An Educational Reform Primer for All State Legislators: When "Choice" is Not Really "Choice" but Just Lipstick on a Pig

How Michelle Rhee (a self-proclaimed left leaning Democrat) and her Students First organization are able to infiltrate state legislatures to push for nationalized education and conservative legislators praise its presence and agenda (and even invite her to set up shop for lobbying efforts):

Rhee’s strategy of freezing her targets—teachersand unions—and attacking them through a media blitz, has been so successfulscores of governors and high-profile conservatives ignore her faux record atHarlem Park Elementary, her affiliation with the social justice minded, racistTeach for America (the majority of whom are white, Ivy League and elitist) andthe cover-up surrounding a DC cheating scandal that happened under her watch.

Potter Williams Report does a fine job describing how those politicians who describe themselves as conservative got snookered into supporting the nationalization of curriculum and other nefarious education "reform" models:

Left and Right reformers are successfully wielding enormous power over testing standards, teacher evaluation models, policy implementation and curriculum. Building coalitions around common ideals such as parental involvement, teacher tenure, failing schools and ‘trophy’ kids, the left has lured the Right into an unholy alliance while their old pals SEIU and NEA battle it out with non-profits like Save Our Schools and the billion-dollar ubiquitous StudentsFirst. 

One Republican lawmaker at least appears underwhelmed by the massive education reforms trotted out by the multi-million dollar lobbyists and wrapped in MO HB1740:

"There's so much lipstick smeared on this pig, it's hard to tell what it looks like," said Rep. Mike Lair, R-Chillicothe.

Lair has uttered one of the most succinct statements on education reform and the unholy alliance of education reform organizations to come out of Jefferson City.  Representative Lair may be echoing the words in the Potter Williams article:

"If something sounds too good to be true and is accompanied by a slick feature length propaganda film (Waiting for Superman) directed by a hard-line leftist (Davis Guggenheim of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”) then it definitely is." 

We wrote about this educational reform disaster last year when Republican lawmakers were invited to see "Waiting for Superman" in Jefferson City.  "Too good to be true" is under all that lipstick on that education reform pig. Take the lipstick off and it is still a pig.  It's not the "reform" the Republicans in Missouri and nationally have come to believe it is.  It's nothing but dressed up pork, designed to use taxpayer money for programs with no taxpayer accountability.  

Kudos to at least one Republican lawmaker who can see past the glitz and glamor of packaged and slick educational reform one liners. 

Fixing Kansas City Schools Will Not Be Easy

America's press has told you the Joe Friday version of the story of the boy who was set on fire in Kansas City.  Just the facts, and fairly sterilized at that.  If you read enough news reports you can get the idea that this was a racially motivated attack. But it appears you have to leave American news reports to get the bigger picture (remember the zoom out post).  Selwyn Duke reported in the Canada Free Press on the atmosphere in the Kansas City schools that made this type of attack almost inevitable.

The boy raised his hand, eager to answer the question.  “What would you know about it?” exclaimed the teacher dismissively.  “You’re not our race."

This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie.  According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month.  Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.

As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying “This is what you deserve.  You get what you deserve, white boy.”  Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area. 

While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High.  Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I’ve learned that Coon’s son is not alone.  Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers – and, shockingly, their teachers. 

Two of these victims were the twin 14-year-old daughters (first names withheld upon request) of Karin Wildeisen.  Ever since their family relocated from Texas they had endured racial animosity in the Kansas City school system and inappropriate behavior by staff, which included teachers laughing while boys humiliatingly manhandled the girls and a teacher slapping one of them on the backside.  But there was far worse to come.

The twins started coming home and talking about the goings-on in an advanced-English class taught by a teacher Wildeisen identifies as Ms. Veda Monday.  Wildeisen said that her daughters told her, “There are four white kids in the class; they are being targeted racially.”  They said that Monday, who is black, was feeding the class racial material, about which Wildeisen notes, “She’s teaching advanced English; she has no reason to be teaching civil rights.” 

But then there was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  One day Monday allegedly showed an explicit film involving portrayals of whites lynching blacks and then, reports ex-Texan Wildeisen, “in front of the class attacked my daughters, telling them that ‘everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks’” and that all white people were ‘responsible for Jasper because [their] skin is white.’”  This reference is to an atrocity in Jasper, TX, in which three white men murdered a black man in 1998.

Where would a teacher get the idea that all whites are responsible for the Jasper tragedy?  It’s not hard to figure out.  Black-liberation theology (BLT) instructs, writes the man some regard as its father, Professor James Cone, “All white men are responsible for white oppression.”  And how common is BLT?  Well, Cone’s books were required reading at Barack Obama’s long-time house of worship in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ.

The end result of this is that Wildeisen, like Melissa Coon, decided to pull her children out of East High.  Also like Coon, she intends to leave the area, saying that it and the school are a “powder keg.”  As for now, her daughters are studying at home via a distance-learning program.

Another white victim is 15-year-old Ashley Miller, whose family had moved to K.C., MO, from Kansas.  Subject to racial harassment, she was called names such as “white b****.”  She also actually shared a class with Allen Coon, and as the only two white students in the room they became the target of sexual comments.  Moreover, she reports the same experience with race-baiting videos as do the Wildeisens: they would be shown, and an onus would be placed on the white students.  Her mother Melissa told me that she now fears for her daughter’s safety and, you guessed it, is in the process of withdrawing Ashley from East High.  And the rest of the pattern is holding, too: the Millers are contemplating leaving the area.

Yet even putting the brutal fire attack aside, Melissa Coon’s young boy by far got the worst of it.  The tow-headed Allen looks like “the classic all-American white boy,” says his mother, and “after the first week [of school] he was nothing but racially harassed.”  She says that “he was called every racial slur you can imagine,” such as “honkey,” “cracker,” “whitey” and “guero” (a Spanish slang term for whites that can be used in a derogatory way).  He was, she reports, pushed into lockers and was jumped in the bathroom.  And, even before the recent attack, he was sometimes menaced by groups that would follow him part of the way home.

Even more damning, though, is that multiple educators were complicit in the harassment.  Mrs. Coon related an incident in which a teacher she identifies as Ms. Carla Kinder called Allen “Casper” and then “got all the students to get involved.”  Other times, the students would initiate the harassment and the teachers would pick up the baton.  “They would tease him; people would make fun of him and they’d chime in,” said Coon.

This is the atmosphere in the Kansas City schools and the teachers, and even the administration, seem to be tacitly supporting it. Duke continues,

And Indifference 101seems to be a course offering at East High, too.  Melissa Coon had been complaining to the school’s administration about her son’s harassment repeatedly – only to be ignored and stonewalled – repeatedly.  At one point an administrator told her that her son could only have a transfer to another district school but said that Allen would have “more problems there” and that he should stay at more “racially diverse” East High (which has no more than 20 white students).  At another, a vice Principal Coon identifies as Ms. Jessica Bassett denied, while shaking and rubbing her hands together nervously, ever having heard about Allen’s problems even though they had been brought to her attention on at least five occasions.

St Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams spoke of the difficulty in firing a bad teacher in Missouri's metropolitan districts which has led to the retention of some really awful teachers. His comments, at a Show Me Institute Policy breakfast, indicated that it can take up to 100 days to get rid of a bad teacher. If you do the math, this is more than half a school year (180 days) that kids are subjected to teachers the administration would like to get rid of.  Is this the excuse that Kansas City officials will give for not disciplining their teachers who incite such behavior in their classrooms? Probably not, because the problem extends beyond the schools.   

And Coon’s experience with the local police hasn’t been much better.  Listening to her testimony I got the feeling that K.C. law enforcement didn’t want the arrest and prosecution of two black youths on a hate-crime charge, possibly for fear of the “powder keg."

Does anyone think that replacing the school board or superintendent is going to fix this problem? This problem is deeply embedded in the community.  You can read many explanations of why here and here, but one salient point both authors make is this.  If you repeatedly expose people to a limited set of facts designed to prove an agenda (otherwise known as propaganda), you will inevitably create people who believe your agenda to their core. If you do this in class, you end up with students who do what they did to Allen Coon. If you do this in the broader media, as Jack Cashill of the American Thinker posited on the  refusal of the media to report politically incorrect “hate crimes", you find the cumulative effect to be one that leads minorities, especially blacks, to think themselves "uniquely victimized.” And when you thus believe, you’re more likely to lash out.

If you display a group’s sins to the exclusion of its triumphs ad infinitum, you can make it appear a den of demons.  And, ever since the advent of video technology, propaganda films have been used the world over to cultivate racial and ethnic hostility.  It is Hate 101.

This is one cautionary tale regarding local control, but I mention it in the name of putting all the cards on the table. Surely we can turn curricula over to the schools and teachers without allowing them to teach hate and divisiveness. Can't we?

DESE March Video Message

Here's the Missouri educational landscape from DESE's point of view.

Stunning News from the Duval County (Jacksonville) Florida School Board

While visiting my hometown, I was stunned to read in the Jacksonville Times-Union the agenda of the Duval County School Board.  It wasn't so much that the agenda was in the main newspaper of the city, it was the information contained in the agenda and relayed to the public.

Check out the March 6 entry from the Times Union:

Item: Consider creating four new staff positions: information and accountability chief officer, director of high school acceleration programs, supervisor of district athletics and a hearing officer.

What it means: The information and accountability officer would oversee all academic program research, assessment and evaluations, with a salary range of $108,000 to $162,000 a year.
The salary range for each of the two supervisor positions is $49,111 to $89,528. Jon Fox is retiring from the athletic director job, and district is changing to a district-level supervisor/administrative position overseeing all athletic directors in the district. The current hearing officer is a school-based assistant principal, and the district is changing the job to a district-level supervisor position. Both positions would be paid for with money already budgeted.

The salary range for high school acceleration programs director has not been determined.

This is fairly typical of school board agendas.  They inform the public how taxpayer dollars are being spent and for what purpose.

Read what's next on the agenda:

Item: Consider suspending without pay three teachers for misconduct or unprofessionalism in unrelated incidents.
 
What it means: *Teacher A*, a first-grade teacher at Whitehouse Elementary School, faces a 30-day suspension. She is accused of sending an email containing racial stereotypes to the entire staff of her school.

*Teacher B*, a Wolfson High School social studies teacher, faces a 15-day suspension. He is accused of telling dirty jokes in class and talking about his sex life with students.

*Teacher C*, a second-grade teacher at Highlands Elementary School, faces a 15-day suspension. He is accused of dragging a resistant student to the school’s clinic in January.

(*The teachers' names are listed in the Times-Union article.  We have not compounded the error by reprinting their names.  You may access their names via the link. )  

When did personnel matters become public record?  When did accusations become actual findings of FACT?  I've been told by bloggers and others watching education in Florida that there is a war on teachers, and after reading this public flogging of teachers in the Times-Union, before they were actually "convicted" of an alleged crime against children or bad judgment, I believe there is an effort to point out how "bad" teachers are in the public schools.  

I'd love to hear the teachers' side of the story. I have been on the receiving end of bad teachers; so have my children.  But to publish these accusations before they have been investigated shows an incredible bias against the teachers and should cease.  Any disgruntled parent, student, or an adult with an agenda can make an accusation.  It doesn't mean that the accusation is true.  If these accusations are true, then the teachers should face some disciplinary action.  As it is now, they are publicly named and presumed guilty until proven innocent.


Did you read about the TFA teacher who was wrongly accused of abusing a child (he sent him to the office) and was sued for $2 Million?  It was a set up by the mother.  By printing these allegations against these teachers without finding of fact, this looks like a set up by the Duval County School Board against teachers.


This is an atrocious practice by the Duval County School Board and the Times-Union.  It clearly shows the education reform agenda of Jeb Bush and the school choicers.  Point the finger at accused teachers, publicly broadcast the accusation and lead the public to assume  public education teachers are unprofessional.  The only good teachers, apparently, are those in charters or those teachers children can access through the voucher system.  This is shameful.

Inner City School Failures - Is It A Case Of Too Many Carrots?

ST LOUIS - The Turner v. Clayton and King-Willmann v. Webster Groves cases continue to wind their way through the court system.  It is expected that the Turner case will wind up today in St Louis County Courts. The question the court is addressing is whether or not surrounding districts must allow children from unaccredited districts to enroll.  Though this is a highly charged debate, nothing ground breaking will come out of these trials because this is the only question being addressed.  The law seems pretty clear.  The surrounding districts are looking primarily for some organized way to handle the transfer.  The better question to be asked and answered is not going to be addressed; Why did the St. Louis City schools (and for that matter Kansas City too) fail?

Unless and until someone of character is willing to address that issue, all the fixes proposed in the recent legislation (annexation, transfers, charter schools, tax credits for private schools) will simply be band aids, and you know band aids don't stick for very long. How do we know the problem will persist?  Senator Chappelle-Nadal (District 14) said, at the recent public education panel on the Turner Fix at Washington University, that they had a lot of performance problems in north city schools and, now that those kids moved to North County, they have those same problems there.

Dr. Richard Curwin is the director of the Master's program in Behavior Disorder at David Yellin College in Jerusalem and the author of 20 books related to motivation and behavior, including Discipline with Dignity.  He believes that a system designed to motivate people (students) to perform that is based solely on positive rewards is doomed to fail. So many people, with truly good intentions, go into inner city schools believing that they can turn things around for students by simply being their cheerleader, someone who keeps telling them they can do it and rewarding the times they do while simultaneously ignoring the times they fall short of the goal set.

After twenty years and $2+ billion spent on the Kansas City schools, it seems hard to believe that no one has ever gone into those classrooms with sincere concern about how well the children do and a positive attitude.  Yet many came loaded with prizes and eagerly awaited the day their students participated and achieved, believing they were the first ones to try this.  Dr. Curwin wrote of a time when he was a teacher,

"When I taught seventh grade English, I frequently gave stickers to my students. One day I ran out, and informed my students that there will be no stickers for a few days. A riot ensued. "Where's my sticker?" "I want a sticker!" "I won't do anything without a sticker!!!" I discovered they had become addicted to stickers. A parent even called that night to complain that her son was upset because I didn't give him his sticker. I decided to never use them again

Hyperbole aside, there is an addictive quality to rewards; and when children expect them, they become dependent on them"

That last line is eye opening and may explain some of what has happened in our inner city schools. Those in charge should be asking "Have we addicted these children to rewards such that they will only achieve when the reward is present?  And if we have, what is the long term cost of this policy?"  In an article for Edutopia Dr. Curwin wrote,

"When I talk with educational professionals and parents about why it is best not to use rewards in both academic and behavioral situations, I frequently hear the response, "But it works." Before debating whether or not rewards work, we need to understand what the word "works" really means. For example, if I went to the doctor with a sore knee, one solution that would end the pain would be to amputate my leg. There is no doubt this solution would work. But it is still the wrong answer.

What's missing is that we must look not only at the benefit of the strategy but also at the cost, and decide if the gain is worth the price. When it comes to educating and raising children, at school and at home, there is always a cost, no matter what solution is selected. Some of the costs are obvious, many are hidden, but they must be considered whenever we determine if something works. When it comes to rewards, before we examine the potential benefits, lets fully examine the costs. They are very high."

The reward need not be something tangible.  The reward may be, as is the case of a Rockwood School, a homework free night. That is not the specific reward they offer.  What their policy says is that if a student doesn't turn in the homework assignment on time, they will be required to do it in school during lunch. There is no zero given for the missing assignment.  Approximately 30% of the students now regularly do their homework during this specially monitored session.  The school must now shuffle personnel to staff this session and the students are learning that they can easily avoid doing work at home. Everyone, including parents, is being conditioned that there should be no time spent outside of school either absorbing material or developing skills.

We have developed schools that are all carrots and virtually no sticks. What shifting to charter or private schools does is enable someone to reintroduce a stick.  In the case of Kansas City, one parent suggested, in essence, that the entire district be taken down to start over.  This only works if you recognize what you built into the old system that caused it to fail.  This enables you to reintroduce the stick, but only if you acknowledge that is one of the elements missing.

Admittedly, the problem is complex and so will the solution be, but discipline problems are one of the top challenges noted by teachers in all school districts. If those that make policy at the very highest level don't address discipline in their solutions, the band aid will fall off.

Here are some more of Dr. Curwin's  thoughts about rewards.

1) Satiation

Satiation means that more of something is required to get the same effect. Examples are pain medication or hot water in a bath. I love a hot bath, but eventually it starts to feel cooler, and I add more hot water. Rewards are like that. Children never say, "That's way too much. Please give me less." They often say, "Is that all? I want more." Eventually, rewards like stickers, food, parties, toys or candy become expected, and their effect is greatly reduced. It is a common myth that you can start with rewards and later remove them. This happens very rarely.

2) Addiction

Satiation leads to addiction. Many children become addicted to rewards and will not work without them.

3) Finishing

In school there is a difference between learning from your lesson and simply finishing it. Did you ever take and pass a foreign language course in high school or college? Can you speak that language now? Did you ever take a required course and passed it while learning nothing? This phenomenon is called "finishing." Bribes tend to produce "finishers" rather than "learners." Children are more interested in finishing their work and getting the reward than actually learning what the lesson is designed to teach. Finishing work is far less important than learning from the work that is finished.

4) Manipulation

We do not like it when children try to manipulate us. Yet when we manipulate them, we teach them how to be master manipulators.
Giving your wife flowers (or receiving them from your husband) illustrates this concept. If the flowers are meant to show love, it is appreciation. If they are meant to convince the recipient to do a favor for the giver, it is a manipulation. Many children, who have been manipulated throughout their lives, are very sensitive about it and react negatively to further manipulation.
Sometimes even the winners lose. Talia was a charming eighth grader who studied hard and gave thoughtful answers in class. Her teacher continually said to the class, "Why can't more of you be like Talia? She always does her work and tries hard." Other children began to tease her about being the teacher's pet. She was occasionally shunned. She began doing small annoying things, albeit mild, and stopped handing in homework to stop this persecution and to get the teacher to stop using her as an example. Many children do not like being singled out for doing well.

5) Increased Pressure

The more we tell children how good they are, the greater the fall if they cannot live up to all that praise. Pressure leads to insecurity. It is far better to build confidence from the inside by designing activities that challenge children than it is to simply reward them.

6) Bribes

Bribes reduce choices and the skill of making them. When we offer an incentive for a child to do something, then we are deciding for that child what we want him to do. Obviously, this is not generically bad. There are many times when we need to make decisions for children, especially those involving safety. But when we decide for others, we take away the ability of that person to choose, and an opportunity is lost to teach decision-making skills. One way to identify great teachers and parents is by how well they balance telling children what to do and letting them make their own choice. 

Bribes are threats in disguise. Withholding rewards can be used as a threat hammer very easily. The truth is that threats and bribes are two sides of the same coin: control.

"Um...no...data isn't all that important." - Bill Gates

Don't worry.  Every decision will be data driven.

We've heard that a million times lately.  It is meant to reassure us.  But we are finding more and more of this data, that somebody just HAD to collect,  that is not seeing the light of day and that should concern us.

Forbes just reported that Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been delaying the release of the final results of the Congressionally-mandated evaluation of the federal Head Start program, which impacts millions of American children. The study of 5,000 preschoolers was completed in 2008, but the final results have been delayed for four years. Why so long HHS?  Could it be the "data" showed this?

"The study found that, compared to their control group peers, Head Start failed to boost students’ cognitive abilities across 41 measures. Moreover, first grade teachers reported that former Head Start students were actually less prepared in math than the non-Head Start students."

 $180 billion over the life of the program and the data are beginning to show that it doesn't do very much good.  The part of the report we are still waiting on is whether the program had effects on third graders which is due out this year (maybe).  Strangely, ed reformers like Michelle Rhee and Howard Dean are out pushing their 0-6 agenda, trying to get children into government run formal education as early as possible. The data should have every parent asking, "Why?"

More data that is not seeing the light of day comes from the popular Value Added program for teacher performance evaluation. Using the actual value-added scores of thousands of New York City elementary school teachers from the school years that ended in 2006 and in 2007, one researcher found absolutely no correlation between student performance and value added scores.

From the author himself,

In any introductory statistics course, you learn that a graph like the one above is a textbook case of “no correlation”. I had Excel draw a line of best fit anyway, and calculate an r-squared correlation coefficient. Its value? 0.057 — once again, just about as close to zero correlation as you are ever going to find in the real world.

In plain English, what that means is that there is essentially no such thing as a teacher who is consistently wonderful (or awful) on this extremely complicated measurement scheme. How teacher X does one year in “value-added” in no way allows anybody to predict how teacher X will do the next year. They could do much worse, they could do much better, they could do about the same.   -  Gary Rubenstein

If the people at the administrative top are going to keep pushing to collect more data, like the longitudinal data system, then we need to start demanding that they follow the data. When something they're trying out through the free laboratory of our school system doesn't work, they must follow the data and eliminate it.

Does the Government Really Believe in "Choice"? When it Comes to Sex, Yes. Food Choices? Not so Much.

Here is an interesting post on HotAir about the "nudging".

JE Dyer asks, "What if government treated eating the way it treats sex?"

It’s a useful distinction to consider.  A particular moral idea governs left-wing views on social and health matters, and the left’s purpose with political advocacy is to put the power of government behind that view.  By examining the left’s very different policy approaches to eating and sex, we can discern the features of the morality at work.

.....If government treated obesity the way it treats sex, it would encourage schoolchildren to explore their enjoyment of Twinkies, Oreos, and moon pies; it would employ professionals to devise ways of suiting government policies to the principle that our bodies belong to us and we can put whatever we want in our stomachs; it would hold legislative hearings on the overriding importance of the freedom to eat what we want; it would resist the very idea of remedies that involve the individual eating less, or eating different things; it would pay for liposuction, cholesterol drugs, heart surgery, and diabetes-mitigation measures but not for programs of diet and exercise; it would encourage the development of drugs that could prevent fat formation regardless of what one eats; and it would make it a basic human right to be able to eat whatever one wants and have the consequences mitigated by the public. (emphasis added)


This is a most illuminating article on how the government wants to control the behavior of its citizens in a particular direction and it provides excellent examples of "nudging".  

Now in the Florida Senate. Coming Soon to a Legislature in Your State?

Education reform looks more and more like health care reform but with one important caveat.  This reform, unlike the Health Care Reform pushed through the  US Senate and House, is bi-partisan. Keep an eye out on your state legislature and its stance on school reform. Florida is perhaps the one of the first states to institute mandates, laws and reforms without due diligence by both political parties:

• The Florida Senate votes tomorrow without a cost analysis. 
• Strong political forces denied all public (remember the public pays for the education reform decided on by legislators) opposition to be presented at each step...Parents Across America (Florida) and Florida PTA included.  Citizens drove to the capitol and were denied a chance to speak.

 
THIS is the Education Reformer playbook (renamed the Elite Reformer playbook?)...it doesn't matter the political affiliation. Citizens and legislators don't know how much the reform costs, conflicting reports come into the Legislature and there is no consensus if this really reforms education or just funnels taxpayer money into crony capitalist organizations, and questions remain unanswered if the process will overwhelm the system with unintended consequences.

Keep an eye on what happens in Florida as this drama may be coming to your state either this session or next.

From "Why Republicans Should be Against Florida's Parent Trigger Legislation"

The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 03.04.2012

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 03.04.12.  The visual soundbites from Twitter include:

• Is the problem in education about WHAT students learn or HOW?  There's a lot of money in HOW education is delivered.......In a panel at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, 3 experts spoke about changing landscape of K-12 #education: http://bit.ly/yAg9ds

• Arrest these teachers for BULLYING......A 13-Year-Old's Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School - Education - GOOD http://bit.ly/yMLCMl

• Jeopardy answer: It's not Common Core data driven....How did Gandhi feel education should be done? http://bit.ly/jtB8ca

• Shakira ‏ @shakira White House announced a $500 million investment in Early Childhood Dev. Amazing news for all children in America & for our latino community! Retweeted by Arne Duncan.......No, what's amazing is the amount of debt passed on to these children with little hope of repayment.
  

•  This never happens in America......Education dialogue with public bit.ly/wg1Lvc

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Educational thought for the week:

Did Arne Duncan REALLY say this?  If so, he needs accounting 101.  A $16 Trillion debt is a  huge number.  And what's a budget for anyway?  Harry Reid can't make sense of it either.

.@ArneDuncan: "Budgets reflect our values. They're not numbers. We're either gna invest in education, or we're not." #edcities