Paul Tudor Jones is a hedge fund billionaire who enjoys a lavish life style, with multiple homes, jets, and yachts. He has cultivated his image as a philanthropist who cares deeply about the poor and needy. But his political activities assure Republican control of the New York State Senate, which refuses to raise taxes in the 1%. He is a major supporter of charter schools and of a group of wealthy backers of “Families for Excellent Schools,” which financed a multi-million dollar campaign to defeat Mayor Bill de Blasio’s effort to rein in charter schools.
He gives political contributions to Democrats (such as Corey Booker and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) and Republicans (such as Eric Cantor).
Know your billionaires.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Families for Excellent Schools”
If Tudors are our tutors
And Gates’ are our front-gates
Unsuited are our suitors
And fetid are our fates
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More and more democratic NY legislators are listening to the parents in their districts and supporting charters.
Unfortunately, their leadership chose to put provisions in their budget (at the request of NYSUT and UFT) that would effectively kill charters in NY (and which would close numerous traditional schools if applied to them as well).
Luckily, we have groups like Democrats for Education Reform that support progressive politics including putting the needs of children first in education. NYSUT/UFT are clearly more interested in shutting down competition and dissent than improving anything.
Anyone who supports taking effective schools away from predominantly minority children from economically disadvantaged families is not a progressive, they are representing the narrow interests of adults who are threatened by the success of these schools.
Anyone who decides their opinion about a school based on its governance instead of based on the teaching and learning occurring there is also not a progressive. The purpose of public education is education.
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Your last two paragraphs make for excellent arguments against charter chain takeovers. So thank you, John. Let’s leave the schooling to the teacher, not the corporation.
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LeftCoastTeacher: well put.
Or look at it this way: just another attempt to Dial up the drumbeat in support of educational pedagogy that measures genuine learning and teaching by how much children cry.
After all, you wouldn’t want those little “test-taking machines” to actually enjoy going to school, now would you?
😏
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Hedge funds (who finance DFER) have a long and positive record of acting in the best interests of others. Note- post comment on April 1.
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Apparently, John believes that putting a provision in the budget that requires charter schools to serve their share of needy students will “effectively kill” them. Well-put, John. I appreciate you noticing that if charters couldn’t cherry-pick their children, how can they profit from educating only the cheapest ones while forcing the expensive ones back in public schools so that someone else pays the cost?
Thanks so much your honesty about how unethical charter schools are. It’s wonderful that the people promoting charters are finally exhibiting a modicum of honesty. We appreciate it, and it is long, long overdue.
According to John, charters should get to drum out as many special needs children as their oversight agencies allow them to drum out, and since their oversight agencies only like good test scores, that means they can drum out as many as they want. And if they can’t, they will be effectively killed off.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Thank you John!
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Big money usually has no morals. They’ll go where their best interests are served.
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Tudor Jones is a Memphian.
Here is an article that discusses the big Tudor Jones education initiative. It calculates the end result of education reform: $225 trillion returns in 80 years which is almost $3 trillion a year. No wonder these billionaire guys are excited. They would invest barely more than $200 billion, and get $225 return. That’s a thousandfold profit, or 100,000% profit.
The article lists 5 “fundamental” ideas to better education—and it calculates both the needed investment and return dollar amounts (hence profit amounts) each of the ideas will generate.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2014/12/01/heres-a-plan-to-turn-around-u-s-education-and-generate-225-trillion/
It’s rare to read such an explicit receipe from the reformers. They usually hide their true intent in deafening jargon. Not much of that is done here—including an explicit call for blackmailing politicians on page 6.
Here are the big ideas in order.
page 2, TEACHER EFFICACY it will generate $60 trillion profit.
“Instead of teaching the theory of education, let’s teach the practical education training tools, and let’s have a master’s degree program where teachers teach teachers and literally relay those skills from one generation to the next. Identifying who those elite teachers are, put a jersey on them to give them some status so that when they walk into a room they aren’t just a teacher from XYZ school, but a member of USA Teaching. A master teacher, the highest level of status as recognition of their peers and called to the highest calling, which is to then convey those lessons.”
Page 3, UNIVERSAL PRE-k: $37 trillion profit.
Page 4, SCHOOL LEADERSHIP: $50 trillion profit.
“Our main focus as a foundation is on the replication of high-performing charter schools.”
Page 5, BLENDED LEARING: $33 trillion profit.
“What This Is: Arming students with computers and delivering rote lessons in part through digital media, personalized and optimized to individual needs and pace, allowing teachers more value-added.
How We Achieve This: National broadband coverage, computers for every student and training and coaching teachers and schools on how to integrate online learning within a brick-and-mortar school.”
Page 6, COMMON CORE/COLLEGE READINESS: almost $28 trillion profit.
This one is an explicit call for blackmailing politicians
“Philanthropists need to rethink how we’re engaging in these problems. So far I think we’ve done too little to engage families and teachers and to ensure that they have what they need to help kids succeed. Second, we have been too focused on trying to solve education through the sainted lens of charitable giving and not focused enough on the more gritty lens of politics. I’m increasingly convinced that in addition to funding great schools and great teachers, training programs and other educational interventions, we need to step up our political giving. We ask our elected officials to stick their necks out for our kids, and then we don’t support them when our opponents try to tear them down. They need to know if they do what’s right we’ll be there to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.”
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Replace blackmail by bribe. I always mix the two words—they are not that far from each other in practice, are they?
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Máté Wierdl ,
I don’t know if you honestly didn’t understand the article or if you did and just want to mislead readers.
The “profit generating” you refer to is the increase in GDP that can be expected as a result of “better-skilled high school and college graduates on our national GDP”.
They’re not talking about investing this money themselves and getting profit, they’re talking about the country investing it and increasing GDP.
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“I don’t know if you honestly didn’t understand the article or if you did and just want to mislead readers.”
I did understand the article. We know how to interpret stuff like “We want to help poor children”, “we want to increase graduation rates”, “we want to provide personal learning for all children”, etc: provide workforce for the billionaires’ economy so that they can speedily reach their dream: become a trillionaire.
For example, we learn about the “expert rich guy” on teacher efficacy this important fact, on page 2
HOW HE SUPPORTS TEACHER EFFICACY: Board Member, Robin Hood Foundation; Chair, Relay Graduate School of Education
So of course, Relay GSE will lead the way to transform teacher efficacy using the principles I already quoted, because Relay is known for its altruistic work to benefit the common people. Here it is again.
““Instead of teaching the theory of education, let’s teach the practical education training tools, and let’s have a master’s degree program where teachers teach teachers and literally relay those skills from one generation to the next. ”
Sounds like an ad for a model which happens to be the Relay model.
About early childcare?
HOW HE SUPPORTS EARLY EDUCATION: Pritzker Children’s Initiative, Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development
No comment, just a link to this blog on the topic
and a video from it
School leadership?
HOW HE SUPPORTS SCHOOL LEADERSHIP: Chair, Charter School Growth Fund and KIPP Foundation; Special Advisor, Fisher Fund
We do trust KIPP, don’t we?
Blended learning?
We’ve discussed it here on this blog exhaustively.
Common Core/College readiness?
HOW SHE SUPPORTS COMMON CORE/COLLEGE READINESS: Chairman, Stand for Children, Leadership for Educational Equity
Leadership for educational equity is tied with TFA. Here are blog entries about Stand for Children
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=stand+for+children
These altruistic people all happen to see the future shaped by their own businesses. They want to increase tax revenue that can then be spent on their charter chains, computers, software, ed school.
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I did mess up one thing: the quoted numbers. The investment is $7 trillion, so the $225 trillion return is only 30 fold or 3,000%.
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Of course, we should also point out the connection between the Robin Hood foundation (established by Tudor Jones) (Uncommon) charter schools and Relay graduate school: Norman Atkins.
https://www.robinhood.org/about/norman-atkins
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Warranting explanation, why colleges accredited by NCATE, (e.g. UMass) agree to be part of an accrediting body that includes Relay.
An employee of a Gates-funded organization wrote at “Philanthropy Roundtable”, “…reformers…declare ‘We’ve got to blow up the (university) ed schools.’ ”
Reputation and legacy, so easily destroyed, when good men remain silent.
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No donations to Cuomo – who helped assure Republican control of the State Senate, blocked taxing 1% and is a a major supporter of charter schools (and recipient of much campaign contributions from them)?
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The Debbie Wasserman Schultz that has done all she could to help Hillary clinton win the nomination….
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NYC public school parent,
How many traditional public schools would have to close if they were each required to have above the average number of ELL students?
Answer: about half. That’s the whole point of “average”.
Why is the proposed change written so it would close so many schools and why does it apply only to charter schools?
Answer: It was written by NYSUT and UFT, who don’t care about ELL students, they care about getting rid of charter schools.
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John do you have any links regarding a NYSUT & AFT proposal to require charter schools to enroll ‘above the average of ELL students’?
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Sp & Fr Freelancer ,
http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A09006&term=&Summary=Y&Actions=Y&Votes=Y&Memo=Y&Text=Y
Search for “PART AA”
“When developing such targets, the board of regents and the board of trustees of the state university of New York shall ensure [(1)] that such enrollment targets equal the number of students that, as a percentage of the students authorized to be served by the charter school in its charter, is equal to the percentage of students in each category that non-charter public schools in the district where the charter is located enrolled in the preceding June in all of the grades combined which are served by the charter school.”
Schools that don’t meet or exceed the targets get less funding, can’t expand, and should not be renewed.
The aim of increasing enrollment of subgroups is good, but requiring that all charter schools be better than the district average is like requiring that all schools be better than average. Also, remember that charters have to do this in an environment where parents have to choose them.
UFT president Michael Mulgrew called the legislation one of the union’s “main legislative priorities in Albany” this year. I wish their priorities had something to do with the schools they’re in instead of shutting down alternatives.
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Máté Wierdl,
Newsflash, there is no separate “billionaires’ economy”.
They may control it, but it’s the one and only economy that we all live under.
Your contention that they want to increase GDP so they can increase taxes so that they can spend on charters, computers, software, and ed schools is laughable. But even if not, are you saying we should keep kids unprepared for work and keep the GDP down?
We should all be less well off? For what, spite?
Less money to spend on infrastructure, social safety net, healthcare, etc…
Yeah, that will show them.
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“Newsflash, there is no separate “billionaires’ economy”.”
Exactly. There’s one economy, and that’s the billionaires’. Our dreamy eyed mega-money men and women want to get their hands on public education, because that’s the last big thing that hasn’t been deregulated. It’s almost a trillion dollar per year business, but even that is not enough for these altruistic rich dudes. What they want, according to the article, is to get their hands on that $1 trillion and rig it, so it produces workers for them, so they don’t have to spend money on training.
And of course, they keep repeating their mantra ad infinitum according which the purpose of education is to be successful in the economy—their economy. That’s our purpose in life: work for them, make them richer than God.
If you look at the history of the last 40+ years, you realize that the increase of GDP benefited only one class: the class of rich dudes. Tudor and friends know this very well, hence they want to increase the GDP even more.
GDP is, in fact, RDP, Rich Dudes’ Profit.
As I showed, all the article does is recommend changes in education that would directly benefit the organizations, corporations these Tudorists own or lead. Yeah, they don’t want to invest much of their own money. They just invest peanuts, a few millions here and there, mostly to bribe politicians, “researchers”. What they want is that the government invests taxpayers’ money to make the changes that would then make the economy’s Dollar River flow into our RD’s pocket faster than thought.
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As long as parent’s believe, the purpose of education is to successfully participate in the rich dudes’ economy, their kids will just continue slipping down into eventual poverty.
Kids need an education that would enable them to understand their own power and fearlessly think about social change that would result in an economy which is theirs. For that, parents need to forbid their kids’ economical indoctrination via endless tests, assessments and data manipulations.
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Máté ,
Lovely in theory, but tell me what happens to kids who aren’t prepared to participate in the economy.
Answer: jail, homelessness, etc. Oh, but at least they’ll have your approval for making a stand for something totally abstract.
All nonsense and rationalization for failure.
School’s purpose is to prepare children to be successful and have choices in their lives. I’m glad there are people who are comfortable enough to question the definition of success, but to think that all kids from low income families can do that isn’t reality.
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“School’s purpose is to prepare children to be successful and have choices in their lives.”
Good education prepares for real success in life—which is exactly what rich dudes’ choose for their own kids: arts, music, field trips provided by schools where teachers still enjoy their academic freedom.
For other kids, starting at age 4-5, rich dudes choose an education that consists of computerized test prep by teachers who are trained for 5 weeks by other clueless discipline enforcers, literally relaying incompetence from one generation of teachers to the next. These other kids, including my own, are told “your purpose in life is to work 24/7 for rich dudes, and increase the GDP, that is, the Rich Dudes’ Profit. That’s your success for you.”
Nothing is abstract about this. This is the faithful description of reality—just read the article, and teach kids who are told, thinking is when you are trying to get the correct answers to test problems.
John, you seem to believe that testing and common coreing students, continuously assessing teachers, privatizing public schools will somehow result in successful participation in any kind of economy. Well, this belief is just that, a belief. People believe all kinds of things, and these beliefs will enter reality only after research proves them viable. Decent people do research in a lab. Tyrants, billionaires do their experiments with the whole population. We see these nationwide human experiments in US education now, and they are not working.
One way of telling good research from unsuccessful one is that while research is published in peer reviewed journals, bad experiments need to be promoted on websites, blogs and political rallies.
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John,
FYI, school’s purpose is not to train workers but to prepare citizens to live In a democratic society.
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Yes, and in the real world, “living” requires “working”.
Do you think high school dropouts and students who need lots of remedial work just to start college are in that position because our educational system has provided them with solid preparation as citizens at the cost of their college/job preparedness?
Nonsense.
Those students are getting neither.
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“Yes, and in the real world, ‘living’ requires ‘working’.”
The virtual reality is that the purpose of education is to prepare you for work. The virtual reality is that it’s getting tougher and tougher out there, and you have to work harder and more to survive. This virtual reality has been created, maintained and spread globally by billionaires.
In the real world, accumulated wealth is beyond comprehension, but still has been increasing faster and faster due to much more efficient technologies. In the real world, people should work less and less, 6 hours a day, 4 days a week, should have 2 months vacations so that they can enjoy life, appreciate and explore the world they are supposed to learn about in school.
Work to live, not live to work.
Billionaires don’t want that. Each wants to win the race to be the first trillionaire, so they promote the virtual reality in which people are under constant fear of not being enough, not performing satisfactorily for their beloved ginormous corporation. The ed reform movement is all about bringing this virtual reality down to kindergarten and probably further.
So education is to prepare kids for real life, a full life which is worth living. Here is a video showing what happens when preparation for virtual reality replaces real education.
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I think it might helpful to the discussion to leave the GDP out of it. It is problematic trying to link the vicissitudes of the economy to the caliber of public ed.
The argument that our public school system is doing a poor job seems to be based mostly on comparative intl test scores. Yet the U.S. has ever scored mediocre in such comparisons including during peak economy in the ’60’s. In those days, as today, our best schools rank w/# top-scoring nations, & our worst schools w/nations emerging from 3rd-world economies. Our best schools still graduate folks qualified for the hi-tech, law, finance, med, science jobs available– but a smaller % of them find employment due to our habit of importing cheaper talent from abroad plus offshoring.
Another popular argument is that 40% of incoming college freshmen need remedial courses. Yet for decades we sent only 25% of hs grads to college. Today, thanks to 35 yrs of corporations & govt claiming that the jobs of the future are only available to college grads, we have 50% hs grads attempting college, & many more [mediocre] colleges created in the attempt to step into the breach.
The pool of jobs available to miscellaneous BA’s/ BS’s in my day (’70’s)– entry-level jobs in huge corporations- have all but dried up. They were jobs in sales & support services which today can be performed remotely via Internet (elsewhere in the country or abroad), I.e., more cheaply with fewer people (one of the reasons US productivity level is so high).
Meanwhile the jobs which employed ‘bus.-track’ hs grads of yore have disappeared into automation & offshoring, likewise entry-level mfg jobs. And the U.S. public ed system began abandoning vo-tech programs in the ’70’s, which, combined with the exhortation for all to attend college, has created a 2-generation lacuna in those trades which cannot be offshored, filled by immigrants.
You can’t just wave a wand & decree via ed-policy that 100% of hs grads will be qualified for the shrinking pool of extra-special jobs left over after we outsource or automate basic mfg & assembly jobs, and automate/ assign support services remotely via Internet, & import what’s left over (lowest level to immigrants, often illegally, & higher levels via cheap H1b immigrants).
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bethree5,
I agree with what you said. I don’t think that public education in this country has declined in any absolute sense. But, it has declined relatively as a result of greater challenges and little change. We have to find ways to educate the students we have, not the ones we wish we had or the ones we used to have.
My issue with this tripe about the failure being the test’s problem or the myth of “well rounded students and citizens” is that it is a rationalization and has zero bearing on the reality that low income students face.
Preparing for the workforce is preparing for successful, choice-filled lives plain and simple. if you are unprepared to earn a living, you are not prepared to lead a successful life unless you are independently wealthy. Sure, there are some people who are happy as starving artists, but they are the exception; most people want the choice to live without scraping by, the option to raise a family, etc.
Yes, education’s aim should be higher than merely preparing for work, but when it is failing at that for large numbers of people, it is disingenuous to pretend that it is because it’s busy making them well-rounded.
It makes me angry when my local high school has a 50% drop out rate and people are talking about well-rounded students. Let’s talk about graduating from high school at all before we talk about preparing citizens and well-rounded students.
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“Yes, education’s aim should be higher than merely preparing for work, but when it is failing at that for large numbers of people, it is disingenuous to pretend that it is because it’s busy making them well-rounded.”
Making students well rounded is not a luxury, an elitist requirement. It’s a basic need, a mandate for schools to provide for all students. Without it, kids are not prepared for life—and that includes jobs. The current testprep teaching is minimalist, incredibly boring and no student benefits from it. Test results have no correlation to college or career success, and they predict nothing. This is well known to those in the trenches of education, but whose voices are not listened to.
Just watch the video I posted above to see what a “poor” school used to be able to do for its students and what it has become as a result of the testing and assessment madness. Then tell me, the ed reform movement is helping kids to get great jobs.
What the reform movement does for kids is that it gives them a completely false sense of what learning and knowledge are, and, worst of all, it makes them bored out of their minds.
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It is a false choice to require picking from test prep or test failure.
If you think reformers want kids who score well on tests but don’t actually learn anything, you are mistaken.
As for “Test results have no correlation to college or career success, and they predict nothing.”, please provide some references. This may have some validity in the margins, but I can assure you that kids who score 1s on the state test have limited, if any, college choices, are more likely to drop out of school, and therefore more likely to end up in prison and unemployed.
A “well rounded” student who can’t read or do math is not “well rounded” at all and highly unlikely to be successful or happy.
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“If you think reformers want kids who score well on tests but don’t actually learn anything, you are mistaken.”
The end result of high stakes tests is that kids do test prep day and night. Literally. This is one of the signs that reformers are clueless about education and kids. They try to transplant some ideas from their adult work experience in their own corporation to education because they apparently think, assessments, tests are universal motivators for all human activity.
One may conclude simply, they think so restrictively because they didn’t have a well rounded education. But then you recall that they do want true, well rounded education for their own kids in private schools which do not take part in NCLB testing and the data based evaluation bonanza. And that means, their motives in reforming my kids’ education is, at heart, sinister: they want education for the masses that would train them to do jobs for billionaires’ corporations while their own kids will get the well rounded education that will enable them to take on any jobs they desire—and enjoy life as much as all humans should be equally entitled to.
The true conclusion probably is that billionaires are both clueless about education and their intentions in the reform movement is sinister.
Again, watch the video to see what works and what doesn’t work in education. Still, what doesn’t work continues to be a national experiment with 50 million kids.
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Máté,
“The end result of high stakes tests is that kids do test prep day and night. Literally. This is one of the signs that reformers are clueless about education and kids.”
I think what reformers didn’t understand was the degree to which schools and educators warped education in this way in response to being measured. It’s not the kids, as the “stakes” for them haven’t changed.
I also don’t think that any reformers consider “tests are universal motivators for all human activity.” If anything, they believe that you measure anything that you want to improve, and generally, the measurement itself doesn’t completely subvert the process. For example, if you started measuring the number of customers that a Starbucks employee serves hourly, you wouldn’t expect that the employees would start rudely dismissing customers who don’t order quickly enough.
Finally, you believe reformers are sinister because they want “test prep” for poor kids as opposed to “well rounded” education for their own, so they are therefore trying to create compliant sheep.
The other way of looking at this is that you need certainly abilities to be successful in this world. Their kids have much of what they need from birth and early years (not fair, but accurate), whereas kids from low income families typically do not. Ideally, kids from low income families can get both basic skills and a wide range of extracurricular activities as well as subjects other than Math and ELA. But, if we can’t get them to basic skills in Math and ELA, all of the rest will not be valuable to them.
So let’s skip the incendiary language of “test prep”, etc. and just talk about being sure kids get basic skills by the time they graduate from high school. This would have a huge impact on these student’s lives. Without ascribing motives or discussing specific strategies, can you agree that increasing basic skills is good for students, the economy, the billionaires; basically everybody?
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“Without ascribing motives or discussing specific strategies, can you agree that increasing basic skills is good for students, the economy, the billionaires; basically everybody?”
I sense, this is where the problems begin: what does “increasing” mean? Reformers seem to think, for example, that knowledge and learning can be measured. I don’t agree.
What are the basic skills? In my opinion, probably the most basic “skill” a kid could have is being curious. If a kid has curiosity, it will motivate her to acquire most other “skills”: it will motivate her to learn about nature, literature, arts, music, to think, to form her own opinion, to express herself. In fact, kids, rich or poor, are born with curiosity, but what happens with this skill if, from age 5, they are told in school, 7 hours a day, what to do, then they deal with 2-3 more additional hours with home work?
So what I agree on is that education should not kill kids’ curiosity. Then it should respect kids enough to always ask for their opinion, their thoughts on any given subject.
This is what’s best for everybody—at least to 99% of the people.
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“I think what reformers didn’t understand was the degree to which schools and educators warped education in this way in response to being measured. It’s not the kids, as the “stakes” for them haven’t changed.”
There are many jobs where measuring performance does no good—simply because the performance cannot be measured, or there’s not even a performance to speak of. Not all jobs are like circuses—though circus performance is one those jobs that cannot be measured. Many sports are measurable, but not all; think about the inherent corruption in figure skating.
Education—teaching and learning— is neither a performance nor can it be measured.
So the warping in education cannot be blamed on teachers one bit, it can only be blamed on the reformers—especially now, that warping is apparent, but they still press on with their experiment. This is not simple cluelessness anymore.
This education reform is all the more weird in the US since the disadvantages of poverty have been adequately addressed in quite a few countries. Think about Cuba or other ex communist countries. For example, the average salary in Hungary is below the US poverty level. Still, until perhaps recently, the free after-school activities helped equalize the possible disadvantages at home.
There are similar successful experiments in the US—I personally witnessed one in Knoxville, TN.
http://www.communityschools.org/university_of_tennessee_%E2%80%93_knoxville_and_pond_gap_elementary_school_knoxville_tennessee/
But reformers, politicians don’t pay attention, and the Knoxville program’s organizers spend an inordinate time trying to get their program funded, since public funds are not shelled out for them while the state spends hundreds of millions on testing and school takeovers.
I wonder why reformers don’t pay attention to real solutions and instead, they insist on continuing their failed experiment.
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“As for “Test results have no correlation to college or career success, and they predict nothing.”, please provide some references. ”
I cannot find the most recent article which reported that now Ivy league colleges are thinking about dropping ACT and SAT. I think Lloyd posted it here, but not sure.
While I am looking for it, here is an article from 2014 with quite a few references. It writes
SAT scores do not predict “college and career readiness.” In fact, they barely predict the success in the first year (and only the first year) of college. A better predictor of college “success” are teacher grades from high school. But that fact undermines the national obsession with testing and the attack on teacher professionalism.
As a result of these facts, a growing number of colleges and universities are now “test optional.” That means, despite all the pressures, these colleges do NOT require SAT or ACT scores for admission. The number is now more than 800.
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=5252
Here is a full list of colleges which are “test optional”.
http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
Here is the list of the top tier ones
Click to access Optional-Schools-in-U.S.News-Top-Tiers.pdf
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Máté,
It is a big stretch to go from colleges recognizing that the SAT is not as predictive of success as desired to saying that state assessments are meaningless.
The students admitted to a college are more homogenous than not. College admissions offices have lots of other data to look at.
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John,
State assessments must be valid and reliable to be meaningful. They should have a cut score that is not based on a bell curve, because a bell curve dooms a set percentage of students to fail. Most state tests can’t meet these criteria. Those tied to the Common Core tests definitely don’t meet the criteria.
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Diane,
Performance on a test will almost always look like a bell curve, as it should. The question is where to put the cut points.
When you say a test shouldn’t have cut scores based on a bell curve, what you’re really saying is that cut scores shouldn’t be evenly spaced or something like that. I think we agree that cut scores shouldn’t be arbitrary and shouldn’t be picked such that a given percentage of kids fail *unless* that is the appropriate cut score based on some external criteria.
NYSED says they were set with proficiency meant to imply no need for remediation in college. Do you think otherwise, or do you just think that’s too high?
Since almost all kids are capable of this, what do you think has to be done with our public education system so that most students can get there? Or do you think they can’t or just don’t want to?
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I should have been clearer and less general about my statements regarding tests, so let me just stick to what I have first hand knowledge and experience in.
I cannot see a correlation between mathematics and math tests. Here I mean state practice tests (actual tests are not available) and SAT, ACT exams.
It’s very difficult to find any math in these tests, since the problems are barely more than calculations to get correct answers.
Besides the contents of the tests, the even bigger problem is that they test how quickly kids can whip out answers. Math is supposed to be about thinking—often careful, patient thinking, making errors as kids are trying to find their way to a solution. Whipping out correct answers to questions as fast as possible is needed in the ER, not in math.
What SAT or ACT can predict is how well kids will do in college if they take similar tests. They will give me no indication, how much kids will be willing to investigate a real math problem with their classmates.
No doubt, many colleges, including the best ones, continue giving speed tests in their math classes. I think they mostly do this because that’s the tradition. But I guess they started realizing, they are measuring something unrelated to math, and as a result, they often overlook kids who may not be fast, may not have great memory to recall all the crazy formulas and definitions, may be nervous while taking a test, but who have true understanding of the subject.
Now you may try to think about all kinds “objective” ways to measure kids’ understanding of math, using all kinds of data, but there is a much more natural, simpler way: talk and, more importantly, listen to them.
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Máté,
“Besides the contents of the tests, the even bigger problem is that they test how quickly kids can whip out answers. ”
I think we’re talking about two different worlds here. I said that I agree that the tests are not useful when looking at the difference between a 3 and a 4. For that matter, I think the math tests test more language comprehension than math.
But, 4% of my incoming middle school students passed their NYS exams. The issue is not “how quickly kids can whip out answers”. It’s that they can’t do the basic math.
This is why much of the minority community is unhappy with opting out. Suburban students are opting out over the difference between a 3 and a 4. Urban families don’t want their community’s most serious problem swept back under the rug where it was before NCLB.
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“This is why much of the minority community is unhappy with opting out. Suburban students are opting out over the difference between a 3 and a 4. Urban families don’t want their community’s most serious problem swept back under the rug where it was before NCLB.”
But then I don’t understand why kids and parents are unhappy in Memphis when their schools are taken over by the Achievement School District as a result of state tests showing that their schools, teachers, kids have been failing.
But I guess what you are saying is that elsewhere “urban” folks are happy about their schools’ problems detected and adequately addressed by the scientifically proven methods of the reform movement. I suppose, kids and parents have been rejoicing in New Orleans, since their schools were detected to be failing by the NCLB measuring device so the reform army moved in and the ACT-meter now shows that they moved all the way up to 16 points after ten years of expert turnaround leadership.
John, I think I get it: You believe in measuring knowledge and learning, you believe in evaluating entire schools based on kids’ scores in English and Accurate Calculations, since these are the basis of education. You also believe that some folks deserve, by birth, a well rounded education which is allowed to escape the measuring machine while urban folks have to be satisfied with a well flattened education that is tailored for easy data collection and scoring. Finally, you believe that the turnaround efforts have been working well.
Well, I believe, all those things are part of a nightmare given us by billionaires to help them reach their dream of becoming a trillionaire.
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/study-finds-high-sat-act-scores-might-not-spell-success/
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America today is suffering from an epidemic of “The Billionaires’ Disease,” and this disease has brought paralysis to our government and ruin to our schools. Most billionaires — with the exception of Warren Buffett — are delusional. They have accumulated great wealth and all the things that go with it, such as being surrounded by sycophants who assure them that they are geniuses. In fact, most billionaires not only believe themselves to be geniuses, but believe that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusion they also think that their self-identified genius can be applied to other areas, such as government and public education, regardless of the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be and what government should or shouldn’t do, and of course they say that what the government shouldn’t do is make corporations pay a fair share of taxes. And there are billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed is the charter school business model that bleeds tax money from genuine public schools and puts public taxpayer money into the pockets of private charter school operators who don’t file the same reports that true public schools file to tell taxpayers just where their tax money is actually going. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants who tell the billionaires how insightful they are because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, perhaps the billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our society: Poverty and racial discrimination.
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