Mike Klonsky writes tonight about John King’s efforts to circumvent the intent of the ESSA law and restore the punishments of NCLB.
Governor Jerry Brown wants to use multiple measures to judge schools, and King does not approve. He wants to impose an A-F letter grade, based primarily on test scores, a simplistic idea invented by Jeb Bush.
The schools that suffer most are those that enroll poor children and children of color.
“King claims it has to be a “simple” rating system so that parents can understand it. He thinks parents are too stupid to understand that there’s more than one way to tell how their schools and their children are doing. His approach is what led to the mass parent opt-out revolt in N.Y. under his administration.
“This is the same line we heard under Bush’s No Child Left Behind. It turned out that NCLB testing madness was just another form of social reproduction. Or more simply put, a way of replicating and enforcing existing inequalities by punishing schools and districts with the neediest kids. Testing mania only reinforced school segregation and hurt poor kids and children of color the most.
“Not to mention the discredited role of the use of standardized tests as a valid measure when it comes to evaluating teachers or schools.”
King claims he is merely enforcing the law, but Senator Lamar Alexander (who led the writing of the law) doesn’t agree with him.
King is trying to assert power he does not have. Senator Alexander is not going to let him get away with it. In a stand-off between a lame-duck Secretary of Education and the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, my money is on the Senator.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
King confuses national education with a weather app or something.
There should be a day when all parents can sound off on one platform on King’s policies and embrace of the Common Core.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DIANE!
Sent from my iPhone
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These neo-liberals are arrogant autocrats that need to be slapped down.
Tired of fighting the John Kings and Arne Duncans of the world about the same thing. You think you have made progress, then they keep coming back. We need to support public schools, and especially the schools that serve the poor. Supporting public schools is about loving not just your own kid, but loving everybody’s kid. It is not about test and punish.
So is mine …Happy Birthday Diane.
I appreciate you comments, and insights on King, but more important than him:
Happy Birthday!
I can’t tell you how much your work has meant to me… Thank you so much!
As a fellow Tennesseean, I have a long memory on Lamar Alexander. The John King I know used to raise chickens. So I will point out that it was Alexander who,started us down the road to reform in our state. He tried to institute paying teachers based on how good they were back 30 years ago. It turned into the “master teacher ” program. There were three levels. To reach level one, a teacher was interviewed. Level two involved some evaluation and might have been my introduction to the use of the word “rubric” in an educational context. Level three had more interaction between agents of the state and the teacher. Each level carried with it the opportunity to earn a thousand or so dollars a year in increased salary.
I recall being nonplussed with the teaching of some of my colleagues who were level three. The evaluation was a dog and pony show, so that any lazy bum who could look good for an hour on several occasions could earn up to a four thousand dollar pay hike. I do not recall knowing how many people were paid to rove about the state doing these evaluations. The expenditure must have been enormous, but just now I do not have enough grit to go look it up.
Lamar Alexander has done some things that were good for Tennessee, but his educational contributions look more like modern reform than real efforts to do a better job. So when he suggests that King is taking power from the states with his interpretation of ESSA, I am reminded that his own policy described above was predicated on the notion that a drive-by evaluation was worth thousands.
Notwithstanding the fact that politics cannot give us exactly what each of us thinks is best, I still do not expect anything positive to come from this clash of titans. They will, in the words of a Sea Train song, “screech til they mantra..”
“King claims it has to be a “simple” rating system so that parents can understand it. ”
A huge amount of ed reform can be summed up in two words: they’re snobs. The sense of superiority, both intellectual and moral, really permeates the whole “movement”.
You really have to read them to get a complete picture of how pervasive it is.
“We will share the #broadprize w/ @YESPrep @SuccessCharters to ensure undocumented students have someone fighting for them.” @TomTorkelson
No one in the country is “fighting for undocumented students” outside of Tom Torkelson.
They just rattle statements like this off constantly inside the echo chamber. It’s assumed they are the only brave warriors for children. The rest of us are either actively harming children due to “self interest” or too stupid to realize the error of our ways.
I completely agree with your assessment of them as snobs. One part of this that I find really frustrating is that they are intellectual snobs, but they aren’t real intellectuals at all. They have undergraduate degrees from elite colleges but how many are tenured research professors? How many are scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, artists? What do they really know about anything?
It strikes me that anyone who thinks that evaluation of a system is possible is a practicing snob. I once met a calculus teacher from another high school at a teacher workshop. We were doing a project, and she failed,to understand what the point was. I was young and full of my self and assumed she was a horrible instructor based on her mistake. Really she was just a person that thought out loud and I was too arrogant to understand. For years she was an icon of what teachers should never be in my mind. Then I met a calculus teacher at a much later workshop. She was bright and full of creative ideas. Her inspiration? That same teacher. I had been the snob.
If I had never met that second teacher, I might never have changed my image of that teacher. Perhaps we all are snobs. If I made millions of dollars every year, and people clapped when I entered board meetings, I might never come to the conclusion that I am fundamentally flawed as are all human beings. Rather, I might come to the conclusion Andrew Carnegie did and suggest God had blessed me in a peculiar way.
Must we not all admit that our ideas are flawed? This will keep us from telling teachers they are no good based on supposedly scientific data gathered from observations that are flawed by brevity. This will keep us from telling students they are lazy when we really do not know why they did not complete a task or answer a question correctly. Admitting our human inability to properly evaluate a circumstance will temper whatever evaluation is forced on us as human beings.
God have mercy on me, snob.
Much worse than snobs. It’s beyond mere arrogance, intellectual and moral.
They really believe they are saviors and crusaders, while they are in fact myopic fanatical weasels with really bad, self-serving, superficial ideologies.
King is a puppet. A parrot-like doll with a pull string in his neck with pre-recorded messages from his puppet masters. He is a one-trick pony. The man doesn’t have an original thought in his little pea brain. He has no conscience. Thank goodness, he is being checked on the power that he THINKS he has. He does, however, have a healthy bank account, and these deformer cogs always land on their feet, either at the next billionaire funded blog, website or profitable non-profit, or they open a charter school or charter management company, and some even wind up the face of manure, like Michelle Rhee at Miracle Grow. How interesting that the child abuser Rhee married a child molester, and neither has been brought to justice on their crimes.
Yes. ENDLESSLY PRE-recorded messages. There is nothing new with pushing King into Duncan’s slot.
“Eric Brandon
July 2, 2016 at 8:24 am
I completely agree with your assessment of them as snobs. One part of this that I find really frustrating is that they are intellectual snobs, but they aren’t real intellectuals at all. They have undergraduate degrees from elite colleges but how many are tenured research professors? How many are scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, artists? What do they really know about anything?”
The CERTAINTY in ed reform circles bothers me. Read any Duncan speech. He announced his agenda as Right and True. That’s not ‘science” – it’s a belief system. There’s nothing really wrong with proceeding from a belief system- “beliefs” motivate and inform lots of good and bad ideas and agendas- but portraying it as “science” is just deceptive nonsense.
The ed reform agenda in my state, Ohio, is exactly the same as it was when it started 15 years ago. Other than doubling down on their ideas, they have not changed a single approach or component of the broader agenda. Am I to believe that they are always right? That seems extraordinary. They have a 100% success rate? Wow. They really MUST be the Best and the Brightest. They’re upending these incredibly school complex systems that are embedded in incredibly complex systems called “communities” and they’re ALWAYS right? Come on. That’s not “science”.
“The United Church of Reform”
Reform is a religion
That worships test and VAM
An edu stuperstition
A cult of Charters scam
Their God is Billy Gates
Who gave them Common Core
Determining the fates
With holey Coleman lore
They pray for teacher firing
Before they go to bed
And really are desiring
Of bots in years ahead
They look for tax exemption
And other ways to win
A capital redemption
Of all the edu sin
King claims it has to be a “simple” rating system so that parents can understand it.’
What John King really means: it has to be a “simple” rating system so that he can understand it.
You know what’s a simple, easy to understand, profiling system? Bush Jr.’s terrorism threat levels. Just as with Michelle Rhee’s grading of schools, it is easy to understand that when you see a certain color, number, or letter, you’re supposed to unleash whatever irrational fears you’ve been harboring. If you see a red letter ‘F’, run for cover. SEGREGATE yourself from danger. There’s a charter school right over there. Go shopping.
Wow. The Chris Christie/Gulen article just disappeared from your page when I refreshed the screen.
Wdf
I moved it
I will post soon
I wish the neoliberal White House staff would listen more attentively to the more progressive voices in Sacramento. Since they won’t, I hope Lamar Alexander takes John King to the cleaners. True liberals AND conservatives agree. Stop John King.
By the way, Governor Brown called out the Obama administration years ago, in his first State of the State of this century. I remember him saying something like this: High stakes testing isn’t progress. It’s not even progressive.
Likewise, NPE should grade the politicians and their education policies.
USDOE: F-
Duncan/King: F-
Congress: F-
NCLB: F-
RTTT: F-
CCSS: F-
PARRC/SBAC: F-
VAM: F-
EdTPA: F-
TFA: F-
CBE: F-
ESSA: F-
Democratic Platform: F-
AFT/NEA: F-
Simple enough for them to understand?