According to a report by Valerie Strauss in the “Washington Post,” Secretary Duncan urged Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio not to appoint Joshua Starr, superintendent in Montgomery County, as chancellor of the NYC public schools. This allegedly was Duncan’s revenge for Starr’s public call for a three-year moratorium on standardized testing.
Testing, of course, is the linchpin of Duncan’s Race to the Top. Duncan may be touchy because Race to the Top has no new funding, gets poor results, is losing steam and its luster, or because of growing popular resistance to Common Core, which is a high priority for the Department of Education, even though it is legally prohibited from attempting to influence curriculum or instruction in the nation’s schools.
Why would Duncan intervene in a strictly local personnel decision, which is unusual, to say the least, for a cabinet member?
Jersey Jazzman explains it here.
Bottom line, according to JJ: Duncan is jealous of Starr because he is a real educator, unlike Duncan.
He writes:
“Maybe this is what bothers Duncan the most about Starr: unlike the SecEd, Starr has displayed courage on the thorny issues of tracking, race, and desegregation. Unlike Duncan, Starr has stood behind teachers, working with them to continue using a model teacher evaluation system, and fighting to keep it even as Duncan pushes his test-based evaluation madness. Unlike Duncan, Starr appears to have the respect of his parents, teachers, and students; even the reformies give him back-handed compliments. And, unlike Duncan, Starr is thoughtful and articulate.”
– See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-petty-jealousy-of-arne-duncan.html#sthash.cFpXm5hZ.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Duncan is a light weight in all ways. I don’t even bother listening to him, except to have a good laugh.
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Not sure jealous is the right term — I would say fearful. After the mess with Obamacare, I think the entire administration is looking over its shoulder for the next shoe to drop — an common core is a big shoe. As Duncan looks out over the national policy landscape he has conservatives going after common core thinking it is mind control and progressives going after it because it represents bad education. The bigger problem for Duncan is federalism–local control of schools. Common core/race to the top is now being perceived as government overreach —both by the right and the left. Characteristically, as he did in Chicago, Duncan removes or marginalizes his opponents — but as he is discovering the United States is a bit different than Chicago.
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“In the end, it looks like New York’s schools are going to be fine. Carmen Fariña, like Joshua Starr, is everything Arne Duncan is not: credential, respected, experienced, and successful. But this incident speaks volumes about Duncan: he went out of his way to keep Starr from taking over NYC’s schools because the man doesn’t want to rush to implement Duncan’s failing policies.”
Does this not say it all?
We have an amateur basketball player as our Federal Secretary of Education.
Duncan has about as much educational experience as Dennis Rodman . . . .
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If Duncan leaves before the end of his term — probably as a CEO for Pearson—Rodman would be the next logical pick—great basketball player and no educational background.
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Easy, now. Dennis Rodman is busy making nice with North Korea. He has Mad Skillz as a diplomat! 😛 And he’s at least a PRO b-ball player.
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Maybe can get Rodman to leave one dictator in order to deal with a few on our own soil . . . .
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That’s so DR can marry M. Rhee so that they can become the First Couple of the US of A as the North Korean Spy Agency has trained the Rheeject to destroy America (sic) through destroying American (sic) Public Education. When complete they will be installed upon the American (sic) throne to be the First Vice Royalty of the new North Korean Empire!
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Rhee would eat Rodman alive. He’s no match for her. Clash of the ids, egos, and super-egos . . . . She’d out-narcissist him in less than a week.
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RR
Rhee, Bloomberg. Klein, King, Tisch, Kopp, Coleman, and Duncan have a sum total of THREE YEARS of public school teaching experience. Eight of the most influential US education reformers of the 21st century have less experience than any one fourth year teacher. This should be a national scandal. By the way Rhee has all 3 of those years.
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Most of our American society and culture is a scandal.
American exceptionalism is a hoax and a scandal . . . . .
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Land of the free, but home of the slave.
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NY Teacher,
That is really horrible.
And true.
Did you listen to the Reverend’s speech at the De Blasio Inauguration? The NY Times blasted him. The NY Times is a supermarket rag when it comes to its editorial board for the most part.
I praise the Reverend, Harry Bellafonte, Letitia James, and the Youth Nobel Poet Laureate.
Bloomberg was reeling in psychic pain. So uncomfortable. Such a lizard, a cold blooded reptile, and plutocrat with a capital P.
Good riddance to Bloomberg. May he join the ranks and present status of Leona Helmsely . . . . .
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Mike “Term Limits are for Little People” Bloomberg.
Did you check out that line-up.
Lord Cuomo with an unprecedented appearance to make good with progressives. Billary – the same.
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Reformers protect their children from the common core. Duncan’s kids attend school in Virginia (no common core). King’s children attend Montessori school (no common core).
In the upcoming elections, votes will count against the common core in 45 states and DC. Governors, mayors and legislators are paying attention. Parents will not go away.
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NY Teacher:
“Billary”?
That’s a fine one. . . . Brangelina, move aside; Billary is/are the new power couple . . .
I did not see Lord Cuomo, but, oh Lord, Cuomo is another American Horror Story . . . .
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I think Farina is actually a cleaner break with the Bloomberg years, Robert; she actually quit on him, after all.
Have you seen this, everybody?
“Education After Bloomberg”
“The former mayor’s greatest legacy is creating a mass movement against education reform.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/education-reformmichaelbloomberg.html
Mathangi Subramanian pays a lot of attention to the young student leaders that rose up under Bloomberg. She’s got a couple of books coming out, apparently, which will be something to look forward to.
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Big Picture:
Duncan & Obama must keep the $$$ pipeline open for the CorpEdReformer$ and their endless Profit$ using children.
Remember, Duncan and Obama are still young and want their own $$ to flow long after the presidency. After all, Gates’ $$$ will NEVER run out and his posse will be Rich4Generations!
Small price to pay…test kids, provide data, hire/fire teachers based on scores, vendors galore, move on the higher education, repeat process, count $Zill, sell same to other countries in the world, count $Zill, etc, etc, etc!
There is No Way to have any influential superintendent stand in the way of their American Greed Future! Can’t permit it and must intervene quickly and forcefully!
The way of the future.
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Starr understands teachers, students and parents and how to best transform and strengthen public education. Duncan understands the reform agenda, he allowed the Department to make changes to FERPA that weakened the law. If CorporateEdReformers truly want to help children from low income families and make a difference why don’t they replicate the successful Milton Hershey School in every state? Oh yeah, that would get in the way of endless Profit$ using children.
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Are you a Montgomery County, Maryland parent? teacher? student? Who says Starr understands anyone? Please cite your source for this.
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The conflict that I see in David Coleman being Pres. of the college board is this and maybe I am wrong, but doesn’t the college board make oodles of $ on various testing? The common core decides what’s on the test? Like I said maybe it’s just me.
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Nope, it’s not just you.
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Duncan is not an educator nor cares about the teachers Obvious on what he did in Chicago. We aren,t listening to him . Let us move forward.
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Duncan intervenes in chancellor pick and grants New York a waiver to eliminate one measly math test. Cities and states across the country must jump through Duncan’s flaming rings to receive funds. How is this not federal control of education?
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Don’t mean to be picky but the “one measly math test” was not eliminated. Accelerated 8th graders taking 9th grade algebra no longer have to take the 8th grade CC/Pearson math test as well. In the past, accelerated students took both the algebra Regents test in June AND the NCLB/CCSS 8th grade math test in April. This is no longer the case because the 9th grade Integrated Algebra test will now be aligned with CCSS. Unfortunately for 8th grade math teachers across NYS, the top (20% or so) performing math students will now be skimmed out of their data.
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Thanks for clarifying. It’s uncharacteristic for King or Duncan (King Duncan?) to kill an entire test. Didn’t realize how much this move may also negatively impact a teacher’s APPR score.
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Their big mistake was tackling the suburban school districts. As long as it was inner city schools, nobody listened to the complaints. The decision makers got careless. They got greedy. Now they’ve bit off way more than they can chew.
The change in educational policy effects almost every voter. No matter what Duncan says, more and more of suburbia is upset at what their children are experiencing. They will not stop complaining and slowly, their voices are reaching the ears of the uninformed.
Duncan and the others might dismiss Diane Ravitch and her fellow bloggers, they can’t dismiss outraged “mama bears”.
Duncan should be afraid – very afraid. Politicians who want to be re elected will be in danger – Republican or Democrat. If they don’t speak out against CCSS, their seats will be in jeopardy. There will be scapegoats – King, Arne, others. Rhee needs to enjoy her spotlight now, because we are taking her down. Not out of malice, but for the survival of our species.
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Just to set the record straight, historically the turn towards managerial/institutional goals in schooling began in the 19th century with a group of “progressive” administrators who moved schools away Deweyite approaches to schooling to managerial mentality that valued efficiency over what they considered to be wasteful child centered approaches to schooling — much of this also had to do with gender issues in that era—men knew best in a profession dominated by females. Two books I would recommend on the historical origins of the Rhee’s and Duncan’s: Managers of Virtue: 1820-1920 (Tyack) and Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Callahan).
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Thanks, Alan! This, and so much more of our history is fading. “Virtue” certainly did not mean precisely the same to those men in the 1920s as to the first American citizens in the 1780s, nor do I imagine does “progressive” now mean exactly what it did to Teddy Roosevelt!
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What I left unsaid in this post, was the unbroken power of the business class to influence/shape the national debate on almost every issue. When not directly financing efforts to control the direction of national policies, their business ideology pull even seasoned professionals into whatever the dominate business paradigm of the day (e.g. data-driven schools). Dewey blamed, and I think correctly, that his model of schooling never gained traction because of what he termed the “machinery” of school administration.
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Could be because “Montgomery County Public Schools was one of two districts out of 24 in Maryland that passed on federal funding by refusing to sign on to the state’s Race to the Top grant application in 2010?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/maryland-schools-insider/post/montgomery-superintendent-sharpens-critique-of-national-reforms/2012/04/18/gIQA8x76QT_blog.html
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They “passed” on federal funding because they were partnering with Pearson! Get the facts!
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I’ve looked and all I find is that he started as a special ed teacher. So far nothing on the amount of time in a classroom. Seems like a typical teach a couple of years then become an administrator, yeee haaa!!!
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From the NYT today, on Chancellor Farina:
“Ms. Farina is a progressive educator who speaks movingly about returning joy to the project of teaching children. “We’ve lost the spirit that education is a calling,” she told me.
She is passionate about social studies and science; she is not opposed to the Common Core or to testing generally. “Life is a series of tests in many ways,” she said. What she opposes, she explained, are myopic systems of learning in which real knowledge becomes a casualty of test knowledge, and what she calls “the gotcha mentality” of the Bloomberg years, when teachers and principals were often abandoned instead of being given whatever support they might need to improve.”
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More . . .Ms. Fariña is a fan of “balanced literacy,” designed chiefly by Professor Lucy Calkins of Columbia, an approach rooted in the idea that children build reading skill by reading books that they love and that engage them. The Bloomberg administration favored this approach until a study two years ago, following 1,000 city school children in 20 schools from kindergarten through second grade, indicated that those second graders taught with a curriculum focused more on nonfiction scored higher on reading comprehension than those in the comparison schools. At the time, Ms. Fariña criticized the study for focusing on too few schools.
Ms. Fariña said there were many potential ways to approach context-based learning and, for instance, to improve vocabulary. Giving children actual lyric sheets when they are singing in class, she said, could be one way of exposing them to new words. One method for going forward might be to teach fundamentals in a more traditional way until fourth grade or so, to lay the groundwork for more expansive learning, and then take things in more experimental directions. The Ascend network of charter schools, educating some of the poorest children in the city in central Brooklyn, has had great success with that model, borrowing the humanities-driven approach of progressive private schools once children are beyond the earliest elementary grades. By sixth grade, Ascend students are reading “The Iliad.” The network’s test scores have been impressive.”
“
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In the study, did they consider that the better readers liked nonfiction, not that nonfiction made the child a better reader. I still think that free reading choice, whether fiction or nonfiction, is the best way to promote literacy. I more than once have children tell me they hated to read, but noted they enjoyed certain magazines. They were always surprised when I pointed out that perusing magazines is also considered reading.
Students deserve a choice in their reading selections.
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Arne Duncan’s failure to engage real educators and parents from the outset, dooms his lesson to failure. Duncan does not speak the common language with educators, and can never achieve shared understanding of the problems facing American education until he does. Duncan treats students, parents and teachers alike as if they’re employees he can reward and punish. He uses fiat and threats to coerce state and local educators into trying out experimental curriculum on live children.
The USA has a long tradition of inventing and pitching “snake-oil,” We say, “Caveat Emptor, fool me twice shame on me…” Professional card sharps up and down the Mississippi were admired for their skills at cards, but if they were caught cheating justice could be swift. Arne Duncan and Co. first hobbles us, then tells us it’s our own fault when we stumble and fall. He’s selling coloured sugar water, claiming it will raise the dead and make the lame walk.
The important questions are, “Who’s buying this load of junk? What do the sellers really stand to gain, as nothing they’ve done has ever been shown to benefit learning in any meaningful way?”
If they’re dismantling public education with “power tools,” educators will need safety goggles and steel toed boots.
http://www.rcfouchaux.ca/blog/2014/01/03/power-tools-in-use-bring-safety-goggles/
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