I reported earlier that the United Opt Out website had been hacked, but that it was fixed and up again. I checked, and there it was. Then I was gone all day because I was lecturing at Syracuse University. When I returned to the hotel, I found this message from Peg Robertson:
“Hi Diane,
So, even though it looks like the website is up, it isn’t. It’s a ghost site. SuperCache was enabled on the site and so we aren’t really sure how long the ghost site will show up. Today we are working to try to retrieve all of the files, then we will have to rebuild the site. But it is complete destroyed internally.
Peggy Robertson”
I asked again if the site was repaired late last night, and she replied,
“The website is destroyed internally – completely gone.
“I currently have my computer guru friend and fellow activist parent whose child opts out (Guerin Green) retrieving all the files for me.
“He has retrieved 727 files thus far today. He has 1,100 more files to retrieve. He is doing this for free. When the files are all retrieved we will rebuild manually. Hard day. I have a request in to the folks at inMotion who hosted our UOO site to see if they can track the hacker or give us any information on the hacker. We will most likely be filing a police report and we will be moving our site to another host (leaving inMotion).”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As atrocious as this theft/vandalism is, it’s also a form of flattery: the so-called reformers must be really frightened if they’re resorting to this. After all, parents are the Sleeping Giant in this process, and if they withhold their kids from the Data Mongers, then this house of cards collapses.
This is a measure of the fear of informed and active parents that is circulating among the so-called reformers; if 20% of parents consistently opt their children out of the tests, no more VAM, no more school closings based on test scores, no more fraudulent David Coleman ruling over the lives of teachers and students.
Michael Fiorillo: I agree.
This is a sure sign that the education establishment is only feigning indifference to those who are for a “better education for all.”
Just as they refuse to risk further weaken their position by debating Diane Ravitch in open public discussion and debate.
What a sneaky cowardly bunch. I think I will have to coin a new term: eduthugs.
Ugh.
😎
The trouble is this is all coming down from D.C. through fake Democrats Obama and Duncan. Unless we have people in there who actually care about public education and refuse to support ANY of these “reforms,” this country is doomed.
The USSC has, through literally making things up, made it easier for billionaires to influence politicians even worse than before.
I disagree that Obama is a “fake Democrat” in the current sense of the Democratic Party Today’s Democrats have followed in the footsteps of the GOP to some extent, in that they have become bought and paid for by corporate interests. Democrats have become owned by the corporate education reformers. Without them, they lose a significant part of their party’s campaign funding.
I think we need to wait to see the results of the police investigation before we start pointing fingers at anyone for this act of vandalism. While I am routinely astounded at the complete lack of morals the leaders of this country demonstrate, I still hold a glimmer of hope that they didn’t blatantly disregard laws and maliciously destroy a website simply for opposing their point of view. Surely they have to be politically smarter than that to have gotten into their current positions. They are the obvious suspects but it seems a little to arrogant, even for them, to launch such an attack. Part of me is hoping they are that dumb and will get caught so legal action can be taken but another part of me hopes it was either a simple mistake or a misguided youth trying out his hacking skills. The later will provide me with some hope that we can work with the powers that be to come to a reasonable solution.
NCmom: my first reaction [see above] was a bit hasty; your caution is well advised. I hope that the self-styled “education reformers” haven’t sunk this low.
However, I am not holding my breath.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
“The later will provide me with some hope that we can work with the powers that be to come to a reasonable solution.”
Je Je Je Je Je, Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.!!!!
There is no reasonable solution to intractable idiologies (purposely misspelled) such are educational standards and standardized testing. These educational malpractice cause harm to many students through the sorting and separating function that they purport to be able to “accurately” do. Well they can’t do what they say they do and in that fact alone we should reject them and not “work with the powers that be” because there can never be “a reasonable solution”.
To more fully understand why read Noel 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.
Hi Duane – Thanks for taking the time and effort to read and understand Wilson’s paper – some 255 pages in length. I had begun reading this some time ago (February 22) but got sidetracked.
From a strictly numerical standpoint, assessment tests do provide a measure of how each test-taker scored relative to those answers that were deemed correct by the test-makers.
These tests also provide a measure of each test-taker’s score relative to the population of test-takers. In fact, the distribution of these scores is the most important factor in interpreting the results.
And apparently that’s enough information to satisfy both the test-takers and the test makers. Unless, of course, a third party gets hold of the test, analyzes the questions, and shows that one or more of the questions is invalid for one or more reasons. Or gets hold of the scores and through analysis suspects that the answers may have been known to the test-takers a priori.
Regardless: Wilson’s assertion, with your concurrence, that the tests are not capable of measuring what they purport to measure is correct. My assertion is based on the fact that a student can achieve all of the objectives of a course of study over the period of instruction/learning and still perform poorly on one of these assessment tests for any number of reasons. Unfortunately assessment testing is the way we have chosen to make our assessments of individual achievement for many, many activities and purposes, regardless of Wilson’s conclusions regarding such tests. He, himself says so best.
1. “…as the study indicates, the world in which assessment
resides is far from that rational world to which much of the writing in this thesis appeals.”
2. “The work is immoral in that it conceptually threatens the inviolability of standards and their measurement, a lynch pin of the cultural production of the modern individual.”
3. “…it is revolutionary in that action based on its conclusions would destabilize to a point of destruction many, probably most, educational and work practices that result in the categorization of people.”
4. “What is challenged in this work is the myth that this complexity can be reduced to simple linear dimension by some sort of examination, as a preliminary to comparing with some standard of adequacy somewhere defined.”
5. And finally his parting shot: What is shown is that such categorizations are inevitably permeated with confusion, uncertainty and error, that genuine rather than fudged estimates of much of this error can be made, and that this particular violation of the human mind and spirit will continue… ” [despite our protestations to the contrary]
I can’t argue with any of these conclusions. However, we can work to change the way student achievement is measured. And that is by tests applied by the teacher, or groups of teachers at the classroom level. Wilson uses the Ph. D. thesis committee as an example. In this situation there is a written document demonstrating the student’s achievements. There is often a demonstrable physical representation of that achievement. And there are at most-times oral arguments presented to a panel of judges.
It seems to me, if a student is able to demonstrate the skills necessary to accurately and successfully produce each of these results on a much smaller scale for the purpose intended, then that student has shown sufficient mastery to be permitted to attempt the next level of proficiency – but not before. In other words, I am proposing a curriculum which approach is based on an individualized plan, conducted at the student’s pace, where only demonstrated mastery of the preordained objectives is the necessary and sufficient condition for continuing to new levels of challenge.
In order to implement this approach, the concept of teaching itself must change from an activity of imparting knowledge, to one of assessing knowledge. The teacher is an expert, or should be in the field of interest. The student is the learner. Instead of the teacher constantly having to demonstrate that expertise, sometimes on an hourly basis, the onus should fall on the student, saving the teacher’s time for evaluation, and for helping students answer questions that are proving most vexing. The student is charged with defining the problem, gathering the resources necessary for solving it, learning the necessary to skills to accomplish that, solving the problem, and finally demonstrating those newly acquired skills to an impartial judge or judges: the teacher or teachers. Now we are talking about real education.
Actually, we know for a fact that the so-called reformers are capable of doing far worse than this; people who seek to destroy a priceless public good in order to feed their insatiable avarice are easily capable of taking down a web site.
We already know what these people are capable of. We just don’t know if they’re guilty in this instance.
agreed!
I did not say they weren’t capable of it. I am simply waiting for proof before I going throwing around baseless accusations. For all I know the host downloaded some horrible computer virus that destroyed all the files and just hasn’t realized yet. Not all the facts have been discovered. I am very hesitant to believe in conspiracy theories. They tend to polarize people and strip one’s arguments of legitimacy. This is a highly emotional issue; rightly so, because it involves our children, so it is difficult to keep one’s emotions in check. The “other side” is both more likely to listen and will have a harder time discrediting us if we are logical and steadfast.
“The later will provide me with some hope that we can work with the powers that be to come to a reasonable solution.”
You mean the people we have:
Written to.
Tweeted.
Blogged with
Petitioned.
Sent Diane’s books to.
And numerous other strategies, attempts at dialogue, search for “common ground”.
Those folks?
They have shown no interest in hearing from us.
Not holding my breath of any sort of reasonable solution from them.
The tide is turning. I remain confident that the democratic process will right this wrong. If we stick together and continue to demand action using legitimate data and proper channels, we can effect a change. We cannot throw up our hands and claim to be victims or even worse resort to nefarious tactics to be heard. Elections are coming and this is going to be a big issue. Continue to educate others. Get the word out. You may be surprised at how few people know what CC really is. This is a groundswell of malcontent that, if we continue to feed it, will be impossible to ignore. I’m on your side and I encourage everyone to make as much noise as possible. Common Core will go down sooner if this movement stays beyond reproach.
Random attacks on poorly protected websites happen all the live long day. I agree in that until we have actual evidence this was an intentional sabotage, I’m not going to believe that.
This was not done by a normal hacker. This is not a site that would even remotely be on their radar. My guess, a company with an interest in not having the opt-out movement to succeed
Pearson claims to employ 40,000 people, many of them with advanced computer skills…
I have to disagree. If the site is found through everyday search engines, and it’s poorly protected, any random hacker can find it and destroy it.
Yes, but why on the first day of NYS test madness and the same day NYS announced they would sever ties with inBloom? The day after NY republican candidate announced he was having his own children refuse the tests? Interesting timing.
Every table in the site’s database was completely mangled, and unrepairable. Somebody went thru extreme efforts to destroy the site.
Please define “poorly protected”. Be very specific.
What would you consider well protected? Again, please be very specific.
And explain your statement that any hacker can find (obviously..people generally want others to find their site) and destroy it (apparently, since it has been taken down). What does this prove?
You seem to be intimating that you know a great deal about hacking and hacker mentality.
Do elaborate.
Nimbus: Coincidence != Cause.
guegreen: Any random hacker could have done the same.
Arig: Insufficiently strong passwords are a leading cause. “Hacker mentality” is possessed by all experienced techies — we know what makes sites brittle. If you know anything about running a website, you know that many attacks are random, and that a website should be as protected as much as possible. If you want more specifics, you will pay my consulting fee (or look it up yourself).
The fact that this occurred DURING our national convention in Denver speaks to the fact that it wasn’t some random hack. And to be able to get in and lock out the admin, this is no amateur. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck……Everyone needs to take off the rose colored glasses, these people do not want their cash flow thwarted and they certainly don’t want any democracy.
You don’t need rose-colored glasses to assume this was a coincidence. Occam’s razor suggests this was a poorly protected site, and the hacker was random, probably from a foreign country that acts as a haven for these folks. You need actual evidence to show that something more nefarious occurred.
Nothing in the logs suggested an attack foreign country. Stop your groundless speculation
Lou,
You seem very invested in assuring everyone the take down of this site was some random foreign hacker.
Yet you seem to have no first hand knowledge of this situation.
Why so sure?
guegreen: It’s not groundless if you have ever run websites before. Besides, why should I stop speculating (based on my real-world tech experience) while everyone else is running around like chickens with their heads cut off making all sorts of guesses?
Ang: I never said I was certain. I said that the scenario is very common and that common explanations should be looked at first. Also, I’m unsure why you would have an issue about me that applies to yourself, in that you also have no firsthand knowledge of the situation. I _can_ speculate intelligently because I’ve run many websites and have investigated many of these events before.
Also guegreen: Do you have direct access to the logs? Before you come after me, you need to answer that question.
I agree. These people are afraid of the public fighting back. Big money is paying for this.
Peggy – This may not have been a random event, but nevertheless it was a destructive one. My first question is: Why wasn’t your site backed-up by inMotion? It seems inconceivable to me as a computer professional that it was not. My second question is: Why haven’t you backed-up the site yourself? When you upload your files to inMotion you should be saving them. In fact, you should have an image of the entire website generated in your own storage facilities on an incremental basis daily. It is asking for trouble in today’s computing environment not to have reliable back-ups for all your important files.
I realize that you are not a computer professional, but administering a website is no trivial task and you apparently have been doing that for some time. You need to make the time for creating a reliable backup capability. Don’t even think about putting up a new site until you have this capability. One more suggestion: create a hardcopy document of the most important files on your site and distribute it as a PDF file. Take a look at my proposed “Handbook of Opposition to Common Core in New York State” (on my own website) as an example.
http://garrettahughes.com/EducationFolder/education.htm
Peggy – Just thought of one more thing you can do to protect your site. The easiest way for a hacker to access your site and wreak havoc is to know your own passwords. Make sure you check all your own devices that you use to access your website for spyware of the type that records your keystrokes. If I were a hacker, that’s the approach I would use – and never, ever share your passwords with anyone. And cover your laptop cameras. Plus learn how to create really secure passwords. It is easier than you may imagine.
Peggy – Another possibility, and your people are probably already aware of this, the attackers are riding the data submitted to the database on your website. I have never worked with databases directly, but was surprised to discover from a friend the variety of techniques that can be used in this manner. More surprising is the frequency of attacks that web hosting companies experience from this type of attack. It makes sense – the data is what you must let in. In this case the data has to be “filtered” properly to screen out malicious code. Turns out this is an oft used technique and is a function of the vulnerability of the code used in manipulating the database. Hope you are able to avoid this type of attack in the future.