But the holes in Duncan's plans do not stop there. Another mistake is that the Obama/Duncan administration is failing to acknowledge the social sources of educational struggles while promoting Race to the Top (RTTT).
This competition for funding has recently revealed itself as a plan deaf to the true problems facing schools, as posted on a recent Rural Education blog at Education Week:
"[Howley Caitlin's] research fleshes out the numbers behind an obvious but important point: While states with large rural populations such as North Carolina and Georgia won Race to the Top money, missing in action are almost all the states with highest numbers of small, rural schools--and many in the high rural-poverty belts the Rural School and Community Trust has identified in the Rural 900, a list of the highest-poverty rural school districts in the nation."
In short, yet another truth hard to swallow, poverty and out-of-school factors do not matter in school reform because teachers are the primary component of student success, according to Duncan, and market forces (competition in RTTT) will provide the objective field upon which school reform will make itself clear.
While Duncan continues to offer claims about truth that ironically avoid the truth, our main concern should be with not swallowing claims of "truth," but a willingness to open our eyes and first see the truth--and then to have the moral courage to do something about children living in poverty in the wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
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