John King is currently Acting Secretary of Education. President Obama will formally nominate him to serve as Secretary.
King’s autocratic behavior as state commissioner of education spurred a massive parent opt out from state testing. King adamantly supports testing, VAM, Common Core, and charter schools. He taught in a “no excuses” Uncommon Schools charter with one of the highest suspension rates in Massachusetts.
As commissioner, King defended inBloom, a Gates-funded data-mining project. After other states had withdrawn due to parent protests, King supported inBloom. The state legislature listened to parents and passed a law forcing the state to drop inBloom. After NY’s withdrawal, inBloom collapsed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Should we put Bonnie and Clyde in charge of the Federal Reserve Bank?
Please, fellow readers, concentrate on Hillary Clinton and her self appointed campaign strategy of joining herself at the hip, ala Siamese twin, of Barak Obama. She must love this decision of Obama’s and his appointment of the notorious charter supporter and killer of public schools, John King (keeping in mind Diane’s painful expose days ago of Harris).
Despite some trash talk about Bernie Sanders opinions (and his roots) regarding education that we read here, and at other venues, he is at least sincere, consistent, and far more trustworthy than Hillary…so as people approach the ballot box, please remember Hillary and her dangerous harpies who say we who support Bernie should spend eternity in HELL. Hillary, and her husband who did so much damage while in office, do not deserve the votes of educators, nor women.
I disagree with some who say we should gather around her should she win the nomination, and I totally agree with Robert Skeels who proposes we vote instead for Jill Stein. But now, I am fighting for Bernie.
And if you haven’t noticed, when Bloomberg was interviewed yesterday about his possible/probable Independent run for Prez, Rahm Emanuel was standing right behind him, at his right hand. Very telling. It is the moment as a Progressive, to put up or shut up.
feh!
Pres. Obama’s appointments to the SEC, Justice Department and Dept. of Education show favoritism to Wall Street.
Well one must repay one’s masters.
Well, I guess we should be happy that he’s doing the wrong thing the right way? At least he’s not trying to sneak him in under cover – he’s going through a “legitimate” vetting process. Yeah, I know, using the word “legitimate” in connection with, well, anything, these days is dicey at best. But for once I’d actually welcome some Republican obstructionism.
I think that Obama doing this in the clear light of day is a stunning piece of evidence how our side is making close to no in-roads in the fight against the reform movement.
We have no control of the narrative. Proof of this is the simple fact that King’s triumphant awfulness was outlined in detail by our side. It was enumerated, laid-bare, and verifiable within the halls of “our side” (blogs and such mostly). Net result? John King will be confirmed as the next secretary of education for these United States.
We aren’t making a dent. The narrative was surrendered long ago by the only real apparatus we had for narrative control: our unions.
And no, opt-out isn’t going to replace unions. Opt-out is a wonderful, smart, skillful fight against something that is inevitably disposable to the reform movement…..testing. Believe me, it’s just a tool towards the reform movement’s goal of privatizing. Opt-out will force a work-around for them for sure, but it will be a bump in their road.
If we don’t see this nomination of King by the President for what it is, and call it by its proper name, A DEFEAT, then we will continue to fail at the first, most essential element of ever achieving victory: perspective. I really don’t think we get it sometimes.
And your advice is….?
Agree NYS teacher…we are spitting in the wind. Obama, ‘Billary’, Schumer, Pelosi, et al, work for Wall Street first. Their words are as empty as their characters, but their pockets are filled with the Billionaire Boys bucks….particularly the Clintons. That means not only the American banksters and the Free Marketeers, but those overseas billionaire-oil Sheiks in Saudi Arabia and UAE who are in league with American oil barons who pay NO taxes.
I prefer to try a Democratic Socialist who says what he believes…since it is what I believe as well.
But we were already getting King. Obama had already spit in our faces. Just that now he’s doing it openly, rather than sneaking King in as “acting” Secretary of Education. The outcome will probably be the same, but at least this way there’s hope for the Republicans to block him (which of course they probably won’t, since he’s on their side, but sometimes they do stuff out of sheer cussedness – i’m hoping that will be the case here).
I welcome some Repugnantan obstruction in this case too, Dienne. It’s better than nothing.
Anyone who uses the canard that we must have Hillary because of the SCOTUS appointments, is kidding them self. We see Obama and his elitists Wall Street appointments (not those of Sotomayor and possibly of Kagan, but of Rahm, Summers, Rubin, Immelt. Duncan, King, White, Holder, Furman, Orszag, etc) which we seem to agree are/were awful. Hers would be a disaster since she is locked in to the old boy network of political religious extremists and far Right Tea Party flacks in Congress. They permeate and divide Congress and have caused endless stone walling to avoid legislation that would help the populace. The Clintons ‘born again’ status gives them entre to this inner circle of those who wish to divide the country, do away with Roe v. Wade and also Brown v. Bd. of Ed. Watch what they do, and do not listen to their pandering words.
She is close to all the billionaires like the Waltons, and her lifetime buddy Eli Broad who says he gave her so much cash that she is at his beck and call. Recommend reading up on her, and on Bill, since their Yale and Litlle Rock days…and her work at Rose Law Firm. She has not had any epiphanies that lead me to think she is now suddenly progressive and truthful. She has always be a self-serving striving insider and a shill for Wall Street looking to make big money, fast. Look into who has contributed to Bill’s Foundation, particularly the world’s richest Middle Eastern despots and radical Islamists like the Saudis…and how much the Foundation pays the whole Clinton family.
Remember how disgusting she was when she said they “left the WH BROKE” though they owned over $12 Million in real estate alone…as millions of modest Americans were losing their homes and pensions a few years later to the mortgage fiasco that Bill started with colluding to kill Glass Steagall. This woman is the leader of the Valkyerie (can’t remember how that is spelled) and we know how that ended.
Yes, exactly, Ellen. And I am more than sick and tired of voting for the “least bad alternative.”
And, very close on the spelling, BTW. It’s a German to English transliteration, anyway.
Thanks Zorba…loved the “Ride of…” Amazingly dramatic.
Meet the New King, Same as the Old King …
aggggh!
Why is anybody who has been paying attention surprised by this move?
No surprise in action run by the oligarchs.
Look who else winshttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/opinion/karl-rove-bamboozles-the-irs.html?emc=edit_th_20160212&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=50637717
The man is a disaster….
Change? Hope?
We hope for change once more…..
Weirdest thing, after the Harris hearing video. We have a robot as the kind of education.
Nothing succeeds like failure.
well said
Or from my POV and how I feel about reformers, nothing fails like success . . . .
More of the same which is why we need Sanders as president.
From last night’s debate, Hillary looks like Obama v2.0 rather than moving forward. Ok, Bernie has crazy hair, but he speaks the truth, is authentic, and very intelligent.
What’s wrong with crazy hair?
Hell, he’s probably happy he has some hair!
Now Obama is just pissing on us and calling it rain. The man has no integrity. Remember the “kicking and screaming into the 21st century” remark he said while praising Duncan? Yeah, when are we going to wake up?
Don’t bitch and complain – organize – bombard your US Senator with “Vote NO” messages … Start a Move On petition – start a King NO Facebook page … if all the opt outs pressured their senators the votes might not be there.
No. What you suggest is exactly what they want: misdirected political effort.
The ESSA has taken the ball out King’s court making him politically irrelevant. Take all your suggestions and focus them at the state level to fight against charters, over-testing, VAM, and defunding of public schools.
DC is a lost cause on public schools.
Go over and read the US Department of Education website sometime. It is indistinguishable from any ed reform lobbying site. Often they are running what look like coordinated political campaigns with the various ed reform “orgs”- they’re all pushing the same thing at the same time.
Completely and utterly captured. The line between public and private is so faint it’s all but nonexistent.
Of course it’s captured. Unfortunately. 😢
How do we make this not happen?
Yikes…I voted for the big O and believed in his hope and change. Now I see him as he truly always was, the way republicans see him. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination then I will vote for the republican nominee…
Sad times.
I simply cannot vote for the Republican nominee if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination.
I will vote for Jill Stein, Green Party.
“I will vote for Jill Stein, Green Party.”
Would Trump be bad for education?
Trump is a buffoon. A conceited, self-promoting buffoon.
The sentiment is understandable. The problem is — if you don’t vote, or if you vote for a candidate that essentially “bleeds off” votes from the Democratic party, you have directly aided the election of a Republican who will probably choose the next 2 or 3 Supreme court justices — including the replacement eventually, for Justice Ginsberg.
This is a long, long game. We (I don’t mean you, because I don’t know you — but I DO mean me, and I think many others, bumbled along for far too many years failing to see the structure that the right wing and their corporatist allies were building to fundamentally reshape (for the worse) our country and its government.
There is no “one election” fix to this — and for all the Obama bashing going on in the comments, stop to think for a moment about where we would stand today if Mitt, or McCain, had won the last two elections. Here is what I think:
1. We need to keep the Republicans out of the white house at all cost. If that means voting for Hillary — I am in. And no, I am not disillusioned. The ONLY real hope, I think, of overturning Citizens United lies with the Supreme Court — not a constitutional amendment (because I don’t think we can get one passed, given the ability of CU’s beneficiaries to buy off the Congress and the state legislatures.
2. We need to regain the Senate (first) and ultimately the House for an election cycle or two.
3. We need to address the disastrous effects of gerrymandering and redistricting at state levels, both to restore the House to a more representative form, but also to begin to restore state legislatures.
And — to the point of the link someone posted on the rewriting of American history, we need to start a public narrative that pushes back against the Koch/ALEC one.
No president — not Bernie, or Hillary, NO one, can accomplish much with Congress in the hands of Republicans. But through executive action, judicial appointments, etc. — there is MUCH that a non-republican can do to prevent the worst of the harms from occurring.
As much as I deplore King, and as profoundly disappointed as I am in King’s appointment, I wake up grateful every day that President Romney, or President McCain, is not in charge. For education — maybe it doesn’t really matter. Obama is really pretty hopeless in this area. But foreign affairs? Supreme Court appointments? Black Lives Matter? Immigration? EPA rules? Hoo Boy!
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Public schools are screwed, no question about it.
I still can’t wrap my mind around why a Democratic President is so wedded to the testing, Common Core, charter schools, and let’s face it, destroying actual public schools to shovel money to the charters.
This is not the Democratic Party I used to know (not that it was perfect way back when, either).
I just would like for Obama, Bill Gates, Rahm Emanuel, and all the other supporters of this abomination to send their own kids to a charter school which practices “no excuses.” Or to an under-funded public school with crumbling infrastucture and drastic cuts to staff, support services, lack of the arts and music and PE, and on and on.
but of course he wants the fox in charge of the hen house
Weingarten is supporting the King nomination. Her consistency in choosing the wrong side
of an issue is amazing.
no one in the media is willing to ask anything about Obama’s education issues and how hillary and bernie feel about them. They are too stupid to be able to deal with the compexity of what is being fought out in American public education…….stick to easier stuff…like big banks, syrian refugees, and how great a president Bill was when he catered to the wishes of the republicans in his now hard to defend welfare reform.
THIS is what you are up against.
http://billmoyers.com/story/the-kochs-are-ghostwriting-americas-story/ and here is where th new elite lives
http://billmoyers.com/story/washingtons-libido-for-the-ugly/
What articles, Susan!
The links to the Moyers post worked of rme.
I was saying how great the articles were. Pardon my English. 🙂
So what are the odds there won’t be a single mention of public schools in this confirmation hearing outside the words “failing”, “accountability” and “assessments”?
So what else is new. Anyway, the people are busy… with he election circus and the Academy awards, and… schools?
I’m betting on a gelded noun called “rigor.”
oh…please…no….
Typical of the Bush-Obama regimes in regards to the Dept of Ed: incompetence is rewarded. Celebrated, even. But I think the chances of him getting confirmed are pretty much nil due to the partisan bickering and the GOP intent to try to block anything Obama. In this case, I’m actually happy about that.
King is worse than Duncan. We’ve gone from the frying pan and into hell.
Sarah — maybe not. He certainly is no better in terms of his intent, or his style. But the cat is out of the bag, a bit, on federal overreach — and NCLB has been killed (I know — its replacement has problems). He is a true lemon, but we are much farther down the road in developing the narrative, tools, and momentum to stop some of the worst excesses.
No — we are still in the frying pan, at least in my opinion — but with a different burger flipper. In this case, though, there are thousands of parents who already KNOW how toxic he is. I don’t think the burgers, this time around, are going to just lie there passively, waiting to be flipped.
The ESSA has reduced King to nothing more than a stream of white noise. The damage Duncan inflicted is infinitely greater than anything King could dream of. We have gone from one frying pan (DC) into 50 different frying pans. Ignore King, ignore Obama’s bit of lame-duckery here. The fight for public education must be waged at the state level.
Perfect metaphor: frying pan into hell.
King is a distraction. Under the new ESSA he is a eunuch – an irrelevant figurehead. ESSA has put 50 balls in 50 courts. Ignore Obama’s last slap in the face and concentrate political efforts at the state level. With two new members of the BOR, the exiting of Tisch, and Chris Gibson breathing down Cuomo’s neck, there is hope yet here in NYS.
What does it matter as long as districts and states continue to allow Universities to collect the data through integrated data systems like this? http://www.edweek.org/media/2015/10/16/9sr-integratedinfographic-c1.jpg
States need to put a stop to this and the MOU’s that exist between these universities and think tanks like Rand. http://ora.research.ucla.edu/OHRPP/Pages/ExternalIRBs.aspx
I love it!!! No matter how many blogs I read and how many headlines are negative, sarcastic, etc, the reality is that no one cares. Education is a total mess here in the good ol USA. A few years and my 60% pension with million dollar TDA kicks in at 55. See ya. I will be laughing as I read the same headlines for the next 20 years.
Why does the US Department of Education promote Summit charter schools as the model for all public schools re: the use of technology?
Is this evidence-based? Is there evidence that a huge investment in technology has enough additional value to justify the cost to public schools? Why promote just this one charter chain over any group of public schools?
If the charter chain “blended learning” approach is experimental is it wise for so many public schools to follow this template and perhaps discover that was a poor and reckless decision down the road, after many adopt it and reallocate limited resources to purchasing these products?
http://tech.ed.gov/netp/assessment/
These are razor-sharp questions.
Your link reveals the Dept. of Ed. to be a tax-payer funded sales team for Silicon Valley. They’re pushing exactly the same stuff –not only unproven, but probably untested –that the tech companies want us to adopt. Very irresponsible. The new rage seems to be “embedded assessment”. This is a Trojan horse that will force districts to replace teacher-created curricula with digital programs. If we have to test, and the tests are embedded in their curricula, we’ll have to adopt their curricula
Of course, ponderosa. That’s been the main point all along. Just as Dwight Eisenhower warned about the “military-industrial complex,” we should be extremely wary of the “education-corporate complex.”
Read my comments on this page about learning and testing !
Cheer up folks, Randi Weingarten is looking forward to working with him.
I nominate Sean Crowley for AFT President.
There’s no real debate or discussion in DC over any of this. I listened to part of the Senate debate over the law to replace NCLB.
They all sound exactly the same, down to the same words and phrases. Whatever “debate” they had the public wasn’t part of it and it’s over. They bicker over who should have more power, state or federal, but it’s exactly the same agenda. All of the big decisions have been made, and were made well prior to the Senators filing into the hearing room.
I felt bad for the people who traveled to testify. They took one or two days out on their own dime and no one in Congress had any intention of changing anything based on that testimony.
This is what I like to see in a public official. Massachusetts governor launches big charter school promotion political campaign. Misrepresents auditor’s report to sell the schools.
Auditor fires back 🙂
Auditor Suzanne Bump today released the following statement related to the recently launched charter school campaign:
“This afternoon, Governor Baker helped launch “Fact Check: Public Charter Schools in Massachusetts,” a public information campaign intended to provide information about charter schools to inform policymakers. However, the campaign itself needs to check its facts. It has come to my attention that this campaign is misstating the findings in an audit links to PDF file my office conducted in 2014 of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) oversight of charter schools.
Specifically, the campaign uses my office’s audit to demonstrate that there are currently over 37,000 students on the wait list. Our audit specifically states: “We estimated that unduplicated counts taken at the end of the lottery process in March 2013 should have been no more than 38,034 students (with 14,800 from Boston), as opposed to the 40,376 unduplicated count reported by DESE. However, even that adjusted count was significantly overstated to an extent that could not be quantified because, as DESE managers subsequently told us, a majority of charter schools roll forward waitlist entries from prior years that may no longer be applicable. They noted that students could remain on a school’s waitlist for several years, but stated that they could not estimate the number of students involved.”
Good for her for doing her job.
For people who are constantly wrapping themselves in a mantle of “science!” and “data!” they’re really sloppy with numbers. Also, since this is obviously a political campaign to promote charters over public schools, is it now okay for public schools to do the same thing? Or is that still forbidden? Why are there two sets of rules as far as politicking?
Sign this petition:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/stop-nomination-john-b-king-secretary-education-until-he-can-be-vetted-people
I’d sign it but could somebody correct the grammatical and other errors first?
I don’t think it’s OK for our children to be geo tagged or for huge files about each to be created and collected by government. The Government public/private partnerships are destroying privacy and providing the outside vendors or other stakeholders who want access to it. Our children are NOT Human Capital, in whatever name is used by a school district to describe that idea.
The Dept of Defense has promoted this data collection through the Federal Dept of Education and with the Private partnerships to ensure it comes together. They can use sophisticated layers and employed intermediaries to circumvent the FERPA Law. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/01/07/new-student-database-slammed-by-privacy-experts/
So it seems all too easy to use other countries to circumvent any laws and spy our kids. http://www.globalresearch.ca/massive-secret-surveillance-in-canada-ottawa-spying-on-its-citizens-and-brazil-in-collaboration-with-the-nsa/5500823
Paul Gammill was the whistle blower at the Fed Dept of Ed who saw this coming and was fired when he opposed it. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/01/ferpa
Gammill did not know how it would all roll out – that’s what I am providing here – and when he sued it appears his case was dismissed without merit and I believe he also filed under the whistle blowers law prior to it going into affect so he was not protected by it… need to recheck https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2659781/gammill-v-us-department-of-education/
Rand’s 2008 K-20 Student Record Data System for California came from a what appears to be a grant from the Hewlett Foundation.
Rand is a non-profit corporation and is currently battling LA County regarding payment of taxes and it is supposed to go before the Supreme court in March. They claim they provide services by conducting research that is made available to the public. This report, “Toward a K–20 Student Unit Record Data System for California”, laid much groundwork for what we see in our schools today. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG695.pdf
Anyone with a child in public school today will recognize how basically everything we are seeing there in the data realm manifested out of the ‘research’. This is a 128 page report, so to give you a quick view, I suggest searching it for ‘ Is There a Better Alternative? ” to begin to understand how the data collection is on steroids! This diagram from a PA school district but its all the same across the country. Big Money backing all the DATA on our kids. http://www.edweek.org/media/2015/10/16/9sr-integratedinfographic-c1.jpg
The Hewlett Foundation also funded this 51 page doc in 2008 called “Unfinished Canvas” A way to assess the k-12 Arts. It was created by SRI International, who’s subsidiaries include “Artificial Intelligence Center”, “Sarnoff Corporation” in NJ, SRI Ventures (they brought Siri to the Iphone, among other things), and Trap.it
Click to access AnUnfinishedCanvasLargeScaleAssessment.pdf
Initially, from what I understand, the Hewlett sponsored agenda for arts assessment, which involved non-arts educators developing the assessment standards was put in place. There was great push back by the Arts Educators and they got that changed. I’m told the New Standards for the Arts were designed by REAL Arts Educators.
Follow the money. It always leads back to the same people.
I agree with Mr. Wierdl–it’s difficult to sign something that is so poorly worded!
WE GOOFED BUT TRUST US TO FIX IT: Now headed for Senate confirmation hearings, Obama’s Acting Education Secretary John King admits in a new video that standardized testing has been harmful and wasteful, yet will continue federal tinkering to find a better balance between subjecting kids to non-stop testing hell and collecting data to improve instruction.
Reading stiffly from cue cards, King continues his “apology tour” after alienating teachers with corporate reform policies straight out of ALEC’s basement. Yet the Secretary continues to pretend outraged teacher and parent groups do not see right through to the heart of the problem – the corporate revolving door and the influence of money in politics.
Obama had always mailed in his education policy, straight from the boardrooms of Center for American Progress, the Gates Foundation and social engineers like Joanna Weiss. The policies were also favored by Wall Street and billionaires like the Waltons and Broads, yet were met with whimpers by the heads of the large teacher unions.
This untested market-based approach to changing schools exploded in opt-outs and gave Republicans an issue with great traction. Now Obama is backpedaling, but only in rhetoric as his actions only cement his commitment to upending classrooms through continuous, invasive measuring. His promises to help underperforming schools remain broken, as support for addressing actual learning obstacles flows instead into the hands of testing contractors and armies of consultants.
In essence, Obama is saying to America “yes we goofed” but let’s have a “fresh start”, beginning with the nomination of King, a darling of privatizers and dark money PACs that rain campaign cash onto your state legislators. This is not only tone-deaf and a thumb in the eye, it’s doubling down on corporate reform and federal centralization.
As a short-lived teacher and charter network director, King lacked the experience the education community was looking for, so his PR handlers instead launched an all-points media blitz based on his personal narrative, which credited NYC public schools for changing the trajectory of his life. Strange then, that he would pick a career in charter schools, which require pro-active completion of lottery applications, thereby leaving behind the most needy children whose parents are not as involved.
Today, the hope of students, parents and teachers across the political spectrum is that local control of schools can be restored by downsizing almost everything the megalithic USDOE does, abandoning NCLB’s federally mandated test requirements and concentrating on supporting the research-based recommendations of actual educators instead of mandating ham-handed “fixes” after meeting with lobbyists.
In short, Obama’s record on education is widely considered even “worse than Bush”, but the way forward now is no longer manufacturing fake crises and endlessly patching up failed (and unconstitutional) federal testing policies, it’s folding up shop and giving tax dollars back to districts so teachers can teach.