Obama and Duncan Giving Bush's Failed Education Policies A Third Term
It is an inauspicious beginning for this so called Democratic administration....one that consistently has broken its campaign promises and acts more like the party of Reagan and Bush than the party of FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson and the common good.
As the Washington Post reports: "To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration's first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.
"Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools -- all are integral to President Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser.
"Labor leaders, parsing the Education Department's fine print, call the proposal little more than a dressed-up version of the No Child Left Behind law enacted seven years ago under Obama's Republican predecessor.
" 'It looks like the only strategies they have are charter schools and measurement,' said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. 'That's Bush III.' Weingarten, who praises Obama for massive federal aid to help schools through the recession, said her 1.4 million-member union is engaged in 'a constructive but tart dialogue' with the administration about reform.
When the Obama administration receives accolades from a right wing GOP gubernatorial candidate, a graduate of the Bushite Regent University Law School, whose far right, bigoted, fundamentalist positions on women are disgusting, one can be certain that those Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan's education policies don't pass the smell test.
Duncan seems to be another one of Obama's terrible choices for cabinet and other high posts in his administration.
Danny Weill writes at Counterpunch:
"Many in the educational community are unhappy with the Obama administration’s commitment to NCLB standardized tests. Diane Ravitch, a Research Professor of Education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., writes a blog for EdWeek where she dialogues with Deborah Meier, a leading progressive educational leader. In early 2009, in a letter posted to Deborah Meier at EdWeek, Ravitch candidly expressed her dismay over the Obama administration’s devotion to NCLB and the direction Arne Duncan was taking the department of education:
" 'However, based on what I have seen to date, I conclude that Obama has given President George W. Bush a third term in education policy and that Arne Duncan is the male version of Margaret Spellings...' "
Categories: Education
Tags: Barack Obama Obama Administration Education
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