Well, Mike ain't gonna be getting a Christmas card from Linda this year. In an article published today in the New Republic, Mike is clear: when it comes to secretary picks, LDH is the "worst case scenario" (of course, Flypaper readers will know that that particular sentiment is old news). The article, which outlines Darling-Hammond's history in the education community, is certainly right about one thing: her appointment as secretary, deputy secretary, or really any position in the department or administration at all is going to cause a huge uproar. (If her position as transition team education advisor hasn't done that already.)
Apparently Darling-Hammond doesn't understand what all the fuss is about. She thinks that her "personal opinions" don't matter because she's just there to "implement" Obama's education platform. Well, that's all warm and fuzzy (or as Mike would say--and did--"The ideas associated with Darling-Hammond are ones that educators love because they're warm and fuzzy,") but it still begs the question: what is Obama's education platform? He certainly did a bang up job playing both sides against the middle during the campaign. And now we're left wondering where he stands--and when for Pete's sake he's going to pick a secretary. Can you blame the reformer for finding Darling-Hammond's involvement troubling at best (and downright terrifying at worst)? (Just ask Kate Walsh: "The reform community is scared to death.")
So what do we make of LDH? Well Tom Toch over at Quick and the Ed had nothing but praise for their darling Darling yesterday. In fact, he thinks that her recent article in the Phi Delta Kappan is a promising look into her current thinking--and that her mushy (dare I call them "fuzzy") conclusions about standards and assessments are good! Sorry, Tom, but I think you may have singlehandedly called for a renaissance of the Quick and the Ed Watch. (And that snarky comment about "anonymous reformers" didn't help either.) Another day, another day.
The real kicker is LDH playing dumb. Does she think we haven't read her outrageous research from the last 15 years? And does she think we don't see the game she's playing? She has said, for example, that she hates TFA ("TFA is bad policy and bad education,"??she wrote once). That certainly seems reasonable... since she's spent a significant portion of her career studying teacher certification and training. Nobody wants to see their life's work shown up by a young (in 1992) upstart. Why spent years getting certified when you can be trained in 5 weeks? It's a reasonable question and one with which Dale Ballou, Vanderbilt education professor, would probably agree. Mike may have not be getting a card but Ballou will get hate mail. In reference to a study Darling-Hammond published arguing that teacher certification is essential to increasing student performance, Ballou had this to say: "She's either dishonest or the sloppiest person in education research I've ever seen." Yikes.
Of course Darling-Hammond continues to toodle along playing innocent. "The critiques of being 'old school' are particularly ironic since I have been fighting for a lot of reforms before they were recently on the national radar," she told Newsweek. Yeah right. Is that the AFT's radar--er "table"--you're talking about? Come clean Linda! We know what you want and we know the stakes. Let's just hope Obama does too--and chooses reform over status-quo.
