NYC Educator: Education, Cajun Style

NYC Educator: Education, Cajun Style:

Education, Cajun Style

US Education Secretary Arne Duncan famously stated that Katrina was the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans. But hey, you can't just flood the whole country. First of all, even if you have a very important job like Arne does, you still don't get power over time, space, and nature.

Unfair though that is, you have to deal with it. There has to be another way. After all, New Orleans proved a perfect opportunity to close down virtually the entire public school system and replace it with charters. This is a bonanza for your BFFs who heretofore had not been making a dime from education.  Sure they aren't really doing very well. But that's not really the point, is it?

Arne knows a lot about education. After all, he's never been a teacher, so he's unencumbered by the special interests and prejudices that come with that job. However, he did run the Chicago school system. While it's true his program failed utterly, that's not the point either. If we can't simply produce hurricanes to improve education, how can we help the entire country make our BFFs more wealthy like we did in Chicago and New Orleans?

Clearly, this Common Core stuff is a bonanza. If we can introduce tests for which students are unprepared, if we make people who don't even speak English take them, if we fail to allow for poverty, handicaps, or learning difficulties, we can cause an enormous drop in test scores. Once we reach a 70% failure rate, it will be a true crisis and we can start closing schools even in affluent districts. Eva Moskowitz and Geoffrey Canada can come riding to the rescue, and if they fail, what's the dif? The unions will be gone and the money we wasted on teachers will now