US Secretary of Education: Total devastation good for education

Poor Arne.  His fortunes were riding high.  It looked like in the aftermath of Obama's State of the Union speech, education was the one policy arena where is might not be too difficult to get bi-partisan agreement.   (Not exactly a heavy lift.  Teachers' unions are traditionally strong Democratic supporters, so a Democratic president willing to undermine them must have seemed a little bit too good to be true to the just-say-no Republicans.  Of course, there was the usual posturing.    Can't appear too gleeful, you know. ) 

Along with the opportunity to impose policy, it looked like Arne was going to get another big pot of play money to toss around.  And the New Yorker had the courtesy to profile him with a nice little puff piece.

Yep, things were going along swimmingly for ole Arne.  He had managed to escape any questions about the emerging news of his seven-year failure as Chicago Public Schools CEO, and the pummelling of his chief flack Peter Cunningham by the evil Richard Rothstein in a radio interview had escaped widespread media scrutiny.

But then a mutant virus tunneled into Duncan's mindware, causing him to say this:  "Let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster..."

The red alert immediately sounded in mission control room as programmers scrambled to fix the rogue program and get Duncan back on script -- but it was too late.  The US Secretary of Education had pronounced that total destruction of their schools and communities was the best thing that could have happened for thousands of poor, black children.

I think you should have kept doing what you're best at -- being considerably less honest -- Arne, chum.

Arne's trough problem

A few days ago, I wrote about the political calculations Arne Duncan would have to make in doleing out the Race to the Trough dollars.  It seems like the editors of the Wall Street Journal were also vexed that Duncan might not be heartless enough to keep sufficient numbers of little piggies away from the slops.  After all, they did go to all the work of filling out those great big applications!  And they do so need the money!

"Courage, Arne!" cry the WSJ editors, "Don't waver!  Stand firm!  Allow only the truly deserving to gorge!  Damn the rest!"

But Arne, think.  Wall Street Journal, Arne.  Republicans.  Elections.  Not your friends.  Will never be your friends.

Lest there be any doubt who WSJ's readers are, it is illuminating to peruse the readers' comments on this editorial.  I particularly fancied this gem:

And the real problem is the low quality of "inner city" students that no amount of federal legerdemain will ever cure. Hint! High dropout rates are good. It gets rid of the deadbeats so motivated kids won't have their classrooms disrupted.

Yep, this commenter perfectly encapsulates the current school reform strategy promoted by Duncan and praticed in Chicago and New York.

Person of the Year!

Michelle Rhee has finally gotten herself into deep doo-doo over a remark to Fast Company about teachers let go in October for what she claimed were budgetary reasons  "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" 

Just imagine, if she says stuff like that to a journalist, what demon spawn emerges from her mouth when speaking to her closest staff behind closed doors?  Perhaps one or two of her top lieutenants might realize that now is a good time to save themselves from the sinking ship and come clean about all the shenanigans that are no doubt going down in DCPS HQ.

In an ironic twist, as a perfect illustration of how clueless such groups are, some business/politican outfit called Federal City Council announced Rhee as their person of the year.  Nice move guys.  I'm sure that will be a great comfort to her as she's packing her bags for Sacremento.

Race to the Trough as political stupidity

So I guess something like 40 states put in the effort to send in their troughside applications in round 1.  And you just know it was a big pain in the butt for them, and hopes are riding high.  So here's how it's gonna turn out:

As with most things in nature, the quality of the applications (according to whatever criteria DOE comes up with) is going to be distributed along a bell curve.  There's going to one really outstanding, a few pretty good, a whole bunch of so-so, and some real stinkers.  And they're all going to have to be graded, and Arne Duncan is going to have to set  a cut score.

What a miserable job.  

Of course, he repeatedly said that there are going to losers, but nobody who went to all the trouble to complete the application was sitting around thinking, "Geez, I bet I'm a loser."  So Arne had 3 choices.  He sets the cut score really high and awards grants to the indisputably superior applications, but then he makes lots of enemies, lots of disgruntled governors phoning in and whining and complaining about how in these cash-strapped times Duncan made overworked state ed depts waste their time.  That would probably be a bad move.

Or he sets the bar somewhere in the middle, in which case you'd be hard-pressed to find a hair's-breadth difference between some of the winning applications and some of the losing ones.  Then Duncan wouldn't make a lot of enemies, but the few he made would be extremely vocal and annoyed.  It will be like trying to explain to Mr & Mrs Smith why you gave Johnny at 89 on his history paper instead of the 90 he needed to get into the gifted program.  "You've gotta be kidding me!  You're telling me he lost by a misplaced comma?!?  But you said yourself he was a wonderful writer!"

Or Dunc is going to do what he has repeatedly said he won't do and make almost everybody happy by giving them a little taste.

Given Obama's current political fortunes, I'm betting on option 3.

Race to the Trough as stealth policy

Mike Klonsky provided a link to a KCRW Public Radio show featuring Richard Rothstein, former New York Times education reporter and co-author of the important book Grading Education, and Peter Cunningham, chief flack for the US Department of Education.  As Klonsky notes, it was like punching a marshmellow (for Rothstein), because Cunningham came across as a nitwit with nothing coherent to say in defense of the Race to the Trough.  Cunningham basically says, yeah, most state's standardized tests suck and the NCLB accountability scheme sucks, but to change those, we'd have to change the law, and we have to spend this money quick, so we don't have time to change the law yet.  You could charitably say that his argument amounts to a pathetic version of "When you're stuck with lemons, make lemonade," although it comes across more like, "We're stuck with PCBs, so we we're making pickles."

Although Rothstein communicates very well, most of critical points he raises (and this is not meant as a dig at him) about the stultifying, curriculum-narrowing, damaging effects of ever-greater reliance on standardized testing are not really new.  (It was surprising that Cunningham hadn't seen these criticisms coming and prepared to address them better -- after all, that is his job -- but he's a nitwit.)

One point Rothstein brought up that hadn't occurred to me (around minute 39 of the show) was that Race to the Trough really should not even exist.  RttT was part of the ARRA economic stimulus/jobs creation bill.  An objection of ARRA opponents to the bill was that it would be used as an underhanded means of pushing Obama's preferred policies.  And RttT is certainly that.  Oh, yes, it is providing jobs for plenty of  educational snake-oil salesmen, but they probably rank only slightly below bankers and lawyers in popular esteem.  Now admittedly, $3.5 billion does not seem like a whole lot of money in comparison to the bank bailout -- but I would think it could be used to create quite a few jobs. 

And Cunningham, of course, simply missed Rothstein's point and said  that using ARRA funds to drive policy was a fine and noble thing to do.  That sentiment should make him an honored guest at a Tea Party or two.

There may be some hope, after all

After Scott Brown's election to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, there was lots of chatter about how Obama would need to move to the center to shore up flagging support from independents.   That didn't seem right to me.  Clearly, that election was an early referendum on Obama's leadership, but the problem was not that he was too leftist.  Instead, it seemed like BO had long neglected what might be fundamental law of politics: Dance with the one that brung ya.  In BO's case, that meant energetic youngsters as well as older, less robust progressives like myself who made up for what we lacked in energy by dropping dollars into BO's warchest like we'd never done for any candidate before.  Barack had charmed us all and we were swooning to glide away in his arms.

The Tea Partiers are livid about Obama and healthcare, sure, but he ain't never gonna make them happy anyway.  Heck, they voted for Palin.  What he's sorely missing is any enthuthiasm in his base.  Massachusetts voters, like many of us, have failed to see the change we could believe in. So I suspect good numbers of progressives sat on their hands.  You certainly didn't see them rocking the streets, knocking on doors, dialing the phones, to rouse up support for Obama's girl.  If they had, there's no question Scott Brown would have been a brief, unmemorable flash. 

So today's NY Times story about Obama finally taking on the banks, promoting Volcker and sidelining Geithner and Summers, comes as wonderful good news.  I especially liked the hints about how Geithner and Summers might soon be shown the door. 

Maybe, just maybe, with all the bad news coming out of Chicago about Arne Duncan's failure, universal disparagement of the Race to the Trough, Bloomberg faced with parents protesting outside his house, Michelle Rhee's luster noticeably tarnished -- BO might come to realize that those 3 million teacher votes and voices and energy and 30 million fingers and 6 million feet could be more useful to his political longevity than all Broad's bucks.  And Flunkin Duncan will maybe start looking for a job doing something he could do well -- coaching high school basketball somewhere.

Among other insightful comments on what the 2010 education priorities of the Obama administration might be, Steve Peha has offers this:

Our Secretary of Education has remarked many times that our tests are inadequate and that the language of the current ESEA encourages states to lower their standards over time. Appropriately, he calls this process, “the race to the bottom”. Mr. Duncan has the issue pegged. But fixing it doesn’t seem to be at the top of his agenda. I find that strange. Finally, someone in Washington has identified the fundamental problem with the fundamental element of reform, and yet he doesn’t seem to want to do much about it. ... I'm baffled.

Mr. Peha is right.  Not only is it nowhere near the top of Duncan's agenda, he is pushing states hard to use those same crappy tests to evaluate teachers.  To help Mr. Peha with his bafflement, I would submit that Duncan is a master of doublespeak, defined in George Orwell's 1984 as:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfullness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it ... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.

Also known as "speaking with a forked tongue," it is critical skill for high-level education policymakers and administrators.