WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mayday Protests, 1971

“If the government will not stop the war, we will stop the government.” -- Bill Moyers

CPS spokesperson Emily Bittner

 “This decision demonstrates that Governor Rauner’s attempts to drive CPS into bankruptcy are misguided and wrong. While CPS faces a $1 billion budget deficit next year, it can be solved if we all work together, as we are committed to doing.” -- Fortune

Spellings

UNC Pres. Margaret Spellings

Bush's former Sec. of Education says, while she doesn't endorse the new state law limiting protections for LGBT people, the university will enforce it, despite warnings from the feds. Spellings maintained her anti-gay stance, dismissively describing homosexuality as a “lifestyle.”-- Slate

Trump gets it all wrong on education

 "Now, if you look at education. Thirty countries. We’re last. We’re like 30th. We’re last. So we’re last in education. If you look at cost per pupil, we’re first. So we — and by the way, there is no second because we  spent so much more per pupil that they don’t even talk about No. 2. It’s ridiculous." -- Washington Post

Trump: 'I don't know how people make it on $7.25 an hour'

"But I'd rather leave it to the states. Let the states decide.” -- Politico

Sen. Elizabeth Warren & Rep. Tammy Duckworth

Corporations should be free to pay their CEOs whatever they choose, but taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize those salaries  — especially not when it gets in the way of our most vulnerable citizens leading more secure lives. -- Sun-Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Duncan's biggest fan

“I’m a fan,” said Margaret Spellings, Duncan’s immediate predecessor, who was education secretary during President George W. Bush’s second term and an architect of Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind policy. “He’s a good man who I think is doing the best job he can.” -- Politico

Petrilli agrees

He has “used his power responsibly for the most part,” said Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a former Bush-era Education Department official. “The priorities he’s been pushing on are the right ones.” -- Politico

Ravitch not so much
“If you like federal control of education, he’s your man.” -- Diane Ravitch

Gates knows best

"It may surprise you—it was certainly surprising to us—but the field of education doesn't know very much at all about effective teaching." -- Bill & Melinda Gates

Measurement and its discontents

One way is to ask ourselves what is missing from our measurements. Are the tests administered by schools making students smarter and more educated, or just making us think we know how to evaluate education?  -- Robert Crease, New York Times

Duncan's Law

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. -- NYT

All of Duncan's Race-To-The-Top stimulus money handouts, his speaking tours with Newt Gingrich, his embrace of T-Party govs like Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, none of that could buy him the credibility with Congress he needed for re-authorization of No Child Left Behind.

Duncan & Spellings

NCLB is a law that even he now calls a “slow-motion train wreck.” But Duncan has been a vocal supporter of the test-and-punish law since the Bush days, when he, as Chicago schools CEO, journeyed to D.C. to buddy up with then Ed Sec. Spellings. Remember, it was Spellings who declared the law, "99.9% pure" while Duncan cheered her on.

Now embarrassed by the 2014 proficiency mandate and his own projected 82%  national school failure rate, Duncan is taking the law into his own hands. About 38,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools fell short of their test-score targets under the federal law last year, and Duncan has predicted that number would rise to 80,000 this year. That doesn't provide Obama with much of a record to run on in 2012 -- does it?

While maintaining the worst aspects of the law's of test-and-punish provisions and using them to promote massive school closings, teacher firings, and conversion to privately-run charter schools, Duncan is offering waivers to the states based on Jeb Bush's Florida model, which even brother George wouldn't tolerate. While Jeb was governor, many of the state's A or B schools were considered "failing" by NCLB standards. 

Now, instead of junking the Bush-era law Duncan is encouraging every state to apply for a waiver which he personally could approve-- or not. The Duncan waivers would come only if he deemed that a state was following the "reform" guidelines prescribed under Race To The Top, ie. school closings, mass teacher firings, and more charter schools.

The problem for Duncan is that without any more stim money in his pocket and with massive cuts in the education budget anticipated in the wake of the Obama/Boehner debt deal, he has no juice. NCLB is a dead law walking and Duncan's own future is very much in doubt. He has already lost most of his base of support on the left and now the right is opening up on him.

From the Times:

“It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. He called Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”  

Unfortunately, the real victims of all this top-down educational tyranny will be the cash-starved schools themselves operating under confusing federal mandates and a rudderless Dept. of Education.

Pres. Obama, it's time to dump both NCLB and Arne Duncan. 2012 is drawing near.

Bush's & NCLB's last hurrah

It was like singing Happy Birthday at a wake. Bush, Spellings, Sharpton and the whole test-crazy accountability gang were there in Philly, raising their glasses high, in honor of the 7th anniversary of No Child Left Behind. Sounding every inch the loyal bureaucrat, L.A.'s former do-nothing superintendent, Roy Romer (who later led the giant $60-million Gates flop called Ed in '08) delivered the eulogy:

We must fulfill and build upon the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act by holding schools accountable for the success and achievement of every child.

It's Duncan

Well, you can't win 'em all. While I had no expectations that the Obama team would select the only progressive educator on the list for Sec. of Ed, I had hoped he would steer clear of the hatchet-swinging, test crazy, union busting, NCLB-loving, privatization-minded, Klein-Rhee-Vallas-Duncan types. Now some of my friends here in Chicago have argued with me, that Duncan is really not that way--that he's more of a compromise pick somewhere in the middle of Klein and Linda Darling-Hammond.

After all, they point out, Duncan got Randi Weingarten's stamp of approval along with that of Margaret Spellings. Everybody to the right of left-center field and left of Rush Limbaugh should be happy with this pick. Duncan isn't an ideologue, they argue. He'll be a decent bully-pulpit spokesman for urban public education, especially now that he's out from under the thumb of Daley. And the good side is, it might open the way for some changes here in the Windy City, where the disaster that is Renaisance 2010 has but a year to go and hopefully will go the way of NCLB.

Up until yesterday, I thought that the fallout over Blagojevich might reach all the way to City Hall, thereby making a Chicago pick for SOE too risky. But then I came to my senses.

My feeling is that these battles over cabinet posts tend to be ultra-divisive and sap the energy of progressive educators. Whoever is running the DOE is going to be a damn sight better than what we've had the past eight years. The struggle continues either way and the battle over real education reform will remain contested territory.

Is that sour grapes talking? Maybe a little.

Quotables

Arne's biggest fan

Margaret Spellings rolled into Chicago yesterday, to endorse Arne Duncan as her successor. While George Bush called himself, "The Decider," Spellings simply wants to be remembered as “the practical implementer of the law” (NCLB). Whatever has she been smoking? Spellings would do well do get out of town and back to Texas soon after Jan. 20th before the law catches up with her.

Clout Street says:

Duncan, who appeared embarrassed as he stood along side Spellings, downplayed her comments and continued to refuse to say whether he is interested in the job if Obama offers it to him.

I’m quoted in Alfie Kohn’s upcoming Nation piece, “Beware of the School Reformers.” Alfie needed a succinct summary of Arne Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 initiative. So I gave him one:

Just as the test-crazy nightmare of Paige’s Houston served as a national model (when it should have been a cautionary tale) in 2001, so Duncan would bring to Washington an agenda based on “Renaissance 2010,” which Chicago education activist Michael Klonsky describes as a blend of “more standardized testing, closing neighborhood schools, militarization, and the privatization of school management.”

Did I leave anything out?

Religion Dept.

Dan Terkell, Studs’ son, changed the spelling of his surname during the McCarthy era when Studs “never met a petition he didn’t like.” At last week’s N.Y. tribute to Studs, Dan says, referring to Wisconsin’s fascist Senator Joe McCarthy:

“I honestly don’t know whether there is a heaven or hell. But I would guess that tail Gunner Joe and my father are not in the same place.”

Michelle Rhee, D. C. schools chancellor, in The Atlantic

"As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles. You can’t say, 'My students didn't get any breakfast today,' or No one put them to bed last night,' or 'Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.'"

You can’t?