Dr. John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma City, anticipates the collapse of corporate reform in this outstanding post. He gives much of the credit to the opt out movement, which stood up to political and corporate power to protect their children. Who ever thought it was a great idea to subject 9-year-old children to 8 hours of testing? Who thought it would be a good idea to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up every year? Who thought it was a good idea to drain resources from public schools and give them to privately managed charter schools?
Parents certainly didn’t. They refused to be bullied by school officials and politicians.
Thompson writes:
“Three cheers for the Opt Out movement! When the history of the collapse of data-driven, competition-driven school improvement is written, the parents and students of the grassroots Opt Out uprising will get much – or most – of the credit for driving a stake through the heart of the testing vampire.”
Thompson thanks Tom Loveless for pointing out that all of these alleged reforms have not produced the promised miracles. But he faults all those who continue to believe that testing, punishments, rewards, and competition improves education.
But he gives Loveless a demerit for continuing to accept the premises of corporate reform.
“One cheer for the Brookings Institute’s Tom Loveless, and his discussion of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and for noting the failure of CCSS to raise student performance. Okay, maybe he deserves 1-1/2 or 1-3/4ths cheers for his resisting changes to the reliable NAEP tests in order to please Common Core advocates, and for concluding, “Watch the Opt Out movement.”
Loveless notes that “states that adopted CCSS and have been implementing the standards have registered about the same gains and losses on NAEP as states that either adopted and rescinded CCSS or never adopted CCSS in the first place.” He then gets to the key point, “The big story is that NAEP scores have been flat for six years, an unprecedented stagnation in national achievement that states have experienced regardless of their stance on CCSS.“ Now, Loveless says, “CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores.”
“The big story, however, is the failure of the entire standards-driven, test-driven, competition-driven model of school improvement. Loveless is free to adopt his own methodology for his latest research paper on education reform but he deserves a “boo” for continuing to reduce complex and inter-related processes to a bunch of single, simple, distinct, quantifiable categories….
“Loveless, Brookings, and other reformers deserve a loud round of boos for pretending that the failure of Common Core standards is unfair and/or regrettable. On the contrary, the political and educational battle over national standards is a part of the inter-connected debacle produced by a simplistic faith in standards and curriculum; bubble-in accountability; and the federal government’s funding of teacher-bashing, mass charterization, and the top-down reforms of the last 1-1/2 decades.
“While I appreciate Loveless’s candor in acknowledging that the stagnation of NAEP scores in the last six years is unprecedented, his focus on standards misses the other big points. These realities have not been lost on the grassroots Opt Out movement….
“Perhaps we’re seeing the last days of the education blame game. Maybe Loveless and other pro-reform analysts will give up on trying to pin the rejection of their policies on parents and teachers. As parents refuse to allow their children to take the tests, it will become even more impossible to set cut scores, meaning that it will become even more impossible to claim that systems can identify the children and adults who supposedly should be punished for their scores. Once the punitive parts of school reform are repudiated, little or nothing will be left of this unfortunate period of education history. And, the Opt Out movement will deserve the credit it is granted in closing that chapter.”
