Jan Resseger is always worth reading. She thinks deeply about the issues and synthesizes brilliantly.
In this post, she asks and answers what’s at stake in the election tomorrow for our nation’s public schools.
She believes that therere is a chance for fresh thinking about how to help schools instead of punishing them.
If Joe Biden is elected President, I believe our society can finally pivot away from an artificially constructed narrative about the need to punish so called “failing” public schools, and away from the idea that school privatization is the key to school improvement. During Betsy DeVos’s tenure, our two-decades old narrative about test-and-punish education reform has faded into a boring old story fewer and fewer people want to hear anymore, but nobody has proclaimed an alternative.
Will Biden liberate our students, teachers, and schools from the grip of twenty years of oppressive, destructive, stifling federal policies? Or will he feel loyal to the failed ideas of Race to the Top? Will he encourage the states to repeal VAM? Will he grant blanket testing waivers for this spring? Will he urge Congress to rewrite the “Every Student Succeeds Act” to eliminate the annual testing mandate? We will find out later, and we will push as hard as we can for genuine change.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Adding to, “what is at stake”- Media reported that Trump’s Covid advisor, Scott Atlas (Hoover Institute), apologized for going on RT for an interview. RT is state owned media of Russia. It is a general assumption that what is broadcast by RT is a foreign government’s propaganda.
I guess that American comedy plays well in Russia.
138,847,000 Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election.
92 million have already voted in this one.
If Biden’s rhetoric corresponds to his policies and actions, I believe public education will be in a better place. I believe Biden will end the funding stranglehold that has been part of Trump’s education policy. How much more schools will get depends of what happens in Congress as a result of the election. As far as actual policy, I think we will have to wait and see. Dr. Jill Biden cannot be blind to what has happened to public education, I hope she has influence over her husband. We already know that Joe Biden is not afraid to announce support for unions. In a Pennsylvania speech Biden stated that unions built the middle class, and union members in the Commonwealth have been actively campaigning for him. We also know that special interest groups will be lining up curry Biden’s favor should he win.
Biden was Obama’s VP for eight years as Obama crushed and privatized public education, yet Biden never uttered a peep of protest. But things are going to be different now. It’s like being married to an abuser for 47 years but believing he’s going to change in his 48th year.
Sure, vote for Trump and get complete and total eradication of public schools.
I do agree that on a purely self-interest basis, those who send their children to private schools would absolutely prefer Trump/DeVos over Biden and are benefiting greatly.
Since we all agree that Biden would not direct the billions in federal aid to private schools that the Trump/DeVos administration does, defeating Biden would be a good thing for private school parents who care only about private schools.
President Trump is a lot better for private school parents who only care about their own self-interest than Biden is, and that may explain some anti-Biden sentiment.
Private, including religious.
May this solemn day be the beginning of the great repudiation of everything our oafish, heartless, artless president and his rapacious, toadying party stand for.
Well said.
Dear Joe and Kamala:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/why-we-need-to-end-high-stakes-standardized-testing-now/
Well, since Biden largely was a dud in his own academic accomplishments, I don’t expect any innovative or deep thoughts about education or anything else from him personally. The larger question is “Who will influence Biden the most in the arena of education?” If he takes all his advice from the NEA and/or the tired hacks who have mis-guided education for the past 50 years, things are not likely to get “better,” whatever that actually means.
Unlike Trump, who cheated on his SAT and in life, Biden will surround himself with intelligent people. Better a C student than a liar, cheater and fraud.
Absolutely!!!!
Larry-
The public school-educated children of the middle class and poor created the GDP that made the governing 400 families of idle rich quite pleased with themselves.
Conservative religious and their allies, the rapaciously greedy billionaires like Bill Gates, Walton heirs, Charles Koch and Reed Hastings may kill the golden goose.
Before the feds, states, and district central offices got into the business of micromanaging K-12 education, we had the best of both worlds:
–remarkable stability, continuity, and good sense in our curricula and pedagogy because of the habits of the tribe of teachers and refinement in the crucible of practice
–freedom, in our schools, for classroom practitioners to be flexible and to innovate based upon both their students’ needs and on ongoing recommendations and discoveries by hundreds of thousands of scholars, researchers, and colleagues.
These decades of puerile national “standards” and demonstrably invalid testing–of top-down micromanagement and mandates–hav,e tragically and ironically, DEBASED our curricula and pedagogy, and have led to NO IMPROVEMENT WHATSOEVER according to the Deformers’ own risible, indefensible measures–test scores.
Let’s return power to teachers and department heads in public schools and get these other cooks out of the kitchen. The results will be much more palatable, as anyone familiar with U.S. schools before the standards and testing mania can attest.
Ares, god of factions, spare us, if you please,
another bill upon the Hill that’s worse than the disease.
Ares, god of factions, spare us, if you please,
another bill upon the Hill that’s a cure worse than the disease.