Corporate Reformers in Oregon joined with their allies in the business community to kill a bill (HB 2318) called “Too Young to Test,.” Modeled on laws in New York and New Jersey, the bill would have prohibited mandatory standardized testing from pre-k through grade two. Most of the testimony favored the bill.
The purpose of HB 2318:
Prohibits State Board of Education from requiring, and school districts from administering, certain assessments to students enrolled or preparing to enroll in prekindergarten through grade two. Makes exception for assessments administered for diagnostic purposes as required under state or federal law.
The Corporate Reformers and the business community killed it.
No one, the Corporate Reformers insist, is ever too young to test.
They also focused on killing a bill to strengthen Oregon’s opt-out law.Then they killed a bill to strengthen Oregon’s opt out law. (SB 433). Here is their letter of opposition to SB433.
They claim they need the test scores so they can effectively advocate to meet student needs. No one should be allowed to opt out of testing, no matter how young.
Apparently they don’t know that standardized testing is highly correlated with family income and family education. They should read Daniel Koretz’s The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.
Stand for Children was part of the pro-testing lobby. SFC is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation and other pro-testing, pro-privatization foundations. Stand for Children advocates for high-stakes testing, charter schools, and test-based evaluation of teachers. Dana Hepper of “The Children’s Institute” also lobbied against these bills and in support of standardized testing of kindergartners; she previously worked for Stand for Children. In addition to endorsing the joint statements, here is her testimony supporting mandated standardized tests for children of all ages and opposing opt out.
They say they need the scores so they know what children need.
BUT, THE CORPORATE REFORMERS HAVE THE TEST SCORES NOW AND THEY ARE NOT ADVOCATING FOR STUDENT NEEDS.
Teachers in Oregon are on strike to advocate for smaller classes, nurses, mental health counselors, librarians, and social workers.
Where are the corporate reformers?
Fighting for more standardized testing, even for kindergartners! Fighting parents’ right to opt their children out of standardized testing!
Are they joining the teachers to demand more investment in schools? No.
Are they on the picket lines demanding smaller classes? No.
Are they lobbying for increased funding for nurses, social workers, librarians, and mental health counselors? No.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Weeping again. I am at the end of my rope. How much more can this country take re: the greed and this horror?
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Yvonne, if you can stay sane until January, my new book will make you happy and hopeful.
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At this point, it would not surprise me if Pearson and Gates were to announce their new initiative for the standardized testing of fetuses. These people are sick and understanding nothing of how actual human beings work.
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You beat me to it.
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cx: understand nothing
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I’ll repeat myself: Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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Please step up, Oregon voters!
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Oh gag me. The whole idea of K assessment turns me right off. Help me out, Diane: why does it say the proposed “too young to test” Oregon law was based on similar laws in NJ? Near as I can tell from scanning the nj gov site, NJ K kids are getting assessed over the 1st 7 wks of school via the NJKEA, a commercially developed (“Gold”) assessment tool. It was developed as part of RTTT proposal & piloted in 2015.
Meanwhile at “spring roundup” in ’96 the very experienced K teacher at our local elemsch needed a mere 10 minutes w/my youngest to advise me to give him another yr of PreK even tho he would be 5-1/2 by Fall. She had cogent reasons; I ignored them; he repeated K… And none of my 3 were required to sit w/ K teacher periodically over 7 wks for “assessment”! That same K teacher recommended my youngest for SpEd evaluation in his 2nd yr of K; the recommendations & implementation were excellent; he benefited from them K-12.
What is this about other than deprofessionalizing teachers– as evidenced by RTTT man Costanza statement (in a NJ Spotlight article actually linked to the njgov site) “Even as teachers are doing all kinds of things in their classes, this is making sure they are collecting evidence about their kids.”
I have more questions!
Under commentary on the OR proposed bill, first up is Dana Hepper, Director of Policy & Advocacy, Children’s Institute, against the bill. “Until the creation of the Oregon Kindergarten Assessment, the state had no data before 3rd grade to help inform how to address achievement gaps effectively.” What data does that? “Waiting to have data on these disparities until 3rd grade too often results in K-3 approaches that are too late to close achievement gaps if we haven’t also invested earlier.” What “approaches”? She adds that one of her children is an LD w/SpEd services [inkindergarten]: “commercially-developed and normed assessment allows me to see her closing the gap between her and her peers.” Exactly how does that work??
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Oregon has the data and is doing nothing with it because they need more data. Be assured that The Children”s Institute and Stand for Children have no ideas about equity other than to open more charter schools and test more frequently.
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I swear, these ed-reform folks — & the idiots in state DofEds that buy their stuff – make it sound like they are a team of robots about to take their place at the front of every K12 class to ‘deliver ed’: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that… without more data.”
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The utter subjugation of the populace didn’t happen via secret police and mass executions as in Stalin’s Russia.
No, it was much more subtle, occurring bit by bit, drip by drip, a boiled frog phenomenon.
It all started, seemingly innocently, with Learning Management Systems, or LMSs These were database systems into which were entered all of a student’s information–grades, disciplinary actions, attendance records, health records, demographic and economic information, standardized test scores, and so on.
The Department of Education, with a big grant from a billionaire donor, rolled out retinal scanners and galvanic skin response wristbands that students would wear. These fed data about student attention to task, or gritfulness, directly into the LMS and alerted teachers when that attention strayed. These were the forerunners of the “identification buttons” that employers started having their employees wear–the ones wirelessly readable by the ubiquitous workplace drones that swept the floors and washed the windows and emptied the trash and inventoried supplies and so much, much else.
Of course, the national security services had bankrolled, many years before, the creation of several social media platforms to which people would post EVERYTHING about themselves, and it was a simple matter to data mine these to create extraordinarily detailed profiles of every citizen.
And then it only made sense to extend the LMSs–now called Human Capital Management Systems, or HCMSs–from school to the workplace, making it easy to provide prospective employers with transcripts and test scores and other LMS data and to add to each citizen profile his or her evaluations and workplace time-on-task, location tracking, and other data.
And then the Social Responsibility Transparency Acts, which followed the 2028 jobs riots, merged credit ratings and HCMS data and social media data and Armed Services records and police records and banking and credit card records and GPS data to produce the Social Credit Index, or SCI. . . .
How difficult, in comparison, were the jobs of the Thought Police in Orwell’s 1984. All the Ministry of Love had were two-way telescreens!
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Eveybody sing along now: He sees you when you’re sleeping. . . .
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yikes. Everybody
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Link to this piece: Link to this piece on my blog: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-2/
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