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Sunday, June 12, 2011

Schools Matter: NCTQ's LAUSD report's highly questionable veracity shows Bill Gates' pervasiveness and perniciousness

Schools Matter: NCTQ's LAUSD report's highly questionable veracity shows Bill Gates' pervasiveness and perniciousness

NCTQ's LAUSD report's highly questionable veracity shows Bill Gates' pervasiveness and perniciousness

Reformers appeal to the urgency of confronting "failing schools," but the logic of their argument leads inevitably to students' dependence upon parents who know how to maneuver within the system to gain private advantage. This is an abandonment of the goal of a comprehensive public sector that provides equitable, universal opportunities. Such consequences are anathema to progressives when free-market ideas are applied to health care; there is no reason they should be welcome when applied to the education of the nation's children. — Kevin G. Welner (professor of education and director of the National Education Policy Center)

NCTQ is a right of center think tank immersed in neoliberal policy promotion. The LAUSD report is non-peer reviewed propaganda intended to empower privatization pushing poverty pimps like Mayor Villaraigosa. Early this week the Los Angeles press was awash with news trumpeting the findings of a report from an organization called the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). The report, entitled Teacher Quality Roadmap Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD was heralded by the corporate education reform junta as a definitive report that contained all of the answers to Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) problems. Among the biggest cheerleaders of the report was the privatization minded Mayor Villaraigosa who said of the NCTQ "I look