How can there be a public education crises when only 40 percent of the jobs require a high school degree and by age 25, 90 percent of Americans have a high school degree or its equivalent? I think those numbers say that the workforce is overqualified and someone is cherry picking numbers to manufacture a public education crises.   Then there are the jobs that require a bachelor's degree or better-that number is 23 percent [about 33 million jobs], but according to a special report of The Most Educated Countries in the World, 42.5 percent of Americans [about 90 million] have a college degree.

Today's education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it's the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.
 

Washington State declined to ask Arne Duncan for a waiver from NCLB because the legislature thought that the price was too high. In exchange for gaining freedom from NCLB's demand that 100% of students would be proficient by 2014, the state would have to agree to endorse Arne Duncan's inane idea that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students. Apparently some wise policy makers saw the research and the universal failure of Duncan's idea and said "no thanks."  Now virtually every school in the state of Washington is a "failing school."

Pressure to meet national education standards may be the reason states with significant populations of African-American students and those with larger class sizes often require children to learn fewer skills, finds a University of Kansas researcher.  "The skills students are expected to learn in schools are not necessarily universal," said Argun Saatcioglu, a KU associate professor of education and courtesy professor of sociology.
 

Why would policymakers create tests that are designed to mark as failures two out of every three children?  For the second year in a row, that is the question that New York parents are asking. The 2014 New York State Common Core test scores were recently released, and there was minimal improvement in student performance. Proficiency or "passing" rates went up 0.1 in English Language Arts (ELA) and 4.6 percentage points in math,despite the rollout of the $28 million, taxpayer funded curriculum modules, and greater familiarity with the tests. Proficiency rates continued to be horrendous for students who are English Language Learners-only 11 percent "passed" math, and 3 percent "passed" the English Language Arts tests. 

This study found that the Texas exit testing policy created a misalignment between educator and student-level accountability, which had particularly negative consequences for struggling students. The findings of this study suggest a need for policy makers to reconsider the assumptions on which exit tests are based and to more closely consider the goal of exit testing systems in the context of, and in relation to, the larger systems of accountability in which they are embedded.  

Part Two: Why is the Obama Administration Waging War on Teachers?   by Paul Horton  on the Living the Dialogue blog 

But in order to encourage this competition and choice, Obama education policy makers have declared a war on teacher unions and teachers. When the Central Falls, Rhode Island, School Board voted to fire all of the teachers at its high school without due process in February 2010, the President and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, strongly supported the school board. The Obama Administration claimed neutrality when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike 2012 when mayor Rahm Emanuel did not honor wage increases from a previous contract and demanded a longer school day without having appropriated funds to support a longer school day, but Secretary Duncan, a former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, fully supported the mayors' attempt to break the union. Even more recently, Secretary Duncan was outspoken in his support of the Vergara decision that ruled to deny tenure to California teachers.