Monday, February 16, 2015

The Bleat Goes On, #2: The Dis-Education President



On the whole, yer ol perfesser detests the current incumbent SLIGHTLY less than his predecessor, on a number of grounds. There is ample reason for fierce criticism of ThePrez.
But, if there is one thing for which I shall bear Prez. Shamwow F. Lowbar an eternal and undying enmity, it will be his treatment of the nation's schools and students. 
It is also that area, schooling, in which he most clearly betrays his servile,corpoRat bona fides.
Obama may have had generous intentions, but he if so, they were still-born when he installed and has KEPT that flaming, cortpRat douchebag, Arne Duncan, as SecEd...
Duncan has been the leader of the swarming hordes of corpoRats, privatizers, real estate tycoon, testing grifters high techers, and other smarmy opportunists looking to extract as much of the public treasure as they can from the country's public schools, to get it while the getting is good.
Under the Lowbarry/Duncan regime, it's gotten better and better.,..
Duncan, a corpoRat lawyer with only distant relations to the nitty gritty of schooling, has been a leader of the pack of jackals snapping at teachers' heels, accusing and abusing them for the systematic---and systematically engineered--failures within the institution. Teachers can no more be blamed for their students' successes or failures, measured by occasional tests, no matter the stakes, than can dentists be blamed for their patients' personal hygene between visits..
For 30 years, schools and teachers (unions) have been targets of legislative and corpoRat efforts to provide the impetus for the wholesale privatization of schooling, and Lowbar and his ass-hole hoops-playing buddy have opened the door and unlocked the safe.
Teachers are NOT responsible for the conditions that produce bad educational outcomes, when the single variable most correlated with school success is the child's residential Zip code. But, by his silence towards Duncan's calumnies, the cowardly President encourages the kinds of arrant nonsense spouted by the 'reformers.' 

1 comment:

Cirze said...

So true.

But how can we open the so-called progressives' (who are bringing us this misguided profit-driven solution) sensibilities to these facts?

Please don't stop your passionate advocacy.

We must continue to advance our ideas for real education reform: better union representation, higher pay and better working conditions for teachers, and better schools for all starting with the areas that have the least support in their tax base.

Teachers are NOT responsible for the conditions that produce bad educational outcomes, when the single variable most correlated with school success is the child's residential Zip code. But, by his silence towards Duncan's calumnies, the cowardly President encourages the kinds of arrant nonsense spouted by the 'reformers.'