This piece of puffery about NYSED commissioner David Steiner should not be read on a full stomach.
It's pretty glucose-heavy.
The gist I get is that Steiner - lover of the classics, quoter of of Shakespeare - is agonizing over the Cathie Black waiver matter.
Oh, please.
Steiner may play an educator on TV for the public but behind closed doors he is a Bloomberg/ed deform shill through and through.
He has been bought and sold and had a Bloomberg LP stamp on his forehead.
Anybody working in official education circles in New York these days has to have that stamp of approval.
And you can see it from how Steiner conducts his official duties.
What lover of the classics agrees to reduce good teaching to test scores and ELA curriculum to multiple choice test prep?
The Times piece says Steiner likes to weave the works Plato, Dante, Homer and Shakespeare into his emails.
How fantastic!
But what I see him weave into his efforts as NYSED commissioner is the works of Bloomberg, Gates, Rhee, Klein, Duncan, Broad, et al.
As such, I am certain his hero Dante will have a special circle in hell for Steiner where he can try and engage hungry special education students, fresh from Obama's food stamp cuts, on test prep.
In order to get out that special circle in hell?
He's got to have all of them improve on their tests, year after year, for eternity.
David Steiner just like Rhee, Klein, and Duncan, is a stool pigeon of corporate ceo's like Bloomberg, Gates and Broad et al. Those ceo's want to apply the same failed neo-liberal-market principles that crumbled the economy in education. They are pushing the government to relinquish public education to the private sector gradually in an accelerated way. That will certainly lead to the privatization of the public education system through charters. Who else but Cathie Black to lead the destruction of public education where Joel Klein left off? That's why Steiner may seem divided between educator reflexes and being a loyal stool pigeon of the neo-liberal ceo's. We should organize to defeat the whole privatization/charter agenda. Tony Da Fighter
ReplyDeleteTony, on a grassroots level, there is some organized pushback. But of course our union heads are on the take from these guys, so we get self-serving jive from them.
ReplyDeleteBloomberg gets an accommodation from Steiner
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