Mercedes Schneider argues that corporate reform is driven by ideology and greed, not evidence or the pursuit of better education.
She looks at the recent NCTQ report, which had no evidence for its large claims, and at vouchers and course choice in Louisiana. Vouchers have failed, but their champions won’t admit it. Course choice is ll about dollars, nothing more.
Without big money on offer, she writes, corporate reform would disappear: “If there were no six-figure salaries to accompany their ideological push, the likes of John White would be out of the door.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mercedes is absolutely right and a great asset for defending public schools, thank you!
Thanks, Ira. By the way, our 2013 school performance scores were due for release on July 29. Still not out. I’m thinking RSD has sunk even lower.
“If there were no six-figure salaries to accompany their ideological push, the likes of John White would be out of the door.
Allow me to rephrase the above statement: If he were paid a teacher’s salary, John White would be out of the door.”
White
This is so true. Something is inherently wrong with our priorities in education when the farther one is from the classroom, the higher the salary is likely to be.
This actually starts at the school level, too. When I was working at a number of different inner-city schools serving low income minority children, more often than not, I could instantly pick out the principal’s car in the parking lot. It was not because the car was parked closest to the entrance door, though it usually was, but because teachers were the least likely to be able to afford that Land Rover, Jaguar or Lexus (Yes, those were really the principal’s cars, parked in the lots of our most needy schools.) The teachers often had beaters, like my 14 year old used car. No teacher makes a six figure income in my district.
Our society is willing to pay for what it values and, clearly, we value generating a lot of administrative red tape way more than teaching. And don’t even get me started on the lack of qualifications of the highest paid, furthest from the children bumbling bureaucrats, like TFA alums White and Huffman or Vallas and Duncan…
That was exactly the impression I had while working at ACT. Hardly did I ever see this “not-for-profit”(?) mogul do something that was not profit-driven, including apparently- minuscule things like the annual “student poster contest.” In 2011-2012, when they foresaw Pearson’s end of contract in Florida, suddenly two Florida students won the contest. Then ACT withdrew a subcontract it had with Pearson and started marketing itself to Florida. Thank goodness Florida parents are becoming savvier each day and so wise to move heaven and earth against this money-driven frenzy cloaked as education reform.
Gary Rubenstein just debunked the latest “miracle” being
touted by John White, TFA’s CEO Ms. Villanueva-Beard,
and others:
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/08/01/fat-lie-tuesday/
At private high schools, students aren’t permitted to even
take A.P. exams unless they’ve already taken and passed
A.P. courses in the subject area being tested.
Makes sense, right?
Well, John White and the TFA-affiliated folks had the bright idea
of making masses of totally unprepared Louisiana students take A.P.
tests in subjects in which they’ve never even taken courses, let alone
achieved a passing grade. The result: almost all of them fail
miserably—probably just randomly bubbling in, and leaving
the constructed response essay portion blank.
A idiotic exercise, right?
No, because a miniscule few did pass while the rest (96% or more,
depending on the school) failed, John White, TFA CEO Ms.
Villanueva-Beard, and others tout this a “major success.”
Why would they claim such nonsense?
Well, this is because that even though that cohort of students
failed the test miserably, they were “exposed to more rigor” in the
process of taking the test, and thus benefited from this
“exposure”.
Welcome to Louisiana!
How about first “exposing” them to the actual courses in the
subject matter that the A.P. is testing, and then see if they
can achieve proficiency… and then let them take the test?
Throwing paraplegics and quadroplegics—or even people
capable of swimming, but who have never been in the water—-
into the deep end of a swimming pool, certainly “exposes”
them to more “rigor”, but is it a good idea?
According the John White and TFA folks like Ms. Beard,
the answer is “YES.”
Let us not forget the $90 bucks or so that the College Board gets for each test taken.
And we all know who is the President of the College Board, right!
Also, it is interesting to think that teachers are mandated to use research based practices.
So what is the payoff to the state school system, to have so many unprepared kids take AP exams knowing that most will fail? Do they get some kind of financial gain on the back end or credit just for testing more kids?
The spin is in saying that “more students than ever are taking AP courses.” They play this angle, similar to the way that some charters feed the “all of our students enrolled in college” nonsense.
Reform will focus on the part of the story that glorifies them. As such, their reporting is necessarily piecemeal.
For those who DO pass, College Board kicks back money to the district for every passing student. My district alone got over $150,000 last year. Wonder why my district is pushing for a gazillion AP courses?
Thanks, Mercedes. I understand some students who took the AP tests didn’t actually take AP courses –which is absolutely absurd to me. Sounds like it’s about bragging rights either way.
Given the commerical interests and vast economic empire of higher education, I would not be surprised if American colleges on the whole are not as selective and rigorous as Finland’s system is.
Many colleges here are of soaringly high quality; others are not.
But we need to have a much more sound way of ascertaining which ones are and aren’t. NCTQ lacks the quality scholarship and very intellectualism it crticizes schools of education for not having.
Excellent instruction and curricula of substance in higher and k-12 education are critical, indispensable components.
But alone, they will not have their full effect if all or most of the other building blocks of public education are being destroyed. One of the main causes or perhaps symptoms of the turmoil education is in today is that true educators and cognitive scientists have not been permitted to populate the round tables of policy and legislation. They are in the minority in that regard.
If we had the Stephen Krashens and Linda Darling Hammonds and actual dedicated reputable classroom teachers at the policy round table, the American landscape would look a lot different today and for the better . . . . .
Examining teacher preparation is critical because it is part and parcel of teacher quality.
But the quality of such examination is also to be rightfully scrutinized. Ideologically driven means of characterizing teacher education is no substitute for robust fact finding and empirical design. The very means NCTQ has used goes against its mission of promoting scholarship and erudition.
Students, teachers, families, and tax payers can ill afford the slanted and untruthful agenda behind NCTQ’s Snickers bar version of satisfying one’s hunger for substance . . . .
I think it is clear that ideology and profits drive most everything, including “education reform” but I think that we should provide better evidence that the practices that we advocate result in successful outcomes for students and those involved in education. We too, are very ideologically driven and I wish that I had a few talking points supported by evidence that I could refer to when trying to demonstrate why the relentless testing of young people is a failed approach in terms of their “education”– evidence rather than a position. Is there a place this is housed?
That is a good question.
KimK55,
Yes there is a place to understand why educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students are failed approaches. Noel Wilson has shown how the many errors in the making of educational standards and the usage and disseminating the results of standardized test are completely invalid. Read and understand his “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.
How Education Reform Works Today in Four Simple Steps
1. Fund research (often with taxpayer support).
• Tell researcher your hypothesis.
• Have researcher gather data.
• Have researcher compare data to your hypothesis.
• Have researcher change data to match your hypothesis.
2. Fund three groups with imposing names
• 1st group warns nation of crisis and announces new research.
• 2nd group awards 1st group for their new research.
• 3rd group writes new laws using other two groups as evidence.
3. Fund lawmaker’s campaigns that will pass new laws.
4. Market goods and services required by new law.
You don’t needs tests, just read examples that people bring to this blog and you can see that the bottom line is the the most important part of corporate charters.