Addressing a group of civil rights leaders and advocates at this week's meeting of the Urban League, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accused people who criticize his Race to the Top grants and other education policies of being "intentionally misleading or profoundly misinformed." As highlighted by Paul here at Open Left the other day, President Obama immediately reinforced the message by scolding critics of his education reforms for making "a fuss" over something that shouldn't be seen as "controversial." Then, to complete the triumvirate, the supposed progressives at the Center for American Progress castigated Congress and anyone else who would dare lay a finger on the Obama administration's Race to the Top and other "reforms."
As Paul explained yesterday, what's seldom discussed - not only among leaders of the Democratic party but also in the progressive community - is the actual "evidence" for and against the dangerous proposals being championed by those who consider themselves to be "on the left" of America's political spectrum. Instead people on the left are generally in denial about issues of race and class that are at the heart of the matter. And educators themselves are being played for suckers by the Democratic establishment.
Nowhere was this situation more painfully obvious to me than at last week's Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas. As lots of lip service was being paid to "saving teachers' jobs," not much of anything in the agenda addressed the destructive education policies of the Obama administration. Of course, lots of presenters had high-minded declarations about the importance of schools to democracy and the progressive cause. But no one had anything particularly progressive to say about the direction of school reform.
As news came out during the conference that another 241 teachers were being fired by Washington, DC's autocratic chancellor Michele Rhee for being "ineffective," no one of any prominence at the meeting pointed out the blatant unfairness of the Obama administration's push to evaluate teachers on the basis of students' scores on standardized tests.
In fact, an attendee I was having coffee with as the news broke was absolutely gleeful about it. "There are too many bad teachers," she explained to me while coolly scrolling through the headlines on her Blackberry, "And they're never made accountable for anything."
At the conference's Education Caucus, which all too symbolically never made it to the final agenda distributed to attendees as they arrived, educators exhorted the progressive blogosphere to push politicians in DC to pass the "edujobs" bill to save hundreds of thousand of teaching positions, a prospect, by the way, that seemed incredibly remote even as the declarations were being made.
The NEA's terrific spoksperson Lily Eskelsen informed the caucus crowd about the vagaries of for-profit education entrepreneurs, the creeping corporate influence on local schools, and out of control charters. And D Kos education blogger annie em backed her up with information about the corrupt Imagine charter schools chain. Yet in the ensuing discussion, a frontpage blogger from MotherTalkers (sorry, didn't get your name) explained how much her audience "like charter schools."
So as the rest of Netroots Nation rolled along on the general affirmations of the first year-and-a-half of the Obama presidency, all of us who care about public schools were left talking among ourselves about the abyss that we all too clearly see our country's school children heading toward.
In the mainstream media, the reporting was far less nuanced as both union meetings were cast as sharply at odds with the Obama administration and openly combative to "reform."
The different way these meetings were being reported on in the MSM, compared to the trade media, reminded me of how reporting on education in the mass media - what little of it there is - is so distorted by what I call "spokesperson laziness" and "false polarities." All too often, reporters in the MSM simply look for the easiest-to-reach representative of a "constituency" rather than digging into various points of view. And the goal always seems to be to develop a narrative of combat in which two "opposing" constituencies are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for dominance.
When it comes to education, this approach to "journalism" is probably more damaging to public awareness than on other issues. Because what's reported about education is so miniscule in the first place, people only seem to be aware that the Obama administration is pushing for "reform" and that teachers have all coalesced behind their unions in bitter "resistance to change." And this is totally false.
It is only when you start listening to educators themselves that you get the real story of what's going on in schools as the new politics of "education reform" steamrolls across the country.
Yet, as veteran educator and edublogger Walt Gardner points out here, teachers are the "potted palms" in reporting about education.
In fact, surveys of teachers have clearly shown that what they think is important to focus on in their work isn't at all aligned with what the Obama administration's policies are pursuing.
So what would we learn if we listened to educators?
According to the Washington Consensus on public education, all the Serious People agree that the one important "success" of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy was that it had "advantages for low-income and minority students" because it forced states to focus on the interest of these children. This is, of course, utter nonsense.
As Linda Darling-Hammond points out in The Nation, after eight years of NCLB, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities."
The reality is that no one in DC-land is any more "focused" on addressing the issues of race, income and school reform than they've ever been. Instead, America's first black President is ironically perpetuating America's blindness to the history of racial and socioeconomic inequality in public schools and taking our country in the exact opposite direction of what could create a brighter future for children raised in poverty.
It's true that the political leadership of our country has never openly embraced the connection of race and income to education. But the policies of the Obama administration so fly in the face of what is known about the relationship of race and income to school reform that one has to consider if what is afoot is a concerted attempt to undo any progress that's been made since Brown vs. Board of Education broke the back of racially segregated schools.
"School's Out" may be on the minds of most children and teachers right now. But in the halls of Congress, the debate over education policy and reform raged on this week.
As a broken Senate failed America's children by not passing legislation that would prevent mass teacher layoffs, politicians in another committee room held a hearing on oversight of the for-profit college industry. Many of the same rhetorical points from the argument over K-12 reform were brandished in that hearing as well.
The rapid expansion of privatization in education is the overwhelming trend at all levels. "While enrollment at institutions of higher education increased by 31 percent from 1998 to 2008, the number of students entering for-profit schools soared 225 percent over the same period."
This explosive growth of for-profit higher education is being likened to the housing bubble and the unscrupulous profiteering by the home mortgage industry that recently wreaked havoc on our economy:
"Steven Eisman, portfolio manager of the FrontPoint Financial Services Fund who has studied how the for-profit education industry operates and derives its revenue, did not mince words in his testimony. 'Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime- mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task,' he said. 'It is my hope that this administration sees the nature of the problem and begins to act now. But if nothing is done, then we are on the cusp of a new social disaster.'
Eisman testified that the for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate, driven by easy access to government-sponsored debt in the form of Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the government. Thus, the government, the students, and the taxpayer bear all the risk and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards, he said. When the Bush administration took over the reigns of government, the Department of Education gutted many of the rules that governed the conduct of this industry, he said. Once the floodgates were opened, the industry embarked on 10 years of unrestricted massive growth. Federal dollars flowing to the industry exploded to over $21 billion, a 450 percent increase."
On the K-12 side, the same Wall Street operators who recently sent our economy into oblivion are now amassing huge amounts of wealth behind the charter school industry. The reason:
"There are about 5000 charter schools in place now at about 4% of the total public school system in the United States and it's grown at about 400-500 units per year, which is about a $2 billion dollar annual investment opportunity set. So it's a very big and high growth category that is going to continue to represent opportunities . . ."
Perfectly symbolic of this "partnership" between public schools and the private sector was the recent announcement that former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will now be working for America's most prominent and well-funded lobbyist for big business, The US Chamber of Commerce.
Meanwhile Diane Ravitch, one of the most well-known and outspoken critics of the Obama administration's education policies, reported on having her say in DC and at the Whitehouse. Her conclusion:
"Living outside the Beltway, I am struck by the fact that the education think tanks in DC are like an echo chamber. Almost all share the 'consensus,' and because they agree with one another, they think they are right. The Obama administration bought into that consensus, and seems utterly tone-deaf to how their agenda is received outside the Beltway."
The frustration that educators are feeling at the tone-deafness of the political debate in DC is palpable, impassioned, and pervasive:
"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school 'reform,' with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom's after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) . . ."
(emphasis not added)
It's not just educators either. Parents don't like Sec. Duncan's "overly disruptive" turnaround models that rely on closing schools and firing teachers. Christian churches are appalled at "the administration's effort to push states to increase the number of charter schools, its plan to turn some of the federal money used to help poor children into competitive grants, its punitive approach to dealing with low-performing schools, and the 'ugly' demonization of public school teachers." (h/t FunkyGal)
Yet so little pushback against the Washington DC Consensus on education reform is registering among politicians. Even the most progressive Democrats in Congress have mustered an opposition that can be characterized as mild at best.
So one wonders why the messages about the Obama administration's education policies aren't getting through - not just to the politicians, but also to the media, the progressive blogosphere, and even bloggers in the education industry.
True, there are fundamental structures standing in the way of ordinary people getting their voices heard in our corporate-media dominated society. But that set of circumstances does not absolve one from straining harder and striving harder to get better at being heard above the fray.
It's also true that it's not that unusual for professionals in a specific discipline to feel that their voice isn't being heard. For instance, doctors and nurses frequently complained that their voices weren't being heard in the recent debate over health care reform. But the scale at which educators are being ignored in the Obama administration's education agenda is truly off-the-charts. And no one in the Democratic Party ever went after the American Medical Association with the vehemence that teachers' unions are being vilified in the debate over education policy. So what gives?
It's not that educators aren't able and articulate advocates for their side. And people voicing their discontent with President Obama's education policies certainly know what they're talking about. But it could be that "knowing what they're talking about" may in fact may be part of the problem.
So it all comes down to this. As schools across the nation are winding up their academic calendars, test scores are ruling the lives of educators and families to an unprecedented extent. Some kids -- especially those enrolled in special education programs or those whose primary language isn't English -- are having their futures forever altered by a score from a single test given on a single day. And teachers' lives are also being thrown into turmoil as "technical glitches" delay test results and sew confusion. From my own perspective, high-stakes tests meant that my child could take the last of school week off from classes so teachers could use that time to drill and retest students who failed end-of-year exams.
So as teachers dutifully marched through their orders to impose a test-driven approach to education that is antithetical to everything they believe to be in their students' best interests, they are nevertheless being told that that their jobs must be made harder and their work held to an ever tougher scrutiny.
Leading pundits such as David Brooks hailed this year as the year that public school teachers have rightly become "fair game." According to Brooks, the whole reason for 27 years of school reform failure is that we haven't been tough enough on teachers. What's needed is to get "Patton-esque" on these lay-abouts and adopt "stubborn, data-driven" policies that have a "low tolerance for bullshit."
The recurrent call to "get tough" on teachers and schools now dominates the discourse on education in our country. Time and time again, we are told that the solution to boosting student test scores is to ratchet-up the pressure on educators. Teachers are told that they have to work harder and for longer hours; their training has to be tougher, and their jobs made less secure.
From their cushy chairs and air-conditioned offices in DC thinktanks and corporate headquarters, education reformists chant the get-tough mantra to make standards "tougher" and make teaching more "rigorous." Addressing an audience of educators that is mostly female, their prose bristles with masculine exhortations to be tough-minded with teachers and "stiffen" requirements.
And some wonder why teachers feel they are being beat up on?
The big news in the edusphere this week was the release of the final version of common core standards outlining "what experts decided are the knowledge and skills students should have in mathematics and English/language arts."
"Reformists" immediately hailed the release, some even going as far as to claim that they will help "cure" poverty.
Many states, however, expressed their reservations to immediately adopt the standards. One of the most powerful incentives for states to accept the common core standards is the Race to the Top competitive grants that Arne Duncan is dangling in front of them. States that adopt the standards increase the eligibility for RTTT funds, and no doubt, many states will rush to accept the standards for this reason alone.
I've already written extensively about my reservations with national standards. And there's certainly an array of experts who disagree with me. But I found it ironic that in the same week that one of the cogs in Arne Duncan's grand mechanism to transform public education -- national standards -- was falling into place, two more of his precious ideas were proven to be complete and utter shams.
In the education community, it's hardly a cause for celebration when the latest results of a National Assessment of Education Progress hit the media, as one did this week when the results of a NAEP report on urban school districts was announced. And NO, that's not because NAEP results are always bad, as indeed the results of this latest NAEP are not all bad. And NO, it's not because educators are inherently resistant to assessments. In fact, according to surveys, the vast majority of teachers welcome being assessed based on student engagement, principal observations, and locally made and administered student performance evaluations.
What makes announcements of NAEP and other broad assessments unnerving to educators is that the results are used by politicians and pundits as the basis to propose, well, just about anything.
Unfortunately, some of those people using NAEP and other studies to make ridiculous pronouncements about the state of public education are people who are supposed to be allies of public education, specifically people who call themselves "Democrats." In her weekly blog post, Diane Ravitch spotlighted the clout of a particularly powerful group of Democrats known as Democrats for Education Reform who are actively undermining traditional public schools.
"This is a small and politically powerful organization that involves some of the nation's wealthiest hedge-fund managers. A story in The New York Times explained that when New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wanted entrée to the hedge-fund crowd for his political fundraising, he had first to meet with Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. No money for his candidacy unless he showed a favorable stance towards privatization. Democrats for Education Reform-referred to as DFER (dee-fer)-is active nationally, promoting the candidacy of pro-charter candidates for state legislatures and for national office."
The rightwing is elated at the tendency of people who call themselves Democrats to support Bush-era ed policies that undermine teachers' unions and public schools:
"From enacting new curricula standards to school choice measures such as charter schools, the NEA has been bested by the coterie of centrist Democrats, conservatives, libertarians and idiosyncratic left-learners who make up the school reform movement. The fact that Democrats -- including prominent liberals such as Green Dot Schools founder (and Rock the Vote cofounder) Steve Barr -- are also some of the most-prominent backers of school reform means that the NEA can no longer count on the Democratic National Committee for unquestioned support."
I've often been perplexed at the tendency of Democrats - even those who profess to be progressive - to support education policies that are not the least bit democratic, let alone progressive or even liberal. Is it because the Washington consensus on education policy is just a front for corporate takeover of public schools? Is it because they're all engaged in a global capitalistic plot hatched by the World Bank to subvert publicly funded schools? Is it because there is a failure of the minds of our leaders to grasp, as William Timberman suggested in comments to last week's Left Ed post, the importance of public education in the scheme of all the other overwhelming problems they face?
Today on Left Ed, let's consider another option. Let's explore the idea that much of the Democratic party and its leadership is seriously off-kilter on education and willfully ignorant of the destructive nature of their policies because they suffer from a case of Education Deficit Disorder.
One of the more important items in this week's education news was a new bill sponsored by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin proposing a $23 billion "bailout" fund for saving tens of thousands of teaching positions that states and school districts will not be able to fund in the coming school year. A WaPo article reported that Education Secretary Arne Duncan stopped just short of endorsing Harkin's bill but said that unless Congress acts, there will be "an education catastrophe" resulting in 100,000 to 300,000 teachers losing their jobs. "It is brutal out there, really scary," Duncan waxed empathetically and took care to note that schools and kids "suffer" when teachers are laid off, class sizes balloon, and summer sessions get canceled.
At the same time Duncan was lamenting the effects of teacher lay-offs on children, his staff was busy on Capitol Hill pushing a "blueprint" for education reform. A key element in the blueprint is that at least 5% of the nation's schools - potentially 10% - that are deemed "lowest performing in state" will be forced to adopt a federally mandated "intervention model." Of the four models prescribed in the blueprint, only one does not involve mass firings of teachers.
As Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, pointed out, adopting Duncan's blueprint will quite likely "cost teachers their jobs."
In another fit of cross-purposeful policy making, Duncan's team is also pushing a National Education Technology Plan (NETP) that urges schools to pursue ambitious learning goals such as teaching students twenty-first century skills, critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication. The plan also "calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all students," where teachers conduct "personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all" approach to curriculum and instruction.
While most educators would probably regard NEPT's goals as worthy, they can't help but point out how these goals conflict with the Obama administration's overall blueprint for education. How can a school system that emphasizes high-stakes testing in just two subjects - reading and math - fulfill the curriculum goals of teaching "collaboration and multimedia communication?" How can an approach to schooling that values test data more than any other output at the same time assert that it is "personalizing learning? "As one commenter in the previous link states,
"The focus of the federal and state governments on high-stakes testing is in direct contradiction to creating an environment where humans learn best... Stop attaching funding to only standardized test scores. Then, perhaps schools could begin moving towards creating an environment where 21st-century skills can develop."
So here's the deal: At the same time that our federal government is mustering financial resources to save teachers' jobs, it's also pushing measures to eliminate them. And at the same time that the US Department of Education is urging educators to focus their programs on ambitious learning goals and qualitative learning experiences, it's doing everything it can to undermine those goals by focusing on a narrow curriculum and strict, quantitative measures. This cognitive dissonance that characterizes the Obama administration's approach to education reform isn't anything new.
Last month, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed that the "best thing that ever happened" to public schools in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. (To be fair, here's the quote in context.) Although two days later Duncan apologized for his remarks, what he said - when he was thinking in his self-described "really honest" mode rather than perhaps a less than honest mode - actually reveals an essential aspect of the destructive school reform policies being carried out by the Obama administration.
Across the country, literally, from Rhode Island to California, Minnesota to Louisiana, federal policies are being used as leverage to shutter hundreds of public schools, eliminate teachers, disrupt the lives of families who are least able to cope with upheaval, and relegate many kids to gangs and street violence. When public schools deemed to be "under-performing" based on federally mandated standardized tests are not closed outright, they are being put on the auction block for take-over by the highest corporate bidders. The wave of closings and privatization washing over American schools is being labeled as a "turnaround" approach to reshape public education into something that will better serve children and youth.
According to Duncan, the intent is to turnaround approximately 5,000 schools, which is about 5 percent of US public schools. But the narrow scope of the turnaround approach has catastrophic effects on the schools that get targeted. Of the three "turnaround models" proposed by Duncan, only the third and final option doesn't include firing the school faculty or leadership. Because at least half of the targeted schools are in big cities, and many others are in suburbs and medium-sized towns, where schools have higher than average student populations, the numbers of students and families affected by these policies are potentially in the many tens even hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, kids only get one shot at an education. And any approach that puts their schoolyears at risk will have lifelong negative effects.
With all that's potentially at stake, you would think that a school reform strategy that is as far-reaching as Duncan's turnaround approach would be backed up with some solid research and a track record of success. Alas, such is not the case.
(I would have done this myself, but I knew that Jeff could do a much better job. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Quick! Who is your go-to expert on American education policy?
In a lot of political arguments, that's frequently the crux of the matter, isn't it? On the economy, you go to Robert Reich or George Will. For the Middle East, Juan Cole or Max Boot.
But when you're looking for opposing sides in the debate on America's public schools, the initial appearance is that, well, there aren't any opposing sides. For sure, there are differences of opinion on specifics that people often argue about with great passion - whether to give out school vouchers so students can attend private schools, whether to teach intelligent design in science classes. But among political leaders in Washington DC and prominent pundits in the MSM, there's a startling uniformity of belief about the state of American education - an over-arching narrative that provides a context that is rarely disputed even when people argue about the merits of year-round schools or whether or not to teach phonics.
For instance, when you look at the education policies that Republican presidential candidate John McCain was pushing for in his campaign, you'll find that these are the exact same policies - school accountability based on standardized test scores, merit pay for teachers, charter schools to compete with public schools -- that are being implemented by the Obama administration. And when the Bush administration's Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings passed the policy baton to the Obama administration's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, she welcomed him as a "fellow reformer" of what's wrong with US schools.
It seems that when it comes to uniting the polarized discourse of DC, nothing brings adversaries together like education does. What else has ever united The Center for American Progress with the US Chamber of Commerce? Or CAP (again) with the American Enterprise Institute? It's as if education is David Broder's wet dream.
The reason for this is that, for decades, the popular perspective on American education has been dominated, almost exclusively, by a single, simple narrative. Whether you listen to E.J. Dionne or Lou Dobbs, America's schools are "failing." American education is in a "crisis," we've been told again and again. Our students can no longer "compete" against the students of other nations in the race to, um, whatever we're all supposed to be racing toward. Educators themselves are seen as part of the problem. And only the leading business captains or the famed entrepreneur dé jeur - such as Bill Gates or Louis Gerstner - can possible know what to do to fix our "broken" schools.
For years, the most prominent and powerful antidote to this contagion of lock-step thinking has been the writings of Gerald Bracey. Like the impertinent youth who persistently remarked that the emperor had no clothes, Bracey wrote a different story about our schools, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what was really true and not true about what was being said about them. In his books, his recurring column in Kappan magazine, and his diaries at HuffingtonPost, he argued persuasively - with actual facts and steel-eyed reason - that the conventional wisdom about our nation's public schools was not only false; it was a cover-up for what is, at the heart, a problem of our democracy.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bracey has left us. And as commenter craigspinks lamented at washingtonpost.com, "Who will take his indispensable place?"
In the latest iteration from our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan declared that
"But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score."
Given the fact that we don't really judge sports teams by the box scores (hello, it only matters who wins!), let's think about the whole highly questionable idea of framing education endeavors around a sports analogy.
I know that there are always a lot of lame sports analogies in our culture:
* sports as a formula for success in business (yeah right, who "won" in our current financial debacle?)
* sports as a framework for personal fulfillment (go ahead, try using "winning" as a productive framework for personal relationships)
* sports as an analytical argument for politics (currently being vigorously applied in the MSM with awful consequences for the rest of the country)
But in what way is sports really analogous to schooling? Should schools and teachers really "compete"? Don't we want everyone to "win"? Is there really a direct relationship of teacher behaviors to student achievement, or isn't there a lot of influence on student achievement that is outside the teacher's control (research says there is)?
But perhaps even more frustrating than the overly simplistic argument that determining success in schooling is somehow analogous to determining success in sports is the indescribable vagueness of what Herr Duncan is maintaining, which is that teachers "be judged on student performance, though not solely on test scores," without ever giving a clue as to what else is involved in his private criteria for evaluation.
(During his great rightwing year of reform, one of several issues on which Governor Gropenator made a total fool of himself was school reform, wherein he touted the elixer of merit pay, along with the need to axe tenure so that poor teachers could be fired. Local State Senator Alan Lowenthal, head of the Education Committee at the time, told me, as a reporter covering the story, that no testimony or evidence whatsoever had been submitted to his committee, so it was impossible to evaluate the governor's argument.
Is Obama smart enough to heed such examples? - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In yet another iteration of the media's account of the Obama administration's probable intentions toward school reform, Jonathan Alter at Newsweek has come down from the mountain after his interview with his expert on education, with the proclamation that "we know by now what works for at-risk kids. The challenge is trying to replicate it." That expert? None other than Bill Gates. And what works? Teacher merit pay. Or what Gates euphemistically calls "effectiveness-compensation systems."
That anyone would turn to Bill Gates for advice on how to guide America's schools is not so bad. His involvement in the funding of technology initiatives in schools is highly commendable. But that all of the rhetoric on school reform is coalescing around one idea for solving all our education problems is the height of reductionist folly. As I explain on the flip . . .
In major newspapers and in op ed columns by Washington DC insiders, Obama's choice for Secretary of Education, and thus a signifier of the potential direction for education reform, is being portrayed as a continuation of the ongoing struggle between "the reformers" and the teachers' unions. In an article appearing in the Boston Globe and a column by The Washington Post's David Brooks, the real choice for education reform basically comes down to this:
Either pick a "real reformer," such as New York City superintendent Joel Klein, who espouses teacher merit pay, strict accountability based on test scores, pro NCLB, and all for parent choice (i.e., charter schools). Or pick Linda Darling-Hammond, who Brooks dismisses as " the establishment view" and Seyward Darby at The New Republic contends is "vexing education's boldest change agents."
And then there's Arne Duncan, Chicago Public Schools chief, who has been positioned as the Goldilocks candidate who is potentially "just right" for everyone, even though he has previously espoused many of the same beliefs (sub required) as Klein and other "reformers."
It's a convenient narrative that adheres to the longstanding rightwing frame. This frame maintains that the real problems with America's schools are due to teachers' unions and a "bureaucracy" that is immune to the purifying force of the "free market." So basically, there's only two sides to this argument: the "reform minded" who adhere to continuation of NCLB-like "accountability" and the "establishment" which is always framed as an ally of the teachers' unions.
What is totally left out of the picture is that there is a real alternative to this frame that is rarely reported in the MSM and whose voice is rarely heard in the debate that leaks from the Obama transition team. Join me on the flip to explore what that is . . .
