Laura Chapman on Sludge and Conflicts of Interest

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1. George Schmidt says:

   May 20, 2014 at 11:31 am

   Sadly, this is not really “Enough.” When CORE first won the Chicago Teachers Union leadership election in June 2010, we almost immediately had to go to the American Federation of Teachers convention in Seattle in July 2010. (I had been covering the election vote counts, so I was not a delegate but attended AFT as a journalist). The biggest scandal of the AFT 2010 convention was that Randi Weingarten had invited Bill Gates to speak to the convention, ignoring the militant history of unions in the “Northwest” (which went as historians know from Northern California all the way up through Canada and into Alaska). An entire century of history was simply whited out, and instead a union busting neoliberal corporate “education reformer” (and members of the by then infamous “billionaire boys club”) not only got to speak to the 3,000 delegates, but was cheered massively by delegates who were told to drown out the dissenters.

   A little checking and people discovered that AFT locals (Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado to name three) had been getting millions in Gates grants to do “performance” based teacher ratings, i.e., merit pay based on test scores. And of course during that time, AFT’s “American Educator” was routinely cheerleading for Arne Duncan’s policies, including Race To The Top.

   By the time delegates got to Detroit for the July 2012 AFT convention, much had changed, although we were still on the eve of the Chicago Teachers Strike of (September) 2012. But despite four years of teacher bashing by the U.S. Department of Education, everyone was expected to cheer madly for Joe Beiden (as usual, Barack Obama was stiffing the unions, as he had been doing since 2008, as I reported). A Chicago group sat silently holding signs that said END RACE TO THE TOP, while another group protested loudly, and briefly, in the very back of the hall.

   From what I can tell, the AFT national leadership and many others simply assumed that CORE and Karen Lewis would disappear after one three-year term, as Debbie Lynch had after being the CTU president from 2001 – 2004. But once the strike was over, we continued to build our strength.

   Among other things, the Chicago Teachers Union contract, negotiated as a result of that seven-school-day strike, blocked “merit pay” for Chicago teachers and other school workers. We had to strike to do that, but it was certainly worth it, despite the heat of the struggle. Meanwhile, New Haven, D.C., Baltimore, and Newark (and probably others) were being bullied into going along with the Gates (and others’) merit pay nonsense — based on the flawed VAM nonsense.

   CORE grew stronger during the first three years in office, and as a result of our organizing (not just media, but precinct by precinct Chicago style, from January on) we won a second term with 80 percent of the vote in May 2013. And so now, we — as the 30,000-member Chicago Teachers Union — have taken a stand against Common Core, which we are elaborating for those who ask it. And as we heard last night at our CORE membership meeting, teachers and locals from across the USA are calling us to ask for more information about our resolution and about the arguments against Common Core.

   The AFT 2014 convention is in Los Angeles in July. Common Core will be one of the central issues debated, as will be the Obama administration’s five-year-long attack on public education and public school teachers. You can count on it. And part of that discussion will include questions about how AFT joins those who take money from the billionaire boys club and then seems to fall in line with those others mentioned in the great post above.

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   • John a says:

     May 20, 2014 at 5:08 pm

     The CTU is one source of hope and pride for those is who remain committed to building a vibrant progressive union movement. No doubt, the CTU will fight the good and necessary fight to make their voice heard and work to dethrone Weingarten and her lackies at the next AFT convention. I would hope that CTU rank and file and leadership knows that they are not alone in this struggle and and align themselves with other progressive locals that seek a change in AFT policy and leadership. It is time to “throw the rascals out”

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2. Laura H. Chapman says:

   May 20, 2014 at 11:44 am

   Thanks for the follow-up. My “enough” was addressed to me, and my impulse to do a marathon rant when the general point had been made.
   Following the money, pass-throughs of dollars, and interlocking directorates is hard and important work.

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3. Michael Fiorillo says:

   May 20, 2014 at 11:47 am

   Howzabout Randi Weingarten accepting over a million dollars from Gates, whom she had as a keynote speaker before the AFT convention, and her support for the Common Core Standards that are a stealth program of Gates?

   Howzabout Weingarten never emitting a peep when Eli Broad mentioned her as one of his prime “investments?”

   Howzabout her boasting of her “collaboration” with Michael Bloomberg as he was dismembering the NYC public schools, her allowing him to gain an illegal third term, along with continued control of the schools?

   There are many potential members for this Hall of Shame. Weingarten deserves a place near the top for her betrayal of teachers.

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4. Chiara Duggan says:

   May 20, 2014 at 11:50 am

   Ed reformer Jeb Bush goes all-in on public school bashing.

   They’re “agnostics”! Really! No ideological (or heaven forbid!) “self-interested” and purely political bias against public schools here at all!

   His name is Jeb Bush so no one will take apart or question these anti-public school claims. That’s how “merit” works in our meritocracy!

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/19/jeb-bush-bashes-traditional-public-schools-again/

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5. Rick Lapworth says:

   May 20, 2014 at 11:52 am

   …and the million dollar question (literally?): why do people care more about the money they earn, instead of the good/service they provide? Is the “love of money a root of all evil?” If I stand to gain, because of the loss to another (ex. wasted monies for goods/services that provide no real benefit) will I choose or refuse the gain?
   4 decades ago NONE of this “useless machinery” of testing and “accountability” existed and students were well educated and ready for the “real world”. So, why and when did it become the top-down monster that it has?

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6. Duane Swacker says:

   May 20, 2014 at 12:08 pm

   “Where can I find a peer-review of the claims about reliability and validity packaged with this whole scheme?”

   Well, Diane, the one and only never refuted nor rebutted peer-reviewed study that totally destroys any claims of reliability and validity of “this whole scheme” (educational standards and the accompanying standardized tests) can be found at “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
   http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700

   Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)

   1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.

   2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).

   3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.

   4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”

   In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.

   5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.

   6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.

   7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”

   In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?

   My answer is NO!!!!!

   One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:

   “So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”

   In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.

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   • Duane Swacker says:

     May 20, 2014 at 12:19 pm

     Thanks for the set up on that one, Diane!! Y’all had to know that was coming, eh!

     For a shorter take-down of the validity and reliablility of “this whole scheme” read Wilson’s scathing review of the testing bible “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” put out by American Educational Research Association; American Psychological Association; National Council on Measurement in Education. (2002) found at: http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5index.html

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7. firstteachers says:

   May 20, 2014 at 1:34 pm

   So what is the game plan going to be?

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8. onewomansjournal says:

   May 20, 2014 at 3:15 pm

   Reblogged this on onewomansjournal and commented:
   Yes…SLUDGE!

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