Another Common Core disaster: Corporate-education reformer John King is exactly the wrong man to be secretary of education
John King's policies hurt schools, students and communities. Why is Obama letting him run education policy?
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will hold a confirmation hearing for John King Jr., President Obama’s nominee for the position of secretary of education. King has served as the acting education secretary since the beginning of the year after Arne Duncan, who had fulfilled a seven-year tenure, stepped down.
King has been one of the most influential and loathed figures of the corporate school-reform movement in recent years. A growing body of research and evidence has suggested that the policies he has peddled throughout his career have been ineffective and destructive to communities, educators and students, especially to the population he claims to be working on behalf of: poor African-American and Hispanic children. The committee should reject his nomination and call on President Obama to nominate a serious candidate who supports equitable, progressive public education for all.
In 1999, King co-founded Roxbury Prep, a “no excuses” Boston charter middle school that educates mostly poor African-American and Hispanic students. The school features a regimented learning environment. Students who fail to follow the dress code are not permitted to attend class. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education report explained, “Students are required to be in line and silent in the halls when passing from one class to the next. In class they are expected to be focused and on task.” It was King, as the New York Times reported, who implemented many of these structures as co-director.
What resulted from these authoritarian practices was an out-of-school suspension rate that was one of the highest in Massachusetts. In the 2003-2004 school year, King’s final year at the school, Roxbury Prep had a 55.9 percent suspension rate, compared with a statewide 5.9 percent rate. These figures have remained very high. In the 2014-2015 school year, the school had a 40 percent suspension rate, compared with a statewide 2.9 percent rate, giving it the highest suspension rate in the state. In 2014, the Obama administration implored schools to jettison zero tolerance policies, so it seems odd that King would be tapped to fill a role that requires him to renounce and lobby against his long-standing beliefs.
In 2011, King was named the education commissioner of New York state. He oversaw the rocky implementation of the Common Core standards. The standards, which are currently adopted by 43 states (and falling by the day), dictate what children must know and be able to do in each grade level from kindergarten through 12th grade. Bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, they were crafted by the National Governors Association in partnership with Achieve Inc. States were then bribed by the Obama administration with Race to the Top initiative monies to enact them, dovetailing with a time when school budgets were being heavily slashed due to the economic recession.
From Buffalo to the east end of Long Island, in the fall of 2013, John King went on a Another Common Core disaster: Corporate-education reformer John King is exactly the wrong man to be secretary of education - Salon.com: