Obama Admin Supports Naming Names In NY Papers

Not a surprise how the Hopey/Changey people came down on the publishing of teacher ratings in the NYC papers:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is throwing his support behind Chancellor Joel Klein’s decision to release individual teacher’s effectiveness ratings to the press.

Just before the city and union agreed to postpone any release of teachers’ ratings that included their names, Duncan sent a statement to reporters in which he seemed to take the city’s side.

“I give New York credit for sharing this information with teachers so they can improve and get better,” he said.

Duncan gives New York credit for sharing this information with teachers through the newspapers?

How about a simple conference?

Or making it available online?

Gotham Schools reports many teachers couldn't access their scores and even when they sent to the DOE for help, they never received access to the reports.

Duncan, like his boss, is a weasel with an anti-teacher agenda.

They KNOW these reports have huge margins of error.

In some cases as large as 30%

But they DON'T care.

Because this isn't about improving education.

It's about busting the unions, firing senior teachers, and reducing labor costs.

Do you think Obama or Bloomberg would use a political polling outfit that conducted polls with 30% MOE's?

Do you think Obama or Bloomberg would invest money in a company that had a 30% MOE in reporting their earnings?

You bet your sweet ass they wouldn't.

But 30% MOE's on the teacher reports and the publishing of those reports in the papers is just fine with them.

Not enough bad stuff can happen to these people - Bloomberg, Klein, Obama, Duncan, et al.

With a Republican Congress coming in, some of that bad stuff just might happen to Obama.

I certainly wouldn't rule out impeachment for Hopey/Changey.

Repubs are itching to destroy him and they aren't above creating some bullshit scandal to do it.

Frankly, I won't be all that upset if they do.

Given the way Obama doesn't seem to care how teachers are being scapegoated for all the ills in public education, indeed seems to relish sticking it to us, I have little sympathy for him or what Repubs do to him.

But Bloomberg and Klein will probably get away with all this jive - the lying, the phony test scores, the endless reorganizations that have been conducted just to create chaos and instability and hide their true purpose, which is the blowing up of the old system and the creation of a new public school system that is largely privatized and de-unionized.

But at the end of the day, I will say again that until the UFT, the AFT and the NEA leadership accept that they have enabled this crap by not fighting it tooth and nail from the beginning, we will continue to lose these battles, and ultimately the war.