Arne Duncan just doesn’t get it: How the media and phony reformers hurt your kids

Defenders of charter schools and Common Core cast critics as ignorant skeptics. It could cost Democrats elections

JEFF BRYANT

For years, education policy in the United States has been driven by a Washington consensus that found comfort in believing public schools are effectively broken and only a “reform” agenda of austerity mixed with the stern hand of managerial oversight from the Beltway and state capitals could save them.

This made it possible for Democratic candidates to mostly “copy” Republicans on education policy and crow about how much “everyone is for the kids” – especially the poor ones in “failed” schools.

Writing in Jacobin, Micah Uetricht observed that when the subject is education policy, “Democrats have swallowed the Right’s free market orthodoxy whole,” including the whole “reform” menu of “high-stakes standardized testing, merit pay for teachers, school closures, privatization and union-busting through charter school expansion.”

Even Democratic candidates and office-holders calling themselves “progressives” have been all “bipartisan” and move-to-the-middle-ish on education while they chose to fight tooth-and-nail with conservative Republicans on other issues – like healthcare, the deficit, Social Security and the economy – that drew bigger numbers to the polls.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/arne_duncan_just_doesnt_get_it_how_the_media_and_phony_reformers_hurt_your_kids/