Peter Cunningham Attacks Critics of School Reform .

Teach for America, charter schools, merit pay for teachers, value-added methods for teacher evaluation, Common Core, next generation high-stakes testing—these are the pillars the reform movement is built on and each commitment has bodies of research revealing them to be ineffective, and some times even harmful to our democratic goals of education reform.

Cunningham is writing as a political appointee who was paid with our tax dollars to monitor critics of the U.S. Department of Education and craft responses (none of that appears to have much to do with education, by the way, but a great deal to do with partisan politics).

See Diane Ravitch  The Attack Begins:

Because of my new book,

 which won’t be available until September 18, I fully expect the corporate reform attack machine to come after me. They have invested a lot of energy in charters, vouchers, merit pay, stripping teachers of tenure, collective bargaining rights, pensions, etc. despite the lack of any evidence that these strategies improve education. It makes them angry to be reminded that their plans have failed again and again.