NYT: Administration Seeks Converts to Education Plan

By framing this as a fight between the Obama administration and the teachers' unions, the New York Times undercuts the very real grassroots opposition to the Obama/Duncan plan, very real resistance from teachers, parents, and students. These teachers do not identify themselves with corrupt union shenanigans or with union heads who are just jockeying for a bigger chair at the corporate/politico table.

Sidenote: Here's the headline story in today's Burlington Free Press:


Two Vermont schools were mistakenly included in a list of the state's “persistently lowest achieving schools” released last week, and two others have taken their place, an apologetic Vermont Department of Education announced Tuesday.


The rules from Duncan's US Department of Education say Vermont must identify its "10 worst schools" in order to apply for $8 million dollars:

Applicants, according to the state news release, "must be willing to embrace one of four strictly defined models for school improvement" laid down by the U.S. Department of Education. Those models include closing the school or refashioning it as a charter school, replacing the principal and half the teachers, or implementing various "transformation" reforms.

Please note: Being among "the 10 worst in Vermont," doesn't mean a school is bad. When you rank schools by standardized test scores, some school has to be the lowest-scoring.

Relying on the fact that when money talks, state politicos and bureaucrats not only listen, they salivate, Duncan holds out the carrot that each branded school will get a chance at $800,000 of "conditional" money (taxpayer dollars) for wearing the scarlet letter. Nobody seems to worry that if William Mathis' highly regarded research on NCLB holds true for Duncan's schemes, the US Department of Education "conditions" for receiving this money will cost the schools a whole lot more than what they get--just in dollars--never mind the psychic trauma to a community when all the school educators are dumped in the name of school improvement. Remember "Dramatic changes in staffing or management" is one of Duncan's reform models.

Ask your state department of education officials why they are lying down and playing dead in the face of the destruction of public schools. Ask your governor. Ask your local state legislator.

Go to school boards meetings.

Raise hell.

Facing intense resistance from teachers’ unions, the Obama administration has begun trying to persuade union leaders, teachers and the public that its proposals for overhauling federal education policies are good for teachers and for public schools.

In remarks prepared for delivery to Congress on Wednesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued that the proposed policies would elevate the teaching profession by encouraging better tests, by ending the demoralizing practice of mislabeling thousands of schools as failures and by offering teachers opportunities for career growth.

“We think there is a lot in our proposal that teachers will like,” Mr. Duncan said in the prepared testimony, a copy of which The New York Times obtained on Tuesday.

But the union leaders were not easily convinced. In interviews, they said the administration’s proposal for rewriting the main law outlining federal policies on public schooling, No Child Left Behind, would continue what they called an overemphasis on standardized tests, impose federal mandates on issues traditionally handled in collective bargaining, and probably lead to mass firings of teachers in low-performing schools.