John King Is Concerned
If you’re on the USED mailing list, this weekend you received a “Friend” e-mail from John King, the latest in a series best entitled Let’s Keep Throwing PR Spaghetti At The Wall Until Something Sticks.
The theme, as with his Vegas speech a few weeks ago, is that gosh, we just have to get the focus back on a well-rounded education because somehow, some way, we’ve just gotten all twisted up with this testing stuff.
The most powerful thing about John King is his story, so he pulls that out again and seriously, there is nothing that anyone can mock about King’s story. His mother died, and he was raised for a few years by a very sick father who then also died, and King was an orphan at age 12. He credits his teachers in general and one, Mr. Osterweil, in particular, for saving his life. And in this letter’s retelling of the story, he also credits how involvement in and exposure to the arts also made a huge difference. That’s a new feature; the moral of King’s story is usually that great teachers and an orderly school can turn a student’s life around. Now they also need exposure to the arts to open up the world.
The most intriguing thing about King’s story has always been that he fails to draw any of the obvious lessons from it, like that fact that Alan Osterweil saved King’s life without the benefit of Common Core Standards or a Big Standardized Test. King has never publicly considered whether the reforms he has championed would have helped or hindered Osterweil, or if Osterweil would have approved of theaggressive, excessive suspension policy at King’s Roxbury charter.
But King plows on, with more thin-sliced baloney:
I hear frequently and passionately from educators and families who believe that the elements of a great well-rounded education are being neglected because of a too tight focus on reading and math.
Well, yes. I’m sure you do. But do you have any idea how such a thing happened?
Sometimes, that’s because of constraints on resources, time, and money. Often, teachers and administrators describe how No Child Left Behind and its intense focus on English and math performance left other subjects under-attended to or even ignored.
The mystery here is whether King is incredibly dense, or he thinks the rest of us are. First, the constraints of resources, time and money would not necessarily affect the arts except the federal government mandated that reading and math must be the focus of all education. And that didn’t just happen under NCLB— it continued and was intensified under the Obama-Duncan administration and Race to the Top along with Waiverpallooza, which required states to tie math and reading scores to teacher and school evaluations.
And King has to know that. Arne Duncan can claim ignorance from being safely ensconced in the beltway bubble, but King was out there trying to sell this mess to the people of New York in meetings so contentious that King canceled them and had to be forced back out there to meet with people.
The narrowing of the America’s curriculum did not just mysteriously happen. It was the direct and completely predictable result of the policies pursued by the last two administrations.
I’ve been clear, as has the President and my predecessor, Arne Duncan, that in John King Is Concerned:
