Anyone watching Arne on MSNBC?

[proud2BlibKansan]

Andrea Mitchell asked him about Diane Ravitch and her research on charter schools. Why should we focus our resources on 1,2 or 3% of our schools instead of 97%, especially when charters don't perform as well?

Arne praised Diane and claimed charter schools in Harlem which is in Diane's hometown of NYC, have been very successful.

:rofl:

Arne obviously has not read Diane's book!! She has a whole chapter on this 'miracle' in NYC and another chapter on the Ponzi scheme used to report charter school test scores!!

Oh, Arne, you FAIL on this.

:rofl:

[tonysam]

1. This "magna cum laude" from Hahvahd makes George W. Bush

look like a genius.

Arne's the classic dumb jock.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. LOL her last question was about the president's Final Four picks!!

:rofl:

[tonysam]

4. I'll bet he's a lot more well informed on that issue.

Arne should have headed the NBA or the NCAA.

[madfloridian]

2. Now that is scary he is so uninformed.

But I am not surprised.

[QC]

5. Cronies don't have to be informed, or even competent, for that matter.

He's an old friend of the president's. They play basketball. Mere competence and learning cannot trump those things.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Well at the very least he needs to read Ravitch's book

[demosincebirth]

7. In California, only seven percent of charter schools perform

better that public schools.

don't have a link, I heard it on a local talk show last week (KGO AM)

[frazzled]

8. "Diane" is not always right either (though for a long time she was truly "right" ...

on the political spectrum.

She was, of course, a part of George H.W. Bush's Education Department, and strongly endorsed private school vouchers. She served on the conservative/libertarian Hoover Institution's education task force. She won an award from the Hoover Inst. for her book slamming multiculturalism.

Even today, since her "reversal" of opinion on some issues (like charter schools), she continues to hold controversial nonliberal positions, such as opposing movement and choice within public school districts, prefering "neighborhood" schools (read: separate but equal):

she is quite mistaken in her nostalgic embrace of the neighborhood school. The neighborhood school is a good deal if you live in a nice neighborhood, but what about children stuck in dangerous communities, where the school reflects the economic and racial segregation of the area? Carefully designed public school choice programs can help. To guard against the self-selection problem that skims the most motivated families into charter schools, some communities, like Cambridge, Massachusetts, have universal choice, with the goal of having all schools socioeconomically integrated. More than half the families choose non-neighborhood schools, and the resulting economic and racial mix has proven highly successful. In Cambridge, almost 90 percent of black, Hispanic, and low-income students graduate in four years, some 20 to 30 percentage points higher than comparable groups statewide. Finland, which Ravitch notes has very high academic outcomes, is also the least economically segregated country of some fifty-seven nations that recently competed on an international science exam.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com//features/2010/1003.kahlenberg.html

And that opinion is from a liberal reviewer of her book who likes her.

So, I don't know what your hysterical laughter icons are for. As for those who like to mock Duncan for being from Hahvahd (though you know he grew up on Chicago's south side, where his mom ran after-school programs for poor black kids in her house), Diane Ravitch is from oh-so-posh Wellesley and Columbia. So scotch the elitist comparisons. I don't support everything Duncan is saying, but I sure as hell don't support Diane Ravitch's crazy talk either.

[proud2BlibKansan]

9. You also need to read Ravitch's book

She is not a conservative. She is a lifelong Democrat who was honored when asked to serve in the US Dept of Ed, even though it was under a republican president. And she believed NCLB was a good bill until she saw the increased emphasis on testing and lack of funding. That's when she quit.

As for poor neighborhood schools in low income areas, they are proof of what happens when you have a two tier system and don't adequately fund the schools serving the bottom tier. Thanks for making the point I have been stressing for 30 years.

[frazzled]

11. You are so wrong on this

It's not about funding schools in bottom tier neighborhoods more adequately (though more money can help). It is about relegating populations who live in poverty into ghettoized institutions, where there are often families in which no one themselves has graduated from high school or gone on to college, and no interaction between children of different races, classes, or language bases. Desegregated schools boost achievement and promote cultural understanding on all sides, and retreating from that goal is regressive.

My children attended school in a city whose desegregation plan in the 1970s opted for full choice (as in the Cambridge plan cited above, where achievement and graduation rates exceed those in the rest of the country). We chose to send them to a school that met their particular educational model (it was called "continuous progress") in a neighborhood on the border between a fully minority and middle to upper-middle class white district. There, black, southeast Asian, Native American, and white students thrived together. Shortly after my kids graduated, the city returned to a "neighborhood" school model, which I forcefully opposed. I had worked with Hmong and Cambodian and Vietnamese kids who were going to be stuck in all-immigrant schools, with no English-speaking classmates to interact with. Black kids who were excelling were going back to all-black schools. White kids were never going to meet and work with kids from other races, backgrounds or cultures. Everyone would be impoverished by this.

Sorry, until we achieve racial and economic parity in neighborhoods themselves, neighborhood schools are NOT a progressive model.

[proud2BlibKansan]

10. Also,

Every liberal I know and respect who has the knowledge to understand these issues strongly favors neighborhood schools. Removing children from their neighborhoods and closing their local schools devastates communities, especially in low income urban and rural areas.

As for laughing at Arne, he's a horse's ass and continues to prove he doesn't know what's best for our kids. It's actually kinder to laugh at him than to say what I really think of him and his policies.