No Need To Worry For The Educrats And Their Shills In The "Non-Profit" World

Frank Bruni has another education reform column today that fetishizes the Department of Education, the educrats who run it and the reforms they impose, complete with quotes from Joel Klein, Kati Haycock and Michael Petrilli.

Gee, that's not rigging the column much, is it?

I'm not quoting from the column - you can read it yourself if you want.

But I did find this response in the comments relevant:

Six family members are teachers. Can anyone cite any measure by which initiatives instituted over the last 15 years achieved any success? No child left behind, common core, student growth objectives, over a hundred hours of standardized testing and teacher evaluations, just to name the ones I know. No child left behind resulted in half of my daughter’s 8th grade math class performing at a 2nd grade math level! These initiatives require so much administrative paperwork that the teachers don’t have enough time to prepare creative lesson plans. All six of the teachers I know work 60-80 hours per week. A substantial portion of the year is devoted to standard tests instead of teaching. Our children are at the greatest disadvantage in the history of this country and falling further behind. To what end? Do any of these decision-making bureaucrats/administrators ever speak with the teachers to learn what they would do to improve classroom effectiveness? Teachers are given unrealistic goals by which their performance is measured. For example, 2-3 grade level improvement in the students. I attended school in the sixties and believe the quality of my education is light years ahead of what our children get today. At that time, the teachers had a loose-leaf book with guidelines for each day’s lesson plan. There was at most, one standard test during the school year. Get rid of all the layers of six figure administrators and restore responsibility for the classroom to our teachers.

One big difference between the school experience the commenter mentions and now is the number of education "experts" in education "non-profits" who weigh in with the news media with their "expertise" on education issues.

There's an awful lot of money to be made shilling for corporate education reform, that's for sure.

And of course those "experts" in education working for the "non-profits" are all funded by very wealthy interests like Bill Gates or Eli Broad.

Frank Bruni need not worry for his beloved educrats and their reforms.

So long as the wealthy interests continue to back them, they'll be around.