Robert Shepherd, a frequent commenter on the blog, is an experienced veteran in the world of education publishing, having developed curriculum, textbooks, and assessments.
He writes:
The New York legislature just voted to dump inBloom. But Diane Ravitch’s first post about that subjected noted, wisely, that inBloom was dead “for Now.”
Don’t think for a moment that Big Data has been beaten. I am going to explain why. I hope that you will take the time and effort to follow what I am going to say below. It’s a little complicated, but it’s a great story. It’s a birth narrative–the astonishing but, I think, undeniably true story of the birth of the Common Core.
The emergence of the Internet presented a challenge to the business model of the big educational publishers. It presented the very real possibility that they might go the way of the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon. Why? I can point you, right now, to about 80 complete, high-quality, FREE open-source textbooks on the Net–ones written by various professors–textbooks on geology, law, astronomy, physics, grammar, biology, every conceivable topic in mathematics.
Pixels are cheap. The emergence of the possibility of publishing via the Internet, combined with the wiring of all public schools for broadband access, removed an important barrier to entry to the educational publishing business–paper, printing, and binding costs. In the Internet Age, small publishers with alternative texts could easily flourish. Some of those–academic self publishers interested not in making money but in spreading knowledge of their subjects–would even do that work for free. Many have, already. There are a dozen great free intro statistics texts with support materials on the web today.
Think of what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s what open-source textbooks were poised to do to the K-12 educational materials monopolists. The process had already begun in college textbook publishing. The big publishers were starting to loose sales to free, open-source competitors. The number of open-source alternatives would grow exponentially, and the phenomenon would spread down through the grade levels. Soon. . . .
How were the purveyors of textbooks going to compete with FREE?
What’s a monopolist to do in such a situation?
Answer: Create a computer-adaptive ed tech revolution. The monopolists figured out that they could create computer-adaptive software keyed to student responses IN DATABASES that they, AND THEY ALONE, could get access to. No open-source providers admitted.
Added benefit: By switching to computerized delivery of their materials, the educational publishing monopolists would dramatically reduce their costs and increase their profits, for the biggest items on the textbook P&L, after the profits, are costs related to the physical nature of their products–costs for paper, printing, binding, sampling, warehousing, and shipping.
By engineering the computer-adaptive ed tech revolution and having that ed tech keyed to responses in proprietary databases that only they had access to, the ed book publishers could kill open source in its cradle and keep themselves from going the way of Smith Corona and whoever it was that manufactured telephone booths.
Doing that would prevent the REAL DISRUPTIVE REVOLUTION in education that the educational publishers saw looming–the disruption of THEIR BUSINESS MODEL posed by OPEN-SOURCE TEXTBOOKS.
A little history:
Just before its business entirely tanked because of computers, typewriter manufacturer Smith Corona put up a website, the Home page of which read, “And on the 8th day God created Smith Corona.” 2007 was the 50th anniversary of the Standard and Poors Index. On the day the S&P turned 50, 70 percent of the companies that were originally on the Index no longer existed. They had been killed by disruptions that they didn’t see coming.
The educational materials monopolists were smarter. They saw coming at them the disruption of their business model that open-source textbooks would bring about. And so they cooked up computer-adaptive ed tech keyed to standards, with responses in proprietary databases that they would control, to prevent that. The adaptive ed tech/big data/big database transition would maintain and even strengthen their monopoly position.
But to make that computer-adaptive ed tech revolution happen and so prevent open-source textbooks from killing their business model, the publishers would first need ONE SET OF NATIONAL STANDARDS. That’s why they paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created. That one set of national standards would provide the tags for their computer-adaptive software. That set of standards would be the list of skills that the software would keep track of in the databases that open-source providers could not get access to. Only they would have access to the BIG DATA.
As I have been explaining for a long, long time now, here and elsewhere, the Common Core was the first step in A BUSINESS PLAN.
Bill Gates described that business plan DECADES ago. He’s an extraordinarily bright man. Visionary.
So, that’s the story, in a nutshell. And it’s not an education story. It’s a business story.
And a WHOLE LOTTA EDUCRATS haven’t figured that out and have been totally PLAYED. They are dutifully working for PARCC or SBAC and dutifully attending conferences on implementing the “new, higher standards” and are basically unaware that they have been USED to implement a business plan. They don’t understand that the national standards were simply a necessary part of that plan.
And here’s the kicker: The folks behind this plan also see it is a way to reduce, dramatically, the cost of U.S. education. How? Well, the biggest cost, by far, in education is teachers’ salaries and benefits. But, imagine 300 students in a room, all using software, with a single “teacher” walking around to make sure that the tablets are working and to assist when necessary. Good-enough training for the children of the proles. Fewer teacher salaries. More money for data systems and software.
Think of the money to be saved.
And the money to be made.
The wrinkle in the publishers’ plan, of course, is that people don’t like the idea of a single, Orwellian national database. From the point of view of the monopolists, that’s a BIG problem. The database is, after all, the part of the plan that keeps the real disruption, open-source textbooks, from happening–the disruption that would end the traditional textbook business as surely as MP3 downloads ended the music CD business and video killed the radio star.
So, with the national database dead, for now, the deformers have to go to plan B.
What will they do? Here’s something that’s VERY likely: They will sell database systems state by state, to state education departments, or district by district. Those database systems will simply be each state’s or district’s system (who could object to that?), and only approved vendors (guess who?) will flow through each. Which vendors? Well, the ones with the lobbying bucks and with the money to navigate whatever arcane procedures are created by the states and districts implementing them, with the monopolists’ help, of course. So, the new systems will work basically as the old textbook adoption system did, as an educational materials monopoly protection plan.
All this is part of a business plan put in place to prevent the open-source textbook revolution from destroying the business model of the educational materials monopolists.
In business, such thinking as I have outlined, above, is called Strategic Planning.
So, to recap: to hold onto their monopolies in the age of the Internet, the publishers would use the Big Data ed tech model, which would shut out competitors, and for that, they would need a single set of national standards. The plan that Gates had long had for ed tech proved to be just the ticket. Gates’s plan, and the need to disrupt the open-source disruption before it happened, proved to be a perfect confluence of interest–a confluence that would become a great river of green.
The educational publishing monopolists would not only survive but thrive. There would be billions to be made in the switch from textbooks to Big Data and computer-adaptive ed tech. Billions and billions and billions.
And that’s why you have the Common [sic] Core [sic].
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I so agree with this analysis.
It is further shown in the demise of the paper industry.
We seem to be “teching” businesses to death, bit by bit.
This has always happened, but much slower, and, therefore, easier to adapt to the changes.
I am not “anti-tech” but it is out of control. Just look at the multi-transaction one-click purchasing and trading that goes on in the stock market. It results in such rapid transactions that it is essentially ‘insider trading”. No hard working, non-tech driven person can compete. So we are shut out.
Education delivery is going in the same direction. This does not sustain real, worthwhile work. All it does is set up competition for more technically exclusive, internally competitive concentration of wealth hoarding.
It is like a power grab and feels so wrong to traditional teachers because it is born of taking not giving, of authoritarian exclusivity, not caring and outreach.
Just because something “can be done” it doesn’t follow that it “should be done”.
This is all about lining the pockets of the top one percent of the top one percent. The OP is way overstating “open source” software and textbook publishers, and the death of paper. Good grief. CCSS is all about creating national standards, which in turn would be used to create international standards, because this is what the multinationals want to fulfill their demented neoliberal/globalist fantasy of a low-wage worldwide labor force. Ditching teachers in favor of software is a cheapo way to do it and have money handed over to Gates and Pearson. Not all countries will ever be able to be fully wired, and they don’t have to be, for students in industrialized countries will be forced into the labor force after middle school. Child labor laws are about to be repealed.
I have read that a big contributor to the financial meltdown in 2007 was the transition by banks to electronic imaging. Here’s the argument: Banks are regularly visited by auditors who go through their loan portfolios. In the old days, those auditors would look through stacks of paper. When those portfolios became tons of online pages instead, auditors became more lax. They didn’t look at the documents underlying the loans as carefully as they did before. And so they passed on a lot of questionable stuff, not recognizing how much risk the banks had taken on. That was part of the perfect storm that caused the meltdown (that and insurers of bonds not having been required to hold cash reserves sufficient to the risks they had taken on): big financial institutions were carrying many billions in bad real estate loans.
This narrative dovetails nicely with the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin’s just published The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Collapse of Capitalism. http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Marginal-Cost-Society-Collaborative/dp/1137278463/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397218576&sr=8-1&keywords=rifkin+zero+marginal+cost
It does. I haven’t read Rifkin’s book yet, but it looks fascinating, and I have long been a fan of his work.
Brilliant, Robert. Brilliant. I have seen this coming in the college textbook market for some time. Now that the game plan is in the open, here comes Plan B. You can bet all of the Broadie State Commissioners/Superintendents will rush in to fill the vacuum. After all, where are they going to land once the CCSS goes down the drain? Can you envision rats jumping from a sinking ship?
It’s opinion. There is not a single source cited in the OP, and it is off base.
Agree with susannunes. There is no evidence for this. Logical, given certain presuppositions, but I’m unconvinced.
Hi, Susan. Can you explain how it is off base? These pieces seem, to me, to fit together all too neatly, and I think that the case regarding the effects on markets of the various parts of the Ed. Deform package is very strong, indeed. One thing that I have noticed in following educational publishing over the years is that educators often aren’t aware of the market effects of decisions that they make. There was a great deal of press and chit-chat on the Net about the privacy issues surrounding inBloom but ALMOST NO ONE was discussing the consequences for the market in educational materials of having a single vendor of the national database service determining what “partners” would be connected to that service and at what cost. And very few have considered carefully the consequences for the market of having a single set of national standards.
Of course, a single set of national standards creates ENORMOUS economies of scale for the very large, deep-pocketed educational publishers. Here’s one: Printing costs are dependent upon the number of copies printed. If a publisher can do a text aligned to one set of national standards and already has enormous market share, then that publisher can do very large print runs at very low unit cost. A smaller publisher cannot pay for such a large print run and cannot assume the risk of a large run. And so, since price is a function of the cost of the goods sold, the large publisher with an huge national market can crush the smaller publisher on price. If, however, that publisher has to do smaller runs of state-customized product, the publishers still has an advantage, of course, by being able to negotiate based on total amount of work given to a printer, but the advantage is lessened.
And, a single set of standards keep smaller publishers from being able to do a better job than the big ones of producing a niche product.
A few decades ago, there were 30 or so educational publishers in the U.S. with significant market share in niche markets. Now, there are three, in K-12, that control almost all the business. That’s not good for anyone. It decreases competition and innovation and the choices that the customer has.
Nice story. We are fortunate that someone has had access to the thinking of the people in all the corporations involved. This is deserving of being published on Wikipedia.
Now we have a narrative, and better no one dare question it.
I have problems with many textbooks from the major publishers and even to adoption process. That needs improving badly, and when they are published for profit, that may not happen.
But open source books and materials open up some real possibilities – some of which aren’t so good. Think of Wikipedia as a historical source …
If only we could have our democracy back, people would choose human grace, exemplified by a caring, creative, and enthusiastic teacher.
Bob, thanks for restating your vision, for those of us who are new to the site.
I’m thinking of Wikipedia as an invaluable source of information.
What do yo mean by “historical source”?
WHO regards it as “invaluable” when anybody can put any kind of nonsense in those articles? The OP is so far offbase that it is funny.
Lets see YOU try and change something in Wikipedia. Here’s your assignment susannunes:
Change the density of gold from 19.35 to 35.19.
Let me know as soon as you have made the change. Thanks
I’m still waiting.
Come on sssusannunes, your anybody. Just do it.
35.19 is truly nonsense by the way.
susannunes
If changing or entering nonsense into Wikipedia is too hard for you. Here’s an easier assignment, find me some nonsense that anybody other than you has entered. Reasonable academic topics only please. I dont care if Justin Beebers middle name was changed.
GO!
susan, again, in what ways is it “so far off base?”
It’s an opinion; it is not fact. I certainly don’t think Wikipedia should be cluttered with more opinion posing as fact.
My students have been able to change Wikipedia entries in matter of seconds. That’s why I won’t let them use Wikipedia as a source in their research.
Susan and Louisiana,
Do some research into how this works. Wikipedia has a network of editors. Yes, you can put something wrong up, but it will be seen and corrected very, very quickly. And, again, there have been a number of academic papers on the accuracy of Wikipedia. Verdict: on the whole, more accurate than print encyclopedias.
Why? Millions of editors. Millions of eyeballs. And flagging and review when there something is changed back and forth.
Wikipedia is the realization of the dream of the Universal Library of Knowledge that one of the Ptolemies had for the Library of Alexandria, the dream of various Arab and Persian and Greek encyclopedists, of Diderot.
Finally.
It’s difficult for a falsehood to last long out in the open.
What Bob said.
Lots of passion for the truth as well.
Always appreciative of Robert’s insight. Thank you Robert.
Thank you, Joanna
Yes, educrats and teachers have long been suckers for being allowed to sit at the table with the powerful gates, duncans, spellings and the rest. Photo op with the president, oh sure thing!! Most seem painfully unaware of policy and the impact of that policy on their jobs, their income, and their ability to teach students. Ask any ed prep program leader what they are doing to make their product (ther teachers) more competitive and they just stare. Anyway, your post is the one worth reading through all the bloviation that gets posted. Thank you. It has always been about the money. Always will be.
Thanks, Akla. I read your notes, below. Lots of insight there.
Where does the “failing schools” meme fit in?
NYS Teacher,
Bob Sloan, at Daily Kos, Oct. 1, 2011, addressed the “failing schools” propaganda in a document, he attributed to Eric Heubeck and Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of ALEC.
” We will take every opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with (institutions like schools) …we will be entirely destructive…We will not try to reform the existing institutions… We intend to weaken them then, eventually destroy them… We will remain a constant barrage of criticism…. We will create our own institutions.”
Yeah, and how does privatizing education with as many as 75% – 90% charter schools, which don’t have to follow the Common Core, take CC tests, send student info to data warehouses etc., further corporate profits in this business plan? And what kind of pay-off will there be for the hedgefunders that are so gung ho about charter schools today?
When Pearson started buying off so many competing textbook companies in higher ed in the early 2000s, it was clear something nefarious was up. NCLB was new then and the connection with lower ed was not so clear.
This is like the 2001 move Anti-Trust re: killing off Open Source. Is it art is following reality or vise versa???
The failing schools meme is the reason why it is “necessary” to have a single set of “higher” (excuse me while I chortle) standards
privatizing schools is a whole separate gig, a different crew of oligarchs seeing education as “the 21st-century investment opportunity”
I don’t think privatization is a separate matter since Gates strongly supports charter schools, so he must not see them as a threat to profits. However, their exponential expansion definitely could impact profits, so this paradigm only works if there is a plan to regulate charters, at least to the extent that they are required to also follow the Common Core, implement CC curriculum and tests and submit student data for warehousing. That could be accomplished at the state level a la ALEC legislation. (Maybe the same will be true for voucher schools.) Since ALEC was not initially onboard with the Common Core but has since turned around, perhaps profiteers and their political lackeys have convinced them of this.
yes, Ed Deform is extremely incestuous. I was thinking about the genesis of the privatization movement. Here’s one interesting connection:
NCLB said, you schools will have to make adequate annual yearly progress toward 100 percent (chortle) proficiency in math and reading, or you must close them and offer alternatives. By 2012, 60 percent of schools in the US were in danger of not meeting AYP under the law. (This was the opening that Duncan exploited to force states to adopt the CC$$, BTW–he would grant waivers and save their schools IF they did that.)
So, where were all those replacement schools to come from? Creating them would cost trillions. Enter VIRTUAL CHARTERS and charter schools. So, the connection works the other way around, here. The standards and testing reforms create the charters. There are some who are behind standards and testing not because they want to use these to create monopolies but because they want to use them to privatize education. So, two very different sets of goals. Strange bedfellows, both supporting a single set of national standards and these egregious assessments to serve their own purposes.
And how do hedge fund managers profit, or is that just about power over peons, controlling the message and saving taxes –much like the foundations?
What’s your take, Cosmic Tinker? I have met a lot of highly successful businesspeople who were adamant about the virtues of privatization generally because they believe that when you have a distant, controlling authority (the school district, the state department, the USDE), then that authority makes stupid, bureaucratic decisions that stand in the way of innovation and competition among ideas. I think that their argument would be: in everything, let people put forward their ideas, and let the market judge those and sort out the winners and losers. What I see, instead, of competition from differing approaches to schooling but, instead, crony capitalism–a fix whereby a politician sets up some buddies who have decided to profit in the education biz. Some of those financeers, of course, have direct investments in charter schools and profit from those. Different story. A lot of people don’t recognize some of the indirect ways in which charters can be very profitable. For example, some operators make a killing in real estate–buying buildings with one company they own and leasing those to the charters schools they also operate.
I’m not sure, but I find it very hard to believe they have no skin in the game. I think there must be a pay off for their venture philanthropy with the non-profit charters, but I don’t know what.
I do know that billionaires play shell games with non-profit schools that are effectively fronts and managed by for-profit companies, which are subsidiaries of their corporations, with the school’s board stacked with corporate shills. They effectively pay management fees to themselves. Is sitting on a distant non-profit board a tax write off?
BTW, I know this is done at charters around management and real estate matters, but I experienced it at a non-profit college that was owned by convicted felon, junk bonds trader Michael Milken and his many for-profit education companies.
Ah yes, Cosmic, instead of *paying taxes* and letting government (presumably elected by the People and therefore “accountable” to them) make the decisions, they get to, in essence, take that tax money and decide what to do with it–to set up profit-making arrangements for their for-profit arms.
The first thing to know about the “failing schools” meme is that it’s false. It’s based upon comparison of the scores on international tests of students in U.S. schools to those of students in schools in other countries. What the data show, if you weight for SES, is that U.S. students lead or are very near the top in every area. They also show that our lowest SES students perform badly on tests OF THIS KIND. The message to take from those comparisons is that poverty matters.
The second thing to know about that meme is that it is used to support the business plan. Achieve ran the “U.S. schools are failing” crap on the Home page of its website for a long, long time. And every deformer features it front and center in every speech–that is, every speech features a falsehood as its primary rationale for these deforms.
The third thing to know is that standardized tests are poor measures of sophisticated and creative thinking.
The fourth thing to know is that they are invalid measures of reading and writing ability because the reading and writing done for these tests bears little resemblance to actual reading and writing.
The fifth thing to know is that the meme is appealing to authoritarians who wish to use it to impose authoritarian, demotivating, backward extrinsic reward and punishment models on students, teachers, and schools.
The OP is way off base. Nobody in his or her right mind thinks “open source” software is any kind of challenge to textbook publishing or to encyclopedias. That is just stupid on its face. NOBODY believes Wikipedia is any kind of reliable source for information because any idiot can go in there and right anything and nothing is peer-reviewed.
“write”
I thought academia would reject data at, “Ratemyprofessor”, for the same reasons you cite. However, as a member of search committees, at a Level 1 research university, I heard information from the site, often used as input for candidate selection and faculty review.
Actually he is not way off base. Have you heard of OER Commons? The NSDL? These are all digital resources for the public that include courses, assessments, learning objects, etc that can be used to teach/learn about a number of subjects. Contributors include many of the major universities and NASA. We no longer subscribe to many of the encyclopedias and databases we once did because of them, and we no longer buy print encyclopedias or purchase print materials on various science topics or cultures because better resources are found online. As for Wikipedia – while not my favorite source, for every idiot who wants to go in there and write a page, there are 10 more who will go in there and edit the page. While not an official peer review, it is most definitely reviewed, with some topics more accurate than others. Don’t dismiss it so disdainfully- it does have some value.
Students at elite, world class universities use Wikipedis all the time as a starting point for research that is cited. Try taking off your tin-foil hat while you read and think this through.
And yet students at my community college and in my classrooms are told not to use wikipedia as a reference in their research papers. It is not a peer reviewed site. I like it for a starting point for subjects in which I have no clue. I can pick up a few refs to real research and then go from there. But for the most part, why use a second rate source, often containing poor quality information from very biased sources, when real peer reviewed articles are available and easily found? And remember, gw bush and gore were students at world class universities, so that really does not give much weight to your argument for usage.
Akla
Correct; student cannot (nor should tehy) cite Wikipedia, but it is still ann extrordinarily useful and important resource.
I write, mostly on nonfiction topics, mostly educational materials, for a living. I use Wikipedia all the time. Of course I wouldn’t use it or any print encyclopedia, for that matter, as a sole, definitive source. When one fact checks, one goes to many sources and tries to make those as definitive as possible. Wikipedia articles commonly have MANY footnotes. Many of these are to peer-reviewed materials (though peer review does not guarantee accuracy, of course–think of the Sokol hoax) and to primary source materials. Wikipedia articles also commonly have External Source links. So, Wikipedia is a great start for a lot of research, and it points in useful directions.
Fact checking is an interesting undertaking. People imagine that it’s a lot more cut and dried than it is. A number of years ago, I was working on a history project–a series of books for kids in K-12, at the various grade levels, on Document-Based Questioning. I called my staff together and told them, “I want this to be the best-researched set of history texts ever produced in this country.” I hired a team of really great fact checkers, very experienced historians and researchers.
And here’s what I got back: Almost everything that people think they know about historical events is off enough to be called “only partially true” or “mostly false.”
Consider this quotation from a white, American man of the nineteenth century:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
Now consider these quotations, also from a nineteenth-century white, American male:
“On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self evident lie.’”
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
The first of these statements, from a contemporary perspective, seems outlandish and shocking, the second reasonable and evident. The third . . . well, isn’t that just WONDERFUL? You may have guessed, however, or may know, if you are a student of history that the quotations above are all from the same person: Abraham Lincoln, whom we remember as the “great emancipator.”
Did Abraham Lincoln travel to New Orleans and witness a slave auction, and did doing so affect him deeply, and did he then, as a young man, express his abhorrence of the institution? Well, this turns out to be a very complex, very nuanced story. One could write an entire book about it easily. But in the history texts, again and again, one gets the mythologized version. There are a number of relevant historical documents. They tell conflicting stories. They amount to powerful indictments of slavery. They show that the man was personally horrified by what he saw on several occasions. But it’s not that simple.
see, now you are just confusing us here with your multiple versions of history. Tell us one story, tell us all the same story, eliminate alternative versions, tell us the same story again and again. Education just works better that way. 🙂
All societies have told their myths, but the vehicles for these differ. We tell them in history textbooks.
According to Wikipedia, the journal Sokal submitted the bogus article to was not peer-reviewed at the time. That info could change tomorrow. I used to contribute to Wikipedia because I care about accuracy wherever information is shared. I knew my students were using it, even though every college where I’ve taught has not allowed students to cite Wikipedia, but I made an exception for one article. I stopped allowing that not long afterwards, and I don’t contribute there anymore, because I got tired of people changing what I wrote. (And yes, the info I submitted was accurate and I had cited several credible sources.)
That journal, Social Text, was chosen by Sokol precisely because it was the leading (most influential, most well-known) journal on the Postmodernist side of the theory wars.
I, too, had one really bad experience with Wikipedia. I am a long-time student of motifs in literature. Several years ago, I checked the Wikipedia article on “motif,” and it was really idiotic. The author was, it seems, completely unfamiliar with the vast scholarly literature on this subject and didn’t even mention, for example, of the Arne-Thompson motif index. The definition given for “motif” was crude at best. So, I wrote a concise, scholarly introduction to the study of motifs and posted it. My piece, which I put quite a lot of work into, was immediately replaced by the puerile nonsense that was there before. I could have gone back and forth with the ignoramus who wrote the article that I replaced, and I could have lodged a complaint, either of which would have triggered a review, but I got sidetracked by other matters. When I last checked, however, there were separate entries on Wikipedia dealing with motif in folklore studies and the original article was somewhat better but still amateurish.
Wikipedia has also had its share of scandals around people (both within and outside the organization) being paid by companies, PR firms and individuals to edit, in order to skew info and promote their agendas: http://twkozlowski.net/paid-editing-thrives-in-the-heart-of-wikipedia/
Ah, I see. Wikipedia has more users today than all encyclopedias in history put together.
And there is a review process on Wikipedia. Yes, anyone can edit, but challenges on entries create flags for that process. Dig a little more deeply, Susan, and review the editorial comments behind Wikipedia.
I would say that MOST serious researchers use it today. But, of course, they cross check in other sources. That’s SOP anyway.
And, there have been several studies of late that show that the error incidence on Wikipedia is LOWER than in print encyclopedias. Why? The moment an error appears there, millions see it.
And, Susan, if you don’t think that Open Source is a challenge to traditional educational publishing, tell that to the sales rep who loses the sale of that statistics text to an open source product. Again, I can point you, right now, to a hundred or so highly vetted textbooks in many, many fields, written by teams of professors, and available online for free.
It’s hard to compete with free unless you fix the market.
Susan, a big study was published in Nature
Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005) | doi:10.1038/438900a; Published online 14 December 2005
showing that Wikipedia was as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Correction:
The Nature study found that the average Wikipedia science article contained 4 errors and that the average Encyclopedia Britannica science article contained 3.
This might be surprising to some people, but it won’t be surprising to anyone who has done fact checking professionally. I have written an as-yet unpublished book (I haven’t had time to pursue getting it published) called Uncertainty, which is about this very phenomenon, about what everyone thinks, falsely, that he or she “knows for a fact.” The book contains pages and pages and pages of commonly believed falsehoods.
And, doubtless, the book contains many, many errors. All do.
So, my memory of the Nature article was faulty. When I went back and checked it, I found that I had erred. My basic takeaway–that Wikipedia was as accurate as the most highly respected print encyclopedia–was sound, was OK. But my memory of the details was wrong. The study showed that that print encyclopedia was SLIGHTLY more accurate.
That’s the way it is with human memory. That’s the way it is with the memory of renowned experts who write encyclopedia articles, and the more renowned they are, the more likely people will take their slip-ups for the truth. To err is human. To pounce on error in online posts is so as well.
See Mercedes Schneider’s review of the funding by Pearson and the Pearson/Gates connection: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/about-pearson-the-golden-goose-state-standards-and-then-some/
This is a great post.
The business push for CCSS (and the entire spectrum of corporate reforms) has always been profit thinly veneered as “educaitonal opportunity.”
deutsch29:
I’m sure there were commercial motives behind the Common Core Standards, in both their creation and promotion, and there’s no question that Gates and other billionaires are trying to reduce the cost of education, but there appears to be a speculative dimension to this “birth narrative.” The account also appears to squarely contradict your carefully documented work that shows how the Gates Foundation poured over two billion dollars into the creation and promotion of the CCS. Given that fact, I’m not so sure about the following:
“But to make that computer-adaptive ed tech revolution happen and so prevent open-source textbooks from killing their business model, the publishers would first need ONE SET OF NATIONAL STANDARDS. That’s why they paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created. That one set of national standards would provide the tags for their computer-adaptive software. That set of standards would be the list of skills that the software would keep track of in the databases that open-source providers could not get access to. Only they would have access to the BIG DATA.”
Are “the publishers” (also referred to as the “educational materials monopolists”) and the Gates Foundation one and the same? It doesn’t look like it. If Gates, and not the publishers, paid for the Common Core, where do Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and the others actually fit in? And what role did the federal government play?
My impression is that Bill Gates and his foundation are trying to prepare the way for Microsoft’s further participation in an expanding ed tech market (which they’re partly responsible for expanding), but if that’s true, aren’t they actually competing against the traditional textbook publishers? If the remaining education publishers are indeed colluding with Gates and Microsoft to actively block the spread of open educational resources, it would be helpful to see more evidence. While most of the post seems plausible, even a few links to articles, speeches, reports, and blog posts might help clarify the apparent contradictions in this narrative.
It’s worth noting that the Gates Foundation has helped fund the Big Idea Fest, an event run by ISKME, an organization that supports and promotes open educational resources. I guess that could be a smoke screen, but in the absence of any documentation for the claims being made, it would be hard to verify them. The whole thing is a little bit confusing.
Randall, this piece does not contradict Mercedes’s carefully documented work. As I say, there is a confluence of interest here. Please note that Microsoft and Mr. Gates have equity stakes or partnerships in many of these fledgling ed tech providers, and a big initiative with Pearson to create and sell Common-Core-related educational software made to work seamlessly with Microsoft products like Office.
And quite a long while ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put out an RFP for proposals for entrepreneurs looking for seed money to start producing computer-adaptive ed tech. Mercedes has written about that.
Bob Shepherd:
Yes, the article does contradict her work. She explicitly states that the Gates Foundation paid for the Common Core Standards. You explicitly state that the publishers paid for them:
“But to make that computer-adaptive ed tech revolution happen and so prevent open-source textbooks from killing their business model, the publishers would first need ONE SET OF NATIONAL STANDARDS. That’s why they paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created.”
I know you don’t believe that 2 + 2 = 5. Please don’t ask me to believe it.
There are other inconsistencies, omissions, and unsupported (and frankly questionable) claims in the article. I don’t necessarily disagree with the overall gist of it, but a careful reader might notice the yellow flags and either ask for more specifics or seek out other articles that might fill in the blanks.
Now with the above comment you’ve introduced a new term: “these fledgling ed tech providers.” When you mention ed tech in the article, you are referring to “the educational publishing monopolists.” Do you mean that the education monopolists are fledglings when it comes to education technology? (If so, is this true?) Or, are you talking about the many actual “fledgling ed tech providers” that are attracting funding these days? Again, it’s confusing.
It sounds like the original article was written off the cuff. I have no problem with that, but for me its big claims raise more questions than they answer. That’s why it would help if you would identify at least some of your sources. The conclusions are so far-reaching, it doesn’t sound like you could have based them on personal experience alone. If they are based on overall impressions rather than on systematic research, then maybe they shouldn’t have been presented as a definitive origin story.
Opinion pieces are just that. Opinion pieces. Some are researched. Some are off the cuff. Some are both. But they are opinions until declared as fact. Others chime in because they may be looking for a connection, a support group, a helpful suggestion, etc.
Just because it isn’t a researched dicument , it doesn’t invalidate the thinking, the attempt to piece things together in this huge nation that is in the midst of political divisiveness, and religious zealotry.
Sometimes connections are hidden in plain view.
Don’t we wish there were more analytical thinking?
Besides, just who can one site these days? Unless one has access to unretouched data files, there is just no way to get to the facts.
The only facts that matter are the evidence seen daily in the classroom, with or without tests.
I am simply not interested in a bunch of Bill Gates clones. I like people with personality and joy. With an ability to accept faults but not call them failures.
Yes he can seem nice enough but he is not a typical American, nor would most people wish to be just like he is.
We will see that he is the Wizard of Oz someday, fooling people to believe it is OK to try to dominate the world with smoke and mirrors on a computer screen.
Let kids and teachers and communities live.
Randall, they both were financial supporters of the CCSSO from the start
Randall, one of the issues with all this is that people have almost ZERO interest in hearing the business story laid out. No, I did not go into the nuances, in the details, but I could have done so in excruciating detail. If you look at those fledgling operators, who owns them, who provided the seed money, who is the “major partner.” Quelle surprise.
Look up White Hat charters in Ohio. ‘Nuf said.
Randal, see Mercedes Schneider’s review of the funding of the CCSSO by Pearson and of the Pearson/Gates connection, here: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/about-pearson-the-golden-goose-state-standards-and-then-some/
Bob Shepherd:
Nice try. I read that post a while ago, and it only proves the stunning disproportion between Gates funding and Pearson funding of the Common Core. In other posts Dr. Schneider identified 2.3 billion dollars in funding for creating and promoting the Common Core Standards. In the post you linked to, unless I read it wrong, she identifies .5 million dollars in donations to the Council of Chief State School Officers:
“From 2009 to 2011, the Charity decided to donate to CCSSO.
In 2009, the Charity (now called “the Foundation”) paid CCSSO a $100,000 “grant.”
In 2010, the Charity increased its grant to CCSSO $340,000.
In 2011, the Charity paid CCSSO another $100,000.
Throw the copyright-holding dog a half-million bone.”
Pearson was fined millions for using its “charity” funds to bring revenue to the for-profit arm. Dr. Schneider reports that the Gates foundation advanced nearly three million dollars to the Pearson Foundation “to support the development of open access courses for 6th and 7th grade mathematics as well as 11th and 12th grade English language arts.” Open access? That’s interesting, because your (ever-changing) theory claims that Gates and Pearson and other publishers created the Common Core to quash the development of “open resource” educational materials.
Even if you add up the Pearson “charity” donations to the CCSSO (half a million dollars?) and the for-profit Pearson donations to the development of Common-Core-aligned digital learning initiatives (total unclear), Pearson’s contribution to “paying for the Common Core” is nothing compared to the Gates Foundation’s, which paid 2,300 million! Pearson couldn’t have contributed more than 20 or 30 million, and it might have contributed much less than 10 million. And according to Dr. Schneider, approximately three million of the Pearson Foundation revenue in 2011 came from the Gates Foundation.
The big fine was levied because the Pearson Foundation was conducting activities intended to enhance the bottom line of the for-profit Pearson entities under the guise of making non-profit donations. You could say that the Pearson operatives weren’t being as smart as Bill Gates in covering their tracks, but it’s clear that Gates Foundation activities might pay off for Microsoft in the long run. I don’t know who’s disputing that. It’s old news.
Meanwhile, you’re still claiming that Gates and Pearson are comparable partners in paying for the Common Core. That would be true if 2,300 = 20 or 30 (or less than 10). But it doesn’t, and they aren’t. You’re also insisting that the reason for creating the Common Core was to make it to possible to create computer adaptive teaching and testing software to be controlled by a few educational materials companies, with the intent of suppressing open education resources. That’s the reason for the Common Core Standards, you say.
Some of that sounds plausible, but you still haven’t backed up those claims with very much substance. That Gates, Pearson, and the US Department of Education have been collaborating isn’t under dispute. (But the claim that Pearson was a substantial partner with Gates in paying for the Common Core–according to Dr. Schneider’s blog posts, including the one you linked to–is still false.) And according to press accounts of the fine levied against Pearson, its foundation’s illegal activities were partly intended to secure even more funding from the Gates Foundation.
Anybody who thinks Bill Gates is “an extraordinarily bright man” and a “visionary” doesn’t have a whole lot of credibility with me. Being a monopolist doesn’t confer brilliance.
Are you kidding me, Susan? This man built the largest non-state fortune that the world has ever seen. He saw personal computers coming when IBM and DEC were saying that they would never amount to anything. He has out-foxed the competition in market after market. He achieved unquestioned dominance in the OS market, in the office software market, in the database market.
When I was a little boy, I had a fantasy about figuring out a way to get a dime from every person in the world. Well, Bill did that. He is an extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily gifted person.
If you read the Gates Notes, which I encourage you to do, you will see that he is thinking very clearly about a lot of long-term issues. He has a knack for that, for seeing the long-term trend. And now he has the fortune and the sources of information to assist him in doing that.
Few, for example, have any notion that meat eating means throwing away 90 percent of the calories (the plant food calories that were used by the animal in his or her own life processes), or that 70 percent of all arable land is now used for growing feed crops, or that 31 percent of all wild vertebrates on planet Earth have disappeared since 1975 due to loss of habitat, primarily to agriculture. Gates knows all that. And so he is investing in several startups that produce extremely tasty meat and egg alternatives, in ongoing research to make those as palatable as meat. The course we are on, now, is absolutely unsustainable as a matter of straightforward, indisputable science, and Bill Gates sees that at a time when very few even have a clue about it.
Of late, meat consumption has risen highly in the developing world. The trend line for that is absolutely unsustainable. Bill has watched those trend lines. He has crunched the numbers. He knows that that cannot, as a matter of fact, continue. And he’s already acting on that knowledge when most everyone else is still clueless about it.
He knows for example, from a joint study by Pew and the UN, that livestock production produces more greenhouses gases than all non-livestock-related fossil-fuel-based transportation put together. And he knows that people are worried about the human population but haven’t given any thought to the fact that there are 68 BILLION farmed animals on the planet right now. (I crunched those numbers myself based on FAO data tables.) And he knows the resource cost of meat production (1,500 gallons of water per pound of beef). That we are taking a trillion and a half fish out of the ocean each year (British fishcount study). That that rate will mean total collapse of all commerical fisheries by mid century (Fisheries Centre, Univ. of British Columbia).
Unsustainable trends. And so Bill Gates is already working on alternatives when our politicians haven’t even recognized that there is a problem.
That is what I call visionary.
I think that Gates sees ed tech as a win-win. He will make money. Costs of education will be lowered. And he has done some things that I definitely approve of there. The Khan Academy makes a wide range of good courseware available to any poor kid in the developing world who has an Internet-connected device and access to the electrical grid or a generator.
Bob Shepherd:
When it comes to education, this visionary is either really badly informed, or he isn’t telling the truth. Much of what he says in speeches, interviews, and op-eds on the subject is just plain false.
One quick example. In his interview with CNBC at the 2013 Davos conference, he said, “You know, a lot of our unemployment is because kids aren’t well educated enough.” No, a lot of our unemployment was caused by the credit crisis of 2008, which was brought on by financial deregulation, shady practices, easy credit, and a housing bubble that went bust and still hasn’t recovered.
Unemployment was only related to education in the sense that many thousands of teachers were laid off nationwide due to budget cuts caused by drastically lower tax receipts during the recession and wrongheaded “education reforms” (like austerity programs for urban districts that raised class sizes as high as 50 per class).
Poor education had nothing to do with it. In fact, highly educated people are still having trouble finding jobs. Many that do have jobs are underemployed and overworked, including the young teachers who toil for peanuts in charter schools, often under sweatshop conditions.
So we have a gifted visionary spreading disinformation about education in general and teachers in particular. What are his motives for doing such a thing? Does it have anything to do with money?
This article in Harper’s Magazine sees his vision for solving the world hunger problem as yet another nightmare… Let Them Eat Cash: Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/06/let-them-eat-cash/
Bill Gates, not textbook publishers, is the one behind Common Core. It was his baby to begin with because he fell in love with the itty-bitty European countries’ ideas about “national standards.” He thought if it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for the USA, never mind that the US has something called a separation of powers that precludes national education standards set by the US government on curriculum, licensing, etc. He also realized if everybody was doing the same thing at the same time, you can just have everybody on a computer. It was a potential moneymaking bonanza for him. The OP has it precisely backwards.
As I said, a confluence of interest. Gates and Pearson were the big co-funders of the Common Core.
Unless I’m missing something, Mercedes Schneider concluded that the Gates Foundation supplied the vast bulk of the funding (around 2.3 billion?) for the creation and promotion of the Common Core Standards. She has a detailed post about Pearson involvement with the Council of Chief State School Officers (and other shenanigans) titled “About Pearson, the Golden Goose State Standards, And Then Some” (December 15, 2013).
The links in an earlier post from Diane suggest that the CCS-related outlays from the Pearson Foundation were made with the expectation of fairly rapid and ongoing returns on their investments, er, donations, some of which put them on the wrong side of the law:
Lots of interesting details in the comments and links.
yes, Randal. But Pearson was also in on this from the beginning. It was financing the organizations themselves–the CCSSO and the NGA. It was a sponsor of both.
And, again, Gates and Pearson are partners in a big new suite of Common-Core-based computer-adaptive software programs.
So, Randal, if you will go back and reread what I said, it was that Gates and long had a vision for computer-adaptive learning, that the big textbook publishers saw this as an opportunity, and that they jumped on that. There was a confluence of interest there.
Bob Shepherd:
I did reread what you said. As you know, I’m not questioning whether you believe this: “Gates and long had a vision for computer-adaptive learning, that the big textbook publishers saw this as an opportunity, and that they jumped on that. There was a confluence of interest there.”
I’m questioning the part that I quoted, and I’m saying that more specifics would help clarify and back up your main point, which I take to be that the Common Core Standards exist because textbook publishers wanted to stop the spread of open source education resources in order to protect their business. It’s a really interesting thesis, but it hasn’t been substantiated.
The world already knows there were commercial motives behind the Common Core. This was spelled out in the Harvard Business Review. Are there any possible “smoking guns” for what you’re saying?
So, at any rate, my book is not about the politics or the economics. It’s a) a critical analysis of the amateurish “standards” and b) a book about teaching reading, literature, grammar, vocabulary, writing, research, media use, thinking, speaking, and listening in ways PRECLUDED BY these purported “standards” but far better than what is envisioned by these ‘standards.”
Bob Shepherd:
I’m buying that book. I hope you get a chance to elaborate a little more on the origins of the Common Core sometime.
Randal, I was following what the NGA and the CCSSO were doing and who was supporting them long before most educators even knew that they existed (most people still don’t). Pearson has been a major sponsor from the very beginning. And so has Gates. And they have common goals that they have come together to work on, but they have come at these from different angles and for different reasons. Again, if you will reread my piece, you will see that I mention that Gates has had this vision for a computer-adaptive revolution in education for many decades. He wrote about this thirty years ago and started actively working toward it after he retired from day-to-day operations at Microsoft. And Pearson has a whole set of reasons of its own to want to see this happen. A confluence of interest creating a great river of green. Yes, Gates wrote the check that went to Coleman to pay for the standards. But Pearson and others financed the organizations that did that. Both standard to make a lot of money, and, again, they are a) business partners in this enterprise and b) have equity stakes in other organizations that will profit from it.
Bob Shepherd:
According to Dr. Schneider’s reporting, Pearson’s funding of these initiatives amounted to a pittance compared to Gates Funding. Gates overwhelmingly paid for the Common Core Standards, not Pearson or the other education publishers, as you stated.
“But to make that computer-adaptive ed tech revolution happen and so prevent open-source textbooks from killing their business model, the publishers would first need ONE SET OF NATIONAL STANDARDS. That’s why they paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created. That one set of national standards would provide the tags for their computer-adaptive software. That set of standards would be the list of skills that the software would keep track of in the databases that open-source providers could not get access to. Only they would have access to the BIG DATA.”
It’d be great to be able to follow some links or look up some names associated with this narrative. Except for the error about who paid for the Common Core Standards, it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. I’m hoping to read more about the inside story when I buy your book.
My book is about the standards themselves, Randal, about why and how they misconceive teaching and learning in the various domains of the English language arts. It is basically a critical reading of the “standards.” And, again Pearson and Gates ARE PARTNERS in the creation of computer-adaptive learning systems, and Pearson was a major sponsor of the CCSSO, the organization that solicited the funding from Gates to pay for the actual writing.
Bob Shepherd:
“And, again Pearson and Gates ARE PARTNERS in the creation of computer-adaptive learning systems, and Pearson was a major sponsor of the CCSSO, the organization that solicited the funding from Gates to pay for the actual writing.”
You’re repeating things that aren’t refutable and that I didn’t refute at all, but you’re acting as if I did refute them. That’s a special form of reasoning, and it’s not considered a valid one.
Not to intrude, but pick up the phone or use email. Or go outside it is too pretty to be inside typing if one is not chained to their desk as I am. The different actors have come together to maximize their efforts and profits. gates and pearson and others have long been heavy funders of ccsso, ngo, and many other education organizations and think tanks. Back when Clinton was head of the ngo and the first set of common core type ideas were floated (a national set of standards, a national test, say the NAEP, etc) people shot it down as being national–guvmint controlling our childrens learning, run from the feds states rats and all. No performance based outcome measures could stand the brunt of the rabbles attack. Come full circle and the republicants now are in charge and want the same set of national standards, curricula, tests, etc to prove that public schools and teachers unions are failing our children and trapping the poor and minority in failing schools while those public school teachers and unionists send their children to private schools (they never mention that the wealthy legislators and backers of cc do the same thing). They need to show that the system is failing in order to get support for their new education system. And to get legislators to throw billions into their hands. They are bringing textbook publishing, computer technology in delivery/teacher of materials, methods, and test publishers alltogether to build this one system that they will own, they will control, and from which they will profit. Will the new education system work? As the high school student shrewdly pointed out, no one knows. We are experimenting with our kids to see if this new standarized system of teaching will work to help students learn better than their peers in other countries. Gates has said it will take at least 10 if not 20 years to know if this system works. To determine if the outputs are consistent, reliable, and high quality. Are interchangable across states and corporations and jobs. Assimilate now, resistance is futile: The Borg
I have long had an interest in educational publishing as an industry and about the economic forces shaping it, so I view these matters through that lens. Yes, Gates wrote the check for the standards, but he handed it over to an organization sponsored by what would turn out to be HIS PARTNER in the creation of a new generation of computer-adaptive learning programs. That partner also just happened to be, by far, the largest educational publishing monopolist.
When I first heard about the CCSSO, years ago, it was already listing Pearson as its major sponsor.
The Pearson logo was appearing on its communications, way back then.
Bob Shepherd:
Like I said, I did reread the post. None of what you wrote below addresses my actual questions and feedback. So I’m gonna have to give up.
“NGA and the CCSSO were doing and who was supporting them long before most educators even knew that they existed (most people still don’t). Pearson has been a major sponsor from the very beginning. And so has Gates. And they have common goals that they have come together to work on, but they have come at these from different angles and for different reasons. Again, if you will reread my piece, you will see that I mention that Gates has had this vision for a computer-adaptive revolution in education for many decades. He wrote about this thirty years ago and started actively working toward it after he retired from day-to-day operations at Microsoft. And Pearson has a whole set of reasons of its own to want to see this happen. A confluence of interest creating a great river of green. Yes, Gates wrote the check that went to Coleman to pay for the standards. But Pearson and others financed the organizations that did that. Both standard to make a lot of money, and, again, they are a) business partners in this enterprise and b) have equity stakes in other organizations that will profit from it.”
Randal, you said that I was wrong, that it was Gates who paid for the standards. I explained that Gates turned over the check to the CCSSO, which was supported by Pearson, and that Pearson and Gates were both committed to this vision of computer-adaptive instruction. So, I did address your comment.
Bob Shepherd:
“You said that I was wrong, that it was Gates who paid for the standards. I explained that Gates turned over the check to the CCSSO, which was supported by Pearson, and that Pearson and Gates were both committed to this vision of computer-adaptive instruction. So, I did address your comment.”
I hesitate to say anything at all, but no, you aren’t addressing the comments as offered. Instead, you’re continually shifting the rhetorical ground, as above. This allows you to present yourself as “right,” but it also inhibits a forthright exchange.
So, yes, perhaps I should have been clearer in my original post. But the fact remains that the publishers backed the creation of the national standards because it gave them a single national system to tag their software to AND it created ways to work that system to shut out competitors and preclude the development of open-source alternatives to their products. When I used “they” in the hastily written post that Diane reposted, I was referring to educational publishers generally. Pearson is one such. Gates was getting into the business. So, they.
Both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Pearson have been sponsors of the CCSSO for a long time. This is not a simple “bad guy” story, Susan.
It’s not either/or. See Mercedes Schneider’s review of Pearson’s funding of the CCSSO and of the Pearson/Gates connection: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/about-pearson-the-golden-goose-state-standards-and-then-some/
People can avoid being “tagged” by Google by using another search engine which does not track users, DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com
“Think of the money to be saved.
And the money to be made.”
And the domination to be accrued…
The Perfect Solution to Disseminating Information to the Masses! By Bill Gates
Too bad Gates did not have his own kids at the receiving end of this ‘Ever-so-flawless’ process of information in & information out. He may not have been concerned about the impact on his children, but I would hope Melinda might have. Maybe!
Although, the assembly line makes sense, but there are real humans attached to this AmericanGreed scenario.
Dr. Temple Grandin, PhD in animal husbandry and an individual with Autism, has researched and published extensively about Autism, her own and others. If you are not familiar, her lectures are on YouTube. She encourages the nation to guide people with high functioning AU -Aspberger’s, to seek employment in the tech fields because their strengths and brains operate along those skill areas. I am saying all this, because her ability to build on her insight and skills has changed the slaughter industry – big companies follow her recommendations. She stresses the humane treatment of animals. Back to Gates and Co., similar process (not slaughter…) but – HUMANITY was left out of the Perfect CCSS GetRichQuickScheme. Teachers and Parents all over NYS and soon on a larger scale, the US, are letting the Schemers know….what about the children?
Ultimately, this Giant Scheme is all about GetRichQuick, then about education.
Other countries around the world may try it, but their children are not as easily for sale as billionaires and legislators have sold our children.
It’s HUMANITY Stupid! We may come to that conclusion after we have destroyed ours. US is VERY YOUNG and we rule by $$$. If that is all there is and will remain as our value system… In my book, we may be short lived.
Extremely insightful and informative. Thanks!
Brilliant! Cynical! True. Newspapers are being brought down by much the same.
As someone who has published 105 books, including 20 of my own, and is now working digitally with many projects, this article provides a keen insight into these transitions.The writer’s description of the process is valid. When greed and the need to retain control are a big part of the picture, much is explained.
How true it is. Another culpert – change programs validated by longitudinal study that can be duplicated in imagination only without reference to the one size fits one delivery that is often most important. Teachers don’t have enough say in their approved tools and resources.
Teachers don’t have enough say in their approved tools and resources
Teachers, at the building level, should have THE ONLY say, subject to veto by school boards and by the courts.
Our district adopted a math series developed in Chicago back in the 1990s. While it has its merits, it is true that spiraling kind if replaced mastery. Proponents kept griping about “old-fashioned drill and kill” math teaching. I understood to a point. But we have to have mastery at some point. And we also need some spiraling. I used Drops in a Bucket reviews for both 3rd and 4th grade practice.
In any case, I think we have gotten off track in our objections. Or lost focus. There are things in the CCSS that are both bad and good. Objective by objective. Grade by grade. It needs to be evaluated as to whether it appropriately applied. We have often gotten so frustrated with the testing mania that we have begun to blame the CCSS. I don’t think it is the “main problem”. Different groups of people have different reasons to hate the testing, the CCSS, and the treatment of content from political perspectives. On top of that union busting at the had of ALEC legislation and the RttT mandate to evaluate teachers based upon tests that are inappropriate has teachers highly agitated.
I am a ” nobody” on this forum.But i just want people to find a common place to fend off the crux of all the issues. IMO, the problem is simply the inappropriate use of these tests to close schools, fire teachers, and label dtudents , condemning all as “failures”.
We need to recognize that the tests are the bridge that ties together CCSS, VAM, teacher tenure and contracts, college applications and denials.
Many people are binding together and refusing to put their children through the testing stress and heartlessness. This needs to be our focus, IMI. The other parts will follow.
From the beginning, teachers and administrators thought the NCLB Act was damaging and all children would NOT be able to pass in 2014. And they won’t. Yet, we all did all that we could to get as many kids to pass as possible. No one sabotaged the process in our school. Yet we were still harassed to do more and more and more. Trying to get the bottom kids to a passing level was stressful. We all became spec ed teachers to some degree. But we felt exhausted trying to meet all students’ needs. The top kids need more time and challenge. And VAM seemed to be there ready to catch us if we didn’t bring ALL kids up, even if they had done great on a third grade test without having skills. Fourth grade testing was much more difficult in every way than third. And so VAM wasn’t remotely accurate. Only kids with IEPs got special test time or different accommodations. The other lower kids had to swim or sink. They didn’t always swim.
We also had attitudinal test takers in 4th grade that did not care, spent 25 minutes on a test, and teachers weren’t allowed to nudge them in any way.
So, the problem is that the tests aren’t truly valid. And if we have a world in which all we can expect is for people to be “perfect” or “fail”… This is pitiful. It is not the fulfillment of the American Dream and it shouldn’t fulfill any teacher. At all.
If it does fulfill someone…I don’t wish for the to be around my kids or grandkids.
I agree that the most important thing that has to happen is that we have to stop using these curricula-and-pedagogy-distorting, abusive, invalid summative standardized tests. That’s priority number 1.
If people opt out successfully, starting in lower grades, the testing will be gutted. The other issues will fall in place.
deb: whether I agree or disagree with you, you and the term “nobody” don’t go together. You are one of many who keep the discussions here lively and informative.
Two points.
First, the short one. I much appreciate the discussion on this thread and—I hope I am not alone in this—love the sharp but civil back and forth. Haven’t made my mind up on the whole topic raised by Bob Shepherd, but it has one very strong core idea: that privatizing tech billionaires are acting, well, like themselves. Nothing more, nothing less. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Bill Gates gotta be all that Bill Gates gotta be…
Who, or what, else could he be? Certainly not a Bob Shepherd…
😏
Second, your comment that “We need to recognize that the tests are the bridge that ties together CCSS, VAM, teacher tenure and contracts, college applications and denials.”
Opinion? Sure. But this is strongly supported by a very well informed and articulate “education reform” insider, Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
Perhaps he let the cat out of the bag, but good for us that he forgot that ‘loose lips sink ships’ of $tudent $ucce$$—
“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” [Michael Kinsley]
😎
“those people won’t vote for me anyway”
Well, from what we can tell, the bulk of the CCSS is inferior to our district’s curricula. The problem is that in our district, there is an expectation of 100% passage and 100% one year’s growth, or it is the teacher’s fault. I am not talking about scores that are “proficient” but scores that are accelerated or advanced. It is very stressful to be responsible for all students caring that much about tests! Yet we can be labeled ineffective for such student behavior.
Kind of like the psychology of drinking water. Why have free water fountains everywhere, when you can put it in a bottle and charge a dollar for it?
Many of these companies do, in fact, simply bottle tap water
” in the switch from textbooks to Big Data and computer-adaptive ed tech”
OK, but for discussion’s sake, how about the following:
1. if not a switch from textbooks to big data, then what? a switch to free resources?
2. Did people resist textbooks as a business plan as well (obviously all successful businesses have a business plan, and if your business is text books then was that a problem in the day of text books)?
3. Don’t we just have more tools in the tool box, but still need text books? (I personally still love the text books I have in the music classroom and use them; they are an excellent and comprehensive collection of songs that would take a long time to sort and gather without the text book). I think we still need text books.
4. Did they anticipate a problem that doesn’t really exist? (text books dead or obsolete; many people think music is a “dead language,” but that could be argued against. . .maybe the same is true of text books. We still need them and people will still pay for them).
You have to look at it as a system. The test gathers data on which students (gender, ethnicity, geographic location, ses, etc) answer certain questions correctly. Based on those questions, the test can generate new questions at a higher level (grade level for example) and see how the student answers. And then, iteration after iteration, continue to adjust and challenge the student with harder or easier questions. The questions are drawn from a database of materials used in the classroom (in our current paradigm, a textbook). Remember how all the kids asked “is the discussion material included on the exam” and the response from teachers everywhere — ok some/most teachers– no, only the material in the book is covered on the exam”. The owners of the test need complete access to the book materials, and those books need to be aligned to the standards and the examples provided for instructional purposes. This is more efficient and economical. Imagine what it would cost if the test maker had to pay a fee to providers of books from outside the system? In this way, the test can be easily changed, the materials can be easily changed/updated, and one does not need a teacher as the middleman or outside books. Thus online learning modules. Online exams. Online schools. But what of online sports? Will we continue to build those expensive taj mahals so that kids can gather to play sports if they can get all their learning on line?
Anyway, back to the system: No more need for publishers to go through state after state adoption processes, deal with evolutionists and creationists, ect. or have to lobby legislators (which to me is more than enough reason to adopt this system) in order to get the books adopted. No more need to demonstrate that the books are aligned to that state’s specific standards and test. Saves money, saves time. Once the books are in use (assuring us that they are indeed aligned to common core standards and the common core tests at the national level), all content can be fed into the dataset for later use. Also, for remedial purposes, the material can be packaged and repackaged into multiple programs and presented in multiple ways to meet all of those multiple intelligences that are out there. And the material can be marketed to specific kids based on their scores and problem areas.
When we developed a software program for use with at risk kids that helped them learn about drugs and alcohol, it was easier to develop the algorithms to pull up new easier or harder questions for a kid than it was to develop the questions. It was very difficult and time consuming to write multiple questions with multiple levels of difficulty and at different grade levels. And we did not even attempt to adjust things based on the reading level of the student nor their ability to use a computer and the software. I am sure that the common core tests have taken reading ability/level into account and that the exams test the subject matter, not the computer/typing skills of the student. Right?
This is not just about replacing the text book. This is about designing a whole new interactive, integrated system of teaching. Will students be able to learn with this new instructional system? What role will a live teacher play–other than as a coach? Remember, gates said we will not know if this common core system works for some time. Only after it is developed, properly implemented, tested, adjusted and retested will we know if students actually learn what they need to know to meet the jargon of the ed policy people in fifteen years or so. My twenty five cents. Do not be a red shirt!
Akla, you are describing the current push for “‘personalized’ learning, delivered digitally”–a phrase we hear a lot lately; but this is not only about *academic* questions that will be adaptive…
“They” (edtech software writers?, state boards of ed? businesses who want access to future workers’ profiles? others?) are also interested in fostering in children AND MEASURING certain “attitudes” and “dispositions.”
You may notice the school giving surveys to your children that ask personal questions. There is one in particular called “Communities that Care” which is pretty alarming from a parental perspective. The federal government has so far given grants to 11 states for “Safe and Supportive Schools”. (You can search that phrase and see the ED.gov press release that tells which states.) Here is the link to one of the “Communities that Car” surveys some districts are using: http://www.pridesurveys.com/supportfiles/CTC_Survey.pdf. READ IT CAREFULLY. Notice that in small print on the first page, it says “*Revised in 2012 to meet new Federal Core Measures Guidelines.”… The what??
I think people lump it all together in their minds with all of the anti-bullying efforts being advanced, and that is intentional. Clearly, we want to eliminate bullying; but I have come to decide that the government is just using the issue for their own (business-financed) agenda, and they really couldn’t care less about actual bullying.
Anyway, the new online tests can be adaptive when they ask your child “attitudinal” questions as well.
THIS PUSH TO MOLD CHILDREN’S ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS IS HAPPENING. Here is the link to a paper that the CCSSO (one of the copyright holders of the Common Cor(porat)e Standards) published last year which says that the standards are absolutely “critical,” but not “sufficient,” and that students need to be not only “college and career ready” but also “citizenship” ready (compliant?)… http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/ILN%20Knowledge%20Skills%20and%20Dispositions%20CCR%20Framework%20February%202013.pdf. Note that those “attitudes and dispositions” on page 6 will have to be MEASURED…
Besides, Akla, (even if you are not as alarmed as I about the “disposition” and “attitude” training of young children), you champion the digital delivery as if students are simply empty vessels which need to be filled with content and skills. But in reality, students learn via RELATIONSHIPS–yes, relationships to the material, but also relationships to the teachers who share their own passions for the material with their students and relationships with their [the students’] peers. Schools are not just supposed to be places where students go to be filled with info but also where they go to LEARN TOGETHER with others and from others. You use the term “interactive.” But what you are describing is a human “interacting” with a machine. (Not exactly what I would call “interactive.” I would call that “solitary.”) And what about *new* ideas? How will the computer-delivery systems process new ideas? And creativity? Or will those be sidelined?
Do I think some of the stuff is useful? On a limited basis. Like the weight machines at the gym. But sometimes you want to get out and experience real life too where you use that strength training for something… I have learned plenty of stuff from the Internet. By myself. But I already know how to learn.
(Personally, I am thankful I am out of school and not learning with “adaptive” software. For really conceptually challenging material, I have to TALK. (NOT TEXT, NOT EMAIL) face-to-face with a live human being in order to learn, and it is helpful for being inspired about the material, too. I am reasonably sure I would have been left behind in math (my subject) and never reached my potential.)
I have a friend, Lois, who is known for direct observations. She retired after teaching 35 years in grades k-2.
She always said, “We will be beyond repair when children prefer to build a virtual snowman online instead of playing in the snow themselves.”
Have the testing gurus reached this state of existence? I think they may have. How unfortunate.
sorry, Ann,, I do not champion this system Please note I was just explaining why the author was correct in his opinion that they are trying to shut out the textbook and other alternate sources of materials. You do realize I was raising questions concerning the ability of such a system to truly help students learn and that there is so much more work that would need to be done in order to make it a valuable system. But that work is not being done. And as you correctly point out–them guvmint people can use it to imbed ideas in our students heads!!! Of course, this has been the fear of people since our public schools were started. They want them core patriotic values taught, but which ones? Is it really patriotic and American to require a student to say the pledge or to pray in school? Reminds one of what the maoists and stalinists and the rest of the ists did. And yet republicants today would have us believe Mccarthy was a true patriot for exposing those who would practice their right to believe something the government did not tell them to think.
Yes, I poke fun, cause how you gonna keep em down on the farm after they seed Paree? Or Cosmos– a black man that seems intelligent and is not dribbling a ball or doing time? I agree, a teacher can play a valuable role–but that costs money and these corporate types see a way (short term solution) to save money, sell product, and take over the market for the time being. On line learning will be and is a valuable tool, but for most it will never be a tool to promote learning. Thus my point of a teaching system vs learning. So start telling your story–sell yourselves and your added value. Compete.
Business today is based on short term transactions.
Education is longterm. These business goons have to find a way to turn a profit on a quarterly basis…with tech speeding up trade, it has become a daily reality.
Children aren’t comodities. They aren’t up for sale or trade. The imperfect ones can’t be discarded. Or can they? It appears they will be.
This is frightening and sickening.
Akla, many well-informed, thoughtful responses here. Thank you.
Joanna, think of what happened to the music CD. To video stores. In industry after industry, we are seeing the digital download and cloud-based replacement.
But it still requires a musician to make the music that is recorded, so at least there’s that. Right? 🙂 We will still need educated people to think and research and generate the material that is in the accessible info. So the problem is: does the system to guarantee sales of generating material stamp out the system that breeds good minds that are educated?
A number of years back the band Radiohead put up a new album on the Net itself, by-passing all the middle-persons. And as an added deviation from the way things are usually done, they told their fans to pay what they though it was worth–what they could afford–from $0 to £99. Actual stats on what they made are not available, but I’ve read estimates that they sold 3 million copies at about about $2.70 apiece. That’s a nice hunk of change.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Just a layman here (parent, taxpayer, PT educator). Robert, your analysis is grounded in keen observation and common sense. I would only add: I have no doubt that the future will bring down national/ international ed standards in favor of open sources, just as PC’s brought down main frame computers, just as cable is isolating & dumbing down the once-big 3 networks, just as the internet is buckling the knees of once-revered newspapers.
Bill Gates is not a fool. I suspect the business plan of which CCSS forms a cornerstone follows a time-honored corporate paradigm: control, monopolize, and profit during the available window before tech changes are fully realized and assimilated. Government institutions and their laws lag by a predictable number of years; that’s the window.
As teachers and parents, we must agitate against ed policies that harm the children stuck in that window. As taxpayers, we must be activists: expose the tax monies wasted by ed policy on propping up corporate profits without improvement to public ed–overturn legislation that allows money to buy legislation– re-instate legislation that discouraged monopoly and financial fraud, and forced corporations to share their profits with the people.
If you control the gateways, you control the market. Think of the leverage that controlling the operating system used on most computers produced. Enormous.
For a long, long time, adoption processes in adoption states also served as a gateway that ENORMOUSLY FAVORED very large, deep-pocketed educational publishers. I have heard it a thousand times from smaller educational publishers: We just can’t afford to compete in those adoption state markets. Why? Well, in some cases, the states pass well-intended adoption criteria that nonetheless cost so much up front that the smaller publisher just can’t play–long lists of required ancillaries, enormous sampling requirements, presentations to be delivered on-site around the state as part of the adoption procedure–all costly undertakings done simultaneously for MANY products. In other cases, the very adoption officials working for state boards of ed ended up with cushy jobs and/or consulting contracts with–guess who?–the big publishers.
Reblogged this on rightfulwriter and commented:
I wish I could say legislation is meant to benefit our children. However, it’s about lining pockets. This is what it’s all about folks. Follow the money.
Thanks Robert for your assessment, I believe you are 100% correct — this was first and foremost a business plan, codified into law by the Obama administration in Race to the Top. It is the DoE doing central economic planning in order to privatize an entire public sector. Is there another sector where they have worked this much damage, and created such a huge amount of mistrust of federal, state and city governments among Americans? Maybe the domestic spying industry or the emergence of HMOs in the 1980s? Someone wiser in finance and politics will have to advise me here. Before RttT’s billions and goals, few major Silicon Valley corporations pursued the ed market, even though delivering open source textbooks and tests to public schools would have saved US tax payers many hundreds of millions. Because standards varied in state after state, costs required to differentiate products and service customers made it an unattractive business opportunity. That approach to the ed market was too limited; the ‘disruptive’ model of applying new technology leads to skyrocketing earnings startlingly few employees. The ed sector profit opportunity is immense once you put the government in charge of creating a scalable, national market through CCSS. All school districts require new texts, tests and technology. All teachers take the blame for any corporate miscalculation in this plan — they will be fired based on new standards and new secret, overly difficult tests. That is why the junky VAM methodology was suitable, even though Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are usually very good at math.
Saw the movie version of this years ago. Birth of a Nation…
This is VERY insightful. I have recently come to (almost) the same conclusion. Common Core is absolutely a business plan. I am not so sure it was instigated by the textbook publishers, but they signed on to the plan big time for the reasons outlined in the OP. It seems that Gates was the central figure who picked up the reins of an idea (“School-to-Work”? “Outcome-based-education?” discussed in the 90s) and put the plan in motion (Lots of very detailed research and analysis of the money trail laid out clearly by Mercedes Schneider on that.) The timing was crucial–not only had the economy bottomed out in 2008–leaving the states starving for money (“State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” $53Billion which had its own strings of which RttT was a small piece); but we also had the NCLB time bomb about to go off because according to that travesty of a law, ALL students have to be “proficient” (i.e., above average–a mathematical impossibility, BTW) by 2014. So you had a “sink-or-swim” carrot and a giant stick “incentivizing” states to sign on to CC. And quickly.
The heavy hitters from the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce all have their (financial) reason$ for championing the plan (and none of them have to do with what will ultimately be good for kids or their interests…) I think there was at least as much interest in creating a standardized, compliant, mass-produced workforce whose data files can be scanned by personnel software in the name of efficiency and cost cutting. (See http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2014/02/paul_horton_why_the_common_cor.html)
And by the way, the CCSSO (one of the copyright holders of the Common Cor(porat)e “State” Standards) recently published a new paper in which they have concluded that “college and career ready” standards are “critical” for success but not sufficient and that students need to be “citizenship” ready. Students must also develop the right “attitudes” and “dispositions” in addition to knowledge and skills to be successful. (And by the way those things–listed in a table on page 6–will need to be MEASURED and TRACKED…)
You can watch inBloom’s “Vision” for education here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjbdpXohk0. Be sure to pause at 3:36 and think about how they know that information about students and where that data lives and how long it will live there…
It’s all a very complex and sticky web of intrigue and greed, and not much of it has to do with being good for students or in turn for our country. (But the giant corporations most interested in this endeavor are not that loyal to any particular country by now.)
BTW, here is the link to the paper by the CCSSO: http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/ILN%20Knowledge%20Skills%20and%20Dispositions%20CCR%20Framework%20February%202013.pdf
Well said, Ann.
Great article and I’ll pass along to others. I agree that money is very much the motive of CCSS as well as control. It’s like the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil.
The article points out not only money but control being very much an issue as well. Those that have the money will have control and will also dictate what is taught whether or not it is correct and true. There is a “world view” that is very present in the text books today that is spreading the idea of “global citizenship”. I, for one, do not want my children to be taught to be a global citizen. We are in fact, US citizens. Our country is founded on totally different principals than other countries around the globe. Thomas Jefferson summed it up by saying “All men are created equal; endowed by their Creator with “unalienable Rights”; these rights include “Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness”.
I do not want to become a “global citizen”. Becoming a Global citizen means giving up exactly what our Founders fought for and Jefferson summarized. Our Forefathers and families, left the other parts of the globe because they were not free to worship, speak or think under the control of the governments they left.
If US citizens allow CCSS to be implemented, as planned and pointed out above by Mr. Shepherd, we will no longer be a free society. Those in control will be the thought police and will be indoctrinating our kids to what they want them to believe is true – all of which is right in line with the UN Treaty Agenda 21 and global citizenship aka code word “sustainability”. susannunes pointed this out in some of the comments. Also see http://www.occupycorporatism.com/un-wants-to-stabilize-global-economy-with-one-world-currency/
I agree and disagree with susannunes on respect to the “open source” software. Peter Symth states is best – “open source books and materials open up some real possibilities – some of which aren’t so good.” Not good like susannunes points out letting anyone post anything they want. However we all know that there are issues with texts books. Textbook publishing companies print theories as facts and are behind with regard to new documented discoveries in science that actually disprove things that are in printed and taught as facts – I see this in my kids textbooks. That is the very reason I like the idea of open source. However, if someone can’t footnote their statement with reliable source documentation, I think that it should clearly be viewed as “opinion” vs “facts”. Under the operation of free speech doctrine, we all have a right to our opinion whether right or wrong. Opinions don’t need to be held as facts, opinions in an open source software should be stated as opinions and not as facts. In fact, facts change as scientific discoveries are made so it would behoove us to go to something which can be updated rapidly and taught to our students.
There are no easy answers to the problems at hand but we must not let a few organization and the government control our education system. Our founding fathers knew that and hence made it clear, they reserved most subjects to state, local, or private endeavor. The Founders feared the concentration of power and do I . The best way to protect individual freedom and civil society was to limit and divide power. It’s much better to have decisions made independently by states, each able to innovate and to observe & copy successful innovations in other states if they want to. There shouldn’t been one decision made for the entire country as far as education is concerned. As the country gets bigger and more complex, and especially as government amasses more power, the advantages of decentralization and divided power become even greater to our freedoms.
So, what’s the alternative? (Ed Deformers always ask this, expecting stunned silence in reply. Well, here’s the alternative.)
Instead of a single set of national standards, an open-source wiki to which are published, for every domain, in every subject, for varied learners, at every grade level, VOLUNTARY, COMPETING, ALTERNATIVE
standards
frameworks
sample lesson plans
model curricula
learning progressions (aka curriculum maps)
pedagogical techniques, strategies, and rationales
model assessments (diagnostic, formative, and performance)
texts
in a variety of formats (including video)
prepared by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, practitioners (teachers, curriculum coordinators, other administrators), and professionals in various fields
Review in every state of the competitive consequences of state-created barriers to entry into the educational materials market in those states.
A level playing field that encourages REAL COMPETITION, actual FREE MARKETS in the educational publishing industry.
That’s how you get innovation.
You don’t get it via regimentation, standardization, and top-down mandates from a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, from a national curriculum and pedagogy Thought Police.
So what’s the alternative?
If you are being beaten senseless and without mercy, you don’t ask
your attacker to please strike you with less force, or to strike you with less frequency, or to strike you with a smaller stick.
Under no circumstances do you have to give your attacker an alternative to beating you in order for them to stop.
THANK YOU, BOB!! I have been saying this from my own (very small) corner. When (and how) do we start? (Unfortunately, I am a bit of an amateur when it comes to actual “standards,” but I can make up for that by contributions of time and energy. 🙂
The amateurs where the ones who made up these ELA standards by hacking together some lowest-common-denominator groupthink from the preceding standards and sprinking a tiny bit of New Critical fairydust over the result.
Bob, has anyone started this wiki yet? I would be willing to help with basic administrative-type contributions. (Besides being ed certified–SpEd & math–I have a master’s in comp. sci.)
Right on Bob. I think they looked at Linux and thought about that. Plus Gates said get rid of all paper processes with digital. So that doesn’t bode well for us low tech paper book luddites.
Excellent as usual. Regardless of who started the whole thing, this is the outcome:
“And a WHOLE LOTTA EDUCRATS haven’t figured that out and have been totally PLAYED. They are dutifully working for PARCC or SBAC and dutifully attending conferences on implementing the “new, higher standards” and are basically unaware that they have been USED to implement a business plan. They don’t understand that the national standards were simply a necessary part of that plan.”
And most of these people will never realize it.
Robert…thanks for this brief history lesson. It puts CC in the true perspective of the business model goal of the ALEC planners.
One addition to your mention of Standard and Poors. In the period of 2007 – 8, when the economies of the world crashed due to banksters fraud, it finally came to light that the 3 rating agencies including S & P were not independent at all as investors had long been led to believe, and relied on. Their reports were/are indeed paid for by the stock companies they evaluated. So here was another fraud perpetrated on the entire public.
Dear Robert…you are a treasure and a wealth of information and measured analysis.
What about non-profit organizations like Khan Academy and CK-12 Foundation? They are both creating open databases of concept tags and computer adaptive learning experiences.
What about non-profit organizations like Khan Academy and CK-12 Foundation. Both have high quality, open learning resources and are both building computer adaptive learning with OPEN DATABASES of concepts, tags and student data.
jchakra, the CK-12 ELA materials have been leased by Amplify, which is a for-profit corporation owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Khan Academy is a shiny object to distract the public while the educorps establish a beachhead. Khan is basically a guy chatting about topics on a whiteboard. Fifteen minutes of Khan and kids are begging for human interaction. The fact Gates endorses Khan is a play.
For a long time now, education policy makers in state departments and at the federal level have made decisions ONE ENORMOUS EFFECT on the market for educational materials: creating economies of scale that a few large publishers could exploit.
There has been ALMOST NO discussion of the economic effect of creating a single set of national standards. What that does is create enormous economies of scale for the big educational publishing firms.
Many people look at the educational materials market in the United States and think that they are seeing separate publishers, but what they are in fact seeing is separate imprints all owned by three big publishers, one of which owns the lion’s share of the whole. Those imprints USED TO BE separate publishers, but they were swallowed up by the big three. Where there were 30 players, there are 3.
And to a large extent they were swallowed up because of economies of scale that education policy makers put in place WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES FOR COMPETITION. They made decisions that made it easy for the large publishers to flourish and difficult for the small ones to survive.
Adoption criteria in adoption states were, in their effects, an educational materials monopolist protection plan.
And regarding those ed tech startups: look at who the “partners” are; look at who has equity; look at who provided the seed money in return for that equity.
There are many (I am one of them) who believe that the transition from print to digital delivery is inevitable. Why? Paper is very, very expensive. Pixels are very, very cheap.
But that transition is fraught with danger for the big education monopolists. It is much cheaper to put up a website than to print books and ship them. That opens the market space again, making it possible for competitors to spring up all over the place. So, what’s a monopolist to do?
Well, go with the ed tech revolution in education already being pushed by powerful Silicon Valley magnates. But control it. Create one set of standards to create lots of economies of scale, one national database or a proprietary database that one sells to the states and to which only you and your partners can connect, make a deal to distribute software preloaded into tablets that are already connected to the proprietary database being used by the district or state, lock those tablets so that they cannot be used freely with other curricula, cut deals to get the tablet and the curricula for one low, low price.
In other words, manipulate the market for digital educational materials in ways that will limit access to that market to Company A (you, the parent company) Companies B-F (your imprints, fully owned by you), and companies G-Z (the “partners” or joint venturers).
A long, long time ago, the spreadsheet market was dominated by Lotus 1, 2, 3. And the word processing market was dominated by WordPerfect. But another publisher controlled the operating system for PCs, and for years, almost all PCs that shipped with that operating system on it also had a “free” copy of Microsoft Office on it. What did that do to Lotus and WordPerfect? Think about it.
Same story in ed tech. To the extent that you have influence over or control of the gateway to the market, you control the market.
I am a HUGE believer in ed tech. From time to time I think that I might write a piece about the advantages of digital delivery of educational materials, but that would be an ENORMOUS undertaking because there are so many. And, at any rate, I am convinced that for purely economic reasons, that transition to ed tech WILL INEVITABLY occur.
The question is whether the feds and the state departments will allow rules of the road to be put into place in that market that limit access to the market to–guess who?
And already, they are doing so.
The gist of that piece would be this:
You can have an ed tech revolution in educational publishing
that opens up markets, creates competition from lots of vendors and lots of innovation because of that, provides never-before-dreamed-of access to resources, gives small schools and districts access to a much wider variety of programs and resources than they could otherwise afford, lowers costs of materials, uses crowd-sourcing to draw upon development resources of a scope and depth never before imagined
or
that locks those markets down, that gives access to a few monopolists and only to them–Orwellian control over the education of the young
You can freedom or totalitarianism. And which you will have will depend upon decisions made by state departments of education and the USDE. And often, if the past is any indication, those decisions will be made WITHOUT ANYONE GIVING ANY THOUGHT to their consequences for limiting market access.
A more polished version of this piece is available here:
I just started this at Petition2Congress. It is very easy to sign, copies are automatically sent to President Obama, and your own senators and your representatives. Please take the time to read and the petition entitled: STOP COMMON CORE TESTING. Thank you.
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/?m=5265435
Great letter, NY Teacher. I signed it.
Thank you so much Bob. Your endorsement means a lot.
Terrific petition NY teacher. I just signed and added a few sentences from my own experience. Hope all readers go to ths link and sign.
Thank you Ellen. Together we can stop the madness. This is a political battle not an educational debate. We have to hit them where it hurts the most – the voting booth! They’ve got the guns, but we got the numbers.
I sent my petition in the form of letters. Next, will send letters to my state reps. Thanks.
Thank you. 2,024 letters and counting. When the power that be have their power threatened, they will act.
old joke: A petition is a list of people who can’t say ‘no’.
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
— Senator Dirksen (attributed)
Someone who doesn’t know Esperanto is preaching to us about education???
Education reform begins with teaching Esperanto.
According to standards back in the day, Bill Gates wasn’t qualified to teach computer science. Isn’t it good karma that he have a hand in changing obviously corrupt standards?
Reblogged this on Exceptional Delaware and commented:
This is two years old today, but it has never been more true. I put this up on Facebook, before I wrote on Kilroy’s Delaware and before I started blogging. It was articles like this that led me to what is really going on in education. Big data and corporate profits… your child is just a pawn. Opt out NOW!