Perhaps someday historians will figure out how the Obama administration pulled the wool over the eyes of so many people about its plans for urban schools. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama named Professor Linda Darling-Hammond as his senior education advisor. She went on national television to describe the progressive policies he would pursue if elected.
Soon after the election, President-elect Obama dropped Darling-Hammond and selected his basketball buddy Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. He introduced Duncan as someone who had enjoyed remarkable success in turning around the Chicago public schools. We now know that Duncan did not enjoy remarkable success, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is applying a wrecking ball to the Chicago public school system.
What went wrong? How did Obama fool us? Once he was elected, why did he choose as Secretary a non-educator who was determined to make standardized testing the centerpiece of his program, to advance the privatization of America’s public schools, to demoralize teachers, and to make common cause with the nation’s most rightwing governors? Why does Duncan never speak out against segregation? Why does he pretend that poverty doesn’t matter so long as poor kids have “great” teachers? Why does he never speak out against vouchers? What will historians say about Race to the Top, which turns out to have as much evidence as No Child Left Behind?
The Obama Administration’s “Scorched Earth Policy” for Urban Schools
By Dr. Mark Naison
The Obama Administration, in the five years it has been in office, has pursued an Education “Scorched Earth” policy in major urban centers, closing public schools en masse and replacing them with charter schools. And for the most part, Democratic Mayors have enthusiastically supported this policy. Only in the last year, there has been finally been some resistance to this policy, by newly elected Mayors in New York and Pittsburgh. That resistance must spread if public education is to survive and be revitalized in Urban America. Electing anti-testing, anti-charter school and pro public school Mayors in big cities should be a major priority of activists in the last three years of the Obama Presidency, along with building the multi-partisan movement against the Common Core Standards. That is the only way we can build public schools into strong community institutions where creative teaching and learning is practiced and honored.
Dr. Mark Naison is one of the Co-founders of BATs with Priscilla Sanstead
http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-obama-administrations-scorched.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Across the nation we are watching NYC’s new progressive mayor for answers to what happens to self-professed progressives who are somehow transformed.
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It’s not easy for a politician to stand up to this, Miron. The fix is so far in and the Plutocrats have so much power, that the temptation if very, very strong to play along. Ordinary money talks, but the Plutocrats’ billions command. The situation is not unlike that when the mob ran Chicago. For all I know, it still does.
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Bob, please forgive me. I swiped this, and posted it on my facebook page (with a citation, of course, and a link to your blog.) One of the funniest pieces of satire I’ve read in a long time. the trouble is, of course, that it’s just too close to the truth for comfort.
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The best possible spin I come up with when I reflect is that Obama truly believes the children of the masses having minimal survival skills in the “job market” is better than the only alternative, in his mind, which would be letting children of the many continue a decent to the streets and even more abject poverty. Also, access to capable and expendable labor here in the U.S. is a great answer to the off-shoring issue and the draw of illegals-labor across the Mexican border. “Jobs Americans won’t do” become “jobs Americans have no choice but to take”. Win-win.
Also, the thought that a truly educated, enlightened, empowered and active citizenry is more likely to lead to outrage and real reform has to be frightening to the privileged, regardless of their party affiliation. This isn’t really a Dem or Republican driven education reform, it is the rulers control over the ruled. We are no longer educatiing, we are training and indoctrinating.
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He’s a neoliberal, not a Democrat. He’s a tool and never should have gotten the Democratic Party nomination, let alone the presidency.
His education policies are nothing short of a train wreck.
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Hello, my name is Arne “Dunkin” Duncan. I’m not an educator, but I play one in Washington. I am your new Secretary of the Department for the Privatization of Public Education, formerly the USDE. Let me get one thing straight at the very beginning, the Plutocrats have no seat at the table where education policy is discussed. They own the table, and they own me.
I know you soccer moms are not going to like hearing this, but I have it on good authority from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that we are experiencing a grit crises here in America, inc. If we don’t do something to stop those lazy, shiftless teachers and kids around the country from being failures, Singapore is going to thow us to the mat, stop on our rib cages, buy up all our MacDonalds franchises, and replace all our Walmarts with Singaemporiums.
For this reason, the states are are leading the charge empower the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth–CCCCMiniTru for short–to stave off this disaster. CCCCMiniTru is an entirely state-run initiative that had nothing whatsoever to do with funding from a few Plutocrats, for as I told you, they have no seat at the table.
Here’s what we need to do: Fire all the teachers for underperformance and replace them with nifty “personalized” software from Gates Murdoch Pearson Knowlogy K12, Inc. Teaching, there’s an app for that. And we need to hook the kids all up to retinal scanners and galvanic skin response monitors to measure their gritfulness in real time as they do their identically personalized worksheets on a screen.
And to ensure that these initiatives go forward, I am hereby announcing a program of blackmail of the states called Race to the Top, the name of which captures, perfectly, what education is all about–getting to the top before the other guy and leaving those Singaporeans clinging to the bottom of the stair. It’s about beating the other guy at checking off the magic bullet list prepared by my friend, that vastly experienced education scholar and philosopher Lord David Coleman, who is even better qualified for this work than I am because he once looked unsuccessfully for a teaching job for a while.
And so it went. The plan was implemented.
CCCCMiniTru fired all the teachers and replaced them with pimply adolescent aides from Teach for a While, who would spend two years walking around making sure that kids’ teaching machines were turned on before going off to their real jobs in investment banking. And it installed headphones to blast into kids’ ears Barry Sadler’s “Song of the Green Beret” and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir cover of “Everything Is Beautiful” whenever their gritfulness fell below proficiency level 3 point 86. Kids would do anything to avoid those.
From their gleaming, floating offshore cities—West Xanadu, Elysium, Redmond, and Shangri-La LA—the 0.1 percent dispatched drones to monitor the general population for terrorist activities such as spending too little on consumer goods and failing to show up on time to their meager and part-time but nonetheless essential service jobs, assigned to them by Gates/Murdoch Kelly Temp Services, the sole employer of proles. Everyone, young and old alike, was rigorously tested every 23 point 4 minutes to ensure proper understanding and performance of whatever task he or she happened to be engaged in—nail polishing, going to the bathroom, preparing Happy Meals—whatever.
To no avail. Sure, people (well, proles) were doing what they were supposed to do–they were going through the motions at the required pace. And they were hitting their grit benchmarks. The Fair and Balanced Good News of well-met production quotas for grit, along with other key production metrics, was continually broadcast from every wall and street corner by Gates/Murdoch Fox state television, and if you missed those reports, you could always check the running ticker on your Gates/Murdoch Google Glass and Retinal Scanner.
But weirdly, nothing quite worked. Everything the proles produced, though to specification, was shoddy. Things fell apart. STUFF–the essential output of Consumer Homo Economicus–was produced with grit but not, it seemed, with True Grit. Whatever could the Plutocrats and their windup politicians do?
Fortunately, Walmart Pharmaceuticals and Neurological Engineering had a solution: Freedom Juice, piped into people’s heads via ports installed in the back of their skulls. Gates/Murdoch Goldman Citi Merrill Chase Bank of Amerika, Inc arranged a loan from the Singaporeans to install the necessary infrastructure. Soon, a network of piping covered the entire country and, and one tendril of a pipe led to the back of the head of every student and worker at every desk.
What could go wrong?
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cx: crisis, not crises; Teach for Awhile, not Teach for a While
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I appreciate your insights/other comments; this is your Best Ever!, Mr. Shepherd.
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“Teaching – There is NO app for that.” would make a nice bumper sticker.
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Thanks, booklady.
And paz, I think that’s a great idea.
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It’s sort of disconcerting to watch ed reformers rediscover tens of millions of public school kids during this brief CC testing period.
All of a sudden public schools are Job One and they’re all eagerly counting number of students tested and saying what a great job everyone is doing. Are the schools conducting this giant testing experiment the same set of loser schools they’ve been using as a punching bag for a decade? Did public schools all of a sudden become competent organizations, members of Team Ed Reform, right when CC testing began?
I don’t think public schools have gotten this much positive attention since Bush took office. I wonder how long this brief moment in the sun will last. At least thru the end of baseline score collection, I bet!
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I think you got it, Chiara. Just wait until the scores come out. Then public schools will be failure factories again.
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Here’s an ordinary public school that like all public schools was MOST LIKELY a failure factory, and yet somehow they managed to get an A++ on test-taking from the national assessment CEO:
“By Laura Slover
Laura Slover is the CEO of PARCC, Inc., the nonprofit managing the assessment project for the PARCC states
Last week, I had the great fortune of watching a 6th grade class in Prince George’s County, Maryland, take the computer version of the PARCC ELA/literacy test. I was so impressed with how engaged the students were and how hard they worked on the field test.”
These can’t be the same schools and kids that were all failing just last month, can they?
It’s like some kind of PARCC, Inc. miracle 🙂
https://twitter.com/PARCCPlace
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The PARCC (spell that backward) Twitter feed. If only Stalin had had Twitter back in the day. He could have published his daily production statistics for Pig Iron and Pork Bellies and Corn there, along with his commentaries about how the workers were all pulling together to make the collective farms and Five-Year-Plans a complete success.
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There will be NO scores this year except in NY. All other states are merely field testing for PARCC and SBAC. The real tests have yet to hit the fan. All of the time, energy, and money has been expended so PARCC and SBAC could develop the real CCSS tests for their 2015 roll out. If parents are unhappy now, we aint seen nothing yet.
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My mistake. I should have said wait until next year when the scores come out.
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Ohio Governor recruits “Dream Team,” including Joanne Weiss, Arne’s former chief of staff, to recruit and pay teachers to evangelize for the Common [sic] Core [sic]:
http://jonathanpelto.com/2014/04/18/malloy-administration-recruits-dream-team-sell-common-core-connecticut-teachers/
Weiss was the one who wrote on the Harvard Business School Blog that the Common Core was created to produce “a national market” for “products that can be brought to scale.”
A rare moment when one of these people actually told the truth. The Common Core was created in order for Pearson and various Gates startup companies to have a single set of tags to key their computer-adaptive educational software to.
That’s why it is the CC$$.
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Dear Governor: Please send me a briefcase full of dough and a plane ticket. I am just itching to tell Ohio teachers what I think of the Common [sic] Core [sic].
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So many national thought leaders and so little time.
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I think that the President is most concerned about affordable health care. Considering that his ill mother was worried about paying for health care, this is understandable. I also think that health care is very important. We should all have access to affordable health care. This will probably be the President’s big legacy.
Education, except as a talking point, does not seem to be a major concern. We’ll probably have to wait for the next cycle of elections and vote for “education” people.
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Yeah, he’s so concerned about affordable health care that he passed a bill that gave the insurance companies millions more customers without any measures to control costs or fees.
Besides, Obama prides himself on being able to handle multiple issues simultaneously and in depth. He is perfectly aware of what’s going on with education – he’s not distracted by health care.
Please wake up and see what a sham Obama has been in every area.
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Bravo, Dienne, you are 100% right. I’ve noticed you often point out inconvenient truths in the comments of this blog.
Obama has been a huge sham in every area. He is wholly owned by the financial industry and other wealthy interest groups who financed his campaigns.
We need real campaign finance reform if America is ever to move from a plutocratic oligarchy to a democracy. But the foxes are guarding the henhouse.
This recent study of American politics, by scholars at Princeton, is instructive:
Click to access Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf
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Exactly, Dienne. The man has been a disgrace to the office. And he misled a nation, in several senses of that term.
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ObamaCare is a government-assisted private boondoggle. Its main purpose is not to ensure public health, but to insure the profitability of private health insurance companies and the private pharmaceutical and hospital industries”
The result of ObamaCare has been a situation in which healthcare has become more thoroughly privatized, and the possibility of a single-payer Medicare-for-all system – the cheaper, more effective, already-proven and undeniably popular (favored by two-thirds of the public in 2009) solution – has become deferred even further, and made harder even to see or discuss.
Some say ACA represents progress.
PROGRESS?: ACA entrenches the for-profit medical industry and destroys all movement towards Single-Payer (which had a great deal of momentum in2008 pre-Obama- funny thing about that).
PROGRESS?: ACA is not health CARE reform, it was never intended to be so, ACA is health INSURANCE reform. It’s legislation written by the health insurance industry to sustain industry rationing of healthcare based on economic class, race, gender and age.
This bill is worse than the “bailout” of the corrupt banks because it sets in law many possible legalistic maneuvers and loopholes – all at taxpayer expense – under the guise of “reform”. It institutionalizes deceit and corporate profits and really does not ensure anything else.
So…what ARE the lessons repeated and learned from OBAMACARE?
1-That private health insurance is America’s Way…and should stay that way.
2-That FORCING people to BUY insurance is the solution to not having enough health care.
Just what America needed: more dumbing down and corporate brainwashing.
Many Dems rejoice and say this is the “first step to change.” What rubbish!
Insurance Companies rejoice because THEY got the Lion’s Share of their ultimate Wish List; it is THEY who believe this is the “first step” to ending any chance EVER for a Public Plan. They’re likely closer to the truth because they’ve been given a good hand, and with the new economic power HANDED to them by Congress, they will further dominate any future debates.
…and NOW Democrats are parading around like they just saved America…meanwhile our “saviors” let the wars rage on, put up with spying over the phone, cozy up to torture, and allow Wall Street bandits to take home rewards.
ACA’s main purpose is not to ensure public health, but to insure the profitability of private health insurance companies and the private pharmaceutical and hospital industries.
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The best and most concise description of Obama I’ve ever read came not from a historian or pundit, but from a reader commenting on the (excellent) blog, “Moon of Alabama.”
Reader “bevin,” commenting on events in Ukraine in February and March, stated,
“Obama is just a willing executioner. From the ruling class’ point of view, he’s the perfect figurehead, because his mere appearance confuses and disarms so many. He seems to have spent his whole life trying to get chosen to play Judas. And that’s all there is in his resume.”
Transpose this quote to Obama’s actions concerning the schools, and its a perfect fit.
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This is what happens when presidential candidates are NOT vetted, and Obama was not. I had rejected him a long time ago because I knew something was seriously askew with him.
Obama has longstanding ties with the charter school movement beginning with his involvement in the Joyce Foundation.
He’s a fake, a fraud, a disgrace to the Democratic Party brand.
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There was a fierce lobbying assault by deformers before the 1st inauguration to get Obama to NOT choose Linda Darling Hammond and instead go with what turned out to be Duncan. Sorry, but I can’t find my link to the article which contains the story.
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The effort to dump Linda and choose Duncan was documented in Steve Brill’s paean to charters and corporate reformers called “Class Warfare.” Accurately titled. The 1% v. The 99%.
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Why indeed, Diane. What went wrong? The electorate is dumb.
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No, Harlan. The alternative was a worse candidate, Mitt Romney.
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Linda, your loyalty to liberal failure is heroic. Romney was a 10^22 better candidate. And in 2016 my hope is that Ted Cruz will be your new president.
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Harlan, your dream is my nightmare.
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I am so disappointed in how our elected officials have reacted to the CCSS. They are either misinformed or delusional – or both.
Obama has done us a disservice by appointing Duncan and allowing him to run our educational system into the ground.
Don’t they know any families which attend public schools?
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Too many believed the propaganda. As more and more people are making noise, they are beginning to notice and some are actually researching the issues.
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Sounds, miracles do happen.
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It was a season of beleaguered union leaders, Democratic politicians under Koch siege, and established media facing threats of extinction. Who blames them for falling for the promises of a captain of industry, riding an illusionary white horse, tossing favors in all directions?
The story of Common Core is the story of an emperor with no clothes. The NYT editors know a columnist doesn’t refer to a legitimate opposing view as, “clownish”, except as desperation. They’re aware that belittlement goes beyond the pale of good journalism. But, saving face is important, when a newspaper is, on the back side, of a story released by 17 year-olds, in their Ohio school paper.
I thought Bill Gates’ rant against public pensions, in 2011, showed unwarranted arrogance but, I didn’t face the same pressures
editors, union officials and politicians endured so it was easier for me to see it.
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Zounds (I have a hard time with this auto speller – it keeps changing my words)
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