John Thompson is a historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma. He has written on this blog frequently.
He writes:
The Perfect Storm of Education Reform: High Stakes Testing and Teacher Evaluation, by Sheryl Croft, M. Roberts, and Vera Stenhouse provided an essential service to public education by explaining that the corporate school reform disaster wasn’t due to its “discrete singular efforts.” Instead, it was “a confluence of systematic and orchestrated education reform efforts that are akin to storm fronts.” Just as important, Croft, Roberts, and Stenhouse provide insights into why post-Covid schools are likely to face comparable challenges.
As their metaphor explains, rain and wind don’t necessarily wreak havoc, and no single policy mandate, no matter how ill-conceived, was to blame for the corporate reforms’ “colossal failure;” the catastrophe was caused by the combination of an unprecedented amount of high-stakes standardized testing, data-driven teacher evaluations, and attempts to hold individual students and teachers accountable for Common Core test results; the “testing industrial complex (TIC),” where consultants promoted test-driven policies and teaching methods; charter schools and a culture of competition driven by test scores; the “false narratives” about public education, especially incessant attacks on failing teachers; similar mandates for teacher preparation policies; and the replacing of recess and play with nonstop test prep which often drove the joy of learning out of school. Moreover, reformers didn’t understand what should have been obvious – that these mandates would most damage the educations of poor children of color, who were most likely to receive the biggest deluge of “drill and kill” test prep.
As Croft, Roberts, and Stenhouse explained, the perfect storm of corporate school reform “arrived in full in 2015.” In doing so, they preview the dilemmas which many post-Covid schools will likely continue to face. Corporate reform was “a perfect storm” that eroded “the bedrock of public education in the United States.” It was like “a mesoscale storm [which] is comprised of individual storms that combine to form a larger persistent/perfect storm.” Even as educators need to stop and think anew about post-Covid schooling, the components of these edu-political storm fronts continue to move across the landscape.
No Child Left Behind was like a high-pressure “warm front (precipitation and fog) followed by a cold front (narrow) bands of thunderstorms and severe weather.” It propelled the testing industrial complex to produce “a warm front” which “rained down neoliberal education polices under the guise of improving education while obscuring the free-market ideology of corporatization.” Despite its failure, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doubled down on both the false accountability-driven narratives, and the testing industrial complex. The TIC front also forced local school systems to “lay off teachers, close neighborhood schools, eliminate art and music programs, and dedicate more and more revenue to supporting standardized testing.”
I saw the same dynamic in Oklahoma City which Croft, Roberts, and Stenhouse analyzed in Georgia. Duncan briefly visited our KIPP Charter School and made the obviously false statement that it became an “A” school by “raising expectations” while teaching the “same students, in the same building,” Of course the low-income, high-attrition KIPP had nothing in common with schools like my mid-high serving everyone in a segregated neighborhood with an extreme concentration of generational poverty, a lack of social capital, and enormous numbers of children who survived multiple traumas. That Big Lie was a major reason why disadvantaged black, brown, and poor people were “most grievously injured” by corporate reform.
By now, it should be clear that complex, interrelated social, economic, and educational problems need complicated interconnected solutions – not wave after wave of interconnected assaults on public schools and “disruptive innovation.” But, there is no sign that market-driven reformers have abandoned their faith in “transformative” change. So, educators still have reason to fear another TIC storm front.
I’m especially concerned about last part of the confluence of corporate reforms described by Croft, Roberts, and Stenhouse that turned my troubled school into the state’s lowest-performing mid-high school. The final storm front dumped millions of dollars of Stimulus and School Improvement Grant money, funding policies that made our school much, much worse, replacing classroom instruction with nonstop remediation. We can’t ignore the lessons of the failed post-Great Recession investments without inviting another TIC-funding storm.
My experience of 2009 was like that of the educators who Croft, Roberts, and Stenhouse listened to. Our top administrators understood why NCLB had failed, and why it made no sense to double down on test and punish. Even though they could only say so in private, the top OKCPS administrators knew the social science which explained why better instruction, driven by better professional development and curriculum, could not improve outcomes in most of our district’s schools until a socio-emotional foundation was laid. That would require a team effort, drawing on community partners, and patience. But, they were intimidated by state legislative leadership and federal guidelines into a rushed instruction-driven, curriculum-driven gamble.
Today’s education leaders shouldn’t allow themselves to be intimidated by demands that standardized testing must continue, and prioritizing the “remediation” of last year’s learning loss, using the “best practices” sold by the TIC’s consultants, so that neighborhood schools don’t lose in the competition with charters. The Oklahoman reports that the OKCPS (for instance) will receive $255.4 million in stimulus money (more than three times the federal assistance it received after the Great Recession), but there has been no public discussion about spending priorities. Instead, it reported that many Oklahoma districts hope that the 2021-22 school year “will closely resemble pre-pandemic life.”
Chris Brewster, the superintendent of the charter system which has creamed off the most students from the Oklahoma City School System, exemplifies the hope that “growing teachers, training teachers and equipping teachers” is the best way to spend the new money. If Brewster really believes that, then he clearly doesn’t understand how his charters operate in a completely different world from the OKCPS schools serving entire neighborhoods with extreme concentrations of generational poverty, with so many students who have survived multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
Urban district leaders can choose to listen to community partners and State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, and prioritize the student supports which could provide the foundation for holistic teaching and learning. Or they could be intimidated by the Republican leadership which changed the excellent state funding formula in order to punish urban schools, who invested $10 million of federal Covid relief money in private schools, and increased spending for charters, as they cut corporate taxes and implicitly banned discussions on Critical Race Theory. If that happens, they – like compliant educators in 2009 – could feel obligated to focus on the learning deficits produced by last year’s crisis, and squander opportunities to bring together waves of constructive student-centered policies.
Educators should shake off their fears and start with the wisdom of Teresa Thayer Synder about the need to “Resist the pressure from whatever ‘powers that be’ who are in a hurry to “fix” kids and make up for the “lost” time.” She stresses the humanity of students:
In our determination to “catch them up,” I fear that we will lose who they are and what they have learned during this unprecedented era. What on earth are we trying to catch them up on? The models no longer apply, the benchmarks are no longer valid, the trend analyses have been interrupted. … We can make those invalid measures as obsolete as a crank up telephone!
She then tackles the reality that should be our priority:
When the children return to school, they will have returned with a new history that we will need to help them identify and make sense of. When the children return to school, we will need to listen to them. Let their stories be told. …
I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upside-down world. They missed you. They did not miss the test prep. They did not miss the worksheets. … They missed you.
If that sounds too touchy-feely for under-the-gun educators, they should draw upon the recent New York Times’ reporting by Eduardo Porter on the West Virginia initiative which “mushroomed into a partnership branded Reconnecting McDowell, encompassing over 100 organizations and offering assistance like social and health services for families and apartments for teachers and other professionals.” The program grew out of a conversation between American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, and Gayle Manchin, the State Board of Education vice president (and the wife of Sen. Joe Manchin.)Since Oklahoma and West Virginia are basically tied with the highest percentage of young people who have survived multiple ACES, our education leaders should listen to Porter who writes:
Reconnecting McDowell has done well by many students and their families. It sent health clinics, mental health clinics and even dentists into the schools. It runs a mobile farmers’ market out of a truck, offering produce to poor families that can be many miles from the nearest supermarket. It championed a juvenile drug court to offer intensive drug treatment programs that help nonviolent young offenders return quickly to school, rather than go to jail. The program helps with college tuition and funds a mentoring program that takes groups of high school seniors to Charleston, the state capital, and Washington.
I understand the fears of education administrators who worry that building such a mesoscale solution is too daunting of a challenge. If we can’t subdue our fears, however, who knows how many waves of mesoscale storm-like corporate reforms will rob our kids – especially those who have suffered the most – of what it takes to really offer our students the learning required in these calamitous times?
Poste at O[ED News https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/John-Thompson-on-The-Perfe-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education-Curriculum_Education-Testing_Educational-Crisis-210625-109.html
“reformers didn’t understand what should have been obvious”
Time to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
They understood what they were doing and understood the likely consequences.
Bill Gates, who financed much of the deform had previously tried a “ranking” system akin to VAM based teacher ranking on his own Microsoft employees with disastrous results. He knew the likely outcome of VAM but nonetheless pushed it through with a lot of help from his pals Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.
These people are not simply innocent ignoramuses . They are directly responsible for the damage that they did and should be held legally accountable.
It’s not likely Duncan or Obama could ever be held to account because being president or working for the president for the means being above accountability.
But it might be possible for all the people affected by his policies (teachers, students, principals and parents) to bring a multi billion dollar class action suit against Gates.
The “discovery” phase of such a suit would alone be worth bringing the suitl, since it might bring to light emails and other correspondence between the Gates Foundation and people like Arne Duncan and David Coleman (assuming GF has not already deleted all the evidence and that it does not still exist somewhere on a backup tape*
*Completely erasing digital evidence s not an easy thing to do, not even if you know what you are doing.
The biggest worry for Gates is probably that someone who worked for Gates Foundation has kept “personal” copies of server backups containing emails from Gates and others at GF.
Evidently Buffet (Warren,not Jimmy) has quit the board of the Gates (supposedly) philanthropy board.
Wasted away in Gates Foundationville
Looking for my lost shaker of salt
Some people say that their’s a tEEEacher to blame
But I know, it’s my own damned fault
excellent ending for that song: many of the reformer groups ultimately cut their own throats
Buffett is one of the billionaires highlighted by the ProPublica report who effectively pays zero taxes.
From 2014 to 2018, he paid a ” true tax rate” of only one-tenth of 1 percent.
The guy is such a phony baloney.
He claims to support higher taxes (maybe he means two tenths of 1 percent?) On people like himself, but continues to pay nothing.
If he were really as concerned as he says , he would voluntarily pay taxes at rates like the rest of us who earn more than the minimum income(Note to Warren: that does not include 0.1%)
Goodness knows he has no problem giving billions to a foundation managed by a guy who saw fit to meet with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on multiple occasions (including Epstein’s residence).
Buffett is little more than a well “orchestrated personality”. As fake as Parkay. The “Orchestrated Oracle of Omaha”.
On Microsofts employee ranking system
“At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor…”
Kurt Rochdale, Vanity Fair
Though Steve Ballmer was CEO at the time, Bill Gates was certainly fully onboard with the policy, which nearly destroyed Microsoft as a company. Gates was obsessed with monitoring , evaluating and controlling every aspect of Microsoft. He’s a control freak who has applied the same obsession to everything he does, including Common Core and other interference with education.
Kurt Eichenwald
Autocorrect has a mind of its own that gets very annoying very quickly.
Idiot programmers.
One can only wonder how many teachers Value (sic ) Added Modeling (VAM) drove out of the teaching profession.
It NEVER had any scientific basis (it’s quackery) and the negative outcomes were totally predictable.
It was the height of dishonesty to push such a policy knowing full well that it not only would not achieve the claimed results , but that it would completely distort and corrupt the evaluation process and result in the firing and resignation of untold numbers of teachers.
The people who pushed that policy on schools (Gates, Duncan, Obama, Rhee and others) have a lot to answer for.
Maybe now that he is coming under a bit of public scrutiny through his divorce – will the curtain be pulled back on all that he has foisted on public schools.
That “scrutiny” of Gates has been almost exclusively limited to his divorce and possible “dalliances” answers your question.
It’s rare that a journalist will actually dig into the funding and policies pushed by the Gates Foundation. My guess is that most are either in awe of him or afraid of him.
The NY Times report on Gates’ meetings with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was an anomaly.
My eyes are on McKenzie Scott. Having a teacher as her new partner may be a very strong influence on her giving patterns to education: https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=393
Maybe the contrast in the ventures she, and others, fund (which differ vastly from the types of projects Gates invested in) will help shed light on what works and what simply serves corporate interests.
I was wrong about Scott.
I thought she was no different from the rest.
But her pattern of giving is completely different. She places no strings on the money she gives, where with Gates and the others, it’s all about control.
Scott is still not doing it anonymously, which, as far as I am concerned, is the most magnanimous way of giving, but perhaps she is doing it publicly to set an example for other billionaires (effectively to shame them, if they can indeed be shamed)
“Today’s education leaders shouldn’t allow themselves to be intimidated by demands. . .”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Never, will never happen. Adminimals* are as adminimals do. . . or is that adminimals do as adminimals are.
I’d say that there are only a handful of administrators in this country who have the cojones to fight against those demands. The rest. . . all adminimals only worried about covering their own asses and collecting the higher than the teachers salary even though most couldn’t/didn’t earn those teacher salary that they received (not earned) while they were in the classroom for a few years.
No, the solution lies in having teachers en masse refuse these horse manure demands and teach to the needs and desires of the students.
But we know that the majority of teachers are rules following, Go Along to Get Along Good German implementers of those horse manure demands, of those educational malpractices. They too have sold their souls for a paycheck.
Where does that leave us?
Realistically, it leaves me hopeless that much good can ever come about with the current regime of obedience, compliance and pseudo-education.
*Adminimal (n): A spineless creature formerly known as an administrator and/or principal who gleefully implements unethical and unjust educational malpractices such as the standards and testing malpractice regime. Adminimals are known by/for their brown-nosing behavior in kissing the arses of those above them in the testucation hierarchy. These sycophantic toadies (not to be confused with cane toads, adminimals are far worse to the environment) are infamous for demanding that those below them in the testucation hierarchy kiss the adminimal’s arse on a daily basis, having the teachers simultaneously telling said adminimals that their arse and its byproducts don’t stink. Adminimals are experts at Eichmanizing their staff through using techniques of fear and compliance inducing mind control. Beware, any interaction with an adminimal will sully one’s soul forever unless one has been properly intellectually vaccinated.
I wonder whatever happened to Mr. Teachbad?
Thank you Duane.
Adminimals are mostly protecting their salaries. I do believe many believe what they are doing is right – and that teachers get in their way of following their chain of command.
Do not try to reason with an Adminimal. They can be manipulative. I have seen the fear and compliance techniques you mention in action.
Adminimals love to hire brand new teachers with no experience – as they are easiest to indoctrinate. Teachers with no experiences are good in 2 ways. They save the district money by starting at the very bottom of the contract and they are easier for Adminimals – as they are just grateful for a job and will do whatever – blindly with enthusiasm. It takes many years of experience and watching children learn and grow… to become a good teacher. It also takes several years to understand the political dynamics in a system and to be able to advocate for what is best for staff and children. Before you get to that stage, a new teacher can be doe eyed and enthusiastic to do whatever their administrator asks – without understanding the implications. This feeds in to the narrative that the more experienced teachers are “resistant to change” – when in fact more experienced teachers are continually embracing the (right) change.
It’s all so Machiavellian.
The right director and script could make a really good movie about teaching, school politics and ed reform.
Well said!
Adminimals go ballistic when teachers try to stand up for educational justice and equality. They lose whatever professionalism they have and turn into vengeful attack dogs. It’s frightening, really. They do it because their bosses offer them financial incentives to turn all instruction into remediation.
I would like to see one piece of evidence, just one, that remediation works. I can point to plenty of evidence that segregation does not work, and remediation classes increase segregation. Logic should be part of the discussion: If you put a student with low grades into a slow paced class with other students who have low grades, the students will be dejected, lose touch with more successful models, and get worse instead of better. Where is the evidence that intervention classes work? They don’t! Remediation harms students. Period.
Why are so many people incentivizing failure? Money. When are adminimals going to stop basing their actions on stupidity? Never. The only way to stop them is to stand up to them with collective action. I will organize the troops when my principal brings remediation classes to the table this year, just as I did last year, just like I’ve been doing almost every year for more than a decade. When we fight, we win!
Your experience out west and mine in the east are so similar. It shows that it’s not all regional. These federal mandates and corporate influence, which include false narratives, are far reaching.
I agree, over remediation of young children does not work. We had a few years in our school where pull out remediation was done to the extreme. (keep in mind we are a high performing district). All that mattered was literacy data. Staff members with a little bit of knowledge in one area and ambition to build a resume who are put in a decision making position – can be a powerful force in a school.
It’s cleaner (and easier) to look at bits of data and numbers and believe you know what is going on with a child and what works to get them to perform better. It’s very clean and clear. Those who may be more suited to be accountants, data analysts, administrators…… but enter the field of education – thrive with this kind of super organized, clear and concise way of approaching education. But it is not what really works for human growth and development. Learning – academic, emotional and social growth is much more complex, messy and nuanced.
We need a different model where humanity is central to teaching. And all K-3 teachers should be required to have early education courses in child growth and development. Teachers of young children need to well understand that learning and growth is developmental – lest they be indoctrinated to a new “program” and system which is overly based on data and remediation.
Well said, beachteach!
“I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement. . . .”
Those “artificial constructs” don’t measure a damn thing. Nothing! Zip! Zero! Zilch!
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.
Thase supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation. Because there is no rebuttal/refutation!
Or as SDP says:
Whatever is measured counts
Whatever counts is measured
And counting whatever measures
Is measuring whatever counts
Swacker’s bumper sticker: epistemology matters
He’spissedoffemology
Or maybe just He’spissedemology
How can one not be pissed off with the state of public education these days?
Epistemology* indeed does matter, Roy. Many here understand that fact-others don’t. Starting with a false epistemology almost always results in bad/wrong/harmful educational malpractices. . .
. . . and it is the students who pay the price.
*For those who don’t know: e·pis·te·mol·o·gy
/əˌpistəˈmäləjē/ noun
the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. (from Oxford Dictionaries)
and
“. . . is the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.” (from Merriam-Webster)
Deform marches on undeterred by reality. Despite massive failure, the deformers and politicians mostly in red states are pushing utter destruction and useless vouchers. The wrecking ball state know as Florida serves as model of destruction of the common good. Some states look to Florida to show them way to dismantle their public schools and save money.
The good news is that some wiser politicians are willing to take a look at community public schools with wrap around services for needy students. The Biden administration is offering additional funding for under funded public schools. The outcomes are promising, and I hope the media give these schools the attention they deserve.
Just catching up with this one. Yesterday was the last day of school.
Of course, teachers, staff, the administrators and the kids are always happy on the last day of school.
But yesterday, the happiness was immense.
IMMENSE.
A global pandemic, a near take over of our government by fanatics and the still accelerating backlash against B.L.M. all heaped on top of 10+ years of stupid ass, destructive school “reform”. Talk about a mountain of bad this year.
Meanwhile, the almighty Regents Exams in New York State were mostly cancelled this time around. And, you know what, hardly anyone cared. Except for people who are worrying about, what if my class, what if my kid has to take standardized tests in the future???
Yeah, that’s a great reason to have tests -not. Give tests in order to prepare us for more…tests.
One more year for me teaching. ONE….MORE….YEAR.
And, thank God for the people on this blog for helping to make sense of this colossal disaster.
May you all have a wonderful summer!
I too look to the classroom for one more year. I too experienced a crazy year. We did have tests, but they were somewhat compressed. It still disrupted a year insane.
My year began in August frantically trying to learn to use MSTeams and figuring out how I could fit the material into such disorder. My solution was to kick out most of my own evaluation techniques. No test teaching turned out to inflate a lot of grades, but I still got about the same engagement in the classroom. Since so many students rarely engage outside the classroom, I believe there was about the same degree of learning.
You get out of school mighty late compared to us. As summer is now beginning in your part of the country, I hope yours is relaxing and rejuvenating.
I had a somewhat similar experience with the students, Roy. Interesting
We get out late but we don’t start until after Labor Day. Old school.
There has been a lot of uncertainty over the past year.
But one thing is certain.
The schools are going to lose something very valuable when both of you leave.
One cannot say thank you enough times.
Thank you for the sentiments. I feel overrated for a change. Maybe I can take up poetry. I can be like you when I grow up. Growing up is overrated in itself.
If you take up real poetry, you won’t be like me.
That is also for certain.
I am the Magic Eight Ball of poetry. The Magic Poetry Ball, which gives you the same (usually goofy) DAMmed ditty over and over but in slightly different verse and rhyme.
Thanks.
The opinion of the “regulars” on here matters a lot to me.
I’ve been carrying a very nice comment Bob Shepherd wrote to me back in December. It’s printed out and tucked in my plan book.
Yeah, I still have a plan book, ha, ha. And, file cabinets full of paper, (including some great student work from years ago.)
I too just finished school last week. We accomplished being full time, in-person all year. Children were happy all year (with masks) and parents were supportive and appreciative. I am exhausted.
We gave computerized, and other, standardized tests this year. How else could we have clear data that 6 year olds learned this year? Right? The admins, who required us to give tests, rarely came into the schools, have large offices where they did not have to be around people and have never worked with elementary students. Oy.
“Thank God for the people on this blog for helping to make sense of this colossal disaster” – hear, hear.
The two faces of the Manchin family-
Gov. Manchin instigated pro-charter school legislation. The majority in the West Va. Congress thwarted him. The Manchin daughter, as President of Mylan, price gouged the vulnerable when they went to buy their Epipens. There is also the matter of how the daughter got her degree from the University of West Va.
Speaking of… at some point in the future historians will be willing to add to the telling of the “perfect storm”, the almost 50 state Catholic Conferences, two of which (out of what may be many more) take credit for school choice legislation in their states.
There appears to be a concerted effort among writers and researchers (or their editors) to create a specific narrative. The Conversation posted a story which had an added correction at the bottom. The article is titled, “Why Gen X and Millennial evangelicals are losing faith” (6-24-2021). The first paragraph of the article, written by a researcher from the American Academy of Religion at Az. State University, defines evangelicals as a “large subsection of protestants”. The third paragraph refers to Comey Barrett as a “conservative Christian”. That’s an odd omission of the Catholic religion given Barrett’s Notre Dame position. None of the article’s following paragraphs address the Catholic activity in the referenced “culture war”, nor does it mention the number of Catholic Millennials and Gen X’ers leaving their church. The religious academy identifies the “hyper masculinity embedded in Am. evangelism” but, a sect that overtly and unapologetically discriminates against women is provided with distancing. BTW, the noted correction was labeling of Barrett as a “conservative Christian”.
The Bermuda High not mentioned here is the blatant complicity of state and district superintidents throughout the failed era of this “Standards Movement.” I was with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools in the 1990’s when the “ABCs” became a legislative mandate. High stakes tests became the order of the day. I was teaching high school when confronted with this legislation and believed incorrectly that district and state department educators would rebuff this movement. They didn’t. Too often across the country districts have intensified the testing mantra far beyond even state mandates. While a principal in Huntsville, AL our district gave three different tests (1 state and 2 local) two to three times per year. Anyone who actually observed students taking these tests could see the students were not taking them seriously. This perfect storm has not only been the result of corporate malfeasance, but the malpractice of educators who should know better. High stakes testing and teacher abuse have been the result of a corporate partnership with the education establishment at the expense of American students.