A friend works in the online industry. It’s a job. She sent me a copy of a high school graduation exam. The students learn at home on a computer.
She said the kids can take the exam over if they don’t like their score. Because they take the exam online at home, they can google the answers. Or they can have the book open in front of them.
Bear in mind that the big money in this country is investing millions to put our kids online as much as possible. They are not doing this for philanthropic reasons. They are doing it because there is a game plan. The plan is to reduce the cost of education by having fewer teachers. In a virtual school, class size may be 60-200. That means fewer teachers. And the teachers are paid low salaries.
ALEC, the shadowy organization of conservative state legislators, has model legislation promoting for-profit virtual schools. Chris Christie is eager to open more in New Jersey. Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania has many of them. So does John Kasich, who coddles the two big for-profit virtual school founders, who are major contributors to the Republican party in Ohio.
Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence and Bob Wise’s Alliance for Excellent Education are pushing virtual schools as the acme of excellence.
Here is an excerpt from a current graduation exam. Is this high quality? Does this look like excellence to you?
Consider the intellectual level displayed in the exam questions here (and they are typical). This was the literature section of the high school graduation test. The subject, ironically, was George Orwell’s 1984. The questions were either true-false or multiple choice. If the whole country could be reduced to this kind of simplistic thought process, people would be easy to manipulate and control.
A. faking photographs B. destroying originals C. telling the facts
1 of 12
7/10/2012 10:28 AM
Quiz: Final Examination E201A
D. storing corrected documents
ce Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: C Your Response: C
5.
040 Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: A Your Response: A
6.
X Points Earned: 0/1 Correct Answer: B Your Response: A
7.
http:// us/section/content/default.asp…
Winston’s job is to Part 1 Chapter 3-4
A. rewrite the news to fit the Party’s needs B. write the news
C. help rewrite a new dictionary
D. write the scripts for the telescreen news
What is unusual about the dictionary Syme is working on? (Part 1 Chapter 5-6)
A. It contains slang
B. Words are being destroyed C. Words are being added
D. It contains curse words
In this chapter, Winston twice says that
A. Mrs. Parsons
B. O’Brien
C. Syme
D. All of the above
fie Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: C Your Response: C
will be vaporized (Part 1 Chapter 5-6)
8.
Which is NOT an appealing aspect of the room upstairs at Charrington’s. (Part 1 Chapter 7-8)
A. Modern furnishings B. Old
C. Comfortable
D. Fireplace
2 of 12
7/10/2012 10:28 AM
Quiz: Final Examination
9.
The Party teaches all kinds of half-truths about history. (Part 1 Chapter 7-8)
se Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: True Your Response: True
10.
se Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: A Your Response: A
11.
All were sights at Victory Square EXCEPT (Part 2 Chapter 1-2)
A. Prisoners in leg-irons
B. Soldiers marching
C. Guards with submachine guns D. A line of trucks
Winston and the girl decide to meet (Part 2 Chapter 1-2)
A. at her house.
B. at the park.
C. at Mr Charrington’s shop. D. on Sunday afternoon.
3 of 12
7/10/2012 10:28 AM
Which thought did Winston NOT have about the scrap of paper? (Part 2 Chapter 1-2)
A. He was being invited to join a committee. B. The Brotherhood was alive.
C. The Thought Police were on to him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All of the 20th Century metaphors for totalitarianism seem to be coming to the fore with the education deform movement. Brave New World has come to Philadelphia with money from the Gates Foundation.
from the Philadelphia Public School Notebook:
“Mastery poised to expand its influence around teacher coaching”
1. “The Philadelphia Great Schools Compact is asking the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for $2.5 million, some $650,000 of which would pay for Mastery to train teacher coaches to work in District and Catholic schools and other charters.”
2. “Mastery’s coaches, who work with a group of nine to 12 teachers over six or seven weeks, give them a series of techniques for running a tight, focused classroom, such as circulating regularly around the room and promoting student participation. The coaches then monitor how well the teachers use the techniques through forms and checklists based on different levels of observation and feedback.
Each lesson has a measurable objective around student outcomes and teacher actions, such as counting how many students are actively on task or have answered verbal questions.
There are different levels of observation and feedback – up to and including real-time, in-person coaching sessions in which the coach gives the teacher instructions through an earpiece. Teachers can also opt for wearing a device called a “motivator” that buzzes them at preset intervals as a reminder to repeat certain activities, such as circulating around the room, until they become habitual.”
3. “In addition to being focused, Mastery’s method assumes that teacher behavior can change and effectiveness increase “in a short amount of time, that changes can happen quickly and need to happen quickly,” she said.
Wu said that Mastery also “does the best job of incorporating data into the coaching.” She gave an example that the coach might observe that at 9:05 just 6 students were on task, but at 9:20, 18 were on task. This kind of close observation helps the teacher pinpoint student weaknesses, focus her attention, and develop new strategies.
Mastery’s method has a lot in common with the book “Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College” by Doug Lemov, which has garnered a lot of attention.”
The full article is at http://thenotebook.org/blog/125063/mastery-tpoised-expand-its-influence-around-teacher-coaching
I wonder if they teach how to have “rigorous discussions” like Relay.
Because they don’t get teaching, they are trying to make it an exact science and it is not.
This will be another failure years from now. Notice the main spokesman or leader sends his kids to private schools.
I am galled by the assumption that even the most green teacher hasn’t already figured out how to circulate around the classroom, even without the sage wisdom and guidance of a “mastery coach” or a “motivator buzzer.” They really don’t think much of our profession. I wonder how they regard the teachers of their own children?
To Alan….Circulating in the classroom should be a given, for sure, without being coached or guided by a master teacher. My thought on this is how much more difficult it will be to do that with more students crowded into a classroom when the walls of that classroom are unmovable?
I am currently rereading Callahan’s “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”. What you have pointed out in #s 2-3 sounds almost exactly like what happened back in the teens and twenties of the 20th century with “efficiency experts” roaming school classrooms and district offices, charts and checklists in hand, attempting to introduce/evaluate teachers and schools via the “scientific management” system as developed by F. Taylor in the manufacturing sector earlier in the century.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Or is that the more things stay the same they change (in name only).
It is really amazing to read what critics were saying at the beginnings of the 20th century and realize that the critics today are saying the same things (which were/are based on incomplete perceptions and knowledge of what really goes on everyday in the teaching and learning process.
Everyone involved in education should read Callahan’s work.
That is a great book. It should be required reading for all teachers, new or not-so-new. I would recommend it to administrators, but they would likely read it and go , “Hey! Great ideas!”
Subtlety and irony escape the slower among us.
Michelle on the following post points us to Isaac Asimov’s “The Fun They Had” short story about “teaching machines”. Just read it and with a little modernization of words is still spot on.
http://iceuftblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/isaac-asimov-predicted-results-of.html
Thanks for pointing this our for us!!
It’s been 1984 in public education for about two decades now.
I feel like a pawn piece on a 30 year old chess set, who has just been awarded sel-awareness and now undstands he has been manipulated by an agenda far bigger then himself his entire life. I remember over 20 years ago in high school studying each year for the Regents exam, and buying the red Barron’s book for each subject so I could take practice exams that would clue me in to the type of questions I should expect- and more importantly the strategy behind the questions, so that I would not have to think as hard about the content, answer the questions faster, and finish the test on time. That was the beginning for the educational landscape that exists today. The same went for SAT prep, and later GRE prep. Companies making money on showing us how we could beat the test by thinking like the test maker instead of fully being able to process and synthesize the knowledge. Higher ordered thinking requires more time and manpower to assess, and therefore more costly to test developers, so we get sold tests that that do not measure what they claim to measure, and individuals spend hundreds to thousands of dollars for test prep to cheat themselves out of learning the material in the first place. This begs the question, why do we need to learn the material in the first place, if the commercial industry is encouraging us to cheat on the assessment, for a price, in the first place?
Oh and by the way, first place 😉
More from the test:
How do adults who were “educated” on only multiple-choice and true or false assessments as kids make critical and creative life decisions?
A. What’s a “critical decision?”
B. I don’t understand the word “choice”
C. Google isn’t working now
D. I can’t find this part in the text