Deb Meier speaking back to Secretary Duncan

Great little interview with Deb Meier on Obama's education policy (including testing and charter schools). A few highlights:
on Duncan's centralizing ideas:
...to look for the answer increasingly in distant from where the action takes place, the cutting out of teachers’, parents’ and children’s voices in making decisions about schools, as we escalate the penalties if they don’t meet test scores. The incredible obsession with test scores, particularly in two particular areas, that hardly define what it means to be a well-educated person.

on charter schools:
...there’s nothing particular about charter schools that gives schools either greater autonomy to make decisions, powerful decisions, close to the children—that’s what I think is wonderful about a small school, that you can know kids and their families, can all know each other well, and can have a conversation that impacts on the school.
But what we’re seeing instead is an enormous number of pilot schools that are really replicas of the worst parts of the public system, where decisions are made farther and farther away from children, and they’re made on the basis of people who don’t know the kids or that school well.

on mayoral control of schools:
The mayor claims that mayoral control works, but, in fact, if you look at the data about which systems are doing best around this country, urban systems, in fact it’s the ones that don’t have mayoral control, not mayoral control. And even in this last round of test scores in New York City, in fact, the cities in New York State that don’t have mayoral control did better than New York City. So, what’s frustrating to me is I don’t like that definition of success, but that they don’t even believe it for themselves.

on who's running the ship:
So I’m also just stunned by the Department of Education that includes virtually no educators, whose definition of being well-educated is that you graduated from Harvard.

There’s something basically missing about what we want from our schools. And if we don’t get that right, and even discuss it, so that the only meaning of achievement now is improving test scores.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and when you mentioned the people who are running the system that aren’t even educators, increasingly now, especially with this charter school movement, even the principals have no experience as teachers.

DEBORAH MEIER: There is no respect for—now, it’s not the only place we do this. I‘m a little stunned that you send in people on the basis of some general brightness category to fix automobile industries, who know nothing about manufacturing and industry. We’ve gotten—you know, this decade of interest in finance has made us think that only people who know how to manipulate money know how to change the world for the better.