While visiting his sister in Albuquerque, Paul Horton encountered the same corporate reform claptrap that he read regularly in the Chicago Tribune and sent the following letter to the editor:
“Dear Editor,
I read your banner article, “SBA scores in NM lower now than five years ago” with great interest. As a teacher with thirty-two years experience, I am very concerned with the obsessive focus on SBA scores in the article.
While I understand that lower test scores might be a concern, I am more concerned with the scripted response of Hannah Skandera, New Mexico Education Secretary designate.
Ms. Skandera is clearly on the bandwagon of a national education reform movement that is funded by the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council that is heavily funded by the Koch brothers.
Ms. Skandera clearly serves the interests of these organizations and not the children of New Mexico. Her agenda insures that millions of hard-earned tax dollars of the citizens of New Mexico will flow to Pearson Education, an English company that has taken over the standardized testing industry in the United States.
The biggest issue facing the students in New Mexico is increasing levels of poverty exacerbated by increasing levels of income inequality. Your education reporters need to disaggregate the SBA scores to correlate them to average income levels in schools and districts.
Ms. Skandera will tell you in the coming months that scores for the new PARCC tests will decline by 30% on average. She does not tell you that Pearson Education will control the determination of “cut scores.” This is a part of the script that she will continue to read. She has no real direct knowledge of education issues, she is simply following the “toolkit” that is being used in many other states and the citizens of New Mexico are being played for suckers.
In point of fact, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) has been measuring student achievement for over forty years and it remains the best and most accurate reflection of student achievement across the United States. The fact that scores across the country have flattened on average over the last several years is mostly the result of increasing poverty, rising income inequality, and the deteriorating living conditions and shortage of jobs in urban and rural areas all over the country.
Even more important, the current flattening and decline of scores in areas where poverty is prevalent is more the result of the failure of national policies that focus teaching on producing higher test scores. In this regard, the NCLB and Mr. Duncan’s Race to the Top (RttT) are only making these issues worse with their obsessive focus on standardized testing and the defunding of public schools.
The citizens of the great state of New Mexico need to stop paying Pearson Education and start paying for lowering class size, hiring more special education teachers, librarians, art teachers, language teachers, and clinical social workers.
Human investment, not investment in education corporations, will lead to better results for the state of New Mexico. Ms. Skandera is more concerned about pleasing Pearson Education that the parents of New Mexico. Wake up and smell the green chilies cooking! Pearson Education does not care about your kids!
Paul Horton
History teacher and former APS student
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
phorton@ucls.uchicago.edu
http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Awesome.
Excellent letter!! Right on point, Paul!
Also, Diane, it’s really great to see your posts starting at 7 am ET again! I truly wasn’t liking the new, later schedule at all.
Unfortunately, few newspapers publish letters that are longer than three or four short paragraphs. And more and more they are picking the most ignorant and vile letters to publish. Paul’s letter is far too rational and eloquent.
“Ms. Skandera will tell you in the coming months that scores for the new PARCC tests will decline by 30% on average.”
No she won’t. She’ll roll them out with great fanfare and no context and use the lower scores to sell more of the narrow, grim, joyless ed reforms on the Chiefs for Change website using fear, which is what they relied on to sell the Common Core in the first place.
I’m amused they believe they didn’t use enough “emotion” to sell Common Core to parents. They used plenty of “emotion”. One emotion. Fear.
What she said ^
“Ms. Skandera is clearly on the bandwagon of a national education reform movement that is funded by the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council that is heavily funded by the Koch brothers.”
Excellent letter. But we need to stop referring to the corporate privatizers of public education as a “reform movement.” They want to make as much money as possible from our public schools. They’re as much of a reform movement as was the packaging of subprime mortgages for the real estate market, which, of course, wrecked the entire global economy. The result of this “reform movement” will be to dismantle our public schools for corporate profits, and once we lose our public schools, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get them back.
Andy,
How about beserkers?
This is being promoted as a “split” in the Democratic Party but it reads to me like it was released for the benefit of both the agencies; Incite and New Partners. They’re hoping they can keep both of their client lists by placating both labor and anti-labor:
“Gibbs’ former co-workers saw it the same way. When he signed on with Brown, he was working with the Democratic firm New Partners. His liberal colleagues reacted angrily when news of the marriage surfaced, and the American Federation of Teachers made its displeasure known.
Gibbs and LaBolt had launched The Incite Agency in June 2013. It was housed within New Partners, but had its own employees and clients, Gibbs said, describing what is a fairly common business relationship in Washington.”
I don’t think this has anything to do with anything real, or anything to do with any of us.
Just my take! Let the buyer beware! 🙂
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/04/robert-gibbs-teachers-unions_n_5649426.html?1407195980&utm_content=buffer7b5a9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The corporate manufactured crises in public education is a war that is in every state. Here’s one more example discovered in New Mexico. The carpetbaggers who are out to profit off children and tax payers are flooding every state buying elected and appointed public officials and the media.
Lloyd,
Let me know if you ever make it to Chi-town.
My view: Why the constant pressure to keep increasing test scores? Must we eventually teach quantum physics to kindergartners? What folly?
Might it not be nice to teach children how to get along in a world gone mad, to teach compassion, love of neighbors, to LOVE learning itself, to seek ultimate values of good, truth, and beauty? To see people not as scientific objects but as spiritual entities with whom we share values et al.
Must we forget what our greatest teachers and thinkers have told us what true education is all about? Indeed, what ARE the most pressing problems which the world faces. Think carefully, then decide what educational priorities should be.
“Must we eventually teach quantum physics to kindergartners?”
Why not? It sometimes seems as if kindergartners know what quantum is all about bouncing from one state to another in what appears to be a random fashion.
Gordon,
What you describe is what all of us want for our children. The wording conjures a beautiful experience. But, the deformers can’t make money using the construct.
The children of the 1% will have the rich education that you extoll, while the children of the 99% will receive an impoverished education.
The 1% have the politicians in their pockets, as evidenced by the estimate, “the middle class lost 36% of their wealth since 2003”.
Great letter but I doubt that our local paper will publish it as they are nothing but a pro-Martinez/Skandera rag. Our school just got rid of art in order to hire a “data coach” when I already serve that function in my role of instructional coach. Breaks my heart and I gave notice that I am leaving for a special ed classroom job elsewhere.
“data coach”
Hey the district has to control all that data, don’t they? I mean the data has to be coached to make sure it says what the district wants it to say.
Laura,
No doubt. Facebook it and tweet it and continue to get in the face of fraud. If Pearson Education were ever rated by Consumer Reports they would get nothing but full red circles. Why is a crappy product being forced on the citizens of New Mexico? Boycott Pearson, PARCC, and tell your state rep. to deny funding to PARCC and Pearson. Shut them down in your state. Pickett and occupy Skandera the beserker’s office!
Sorry I am commenting so late, just got off I-40 for the night.
Pickett the Journal, there is plenty of shade outside their offices! Close down Paseo at 5pm! We did it at 62nd and Cottage Grove on the South side several times.
Organize Laura, get out there! The publishers of the Journal have contempt for you, give it back to them!
I asked a reported at the Journal about this and told him it had already been sent to the editor without response. He replied with, “Best bet is Dan Herrera, the editorial page editor. You can reach him at dherrera@abqjournal.com“. Worth a shot?
I am positive that Martinez (aka Governor of NM) and Skandera (aka NM Secretary of Education Designee) will put all the blame on the Teachers, Administrators, and Students for the decline in test scores. They placed full blame on the School Districts for the Teacher evaluation disaster that occurred this year with the implementation of the dictatorial forced evaluation by Skandera. I used to think that agencies like the NM Public Education Department PED) were established to SERVE the Public Schools in NM but under the leadership of Martinez and Skandera the Teacher, Administrators, Students and Parents have been placed in a position of SERVITUDE to the PED. And, it gets worse with every passing month.