Ernest Anemone, lawyer and teacher, describes here the growing opposition to market-based reforms such as school choice, test-based accountability, and Common Core. He praises the Badass Teachers Association for bringing out not only the grievances of teachers but giving them a vehicle to fight such powerful figures as Bill GTes and the Walton family.
What is at stake, he avers, is the future of democracy.
He writes:
“On one side of this battle are a powerful group of self-proclaimed reformers inspired by market values and financed by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings and the Walton Family. They believe that the purpose of education is to prepare children for the labor market by teaching them a “Common Core” of subjects which emphasize English and mathematics. Student proficiency is measured by standardized tests in these subjects, and classroom innovations are supposedly spread to the ‘best performers’ through the mechanisms of competition and ‘school choice.’
“On the other side of the battle are groups like the Badass Teachers, the teachers’ unions, and organizations like FairTest and the Network for Public Education who believe that schools should prepare children to be active agents of democracy, while providing them with a potentially-transformative experience. In their vision of education, students are engaged in cultivating their own moral voices through critical reflection, so educational achievement cannot be reduced to a standard curriculum or measured by standardized test results.
“Although classroom innovations are important, educational success is defined by broader factors outside of the school’s control—especially poverty. According to education historian Diane Ravitch, “poverty is the single greatest determinant of low test scores.” However, the standard package of reforms that is pushed so hard by Gates and others lacks any practical understanding of what it means to teach the 45 per cent of American children who come from struggling families, including the 16 million who live in abject poverty.
“The implication of ‘school choice’ programs is that good choices by ‘consumers’ lead to good results, and poor choices lead to poor results. But recasting poverty as a choice is not only misguided but damaging to the fabric of democracy. High-stakes standardized testing also creates a marketplace of shoddy comparisons—a marketplace that fails to see the strength in certain types of variation because it erroneously regards all variation as weakness.
“Against this background, it’s vital to protect the ability of schools to cooperate with each other (not to compete), and to model other aspects of democratic culture. When teachers, parents and children collaborate in a common search for solutions they increase their democratic capacities. It’s a fundamentally egalitarian vision that rejects the view of education as a commodity that can be quantified, bought and sold.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It needs to be understood that Capitalism hates Democracy and will destroy it if we give it half a chance.
How does Democracy feel about Capitalism?
The way a Diabetic feels about Sugar.
The two eye each other warily.
Another argument in favor of the arts and humanities.
” They believe that the purpose of education is to prepare children for the labor market by teaching them a “Common Core” of subjects which emphasize English and mathematics.”
What a dull and vapid world we might inhabit if they get there way.
I would recommend Howard Gardner’s “Frames of Mind” to Bill Gates and company. Children need a comprehensive, well-rounded education since there are several types of intelligence and talents. With such a narrow focus of reading and math, how many artists, athletes and musicians would never find their true passion and path? Is that all his children studied in school is reading and math? Or this narrow focus what the elite feel the drones of the world should be permitted?
I love this group and the exchanges. I feel guilty, when I make an error. Mind you, this is the only group, that I feel this way. “There” should be “their”.
The money people are attempting to create a “Stepford” in which all children are educated according to their submissive docile standards.
cross posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Ernest-Anemone-Market-Ref-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Children_Democracy_MARKETING_Poverty-141014-957.html#comment515934
with this comment:
For those of you who follow my links to all the MOST IMPORTANT INFO ON EDUCATION AND THE BOGUS REFORMS, you know what none of the writers of the Common Core were educators, that the testing mania was created to enrich Pearson and monetarize public education. I could never be used to evaluate teachers and is only hurting children by preventing teachers form enabling great learning goals, but what is THE MOST IMPORTANT ‘TAKE-AWAY’ is the damage to our democracy as these billionaires seek to re-write not only curricula but history as it is taught. Koch and clones are writing the curricula for the schools, and they change American history so that it reflects their views not real history.
Watch out…democracy depends on an educated citizenry. hill everyone looks at ISIS and football, and Xmas sales, the insidious work is being done by the billionaires boy’s club.
No mention of the end game? Ka-ching, how it enriches the charter management companies and hedge fund investors through raping our PUBLIC tax dollars and funnels to them that never-ending supply of monies that must in any event be spent on education. This scheme circles the money right back to them, after they have dismantled public schools and undermined real teachers and broken unions. This doesn’t begin to criticize the back-door deals to enable legislation and laws at the 11th hour in dark room votes to keep the public out, and to decide what happens with our public schools, and make special rules for the charters and TFA and TNTP.
It isn’t enough to out them on the common core and the test-mania that benefits Pearson. No, the test-mania is to fire teachers. bust unions, dismember public schools and give them and the buildings to the charter/privatizers with the “ok” from the government. What about separation of church and state and vouchers?
I so agree with you. The institution of public education is being destroyed and they are raiding pour tax money to do it, as the people in this country watch football and shop for Xmas, and worry about Isis. No one I meet has any idea about this. It mass me want to cry for our democracy.
i wonder if you can speak to my current pro-common core thinking? in our daughter’s public schools (3 of them so far and she’s in 5th grade) in Tennessee, we have seen teacher bias (racial misunderstanding/cultural illiteracy/racial bias) and it seems to me that CCSS is the first set of standards that promotes the SAME excellence, regardless of zip code, north or south, for each child across our country. whether they live by a country club or by a toxic dump site. if we could fine-tune these standards & schools are given the same resources by which to implement them (smaller class sizes, effective experienced teachers, well-funded schools) – aren’t CCSS a move in the right direction?
A.G.,
After much reflection, and waiting four years to reach a judgment, I have concluded that the Common Core standards lack the wisdom and judgment that would have been there if they had been written by classroom teachers instead of representatives of the testing industry. The tests aligned with them are designed to fail most students because the testing industry selected a cut score that is out of reach for most students. No, the standards are not excellent. I agree with you that supplying the resources for smaller classes and experienced teachers would make a difference. The CCSS will not.
Can we not make the standards more excellent by having teachers revise them and the tests that go with them? I say this because I am concerned about what happens when standards are left to states or school districts. Too many of our schools have administrators and teachers who are not seeing some of our children and their potential clearly. If we have the same, high-level standards for ALL children and a way to implement them effectively and fairly (and test fairly and sensibly, if at all) wouldn’t this safeguard children from racism and the low-expectations that can come to children of color in the classroom?
AG, the standards are not supposed to be revised. They are set in stone. They are copyrighted. They are not perfect. Standards don’t create high performance. They are not self-fulfilling. Any standard-setting process leaves room for revision. This one forbids it. The CCSS is about bankrupting schools, making public education look bad, and generating profits for the tech and testing industries. Crony capitalism at its finest.
“Any standard-setting process leaves room for revision. This one forbids it.”
Do you mean the standards can’t be revised, or do you mean that individual states can’t revise them? I assume the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers could revise the standards. Am I wrong?
FLERP,
States are not allowed to revise the CCSS. They may add 15%. But they may not revise the original. There is no revision committee at NGA or CCSSO. There should be.
But the NGA and the CCSSO could revise the CCSS.
I wouldn’t expect that states would be permitted to revise the CCSS, just as I wouldn’t expect local schools would be permitted to revise state standards. It doesn’t make sense to me.
I can understand the argument that the NGA and the CCSSO should have a process in place for revising the standards. And I can understand the argument that states should have the freedom to revise their state educational standards. And states do have that freedom, don’t they? They could use their own state standards, and not use the CCSS.
Local districts, I suppose, are forever doomed to use whatever crappy standards and curriculum they’re told to use by the states.
FLERP, who shall we contact at NGA and CCSSO to revise the standards? Is there a contact name or number that no one mentioned yet? Or should we write the architect, David Coleman, who now runs the College Board? Any ideas?
Let’s not forget that the ONLY standards that really count are those that are tested. The test items will become the de-facto standards and they will drive curriculum and pedagogy. In fact many of the standards, as written dictate actual classroom practices.
Close reading and multiplications arrays are two well known examples.
In my experience this year, watching my first grader bring home common core-aligned math & English language homework (complete with bubbles to fill in, so he’s ready for that important task in a year), the tests will fail many of the students simply due to the deliberate trickiness of the questions. These are often not asked in a straightforward way; in fact, the questions are almost comically convoluted. So even a child who actually does understand the math or language skill being evaluated, esp. a very young child, is likely to mark the wrong answer because the question is so oddly worded, or so obliquely aligned with the best (of 3-4) answer offered. My husband and I both teach at the college level, both have PhDs (in econ & history respectively), and have found several of the first-grade practice test questions (I assume that’s roughly what these are, given the worksheet format) puzzling. The best-choice answer sometimes borders on outright incorrect. Is this others’ experience? It will certainly be frustrating to watch good schoolteachers rated poorly because their young students are not test-savvy, however adept the children may be in age-appropriate math or reading. Nothing noble about raising a nation of excellent bubble-testers; in the past we have mocked such countries (rightly or not) and trumpeted our population’s greater ingenuity.
yes, we have the same experience but our tests have been TCAP, aligned with TN state standards (we have not yet been given any tests that are linked to common core (PARCC). but yes, these TCAP bubble tests don’t accurately reflect a child’s true understanding of the material or allow for nuanced understandings. questions are deliberately tricky and misleading. the older our daughter gets the more she learns that doing well on standardized tests is its own animal & it’s like a game of winning. whether the teachers actually say this (just guess if you don’t know an answer, that way you may get it “right”) or whether she’s just absorbing the importance given to the outcomes (% of teacher review, % of children’s grade) it’s sad to see our children “learning to the test”
You are describing the Pearson assessments in math and ELA that we’ve seen in 2013 1nd 2014 here in NY. I have described them as TRAPS not TESTS. Intentionally designed to trick, confuse, frustrate, tire out, wear down, and break the will of most young test takers. Tests designed to create a failure rate (70% in NY) that will be used to support the bogus claim that America’s public schools are “failure factories”
Parents, do not let test scores unfairly define your children, intimidate and threaten your children’s teachers, or to help dismantle the public school system that has been the cornerstone of our democracy. If my kids were in elementary or middle school, I would opt them out of this test-and-punish regime that is masquerading as a the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
I do think public education in our country (and the testing) is a civil rights issue but that is nothing new.
A.G,
To understand why the CCSS, or any other set of standards are COMPLETELY INVALID due to the myriad epistemological and ontological errors in the process of making, using, “measuring” (yes, standards by definition include measurements), i..e., standardized tests and the dissemination of the results read and understand Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted complete destruction of those educational malpractices in “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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And 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 attempts to measure “’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.
By Duane E. Swacker
Yes, I agree with much of this. As a parent, I wonder where Noel Wilson educated his children.
“Monolithic Reform”
Reform produces monoculture
By standardizing test
Ensuring that when change engulfs her
Extinction will arrest
“by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings and the Walton Family.”
I don’t blame them. I blame the politicians and media who fall at their feet, basically groveling and repeating their every word as if it’s brilliant.
It’s embarrassing, quite frankly. Show some self-respect or something. It’s painful to watch.
“The Ten Commandments of Reform (For teachers)”
1. I am the LORD thy Gates. Thou shalt have no strange Gates’ before me (at least not any stranger)
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any non-digital image (no drawing, finger-painting, or any other kind of painting)
3. Thou shalt not take the LORD’s name in vain (eg, “Gates-damned VAMs”)
4. Remember the Common Core, to teach it wholey
5. Honour thy Secretary and thy President
6. Thou shalt kill poetry and literature (dead)
7. Thou shalt not commit art
8. Thou shalt not steal time for music that shalt be spent on math and close reading
9. Thou shalt not bear truthful witness against thy superiors (reveal that they don’t have a real PhD,etc)
10. Thou shalt not covet thy principal’s salary, thy superintendent’s salary, thy superintendent’s kids’ private school (class sizes,resources,etc), thy local charter school’s resources or anything else that does not seem fair and equitable (Live with it. After Vergara, you’re just a lowly teacher who can be gone in the blink of a superintendent’s eye)