I don’t know who wrote this song, but it is terrific.
You don’t have to live in New York to get the insanity of rating teachers and principals by test scores. Follow the singer as he explains the bureaucratic rabbit-hole that he falls into as he tries to comply with a state law that can compete with anything in “Alice in Wonderland” for sheer nuttiness.
Follow the the song and see if you can figure out what all this mumbo-jumbo jargon has to do with children or education. And the kicker is that teachers in charter schools are exempt from the maze of regulations that every public school teacher and principal must comply with.
By the time the song concludes, you too will sing, “APPR is how we rate, teachers in New York State.”
Towards the end, you may recognize Carol Burris, the principal who led the rebellion against APPR.
And you will surely recognize John King, soon to be Secretary of Education, who loved APPR.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The events that inspired the original words to this tune, Alice’s Restaurant, occured 50 years ago now. Arlo Guthrie explains that the original was about stupidity: “To have what happened to me actually happen and not be a work of fiction still remains amazing. It’s an amazing set of crazy circumstances that reminds me of an old Charlie Chaplin movie.” Seems apt!
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/arlo-guthrie-looks-back-on-50-years-of-alices-restaurant-20141126#ixzz3siJoHTe1
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The massive maze of regulations and paper work is sucking the air out of lots of teachers’ day. Time that should be better spent is now being used to fill out surveys, logs and other assorted lock step reporting that requires teachers to justify their existence, This is in addition to the regular planning, grading and connecting with parents. If you are a compensatory teacher, the mound of bureaucratic nonsense is even deeper. This is a waste of time clearly designed by those that never taught.
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Here’s a link to the lyrics.
http://www.videotexts.net/en/video/?v=jV3ay46zMoQ&lang=en
Seems entirely appropriate since Arlo Guthrie has just started a tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacre, a song to protest the war and stupidity, as Christine Langhoff noted above.
This time the war is on public schools and school children. The stupidity speaks for itself.
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3:05, George Washington duck.
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Check this out
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And this:
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