The hedge-fund manager group called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is conducting an aggressive telephone campaign in D.C. to promote the Common Core and high-stakes standardized testing. The rhetoric is deceptive, as usual.
Jeffrey Anderson writes in the Washington City Paper:
“In a one-party city with a civic focus on education, an advocacy group like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) sounds as wholesome as Mom and apple pie. Everyone in D.C. is a Democrat, right? Who isn’t in favor of education reform?
“Aided by such safe assumptions, the New York-based PAC recently injected itself into a complicated school debate when it employed phone banking that connected D.C. residents with their respective school board members.
“Residents around the city received calls on behalf of DFER to tell them that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is proposing to “hold schools accountable not only for the academic achievement of students but also for the growth that students make on their achievement at whatever level they start out.”
“Sounds like a winner, right?
“The callers then offered to direct residents to their representative on the D.C. State Board of Education to “let them know you support this proposal.” They then asked, “May I put you through?”
“What the campaign does not tell citizens is that the proposal presents the school board with complex decisions in an ongoing policy debate that is central to a virtual culture war over public education reform in America.
“Nor does it disclose that Democrats for Education Reform is a PAC that raises money from corporations, foundations, and influential philanthropists to back political candidates who favor standardized testing and the Common Core standards—and apparently seeks to directly influence elected school board members on contentious policy issues.
***
“OSSE’s draft plan is based on the federal “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which requires states to create a new school accountability system beyond the standardized math and reading tests of “No Child Left Behind.” The idea of Every Student Succeeds is to provide states with flexibility to also measure performance in science, social science, art, and other indicators of school quality.
“Under the plan DFER is promoting, 80 percent of school accountability for elementary and middle schools is based on standardized tests in reading and math and a complex formula meant to determine student “growth.” (Most of the remainder is based on attendance and re-enrollment.) The accountability system not only rates schools relative to one another but also sets guidelines that will influence educational and administrative priorities.
“Proponents of the plan, such as DFER’s D.C. director Catharine Bellinger, believe that a school rating system should be based on single test scores that reflect performance on college and career-ready exams, such as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).”
Here is a safe bet: Not one member of the board of DFER sends their children to a school that is ranked by test scores or uses standardized tests to rank students.
Now that DeVos is leading the national movement for privatization, DFER can concentrate its energies on testing and ranking other people’s children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whatever grassroots opposition to privatization DeVouring public schools sprouts, it will quickly be replaced with the bland astroturf of aloof billionaires, this time with robo calls. Opposition to Trump will be covered with the wet blanket of Common Core. The obsession with testing doesn’t just narrow and contort curricula into meaningless test prep, and rob students of valuable, explorative learning time, it’s the DeVious (Thank you, Poet.) way to trick the public into accepting DeVouchers.
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De and re, such wonderful prefixes. Rheeally, especially if you’re a DeVout member of the anti rheephorm crowd, DeVious, eh!
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They’ve been mangling language for years. Our turn to play. I choose to DeViate from Rheecycled segregationist language. Call it choice.
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Cross posted at Oped: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/DFER-Launches-Phony-Phone-in-General_News-Campaign-Tactics-Robocalling_Corporations_Diane-Ravitch_Money-170304-229.html#comment648376
with comments which have embedded link at that site.
Democracy depends on shared knowledge!and no where,–even in this article laying out the destruction of our nation — do I EVER read how the GOP (with it’s ‘deficit reduction’) has defunded the INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION,SO THAT across the nation, the schools failed, and the blame was placed on those “incompetent teachers.” Thus hundreds of thousands EXPERIENCED professionals WHO GRASPED WHAT learning looked like, were thrown out, and thus, the schools failed.
What a surprise.
Thus, like every dictatorship, they ‘get em’ young, and rewrite history so that Lies are the NEW TRUTH and education goes the way of health care, enriching the oligarchs and ending income equality for our people… because (make no mistake about this) public schools are the only road for all our people to learn the CRITICAL THINKING skills that enable them to move out of poverty.
See my series on privatization https://www.opednews.com/Series/PRIVITIZATION-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150925-546.html
and the legislative takeovers that ensued… where non-educators replaced local school boards, and now run the schools to profit the hedge funds and private school operators !
https://www.opednews.com/Series/legislature-and-governorsL-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150217-816.html
The fight to save public education will happen at the grassroots level. The Network for Public Education (NPE) will watch Betsy DeVos and the PAC”S that report & push the worst ‘deforms’ . The NPE can keep you informed about what is ongoing in your state, and help to connect you with other people who are mobilizing to stop privatization. PLEASE join us,become active, send us action alerts about meetings, protests and demonstrations — help you get the news out.
https://networkforpubliceducation.org/grassroots-education-network-3/
Get everyone you can to join NPE.USE Facebook to get people to join. Create a local group/network in support of public schools. Use Facebook or create a website, then join our Grassroots Network. Make a donation . If we are to fight this we will need funds. Together, we will build a movement so powerful that we can beat Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, and all others who aim to privatize our public schools. Together we can keep the for-profit privateers and frauds out of our schools.”
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Teacher friend of mine sent this note to me the other day…has to be anonymous or she could end up in LAUSD ‘teacher jail’….
Letter starts here…
“In October, 2015, then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote: “Time-limited: While it is up to states and districts how to balance instructional time and the need for high-quality assessments, we recommend that states place a cap on the percentage of instructional time students spend taking required statewide standardized assessments to ensure that no child spends more than 2 percent of her classroom time taking these tests.” Caveat..I only know about grades 6-8.”
“LAUSD continues to mandate interim assessments which cause more than 2 percent of instruction time to be lost to standardized testing with no instructional value other than to prepare students for further annual state tests mandated by the Every Student Succeeds Act. As Duncan continued, “Parents should receive formal notification if their child’s school exceeds this cap and an action plan should be publicly posted to describe the steps the state will take to review and eliminate unnecessary assessments, and come into compliance.”
Oh, yeah…like these teachers can inform parents and not be fired, sez I.
Over the past few years I have heard similar stories from dozens of teachers…and most say their principals have warned all teachers to NEVER speak of this to parents on penalty of losing their jobs. It is a terrible situation that rarely sees the light of day. Thanks Diane for opening this up.
And another LAUSD teacher of 14 years working in inner city schools, with a graduate degree from one of the nation’s major universities, got her dismissal letter last week, with NO due process. It is unending at LAUSD.
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Ellen,
I was told by mid-level district admin that the purpose of the new interim assessments was to get the students to practice using the SBAC platform. In other words, the purpose of the interim test is to practice test taking for the summative test. A test to practice for a test. Knowing your SBAC password, practicing logging in quickly, knowing where the editing tools are… What a waste of time! Is using the SBAC platform a “college or career ready” skill? What state learning standard is SBAC password knowledge? Do young people need to know how to use the SBAC website to be architects? Physicians? To manage businesses? To participate in democracy? Utter nonsense!
How am I supposed to teach reading and writing with all my class time taken up teaching how to use the SBAC website?
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and it is the NO DUE PROCESS that is shockingly familiar, now, in days when chaos rules educational “accountability” — the public simply has no idea of how often dedicated educators are viciously shut out of their careers
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DFER should defer to Noel Wilson when it comes to educational standards and testing! His never refuted nor rebutted 1997 total take down of those educational malpractices should be required reading for all who have anything to do with public education whatsoever-parents, teachers, administrators and politicians. Let me help you all get started with:
“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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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DFER has high stakes testing as a primary goal, a primary means to get rid of union teachers and public schools. I hope we do not let our fight against DeVouchers morph into a tacit acceptance of standardized testing being used for school and teacher rheevaluation and grading. As you wrote, Duane, high stakes grading buttresses no one.
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Total garbage slanted article – leaves hugely relevant facts out of the piece – annotated here: http://genius.it/www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/loose-lips/article/20853674/an-education-pac-is-phonebanking-dc-residents-to-promote-controversial-policy
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