SQUNTS P.S. -- THE DUNCAN DISASTER

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From:       Ronald Willett <rwillett@nktelco.net>

Subject:    Duncan/USDOE

Date:        April 23, 2012 12:43:39 PM EDT

To:           edunation.k12@gmail.com

Cc:           Arne Duncan <arne.duncan@ed.gov

____________________________________________________

TO:       Edunation Distribution

CC:       The White House

DATE:  April 24, 2012 

SUBJ:   SQUINTS Postscript

Good morning.  

If there is an argument why Arne Duncan shouldn't be removed as U.S. Secretary of Education, and promptly while there is some vestige of due process left in American K-12 oversight, a pair of communications challenges the case.

Today's post in The Washington Post, "The Answer Sheet," by Mary Broderick, president of the National School Boards Association (and in the vanguard of the traditional education establishment), addresses the question of present reform and testing dysfunction in a letter to Mr. Obama.  The query is temperate and refined:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/mr-president-public-education-in-the-us-is-on-the-wrong-track/2012/04/23/gIQA6LEAdT_blog.html

The following 4/23/2012 citation, addressing implicitly the U.S. Department of Education's and Mr. Duncan's dishonesty and demagoguery, trashes any argument: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ed-dept-seeks-to-bring-test-based-assessment-to-teacher-prep-programs/2012/04/22/gIQAmdAxaT_blog.html

Adding more voices to the call for some sanity in K-12 reform thinking and retreat from testing abuse, another coalition has emerged, also reported today in "The Answer Sheet:"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/national-resolution-against-high-stakes-tests-released/2012/04/23/gIQApRnNdT_blog.html

Mr. Duncan has demonstrated autocracy, hypocrisy, and educational incompetence, in sourcing peremptory and counterproductive K-12 education dogma, in an Administration that can ill afford to impose more top-down requirements on this nation's public schools that need to restore creativity and genuine learning.

The true origins, and diverse motivations flogging the present standardized testing/VAM epidemic remain shrouded.  The strategic consequences of present tactics, however, are clear to any thinking student of education, and even if unintended, carry the potential for setting back genuine U.S. K-12 learning, knowledge creation, and creativity analogically on some scale with the prior Bush Administration's economic destruction.

This USDOE performance, reflecting some alternate ideology as dysfunctional as that being floated by the NGA and extreme political right wing, and arguably complicit with a profit-driven to unethical corporate test oligopoly, and charter scams, may even add to the case for denying Mr. Obama a second term.

Regards,

   Ron Willett