Mark Naison says that Pres. Obama must ditch Arne Duncan as the head of the education department:
But to do that, President Obama will have to remove the Harvard-trained lawyer who runs the U.S. Department of Education, Arne Duncan. Not only does Duncan promote policies which force schools and universities to make testing and assessment a far more significant part of classroom learning than it ought to be, his comments to the press and elected officials literally ooze contempt for teachers and school administrators. In Arne Duncan’s view, America’s schools and universities are islands of backwardness and inefficiency in a dynamic society where competition produces excellence and those who can’t compete lose their jobs. Obsessed with quantifying success and punishing failure, he is on a mission to turn every dimension of classroom learning, from kindergarten through graduate school, into something that can be measured and evaluated with the simplicity and clarity of sales figures in a bank or corporation, thereby allowing for ironclad measures of teacher evaluation on a national scale.
Duncan is right up there with one of the worst Secy’s of Education. But he’s been a friend of Obama’s for at least a decade and you know how that works. Duncan is NOT a friend of public education, however. Wittingly or unwittingly, he would have fit in perfectly with the previous administrations ideals on what public education should or should not be.
from today’s Truthout: http://archive.truthout.org/121708R
“A recent report, “Education on Lockdown,” claimed that partly under Duncan’s leadership “Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become infamous for its harsh zero tolerance policies. Although there is no verified positive impact on safety, these policies have resulted in tens of thousands of student suspensions and an exorbitant number of expulsions.”[4] Duncan’s neoliberal ideology is on full display in the various connections he has established with the ruling political and business elite in Chicago.[5] He led the Renaissance 2010 plan, which was created for Mayor Daley by the Commercial Club of Chicago – an organization representing the largest businesses in the city. The purpose of Renaissance 2010 was to increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of accountability – a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago’s 2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district’s alleged underachieving schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification.”
I must confess I don’t know much about education philosophy. What are the preferred alternatives to having high expectations and measured results?