Please read Jersey Jazzman’s hilarious spoof on “The Night Before Christmas.”

He anticipates not the joy of Christmas and Santa, but the much-anticipated release of PISA scores, when Arne Duncan gets to tell the nation once again how terrible American education is and how we are losing the global competition and why we are still a nation at risk.

He will conveniently overlook the fact that he is Secretary of Education and has now been in charge for nearly five years. No accountability for him!

He will surround himself with Beltway insiders who agree that our schools are dreadful despite 11 years of No Child Left Behind and nearly five years of Race to the Top.

How many more years must we wait until we declare these programs failures?

This is how JJ’s poem begins:

“‘Twas the night before PISA Day, when all through the foundations
The wonks were all dreaming about Bill Gates’s donations;

The rankings were crafted for each nation with care,
In hopes that more grants would come from billionaires;

The children were tested and stressed at their desks;
While visions of bubble sheets made them feel quite grotesque;

Suburban moms in their ‘kerchiefs, and dads in their caps,
Hoped on test day their children’s brains wouldn’t collapse,

When out at the DOE there arose such a clatter,
I looked up from Klein’s tablet to see what was the matter.”