Arne Duncan’s “Principal Ambassadors”: Federally Monitored “Local Control”??
A notable corporate reform ploy is to starve school districts of funding and then turn around and offer some “assistance”– which amounts to little more than a district’s selling its autonomy to the corporate reform machine.
Corporate reform is flush with cash, and it wants to leverage its cash in order to trap school systems (both local and state) into the corner of inevitable privatization.
Arne Duncan: Federal Control on Behalf of Privatization
For all of his claims to the contrary, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is leveraging federal enforcement of the spectrum of reforms promoted by Race to the Top (RTTT).
Note that Duncan’s coercive efforts benefit mega-companies like Pearson. This happens to be the same goal billionaire Bill Gates holds in his obscenely-financed efforts to cement a future for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
Duncan wants to back states and districts further into the federal-control-ending-in-privatization corner by threatening to discontinue federal funding by way of his “withdrawing” No Child Left Behind (NCLB) “waivers,” often tied to states’ agreeing to tenets that are also part of RTTT, such as tying teacher effectiveness ratings to student test scores. (Note that the entire “waiver” concept is suspect; NCLB was not reauthorized by its 2007 deadline, and the original NCLB includes no language in regard to the “waivers” initiated by President Obama in 2012.)
However, rather than withdraw his democratic-process-dodging NCLB “waiver,” Duncan would much rather insert individuals trained to enforce state and district compliance to his RTTT– as concerns those teacher evaluations based upon student test scores (his reason for nixing Washington state’s NCLB waiver) and the hardly-”state led” CCSS (his reason for threatening Indiana’s NCLB waiver).
Employees Who Bring Their Own Funding?
In order to insert federal enforcement into state and local education operations, Duncan has apparently taken a lesson from corporate reform-purchasing “philanthropist” Eli Broad. Broad is a major supporter of teaching temp agency Teach for America (TFA). Moreover, his support enables TFA to fulfill its goal of supplanting career school administration with its TFA alums. To this end, Eli Broad offers former TFAers (and others willing to privatize public education) “training” in corporate-reform-friendly “leadership” via his unaccredited Superintendents Academy.
Here is the lure to districts: Broad agrees to subsidize its superintendents’ salaries during a two-year “residency and enlists long-term career support for its grads. Below is an excerpt from the Broad website. It is an appeal to potential “partners,” including state departments of education:
Partner Organizations receive a multitude of benefits from The Broad Residency.Arne Duncan’s “Principal Ambassadors”: Federally Monitored “Local Control”?? | deutsch29