Friday, April 8, 2011

The Hypocrisy Of Corporate Education Reformers

Valerie Strauss points out in the Washington Post today how Bloomberg and Black both blamed "outside forces" for Black's inability to handle the chancellorship of NYC and Michelle Rhee blamed "enemies of reform" for the testing scandal in Washington D.C. that has exposed her "education miracle" as fraudulent.

She notes:

But here’s the hypocritical part of this blame game: While reformers like to blame outside forces for their own problems, they still want to hold teachers responsible for outside forces that contribute to a student’s lousy performance on a standardized test.

Today’s school reform is all about using standardized tests to grade schools, students and teachers. It started with former president George Bush’s No Child Left Behind, and has continued with President Obama’s Race to the Top. States are changing laws to make sure that a good part of a teacher’s evaluation and pay is linked directly to how well their students do on the tests, even if the kids come in hungry, or sick, or exhausted, or mentally ill.

What are the chances that reformers might see the hypocrisy in their positions?

As my kids like to say when I ask about the chances that they will clean their rooms: Slim and none.


The accountability movement is all about accountability for other people, not themselves.

3 comments:

  1. Ya know RBE, "No excuses" is for little people.

    By the way, divd Rhee did a CYA post on Huffington post the other day and i couldn't help reading it. And I posted a comment asking how about her embracing "no excuses", taking responsibility & owning up the fraud. And ya know, it got censored. The same thing happened in a different post - where diva Rhee wrote a concern-trolling post about why "Me First" err..... "Students First" supports collective bargaining for teachers. I posted a comment saying Rhee puts Students First by taping thier mouths shut and linked to the article. And it got censored.

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  2. Censorship happens in a fascist state...

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  3. Yes, I got censored with something she wrote the day after the scandal broke. It was about how she was not anti-union or anti-collective bargaining. I commented why she was allowed to write anything at Huffingtonpost given her criminal behavior regarding her own test scores and DC scores.

    That comment was censored as well.

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