Fwd: Bill to save teachers' jobs would slash reform programs

[Monty Neill <monty@fairtest.org>]

Here is a totally predictable editorial from the Washington Post. Call 
your rep (see my post yesterday) to support Obey.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/30/AR2010063004622.html?wpisrc=nl_headline 


In response to their editorial, I typed out a quick comment:

States that have strong unions and spend more on education have better 
results. Massachusetts greatly increased spending on education in the 
1990s, and MA does very well by international measures. We have fairly 
strong unions.

Obama & Duncan's 'race to the trough' (RTTT) promotes charter schools 
even tho study after study shows on average they are no better or 
slightly worse than public schools. Obaam-Duncan promote paying teachers 
for their student test scores tho more than a century of international 
experiments as well as studies in other fields finds this approach won't 
work. They perpetuate Bush's push to reduce schooling to test prep, 
dumbing down education (progress on the independent National Assessment 
of Educational Progress has slowed and halted since No Child Left 
Untested was passed). (For more on all this, go to http://www.fairtest.org.)

RTTT is more of the same and should be defunded. The feds need to 
greatly expand support to schools serving low income schools and take 
other measures to address poverty. Obey's step is inadequate but at 
least in the right direction. Then the feds need to help schools do 
better, for which there is good research, and stop the ideological 
nonsense and damage perpetuated by Duncan with the backing of the Post 
(which makes more money from test prep Kaplan programs than its 
newspapers), big business (which brought us the financial collapse and 
recession/depression), etc.
--
Monty Neill, Ed.D.; Interim Executive Director, FairTest; 15 Court Sq., 
Ste. 820; Boston, MA 02108; 857-350-8207 x 101; fax 857-350-8209; 
monty@fairtest.org; http://www.fairtest.org; Donate to FairTest: 
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