Say what?

Sometimes I just don't get it. Once again Secretary Duncan makes a statement that just doesn't match something he stated earlier (maybe, if he would have had more standardized tests in school he would see how his logic just doesn't seem to make sense!).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chicagogeek/4333114156/sizes/l/

"U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will talk about the importance of arts instruction and its impact on learning ..."

-ED.gov

Say what? Secretary Duncan will talk about the importance of the arts in instruction! This, from the guy who said "proposed incentive plans must "use fair and transparent evaluations based on multiple measures including student growth." in Newsweek and didn't have a problem with the LA Times publishing teacher names and ranking them based on standardized test scores.

but hey, he's only enforcing the Administration's agenda, right?

"Now that Obama lives in the White House, he seems to have developed a certain fondess for some of the key concepts of NCLB that essentially doomed it to fail: the high-stakes standardized testing regime, the punishment for the lowest-achieving schools, the arbitrary deadlines for success."

-Washington Post

I tweeted this out a week or so ago and asked how the US Dept. of Education would assess the "effectiveness" of art teachers in this model? The best response "How well the bubbles are colored in!"