Poughkeepsie Goes National: John King Replacing Arne Duncan Is A Fabulous Idea

Norm at Ed Notes nails this:

Happy Days for Opponents of Ed Deform: John King Replaces Arne Duncan

Call the King appointment "Building the national opt-out movement one education secretary at a time."

While some of our troops in the battle against ed deform, particularly those in NY State where King served as state ed commissioner, have been tearing a their hair and rending their clothing at Duncan's replacement - ACTING, I offer cheers for the man who had such an impact in fostering NY State in having the largest opt out movement in the entire nation with 20% opting out (Let's pray for a doubling - or more - this year.)

King threw much kindling on the opt out fire while he was here in New York, there's no reason to think he won't succeed similarly on a national stage.

Would also note, just another example of the hubris of the education reformers that they keep recycling the same faces and shuffling them around (Cerf, King, Elia, et al.)

Why I Want Arne Duncan And John King To Remain In Power

The NEA has called for Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan's ouster.

The AFT put him on some kind of improvement plan (a lame way of saying they were calling for his ouster without actually calling for his ouster.)

Many rank-and-file teachers across the country have called for Duncan to step down or be fired.

But you know who hasn't called for Duncan's firing?

The functionaries on the corporate deform side.

And really, given how badly Duncan has screwed up their corporate deform plans, they REALLY ought to be calling for his ouster.

Here's Karen Klein, a supporter of the Common Core, taking it to Duncan in the LA Times:

The scaffolding of support for the Common Core curriculum standards continues, right and left, to lose a beam here, a platform there. After adopting the standards, with vocal support from the governor, both the Oklahoma Legislature and Gov. Mary Fallin have now abandoned them. The American Federation of Teachers was once a big supporter. At its meeting over the weekend, though it didn't switch to outright opposition, it voted to set up grants for teachers to critique or reformulate the standards.

Some of this — especially among the red states that have pulled away to one extent or another — is more political than educational. Even though many Republicans were among the notable figures endorsing the standards from the beginning, now politicians are more interested in pushing the “federal overreach” button as a way of denying President Obama a victory of any kind, especially right before an election.

But the Obama administration has to take the lion’s share of the blame for the uproar over Common Core. The early arm-twisting to get states to adopt it was one problem; with the standards attached to waivers from No Child Left Behind, instead of arising from states looking to improve their students’ ability to succeed in college and jobs, there was bound to be some buyers’ remorse.

But far worse were poor implementation policies supported all along the way by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. It happened too fast, with too little review. Worse, it happened with an unconscionable emphasis on holding everyone responsible right away for how students fared on a new curriculum and new tests.

In other words, this was a management failure, and Duncan, education manager in chief, managed to turn doubters and worriers into opponents when he attacked and mocked those who raised legitimate concerns.

Like NYSED Commissioner King in New York State, Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan has made a fetish of holding everybody else accountable for performance - students, teachers, administrators, schools.

But his own management failures, his political failures, his tone deafness in responding to CCSS critics and opponents - somehow he wants no accountability for himself over these matters.

This is par for the course in the ed deform world - accountability is always for others, never for ed deformers themselves.

No matter how many mistakes they make, they always think they're doing swimmingly.

And this has gotten me to thinking - maybe we don't want Duncan or King, both incapable of seeing their own mistakes or correcting their courses, to leave from power.

It will make no difference if Duncan goes because his boss, Barack Obama, and more importantly, Obama's bosses, the 1% who put him into the White House to carry out their privatization plans, will still push to have their education reform agenda implemented whether Duncan is there to do that implementation or not.

The same is true in New York where some advocates have pushed for NYSED Commissioner King's ouster.

Whether King goes or not, so long as the Board of Regents remain constituted as they are and backed by the New York State Legislature, the education reform agenda King and his merry men and women in reform are implementing at SED is not changing.

But if you're a member of the privatizer and edu-profiteer class and you're pushing to have your agenda implemented in such a way that it doesn't go away any time soon, you should want both Duncan and King fired for their sheer incompetence at institutionalizing the education reform agenda without mishap.

Whether its Duncan stepping in it by calling critics of the Common Core soccer moms who are shocked to find out their kids aren't as smart as they thought they were or King telling booing parents and teachers at a Poughkeepsie Common Core town hall that if they weren't totally silent as he issued his propaganda rhetoric to them he was taking his political football and going home, neither of these two ed deform functionaries have shown the skills necessary to save the Core and the ancillary reforms that came with it like testing and data tracking.

In some ways, if you're an opponent and critic of ed deform, King and Duncan are the best gift you can get for undoing the deform agenda.

Duncan has ensured a political firefight from the right by tying CCSS and teacher evaluations tied to CCSS tests to NCLB waivers and he did us all a favor when he stripped Washington State of its waiver over evaluations.

It couldn't have been clearer afterwards that CCSS emanates from Washington D.C., that the USDOE is the political hand behind it, and if you are opposed to Washington overreach, then you had better be opposed to CCSS and the testing that goes with it.

In King's case, he just keeps saying stupid stuff - like comparing himself to MLK Jr. and teachers engaged in Common Core shill work to members of the Tuskegee Airmen.

Even Governor Cuomo, ever an astute political observer, realizes King is an incompetent fool, which is why he has blamed the poor CCSS roll-out on King and the SED.

Quite frankly, the longer these guys hang around in power, the worse things get for the ed deform agenda.

If you're an opponent or critic of ed deform, you ought to want Duncan and King, incompetents both, to remain in their current capacities.

The best thing you can have when political institutions are trying to impose harmful reforms is incompetent, tone deaf heads of those institutions.

Long live Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education Privatization!

Long live John King, SED Commissioner, reincarnation of Martin Luther King Jr. and honorary member of the Tuskegee Common Core Airmen!

May they reign in incompetence forever, or at least until we can get some sanity back into education policy at the state and federal levels.

So long as both the USDOE and the NYSED are going to be implementing their toxic ed deform agendas no matter what, I want arrogant, deluded men incapable of seeing their own mistakes or correcting their courses like Arne Duncan and John King running things.

NYSED Commissioner King Compares Teachers Shilling For Common Core To Tuskegee Airmen

I know, I know - you think I'm making this up.

But remember, NYSED Commissioner John King once compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Common Core/testing education reforms King pushes to the Civil Rights Movement, so you have to understand that the Good Doctor of the Common Core is given to making grandiose comparisons.

Which is what he did today:

State Education Commissioner John King concluded his keynote address at the State Education Department’s 20th Network Team Institute with an anecdote about his late uncle Haldane King, who was a member of the illustrious Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.

King attended the Thursday unveiling of his uncle’s tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, and spoke about the “clarity of purpose” exhibited by the men who sacrificed so much for their country even in the face of racism.

The commissioner connected that sort of conviction to the work of teachers implementing the Common Core educational standards. “What we must each bring to this work is tremendous certainty about the goal — the goal of college readiness, career readiness, citizenship readiness for our students, which is what brought us to this work,” he said.

These Common Core shillery festivities were paid for by Race to the Top funds and the teachers attending this week of professional development on the Core are supposed to go back to their schools and train their colleagues in how the SED wants the Core implemented statewide.

While these "Common Core Tuskegee Airmen" in Albany appear happy to do their CCSS shill work, even Dr. King (John, not Martin) admitted the CCSS implementation isn't going too smoothly:

King acknowledged the controversy and criticism surrounding the rollout of the new standards. Only this week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino announced the creation of a “Stop Common Core” ballot line designed to tap into voter antipathy.

“There have been a lot of politics over the last four years around how this works,” King told his audience, “and I have no doubt that those politics will continue.”

Oh, you can be sure the political battle to put a stake through the heart of the Common Core Federal Standards and bury them in four different corners of the state will continue apace, Dr. King.

You and your merry men and women in reform can do your CCSS implementation work all you want.

You're losing the political battle with students, parents, teachers, the unions and many politicians - which ultimately means you're losing the battle.

Instead of comparing yourself to the Tuskegee Airmen, you should have used General Custer as a better comparison.

He too was an arrogant prick who thought he knew better than everybody else how to handle conflict, he too wasn't interested in hearing anybody's opinions on anything, he too was lacking in empathy and he too was a grand self-promoter given to making grandiose statements about himself.

In short, he was just like you, Dr. King, or should I say "Common Core Custer."

Common Core Custer.

There's a grandiose comparison for John King that fits.

State Comptroller Criticizes NYSED For Lax Oversight Of Special Education Services

From Ken Lovett in the Daily News:

A Queens-based provider of bilingual pre-school special education services was hit by state Controller Thomas DiNapoli in a new audit for improperly spending taxpayer money on fancy cars, a Manhattan apartment, and even a recent hire's funeral expenses.

The audit, set to be released Monday, found that Bilinguals Inc. received reimbursements to help cover the cost of rent on a Manhattan apartment for Executive Director Trudy Font-Padron and her husband, Robert Padron, an assistant executive director, "so they wouldn't be too far from the office," even though the headquarters are in Forest Hills.

Taxpayers also paid parts of the leases, insurance and other costs related to three upscale vehicles - 2009 and 2011 Lexus SUVs and a 2010 Honda CRV - for Font-Padron and her husband as well as cable TV at their Manhattan apartment, auditors found.

Bilinguals Inc., which has provided services since 1995 to special needs kids ages three through five in New York City and the surrounding suburbs, also wrongly billed governments for excessive compensation for Font-Padron and her husband, employee bonuses, meals and parties, gift certificates, and college tuition for employees, the audit found.

As a result of a shortage of bilingual special ed teachers and therapists, Bilinguals spent $279,552 on international recruiting costs that included trips to South America but resulted in only eight hirings from overseas over a three-year period.

The organization also billed to cover the costs of employees who either weren't working at the program during the three-year audit period ending June 30, 2011, or worked at affiliated out-of-state programs.

All told, auditors found more than $875,000 in improper reimbursements out of the $13.3 million Bilinguals Inc. billed government during the three-year period.

"Bilinguals, like other special education providers audited by my office, took advantage of lax oversight to cash in," DiNapoli said.

That includes more than $541,000 in questionable personal services, $128,629 in non-personal serves, and $205,695 in recruitment costs.

The controller knocked the state Education Department for lax oversight.

"The State Education Department needs to recoup the money paid for these unwarranted charges and put in place more stringent standards to protect taxpayer dollars and ensure the parents and children who rely on special education programs get the funding they deserve," DiNapoli said.

Failed roll-out of the Common Core, test scores that were set to purposely plummet, lax oversight of special education service...

Remind me again why NYSED Commissioner John King still has his job?