This poll of DC insiders shows a deep pessimism about the prospects for Common Core and reauthorization of NCLB.
Most interesting observations:
• “Any bandwidth Congress has seems to be devoted to re‐litigating the health care act.”
• “There’s no sense of compromise and no incentive on either side to try to compromise.”
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
I am trying to reach you about speaking in Vail. Can you email or call me?
Alby
303-520-4962
alby@asegall.com
Abby, please write to my email posted on my website.
I don’t give out personal information on the blog.
NCLB was never popular with most teachers. The 2014 guarantee was evidence enough that it was wrong-minded. As it morphed into district comparisons and so-called winners and losers, it became more distasteful. The more focus that has been placed on tests as indications of good and bad schools and teachers, all the while stressing kids to the point of tears, has sealed its demise.
God, what a fiasco!
Reblogged this on Crazy Crawfish's Blog and commented:
Supporters of CCSS, PARCC, and Arne Duncan starting to see the writing on the wall.
Wonder who will support Duncan longer, Jindal or Obama?
What about supporters of Smarter Balanced Assessment?
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”
So true and prescient. Arne should stick to :
Take it away, Kurtis Blow.
Reblogged this on @ THE CHALK FACE and commented:
I think this is an enormously significant report. Thanks to Diane Ravitch for getting the word out on this.
“Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”
See page 8 of Whiteboard’s report for the statement about Duncan:
Click to access Sept%202013%20-%20Education%20Insider%20(Tracking%20Measures,%20Common%20Core,%20Higher%20Education).pdf
Political appointments like Duncan and Spellings have done nothing except transform the department into the US Department of Corporate Education with Broad, Murdoch, Rhee, Gates, for-profit charters and Pearson’s lobbyists in charge of operations. Spellings and Duncan have funneled billions in federal grants to corporations like Amplify/inBloom/Wireless Generation and Pearson without independent conflict free results. They continue to promote testing nonsense in the name of education and misuse the term accountability every time they have the stage even though they know parents are paying close attention in every state.
The devil is in the details. Read the bios of the insider “team” at Whiteboard Advisors. Gene Hickok, Whiteboard team member claims to be an architect of NCLB and responsible for implementation. He claims to have earned a national reputation as a reformer who embraced charter schools. WOW!!!
http://www.whiteboardadvisors.com/node/612
I loved this line from the Whiteboard Advisors website:
Education Insider is a free monthly report that provides real-time insights on federal education policy trends, debates, and issues—from the handful of decision makers that are driving the process.
“the handful of decision makers that are driving the process”
I could not have said it better myself. Yes, that’s exactly what we have–a handful of insiders making totalitarian, top-down decisions that take away the autonomy of every teacher, principal, curriculum coordinator, superintendent, and curriculum designer in the country. and usurp state sovereignty in matters of standards, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.
I notice that their question about support for the common core in a recent edition of Ed Insider doesn’t even have categories for opposition to it. The ranking is from very weak support to very strong support.
How much do you love fearless leader? Do you love him this much or THIS MUCH?
And they call this research.
sigh
That’s one reason why the US Department of Corporate Education must be abolished – “the handful of decision makers that are driving the process” and are hired or placed in certain positions of power by those who want to destroy local public schools for financial gain.
I’m encouraged by the developing knowledge base of parents who are following the issues. Reformers can’t stand up to parents in every local community. Reform talking points are now ignored by parents.
Rhee, Huffman, Bennett, Duncan, Bush, Scott, Coleman, Klein, Murdoch, Gates and others are circling the reform wagons.
I will drink to the demise of the Common Core, I only hope it is not replaced with something worse. It is time for a rational discussion of “standards.” I won’t reiterate Wilson on standards, but his work would be a good starting point. Public Education should not be business’ training program, let them invest in good people. They will then have an incentive to keep them and pay them. They would not want trade secrets walking, nor would they want the cost of constantly paying replacements. There was something to be said for the “old days.” I trust Duane Swacker will be along shortly….cue 3,2,1…..
Yes, Yes, Yes, a thousand Yeses!!!
Thanks Old Teacher for bringing up Wilson. Maybe just maybe the Quixotic Quest Bandwagon is gaining passengers and momentum.
And I haven’t included anything about using the term “standard” and the uspoken implications of that term in my summary of his work which makes it doubly important that everyone read the dissertation (and not just my measly summary) and understand just how insidious these educational malpractices are. See: “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 logical 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 crap 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.
Thanks, Diane, for sharing this report. Do you, or anyone else here, see major differences between the PARCC and SBAC efforts to develop assessments? If so, what are they?
This report reports differences in whether the two are on the right or wrong tracks. As of Sept 2013, only 27% se PARCC on the “right track” as compared to 56% who see SBAC as on the “right track.” I don’t know anything about the differences between these two groups and am interested in any thoughts people have. Thanks.