Perhaps the Stupidest F*cking Idea in the History of Stupid F*cking Ideas

Thirty-something years ago, Curmie gave a paper at a conference called The Core and the Canon: A National Debate, held at the University of North Texas.  (A revised version of that work was subsequently published in what amounted to a Proceedings volume.)  As a direct result of his participation in the conference, Curmie was invited to join the rather newly founded National Association of Scholars (NAS), only to receive a snotty and condescending rejection letter because at the time he didn’t have a PhD (he was chairing a department at an accredited college, but that was insufficient, apparently).  Today, membership is open to anyone whose credit card payment goes through.  Curmie, needless to say, is not a member.

The NAS webpage claims that the organization “upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”  As Curmie is wont to say, “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  The NAS is predictably right-wing, even de facto advocating signing on to that absurd Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  But if the Compact was a really bad idea, one of the NAS’s more recent forays into the world of educational policy is a classic of pseudo-intellectuality and downright daftness.  Indeed, this is a contender for the coveted title of Stupidest Fucking Idea in the History of Stupid Fucking Ideas.  The NAS was apparently primarily responsible for drafting this nonsense.

The proposal in question is something called the Faculty Merit Act.  It would require:

… all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department. It finally requires everyone in the hiring process, both applicant and administrators, to affirm under penalty of perjury that they have provided every standardized test score.

Predictably, the National Review proclaimed this “a very good idea.”  It is not.  It is not in the same universe as a good idea.

This inanity is based on a series of, shall we say, dubious speculations masquerading as facts: that universities “draft job advertisements with specializations that will ensure only radicals need apply,” that “few close observers believe that the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics,” and above all that a standardized test score, albeit that it “is only a rough proxy for academic merit,” nonetheless will “provide some measure of general intelligence.”  All of this suggests a quantification fetish, completely oblivious to the fact that such a measure is virtually meaningless… or, perhaps, not so much “oblivious” as “fully conscious of the fact but seeking to avoid admitting it.”

First off, even the NAS admits that “Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score.”  Please substitute the words “virtually all” for “some” and add “or lesser” after “greater” in the previous sentence, Gentle Reader; then it will be accurate.  The idea that a 40-year-old PhD should be judged at all by how they did on a single day when they were 17 is beyond laughable.  Standardized test scores are determined by a lot of variables.  Native intelligence is one, but so are the quality of teachers a student has had up to that point, socio-economic status, whether the test-taker has taken this kind of exam before, whether they’re running a fever or just heard some bad news about a dear friend or family member… 

Curmie has written about his own experience with standardized tests several times.  He won’t link them all here; you can use the word search feature on the blog page as well as he can, Gentle Reader.  But it might be worth mentioning that Curmie did better on the GRE than on the SAT, and better on the SAT than on the PSAT.  Did he learn something between taking those exams?  Sure.  But so, presumably, did everyone else in his age group, and the competition was presumably getting tougher: in Curmie’s day, at least, everyone took the PSAT; you took the SAT if you were part of the smaller percentage of students intending to be college-bound, and the GRE only if you were looking at grad school.  Curmie did better because he’d learned how to take that kind of test, not because he’d grown appreciably in intellect.

More to the point, those scores tell us literally nothing about someone’s skillset, only about a very rough approximation of their aptitude.  (That’s the “A” in “SAT,” after all.).  Curmie actually got a perfect score on the GRE in math.  But he’s never been more qualified to teach a college-level math course (except perhaps what is euphemistically called “College Algebra”) than his colleague in the Math Department is to teach Theatre History or Acting.  Even at the most introductory collegiate level, specific disciplinary knowledge and teaching ability are both vastly more important than intelligence, even if those standardized tests really did measure the latter.

But then we get to what the NAS considers the principal benefit of their proposal: “Perhaps most importantly, this information will provide a mass of statistical information that can be used for lawsuits…. The Faculty Merit Act will provide a mass of information that can be used by plaintiffs against discriminatory colleges and universities” (emphasis added).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that the NAS’s real goal is to dismantle public post-secondary education: add to the administrivia, costing a mountain of time and resources; limit applications because there will be a lot of prospective candidates who decide it’s none of anyone’s damned business how they did on a standardized test decades ago; and, above all, open the university up to frivolous lawsuits just because some rejected candidate who would put coffee to sleep got good board scores.  Curmie hasn’t received a single offer to teach math despite his GRE score; he’s a white male and therefore a victim of woke ideology, and dammit, he’s going to sue somebody.  😉

Curmie also notes that David Randall, the director of research at the NAS who seems to be running point for this operation, does indeed have a PhD and some scholarly publications.  What he doesn’t appear to have is any experience whatsoever as a university faculty member.  Imagine Curmie’s surprise.

This proposal is particularly diabolical because some of its foundation is indeed true: there have been plenty of DEI hires that didn’t exactly work out to the benefit of the university or its students.  Are job applicants individuals or representatives of a group?  The answer, of course, is “yes.”  To the extent that they’re the former as well as the latter, the impetus for this proposition is understandable.  That doesn’t make it anything other than moronic.

Curmie first learned of this proposed legislation from Peter Greene at Curmudgucation.  Unsurprisingly, we’re in agreement.  But you might want to check out his take, too.  Let’s give him the last word, shall we? “The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person.” 

The AFT Leadership’s Anti-democratic (and Anti-Democratic) Power Play

Hillary Clinton and loyal minion Randi Weingarten.

Curmie’s intention in terms of catching up on his writing was to alternate between education-related and other topics (mostly but not exclusively politics) for a while, at least until the backlog was brought more or less under control. So, having written last about FIFA and the Women’s World Cup, I should talk about education again. Well, I am… but it’s politics, too, so think of this as a transition piece into the next education essay.

So, what’s it about? The American Federation of Teachers has come out with a very early endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President. Oh, so coincidentally, this happened as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who actually is a friend of labor, has begun to surge both in the polls and in campaign contributions (despite the fact that he won’t accept money from Superpacs). And AFT President Randi Weingarten is accurately described by the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton as a “longtime Clinton ally.” Funny how these things work out, isn’t it?

There’s a lengthy rationale on the union’s website—including, by the way, grammatical errors in the both the third and fourth sentences—all about “vision, experience, and leadership.” Not much about education policy, though, largely because Hillary Clinton is one of only two major Democratic politicians I can think of who’s worse on education policy than Barack Obama is (the other is Andrew Cuomo, in case you were wondering). She’s a fan of charter schools, Teach for America, and high-stakes testing (her silence is deafening on whether test scores should factor into evaluating teachers). Whether these are the best policies for America is a matter of opinion: Curmie thinks they’re awful, but you, Gentle Reader, are free to disagree. Whether such a platform is endorsed by a majority of union members, however, is not opinion. It purports to be a factual statement, and it is, quite simply, a lie.

Ah, but the union leadership “conducted a phone survey calling more than 1 million members, commissioned a second major scientific poll from a nationally respected polling firm, and solicited your [i.e., the membership’s] input online and in person.” And the membership allegedly voted overwhelmingly (more than 3:1) to endorse HRC.

There are a little over a million and a half members of the AFT, so roughly 2/3 of them were allegedly called. Plus, of course, there was the solicitation of online input. Curiously, however, actual AFT members not only weren’t contacted, themselves, they also don’t know of anyone who was. And no one saw any announcement of an online solicitation. Funny thing about that.

It didn’t take long after the endorsement announcement for the fecal matter to interface the whirling rotors. The very next day, for example, Candi Peterson, the General Vice President of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) wrote a blog piece with the headline “Teachers Say No Freaking Way to AFT Endorsement of Hillary Clinton.” Peterson cites a host of tweets from… you know… actual teachers. Here’s a sampling:

”...AFT Link says they used telephone town halls and a web-based survey, I didn't even know existed.”

“I know many AFT members too and have not heard one person polled either.”

“B.S. … how many of the over 1 million members responded?”

“guessing you did not poll your members! No to Clinton who promotes Teach for America and charters!”

“Clinton endorsement is a joke; local union voices are being silenced to retain AFT union funding.”

“sad day when political expediency trumps legitimate representation of members’ real priorities.”

You know, Curmie can be kind of dumb sometimes, but that sure sounds like those folks aren’t pleased. Peterson also observes that:

Given no one could locate AFT’s poll of members, the Badass Teachers Association (BAT) took matters into their own hands by conducting a poll on Face Book. So far 1240 teachers endorsed Bernie Sanders and only 84 endorsed Clinton. One teacher said “Weingarten has this thing about giving false information via polls... It’s scary.”

As it happens, Curmie is a BAT, and therefore can check the current numbers: as I write this, that Facebook poll is Sanders 1361, Clinton 94. (Sorry, you’ll have to trust me on those numbers, as the site is “members only.”) In percentage terms, that’s a 94-6% advantage for the guy the AFT leadership would have us believe could garner only 17% of the votes from AFT members. Yeah, I’m calling “BULLSHIT” on that one. Sure, although there’s no doubt some overlap between AFT members and BATs, they’re not exactly the same people. And outraged Sanders supporters are more likely to vote in that poll than relatively speaking complacent Clintonites. But those factors don’t come close to explaining the discrepancy. And whereas this isn’t a scientific poll, it is at least an honest one: you can’t get to the poll without being a member of the group, and you can vote only once. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that Weingarten cooked the books.

A day after Peterson’s essay came one on the “In These Times” blog, entitled, “The AFT’s Endorsement of Hillary Clinton Is an Insult to Union Democracy” (the essay also appears on the Jacobin magazine site under the title “What Is Wrong with the AFT,” with the blog piece’s title as a subtitle). The author, Lois Weiner, a professor of education at New Jersey City University, writes that “The decision couldn’t be more wrongheaded,” that the endorsement “has disempowered members at precisely the moment when we most need revitalized teachers unions to save a system of education that is being destroyed as a public good by powerful elites and the politicians they control,” and that “[the] process of seeking member opinion was an embarrassingly transparent cover for Weingarten’s longstanding desire that Clinton be the AFT’s candidate.” In other words, Weingarten cooked the books.

Another day later, over at Slate, Laura Moser found only one possible explanation for the endorsement and its timing:

The obvious answer is that the Clinton camp choreographed the AFT endorsement as a safeguard against the unexpected threat posed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—a candidate, incidentally, that unions seem to like so much that earlier this month [AFL-CIO President Richard] Trumka had to remind state and local leaders that they weren’t allowed to endorse Sanders without his say-so.

Translation: Weingarten cooked the books.

Maureen Sullivan takes a different approach in an article in Forbes (not, the last time I checked, a liberal bastion):

In the three months since she announced her run for the White House, Clinton has avoided going on the record about the nitty-gritty of school issues. No doubt she’s keenly aware that supporting the teachers union in their fight against charter schools means ticking off black and Hispanic families who swear by them. And many deep-pockets at Democrat party fund-raisers also favor vouchers in the form of “opportunity scholarships.” Also, how does she explain away school choice for her child but not for the Democratic voters she needs in the primaries?

…. Clinton did not go on to say [in a stump speech in Iowa] what she thought of the new standardized assessments such as PARCC and Smarter Balanced that stretch for weeks at schools across the country. Nor did she mention whether she thought students’ test scores should be used to evaluate teachers or play a role in determining their compensation.

In other words, Clinton has ducked every major education issue, and won’t, in fact, work for what she believes is right if she might lose votes by doing so. And why should she, if she has friends like Weingarten who are almost as corrupt as she is, and who will grant her an endorsement she doesn’t come close to deserving, without having to deal with real teachers, real students, or real parents? Weingarten cooked the books.

There’s a problem with the above analysis, however. It’s not that the Clinton campaign or Randi Weingarten are too honest to manufacture evidence: that’s not remotely true. But the folks at Hart Research are, unlike their clients, unwilling to condone an outright fraud. And they produce numbers that support the AFT leadership’s outlandish claim that members actually prefer Clinton over Sanders. How could that be? (Note: it tells us something about the AFT and something about the GOP that no Republicans were on the list of choices, and only prospective Democratic primary voters were polled. But that’s a screed for another day.) Well, just because their numbers are accurate doesn’t mean their methodology is either honest or competent.

One argument that has been noised around some (on comments pages if nowhere else) is that a very high percentage of AFT members are women, and they responded to the poll as women first and educators second. Another interesting point is that the candidates’ responses to questionnaires weren’t distributed by the AFT’s Politburo until after the endorsement. That would be when at least some of them realized that their interests align far more with “the Bern” than with HRC. Plus, the questionnaire was loaded with queries about issues that have nothing to do with education, plus stuff about “electability.” Of course, those Gentle Readers with good memories may remember that oft-repeated refrain from the 2008 campaign, and if I recall correctly the “Obama can’t win” rhetoric was proved to be less than entirely accurate, as opposed to the “electable” John Kerry four years earlier.

In other words, the selection of voters, the questions asked, and especially the timing all favored Clinton (Hart knew who their client was and what they wanted for results, after all), leading Curmie to suspect that getting the poll taken before even the reasonably sophisticated membership of the AFT had a chance to look at the candidates may have been the real reason for the absurdly early endorsement. Hillary has name recognition, has been the presumptive nominee since Obama’s re-election (as she was in ’08, I hasten to note), and has been (disingenuously) presented as a friend of public education and educators.

Curmie’s kindred spirit in curmudgitude, Peter Greene, gets to the heart of the skepticism felt by any real educator at any level towards the Clinton candidacy in a piece called “How AFT Blew It”:

My opposition to Clinton (and support for Bernie Sanders) is not based on any belief that she is a terrible human being, a crazy-awful person, or some evil mastermind bitch on wheels. My reluctance to support her is not even based on my perception that she is extraordinarily inauthentic (though I think that magnifies her other issues). I just don’t think she is remotely a supporter of public education or the teachers who work there. I think she would be perfectly comfortable continuing the exact same policies that we’ve suffered under for the past fifteen years and in fact would prefer to continue with them….

I believe some folks have grossly over-estimated Clinton’s electability, under-estimated Sander’s electability, and hugely under-estimated how much Clinton really doesn’t support public education and the people who work there. I suppose time will tell.

But in the meantime, I’m really, really hoping that NEA [of which Peter is a member] will take a more careful approach to an endorsement. I hope we don’t send the Dems the message that we will always be there for them, no matter how badly they treat us. I hope we don’t cut the membership out of the process and just expect them to fall in line. And I hope we endorse somebody who isn’t going to, once again, stab us in the back, front, and side.

The AFT’s early endorsement of Hillary Clinton, then, should be applauded by no educator, no union supporter, and no Democrat. At best, it is a mismanaged political stunt for a candidate unworthy of support by an organization of public school educators. At worst, it is a cynical power play by a dishonest and Machiavellian union leader to pour resources into the campaign of a candidate who already has more than enough money flowing in from Wall Street and similar cronies. Either way, it has embarrassed the AFT in front of its members and the world, and it has diminished the authority of actual educators both inside and outside the organization. And that, Gentle Reader, is not a good thing.

The NEA Demands Arne Duncan's Resignation; No One Cares

Yesterday, the rank and file of the National Education Association passed a resolution demanding that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan resign, not that you’d know that from any of the major news organizations: as I write this, it’s now been about 15 hours since the vote, with nary a peep from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, even the Chronicle of Higher Education… well, you get the idea. Hell, it didn’t even make it the NEA’s own website, although the election of new officers is right there at the top of the main page.

One would have thought that such a declaration of no confidence in the nation’s foremost education administrator from the country’s largest educational organization (3,000,000+ members) might cause at least a ripple in the national media. Nope.

There are, no doubt, a number of reasons why. For one thing, the vote came late in the afternoon, on a holiday, at the beginning of a weekend. That’s pretty much the gold standard if you want a take-out-the-trash announcement. So was it intentional, or inept? It’s hard to say. It was certainly the latter if NEA wants its resolutions to be relevant to a larger discussion of education issues. But it’s tempting to think that the leadership, which has always been a lot cozier with the reformist movement (Common Core, charter schools, etc.) than the membership has been, anticipated the possibility that they just might not be able to deflect the anger of the rank and file again, just because similar “business items” in previous years failed. So having the vote when the rest of the country was firing up the grill and waiting for the fireworks to start may have been a strategic move. I doubt it, but only because I don’t think the NEA leadership is that smart.

After all, Secretary Duncan has proved himself repeatedly to be the worst kind of arrogant, duplicitous, corporatist hack. Everyone in the education business knew that last year and the year before that and the year before that, but now we also have his remarkably tone-deaf initial response to the Vergara case in California, which essentially eliminated tenure in the public school system in that state:

For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher. The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems. Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve. My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift. Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.

He backpedaled a few days later, but a lot of teachers—rightly, I think—read the first statement as an indictment not only of tenure but of teachers’ unions and indeed of teachers in general. The Vergara decision was, of course, an abomination, although some of the underlying issues do need to be addressed. Duncan’s second run at saying something intelligent about the case wasn’t too bad—supporting tenure but arguing that it shouldn’t be granted after only 18 months on the job, for example—but, especially given his support of what detractors have called the GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement) movement, it was too little, too late.

So, in Curmie’s ever-so-humble opinion, Arne Duncan richly deserves to be out of a job. But that’s not really the question here. The question is why nobody cares that the NEA thinks so, too. For one thing, the resolution carries no teeth. The NEA hasn’t demanded Duncan’s job, before, but they’ve certainly passed sweeping condemnations of his job performance: Here’s a link to Valerie Strauss’s coverage of a 2011 resolution, for example. And he’s more influential in the Obama administration now than he was before those scathing critiques. The principal reason for this is encapsulated by Mike Antonucci on the Hot Air site:

This particular item was introduced in a rather odd speech from California Teachers Association president Dean Vogel, who went on about leaders needing to take responsibility for what happens under their charge. Vogel asked rhetorically “Where does the buck stop?” and concluded “The guy at the top has got to go.” Apparently the buck stopped far from the guy at the top if Arne Duncan is the cause of all this angst.

That’s it, in a nutshell. The problem isn’t Duncan (well, it isn’t just Duncan); it’s the guy who chose him, the guy who really sets policy, the guy who either didn’t demand or didn’t accept Duncan’s resignation at the end of his first term (as he did for, say, Hillary Clinton), the guy whose former mouthpieces Robert Gibbs and Ben LaBolt are now scurrying across the countryside stoking anti-tenure lawsuits.

The real problem isn’t the guy on the left; it’s the guy on the right.

The problem, in other words, is Barack Obama, who won the NEA’s endorsement in both 2008 and 2012. The NEA has never endorsed a Republican for President (they have in gubernatorial races), and Mitt Romney sure as hell wasn’t the one to break the precedent for, but they’re under no statutory obligation to endorse anyone, of course. It is more than a little telling that the Education Week piece linked at the top of this piece says that the union “had no choice but to throw its weight behind Obama” in 2012. This is, of course, unmitigated bovine feces. Yet, as I wrote about two years ago, the 2012 NEA convention had all the trappings of an Obama re-election rally, with t-shirts inscribed with Obama’s name, videos, and delegates’ being encouraged to hold “house parties” to “educate their friends about why Obama… deserves a second term.” There were even encomia to the ACA, which seems sort of out of the organization’s purview.

The NEA, in other words, can’t seem to wrap its collective head around the idea that 1). all the proclamations in the world aren’t going to get President Obama to fire Secretary Duncan or to get him to resign (as Peter Greene at Curmudgucation points out in an essay well worth reading in its entirety, it’s “[interesting] that the resolution calls for Duncan to resign rather than the President to fire him”) and 2). replacing Duncan wouldn’t mean a new direction for the Department of Education, just a new second-in-command to the same President who thought Duncan was an even vaguely appealing choice to begin with.

It may be, as Greene also notes, that there will be a message sent:

... that teachers have had it with this amateur-hour bullshit trash-and-dismantle approach to our profession and the public education that we've devoted our lives to. Let's continue to make it clear to the folks in DC that we have had it with their assault on American public education. Let's continue to make it clear to the Democratic party it's not true that they don't have to stand up for us because we'll vote for them no matter how many times they attack us. And let's continue to make it clear to NEA leadership that we expect them to represent the teachers of America, and not politicians who keep attacking them.

But that, as Greene is well aware, is both wishful thinking and long-term, at least as far as having substantive impact on national decision-making is concerned. In the here and now, the NEA has less power to influence educational policy than it has at any point in my lifetime, and an utterly ineffectual (and close) vote, clearly not sanctioned by a diffident and equivocal leadership, to remove the Secretary of Education isn’t going to strengthen their political suasion, especially since Obama, like most politicians, is not above petulant retaliation.

All these reasons, then, help to account for the deafening silence about the NEA’s resolution that we hear from the corporate media. That, and the fact that they’re lazy bastards who can’t be bothered to actually cover the news.

Arne Duncan Outdoes Himself

In my antepenultimate (to this) post, I described Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as “the worst cabinet member of the millennium (and yes, Curmie includes the likes of Alberto Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld in that analysis).” It wasn’t always that way—I even praised him for his confrontation with the NCAA over graduation rates for athletes. But a). virtually anyone looks good by comparison to the NCAA, b). that was over four years ago, and c). give enough monkeys enough typewriters…

Since that good start, moreover, Duncan has managed to espouse positions which represent the worst of both political perspectives. An arrogant buffoon who has never actually taught a day in his life, Secretary Duncan manages to blend the union-busting, anti-teacher, corporatist Machiavellianism of the GOP with the top-heavy bureaucracies, nanny-state sensibilities, and documentation fetishes of the Democrats. He has become a self-styled Tsar, and President Obama has not only let him get away with it, he’s encouraged it. Obama’s education policy is probably no worse than Bush’s, but it’s no better, either, and that’s a rather scathing condemnation when you get right down to it.

Arne Duncan Attempts to Be Worst Cabinet Secretary Ever

But now comes a statement from Arne the Idiot that boggles the mind in its inanity—even by Duncan’s standards. In announcing a “major shift” in the way the government evaluates federally-funded special education programs, he declared that whereas most states are indeed in compliance with federal standards, including an “individualized education plan” for each student, “it is not enough for a state to be compliant if students can’t read or do math.” And it is certainly true that the dropout rate for students with disabilities is twice that for those without, and that two-thirds of students in special education programs perform below grade level in reading and math. Um… that’s why they’re in those programs, Ace.

Here’s the response of teacher and blogger Peter Greene, in a post aptly entitled “Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE”:

Arne Duncan announced that, shockingly, students with disabilities do poorly in school. They perform below level in both English and math. No, there aren’t any qualifiers attached to that. Arne is bothered that students with very low IQs, students with low function, students who have processing problems, students who have any number of impairments—these students are performing below grade level….

But who knows. Maybe Arne is on to something. Maybe blind students can’t see because nobody expects them to. Maybe the student a colleague had in class years ago, who was literally rolled into the room and propped up in a corner so that he could be “exposed” to band—maybe that child’s problems were just low expectations. Maybe IEPs are actually assigned randomly, for no reason at all….

We don't need IEPs—we need expectations and demands. We don’t need student support and special education programs—we need more testing. We don’t need consideration for the individual child’s needs—we just need to demand that the child get up to speed, learn things, and most of all TAKE THE DAMN TESTS. Because then, and only then, will we be able to make all student disabilities simply disappear.

This is just so stunningly, awesomely dumb, it’s hard to take in. Do they imagine that disabled students are just all faking, or that the specialists who diagnose these various problems are just making shit up for giggles?

If what we were discussing here was only that group of students with ADHD, dyslexia, or similar conditions, it might make a little sense to expect to see progress roughly equivalent to norms for students without those conditions. But no, we’re also talking about kids with developmental disorders so severe they can’t sit, talk, or hold a pencil to take one of Duncan’s precious high-stakes tests.

And now we get the capper, an utterance so mind-meltingly idiotic that it would embarrass Michele Bachmann: “We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel.” Really, Arne, and where is the evidence for that assertion? Any evidence for that? You’re dealing with educators here, dude. You can’t just make shit up and think you can get away with it.

Despite the cringe-worthiness of Duncan's absurd assertion, the Secretary did manage not to be the stupidest person on the conference call. That dubious distinction went to Tennessee’s education commissioner, Kevin Huffman, who put forth the proposition that it is lack of testing, of those magical words “strong assessments,” that’s the real problem. Because mandated testing cures everything from Down Syndrome to celebral palsy, apparently.

Seriously, it’s difficult to imagine what it must be like in the universe these guys inhabit. Unfortunately, the fact that what Duncan, Huffman, and their fellow charlatans propose is utter nonsense doesn’t change the fact that there are serious implications associated with their delusional ravings.

First, tens of thousands of good and effective teachers will have their hard work demeaned by Duncan’s transcendent silliness. Second, schools, already facing budget crises across the country, will have to re-direct resources to accommodate this boondoggle. That means less money to pay teachers, to support libraries and technology centers, to underwrite gifted and talented programs, in short to, well, be a school. Third, since Duncan seems pathologically incapable of doing anything without attaching a threat to it (do it my way or lose your funding), he further alienates anyone who actually knows anything about education from both his own inanities and the DOE in general, and enhances the impression of Chicago-style politics run amok in the Obama administration.

Finally, whereas high-stakes testing of the regular student population is unnecessarily stressful, often incompetently administered, and frequently used as “evidence” of utter falsehoods, at least we can understand the impulse. As a university professor, I do often despair at how remarkably underprepared many of my students are when they arrive in my freshman classes. If testing actually worked (it generally doesn’t), at least we’d have some means of determining what they know and what they don’t—and, as I’ve said before, I do look at a prospective student’s ACT or SAT scores as part of my decision of how to vote on a scholarship application. (I’d never use those scores to evaluate a teacher or a school in any way, however.)

Here, though, the proposal makes no sense at all. There’s no possible way that testing disabled students could do any good at all, could provide any useful information, could in fact accomplish anything remotely positive. The only way this makes sense is if it’s some sort of elaborate ruse to get people like Curmie to say “testing of the regular student population isn’t so bad, because see how much worse it could be.” (Note: ain’t gonna happen Arne—regular high-stakes testing is still awful, even if this is worse.)

Either that, or Arne Duncan is off his meds.