Obama appointing him is one of the main reasons why I'll never trust him completely. And appointing Rahm Emmanuel. And appointing Larry Summers. And appointing Tim Geithner. And re-appointing Robert Gates.

Right there with you! Anyone who cannot see that the corporate megalomaniacs (who've usurped our media, our politics AND our global economy) have taken over completely is NOT paying attention!

It's a damned shame about President Obama.

How I hate the man as well.

And to appointing those other asshats too.

fact that Obama appointed them. No one can say that Obama hasn't been poisoned by corporatists -- it's totally obvious. The damage that Duncan is doing will take a generation to repair, if we can even do it. It's just abominable.

Obama is anti-public ed, and he's especially anti-teacher. Just look at what his best friends like Rahm and Arne do to us on a daily basis.

I'm sure he'll be happy to help with fixing the public schools out of the goodness of his heart!!!

Creepy, eh?

to see how they deal with this 'problem.' I hope they give Duncan and the Dept. of Education the finger. I just don't think they're going to cave in and open a bunch of charter schools so money can be diverted from their public schools. I hope they set an example for the other states who are reluctant to go that route.

Australian basketball star becomes Secretary of Education. The man does not even have a degree in education. Honestly I do not even know what to say about this anymore. We have really let our children down.

Oregon is scrambling to pacify federal temper tantrums and threats to repeal our NCLB waiver because what we did to tie test scores to evaluations didn't go far enough for the deform coalition. Fuck it. I didn't want the waiver to begin with. Duncan can label me a failure from his corporate deform tower while Democrats who should know better keep voting in people who push this shit. My students know better.

I am beyond sick of the charter school crap that Gates touts. He went to Lakeside and so he thinks that private schools are the answer. No Bill, not when you take the funding from public schools to fund private business owned schools you f---ing idiot! You KNOW their bottom line is *not* education but making more money, you nimrod!

Then dummass voters go along with Gate's elitist stoooopid thinking. WTF? And Bill, another thing; you pay less than 2% of your income onto this state leaving you a mere $67 BILLION to "eke" out your living. The poor in this state pay 17+% leaving them less than $10,000 to live on. Until you pay what they do, STFU!

My 2 cents,
Cat in Seattle
Board member of POWER: http://www.mamapower.org

... at the expense of kids and the society at large.

the whole purpose of NCLB was not to educate our children in an appropriate manner but to:

1. Gain control of the educational structure.

2. Break up any teacher's organization (resistance).

3. Gift large amounts of the educational budget to cronies in the form of testing materials, tests, etc.

4. Dumb down the educational level of this country.

In order to disguise the dwindling educational level, they have come up with a high stakes testing, tied the teachers jobs to how the students perform. What other choice do you have but teach testing strategies instead of real educational content to an increasingly bored group of captives.

and counting. Working like a fiend to get reports done. Drive by posting. Tell everyone I said hi.

I'd love to see some WA benefactor (and there are a lot of mega-millionaires in WA, not just the Gates) step up and let the state and parents/students determine the direction they are going.

WA (especially the part not near Idaho) has a lot of very smart, well educated people. Given that they are part of the Pacific Rim, they also have the benefit of diversity and hopes for good education.

I worked for the Maryland department of education for a while and was amazed at how much they had to sell their souls to get the NCLB certification.

The corporatists want to destroy unions, and steer public education funds into private pockets. Everything else is a means to an end. They dont care if kids get educated or not.

the more certain I am that this is the real reason.

They did this in health care in the late 90's when they introduced the DRG's. Remember when the Doc had more say as to your treatment and there was enough staff, esp Nurses that a patient got top notch care. After the intro of DRG's, insurance co put pressure on hospital so you started seeing drive through births (mom staying only 24 hrs) and mastectomies. Nurses started to have unsafe numbers of patients to care for 10 patients with many being fresh post ops on a 12 hour shift.

Well, they are doing the same thing now in education. Education was not as broken that it required this sick fix and neither was health care. I know because I am a school Nurse that defected from the hospital scene in the late 90's.

NOT punish them for failure.

The GOP twisted it around.

I repeat: there is NO constitutional basis for a federal education system. Education is the constitutional purview of each and every state. Of course, certain federal monies "follow the child," as with all federal IDEA law which sends money to each and every disabled child in America for their special educations. How districts are involved with that money is unclear to me, but easily researched.

Education reform, if taken seriously by states, should not depend on the federal government. (No, I'm not a small government rightie, just an anti-Bush/Duncan, pro-teacher/child person) No Child Left Behind CANNOT force a "state takeover," UNLESS that state WANTS that federal money -- which not one state has to if it doesn't want to, nor should it.

First, state panels of citizens can revamp their state budgets to prioritize school spending. How? First thing, they must trim the bureaucratic middleman fat from the state board bureaucracies right down to the district boards. Patronage to corporate lobbies is out. Patronage for each legislature is out.

Second, these state panels should reserve and execute the power to fire district boards of education. District managers can conduct the business of every district just as well, expedite supplies (from competitive bidding) to principals and BILLIONS -- I mean BILLIONS -- alone can be saved when states just "chop the top." The consequence? Nary a ripple will be felt by field professionals and their students in the classroom.

NCLB is a complete failure. Arne Duncan is a reprehensible scoundrel unqualified for his position. The buck stops on President Obamas desk. When this chapter of American history is written the historians will scratch their heads an wonder why a Democratic administration stood by and watched corporations bleed the education system dry.

This failure is not a failure of students and teachers to reach outcomes - this failure is the conscious act of politicians and corporations to trade future generations of Americans for quarterly profits.

Want to get most Americans behind the idea of dismantling the Department of Education? Just let them keep doing what they're doing.

Obviously it is insane to expect 100% success, but it seems equally insane to continue on without testing.

A teacher who brings a 3rd grader from a K level to a 2nd grade level has accomplished more that one who brings a third grader from a 3rd grade level to a 4th grade level, yet the sort of "accountability" you are supporting does not acknowledge that.

And one would hope that educators, who currently use tests every day as a tool to measure student progress, would be capable of devising a testing and evaluation system that fairly accounted for the outliers that are so often mentioned in these discussions. I have rarely read any argument against objective standards and testing that rises far beyond the 'dog ate my homework' variety teachers immediately dismiss when offered by their students, and the exceptions don't do much to inspire confidence in any case.

There is actually no reason why objective standards are impossible or even particularly difficult. We are not talking about measuring the merits of a piece of art, we want to know whether or not Johnny can read, and if our professional educators cannot devise a proper and fair means of accomplishing AND demonstrating this then they are definitely in the wrong line of work. Testing, and evaluating the results of those tests, is pretty much the foundation of evaluating educational progress.

That said, I understand that teachers don't like tests when their own fate hangs in the balance or when their professional skill is measured by the results. This is not exactly surprising, no one likes this. The difference is that everyone else has ALWAYS 'suffered' under this and teachers have not. Like politicians and preachers, teachers have always been one of those protected and unmeasured professions. This being what you offered in your response to me. You ask, how do we fairly measure the teacher who covers three years in one. This misses the point, the real questions are what went wrong the previous two years and why was the student advanced? More, we can discover if there is a pattern, who is responsible, and perhaps even arrive at a strategy to correct it.

involved and far more consequential than measuring the merits of a piece of art.

I can't cover all the issues involved, but to take just one, since you asked--the student was advanced for many reasons, most of which usually have little to do with the teacher and much to do with the system. It has been determined that it's too harmful psychologically to hold a child back, for one thing.

Also, a child who didn't learn from the standard curricula and classroom instruction one year, will not do any better in that same grade in a second year if held back. There is usually not money in the budget to provide the extra support the child needs, so there is little point in holding them back just for them to fail again. Much of why many students are far behind what's considered grade level also often has nothing to do with their teachers, but is related to the child's mental, emotional or psychological difficulties which cannot be addressed properly by a teacher who is already overworked and under-supported.

Not to say there aren't some bad teachers out there who should be given help and time to improve and then gotten rid of if all else fails. But in my experience, the teachers were usually not the problem.

If anything, it's an argument for it-- identify the problem early and establish a track record for that student, or that school, or perhaps that teacher. We need objective information.

the testing, along with their work and my observations, generated and attempting to address each student's individual needs as identified by that data. But I was spending like 16 hours a day either at school or working at home.

I just burned out. I had no sleep, no life, and all my relationships were suffering.

Or a team of people like you.

It is wrong however to take away support when goals aren't met. Funding should be added. And high stakes testing has been shown internationally to NOT work. Idiots.

Throwing more money at it is not the solution.

usually has a far higher success rate.

Funding is based on local property tax primarily and varies drastically. It's also closer to 8k average, and the average students aren't the ones that need help. Likewise a large percentage goes to private companies feeding schools standardized tests nclb requires and don't work.

The correct figure is now $12,743 per student.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

The reality is that the American people spend a staggering amount of money on education, close to a half mil per class per year.

And your argument is still non sequitur.

I told you that average numbers are skewed.