Jeb Bush's appearance at the National Forum on Education Policy, a gather looking to explore "how education can be an engine to ignite the economy" [all videos here]:
Highlights (lowlights):
What he'd do to improve public education (aka disaster capitalism applied to public education):
More school choice across the board. Create it, make it chaotic, if you will. To me, the chaos will create huge opportunities for a whole new set of people to join in this important process [ie his for-profit ventures and other "edupreneurs"] to make sure children gain a year’s worth of knowledge, rigorous knowledge, in a year’s time.
On education reform, Arne Duncan:
“I think for the first time in my political life at least, there seems to be more consensus than disagreement across the ideological spectrum about education reform. I’m very encouraged about Secretary Duncan’s advocacy of challenging the status quo, and I’m excited that Republicans seem to be not wanting to get into a food fight about this but to join forces and to find common ground.”Access to education = internet access (so-called "compassionate conservative," digital style?). Forget about the reasons we have such an inequitable system; just plug in your computer!
“We can create a customized learning experience for each and every one of America’s 50 million students. Technology makes a lot of things possible. It tears down what is the single greatest barrier to a quality education and that’s access. Demography doesn’t have to define your destiny because your address no longer limits your options. In fact, if your address is a web address rather than a physical address the world is your…uh…access. You can access the highest quality possible. With the internet, you don’t have to be in the same room with the teacher to learn. Technology makes it possible for students to access knowledge across the town, across the state, across the country. In fact, we should be open enough to recognize in a global economy that it should be across the world.”
During the Bush administration, more than one highly publicized statements of protest were presented to the president objecting to his stifling and twisting of solid science, signed by long lists of internationally renowned scientists.
ReplyDeleteHas anything like that been presented to Obama? Anything in the works? If I had the knowhow, contacts and credentials, I'd do it myself, but I don't -- others reading this do.