http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/25-4"Teachers Need to Confront, Denounce Obama's 'Race to the Top'
by Shamus Cooke
It's best to quickly recognize the red flags in any failing relationship. This way, ties can be severed instead of allowing things to linger forever in dysfunction. For Democrats and teachers' unions, the writing is on the wall. The two are simply going in opposite directions.
The Democrats continue on the road to corporate-inspired charter schools, using the tried and true method of "stronger teacher evaluations" to undermine "underperforming" schools and teachers - thus opening the door wide to private charter schools with their non-union workforce.
Obama's Race to the Top education "reform" has enshrined these odious goals into government policy, and the once love-struck teachers' unions have hastily exited the honeymoon stage with the Obama administration, heading toward a quick divorce."
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6268"The desperation of Race to the Top
To make today’s deadline, many of the participating states rushed major education bills through their legislatures to meet the contest’s requirements and engaged in furious negotiations with unions against artificially set deadlines. They passed laws allowing more charter schools to open -- even though studies show that charter schools on average are no better than regular public schools -- and tying teacher compensation to standardized test scores, even though the tests aren't designed to assess teachers.
Is that not a great way to commit serious education reform? Just today, preliminary results of a study were released showing that a performance-based compensation program that heavily relies on student test scores to evaluate teachers showed no improvement in Chicago.
Yes, the program was one of Duncan’s efforts when he ran the Chicago schools, and yes, tying student test scores to teacher compensation is one of Duncan’s big ideas for helping students achieve more.
Of course this new analysis, which you can read more about here, is hardly definitive, but that’s exactly the point: We are rushing, again, into school reform initiatives with billions of dollars without much evidence that where we are headed is the right direction, and, in some cases, with evidence that it is clearly the wrong one."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=219&topic_id=28157&mesg_id=28157""She points out that these reforms are going on worldwide. She discusses the Race to the Top program.
Gonzalez asks her to compare not only what’s happening here in the United States, but around the world, in terms of these so-called reform initiatives.
LOIS WEINER: Absolutely. And I think it’s important to understand that Race to the Top is not unique to the United States, and what Arne Duncan did in Chicago is not unique to Chicago. And in fact, the contours of this program were carried out first under Pinochet in Chile. And this program was implemented by force of military dictatorships and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Latin America. And the results have been verified by researchers there. They produced increased stratification. So I think what we’re seeing right now are the results of that increased stratification, a stratification, inequality of results, because if you think about it, No Child Left Behind is almost a decade old. And what are the results? The results are a growing gap between poor minority—achievement of poor minority kids and those kids who come from prosperous families who are—who live in affluent suburbs and in those suburban schools.She says it is a way to prepare students for jobs in this economy.
And I think it’s also very important to understand that this focus on educational reform is replacing, is a substitute for, a jobs policy. We need to understand that. Education can democratize the competition for the existing jobs, but it cannot create new jobs. And when most jobs that are being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything about that. So, we need to—we really need to look critically at Race to the Top and understand the way that it fits into this new economic order of a so-called jobless recovery and that what’s really going on is a vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids, so that they’re going to take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth grade education, because those are the jobs that are being created in this economy."
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