Kevin Ohlandt blogs at Exceptional Delaware.
He left the following comment in response to Peter Greene’s post about “Lab Rats for America.”
“But where oh where would all of this become incorporated? Look no further than the home of 85% of U.S. companies… the First State… Delaware. On May 2nd, Delaware Governor Jack Markell announced his state would begin to look at changes in state regulations and state code to allow for Blockchain start-ups to come to Delaware.
“As well, we have a coding school in Delaware which was founded by Ben DuPont, of the legendary DuPont family of Delaware. The same family that actually created many of the “brown schools” in our state in the early 20th Century. Also a big supporter of charter schools.
“This is what is has all been leading up to. And opt out? They love it. As long as they resist it just enough to issues threats and build the base for more parents opting out. Not wholesale, but steady increases. That way they can “realize the error of their ways” and lead us to a digital personalized learning competency-based education paradise where the state assessment is no longer given once a year, but throughout – in the form of end of unit online assessments. At the end of the year, the total scores will be calculated and serve as the official state assessments.
“Because these are also part of students grades and their ability to move on, the ability to opt out becomes moot. Teachers (or rather, glorified digital moderators), will get immediate feedback. The tests won’t be as long, so parents won’t have to worry.
They are three steps ahead of us, always. While we are lashing out about PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and teacher evaluations, they are laying the groundwork for all of this.
“They can say this is an attempt to erase all inequity, but we know that is a false narrative. This is the corporate takeover of America. This is the end of public education.
But the question we ALL need to ask ourselves… how do we stop it? We are seeing coding classes in 3rd grade in Delaware. Are kids actually laying the groundwork for a lot of this already? You know this is a data-mining paradise for them.
“The Rodel Foundation of Delaware has been pushing this in our state for a long time. Our State Board of Education and Dept. of Education are the most deceptive and fraudulent parts of our state.
“If we want to save public education and, I’m going to say it, the future of the country, we have to act now.”
The only option might be to boil the oil and sharpen out pitchforks.
Reblogged this on Matthews' Blog.
I know a lot of them are volunteers, but I hope public school advocates and parents are forcing state lawmakers to listen to them on the new federal education law.
If 500 ed reform lobbyists are the only people heard we’ll be in real trouble down the road. We all saw NCLB. We know how this story ends.
“. . . competency-based education. . .”
Guess who completely destroyed CBE back in his ’97 dissertation?
Yep, if you guessed Noel Wilson you are correct. Read Chapter 18 “Competencies, The Great Pretender” to understand why. Wilson’s summary:
“I have argued that there are at least thirteen sources of invalidity that affect the measurement [sic] of competency standards. I contend that any one of these, applied to the assessment of individual students, would make the assessment of that student in these terms invalid.”
To learn what those 13 sources of invalidity are read and understand his never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Never refuted nor rebutted…
As long as “we” ignore Wilson’s observations, “we” can
rationalize “our” complicity…
YEP!
This story, of the stealth attack on authentic education known as CBE, has become the most important story of the day. CBE completely circumvents any real, functional involvement by parents in their children’s education. It is coercive in the extreme. It completely negates the role of teachers in the learning that occurs within students. One can only hope that rather than accepting the embedded of the testing industrial complex, parents will opt out en masse and refuse to accept the conversion of their children into mere data points that exist to serve GERM, the Global Education Reform Movement. Just as the testing industrial complex has adapted to Opt Out, Opt Out can adapt to the testing industrial complex.
“embedded control” of the testing industrial complex
Delaware? Add the recruitment of students and use of federal funds to enhance business operations in Delaware while reducing the cost of corporate training—all under the Obama administration’s little “experiment,” in supporting coding bootcamps and online education.
One of the “experiments” happens to be in Delaware.
Students who enroll at Zip Code Wilmington, with Wilmington University, DE are eligible for Title IV student aid and other grants from USDE.
Wilmington University functions as the pass through “banker” allowing students to enroll in a 12-week boot camp to prepare them for entry-level programming jobs at companies headquartered in Delaware. The twelve week training is $12,000.
Selected graduates of the boot camp will move directly into a paid 26-week apprenticeship at area corporations. Apprentices receive additional education and on-the-job guidance, including, access to workshops and a mentor. This boot camp and apprenticeship, founded in 2014, is available only to students who enroll through Wilmington University. The program is described as a “private/public/charitable partnership.”
If you look at the founders, advisors, and members of the steering committee, you may wonder, as I did, why students who enroll should pay fees for a program that could be, (and arguably should be) paid for by the corporate beneficiaries.
The boot camp founders include, a former President, of Juniper Bank, now Barclaycard; a venture capitalist, with 41 portfolio companies; a partner at Brown (investment) Advisory managing about $52 billion in assets: and a lawyer specializing in business counsel.
Members from the four-person Advisory Group for “employer engagement” come from
Capital One; DuPont; Corporation Services Company; and JPMorgan Chase.
Add the Steering Committee. These are tech experts from “partner corporations” that will accept apprentices and help with and curriculum and assessment of the quality of graduates.
These members come from Avid Technology; Douglas Elliman Real Estate; Corporation Services Company; JPMorgan Chase; Chatham Financial, Bank of America; Capital One; and Diamond Technologies.
The whole program has these major “partners”: JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chatham Financial, Barclays, Capital One, Hacker Rank, and Corporation Service Company.
These financial institutions do not want to pay for the initial training of their prospective employees. In theory, these prospects will be drawn from backgrounds marked by poverty and fast-tacked into high paying jobs. Ordinarily, Title IV funds could not be used for this and the other seven programs Obama has put into this experiment. more at http://www.educationdive.com/press-release/20160816-studycom-selected-by-department-of-education-for-educational-quality-throu/
At 1:56 in the video, the teacher (monitor, facilitator?) says “especially in Kindergarten”. Aaaaaarrrrggggg! 😱