Doomed!

A clip from the Salon article:

. . . . Few would dispute that we should hold our educators and the children they are entrusted with to a high bar of excellence, but evaluating performance on test scores has never been a viable strategy. As Common Core test results have started trickling in, the results aren’t pretty. In New York, they show a widening of the achievement gap between black and white students. This leaves young teachers at a disadvantage since they are often placed in high poverty schools and are still learning on the job. They often have to also play the role of counselor, psychiatrist, and day care provider. So while the White Suburban Mom is disappointed because she’s tried her best to ensure the highest quality of life for her daughter, the Single Black Urban Mom who works two jobs simply can’t be as engaged with her son’s education: a child afflicted with toxic stress who then takes the same exam on an empty stomach. Ignoring these elements and relying solely on improving testing scores demeans the teaching profession and puts the students who need the most attention and wraparound services at a disadvantage.

Of course, this forms the ideological basis of corporate reform: firing “bad” teachers will fix education which will lead to middle class prosperity which will alleviate poverty. “College and career readiness” are the choice buzzwords found in the text of the Common Core. Speaking to Politico, Duncan said, “the path to the middle class runs right through the classroom.” Such a perspective, keen in the 1960s, sounds positively outmoded in 2013. As Millennials are quickly realizing, that rose-tinted vision of education as the great social equalizer simply cannot reconcile the effects of the Great Recession and decades of bad policy. . . .