The Pioneer Institute is a conservative think tank in Boston. Unlike most conservative think tanks, it opposes the Common Core and the associated testing. This week, Pioneer called on State Commissioner if Education Mitchell Chester to recuse himself from deciding whether Massachusetts should keep its MCAS state tests or drop them for PARCC. Chester is chairman of the PARCC board. Pioneer says he has a conflict of interest. Seems obvious, no?
Here is Pioneer’s statement:
“Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester Should Recuse Himself from the Upcoming Decision on PARCC and MCAS
“BOSTON – Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester, who later this year will make a recommendation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the board) about whether to replace MCAS tests with those developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), chairs PARCC’s governing board.
“Pioneer Institute calls on Chester to recuse himself from the MCAS/PARCC decision process for the following reasons:
“1. As commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (the department), Chester serves as secretary to the board of education and oversees the state agency and hearing process for choosing between MCAS and PARCC. The agency he heads gathers the information on which the policy decision will be made and conducts the internal evaluation. Commissioner Chester ultimately makes a recommendation to the board about which test to choose.
“This is clearly a conflict of interest. Taking this matter out of the context of education makes the point perhaps more evident. Imagine that the general manager of the MBTA also chaired the board of Keolis or Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad when the two companies were competing for the $2.6 billion contract to operate the T’s commuter rail system. Such a conflict of interest would never have been tolerated, yet this is precisely the situation given the commissioner’s leadership role at the PARCC.
“2. In its role managing a series of five statewide public hearings that are currently underway on whether the board should officially adopt PARCC and abandon MCAS, the department chooses who to invite to deliver expert testimony. The invited experts speak first and are allowed more time than members of the general public. Thus far, in the first four hearings, a strong majority of the invited experts have been supporters of PARCC.
“3. Commissioner Chester has also formed a team of Massachusetts/PARCC Educator Leader Fellows within the department. According to a memo Chester sent to district and charter school leaders, the PARCC fellows, who receive a stipend, should be “excited about the content of the Common Core State Standards” and “already engaged in leadership work around them.” The department has no MCAS fellows.
“4. The commissioner’s interactions with local education leaders have led many to believe that the decision to abandon MCAS has already been made. Brookline Superintendent and Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents President William Lupini, in a 2014 letter to the town’s school committee, flatly stated that “MCAS will be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new ‘next generation’ assessment after the 2015 test administration.” (No other “next generation” test or MCAS 2.0 is under development or consideration.)
“5. Given that the PARCC consortium originally included 26 participating states and Washington, DC, but now includes only seven and DC, there is enormous pressure on the commissioner, as the chairman of PARCC, to ensure that the testing consortium does not lose any more states. This is especially so after a spring during which numerous states declined further participation in PARCC; just last week one of the few large states remaining in the consortium (Ohio) left the consortium.
“The financial viability of PARCC is in great part a function of the number of students it services. When PARCC included 26 states and DC, it could plan its pricing strategy on the basis of serving over 25 million (of the over 31 million) public school students enrolled in those jurisdictions. With the loss of Ohio, PARCC has been reduced to serving just over 5 million. Additional consortium states, most immediately Arkansas, are actively working toward similar departures. Massachusetts’ almost one million public school students are of considerable concern to the consortium’s financial viability, therefore creating an untenable ethical position for the Commissioner.
“Sadly, the larger process of choosing between Massachusetts’ previous academic standards and Common Core, which led to the current MCAS/PARCC issue, is already one that has been rife with at least the appearance of conflict of interest. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and then to market Common Core. Oddly, Commissioner Chester relied on three studies conducted by Gates-funded entities, directly or indirectly, to inform his 2010 recommendation that the board of education adopt Common Core. A 2010 WCVB-TV 5 investigation found that Chester and other department personnel accepted $15,000 in luxury travel and accommodations from Common Core supporters prior to the board’s adoption of the Common Core.
“As a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Governor Baker opposed Common Core and PARCC. In March of this year, he criticized the MCAS/PARCC process and earlier procedures that resulted in the adoption of Common Core, telling the State House News Service, “I think it’s an embarrassment that a state that spent two years giving educators, families, parents, administrators and others an opportunity to comment and engage around the assessment system that eventually became MCAS basically gave nobody a voice or an opportunity to engage in a discussion at all before we went ahead and executed on Common Core and PARCC.”
“Such practices need to end, and the public’s trust in the department’s ability to manage a publicly impartial, transparent and accountable process needs to be restored. The first step is for Commissioner Chester, who chairs PARCC’s governing board, to recuse himself from the upcoming policy decision about whether to replace MCAS with the PARCC test.
“In cases where there are several apparent conflicts of interest, recusals are an appropriate administrative response meant to uphold the public trust.”
“This is clearly a conflict of interest.”
In many places that would be a tautology, but we are talking about Massachusetts in this case. 🙂
Sadly so.
http://patch.com/massachusetts/falmouth/gov-deval-patrick-investigation-embezzlement-27-m-0
I usually am not a fan of the Pioneer Institute, but in this matter I find myself in agreement with them. It is odd the coalition opposing Common Core is from such disparate places.
Their argument is solid and I agree with it. But their interest is in maintaining the long standing MA standards and MCAS which they were instrumental in developing and pushing on us when several members sat on the MA Board of Education in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Now James Peyser, the former Pioneer Institute Executive Director and BOE president, is Governor Baker’s Secretary of Education. I’m not sure how this MCAS vs. PARCC fight will come down.
I totally agree.
You are so right, Sallyo57!
Peyser was the original architect of the turnaround privatization project, and if there is a conflict on the PARCC side, there is also one on the MCAS.
MCAS was the instrument they used to remove Holyoke from democratic control and hand it over to Peyser’s profit-extracting cronies. The “non-profit” turnaround partner is a money laundering operation, a means to direct public money away from the community and funnel it to for-profit cronies like Chris Gabrielli.
Here is the community hearing at which Holyoke tried in vain to protect its children from abusive corporate takeover. I was there. Please, help stop Peyser and Mitchell both. Don’t let them bypass the people again.
If he doesn’t recuse then I hope there will be hearings by the state shortly after.
Yes, hearings. Please, Hearings at last!
Hold on, everybody. MCAS is our enemy, and Pioneer Institute is the architect of the accountability hoax. Please support the MTA’s call for a 3 year moratorium with a study commission, at the END of which the people decide which or whether any high stakes regime will be inflicted on our kids.
Listen to Pioneer Institute launching their final war on public education in 2008:
“Given the likely consequences of neglecting this problem, it is difficult to overstate the urgency with which school leaders must address student achievement among poor, minority and ELL students. This dire situation calls for the expertise of “turnaround principals” who are capable of achieving quick, dramatic and sustained change to raise student achievement. This, however, cannot be a solo endeavor. To achieve and sustain a successful turnaround, there must be district and school leadership teams in place with the knowledge and skills necessary to support the turnaround principal.”
http://bgc.pioneerinstitute.org/uva-school-turnaround-specialist-program/
Can we just start with how completely insane it is that we’re having the debate on PARCC in public schools AFTER they put it in?
Are they now willing to admit that it’s probably best to have a public debate PRIOR to huge changes in public schools that affect tens of millions of children?
It just seems like a really profound fundamental error has been uncovered here and we can all just blow by it, I guess, but what does it say about the thought process and leadership of this “movement” that they did this? Have they learned anything? Any course/leadership changes on tap, or just full speed ahead? Maybe a seminar on the import of “public” in “public” schools is in order. They’re really NOT just publicly-funded private schools. That’s a category error.
“The best debate is no debate”
Better to give apology
Than ask permission first
And better still, fait accompli
Not easily reversed
Principals are required to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Isn’t the commissioner held to the
same standard of probity?
In a weird way I think they’re victims of their own hype. They swung wildly in Ohio between saying the tests were just like standardized tests that parents took and the CC was just standards that good instruction requires and telling us it was an urgent national security issue.
I love that they’re now scratching their heads “why do people think this is such a big deal?”
I don’t know- because you launched a giant media campaign where you told us no one would ever find work again unless we adopted this stuff immediately?
Hey, Diane,
This might come across as an ad-hominem attack against the Pioneer Institute, but they actually have a hand in privatizing schools (among other things) in Massachusetts. This piece by Political Research Associates is dated 2002, but it is an eye opening read. It implicates Gov. Charlie Baker, former Executive Director of Pioneer Institute, as a privatizer. James A. Peyser, also formerly Executive Director of Pioneer Institute, is now Mass. Secretary of Education. After winning the Gov. election, Baker named him for the role on 12/23/2014. The difference now is that they have the power to privatize things a whole lot faster, set up a massive shock. Ctrl-F Baker, Peyser, or anyone for more info.
http://www.politicalresearch.org/2002/07/13/the-pioneer-institute-privatizing-the-common-wealth/#sthash.c8Ryv4vd.dpbs
Also look up David Sirota’s work on Charlie Baker + Chris Christie.
I think CC/PARCC is low hanging fruit now, so the Pioneer Institute is attacking it to position themselves and their privatization agenda above the fray. The effect is to confuse the discourse into thinking CC/PARCC are the only problem, which helps charter schools, testing companies, and textbook manufacturers distance themselves from the rest of privatization movement even though they are components of it. Not only that, I have no reason to believe Charlie Baker is interested in protecting the democratic process that supposedly went into the MCAS. Its pillow talk. The end game is to give people no choice but throw themselves into the privatization education machine – a machine that creates rigid social classes, stratifies, and destroys communities.
Peyser and the Pioneers have been mucking around with public education here in the Hub of the universe for a long time, back to at least 1993, when “reform” was first imposed and the MCAS was first held up as a gold standard. MCAS is an acronym, by the way, for Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, as misnomer in 3 of its 4 terms, as it is neither compressive, nor an assessment of kids’ abilities or accomplishments nor is it systemic.
What we were supposed to get was this, as Tracy Novick, member of the Worcester School Committee, testified on Tuesday:
“We could finally follow the law regarding assessment of our students. I would urge this Board to adopt neither of the assessments offered and instead adopted ‘authentic and direct gauges of student performance’ that ‘include consideration of work samples, projects and portfolios.’
That is absolutely do-able.
And it is, Mr. Chair, the law.”
http://who-cester.blogspot.com/2015/07/testimony-regarding-parccmcas.html
Nice analysis based on history, this kind of thing is always helpful.
Exactly. We have been living under the Pioneer Institute’s handiwork for almost 20 years now. Along with MCAS and all that it brought, we can also thank them for getting the electorate to eliminate bilingual education in 2002.
Great comment JoeV. I’ve followed Pioneer’s hand in MCAS for years. What I’ve always found particularly troublesome, and ranted about any chance I had, was that MCAS does not apply to ALL Massachusetts schools. Catholic and Private schools do not per BESE, have the “privilege of taking MCAS” because they have a different curriculum. I’ve known savy parents who will send their test failing kid, to a private school for the final year or two so they could get a diploma. Nice they could afford it.
As a turnaround teacher, I’ve also know many hard working kids who didn’t get a diploma and just walked away because they couldn’t pass MCAS. Its surprising that no one has opened up a catholic, private, or online diploma mill, serving just grade 12.
Perhaps taking a page from the Gates playbook, Mitchell Chester also created the “PARCC Educator Leader Fellows” last July.
From the FAQ page of the Fellow application:
“1. What is the Massachusetts PARCC Educator Leader Fellow Team?
The Massachusetts PARCC Educator Leader Fellow Team is a group of 42 K–16 educators from Massachusetts public school districts, two- and four-year colleges, and universities. Teams from Massachusetts and other PARCC states make up a network of educators who provide leadership on state implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the PARCC assessments and related instructional materials.”
It’s important to note that 2014-15 was to be a trial year for PARCC vs. MCAS (think of Great taste! Less filling!), yet the DESE has paid stipends of $3000 to the Fellows for
“> Designing and leading professional development for K-16 educators;
>Speaking to inform parents, school committees, business groups, legislators, and the public about standards implementation and PARCC initiatives in Massachusetts;
>Writing print or online articles for a general audience that present an educator’s perspective on standards and assessments.”
Teachers were released from their classroom, which were attended to by substitute teachers, in order to travel about the state to these ends.
Way to put a thumb on the “open and objective process” scale.
Click to access LeaderFellows-App.pdf
The story of this supposed conflict is illustrative of why thinking that a yes vote on the ECAA that limits federal “overreach” and hamstrings Arne Duncan is a hallucinatory fantasy. Just as this positions the Pioneer Institute to continue it’s goals of privatization under cover of misinformation, so does the ECAA perpetuate all the harms of NCLB and RTTT by pushing them out to the state level where, as we see here, it takes people at the local level with long memories to debunk the sales pitch if they can get the information out fast and far enough.This to me was one of the goals of the ECAA, spread out the battlefield and dilute the opposition against the reformsters. In both places, Mass. and the federal DOE, the policies are unchanged, it’s just the locations where they will be implemented that have been morphed. Add in rebranding and you end up with the SOSDD, advantaged by the balkanization of those fighting in opposition.
Jon Lubar, I don’t agree. We have more chance of changing the views of state legislators than changing the views of this administration and Congress. State legislators can be defeated by angry parents and teachers. No one gives much thought to education when they vote for their gerrymandered member of Congress. ECAA has plenty of faults, but it is a step forward not backward. If it is a choice between NCLB/RTTT and ECAA, the latter is preferable. At least, that is my opinion.
Diane,
Now you have to fight 50 battles instead of one. Good luck. From all these discussions I can only see that change is almost impossible to achieve. Ask Obama, he has tried so hard to bring change to Washington DC and nothing has changed, every body still argues ad infinitum. That includes all the people in this blog.
Thanks for your good wishes, Raj. I assure you that parents have more influence with their local legislators than they do with Congress. Parents are mad and they can vote against the local guy, whom they know.
Raj,
I have to agree with Diane here as well. I’ve met with all my local pols regarding education policies in NYS. I’ve had no luck meeting with my Congress-critter or either of the two US Senators.
While my single voice may have little affect on them, dozens of similar meetings and conversations with them do. This will be a long, drawn out process – to reverse the toxic effects of so-called education reform, but the best way for it to succeed is at the local, then state level, assuming the states are given leave to administer their own education policies without the heavy hand of the Feds controlling them.
Not every state will be won but many will, especially in the blue states. Over time, and if we are lucky perhaps the politicians at the Federal level will see which way the tide is flowing.
Diane is right. One of the dreams of the profit-seeking reformers was to have one huge nationwide market for their products. If things do indeed go back to 50 separate, smaller markets, then that would be a serious blow to the big $ folks. I am not so sure we’ll be back to 50 markets, but certainly more than one. This dilutes their power.
Want proof that the goal of Race to the Top and Common Core was to create “one huge nationwide market for their products.” Read this post by Joanne Weiss, who was in charge of Race to the Top in the Department of Education, then became Arne’s chief of staff. Her background: CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund (funds charter chains and business innovation in education). But read the post: https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-innovation-mismatch-smart.html
Believe it or not, there is an opinion from the state Ethics Commission that this conflict is fine. That’s the same Ethics Commission that developed the regulations regarding teachers that require teachers to report all gifts from children. And it’s the same Ethics Commission that was reluctant to limit what doctors can receive from pharmaceutical companies. So if a music teacher receives a tie with trombones on it from a 4th grade trombone student, he has to report it, but it’s OK for Chester to be PARCC chairman and still in charge of the decision for Massachusetts.
It appears then that the “Ethics Commission” is just doing its job–to make unethical conduct into ethical misconduct.
I am a little confused. Recusal does not seem like quite enough since Chester is Commissioner. How can anyone believe that his hand will not be all over whatever process that is followed and whatever recommendations that are made?
I have mixed feelings about moving the battle strictly to the local level. While our successes have been most noticeable in how they have played out on a state or local level, having a common foe has energized the discussion here. I fear that making concessions at the national level that leave more of the discussion up to the states will divide us. We can already see it in discussions right here where people feel their input being minimized if their experience does not match that of another. We can be like kids comparing who has the biggest scab. It is important that we maintain that national voice/unity. The actions of free market proponents affect not only our schools but the future of our country. The Koch brothers and their ilk have done a very good job of infiltrating state and local government but they have tried to maintain a national voice through ALEC as well. We have to do the same.
2old2teach,
ALEC works state by state. Their influence at the national level is not as obvious. Their members are state legislators. I don’t agree with those who believe that we will lose steam if the battle shifts to the states. Let’s admit it. Our insurgency has no traction at all in Washington, D.C. The Obama administration has never listened to critics of its ill-fated and disastrous education policies. Congress has sat idly by while the feds forced the closing of thousands of schools, most in minority communities. We have held rallies in D.C. and gotten no attention. Rallies at the state and local level do get attention and attract larger numbers. Every important victory that our side has had in the past several years has been at the state and local level, not the national level. That’s where our strength is greatest, on the ground, not inside the Beltway.