What Agenda Are We Pushing?

Maybe a topic that is a bit heavy for a Saturday evening, but one that I have been thinking about for a bit in a number of contexts.  Today’s context comes about from an item in the ASCD SmartBrief a few days ago that read:

First-round Race to the Top winners receive poor grades on academics
A study by Harvard University researchers gives Tennessee and Delaware — the only two states that won first-round federal Race to the Top grants — poor marks for their academic standards after comparing them with national benchmarks, Valerie Strauss writes in this blog post. The report comes just after a group’s analysis suggested that the two states may have been chosen according to criteria that did not adhere to a rigorous scientific process, Strauss writes. The Washington Post/The Answer Sheet blog (5/6)

This specific news item pointed me to the Washington Post article, where I read:

The Education Next report by researchers Paul E. Peterson and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón also shows that standards in most states remain far below the proficiency standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is known as the nation’s report card because it tests students across the country by the same measure and is considered the testing gold standard. States have their own individual student assessments designed to test students’ knowledge of state academic standards, which are all different.

[stuff left out]

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, states actually have an incentive to set low standards because that made it easier to meet the law’s requirements. States with especially high standards have had a harder time doing so. That peculiarity in the law is one of the things that Duncan has said he wants to remove when the Obama administration and Congress rewrite NCLB, probably next year.

And this got me to thinking about a blog entry that was posted by Wesley Fryer entitled NCLB was designed to define public schools as failures.  This particular entry by Wes had a link to an earlier entry he wrote, Will Race to the Top Hurt Kids and Make Charter School Entrepreneurs Rich?, which I found interested because of the some of my own entries in their area, including iNACOL Congratulates Finalists For Race To The Top Funding For Their Online Learning Initiatives and Problem With Cyber Charter Schools – Part One – which essentially outline the focus on primarily the cyber charter schooling aspects of the RttT finalists and then a tongue in check discussion of some of the issues that I have with cyber charter schools.

I understand the market choice and deschooling (i.e., social conservative) agenda that the previous Bush administration was pushing.  But I don’t understand the Obama administration pushing the same social conservative agenda as the previous administration.  But all evidence from the Race to the Top initiative to the proposed changes being discussed to the No Child Left Behind legislation indicate that Duncan and Obama wish to continue to introduce market choice into the education system and continue to deschool what is left of America’s public schools.  It is almost funny that this administration is not willing to stand for this kind of behaviour when it comes to health care, but is more than willing to push us in that same direction when it comes to K-12 education!