Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Who Will Control Metro Nashville Schools in the Future?

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2014 //
10

Nashville is in the cross hairs of the “reform” (AKA privatization) movement.

Here is a good overview of the situation.

With a respected superintendent nearing the end of his contract, with a mayoral election in the offing, with the school board majority up for grabs in the next election, Nashville is looking like a tasty prize for the privatizers.

And there are so many of them! Start with State Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman, who spent two years in TFA but otherwise has no experience as a principal or a superintendent. His major passion seems to be turning public dollars over to charter schools and passing laws to reduce the security and status of teachers. Then there is Governor Haslam, a reactionary who seems to despise public education and has the support of a compliant legislature. And don’t forget Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, who is eager to see private interests take control of public education in his city.

Nashville has been ripped asunder by the aggressive demands of the charter school crowd. The district has only 23 charters but those charters have “sucked up almost all the air” out of all public discussion of education, as if they and they alone held the key to success.

Although the district has chartered some 23 privately run schools to operate using district money, the role these charter schools play has sucked up almost all the air at Metro’s Central Office on Bransford Avenue over the past year-and-a-half.

The topic of charter schools — which have the autonomy to operate without the strings normally attached to traditional schools, including issues like how teachers are hired and fired or what class schedules look like — has polarized the district.

The division has created camps of pro-charter advocates, who argue that many of their schools are outperforming the district and MNPS should be more welcoming to the innovation. That has galvanized an equally entrenched anti-charter camp, which warns of the private investors and interests behind such schools and the taxpayer dollars the district must siphon from traditional public schools to fund these new ones. There has been little discussion trying to find a meeting ground in the middle.

The conflicts between the two are seemingly endless, starting in earnest with the district’s school board refusing a charter school targeted to open on the more affluent west side of town; the state fining MNPS $3 million for said rejection; battles with Gov. Bill Haslam, state education commissioner Kevin Huffman and House Speaker Beth Harwell over approval and costs of charter schools; a fight over leaked data showing charter schools kick out students weeks before state test time; embarrassing spats on Twitter and Facebook between board members and charter school advocates; the school board threatening to sue the state for its charter school law; a noisy protest by charter school advocates on the district’s front lawn; holding charter schools’ growth responsible for the district’s money problems; blaming under-capacity schools on the charter-school boom; and most recently, redirecting new charter schools to South Nashville or to convert select failing schools.

Four seats on the school board will be up for grabs in an election in seven months. The school board elections will attract some of the nation’s most notorious corporate reformers, including Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, and Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst (Rhee is the ex-wife of State Commissioner Huffman). The charter school advocates will spend heavily to gain control of the school board, in hopes of expanding the charters and transferring public funds to their own operations.

Make no mistake. This is a well-funded raid on the public treasury, intended to take money away from the public system and hand it over to the friends of those providing the money for the election:

“Democrats for Education Reform is excited to support candidates who will increase the capacity of our public school system to better serve Nashville’s children, whether those candidates are running for school board or in the upcoming mayoral race,” says Alex Little, chair of the Nashville steering committee for the pro-charter-school group, which has been quietly combing the city for board candidates.

Charter school and reform groups are no strangers to investing in politics, dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into local and state races here in recent years.

At the state level, education-reform lightning rod Michelle Rhee’s Students First organization poured more than $200,000 into legislative races and some local ones, without being shy about throwing massive checks to key candidates.

Last cycle, Metro’s school board races attracted an unprecedented $400,000 among five races and funders of all stripes. Gathering sums more suitable for a bid for state representative than the local school board, Ingram Industries’ Margaret Dolan amassed more than $115,000 for the MNPS board seat she lost to underdog Amy Frogge from Bellevue. In the same cycle, former Teach for America executive Elissa Kim raised some $85,000, largely from fellow TFA types, to beat out the school board’s then-chairwoman, Gracie Porter, in East Nashville.

The biggest players last cycle included the pro-charter crowd, with Mayor Karl Dean and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce bringing influence and some money, and locally organized Great Public Schools and StudentsFirst dishing out dollars. Democrats for Education Reform, working out of Nashville, plans on joining the effort this year. That group is led by Natasha Kamrani, wife of Tennessee Achievement School District head Chris Barbic, whose job duties include taking over or hiring charters to turn around the state’s weakest 5 percent of schools.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Supporting public schools, Tennessee

Peter Greene: The Worst Part of “Reform” Is….?

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2014 //
132

Peter Greene is a veteran teacher in Pennsylvania. He has a blog called “Curmudgucation.”

In this post, he explains that the worst part of the faux reform movement is standardization. Conformity.

And what makes teachers vulnerable to it is that they are groomed to conform and to teach conformity.

He writes:

If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.

It is troubling because conformity and standardization are seductively appealing to schools and teachers.

And, he explains:

Every single aspect of current reform, from TFA to charters to most especially CCSS and the testing program to which it is irrevocably tied to the programs being hawked by Pearson et al– every single aspect is aimed at one thing. Sameness. Standardization. A system in which individual differences, whether they’re the differences of students or teachers or schools, do not and can not matter.

This is not right. This is not how we human beings are meant to be in the world. It doesn’t even work (let me be the one gazillionth person to point out the irony that most of these reformers would have fought and failed against their own system if they had to come up through it). It’s a lie. It’s terrible preparation for our students, and it seeks to deny and stamp out the humanity of every teacher and student who passes through a school….

But here’s a thought. What if we set up a system where every learner had a personal education professional who saw the student on a daily basis, face to face, and who got to know him well enough to chart a course that factored in the content area, the strengths and weaknesses of the learner, the strengths and weaknesses of the education professional, the individual learner’s personal goals, and the unique qualities and history of the place where they were working. It would have to be a very robust and resilient system to accommodate all the zillions of individual differences, but we could achieve that robust resilience by empowering the educational professionals to make any and all adjustments that were necessary to accommodate all the factors listed above.

Or we could just require everybody to cover all the same material at the same time in the same way while ignoring all of the individual factors involved with the live human beings in the room. We could standardize everything. We could make everything the same.

I’m going to vote for the first choice. It has the virtue of reflecting reality, plus it has the virtue of using a system that we already had in place. We just have to put teachers and schools back to where they ought to be.

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Pearson

Joanne Barkan: How Rich Folks Will Overcome (Public Education)

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2014 //
15

Joanne Barkan has written a series of brilliant articles about the corporate reform movement and its wealthy supporters for “Dissent” magazine. She wrote this article for this blog. In it, she reflects on the venture capitalists’ belief that they are leaders of a new civil rights movement.

Joanne Barkan writes:

They Shall Overcome

 

Rooted in the gospel tradition, the song “We Shall Overcome” became an anthem of the African American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s and then an assertion of struggle and solidarity worldwide. Solidarity is at the heart of both the song and the phrase “we shall overcome.”

Given that history, it’s both perverse and predictable that Philanthropy magazine titled its spring 2013 cover story “They Shall Overcome.” The long article—written by then editor-in-chief Christopher Levenick—profiles five of the wealthiest backers of free-market K-12 education reform (charter schools, vouchers, test-based teacher accountability, closing large numbers of public schools, and the like).

At first I thought the title inadvertently reflected the top-down, donors-know-best approach of “big philanthropy”: we do our good works for low-income and minority children in urban public schools, and as a result they shall overcome the difficult circumstances of their lives. But as soon as I began reading, I realized that the title refers to the rich folks, to the philanthropists who—with their money and the correct political strategy—shall overcome. They shall overcome opposition to their brand of “ed reform,” especially the opposition of teachers, their unions, and parents.

The political strategy boils down to this: it’s not enough to have the right policy ideas or even to build public support for them; donors must spend their money to elect like-minded politicians who will translate ed-reform ideas into law. To implement the strategy, major philanthro-ed-reformers should set up 501(c)3, 501(c)4, and 527 tax-exempt organizations. Together these organizations allow a donor to pour unlimited amounts of money into “educating” anyone and everyone on the issues, lobbying lawmakers, and funding political campaigns.

The article breaks no new ground. People who follow the struggle over ed reform have probably seen the video of Jonah Edelman’s notorious presentation on political strategy at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2011. I’ve investigated the strategy from a critical perspective in Dissent magazine. But the Philanthropy article is as much a paean to mogul philanthropists who are helping to privatize public education in the United States as a lesson in strategy. This makes sense: the magazine is the house organ of the conservative Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization based on these beliefs: “philanthropic freedom is essential to a free society; a vibrant private sector generates the wealth that makes philanthropy possible; and voluntary private action offers solutions for many of society’s most pressing challenges.”

The profiles of the philanthro-ed-reformers provide upbeat success stories. The first is about John Kirtley who left Wall Street in 1989 to cofound a venture-capital firm in Florida. In his spare time, he launched a campaign to give dollar-for-dollar tax credits to corporations that fund scholarships for low-income families to send their children to private schools, including religious schools. The tax credits channel money away from public coffers to private schools, which is a step in the direction of privatization. Kirtley and his allies won enough legislators to their side to get a statewide program passed in 2001. Over the next three election cycles, they spent $4.5 million through their 527 organization to elect additional legislators who would expand the program and set up a trigger mechanism to raise its funding cap automatically. In 2010 the bill they supported passed the Florida Legislature.

After Kirtley’s profile come the stories of better-known philanthro-ed-reformers. There is John Walton, one of the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. He “served as a Green Beret in Vietnam. He saw vicious combat—but the fight of his life turned out to be education reform.” There is former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who implements the ed-reform strategy by spending his personal funds lavishly on candidates and issue campaigns around the country ($330,000 in the 2012 Louisiana school board elections alone). Then there is John Arnold, one of Enron’s “most aggressive—and successful—natural gas traders.” After Enron imploded in 2001, he started a hedge fund specializing in natural gas and retired in 2012 “at 38 years of age and with an estimated net worth of $3.5 billion.” He and his wife Laura now devote themselves to philanthropy, much of it directed to K-12 reform. They aim to make their favorite policies permanent—“embedded in the system, and we can move on to other things,” says John.

There is also a lengthy retelling of uber-reformer Michelle Rhee’s story although she doesn’t qualify as a philanthropist—she spends other people’s money. Her goal is an outlay of $200 million a year on ed-reform politics, but no one knows exactly who funds her work. She runs the money through her organization Students First, a 501(c)(4) that allows her to keep the donors anonymous.

Nowhere in the article is there mention of the parents, students, and educators nationwide who oppose the philanthropists’ agenda. The author describes “some 5,600 people” who marched in Tallahassee in 2010 to support the private-school scholarship legislation. But there’s nothing about the 220 mostly African American community leaders and activists from some 20 cities across the country who traveled to Washington, D.C. last January to confront Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They condemned reform polices they consider discriminatory, especially closing neighborhood schools or turning them over to private contractors. Duncan has made the policy involvement of philanthropists a hallmark of his administration. The protesters filed several Title VI civil right complaints on the grounds that shutting down large numbers of public schools adversely and disproportionately affects minority children. Although most decisions to close schools are made locally, the federal Education Department promotes the policy through its Race to the Top and School Improvement Grant programs (see here).

Philanthro-ed-reformers have been chanting the mantra “Education is the civil rights issue of our era” for years, and they’ve appointed themselves leaders of the reform movement. The largest stakeholders in public education—students, educators, and parents—have no role to play except as recipients of donor-designed reforms. When they question the charitable largesse, they become part of the opposition that the philanthropists shall overcome. They shall overcome, not we. Solidarity doesn’t figure in.

Joanne Barkan’s articles on philanthropy, private foundations, public education reform, and other topics can be found at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/author/joannebarkan.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry

Stop Reckless Charter Expansion in This Small Town in California

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2014 //
18

On January 15, there will be a crucial vote to allow the expansion of charter schools in Morgan Hill, California. As the post below points out, Morgan Hill is a small town of 40,000 with only 8 elementary schools. Rocketship wants to open 2 new charters in this small community, which will effectively destroy public education. Please read this post and send an email to the Santa Clara Office of Education. I will. I hope you will too.

 

Rocketship Education is the poster child of corporate reform charter schools. Founded in a poor Silicon Valley Latino community, they hope to expand to nearly 40,000 students nationwide in the next 5 years. That’s despite the fact that they have registered falling test scores each year for the past 5 years; this year only half of their students met English language standards. They came to my community with big promises of accountability and local control. But when they failed to meet their performance goals they broke their promise to relinquish future charters. Only two years after promising local school autonomy, they quietly slipped in a new governance provision, moving all the power to their distant national offices. They use a 41:1 student to teacher ratio, with inexperienced TFA teachers, but tell the public their student to teacher ratio is 27:1, lest it would hurt their recruitment machine. Their aggressive recruitment, with information inconsistent with the facts, is destroying what was once the cohesive fabric of our Latino communities. Rocketship does have some clever ideas, like requiring teachers to visit every student’s home, but a lack of community and district collaboration outweigh those benefits.

Rocketship has greased the wheels with hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions to our County Board of Education, who have approved a state record setting 38 charters in a row. Now Rocketship Education, and their cousins Navigator Schools, are asking for 2 additional charters in Morgan Hill, CA. Morgan Hill is a small town of 40,000, the first farmland south of the San Francisco Bay Area urban sprawl. They have only 8 elementary schools. If these charters moved forward they would crush Morgan Hill Unified, an innovative and successful school district. It’s a plan that makes no sense; Rocketship has falling test scores, while Morgan Hill has successful and thriving math, arts, and STEAM focus academies. Sadly, the district is considering closing those academies if the charters move forward. How ironic that these focus academies that provide thriving students with broad opportunities in the sciences and arts would be replaced with a drill & kill charter that offers little more than intense test prep on computers in rooms packed with students.
You can learn more at: http://www.stoprocketship.com/?p=1151
We’d like to reach out to your readers and ask for help by sending a quick email to the Santa Clara County Office of Education against this plan,http://www.stoprocketship.com/take-action-now/

You can follow us on Twitter at @norocketship
Categories California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Red Queen in L.A.: Where Is the Outrage?

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2014 //
17

Blogger redqueeninla takes a hard look at what is happening to the schools and the children and asks the inevitable question: “Where’s the outrage?”

Why do parents tolerate classes with 50 students? Teachers can’t teach such large classes. Does anyone care?

Why does the media report calmly about self-enriching deals for corporate interests without treating it as a scandal?

Why do we ignore segregation of our most vulnerable children when we know it’s wrong?

She writes:

“And yet therein lies the irony. Reported anger does not register; only blandishments do. The means to move change are so hampered by our unwillingness to hear unpleasantness. We wrap up the old year and hope for betterment in the next, but we school ourselves to ignore what ought to be infuriating. Bad things – injustice, poverty, denied opportunities — are being meted out upon our very own children. As a parent, I see the structure of our society as intended to support this next generation. Why do we do any of what we do if not to provide opportunity for them? Opting for disengagement equates to sanctioning inequity. The most important accounting this new year could bring is an acknowledgement of the harm our complacency catalyzes. Let these lists infuriate you. Hear the anger and do not just shut it off. Demand an accounting with accountability.”

What should we do this new year?

Get angry. Demand an accounting.

Get active. Reject complacency.

Find allies. Make noise.

Defend the children. Defend their teachers. Defend their schools.

United, we have the power to make a difference.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Poverty, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Students

English Teacher: Why I Had to Leave a Profession I Loved

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2014 //
79

In this post, a veteran teacher with 30 years of experience explains why she had to retire. She didn’t want to. But the obsession with data-based decision-making finally broke her spirit.

She recounts incidents where she was able to help students, where students gave her their trust, where classes learned to love literature as she did. She remembers staff meetings devoted to lessons and students, not to data analysis. As all the rewarding parts of her work were eliminated, she realized that the reforms made it I possible to do what she loved est: to teach.

She writes:

“I remember a time when department meetings, faculty meetings, and in-service days revolved around reading, sharing ideas, learning about our subjects—and not around the only topics that seem to matter today: lesson plan format, testing, rubrics, teacher evaluations and technological gimmicks. Watch your back! If you don’t conform it will be held against you!

“I remember AP students who told me their lives were changed after reading Hamlet, or Beloved, or Middlemarch. Is there a metric for that, or is a score on the AP exam the only thing that counts? Yes, we did lots of close reading, but is that what students will remember?

“Mostly I remember a time when I could be creative, do lots of research, veer off in different but related directions, have discussions, allow students to talk about how they feel (yes, David Coleman), and even lecture occasionally, without worrying if I covered every one of the myriad points in the Danielson model in EVERY lesson.

“I am so sad when I read that students, teachers, and schools are labeled “failures.” I am bewildered when I read statements from “reformers” with no background in child development writing standards, arbitrarily setting cut scores, misinterpreting test results, making flawed comparisons with other countries, giving only lip service to parents, and blaming teachers for every ill in society. I am angry when I think of people with no background in education (i.e. politicians from BOTH parties and businesspeople) condescending to, insulting, and even vilifying teachers, whose job is more difficult, challenging, and complex than anyone who has never tried it can imagine.”

Read it all. Get angry. Take action. Find allies. Join your state or local group to resist these terrible trends that destroy the love of teaching and learning. Join the Network for Public Education.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Ten Big Wins for Public Education in 2013

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2014 //
5

Owen Davis, writing for Alternet, lists ten big victories for public schools in 2013.

He begins:

“If what’s past is truly prologue, there’s a good chance 2013 will be remembered as the year the free-market education reform movement crested and began to subside. After a decade of gathering momentum, reform politics began to founder in the face of communities fighting for equitable and progressive public education. Within the year’s first weeks, a historic test boycott was underway, civil rights advocates confronted Arne Duncan on school closings, and thousands were marching in Texas to roll back reforms.

“Perhaps we should have sensed this coming: the Chicago Teachers Union strike in the fall of 2012 foreshadowed the education struggles that would take center stage in 2013. In addition to fair contract provisions, they called for a new course for public schools: well-rounded curriculum, fewer mandated tests, more nurses and social workers, an end to racially discriminatory disciplinary policies, and early childhood education, among other demands.

“The CTU’s chief victory lay in galvanizing public education advocates across the country around a vision for public education that took full form in 2013. At the same time, the year saw reform bulwarks like Teach for America and the Common Core standards suffer unprecedented shocks.”

The tide is turning. Corporate reform is not collapsing, not yet, but it is running into a firestorm of resistance. Rough sledding ahead for the corporate reformers as the public wakes up and parents organize to stop the theft of heir public schools and the joy of learning.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Supporting public schools, Teach for America

Will Mayor de Blasio Grant Clemency to Doomed Schools?

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2013 //
35

Marc Epstein taught at Jamaica High School in Queens, New York City, for many years. The school is under a death sentence, which means the end of many programs that served children with different needs. Here he makes a plea to Mayor de Blasio to save some of the doomed schools.

A De Blasio Clemency?

 

 

This is the time of year that governors and the president issue pardons and clemencies.  They are issued to prisoners who have either been exemplary citizens during their incarceration or set free because extenuating circumstances indicate that their punishment didn’t fit the crime.

 

Mayors aren’t granted this kind of executive power, but this year Bill De Blasio does have the executive power to call a halt to the systematic elimination of several of New York’s comprehensive high schools that have had their fate sealed by Michael Bloomberg’s school closing policy.

 

Ostensibly, these school closings were to result in improved student performance in small schools that were placed within buildings occupied by the traditional high schools. It was an idea hatched by Bill Gates, an idea that he abandoned long ago.

 

In the waning days of his mayoralty, Bloomberg has embarked on a citywide tour, touting his legacy.  The papers have dutifully transmitted City Hall’s talking points, with hardly a demurral finding its way onto the printed page.

 

The Wall Street Journal’s 3,000 word “Bloomberg Reshaped The City” article credited the record high 60% high school graduation to Bloomberg’s stewardship of the schools and politely left out the inconvenient statistic that shows a record high number of New York’s high school graduates are unprepared for college and require remedial courses in math and English.

 

In an interview with Joel Klein, Bloomberg’s schools chancellor for over 10 years, that appeared in the Scholastic Administrator, Klein expressed his hope that the next schools chancellor will continue Bloomberg’s education legacy.

 

If only Mayor De Blasio will pick “someone who is committed to building on the progress of the last 11- plus years,” Klein’s tenure won’t have been in vain, at least according to Klein.

 

If that should be the case, we should prepare for record numbers of meaningless diplomas, more school closings, an unstable teacher work force, and a school system where academic apartheid defines education opportunity.

 

Record numbers of students now use mass transportation to get to the “school of their choice.” Why have 250,000 students using mass transit when many of them could walk to school instead, is a question that has gone unasked and unanswered by reporters and politicians for over a decade.

 

The community has been de-coupled from the neighborhood high school, because hardly a neighborhood high school exists anymore. The result is that parental participation suffers, after-school activities suffer, and the community suffers.

 

A record number of students attend boutique schools that screen their applicants.  I estimate that close to 10% of the seats available to high school students are now reserved for these students.  Most of these students used to help make up the population of the traditional high schools.

 

When Jamaica High School was handed its death warrant, the Department of Education, fearing a backlash from parents who simply didn’t buy the line that Jamaica was a failed school, cleverly carved a Gateway School out of the Gateway program that had existed in Jamaica for about 20 years.

And then, miracle of miracles, the new Gateway High School received an “A” on its report card!

 

Is there a serious argument that can be made for a public policy that is perpetually closing and reopening school houses because they are “failed”?

We’ve all heard of the Amityville Horror, but does that mean we should treat the schoolhouse as we would a haunted house?  But if closing and opening hundreds of schools is the new normal, we’d do better to hire Shinto priests to exorcise the evil spirits in these buildings rather than renaming and re-staffing them.

 

Our lowest performing students usually carry baggage that includes unstable home life, poor to no healthcare, limited language skills, and physical impoverishment. 

 

If instead of further destabilizing their school environment, Mayor Bloomberg had thrown his energy and resources into creating schools along the “Comer Model,” he might actually have had something to show to the public. 

 

The Comer school model developed by Dr. James P. Comer at the Yale Child Study Center has been around for close to fifty years and has a proven track record in addressing the problems of low achieving students in the inner city. But the lure of the well-meaning philanthropist with no expertise proved irresistible.

 

Instead, we are left with the tired litany of the teachers and union as villains, and the mayor and his minions as heroic for taking them on. But beneath the surface Bloomberg has created a highly segregated school system that keeps the disadvantaged far away from the middle classes and the upwardly mobile.

 

If Mayor De Blasio wants to reverse this death spiral, he’d do well to grant clemency to schools like Jamaica High School and Beach Channel High School and give them the resources they need to make them work for the children and their communities.

 

In their heyday comprehensive high schools included students who were on multiple career paths. There were differentiated diplomas and a multiplicity of choices. The students might not have attended all the same classes together, but they played on the same teams, shared the same teachers, and developed mutual respect for one another.

 

Inexplicably that has been destroyed, and instead of these students existing side by side with each other in the same community, they live and learn as peoples apart.

 

When this consideration is no longer a part of our education system we all become impoverished.  Clemency is one way to begin turning this around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Klein, Joel, New York City

Anthony Cody Reviews the Role of the Teachers Unions as Advocates in 2013 and 2014

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2013 //
20

Anthony Cody reviews his own sharp criticism of teachers’ unions during the past year for their support of the Common Core standards in 2013.

Cody questions why teachers have no one to support them when they question the validity of the Common Core.

He doubts that a one-year moratorium on high-stakes testing of the Common Core will matter much.

In a column that he cites, he wrote:

In effect, the Common Core tests will refresh NCLB’s indictment of public schools and teachers, with supposedly scientific precision.

Teachers – and union leaders — may feel as if they should get on board, to try to steer this process. However, I think this is a ship of doom for our schools. I think its effect will be twofold. It will create a smoother, wider, more easily standardized market for curriculum and technology. This will, in turn, promote the standardization of curriculum and instruction, and further de-professionalize teaching. The assessments will reinforce this, by tying teachers closer to more frequent timelines and benchmark assessments, which will be, in many places, tied to teacher evaluations. And the widespread failures of public schools will be used to further “disrupt the public school monopoly,” spurring further expansion of vouchers and charters and private schools.

We must move beyond not only the bubble tests, but beyond the era of punitive high stakes tests. Only then will we be able to use standards in the way they ought to be used – as focal points for our creative work as educators. I would be glad to have a year’s delay for the consequences of these tests, but I think we need to actively oppose the entire high stakes testing paradigm. The Common Core standards should not be supported as long as they are embedded in this system.

He calls upon the unions to exert leadership–not just in helping to impose CCSS–but in thinking critically about the corporate agenda and CCSS’s role in that agenda.

He holds out hope for change in 2014, a hope that I share.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Unions

Edward F. Berger on the Ignorant Mindset Destroying American Education

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2013 //
20

Edward Berger invites you to watch some important TED talks, which he uses to make a point about the appalling ignorance of some of our key “thought leaders.”

Berger writes:

To get the most out of this blog, view Ted Talks 2011 – Knowledge Is Power. #1: Sir Ken Robinson; and #5: Salman Kahn, and the Kahn Academy.

I selected these two excellent presentations for many reasons, but the most important reveal is when Bill Gates comes on stage with Salman Kahn. His reaction and comments – those of a major player in the reform movement – are perhaps the best example of what billionaires who have never done the hard work necessary to understand our public schools and what teachers do, create ideological, (not real) solutions to complex problems.

These billionaires are able to force the adoption of harmful and destructive ideologies, the consequences of their limited understanding, on America’s schools. Perhaps they have influence because politicians and some bureaucrats assume that Wealth = Intelligence? How else can one explain inBloom, Common Core, High Stakes Testing, Race To The Top, NCLB, SAT, teacher evaluation based on false data from student test scores, and other education-adverse implants?

“Reformers,” like Gates, Broad, Rhee, Duncan (and many others) have never learned mastery of subjects and how to teach them, basic knowledge of learning styles, maturation/learning readiness, and classroom management skills. They have not gone through rigorous certification and continued evaluation. They do not have a minimum of 5 years’ experience in the classroom as a teacher. They have not learned to work with parents, and with community needs and values. Most important, they have no concept of the differences in students and teaching approaches depending on age, maturation levels, conditions of poverty or affluence, and learning readiness. They address their imagined education solutions as if elementary, middle, and high school education is one entity that can be reformed by one down-and-dirty hit.

Salman Khan makes a presentation, and Gates gushes. Berger fumes:

Salman Khan’s presentation is well received by educators. His use of video lessons to enhance teaching and learning are very useful. These lessons are tools that teachers can add to their war chests of techniques and exercises that help children learn. Kahn has developed teaching tools. He has not invented a replacement education system. I think that is clear to all who understand what education requires; what education is.

Enter now, Bill Gates. Watch him closely. He is almost orgasmic in his (mis)interpretation of Kahn’s work. What he sees is a solution to all of the complex problems in our educational system. He communicates that Kahn has the solution to education’s ills. That Kahn’s use of video instruction can now change our whole approach to teaching and education. He has found his simple solution to complex problems. Problems he has never clearly and factually defined.

He wonders: Does evidence matter? Does experience matter? Or can billionaires spout off and be believed no matter how nonsensical they are?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »