Mark Weber, who blogs as Jersey Jazzman, here describes the legacy of Chris Cerf’s three years as State Commissioner of Education in New Jersey.
Cerf has announced that he is leaving to join Amplify, the education division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which is headed by Cerf’s former boss Joel Klein. Cerf was deputy chancellor in New York City when Klein was chancellor. Together, they will sell hardware and software to the nation’s schools on behalf of Murdoch.
Weber sums Cerf’s legacy thus:
More state control.
More emphasis on standardized testing.
More inequitably funded districts.
More inexperienced district leaders.
More intensely segregated districts.
More unfunded mandates.
More demoralized and burned out teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Could someone please start to compile a “report card” on all of the Broadies? Let’s expose these shills for what they are.
I usually say, “Throw the hand grenade and run,” in commenting on these situations. In this case, “Throw the bunker buster and run!” How dare he!
Good op ed in the Asbury Park Press. Maybe the revolving door action of Mr. Cerf has finally led local media to begin to question some of these “reform” initiatives:
“Cerf’s successor will undoubtedly be on board with Christie’s policies. But that person also needs to come into the job with an open mind about proper introduction of Common Core, and the broad embrace of charter schools, among other initiatives. New Jersey needs reforms that work, not those shaped to advance an anti-public education agenda.”
“Anti-public school agenda” strikes me as a real departure from the lock-step backing of anything and everything labeled “reform”, because it shifts the focus from charters and vouchers to how reform was sold to the public. We were told this was about improving public schools, not replacing them with privately-run schools.
How has Cerf’s work benefitted or improved existing public schools? That should be the measure for a state-level leader. The public were never told “reform” meant abandoning existing public schools, or they never would have gone along with it.
http://www.app.com/article/20140214/NJOPINION01/302140023/Editorial-Cerf-s-successor-needs-open-mind
“. . . an open mind about proper introduction of Common Core. . .”
There can be no “proper introduction” of CCSS as that educational malpractice suffers all the errors and invalidities that Wilson identifies (and more) that render the whole process “vain and illusory”, harming many students along the way. See 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 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.
I actually wouldn’t have had any problem with the Common Core as standards.
My problem with it is based on my decade-long experience watching ed reform at work.
I think it will be reduced to yet another standardized test program, and it will be used to batter public schools because I can’t find any evidence that the people pushing it value public schools. I also object to how much it will cost because public schools have lost funding under ed reformers.
I think ed reformers, both Republicans and Democrats, would just as soon go to a system of publicly-funded, privately-run schools.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to hire people who don’t value public schools to run public schools. I don’t see this working under any set of circumstances, because of that fatal flaw.
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to hire people who don’t value public schools to run public schools. I don’t see this working under any set of circumstances, because of that fatal flaw.”
Exactly why NY is a mess!
I think Cerf’s retirement at this unseemly junction might indicate a more specific motive than the general pattern of rats deserting sinking ships for nearby garbage scows.
I’m wondering if there isn’t a smoking memo somewhere, about contracts to amplify, or dealings with the pink hula hoop, or some other area reporters might be getting warmer on. It makes the Christie administration look weak, but it also moves Cerf’s coverup acticvities a few steps from public disclosure requests.
I hope so, but I think the bipartisan nature of ed reform works against transparency and disclosure.
One of the great things about having opposition is it provides a political incentive for one side to keep the other side honest.
We don’t have that push-pull with ed reform. There’s no political incentive for Democrats to provide rigorous oversight or push for disclosure because half of them are on board. Anything that implicates Christie in NJ will inevitably involve Democrats. They’re investigating themselves.
This is what is going on not only in New Jersey but across the country. The agenda is very clear it is the reporters who are paid to tell the happy story and we who read and do not question or act. He was hired with his pretend education expertise to destroy public education for students and we allowed him to be successful.
The video promotion for One Newark is really interesting. It clearly promotes charter schools. Maybe they don’t even see the bias against publicly-run schools and towards privately-run schools, ed reformers.
Charter marketing people talk about “creating demand”, which is a business phrase used in the roll-out of a new product. These promotional videos are part of that.
http://vimeo.com/83888614
In the lexicon of so-called reformers: “Winning!”
Its interesting how much one can make in the field of education, aside from the most important people, the teachers!
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor, please ‘cash in’ and get the hell out of Connecticut as soon possible.