived experiences into the classroom,
says McGuire. Maybe well get their test score up, but at what cost? We need to help young people, particularly
children from impoverished backgrounds, understand or value our democracy and their role in society. Thats why
we have public education.
plugging them into a computer. They are not machines. They are humans
who are not fazed by a D but are undone when their goldfish dies, who
struggle with composing a coherent paragraph but draw brilliantly, who
read on a third-grade level but generously hold the door for others.
My most important contributions to students are not addressed by the Common
Core, Smarter Balance and teacher evaluations. I come in early, work through lunch
and stay late to help children who ask for assistance but clearly crave the attention
of a caring adult. At intramurals, I voluntarily coach a ragtag team of volleyball
players to ensure good sportsmanship. I "ooh" and "ah" over comments made by a
student who finally raises his hand or earns a C on a test she insisted she would fail.
Those moments mean the most to my students and me, but they are not
valued by a system that focuses on preparing workers rather than
thinkers, collecting data rather than teaching and treating teachers as less than
professionals.
Until this year, I was a highly regarded certified teacher. Now, I must prove myself
with data that holds little meaning to me. I no longer have the luxury of teaching
literature, with all of its life lessons, or teaching writing to students who long to be
creative. My success is measured by my ability to bring 85 percent of
struggling students to "mastery," without regard for those with advanced
skills. Instead of fostering love of reading and writing, I am killing
children's passions committing "readicide," as Kelly Gallagher called it in
his book of that title.
Teaching is the most difficult but most rewarding work I have ever done. It is,
however, art, not science. A student's learning will never be measured by
any test, and I do not believe the current trend in education will lead to
adults better prepared for the workforce, or to better citizens. For the sake
of students, our legislators must reach this same conclusion before good teachers
give up the profession and the children they love.
Critiques
2AC Gender K
Hostility to critical thinking also provides a platform for antidemocratic views like the hatred of women. People make
arguments without any sense of social or moral responsibility.
Giroux 14 Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the
English and Cultural Studies Department & Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The
McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning, Distinguished
Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, member of Truthout's Board of Directors,
author of dozens of books on learning and pedagogy including Youth in Revolt:
Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America's Educational Deficit and the War on
Youth, Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education, 2014 (Data Storms and the
Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting, Truthout, June 24 th, Available Online at
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-the-tyranny-ofmanufactured-forgetting#/, Accessed 06-25-2015)
How else to explain, for instance, a major national newspapers willingness
to provide a platform for views that express an unchecked hatred of
women - as when The Washington Post published George Wills column in
which he states that being a rape victim is now "a coveted status that
confers privileges"?[8] Will goes on to say that accusations of rape and sexual
violence are not only overblown, but that many women who claim they were raped
are "delusional."[9] There is a particular type of aggressive ignorance here
that constitutes a symbolic assault on women , while obscuring the
underlying conditions that legitimate sexual violence in the United States.
Will expresses more concern over what he calls the "pesky arithmetic"[10]
used to determine the percentage of women actually raped on campuses
than the ever-increasing incidence of sexual assault on women in colleges,
the military, and a wide variety of other private and public spheres.
The clueless George Will, evidently angry about the growing number of women
who are reporting the violence waged against them, draws on the persuasive
utility of mathematical data as a way to bolster a shockingly misogynist
argument and flee from any sense of social and moral responsibility . While
such expressions of resentment make Will appear as an antediluvian, privileged
white man who is truly delusional, he is typical of an expanding mass of
pundits who live in a historical void and for whom emotion overtakes
reason. Increasingly, it appears the American media no longer requires that words
bear any relationship to truth or to a larger purpose other than peddling rigid and
archaic ideologies designed to shock and stupefy audiences.
2AC Capitalism K
We link turn the K education is the only proven solution for
reducing income inequality we are a better option than their
idealism.
Crotty 15 James Marshall Crotty, business of education contributor for Forbes,
holds a Masters in Liberal Arts from St. Johns College, over three decades of active
involvement in American education, including teaching and/or coaching gigs at
Columbia University, LaGuardia College, Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School
of Science, and the Eagle Academy for Young Men, 2015 (Education Is Answer To
Income Inequality: Part One, Forbes, February 27, Available Online at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2015/02/27/knowledge-is-power/,
accessed 7/7/15, KM)
In an op-ed entitled Knowledge Isnt Power, in the February 23 New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist
Paul Krugman argued that soaring inequality isnt about education; its
about power. Because of my own preference for diversity, I welcome Mr. Krugmans well-meaning and
learned viewpoint. Unfortunately, like other bright, beloved and left-leaning public intellectuals such as Krugmans
fellow MIT grad Noam Chomsky (whose remedy for the ills he diagnosed in Manufacturing Consent was a global
take on the contagion effects of highly leveraged financial institutions was spot on) ,