RA Day 1: Thirteen Things NEA Hates About Arne Duncan?
A very strongly worded New Business Item that will be debated sometime this afternoon at the RA makes some blistering criticisms of the U.S. secretary of education.
We probably won't get back to it until this afternoon, but it is interesting to see that even in the face of all the anti-bargaining legislation out in the states, the union is still really upset about things like the Race to the Top program.
It would direct the NEA president to communicate "aggressively, forcefully, and immediately" to Barack Obama about all the things it doesn't like about U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Essentially, this is a laundry list of all the beef the union has with the Obama administration education policies, ranging from its support of the Central Falls, R.I., teacher firings, to its use of competitive grants, to its support for charter schools, to the four School Improvement Grants turnaround strategies, to teacher evaluations based in part on student scores, to what it describes as Duncan's practice of "disrespecting and failing to honor the