This is part 2 of my interview by Abby Rappaport of the American Prospect. This came at the end of a long day in Austin, after I gave two speeches, one in the morning to the Texas School Boards Association and Texas Association of School Administrators, and another in the afternoon to parents and teachers. I was too tired to choose my words. I said what I think.
In part 1 of the interview, we talked about testing and accountability.
Because I was traveling in Texas over the weekend, I didn’t see Bill Moyers’ report on ALEC. I watched it last night, and I hope you will too.
If you want to understand how we are losing our democracy, watch this program.
If you want to know why so many states are passing copycat legislation to suppress voters’ rights, to eliminate collective bargaining, to encourage online schooling, to privatize public education, watch this program.
ALEC brings together lobbyists for major corporations and elected state officials in luxurious resorts. In its seminars, the legislators learn how to advance corporate-sponsored, free-market ideas in their state. Its model legislation is introduced in state after state, often with minimal or no changes in the wording.
Watch Moyers show how Tennessee adopted ALEC’s online school bill and how Arizona is almost a wholly owned ALEC state. Watch how Scott Walker followed the ALEC template.
Moyers could do an entire special on ALEC’s education bills. ALEC promotes the parent trigger, so that parents can be tricked into handing their public schools over to charter chains. ALEC promotes gubernatorial commissions with the power to over-ride the decisions of local school boards to open more charters. ALEC promotes vouchers. ALEC, as he noted, promotes virtual charter schools (Pearson’s Connections Academy and K12 wrote the ALEC model law). ALEC has model legislations for vouchers for students with special needs. ALEC has a model law to allow people to teach without credentials. ALEC has legislation to eliminate tenure protection. ALEC has model legislation for educator evaluation.
It is all so familiar, isn’t it?
ALEC wants nothing less than to privatize public education, to eliminate unions, and to dismantle the education profession.
Michelle Rhee is is a one-person PAC. She is raising hundreds of millions of dollars from rightwing billionaires and foundations and corporations to subsidize her program.
What is her program? Destroy teachers’ unions; eliminate tenure and seniority; privatize public education. Having failed to transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, she now wants to privatize public education everywhere.
When I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I learned from a Democratic state senator that Rhee had poured $105,000 into a race between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Democrat. The difference between them? The conservative Democrat supports vouchers. My informant said, “Candidates here will jump through hoops for a contribution of $1,000. Getting $105,000 is unimaginable.” Rhee bought the election. The voucher-loving Democrat won. He added: Most of Rhee’s money goes to conservative Republicans.
She is trying to buy a seat in Connecticut now. A reader writes:
Rhee’s fraud of an organization has nothing to do with students, teaching or learning. It is a political lobbyist group that secretly slithers around the nation passing our billionaire donated cash to influence and bribe politicians. Her dirty donations push the privatization, anti-union, anti-public school, collective bargaining busting, teacher trashing dogma down their throats. Here she is a pariah and getting her money is the kiss of death here in CT:
The privatization movement has swung into high gear.
Many people find it hard to understand why so many Wall Street hedge fund managers and equity investors have suddenly become interested in public education.
No one ever went wrong by following the money.
Who wins? Who loses?
And another important issue: where is the evidence that privatization improves education or saves money? Or does it save money while making education worse?
Stephanie Simon of Reuters has written one blockbuster story after another. She has done the digging and investigation that make her stories genuinely valuable. In education, as more newspapers cut back their in-depth education reporting, this kind of investigative journalism is becoming increasingly rare.
She wrote stunning articles about the privatization momentum in Louisiana, about TFA, about profiteers jumping into education, about the parent trigger, and about testing in kindergarten.
She is truly fair and balanced, never taking sides, but clearly explaining the issues in context, with attention to their consequences.
Mike Fair, a Republican legislator in South Carolina, worries about the cost and complexity of the new standards and tests.
When you read about the heavy spending that lies ahead, in a time when school budgets are being slashed and teachers laid off, you can see why the Common Core national standards/national tests movement is warmly endorsed by the technology industry.
This is an excerpt:
School districts will need enough computers to allow almost every student to take multiple annual exams. These computers must be suitable for the “innovative” test items and must be maintained and upgraded. Add to this the cost of increased IT staffing, and you begin to realize the problems of buying a Porsche test on a Ford budget.
A recent study projects that states will collectively spend $2.8 billion and $6.9 billion over seven years on technology alone for Common Core. And the authors cautioned that they were accepting the consortiums’ cost estimates at face value; analyst Ze’ev Wurman has predicted that South Carolina’s annual testing costs may skyrocket to $100 per student, compared with $12 per student today.
School districts that can’t afford substantial new technology will have to rotate students through the computer labs; Smarter Balanced recommends a 12-week testing window. But that creates significant security problems — how to keep the earlier-tested students from talking to the later-tested ones? — as well as inequity in results. The students tested late in the window will have almost three more months of instruction than those first out of the gate. Might this give an unfair advantage? And might teachers, whose evaluations depend on these test scores, resent having their students put at the front of the testing window?
These problems will have to be worked out, assuming the whole concept of nationalized standards, tests and curricula doesn’t collapse under its own weight. When that collapse or implosion happens, I hope it is before too much damage is done to our budgets, our schools and our children.
Daniel Barnz, the director of “Won’t Back Down,” continues to insist in various forums, most recently in an article he wrote for Huffington Post, that the movie is not anti-union. It’s just a good story. It has no political agenda. It has nothing to do with the rightwing sponsored “parent trigger” law that it celebrates. It is not a vehicle for union-bashing and privatization of public education. It is nothing like the anti-union documentary (“Waiting for ‘Superman'”) that his producer sponsored two years ago.
The review of the film in the New York Times, written by a regular movie reviewer, not a union shill or an angry parent, calls the movie for what it is:
…“Won’t Back Down” ultimately has no use for nuance, and its third act is a mighty cataract of speechifying and breathless plot turns that strip the narrative down to its Manichaean core. Once teachers give up job security and guaranteed benefits, learning disabilities will be cured, pencils will stop breaking and the gray skies of Pittsburgh will glow with sunshine.
A.O. Scott, the reviewer, says that this movie is evidence that Hollywood is not a “liberal propaganda factory.” The odd thing about the movie is that everyone in it belongs to a union, even as they portray the teachers’ union as the villain.
Did you read that, Mr. Barnz?
Gary Stager knows more about educational technology than almost anyone I can think of. He is one smart guy. Read this and learn how he got taken in by Amplify, the company run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.
This is how he begins his article on Huffington Post:
Anyone the least bit familiar with my work over the past 30 years knows that I oppose standardized testing, Teach-for-America, school privatization, merit pay, Common Core Content Standards, mayoral control and get-rich-quick schemes promising to increase teacher accountability or raise achievement with the signing of a purchase order. (read here or here)I have dedicated my life to improving teacher quality by empowering educators to create productive learning environments that amplify the potential of each child. A large part of my work has involved the use of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression that free learning from the top-down traditions of assembly line schooling.
Washington, D.C., has announced that it will set different testing targets for children of different racial groups. According to a story in the Washington Post, this is now common practice among the states that have obtained waivers from No Child Left Behind.
The District and the states are acknowledging that children of color are so far behind their white and Asian peers that they will need more time to catch up. Actually, in D.C., black students will be expected to make more progress than white students so they can catch up with white students.
The story says:
Officials say the new targets account for differences in current performance and demand the fastest progress from students who are furthest behind. The goals vary across much of the country by race, family income and disability, and in Washington, they also vary by school.
At Anacostia High, which draws almost exclusively African Americans from one of the District’s most impoverished areas, officials aim to quadruple the proportion of students who are proficient in reading by 2017, but that would still mean that fewer than six out of 10 pass standardized reading tests. Across town at the School Without Walls in Northwest Washington, a diverse and high-performing magnet that enrolls students from across the city, the aim is higher: 99.6 percent.
Meanwhile, at Wilson Senior High, 67 percent of black students — and 88 percent of Asians and 95 percent of whites — are expected to pass standardized math tests five years from now.
Setting different aspirations for different groups of children represents a sea change in national education policy, which for years has prescribed blanket goals for all students. Some education experts see the new approach as a way to speed achievement for black, Latino and low-income students, but some parents can’t help but feel that less is being expected of their children.
The absurdity of this scenario is that D.C. and the states expect that all children will reach proficiency on normed tests. Normed tests have a bell curve. On a normed test, half will always be above and half below the mean. No matter how hard you try, a bell curve is still a bell curve. There is no district in the nation where 100% of the children are proficient. The children who are most advantaged cluster in the top half; those who are least advantaged cluster in the bottom half. This is true of the SAT, the ACT, state tests, federal tests, and international tests.
And, if you step back, you must wonder why the standardized tests–whose flaws, inaccuracies, and statistical vagaries are well known–have become the measure of all education.
No private school in the nation is subjecting its children to this mad scramble to live up to the demands of Pearson and McGraw Hill’s psychometricians.
Maybe all this seeming madness is just part of the larger scenario to declare US education a failure and find more schools ripe for privatization.
In a brilliant column, Bill White of the Lehigh Valley News compares Governor Tom Corbett’s education policies to carpet-bombing of Vietnam. The goal nearly half a century ago was to “bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.” White says that Corbett is doing the same with public education with his program of budget cuts, charter schools, and voucher proposals, which have thus far produced layoffs, program cuts, falling test scores, and soaring class sizes.
It seems that the Governor’s goal is to drive parents out of public education and into charters or to demand vouchers to escape the mess the Governor is creating.
Charter advocates always say that charters are truly accountable because if they fail, they are closed. That is not the case in Pennsylvania. Once charters are opened, it is expensive and difficult to close them:
The state law is a nightmare. To revoke the charter of a troubled school, the home district must potentially engage in a lengthy legal battle in which local taxpayers must pay for lawyers on both sides. Once a charter school is approved and operational, the law allows it to continue receiving tax dollars even if it loses its school building, lays off its teaching staff or is in the midst of revocation hearings.
I’m not blaming Corbett for the shortcomings of this law, which passed in 1997. I do fault him for policies and priorities that are dragging down public schools, ultimately stacking the deck for more parents to pursue charter schools and other forms of non-public education, which, if his proposals for education “reform” are enacted, will divert even more money from public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 