Parents Across America Demand to be heard!

Check out my latest on Huffington, how the discontent with this administration's education policies is growing, Parents Across America Demand to be Heard!

The three stooges: Arne, Al and Newt

Check out my latest on the Huffington Post, Arne Duncan has become a national embarrassment, Part II

Alas without the brilliant illustration provided here by David Bellel.

Arne Duncan has become an embarrassment

Check out my latest column on the Huffington Post.

Check out how Duncan's latest intrusion into local politics and slavish flattery of Mayor Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch's NY Post has provoked outrage from parents and teachers alike.

It would all be somewhat comical if this politicization of education reform weren't so inherently dangerous. It's time for Obama to rein his appointee in - before he causes yet further embarrassment to his administration.

The Banana Republic of NYC Public Schools

Check out my new posting on the Huffington Post.

More evidence in the NY Times today of how this Banana Republic that we call NYC operates.

The article further speculates about what political insiders have been surmising for weeks: that Silver caved in on the issue of mayoral control because of a deal he made with one billionaire (Bloomberg) to benefit another billionaire (Larry Silverstein.)

Joel Klein as a tone-deaf Oedipus?

Check out this piece in the Huffington Post by Benjamin Barber, who criticizes the so-called pundits like Jacob Weisberg of Slate, who are pushing Larry Summers and Joel Klein as two potential picks in the Obama administration because of their supposed braininess. As Barber points out:

What's wanted in anyone's cabinet is not brilliance but judgment. Not genius but wisdom. And the former is a lousy predictor of the latter. Like Summers and Klein, a number of the wannabes are arrogant and unlistening. Known for what they know and where they went to school (like Harvard and Yale).

Summers folded as Harvard's President not because he said something politically incorrect about women (too baby-obsessed to be good scientists) or tried to tell one of America's leading public intellectuals (Cornel West) how to be a "good" scholar, but because he was seen as dismissive of faculty, indifferent to contrarian ideas and unwilling to listen to others - traits he had shown during his tenure with the Clinton administration.

Joel Klein's career as chief education honcho for New York City has been marked by a similar disrespect for teachers and parents, and a techno-corporate approach to education that, while putatively wedded to equal opportunity, has been completely tone-deaf to the communities he supposedly serves. He knows a lot and knows it. But he lacks elementary judgment.

President Obama will be in need of counselors with wisdom as well as smarts, and will quickly learn that arrogance isn't merely a "defect of a superior mind" (as Weisberg puts it), but a form of deafness that incapacitates the hubristic for leadership. Oedipus was smart as they come, but, as I recall, made a terrible king.

Dan Brown on the proposed budget cuts; how our schools will suffer

Great commentary by Dan Brown re the proposed budget cuts to our schools in the Huffington Post, which the Mayor touts as inevitable, but in reality are anything but:

“…Mayor Bloomberg took a blasé attitude towards the mid-year cuts, saying the disappeared funds would have "no impact whatsoever," adding, "I know of no organization where you couldn't squeeze out 1.7 percent, or even a lot more."

The CEO mayor's logic may work in terms keeping a company's stock price afloat despite "belt-tightening" or lay-offs, but it doesn't fit one bit for schools. Erasing vital programs and personnel will incontrovertibly have an effect, and a terrible one at that -- especially for our most vulnerable, at-risk students. Meanwhile, the city is giving a 9% raise to its high-priced international consultants and maintaining an excessive, expensive regime of standardized testing….

Among the likely effects he highlights:

“…working in poorly resourced schools will disillusion new teachers even faster and thus keep increasing New York City's absurdly high and costly teacher attrition rate. With budget cuts pushing class sizes to the maximum (34), nearly every middle- and high-school teacher will have an astounding 170 students per semester -- a recipe for accelerated burnout. With more and more fledgling teachers running under-funded, overcrowded classes, students will suffer.