The Badass Teachers Association has produced a series of videos to explain the intricacies and deceptions of corporate reform.
The first laid out the corporate reform strategy.
The second examined the Broad superintendents.
The third looks closely at the legacy of Michelle Rhee.
The thesis that ties them together is that “reform” is a house of cards built on lies that will inevitably fall down, as houses of cards tend to do.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you BAT! I watched the videos yesterday. It’s important for all educators to disseminate the videos to a wide audience.
Also, parents in every state need to organize like TAMSA in Texas. Parent leaders in Texas now are monitoring the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education after the testing fiasco that was legislated by Pearson’s lobbyists. TAMSA created the tipping point to reclaim public education. After TAMSA organized, administrators and superintendents are now empowered to raise questions about the corporate nonsense and the bogus contracts.
In New York, testing has truly become, “the monster that ate education” as Diane said in one on the BAT videos. We need a TAMSA in New York. Maybe NAMSA or NYAMSA? I googled TAMSA to get to their website. Maybe next time include a link? Just a suggestion. I was impressed. NY parents need to organize like our Texas brethren.
The trouble is the continuing moral panic about standards, the lies about ‘value added’, the ‘rationality’ of testing has become such an inevitable and unarguable truth in the education narrative that it is ever harder to promote positive change!
“. . . the ‘rationality’ of testing has become such an inevitable and unarguable truth in the education narrative. . . ”
The “rationality” is actually “irrationality” or “surreality” and as such cannot by any stretch of the imagination be an “inevitable and unarguable truth”.
The “inevitable and unarguable truth” is what Noel Wilson has shown as the fundamental errors and obfuscations that make up the “irrationality” of educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students which render the whole “irrationality” invalid and any conclusions drawn “vain and illusory”, in other worlds useless. Read and understand Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
I know this has been said before, but I am saying it again. If the BAT wants to get ALL teachers involved, having that moniker will not attrack all teachers. I would share the videos with fellow teachers, but I know too many who would not want to be associated with the name of choice. I agree with what they are saying, and I know BAT gets “attention” but it isn’t inclusive of all people who might join in.
Yes, I agree with you. We need all teachers on board, even those of us who are “mature” and rather straight-laced.
It was brought up, but justified, I suppose. I just think that it isn’t what I would call myself to my students, so I wouldn’t identify myself as such on a board. And, many people feel the same way. I am not personally offended by it at all.
Well, I agree. I can’t get over the name. It is pointless asking for a new name so I will support the ideas without being a member.