Sara Roos, a public school parent who blogs as Red Queen in LA, has written a thoughtful and provocative article posted in Huffington Post.
She remembers a time when schooling was focused on the education of the student. But with the advent of mandated state testing, the balance has shifted to a paradigm. The student now performs on the test so his/her teacher and school and principal can be evaluated.
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Roos’ statement about the “transformation of students from the object to which pedagogy is directed into the subject that is scrutinized as a proxy measure of institutional effect” is profound.
It’s a shame, because they really are doing some good stuff in public schools, despite reduced funding and no support from their elected representatives.
On the local level, the only thing I ever hear that trickles down from the national ed reform lobby is testing and test scores and the various uses of test scores and 21st century tests and how to test them without them finding out they’re being tested and on and on and on. How much time and money have they spent on the whether to use 50 or 35 or 25 or 0% test score data to rank teachers, for example? Seems like a bunch.
Imagine if they had directed all that energy and all those marketing professionals to something like making sure they show up for school or replacing the funding we’ve lost since 2009?
It’s so weird how the Obama Administration continues to characterize school funding as “prizes!”
They say over and over again that this isn’t about winners and losers but everything they do contradicts that claim. It’s incredible to me that schools have to meet the DC ed reform agenda or they don’t even have a chance to get a piece OF THEIR OWN money back. This awarding of “prizes” is entirely subjective and it’s been clear to me for a long time that DC is entirely captured by 150 well-connected ed reformers. What if I don’t want my school to look like the ed reform vision? I’m just out of luck? No prizes for you, schools, unless you let Gates and Dell and Walton design your schools!
http://www.ctemakeoverchallenge.com/
A great description of “discretionary” funding. Is it the awarding of “prizes” — or simply out and out prostitution. ciedieaech.wordpress.com: LOVE BY LOTTERY
AMEN to her posting.
The military industrial complex, the corporate “news”: 5 corporations provide the “news” for 80% of Americans and thus can control thought processes to promote THEIR agenda. Now they wish to complete the job by having access to promote THEIR agenda and indoctrinate, not educate, our children.
SCARY.
This has so MANY ramifications it is hard to know where to begin.
but
when less than 20% of Americans vote in the primaries we do not have a democratic government. Can ANYONE dispute the fact that corporate America runs our federal government and that we have the best government money can buy?
Hitler had Goebbels for propaganda. We have corporate America
and
with the advent of a Donald Trump it is terrifying to see the parallels with Hitler and the take over of Germany by the fascists. Germany the land of Beethoven, Goethe and so many freedom thinkers, it is something that should not be taken lightly here.
Your approach to this media manipulation is interesting; I remember reading somewhere that the concept (term?) of “mass communications” came into use under Hitler.
Not only has “reform” turned students into a “proxy value of institutional effect,” it has turned students into a “proxy value of teacher effect” through VAM. Even though research has shown that both assumptions are false, reality and facts never seems to get in the way of the true believers. “Reform” has gone even one step further in my view. “Reform” treats our students like a commodity to be negotiated over. When we hear governors making deals over “high quality seats,” we know they are talking about our young people and future voters. Rather than taking responsibility for doing the best job for our students, policymakers are viewing them as economic entity. This is a perversion of our civic responsibility.
retired teacher: a succinct and sober statement of fact.
Which is exactly why the enforcers and beneficiaries and “thought” leaders of self-styled “education reform” deny the validity (when they reference it at all) of Campbell’s Law.
For viewers new to this blog, see—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/25/what-is-campbells-law/
And for a recent example of Campbell’s Law at work, see this blog, 2-1-2016, “Peter Greene: University President Wants to ‘Drown Some Bunnies’” and its accompanying thread. [*I leave out a myriad of other examples from other arenas such as Potemkin Village outputs to Los Angeles PD “ghost cars.”]
😎
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.
This was part of Sara Roos’ post that is noteworthy for reasons I will discuss.
“In late September, 2014, California’s Governor Brown signed into law AB 1584 and SB 1177, two laws that together form the strongest student privacy laws in the nation.
Together, the laws mandate that Local Education Agencies (LEAs), such as school districts, must take proactive steps to protect student privacy.
Under AB 1584, school districts that contract with third party providers of digital services (storage, software, hardware) relating to curriculum or student records will own and keep private the student records and the third party providers will not be able to use the information for marketing or other commercial purposes.
Under SB1177, businesses serving primarily the K-12 market with schools or school- aged children as users cannot use personal information gathered or provided by the students in order to market goods or services to them. Among other provisions of the law they must observe, they must delete any information that a school requests them to.”
In the meantime 10 districts in California have applied for an been given an RTT waiver and they are operating without any governance by the Board of Education in the State of California.
The RTT waiver was secured with the help of a non-profit called the California Office of Educational Reform (CORE), which sounds nice and official, but has no connection to to any state education agency in California. Ten CORE Districts have totally by-passed state officials, secured an RTT waiver, and have set up an administrative structure with no accountability other than in the form of new “School Quality Improvement Index” and token un-elected oversight panels.
The ten participating CORE Districts (up from an original six given a waiver) are: Long Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Sanger, Oakland, Garden Grove, Clovis, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno, together serving more than one-million students. There is a token “School Quality Oversight Panel” totally unrelated to locally elected and state education officials and a non-elected CORE Compliance Panel, no an ounce of statutory authority. The whole operation is set up to bypass locally elected school boards on many key decisions, including “flexible” allocations of Title I funds.
The “School Quality Improvement Index” will include all of the test scores and indices currently required by the state, add indicators of School Climate and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and scores for year-to-year “improvement, ” a version of AYP on steroids. The indicators for improvements in SEL come from surveys of students and may include parents as well. These surveys were piloted last year. They are sold by Panorama Education.
The School Quality Improvement System, is a version of AYP on steroids. You can see one version here http://coredistricts.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Index-Thresholds_1.27.16.pdf
Moreover, the School Quality Improvement System is attached to a Data Collaborative, so that districts can share information for school improvement. That is the cover story, but not the whole story. A full description of the data-gathering is here, with mystifying colored linear regressions and charts with arrows, along with the extra costs for gathering, analyzing, and formatting information gained from schools and districts for this “data collaborative.” http://coredistricts.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/CORE-Data-Collaborative-v3-1-21-16.pdf
This “School Quality Improvement Index”– with data converted dubiously converted to a ten point scale–is not a conventional public report. Instead the ratings (dashboard versions available) are fed directly to greatschools.org funded by the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations (their logos are displayed) and 19 other foundations (listed in standard type) including the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, New Schools Venture Fund.
Why are these big guns in philanthropy funding greatschools.org?
I have concluded that greatschools.org is designed to aid and abet the red-lining of real-estate and to steer families to specific schools via a tiered system of money-making ads, licenses, partnerships and other producers of “research” and communications (Peter Cunningham and Eric Hanushek on the Board of Directors).
The end game is a school report on “quality’ and “improvement” that aspires to be a national model. But the school quality ratings are really not much more than a trap for unsuspecting persons–including parents looking for their school performance ratings– who get booted to the great schools.org website for some heavy duty marketing.
Take a look for yourself.
Start here http://coredistricts.org/indexreports/ .
Click to see a school report. Try to make sense of it….then look at your browser to see the source of the report information. It is great schools.org, not the school district and not the State of California.
Poke around the greatschools.org website to see how a non-profit can operate as a for-profit that also serves real estate firms, charter schools, publishers of tests and textbooks. See how this website captures media outlets as “partners,” co-opts entire school districts as “partners,”even coopts the US Department of Housing and Urban Development plus Fannie Mae via pay-to-play licenses.
Notice how greatschools.org has placed many highly respected scholars on the Advisory Board, enticing them into this nasty bait-and-switch business— all represented as if relevant to “school quality.” The real estate partnerships and tiers of licensing rights, include a personalized push, steering people to specific schools (without seeming to).
I fell into this snake-pit by way of a NY Times article featuring the latest Broad Superintendent enlisted for Oakland schools, who is on the board of directors for CORE initiatives.”
So far I have identified 34 foundations that are supporting the CORE initiative and the east coast “partner” called “Transforming Education.” Transforming Education is a conduit for channeling money and managing arrangements (the organizational partner) for The Boston Charter Research Collaborative. This Collaborative is working with six charter management companies and MIT under the auspices of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and its Strategic Data Project. The Strategic Data Project is a a system for analyzing “big data” on human capital, meaning teacher effectiveness from recruitment to preparation to employment to outcomes while employed. For the scope of this data gathering operation see the infographic at:
See http://sdp.cepr.harvard.edu/files/cepr-sdp/files/sdp-spi-retention-infographic.pdf?m=1431356823
The question for the CORE Districts is what happens when “the waiver rationale” for this privately financed School Quality Improvement System runs out–certainly at the end of the Obama administration, and how much public money is being now being funneled to the initiative though various memoranda of understanding.
The CORE Districts were formed near the begining of the Vergara trial intended to be a fatal blow to teacher unions, in the midst of failed efforts of the California State Board of Education to muster its own RTT waiver, and at the launch of a new funding system giving districts more control over their budgets. The promoters of the School Quality Improvement System took advantage of that interval of turmoil.
The promoters and the funders of the CORE initiative hope it will become a national model for accountability. It is anything but that.
The opt-out movement and some privacy lawsuits could stop this effort, at least take some steam out of it.
In any case, millions of students as guinea bigs for projects that have no clear provisions for informed consent by parents or students. Panorama Education hopes that will not happen. Among the investors are: Y Combinator, Google Ventures, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Startup: Education.
Praises to Sara Roos, United Opt Out, and Diane. I bet if I said the words ‘Opt Out’ here in West LA, if I just whispered them alone in my classroom at 6:30, a platoon of administrators full fledged and quasi- would descend on me with rage and retribution unrestrained and unending. Corporatization firmly grips Tinseltown. The district is literally giving money to startup companies that claim to raise test scores by going into classrooms and taking up time showing teachers how to be reformy with classes of 40 students since we spent the money for extra teachers that would lower class size on these private consultants in the first place. None dare call them out for this. Well okay, I did, but remember that platoon of rage I described…
Hi Leftie…I too have heard from teachers at schools from the rolling waves of the Pacific and inland as far as San Bernandino that their administrators told them it is forbidden to even say the words “opt out” and their job would be in jeopardy if they even told parents off campus about the movement. This is an intolerable and tortuous impingement of their 1st Amendment rights. Teachers have emailed me at joiningforces4ed@aol.com and asked me not to reveal their identities for fear of being dumped in teacher jail or firing.
Queenie writes an intense and important article here which is, by extension, supported by the NY Times yesterday with their article on how museums use this same technique of supporting their corporate and personal donors with the direction of their exhibits. Strangely they left out the Broad Museum…but we educators in So. California are watching closely for this misuse of information to indoctrinate rather than educate. Shall find the article link and post it here.
Here it is….
From corporate donors to the bias of their exhibits, this incredible article calls out the museums for their own corporate interests and their interpretations of history. In Los Angeles we have to ask if we are ready to trade our school system for the Broad Museum.
Link to NY Times article…..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/arts/design/making-museums-moral-again.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
My response to Sarah Roos at her article:
“Well said, and good to have a name to put to the experience of having been transformed from ‘the object to which pedagogy [or, fill in blank for other social service] is directed, into the object which is scrutinized for evidence of institutional effect’– ‘instruments of an external operation’– a/k/a TOOLS.
When public goods are privatized, the operation ceases to be a pooling of resources to ensure minimum quality-of-life for all, and becomes an operation to collect data from consumers of others’ taxes to determine whether outcomes justify the expenditure– w/ ‘justify’ re-defined as ‘efficient enough to allow for reasonable profit by the provider, as well as promise for sector growth’ (e.g., more health tests/ operations/ occupied hospital beds, & more arrests/ occupied jail cells). And with ‘outcomes’ re-defined as predictive of near-term profits, reflecting the transformation of the corporate model from long-term growth to next-qtr’s-bottom-line.
This is becoming an all-too-familiar experience for American citizens under the neo-con/ neo-liberal gov admins of the last 35 yrs. As a buyer of clothing/ goods or user of phone/ internet services, my data is tracked, making me the tool of advertising. As a user of phone and email services, my data is tracked, making me the tool of NSA’s search for terrorists. As a reader of various news outlets online, I am made a marketing target for all manner of politically-driven outlets. As a consumer of health services, my data is tracked, making me the tool of the insurance industry’s agenda to increase profits by denying services to those more likely to cause them diminished profits. (God forbid my consumption of mental-health services gets online, I shall be forbidden consumption of all sorts of things & publically branded as a kook.)”
I would add only that Roos’ link to
… (Cont’d)… The United Nations’ 1948 declaration for human rights is a sobering must-read. Clearly US is in breach of many of these tenets…
I am not however a doomsayer. It seems to me we still can effect change via voter’s rights as well as consumer options.
RE: voters’ rights: we need to press for campaign-reform & legislation to up-end the Citizens’ uUnited decision. Strike while the iron is hot: it is clear from primary polls & voting that many mainstream folks traditionally voting against their own interests have begun to cotton on to the crony-capitalists’ agenda in both parties.
RE: consumers’ options: the OPT-OUT movement is the best example of voters once stymied by lobbying/ campaign contributions against public interest effecting a change. Hit’m where it hurts: you prevent data-entry into the data-results they need to promote their agenda, you stop them in their tracks.
There are other ways to gather community sentiment as a bloc to effect change.
A favorite example of mine is Saranac Lake, an Adirondack resort community that lost its dept store in 2002; residents had to travel 60mis for dept-store goods. But when Walmart tried to move in in 2008, the community decided this would doom the boutique stores that attracted their tourists. So they denied Walmart’s application, & collected $100/sh
toward developing their own community-owned dept-store. It took a couple of yrs, but they did it, & now are beginning their 6th yr. “Finding products that are eco-friendly, locally-made as well as, so far as possible, items and brands that proudly carry the “Made in the USA” logo – that is our goal and commitment to our customers.”