EduShyster pays a visit to Salem, Massachusetts, where “school choice” has enabled the affluent families to go to some highly-resourced schools, while the less-affluent go to less-resourced schools.

 

If you want to see how bizarre and brain-dead “reform” is, look no farther than Salem. There, the town has fallen in love with jargon and data, and looks to edupreneurs to solve all problems by supplying edumanure.

 

She writes:

 

“At the center of the Open System beats an edupreneurial heart, one belonging to Empower Schools, founded by edupreneur Chris Gabrieli, whose list of political connections is as long as an extended school day, and Bret Alessi, former Education Pioneer and current Mass 2020 visionary. What precisely Empower Schools does, other than BELIEVE IN OPEN SYSTEMS…and produce case studies like this one, remains a bit vague-ish. What I can tell you is that Empower has quickly one over powerful friends aka *aligned leaders,* like Massachusetts Commissioner of College and Career Readiness, Mitchell D. Chester, who recently sang Empower’s praises to the Boston Globe in a story on how school partnerships with edupreneurial groups like Empower are failing to produce results…..Everybody who is anybody
But I digress. The important thing is that the Salem schools bus is hurtling towards a new system, an Open System, and that everyone who is anyone appears to be on board, from the city’s politically ambitious mayor, to the members of the Salem Partnership, to the members of the Community Advisory Board of the Salem Partnership, to the members of the Salem Education Foundation. In other words, everybody who is anybody in the city is *highly aligned,* jargonically speaking, behind a vision of what the city’s students need to succeed. A *laser-like focus on instruction* and *frequent assessments.* The Open System comes with transportation — and to quote district leaders, *data drives the bus.* And that teachers don’t just want to teach, they want to Teach Plus co-captain the data bus.”

 

But what happens when one family says “No, we don’t want our child to take the tests?” Shockingly, the family won the right to opt out. They have been joined by five other families. Hopefully there will be more. How will the “data bus” function if there is no data? Stay tuned. Will the data bus veer out of control? Or will it continue to drive right over the cliff with the children of Salem?