DeVos Provides Evidence of Devolution

The brittle crone billionairess, Betsy Devos, went before a House committee this week to answer questions regarding her bullish support for a 12 percent cut to the federal education budget that has been proposed by the sado-conservatives now in charge at the White House.

Included in the cuts are after-school programs and mental health services for America's poorest communities.  Because the program previously have had so little money spread so thin, DeVos said, we may as well just kill the whole thing.  After all, as Trumpian reason goes, if a most people are starving, we should go ahead and eliminate food for the ones that we're feeding. 

If you're still uncertain about where the Trump/Devos ed budget registers on the inhumanity meter, it also zeroes out federal funding for Special Olympics.  All of it.  By the way, the entire $17.5 million federal commitment to Special Olympics would pay for 5 Trump trips to Mar-a-Lago.

We should prepare for more of this kind of brazen cruelty masked as fiscal responsibility.  After all, this week, we saw, too, the opening salvos in a new war to be waged in the courts, this time, to take away health care away for millions of Americans and to allow insurance companies, once again, to make insurance unaffordable for those with pre-existing conditions.  Does the Trump Party really believe that an effort to kill Obamacare will make its likely preservation the default choice among the populace, rather than the hugely popular option of Medicare-for-All? Probably.

Meanwhile, the spiriting away of the Mueller Report by Trump's AG has left much of the Resistance in a stunned whimper.  I am wondering when Barr's well-choreographed castration attempt will register among the vast majority of citizens who we might have been expected to be marching on the White House for a lesser crime against justice just a week ago.

If you want a larger future that is not ruled by a smaller past, it's time to force all of that generalized disappointment and sadness into a righteous anger that the moral universe demands.  The voting that culminates next year has to begin today.  See below.

Indivisibles,

Last night, in a stunning, reckless, and baseless two-sentence letter, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice announced it won’t defend any part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This is the Trump administration’s clearest attempt yet, not just to sabotage, but to completely annihilate the ACA -- and in doing so, unleash chaos on our health care system and on millions of Americans lives.

We’re pissed. And we know you are too.

→ It would jeopardize Medicaid expansion in 37 states.
→ It would end protections for preexisting conditions.
→ It would end coverage for young people who’d otherwise be able to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.
→ It would end required coverage of preventive care -- like cancer screenings, vaccines, birth control, blood pressure tests and more.

And so, so much more.

Look, we know we don’t need to tell you what’s at stake -- you’ve been fighting this fight with us for the last two years. But, we’ve got three things we can do right now to beat back these latest Republican attempts to take away our healthcare, and we need your help. We’re making an urgent appeal to ensure our movement has everything it needs to respond in full force. So, if you’re ready to pitch in $5, $10, $25, or more to help fund this work, click here. Otherwise, read more about our plan below. Contribute >>

So, what happens now? To be clear, the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land. Republicans have tried repeatedly for 9 years to repeal, undermine, and sabotage the ACA, and this is just one more attempt at that. It was because of grassroots pressure that it exists today. What’s important to remember is that this fight is now in the courts -- and there are plenty of stakeholders ready to do the job that Trump’s DOJ won’t (check out our resource with more on the upcoming legal battle here). 

Right now, there are three meaningful things that you can do to protect health care for millions while this makes its way through the courts:

1. Pressure House Democrats to use their oversight and investigatory power to hold the Trump administration accountable for their sabotage. Call them and demand that they ask the tough questions -- ask them what they’re doing about Trump’s attack on our health care right now.
2. Keep calling to get your members of Congress to commit to building on the success of the ACA and lay the groundwork for a single-payer system. Yes, ask your representatives to cosponsor Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare For All Act (we’ve got a call script!), but go a step further. Demand your members of Congress lay the groundwork now for what comes next: that means holding hearings, hearing from experts, working through the policy debates, building consensus, and drafting legislation so that it’s ready when we take power. Your continued pressure can ensure that they do this.
3. Organize, organize, organize to reverse the radical, conservative transformation of our judicial system (read: win in 2020). Right now, that means asking your senators to fight like hell to block additional Trump appointees to district and circuit courts. It also means knocking doors to take back power in the Senate and the White House to ensure that our district and federal courts are occupied by qualified judges dedicated to safeguarding our rights and promoting justice -- not advancing partisan political goals.

The good news is that our team is working day in and day out to put resources and tools in the hands of Indivisibles across the country to build local power and do just that: hold members of Congress accountable for oversight, demand bold policy alternatives to Trump’s hateful agenda, and win in 2020. 

The not-so-good news is that we’re working against the clock, and the administration isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Your contribution can help us fight back. If you can pitch in $5, $10, $25, or more right now your dollars will go directly toward our efforts to ramp up this work. 

Right now, we’re:

→ Launching a $25,000 rapid response digital ads campaign to make more people aware of Trump’s latest attempts to destroy the ACA and mobilize more folks to take action and get involved on their home turf.
→ Rolling out a state-of-the-art membership management platform for Indivisible groups, allowing them to better engage with their members, organize their events, and build long-term power.
→ Putting the final touches on our new click to call tool to make it easier for people to get connected to their members of Congress and get the right information to make the most strategic ask with a single click of a button.
→ AND we’re planning major campaigns to double down on oversight efforts, protect communities under attack by the administration, and strengthen our democracy.

Two years to the week after their unsuccessful first attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act in the House, Trump and Republicans are still in relentless pursuit of your care. And they’ll do whatever it takes, no matter how lawless -- and no matter how many people it hurts.

We. Will. Fight. Back. And we will win.

In solidarity,Indivisible Team

The Alexander-Ravitch Policy Era Grinds On

Valerie Strauss is publishing interviews by oddball and Disruptor Foundation Fellow, C. M. Rubin, who is in the process of interviewing six "potential" candidates for Secretary of Education under the next President Clinton. 

Diane Ravitch's is the most recent interview offered at Valerie's WaPo blog.

Ravitch begins her first response to the first question by labeling our sordid modern history of racist standardized testing the "Bush-Obama policies." Even though the standardized testing ideology has been around for over a hundred years, Diane would have been much more accurate to label the modern-day fixation on testing as the "Alexander-Ravitch policies," as Lamar and Diane provided the foundation upon which Bush II and Obama built their shaky edifices.

After all, it was during the mid-to-late 1980s that Lamar gained national prominence as the nation's first "Education Governor" by instituting some of the first high stakes grade-level tests in Tennessee and by initiating bonus pay for teachers based on evaluations. 

In 1991, Alexander leveraged his bullshit reforms in Tennessee into the Secretary of Education slot under Bush I.  With recommendations from Checker Finn, Lamar hired Diane as his Assistant Secretary in charge of research at ED, even though Ravitch had never even written a doctoral dissertation.  But that did not matter: Diane had attended elite colleges, had never trained as an educator, had never been a teacher, and she marched to drummers at the Hoover Institution.  

In the years leading up to her post at ED, however, Diane had already gained lot high-level experience in using test scores to demonize public schools.  She was part of Washington's inner circle of former Reaganites and corporate enemies of public education who pushed through a set ridiculous cut scores for NAEP in 1992, in order to exaggerate the weaknesses of public schools:

In 1993, the National Academy of Education argued that NAEP’s achievement-setting processes were “fundamentally flawed” and “indefensible.” That same year, the General Accounting Office concluded that “the standard-setting approach was procedurally flawed, and that the interpretations of the resulting NAEP scores were of doubtful validity.” The National Assessment Governing Board, or NAGB, which oversees NAEP, was so incensed by an unfavorable reportRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader it received from Western Michigan University in 1991 that it looked into firing the contractor before hiring other experts to take issue with the university researchers’ conclusions that counseled against releasing NAEP scores without warning about NAEP’s “conceptual and technical shortcomings.”

In addition, NAGB absorbed savage criticism from the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded in 1999 that “NAEP’s current achievement-level-setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters’ judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results. ... The results are not believable.”

Oh, did I mention that Diane was a member of NAEP's governing board from 1995 to 2004?  Did she help to fix any of the preposterous benchmarks while she was a Board member? No, she did not.

As recently as 2009, the U.S. Department of Education received a report on NAEP from the University of Nebraska’s Buros Institute. This latest document expressed worries about NAEP’s “validity framework” and asked for a “transparent, organized validity framework, beginning with a clear definition of the intended and unintended uses of the NAEP assessment scores. We recommend that NAGB continue to explore achievement-level methodologies.” In short, for the last 20 years, it has been hard to find any expert not on the Education Department’s payroll who will accept the NAEP benchmarks uncritically.

In all of her truth-telling about corporate ed reform since her 2009 reprogramming by Randi Weingarten and Richard Rothstein, has Diane ever admitted that NAEP benchmarks are a joke?  

Nah, in fact she holds up NAEP as the gold standard, and in her interview with Rubin she pretends to advocate, even though her support for ESSA shows otherwise, for a national testing policy that emphasizes tests "only for diagnostic purposes."  With cut scores like NAEP's "diagnostic tests," who needs anything more, right?

The most troubling aspect of the latest Ravitch interview, however, comes when Ms. Rubin asks her what the role of education should be in solving the problems of income inequality.  

Q) What should the role of education be in solving our income inequality problems? 

A) Education is opportunity. For some children, it will be their path out of poverty. For many others, schools are unable to overcome the burdens of poverty. We most certainly have far too much income inequality. 

The best way to solve it would be for government to provide children’s grants so that no child grows up in abject poverty. 

That, plus investing in the rebuilding of our infrastructure so that there are jobs for those who are able and willing to work. As Bob Herbert demonstrated in his book “Losing Our Way,” we need to rebuild our bridges, tunnels, highways, and other parts of our infrastructure. There should be enough work for all.

Education should offer equality of educational opportunity to all children. Schools in every neighborhood, regardless of zip code, should offer an excellent education, including the arts, foreign languages, play, technology, history, literature, the sciences, mathematics, and opportunities to create and make things.

Education is opportunity?  Really, Diane?  Not only does she show a thorough lack of imagination in advocating for what amounts to a child poverty voucher that would would be applied to remove "abject" from the poverty that children struggle in, but she ignores the Coleman research and the half-century of research since on the power of socioeconomic integration.  

Does Diane really believe that a poverty voucher and an enriched curriculum in a high-poverty segregated school is what education can do to address income inequality? Does Diane remember that the Supreme Court agreed unanimously over a half century ago that separate education is inherently unequal? Can she be so out of touch with the research and the social realities on the ground? 

If she does believe this backwards nonsense that she is espousing, then she is truly qualified to be the next Secretary of Education, since that is exactly what Hillary Clinton will be looking for.

But don't count on Ravitch leaving her present position any time soon.  She is much too valuable as a dependable shepherd for the Washington establishment, patiently leading her sheep into a box canyon by talking tough and pretending to advocate against policies that she and Lamar have supported for a long time.

Duncan Invites Parents to Conduct Research on Reasons for Racist Practices in Schools

Duncan sent one of his underlings to the News Hour this evening to express her disgust that 3 and 4 year old students, most of whom are minority children, would be suspended from school.  The young African-American woman from the Duncan's Civil Rights Office leaned forward into the camera and expressed her disgust at such practices.  

When the interviewer asked her why this was happening, she stopped leaning forward and excused herself from any such speculation, since it is the Department's duty to report the facts, ma'am, just the facts.  Why it's happening--can't say.  That's for parents, or researchers, or someone else to determine.

Could it be Duncan's department dare not dig deeper into why minority students are suffering, for fear of what it may turn up facts that would tie the U. S. Department of Education directly to the shameful results of their own survey.  Let's take them one at a time:

1) African-American children comprise 18% of all public school children enrolled . . . but account for nearly half of all suspensions.

Now we know that the education conformers of the BRT, the billionaires, the corporate media, and even the President have celebrated the philosophy of No Excuses for almost 20 years now.  The reason KIPP has become the poster chain gang for urban schooling is the fact that they were first to embrace fully the penal pedagogy of the No Excuses ideology, and former teachers offer testimony to reality of total compliance schooling that needs no excuse to abuse and humiliate children whose needs are secondary to the No Excuses dogma.  

We also know that the 6,000 charter schools are mostly the No Excuses variety, and they enroll a disproportionate number of minority students--until they are found wanting, either behaviorally or intellectually.  Student attrition in KIPP schools is 40-60 percent between grades 5 and 8.  

We also know the federal government has spent over $700 million since 2010 to seed, feed, and breed more segregated charter schools of the total compliance, no excuses, zero tolerance variety.  The KIPP model has also influenced other urban schools that believe that turning schools in medium security prisons can have big pay-offs in test scores, which has become the debauched surrogate for what it means to learn.  

To Point 2.  African-American and Latino students

2) . . . are more likely to attend schools with a higher concentration of first-year teachers than white students. And . . . nearly half a million students nationally attend schools where nearly two-thirds or fewer of teachers meet all state certification and licensing requirements. Black and Latino students are more likely than white students to attend these schools.

There’s also a teacher salary gap of more than $5,000 between high schools with the highest and lowest black and Latino students enrollments, according to the data.

And the Obama Administration's role in all this?  Just like their predecessors, Team Obama has been a relentless advocate for alternative certification programs like Teach for America and its knock-offs, and it has given hundreds of millions to Teach for America over the past 6 years.  In 2010 alone, TFA landed a $50 million dollar lump from ED.

KIPP and other chain gang charters could not operate without TFA's inexperienced 2 year temps.  Conditions are too grueling for non-masochists to work for any length of time in these schools, where teachers are subjected to the same abusive treatment that they are expected to mete out to students.

The interviewer tried once more:  With the Supreme Court decision from the 1950s and the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, why are these inequalities still commonplace?  Even though the young Obamaite would not answer, don't we all know?  

What has the federal government been doing, other than making sure that these inequalities get worse than they have been?  

What is amazing to me is that the survey ever saw the light of day.  Watch the video below.

The New New Federalist Plan to Crush Teachers and Public Schools

Here is the conclusion of George Will's most recent tribute to Arne Duncan for moving forward on Obama's plan to re-focus the war against teachers and public schools down to the state level, whereby Obama can then be shielded from blame for the anti-union, anti-democratic, and anti-civil rights actions that his own federal policies encourage:

Regarding grades K through 12, federal education policy — if such there must be — should permit, indeed encourage, 50 laboratories of educational experimentation. Federal policy should be confined to providing financial rewards contingent on improvements confirmed by national metrics — Duncan’s single goal post.


The Education Department sits at the foot of Capitol Hill, where many new legislators consider “federal education policy” a constitutional oxymoron. They have a point. They might, however, decide that the changes Duncan proposes — on balance, greater state flexibility in meeting national goals — make him the Obama administration’s redeeming feature. 

Take Tennessee as a prime example.  As one of the first two states to land big money ($500 million) from Race to the Trough Top,  the State set out immediately to remove the cap on charter schools and to promote them as the prime school turnaround option, to undergird its test-score analysis and archival systems, and to begin to hurriedly design a teacher evaluation system based on test scores. 

Bill Sanders, testing guru and former adjunct professor at UT, has moved back to Nashville from the SAS campus in North Carolina to be close to the action.  So far Sanders has remained mum on the fact that the National Academy of Sciences has nothing good to say about using value-added modeling for assessment of anything or anyone involving high stakes.  But, then, for some teachers don't matter--it is only the students' test scores that matter.

Now combine these developments with the corporate-funded election success by Tennessee Tea Party Republicans who now suddenly control both State Houses and the Governor's Chair, and you have a perfect storm aimed squarely at sweeping away the teaching profession, teacher preparation, collective bargaining, due process, retirement, school governance and oversight. 

In short, public education as we know it will cease to exist if these guys prevail, with the federal government doing nothing except to help the process along with huge infusions of cash.  Here is a list of pending legislation now zooming through the legislative chambers in Nashville:

HB130, abolishes teacher unions’ ability to negotiate conditions of employment with school districts.

SB102, eliminates Tennessee Education Association-selected positions on Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System board of directors.

HB159, prohibits public employees having dues deductions for either political action committees or dues, if the organization engages in political activity “in any way.”

HB145, blocks Tennessee Education Association from recommending appointees to the Tennessee Financial Literacy Commission board of directors.

These guys make Fathead Christie in New Jersey look a Deweyean progressive. 

And don't expect the new governor, Bill Haslam, to veto any of these draconian measures if they are voted through.  As CEO and majority owner of Pilot Oil (yes, the ones you see on every interstate), Haslam is the corporationist's poster boy.  Here are few of his holdings that he dumped prior to his election in order to avoid ethics questions:

The multimillionaire Knoxville mayor sold stocks of U.S. tobacco giants Lorillard Inc. and Philip Morris International, several oil companies, Canadian payday loan company Cash Store Finance Services Inc. and Amazon, the Internet retailer that refuses to collect sales taxes from customers on behalf of states such as Tennessee.

He also got rid of investments in two major state contractors, CVS Caremark, which manages state pharmacy benefits, and United Health Group, which owns TennCare contractor AmeriChoice.

Good folks.

So, yes, there is a new new federalism, or is that feudalism?  Unless people organize in every state, a piece of the national juggernaut will be show up in every state. 

Today there are signs that teachers are hitting back, suing a local school board that could not wait for the new laws crushing collective bargaining to go into effect.  That's a start.  Now if the prostisuits who run the AFT and NEA would come out their spider holes and say something, that might help.  Oh, I forgot--they're listening to Arne and Bill Gates.

The President Asks for Our Help: We Ask the President to Stop Treating Us Like Idiots

Arne Duncan's federalized system of bribes called Race to the Top has all sorts of incentives for state education departments. It has incentives to develop constant data surveillance systems for both students and teachers, with tests to decide who gets to graduate, who gets rehired, who gets to move to the next grade, and which schools get needed cash. There are incentives, too, for the creation of unlimited numbers of the segregated corporate charter school test camps based on the Wall Street Model of Public Oversight, i. e. NONE. And, indeed, there are incentives for states and localities to dump their curriculum and standards into the trash in favor of a single nationalized curriculum and testing system based on the deep thinking of the MBAs, economists, and lawyers hired by the Business Roundtable to oversee the project.

Having entered and lost the first round of this Race to Serve the Oligarchs, many states and localities are balking at the thought of entering Round 2 of Judgment by the Plutocrats. By now all the states have figured out what Arne and Bill and Eli want--it's just a matter of who can craft the most morally irresponsible, pedagogically-suspect, and profession-damaging mode of getting there. In ed deform nomenclature, that's called Bold Planning.

Some states have pulled out of Arne's bribe game entirely, including Kansas, Indiana, Texas, and Alaska. Ohio is so desperate for local participation that it is using its own pathetic bribes to get LEAs to sign up for Round 2, with "the state . . . sweetening the pot . . . by guaranteeing a minimum of $100,000 to districts and $25,000 to charter schools - over four years." Could there be anything sadder!

So while Duncan, Gates, and Broad use bribes and extortion to circumvent the legislative process that was intended to make federal education policy, the nation's schools are on the brink of a nervous breakdown while losing up to 300,000 teachers in the coming Fall--that is, if developments in Greece do not trigger another worldwide economic Panic between now and then.

Meanwhile, the President, now running neck and neck in the polls with Ron Paul, tells us that he needs our help to save the Dems from a crushing defeat this coming November. Well, we need something from the President: we need him to stop treating us like idiots and to do something about education that would distinguish his approach from the past generations of failed reforms that preceded him and that are now being repackaged for, yet, another generation of failure. More corporate control and corporate welfare, test-and-punish child abuse, and anti-teacher policies are not the answers to the problem of renewing and strengthening the American public education system. So, Mr. President, let me respectfully remind you that when you get on the side of the people (the parents, students, and teachers) instead of the side of the billionaires, then the people will get on your side. Not until then. Only then. In the meantime, your Party be damned. It's just that simple.

And here are the People asking for the President's help--the children who, indeed, are looking for something a little more than the same "shitty deal" for education that Eli Broad, Walmart, and Bill Gates have in mind. From the New York Times:

It was a silent call to arms: an easy-to-overlook message urging New Jersey students to take a stand against the budget cuts that threaten class sizes and choices as well as after-school activities. But some 18,000 students accepted the invitation posted last month on Facebook, the social media site better known for publicizing parties and sporting events. And on Tuesday many of them — and many others — walked out of class in one of the largest grass-roots demonstrations to hit New Jersey in years.

The protest disrupted classroom routines and standardized testing in some of the state’s biggest and best-known school districts, offering a real-life civics lesson that unfolded on lawns, sidewalks, parking lots and football fields.

The mass walkouts were inspired by Michelle Ryan Lauto, an 18-year-old aspiring actress and a college freshman, and came a week after voters rejected 58 percent of school district budgets put to a vote across the state (not all districts have a direct budget vote).

“All I did was make a Facebook page,” said Ms. Lauto, who graduated last year from Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan, N.J. “Anyone who has an opinion could do that and have their opinion heard. I would love to see kids in high school step up and start their own protests and change things in their own way.”

At Columbia High School in Maplewood, that looked like 200 students marching around the building waving signs reading “We are the future” and “We love our teachers.”

In West Orange, a district that is considering laying off 84 employees, reducing busing, cutting back on music and art, and dropping sports teams, it was high school students rallying in the football stands.

At Montclair High School, it meant nearly half of the 1,900 students gathered outside the school in the morning, with some chanting, “No more budget cuts.”

In the largest showing, thousands of high school students in Newark marched past honking cars stuck in midday traffic to fill the steps of City Hall under the watchful gaze of dozens of police officers.

With their protests, the students sought to send a message to Gov. Christopher J. Christie, a Republican whose reductions in state aid to education had led many districts to cut staff and programs and to ask for larger-than-usual property tax increases. Mr. Christie, who has taken on the state’s largest teachers’ union in his efforts to close an $11 billion deficit, has proposed reducing direct aid to nearly 600 districts by an amount equal to up to 5 percent of each district’s operating budget.

“It feels like he is taking money from us, and we’re already poor,” said Johanna Pagan, 16, a sophomore at West Side High School in Newark, who feared her school would lose teachers and extracurricular programs because of the governor’s cuts. “The schools here have bad reputations, and we need aid and we need programs to develop.” . . . .

Obama Budget Eliminates School Library Funds for Poor Schools

AASL President, Cassandra Barrett, is shocked that schools with large large numbers of students living in poverty are having their federal school library funds eliminated in the Oligarchs' new education budget. What she does not realize is that the new corporate charter schools for the poor have been planned with no school libraries or librarians, which neatly eliminates the need for federal library funds. When the goal is segregation, containment, and psychological neutering of the poor by highly unqualified "teachers," who needs libraries?

By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal,02/01/2010

President Obama has delivered a slap in the face to school librarians. In his FY2011 budget proposal to Congress on Monday, he completely eliminated the Improving Literacy for School Libraries grant program, designed to boost academic achievement by providing students with access to up-to-date school library materials.

President Obama unveils the fiscal year 2011 budget, which wipes out federal funding specifically earmarked for school libraries.

“I’m shocked,” says Cassandra Barnett, president of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and a media specialist at Fayetteville High School in Arkansas. “On one level, I’m angry, and on another level, I’m highly disappointed. This is a real morale killer.”

Although Obama’s proposal includes a $400 billion investment in education, there’s no mention of federal funds specifically geared toward school libraries—and that means schools with at least 20 percent of students coming from families who live below the poverty line will no longer have access to those badly needed monies for everything from library books and extended hours to technology and professional development.

“[Obama] is proposing to take away the last access to literacy for these kids in high-poverty areas,” says Barnett, whose own school qualifies for the grant program. If Congress approves the proposal, Barnett’s says her library budget will suffer and her district won’t rehire a library supervisor as planned.

Lisa Layera Brunkan, one of the three moms who co-founded the Fund Our Future Washington grassroots organization that lobbied for and secured $4 million in emergency funding for school libraries in their state, says Obama’s proposal would punish “our poorest, our most remote, and our most challenged students.”

“Put simply, cutting this program will hurt the children of the school districts that are scraping by with the least resources,” she adds. “The types of programs that are funded by Improving Literacy Through School Libraries are exactly what the business world and universities are saying matter and what parents want for their children."

Why an Obama Win Marks the Beginning of the Contest

The new President will be inundated with suitors from various camps vying for his attention on education issues, and most of them do not represent real change, or any change at all for that matter. In fact, most are recipes with the same snake oil base that has been used in the past reform remedies, treatments that surely have made a lot of money for the hucksters who sell them, even as the patients suffer the force feeding and turn sicker and sicker. We must remember that most of the “progressive” education reformers now lining up to root their way to the Washington feeding trough are no less self-interested than the conservatives who are currently planning extended holidays from the monies they managed to extract from the federal treasury over the past eight years.

Among the prominent edu-suitors now flexing their elbows will be, of course of Andrew Rotherham, who is anchored at the Progressive Policy Institute, which, of course, is no more progressive than the republocrats of the Democratic Leadership Council that created it. And over the years, Rotherham has showen an impressive bipartisan ability to soak funds from both sides of the aisle. For instance, he and an illustrious Board that included Lisa Graham Keegan raked off millions early in W’s reign with the Education Leaders Council, which was the subject of an DOE OIG Report (pdf) in 2006 that found a consistent misuse of federal education grant monies by the bipartisan gang who ran ELC before its office was shuttered and its website went 404. Did they ever return the money?

Rotherham, too, has been a stalwart front man of the charter school corporations, a supporter for a de-professionalized teacher corps, and a fan for the gutting of unions. While it would seem that Rotherham could become a charter-supporting sidekick of the new president, we must remember that Obama actually has some genuine concern for the children of urban schools--which could present some awkward moments in any discussion with the EduWonk. Look for Rotherham to call for national standards, some cheap variety of value-added testing, teacher pay based on test scores, and more charter school chain gangs for communities where white liberals don't mind cutting the education budgets by 20 percent. Here's to the middle class!

A leading competitor for Obama's attention will be Marc Tucker, who long ago crafted a ridiculous K-22 education blueprint based on a labyrinth of high stakes tests that determine which curriculums students study and which colleges students get to attend, where they will study to pass more high stakes tests (see posts here and here for the dope on Tuckerism). If there were anything funny about his efficiency maze, it might be called the Monty Python Game of School. With humor missing, however, only absurdity remains.

That has not stopped three states of very different political stripes from dusting off some pieces from the Tucker Kit. Utah, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire (the good, the bad, and the cranky) now constitute the oddest of alliances to subject their schools to elements of another grand experiment that will prove, once more, that it is easier to run into a brick wall than to figure a way over it.

There will be others who will get hearings with the new President's team, and it could be that there are better contenders to morph the current federal policy of mass stupidification into something that testocrats, closet racists, the delusionists at Ed Trust, and the bean counters all can like even more than the current Bush plan. I am hoping that Linda Darling Hammond gets a shot as Secretary.

It took eight years to dig this hole, so the next President will not be starting at ground level. In a geographic sense, it is as the Kaplan education rep for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, notes, "the next president will be like Bush." The next President will inherit the same 19th Century educational philosophy, organizational structure, and race science used to sort the haves from the never hads. What Mathews and many others have forgotten, however, is what Obama continues to remind us of: change will not happen on Election Day. It will only happen over the next four, or maybe 8 years, as people make the case for something better, do the work to build coalitions, do the work to implement change, are patient and persistent in evaluating the results, are brave enough to point out the stupidity where it exists, and then push on to create a more perfect Union--or at least a more humane and effective schoolhouse. So yes, Obama "will be like Bush" on the day he takes office. After that day first day, however, nothing will remain like that again--forever.

But only if You Vote.

Obama, McCain, and the Disappearing Light Between Them on Education

There are two policy issues that threaten the creation of quality public schools for all who choose them, and Barack Obama and John McCain support both of them: corporate charter schools and teacher raises based on test scores.  

There are many liberals who believe that they, themselves, support charter schools for the promised innovation that such schools of the imagination, well, promise.  As the liberal script goes, charter schools offer the opportunity for parents and teachers to form innovative programs that serve various niches within communities by focusing the school environment and curriculum on things that matter to the constiutents who come together to learn and teach, all the while forgoing the control and bureaucracy of local school boards.

Sounds great, right?  Power to the people!  Well, to the anti-public school wing of American school reform--the wing with the money--this kind of liberal blather sounded the dinner bell for a new feeding line for the ed industry's corporate welfare artists and the religious welfare scammers who believe the solution to urban poverty is a uniform scripted curriculum for uniformed children who are fed a Spartan diet of behavior modification with their boiled reading and math.  

These KIPPster schools, and the corporate charters that emulate them, have an effective PR machine (the American media) that boasts the high percentages of their graduates who attend college.  What is not talked about are the large numbers of children and parents who cannot hack the regimentation or cognitive decapitation on which these schools build their mindless parrot learning programs. Many urban parents desperate for something besides the demoralized poverty schools that have been blown up by NCLB look to these newly-painted child workhouses with a hope and a prayer.

So much for liberal dreaming.  Not only have the privatizers coopted a good figment of liberal imagination and operationalized it for their own economically-driven ends, but they have used the same idea to attack humane teaching, teacher tenure, collective bargaining, and retirement plans.  What about school libraries and librarians?  Who needs them in the small-school chain gangs?  Who has time for the library--if there were one?  

So while both liberal and conservative politicians rub their chins and consider the 20% payroll savings that the charterizers promise by cutting teacher pay in the charter detention camps, they have arrived at a scheme by which teachers in these "schools" may earn back the pay they will have lost through charterization:  higher pay for test scores.  The vortex tightens, and the dizzying spin of mindlessness accelerates.  

Such visionary planning leads me to conclude at this point in "yes, we can" campaign of 2008 that any real audacity of hope came from those audacious enough to believe that the new boss will be any different on education than the old boss.  Read 'em and weep.