As We Know,

Delaware and Tennessee were the first states to receive the Obama administration's blackmail money in order to implement "reforms" disastrous to teachers, students, and parents. And naturally the unions go right along with this, thus sealing their fate:

The Obama administration on Monday named Tennessee and Delaware as initial winners in its “Race to the Top” education initiative. The two states, which were granted a combined award of $600 million in federal funds, were those in which local and state union affiliates carried out the greatest collaboration in undermining public education and teachers’ job security.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top program last year as the centerpiece education program of the new administration, offering up to $4.5 billion in federal funds to those states that were the most “innovative” in their policies.

As the World Socialist Web Site warned at the time, this had nothing to do with achieving education excellence or improving conditions in the schools, and everything to do with promoting a political agenda of privatization (charter schools) and destruction of wages, jobs and working conditions for teachers and other school workers (“accountability”).

Only 16 of the 50 states were selected as finalists. Tennessee will get $502 million and Delaware, a much smaller state, $107 million. Both states have Democratic governors who were better able to make deals with the unions and insure their support for the bid for additional federal funds.

Both states have merit pay plans for teachers, which allow principals to award pay raises based on alleged “performance,” which means, in practice, discriminating against teachers who defend working conditions and job security against management demands.

One of the reasons the "step system" of compensation for teachers was instituted was because principals couldn't be trusted with "awarding" raises. It was a recognition of how utterly political the public education culture is.


So-called Democrats propose and implement far right Republican policies and get away with it.

I'd like to know who writes the New York Times editorials:

Washington has historically talked tough about requiring the states to reform their school systems in exchange for federal aid, and then caved in to the status quo when it came time to enforce the deal. The Obama administration broke with that tradition this week.

It announced that only two states — Delaware and Tennessee — would receive first-round grants under the $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative, which is intended to support ambitious school reforms at the state and local levels. The remaining states will need to retool their applications and raise their sights or risk being shut out of the next round.

That includes New York State, which ranked a sad 15th out of 16 finalists.

There is such brazen ignorance about public education by this paper, it simply means to me it is completely in bed with Mayor Bloomberg.