Obama NCLB Waiver Process Even More Damaging To Schools Then NCLB

Under the No Child Left Behind waiver the state received from the feds, the lowest performing schools must undergo major overhauls or be closed and turned into new schools.

NY1 reports 123 NYC schools are on the state's list to undergo overhaul by 2014-2015 or be closed.

All but one of those schools serve high poverty populations.

But of course the "failure" of these schools lies with the teachers and the administrators, so the NYSED and the Regents are going to do the Obama USDOE's bidding and get these schools overhauled or shut in the next two years.

You can bet they will try and fire lots of teachers at these schools as an offshoot of this, close as many of these schools as they can and reopen as many of them as charters as possible.

The new schools will of course rarely serve the same high poverty, high needs populations as the old schools, so the students from the closed schools will get sent to other schools around them that are not currently on the state's list for overhaul or closure but will be in a few more years.

This is what the Bloomberg administration has been doing with their closure program since they got into office - closing schools, sending kids from the closed schools to other schools around them, then closing those schools when test scores and grad rates drop.

Now the state is going to pick up the ball and run with it in a big way.

If this process is allowed to continue unabated, most New York City public schools will be overhauled or closed in the next decade.

Many of the teachers at these schools will be fired and replaced with cheaper rookies or software programs.

And that, of course, has always been the goal of "education reform."

Ignore the outside socio-economic issues that cause the problems in these schools in the first place, blame instead the schools and the teachers in the schools for the problems, shut the schools, fire the teachers, send the kids to other schools that soon are in need of closure and overhaul as well.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat - the process goes on until they shut almost every district school and have it in the hands of an edu-entrepreneur.

Think Detroit. Think Philadelphia. Think New Orleans.

This is the Obama policy in a nutshell - brand them as "failures," close them, fire the teachers, reopen the schools as charters with non-unionized teachers.

Any teacher who votes for Barack Obama, knowing this has been his education policy from the beginning, that this was the point of Race to the Top and now his NCLB waiver process, ought to have his/her head examined.

They're coming for you, they're coming for your school, they're coming for your job, they're coming to fire you and toss you on the junk heap and give all that yummy yummy education money to the edu-entrpreneurs and oligarchs who like Eva Moskowitz, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch.

And they're doing this not because the reforms work - actually lots of research shows they're not working at all.

They're doing it because the reforms are the excuse for the larger objective - the privatization of one of the last piece of the public trust left.