Friday, July 28, 2006

Spellings Bends, Feller Spins


AP's Ben Feller continues in his role as Spellings' media lapdog, massaging yet another press release from ED to add a prostituted journalistic touch to the Queen of Pain's most recent decree to bend NCLB rules when it is in the best interest of the unregulated tutoring industry.

With mandatory school transfers causing chaos in school systems where more schools than not are on the federal fail list, thus limiting transfer options, ED has chosen to acknowledge reality and to reverse the order of transfer and mandatory tutoring sanctions in 23 school districts. This allows Spellings to stick with her PR campaign based on the projection of a misleading image of flexibility, but, more importantly, it addresses the ed industry's growing impatience at the rate that tax dollars are transferred to corporate coffers for "education" services for which there has been no accountability.

If you didn't know that Feller's piece was intended be a news story, it would be easy to confuse it with a fawning and cuddly op-ed intended to reinforce ED's PR:
The policy changes announced yesterday are part of a pattern of enforcement by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. She wants to show she can adapt — waiving rules to get more kids in tutoring — and yet be tough on states that do not comply, by threatening to pull their money.

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