Hi,I read your tweets and have just subscribed to your blog. I'm a teacher by trade, and I also sit on the school board of the largest school district in my county. I've been reading about RTTT and Arne Duncan as much as I can, and the more I read, the worse everything seems. I sent you the link to this TruthOut story, Obama's Betrayal of Public Ed? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling, by Twitter; I didn't notice it on your blog, but maybe you've already seen it.
A few days after I read that, this story ran in my local putrid rag on Sunday: Sonoma County school officials split over Race to the Top funds. You'll see a quote in the middle of the article from "Kate Walsh, president of the nonpartisan National Council on Teacher Quality." I looked them up on SourceWatch which says, "The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is a nonprofit organization that 'advocates for reforms in a broad range of teacher policies at the federal, state, and local levels,' according to its website. In particular, NCTQ supports 'a more market-sensitive approach to the structure of the profession, in order to encourage a more equitable distribution of the finest teachers to the schools that need them the most and in the subject areas that are particularly difficult to fill.'" This is all the market stuff the TruthOut article was talking about.
Like I said, the more I read, the more scared I get. Maybe I'm hyper-paranoid, but I think "they" want to dismantle public ed and make it all free-market, of which a by-product would be no more unions. Appalling.
Keep writing! We need people like you to spread the word.
Laura Gonzalez
Laura,
ReplyDeleteThe use of the words "betrayal of public education" referring to Obama, reveals a certain naivety and misunderstanding of the current situation on the part of the authors. I read their piece and can only assume that they thought, 1) Barack Obama was claiming to be some kind of anti-capitalist savior who now has betrayed us by going over to the side of market politics, or 2) that the current struggle is currently over public vs. private schools and school systems. Of course there are anti-public forces operating inside and outside of the Obama administration. But Obama is not anti-public schools. In fact, his Race-To-The-Top strategy is very much a defense of public (bigger and more aggressive government control and intervention) education. It is in fact, a public/private partnership using top-down reform in an effort to "save" the public sector. This is exactly the program Obama and the Democrats ran on. They haven't "betrayed" you. This is what they ran on and what you voted for.