A pushback against the Obama/Duncan plan is slowly gaining steam.

This is from an opinion piece in the Santa Cruz Sentinal

Sandra Nichols: Why 1,000 schools are doomed to damnation

There is an emergency in our California public schools, but the 1,000 "low-performing schools," including six in Santa Cruz County, are not the problem. They are the symptom.

In its infinite wisdom, the California Board of Education has approved emergency regulations and deemed the 1,000 schools utter failures from which parents can rescue their kids via "open enrollment," transferring them to other schools. State board member Benjamin Austin commented, "The schools in this list are bad schools."

Mr. Austin, go to the schools on the list. See what's going on there. Then suggest a remedy to any problems you uncover. Don't just sit around and label schools you know little about as failures. Talk about living in an ivory tower and being the decider while Rome burns.

But wait! There will always be schools that are the lowest performers no matter how you rank them. The Obama administration, by requiring such a list for states seeking the elusive bucks, is dooming California to damn 1,000 schools every year.

This is one of the main problems (or not depending on who you are) of the whole Obama/Duncan system. From a rational point of view, this whole closing bad schools thing makes no sense. Schools need good teachers, small class size, supplies,  and support from administration. Parents and community members need this. From the point of view of the wealthy, privatization class this is good. This bad school plan is good because every year there are bad schools that can be closed and privatized - every year. There are only two ways to stop this - voters have to locally vote out of office those mayors who are in favor of this horrible patriarchal scheme, or eventually there will be no more schools to privatize because there will be no more public schools.