Parents, teachers protest senior-high entrance process

By Lee I-chia  /  Staff reporter

Students and parents in Taipei yesterday protest against the 12-year national education system, while calling for reforms.

Photo: CNA

Demonstrators took to the streets of Taipei yesterday against a new mechanism in senior-high school admittance, which they say is unfair because it does not take into account students’ grades.

The mechanism is part of the new 12-year national education system and deducts points from students each time they fail to be accepted by a school on their list, which effectively punishes children for aiming too high.

Hundreds of parents and teachers took part in the parade, organized by the Alliance on Obligatory Education.

They gathered on Ketagalan Boulevard, saying the mechanism is unfair because some students in the first phase failed to land a school, even though they obtained high grades in examinations.

“We have to save our own children, save our own future and our nation on our own,” they said.

“We want adaptive education and real democracy,” they chanted. “We want the point deduction mechanism abolished.”

The alliance said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators, having a majority of seats in the legislature, passed the Senior-High School Education Act (高級中等教育法) in June last year, and directly enforced the new 12-year national education system, without testing the system in advance.

This new senior-high school admittance process is like gambling, protesters said, adding that it deprives the parents of their right to choose the best education for their children.

“Why can the system not be made transparent so that students can choose the school they want according to their results?” one protester said.

“While the first phase of the admittance results have been announced, we want remedial measures in place for the second phase,” a parent said, while another parent shouted: “Minister of Education Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧) step down from your post.”

A teacher surnamed Chang (張) said she was dissatisfied with the point deduction mechanism, which left six of her 10 highest-graded students without a school.

A parent surnamed Wang (王) said: “My son was shocked when he saw he was unable to land any schools, even though he scored 5 A’s and filled in 30 preferred schools.”

Another parent surnamed Lin (林) said there was no guidance for families to refer to when they filled in the school preference section, so it felt like gambling on their children’s future.

The protesters ended their demonstration at the Legislative Yuan, where they split into discussion groups for, what they called, “deliberative democracy on the streets” over two topics: whether point deduction should be enforced and how the entrance mechanisms should be redesigned.

The demonstrators also asked for grade intervals to be made smaller, as well as for the officials responsible for the flawed system to be punished.

Linguist races to save Aboriginal language

KANAKANAVU:：National Taiwan University’s Sung Li-may is working with the few remaining native speakers of one Aboriginal language to document it for preservation

By Peter Enav  /  AP, DAKANUA

Thu, Jan 10, 2013 - Page 5

Her eyes lit bright with concentration, Taiwanese linguist Sung Li-may (宋麗梅) leans in expectantly as one of the planet’s last 10 speakers of the Kanakanavu language shares his hopes for the future.

“I am already very old,” says 80-year-old Mu’u Ka’angena, a leathery-faced man with a tough, sinewy body and deeply veined hands.

A light rain falls onto the thatched roof of the communal bamboo hut, and smoke from a dying fire drifts lazily up the walls, wafting over deer antlers, boar jawbones and ceremonial swords that decorate the interior like trophies from a forgotten time.

“Every day I think: Can our language be passed down to the next generation? It is the deepest wish in my heart that it can be,” he says.

Kanakanavu, Sung says, has a lot more going for it than just its intrinsic value. It belongs to the same language family that experts believe spread from Taiwan 4,000 years ago, giving birth to languages spoken today by 400 million people in an arc extending from Easter Island off South America to Madagascar, off Africa.

“Taiwan is where it all starts,” says archeologist Peter Bellwood, who with linguist Robert Blust developed the now widely accepted theory that people from Taiwan leveraged superior navigation skills to spread their Austronesian language far and wide. At least four of Taiwan’s 14 government-recognized Aboriginal languages are still spoken by thousands of people, but a race is on to save the others from extinction.

The youngest good speaker of Kanakanavu, also known as Southern Tsou, is 60, and the next-youngest, 73.

“To survive a language has to be spoken,” Sung said. “And with this one it isn’t happening.”

It’s a story repeated in the remote corners of the earth, as younger generations look to the dominant language for economic survival and advancement, whether it be English or, in Taiwan’s case, Mandarin.

Aborigines account for only 2 percent of the Taiwanese population of 23 million. Many young people are leaving Dakanua, a picturesque village in the south that is home to the Kanakanavu language, to work in the cities.

Sung is clearly revered by Dakanua’s tiny cadre of Kanakanavu speakers, who are happy to spend long hours going over their language with her and a small group of graduate students she brings to the village from National Taiwan University in Taipei.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, they sat outside a well-ordered cluster of whitewashed concrete buildings, painstakingly documenting the proper use of the imperative and the grammatical subtleties of concepts like “it could be that” or “it is possible that.”

In the background the bamboo and palm tree covered contours of Mount Anguana protruded through a moving blanket of fog and mist, and a thin rain fell in the Nanzihsian River (楠梓仙溪) valley below.

Life here is defined by farming, a reverent belief in Christianity — Presbyterian and Roman Catholic missionaries converted almost two-thirds of the Aboriginal population in the 1930s and 1940s — and chronic concern about the harsh elements. Five hundred residents in the nearby Siaolin Village (小林) were buried alive three-and-a-half years ago when torrential rains unleashed by a typhoon sent thousands of tonnes of mud cascading down onto their homes.

Sung started working with Aboriginal languages almost by accident. After returning to Taiwan in 1994 as a newly minted doctor of linguistics from the University of Illinois, her department head at National Taiwan University pushed her into the discipline, insisting that Taiwan’s majority Chinese population had to understand more about its Aboriginal minority.

“At first I was intimidated,” says Sung, now the director of the university’s Graduate Institute of Linguistics, one of a handful of Taiwanese bodies seeking the preservation of the Aboriginal languages as part of a wide-ranging effort funded by the government.

“I had no idea of how to carry out my field work among the Aboriginals. But over time I got used to it. And I learned the importance of Taiwanese Aboriginal languages in the overall scheme of Austronesian dispersion,” she says.

The deep-rooted linguistic seeds the dispersal sowed have now morphed into dozens of languages — Malay for example, and the Philippines’ Tagalog — that make Austronesian one of the largest language groups in the world.

The dispersion is illustrated by the similarities of the words for “ear.” What linguists call the proto-form — the Taiwanese basis from thousands of years ago — is usually rendered as galinga. In modern Taiwanese Aboriginal dialects that becomes calinga, while in the Philippines it’s tenga, in Fiji dalinga, in Samoa talinga and in Papua New Guinea taringa.

Taiwanese Aborigines traveling to New Zealand, for example, are struck by the close relationship of their own languages to Maori, particularly when they hear the local version of numbers.

Sung’s most recent project was collating a Chinese-English dictionary for the Sediq language spoken by the tribe of Taiwanese mountain dwellers memorialized inWarriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale , a 2011 film recounting their rebellion against Japanese occupiers in the 1930s.

In February last year she began her work with Kanakanavu, hoping she can preserve the language before the last speakers die out. The odds against her are long. Even many 40 and 50-year olds are incapable of mouthing anything more than a few simple phrases in their native tongue.

Still, frolicking on the neatly cut lawn of Dakanua’s deserted bed and breakfast is a three-year-old girl with a runny nose, an infectious smile and a lovely lilt to her voice.

She is the granddaughter of Mu’u Ka’angena, the man with the leathery skin, and just within earshot she begins conversing with him in very simple Kanakanavu.

“Did you hear that?” Sung asks. “Isn’t it wonderful? She’s our hope for the future.”

The war on public education Pt. 1

The war on public education

By Heather Cottin on April 12, 2014

Today’s capitalist public school curriculum called “Common Core,” coupled with impossible-to-pass examinations, is facing growing opposition all over the United States.

The president of a parents’ group on Long Island called Common Core and high-stakes testing “child abuse.” Some 30,000 children, with their parents’ permission, opted out of Common Core examinations in New York state at the beginning of April.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., teachers, parents and students filled a schoolyard to protest Common Core tests administered by the school. In one Connecticut high school, only 47 of 530 high school juniors sat for the Common Core English examination.

In every state, opposition to Common Core is growing.

War on public education began with Reagan

The war on public education began when Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, gutted one of the best university systems in the U.S. Cutting funding for higher education by 20 percent and ending free tuition, Reagan famously said California “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” He also cut funding to public kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) schools in the state, devastating already poor and inner-city schools.

Once he became president, Reagan tried to shut down the Department of Education. Failing that, he appointed William Bennett to head it. That heartless reactionary relentlessly attacked teachers’ unions.

Reagan cut federal funding to education by half. The most destructive part of his legacy came from his creation of a so-called “blue ribbon” commission that produced a 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” The report promoted the lie that the U.S. educational system was a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

This report justified the defunding of the U.S. public educational system and the privatization of schools. It led to the DOE’s development of the “No Child Left Behind” policy. Initiated under the George W. Bush administration in 2001, NCBL required all public schools that received federal funding to administer standardized tests to all students. The plan was to give a school federal money if students did well and take it away if they didn’t.

A decade earlier, James D. Watkins, an admiral appointed by President George H. W. Bush to head the Department of Energy, had commissioned the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to develop data on the so-called decline of U.S. public education. The charts and graphs in the labs’ findings, published in 1990, absolutely disproved the later conclusions of the NCLB act. Instead, Watkins found there were improvements at every level of U.S. public education. The report was buried.

The second Bush administration moved forward with No Child Left Behind. Corporate-funded think tank policy wonks looked for ways to suck money out of the public school system. Using the carrot and stick of federal funding, along with high-stakes tests devised by corporations, NCBL began the slow destruction of U.S. public schools.

Corporations sold the tests to the states and “teaching to the test” became the job of millions of educators. Profits from the sale of millions of tests redounded to private capital.

Some schools curtailed recess, fearing that bad test results could shut them down for failure to “perform well.” Many eliminated art, music and other creative programs because they lost funding.

In poor areas, lower NCBL test results became an excuse to close schools and launch the charter school “movement.” Thousands of these profit-making academies opened all over the country, promising, but rarely delivering, better schools.

The capitalist media and their corporate-financed politicians relentlessly attacked public school teachers and their unions. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, on the defensive, were unable to halt this corporate assault.

Part 2 will expose how today’s Common Core is part of the educational-industrial complex. For the entire article, see workers.org.

Heather Cottin has been a teacher in public high schools and colleges for 48 years. She is also an administrator of the Facebook group “Radical Moms.”

Common Core and the educational-industrial complex Pt. 2

Common Core and the educational-industrial complex

By Heather Cottin on April 17, 2014

The war on public education, part 2

In 2009, the Obama administration launched Common Core, which was a devastating attack on the entire K-12 curriculum and on all teachers, students and parents. It was called “Race to the Top.”

Common Core was developed to scrap the entire curriculum of 41 — now 44 — states which at that time accepted billions of dollars in federal funding. The National Governors Association and the heads of state education departments in all those states bowed to the Common Core “standards” and curricula.

The development of the curricula was spearheaded by the super-rich: Charles and David Koch, Bill and Melinda Gates, ExxonMobil, Lockheed-Martin, the Ford Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Boeing, the Walmart Foundation and Pearson Publishing Co. The last became the monopolist publisher of all Common Core K-12 textbooks. The Koch brothers’ American Legislative Exchange Council funded and perpetuated Common Core in every state. (Truthout, Sept. 6, 2013)

Pearson Publishing reported revenues of approximately $9 billion in 2010. “Over the past 15 years, through … investment and acquisitions, Pearson has become the leading education company in the world.” (Huffington Post, March 19, 2013)

The Gates Foundation was responsible for curriculum and standards development for the math and English language arts for all Common Core K-12 students. The foundation created the inBloom network, which stored all the data of the millions of children taking Common Core exams in a “cloud.” The federal government has now taken over managing the cloud.

Whose standards are they, anyway?

New York state, which is currently leading the resistance to Common Core, receives $900 million from the federal government in RTTT funding. At a time when wages are low, long-term unemployment is growing and the tax base in every state is falling, fear of losing this money amounts to extortion.

Not a single one of the 135 people who wrote the early childhood Common Core standards was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional. (Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2013) In the upper grades, literature and poetry have been nearly eliminated. Each moment of a Common Core lesson is “mapped” out, allowing for no creativity. Teachers report children are bored and overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy and stress.

Teachers are quitting the profession. Education analyst Diane Ravitch says on her blog that “[T]the instruction of our students has been reduced to district directives putting our students at the mercy of mind-numbing computer tutorials. … [T]hrough all of this, we have been slowly and systematically robbed of the relationship we have with our students.”

Kindergarteners across the country had to take midterms this January. First graders have four to five tests per week. At a meeting of more than 200 people against Common Core in Plainview, N.Y., an 11-year-old said she had to do homework until midnight some nights and just “wanted to be a child and go outside and play.”

Eight principals from New York state wrote, “We know that many children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Others simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk, and wrote, ‘This is too hard’ and ‘I can’t do this’ throughout his test booklet.” (The Daily Caller, Nov. 25, 2013)

In many states, parents are organizing to resist this educational disaster. New York state Commissioner of Education John King had to abandon a speaking campaign promoting Common Core last fall after he faced infuriated parents and teachers in several meetings around the state.

The nearly 3,000-delegate body of the New York State United Teachers recently passed a vote of “no confidence” against King. Citing the “failed” rollout of Common Core academic standards that base teacher evaluations upon student test scores, the federation, representing 1,200 unions and 600,000 members across the state, withdrew its support for Common Core standards in New York. (Newsday, April 5)

To the capitalists and their obliging politicians, education is just another opportunity to make more profits. If the vast majority of children fail their tests, they still can bank the proceeds. The ruling class sends their own children to private schools that do not teach to odious Common Core standards.

But the anger of parents, students and teachers is growing. Common Core is a failure. When the capitalists decided to demean workers’ children, scorn their parents and debase the teachers, they showed their complete disregard for the entire working class. Working-class anger against the destruction of the public schools is uniting parents, students and teachers across the country against the ruling class and the government that is forcing Common Core upon our children.

Heather Cottin has been a teacher in public high schools and colleges for 48 years. She is also an administrator for the Facebook group “Radical Moms.”