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Obama Uses Funding to Pressure Education Establishment for Change - washingtonpost.com
The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.
"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama said in an Oval Office interview Wednesday. "And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change."
t r u t h o u t | Obama's View of Education Is Stuck in Reverse
The success of a market ideology that has produced shocking levels of inequality and impoverishment, along with a market morality that makes greed and corruption ubiquitous, should raise fundamental questions about how viable such a philosophy is for educational reform in the United States. Obama's vision of education is largely centered around an economic discourse and rationality tied to the past, to the world and business values of investment bankers, insurance companies, and various other institutions in a market-driven culture that viewed aiding society largely with contempt. What the Obama administration must understand is that the crisis in education is not only an economic problem that requires resuscitating the values of the Gilded Age, but a political and ethical crisis about the very nature of citizenship and democracy. Obama and Duncan, on the issue of educational reform, appear to be stuck in reverse.
US Secretary of Education Calls Texas High School Teacher
Are you posting on the Listening & Learning Tour blog on raising standards? Waiting for a call from Arne? So far, they've received only 400 comments to the questions Arne asked: Many states in America are independently considering adopting internationally-benchmarked, college and career-ready standards. Is raising standards a good idea? How should we go about it?
What a hoax! States are considering adopting these standards because Arne says they won't get Federal millions if they don't.
Frankly, I wish Arne would call Wilma Ralls, who begins her comment thusly:
Fifty percent of our population drops out of school before they can finish high school. This is NOT a failure of EDUCATION. This is a FAILURE of our ECONOMY! When every child is raised in a healthy environment, EDUCATION will be possible. Until then, our educational system will continue providing children raised in wealthy communities the activities required to get into their “legacy” university, along with other bad motivations picked up by the legacy of their “unequal, mis-managed, non-socialized” educational experiences, while the rest limp through life not ever really completely engaging or benefiting from conventional society. The other half of the population has gone through life in the US, at least for the past 30 years, continually being left further and further behind economically, socially, politically, health-wise and in every other area of life. Add that to a school system stuck in the 18th century and you have, yes, FAILURE! Our schools fail our students and they fail our society but until everyone in our society has an equal chance to benefit from our economy, there is not much that can be done to improve our schools with the meager resources they receive.
Or Poster 202:
How about writing standards for politicians and testing them to death?
This press release says one can read the Texas teacher's full comment at #91. Someone at the DOE can't count. It's not there. . . nor is it nearby. Nor is it at 191.
Turning Around the Bottom Five Percent
Now let me also make something very clear: closing under-performing schools is a state and local responsibility. It's up to state and district superintendents and the political leadership. If they won't make these choices, I can't force them to do it. My job is to support the work – provide funding – help define success – and drive the public consensus toward the desired outcome. But the people who run our schools – and the parents who depend on them – must demand change if they want it to happen.
t r u t h o u t | Teachers File Racial Discrimination Suit Against School "Turnaround" Plan
SF Education Examiner: Arne Duncan misstates Chicago results; watchdog barks a warning
So, what are we going to do about Duncan's lies, besides ask our fairy godmother to make his nose grow every time he does it?
Just keep telling the truth, I guess.
Duncan Faces Political Battle Over Education Reform
"Hold them accountable for results but really let states and districts figure out how to get there," Duncan said.
Schools Matter: More New Democrats and DFER
According to Rahm Emanuel, Democratic policymakers are working on a "quiet revolution" in education reform. If yesterday's DLC gathering and two briefs from DFER are indicators of what's to come, we're in for some big changes. Here is a summary of the hour-plus DLC discussion on education reform and the DFER policy briefs.
Education chief hopes stimulus will push standards - USATODAY.com
"Having real high standards is important, but behind that, I think in this country we have too many bad tests," Duncan said. "If we're going to have world-class international standards, we need to have world-class evaluations behind them."
Education Week: Start Over
duncan: I’m calling on the existing network of turnaround specialists to be ready, and I’m urging charter school groups, unions, districts, and states to get in this business of turning around our lowest-performing schools.
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First, states need to adopt rigorous K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and the workforce. Second, they should create data systems that will track from year to year whether students are making the progress they need to graduate from high school ready to succeed in college or the workforce; these systems also will provide the information to determine whether a teacher is effective in improving student performance. Third, the states need plans to find effective teachers and make sure those teachers are working in classrooms where they will have the greatest impact on the students who need the most help. Finally, states must have plans to turn around their lowest-performing schools.
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In Chicago, the most successful interventions we implemented when I led that city’s school system were complete turnarounds. We moved the adults out of the building, kept the children there, and brought in new adults. It was the best and fastest way to create a new school culture, one in which student achievement was the primary goal. All of the school’s decisions—the length of the school day and school year, the choice of curriculum, the discipline code—revolved around that goal.
The Duncan-Obama education manifesto
SUCESS, did Arne Duncan, professional nice guy, actually connect the words success, Chicago, and schools in the same lifetime? Let me go back and re-read that passage, after all I did graduate from a CPS high school. Yep, he said it. He even says it again. ‘Chicago’s success proves that we as a nation can expect dramatic and quick turnarounds in our lowest-performing schools.’
It is at this point that my evil twin grabs the steering wheel and goes off the yellow-brick-road and into the ditch. Good luck, Mr. Duncan, but Chicago schools are not a success anymore than the eight-track tape, the Vietnam War or silicone injections. They were all good ideas for a moment, but eventually failed, and faileld large.
Arne Duncan and the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality? - Volume 23 No. 3 - Spring 2009 - Rethinking Schools Online
With the appointment by Barack Obama of Arne Duncan—a noneducator from the business sector who was Chicago's "chief executive officer"—as U.S. Secretary of Education, this phenomenon may repeat itself.
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The impact of those policies includes thousands of children displaced by school closings, spiked violence as they transferred to other schools, and the deterioration of public education in many neighborhoods into a crisis situation.
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Schools are also anchors in gentrifying communities and signals to investors of the market potential of new development sites. For Chicago's working-class and low-income communities, particularly those of color, this has meant gentrification and displacement, including of thousands of public housing residents.
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Secretary Arne Duncan Addresses the Fourth Annual IES Research Conference
Secretary Arne Duncan Addresses the Fourth Annual IES Research Conference
Arne Duncan Hopes To Overhaul Education System
Ohanian on Duncan's appearance on Talk of the Nation: Duncan repeats all his scripted messages in this talk. I would just say I'm really tired of the hypocritical call for recruiting "the best and the brightest" to enter teaching. No, Mr. Duncan, those are not the people we need in our schools: We need the savvy, rock steady, dependable, loving, forgiving people who have an enormous capacity for wait time and the psychological equilibrium to be able to enter the classroom every day not holding a grudge for what happened the day before.
That said, I hold a hard grudge against a Secretary of Education who can say that teachers perpetuate poverty and we perpetuate social failure.
The Fortune 500 hundred perpetuate poverty. The U. S. Congress perpetuates poverty. Get off teachers' backs, Duncan.
Politics K-12: Duncan to States: Test Scores and Teacher Evaluations Do Mix
In his speech to the Institute for Education Sciences, Duncan urged researchers to work on improving accountability models based on student achievement growth on test scores and developing fair models of compensating teachers and other school staff based on the achievement of their students. Ultimately, he added, the data should be used to ensure that students are on track to graduate and to succeed in college, according to an Education Department press release.
PURE - Arne backing away from Chicago reforms?
Later, when talking about how the governor of South Carolina tried to reject the education stimulus money, Duncan commented that South Carolina was shortchanging its students by not taking the money. Conan asked, "Are the results in Chicago good enough that you can go tell South Carolina what to do?" Arne replied, "We all have a long way to go – we're proud of the progress we made in Chicago, but they have more work to do."
Push is on for a ‘common’ education standard for US schoolchildren | csmonitor.com
Arne Duncan: As a result of No Child Left Behind, “children have been lied to, parents have been lied to." [Duncan's standard speech here.]
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