Don’t forget that education laws are disregard and/or disrespected, especially by these politicians, Bloomberg and Klein. Democracy doesn’t have a chance of surviving in this system.

At some point, and it may be very soon, parents and taxpayers are going to stage a revolt and force the Legislature to toss these turkeys out. Unceremoniously, I hope. At least let’s demand that an independent Inspector General be established with full authority and budget to see what NYSED is really doing with our children, and our money, and make this information available to all who care.

I note two important developments re NYSED within the past year, none of which bodes well for the future. First of all, the amount of information actually made available to the public has decreased markedly. Secondly, the US DOE Inspector General issued a scathing audit of NYSED which basically said that it neither audits nor supervises how districts really spend our – not their! – money. The confluence of these two trends, each of which is bad in and of itself, signifies nothing but ill for the future.

Race to the Top? Not in NYS. More likely, Race to the … Flop. Except we’ll never learn just how bad things really are, and how poorly RttT funds have been spent, until years later – because the real information will be buried somewhere in one of NYSED’s infamous data warehouse-vaults, never to see the light of day.

Things which relate to children are too important to be buried under NYSED’s rock.