Edushyster has done it again.
Here, Edushyster defends Joel Klein against the outrageous claim that Rupert Murdoch is trying to make a profit by selling lots of stuff to the schools. It’s all about collaboration. It’s all about replacing teachers with technology to help with budgetary issues. It’s all about reform.
Corporate reform privatizers like Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, Michael Bloomberg, and Mitt Romney like to boast of the glories of a marketplace for schools. They want parents to be consumers, armed with test scores and school report cards and grades. In that great come-and-get-it-day, all schools will be excellent when they compete. That’s why all those programs on all those channels on your TV dial are excellent, and why every product in the marketplace is excellent. Ah, the glories of deregulation!
This teacher describes the new marketplace:
I just spent this past weekend in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Visiting several Autumn festivals I noticed private and charter schools had set up tents in every festival/fair I attended. Right next to the honey and jewelry dealers these ‘privateers’ were peddling their wares. I even saw one at a tag sale!
The good news is that they all were sitting there with no one at their tent.
Wonder if they were unionized Mitt?
What does it say when you need to sit in a tent and peddle the virtue of your school?
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.
School of One is an online program that was piloted in 3 schools.
Two of the three schools have dropped it, but the Bloomberg administration plans to expand it to more schools.
School of One was developed by Joel Rose, who was TFA, Broad Academy, Edison, then worked for Chis Cerf and Joel Klein at the NYC Department of Education. The NYC Parent Blog describes the history of the School of One here and points to some important ethical issues.
Time magazine cited School of One as one of the best inventions of 2009, before it was implemented.
It won a $5 million grant from the US Department of Education as one of the most innovative programs in the nation.
The city put $9 million into the program so far, and previously projected the cost at $46 million. It will be added to four more schools, with the help of the federal grant.
Education Week has an article by the always well-informed Alyson Klein that speculates about Romney’s possible choice for Secretary of Education.
The possibilities include:
Jeb Bush, former Florida governor, who shaped the Romney agenda for privatization of the nation’s schools;
Tom Luna, the state superintendent in Idaho who is known for his allegiance to online corporations and his efforts to increase class size;
Joel Klein, the former chancellor of NYC, now selling technology for Rupert Murdoch, another supporter of privatization and opponent of unions, seniority and tenure;
Michelle Rhee, leader of a national campaign to remove all tenure, seniority and collective bargaining fromt teachers;
Chris Cerf, acting commission in New Jersey, who is leading Chris Christie’s push to privatize public schools in that state;
Here is the big surprise:
Arne Duncan, who is seen by Republicans as compatible with Romney’s agenda and, as the article, says, eager to stay on.
There are other names, but it is interesting to realize that at least four of the six listed here are allegedly, nominally Democrats.
The Education Law Center, an independent organization that advocates for the children of New Jersey, obtained a copy of a proposal that the Chris Christie administration made to the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.
The plan calls for aggressive state intervention in the state’s lowest performing schools. Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf wants to set up an “achievement district” for the low-performing schools. These schools would likely be closed and handed over to private managers as charter schools. The state plan calls for eliminating collective bargaining in these schools.
The amount requested was $7.6 million, of which the Broad Foundation has thus far supplied $1.6 million.
This should not be a difficult sell for Cerf. He is a “graduate” of the Broad Foundation’s unaccredited Superintendent’s Academy. And the chairman of the board of the foundation is his former boss, Joel Klein.
It’s somewhat strange that people like Cerf (and Arne Duncan, for that matter) think that a school gets “reformed” or “turned around” by firing the staff, closing the school, and handing it off to a charter operator. Cerf is a smart enough guy, and he surely knows that charters on average don’t produce better results than the public schools they replace unless they push out the low-performing kids.
One of the news stories says that Cerf wants to use New Orleans “recovery school district” as a model for New Jersey, but I wonder if he knows that 79% of the charters in New Orleans were graded either D or F by the state, and that New Orleans ranked 69th of 70 districts in the entire state.
How long can this shell game go on?
I understand that the people in the Abbott districts (the poorest cities where the lowest-performing schools are) may be accustomed to getting pushed around by the state, but how will the people of New Jersey feel about Christie and Cerf bringing in a raft of charter school operators to privatize what used to be their public schools?
One of the brilliant readers of this blog sent in a comment that made me understand what has been happening to American public education for the past 15-20 years.
It is the conscious, purposeful application of a marketing strategy called FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Wikipedia says that FUD is used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, and propaganda. I sensed that this was happening but I didn’t realize that it was a tried and true strategy that has a name and a documented history.
It’s a strategy in which one competitor undermines the other by spreading FUD. Read the Wikipedia entry to learn who the FUDmaster is.
In this country, the enemies of public education use FUD to advance their primary goal of privatization. They say our public schools are “obsolete” and “broken.” They say it over and over again. They use that line to promote privatization and for-profit education. They want to cut costs by getting rid of experienced teachers and replacing them with online instruction, so they belittle the value of experience and push laws to get rid of tenure and seniority. As they succeed in their use of FUD, what is broken is the spirits of teachers.
They say again and again that our schools are failing when they are not. They have wept about international test scores since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, even as our economy took off. They use FUD to blame the schools for the market failures they cause. They use FUD to blame the schools for poverty.
High-stakes testing is their tool of choice to close schools and fire teachers.
If you want to see the quintessential application of FUD to public education, read the report of the task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice, which says that our public schools are a threat to national security and that their salvation is to help kids escape them via charters and vouchers. For an antidote, read my review of that report.
Or you could watch the quintessential documentary of FUD, see “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” and then read my review.
The reader who opened my eyes to this marketing strategy, designed to harm public education and to allow its destroyers to call themselves “reformers” signs her stuff as “chemtchr.” Now we know.
| Your reader is describing a market-capture strategy refined in the hardware/software market wars of the last century. It is based on sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about competing products. I capitalized each word. because the acronym is for the strategy, FUD, is enshrined now in the history of the dawn of the computer age.Google it, and read how IBM piioneered it, and then how the FUDmaster himself out-fudded them.It’s been unleashed now on public education. The children of a whole free nation, and the very people charged with their daily defense, are deliberately assaulted by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Our state-imposed subservience to the data industry monopolists eats into every day of their childhood, as the FUDmaster tries to impose his defective new operating system on their minds and hearts. |
At the suggestion of a reader, I posted a list of the board of directors of a Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, dating from 2009. It included several school superintendents.
Readers have commented on the track record of the superintendents on that board.
Let’s see:
Joel Klein: Resigned in 2010, after NY State Education Department revealed statewide score inflation and New York City’s celebrated test scores collapsed
Michelle Rhee: Resigned in 2010 after D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty defeated, largely because of her divisive reputation
Arlene Ackerman: Resigned in 2011 in Philadelphia after tempestuous reign
Maria Goodloe-Johnson: Fired in 2010 in Seattle
Arne Duncan: His plan called Renaissance 2010 failed to lift Chicago public schools, now U.S. Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings: Not a superintendent, but architect of disastrous NCLB
And to think that this is the organization that is training superintendents to “reform” urban education!
A reader sent this list of the board of directors of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems for 2009.
The center is part of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which runs a training program for urban school superintendents.
Some (many?) Broad-trained superintendents have been involved in controversy, due to their non-collaborative management style.
| Joel Klein, Chair, Chancellor New York City Department of Education Barry Munitz, Vice Chair, Trustee Professor California State University, Los Angeles Arlene Ackerman, Superintendent of Philadelphia Public Schools Richard Barth (Chief Executive Officer KIPP Foundation) Henry Cisneros, Chairman of City View America, former U.S. Secretary of HUD Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education (on Board until Feb. 2009) Louis Gerstner, Jr., Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Superintendent Seattle Public Schools Dan Katzir, Managing Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation Wendy Kopp (CEO and Founder of Teach for America) Margaret Spellings, President and CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company, former U.S. Secretary of DOE Melissa Megliola Zaikos, Autonomous Management and Performance Schools Program Officer, Chicago Public Schools Michelle Rhee, Chancellor District of Columbia Schools Lawrence Summers, Director National Economic Council Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report; Publisher of the New York Daily News |
Several months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).
Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate raged, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.
To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues.
U.S. News defended the project, saying that it had been endorsed by leading educators. The specific endorsement to which it referred came from Chiefs for Change, the conservative state superintendents associated with former Governor Jeb Bush. This article, by the way, has good links to NCTQ’s website, describing the project and its methods. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.
Just this week, NCTQ released a new report about how teachers’ colleges prepare students for assessment responsibilities. The theme of this report is that “data-driven instruction” is the key to success in education. The best districts are those that are “obsessive about using data to drive instruction.” The Broad Prize is taken as the acme of academic excellence in urban education because it focuses on data, data, data. The report acknowledges that the data it prizes in this report is “data derived from student assessments–ranging from classwork practice to state tests–to improve instruction.”
Data-driven decision making is now a national priority, it says, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who required states “to improve their data systems and create high-quality assessments” if they wanted a crack at his $5 billion Race to the Top.
Unfortunately despite a massive investment in data collection by states and the federal government, the report says, teachers don’t value data enough. Reference is made to the report sponsored by Gates and Scholastic, which found that most teachers do not value the state tests. I wrote about that report here. How in the world can our nation drive instruction with data if the teachers hold data in such low regard?
The balance of the report reviews teacher training institutions by reviewing their course syllabi. The goal is to judge whether the institutions are preparing future teachers to be obsessed with data.
Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I value, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.
And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?
NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.
For a time, it was not clear how this fledgling organization would make waves or if it would survive. But in late 2001, Secretary of Education Rod Paige gave NCTQ a grant of $5 million to start a national teacher certification program called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (see p. 16 of the link). ABCTE has since become an online teacher preparation program, where someone can become a teacher for $1995.00.
Today, NCTQ is the partner of U.S. News & World Report and will rank the nation’s schools of education. It received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review teacher quality in Los Angeles. It is now often cited as the nation’s leading authority on teacher quality issues. Its report has a star-studded technical advisory committee of corporate reform leaders like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.
And I was there at the creation.
An hour after this blog was published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams. According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 