Peter Greene reports on the latest declaration that the sky is falling, released by the Foundation for Educational Excellence. FEE was established by Jeb Bush to push the Florida Miracle, digital learning, vouchers, charters, and high-stakes testing. When Jeb! decided to run for President, he stepped down and Condoleeza Rice took his place. She has been quiet, perhaps because she is learning the ropes about education. While Condi is studying up, Jeb!s righthand woman, Patricia Levesque wrote this latest blast at America’s terrible schools.
Quite frankly, I wonder why everyone swallows the latest alarm. We are,after all, the most powerful nation on earth. If our schools are so awful, how did we achieve economic, military, and cultural success? Sure, we have problems, big problems, especially segregation and poverty. But that is never what reformsters worry about. They work on the assumption that if they could get the right standards and the right tests, poverty would disappear.
FEE has discovered an earth-shattering crisis: the “Proficiency Gap.” It seems that NAEP has a higher standard for proficiency than almost every state. This is not a new finding. I think it has been written about many times. The NAEP “proficiency” standard is very high; it represents a very high level of performance on the NAEP tests. States, which must be concerned about getting kids through high school, do not set as high a standard as NAEP. NAEP proficiency was never meant to be a goal that all or almost all students could reach. No matter how high your expectations, some kids will not do as well as others. Not all will achieve A-level performance.
Greene’s complaint is that FEE never defines what proficiency is or how it should be measured. FEE seems to assume that a score on tests of reading and math are all that is needed to predict whether students are ready for college and careers. Peter has too much experience to accept that claim, especially when it comes from privatization advocates with no classroom experience.
Greene asks:
Is there a proficiency gap?
Between what and what? If the assertion is that we have a gap between the results of one lousy standardized test and another different lousy standardized test, then, yeah, I guess so, but so what? If the gap is between what we tell students they can accomplish and what they actually are able to accomplish– well, where’s the evidence? Oh, I know what reformsters believe– that all the poverty in the country is the result of students who couldn’t score high enough on a standardized test. This strikes me as highly unlikely, though I get that there are many possible explanations for and solutions to widespread poverty. But if we’ve had the most terrible education system in the world, and we should fear that because it will lead to failure and collapse, I just feel as if the country isn’t doing as badly as all these chicken littling privatizers want to say, and where I do see failure, I see problems of racism and systemic barriers to class mobility. Oddly enough, race and poverty do not appear as issues on the proficiency gap site.
So if FEE is declaring that states need to do more about closing the resource gap and the opportunity gap and the stupid racist barriers gap, that would be swell. But I’ve read enough FEE materials to suspect that they’re chicken littling in one more act of “There’s a terrible emergency, so you must do as we say!!” The Honesty Gap folks wanted us all to buy more PARCC and SBA tests, and Common Core harder, as well as handing over more public schools to private interests. Oh, and stop opting out. This seems like more of the same old stuff aimed primarily at helping privatizers close their revenue gaps.
Is there is Missal Gap or do we already have too much catechism in the schools?
(edit) Is there a Missal Gap …
Marilyn Manson said it a long time ago “Fear and consumption.” Create the fear and magically a solution will appear to make it all better. We had better be better at telling the truth.
Is Jeb referring to himself?
TAGO!
“The Proficiency Gap”
The biggest gap of all
Is right between Jeb’s ears
The writing’s on the wall
Confirms our greatest fears
You got it right!
Jeb?
“Foundation for Educational Excellence (FEE)”
Education for a fee
Is what we’re really after
Education shan’t be free
Cuz that is just disaster
I cannot stomach Jeb Bush. I cannot stomach John Kasich or Scott Walker. Where are these dictator like men coming from? What goes around comes around. These dictators will never get the Presidency. If they would ever squeak through, things would even get worse than they are. It is a frightening time.
I like it when you editorialize, Diane!
I too like your editorializing here. However, in order to change the status, we must present some revolutionary changes in the system. Preaching to the choir without concrete proposals for change is having little affect on the privatization gangsters. The principal reason is that the charter movement and extreme testing have been aided and abetted by the administrators, some who are fearful of losing their jobs, others who are coerced, and some who have been corrupted by the likes of Bill Gates, the Waltons, the Broads, Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan and Frank Biden. Yes, I said Frank Biden, the vice President’s brother. This debacle is a bipartisan effort to destroy the public schools, and it will only change when the white middle class realizes that they have been taken for a ride
by politicians of both stripes, by our home grown oligarchs, and by a fraudulent administrative system. Diane, you know the system better than anyone. What are your proposals for change. You have the ear of many activist teachers. If you don’t articulate a plan to change the status quo, it probably won’t happen.
Ian
Ian, go read her books, her proposals are outlined and documented. Most of us here have read them.
as a republican, I will not vote for any candidate that is pro education reform as it now stands. I don’t like either democratic candidate either. What to do?
Vote for Rand Paul. He wants to reform the Dept. of Ed by closing it. If you should close a failing school, what’s good for the goose…
The gap exists in the reformers’ bank accounts, and they want to fill those gaps with your tax dollars. The. End.