Jeb Bush hatchet man Tony Bennett (thrown out of Indiana) appointed as FL's "Education Commissioner"

[seafan]

I KNEW this was going to happen.


Former Indiana superintendent is Florida's new education commissioner, December 13, 2012


Just as surely as the partisan U. S. Supreme Court installed George W. Bush into the White House on December 12, 2000, Jeb Bush pushed his aggressive "Educational Reform" operative into the Education top spot in Florida yesterday, to continue the "Bold Educational Reform" that Jeb Bush himself so highly prizes. Why? Because tearing down teachers' unions and starving public education funding in this country in order to take private control of that nice pot of money will make Jeb and his cronies rich.

Very, very rich.



The story in a nutshell?

Parents and teachers in Indiana last month threw out one of Jeb Bush's prime "educational reform" operatives, as they soundly rejected one-term Indiana school superintendent Tony Bennett. Bennett's mission was to push the Jeb Bush Playbook of Bold Educational Reform-- school vouchers, charter schools, forced standardized testing of students, school grades, lax teacher qualifications, merit pay for teachers based on students' scores on rigid standardized testing methods, and now, the rapid push for online education.

Keep in mind that Indiana voted definitively for Mitt Romney, so this rejection of Bennett was obviously no accident. Unfortunately, Bennett leaves substantial damage behind.


Guess what... The Florida Commissioner of Education position has been open since since Gerard Robinson resigned in disgrace on July 31. This week, Tony Bennett threw his hat into the ring at the last moment, and miracle of miracles, via the Florida State Board of Education, two members of which are former Jeb Bush chiefs of staff, he landed the job of Florida's Education Commissioner.


Nothing like shoehorning another Jeb Bush loser into a position to drain the lifeblood of public education beyond recognition in Florida. Indiana rejected Jeb Bush's Plan for their schools. Also noteworthy is that Idaho voters did as well:

Idaho voters appear to have overturned the “Luna laws,” three school reform laws named for state schools Superintendent Tom Luna who made them the centerpiece of his agenda. Voters rejected his plan to require high school students to take two online courses and for the state to spend $180 million to lease laptops to make this happen. They also rejected merit pay for teachers that is linked to student standardized test scores and they opposed limits on the collective bargaining rights for teachers.

We remember Luna.




When Bennett lost his election to a Democratic school teacher last month, Gov. Mitch Daniels whined to the media:

Republican frustration over the election defeat of Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett boiled over into the public this week with Gov. Mitch Daniels claiming at an education reform conference in Washington that teachers used illegal and improper methods to oust Bennett.

And we heard more whining from Patricia Levesque, executive director for Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education.....


And we heard from a peevish Jeb:

And now that Bennett is out, Bush told StateImpact Florida’s Sarah Gonzalez about Indiana: “Well it’s not my education agenda. It’s the education agenda of the Indiana governor, the Indiana state school officer, the Indiana legislature, the Indiana business community, that Tony Bennett didn’t get elected.”

Indiana, we are happy you stood up to Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett. Sadly, your gain is now Florida's loss.


And North Carolina, we did our best to warn you.


So the hot potato is back in Florida.



So now, Floridians, we've got yet another failed Jeb Bush operative turning up here, very predictably, to continue the assault on public schools/teachers/unions, at his behest.


The shark never stops chewing at the perimeter.


Jeb Bush makes case for more online university courses, December 4, 2012

The Big Money Driving Online Higher Education in Florida, December 5, 2012


Jeb Bush, with cash and clout, pushes contentious school reforms, November 30, 2012


Who does Jeb Bush think he’s kidding?, November 26, 2012

Anybody who follows education policy knows how influential Jeb Bush has been in states well beyond Florida, where, as governor from 1999-2007, he launched school reforms – including standardized test-based accountability for students and schools, the expansion of charter schools and vouchers, and a letter-grade (A-F) rating system for schools that has served as a model around the country. Nowhere has the Bush influence been as strong as in Indiana, where the superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett, has looked on Bush as his guru.

.....

Bennett followed it in Indiana, where, with the help of Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and the Republican-dominated legislature, he pushed through a state-wide voucher program, a school grading system, test-based accountability, etc.

Indiana voters had their say on this package of reforms earlier this month when they tossed out Bennett in favor of a veteran teacher, Glenda Ritz, who opposes this brand of school reform because, she says, it doesn’t work.

.....

The irony is that Bennett may actually wind up in Florida, where state officials are looking for a new education commissioner and have expressed interest in Bennett because they like his brand of school reform, the one he got from Bush.

.....

Why the List of Tony Bennett’s Financial Backers Should Be Important to Floridians, December 9, 2012

...K12 Inc...McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt education publishing and printing corporations...Charter Schools USA...Koch Industries & Koch Development...Florida Crystals Corporation...Eli Broad...



The Corporate Cash Which Fuels Jeb Bush’s Education Empire, October 9, 2011



The Inconvenient Truth About Florida Education, December 6, 2012

Despite what Gov. Rick Scott and his Department of Education may tell you, the Florida public education system isn’t very good, especially when it comes to the percentage of students graduating from high school within four years.

The U.S. Department of Education recently released data listing state four-year high school graduation rates for the 2010-11 school year -- the first year in which all states used a common, rigorous measure. Prior to the new methodology, varying methods used by states to report graduation rates made such comparisons unreliable.

The goal was to develop a graduation rate that provided parents, educators and the public with better information on their school's progress while allowing for meaningful comparisons of graduation rates across states and school districts. The new graduation rate measurement more accurately accounted for drop-outs and students who do not earn a regular high school diploma.

According to data, Florida had one of the worst graduation rates in the nation, 71 percent. The state tied with Louisiana and had only five states ranked below it: Alaska and Oregon (68 percent), Georgia (67 percent), New Mexico (63 percent) and Nevada (62 percent).

Yes, Mississippi and Alabama finished ahead of Florida.

Just a continuation of the Jeb Bush legacy.



Jeb Bush


Tony Bennett
Link


Floridians, our work is not yet done to rid this state of the corrosive influence of those who hold nothing but unveiled contempt for the people and the public education of our children.

[Enthusiast]

1. Thank you for this, seafan.

"Yes, Mississippi and Alabama finished ahead of Florida."

The Bush education legacy. Aren't we blessed to have this Bush clan? :sarcasm:

[formercia]

2. A little off-topic

Charlie Christ once call himself a "JEB Bush Republican"

The 'boys' see the GOP losing clout, so now it's time to re-infest the Democratic Party.

Remember, the 'boys' who plotted the 1933 Coup were Democrats, including Prescott Bush. It's not about Party, it's about Control.

[No Elephants]

3. Thanks for that reminder, formercia.

As I have posted, I don't trust party switchers because it is about their personal ambition, not principles.


I think the Party is silly to lionize them.

[formercia]

4. The roots of privatizing Public Schools:


<2> Bush's assurances of equality and opportunity stand in stark contrast to his past actions and family history. The seeming diversity within this administration is quite literally, skin deep. All of GW's cabinet appointees - including his minority appointees and advisors - are associated with right wing think tanks and foundations connected to white supremacists, the CIA or eugenics, the pseudo-science of racial superiority. Many - including Stephen Goldsmith, Tommy Thompson, Elaine Chou, John Ashcroft, Marvin Olasky, Linda Chavez, Karl Rove and Spencer Abraham - are colleagues of or are organizationally associated with Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. 
<3> According to the Bell Curve, Blacks are genetically inferior. Having a low IQ, they can't help but have out of wedlock children, live in poverty or resort to criminal activity. This conclusion is then used to justify building more prisons, privatizing schools and eliminating affirmative action, welfare and many social programs. 
<4> Undoubtedly, some people share this view of African Americans. Re-packaged as, "compassionate conservatism" - a motto coined by the CIA's Manhattan Institute - this kind of subtly-coded racism is exactly why Bush appealed to many white voters. 
<5> However, it's not just Blacks and Jews who need to be concerned about the Bush presidency. Bush's cabinet has striking parallels to and many of the exact same corporate players as the IG Farben oil, pharmaceutical, chemical and munitions cartel that formed the industrial base of Nazi Germany. By means of their vaccines, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and pollution these corporations and their modern day subsidiaries have already caused the death, illness and injury of more people than the Nazis did. 

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/jewish_pespective.htm






Policy recommendations

The book argued the average genetic IQ of the United States is declining due to the tendency of the more intelligent to have fewer children than the less intelligent, for the generation length to be shorter for the less intelligent, and through the large scale immigration to the United States of those with low intelligence. The United States will become increasingly like Latin America, with high IQ whites and Asians living in fortified enclaves protected by high fences and armed guards from "the menace of the slums" below.
In a discussion of the future political outcomes of an intellectually stratified society, they stated that they "fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent - not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but 'conservatism' along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below".<1> Moreover, they fear that increasing welfare will create a "custodial state" in "a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population." They also predict increasing totalitarianism: "It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states".<2>
Herrnstein and Murray recommended the elimination of welfare policies that encourage poor women to have babies:


We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. "If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility." The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe.<3>
This claim spurred later research in economics and sexology, which considered that welfare programs for women had a doubly negative effect on aggregate IQ within the transfer group, by allowing the female partner to forgo a full consideration of the male's ability to serve as a provider of familial resources, instead placing greater emphasis on desirable physical or social characteristics (presumed to be not as positively correlated with IQ). Neither of these claims, as originally embodied in text and the follow-on research, dealt with race as such, but rather demonstrated concern that large numbers of minorities were positioned as recipients, leading to a continual worsening of the measured divergence in intelligence. However, two years later, the 1996 U.S. welfare reform substantially cut these programs.
The book also argued for reducing immigration into the US which was argued to lower the average national IQ. It also recommended against policies of affirmative action.

--snip--

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve


This book should have been titled:

Privatizing Public Schools, a roadmap for Reich-Wankers.