The Obama administration believes in balancing how sorry they are with how little sorry the public will go for… always short of the real course correction that would make friends of adversaries. Clearly, they need a scripted curriculum. Here’s what making amends should look like:
Dear America,
We realize that there’s something wrong with a government that seeks to change society by attacking its own people, and we want to apologize. We know that the real #beliefgap is the one that has developed in you. You want to know where’s the change you can believe in. Well, we’d like some better conversation and we have decided to start that better conversation with making amends. Here goes:
Dear America, we’re sorry for…
- weaponized testing;
- experimenting on the public without their consent;
- blackmailing whole states through their coffers;
- evaluating the college and career readiness of five year olds.
- expecting every tween to move from concrete to formal operations based solely on exposure;
- hypothetical right out of the box standards followed by tests of their acquisition… nationwide.
- refusing to work with the experts, ignoring criticism… like that provided by the Math and ELA experts who worked on the Common Core and refused sign off on the end product
- ignoring The American Statistical Association who argued against the use of VAM as a measure of teacher quality.
- not taking counsel outside of an echo chamber of self appointed saviors;
Dear America, We’re also sorry for…
- calling Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,”
- unacknowledged cherrypicking;
- crony appointments;
- defunding and underfunding community schools;
- supporting increased class size, decreased course options, and passive decay of infrastructure brought on by defunding and charter preferencing;
- resolutely defending charter and reform celebrities in the face of brazen misdeeds and criminal acts;
- building an elite social justice career lane for the privileged;
- paying the big bucks to propagandists whose job it is to sell daily messages of teacher and public education hate.
- treating reform like a team sport;
- promoting team loyalty over mission;
- scapegoating teachers instead of explicitly attacking years of state sanctioned policies that consolidated the poor in underfunded schools and abandoned communities;
We’re not even sure that sorry is enough for
- #beliefgap
What great vision of education reform rests on the failure of citizens young and old as its inspiration?
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