Frank Breslin, retired teacher of foreign languages and history, calls for Congressional hearings about the cost and misuse of testing.
He points out that test scores are used to close public schools, fire teachers, and privatize schools, even though charters do not get better results than public schools.
He warns that the federal government has used testing to impose its failed ideas on schools, eviscerating local control. Breslin concludes that the best way to end federal intrusion is to abolish the Department of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Its time for congressional hearings about the validity of much of the reform movement, and definitely the lack of oversight of charters and putting $ above the kids, when “its all about the kids.” Many of those in Congress have the elites’ monies in their pockets…so rheely what can we expect of anything there?
I don’t think there will be any regulation of charters out of DC. Even those who admit that there are bad charter schools make suggestions that are NOT regulation but instead simply more market-based mechanisms, more “relinquishment”.
This is Arne Duncan, the nations most prominent charter school promoter:
ARNE DUNCAN: The CREDO report last week was absolutely a wake-up call, even if you dispute some of its conclusions or its language. The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and even third-rate schools to continue to exist. Your goal should always be quality, not quantity.
Charter authorizers need to do a better job of holding schools accountable, and the charter schools need to support them loudly and sincerely. I absolutely applaud the work that the Alliance is doing with the National Association of Charter Schools Authorizers to strengthen academic and operational quality. We need that. We also need to be willing to hold low-performing charters accountable.
That’s not regulation. He’s suggesting that charter authorizers “do a better job”. This is from the US Department of Education in a Democratic administration. This is as far as the DC “conversation” goes on regulating charters.
If there’s any regulation of charters, it will come from the states. DC is hopeless.
They don’t regulate for-profit colleges now, and MOST of that funding is federally-subsidized. How are they going to regulate thousands of K-12 schools in 48 states?
This is the complaint from the CFBP on a for-profit college chain. It was filed last week. That’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That agency was able to reach for-profit colleges only because this chain happened to have a private lending business they controlled.
The practices outlined in this complaint have been going on for years, all the while the USDOE along with Congress was supposedly “regulating” them. They were regulating nothing. These students were brutally ripped off, over YEARS and they will never be able to discharge the debt they took on. Never. There’s no way to discharge it.
Why would they do any better on regulating charter chains? They can’t regulate the for-profit colleges they should have been able to regulate now. They’ll have less federal reach with charter chains, not more.
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/cfpb-sues-for-profit-corinthian-colleges-for-predatory-lending-scheme/
If those hearings were to be held, I’ll volunteer (hell someone has to do it) to instruct the members of Congress on the COMPLETE INVALIDITIES of the standardized testing processes that have resulted in COMPLETELY UNETHICAL USAGE of the results to discriminate against many children who are “lacking” in the necessary test taking skills, whether that lack is because of uncontrollable by the individual, inherent differences in brain capacity and processing (looking for a better word than that) or from injury and/or, illness.
That discrimination resulting from the sorting and separating inherent to standardized testing is the true “civil rights” issue of now.
To understand why that discrimination is so harmful read and understand Noel Wilson’s never rebutted nor refuted 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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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 wit
h 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. And 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 attempts to measure “’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.
By Duane E. Swacker
That’s my current discussion with the faculty of my school, Duane: that kids internalize these scores. We were told at a faculty meeting yesterday that we should explain to parents that these new CC scores in Utah aren’t really that low. Between 56% and 71% percent of the kids are “not proficient” on these new tests. I’m now trying to help my faculty realize that kids will still see these scores as failures, and that we need to help them and continue to fight the testing.
I cross-posted the Huffington piece on Oped
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/We-Need-Congressional-Hear-in-Best_Web_OpEds-America_Children_Congressional-Hearings_Government-140920-681.html
with this comment:
I wrote this essay “No Constitutional Rights” in 2004,
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
at the top of my career when the war on teachers was in full swing so that the schools could fail, and be monetarized and public education could be controlled. Please read it, because this is where the investigation should begin… on the assault on Americans who just happened to be teachers, depriving them of their right to due process, and sending over a hundred thousand educated, dedicated professionals out of the school door, in the most despicable manner.
I have said this before and I will say it again now that I am no longer alone in witnessing how this PLAN to empty the schools of the professionals by making testing the benchmark, and usurping the national conversation! The Duncan narrative which became the national conversation about TEACHING, ignored the real purpose of education LEARNING.