Is President Obama Continuing Conservative Education Policies? -- New York Magazine:
"“Duncan’s plan is cut from the same cloth as the education policies of the Bush administration,” said Sara Bennett after watching the show from her Park Slope home. “It is misguided, disastrous for schoolchildren, and has no basis in sound research.” A Legal Aid lawyer turned activist and the mother of a tenth-grader in a public high school, in 2006 Bennett co-authored The Case Against Homework, which helped launch what came to be known as the “anti-homework movement.” Parents from all over the country, but especially in the gentle strongholds of enlightened parenting like Park Slope, Santa Monica, Berkeley, and Mercer Island near Seattle, began organizing against what Bennett and others have called a “skyrocketing” increase in the amount of homework kids are assigned. They see it as a symptom of a deeper problem—the pressure placed on teachers by school districts to improve their students’ test scores and thereby secure state and federal funding. Many of the movement’s activists are directing their fire toward Duncan’s plan, which they claim will only further enslave children to homework and testing and create a homogenized “monoculture.”"
"“Duncan’s plan is cut from the same cloth as the education policies of the Bush administration,” said Sara Bennett after watching the show from her Park Slope home. “It is misguided, disastrous for schoolchildren, and has no basis in sound research.” A Legal Aid lawyer turned activist and the mother of a tenth-grader in a public high school, in 2006 Bennett co-authored The Case Against Homework, which helped launch what came to be known as the “anti-homework movement.” Parents from all over the country, but especially in the gentle strongholds of enlightened parenting like Park Slope, Santa Monica, Berkeley, and Mercer Island near Seattle, began organizing against what Bennett and others have called a “skyrocketing” increase in the amount of homework kids are assigned. They see it as a symptom of a deeper problem—the pressure placed on teachers by school districts to improve their students’ test scores and thereby secure state and federal funding. Many of the movement’s activists are directing their fire toward Duncan’s plan, which they claim will only further enslave children to homework and testing and create a homogenized “monoculture.”"
