When you have a liberal like Tom Harkin signing on (George Miller I am not surprised one iota) to this debacle, it's beyond hope.
It was bad enough when Ted Kennedy helped push through the original NCLB, but timing had a lot to do with its passage (it passed shortly after 9/11, with pressure to be bipartisan and all of that). Kennedy, to his credit, wasn't happy at all with the lack of funding to implement it.
Well, who would have thought I'd have yearned for the days of yore when our beloved George W. Bush spearheaded education policy.
There is this:
Teachers and administrators will be fired if they do not raise the test scores of their students, schools will closed if the test scores of their students do not go up, and states will only get Title 1 money by showing the Obama administration how "innovative" they are - in other words, the Race to the Top competitive grants are going to be enshrined in the new education law every year and districts are going to have to do what the administration wants, like tie tenure and evaluations to test scores and open lots of charter schools in order to qualify for Title 1 money.
And for some reason known only to the Great Obama, schools that are already doing well on their measurements will receive more money while schools that are not doing well will be closed or re-structured a la Duncan's policy in Chicago and Bloomberg's here in NYC.
This is really really bad.
Any teacher who voted for Obama who still supports this man needs to have his or her head examined.
Within a few years, the entire public school system - both urban and suburban - will have been destroyed by Obama and Duncan.
He's throwing a time honored institution over a cliff, and it's all because of neoliberal ideology.
And of course bribery from the billionaires with the same neoliberal outlook.
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