Last night there was a grand event at the Kennedy Center where veterans of the Bush and Obama education world joined together to wring their hands about the crisis at hand. The crisis is not the mess they made of American education for the past 20 years. The crisis is that the tests are not hard enough, the punishments are not tough enough, and the nation needs to buckle down and keep on testing and firing and demanding more from everyone. Except them. Of course.
Our reader Laura Chapman explains what was behind the big party:
“I wanted to look past the PR for this one event. The event is a launch for a new campaign capitalizing on “stagnating” NAEP scores and persistent gaps among students “who have been underserved.”
“The reformists are calling for “evidence based” methods of teaching using only “high quality, standards-aligned, content-rich curriculum.” Suddenly these reformists think “deficits in content-knowledge” matter. But these reformists are really fans of the Common Core and have a lonh history of ignoring much else worthy of study, content in the arts and humanities for example.
“In addition to being sponsored by the Collaborative for Student Success, this “new literacy campaign” is sponsored by Achieve, The Alliance for Excellent Education, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Learning Heroes, Literacy Now, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Council on Teacher Quality, National Urban Alliance, National Urban League, Military Child Coalition, and The Education Trust. These have been supporters of the Common Core, and many love high-stakes tests.
“The Collaborative for Student Success is a multi-faced project of the New Venture Fund. It is supported by: Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. The website markets three of the Collaborative’s favorite math programs, but it also features “campaigns” of the Collaborative. Each campaign has a separate website. All campaigns are based on the premise that states are not living up to the requirements of ESSA. Truly, the sponsors of the Literacy Initiative are die-hard defenders of the Common Core and ESSA. Here are the camaigns in progress.
“A web-based “Assessment HQ” offers test scores and demographic breakouts for test scores “for more than half of states in grades 3-8.” This campaign is designed to claim that state assessments are not tough enough or fully reported to parents. The Collaborative scoops up state assessment results in math and ELA and puts these together in an interactive map. The Assessment HQ is actually sluggish and out of date. It is presenting data from the 2014-15 school year and it was designed to push PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests.
“The “Check State Plans” campaign offers ratings of the state plans for ESSA based on their strict conformity to ESSA. The Collaborative asked 45 reviewers to judge state plans, back in 2017, at about the same time that Bellwether Education Partners also put together a panel to review state ESSA plans. The Collaborative wanted to see “the following principles” honored in state plans. “Set the bar high for what students need to know and understand; Focus on closing the achievement gap in math and English; Ensure that parents and communities have access to meaningful data; Have a real plan for helping those schools that have been historically failing.”
“The “Educators for High Standards” campaign has offered about 12 fellowships to teachers willing to voice enthusiasm for ESSA, along with “partners” from the following groups, all known to push for high-stakes tests and the Common Core: The National Network of State Teachers of the Year, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, PARCC, Teach Plus, Student Achievement Partners (Achieve the Core), National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Hope Street Group, The New Teacher Project (TNTP), Teach for America, Center for Teacher Quality, and Educators4Excellece.
The” Military Families for High Standards” campaign features the work of advocates for schools serving military families. Among the resources is an article from the Center for American Progress titled “How the Common Core Improves Education for Military-Connected Children.”
“The Honesty Gap” campaign asserts that states must take NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” as the standard for judging the “honesty” in state tests. State tests that claim students are “proficient “are dishonest unless the state standard is the same as for NAEP tests. The “honesty gaps” for each state are shown on an interactive map. The explicit message is that schools are often lying to parents about student achievement. The website should be called Arne Duncan’s BS. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=246201831
The “Understanding ESSA” campaign provides news about USDE activities (up-to-date) and links to state actions that comply with ESSA.
The whole website is devoted to belligerent judgments of states, districts, and schools while bolstering advocacy groups who will insist on “strict fidelity” to ESSA in state plans.
These birds of a feather intent on repeating the misery of two decades of top down reform.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The disruptors will continue to disrupt and manipulate to gain access to public money as long as there is money to be made. As long as we incentivize and support the destruction of our public schools, these opportunists will squeeze tax dollars out of our public schools. Tax credits and write-offs are an incentive to billionaires that encourage them to continue to interfere with public education. They will continue to spin their false narratives through their sycophantic “think tanks” and foundations. Only if we take away the money and incentives to disrupt will they slink away.
The Collaborative for $tudent $ucce$$ website is worth visiting because it provides, in very brief compass, a compendium of utter Ed Deform lies. Start with the lie that the Common [sic] Core [sic] is an example of “higher standards.” You know, as in thank God for Lord David Coleman and Master Gates, because of whom, students now think critically and read carefully, something they never, ever did before these geniuses started doing the deciding for he rest of us. Add the lie that the Common (as in base, mediocre, pedestrian) Core (as in cored, emptied, hollowed out, which is what these standards have done to curricula and pedagogy) was a local and state initiative. Mix in the lie that the high-stakes standardized tests validly test what they purport to test (the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards”) and lead to improvements in outcomes.
Amusingly, this organization and its website claims to be data based and ignores the overwhelming data we’ve received from an entire generation of this standards-and-testing nonsense–the data that show clearly, unequivocally, that this crap doesn’t improve outcomes and doesn’t narrow achievement gaps.
When the data show that smoking causes cancer, what you need to do, according to the Collaborative, is smoke a lot more cigarettes. The problem has been in the implementation. You should switch to holding your cigarettes in the other hand. And, ofc, spend more on them.
cx: Amusingly, this organization and its website claim to be data based and ignore. . . .
Yeah, I love the mansplaining ways of these non-teachers.
The Collaborative for $tudent $ucce$$ is a cult, and like all cults, impervious to evidence.
In Data is Redemption. It doesn’t matter that the data come from completely invalid tests that don’t measure what they purport to measure. Numbers are always right! LMAO!!!!
Ironically, they have taken, on their website, a mansplaining approach to their topics. There are all these myths out there, and they are going to dispel them and arm you with the “facts.”
It’s amusing that this cult is now calling for content-based instruction given that it is still hawking the almost completely content free, puerile, pedestrian Gates/Coleman bullet list of vague, abstract, random, poorly articulated skills. But that list is still, ofc, Collaborative scripture, until, that is, Gates reconvenes his Politburo, his Common Standards and Curriculum Commissariat, to write the Super Duper Now Everything Is Going to Be Different Next Generation Wowie Zowie Standards, aka, the New Revelation $cripture (with new Scrubbing Bubbles and Study Buddy Avatars and a Fresh, New Scent!) for the benighted educators of the world, who would be stumbling about in the darkness if not for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation benevolent intervention. Not going to reveal yet what these are going to look like, but of a few things you can be certain–these will make everything perfect by allowing for lots of testing and depersonalized learning and charter schools and vouchers, and once these are in place, we shall all enter the New Jerusalem, America will be great again, and no child will be left behind, and your dishes will wash themselves.
Rinse and Repeat.
“It doesn’t matter that the data come from completely invalid tests that don’t measure what they purport to measure.”
You have to know this is coming, Bob! As you and I have pointed out many times before. Those completely invalid tests don’t “measure” anything. From my archives:
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
or perhaps: pure insanity pushed forward as logic?
“Slink away” from self-congratulatory events that have catering and country western concerts, all paid with tax sheltered dollars, why would they?
Thank you for your research, always insightful and comprehensive.