March Issue of “Monthly Review” Devoted to Testing Resistance

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1. Adrian Mendez says:

   March 3, 2016 at 3:14 pm

   The Monthly Review publishes great work, not just on public education!

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2. Laura H. Chapman says:

   March 3, 2016 at 4:26 pm

   Great point….”Moreover, the Every Student Succeeds Act clearly presumes that real control of the Common Core State Standards, and hence the standardized tests themselves, will remain primarily in private hands: the Council of Chief State Officials, the National Governors’ Association, educational service companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and the big venture capitalist foundations that provide funding and direction. All of this means that the Opt Out struggle will continue, but will be fought out in shifting terrains from state to state.”

   Meanwhile out in California CORE districts serving 11 million students are being enlisted by private foundations to participate in a version of NCLB accountability with measures of annual yearly progress. This is a legacy project from one of USDE’s “waivers” allowing for an alternative accountability measure.

   The CORE districts are about to be hit with AYP on steroids, with data-gathering extending to dubious measures of social-emotional learning plus student, staff and family surveys of “school climate.”

   CORE has “partners” for the testing and data analytics and for scaling this “School Quality Improvement System.” There are opportunities for data-mining that only Gates, among other funders, can love. The Common Core, SBAC tests, and VAM all appear to be part of this system. This is the program that the NYTimes featured several days ago on measuring joy and grit, with the “grit” scholar Angela Duckworth bowing out as a contributor.

   I am still trying to understand this “School Quality Improvement System” meaning continuous improvement in closing gaps galore, until everyone earns the perfect score conjured from multiple “continuous improvement scales” each with 100 points. There is an absurd level of precision in these scales. It is totally out of proportion to the metrics that are contributing to the ratings of schools and districts, especially the validity of SEL tests. The aim of this venture is to scale up. Some of the marketing pitches for deals if you get in in on the action are also in the following document.
   See http://coredistricts.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/CORE-Data-Collaborative-v3-1-21-16.pdf

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   • ciedie aech says:

     March 4, 2016 at 2:19 pm

     A most irrational “rationale” to assume that at any point in history, or at any point in the future, there could ever have been, or ever could be, “continuous improvement…until everyone earns the perfect score.” The entire past decade of punitively standardizing school reforms falls into the abyss based upon this one simple, and clearly irrational, statement.

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3. Seth Sandronsky says:

   March 3, 2016 at 6:12 pm

   The term “continuous improvement” has a history from just-in-time manufacturing. Employers such as the Toyota Motor Corp. used this tool to more tightly control workers and the workplace, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s: http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/dstools/jit-just-in-time-manufacturing/

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   • Duane Swacker says:

     March 3, 2016 at 6:41 pm

     Having worked with and used JIT in a manufacturing environment here in the US in the 80s (when it was first used in USA) I find the concept to be an excellent use to control the manufacturing process itself but more specifically the materials used so as to contain costs. I did not see or read of it being used to “more tightly control the workers” but rather the materials and inventory.

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   • JEM says:

     March 4, 2016 at 12:12 am

     Done right — JIT actually empowers workers, because they become integrally involved with identifying both problems and solutions. They themselves are the “customers” of the people who supply them with materials, etc. — and they in turn have other customers (end users or the next person down the line) whose work they are trying to improve. I am sure it can be done badly/wrong — and I would imagine that if people try to hijack the concepts and use them in top down (rather than bottom up) management systems — they could be disastrous. But the fault there is the fault of management, for misunderstanding the ideas at the heart of the system — not the fault of the system itself.
     This is not a system that can effectively be imposed top down, nor implemented half heartedly. But when everyone in an organization is educated in its methodology, it can be highly effective — not just in manufacturing, but also in hospitals and other large systems. I would love to see our downtown public school bureaucracy, currently filled with apathy, waste, and people blatantly following their own agendas (not the one set by the board) adopt it. (A management full of people trying to figure out how to best serve their customers? Empowered to notice problems at the “customer level” and propose solutions that management would actually listen to and implement? Unfortunately, I am not holding my breath.

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4. drext727 says:

   March 4, 2016 at 8:47 am

   Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.

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