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Paul Bonner: Our Useless Focus on Test Scores

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2023 //
68

For the past quarter-century, American policymakers have been laser-focused on raising test scores. They assumed that higher test scores equals better education equals better economy. The cost of all this testing was billions of dollars, which would have been better spent on reducing class sizes, raising teachers’ salaries, and updating schools.

From No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top to the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, federal policy has made standardized test scores the most consequential measure of all schooling. Every release of scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress produces a flurry of articles with dire predictions about the future (“a Sputnik Moment!) or the discovery of a miracle (e.g. the Texas/Florida/Mississippi 4th grade reading miracle, which strangely disappears by the 8th grade).

But an occasional outbreak of wisdom cautions us that we are looking for “success” in the wrong place.

Paul Bonner is a retired educator. He posted the following comment on the blog.

My first personal encounter with NAEP was around 2005. I was an eighth grade assistant principal facilitating the process between my staff and the NAEP testing officials who were to give the test. As I monitored the hall during the testing of selected random students, it struck me how disinterested our students were in performing on the assessment. My school at the time was a high performing magnet program with a highly motivated student body. I assumed, incorrectly, that due to the competitive attitudes of our students that they would want to perform well, as I had with standardized assessments in the 1970s no matter what it meant concerning my academic standing. What I learned in this first encounter was that students were already fed up with standardized tests particularly if it had no bearing on their academic standing. These students made a habit of blowing away all of the state tests and for them NAEP was a waste of time. The idea of NAEP as a report card might be significant if students were not already wasting three weeks of their year with state and district tests. In other words, no student benefit so why bother. How does this give us an accurate read on student capacity? Second, none of the standardized assessments, international, national, state, or local have shown meaningful movement in student performance over the decades. A few points either way does not reveal any real change in instructional efficacy or evidence of greater learning opportunities for students no matter their circumstances. The realities remain the same. Students prepared for schooling or provided significant instructional and experiential resources perform well. Those who do not have such privilege do not. Policy makers and educational leaders are simply fooling themselves when denying that fact. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is telling in this regard. Piddling about a few point improvement in a NAEP test for fourth graders isn’t going to change the fact that Mississippi and other poor states provide far less opportunity for their students and poorer outcomes than wealthier states wiling to put more resources in the classroom. Testing has become a waste of time and money that could be better used elsewhere.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Hoax, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

David Wallace-Wells: The Headlines Are Wrong! U.S. Students Outperformed Their Peers in Rest of World on PISA Test

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2023 //
13

The news media keep a set of stock headlines at the ready whenever national or international test scores are posted: SCORES DECLINE! U.S. STUDENTS FAILING! A SPUTNIK MOMENT! OUR SCHOOLS ARE FAILING!

All these cries of “failure” feed the phony narrative of the privatization movement. Organizations funded by rightwing billionaires promote the idea that students will get higher scores in charters or voucher schools (we now know that this claim is not true, that charter schools are no better (and often worse) than public schools, and that vouchers subsidize wealthy families and do not save poor kids.

It is a fact that U.S. students have never performed well on international tests, as I explained in my book REIGN OF ERROR. Since the 1960s, when the first international tests were administered, our scores on these tests were mediocre to awful. Nonetheless, our economy has outperformed nations whose students got higher scores decades ago.

Now for the good news.

The latest international test scores were released a few days ago, and scores went down everywhere due to the pandemic. David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for The New York Times, reported that even with dropping scores, U.S. students outperformed the rest of the world!

He writes:

By now, you’ve probably registered the alarm that pandemic learning loss has produced a “lost generation” of American students.

This self-lacerating story has formed the heart of an indictment of American school policies during the pandemic, increasingly cited by critics of the country’s mitigation policies as the clearest example of pandemic overreach.

But we keep getting more data about American student performance over the last few years, and the top lines suggest a pretty modest setback, even compared to how well the country’s students performed, in recent years, in the absence of any pandemic disruption.

Now, for the first time, we have good international data and can compare American students’ performance with students’ in peer countries that, in many cases, made different choices about whether and when to close schools and whether and when to open them.

This data comes from the Program for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in almost 80 countries typically every three years — a long-running, unimpeachable, nearly global standardized test measure of student achievement among the world’s 15-year-olds in math, reading and science.

And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

The performance looks even stronger once you get into the weeds a bit. In reading, the average U.S. score dropped just one point from 505 in 2018 to just 504 in 2022. Across the rest of the O.E.C.D., the average loss was 11 times as large. In Germany, which looked early in the pandemic to have mounted an enviable good-government response, the average reading score fell 18 points; in Britain, the country most often compared with the United States, it fell 10 points. In Iceland, which had, by many metrics, the best pandemic performance in Europe, it fell 38 points. In Sweden, the darling of mitigation skeptics, it fell 19 points.

In science, the United States lost three points, about the same decline as the O.E.C.D. average and still above the level Americans reached in 2016 and 2013. On the same test, German students lost 11 points, and British and Swedish students dropped five; performance by students in Iceland fell by 28 points.

In math, the United States had a more significant and worrying drop: 13 points. But across the other nations of the O.E.C.D., the average decline from 2018 to 2022 was still larger: 16 points. And in historical context, even the 13-point American drop is not that remarkable — just two points larger than the drop the country experienced between the 2012 and 2015 math tests, suggesting that longer-term trajectories in math may be more concerning than the short-term pandemic setback. Break the scores out to see the trajectories for higher-performing and lower-performing subgroups, and you can hardly see the impact of the pandemic at all.

Of course, the Program for International Student Assessment is just one test, with all the limitations of any standardized measure. It is not good news, in general, if the world is struggling academically. And none of this is an argument for American educational excellence or never-ending remote learning or a claim there was no impact from closures on American kids or a suggestion that the country’s schools should have stayed closed as long as they did.

It is simply a call to assess the legacy of those closures in the proper context: a pandemic that killed 25 million people globally and more than a million in the United States and brought more than a billion children around the world home from school in 2020. In the 18 months that followed, American schools were not choosing between universal closures and an experience entirely undisturbed by Covid-19. They were choosing different ways of navigating the pandemic landscape, as was every other school system in the world. A good first test of whether the country bungled school closures is probably whether peer countries, in general, did better. The test scores imply that they didn’t.

So why do we keep telling ourselves the self-lacerating story of our pandemic educational failure?

One reason could be that while some state-level testing data shows no correlation between school closures and learning loss, some analysis of district-level data has shown a closer correlation. But this suggests that learning loss is not a national problem but a narrower one, requiring a narrower response.

Another is that testing is blind to other markers of well-being. Chronic absenteeism, for instance, is up significantly since before the pandemic and may prove a far more lasting and concerning legacy of school closure than learning loss. And the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national mental health emergency — language that has been echoed by the American Medical Association.

But while American teenagers have reported higher levels of emotional distress in several high-profile surveys, here, too, the details yield a subtler picture. In the first year of the pandemic, according to a study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, 17 percent fewer American teens made mental-health visits to emergency rooms than in the year before; in the second year, they made nearly 7 percent more. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of teenage girls reporting persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness rose from 47 percent in 2019 to 57 percent in 2021 — a concerning rise, though only slightly larger than the six-point increase from 2017 to 2019. The number of male teens reporting the same barely grew, from 27 percent to 29 percent, having risen much faster from 2017 to 2019.

Each of these data points should probably be understood in the context of mental health surveys of older Americans, such as the General Social Survey, which found that the percentage of American adults describing themselves as “very happy” fell from 31 percent in 2018 to 19 percent in 2021 and those describing themselves as “not too happy” nearly doubled to 24 percent. It is hard to disentangle the effects of school closure here from the experience of simply living through an anxious and disruptive time. To judge by the bleakest standard, youth suicide declined during the period of school closure and returned to prepandemic levels only after schools reopened.

Overall, American adults lost some confidence in the country’s school system in those years, with national approval dropping from 50 percent to 42 percent. But the drop is not from current parents of kids in school, whose approval rose throughout the pandemic, according to Gallup, from 72 percent in 2020 to 73 percent in 2021 to 80 percent in 2022. (Other recent surveys, including ones from Pew and The Times, have found similar postpandemic parental approval, between 77 percent and 90 percent.) Instead, as Matt Barnum suggested on ChalkBeat, the decline has been driven by the perspective of people without kids in those schools today — by childless adults and those who’ve opted out of the public school system for a variety of personal and ideological reasons. [Ed.: bold added]

Could we have done better? Surely. We might have done more to open all American schools in the fall of 2020 and to make doing so safe enough — through frequent pooled and rapid testing, more outdoor learning and better indoor ventilation, among other measures — to reassure parents, 71 percent of whom said that summer that in-person school was a large or moderate risk to their children and a majority of whom said that schools should remain closed until there was no Covid risk at all. We could have provided more educational and emotional support through the darkest troughs of the pandemic and probably been clearer, throughout the pandemic, that the risk of serious illness to individual kids was relatively low.

But we could do better now, too, by sidestepping pandemic blame games that require us both to exaggerate the effect of school closures on educational achievement and the degree to which policymakers, rather than the pandemic, were responsible.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Education Reform, Failure, Fake News, Hoax, International, Standardized Testing

Paul Thomas: Our Perpetual “Crisis in Education” Is Fueled by Unreliable, Invalid Test Scores

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2023 //
10

Paul Thomas of Furman University is a clear-sighted analyst of education policy. He is fearless when it comes to calling out frauds. This post is a good example.

He writes:

“The administrations in charge,” write Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).

Deleuze’s generalization about “supposedly necessary reforms” serves as an important entry point into the perpetual education crisis in the US. Since A Nation at Risk, public education has experienced several cycles of crisis that fuel ever-new and ever-different sets of standards and high-stakes testing.

Even more disturbing is that for at least a century, “the administrations in charge” have shouted that US children cannot read—with the current reading crisis also including the gobsmacking additional crisis that teachers of reading do not know how to teach reading.

The gasoline that is routinely tossed on the perpetual fire of education crisis is test scores—state accountability tests, NAEP, SAT, ACT, etc.

While all that test data itself may or may not be valuable information for both how well students are learning and how to better serve those students through reform, ultimately all that testing has almost nothing to do with either of those goals; in fact, test data in the US are primarily fuel for that perpetual state of crisis.

Here is the most recent example—2023 ACT scores:

I have noted that reactions and overreactions to NAEP in recent years follow a similar set of problems found in reactions/overreactions to the SAT for many decades; the lessons from those reactions include:

  • Lesson: Populations being tested impact data drawn from tests.
  • Lesson: Ranking by test data must account for population differences among students tested.
  • Lesson: Conclusions drawn from test data must acknowledge purpose of test being used (see Gerald Bracey).

The social media and traditional media responses to 2023 ACT data expose a few more concerns about media, public, and political misunderstanding of test data as well as how “the administrations in charge” depend on manipulating test data to insure the perpetual education crisis.

Many people have confronted the distorting ways in which the ACT data are being displayed; certainly the mainstream graph from Axios above suggests “crisis”; however, by simply modifying the X/Y axes, that same data appear at least less dramatic and possibly not even significant if the issues I list above are carefully considered….

This crisis-of-the-day about the ACT parallels the central problem with NAEP, a test that seems designed to mislead and not inform since NAEP’s “Proficient” feeds a false narrative that a majority of students are not on grade level as readers.

The ACT crisis graph being pushed by mainstream media is less a marker of declining educational quality in the US and more further proof that “the administrations in charge” want and need testing data to justify “supposedly necessary reforms,” testing as gas for the perpetual education crisis fire.

Please open the link to read this excellent analysis in full.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Hoax, Lies, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Charles Foster Johnson: Protect Our Public Schools! Block Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2023 //
5

Charles Foster Johnson is the founder of Pastors for Texas Children. He actively supports full funding of public schools and separation of church and state. He, along with other faith leaders, wrote the following article in The Dallas News.

Don’t Defund Public Schools

Voucher scheme wastes money, violates Constitution

The education community in Texas has remained patient and courteous throughout the spring general session of the Legislature despite the record $32.7 billion surplus. They have upheld the values of kindness and respect that society expects. However, there comes a point when patience wears thin, and the truth must be spoken: it is time to allocate the necessary resources to educators and school districts.

Simply put, it’s time to provide the funding our educators and school districts need. This funding is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is essential for Texas teachers to keep pace with the rising cost of living. School districts must fulfill their role in shaping the future workforce of Texas, which boasts the ninth-largest economy in the world. It is imperative to honor the trust placed in you by Texas taxpayers, who expect their hard-earned money to be invested wisely in the education of over 5 million Texas students.

The time for political games and holding funds hostage for private schools must end. Public schools are the heart of our educational system and need their fair share of resources. Even after passing tax relief measures earlier this summer, there remains a surplus of $14 billion, not to mention the over $21 billion in the state’s rainy day fund. Moreover, inflation ensures that surplus funds will continue to accumulate in the foreseeable future. This is not the government’s money to wield for hardline negotiations; it belongs to the people of Texas.

Over 90% of Texas students attend public schools, yet the state has not increased funding to school districts since 2019. Operating costs have significantly risen during this period. Additionally, our teachers, who demonstrated unwavering dedication during the global pandemic, have yet to receive sufficient salary increases to keep pace with inflation.

It is high time to allocate the necessary resources to public schools to address these issues.

Due to legislative inaction during the spring, school boards across Texas were forced to approve deficit budgets merely to survive this academic year. For example, Dallas ISD approved a $186 million deficit budget, Garland ISD faced a $69 million deficit, and Plano ISD had to manage a $24 million shortfall. This approach is akin to depleting one’s savings to pay the electric bill — it is unsustainable and morally unacceptable.

What is most disheartening is the lack of significant funding for schools this year and the mounting frustration within the education community: educators, administrators and parents alike. It should not have come to this point.

Instead of prioritizing public schools, Gov. Greg Abbott has traversed the state promoting a program that redirects tax dollars to private schools, masquerading under the banner of “education freedom.” Comparable programs in other states have proven to be financially burdensome. Arizona’s private school subsidy program, initially allocated at $65 million, is estimated to cost $900 million next year. In Florida, a similar program has been used for non-educational purposes like theme park tickets, kayaks and televisions (https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/verify/yes-school-vouchers-in-florida-can-be-used-for-tvs-skateboards-theme-park-tickets/77-49577639-1a29-4acd-86ac-af50efc107e9).

Voucher programs like these do not align with the principles of fiscal conservatism. Moreover, the effectiveness of private school subsidies in improving student achievement remains highly questionable. In other states, established private schools have yet to embrace these subsidies due to limited capacity and high costs. Consequently, makeshift private schools have arisen, unable to match the offerings of public schools, resulting in most students returning to the public system.

The notion that funding for Texas public schools has been delayed to channel resources to private schools should anger the parents of millions of children and the thousands of educators who tirelessly serve them. Our students have only one chance to experience their current grade level; they should not be made to wait.

In a disturbing breach of the American principle of separation between church and state, Abbott has called upon ministers and pastors to advocate for this subsidy program from their pulpits on Sunday, Oct. 15. Texans understand a fundamental truth that eludes the governor: Genuine faith must be voluntary and cannot be endorsed or supported by state authority. Using tax dollars to subsidize religious instruction is a violation of this principle.

Abbott’s threats against state representatives who support public education constitute a desperate attempt to intimidate them. The Texas House has consistently opposed private school subsidies for over two decades, and there is no reason for that stance to change now.


The time for delay has passed; enough is enough.


Charles F. Johnson is executive director of Pastors For Texas Children. George A. Mason is senior pastor emeritus at Wilshire Baptist Church. Victoria Robb Powers is senior pastor at Royal Lane Baptist Church. Andy Stoker is interim executive director at Interfaith Alliance Texas. Neil G. Thomas is senior pastor at Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ. They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Hoax, Texas, Vouchers

The Plot to Take Down Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2023 //
9

Recently the Network for Public Education and the Education Law Center sponsored a zoom conversation with Nick Surgey. Nick is an experienced investigative journalist who works with an organization called Documented, which digs into the Dark Money groups undermining Public schools and other democratic institutions. Nick has done the legwork that identified the money and people behind the home schooling movement, as well as the rightwing Alliance for Defending Freedom. He has worked with the Center for Media and Democracy and other pro-democracy organizations.

This is a discussion you should definitely tune into.

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Hoax, Inequity, Koch Brothers

UNESCO Report: The Dangers of Ed-Technology!

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2023 //
33

This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.

UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Childhood, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Hoax, Inequity, International, Online Learning, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization, Propaganda, Technology

Peter Greene on Chris Rufo’s Plans to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2023 //
22

After I first listened to Chris Rufo’s infamous speech at Hillsdale College, something clicked. I saw the plan for the demolition of public education. Rufo spelled it out. He is a proponent of universal school choice, and he says the way to reach that goal is to create universal distrust of public schools. This is why we hear blarney about public school teachers “grooming” their students and indoctrinating them. It’s all part of the plan to create “universal distrust.” It’s a plan to privatize public education by disseminating lies and defaming teachers.

Peter Greene listened to Rufo’s speech and analyzes it closely. Please read to see the master plan, the hoax about “critical race theory,” and the rightwing plot to privatize public funding for education.

And though Peter says he summarized the speech to save you time, I urge you to listen to it. It’s scary.

Categories Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

DeSantis and His Failed Search for Voter Fraud in Florida

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
21

One of the most bizarre aspects of the 2020 election-denial drama is the search for voter fraud in states that voted for Trump. Florida is Exhibit Number One, as demonstrated in this excellent article in the New York Times by Alexandra Bersin and Sharon LaFraniere. Trump won Florida handily, yet Governor Ron DeSantis felt he had to mollify Trump’s rabid base by insisting that he would root out election fraud. Did he want to increase Trump’s numbers or what? Maybe Biden really won Florida? It made no sense. Or was DeSantis grandstanding for the nutty rightwing base?

The story begins:

It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.

Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.

The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.

But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.

In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.

Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.

Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.

DeSantis never spoke honestly to the election deniers. Instead he appeased them. His “election crimes unit” managed to find a grand total of 32 ex-felons who voted illegally. They didn’t know they were voting illegally because they received letters from the state urging them to vote and were issued voter registration cards.

Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.

He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.

In the 2020 election, 11 million Floridians voted, and Trump won the state by 371,686 votes. Yet the leaders of the election fraud crusade descended on Florida, including Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com. Local activists organized to find evidence of voter fraud. One group even delivered a box of claims to DeSantis’s mother, who sent it on to her son. None of the “evidence” or tips panned out. The search for voter fraud was a wild goose chase.

DeSantis’ much-ballyhooed election crimes unit turned over 1,500 names of potential fraudsters to local officials, which resulted in 32 arrests. A big nothing-burger.

DeSantis boasted about his crackdown on voter fraud, but never admitted that it produced no evidence of voter fraud. The only genuine fraud was the insistence by conspiracy theorists that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

And my initial question remains unanswered: what was the point of searching for voter fraud in a state that Trump won handily?

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Hoax, Trump

Florida: Most Voucher Recipients Never Attended Public School

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2023 //
11

Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University tweeted the following information from official sources in Florida:

Oh would you look at that—70% of expanded Florida #schoolvouchers users were already in private school.

Another 18% entering kindergartners.

Only 13% came from public school.


@FLBaloney @FloridaPolicy @DianeRavitch
drive.google.com/file/d/1yyl80J…

Categories Education Industry, Fake, Florida, Hoax, Lies, Vouchers

Don’t Fall for This Telephone Scam!

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2023 //
23

CNN reports that telephone scams now use artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of a loved one who is in desperate trouble and needs help or ransom money right away. In this example, a mother gets a call from what sounds like her daughter, who has been kidnapped, and the gruff voice of a man demanding $1 million to ransom her. It’s a scam, but sometimes it works. If you get a call like this, don’t fall for it. Call your child, call the police, record the call.

The Boston Globe reported on a scam that has become commonplace. An elderly person gets a call from someone with a youthful voice who says, “Grandma, I’m in trouble. I rented a car and ran a red light. I crashed into a car driven by a pregnant woman. I’m in jail, and I need money to make bail. Please help me.”

This happened to a 93-year-old woman in Massachusetts. She rushed to the bank, withdrew $9,500, spoke to a smooth-talking man who claimed to be a lawyer, and handed the money over to a LYFT driver.

I mention this because I received the same scam call. A young man called, claiming to be my grandson. He was in a car accident, he said. It was his fault. He needed money right away for bail. He gave me the badge number and telephone number of the arresting officer. I asked if he had called his mother. He said he couldn’t reach her. I hung up, called his mother, and she said the grandson in question was in his dorm, preparing for finals. I didn’t fall for the scam.

But this grandmother did.

Last month, a 93-year-old grandmother from Pembroke took a call from someone she thought was her granddaughter Abby. Through sobs, Abby begged for money to get out of jail.

Yes, it was a scam, and the grandmother ― who asked that her name not be used for fear of being targeted by other scammers ― fell for it.

The scammers used a somewhat elaborate ruse that included having “Abby’s lawyer” come on the phone to matter-of-factly explain the necessary steps to secure her release.

It was a cruel and wicked exploitation of a grandmother’s love and concern, perpetrated by slick con artists who have no decency.

But the grandmother and her family said they were also upset that Bank of America, from which she hurriedly withdrew $9,500 in cash, did nothing to stop her from throwing away thousands of dollars.

The family also wondered about Lyft, the ridesharing giant, which picked up the cash and delivered it to the scammers, apparently unwittingly.

The family contacted me to call attention to the roles played by two of the country’s biggest corporations and to warn other elders and their families to be on guard, they said.

When the grandmother answered the phone in her home on the morning of Feb. 25 she was stunned to hear a hysterical “Abby” pleading for help.

Here’s what happened:

“Grandma, you got to help,” the voice said. It sounded like Abby, who is in her early 20s. She grew up nearby and spent plenty of time with her grandmother.

She told “Grandma” she was accused of texting while driving and causing an accident in which the pregnant driver of the other car was hurt and taken to the hospital. “Abby” insisted it wasn’t her fault and told “Grandma” she broke her nose in the accident.

“Abby” swore her grandmother and grandfather (he’s 96) to secrecy before putting someone purporting to be her lawyer on the phone. He told her, among other things, that the money was “fully refundable.”

The grandmother hurried off alone to a Bank of America branch office in nearby Marshfield, where she regularly does her banking, feeling anxious and afraid.

At the teller’s window, she showed her driver’s license and presented a check made out to cash. Very few words were exchanged before the teller put a small stack of bills into a white envelope and slid it to the grandmother.

The grandmother was so preoccupied with her mission that she left the bank without counting the money or even looking in the envelope, she said.

Back home, she called the telephone number the phony lawyer had given her. He instructed her to find a small box into which to put the envelope.

The “lawyer” told the grandmother someone would come to her house to pick up the box and gave her the license plate number, make, and model of the car.

A few minutes later, the “lawyer,” still speaking in a reassuring voice on the phone, told her to bring the package to the driver. The driver said little before driving away with it.

About 30 minutes later, the “lawyer” called again and told the grandmother he had bad news: The pregnant woman’s baby had died and Abby was now charged with manslaughter. He needed $9,000 more to get her released.

That’s when she told her son, who happened to be visiting, what was happening. He spoke with the “lawyer,” whom he described as sounding “unbelievably calm and professional.” The “lawyer” told the son the name of the jail where Abby was supposedly being held.

The son hung up and called his niece. She answered. The jig was up.

The son called back the “lawyer.” The call went dead. (I called the same number several times but kept getting a fast busy signal.) The son gave the police the license plate number given to the grandmother. Police said the pickup was made by a Lyft driver.

The reporter for the Globe, Sean P. Murphy, was able to persuade Bank of America to refund the woman’s payout. The scammer got away with it.

Categories Corruption, Fake, Fraud, Hoax, Lies
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