This is unbelievable but true.
Last night, I posted a comment from a teacher about the P—C test. When I looked at my email this morning, a reader asked me what happened to the post. It was gone.
I am reposting the content here. I hope it is not removed by anonymous.
From a reader:
“Remember, copyright protects only words, not ideas. PARCC may be able to find DMCA complaints related to the question text, but DMCA cannot apply to the statement of facts.
“For example:
“The PARCC asked students to read texts far beyond any reasonable expectation of their abilities. These included the poem “The Mountains” by Margan Dutton, which draws on the philosophy of Plato, and an article for Scottish mountaineers about how dialing 999 for an ambulance in climbing accidents causes logistical problems. 4th grade students also read a selection from a book about sharks advertised by Scholastic as having a Lexile score appropriate for 7th grade and being of interest primarily to high school students.
“And there’s not a blessed thing the DMCA can do for them, because they don’t own the copyright to those words. They also can’t hunt me down through my district, because I don’t teach in the US and never signed any confidentiality agreement.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The stifling of discourse in America continues.
We must keep up our resistance.
Making a screen shot of this post. You are all invited to do likewise.
I saw it in my email which I will save. No, no they can’t take that away from me (email, that is).
Please counter the DMCA thing. It’s used all the time to silence dissent. Check out Retraction Watch for more info on how it’s used erroneously. And tweet away.
Do you have lawyers? This is important to keep your voice out there.
The reader is correct, Diane. If you posted actual quotes from PARCC’s copyrighted materials, they would have a case. But to shut you down over simply posting ABOUT the nature of those copyrighted materials is an abuse of the DMCA and you need to call them on it.
I am the copyright officer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. I deal with this stuff all the time and have to be very careful to do so legitimately.
Have at them, Diane!
So the CRRAP testers are getting a little thin skinned?
Down to only 6 states (from 24) actively buying their CRRAP?
The new ESSA threatening to put CRRAP on the smoldering ash heap of FAILED education reform?
The fascist-like defense of their CRRAP tests backfire much?
I hope they don’t let the monitor hit them in the place they CRRAP on the way out.
Pardon my dyslexia.
Demanding that teachers not look at or discuss the very tests used to evaluate their professional “effectiveness” is a very bad look for the Common Core testing agenda. When I tell this to my non-teaching friends it takes a long time for their disbelief to be suspended.
Luckily, Arkansas moved away from from PARCC this year after a tumultuous, counterproductive 2014-2015 school year. My 11th grade English students wasted valuable time that could have been spent a) preparing for the ACT, which has actual consequences on their post-high school ives or b) engaging with the meaningful, rich materials and activities we all want to occur in the classroom.
After each practice test (provided by the overly-expensive TLI interim testing service), students came away dejected and frustrated. There was no way to prepare for the materials before the practice tests, and afterwards I was astonished at the ridiculous question formatting and ambiguity. Designed to mimic the PARCC exam, the practice tests used unfair levels of rigor and obstructive questions.
Though these were not the actual PARCC tests, they were modeled after them by a professional testing service. Students demonstrated similar frustration after taking the actual PARCC, though I cannot comment on specifics due to a signed agreement.
I am thankful that Arkansas moved away from this service, but my gratitude does not come close to the frustration I have for it. My students lost valuable time and motivation because of the poor design and implementation of this testing service, and this is time they cannot get back. I have no problem with standardized testing as a means of tracking student progress (I was up late tracking/graphing individual student progress on year-end ACT diagnostics last night), but, in baseball terms, we have fallen beneath the Mendoza Line with our testing culture.
(I have gone on in more detail on my blog, including this post: http://marcusluther.tumblr.com/post/104812100872/datadriven)
Please keep fighting for our students!
Maybe Big Brother isn’t just watching–Big Brother is trespassing and vandalizing. 😳
You know you’re getting at the TRUTH when the perpetrators are trying to shut you down. Keep it coming – and continue standing up for children and education! Thank you.
And farewell, Fair Use Doctrine! Alas, we knew you well, back when quoting extracts of copyrighted material for the purpose of critical review was a legitimate activity understood by all educated folk.
Certain situations of binding agreements or contracts may supercede fair use. This may be the case for these assessments. But, apparently, Diane didn’t even use a direct quote, therefore the the action is illegitimate.
The irony is the context.
What could be more geared toward “educating the public” (the prime function of the fair use exception) than a critique of a test that is purporting to assess the public education system?
This appears to be a pretty blatant misuse of copyright law.
And the fact that the folks at PARCC have actually used the threat of an infringement suit to “pressure” the blogger who posted the test questions to “give up” her source is not only grotesque but very likely illegal.
Yes, Michael, but who is the signee to these agreements and how enforceable are they anyway? Not the students (they cannot enter into legally binding agreements – just conduct codes, and even there things get messy) and not their parents.
I would however love to see an actual lawsuit wend its way through the courts.
Diane, is your website a WordPress.com website? If it is, then somebody compelled them to delete the post from your account. I think this might signal how vulnerable your website is. Perhaps you should look into hosting your own private web server powered with WordPress open source software. Look into the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
Yes
The site is WordPress
Also you can export the site contents at any time. Hopefully you are making backups.
wp-admin > tools > export
I don’t see much of a difference between corporate controlled American media, and China’s state controlled media Xinhua. Both control content and both deny that they do it. But in China, social media also offers the same challenges for Big Brother of the East that Corporate Big Brother in the West faces from the 99% in the U.S. and the U.K. where the autocratic, for profit,opaque and often fraudulent corporate Testocracy machine is in full swing. China’s CCP keeps watch on its Internet Social Media too and intervenes to delete content on their versions of Facebook and Twitter that they don’t want just like Pearson is doing.
And dig this: in 2011, the CEO of Coca-Cola said China was more “Business Friendly” than the United States, because the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) runs China like a corporation.
After all, in the early 1980s, the CCP rewrote China’s Constitution and was set up like a corporation with its own board of directors (called the Politburo Standing Committee) and a CEO (called a president) but with term limits for both and an impeachment clause that allowed the CCP to get rid of tyrants the Standing Committee can’t control. They didn’t want another Mao.
How do we get term limits for the billionaire oligarchs and corporate CEOs? In China it is mandatory that everyone retires at age 60 for men and 50-55 for women, and this also applies to most of that country’s leaders.
I learn interesting stuff from your posts all the time.
I have, for years recommended that my colleagues refuse to sign the confidentiality agreement. I have declined when asked to sign. Still most teachers just sign as if it were just a frivolity.
Thank you for your subversion in the name of justice!
No consequences if you don’t sign it?
Non-disclosure agreements (eg, between PARCC and teachers) are one thing, but copyright is something else entirely.
Since PARCC does not know the name of the teacher who revealed the contents of the test, they can’t go the route of non-disclosure prosecution so they are threatening Copyright infringement prosecution to intimidate Diane and others into silencing all discussion of the fact that the public is effectively being bilked out of millions of dollars through tests that are simply not appropriate for their claimed purpose.
SomeDAM Poet: please forgive the quibble…
But did AutoCorrect [for $tudent $ucce$$?] sneak in and change “hundreds of millions of dollars” or perhaps even “billions of dollars” for the resulting “millions of dollars” in your last sentence?
Just checking…
😎
KrazyTA
I am just trying to avoid being hyperbillyic, since I actually don’t know how many millions — but I’m pretty sure that it is more than one because that would not even cover the salaries of the officials and lawyers at PARCC who are chasing bloggers around threatening copyright lawsuits.
of course, if I were someone on The PARCC Side, I would claim “gazillions” — as in “Suburban moms have spent multiple gazillions of dollars producing anti-Common Core and ant-PARCC propaganda — like “Use the Opt-out, Luke.”
Billions is a safe bet—certainly more accurate than millions. Consider the fact that in TN, the freshly fired testing company had been hired for $108 million one year before.
PARCC execs saw the movie Trumbo, missed the message to act like a human being, and saw it as a how to guide to be a bully.
I wouldn’t assume that anyone deleted the post. As a website developer, I do know there are many possible system errors that could account for a disappearing post.
Probably this is what happened.
ON VULNERABILITY: This is yet another example of the way privatization has put countless tax dollars and man hours at risk because of the high stakes nature of the tests and the concept of verticalization.
In the old days, a pilfered copy of a test could be circulated for other students, affecting one class or a whole grade at the most. Standardized tests are much more vulnerable, particularly in the digital age because hundreds of thousands take the same test.
So let’s say a rogue 8th grade student tweets test answers out for whole state, like 1b2c3a4c etc. as schoolmates all went absent to take it later. Would this invalidate the test? Would it be readministered? Sounds like it would be extremely costly. This is why they have different versions, but the vulnerability comes from the mass-“scalability” that Ed reformers love so much.
Cheating scandals have been part of the standardized test debacle from the start. Aside from the mistakes and errors, cheating skews results in ways that can’t even be measured.
These tests have already cost lives and freedom, a curious way to educate our young where we prioritize competition and filling in the right bubble over being a thoughtful, curious learner.
“In the old days, a pilfered copy of a test could be circulated for other students, affecting one class or a whole grade at the most. Standardized tests are much more vulnerable, particularly in the digital age because hundreds of thousands take the same test.”
and
“Cheating scandals have been part of the standardized test debacle from the start.” (see the Air Force Academy exam scandals)
And what is the underlying cause of the “cheating” (a specialized form of knowledge gathering?) so decried by all??
The concept of grades and grading and the certification/validation/gate-keeping processes that are based on them.
No, it’s not “personal shortcomings” or “failures of character”. It is the system that rewards those who can fool the system the best and if you can’t, well tough shit!!
Students should be required to keep their eyes closed during the tests. Can’t have them actually seeing copyrighted information!
Smiley face!!
Hey, that was my post! I didn’t receive a DMCA takedown notice, but maybe you did as the blog’s owner?
The thing about DMCA is that it lets Big Corporations say scary things to make other people be quiet. Well, ain’t gonna happen.
Txedrights.net which supports Texas opt out parents gets hacked every testing season.
It’s time to stop outsourcing any public education function to private companies.
So no more outsourcing of tests, grading, building maintenance and cleaning, text book writing, software, and certainly no more outsourcing of schools or even individual kids via vouchers.
Let’s see if we can do all these in-house to everybody’s satisfaction. If other countries can do it, so can we.
People may insist on their need to choose a school, a textbook, or shiny new technology for their kids’ classroom. But that’s not how it works, because decades of evidence proves, we must put the tax dollars into those pockets that directly do the sweating for us. Who made us think, filling intermediate pockets will miraculously be more beneficial? Why did we think, intermediate pockets will work even in theory?
I am afraid, public education works very similarly to public transportation where you can take the bus, the train, the subway at a reasonable expense or, if you think you want to take your chances in the morning or after work traffic in your own vehicle, you need to shell out your own savings for it.
But beware: while you are sitting in your Mercedes convertible, staring at infinitely long red lights and breathing in other cars’ emissions, I may look up from my book I am reading on the high train, lean back, and feel sorry for the people stuck in the traffic below.