Missouri Republican Governor Eric Greitens wants to remove the state superintendent and install his own choice, a buddy who believes in privatization.
The state board is, by law, supposed to be independent, not politically subservient, but Greitens appointed members who were supposed to do as he told them.
One of his five appointees refused and was removed.
When the vote was called, the board split 4-4, so for now the governor won’t get his way.
More than three hours after the meeting ended, Greitens responded by slamming local school district officials and education organizations, saying the state earmarked more money for schools this year, but the money didn’t result in higher pay for teachers and improved test scores.
“Today, the system works for insiders and bureaucrats who get paid real well, but it fails too many students, families, and teachers,” Greitens said. “There are a lot of people committed to the status quo. They’ve been willing to harass and intimidate anyone who stands up to them. That won’t stop us from doing what’s right. We’re fighting to get results for Missouri teachers and students.”
The four recent appointees who supported Vandeven’s ouster included Eddy Justice, Doug Russell, Sonny Jungmeyer and new member Jennifer Edwards.
Vandeven’s supporters say she is doing a good job and that Greitens is meddling with a school board that operates independently of politics.
“It is critical that the independence of the state Board of Education be maintained so the board can make the best policy decisions for the nearly one million students in Missouri’s public schools,” said Melissa Randol, executive director of the Missouri School Boards’ Association.
Imagine that! The state spent more money on education this year, but test scores didn’t go up!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Imagine that! The state spent more money on education this year, but test scores didn’t go up!”
The ever-present bludgeon of test scores to denigrate the hard work and effort of the teachers and students. Gee you think that Greitens has read any of Wilson’s work on the invalidities involved in the standards and testing regime that render the usage of any results to be completely invalid?
Probably not, but let’s remind him, eh:
“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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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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Add to this the fact that in our city we now have years of labeling F schools inside F neighborhoods…
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Gov. Greitens received more than $700,000 in campaign contributions from charter school proponents in 2016, including $100,000 from the DeVos family. This might provide a bit more information on what happened today. It was posted when the outcome of the vote to fire the commissioner was still in doubt. https://rturner229.blogspot.com/2017/11/vote-to-fire-commissioner-of-education.html
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Thanks for the link, Randy!
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Hooray! Another good-news item. Article & comments show locals are onto this Trumpster-gov’s educational manipulations.
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Of course the test scores didn’t go up. First I’m willing to bet that the tests are like the mindless things I dealt with in Michigan until I gave up and retired. Of course it doesn’t help that apparently the money wasn’t to be used to raise the pay of the hard working teachers who are the only people in the system that actually deliver “education” to the kids. I’d bet that given the reactionary gerrymandered state governments we have today that the Legislature and the Governor passed the state school funding law with a specific clause that the money couldn’t go to the teachers. But, the governor is right any new moneys into the school systems the first cut goes to the “administrative overburden” especially the “central office and its bureaucracy! And while I was teaching in Michigan the next group that received a boost in funding was always interscholastic sports. Then if there was anything left we got maybe a couple of hundred dollars as a raise. Of course we knew that if the state grant went down the first people that would be fired to cut expenses would be the teachers. After 20 plus years of this in Michigan now the Republicans who control our government are “shocked, shocked” [to quote Claude Rains in Casablanca] to find that college students aren’t going into the education programs at our teacher training institutions and the schools can’t hire qualified and certified professionals to step into their classrooms and teach the current students. What a bunch of hypocrites!
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After years of futile effort to make the Post Dispatch and other st. louis media realize the damage being caused by charter schools…..the successful thing….TRIBALISM. Mayor Slay was a democrat using charters to take 30% of public schools population—it made sense—Slay was supposedly a democrat wreaking havoc and causing damage……but now a REPUBLICAN is attempting an updated effort on behalf of the same Krap……omigod…..what is this republican trying to do? It is pretty much the same stupidity that Slay did—-problem is, Slay was doing it on behalf of white people…..running black families out of town, enough to change the demographics of St. Louis.
Greitens might not have a friendly greeting for such stuff as making white children a tool for making money….Whatever he is going to try……he might be in the wrong tribe for some of the Missouri media who did not worry about damage caused by democrats….
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The governor is correct. Harassment and intimidation is the order of the day. Every time a teacher sees her way to lasting perhaps two or three more years, a new curriculum, a new template for a lesson plan that takes hours to fill out, a new report that demands filling out a spreadsheet with data, or a new and more invasive approach to the same old subject invades the life of the teacher. He is the source of this harassment and intimidation.
Kolk is correct as stated above. Almost all the new money spent on school has gone to administrative expansion, technology, testing, and companies that sell programs.
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this is the cautionary tale.
New state Governor in new president era.
Pouring the GOP kool-aid and rhetoric everywhere including tv commercials with his governor pals from other states.
Hasn’t any idea what he’s talking about (sound familiar) but spews the same verbage “spending on education increases blah blah blah test scores going down.”
Wouldn’t recognize a charter school if he saw one except knows that’s what Secretary D and pres want so he jumps through the hoop.
Couldn’t care about rural constituents who voted him in and whose local taxes can’t support schools now. gee those vouchers will sure help them. Got many rural charters out there?
And couldn’t care about city school (KC and St. Louis) except to oppress kids in the charters – but will preserve enough truly public schools for ELLs, students with disabilities, and those kicked out at charters for walking and chewing gum at the same time.
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