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Saturday, September 20, 2014

Marie Corfield: NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia has no time to be diplomatic – Part II

Marie Corfield: NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia has no time to be diplomatic – Part II:



NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia has no time to be diplomatic – Part II

Part I of this series on the round table discussion between NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia and NJ education bloggers and activists focused on the devastating effects of high-stakes testing on special needs children, and how edu-preneurs are profiting from the testing boom. 

Part II focuses on the mainstream media blackout.

As with Part I, unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are Lily's.


When you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth* 


*Attributed to both Vladimir Lenin and Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

"Everything [Secretary Duncan] said, everything [he's] advocated for says there must be a consequence for not having your quota of kids hitting your cut score...  
"[He] needs to see teachers being evaluated by students' test scores, students being labeled by their test scores, schools being called 'failures' by student test scores...
"Let's call it what it is; it's not 'accountability'...
"The fact is that standardized tests won't tell you if kids are college and career ready, yet they say it and the mainstream press prints it. And that has to end." (emphasis mine)

In the past six years or so education blogging has exploded. My blog roll is but a small sampling of the highly educated and well informed citizens who are writing about what's happening. Lily blogs and Tweets: here's her account of her NJ tripDiane Ravitch's blog alone gets thousands of hits a day. Ed bloggers are doing incredible investigative work connecting the dots between Wall St., Silicon Valley billionaires, charter schools, test prep companies, 'charities' such as The Broad, Walton and Gates Foundations, ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) and Washington, DC. They're writingMarie Corfield: NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia has no time to be diplomatic – Part II: