I am going to stay with education a day or so more as I listen to corporate WYPR tell us that this education reform...Race to the Top WILL CONTINUE even as most citizens in Maryland do not want it. Again, we had to listen to Maryland State Education Association say that its union supports these policies and yet, every county I know of is shouting they do not want this kind of reform. MSEA is like NEA......they are made up of appointed education officials who then hire like minded people. They are bureaucrats for the Maryland State Department of Education. So, if you have a neo-liberal President like Obama who appoints a raging corporate education-privatizer like Arne Duncan as US Education Secretary, Duncan then fills his department heads with education privatizers and all of them are Federal union employees. The same happens at the state level. Neo-liberal O'Malley, Maryland's governor, appoints all of the heads of Maryland State Education and he appoints education-privatizers too. Those department heads hire people who want to implement privatization policy. These people are state union employees and indeed, there may be 17,000 of them. They are bureaucrats.......
Meanwhile, rank and file teachers all across the state are saying that this education union does not speak for them....and it doesn't. It works for O'Malley and Bill Gates/Wall Street. So, from Montgomery County to republican counties to Baltimore City and County......teachers and parents are shouting and it is growing as fear of retaliation is overcome by the shear ignorance of these Race to the Top policies. WHEN WYPR SAYS THAT THESE POLICES WILL BE IMPLEMENTED, WHAT THEY ARE SAYING IS THAT WITH THE CURRENT CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR.....ALL OF THEM WILL CONTINUE THESE REFORMS BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL NEO-LIBERALS------BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR. It is the Executive office of governor and mayor/county executive that decides if these reforms continue----NOT WYPR OR THE 1%.
The answer is running and voting for labor and justice to boot neo-liberals out of the democratic party-----they are not democrats. Then, that labor and justice governor will appoint leaders to state education that are democratic education policy-makers and the MSEA will then shout out for strong public schools and not privatized schools that kill teachers.
I will email the MSEA to take a look at my website to know what is happening in education since many of them are probably simply business people.
I showed a good piece on corporatization of education so let's look some more at research that says none of this is worth the money, time, and effort and again, what the end-goal looks like.
There are two world leaders today in educating their citizens....Finland and South Korea. WE THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA WANT THE FINLAND MODEL AND neo-liberals/Brookings Institution want the South Korean model.
IN FACT......NEO-LIBERALS CREATED THIS SOUTH KOREAN MODEL AFTER THE WAR EVEN AS THEY DISMANTLED THE #1 RANKED PUBLIC EDUCATION MODEL IN THE US TAKING AMERICA FROM THE RIGOR AND RESOURCES THAT MADE IT #1. THEY DID THAT BECAUSE THE US MODEL IN THE MID-1950s WAS THE SAME AS THE FINLAND MODEL TODAY. FINLAND IS #1 TODAY BECAUSE IT USES THE MODEL AMERICA USED TO HAVE.
Confusing yeah? Not really. Finland's model is a social democratic model full of public revenue supported public schools and lots of resources for these schools and well-paid and well-protected teachers as employees.....just as the US had before Reagan/Clinton dismantled it.
FINLAND'S MODEL CAME FROM THE US EDUCATION SYSTEM WHEN WE HAD A SOCIAL DEMOCRACY. REAGAN AND CLINTON KILLED THIS BECAUSE THEY WANTED PRIVATIZED SCHOOLS WITH NO PUBLIC FUNDING SINCE CORPORATIONS AND THE RICH DO NOT PAY TAXES AND WHAT IS LEFT IS SENT FOR CORPORATE SUBSIDY.
So, the US has this model for success in public education that existed before neo-liberals got hold of our government.
Today I wanted to look at South Korea to show where neo-liberals are wanting to take the US......and tomorrow I will show Finland and how its school system mirrors what America had when it was a social democracy! Note below the article that shows Korean citizens want to move towards the Finland model and Korean teachers are shouting against the same policies of Race to the Top as US teachers are!
KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS KOREAN MODEL WAS POLICY FROM THE SAME NEO-LIBERAL THINK TANKS FORCING THESE POLICIES ON AMERICA RIGHT NOW!
S. Korean teacher earns $4M a year, but isn't proud of success
Posted: Wed 8:38 PM, Feb 19, 2014 Local 8 NOW TV
SEOUL -- He commutes in a chauffeured Mercedes, makes more than $4 million a year -- and he's an English teacher.
Forty-four-year-old Kim Ki-Hoon is a private tutor who is thriving in South Korea's test-score-obsessed, academic-crazed culture. Kim teaches in a "hagwon," or "cram school," part of the $17 billion after-school learning industry.
CBS News was with Kim at the school on a Saturday afternoon; he says studying on weekends is typical.
Kim appears on TV shows featuring "star teachers." His students say his teaching is more engaging -- and practical -- than most. And to show his human -- almost geeky -- side, he'll bust out the guitar.
"I was inspired about his lectures," says 22-year-old Seung Jun-Yang. Seung says a typical school day starts at 7 a.m. and kept him studying past 1 a.m.
Students cheer on classmates before big exams, in this country where more than 70 percent of kids go to college. Competition is so fierce that parents can be seen praying for their kids' success.
But when asked what the long hours of schooling mean for students, Seung says, "Personally, I think, depression time."
Kim agreed.
"I'm not actually proud of my success," he says. "The other side of the coin is the inefficiency of Korean education."
While an international educational poll ranks Korean students at the top for academics, they're at the bottom for happiness. Kim is trying to change that.
"This is my favorite place to be, and I am happiest when I'm teaching," he says.
If we had to guess, going to the bank isn’t too bad, either.
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If you listen to Obama he is using the same hype that Koreans use to support their education. COMPETITION---BEST OF THE BEST---LIMITED SPACES IN TOP SCHOOLS.
Sadly, Obama is one big corporate hawker.
Obama Praises Korean Education System?
by Robert Koehler on March 12, 2009 in Korean Society
As you all already know, US President Barack Obama praised the Korean education system yesterday:
“Our children _ listen to this _ our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year,” Obama told a gathering at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce here. “That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy.”
As the KT points out, this comes as a shock to many in Korea, land of the “goose father,” international school controversies, constant bitching about private tutoring and never-ending talk of public education reform.
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While neo-liberals in the US try to force this Race to the Top privatization model they used in South Korea on Americans......Koreans are saying they do not like or want it as it takes all the quality of life and choice from life.....not very democratic!
Please keep in mind.....it is a neo-liberal policy that America must compete in global markets to be #1 and all of this is to make the rich richer. It has nothing to do with what is good for the country or you and I.
OECD education report: Korea’s school system a pressure cooker for children South Korea's education system is so controversial hundreds of thousands of pupils seek education overseas South Korea's education system is highly focused on examination results
Photo: Alamy By Andrew Salmon, Seoul
1:36PM GMT 03 Dec 2013
It has been praised by President Barack Obama and delivered top-five results for South Korea in global literacy and numeracy tests, but among Koreans themselves, the education system is so controversial that hundreds of thousands become educational emigrants.
he regimented by-the-book teaching system leaves nothing to chance.
“I have a friend in the US who is a swimming instructor and she guides her students to learn the best personalized swimming techniques for themselves, but this takes a long time to develop,” said Kim Won-sook, headmistress of central Seoul’s Jangwon Middle School. “In Korea, educators teach everything: The methods, the techniques - even how to practice.”
Teaching is egalitarian, but by favoring the average student, she added, does not cater well to slow or advanced learners.
“Korean education cannot produce geniuses,” added Sue Kim, an educational reporter at Korea’s leading daily, The Chosun Ilbo. “We don’t have any Nobel laureates, but we can produce a lot of Samsung mid-level managers.”
The system is highly focused on examination results.
The modern equivalent of the old state-run Confucian exams is the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test, or KSAT, which streams students for universities. In a society burdened with nepotism, cronyism and corruption, it is one of the few areas of Korean society that is scrupulously fair.
But intense focus on exam scores creates an irony: knowledge is often eschewed in favor of test preparation. “I have a nephew who is very literate but his mother says, “I don’t want him to read, as he won’t pass his tests,’” said Emanuel Pastreich, a Harvard professor of Asian Studies teaching at Seoul’s Kyunghee University. “In Korea you have to know the right answer to every question, but in the US or Europe, the process of getting to the answer is much more important,” added education journalist Kim.
Likewise, Koreans often consider skill less important than qualification. A Japanese chef working in Seoul noted that after graduating from a cooking institute in Italy, he decided to gain real experience working in Italian kitchens. Meanwhile, his Korean counterparts at the institute, having gained their certificates, flew home and opened restaurants.
Egalitarian school teaching, combined with pressure to ace exams and enter prestige universities, has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of cram schools that offer children a chance to get ahead; Kim the reporter noted that when her daughter entered elementary school, every single new student could already read.
“Parents prepare their children before school, so what is happening is that everyone in the classroom is equally prepared,” she said. “They are equally far advanced of the curriculum - and that is happening at every level.” THIS IS THE TIGER MOM APPROACH THAT IS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.....
Hakwon are as notable in Korean towns as pubs are in British, but British children might quail at the hours their Korean counterparts spend in them: Teens commonly leave school and attend hakwon until midnight.
“Kids sleep in school and stay up for the hakwons,” said Pastreich.
Scholastic pressures are so great that suicide is the number-one killer of South Koreans under 40 (compared to traffic accidents in other developed nations), while educational cost burdens are so colossal, they are cited as a factor in the declining national birth rate.
As a result, many Koreans are opting out and studying abroad. In 2012, 154,100 Koreans were enrolled in foreign universities and 85,000 were doing overseas language courses, according to ICEF Monitor, an educational data provider. And in November, Seoul’s Kyungyang Shinmun newspaper estimated that 5 percent of Korean families live apart, with the husband working in Korea, while the wife accompanies children studying overseas:
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Obama and neo-liberals follow Brookings Institution/neo-liberal policy and as such......choose a South Korean/Chinese model for education. Both are very autocratic and have intense competition with children frazzled with constant testing, study, and winners and losers. China has the model of tracking children into vocational schools according to how the state makes the assessment. THIS IS THE MODEL BEING USED BY NEO-LIBERALS IN STATES ACROSS THE COUNTRY....PHILLY AND BALTIMORE FIRST AND FOREMOST.
Below you see South Korean teachers shouting out 'enough is enough' as they reject the very model being forced on Americans right now.
DID YOU KNOW THE SAME NEO-LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS BEHIND RACE TO THE TOP INSTALLED THIS EDUCATION SYSTEM IN SOUTH KOREA AFTER THE WAR?
South Korea: Education union challenges standardised testing
(20 June 2012)The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) has challenged the South Korean Government to eliminate Korean Standardised Testing. The KTU, an EI affiliate, argues that the measurement of a teacher’s worth should not rely on standardised testing.
Members of KTU and education civic organizations protest in front of the building of the Ministry of Education in Seoul on 12 June The KTU held a press conference to raise this demand together with education related civic organizations in front of the Ministry of Education in Seoul on 12 June.
Schools in South Korea’s 16 provincial education offices have their budgets allocated according to the Standardised Testing Results (so-called Ilje-gosa), which are made available to the public.
Schools with the highest scores receive more money than those with lower scores. This, explained KTU President Jang Seok-woong, “puts a strong pressure on the schools to get a high grade on the testing by fair means or foul”.
Teaching to the test
“Implementing standardised testing since 2008, the Government has driven teachers and students into cutthroat competition and spread the philosophy of teaching only to the test, narrowing the school curriculum,” he added.
When the tests were initially imposed on public schools in 2008, the Ministry of Education dismissed 14 KTU teachers who exercised their right to opt out of the test, after conferring with students and parents regarding whether or not they wanted to participate in the standardised exam.
The Lee Myung-bak administration has undertaken a brutal attack against unionised teachers over the last five-year period. This has included the dismissal of 16 KTU executive members, the suspension of 67 union staff members, suppression of teachers' freedom of speech, and restriction of teachers' trade union rights and freedoms.
Educators at heart of debate
EI supports South Korean educators, parents and students in their struggle against test-driven education and the misuse of standardised testing to gauge teaching standards. EI firmly believes that educators and education unions should lead the debate about defining quality and excellence in teaching.
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Neo-liberals in the US are trying to install the same education model as they did in South Korea after the Korean War. As you can see below.....the citizens of Korea do not want it. As neo-liberals installed this model in Korea.....they dismantled the US model now shown with the Finland education system. This model was ranked #1 when America used it and it is now #1 with Finland and uses social democracy.....while Korea's is autocratic and cruel....neo-liberalism.
Neoliberal Ideology And The Restructuring Of Education In South Korea: The Continued Struggle For Democratic Social Reform, Workers’ Rights And Cham
Elizabeth Goggin, SIT Graduate InstituteFollow
Publication Date 2009
Degree Name MA in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations
First Advisor Janaki Natarajan
Abstract The history of South Korean education has been turbulent and contentious among its citizenry in the six decades since the country’s inception. Following Japanese colonial rule the political and governmental affairs of the country remained largely in the hands of the Japanese sympathizers making up South Korea’s ruling class at the time, which included the formation and administration of the education system. The United States, having had an integral role in the creation and development of the South Korean state, also influenced the trends and design models used to enact education reform, especially since military rule ended in 1993. This political transition in South Korea signaled the arrival of neoliberal economic policies and the evolution of the school reform movement from the previously promoted standard of equal education for students to a system valuing competition above all else. This paper examines the particular role of neoliberal political ideology in schools and how it has impacted education for students and professional freedom for teachers. In doing so, it attempts to answer the question: How have the legacy of a colonial education system and more recent neoliberal reforms in South Korea affected teachers and students? Through a series of interviews with members of the Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union (KTU) and students in a private girls high school in Seoul, it deals with themes of hierarchy in schools, heightened competition, the loss of labor rights, political rifts and the increasing disparity in educational opportunity. It is argued that neoliberal reform policies, heightened under the Lee Myung-bak administration, have been detrimental to the formation of an independent and egalitarian South Korean education system and have damaged the teachers’ movement for democratic control of schools.
Disciplines Curriculum and Social Inquiry | International and Comparative Education
Recommended Citation Goggin, Elizabeth, "Neoliberal Ideology And The Restructuring Of Education In South Korea: The Continued Struggle For Democratic Social Reform, Workers’ Rights And Cham" (2009). Capstone Collection. Paper 1316.
http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/capstones/1316
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As you see this reform is being forced on all Western nations by neo-liberals who have temporary control of our government. As this article shows, the goal is to make education about job training and less about educating for a democracy.....building citizens. Remember, the only reason jobs are scarce and the economy is stagnant is that Wall Street made it that way with massive fraud and corruption and wants to keep it that way because a desperate labor force can be exploited. Global markets allow these corporations to consolidate all business into one ownership and then to seek profits overseas even as they keep the domestic economy stagnant. THIS WAS THE GOAL OF REAGAN, CLINTON, BUSH, AND NOW OBAMA AS NEO-LIBERALS/NEO-CONS.
So, students should not have to feel pressured by competition to get into schools.....to obtain and compete for jobs.....all of which this education reform pretends is necessary.
STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE AND TAKE BACK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FROM THESE CORPORATE POLS. WE SIMPLY NEED TO REVERSE TH
Neoliberalism and the commercialization of higher education
By Holly Brentnall
SUNDAY JULY 28, 2013 The International
With neoliberalization university students are becoming increasingly career driven rather than critically engaging with their education. Cuts in spending and the replacement of academic staff by technology are not the only pressures faced by British academia. Increasingly, education is fashioning students into a productive labor force rather than teaching them more traditional academic ideals.
Last year’s plans to raise tuition fees in Britain to a maximum of £9000, $13,731 at today’s exchange rate, were coterminous with cuts of £2 billion in funding for education. Universities’ lack of funding caused them to compensate for lost income by hiking up tuition fees. This is perceived as disastrous for Britain’s progression up the global league tables, which, conducted by the Times educational supplement, rank universities by teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. With increasing competition from universities around the world, the UK’s University and College Union warns that Britain is at risk of being left behind.
The neoliberal turn to privatization and the commercialization of education is an area of concern for British universities. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been expressing itself in university syllabi. Abandoning previous values of critical-thinking and challenging basic assumptions, the focus leans towards teaching vaguely defined “skills” such as “teamwork,” “communication” and “leadership.”
Such effects are evident in the recently “enhanced” course guides at the London School of Economics (LSE). The LSE is a private university that specializes in the social sciences and ranks third in the university league tables for the UK. The university’s new course guides include ‘skills’-sets that lecturers have to tick off as they incorporate them into their lessons. Such an approach propounds an entrepreneurial attitude over the goals previously associated with the social sciences. As sociologist Stephen Ball claims, in such institutions students as commodities transforms education into a “big business” rather than education for education’s sake.
What is neoliberalism?
In the 1970s, responding to a period of stagflation (inflation with rising unemployment), former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan were the first to advocate the creeds of neoliberalism. This involved political-economic practices of privatization and deregulation besides the promotion of free markets and free trade. Neoliberalism rapidly spread across all G7 countries (the seven wealthiest countries on earth, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan) before being imposed via violent military coups onto many countries in the ‘developing’ world, including Iraq, Poland and most of South America.
According to geographer and anthropologist, David Harvey, proponents of neoliberalism hold positions of incredible power in university think-tanks as well as in financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The main intent of neoliberalism is to generate wealth by opening up countries to free trade, trade between countries that is not regulated by the government, allowing for deviance from ethical practices. However, studies such as those by economists Duménil and Lévy indicate that the primary effect of neoliberal strategies across the world has been for wealth to become increasingly concentrated within the richest strata of society. According to these studies, neoliberalism does not even improve economic growth, with global growth falling by almost 3% last year. In contrast, countries such as India and South Korea, spared from certain aspects of neoliberalism, saw rapid growth thanks to investment in industry.
Other implications of neoliberalism include the reduced power of organized labor, increased productivity paralleled by declining wages in order to extract more value, and most poignantly, as analysts such as David Harvey have found, the pumping of wealth from the poorest to the richest members of society via transfer pricing and cheap migrant labour.
Neoliberalism and higher education
Many academics are against the reforms in education taking place, whilst others argue that it is a necessity in a time of economic crisis. Doctor Jason Hickel, lecturer in Economic Anthropology at the LSE explains, “This seems like a relatively innocuous change, but to me it’s a sign that the way we think about higher education is changing for the worse.” Some might reject this, claiming that teaching career-orientated skills are crucial in order to bolster students against the current economic climate. “Of course, students need to get jobs upon graduating. I am sensitive to that.
The proponents of the New Enhanced Course Guides argue that students will be able to use the language from the skills section to fill out their CVs and to convince employers to hire them.” Nevertheless, as Hickel argues, “The kinds of skills that the New Enhanced Course Guides [at the LSE] include, reflect the language of the corporate world and the ethic of entrepreneurial self-management. Even if they didn’t, they would still send students the wrong message, namely, that education is designed to equip individuals with marketable skills, and that the ultimate end goal is productivity.”
Furthermore, the way people are taught will have transformative effects on the world as a whole, as generations of students progress into the jobs market and foreign students return to their countries of origin, carrying with them the neoliberal articles of faith. After coming home with neoliberal values, many American-educated students led military coups in which the pursuit of commercial ideals implicated the death of hundreds of thousands. This was the case for Chile in 1973, where the insurgent government was led by US-educated graduates. More recently, in 2009, a coup in Honduras was led by graduates taught at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US training ground based in Georgia, which has been linked to to torture cases, dictatorships and military coups. Countries that experienced such coups, according to data gathered by the CIA, are among the most economically unequal in the world. With an intake of students from 145 different countries, spanning from South America to the South East Asia, the global impact of education at universities such as the LSE will be equally significant.
Besides the circulation of powerful neoliberal ideologies throughout academia, tuition hikes also become subject to marketization, the treatment of education as a business and students as a future labour force. Evidencing this, one year into its term in office, the British Conservative Party held meetings to discuss how universities could help contribute to growth in the economy.
In this process of marketization, austerity measures have led to increased tuition fees, which students find increasingly difficult to pay and applications to universities are declining. In 2011, there was a decrease of 20,000 applications. This implicates the bursting of the tuition bubble which has led to a further neoliberal assault on education through managerial-imposed readjustments of academic faculties as well as closures of poorly achieving departments. This in turn has led to declining moral and increased strategic competition between academic staff.
Education has also become increasingly quantified via standardized testing, as universities and departments are ranked by performance in a way that brushes over divergences in opinion, steering the control of curriculum and organization of departments. With layoffs as well as cessations of entire disciplines in certain universities, underachievement is blamed upon the teachers rather than the effects of reduced funding.
For example, the closure of Exeter University’s chemistry department in 2006, determined principally by financial motives, was met by vociferous resentment on the part of the chemists as well as students, academic unions and the Royal Society of Chemistry. The department was shut down due to its low position in the university ranking, the high cost of running its laboratories and in order to attract further grants. Students and teachers alike responded with letters and emails of complaint. Nevertheless, the university’s director, Steven Smith, persisted in this profit-making tactic.
What are the viable alternatives?
Neoliberal techniques involve the commercialization of education, focusing principally on preparing students for the world of work. As Hickel argues, “Those of us who teach in the liberal arts and social sciences generally reject this approach. We encourage our students to value learning for its own sake, and we try to sow in them a passion for asking difficult questions about the world and equip them to think critically about taken-for-granted assumptions.”
From the start of the 21st century, academics and institutions have started calling for a revival of the cosmopolitan ethic (‘an injury to one is an injury to all’), which provides tangible alternatives to neoliberalism. Others advocate Democratic Learning, which, in drawing on the views of the educator, John Dewey, provides a framework for teachers, involving methods influenced by the students themselves and, takes a humanist approach to teaching, concerned with human welfare. So doing, lecturers will supply students with the tools necessary to become fully active democratic citizens. As Hickel claims, “We need to be empowering students to resist this kind of commodification of everything rather than encouraging it, especially given that all indicators seem to suggest that it’s leading our society down a dead-end road. For us, higher education is more about learning how to challenge the status quo rather than simply learning how to climb the ladder.”
On the other hand, some take a less optimistic view of British education. As Tarak Barkawi, lecturer in Politics at the New School for Social Research explains, “For many years now in the UK, faculty have been forced to put things on their syllabi (like learning aims and outcomes) so that battle was lost some time ago.” Barkawi also introduces yet another side of the debate: “For what it is worth, the neoliberal modernizers are bad, but so too are those who cite traditional academic values to protect cosy jobs, or to not do their jobs, or to carry on doing what they always have done. So you have to be a little careful at taking everything at face value.”
As broached by Barkawi, the commercialization of British education is not a black and white issue but a more nuanced matter of much contention. There are those who advocate a profit-orientated education, others such as Hickel who plead for a return to critical engagement and a humanist outlook, and finally, those such as Barkawi who have a more tentative view. However, as the league tables demonstrate, for British universities not to lag behind the rest of the world there must be a reassessment of the purpose of education.
Holly Brentnall is a freelancer for The International.
Meanwhile, rank and file teachers all across the state are saying that this education union does not speak for them....and it doesn't. It works for O'Malley and Bill Gates/Wall Street. So, from Montgomery County to republican counties to Baltimore City and County......teachers and parents are shouting and it is growing as fear of retaliation is overcome by the shear ignorance of these Race to the Top policies. WHEN WYPR SAYS THAT THESE POLICES WILL BE IMPLEMENTED, WHAT THEY ARE SAYING IS THAT WITH THE CURRENT CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR.....ALL OF THEM WILL CONTINUE THESE REFORMS BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL NEO-LIBERALS------BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR. It is the Executive office of governor and mayor/county executive that decides if these reforms continue----NOT WYPR OR THE 1%.
The answer is running and voting for labor and justice to boot neo-liberals out of the democratic party-----they are not democrats. Then, that labor and justice governor will appoint leaders to state education that are democratic education policy-makers and the MSEA will then shout out for strong public schools and not privatized schools that kill teachers.
I will email the MSEA to take a look at my website to know what is happening in education since many of them are probably simply business people.
I showed a good piece on corporatization of education so let's look some more at research that says none of this is worth the money, time, and effort and again, what the end-goal looks like.
There are two world leaders today in educating their citizens....Finland and South Korea. WE THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA WANT THE FINLAND MODEL AND neo-liberals/Brookings Institution want the South Korean model.
IN FACT......NEO-LIBERALS CREATED THIS SOUTH KOREAN MODEL AFTER THE WAR EVEN AS THEY DISMANTLED THE #1 RANKED PUBLIC EDUCATION MODEL IN THE US TAKING AMERICA FROM THE RIGOR AND RESOURCES THAT MADE IT #1. THEY DID THAT BECAUSE THE US MODEL IN THE MID-1950s WAS THE SAME AS THE FINLAND MODEL TODAY. FINLAND IS #1 TODAY BECAUSE IT USES THE MODEL AMERICA USED TO HAVE.
Confusing yeah? Not really. Finland's model is a social democratic model full of public revenue supported public schools and lots of resources for these schools and well-paid and well-protected teachers as employees.....just as the US had before Reagan/Clinton dismantled it.
FINLAND'S MODEL CAME FROM THE US EDUCATION SYSTEM WHEN WE HAD A SOCIAL DEMOCRACY. REAGAN AND CLINTON KILLED THIS BECAUSE THEY WANTED PRIVATIZED SCHOOLS WITH NO PUBLIC FUNDING SINCE CORPORATIONS AND THE RICH DO NOT PAY TAXES AND WHAT IS LEFT IS SENT FOR CORPORATE SUBSIDY.
So, the US has this model for success in public education that existed before neo-liberals got hold of our government.
Today I wanted to look at South Korea to show where neo-liberals are wanting to take the US......and tomorrow I will show Finland and how its school system mirrors what America had when it was a social democracy! Note below the article that shows Korean citizens want to move towards the Finland model and Korean teachers are shouting against the same policies of Race to the Top as US teachers are!
KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS KOREAN MODEL WAS POLICY FROM THE SAME NEO-LIBERAL THINK TANKS FORCING THESE POLICIES ON AMERICA RIGHT NOW!
S. Korean teacher earns $4M a year, but isn't proud of success
Posted: Wed 8:38 PM, Feb 19, 2014 Local 8 NOW TV
SEOUL -- He commutes in a chauffeured Mercedes, makes more than $4 million a year -- and he's an English teacher.
Forty-four-year-old Kim Ki-Hoon is a private tutor who is thriving in South Korea's test-score-obsessed, academic-crazed culture. Kim teaches in a "hagwon," or "cram school," part of the $17 billion after-school learning industry.
CBS News was with Kim at the school on a Saturday afternoon; he says studying on weekends is typical.
Kim appears on TV shows featuring "star teachers." His students say his teaching is more engaging -- and practical -- than most. And to show his human -- almost geeky -- side, he'll bust out the guitar.
"I was inspired about his lectures," says 22-year-old Seung Jun-Yang. Seung says a typical school day starts at 7 a.m. and kept him studying past 1 a.m.
Students cheer on classmates before big exams, in this country where more than 70 percent of kids go to college. Competition is so fierce that parents can be seen praying for their kids' success.
But when asked what the long hours of schooling mean for students, Seung says, "Personally, I think, depression time."
Kim agreed.
"I'm not actually proud of my success," he says. "The other side of the coin is the inefficiency of Korean education."
While an international educational poll ranks Korean students at the top for academics, they're at the bottom for happiness. Kim is trying to change that.
"This is my favorite place to be, and I am happiest when I'm teaching," he says.
If we had to guess, going to the bank isn’t too bad, either.
________________________________________
If you listen to Obama he is using the same hype that Koreans use to support their education. COMPETITION---BEST OF THE BEST---LIMITED SPACES IN TOP SCHOOLS.
Sadly, Obama is one big corporate hawker.
Obama Praises Korean Education System?
by Robert Koehler on March 12, 2009 in Korean Society
As you all already know, US President Barack Obama praised the Korean education system yesterday:
“Our children _ listen to this _ our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year,” Obama told a gathering at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce here. “That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy.”
As the KT points out, this comes as a shock to many in Korea, land of the “goose father,” international school controversies, constant bitching about private tutoring and never-ending talk of public education reform.
____________________________________
While neo-liberals in the US try to force this Race to the Top privatization model they used in South Korea on Americans......Koreans are saying they do not like or want it as it takes all the quality of life and choice from life.....not very democratic!
Please keep in mind.....it is a neo-liberal policy that America must compete in global markets to be #1 and all of this is to make the rich richer. It has nothing to do with what is good for the country or you and I.
OECD education report: Korea’s school system a pressure cooker for children South Korea's education system is so controversial hundreds of thousands of pupils seek education overseas South Korea's education system is highly focused on examination results
Photo: Alamy By Andrew Salmon, Seoul
1:36PM GMT 03 Dec 2013
It has been praised by President Barack Obama and delivered top-five results for South Korea in global literacy and numeracy tests, but among Koreans themselves, the education system is so controversial that hundreds of thousands become educational emigrants.
he regimented by-the-book teaching system leaves nothing to chance.
“I have a friend in the US who is a swimming instructor and she guides her students to learn the best personalized swimming techniques for themselves, but this takes a long time to develop,” said Kim Won-sook, headmistress of central Seoul’s Jangwon Middle School. “In Korea, educators teach everything: The methods, the techniques - even how to practice.”
Teaching is egalitarian, but by favoring the average student, she added, does not cater well to slow or advanced learners.
“Korean education cannot produce geniuses,” added Sue Kim, an educational reporter at Korea’s leading daily, The Chosun Ilbo. “We don’t have any Nobel laureates, but we can produce a lot of Samsung mid-level managers.”
The system is highly focused on examination results.
The modern equivalent of the old state-run Confucian exams is the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test, or KSAT, which streams students for universities. In a society burdened with nepotism, cronyism and corruption, it is one of the few areas of Korean society that is scrupulously fair.
But intense focus on exam scores creates an irony: knowledge is often eschewed in favor of test preparation. “I have a nephew who is very literate but his mother says, “I don’t want him to read, as he won’t pass his tests,’” said Emanuel Pastreich, a Harvard professor of Asian Studies teaching at Seoul’s Kyunghee University. “In Korea you have to know the right answer to every question, but in the US or Europe, the process of getting to the answer is much more important,” added education journalist Kim.
Likewise, Koreans often consider skill less important than qualification. A Japanese chef working in Seoul noted that after graduating from a cooking institute in Italy, he decided to gain real experience working in Italian kitchens. Meanwhile, his Korean counterparts at the institute, having gained their certificates, flew home and opened restaurants.
Egalitarian school teaching, combined with pressure to ace exams and enter prestige universities, has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of cram schools that offer children a chance to get ahead; Kim the reporter noted that when her daughter entered elementary school, every single new student could already read.
“Parents prepare their children before school, so what is happening is that everyone in the classroom is equally prepared,” she said. “They are equally far advanced of the curriculum - and that is happening at every level.” THIS IS THE TIGER MOM APPROACH THAT IS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.....
Hakwon are as notable in Korean towns as pubs are in British, but British children might quail at the hours their Korean counterparts spend in them: Teens commonly leave school and attend hakwon until midnight.
“Kids sleep in school and stay up for the hakwons,” said Pastreich.
Scholastic pressures are so great that suicide is the number-one killer of South Koreans under 40 (compared to traffic accidents in other developed nations), while educational cost burdens are so colossal, they are cited as a factor in the declining national birth rate.
As a result, many Koreans are opting out and studying abroad. In 2012, 154,100 Koreans were enrolled in foreign universities and 85,000 were doing overseas language courses, according to ICEF Monitor, an educational data provider. And in November, Seoul’s Kyungyang Shinmun newspaper estimated that 5 percent of Korean families live apart, with the husband working in Korea, while the wife accompanies children studying overseas:
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Obama and neo-liberals follow Brookings Institution/neo-liberal policy and as such......choose a South Korean/Chinese model for education. Both are very autocratic and have intense competition with children frazzled with constant testing, study, and winners and losers. China has the model of tracking children into vocational schools according to how the state makes the assessment. THIS IS THE MODEL BEING USED BY NEO-LIBERALS IN STATES ACROSS THE COUNTRY....PHILLY AND BALTIMORE FIRST AND FOREMOST.
Below you see South Korean teachers shouting out 'enough is enough' as they reject the very model being forced on Americans right now.
DID YOU KNOW THE SAME NEO-LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS BEHIND RACE TO THE TOP INSTALLED THIS EDUCATION SYSTEM IN SOUTH KOREA AFTER THE WAR?
South Korea: Education union challenges standardised testing
(20 June 2012)The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) has challenged the South Korean Government to eliminate Korean Standardised Testing. The KTU, an EI affiliate, argues that the measurement of a teacher’s worth should not rely on standardised testing.
Members of KTU and education civic organizations protest in front of the building of the Ministry of Education in Seoul on 12 June The KTU held a press conference to raise this demand together with education related civic organizations in front of the Ministry of Education in Seoul on 12 June.
Schools in South Korea’s 16 provincial education offices have their budgets allocated according to the Standardised Testing Results (so-called Ilje-gosa), which are made available to the public.
Schools with the highest scores receive more money than those with lower scores. This, explained KTU President Jang Seok-woong, “puts a strong pressure on the schools to get a high grade on the testing by fair means or foul”.
Teaching to the test
“Implementing standardised testing since 2008, the Government has driven teachers and students into cutthroat competition and spread the philosophy of teaching only to the test, narrowing the school curriculum,” he added.
When the tests were initially imposed on public schools in 2008, the Ministry of Education dismissed 14 KTU teachers who exercised their right to opt out of the test, after conferring with students and parents regarding whether or not they wanted to participate in the standardised exam.
The Lee Myung-bak administration has undertaken a brutal attack against unionised teachers over the last five-year period. This has included the dismissal of 16 KTU executive members, the suspension of 67 union staff members, suppression of teachers' freedom of speech, and restriction of teachers' trade union rights and freedoms.
Educators at heart of debate
EI supports South Korean educators, parents and students in their struggle against test-driven education and the misuse of standardised testing to gauge teaching standards. EI firmly believes that educators and education unions should lead the debate about defining quality and excellence in teaching.
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Neo-liberals in the US are trying to install the same education model as they did in South Korea after the Korean War. As you can see below.....the citizens of Korea do not want it. As neo-liberals installed this model in Korea.....they dismantled the US model now shown with the Finland education system. This model was ranked #1 when America used it and it is now #1 with Finland and uses social democracy.....while Korea's is autocratic and cruel....neo-liberalism.
Neoliberal Ideology And The Restructuring Of Education In South Korea: The Continued Struggle For Democratic Social Reform, Workers’ Rights And Cham
Elizabeth Goggin, SIT Graduate InstituteFollow
Publication Date 2009
Degree Name MA in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations
First Advisor Janaki Natarajan
Abstract The history of South Korean education has been turbulent and contentious among its citizenry in the six decades since the country’s inception. Following Japanese colonial rule the political and governmental affairs of the country remained largely in the hands of the Japanese sympathizers making up South Korea’s ruling class at the time, which included the formation and administration of the education system. The United States, having had an integral role in the creation and development of the South Korean state, also influenced the trends and design models used to enact education reform, especially since military rule ended in 1993. This political transition in South Korea signaled the arrival of neoliberal economic policies and the evolution of the school reform movement from the previously promoted standard of equal education for students to a system valuing competition above all else. This paper examines the particular role of neoliberal political ideology in schools and how it has impacted education for students and professional freedom for teachers. In doing so, it attempts to answer the question: How have the legacy of a colonial education system and more recent neoliberal reforms in South Korea affected teachers and students? Through a series of interviews with members of the Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union (KTU) and students in a private girls high school in Seoul, it deals with themes of hierarchy in schools, heightened competition, the loss of labor rights, political rifts and the increasing disparity in educational opportunity. It is argued that neoliberal reform policies, heightened under the Lee Myung-bak administration, have been detrimental to the formation of an independent and egalitarian South Korean education system and have damaged the teachers’ movement for democratic control of schools.
Disciplines Curriculum and Social Inquiry | International and Comparative Education
Recommended Citation Goggin, Elizabeth, "Neoliberal Ideology And The Restructuring Of Education In South Korea: The Continued Struggle For Democratic Social Reform, Workers’ Rights And Cham" (2009). Capstone Collection. Paper 1316.
http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/capstones/1316
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As you see this reform is being forced on all Western nations by neo-liberals who have temporary control of our government. As this article shows, the goal is to make education about job training and less about educating for a democracy.....building citizens. Remember, the only reason jobs are scarce and the economy is stagnant is that Wall Street made it that way with massive fraud and corruption and wants to keep it that way because a desperate labor force can be exploited. Global markets allow these corporations to consolidate all business into one ownership and then to seek profits overseas even as they keep the domestic economy stagnant. THIS WAS THE GOAL OF REAGAN, CLINTON, BUSH, AND NOW OBAMA AS NEO-LIBERALS/NEO-CONS.
So, students should not have to feel pressured by competition to get into schools.....to obtain and compete for jobs.....all of which this education reform pretends is necessary.
STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE AND TAKE BACK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FROM THESE CORPORATE POLS. WE SIMPLY NEED TO REVERSE TH
Neoliberalism and the commercialization of higher education
By Holly Brentnall
SUNDAY JULY 28, 2013 The International
With neoliberalization university students are becoming increasingly career driven rather than critically engaging with their education. Cuts in spending and the replacement of academic staff by technology are not the only pressures faced by British academia. Increasingly, education is fashioning students into a productive labor force rather than teaching them more traditional academic ideals.
Last year’s plans to raise tuition fees in Britain to a maximum of £9000, $13,731 at today’s exchange rate, were coterminous with cuts of £2 billion in funding for education. Universities’ lack of funding caused them to compensate for lost income by hiking up tuition fees. This is perceived as disastrous for Britain’s progression up the global league tables, which, conducted by the Times educational supplement, rank universities by teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. With increasing competition from universities around the world, the UK’s University and College Union warns that Britain is at risk of being left behind.
The neoliberal turn to privatization and the commercialization of education is an area of concern for British universities. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been expressing itself in university syllabi. Abandoning previous values of critical-thinking and challenging basic assumptions, the focus leans towards teaching vaguely defined “skills” such as “teamwork,” “communication” and “leadership.”
Such effects are evident in the recently “enhanced” course guides at the London School of Economics (LSE). The LSE is a private university that specializes in the social sciences and ranks third in the university league tables for the UK. The university’s new course guides include ‘skills’-sets that lecturers have to tick off as they incorporate them into their lessons. Such an approach propounds an entrepreneurial attitude over the goals previously associated with the social sciences. As sociologist Stephen Ball claims, in such institutions students as commodities transforms education into a “big business” rather than education for education’s sake.
What is neoliberalism?
In the 1970s, responding to a period of stagflation (inflation with rising unemployment), former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan were the first to advocate the creeds of neoliberalism. This involved political-economic practices of privatization and deregulation besides the promotion of free markets and free trade. Neoliberalism rapidly spread across all G7 countries (the seven wealthiest countries on earth, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan) before being imposed via violent military coups onto many countries in the ‘developing’ world, including Iraq, Poland and most of South America.
According to geographer and anthropologist, David Harvey, proponents of neoliberalism hold positions of incredible power in university think-tanks as well as in financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The main intent of neoliberalism is to generate wealth by opening up countries to free trade, trade between countries that is not regulated by the government, allowing for deviance from ethical practices. However, studies such as those by economists Duménil and Lévy indicate that the primary effect of neoliberal strategies across the world has been for wealth to become increasingly concentrated within the richest strata of society. According to these studies, neoliberalism does not even improve economic growth, with global growth falling by almost 3% last year. In contrast, countries such as India and South Korea, spared from certain aspects of neoliberalism, saw rapid growth thanks to investment in industry.
Other implications of neoliberalism include the reduced power of organized labor, increased productivity paralleled by declining wages in order to extract more value, and most poignantly, as analysts such as David Harvey have found, the pumping of wealth from the poorest to the richest members of society via transfer pricing and cheap migrant labour.
Neoliberalism and higher education
Many academics are against the reforms in education taking place, whilst others argue that it is a necessity in a time of economic crisis. Doctor Jason Hickel, lecturer in Economic Anthropology at the LSE explains, “This seems like a relatively innocuous change, but to me it’s a sign that the way we think about higher education is changing for the worse.” Some might reject this, claiming that teaching career-orientated skills are crucial in order to bolster students against the current economic climate. “Of course, students need to get jobs upon graduating. I am sensitive to that.
The proponents of the New Enhanced Course Guides argue that students will be able to use the language from the skills section to fill out their CVs and to convince employers to hire them.” Nevertheless, as Hickel argues, “The kinds of skills that the New Enhanced Course Guides [at the LSE] include, reflect the language of the corporate world and the ethic of entrepreneurial self-management. Even if they didn’t, they would still send students the wrong message, namely, that education is designed to equip individuals with marketable skills, and that the ultimate end goal is productivity.”
Furthermore, the way people are taught will have transformative effects on the world as a whole, as generations of students progress into the jobs market and foreign students return to their countries of origin, carrying with them the neoliberal articles of faith. After coming home with neoliberal values, many American-educated students led military coups in which the pursuit of commercial ideals implicated the death of hundreds of thousands. This was the case for Chile in 1973, where the insurgent government was led by US-educated graduates. More recently, in 2009, a coup in Honduras was led by graduates taught at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US training ground based in Georgia, which has been linked to to torture cases, dictatorships and military coups. Countries that experienced such coups, according to data gathered by the CIA, are among the most economically unequal in the world. With an intake of students from 145 different countries, spanning from South America to the South East Asia, the global impact of education at universities such as the LSE will be equally significant.
Besides the circulation of powerful neoliberal ideologies throughout academia, tuition hikes also become subject to marketization, the treatment of education as a business and students as a future labour force. Evidencing this, one year into its term in office, the British Conservative Party held meetings to discuss how universities could help contribute to growth in the economy.
In this process of marketization, austerity measures have led to increased tuition fees, which students find increasingly difficult to pay and applications to universities are declining. In 2011, there was a decrease of 20,000 applications. This implicates the bursting of the tuition bubble which has led to a further neoliberal assault on education through managerial-imposed readjustments of academic faculties as well as closures of poorly achieving departments. This in turn has led to declining moral and increased strategic competition between academic staff.
Education has also become increasingly quantified via standardized testing, as universities and departments are ranked by performance in a way that brushes over divergences in opinion, steering the control of curriculum and organization of departments. With layoffs as well as cessations of entire disciplines in certain universities, underachievement is blamed upon the teachers rather than the effects of reduced funding.
For example, the closure of Exeter University’s chemistry department in 2006, determined principally by financial motives, was met by vociferous resentment on the part of the chemists as well as students, academic unions and the Royal Society of Chemistry. The department was shut down due to its low position in the university ranking, the high cost of running its laboratories and in order to attract further grants. Students and teachers alike responded with letters and emails of complaint. Nevertheless, the university’s director, Steven Smith, persisted in this profit-making tactic.
What are the viable alternatives?
Neoliberal techniques involve the commercialization of education, focusing principally on preparing students for the world of work. As Hickel argues, “Those of us who teach in the liberal arts and social sciences generally reject this approach. We encourage our students to value learning for its own sake, and we try to sow in them a passion for asking difficult questions about the world and equip them to think critically about taken-for-granted assumptions.”
From the start of the 21st century, academics and institutions have started calling for a revival of the cosmopolitan ethic (‘an injury to one is an injury to all’), which provides tangible alternatives to neoliberalism. Others advocate Democratic Learning, which, in drawing on the views of the educator, John Dewey, provides a framework for teachers, involving methods influenced by the students themselves and, takes a humanist approach to teaching, concerned with human welfare. So doing, lecturers will supply students with the tools necessary to become fully active democratic citizens. As Hickel claims, “We need to be empowering students to resist this kind of commodification of everything rather than encouraging it, especially given that all indicators seem to suggest that it’s leading our society down a dead-end road. For us, higher education is more about learning how to challenge the status quo rather than simply learning how to climb the ladder.”
On the other hand, some take a less optimistic view of British education. As Tarak Barkawi, lecturer in Politics at the New School for Social Research explains, “For many years now in the UK, faculty have been forced to put things on their syllabi (like learning aims and outcomes) so that battle was lost some time ago.” Barkawi also introduces yet another side of the debate: “For what it is worth, the neoliberal modernizers are bad, but so too are those who cite traditional academic values to protect cosy jobs, or to not do their jobs, or to carry on doing what they always have done. So you have to be a little careful at taking everything at face value.”
As broached by Barkawi, the commercialization of British education is not a black and white issue but a more nuanced matter of much contention. There are those who advocate a profit-orientated education, others such as Hickel who plead for a return to critical engagement and a humanist outlook, and finally, those such as Barkawi who have a more tentative view. However, as the league tables demonstrate, for British universities not to lag behind the rest of the world there must be a reassessment of the purpose of education.
Holly Brentnall is a freelancer for The International.
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