When the Every Student Succeeds Act was passed, there was a bipartisan majority that agreed on reining in Arne Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education.
Race to the Top, which was not a law but a program, gave the federal government unprecedented power to dictate what happened in public schools across the nation.
ESSA is flawed in many ways but one point is clear: It is intended to empower districts and states to make decisions (about some things, but not about annual testing, which is still mandated).
Many observers think it is wrong to take power away from the federal government because states and districts have not always been diligent in protecting the rights of children.
Apparently John King, the Secretary of Education, agrees that the federal government should hold onto the power that Congress has taken away. He is writing the regulations for implementation of ESSA, and the regulations appear to nullify parts of the law.
He got his first grilling today, before a House Committee. Representative Kline let him know how unhappy he and the committee are.
King will also appear before the Senate HELP Committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions), chaired by Senator Lamar Alexander. Senator Alexander will demand fidelity to the law. King apparently thinks that Congress can be ignored, bypassed, or fooled. Senator Alexander was Secretary of Education from 1991-1993. He will not be patient with obstruction.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know what the dynamics are. The bill is so sloppy that Congress is, in my view, responsible for giving King authority to act like a tyrant and interpret it as he wishes.
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AGREE!
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I agree.
The ambiguities were no mere ‘accident”
This is what lawyers do when they want to accomplish something but know that if they word things clearly, the public will not accept it.
It’s also no accident that Obama signed the bill — a bill that on its face might seem to be a repudiation of many of his policies. He obviously had been reassured that he would still be able to do as he pleased.
Some people keep falling for the same old tricks.
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I’d like to get all riled up about this but I’m not a conservative and I don’t really care which ed reformer puts forth which rule.
I think it has much more to do with power than principle. Republicans were more than happy to “federalize” schools when Bush was in power. Now that they hold most states but not the Presidency they’re gung ho on federalism again. By the same token, Democrats control very few states so they’re clinging to executive power. Power struggle.
Take it from me, it all looks the same when it trickles down to schools, whether it’s John Kasich or Obama. It’s all the same ed reform agenda with a different Party label.
Let me know when they have an actual debate with actual dissenting opinions. It all looks like echo chamber from the cheap seats.
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AGREE!
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Also, is this the same John Kline?:
“Legislation designed to prevent for-profit colleges from gaming the federal aid system and exploiting veterans died within 15 minutes of being introduced earlier this month.
U.S. Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, quashed the bill by ruling it nongermane to the topic of financial aid being discussed at his July 10 hearing.”
All complaints by people who were brutally ripped off by his donors should be directed to his office.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/24/why-the-university-of-phoenix-s-favorite-congressman-killed-the-gi-college-aid-bill.html
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Isn’t King a classic lame duck? This can play out in two opposite ways. Let King continue to strangle education with tests and blame him for doing what the legislators actually want after he is gone. Or, stall and ignore him for six months and deal with a more responsible senate-confirmed replacement. Why this ineffective guy still has input is beyond me. It takes an sniveling idiot not to recognize his own limitations.
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Fred,
King has been confirmed by the Senate. He doesn’t necessarily have to be replaced by the incoming president.
Scary thought, eh!
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Duane,
Everyone appointed by the current President is automatically terminated when the President’s term ends. King stays on only if the new President invites him to a member of the Cabinet. No one confirmed by the Senate gets life tenure except judges.
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Thanks for that clarification!
But what happens on inauguration day. Do the appointees and/or cabinet members just leave their offices and duties? Or does the incoming president usually have replacements already chosen?
Seemingly arcane governmental questions that do have an effect on the country, eh.
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Yet, as we see now, the current USDOE is packed with stealth reformists from TFA, the Broad ‘Academy’, the Fordham Institute, Bush-era appointees, and other poisonous political patrons,
It seems to me that the Secretary is little more than a figurehead at this point; the various hidden ideologues will ensure that the will of ALEC, Gates, and the billionaires gets implemented one way or another.
I would almost wager that Secretary King is playing a game of diversion where he lets Congress focus on the more egregious suggestions to keep them from doing anything about the details, rules, budgets, and controls they are quietly putting into place across his department.
That’s how a real player plays the Washington, DC game.
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Duane: The answer is yes. The cabinet positions are unfilled to start, although the Senate usually confirms people pretty quickly, sometimes even during the “transition” from one president to the next.
The way Congress is going right now, though, who knows how long it will take them to confirm Cabinet positions?
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Ed reformers have made an important discovery:
“K-12 decisions are more reflective of public will when they’re litigated through a democratic process ”
They’re CONSIDERING granting some (limited!) authority to the public!
It’s called “democratic governance”. It’s VERY innovative and cage-busting. Bill Gates should give a TED talk and explain it to us, or, one could just read the Ohio state code that governs public schools and see it all laid out.
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“Reformers” see democracy as the opposition. They entitled feel they can circumvent democratic process through their deep pockets. It has worked too well for them. Congress, governors, mayors, unions, and even some school boards can be bought!
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Chiara—I am thankful for you. You tell it like it is and I enjoy your comments.
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King is a reformer turd who wants to ensure he still has a job by rewriting history. Shame on him, as always.
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So TRUE. But remember, he is just Obama’s BOY, and Obama is the BOY of the rich.
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Everything that King did in New York State and is doing now in D.C. — and everything that Arne Duncan did in Chicago and in D.C. — was always geared towards certain primary goals:
1) increase the privatization of our public schools — close them and put the control of unaccountable management of money-motivated private sector entities (i.e. charter schools);
2) destroy any and all democratic governance of schools;
3) destroy teachers’ unions… or weaken them as much as possible;
4) enable the profiteering of companies that provides testing, on-line curriculum, digital curriculum, etc.
(with 2, 3, and 4 as part of the means to bring about 1)
Once you can see this clearly — much like taking the “red pill” in the movie “THE MATRIX — everything that King and Duncan have done, and are now doing makes total and perfect sense. Everything they do and have done was geared towards accomplishing one or all of those four objectives.
If it doesn’t lead to 1-4 or in any hampers achieving 1-4, then don’t do it, or end it.
If it DOES lead to 1-4, then do it full out, no matter how damaging that is to students and teachers in both the short and long term.
Think about it:
Mayoral control usurping and replacing control via a democratically elected board?
Test-based evaluation and paying of teachers?
Common Core testing?
Charter expansion?
The mass firing of those teachers in Rhode Island?
Insist that all special ed. kids achieve on the same level as their fully-abled peers, then blame punish teachers when they can’t pull of such miracles?
The list is endless.
And now we have this federal incursion into local school control, which the recent ESSA legislation explicitly forbids. John King is practically taunting the legislative branch, saying:
“Oh, so you senators and congresspersons say I can’t do any of this? That the new law that you passed forbids it? Well, guess what, guys and gals? I’m doin’ it anyway, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me! Na na-na na-na naaaa!”
King’s actions are designed to hamper the ability of traditional public schools to succeed in educating kids. It’s about having the those D.C. running the DOE being able to starve certain districts, or parts of districts, or individual schools, so that starvation will lead to “failure”, which can, in turn, be used to justify closing the schools and turning them over to money-motivated privatizers. …
… or to have financial leverage to institute union-busting merit pay schemes or other union-busting schemes… or to leverage and close school boards and replace them with mayoral (read: corporate) control …
… or to encourage, with the funding as the leverage, the opening of more and more privately managed charter schools run by money-motivated charter operators, schools which are not accountable to the public, not transparent to the public, and who don’t educate all the public — eschewing those students most expensive and troublesome to educate … special ed., immigrants, second language learners, homeless kids, foster care kids, kids with extreme behavior arising out of distressed home life conditions.
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Good summation. It is following the Milton Friedman plan for privatizing US public schools paragraph, by paragraph.
This plan has been publicly available for quite a few years now. The embrace of neoliberalism by the IMF, the US Chamber of Commerce (ALEC), and other nefarious players in the international economics scene was documented by Susan Ohanian back in the early to mid 1990’s.
Over and over and over again we were told that we were little more than tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists when we tried to raise these issues with our professional organizations (see Ohanians very shabby treatment by the NCTE), the teachers’ unions (see the shabby treatment of dissenters by Randi Weingarten’s Unity party), and the ivory towers of higher education (see the dismissive refusal to engage in discussion or research by pretty much every professor in the country due to Gates funding being jeopardized.)
http://www.edchoice.org/who-we-are/our-founders/the-friedmans-on-school-choice/article/public-schools-make-them-private/
Read the plan, look at what is happening, and realize this has been an ongoing, long-range plan that has succeeded in capturing both political parties, the wealthy elite, the ivory tower, and the business community.
Those are formidable opponents with deep pockets and endless resources but they are not invulnerable nor unassailable, as any student of world history can prove.
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Anyone know what King’s response to that was?
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http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/8/88/Princejohn07.jpg/revision/latest/thumbnail-down/width/340/height/229?cb=20111025164409
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Lamar Alexander has had terrible ideas about how to run our public schools for a very long time. Here he is in 1989 describing his “brand New American School.”
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King learned from the best in the business about usurping Congress, chiefly Obama and Cuomo. I bet 95% of this blog’s visitors along with its creator voted twice for this guys. Why? Because their last names are followed by a “D”? Poor habits are hard to break.
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“Poor habits are hard to break.”
Like voting rethuglican because a candidate has an “R” after his/her name, eh!
I believe there are a lot more independent thinkers on this site than just 5%. Some of us haven’t voted for a dim or rethug for president this century.
And don’t you love not being able to correct thoughts after they are submitted?
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The first time, we could choose Sarah Palin on the ticket. Then it was trust fund baby Romney with Ayn Rand worshiper Ryan. I still have the 47% comment ringing in my ears. Now we have Trump. Talk about bad habits. The problem with Republicans is they love the Constitution until they don’t. Case in point, the conservative blogs are full of wild eyed rants warning Obama wants to take all your guns and ignore due process. Yet these same hypocrites are willing to sacrifice our safety and eliminate due process for teachers.
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‘Some of us haven’t voted for a dim or rethug for president this century.”
I haven’t
And no, Nader is not responsible for Bush (not directed at you, Duane, of course)
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Here’s your federally-subsidized “personalized learning” folks:
In interviews over the past two months, current and former employees at Rocketship Schools emphasized the pressures on employees and students. They recounted instances of inadequate supervision, bathroom accidents and even infections due to denial of restroom visits.
And they voiced concerns about a disciplinary measure the company calls Zone Zero. Several current and former staffers said this practice, in effect, amounted to hours of enforced silence.
A handful of the employees also reported, and internal emails corroborated, a practice of having students retake standardized tests to increase scores. The current and former educators linked that practice to the company’s policy of tying 50 percent of teachers’ pay to growth in student test scores.
“It’s a really competitive environment,” says Wesley Borja, who worked from 2013 to 2015 at Rocketship Alma Academy in San Jose. “Everyone wants to get higher and higher percentages, and fudge the data, more or less.”
This is what the Obama Administration and Jeb Bush want to jam into every low and middle income school in the country- classes of 90 kids and row upon row of kids sitting at screens taking tests over and over again.
Another ed reform rip-off directed at the lower classes. Is it okay with them if we pass on these “innovations”? They look like cheap garbage to me.
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/06/24/477345746/high-test-scores-at-a-nationally-lauded-charter-network-but-at-what-cost
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What is it ed reformers find so fascinating about rows of kids sitting at screens taking tests? This image crops up again and again. These are the same people who dismiss public schools as using a “factory model”, right? Rocketship is an ACTUAL factory model. Have they ever been IN a factory?
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Just what every parent wants for their kids:
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Google image search results: Rocketship Academy:
Fa$inating row$ of kid$
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Who is wowed and impressed by rows of computers in 2016?
Why is this considered “innovative”?
I literally took safety training at a facility like this in the 1990’s, at an actual factory.
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A bit off topic, but worth a read. “America’s Not-So Broken Schools”
A measured argument against “creative disruption” of the public school system.
The last two paragraphs:
>The evolution of America’s school system has been slow. But providing a first-rate public education to every child in the country is a monumental task. Today, 50 million U.S. students attend roughly 100,000 schools, and are educated by over 3 million teachers. The scale alone is overwhelming. And the aim of schooling is equally ambitious. Educators are not just designing gadgets or building websites. At this phenomenal scale, they are trying to make people—a fantastically difficult task for which there is no quick fix, no simple solution, no “hack.”
Can policy leaders and stakeholders accelerate the pace of development? Probably. Can the schools do more to realize national ideals around equity and inclusion? Without question. But none of these aims will be achieved by ripping the system apart. That’s a ruinous fiction. The struggle to create great schools for all young people demands swift justice and steady effort, not melodrama and magical thinking.<
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Here’s the link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/everything-in-american-education-is-broken/488189/
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The echo chamber rolls on, disinterested in any dissent.
Look who is headlined at the charter school promotion event:
“Andre Agassi, Secretary John King, Howard Fuller, will all be on the main stage. ”
The Obama Administration sponsors yet another cheerleading event for charter schools. I foresee a massive expansion of the Rocketship chain. Access is everything, and ed reformers get exclusive access.
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Actions shout much louder than words and the actions of Arne Duncan and John King reveal that these minions are doing what their overloads want — I’m not talking about President Obama or G. W. Bush or Bill Clinton, or Reagan or Nixon, etc, because I think they are just more minions — and these actions reveal people who detest the democratic process of the Republic of the United States and the voice of the people that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and its amendments.
These overlords are the royalty of the 20th and 21st centuries. They are not called dukes, earls, barons, princes, kings or emperors. Instead they are called multi millionaires and billionaires and they are using their wealth and the power that wealth buys them to subvert our republic.
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