Did you ever have the experience of thinking you heard something before, but you just couldn't quite place where and when you heard it? That's the way I have been feeling about the
nondescript orwellian edspeak that all of us in public education continue to be tormented with. And then, it finally occurred to me where the logic defying statements like
"No Child Left Behind" and "all [illiterate] students are going to college" really come from. In 1979, Peter Sellars played an idiot savant -- emphasis on the idiot -- in the movie
Being There. Chance the Gardner has people ascribe to him great insight, when the simpler and more reasonable interpretation is that Chance the Gardner is just a moron.
The epiphany that LAUSD is being run by Chance the Gardner clones, who are not really bad as much as they are banal people, is a truth that is painful to accept when one realizes that in dealing with LAUSD leadership, there is no there there. For these folks heading LAUSD, their work is not a profession, but rather a job that it takes everything they have just to memorize the slogans they continue to repeat like a catachism where questions are followed by answers to be memorized, but please don't have any expectation that these public education leaders actually understand what the hell they are talking about. This
ah ha moment explains why we
