Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center, which had been one of the most respected critics of corporate education reform, has announced its intention to cross over and join the reformers! This is terrible news for all those who counted on its ability to marshall first-rate scholars to debunk the claims and hoaxes of the “reform” movement.
Welner says that he is to doing it for the money. The big money, he claims, is with parents and teachers, not hedge fund managers or the Walton or Gates or Broad Foundations.
To quote the press release:
BOULDER, CO (April 1, 2015) – The National Education Policy Center today announced that it is changing its mission statement and renouncing the pursuit of strong, equitable public schools.
NEPC director Kevin Welner admitted that the whole enterprise had been a ruse, and that he and his colleagues were really only in it for the money and for the elation of constant policy victories.
The NEPC’s mission statement has been “to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. … guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence.”
Welner announced that the new mission statement would be “to promote policies that have a surface appeal, that are built on the whimsical magic of the free market, and that use schools to facilitate the reproduction of inequalities from generation to generation.” Research evidence, Welner added, would be created whenever necessary to prop up these goals.
“We know that by abandoning our past mission we’ll have to forgo the immense funding advantages that come from caring about high-quality evidence and equity and public schooling. But that was never really us. There comes a time when we must set aside our crass pursuit of financial support and dedicate ourselves to our true ideals. If this means trying to squeeze money from financially strapped hedge fund managers or ‘reform-focused’ foundations with tiny endowments, then that’s just what we will have to do,” said Welner.
April Fool’s?
Of course April Fool’s! Gotta keep a sense of humor or the reformies will drive ya nuts.
To post again:
One man asks what is right
the other what is to come
And that is the difference between the free man and the slave.
Terrible news indeed.
This is too blatant to be true….
it must be a hoax, April Fools, or people in charge really don’t care about anything but power and power
April Fool’s! Sounds like an article for the Onion.
I heard a similar announcement on NPR this morning about the world’s biggest power couple, Bill and Hillary, were parting ways. Got suckered in big time. It, too, was an April Fools joke.
Good choice of date to make this “announcement.” Good to see that humor is still alive and well in ed policy land.
“Welner announced that the new mission statement would be ‘to promote policies that have a surface appeal, that are built on the whimsical magic of the free market, and that use schools to facilitate the reproduction of inequalities from generation to generation.’ Research evidence, Welner added, would be created whenever necessary to prop up these goals.”
This has to be an April Fool’s joke. These are such blatantly idiotic intentions.
April Fools!
It is April 1st but there may come a day in the all too near future when……we may discover it is true.
Today is April 1
Unless this April’s Fools, this would be April Foolish 🙂
Could this be an April fool’s joke???? Let’s see if the policy statement changes tomorrow. Vernon Denney Nashville, TN
I keep hoping that last night’s NY Assembly vote was an April joke too!
Gotta be an April Fools. So much bad news on what is normally a fun day 😦
Very funny! Too bad lots of reform news is deadly serious!
This is an April Fool’s joke in the same great spirit of NEPC’s annual awards for the dumbest reports about public education, usually from foundation sponsored belief tanks and USDE. This is a great time for anyone who is unfamiliar with this vein of great scholarship and informed criticism to visit the archive. One of my favorites is “Have We Identified Effective Teachers Yet? It is critical look at the claims made by economists who received about $64 million plus from the Gates Foundation to “prove” that the assumptions required for VAM–random assignment of student to classrooms, and classrooms to teachers–could be accomplished in schools, on a broad scale, with important proofs of who really was “effective” and who was not. This multi-faceted program of studies is known as the MET Project.
As usual, test scores were the biggie for judging whether a teacher would be “effective.” Correlations of test scores were sought with the Danielson rubric–applied to VIDEOS of teaching submitted by teachers–along with a student survey. An economist designed the survey. The survey probed students for more than opinions about teachers. It asked students to provide answers to some very personal questions about their family and home, with no clear awareness or concern for FERPA regulations.
Read about the key findings and informed criticisms here: Rothstein, J. & Mathis, W. J. (2013). Have we identified effective teachers? Culminating findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching project. (Review). Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013.
Unfortunately, that MET study is still cited as if it is above criticism. VAM has survived, and data gathered from the MET project is still being massaged.
A case in point is the Aug/Sept issue of Educational Researcher, 2014, an article reworking data from math scores by four researchers and a Ph. D. candidate. They are trying to figure out why VAM calculations based on math scores for grades 4 to 8 (six districts, different states) are not highly correlated with scores on a teacher observation protocol for math called PLATO. The researchers have, unfortunately put another peer-reviewed study into the propaganda mill for VAM along with an observation measure intended to points to one-and-only-one view of “quality teaching.”
Chasing one-size fits all measures of teacher quality should be ridiculed.
Gates and those who are engaged in perpetuating this nonsense need to be called out as navel-gazers. I hate saying this because I do think carefully crafted research can offer some insights into teaching. But, the tables, graphs, and footnotes in this study show how absurd these efforts to massage data have become, how totally disconnected they are from the work of real teachers. Judge for yourself. How important to events in education today are statistical maneuvers such as constructing scree plots, doing Horn’s parallel analyses, and thinking about eigenvalues?
Teaching is not a mechanical engineering problem.
It is not OK to use VAM. It is not OK to the familar word games, in this study converting VAM into units called “a month’s worth of learning” even though these “months-of-learning units” are meant to thought about and called “relative units,” and really in the end, actually refer to “months of schooling gained.” News flash to researchers: One month is school is not the same as another!
Too much of this “evidence-based” nonsense is parading as if the research contributes to a meaningful discussion of learning.
I hope Kevin Weiner and his able crew of debunkers will not be afraid to look at the long tail of the original Gates-funded project, including the bubble up in peer-reviewed publications from the American Educational Research Association.
Kevin Welner–Bad proofing, not April Fooling.