Emily Talmadge, teacher-blogger in Maine, warns that the long tentacles of Bill Gates are infiltrating the Opt Out movement.
Why would America’s leading test autocrat join arms with test opponents? Well, it turns out that Gates and his buddies see the end game for the Big Standardized Test. What they are now planning is embedded assessment, where students work online and the instruction and assessments are intertwined and embedded. Testing is no longer a single event but a daily, continuous process.
So it makes sense for the technocrats to bury the stand-alone test and usher in the insidious embedded assessment. All-time, nonstop testing, adjusted to every student. Personalized, standardized, individualized, customized, mechanized.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It wasn’t enough for him stack-ranking MicroSlop™ into Fear and Trembling and the Blue Screen of Death — now he wants to Rank and Yank the World.
“Devalue Added Model (DAM)”
Gates is to value
As white is to black
As any can tell you
His stuff is a hack
It’s so relentlessly grim, ed reform. I read these dispatches from Gates or the US Dept of Education on testing these kids every minute of every day on everything from math to “character” and it just feels absolutely joyless. A grim, long march to College and Career Ready, with testing and tracking every step of the way.
Someone should tell him about Heisenberg — no, the other Heisenberg — the more you measure a process the more you interfere with it.
Jon, 2500 years before Heisenberg, Cratylus said that you cannot step into the same river once . 🙂
Reblogged this on education pathways and commented:
Gates is joining hands with the Opt-Out movement with the goal of replacing standardized testing dollars with ongoing, daily online assessment dollars? Sounds like science fiction, but…
Beware of nuances. Assessment that is embedded in instruction in order to inform both students and teacher about how to improve learning is a good thing. Alternatively, when that information is used for “interim” consequential purposes, it turns negative and becomes undermining. This is the danger when classroom-level assessments enter the public sphere. See: What if We Approached Assessment This Way? http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/What-if-we-approached-testing-this-way_-_-The-Answer-Sheet.pdf
Yes. A thousand times, yes. Ongoing assessment is a normal, natural part of…well, life itself. But when it’s embedded and insidious, and used for all the wrong reasons, we are headed down a slippery slope.
Gates = GREED & ARROGANCE to the MAX. Gates thinks he can BUY anything. Gates Schmates.
I’m with Arthur. Just as Tom Vander Ark tells his readers, we need to keep our eyes on the prize (our kids’ educational experience in schools), not the surrounding discourse or the ugly bedfellows. With the volumes of cash going from state budgets to textbook companies like Pearson and Scholastic and to hardware makers like Apple, the ship has sailed on corporate involvement and standardized materials in public schools. The issue is, as it’s always been in state-level and district-level adoption processes, can we get the vendors to produce media that serve our kids? When formative assessment is embedded–the way it is every time kids go out to the playground–it has the potential to enhance the school experience for everyone involved, supporting teachers’ role as guides and coaches while enhancing kids’ sense of autonomy. Of course it can cut other ways too–that’s why it’s worth reading the thoughtful game-based assessment research at http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/glasslab-research/
Russell,
“Guides”, “Coaches”, “Partners”, “Human Capital Pipelines”…., do you guys ever get sick of your own blather?
If we got rid of all of the employees or quasi-entrepreneurs, peddling layer upon layer of superfluous junk and, gave students a teacher, without a cut going to Wall Street and cellophane valley, our nation could continue to efficiently develop good citizens with high productivity.
To forestall any argument about my comment being self-serving, I’m not a teacher. As a taxpayer and a person interested in future prosperity for the middle class, it’s become obvious that there are a lot of functionaries making money on the backs of children, at the expense of middle class taxpayers.
The funding sources for Russell’s “institute of Play” won’t surprise anyone.
The new welfare class…. venture “philanthropy” toadies.
No discernible skills, but telling national publications that teachers have to “shift (to technology) or, get off the pot.”. Others, sighing with mock regret, that oligarchs own the system. and acceptance is the only answer.
If there is any remaining justice, in this land and, any remaining respect for the national sacrifices of the past 250 years, the new welfare class, sucking from the teat of the richest 0.2%, will drown in their words.
Pearson is at the table in these developments, so is Google’s non-profit gooru with Amplify, Pearson, school districts, startups, and well-known institutions as “partners.”
Gates wants to normalize teacher education around non-stop testing with as much as the Common Core as possible, but that is not longer essential.
The Gates agenda is forwarded by the National Council for Teacher Quality (where Pearson is also present).
The latest NCTQ publication,”Learning about Learning,” praises frequent testing as one of six “proven” strategies to ensure learning.
Gates is funding teacher preparation centers with data-gathering at the center of coursework, student teaching, and measures of teacher “effectiveness” as those graduates are hired and are evaluated based on the scores attained by their students (for up to five years).
Last year, Gates awarded a three-year grant, $6,872,650, to Relay Graduate School of Education to scale up data mining from the existing TeacherSquared “platform” where tech-savvy teachers are using Facebook,Twitter, and You Tube to share how they merge teaching and testing. That is a goldmine of ideas. Relay will curate, structure, and distribute the best ideas and effectively promote and enlarge this way to by-pass test construction by professionals with their obligations to meet criteria for test validity, reliability, and the rest.
The TeacherSquared platform is one of several in a portfolio being developed by the Gates Foundation. Among other functions, the TeacherSquared platform can be used to reduce teacher participation in big conferences of professional associations where, among other activities, scholarship has been brought to bear on practice.
Gates is helping to incubate and spread the concept that teachers should forego theory, scholarship, and focus on practical ideas, manage their professional development through on-line meet ups along with informal place-based communities. Gates is a fan of Relay, and that means Doug LeMove, and charters, and charter colleges of education. All of this is arrogantly portrayed as “elevating” the teaching profession.
Some of this makes “sense”. There’s even more ongoing money to be made from embedded. I am dubious of the claim that Gates “embraces” opt-out, though.
Embedded leaves open so many questions. If the point is to benchmark like mad maniacs, this will only make things more insane because there will be pre-benchmarks that districts will mandate to all the standard-by-standard embeds. This is the likeliest outcome of the ploy.
But if the point is to allow for try-try-again on the embeds that can be done at any time anywhere, well… that has its plusses and its minuses. On the plus, embeds that can be retaken for a later chance at mastery can provide a lot of flexibility. Also in the pro column is that a mentality of try-try-again at the state level would HAVE to go along with a change in the test/punish concept behind the tests in the first place, so the tests would actually be informative for improving instruction. On the downside, embeds that can be retaken will lead to a culture of never trying hard the first time. Ask my district, which has an infinite retakes for teacher-written tests as its policy, whether this has been a good idea.
In short, embed is likely to be a bust in the end. The only REAL solution to having standardized tests that don’t drive us all insane is to do only randomized testing (not of all kids, every year), and limit kids to getting a certain number of tests during their entire academic careers. I am fine with a mandatory exit test in math and english (algebra2/11th grade) that I actually think kids should have to PASS, but the rest should be randomized. You only need 10% of kids each year to know everything you need to know at the school and district level. You just won’t be able to hang anything on the kids and teachers. In my opinion that is a feature and not a bug.
I am dubious of the claim that Gates “embraces” opt-out, though..
I don’t know of any specific actions regarding OptOut, but ESSA’s state tests are not in the long-term interest of the tech industry that Gates and others promote. They really want to see no distinction between instruction and testing. That possibility is made real through online programs currently marketed as “personalized,” with unparalleled data-gathering. Those systems for delivering instruction make any “opt-out”difficult while complicating issues of data security.
Anyone who believes the exact same group of lobbyists and experts who run “ed reform” will do anything different with “edtech” or “blended learning” is naive.
They’re literally the same people. Ed tech and blended learning will be like everything else they do – market-based and focused on schools as service providers and children as either consumers or products.
Amen!
According to an Amnesty International investigation, along with Apple and some others, Gates’ company may be benefiting from child labor (cobalt mining) in the Republic of Congo — children as young as 7 (and adults) working in dusty, dangerous cobalt mines for long hours at low pay.
From the Amnesty International report:
“Millions of people enjoy the benefits of new technologies but rarely ask how they are made. It is high time the big brands took some responsibility for the mining of the raw materials that make their lucrative products.”
“The report documents how traders buy cobalt from areas where child labour is rife and sell it to Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd (Huayou Cobalt).
“Amnesty International’s investigation uses investor documents to show how Huayou Cobalt and its subsidiary CDM process the cobalt before selling it to three battery component manufacturers in China and South Korea. In turn, they sell to battery makers who claim to supply technology and car companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, Daimler and Volkswagen.
“It is a major paradox of the digital era that some of the world’s richest, most innovative companies are able to market incredibly sophisticated devices without being required to show where they source raw materials for their components,” said Emmanuel Umpula, Afrewatch (Africa Resources Watch) Executive Director.”
///end quotes
Gates’ company Microsoft (along with Apple) is also among those US companies holding a huge stash (over $100 billion) offshore, thereby avoiding US income tax.
We Have Met Big Brother And His Name Is Bill …
Diane – I do not know why Emily Talmadge is spreading this about. It is false. I am working with Citizens for Public Schools. FairTest obviously cannot and has not been bought out.
Christine, I’ve worked with CPS for years. I always though it was just their association with the “Teacher Union Reform Network”, that made them so limited. Lisa once told a conference workshop we couldn’t publicly support parent actions against the Boston public school closings, because we “couldn’t get out ahead of the unions”, which support CPS financially.
This is sad but true. Please don’t attack Emily for her courage in following through on it. You can see many links if you look at my comments on Lisa Guisbond’s letter, which Diane has also posted.
The Boston Federation of Teachers, and the MTA under former presidents Toner and Waas, were major players in supporting the disastrous Massachusetts education reform legislation of 2010 and 2012.
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