Another BN Bad Opinion

The Buffalo News' anti union bias is showing again. Blatantly. On the “Opinion” page.

Good thing it's an opinion and on that page because it has no basis in fact or reality.

The opinion, which they are entitled to, deals with the fact that teachers and their union, NYSUT, have become very vocal and active in the fight against the privatization of the public school system. The one we pay for with our taxes that Wall Street can't make much of a profit off of.

Of course they are using that tired old lament that our students are not performing well on the “standardized” tests.

First – Whose standards? Were they developed by content area specialists and professionals? And people that actually had teaching degrees? That actually currently teach in schools? On top of that – are also developmentally appropriate? (Hint: The answer is no on all counts.)

Second – Have the people making the tests made one that actually measures something useful and goes beyond simplistic regurgitation of material? Seriously. I had an Eighth Grader show me how to score a 4 with simple copying from the essay. You and I would call it “plagiarism.” They called it passing the test in the easiest way possible. (This is success? Achievement?)

And the News is fearful that the teachers have finally found their voice and are pushing up the chain of command in order to be heard and listened to.

So Albany is starting to make changes because they realize that all the changes that the Bush and Obama administrations made were bad from the beginning and needed to be more thought out before being implemented, if at all. After all – the Buffalo News and all the pro-privatization forces still have not proved that all this testing and the the Common Core Learning Standards have improved anything.

Let's remember – The so called “Texas Miracle” of former President (SICK) Bush was found to be a fraud. All the testing pushed low scoring students out of school and into GED programs (if they chose to get a GED). So if you take a school and remove all the “bottom feeders” from the scoring pool, of course the test scores are going to improve. That does not mean that education has improved. It only means that the students that do not do well in a rigidly structured assembly line education system have left.

And the News keeps ignoring (rather deliberately I might add) a key reason why students do poorly in school. And pardon the pun, but the News refuses to write about poverty. Economically poor students generally do not perform well in school or on tests. This is logical. If you don't know where home is going to be and the only food you are going to get is in school, then you are probably not going to do well in school.

And if you are in a community that has houses that are loaded with lead paint, which science shows to be brain damaging, chances are that school performance is going to be less than stellar.

And if your parents are working two jobs to make ends meet, or parent because the other one is in jail or prison, then guess what the studies show? Need a hint? Look at the previous paragraphs and follow the pattern. It's OK to do that. It's how students do well on the Common Core ELA exam.

The Buffalo News refuses to address the crisis that capitalism creates when it pushes income down to as low a level as possible. After all, it's all about the profits and whatever is good for business is good for society.

That seems to be the News agenda – The privatization of education so that Wall Street can take more of our money and give us next to nothing appreciable in return. They can show us all the fancy charts and graphs, but none of that means anything if a student feels unprepared for college.

Actually, the number of students that I have taking remedial courses in college is rather disgusting. Then again, Testing started in the 2002-2003 school year. 2012 is the first year that students graduated after all that testing and college achievement is nothing to write home about.

So if all this testing were working, then graduation rates would be going up and and college dropout rates would be going down.

The News wants us to buy their pro-privatization platform and the people of WNY need to let the News know that while we may buy their paper (mostly for the comics and coupons), we do not buy or believe their ideas that fail to address the underlying causes of the problems that s chools, teachers, and students face.

Socialists demand:

An end to the useless daze of standardized testing and allowing the teachers to teach their students.

An end to the privatization of public schools.

No tax payer funding for schools that are not accountable to a publicly elected school board. (And have people on the Board with education backgrounds and experience. After all – do you really think the Buffalo News wants me on their Board of Directors? I have no experience in newspapers but I have a whole ton of opinions on what they need to be doing and aren't.)

Parents, students, teachers,and taxpayers all want successful schools.

They do not want the mess that we have now that is killing inspiration and hope for the future.