New octopuses: 16 superintendents from east coast to mid-west sign on to education manifesto

Sixteen superintendents in public schools from the east coast to the mid-west and a southern one signed on to an education manifesto on "How to fix our Schools" in the Washington Post newspaper on Sunday, October 10, 2010.
Needless to say, these are all large urban school districts with poor minority children comprising the student enrollment. Obviously this opinion piece regurgitates similar criticism as before.
Teachers  and unions are the problem in public education today,  and what  parents need are options like charter schools and inexperienced teachers at the expense of the veteran teachers whose higher salaries they don't want to pay, as well as, to "de-professionalize" teacher education, bringing in a cadre of young unemployed college graduates with a BA or BS degree they could control and pay lower wages.
U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan with only a BS in Sociology  insists upon highly qualified teachers and administrators in the classroom when he lacked the qualifications for the positions he held in education from the Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools to U.S Secretary of Education.
Here are a few excerpts: "How to Fix Our Schools," opinion piece in Washington Post.
"...the transformative changes needed to truly prepare our kids for the 21st-century global economy simply will not happen unless we first shed some of the entrenched practices that have held back our education system, practices that have long favored adults, not children. These practices are wrong, and they have to end now."
"...for too long, we have let teacher hiring and retention be determined by archaic rules involving seniority and academic credentials. The widespread policy of "last in, first out" (the teacher with the least seniority is the first to go when cuts have to be made) makes it harder to hold on to new, enthusiastic educators and ignores the one thing that should matter most: performance."
"...we have to change the rules to professionalize teaching."
"We also must make charter schools a truly viable option. If all of our neighborhood schools were great, we wouldn't be facing this crisis."
"Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory."
Octopus credit: DeviantArt