This is a terrific commentary on the Bennett fiasco, written by Valerie Strauss. Who is the biggest loser? Could it be the man behind the curtain who decided that testing would make kids smarter? The one who turned choice into a battle cry? The guy who invited for-profit charters into Florida to make buckets of cash that could be used to hire lobbyists and clear the way for more profits?
Florida has been shuffling education commissioners in and out of the state with startling regularity. There have been 8? 10? in the past decade. This is success?
Meanwhile, Bennett has been bounced from two states in the past year.
And the trap for him was the dumb school grading system that Jeb Bush is so proud of. No state has gotten it right because it is too simplistic to label a complex institution with a single letter grade; there are too many variables, too many moving parts, too many different components that make up a school to say that it can be rated like a tomato or a pumpkin.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m sure Bennet agrees with Valerie Strauss. The difference is he wants to profit from the simple but politically effective A-F rating system. In a sense a stroke of “genius”.
“What, after all, does it say for Bush’s national reform agenda if the former governor can’t influence education policy in the state in which he started it all?”
It says Jeb is just another piggy feeding at the public trough…see Jeb and his teats (oops I meant team):
I agree Bush has lost big-time, but I disagree strongly with the political “victory” position Valerie offers.
Here’s what I posted to her blog:
Valerie, you’ve accidentally conceded the whole battle while you rejoice over this one skirmish. What’s wrong with this statement?
“…Said Nan Rich, a Democrat and former Florida Senate minority leader who is running for governor: “How can we hold students, teachers and schools accountable if the system’s leadership keeps changing? We need to stop the revolving door of leaders.” She makes a good point…”
No, she doesn’t make a good point. We aren’t going to defend the American public education system by praising spineless Democrats who defend the vicious, fundamentally flawed corporate drive to “hold students, teachers and schools accountable.”
Lazy, short-term thinking like that only helps them entrench themselves further in both parties. No politician who uses the corrupt jargon of “accountability” is on the side of American children. Our most urgent goal is to get the corporate boot off their necks entirely.
The biggest losers in the Bennett scandal? The children that are continuing to be abused by the new status quo of inappropriate high-stakes testing, inaccurate and abusive ranking of schools, and the constant churn of teachers amid reformist expectations.
Let us not be caught dancing in the aisles over this one man’s come-uppance…let us focus the media’s attention and focus the public’s attention…let us lead the dialog back to the students. How where they hurt by this? What do we need to do now to remedy it and keep it from happening again? Why was this ever even possible, and how do we keep it from happening again?
Exactly. It’s exactly their “accountability” doctrine which most directly hurts children, in my experience. That’s the teeth in the testing trap. How can we counter this central smarmy term?
Here is the powerful and “sticky” counter-narrative we should raise: cheats and liars are holding our children “accountable” to their profit-crazed cronies. Corruption is rampant. They don’t know how to teach children even in the most mechanical sense, so their only refuge is in scrubbing struggling children off their rosters, statistical lies and outright cheating.
The “lucky” kids who are accepted into their fraudulent enterprise, overall, actually fare worse than they would in real public schools. The crony-charter industry uses tricks like this rigged school grade to cover up that evidence, but it breaks through their smoke-screen.
Get Jeb Bush’s heel off our children’s throats. They aren’t for sale, and they aren’t “accountable” to his business plan. American children need to be free to learn, and American teachers must be free to teach them.
The biggest loser in this one skirmish is Jeb Bush, however until his influence is exorcised and completely discredited Florida’s education future as well as Florida politics in general will not change. Jeb Bush is the worst single thing that has happened to this state in the last twenty years including Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma.
His brother screwed things up pretty bad too.
The biggest snake oil taps in Tallahassee are the Foundation for Florida’s Future and Chiefs for Change. JEB! must be stopped.