The NY BATS. Are not happy about President Obama’s selection of John King as Secretary of Education. Say this for King. His arrogant indifference to parents set off the largest testing opt out in history. Maybe he can do the same for the nation.

BATS write:

“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.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm