Op-Ed: All Learners Need Real Satisfactions As Their Major Motivator

Essential impact of self-image damaged by NCLB Requirements threatening sanctions For ANY Failures on “High-Stakes Tests”

Image: whitehouse.gov

(BEND, Ore.) - “Outside of Lake Woebegon, not all children are above average”. This overwhelming truth of school life and experience comes from a 2005 cover story in TIME magazine (2/21/05).

Their report won wide attention then --and now does so again, as Congress returns to face inevitable decision on continuing NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, already shown to be draining federal funds at ruinous costs, via a semi-racketeering approach by heavily-involved special interests.

That’s Bush’s opening gun for overwhelming our educational system, seen widely within the educational, academic, and cultural communities as an attempt to force further school-failures for political purposes; and hard-driven by long-known corporate special-interest dollars and interventions already underway for more than thirty years.

TIME's insightful writers stress the well known essential, inevitable, unavoidable impact of parent-teacher relations on results for every learner at any level -- in ANY school-location --citing everyday real experiences across the entire nation.

Ongoing experience with NCLB has proven up that fact, painfully for many school districts -- some right here in Oregon. That seminal article --like many others published over preceding years-- stresses the long-known, most-essential educational fact that “every learner is an individual person”; AND, sometime, sooner or later, also “a demanding problem-case”, for every teacher.

It is a rare child who makes it all the way through K-12 without such an event, situation, occasion or happening --as most parents know.

That’s “the typical situation across the entire nation --the overcrowded classroom”, with kids clamoring for impossible attention and assistance.

It has become “the most essential fact in all of American education, making the working-situation a reality that must now be faced and remedied”, somehow, NOW.

The inescapable truth is that close, demanded, personalized teacher attention, often a problem, has now become one “...impossible to solve for each learner, when overwhelmed with more than 30 ‘definite-persons’ in nearly every classroom.”

Learners truly LEARN when they find great personal satisfaction in their own understandings of their own progress. BUT, as children always have done over the past centuries, some will surely “give up too easily when pain and too-public embarrassment at continued failure arrive” --rather than solid, sensible satisfactions.

ONLY the teacher can control, shape and guide those positive gains learning must provide for “effective, efficient every-person preparation for our society and the modern world.”

Every other vital component in the system fails miserably if --and always-when--the teacher is prevented from accomplishing that most demanding and difficult professional action; at the heart of every learning situation, at any level, under any surrounding circumstance.

Even massive injections of monies, “no matter how spent or on what”, can prevent those essential failures “when the system itself is distorted and perverted”; and thus prevented from even-further accomplishment otherwise made possible by the depth, devotion and determination of the teacher.

Always, for full success, in partnership with every parent. Despite “a culture that pays them poorly, a generation taught to question authority and a political climate that argues for holding schools ever more accountable for how kids perform.”

With high-stakes, once-a-year tests “standardized” to levels and content heavily shaped by corporate interests infiltrating legislatures and school districts across the entire nation for three decades.

NOW do you understand why up to 50 percent of newly-trained teacher talent quits the frustrating fight within the first three years?

That’s only one of many American-Century/proven educational truths discarded by the Bush NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND attack on our educational system -- some complex, others simple commonsense.

Like “Classroom Assessment”, professionally applied by a trusted teacher, supplying proof-apparent and demonstrating personal interest; to make sure every learner knows and appreciates personal status and achievements, as major motivator for continued-success in only and unique opportunity ever possible.

Every school-experience “is a one-shot unique/and/only-time, for each and every child, no matter what economic, social, cultural ‘surround’ may be provided by chance and/or circumstance”.

Most Americans believe their children deserve the best possible school-learning opportunity we can provide --and that we are failing miserably to make sure that happens, for far too many millions of our beloved progeny.

Nobody can claim “the irrefutable facts” were not-known when this law-of-the-land, now threatening the very existence of many schools across the nation, was manipulated rapidly through an acquiescent --and mostly uninformed-- Congress.

For fiscal and Bush-family/related reasons, according to an Internet strongly documented special report now in Congressional hands, detailed in depth and depressing developments linked to dollars and dominated by decades of heavy-shaping dollars-spent influence from corporate chieftains.

Despite deep, distressing difficulties --due heavily to desperate funding slashes over several decades, everywhere-- that system still has provided precisely what it was originally designed to do: Effective sorting-out and shaping of learner outcomes “to provide universal basic literacy, to socialize a highly diverse population, and to prepare every person for a world of work and opportunity.”

In our early-nation years that was seen as reflecting the clearly-stated Founders-principles of “equal opportunity on a level playing-field” for every American citizen. No other nation in this world has ever done so well, for so many, under such difficult developments; as our modern lifestyle and history surely demonstrates in depth and with full detail felt by every family.

But the system has remained largely unchanged from the 19th Century, when those reasonable objectives were driven by economic, social, cultural trends; and then-current learning-process knowledge.

Equally-desperate efforts to bring on basic change and true research/guided development have been stalled, stymied, and nailed down/static by the same groups profiting from the original-shaping/then--for their own economic, social and cultural reasons.

Which is fundamentally the WHY of all those decades-continuing dollar-diminutions, personnel displacements, and State-level supervising agency starvation-“budget controls”.

While complacent, sometimes uninformed --even UN-interested!--legislators rapidly whipped-into-line for lavish “corporate campaign contributions”, among other reasons, mostly political in nature and impact forced by what’s now recognized as “neo-conservative” policy.

Now we are in the Seventh Year of the 21st Century, facing modern demands and essential changes impossible without a real revolution in our educational system; one NOT shaped nor set up by every-state corporate billion-dollar "informational efforts”, aided and assisted by U.S. Office of Education efforts and personnel.

Many distressing details and their damaging consequences coming irrefutably from NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND will be explored, reported and analyzed in our second-part Op Ed, coming soon.

Federal-funding faucets never before opened for multitudinous and manifold “standardized” tests; new and unproven approaches to basic subject-and-skill areas such as reading and math; and over-simplified, entertainment-pattern learning media in high-cost formats; are building huge flows of cash for new companies and many older ones --all recipients of Bush-based educational largesse.

In fact, a broadly-investigative special study now on the public record since it has been provided for federal and Congressional review, states unequivocally that billions of federal dollars have already been lost to privileged profiteers set up specifically to reap all those dollars.

Further special-needs requirements, built into NCLB purposely, are creating outside-provided tutoring and aid to assist deprived and handicapped children --with NCLB requirements providing the sanction loaded gun to force compliance or lose both schools and personnel.

“Stay tuned”: Then let your voices be heard loud, long and clear and continually, as Congress meets to reconsider this Bush-attack.

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Reader’s Note:

Meaningful quotes have been presented widely in this Op Ed, some verbatim, others shortened or summarized to make the point clearly. Every quote is documented here with source and full-statement, available on request. This protocol for quotation is standard practice in professional reports, adopted here for impact in the tight-space available.

The extremely revealing investigative series referenced for this Op-Ed (I read every one of more than 220 pages) runs 23 already published parts --so far. It is found in entirety at: www.diatribune.com/bush-profiteers-collect-billions-nclb Our next Op Ed in this two-part series will consider in depth and detail, with links to more than 40 other daily newspaper and national magazine reports, what profiteering opportunities are presented for various media-producing groups and persons via NCLB distorted-perverted ”legal requirements”.