The OECD has created tests that schools can administer to their students in order to compare them to the nations of the world.
Some schools have gleefully administered the tests, happy to discover how their students compare to children of the same age in the rest of the world.
Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education this year, warned that it was not valid to compare schools to national systems.
The OECD test has sponsors now but it will eventually be a money-maker:
“Although these early administrations have been partly subsidized by private philanthropies, most districts will have to pay $11,500 per school in order to participate starting next year, according to Peter Kannam at America Achieves, a nonprofit that has been recruiting new schools and coordinating exchanges among participants.”
http://www.americaachieves.org/oecd#faq
“The development of this new diagnostic tool by the OECD was made possible by America Achieves, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Kern Family Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Craig and Barbara Barrett Foundation, National Public Education Support Fund, the Stuart Foundation, and the Rodel Charitable Foundation of Arizona.”
Many educators can’t resist the temptation to administer yet another test. What would they do without data? Would they know how to diagnose children’s needs and plan for education without external tests to guide them? Surely, they cannot trust teachers to write their own tests or evaluate student needs.
In the ideal world of the future, school will be devoted entirely to testing, preferably to tests created solely by Pearson and/or the OECD. All learning will be standardized, and all children will be test-taking machines, programmed to find the right answer to every question. Th questions and the answers will be the sole property of Pearson and/or OECD.
Any learning not on the test will be considered a waste of time. Those who choose to think for themselves will be considered outliers, rebels, outcasts, possibly dangers to society. All “knowledge” will be strictly monitored by the Pearson/OECD bureaucracy.
The rules of life in this new society will be:
“We measure what we treasure.”
“You can’t control what you can’t measure.”
“Whatever cannot be quantified does not matter.”
“All problems can be solved by measurement and data.”
“Test scores determine one’s life potential.”
“Test scores are the best measure of students, teachers, and schools.”
Welcome to our Brave New World.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s just get rid of all the tests.
How long until OECD successfully bribes… I mean lobbies The Congress to make these tests…wait for it… MANDATORY!?
$11,500 PER SCHOOL!? What wonderful things could that money buy?
*could* buy. I shouldn’t type so fast.
Indeed! Welcome to our “brave new world”. I love the criteria – rules of life – enumerated here on how “humans” are evaluated. Humans or widgets? Answer: obvious.
That’s quite the poem.
If teachers/parents don’t fight the testing madness until it’s over, we’ve allowed ourselves to be controlled by government and corporations. I’d like to know the WHO (superintendent, mayor, school board, etc.) that is accepting these tests “gleefully”. I doubt that it would be the teachers. And I doubt that title schools’ principals would do this willingly. And I also doubt that I would survive administering another test after 5 continuting weeks of SBAC testing. It is a joke and a waste of instructional time. But how ironic that instructional time is a waste of time in itself as we teach to the test.
I am seeing how SOME teachers are losing their craft and are dependent on CCSS curriculum/tests to lead their instruction. The sad thing is that they are oblivious to the changes taking place of their pedigogical view as a teacher. Most are so overwhelmed its as if they don’t know what hit them. Those who are informed are quitting or retiring. The responsibilities of a teacher have become humanely impossible to achieve.
Diane,
You state:
“In the ideal world of the future, schools will be devoted entirely to testing.
All learning will be standardized, and all (students) will be test-taking machines, programmed to find the right answer to every question.”
To learn LITERALLY how this will happen, please click on “Education Termination” at my Website: http://www.mountainmaninsights.org
You may laugh, you may cry, or perhaps both. The entire process for accomplishing this is clearly described in Education Termination. It will be a triumph of the politicians over the teachers!
Meantime, I wish you healing from your knee operation. My prayers are with you.
Sincerely, Henry Kranz
I understand why it is hard to resist the temptation to give tests to your district to show the skeptical public that NATIONAL test scores have nothing to do with your LOCAL schools…. but after working for over 30 years as an administrator in public schools in several different states and districts I can attest to the fact that no amount of PR concerning LOCAL schools can offset the repetitious message from the main stream media that ALL U.S. public schools are “failing”… and having Presidents from Reagan onward and Education Secretaries from Bell onward echoing that message has only made matters worse…
Here’s a conundrum that has surfaced from reading your blog: if we push back against standardized testing the message from politicians is that we don’t want accountability… and if we use standardized testing results to disprove the meme that ALL schools are NOT failing we are feeding the notion that standardized tests are a valid means of measuring school performance.
The only way out of this vicious circle is to develop some metric for measuring school quality that is more valid than the standardized testing, a method that has three BIG advantages: it’s cheap, relatively easy to administer, and issues data that is seemingly precise. Maybe you could use your blog to crowd source a better way to measure school performance— because if those of us who value public eduction can’t come up with one we will continue to be governed by the rules of the new society you outlined in this post…
In the words of Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The best strategy is offense.
Private schools are dangerous. The children of the rich develop affluenza, there, and then, they maim, kill or rob good people.
I really believe that if college education departments required all of their graduates to have a 3.7 GPA and teachers were paid like executives, there would be no need to police teachers and oversee data. We could trust that teachers are “experts”. I used to believe that Democrats were open-minded, flexible and cared about human welfare, was fair to all etc… The Obama administration is proving that the Democratic party is controlled by corporations as much as Republicans and that it is elitist and arrogant. Hyper control of teachers and students with data to prove “worth” reminds me of what the Nazis were doing. We should be worried. The density of requirements in the Common Core Standards carries the stench of control. The propaganda (“college and career ready” “rigorous” etc. etc.) is laughable when one considers that most of us were college and career ready without No Child Left Behind. Schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods needed our assistance and we let them down and made school more painful for vulnerable students. It is time we spend money on what DOES work: the support services of tutoring and counseling, smaller class sizes, higher teacher pay, higher entry requirements of teachers…Let’s get real with real people and affect real change!
What’s particularly disheartening is Joshua Starr is buying into this. He once called for a moratorium on high-stakes testing and it was rumored Arne blocked DeBlasio from naming him NYC chancellor. Now, he’s giving credence to a test that’s mainly used for political purposes.
The deformers will not be satisfied until education is a game show with one big Leader Board and all student’s names on it, showing just where they stand in the Race to the Top.
Education modeled on American Idol.
Sickening.
Welcome to the new Great American K-12 Education Game Show:
Data Wall
And look for the new
Data Wall, International Edition!
Rheeality television as its finest.
A little summer reading list:
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann
Intelligence and How to Get It, by Richard Nisbett
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by Diane Ravitch
Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered, by Gerald Bracey
War against the Weak, by Edwin Black
Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka , Marion J. Lamb, and Anna Zeligowski
You’re welcome.
All tests all the time!
After all, life is just a test!
And the oligarchs are giving it.
So, be eternally gritful.
And you just might get a big reward.
Love how you toss and catch the right words.
This is another example of how “non-profit” organizations have figured out how to make a profit off of taxpayer money. Apparently, it doesn’t even matter to OECD that they are supporting the child abuse tactic of excessive testing that is promoted by politicians and other proponents of corporate education “reform.”
OECD us effectively helping countries to game the system, too, similar to how Pearson does that with their test prep products. Instead, they should spend their time getting China to test students on PISA in more than just the one city of Shanghai.
Thoroughly disgusting.
America Achieves was founded by Jon Schnur, who also co-founded New Leaders for New Schools. When New Leaders was created, it was closely tied to KIPP, Teach for America, and McKinsey. Schnur is one of those people –– like Wendy Kopp –– who has never taught, and who has parlayed his political connections into becoming an “expert” in public education (big eye roll).
Lo and behold, sitting on the advisory board of directors for American Achieves is charlatan Wendy Kopp. This is a woman, who despite all the anecdotal and empirical evidence on the deleterious effects of high-stakes testing, says that “I have not seen that standardized tests make the profession less attractive.” Kopp uses phrases like “building systems for accountability,” and then adds the zinger that “offering parents the ability to choose their schools is the ultimate form” of accountability. Kopp has received big funding from the Broad Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, and the Robertson Foundation (not to mention the Gates and Walton Foundations and a slew of Wall Street firms [Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase] and hedge-funders).
Included on the teacher advisory board is one Pam Williams from Georgia, an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Core. Pam Williams says that it takes “pain…to grow,” and the Common Core is needed ” to grow the achievement of our students.” Absolutely untrue. In Georgia, poverty has increased markedly, and the state is one of the national leaders in cutting education funding. But to people like Williams – who says nothing at all about poverty, or reductions in funding – the Common Core will fix everything. And pigs will fly.
America Achieves is funded by, among others, the Gates Foundation, and by the Arnold and Kern Foundations. Gates has funded the Common Core.
The right-wing Arnold Foundation supports avidly the privatization of public pensions.
The Arnold Foundation was founded by a hedge-funder who resists accountability and transparency in derivatives markets but calls for them in education. Its executive director, Denis Cabrese was former chief of staff to DIck Armey, the Texas conservative who now formerly headed up FreedomWorks, the group that helps to pull the Tea Party strings and gets funding from the billionaire arch-conservative Koch brothers.
The Kern Family Foundation is based on what it calls “the traditions of free enterprise…ordered liberty and good character.” The Kern Foundation applauds Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute for explaining in his book The Battle, that “free enterprise is fundamentally a system of moral values such as honesty, courage, diligence, thrift and service to others.” Sure. Tell that to all of those who were hurt and cheated and swindled –– and left without homes and jobs –– because of the rampant fraud and corruption on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms.
Schnur sends his kids to The Edgemont School, in Montclair, New Jersey. Edgemont is a very small (about 300) magnet Montessori school that believes “in educating the whole child to the fullest potential through the Montessori principles of student-centered/learner-friendly practices in a peaceful academic environment that fosters the cognitive, social, physical, and emotional development of the child.”
At Edgemont, which claims its Montessori philosophy and practices are fully “aligned with the Common Core State Standards,” about half the students are white, and about 5.3 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, down more than 2/3 what it was several years back. There is a huge learning gap between whites and minorities and between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students.
Using the “accountability” metrics that Schnur advocates, the school is mediocre. The New Jersey state report cards says this:
“This school’s academic performance is about average when compared to schools across the state. Additionally, its academic performance is about average when compared to its peers. This school’s college and career readiness lags in
comparison to schools across the state. Additionally, its college and career readiness lags in comparison to its peers. This school’s student growth performance is about average when compared to schools across the state. Additionally, its student
growth performance is about average when compared to its peers.”
One has to wonder why Jon Schnur’s “expertise” is not working miracles there. Or maybe Schnur is just a hypocrite.