Set aside about 17 minutes and watch this wonderful video. Joshua Katz, a high school teacher, connects all the dots.
This is a truly outstanding presentation. Watch it and help it go viral.
He shows how our present “toxic culture of education” is hurting kids, stigmatizing them as early as third grade by high-stakes standardized testing, while the vendors get rich.
He connects the dots: the testing corporations get rich while our children suffer. He names names: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, ALEC, and more.
The high-stakes tests demoralize many children, label them as worthless, demand “rigor,” while ignoring the children before us, their needs and their potential. As he says, we are judging a fish by whether he can climb a tree and labeling him a failure for his inability to do so. We ignore the development of non-cognitive skills, of character and integrity, as we emphasize test scores over all else. By trying to stuff all children into the same standardized mold, we are hurting them, hurting our society, and benefiting only the for-profit corporations that have become what he calls “the super-villains” of education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OMG, the technocrats let a sane person into one of these meetings.
How did that happen?
Exactly what I was thinking. Is criticism of Ed Reform becoming mainstream in spite of all the money, political influence, and media on the other side?
The Ed Deformers travel from echo chamber to echo chamber. They have created a climate of fear that has silenced people. Teachers and administrators are afraid to speak up for fear of bad evaluations or losing their jobs. Curriculum developers are afraid to speak up for fear of losing contracts. And so the Deformers have NO CLUE who intensely their prescriptions are despised. And the Vichy collaborators with Ed Deform have no clue how much they are despised as well.
But that can’t continue forever. This is a dam that is about to break. We were all sick of NCLB. We are sick to death of SON OF NCLB, the nationalization of the nightmare.
This was a TEDx event. So, it’s a regional TED event, not a national one. And some of the TED people aren’t clueless technocratic philistines.
This reminds me of when Norma and Vivienne Ming got up at SXSWedu and laid into the ersatz “personalization” being done by the computer-adaptive learning folks and the cluelessness of these people about a) the differences among students and b) how demotivating extrinsic punishments and rewards are.
Here’s the great talk by the Mings:
This man speaks the simple truth. It’s what most of us know.
But the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and the testing companies and the politicians owned by them and the Vichy collaborators with these people in our state departments and school districts have created A CLIMATE OF FEAR in which WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS is not said by most teachers BECAUSE IF THEY DARE SAY WHAT THEY KNOW, THEY WILL BE FIRED.
Josuha speaks what most teacher know.
He says, this emperor is naked.
Kids differ. A complex, pluralistic, diverse society needs those differences recognized, celebrated, and built upon.
It is INSANE and ABUSIVE to attempt to mill every student to some “standard.” There are not “standard” students. There are not “common” students.
Every teacher knows this.
Only those who ARE RUNNING EVERYTHING are clueless about it.
cx: There are no “standard” students. There are no “common” ones either.
I wouldn’t call the social and other skills children need, “non-cognitive”. They are cognitive, and how! It would be better to call them “non-academic.”
I thought this as well. But it was a great speech.
Non-verbal and/or nonacademic. Social skills and the arts are generally considered to tap into nonverbal cognitive skills. Non-cognitive involves the behavior the deformers would like us to exhibit. 🙂
Standardized testing means we believe in standardizing students into a mode-median-mean of “individuality”. Yet, real life needs diversity, with a diversity of knowledge and skills, not just a “standardized set” of knowledge and skills. Yes, maybe we believe in some kind of “common core”, knowledge we hold as “essential” to functioning in the US?
Yet, I want some of my students to be farmers, doctors, nurses, journalist, accountants, marketers, etc. because that is what is needed in the real-world.
There are many paths. And our job is to help kids find theirs.
Not to mill them as though they were bolts coming off an assembly line.
Excellent point. And not everything is testable.
Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative?” But they expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever: crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki,
that are crowd sourced and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement
based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts
and subjected to continual critique by teachers who are in charge of their own continual improvement and are given the time in their schedules to subject all the those materials, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
Three more suggestions, all very important:
1. Eliminate the summative standardized tests. They are of no instructional value whatsoever, they waste billions, they distort curricula and pedagogy, and they abuse children.
2. Create a great many tracks. Kids differ. Remake school, as much as possible, to honor this fact.
3. Create an IEP team for every kid, and have that team work with the child, throughout his or her schooling, to navigate those tracks, to discover his or her bliss.
Because our prime directive as educators is to nurture INTRINSIC MOTIVATION to learn and to continue learning throughout life.
Neerav Kingsland @NeeravKingsland · 18m
Why is Boston charter market so good (and higher-performing than NOLA)? Goldstein’s answer: more No Excuses charters http://bit.ly/1pABgKe
This is an example of ideological blindness. They cannot admit that funding matters, because then the whole theory comes crashing down, so they deny what is the elephant in the room.
I noticed this myself, that better per pupil funding attracts better private contractors. It’s obvious in Detroit, where they could not attract reputable charter contractors (according to the emails between the private foundation that is running the public schools and the state actors who pass thru the funding). Detroit doesn’t fund public schools at high enough per pupil levels to get the “prestige” charters. They all passed on Detroit kids, which they can do, because they aren’t actually required to provide a public education. They’re private contractors.
For people who are supposedly so enamored with private sector theory and hope to privatize every public school in the country, they completely ignore market forces when it goes against their argument.
Please help this get viral exposure- he was at TED @ Akron while Michelle Rhee was at TED@Wall Street. If ever there was a 99% versus the 1% moment writ large via TED, this is it.
Here’s what high stakes testing did at my school this year. We now have Jeb Bush’s 3rd grade retention law. All four 3rd grade students who are to be retained are English Language Learners. Two reclassified in 2nd grade, one has been in an ELL program since Kinder and has still not reclassified, and one that breaks my heart is a little girl who has been in country only two years. AZ allows an 18 month exemption for ELLs and the state test. All research says it takes 5-7 years to become fluent in a language. Why are we punishing children who are not truly fluent in English? It’s AZ I know why. The lege likes to punish non-English speakers.
sickening
Patricia,
ELLs are also punished in NJ by being forced to take NJASK “assessments” that are light years beyond their English proficiency levels. Far be it for so called ESL experts to argue the case for the students. Orders come from on high and it is not our place to challenge our superiors.
Time for a class action law suit.
I’m sure it’s happening in your state as well, Patricia, that kids who need special education services are also losing this “race.” They are expected to test at grade level, when the definition of special education is that they must be two standard deviations from “grade level.” It’s unbelievable.
This video made me think of a one of the best articles I have ever read on accountability is Chouinard, J. A. (2013). The case for participatory evaluation in an era of accountability. American Journal of Evaluation, 34(2), 237-253. (http://aje.sagepub.com/content/34/2/237).
She explores participatory accountability or what one might accountability as it should be vs. how it is currently being used as a club.
Anyone know the reference/blog writer who pointed out that it does not matter how much evidence there is to point out the obvious failures of this current system of ed reform as the point is to just demolition the system through demoralization. I read it recently ( past month) can’t remember who to attribute it to.
Can we get Elizabeth Warren on to this- ed reform as financial fraud? The powers that be don’t care, are in power and set the rules and want nothing more than to get the shaky middle grounders to abandon public schools and pour into the charters.
I’ve seen this video. It’s great. I had it on my list to Blog about.
Joshua Katz for U.S. Secretary of Education. He has my vote!
Reblogged this on that Bloody Cat and commented:
As we approach the ACT (having been turned down for fairly simple accommodations that would allow AM to do what she’s capable of), I found this talk quite compelling.
Outstanding TED Talk! Go, Joshua! I want my school board…all school boards…President Obama….everyone to hear this marvelous speech!
Joshua Katz…………You have the ability to speak with clarity and I think you are going to become one of the “spokespeople” for our cause. Congats on a wonderful video and speech.
It’s OK but he doesn’t have an audience there and he is getting a bit too excited for someone talking to an empty room. I’m not so sure this tone advances the argument much.
I disagree.
The video of Joshua Katch on YouTube has generated 24,687 views as of this moment.
That’s not talking to an empty room. And anyone may embed this video in a blog post and spread it that way too. In fact, anyone may copy and paste the https code for this YouTube video and send it out in e-mails urging family and friends to watch.
This is what we call word of mouth. It’s the diamond studded gold standard of public relations. It’s what every PR professional dreams of. Going viral through word of mouth.
We can do that here if everyone who reads this post shares that video.
Let’s take our schools back. It is all about caring relationships over testing accountability.