Veteran educator Arnold Dodge warns that the corporate reform movement, led by the U.S. Department of Education, threatens democracy and creativity. In its quest for data and standardization, the DOE will crush imagination and innovation. Standardized tests reward right answers, not original thought.
Not content to standardize children and their teachers, the DOE now wants to control teacher education by collecting test scores of students and linking them to the institutions that prepared their teachers. Test scores above all!
Dodge quotes John Dewey, who wrote:
“”Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”
“Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought.””
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the film “Spare Parts”—based on a true story—four students, who are all undocumented children brought illegally into the United States by their parents, voluntarily join an after-hours robotics club. These students attended a high school in Phoenix, Arizona where 80% of the children who attend the HS live in poverty as measured by free/reduced lunch, and most if not all were Latino or Hispanic.
To make a long story short, these four students and their faculty adviser end up at UC Santa Barbara in 2004 competing against some of the top universities in the United States: for instance, MIT and Stanford.
Those high school students took 1st place and beat out MIT.
In subsequent years, that HS robotics club at this underperformed school that would be labeled a failure under NCLB, Race to the Top and Bill Gates Common Core agenda would beat MIT again and again. Before those HS students competed, MIT was the 2st place winning champ to beat.
NCLB, Race to the Top, Common Core Standardized Tests and the Bill Gates promoted/funded brutal VAM agenda to rank and yank teachers in addition to closing public schools and turning our children over to fraud riddled corporate Charters that Stanford reports say are often worse or no better than the public schools they replace had nothing to do with this creative success:
I wrote about the film here:
“Spare Parts”
A must see film reveals how Destructive Common Core Ed Reform Agenda is
http://wp.me/pLJTE-TZ @lflwriter
Correction: MIT was the 1st place champ to beat and that under performing high school has beat MIT more than once.
Sorry for the typo.
:o)
My ELLs over the years have amazed me with how clever and resourceful they are. They repaired pencil sharpeners, fixed windows, and repaired floor tiles. The girls have sewn costumes for shows and made tamales. The ELLs come from some of the poorest places on the planet. They can’t run to Home Depot in these countries. They invent! In Haiti they make toys and games from cat bones, tin cans and old rubber tires. Necessity is the mother of invention!
Employees in Arne Duncan’s Department of Education shouldn’t receive government pay nor, government contributions to pensions. Their work should be paid, by the tech, test and hedge fund, 1%’s.
If the proposed Teacher Prep Overhaul goes forward, it’s clear the American people have no representatives in Washington, speaking for them, on the subject of education.
“Dodge quotes John Dewey, who wrote:
“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”
Even Dewey couldn’t escape the ‘modern’ linguistic trap of “measuring” the teaching and learning process which he calls “educative growth”.
It’s still a long uphill battle to break the hold of “scientism” or “metrification” on/in our discourse on the teaching and learning processes.