Andy Hargreaves, a scholar of international renown, participated in a virtual seminar in South Korea about post-pandemic education.
His 20-minute presentation is brilliant, pithy, and compelling.
Look for it on this YouTube video. He starts at about 22:00 minutes and concludes at about the 43:00 minute mark.
He urges South Korea and the rest of the world not to “return” to austerity, competition, high-stakes testing, and education that is subservient to GDP, but to pursue a very different path.
To learn about that different and very alluring vision of the future, take 20 minutes of your time, watch and listen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Most parents, teachers and students would like to see a Fourth Way emerge in education after the pandemic. Education should be about serving the needs of the whole student in a responsible, equitable way. While Hargreaves mentions Big Tech’s efforts to standardize education through various cyber models, he does not mention the role that monetization is playing in making increased delivery of standardized academics. Cyber services,, charter and voucher schools are all monetization schemes designed to move public money into private pockets. There is no legitimate evidence showing that these schemes benefit students. Along with all these schemes come an army of lobbyists that that are driving public money into private hands. Most parents, students and teachers know that humanistic, equitable education is far better for our young people. In the US students will not get an education that addresses their academic,social and emotional needs unless we can get the profit motive out of public education, and we stop politicizing education.
Outstanding, Dr. Hargreaves! And thank you, Diane, for sharing this.
Put a stake in the high-stakes testing vampire! End STDs (standardized testing delusion syndrome)! Teachers, take back your classrooms!
A summary of my issues with high-stakes standardized testing in ELA: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/why-we-need-to-end-high-stakes-standardized-testing-now/
There are a bunch of arguments in this, but I’ve tried to cover them pithily. There’s a lot wrong with the standardized testing we’ve been doing, and this brief essay could easily become a book.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/why-we-need-to-end-high-stakes-standardized-testing-now/
Andy Hargreaves’ presentation is wonderful. I wish everyone would take the time to watch it.
It certainly is!!!
OH MY! What will all those parents do if they can’t compare scores and compete within communities? How will they know where they can purchase real estate away from “those people”? The withdraw symptoms will be pretty intense for a while considering there was no testing last year K-8 and all the colleges are pulling away from SAT/AP/ACT in the future. I guess the parents will have to find another hobby to occupy time and learn to get along with everyone since there will be no “score sorting” in the near future.
Exactly. That’s all these tests are good for.
And Greg, I think of Jefferson’s Declaration of Religious Freedom one of the great documents of our history–a great document from an extraordinarily flawed man. So, I’m with you there.
absolutely on point: HOW will they know where they can purchase real estate away from “those people”
The United States spends about 2 billion a year on contracts for mandated high-stakes testing alone, but that figure barely begins to capture the financial cost. Add to that the cost of computers to take the tests on, the cost of pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the cost of teacher time spent doing data walls and data chats and proctoring and other test-related nonsense, and the cost of curricular materials that have been dumbed down and made test preppy to meet the demand to prepare kids to take these stupid tests, which are demonstrably invalid (they don’t test what they purport to test) and pedagogically USELESS (they don’t provide actionable “data”–that’s utter nonsense; they aren’t even available for teacher inspection and aren’t broken down in ways that are useful and wouldn’t be useful anyway because of their invalidity, and the scores always arrive months too late to inform instruction.
And, of course, the other costs, the nonfinancial ones, are even greater. These tests are child abuse, and they have robbed an entire generation of kids from humane education. Enough.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/the-coring-of-the-six-hundred-with-apologies-to-alfred-lord-tennyson/
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/stopping-by-school-on-a-disruptive-afternoon/
As Andy Hargreaves makes quite clear, we have much more useful and important stuff to be spending our money on. End the tests.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…where the pursuit of happiness is not defined in economic terms.
Every national leader and aspiring national leader should watch this.
Excellent. Makes all the sense in the world.
Someone asked me last night what I thought of Governor Cuomo’s leadership through this pandemic. I told him that it was commendable, especially when compared to Trump and his followers’ insanity, but that he lost me when he rolled out Gates, Bloomberg, and Schmidt as our post pandemic saviors.
How could he possibly have kept a straight face, telling us that our use of remote learning during this pandemic has exposed the “antiquity” of our brick and mortar schools?
The idea of putting those three in charge of “re-inventing” NYC as a “model digital city” is chilling to say the least. What makes it even more worrisome is when I look back only a decade or so ago. Think of how easy it was for Gates to roll out the CCSS, exploiting the extreme financial needs of the states at that time. And now he has an even riper apple to pluck.
I’m in complete agreement with Hargreaves. I’m also all too aware of what and who we’re up against when it comes to initiating the changes we’re talking about. We need to show extreme vigilance and speak up before the wheels start turning, again, as we come out of this pandemic.