“These are presumably the 5,000 chronically under-performing schools that robot Arne wants to close and ‘turn around.’ Such an action raises several questions. First, just where are 5,000 excellent principals to run these schools? Have our star leaders just been waiting in the wings all this time? And what about the needed tens of thousands of ace teachers? Where are they? Are they lurking out there somewhere in the bayous of Louisiana or the sands of Nevada? Second, Duncan told an audience at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor he wants ‘college-ready, career-ready international standards, very high bar.’ (Often when he speaks extemporaneously I hear the sound of grammarian teeth-gnashing). Well, if our race to the bottom has generated 35,000 failing schools, 5,000 of which are hopeless in robot Arne's eyes, what will a much higher bar produce? Finally, supposing for a moment we could find all those teachers and principals, would that be enough? Even an outlet not known for its searching questions to people in positions of authority, U.S. News & World Report, caught the lack of logic here. ‘Would simply replacing teachers and principals work? If all the other factors in a low-achieving student's life -- family, neighborhood, social life -- were to remain constant, would substituting an outstanding teacher for an ineffective teacher reverse the achievement levels? Are good teachers and principals all that is needed to turn around struggling schools, the majority of which are in impoverished communities where the parents might not have the time to help their children succeed in school?’”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-brace...n_b_215883.html
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-- Gerald Bracey, an associate of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, a fellow at the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University and a fellow at the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He maintains a website, the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency, dedicated to using the real-time power of the Internet to debunk disinformation and misinformation about public schools.
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Thanks to Mark Pudlow for the clip and the leads.