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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

UPDATE Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: More from the 'bottom of the barrel' + Prosser community resists charter invasion

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: More from the 'bottom of the barrel':


Prosser community resists charter invasion
Protest at the site of new Noble Charter school across the street from Prosser High School. The community knows the game may be rigged against them. The pro-forma community meetings are a sham with the process being run and controlled by a corporate-funded pro-charter groups, Stand For Children. But in the face of all this, school communities and parent groups are determined to roll back the chart

More from the 'bottom of the barrel'

While teachers in America often come from the bottom of the academic barrel and are disproportionately teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Duncan said, teachers in South Korea are selected from the top of the class and are rewarded for working with low-income students. -- U.S. News
In fairness to Duncan, he didn't actually use the words "bottom of the barrel". He said that a significant proportion of new teachers come from "the from the bottom third of their college class." Same difference as far as I can tell.

Duncan's shares his outlook on teaching with those at the Council on Foreign Relations or at the World Bank, who view public education primarily in the context of global economic and military competition. For Duncan, the role of schools is to provide the "human capital" for American corporations and the military industrial complex. He lays it all out in his 2011 remarks to the World Bank ("Improving Human Capital in a Competitive World—Education Reform in the United States”).
In many respects, our vision of reform has a great deal in common with the World Bank’s forthcoming Education Strategy for 2020. We share your commitment to results—to accelerating the acquisition of skills and