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Halloween Edu-Parade, 2008!

By skoolboy — October 31, 2008 2 min read
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It’s Halloween, and time for skoolboy to present eduwonkette’s second annual Edu-Parade. Here are some of the few costumes you won’t see at the Greenwich Village Halloween parade in New York City:

First up are Philissa Cramer, Kelly Vaughan, and Elizabeth Green as the Gossip Girls. (That’s Elizabeth as vulnerable part-good, part-evil Blair Waldorf.) Over at GothamSchools, Philissa, Kelly and Elizabeth spill all the gossip on what’s happening in New York City schools and beyond. XOXO, ladies!

Here comes Jim Liebman, Director of the Office of Accountability and Assessment in New York City, as ARIS, the $80M information system that the New York City Department of Education purchased from IBM. Like ARIS, Jim produces unreliable data and is inaccessible to teachers and parents.

Next, there’s Lisa Graham Keegan and Linda Darling-Hammond as a couple of fuzzy dice, reflecting their candidates’ fuzzy and dicey education platforms. One of them could wind up as Secretary of Education!

Here’s Margaret Spellings as a Texas Longhorn, as she prepares to move back to the Lone Star State. (Given skoolboy’s feelings about Madame Secretary’s role in promoting No Child Left Behind, I considered several kinds of horns before settling on the bovine variety.)

Next up, blogger/journalist Alexander Russo shows his devilish side. He’s got horns too, but Ed Week is a family newspaper. (Sort of.)

Here are Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation as a pushmi-pullyu, the two-headed character that Dr. Dolittle found on his voyage. When it tries to move, both heads try to go in different directions.

Following the Fordham boys, DC Schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee is the Dark Knight, an obsessive superhero who relies on her strength and intelligence. There’s good, there’s evil … and then there’s Michelle Rhee.

Right behind Rhee is the education Brat-Pack, straight out of 1985 (about when most of them were born, it seems): clockwise, it’s David Levin (co-founder of KIPP), Jason Kamras (TFA alum and 2005 national Teacher of the Year), and the redoubtable Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America. The tagline for the Breakfast Club was, “They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.” These Brat-Packers meet all the time, and they’re changing lots of other people’s lives…let’s hope for the better.

AFTer the Brat Pack comes Randi Weingarten as an astronaut, seeking to broadly and boldly go where no man or woman has gone before: a president of a national teacher union with such complex views that she’s equally hated by the left and the right. (Okay, maybe Al Shanker planted that flag first.)

And finally, eduwonkette (not pictured) as Bill Henrickson, the lead role in HBO’s series “Big Love,” about a modern-day polygamist, surrounded by spouses and acolytes Jay Greene, Kevin Carey, Andy Rotherham and Mike Bloomberg. This costume simultaneously fulfills her fantasies and theirs! (Of course, she’s already been married to Mayor Mike…)

Happy Halloween, everybody!

The opinions expressed in eduwonkette are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.