What Happened to Public Education: Part 1?

It is not a new idea that education has always been a bit about control.  Read John Taylor Gatto's books on education.  His work started a revolution in progressive education, and now look how far down we have gone.  We have not progressed at all, we have digressed into complete tyranny.  

So how did we get here.  It started with the very visible achievement gap between black and white students.  It could more easily have been demonstrated as the rich versus poor students, but it was highlighted as a racial divide.  Suddenly schools had a cause:  to reduce the achievement gap.

No Child Left Behind was the first step towards the take over of our schools.  This program required schools to report all of the test score peformance, but not just general data, the data was to be broken down by "race", social economic status, and whether the student had a disability.  Then, each one of these groups were expected to show growth as dictated by 10% jumps in test scores over every 2 years.  

I have already spoken about how this impossible task was a set up.  I have already spoken about how these tests were designed to create regular statistical distrubutions (i.e. Bell Curves) in which 50% of students taking the test would perform above the 50% line and 50% would fall below it.  I have already share about how by 2011 when NCLB began failing en masse, all these students in all the groups were expected to be in the 70th or 80th percentile.  What a farce.  What a set-up.  

The fear of the achievement gap that drove the entire agenda, and yet nothing changed.  There wasn't even the slightest decrease in the gap, and furthermore the effect of the testing destroyed many of the elective programming switching out music and art for double classes in reading and math.  

Meanwhile, the wealthy schools started to bring in project based learning, flipped classrooms and all of the best models of learning.  So instead of reducing the inequalities in education, NCLB actually made them worse.  Instead of creating a sense of inclusion for all of the different groups, and types of learners, NCLB highlighted the differences, making race on of the primary issues in education rather than self-awareness, self-direction and cognitive capacity.

This was one of the stages of the total destruction of freedom in public education.

https://fee.org/articles/john-taylor-gatto-1935-2018-remembering-americas-most-courageous-teacher/