Supporters of public education in North Carolina are reeling as a result of the sustained assault by the Legislature in this session, but in comes a Gates-funded project to claim that defeats are actually victories and to lobby for merit pay.
The CAN idea is supported by hedge fund managers and Gates to promote charter schools, evaluating teachers by test scores, awarding higher pay to those whose students get higher test scores (merit pay).
CAN is closely aligned with the ALEC-style effort to privatize public education and to dismantle the profession of teaching.
Below is their triumphant letter, saluting the “victories” in the recent legislative session, where public schools and teachers were pummeled by extremist elements who control the Legislature.
Important to bear in mind that over the past century, merit pay has been tried again and again and again. It has never worked.
In recent years, it failed to produce results in New York City. It failed in Chicago. It failed in Nashville, where the bonus offered for higher scores was $15,000.
The Raj Chetty study cited below had nothing to do with merit pay. It established only that some teachers are able to produce higher test scores than others, and that students with higher test scores have slightly higher lifetime earnings. But there was no merit pay involved.
Here is what CAN said on its arrival in North Carolina, where the very future of public education hangs in the balance and where the Legislature is busily eradicating the profession of teaching and funding Teach for America while defunding the North Carolina Teaching Fellows:
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
This stuff just gets dumber and dumber. I can’t believe elected officials sit around wasting their time on this failed garbage. When will it end?
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Matthew Arnold 1852: “PAYMENT BY RESULTS fosters teaching by rote. The school exams are a game of mechanical contrivance in which the teacher will and must more and more learn how to beat us. It is found possible, by ingenious preparation, to get children through the Revised Code examination in reading, writing, and ciphering without their really know how to read, write, and cipher.
To take the commonest instance: a book is selected at the beginning of the year for the children of a certain standard. All the year the children read this book over and over again, and no other. When the inspector comes they are presented to read in this book. They can read their sentences or two fluently enough but they cannot read any other book fluently.
Yet the letter of the law is satisfied and the more we undertake to lay down to the very letter, the more do managers and teachers conceive themselves to have the right to hold us to this letter. The circle of the children’s reading has thus been narrowed and impoverished all the year for the sake of a result at the end of it and the result is an illusion.”
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It’s interesting that you mention the Raj study. As I was reading this this morning:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/08/education-and-the-growth-of-poverty-in-united-states-becker.html
He stated that :
“There is no magic way to improve the education of younger persons, especially given the vicious cycle between less educated and low-income parents, broken households, and low education and other poor performance of children. However, as argued in more detail in earlier blogs (see for example Sept. 2012 on “Good and Bad Teachers”), more charter schools and a greater use of school vouchers, teacher evaluations based on objective measures of their performance, much better pay for good teachers (such as teachers whose students perform better), and weaker tenure for bad teachers would go a considerable way toward reducing school dropouts and improving the overall education performance of American students.”
So I went to look up the blog entry he was talking about in that paragraph since I disagreed with him and wanted to see where he was coming from. In it he uses it as his justification(along with other faulty premises:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/good-and-bad-teachers-how-to-tell-the-difference-becker.html
“A small number of recent academic studies have tried to see how well VA measures predict how students do when they become adults. A summary of a good study along these lines by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff was published this summer in the journal Education Next under the title “Great Teaching”. They had access to data for a large urban school district that spanned the 20 years from 1988-89 through 2008-09. The data contained information on test scores for about 2.5 million children in grades 3 through 8, and also the schooling, and when available, earnings of the children after they finished these grades.”
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So sorry to learn that this cancerous CAN organization is now infecting the NC educational environment, as if NC doesn’t already face enough educational peril from its elected officials.
The various CANs originated with Achievement First’s mouthpiece, ConnCAN (Connecticut Achievement Now). Pied Piper (aka “let me sell you the Brooklyn Bridge”) Alex Johnston and some of his AF cronies — like current Commissioner Stefan Pryor, an AF founder and board member whose only other educational credentials included working for Joel Klein and Corey Booker — conned the Billionaire Boys Club into expanding their vile crusade to all 50 states. So now we have seriously well-funded and organized battles afoot in many states, such as MarylandCAN, NJ-CAN, and RI-CAN, and who knows how many other states. Unlimited amounts of Gates/Walton/Broad money are going straight to wooing state and national-level politicians, engaging pricey PR firms, and setting up state-based organizations to help bury the public schools.
By the way, AF schools are wannabe KIPP competitiors, and therefore not surprisingly are among the worst of the “no excuses” schools. In CT they’ve been exposed for their extraordinary suspension rates, even among the early primary grades — horrendously rigid behavioral management practices that haven’t even evoked a scolding from the State Board of Education or legislative committee that supposedly oversees education. They employ clever mechanisms to circumvent the so-called lottery admissions system, so as to end up educating few if any ELL and SPED students while also cherry-picking the most talented and least poor of Black and Hispanic applicants from the urban districts they ravage. ConnCAN and AF then lie to the legislature and public about everything from enrollee demographics to funding levels and teacher (mostly TFA) qualifications. Desperate, ill-informed, and unsophisticated urban parents and our “hear-no evil, see-no-evil” legislators, afraid to antagonize their funders, lap it up. Pathetic.
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Texas offered bonuses several years back to teachers. I collected thousands of dollars. I really didn’t change the way I taught. Lucky for me, the students came through.
The business community knows that bonuses are only a short term solution, and really not all that effective.
Next week we will hold hands and sing our way to better test scores.
What next?
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I was thinking I replied with this question earlier, but I guess I didn’t hit “post comment;” I will try again.
Can it be assumed that if a hedge fund is involved in an education project, that investors do not care if it succeeds because the “hedge” part is that there are also insurance policies against the failure of the project? Is that right? I am trying to understand that part.
If that is right, then where do children factor in? If money will be made no matter the outcome, then who is looking after the children?
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I figured it out.
Identifying investors in privatization as hedge funds is beside the point, right? Investors are investors, hedge fund or not. I guess the hedge fund being pointed out is just a reemphasis of how the wealth in our country is distributed? Is it for emphasis?
I guess I don’t understand why it matters that investors in charters are hedge funds. Why does that matter?
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If you look in the encyclopedia under “Astroturf Movement” you’ll find a picture of the “WE CAN” movement. Just look through their web sites and you’ll see some serious PR. I love the smiling faces of those Ivy League plutocrats. No, seriously, it’s disgusting. Herr Goebbels is in the 8th circle of hell right now seething with envy.
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In New Jersey, the CAN (Campaign for Achievement Now) group is called JerseyCAN (http://www:jerseycan.org). This is not to be confused with a totally different group called NJ-CAN (http://www.nj-can.org) which was organized to call for a change in state leadership after Governor Christie and the so-called “Christiecrats” revised the pension and health benefit system for New Jersey’s public workers.
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Hi everyone,
I’d like to share a talk I recently gave to the School Board of Palm Beach County, FL about the excessive testing going on in our public schools and who is profiting by it.
http://youtu.be/WheNIUTddT0
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