Christine Langhoff, a regular commenter on the blog, left this response in reaction to the post about “Arne’s Worst Idea” (evaluating colleges of education by the test scores of students taught by their graduates):
Two reasons this qualifies as Arne’s worst idea:
1. NCTQ
2. RELAY
Arne’s recommendations legitimize these faux organizations. Relay purports to be a graduate school of education, when it is better described as a training program not unlike McDonald’s hamburger university. And NCTQ (run by the Fordham Institute) has published a “ranking” of teacher prep programs whose methodology can be summed up this way (from Peter Greene): “this is a report in which some people collected some graduation brochures and course syllabi and close read their way to an indictment of all college teacher training programs”. See Linda Darling Hammond’s more scholarly indictment of NCTQ here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/18/why-the-nctq-teacher-prep-ratings-are-nonsense/
During Duncan’s tenure, up has become down and not through legislation, but stealthily, through regulation changes behind closed doors.
TFA’s = highly qualified teachers
Relay= graduate school of education
FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) = conduit to give away private information to for-profit entities
NCTQ – “ratings” of teacher prep institutions = research
Charter schools = the answer to life’s persistent questions
Looks like our former pro basketball player has become a water boy, carrying water for the dismantlers of our public school systems.
We are left with only one real question: Why was Arne Duncan appointed Secretary of Education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why was Arne Duncan appointed Secretary of Education? Because he plays basketball fairly well.
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Chicago’s Commercial Club!!
Which also has its tentacles into Pensions, Charter Schools and Obamacare !
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This is called “Pay BACK”…plus Chicago is a cesspool of bad politicians. Just look…just so repressive and punitive.
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Why was Duncan appointed secretary of education? In Class Warfare, mercenary writer/ instant education expert/ and inventor of fictitious teachers, Steven Brill gleefully described DFER’s demand to “progressive” President- Elect Obama to ditch Linda Darling Hammond who Obama was campaigning with, for the far more compliant, ignorant and reform crazed Duncan.
Obama, as is his want, of course, caved to his Wall Street masters.
Sounds right to me. Imagine how different our education system would be if, for once, Obama had had the courage to stand up to these arrogant debt merchants and masters of the universe and had appointed Darling Hammond.
I wrote something about it here: http://www.alternet.org/story/155053/does_steven_brill's_'class_warfare'_pass_muster_not_if_you_care_about_the_truth
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Did Obama “cave,” suggesting that his sentiments may in fact lay elsewhere, or as a Trojan Horse, did he enter the Temple of Learning and fling open the gates for it to be looted by a rapacious Overclass?
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I remain very interested to know the names of those who vigorously lobbied Obama at the start of his first term to choose anybody but Linda Darling-Hammond for Sec. of Ed. She was a member of his transition team and was far and away the best choice. When The parents of Chicago’s children heard that Duncan was going to DC they felt like victims of domestic abuse, glad to free of their abuser but feeling guilty that he had gone on to abuse another innocent victim, in this case the entire country.
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Michelle Obama!
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Because he would do what he was told to do by Bill Gates and the Presidential appointments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, especially James Shelton III, his real boss up until a couple of months ago.
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Patrick, could you please excerpt the passage about DFER’s lobbying against Linda Darling Hammond? I’m planning on taking a pair of tongs to he public library and checking out the offal to see for myself.
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Jon, I’ll send them to you this evening — and, yes, use those tongs.
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His worse idea is believing that he is even remotely qualified to have anything to do with the public school teaching and learning processes. If he would realize the truth of the matter and admit he is completely unqualified we wouldn’t be having this “discussion”.
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Why was Arne Duncan appointed Secretary of Education? To facilitate and oversee the dismantling of public education, of course. Surely everyone must understand this by now. He’s doing exactly what he was appointed to do, and doing it quite well.
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how can we be surprised that obama doesn’t value experience? look how little he had! (and yes, i hate to admit that i voted for him…)
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Obama’s agenda for public schools is well…fill in the blanks. Bet you have plently. When both Obama and Duncan clapped whtn the RI HS teachers got fired, for me that was totally embarrassing for the President of the United States to clap when schools are being dismantled systematically via BAD polidies. My thought, “OMG, Obama is clapping. How could he? His clapping is a wholesale attack on America’s public schools.”
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Here’s a fresh story from our nation’s newspaper of record, the NYT, demonstrating how pernicious is the legitimation of NCTQ and TNP:
New York City Teachers Score Highly Under New Evaluation System
“Around the country, new evaluation systems pushed by education reformers in the hope of weeding out low-performing teachers have generally disappointed their proponents, as they have identified relatively few teachers as subpar…
‘Two percent is worrisome,’ Sandi Jacobs, the vice president and managing director for state policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality, said of the number of teachers found to be ‘developing’ in the rest of the state. The council has pushed for states to do a better job of identifying ineffective teachers…
Speaking of the rest of the state, Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, an education reform group that advocates more rigorous teacher evaluations, said, ‘Many districts appear to have completely botched this.’ ”
“Botched” because this witch hunt failed to prove that huge numbers of teachers are incompetent.
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Arne Duncan’s ideas < almost any other idea about education!
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How can we forget this?
Addressing a group of school superintendents in late 2013, Arne Duncan stated that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative came from “white suburban moms who — all of the sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t as good as they thought they were.”[23] This had sparked outrage among different facets of society, ranging from the “white suburban mom who feel marginalized and misunderstood”, the “non-white parent who wants to know why everyone is only now so upset”, to the “non-white parent who wants Arne Duncan to know that she (or he) hates the Common Core, too”.[24]
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The proposed regulations for teacher education programs have been in the works for a while. They include all of the existing and terribly flawed state measures of teachers (VAM, SLOs), observations, student surveys, etc) as one major cluster of outcomes by which teacher education programs will be judged.
Either student or school-level teacher evaluation scores may be used to retroactively judge the teacher education program. The data links are already established to make these connections with teacher and student scores possible in all but about 11 states.
The other measures to be connected in this grand scheme bear on entrance and program specs for teacher education ( with an embedded philosophy about what schools are for and proper instruction) plus employer satisfaction and records on jobs held, performance on the job, retentions and responsiveness of teacher education programs to labor markets for particular jobs such as middle school math, art, etc.
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“Why was Arne Duncan appointed as Secretary of Education?”
Because Barak Obama sat on the Board of Directors of the Joyce Foundation from 1994-2002. The Joyce Foundation is a major player in the school reform movement. Arne’s carrying out the president’s orders. Willingly, yes…but Obama’s directives all the same.
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Right on…
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