The Rats in the "laboratories of innovation"

I don't know where they focus-grouped "laboratories of innovation" as a replacement term for corporate charter schools, but I think they hit this one out of the park. In another teleprompted speech full of the same stale BS that ed reformers have used for the past 60 years to blame teachers and schools for the effects of poverty, Mr. Obama continues incredibly to ignore the fact that the bottom quartile of poor test performers, the same ones living in poverty and the same ones that no education reforms have ever touched, are the children who are dragging down test scores in international comparisons. Without the poor kids' scores included, there is no crisis in school performance in any of the international test score derbies. And yet the reforms that Obama and Duncan have in mind do nothing, i. e. nothing, to address the root cause, poverty, which continues unabated, notwithstanding the "laboratories of innovation" with their "innovative compensation" (teacher pay based on test scores).

Will the American people once again be suckered by the same stale rhetoric of social justice to disguise the Business Roundtable agenda of union busting, curriculum takeover, social control, and deprofessionalization of teaching? In the "laboratories of innovation" that pay on average of 20 percent less than public schools, are we really going to expect teachers to wring out a few more points on meaningless tests in order to earn back that 20 percent cut? At the same time that the bottomless well of corporate bailouts continues to be pumped by the billionaires who are making Obama's education policy?

I think not. Mr Obama, Mr. Duncan, you may go to hell on this one. As Jon Stewart would say, no disrespect.