Jersey Jazzman describes Race to the Top as “segregation gone wild.”
Strangely enough, the districts that applied for RTTT cash and mandates are mostly poor and minority.
Wonder if they know that none of the federal “remedies” has ever worked?
Wonder if they know their district is likely to spend more on implementing the mandates than the money it “wins”?
From NYC Parent blog (by Leonie Haimson):
Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch/run by Joel Klein, Wins the $4.9M Contract to develop the software that will be used to report & analyze results for the new #CommonCore Assessments – both the interim and “summative” exams being developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium for 25 states (blue states in map below.)
Wireless is also developing the software/ infrastructure for the Gates-funded Shared Learning Collaborative, which is collecting confidential student & teacher data in states throughout the country, including NYS, & planning to turn this information over to for-profit commercial ventures, without parental consent, to help companies develop and market their “learning products.” The information will include among other things, names, addresses, grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and learning disability status.
The SLC has now named a new CEO, Iwan Streichenberger, who is going to direct SLC’s transition from a project to a nonprofit enterprise; to “ manage the technology and related services.”
Streichenberger was formerly the Chief Marketing Officer of a for-profit company called Promethean, where he was “responsible for product development, marketing, and sales strategy for the education technology company’s newest division.
He says he will “look forward to telling the story about the transformative technology we are building and how we are working with our industry partners to help education technology achieve its potential for students” and will be speaking about this at the SXSW Edu conference in Austin Texas March 4-7.
Here we go.
Wireless Generation Wins Contract for Common Assessments
By Jason Tomassini on November 29, 2012 12:00 PM | No comments
As the two consortia developing assessments around the Common Core State Standards move closer to the tests’ adoption, for the 2014-15 school year, they are starting to award contracts that will shape how the assessments look and operate. On Wednesday, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium announced that the software used to report and analyze results from its assessments will be developed by Wireless Generation, the education software company.
Wireless Generation will partner with Educational Testing Service (ETS) on the contract. The terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the Request for Proposal stipulated the project could not exceed $4.9 million. Smarter Balanced’s projects are funded through a four-year, $175 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The reporting system will be used for the common assessments students will take in Smarter Balanced’s 25 member states (you can view those states in the map below). The system will collect data from interim and summative assessments given to students and also track their progress toward college and career readiness, as determined by the individual standards. The data will be available to administrators and teachers as well as parents, according to a news release from Smarter Balanced. Schoolwide and districtwide reports will also be available.
The entire system will be open source, which means other computer programmers can build applications using the software’s source code. For instance, Moodle is an open source learning management platform that is used as the framework for companies like Moodlerooms.
Early next year, the public will have a chance to provide input on the system requirements. You can read the Request for Proposal here, and Wireless Generation’s winning proposal here, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Some important notes regarding Wireless Generation. News Corporation, the international media conglomerate implicated in a widespread phone hacking scandal last year, owns 90 percent of Wireless Generation, which is part of the company’s new Amplify education business. Since the acquisition, for $360 million in November 2010, concerns over possible connections between Wireless Generation’s data operations and its parent company have arose. In response, Wireless Generation has pointed out that its data operations are independent from News Corp. and the company has always complied with the many laws governing student data, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In August 2011, the company did lose a $27 million contract to develop assessment tracking software for New York state education department because of the scandal embroiling News Corp.’s newspaper division.
(Larry Berger, a co-founder and executive chairman of Wireless Generation, serves on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week.)
In somewhat related news, the Brown Center on Education Policy, at the Brookings Institution, released a report Wednesday on the cost of state assessments around the country, including a recommendation for states to join testing consortia in order to lower costs. Read more about it here.
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You may recall that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times proposed that Arne Duncan should become Secretary of State and extend his Race to the Top internationally.
Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in New York City sees the implications:
“Close &/or privatize embassies that are struggling in terms of diplomacy & conflict resolution?”
Any readers with better ideas?
Jeb Bush recognized at his summit meeting that the policies he champions were soundly rebuffed by voters in Indiana (and did he mention Idaho?).
But he assures his rightwing allies that testing, evaluating teachers by student scores, vouchers and charters are the right course, even if educators, parents, and other citizens don’t agree. He apparently compared himself to Lyndon Baines Johnson, fighting to push civil rights legislation when it was unpopular.
Someone should inform him that he is fighting to preserve a failed status quo, not a struggling dissident movement. Someone should tell him that NCLB is federal law and that its ugly step-child Race to the Top bribed the states to double down on the punitive strategies of NCLB.
His lament of “stay the course” is very good news indeed. It is a public admission that the privatizers know they have no popular base.
Their strategies have failed for more than a decade.
When do they admit to themselves that it’s over?
At some point, they will stop pouring money into a losing and unpopular cause.
That’s the day when we can begin to build a genuine movement to improve our schools.
Joanne Barkan has written an excellent summary of how public education fared in the recent elections.
Barkan knows how to follow the money. Her article “Got Dough?” showed the influence of the billionaires on education policy.
She begins her analysis of the 2012 elections with this overview of Barack Obama’s embrace of GOP education dogma:
“Barack Obama’s K-12 “reform” policies have brought misery to public schools across the country: more standardized testing, faulty evaluations for teachers based on student test scores, more public schools shut down rather than improved, more privately managed and for-profit charter schools soaking up tax dollars but providing little improvement, more money wasted on unproven computer-based instruction, and more opportunities for private foundations to steer public policy. Obama’s agenda has also fortified a crazy-quilt political coalition on education that stretches from centrist ed-reform functionaries to conservatives aiming to undermine unions and privatize public schools to right-wingers seeking tax dollars for religious charters. Mitt Romney’s education program was worse in only one significant way: Romney also supported vouchers that allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools, including religious schools.”
Barkan’s analysis shows significant wins for supporters of public education–the upset of uber-reformer Tony Bennett in Indiana, the repeal of the Luna laws in Idaho, and the passage of a tax increase in California–and some significant losses–the passage of charter initiatives in Georgia and Washington State.
The interesting common thread in many of the key elections was the deluge of big money to advance the anti-public education agenda.
Even more interesting is how few people put up the big money. If Barkan were to collate a list of those who contributed $10,000 or more to these campaigns, the number of people on the list would be very small, maybe a few hundred. If the list were restricted to $20,000 or more, it would very likely be fewer than 50 people, maybe less.
This tiny number of moguls is buying education policy in state after state. How many have their own children in the schools they seek to control? Probably none.
The good news is that they don’t win every time. The bad news is that their money is sometimes sufficient to overwhelm democratic control of public education.
New York is very proud of its new Educator Effectiveness Evaluation model, which claims to measure which teachers and principals are effective, relying in part on the increase (or not) of test scores of students.
Bruce Baker of Rutgers demonstrates that the model is biased and inaccurate. It favors classes and schools that start off with higher-performing students.
He concludes with a brief sermon about the importance of ethics:
“I have pointed out that the originators of the SGP approach have stated in numerous technical documents and academic papers that SGPs are intended to be a descriptive tool and are not for making causal assertions (they are not for “attribution of responsibility”) regarding teacher effects on student outcomes. Yet, the authors persist in encouraging states and local districts to do just that. I certainly expect to see them called to the witness stand the first time SGP information is misused to attribute student failure to a teacher.”
“But the case of the NY-AIR technical report is somewhat more disconcerting. Here, we have a technically proficient author working for a highly respected organization – American Institutes for Research – ignoring all of the statistical red flags (after waiving them), and seemingly oblivious to gaping conceptual holes (commonly understood limitations) between the actual statistical analyses presented and the concluding statements made (and language used throughout).”
“The conclusions are WRONG – statistically and conceptually. And the author needs to recognize that being so damn bluntly wrong may be consequential for the livelihoods of thousands of individual teachers and principals! Yes, it is indeed another leap for a local school administrator to use their state approved evaluation framework, coupled with these measures, to actually decide to adversely affect the livelihood and potential career of some wrongly classified teacher or principal – but the author of this report has given them the tool and provided his blessing. And that’s inexcusable.”
On Thanksgiving Day, I posted a tribute to the teachers of the year in Acadia Parish in Louisiana.
With Governor Bobby Jindal in charge and with a compliant state board and a compliant TFA state commissioner, Louisiana is ground zero for the privatization of public education in America.
Jindal has control of the state board mainly because of huge campaign contributions from out of state supporters of his rightwing agenda.
As part of its destruction of public education, the state has enacted punitive laws directed at teachers.
Their evaluations will be tied to test scores, and it will be easy to fire them. They have no job rights.
In response to my tribute to the teachers in Louisiana, I received the following comment. Please recall that prior to the enactment of No Child Left Behind and the implementation of Race to the Top, public schools were not closed because of test scores. They were considered a public service or a public good. Closing them down made no more sense than closing down and selling off a community’s public park. But now we just take for granted that schools are closed, against the will of the community, and no one can stop it from happening. This is outrageous and we must not forget that it is outrageous. It does nothing to help students or to improve education. It is only good as a battering ram to hurt public education and to help the privatizers.
The teacher writes:
As a 30-year educator in Louisiana public schools, I can tell you that your support means so much – now more than ever. I will forward this to all the teachers who work with me at Delmont Elementary. A week ago today we were informed that our school would be closed because of our failure to make AYP within a year. But we are still thankful on this day, because we know that even though our state and district don’t recognize our efforts, we have truly touched the lives of 450 dhildren and families; and they have touched ours.
John Dewey said it more than a century ago, and it is still true: What the best and wisest parent wants for his child is what we should want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely and, unchecked, destroys our democracy. (Forgive the paraphrase, but that is close to exactly right from memory.)
Here Leonie Haimson, New York City’s leading parent advocate, gives the same advice to President Obama. She calls on him to get rid of the test-driven policies of Race to the Top, which are ruining the public schools, and stop the privatizing.
What a terrible legacy is would be for President Obama if he left the presidency four years from now with a record of having used federal funds to disestablish public education in city after city, state after state.
She says:
Instead of pauperizing, standardizing, digitizing and privatizing education, we know what works to increase opportunities for children. Just witness the sort of education Obama’s own daughters receive: small classes with plenty of personal attention from experienced teachers, a well-rounded education with art, science and music, and little or no standardized testing. By instituting these reforms in the 1970s, Finland was able to turn around its school system and now outranks nearly all other nations in student achievement. If it’s good enough for Malia and Sasha, it should be good enough for inner-city public school students in New York City or Chicago.
The New York Times has a terrific article today by Michael Brick about the destructive policies that are called “reforms.” This is the first time in my memory that an article in the newspaper of record–albeit an opinion piece–has acknowledged that both political parties share the same demented and punitive approach and that their ideas are hurting, not helping.
Please read it. It gives me hope that our message is breaking through the elaborate publicity machine of corporate education reform.
Here is a sample:
“For the past three decades, one administration after another has sought to fix America’s troubled schools by making them compete with one another. Mr. Obama has put up billions of dollars for his Race to the Top program, a federal sweepstakes where state educational systems are judged head-to-head largely on the basis of test scores. Even here in Texas, nobody’s model for educational excellence, the state has long used complex algorithms to assign grades of Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable or Unacceptable to its schools.
“So far, such competition has achieved little more than re-segregation, long charter school waiting lists and the same anemic international rankings in science, math and literacy we’ve had for years.
“And yet now, policy makers in both parties propose ratcheting it up further — this time, by “grading” teachers as well.
Andy Smarick believes that public schools can’t be fixed or turned around. He thinks that the only way to solve their problems is to close them down and replace them with privately managed charters. Andy served on the board of a KIPP school, so he is confident that KIPP can do what no public school can do.
In a previous post, I called on Andy to join me in “the KIPP Challenge.” This is the challenge for KIPP to take over an entire low-performing district and show what it can do. Prove that it doesn’t skim the best students, show what happens when it takes all the kids, prove the critics wrong. Given Andy’s experience as a member of a KIPP board, I thought he should join me.
Now he says that the School Improvement Grants (SIG) are a vast waste of money. I agree with him again.
Billions have been spent with meager results. The Department of Education has boasted of double digit gains, but Anthony Cody showed the statistical game that the DOE was playing. Anthony warned last March that the DOE was “spinning the numbers,” and that the SIG program was not working.
Agreed!
I feel strongly that a decade from now, we will look back and realize that the billions spent on Race to the Top were a waste of money that diverted schools from their true mission of developing and educating citizens, not the best test-takers who can win a race for higher test scores.
Andy, lover of all things new, wants to see the SIG program replaced by a commitment only to new schools.
But Chicago and New York City have been doing that for years without much success. The New York Daily News reported recently that nearly 60% of the new schools opened by Mayor Bloomberg had lower passing rates than the “failing” schools they had replaced. Why do more of the same when it didn’t work? If most of the new schools do worse than the old schools, we will move backwards, not forwards.
So, my suggestion is that federal money go to build and strengthen communities as well as schools; that it be coordinated with social services and health services to make sure that children are fit and healthy; that it be spent to make sure that schools in every community have a full rich curriculum with experienced teachers; that it be used to make sure that every school serving poor communities has strong parental involvement and social workers. And that we honor our nation’s commitment to equality of educational opportunity.
I know Andy won’t agree with my prescriptions. But I don’t agree with privatizing education.
