Ed Notes Extended

Friday, September 11, 2009

Obama Calls for Public Option in Healtcare While Undercutting Public Option in Education

If you've been following the Obama/Duncan support for the Ed Deform plan, the headline pretty much says it all.

But you might want to check Diane Ravitch's first post of the school year at Bridging Differences, where she in The Start of an Interesting and Dangerous School Year she says:

Nationally, the most important event was the release of the federal government’s regulations for the “Race to the Top.” Those regulations made clear that the Obama administration has fully aligned itself with the edu-entrepreneurs who favor market-based reforms. As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research.

2 comments:

  1. It's time to walk away from the farce that passes for the political process in the US now. It's time for resistance. It's time for disruption. It's time to tear it down.

    The corporate state described by Benito Mussolini may not yet be fully consolidated but the US will soon arrive there. It is a development that explains why the oligarchs and the neoliberal schemers that serve them have handed-off their movement to gut public education to Obama and his blabbering henchman Arne Duncan. Just as well, it explains the use of taxpayer's money instead of or in concert with the fortunes of Gates, Broad, and the Waltons to see their designs realized.

    The day of the monkey wrenches is here.

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  2. My understanding is he isn't insisting on the public option, which leads me to assume he's unsatisfactory on both fronts. We need to put a letter in his file.

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