Paul Thomas here critiques Jay Greene’s claim that schools of choice should not be subject to the same regime of standardized testing as public schools.
Thomas warns about the numerous academics and “think tanks” that are financed by interested parties and thus do not offer disinterested advice. Greene is a strong advocate of charters and vouchers; his “Department of Educational Reform” at the University of Arkansas is subsidized by the Walton Family Foundation, which promotes alternatives to public education.
Thomas concludes:
“If standardized test data are harmful for determining educational quality, student achievement, and teacher impact, let’s end the inordinate weight of standardized testing, period. And let’s acknowledge that the past thirty years of high-stakes accountability has misrepresented the quality of public schools and likely inaccurately increased public support for school choice.
“If charter schools are a compelling option because they allow schools relief from burdensome bureaucracy, just relieve all public schools from that bureaucracy and then no need for the charter school shuffle.
“Neither of the above will be embraced, however, by school choice advocates because they are not seeking education reform; they are seeking a privatized education system.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree. If charters are released from.the burden of standardized testing, then eliminate it for all schools. It feels like we are victims of sleight of hand games here. What is truly puzzling is that, without any proof of success with students, tax money is being funneled into these experiments that often fail…fail much worse than public schools. Yet it continues.
One of the biggest problems with public schools has been the idea that learning can be standardized. The more time that is spent collecting “data” the less time is available for exploring and learning.
Constant comparisons and money spent on efforts to “prove” a constantly changing “position” wastes time that could have been spent on moving forward. The very fact that standardized tests have been given midyear and used to determine “growth” as well as not having tests normed for age, socioeconomic status, native language spoken, and learning problems skews the “results” making the data invalid.
Bottom line, testing is a waste of time and money.
deb: you remind me of something Oscar Wilde wrote—
“Questions are never indiscrete, answers sometimes are.”
Thank you for being indiscrete.
😃
The failure of the leading charterites/privatizers to walk their own talk reminds me of what an old dead French guy once wrote:
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” [François de la Rochefoucauld]
And never forget, when it comes to $tudent $ucce$$, self-contradictory word salad makes a lot of ₵ent¢.
Rheeally!
For the rest of us, not really…
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. Love the last line!
I grew up with a fear of lions, tigers, and bears. Today I fear common core, testing, and the textbooks cycle.
Yesterday I held in my hand a textbook titled “Algebra 1 Common Core”.
The publisher of this textbook is no other than “PEARSON” the testing giant and one of the great common core “pushers!” Change common core, sell new test, sell new textbooks, oh my!
No seat at the table=big chair at the “educational trough.”
Lions, tigers, and bears No Common Core, Testing, and Textbooks
No seat at the table Big seat at the trough
Sent from my iPhone
“Neither of the above will be embraced, however, by school choice advocates because they are not seeking education reform; they are seeking a privatized education system.”
That’s why all of this is so frustrating.
And people just want to be right. They don’t want to actually work on solutions for how public schooling can address poverty (because the achievement gap is poverty).
“They don’t want to actually work on solutions for how public schooling can address poverty (because the achievement gap is poverty).”
There is a reason why the public schools should be leary of “addressing poverty”. It’s because that is not the purpose of public schooling. Now do we have to deal with the effects of poverty so that we can do our constitutionally mandated purpose? Of course we have to deal with the effects but not the causes of poverty. Big difference. It does, however take a lot of money just to deal with the effects of poverty on the teaching and learning process which doesn’t mean that the governement shouldn’t be doing something on its part.
Isn’t it obvious by now that it was never about “great schools” (as measured by test scores) it was always about “choice”?
The response to “wait a minute, these schools aren’t any better than the publicly-run schools they replaced!” is always a conclusory “parents choose them, so therefore they have value”.
Funny how it never works that way when they’re closing public schools. Looked to me a like a lot of Chicago parents didn’t want their neighborhood schools replaced by a charter, despite low test scores. They were completely ignored and then when they could no longer be ignored they were flat-out lied to.
Why don’t public schools have value apart from test scores if private schools do? They’re all publicly-funded now, under ed reform. What’s the difference?
It is not about choice. It is not about improvement. It is about those who have more than enough, wanting more. Starting at 32:30 in this video Pete Seeger said it in 2004. Watch about two minutes and see, if you don’t want to keep watching this great soul. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/28/we_shall_overcome_remembering_folk_icon
Paul Thomas says: ““If charter schools are a compelling option because they allow schools relief from burdensome bureaucracy, just relieve all public schools from that bureaucracy and then no need for the charter school shuffle.”
OK, so Thomas is saying that we should free public schools from collective bargaining obligations, from being required to hire only certified teachers (despite evidence suggesting that certification makes little difference, if any), from having to provide raises solely based on seniority and graduate degrees (there is no evidence that education graduate degrees have any merit).
If that’s what he’s saying, most charter advocates would love him. Their agenda isn’t “privatization,” it’s getting rid of rules that they think are inhibiting good education and that are made for the benefit of the adults in the system rather than the children.
It appears that charters are a way to bypass federal education mandates,IDEA etc. You are referencing employment issues that actually make a case for a strong learning environment. Look at the study of schools in Finland.
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