Jim Arnold is a former s
uperintendent of Pelham City Schools. He's written several guest pieces for the Get Schooled blog and
has his own blog.
Today, he tackles what he considers the bizarre turn in U.S. education policy.
By Jim Arnold
I grew up reading Superman comics and especially enjoyed those that featured stories of an alternative universe. Bizarro World was one such universe where the planet and its inhabitants were diametrically opposite to everything on Earth. Even the name of the planet, Htrae, was “Earth” spelled backwards, and the planet was a cube shape rather than spherical.
Education seems to have entered its own Bizarro World with Arne Duncan’s policies and beliefs. President Obama’s appointee to head the U.S. Department of Education, second only to Bill Gates as the most powerful force in US educational policy, believes strongly in the Bizarro theory of educational improvement; whatever research says, do the opposite.
Look no further than Common Core, the federal standards that aren’t federal standards because Duncan says they’re not. Used as a carrot in the Race to the Top grants, acceptance of Common Core was inferred for states to receive money. Not the only carrot, but large enough to attract the most timid of state Department of Education bunnies to implement the standards before they had been tested on a smaller scale and, even more unbelievably, before they had been written.
Like the publishing company that paid Hillary Clinton millions before her new book was written, many states now wonder what they could have been thinking when that particular deal was made and are rethinking their participation in Common Core and the accompanying testing.
