ESSA: All New Baloney!
ESSA has just cleared Congress, and the Department of Education is already giving us a look at the freshly sliced baloney that they will be serving at the Ed Reform Buffet. From Twitter, just now:
Let's count all the ways this is wrong, because it helps us understand just how USED's vision is messed up.
Holds all students to high academic standards?
The federal government cannot hold all students to a high academic standard. The mind boggles at even attempting to imagine how that would work. John White, Acting Pretend Secretary of ED, will stop by my classroom and go over my students' work with them? He'll engage in spirited motivational speeches to get my students to try extra hard.
The federal government is a dozen layers of management removed from interacting with students. They cannot "hold them" to anything. The most they can do is to try to force those of us who actually deal with students to prove, somehow, that we're holding the students to high standards, and then either carrot or stick us for what they think they know.
But the feds don't have any idea how to do that, just as they don't have any idea what "high CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA: All New Baloney!: