Our blog Poet seeks to understand greatness:
“The Maestro”
Chetty picked his VAMdolin
At Nobel-chasing speed
Duncan played the basket rim
And Rhee, she played the rheed
Coleman played his Core-o-net
Moskowitz, the lyre
Billy Gates played tête-à-tête
With Duncan and with higher
Sanders beat his cattle drum
Devalue Added Model
Pseudo-science weighted sum
Mathturbated twaddle
John King played the slide VAMbone
But Maestro was Obama
Who hired the band and set the tone
For Betsy’s Grizzly drama
(William Sanders, an economist, applied his
“cattle growth model” to students to create teacher VAM)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SomeDAM Poet,
Bingo. You sure have a way with words. Thank you.
SD Poet has outdone himself!
Brilliant! (and not in a Monty Python way).
“Mirror Images”
A blast from the past
But sadly, apt
The Dems are “aghast”
But once were rapt
SomeDAM Poet So wonderful to have you around.
Sanders was seeds, sows and cows.
Great, clever interpretation of the “reform orchestra.”
I especially love the “slide VAMbone”. Ah…where is John B. King these days?
the VAMbone still playing in so many disintegrating districts…
I’m dealing with a student in my 6th grade Math class who’s getting really good at coming up with excuses on why he won’t apply himself in class. This week’s excuse was (I kid you not) “I can’t understand this stupid common core math. Thanks Obama.”
I resisted the urge to tell him the story of Arne Duncan and Coleman and Bill Gates, and instead gave him a Math textbook from 1990 with the same exact problems. He was just throwing out random phrases, so if I were to tell him he was (partially) correct, he’d dig his heels in for the year and be done with it. (He can actually understand the math just fine, but would rather sleep or gripe.)
Harhar! Love it that an 11yo says “Thanks, Obama” re: CCSS.
“The Cleverly Hill Billies”
Come and listen to my story about a man named Bill
A rich billionaire, who had lots of time to kill
And then one day he was walking out the door
And into his head popped the thought of Common Core
Standards, that is, tech gold, tester tea
Well the first thing you know ol Bill is on the phone
He spoke to Obama with a real insistent tone
Said “Common Core is the thing you oughta push”
So they started up a Race to one-up the Dumbya Bush
Tests, that is. VAMmin tools. Pearson PARCCs.
In appreciation of the efforts of SomeDAM Poet and under the rubric of “let’s hope someone in the future never writes this”—
[start]
I met a traveller from another land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert of rheephorm . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Bill Gates, King of Kommon Kore:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands of $tudent $ucce$$ stretch far away.”
[end]
😨
P.S. With profuse apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his poem “Ozymandias.”
Omg. Wonderful. And Shelley would definitely approve!
Presidential candidate Barack Obama took tens of millions of campaign contribution dollars from America’s employee unions and promised he would do great things to strengthen unions. But the only thing President Obama demonstrated was that he couldn’t be trusted.
Obama’s most telling betrayal of America’s unions was what he did to the vital Employee’s Free Choice Act (EFCA).
EFCA was the most significant pro-union initiative since the Taft-Hartley Act. If Obama had only done what he promised — had he set the national agenda and made EFCA part of the public debate — this legislation could have been enacted. Instead, Obama’s actions clearly indicated that it mattered little to him, that he was merely going through the motions, largely to placate labor. “Sorry, folks….at least we tried. No, he didn’t try.
The same betrayal was evident in the president’s shocking non-response to the attacks on America’s public school teachers that were being made by anti-union forces and free-market fundamentalists. Although virtually every study ever conducted by reputable educational professionals has shown that the defects plaguing our school system are not the fault of the teachers, Obama remained mute.
To his utter shame, Obama never once contradicted these slanderous, trumped-up accusations, which he could have easily refuted simply by citing the relevant statistics — statistics he had access to. Instead, Obama sought to curry favor with Republicans and Independents by appointing his former Chicago crony, the anti-union, platitude-spouting, pro-charter-school bureaucrat Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
By refusing to defend the public schools against these subversive attacks, Obama contributed to what we see today as an assault not only on school teachers, but on all our public sector unions.
If President Obama had been even half the friend to labor that Candidate Obama was, America’s unions wouldn’t be in the defensive position they are today.
And then there’s Obama’s strong connection to the pro-charter-school Democrats for Education Reform.
And more, and more.
Lol. More brilliance from our own maestro!
Bravo! Brings to sense a vivid image of the deformer band playing a bazaar tune of self-serving bacchanalia. The VAMbone does slide, doesn’t it. And Eva is quite the lyre. Also enjoyed the Cleverly (I’ll add Miserly) Hillbillies song.
Music, musicians, animals, mathurbation: public education is exciting, and what more could we ask for?