Steven Singer dissects Trump’s latest diktat: He wants to limit the federal role and return control to states and districts. Or he might make available billions for school choice (like Obama’s Race to the Top) while slashing Title 1 and other programs.
At the same time, he wants to impose school choice on states and districts. He might even make federal aid conditional on states and districts accepting vouchers and charters.
Steven Singer says it is impossible to do both.
Kelvin Smythe is an educator and blogger in New Zealand who left the education system when the ideas of the New Right took over. He has since been a critic and an activist.
A friend Down Under sent me one of his recent writings, in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin go searching for a 21st Century Education.
But first a bit about Smythe. He wrote this about his views:
Kelvin Smythe makes a plea for teachers to see behind the commodification of education, the managerialism, the data gathering, the claims of new knowledge, the fads, the array of electronics to what teaching is really about – key interactions between teacher, child, and what is being learnt. He knows that many of his concerns about education, his aspirations for education, his style of writing about them will be dismissed as out-of-date. His claim, though, is that these key interactions are the essence of what teaching should be, and are timeless.
In the story he tells about Pooh and friends, there is this beginning:
Just as they came to the Six Pine Trees, Pooh looked around to see that nobody else was listening, and said in a very solemn voice: ‘Piglet, I have decided something.’
‘What have you decided Pooh?’
‘I have decided to catch a 21st Century Education.’
Piglet asked, ‘But what does a 21st Century Education look like? Then continued thoughtfully: ‘Before looking for something, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it.’
Smith then observes:
We are, it seems, getting ourselves tied in knots about something called 21st century education – before looking for it, as Piglet suggests, it might be wise to find out what we are looking for.
This could be done in respect to how it might differ from what went before, how it might be the same as what went before, how it might be worse than went before, who is supposed to benefit from it, who is calling for it, does it exist, should it exist, what are its aims and, being education, how much is career- or self-serving bollocks.
I intend this posting to be a search for something called a 21st century education.
As part of that I declare my prior understandings about the concept – a concept because there has never been any discussion about something called 20th century education, it was never conceptualised in that way, so why for 21st century education?
The formation and high usage of the concept label suggests powerful forces at work – forces, I suggest, taking control of the present to control the future.
Those active in promoting the concept of 21stcentury education are mostly from political, technology, and business groupings, also some academics: the immediate future they envisage as an extension and intensification of their perception of society and education as they see it now. And in the immediate future, as well as the longer term one, they see computers at the heart of 21st century education, which is fair enough as long as the role of computers is kept in proportion as befits a tool, a gargantuanly important one, but still a tool….
Smythe goes on to write about the dominant philosophy behind the 21st century education hullaballoo.
School education is being pressured to inappropriate purposes by groups who claim a hold on the future and from that hold generate techno-panic to gain advantage in the present.
Another prior understanding is that the inappropriate use of computers for learning has contributed to the decline in primary school education (though well behind the contribution of national standards and the terrible education
autocracy of the education review office).
For all the talk of personalising learning, of building learning around the child, of individualising learning, the mandating question for 21st century education seems to be: how can we build the digital into learning instead of how can we best do the learning? And even further: how can we build schools for digital learning instead of what is best for children’s learning environment? Large open spaces are not the best environment for children’s learning, meaning that in combination with the heavy use of computers to make large open spaces ‘work’, a distinct problem is developing. Computers and large open spaces are being promoted by 21st century advocates as the two key ideas to carry us forward to the education for the 21st century.
I think you will find this an interesting read and will spot the commonalities that we face, in the U.S., Australia, Great Britain, and New Zealand. It is the phenomenon that Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg calls GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement). Its proponents say that it is sweeping the world, and that the train has left the station. But please notice that educators and children are not on the train. They are on the tracks.
When I read this post by Steven Singer, I was so excited that I thought about devoting an entire day to it. Like posting it and posting nothing else for the entire day. Or posting this piece over and over all day to make sure you read it. It is that important.
Steven’s post explains two different phenomena. First, why is standardized testing so ubiquitous? What does it have a death grip on public education?
Second, in the late 1990s, when I was often in D.C., I noticed that the big testing companies had ever-present lobbyists to represent their interests. Why? Wasn’t the adoption of tests a state and local matter? NCLB changed all that, Race to the Top made testing even more consequential, and the new ESSA keeps up the mandate to test every child every year from grades 3-8. No other country does this? Why do we?
He begins like this:
“It’s easy to do business when the customer is forced to buy.
“But is it fair, is it just, or does it create a situation where people are coerced into purchases they wouldn’t make if they had a say in the matter?
“For example, school children as young as 8-years-old are forced to take a battery of standardized tests in public schools. Would educators prescribe such assessments if it were up to them? Would parents demand children be treated this way if they were consulted? Or is this just a corporate scam perpetrated by our government for the sole benefit of a particular industry that funnels a portion of the profits to our lawmakers as political donations?
“Let’s look at it economically.
“Say you sold widgets – you know, those hypothetical doodads we use whenever we want to talk about selling something without importing the emotional baggage of a particular product.
“You sell widgets. The best widgets. Grade A, primo, first class widgets.
“Your goal in life is to sell the most widgets possible and thus generate the highest profit.
“Unfortunately, the demand for widgets is fixed. Whatever they are, people only want so many of them. But if you could increase the demand and thus expand the market, you would likewise boost your profits and better meet your goals.
“There are many ways you could do this. You could advertise and try to convince consumers that they need more widgets. You could encourage doctors and world health organizations to prescribe widgets as part of a healthy lifestyle. Or you could convince the government to mandate the market.
“That’s right – force people to buy your products.
“That doesn’t sound very American does it?
“In a democratic society, we generally don’t want the government telling us what to purchase. Recall the hysteria around the Obamacare individual mandate requiring people who could afford to buy healthcare coverage to do so or else face a financial tax penalty. In this case, one might argue that it was justified because everyone wants healthcare. No one wants to let themselves die from a preventable disease or allow free riders to bump up the cost for everyone else.
“However, it’s still a captive market though perhaps an innocuous one. Most are far more pernicious.
“According to dictionary.com, a captive market is “a group of consumers who are obliged… to buy a particular product, thus giving the supplier a monopoly” or oligopoly. This could be because of lack of competition, shortages, or other factors.
“In the case of government mandating consumers to buy a particular product, it’s perhaps the strongest case of a captive market. Consumers have no choice but to comply and thus have little to no protection from abuse. They are at the mercy of the supplier.
“It’s a terrible position to be in for consumers, but a powerful one for businesspeople. And it’s exactly the situation for public schools and the standardized testing industry.
“Let’s break it down.
“These huge corporations don’t sell widgets, they sell tests. In fact, they sell more than just that, but let’s focus right now on just that – the multiple choice, fill-in-the-bubble assessments.
“Why do our public schools give these tests? Because peer-reviewed research shows they fairly and accurately demonstrate student learning? Because they’ve been proven by independent observers to be an invaluable part of the learning process and help students continue to learn new things?
“No and no.
“The reason public schools give these tests is because the government forces them. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) requires that all students in grades 3-8 and once in high school take certain approved standardized assessments. Parents are allowed to refuse the tests for their children, but otherwise they have to take them.”
A captive audience of 50.4 million students. Read the full analysis as I am skipping the meaty part.
He concludes with these questions:
If an industry gets big enough and makes enough donations to enough lawmakers, they get the legislation they want. In many cases, the corporations write the legislation and then tell lawmakers to pass it. And this is true for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Standardized testing and Common Core are one pernicious example of our new captive market capitalism collapsing into plutocracy.
Our tax dollars are given away to big business and our voices are silenced.
Forget selling widgets. Our children have BECOME widgets, hostage consumers, and access to them is being bought and sold.
We are all slaves to this new runaway capitalism that has freed itself from the burden of self-rule.
How long will we continue to put up with it?
How long will we continue to be hostages to these captive markets?
From California parent, Joan Davidson, about her visit with teacher Larry Lawrence to the offices of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which received $180 million in federal funding when Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, to write tests for the Common Core standards. SBAC was supposed to have 25 states, but it now has only 15. The other consortium is PARCC, which has shrunk from 25 states to only 6 states plus DC
Larry Lawrence and I visited the SBAC office last week before they move which is scheduled to happened by end of June.
It is most concerning. Please read the notes below and attached.
It was concerning that most people are working from remote locations, undisclosed locations, and that a young woman is mostly alone in a 3000 sq. ft. office that is mostly unfurnished and dark.
The SBAC organization is using public funds but refuses to make public their agendas, minutes, meeting locations, budgetary
decisions, etc.
Since the tests are secret as well, someone in one of the 15 states who contract with SBAC needs to explain to the public
how they are using public funds without any public information disclosable to the public.
I have not researched PARCC.
Is PARCC as secretive as SBAC?
Thanks
Joan Davidson
Larry Lawrence and I drove to the UCLA campus today to visit the SBAC office located at the Peter Uberroth building on Le Conte Ave in Westwood.
We were unsure if we would also visit the Graduate Education building office #300 as well known as the GSEIS Building – Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences.
We arrived at approximately 12pm to the building. SBAC office #1400 posted the SBAC name and room #on a paper sign and showed this sign telling visitors to use the door around the corner. The office could not be entered without punching a code.
We went around the corner to that office number that only posted the sign for the CRESST office. #1400 and #1355.
I rang the bell. The code system for entry was also in place.
A woman named Amulet opened the door. I asked if Paisha Allmendinger was in the office. She asked who we were and I said my name is Joan.
Paisha came to the door. It was dark behind Paisha with a very long hallway. She asked what we wanted. I explained that we were educators and we wanted some information regarding SBAC. Asked if she could spare a few minutes.
She invited us into the offices.
I was struck by the vast space approx. 3000 sq. ft. The only occupants that we saw were the woman Amulet and Paisha.
We followed Paisha to her office. She is listed as the director of finances for SBAC. She is approx. 30 years old.
Larry had printed up a SBAC employee list from online and there were 28 people on the list. I asked Paisha were they were. She explained that only 3 people were here in this office while 35 people worked as a virtual office across the Nation.
I said I heard that SBAC was moving. She said yes, there is an RFP currently due on April 6, 2017. This RFP is only open to public agencies that participate in the CA retirement system.
I asked why SBAC was bumped out of UCLA. She said that the contract with the grad school was not renewed.
She said that possibly the RFP would be responded to by Cal State Univ., a UC campus or 1 bidder is a County Office of Education.
The SBAC is concerned about retirement and other employee benefits so they are attempting to remain attached to another public institution associated with the CA benefits program.
I asked what happened to state of Washington as fiscal agent. Paisha said when UCLA signed the MOU with SBAC UCLA became the fiscal agent.
SBAC is aligned to the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Sciences
SBAC employees want to maintain the service credits of employment with a CA public agency.
I asked about Administrators and Paisha said there are 6-10 people acting as Administrators that work at home and come into the office 2 days a week.
She asked what our interest is in this? Larry answered that as a math teacher, he’s interested in the new tests. She pointed out the new test item site online.
The SBAC is matching up questions to the state standards. (CC standards I suppose)
People wanted SBAC to have actual sample questions.
She spoke about accommodations and accessibility and translations for test takers.
I asked if Agendas for meetings were available to public. No.
What about who are the Executive Board of Directors. It’s online according to her.
She stated that the CRESST center is their partner and now is consolidated at the Grad School of Ed offices.
CRESST provides psychometric work to SBAC and validity studies and research.
I asked where this can be found? On CRESST website she said.
We asked who was located across campus in the SBAC office next to CRESST?
No one, it’s just acting like a mailbox for their purposes.
We asked about the status of the SBAC employees who were listed as occupying office space in the GSEIS building across the campus.
Paisha told us that all these 12 people worked at remote locations and none of them were physically located on the UCLA campus. The address listed for them on the SBAC website (GSEIS Building 300) served as a post office box type function. The GSEIS Building is primarily the location of the CRESST staff while the main location of the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences is Moore Hall, located in the central area of the UCLA campus.
My observations and unanswered questions:
The 3000 sq. ft. + office is empty except for Allmendinger’s office and a few partitioned stations. It was mostly dark and eerie.
Paisha’s office had 3 top to bottom bookshelves–all empty.
The only other person that was visible was Amulet who answered the door.
Paisha is titled the Financial Director that would put in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars. She does not seem qualified with prior experience to oversee this agency.
Who is really directing this center?
Strangers such as Larry and I have most likely never visited the SBAC offices.
It is a bizarre atmosphere and should have been bustling.
Where are all of the other 35 people located and who are they?
What are they paid?
What are there qualifications?
What do they do?
Paisha stated there are 6-10 administrators who work with SBAC and come into the office 2 days a week. It was not clarified whether it is 6, or 10.
Jeannie Kaplan was an elected school board member in Denver for two terms. She has watched the complete takeover of the corporate reform movement with a sense of shock, dismay, alarm. Vast sums of money are expended at each local school board election to keep the privatizers in control.
For the moment, Denver is the darling of the corporate reformers. It has choice. Charter schools. Teach for America. High-stakes testing. Common Core standards. A non-union workforce in new schools. Alternative teachers and alternative leaders. It has everything that reformers want.
Except results.
Study after study hails the Denver reforms.
But by every measure, Denver students are not getting a better education. Segregation is growing. The curriculum is narrowing.
Reform is succeeding but the students are not.
Churn, churn, churn=stagnation.
After I posted the story about the forthcoming PBS Series called School Inc., which promotes privatization, reflecting the views of the privatization movement, I shared the story with investigative journalist David Sirota. He recalled the time that his journalism compelled PBS to return millions of dollars to billionaire financier John Arnold for a program he funded about “the pension crisis.” Arnold has a passion for eliminating pensions for public employees.
He also pointed out a story about Bill Gates’ generous support for PBS programs like The Teaching Channel and for programs advocating for the Common Core.
Now, we understand that PBS and its affiliates need to raise money, but the public expects that whatever they feature will be fair and balanced, not an advertorial.
And we certainly don’t expect PBS to align its programming with the whims of rich individuals who seek to undermine and/or privatize and/or control public education.
I would certainly be shocked to see a program on PBS funded by billionaire Robert Mercer on why the nation does not need public television. Yet PBS has shockingly committed to airing a four-part series attacking public schools and praising the virtues of privatization.
When does the public interest get equal time?
Please call 703-739-5000 to register your protest.
Be sure to ask when they will give equal time to expose the corporate attack on our public schools.
I am writing this post for the journalists who cover education. Please fact-check every word that DeVos says. She literally doesn’t know what she is talking about.
This is the New York Times’ report on Betsy DeVos‘ press conference at Brookings.
She claims that the Bush-Obama policies of test-and-punish failed because throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Any teacher could have told you that NCLB and Race to the Top were failures, not because they threw money at the problems, but because they spent money on failed strategies of high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, closing schools, and opening charters.
She is so ill-informed that she would be well advised never to speak in public.
Her comparison of selecting a public school to hailing a taxi is offensive: schooling is a right guaranteed in state constitutions, taking a cab or car service is a consumer choice. She was echoing her mentor Jeb Bush, who compared choosing a school to buying a carton of milk, when he addressed the GOP convention in 2012.
As you will see if you read the account in the story, she has the unmitigated gall to say that her crusade for consumer choice in education–whether charters, vouchers, homeschooling, cyberschooling, whatever–serves the “common good.” What an outrage! Providing a high-quality public school,in every zip code serves the common good. Tossing kids to the vagaries of the free market subverts the common good. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any period of time has learned about the entrepreneurs who open charter schools to make money, about the sham real estate deals, about the voucher schools that teach science from the Bible, about the heightened segregation that always accompanies school choice. Wherever George Wallace and his fellow defenders of racial segregation are, they are rooting for DeVos.
Furthermore, she is utterly ignorant of the large body of research showing that charters do not get better results than public schools, voucher schools get worse results, and cybercharters get abysmal results.
Then she makes a crack about how America’s scores on international couldn’t get worse. She is wrong, and Grover Whitehurst should have told her so. Our scores on the international tests have never been high. Over the past Hal century, we have usually scored in the middle of the pack. Yes, our scores could get much worse. We could follow the Swedish free-market model and see our scores tumble.
Grrr. It is frustrating to see this kind of ignorance expressed by the Secretary of Education, although Arne Duncan should have lowered our expectations.
Please read “Reign of Error” and learn that test scores are the highest ever for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (although they went flat from 2013-2015, probably in response to the disruptions caused by Common Core); graduation rates are the highest ever; dropout rates are the lowest ever. When our students took the first international test in 1964, we came in last in one grade, and next to last in the other. But in the years since, our economy has surpassed all the other nations with higher scores. The test scores of 15-year-olds do not predict the future of the nation.
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lost-years.html?m=1
Peter Greene asks a crucial question: What have we gained–or lost–because of our society’s obsession with standardized testing for at least the last two decades?
When did it start? Before No Child Left Behind was signed into law in January 2002, but not with the same intensity or the high-stakes that took hold since 2002, when the power of the federal government was used to pummel state’s and districts to comply with federal mandates.
This is one of Peter Greene’s most powerful posts. I urge you to read it.
Greene writes:
“After years of hearing how kindergarten has been turned into the new first grade, you’d think at the other end of the K-12 pipeline we would find highly advanced students. And yet– not so much
“I am not going to report a ton of research on this, because the available research is bogus and part of the actual test-centric problem. What I can tell you is what I, as an actual real live classroom teacher who knows actual real live classroom teachers, see and hear.
“This is the result of accelerated early instruction done primarily in the service of test-centric schooling (“We have to get them started early– otherwise how will they be ready for the Big Standardized Test??”)
“It is lost years.
“By the time these same start-em-early push-em-hard students arrive at high school classrooms, they are behind compared to the students that we saw twenty-five or fifteen or even ten years ago. They know fewer things, have fewer skills, and express lower academic aspirations.
“Why? I can offer a couple of theories.
They have learned to hate reading.
“They have learned that reading is this thing you do with short, disconnected, context-free selections, and when you read, you are not looking for something that sparks interest or enjoyment or curiosity or wonder or the pleasure of feeling your brain expanded and grown. You read so that, in a moment, you’ll be able to answer the questions that someone else wrote– and by “answer” we mean from the potions given the one answer that someone else has decided is “correct.” There will be no expression of your own personal insights, and never the possibility that there’s more than one way to understand the text. It is a stilted, cramped way to approach reading, and it means that students grow up with a stilted, cramped notion of what reading even is, or why human beings actually do it.
“With some luck, some students will still discover the joy and, yes, utility of reading– but they will discover outside of school, and they will not expect that the kind of reading that they love has anything to do with the test-centered “reading”: they are required to do in school. That higher level course has additional “reading”? Then I surely don’t want to sign up for that. And since the real task here, the real point of the whole exercise is not the reading, but the answering of questions about the reading– well, I bet I can find a time-saving way to cut that corner. Because after enough years of this, many students conclude that “reading” is something to actively avoid.
“There’s no pleasure there, no discovery, no ideas to mull and discuss, no characters who help us pick apart the thorny questions of how to be human in the world. Just clues for answering the BS Test questions.
“Their years are shorter.
“The school year is now shorter. It is shorter by the number of days involved in the BS Test. It is shorter by the number of days spent on pre-testing and practice testing. It is shorter by the number of days spent on instruction that is only being implemented because it will help get them ready for the test.
“By the time we’ve subtracted all those days, the school year is a few weeks, a month, maybe even more than a month shorter. It was only 180 days to begin with. The test-centric school has amped up a feature of education that has always frustrated teachers– the 180 day year is a zero sum game, a bathtub full to the absolute rim with water. You cannot add something without removing something else. A really feisty or frustrated teacher might turn to an administrator who just said “Add this to your class” and say, “Fine– what exactly do you want me to stop teaching?” But mostly we’re expected to just make do, to perform some sort of miracle by which we stuff ten more rabbits into the hat.
It doesn’t work. Every year students get less actual instruction than they used to, which means their teacher next year finds them a little bit behind, so the school year that used to start on Day One now starts on Day Thirty after the students are caught up– and then it ends on Day 160 because, you know, testing. So the following year those students are that much more behind. And so on, and so on, and so on.
“In the end, kindergarten may be the new first grade, but for many students, twelfth grade is the new eleventh grade.
“There are certainly students who escape this effect, and there are certainly clever teachers who mitigate it. But mostly the injection of toxic testing into the bloodstream of US education has had the predictable effect– it has weakened and damaged the entire body…We have wasted over fifteen years of education; some students have seen their entire schooling consumed by test-centric baloney.
“Yet we keep plowing on, keep committing to Testing Uber Alles. We are losing students, losing education opportunities, losing the chance to awaken some young humans to what they could be and could become– instead, we are still trying to mash their spirits flat under the heavy testing hand. We are losing years that we cannot get back, cannot give back, and this is not okay.”
The state Common Core tests that children in grades 3-8 in New York are supposed to take are shrouded in secrecy.
Last year, a teacher posted a couple of items to show how confusing and tricky they were, and the testing company went on a tear, threatening legal action against the teacher and against the blogger who posted the questions. They went to Twitter and had tweets referring to the post deleted. They went to WordPress, which hosts this blog, and removed my description of the events.
Nonetheless, Leonie Haimson has invited teachers, parents, and students to comment on the tests. You can find her invitation and responses here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 