Want to hone your school reformer skills? Jeb Bush’s foundation has a MOOC for you.
Are you an education policymaker or an education reform partner? If so, this one’s for you.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education is offering three MOOCS — massive open online courses — with “convenient, self-paced modules to accommodate busy schedules” to help you do more to “advance and effectively implement trending reforms.” You get to hear from leading reformers, among them Joel Klein and John King, in courses such as these, as described in a foundation e-mail announcing the courses:
“Securing Our Nation’s Future” : A failing American educational system threatens U.S. national security. In this course, participants will hear from national leaders and experts about these threats, the urgent need for education reform and how America can ensure its own security and global leadership for future generations.
A second course is labeled as being about data privacy and a third, titled “Winning the Ed Reform Conversation,” will help students hone their messages so they can, obviously, win the education reform conversation. (Is the foundation concerned that it is losing the education reform conversation?)
This is a Bush foundation education policy training program in the form of a MOOC, and features people who agree with the Bush brand of school reform, which he implemented as the focus of his governorship of Florida from 1999-2007 and took national in the years since. The centerpieces of these reforms are standardized-test based “accountability” — which has led to growing protests around the country among parents, teachers, principals and superintendents — and the spread of charter schools and voucher/voucher-like programs that use public money to pay private school tuition. Bush has been seen as so much of a national “reform” leader that President Obama himself lauded the former governor as being a “champion of education reform” when the two appeared together at a Miami school in 2011.
(If you are wondering how we can have a failing American educational system after so many years of Jeb Bush-inspired school reforms that have swept across the United States, this “Securing” course probably isn’t for you.)
Along with Klein, the former chancellor of New York City public schools, and King, the former New York State education commissioner who is now a top adviser to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, you will hear from people including John White, Louisiana state superintendent of education; Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Bush foundation, who sent the e-mail announcement; and Greg Hughes, Utah Speaker of the House. The 18 people shown on the foundation Web site who are involved in the courses come from the policy and legislative (and not the education) world.
So here’s the e-mail sent out recently by the Foundation for Excellence inWant to hone your school reformer skills? Jeb Bush’s foundation has a MOOC for you. - The Washington Post:
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