Arne Duncan is a shallow Twit!

Could it be that Duncan is just another member of Obama’s neoliberal gang who thinks privatization of everything public is the cat’s meow and that the destruction of the public school system is an unfortunate consequence of free market forces?

This bullshit is hurting kids; I’m dealing with this at home with my teenager right now, who cannot plan her curriculum for next year because the school system doesn’t know what teachers will be here and which ones will be qualified to teach the classes she needs. Seriously: we don’t know if she can take a couple of science classes next year.

And this is a community which is in better shape than most in my home state of Michigan. It’s hurting a kid who’s in the top decile of her school and is preparing to go into a pre-med program after high school. If this is the impact this budget nonsense is having on a high-achiever in a better school district, what’s it doing in devastated communities like Flint or Detroit Michigan?

Screw the charter schools; the government can’t make an oil company stop a leak, what are they going to do when charter schools fuck up our kids’ education? Issue stern letters??

Milton Friedman made the free market theory into a religion with its holy trinity of deregulation, privatization and stripping of social programs and assets. Arne Duncan is not a high priest of this cult, but rather something like an alter boy. What a travesty that Americans have forgotten that we help invent the idea of a “public” school where all Americans could go not just the wealthy. Arne Duncan and his bosses are the real anti-Americans.

The children of conservatives do not attend public schools so they don’t have to worry. Puts my mind at ease… /s

It was known back in 2002 that charter schools performed no better than regular public schools. They’re also huge money pits, even by “free-market” standards, constantly needing more cash per pupil than regular public schools (in fact, Jeb Bush raided the Florida public school teachers’ pension fund to keep his charter school buddies afloat). Yet they keep getting bailed out, because they exist to break teachers’ unions and to funnel taxpayer dollars to private industry.

We’ll have to disagree. The majority of people in my community identify as Republicans and most of them go to the same public school with my kid. There are private Christian/Catholic schools, too, but they offer middling education compared to the public high school and a private, non-religious charter school which is crowded with the humanities-arts students.

Most of the Republicans’ kids are slackers who are content with drifting along through school, too, more worried about whether they have the latest iPhone or an iPad or a new car. They’ll end up working in corporate America, following in the footsteps of their drone-like parents, are currently un-phased and carefree about next year’s curriculum. Be very afraid — they are our future.

So since Obama, as of today at Carnegie Mellon has gotten back onto the populist theme we can surely expect that this corporate welfare scam will be declared null and void with the money going into helping the crumbling public education infrastructure since Congress failed to step up to the plate. I mean, right?

While I have little respect for this contest or the reality behind charter schools and the other kinds of “leave no child to succeed” plans we got from Bush and failed to change, it is pretty clear from other speeches that Obama likes this stuff just fine. He may spend a few hours every once in a while, like today, plying his trade to the rubes but he obviously strongly believes that creating and supporting an elite, via education or otherwise, is more important than fixing the little problems of the rest of us.

Off Topic:
One fun note on his speech, he came out hyping Cap-and-Trade as the solution to pollution once again. Very populist.

I have several teachers (high end private schools and public schools) and professors in my family and all I have heard about charter schools has been very negative (with one small exception in Detroit). I also came across this site –
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/
I’m in Michigan and I’ve contacted the Bd of Ed saying I’d pay more (taxes, whatever) to fund our local schools and I know of dozens like me. No Child Left really put the cap on ruining public education and Obama is taking it yet another step farther away from where it needs to be…and now there’s simply no money. I will feel much better when we are fed up enough to take to the streets.

Why do we need public schools? Do we really want the riff-raff and the poor to get an education so that they don’t eagerly take the menial jobs that their betters are willing to give them? We can see what is going to happen nationwide right here in the Northeast. Governor chris christie is attacking the teacher unions and going with the charter school path. In NY andrew cuomo is running on a platform similar to christie’s way: refuse to tax the wealthy and ruin the public school system. Of course, there is no definitive study that shows that charter schools are the best way to go. What happens to the special needs kids, and who will be paying for all of the charter school costs? Who will have control of the charter school budgets? Do we get to vote on them as we do on public school budgets? The questions go on and on.

The US has a lot of choices for easily fixing this. One solution is to terminate offshore corporate tax havens and retrieve those “tens of billions of dollars a year.”

The problem we’re faced with in our state can be traced directly to two individuals:
– Andy Dillon, DINO state house speaker and erstwhile gubernatorial candidate;
– Mike Bishop, Tea Party-Norquistian state senate leader.

Dillon and Bishop made an agreement the public has never seen, to prevent any tax increases to pass through the state legislature. The Democratic-majority in the house passes them, but the Republican-majority in the state senate bottlenecks them. And Gov. Granholm is stuck in the middle, backstabbed by these two women-hating men, forced to do nothing but offer budget cuts which they choose to ignore. Watched this dynamic at work at close range during the budget season last fall; the senate actually took off for a Republican conference rather than stick around and try and fix the past-deadline budget.

There’ve been multiple revenue enhancements offered up to help pay for education at state-level, but the senate ignores them and Andy won’t let them get presented to the house or they get pulled into committee as his part of the devil’s deal.

We’re stuck for the foreseeable future. Stuck. And the charter schools are not an option.

OT, did you happen to hear that Arne Carlson told MPR today, that Pawlenty should back off the national campaign trail to provide some leadership for our state.

Carlson also said Pawlenty’s claims that he, Arne is not actually a republican are to be expected these days and that even Barry Goldwater wouldn’t be considered a ‘real’ republican now.

“Compassionate conservatives” (if they aren’t in barren loveless marriages like Mark Kirk and the ex-Mrs Kirk) send their spawn to private schools and therefore haven’t a care about class sizes of 50 in public schools.

I highly recommend A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. A great look at the Friedmanesque economic policies of our current government.

Sigh. Thanks for the post and updating on this important topic. It seems like public schools everywhere are jettisoning teachers, closing down classrooms, offering less classes, etc. All in the name of “saving money.”

The super wealthy for sure send their kids to private schools of some kind, but the upper middle classes (such that is left these days) often take advantage of public schools in the “better” districts. Often these schools fare better, but that can be due to a lot of fund raising that parents do these days. It goes along with the Republican method, though, of I’ll pay for me and mine, but not for thee and thine. I do know that the “good” public school in my area relies heavily on fund raising and donations from parents and relatives of students. Since these are wealthier folks, they can afford it. And because they are funding their own kids, then, it’s ok. As long as those lazy poor people don’t get as little of their (the richies) tax dollars as possible: fine.

I have had any number of Republican friends tell me that having 50 kids in a class is “fine” and “workable,” and I’ve even had some claim to me that they grew up in public schools with class sizes that big (I don’t believe them). Such people have been trained by Rush & Glenn and/or their pastors into *believing* such junk, esp if the end result is busting the dreaded teachers unions (the bane of every Republican’s existence, for sure).

Many Republics do send their kids to public schools, but they are *banking* on their kids getting the “real education” when they go to college. How much longer even the “upper” middle class can continue to afford college these days remains unclear.

That said, I do have friends who teach at the university level, and they numbed to the fact that the vast majority of kids entering college (whether a 2 or 4 year institution doesn’t matter) are woefully unprepared for what tertiary education is *supposed* to be. Most tertiary institutions these days have to waste most of a students first year with remedial studies that they should have done in high school, but either didn’t get or couldn’t get due to budget cuts.

But of course, the big Republican wet dream is to privatize everything bc then “good” Republics everywhere could rip off the system by running the newly privatized stuff. Ugh.

and so… on it goes. Unsurprised by Arne. He was appointed by Rahmbama, after all. What else did you expect?

There’s no polite term which accurately describes the folks in Washington DC.

Does Obama want “job creation”?

How about starting with the prevention of needless destruction of existing productive jobs?

All Obama and Congress need to do is write a friggin check for education. Bam! Productive jobs.

The teachers are already trained and in place, the school buildings have already been built, school board bureaucracies organized, school textbooks published and a load of students are ready and waiting. A herculean effort is not required. They just need to write a friggin check.

And if they don’t write the check… then what? Then we pay unemployment insurance to 300,000 unemployed teachers. Paying teachers to sit at home and not teach our kids is beyond insane.

If the folks in Washington cannot get even this straightened out then it’s time to push for impeachment proceedings. Starting with Obama himself.

Impeach Obama.

Arne Duncan’s mother is a best friend of Maggie Daley, the wife of the Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley. Mrs. Duncan was the principal of the Lab School at the University of Chicago. When the Mayor grabbed control of the Chicago Schools, his wife pushed for Mrs. Duncan’s son Arne, and he got the job. He knew nothing about running a large school system nor much about public education. He’s an automaton. He held onto the job by being Mayor Daley’s butt boy, doing whatever Daley wanted. From there, he jumped to Education Secretary. He’s lousy in that job, too. Now, he’s Obama’s butt boy as well as Daley’s. Duncan is a classic example of the Peter Principle. He does terrible in a job, and gets promoted. Duncan is a loser!

Most of the Republicans’ kids are slackers who are content with drifting along through school, too, more worried about whether they have the latest iPhone or an iPad or a new car. They’ll end up working in corporate America, following in the footsteps of their drone-like parents, are currently un-phased and carefree about next year’s curriculum. Be very afraid — they are our future.

Are you freaking serious? And I suppose Democrat and liberal kids are all just model children. ~~~EDITED IN MODERATION~~~

~~~DO NOT flame other commenters.~~~