A group of 30 organizations associated with corporate reform wrote a letter to Secretary Arne Duncan to insist that he hold teacher education programs accountable for the test scores of the students taught by their graduates.
Groups like Teach for America, StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform (the Wall Street hedge fund managers), The New Teacher Project, various charter chains, Jeb Bush’s rightwing Chiefs for Change and his Foundation for Educational Excellence, and various and sundry groups that love teaching to the test stand together as one.
Their views are in direct opposition to those of the leaders of higher education, who oppose this extension of federal control into their institutions.
Read Gary Rubinstein’s blog about it here, where you will see the full cast of corporate reform characters, many of them funded by the Gates Foundation.
They are certain that what minority students need most is more testing. They want the test scores of the students to determine the career and livelihood of their teachers. And they want the federal government to punish the schools of education that prepared the teachers of these children.
If Duncan takes their advice, he will assume the power to penalize schools of education if the students of their graduates can’t raise their test scores every year.
The vise of standardized testing will tighten around public education.
These people and these organizations are wrong. They are driving American education in a destructive direction. They will reduce children to data points, as the organizations thrive. Wasn’t a decade of NCLB enough for them?
They are on the wrong side of history. They may be flying high now, but their ideas hurt children and ruin the quality of education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The real question is only this —
Why are we letting these dull-witted clods rule our lives?
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Excellent question, Jon. Anytime it is within my power to side-step the rules and mandates of these dull-witted clods, I do.
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This does not make sense. Let’s draw parallels in other fields and test this logic. Colleges of Medicine will be held responsible when its graduated doctors have a high patient mortality rate? Colleges of Law will be held responsible when its graduated lawyers lose cases? Colleges of Business will be held responsible when its graduated MBA students make decisions that result in corporate bankruptcy and/or fraud? Sorry – this logic just doesn’t work for me.
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It is the logic of conquest and plunder. All thieves from conquistadors to your friendly neighborhood protection racketeers follow it. They assert dominion over resources that they have no part in creating and do not have the skill to maintain. They simply insert themselves like trolls beneath a bridge that others built, demanding tribute from all the traffic thereon.
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To date the DoE has mandated making the tests tougher before the c.c. curriculum is even in place, evaluating (and next firing) masses of teachers based on the expected lower test scores, and now it wants to evaluate the colleges of education. This is a perfect storm of privatization.
The DoE and billionaire privatizers want to push test scores all the way back to the colleges of education in order to eliminate the source of independent, courageous dissent voiced by professors like Diane Ravitch, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Linda Darling-Hammond, and others.
They speak out, inform and lead the way for parents and teachers. They are dangerous. They are not in it for the money.
Of course, there is also a business opportunity — to provide alternative “training” on the cheap, like the 5 weeks TFA is paid to provide to new grads — with our tax dollars.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Dept. of Ed had invited this letter, as Mr. Duncan has already talked publicly about wanting this.
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Why does President Obama refuse to listen?
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The Sixty-Four Billion Dollar Question !!!
(Old-timers will know what that says about inflation …)
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Campaign donations…
FIRE DUNCAN! Hire Ravitch!
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These groups are always looking to blame someone or something else. Reminds me of little kids. “I didn’t do it. He/she did.”
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Wow. I don’t see why anyone in their right mind would go into education with these kinds of rules blowing in the breeze! So very, very sad.
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This Huffington Post article by Tim Slekar is worth reading: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-d-slekar/teacher-education-policy_b_1000306.html
Mr. Slekar, Ceresta Smith, and Shaun Johnson gave a terrific presentation at the Save Our Schools conference in DC in August on opting out of high stakes testing: http://saveourschoolsmarch.com/workshop-panel-presentations/opting-high-stakes-testing-workshop-leaders/ I’ve been looking for a video, but no luck so far. I don’t remember if the session was recorded.
Mr. Slekar gave a strong critique of High Stakes Testing as the umbrella that covers all the other bad education reform categories, including Value Added Measures, Common Core Standards, Choice, School Closings and Turnarounds. He said that he couldn’t, in good conscience, NOT opt out of the notion that teacher ed programs should be evaluated by the test scores of their students’ students. He pointed out that standardized test scores don’t really measure student learning, let alone teacher effectiveness. Considering that big margins of error are built into the VAM approach–its inventors have warned against using it to evaluate individual teachers–teacher evaluation systems that use student test scores make no sense. So evaluating teacher ed professors by their students’ students’ scores, he believes, is beyond questionable. (Can’t remember his exact words, but they were forceful and colorful, and right on target.)
Mr. Johnson noted that after finishing four years of grad school, he couldn’t believe how things had changed–testing was taking over. He says that professionals should question the corporate ed reforms, and resist them. All three speakers agreed that opting out of high stakes testing at every level was the right thing to do.
Ms. Smith joined the other two speakers in identifying Pearson Education as a key player in these changes. She said, “Administrators have been bought off with a false notion of partnership between public and private.” Mr. Slekar believes that “Pearson and the reformers want teachers to be data managers.” Mr. Johnson indicated that when Pearson’s new teacher prep assessment system is up and running, the company will own the portfolios that are generated, and they’ll be able to sell the contents. Mr. Slekar quoted Mark Naisan as saying, “Assessment is starting to mean surveillance.”
I’m a retired teacher, so I don’t have a job to put on the line. Anyone brave enough to opt out deserves our thanks. That goes for teachers, professors, parents, and students.
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Pearson is all about making money for Pearson. Case closed.
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Making money for Pearson wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if they weren’t grasping for bad profits and trying to own public education. By bad profits I mean they make money by hurting kids, teachers, and communities–every constituency they claim to be helping. High stakes testing, a bad thing, is the lynchpin of their enterprise.
When M. R. Robinson founded Scholastic, he did the world a favor. For decades his products helped kids learn and teachers teach. The company had a noble business model. It spread knowledge and fun, and grew as a result. I can’t vouch for what Scholastic is doing now, but what Pearson is doing doesn’t look noble at all. They’re spreading stress, boredom, and bogus ideas, while raking in the dough.
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The only thing VAM has consistently and successfully done is remove tax dollars from our classrooms. THAT is it’s designed purpose in spite of the honest efforts of the statisticians and mathematicians who did the actual work developing it. It has been partially successful in causing otherwise good people to cheat to preserved their jobs in the face of irrational evaluation systems.
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This is certainly troubling. I thought Ed was responsible to the states and citizenry, not bogus, corporate funded groups. My bat. Wrong again. Oh well. Welcome to the new “Legislating 101”.
Four years ago, I had high hopes for this administration. I thought the busiest and most active departments would be Justice and Treasury. I thought they would have a full-plate with potential cases dealing with war crimes and financial fraud. No. I was wrong. Treasury is a partner and supplicant for Wall Street and the banks, and Justice seems intent on prosecuting steroid users. Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine Arne ensconced in his office, with lamps burning changing the face of American Education all willy-nilly. I guess he’ll have to respond. After all, his “public” demands it.
Now, I don’t even know where to begin, listing all that is wrong with this. It’s an over reach. It probably tramples on state laws, charters and provisions. It certainly borders on an abuse of power. It definitely sets a precedent. That was something Diane and a few posters mentioned in similar blog posts. The way I see it, if a Cabinet Secretary doesn’t like a law, he/she creates a waiver process. That’s how we got RttT. Now, a problem has been created and Arne has a solution. It won’t be the first time, or the last.
Now, I have no idea why the Republicans and Libertarians haven’t raised any objections with Arne who has managed several power grabs and seems intent on combing the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government in his agency. Now many some people figure-Hey, it’s just education. What’s the big deal? Precedent. What happens if in a few years, someone wants to waive OSHA regulations, energy, or EPA rules/regs? Then what? They can point to Arne and his three branches of government residing at ED as a precedent.
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The arrogance of these people is making them crazier and crazier. This is a notion that is so crazy as to be outside the bounds of any political tradition I’ve ever heard of or read about. It is part of neither a Left nor Right trajectory, even if it is clearly totalitarian in its impulse and objective. It is about complete control by eradication of all potential opposition. It is morally, spiritually and intellectually monstrous and should be called so. These mediocre sons of bitches do not the the right to ruin our profession, our schools, our kids and our country. But they will if we do not unite against them en masse and expose them for what they are: totalitarian monsters.
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I don’t understand how this proprietary data thing happened. The last I recall, there were very strict privacy rules like FERPA in place. What happened to all that? And why are parents not up in arms?
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It happened because we now live in a country where very rich and vulgar people believe it is their right to impose their will upon anything they wish to impose it on, regardless of law, and the people who are supposed to be stopping them — the government and our elected officials — are, in fact, acting as if they are valets. It happened because we have some 430 multi- billionaires. It happened because we are a nation that, by and large, no longer respects democracy ( even in its most debased form ) or even ourselves. The irony and tragedy of this whole repugnant scenario is that true, rich education is the only way out but the proponents of this nonsense, despite their Ivy league credentials, don’t even seem to know what it is.
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DoE recently changed the regulations for FERPA, which went into effect earlier this year. Among the changes included a broadening of who could receive data with personally identifying information without obtaining parent/student permission, for the purpose of evaluation and reporting to state and federal governments.
From what I could tell from checking both the ACLU and DoE websites, ACLU initially took issue with some aspects of the new regs and DoE added some stipulations, such as that the parties involved in sharing/receiving data sign written agreements.
This applies to any schools that receive government funding, and due to Title IV, financial aid, that includes both private and public colleges.
http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/index.html
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Alrighty then. So the Broad Academy is responsible for the test scores of the students in the schools led by its superintendent grads, right?
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It is one thing to profit by providing a service.
It is another thing to profit by placing gates between the providers and the population served, keeping professionals from providing services except by permit of those who do nothing but print the permits.
It is another thing entirely to redefine the service in question to be whatever it pleases and profits your firm to supply.
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What many people don’t realize is that Schools of Education are not the only faculty at universities integrally involved in preparing teachers. All teacher candidates must fulfill General Education requirements in the Liberal Arts and, in some places, there are more Gen Ed requirements for teacher candidates than for other students. Those courses are expand teachers’ background knowledge and skills in a wide variety of disciplines, such as for teaching the disciplines in elementary education. This complicates matters, because who will be held accountable when the students of P-12 teachers don’t perform well on Math tests, their college Math professors or their School of Education professors –or both?
Liberal Arts faculty don’t typically see themselves as part of Teacher Education, even when they are teaching students who are majoring in a subject like Math which they plan to teach in secondary education. About a decade ago, NCATE recognized this issue and required that Schools of Education collaborate more with Liberal Arts faculty. At the college where I was teaching at the time, we began by meeting with Liberal Arts faculty and asked them to evaluate the dispositions of teacher candidates each term. Many saw that as a new role for them and did not like having to participate. I can’t even begin to imagine what it will be like when it sinks in to them that they may be held accountable for the test performance of their students’ students.
I have to wonder what the end game is for the organizations that are involved in pushing this initiative, as well as what Duncan’s desired outcomes are. Bringing down Schools of Education? Reducing or eliminating teacher certification requirements? Determining college coursework and curriculum? I don’t know, but I would not be surprised if they want standardized tests to be mandated for colleges… God save us. Please.
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I believe the end game is layered but at least part of the goal of this reckless and savagely anti-intellectual and even anti-human campaign is to entrench the extremely dubious criteria of standardized tests so deeply as to eliminate all discussion of their true value or worthlessness. In other words, yet another example of insidiously creating something that is too big to fail. This same strategy is being used, I believe, with the Common Core.
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It behooves professionals of every stripe to make their profession understandable to the public at large. That requires feedback and two-way communication and all of that is very beneficial to both sides of the profession-public interface.
But no profession can survive if it allows unqualified factions to define its professional norms.
I hope that is manifestly clear.
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When government dictates educational practices to even private universities, just because their students also want to be eligible for federal financial aid (which may only be loans), dangling the purse strings like this is coercion and bribary.
Harvard, the University of Chicago, etc., the alma maters of these brilliant ivy leaguers who are behind the anti-intellectual rape of our nation’s schools, should be confronting their wayward progeny about the ramifications of such actions.
Time and again, those with money and power in this country are proving how, regardless of political affiliation, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
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