Duncan Sacrifices Student Welfare to Preserve Corporate Agenda

During the summer of 2001, as NCLB was moving toward its final mark-up, testing experts were waving a red flag over the 100 percent testing proficiency target for 2014. Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger published their red flag as an op-ed in the New York Times that pointed to what was about to happen if the bill proceeded with the the insane proficiency target intact--the poorest schools and the most diverse schools would receive the most punishment before anyone else.

Both [Senate and House] bills would be particularly harsh on racially diverse schools. Each school would be expected to achieve not only an increase in test scores for the school as a whole, but increases for each and every racial or ethnic group as well. Because each group's scores fluctuate depending upon the particular students being tested each year, it is rare to see every group's performance moving upward in the same year. Black and Latino students are more likely than white students to be enrolled in highly diverse schools, so their schools would be more likely than others to be arbitrarily disrupted by a poorly designed formula.

What Kane and Staiger could not see was that, in the black hearts of Washington ideologues, their prime motivation was disruption of public schools, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable.  Kane and Staiger didn't know those crafting the bill wanted to blow up public education and replace it with "market solutions."  They didn't know a cruel calculus and crude algorithm had been designed to prove the failure of the public schools, and it had been planted in NCLB and then covered over with the civil rights banner of leaving no child behind.  Truly a Satanic level of cynicism.

Staiger and Kane concluded:

In their current bills, the House and Senate have set a very high bar, so high that it is likely that virtually all school systems would be found to be inadequate, with many schools failing. And if that happens, the worst schools would be lost in the crowd. The resources and energy required to reform them would probably be dissipated. For these schools, a poorly designed federal rule can be worse than no rule at all. 

Needless to say, the warnings were ignored and NCLB was quickly approved in the wake of 9-11. 

And it worked like a charm.  By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, half of America's public schools were not making testing proficiency targets, and the mass conversion of the poorest urban schools to corporate charters was well underway.  Private tutoring companies were raking in billions, and Reading First contracts were funneling billions more to McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

To maintain the momentum of corporate takeover and to expand profitability into the technology sectors, Duncan/Gates devised a plan of extortion and bribery that would move states to sign on to new federal mandates in order to avoid the certain failure that was headed their way by 2014 if they did not.  Race to the Top offered would offer more money to states left desperate following the 2008 Crash, but to get the money, states had to sign on to Common Core (with online testing), removal of charter school caps that would allow accelerated expansion of charters, and value added test-based teacher evaluations that would be used to run off all those real teachers who refused to have the worth of their profession determined by a gain score from a junk test. 

There was a problem, however.  The National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences had issued, what's that!, another red flag, this time about using value-added test scores for high stakes purposes.  In fact, they wrote a 17 page letter during the RTTT pre-approval comment period to Arne Duncan stating the folly of using value added for high stakes purposes.  That was in the Fall of 2009.  Gates/Duncan proceeded without blinking, just as the Bush Gang had in the Fall of 2001when NCLB was ready for launch. 

In the Spring 2014, this fateful year for those who did not respond to the extortion and bribery by Duncan/Gates, the American Statistical Association underscored the NRC and NAS conclusions from 2009, with its own blistering appraisal of the continued use of value added testing for high stakes purposes.  This time Duncan/Gates responded by simply saying the scientists were wrong.

Which brings us the New York Times article today about what is going on in the state of Washington, where legislators have defied the the extortion and bribery schemes to expand the corporate takeover of public education. In doing so, they have awakened the insane proficiency mandates of NCLB, which remains in effect for those who will not go along with value-added test based teacher evaluations.  Here's a clip:

SEATTLE — Three years ago, Lakeridge Elementary School, where most pupils come from lower-income families, was totally remade. A new principal arrived and replaced half the staff, and she lengthened the school day and year. Working with a $3 million federal grant, the staff collaborated with the University of Washington to train teachers in new instructional techniques. The results were powerful: Test scores soared.

Yet just before school resumed for this fall, Lakeridge learned that it had been declared a failing school under federal education law.

In fact, nearly nine in 10 Washington State public schools, including some high-achieving campuses in the state’s most moneyed communities, have been relegated to a federal blacklist of failure, requiring them to set aside 20 percent of their federal funding for private tutoring or to transport students to schools not on the failing list, if parents wish.

The schools in Washington are caught in the political crossfire of a battle over education policy. Because the State Legislature has refused to require that teacher evaluations be based in part on student test scores, schools are being held to an outdated benchmark that is all but impossible to achieve — that by 2014, every single student would be proficient in reading and math. Thousands of schools in California, Iowa, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming have also been declared failing for the same reason. . . .

Gates/Duncan remain unmoved by the millions of students being cheated as a result of insane federal rules that are written to benefit corporations:

Mr. Duncan said he wanted states . . . to use student test performance as one of several measures to rate teachers. “The goal of teaching is students learning,” he said. “And this is a piece of evaluating what students are learning.”

Got that?  I close with a clip from the most recent reminder from the ASA to Duncan/Gates of the unethical, unreliable, and invalid use for which they insist on using to turn children into test scores for the benefit of the Oligarchs.

·      VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores, and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.

·      VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.

·      Under some conditions, VAM scores and rankings can change substantially when a different model or test is used, and a thorough analysis should be undertaken to evaluate the sensitivity of estimates to different models.

·      VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools.

·      Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.

An investigative documentary into the Common Core State Standards Initiative

BUILDING THE MACHINE (2014) - Official Trailer [HQ]

I want to use the same disclaimer here that I did the last time I posted Common Core State Standards (CSSS) related materials from sources that I disavow any connection with. The video is produced by, and also features, individuals that are from fringe-right-wing groups. The last time I published a disclaimer like this, I was subjected to a firestorm of criticism from the right. That's fine, we will never be allies in any sense other than shared opposition to the vile corporate CCSS curriculum being foisted on students. That said, there's a distinction to be made between factual information about CSSS, and ideological opposition. That's why I am posting this film trailer, because the factual case against CCSS can be made from either end of the political spectrum.

K-12NN Founder's Open letter to the President, entreating him to read Professor Ravitch

You would come to allow — or steer — some of the worst policies to undermine, weaken, and privatize public education through your appointee, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Those babies and toddlers you kissed grew up some, and are now entering kindergarten and first grade. In some states, children as young as first grade might be taking tests on art instead of actually creating art, or doing worksheets for "homework". — Dr. Cynthia Liu

Dr. Cynthia Liu is one of the Los Angeles region's best kept secrets. It's not that her K-12 News Network site isn't read nationally, or that she hasn't won awards for her blogging and innovative social media work. Yet somehow, inexplicably, she's often left out of the conversation about prominent writers opposing corporate neoliberal education reforms. That's tragic, because Liu is one of our profound thinkers on these issues. Moreover, her ability to write for a more moderate audience gives her cross-over appeal. Audiences that many leftist writers like myself inevitable turn off by quoting favorites like Bruce Dixon, Jonathan Kozol, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire. Liu has read all of those people too, she's just judicious on where and when she cites them.

Liu's latest essay entitled Open Letter to President Obama — The One Book You Should Read on Public Education: Reign of Error, By Diane Ravitch is masterful in that rather than skirt the fact that Barack Obama's policies have been disastrous, she calls them out while simultaneously giving the administration an opportunity to save face. She's not the only author to do that, our very own Dr. John Thompson frequently writes from that perspective as well, but this Liu piece is particularly effective. It's something I could send to my liberal friends that they wouldn't find offensive — the same folks that have told me my work offends them.

The essay artfully ties together a number of threads, and entreats the President to read Professor Diane Ravitch's latest book. About halfway through we're presented with a review of the book, written from the perspective of being a pedagogy for the President. Nice too, is that Liu's pointed criticisms of the charter sector that go even further than Ravitch's. It's an interesting way to write a review, in that there's a sort of exphrasis tailored to telling one of the chief architects why the structure isn't sound.

Her "open letter" to the President angle is actually a viable approach. While I personally voted for Cynthia McKinney in 2008, Dr. Jill Stein in 2012, and would proudly wear one the Too Left for Obama (2L4O) T-Shirts sold on the Black Agenda Report site, I'm not your typical voter. We need a broader base of people critiquing these policies, and writers like Liu are more likely to reach them. If you know any liberals, or misguided progressives, who are wrong on education issues, send them the link to the essay. It can't hurt to try.

New Report on Race to the Top Finds Many Wrecks in the Ditch or Over the Cliff

EPI and The Broader, Bolder Approach have an important important report on how things are going with Race to the Top (RTTT), or as it may be more aptly known, HUAP (Hurry Up and Privatize).  In examining what the states have done to get some of Arne's 3.4 billion bucks, the authors find confusion, conflict, corruptionism, confoundedness, and cautious dread (that's as optimistic as it gets in RTTT land these days).

In looking at the how bonus bribe points for RTTT grant applicants were stated, I have responded (after each below) to what this has meant in the RTTT golden state of Tennessee, where the first grant of $501 million was handed out by judges approved by the Gates Foundation.  With another $90 million going directly to Memphis from the Gates loose change drawer, Tennessee has since exploded with policies and practices antithetical enough to good education practice and friendly enough to CorpEd to earn the Seal of Approval by Arne Duncan.

To obtain points, states had to commit to specific changes:

• Develop teacher (and principal) evaluation systems that substantially rely on measures of student achievement and growth. States thus promised to develop strong data systems that would enable them to assess student progress and achievement and to evaluate teachers based in part on these data, using “value-added” measures that purport to assess teachers’ impact on student learning, distinct from other factors. These systems would eventually collect data based on the new, higher standards that states also had to adopt: 40 points out of the 500 were contingent on developing and adopting standards based on the Common Core State Standards, and RTTT is widely credited with spurring rapid adoption of the Common Core across almost all states (40 states competed in the first round of RTTT).

Just weeks before the RTTT Bribery Scam was announced in the Fall of 2009, the National Research Council and the National Academies of Science sent a 19 page letter to Arne Duncan that warned him that value-added measurements were not reliable enough to use for high stakes purposes.  What resulted in Tennessee was quick adoption of all the RTTT priorities by special legislative session in January 2010, including a Rube Goldberg model for teacher evaluation based on value-added scores, as documented by Michael Winerip.  

Teachers are now rated on a 1-5 scale based on value-added scores and observations that have been fine tuned to align with the test scores.  According to local teachers, the screws are being tightened each year now to make increase the number of 1s and 2s and decrease the numbers of 4s and 5s.  Where teachers teach subjects that aren't tested, their scores depend upon the school's overall scores, rather than their own.

• Strengthen teacher preparation programs and improve access to and quality of professional development programs.

This has led to closer alignment of teacher ed curricula with how to take and pass tests and how to use "data." Teacher ed programs are now rated on how well their graduates raise test scores.  The state plans to follow CorpEd's initiatives to weed out teacher ed candidates with lower ACTs or SATs, which guarantees to have a whitening effect to the surviving teacher ed programs.

• Identify alternative routes to certification in order to remove barriers to teaching for potentially strong teachers who might be impeded by existing systems or processes.

No problem.  Tennessee now has no caps on TFA, TeachPlus, TeachMemphis, and other start-ups where white girls, primarily, with no training are replacing teachers, particularly in Memphis's poorest schools.  The Walton Family Foundation just coughed up over $2 million in TN, alone, to pay the TFA home office cut for 550 new TFA teachers in Tennessee.  Over 200 new TFA beginners started work in Memphis this year.

Hundreds of real teachers in Memphis have been "surplussed" before the term was changed to "excessed," as a result of the Gates plan to turn urban Memphis into another New Orleans charter system.  Almost 200 of the "excessed" teachers are Level 4 or Level 5, which very nearly matches the number of TFA temps that started this year in Memphis.  This was posted at Facebook back in May by a Memphis teacher:

. . .a couple hundred excess teachers, including me, were herded into lines, in a hot hallway, to schedule short interviews with Principals of listed schools. Almost immediately, interview spots were called as filled at several schools. I got 1 interview, the only interview left for a position I qualify for. There were several hundreds behind me in line, I would say I was with in the first 50-70 in line... If not closer. So I leave a bit and come back for my 11:30 interview. On the door hung a sign that said "filled" and the position scribbled out. I returned to the Teach Memphis staff who said, "yeah, that position was already filled" and unapologetically invited me to the Networking Session at 1pm to leave my resumes with principals of schools that didn't have interviews spots available. I will go, and I will go tomorrow. But this seemed like a humiliating waste of time for professionals. . . 

• Identify and turn around the lowest-performing schools, using one of several strategies along the lines of federal school improvement grants. Strategies include firing the principal and/or much of the staff, turning the school over to a charter or other outside manager, or closing it altogether.

With the impetus from RTTT to focus on the bottom 5 percent of test scoring "priority" schools, Tennessee has an ongoing supply of charter targets (there will always be a bottom 5 percent).  With over 50 charters now and most of them located in Memphis, another 13 public schools have been put up for corporate auction for next year by the Achievement School District, a district on paper only, as it functions as Commish Huffman's state office that hands out charter contracts for schools that are being turned over for corporate control. 

So bottom line:  While the EPI Report finds many shortcomings in terms of results of RTTT, I would argue that RTTT has been wildly successful from the standpoint of the people who put it together.  Until we all come to realize that CorpEd does not believe any of their rhetoric about educational rights, civil rights, teacher quality, blah blah, and that their motivation is corporate takeover of schools, social control through testing, and the crushing of the teaching profession, then we will continue to tsk, tsk about what a failure RTTT has been.  IT HAS BEEN A HUGE SUCCESS FOR CORPORATE EDUCATION REFORMERS!!

Common Core State Standards Primer

Disclaimer: The publishers of this document, Truth in American Education, have some very disconcerting right-wing membership and advisors. I mean really right wing, like Heritage, Koret, the Teabaggers, and other assorted birthers and Birchers. However, this Common Core State Standards Primer document appears on the Hoosiers Against Common Core site that Professor Ravitch mentions in her recent Two Determined Moms in Indiana Take On Common Core post. Like the old adage: "even a broken clock is right twice a day," this flyer provides factual information on the Corporate, er... I mean Common Core State Standards. While I have major ideological differences with their organization, I find their assessment of CCSS to be pretty much spot on.

Common Core State Standards Primer by Shane Vander Hart

Continuing skirmishes with CCSS cheerleaders on Diane Ravitch's blog

"There is no evidence that standards and tests improve school achievement. The money budgeted for standards and tests to enforce the standards should be used to protect children from the effects of poverty." — Professor Stephen Krashen

The following is my edited commentary in response to comments by a CCSS supporter on the Professor Ravitch post: A Teacher of Latin Writes In Defense of Fiction.

Kaye Thompson Peters, I've grown weary of the trite "apple and oranges" device that you employ everywhere in your stalwart defense of Corporate Core. You even used it in a gushing apology for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Hoover's fringe-right EdNext. While you might not be uncomfortable that Pearson Education, Inc. has been promoting your writings on CCSS, it does cause some of us consternation. When discussing CCSS in relation to NCLB and RTTT, we're not conflating apples and oranges, we're discussing a bushel of rotten apples foisted on us by a bunch of billionaires suffering from the Shoe Button Complex.

To be sure, the revenue minded corporate overlords who coined Corporate Core have never considered high-stakes standardized testing a separate issue from their imposition of CCSS. They are one in the same and they serve the same set of goals in the neoliberal project of privatizing public schools. The Gates Foundation and the Duncan led Department of Education (my apologies for that redundancy) have been quite effective in convincing surrogates (some even in the AFT and NEA, sadly) to crow that they aren't inextricably linked. Such propaganda is so transparent that astute people see right through it. Ms. Peters, CCSS isn't a solution to, but instead it is a deliberate doubling down of, the vile policies of NCLB and RTTT.

Privatizer Dr. Catherine Thome's explanation for the impetus of Corporate Core tells us all we need to know about who stands to gain from CCSS:

"All students must be prepared to compete with not only their American peers in the next state, but with students around the world."

David Coleman's contempt for literature in English classes (at least for working class children) reflects both his corporate pedigree and that of his plutocrat handlers. It is no "red herring" to point out this glaring fault of CCSS, but I do agree with Mr. Heller that there are other fundamental flaws to this nationally imposed corporate curriculum. We need far more "Grapes of Wrath" and far less "FedViews" in this society. Sandra Stotsky does an excellent job taking on Coleman's corporate aims in her piece reproduced on the Parents Across America site.

Ultimately we must resist CCSS. Susan Ohanian, Professor Stephen Krashen, and the Schools Matter camp are leading the way on this. My recent short on Schools Matter has some great resource links for fighting CCSS.

Debunking Common Core Curriculum's so-called Four C's

"When you go to doctors, they don’t take all your blood, they only take a sample." — Professor Stephen Krashen

Professor Diane Ravitch had a brief comment entitled The True Goals of Education? this morning where a reader suggested a sort of whole child approach based on virtues as opposed to tedious test preparation. That in itself wouldn't merit much attention, but oddly one of the readers posted a comment suggesting that those self-same virtues were the stated intent of Common Core State Standards. The following was my response to that assertion:

For the plutocrat sponsors* of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to suggest that it has any goals beyond imbuing corporate servitude, compliance, petty jingoism, and acceptance of austerity is nothing short of pernicious propaganda.

Certainly David Coleman and Co. coined their "four C's" well after the fact, and clearly this was in response to to cogent criticisms by actual educators including Susan Ohanian, Professor Stephen Krashen, and others.

• Common Core State [sic] Standards
• Stephen Krashen brings Common Core debate to pages of the Sunday New York Times in time for the testing debate at the AFT convention
• BOONDOGGLE!
• High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle?

Everything in Corporate Core Curriculum is designed to discourage critical thinking skills, and this is why CCSS won't be required outside of public schools (eg. charters, parochial, and private schools). There definitely won't be any canned corporate curricula sponsored by the Gates Foundation inflicted on the children of privilege at schools like Sidwell Friends.

Like its fellow malignant projects "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top," CCSS has goals directly aligned to neoliberalism:

• Cause the appearance that the public school school system is broken, and that market solutions (charters/vouchers) would fare better.
• Control the curriculum and combat any chance that "dangerous" curricula that might cause people to resist neoliberalism or question corporate dominance is taught.
• Further sort students by race and class, and further subject them to endless mind numbing test preparation. Ultimately discouraging any critical thinking skills in any class outside those running society.
• Serve as the perfect excuse for union busting and the total deprofessionalization of teaching. Ultimately leading to low cost, but highly profitable delivery of necessary information (informational texts anyone?) to those not deemed as needing critical thinking. Real teaching will continue to exist in the hallowed halls of elite private schools for scion of the ruling class.
• Obscene profits for charlatans like Pearson, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Gideon Stein, and everyone else associated with the diverse markets connected to school privatization, real estate, and the standardized-testing-industrial-complex.

We must resist Corporate Core by every means posible. Paris 1968 is a good model for us to follow. If we don't, we may as well begin writing our eulogies for public education today.

_____
* I'm not saying Mr. Mindlin is working for one of them. He did, after all, say the so-called "four C's" were "allegedly" at the heart of CCSS.

Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters'

"Just continue to follow the money. This Race to the Trough will make the Reading First crooks under Bush look like dopey Boy Scouts." — Professor Jim Horn

The neoliberal cabal at Southern California's KPCC can't cheerlead for school privatization loud or frequently enough. Not content with Pat Morrison lobbing softballs to Broad Superintendent Academy graduate and former Gates Foundation employee John Deasy once a week, KPCC's intrepid education beat reporters are always looking for the latest anti-public-school story angle.

Tami Abdollah's latest piece, Size matters in new district-level 'Race to the Top' competition, is a fluffy homage to Deasy and fellow poverty pimp Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The light-on-facts article enthusiastically reports the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) "has worked to institute a lot of the" corporate reforms and privatization requirements that Duncan, Gates, Broad and Coleman want to see for Race to the Top.

I chimed in with the following commentary:

There's a fundamental misunderstanding of Race to the Top (RTTT) in this article. RTTT funds, if granted, are not for things that actually improve education like smaller class sizes or researched backed academic programs including project based learning and the like.

Instead RTTT funds are earmarked for The Gates Foundation and Education Department's pet projects that don't help educational outcomes at all. If anything, they exacerbate problems. RTTT funds are for more profligate data tracking systems. More mind-numbing standardized tests and test preparation for students already averse to school because of a glut of standardized tests. Moreover, RTTT is to be used for highly discredited pseudo-sciences including VAM/AGT.

The district would be better off finding legitimate sources of funding that they can put into classrooms and school libraries. RTTT represents a windfall for testing companies, publishers, and technology firms, but offers nothing for actual improvement to pedagogy. Pearson, Microsoft, and McGraw Hill stand to gain from LAUSD garnering RTTT.

Schoolchildren, educators, and our communities all stand to lose if LAUSD does somehow get tangled up in Duncan's RTTT bribe scheme.

Obscuring history and human agency through NCLB, RTTT and CCSS

"Prior research, then, strongly suggests that charter programs have not lived up to their initial promise of transcending the segregating effects of traditional district boundary lines. In fact, these studies indicate charters exacerbate already rampant school segregation, particularly for Black students." — Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Jia Wang

The Smith and Carlos Statue
at San José State University

I was reading Dave Zirin's latest piece, Fists of Freedom: An Olympic Story Not Taught in School, this morning and several things stood out and had me thinking in terms of how Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and its related high-stakes testing regimes not only distort curriculum, but how they are intended to distort students' consciousness of their reality.

It was probably Zirin's mention of the testing-industrial-complex conglomerates Pearson and Prentice Hall in his first paragraph that had me thinking of the article from a perspective of the damage Corporate Core Standards are poised to inflict on working class children. Zirin points out that entire history and context that are associated with the iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City is completely lost in the corporate account of the photo and the period. Also absent from the curriculum published by the profitable firm best known for Pineapplegate is an explanation of white supremacist Avery Brundage's kowtowing to Hitler in 1936.

Zirin proceeds to fill in all the details and context missing from Pearson's corporate account in a way that will frighten StudentsFirst's David Coleman since it exposes power inequalities and racism at every level of society. As in the case of Texas textbooks, this is the kind of history that Corporate Core Standards is trying to obscure, distort, and deny at every turn.

The essay ends with:

The story of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics deserves more than a visual sound bite in a quickie textbook section on "Black Power." As the Zinn Education Project points out in its "If We Knew Our History" series, this is one of many examples of the missing and distorted history in school, which turns the curriculum into a checklist of famous names and dates. When we introduce students to the story of Smith and Carlos' defiant gesture, we can offer a rich context of activism, courage, and solidarity that breathes life into the study of history—and the long struggle for racial equality.

Several very important points here. First Zirin cites "many examples of the missing and distorted history in school," which of course, is by design. Our oppressors not only don't want young people to learn specific ideas and examples of struggle, they especially don't want students to draw the conclusion that they can actually change their reality through struggle. Instead students should become depositories for what Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and David Coleman feel prepares them "college and career" (read low paying service sector jobs). Never let students begin to engage in critical thinking since that might allow them draw their own conclusions of society, or worse, try to address systemic problems. Confer:

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. — Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

Keeping the history of struggle away from the most oppressed in society is of paramount importance to the billionaires, profiteers, and racist politicians pushing school privatization via charters and vouchers. We see examples of this everywhere. From the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) Corporate Charter chain denying African American students their history and culture, to Michael Hicks, Tom Horne, or John Huppenthal's book burnings banning in Arizona, to the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS) removing access to ethnic studies and heritage language programs for impoverished students of color, there's a deliberate effort on the part of the corporate education reform junta to prevent teaching critical thinking in lieu of memorization of material for standardized tests.

Zirin then mentions that shrinking curriculums, epitomized by CCSS, "turns the curriculum into a checklist of famous names and dates." Putting aside the glaring fact that this again speaks precisely to the banking concept of education aforementioned, CCSS and its attendant testing regime have all but enshrined the "Great Man Theory" of history. This isn't surprising given the extremely high opinion Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, and all the other corporate education reform billionaires hold of themselves. Much of corporate education reform, including the idea that market concepts like competition will improve education, are a reflection of its proponents' extreme narcissism.

Common Core State Standards, like all the other components of corporate education reform, are an antithesis of social justice. Reducing students to repositories of information deemed important by David Coleman is part and parcel the banking system of education. Instead of teaching students what they need to liberate themselves, Corporate Core Standards were designed to insure passivity and compliance. We must resist the real "status quo" of arbitrary standards and high-stakes standardized tests by every means possible. We must use Smith and Carlos' example of resistance not as something to regurgitate on a Scantron form, but as something we must do ourselves.

Gates, ALEC, and Tennessee Miracles

Roll Call has a story this morning on the Plutocracy's attempts to crawl of out of sight from the Web spotlight that is now shining on their corporate coddling of the fascist outfit, ALEC.  And yes, Gates is among those to look shocked and say wh. . .?  This comes only after $375,000 was paid for lobbying and lawyering and bill writing in the area of anti-teacher and anti-public school activity in states like Tennessee, now Ground Zero in the war against public education.

The foundation, run by the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and his wife, contributed more than $375,000 to ALEC in the past two years and was the target of an online petition launched today by the liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee that garnered more than 23,000 signatures in a matter of hours.

“We have made a single grant, narrowly and specifically focused on providing information to ALEC-affiliated state legislators on teacher effectiveness and school finance,” said Chris Williams, the spokesman, noting that the foundation was never a dues-paying member. The foundation advocates for global health initiatives and efforts to reduce poverty.

Just a few days ago the"news source," Chattanoogan.com, changed a few words in corporate-run State Achievement District press release that announced the bidding has begun on charterizing of Tennessee's public schools, beginning with those with the poorest students and, thus, the lowest test scores.  The "Achievement" District became a new entity in early 2010, thanks to legislation passed with the help of ALEC and Gates.  The CEO of the Achievement District is the Commissioner of Education, Kevin Huffman, whose goals are the same at the TFA cult that still controls him. 

The Race to the Top grant of $501,000,000, written by Gates Foundation employees or former employees and judged by the same crew,  will allow for the bottom 5 percent per year of schools to be taken over each year by corporate charter companies, who bring their own unique brand of penal pedagogy to Tennessee's most vulnerable children. 

With this new influx of out-of-state corporate reform school bottom feeders, there is a big, big promise that they are making: to move the lowest 5 percent of schools into the top 25 percent of schools within five years.  From Chattanoogan.com the State Achievment District:

The nation’s top school operators are competing for the opportunity to open schools in Tennessee.  In an effort to ensure the lowest performing 5 percent of schools in the state will perform among the top 25 percent within five years, Tennessee’s Achievement School District is working to expand existing, high-performing charter schools as well as attract new operators that will provide transformational educational opportunities for students in the state.  Achievement School District (ASD) received applications from school operators to begin serving Tennessee students as soon as the 2013-2014 academic year.

Obviously, the KIPP corporate reform school model will be in operation: minimal enrollment of special education, ELLs, disabled, and any children of any parents who are not accepting of total control, total compliance, and test prep factory learning. 

Tennessee is quickly approaching the point when Schools (will not) Matter, for any potential good, anyway. 

Sign up for the 99% Spring Training in Non-Violent Direct Action Here.

Rushing Toward the Cliff While “Tweaking” the “Quirks”

In 2001, the PR firms that the Business Roundtable hired to sell their plan to blow up public schools and to rebuild them in the corporate image for corporate benefit could not have settled on a more cynical and appealing mantra: we must close the achievement gap, and NCLB is the way to do it.

Now over ten years later, the gaps are still gaping and growing wider as the achievement disparities map click by click onto to the diverging lines on the inequality chart between rich and poor. Who would have guessed that applying thumbscrews to the most vulnerable of the nation’s teachers and students would not have had the desired effect of ending the achievement gap? Even though it did have tremendous benefit to the corporate charter school cause.

Since 2001 the Business Roundtable has been joined by venture philanthropists, hedge funders, edupreneurs, real estate outfits, corporate foundations, and various other corporate welfare vampires to finish the job that was left when the social neocons lost to Team Obama, who took control and quickly turned over the ED keys to the neoliberal wing of the Corporate Party.  Same agenda, intensified, with different players.

Now we see the same "gap" language being used to support the latest assault against common sense and scientific consensus that is rushing forward in order to finish the job that NCLB started.   This is from the NYTimes revisit to Tennessee, with a reporter this time much more attuned to the Gates and Broad agenda for turning teachers and principals into data-shuffling robots (see the Winerip story for a more realistic view of what is going in Tennessee, where $501,000,000 in RttT money has, overnight, displaced Southern modesty with unmitigated corporate arrogance).

This is from today's Times piece, quoting the lawyer for the BRT hothouse for phony teacher research, The New Teacher Project (my bold):

    Backers of the new approaches say that change takes time. “You have to start the process somewhere,” said Daniel Weisberg, executive vice president and general counsel at The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit agency founded in 1997. “If you don’t solve the problem of teacher quality, you will continue to have an achievement gap.”

Really, Mr. Weisberg?  You expect us to believe that we need teachers to stick to the teacher eval scheme designed by Achieve, Inc., and we must have principals to adhere with equal mindlessness to that scheme when observing?  And this will close the achievement gap?  And if teachers and principals don’t, the process will eliminate them, even though we know that the process is built on a pedagogically-indefensible house of cards?  And we must use value-added test scores, too, is that right, a plan that even Bush’s former head of education research knows is a joke that no teacher, or her lawyer, is amused by:

    States “are racing ahead based on promises made to Washington or local political imperatives that prioritize an unwavering commitment to unproven approaches,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There’s a lot we don’t know about how to evaluate teachers reliably and how to use that information to improve instruction and learning.”

Here are a few other clips from the Times piece today:

    Steve Ball, executive principal at the East Literature Magnet School in Nashville, arrived at an English class unannounced one day this month and spent 60 minutes taking copious notes as he watched the teacher introduce and explain the concept of irony. “It was a good lesson,” Mr. Ball said.

    But under Tennessee’s new teacher-evaluation system, which is similar to systems being adopted around the country, Mr. Ball said he had to give the teacher a one — the lowest rating on a five-point scale — in one of 12 categories: breaking students into groups. Even though Mr. Ball had seen the same teacher, a successful veteran he declined to identify, group students effectively on other occasions, he felt that he had no choice but to follow the strict guidelines of the state’s complicated rubric.

    “It’s not an accurate reflection of her as a teacher,” Mr. Ball said.

    . . . .

 

    Each observation focuses on one or two of four areas: instruction, professionalism, classroom environment and planning. Afterward, the observer scores the teacher according to the state’s detailed and computerized system. Instruction, for example, has 12 subcategories, including “motivating students” and “presenting instructional content.” Motivating students, in turn, has subcategories like “regularly reinforces and rewards effort.” In all, there are 116 subcategories.

    . . . .

    For principals, it is not just the observations, but also the pre-conference (where teachers explain and show the lesson), the post-conference (where observers explain what teachers might have done better) and four to six hours inputting data. “We are spending a lot of time evaluating people we know are very good teachers,” Mr. Kilzer said. 

 

    For principals, it is not just the observations, but also the pre-conference (where teachers explain and show the lesson), the post-conference (where observers explain what teachers might have done better) and four to six hours inputting data. “We are spending a lot of time evaluating people we know are very good teachers,” Mr. Kilzer said.

    . . . .

    Gera Summerford, president of the Tennessee Education Association, compared the new evaluations to taking your car to the mechanic and making him use all of his tools to fix it, regardless of the problem, and expecting him to do it in an hour.

Hawaii's Teachers Take a Stand: Take Your RTTT Bribe and Shove It

From Valerie Strauss at WaPo:

Public school teachers in Hawaii have rejected a contract that called for a move to a performance-based evaluation and compensation system, as required by the Race to the Top grant that the state won from the Obama administration.

The rejection comes shortly after Hawaii was warned by the U.S. Education Department that its $75 million Race to the Top grant had been put on “high-risk status” — the first state to be so sanctioned — because it had not moved quickly enough to implement specific reforms.

Sixty-seven percent of about 9,000 teachers, counselors and others represented by the Hawaii State Teachers Association opposed the contract, which was seen as a way to move Race to the Top efforts forward and improve its status with Washington. It was the first time in the organization’s 44-year history that members rejected a contract that had been approved by its board, according to the Hono­lulu Civil Beat.

The Hono­lulu Civil Beat put this headline on a story it ran announcing the defeat of the contract proposal: “Hawaii Teachers Vote a Stunning Blow For Race to the Top”

Race to the Top is the administration’s signature education initiative, a $4 billion-plus contest in which states and districts have competed for a slice of the money in exchange for implementing school reform policies favored by the department. Those include expanding charter schools and evaluating teachers in part on the basis of students’ standardized test scores. Twenty-one states plus the District of Columbia have been awarded grants through several rounds of Race to the Top. Hawaii won $75 million but could lose its grant (a few million dollars have already been spent) if the department is not satisfied with the pace of reform there.

Education Department officials told Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) in a recent letter that the progress the state had made in implementing reforms in the first 14 months of the grant had been “unsatisfactory.” Federal officials are planning to visit Hawaii early this year to do an on-site evaluation of Race to the Top compliance.

The proposed contract called for a new evaluation system for teachers that would be partly based on student growth, a controversial approach because there are many factors that influence a student’s academic performance and teasing out how much a teacher is responsible is very difficult. The formulas that are used to try to do this rely on standardized test scores earned by students and are not sophisticated enough to be valid or fair, assessment experts say, although policymakers have forged ahead with these systems anyway.

But the contract proposal, according to several Hawaii newspapers, did not actually spell out the details of how the new evaluation system would work. It would, however, have reversed a 5 percent pay reduction that went into effect last year.

Hawaii may be having the biggest trouble among Race to the Top recipients satisfying the Education Department, but it isn’t the only one; implementation in several states is slow.

The Associated Press reported earlier this month that reports issued by states detailing their progress in the first year of their Race to the Top grant showed that most of them were behind schedule with implementation. New York and Florida were having the most serious problems aside from Hawaii, the AP said.

Respectable Academics Standing Up to Chief Corporate Goon, Rick Hess

Of the many things I get red in the face about is the fact that education academics, my colleagues,  have been sitting on their hands in in their pre-fab towers (ed school people don't get into the real university Tower), thinking they are above the dirty fray or the screamers on the Right who want to take down the Republic by dismantling public instituions.  Recently, however, I have noticed a number of relevant and readable pieces coming from Teachers College Record, one of the chief hangouts for academics who usually write for an audience of 5.  I was so impresse that I actually gave up $16 to renew an online subscription. 

Apparently the bots of the Borg have noticed, too, for recently they sent out their chief ed hack unit to attack a TC article by Valente and Collins on the idiocy and unfairness of RTTT.  Well, Valente and Collins have come out of their mobile home tower to defend themselves.  Here is a clip, but do read the whole thing here:

. . .  .Who is getting Race money? It is those who are already achieving on standardized tests and who were already winning the Race.

Take a look at the numbers on who receives the benefit of the Race to the Top funds, this from a joint report by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, National Action Network, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., National Council for Educating Black Children, National Urban League, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Schott Foundation for Public Education:⁹

1) 37 percent of the finalist states receive free and reduced lunch

2) 14 percent of the finalist states are Hispanic

3) 2.5 percent of the students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch nationwide receive monies from Race to the Top

4) 3 percent of Black students nationwide receive monies from Race to the Top

5) less than 1 percent of Latino, Native American, and Hmong students receive monies from Race to the Top

In short, the Race to the Top disproportionally benefits affluent or well-to-do, white, and “abled” students.  

Is this a race to the top or a race rigged for the top? . . .

Ooh, good one.

Karen Lewis on RTTT, Charters, and More

One can hope we are looking at the next President of the AFT:

Children, Parents, and Teachers Pushed to the Bottom in "Race to the Top"

From Tennessee to New York: Welcome Back to School--You Fail!

Jim Horn

When Tennessee children left school in early June, the majority of them were proficient in reading and math.  When they return to school later this month, most of that majority of children will not be proficient or even close to it.  From Saturday's The Commercial Appeal:

Friday, the State Board of Education passed new "cut" scores for the state tests, retooled last year to match more rigorous curriculum and standards the state began adopting in 2007.

Based on the new scores, more than 52 percent of third-graders flunked math in the just-finished school year.

And the news gets worse with each grade. In grade six, for instance, nearly 70 percent flunked math; in grade eight, 75 percent failed.

Reading in most grades was slightly better, with the failure rate at 52 percent for fifth-graders and moving up to 57 percent for eighth-graders.

"I think that everyone in the room fully realized that tough work lies ahead and that there would ultimately be real consequences for students, our districts and our state," said Memphian Teresa Sloyan, a member of the State Board of Education.

"For the first time we will know where our children are in terms of their academic preparedness."

In the test taken in the spring of 2009, 91 percent of Tennessee students scored advanced or proficient. . . .

So the new mass failure, thank goodness, doesn’t have anything to do with all the video games or hours of TV watching that filled students’ time this summer.  For the majority of children to become failures overnight, it took coordination from a set of policy recommendations by Achieve, Inc. (the education arm of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Roundtable), a lame duck governor, Phil Bredesen, who sits as Co-Chair of Achieve, Inc., and a Tennessee State Board of Education willing to toe the line of the corporate education reformers who now run the U. S. Department of Education, which paid out $500 million to Tennessee last spring in the Race to the Top.  In short, it is time for Tennessee school children, parents, and teachers to suffer the consequences of Tennessee’s acceptance of the RTTT money and corporate governance of schools.

This most recent “standard setting process,” then, that culminated July 30 with the establishment of new cut scores, or passing scores, for TCAP will, no doubt, cause much confusion and not a small amount of anxiety and heartbreak for children and their parents.  The confusion and misinformation can already be seen in one of the first editorials on the subject in The Commercial Appeal:

Huge drops in scores are predicted as the questions get harder in an effort to match tests administered to students in the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP].

The truth of the matter is that there are no tougher or harder questions responsible for the testing sledgehammer that has just come down.  The failure fever that will set in over the next few weeks as parents learn of the new “standard setting” by the State comes, in fact, from moving back the goalposts after the ball has been kicked.  (The same thing happened Friday, by the way, in New York).  The students who would have split the uprights under the TCAP rules last Spring when they took the test will now see their effort fall way short of the goalposts, which have suddenly been moved as a result of the new cut scores just established while the ball was still in the air.

According to the State Board of Education’s “independent” expert hired to oversee the “standard setting” process, Dr. Wayne Camara, who, by the way, sits on the Board of Directors for the Association of Test Publishers, the new cut scores were greatly influenced by consideration of external data from NAEP and ACT, even though panelists were instructed NOT to use NAEP or ACT as evidence in establishing cut scores for the TCAP.  NAEP and ACT were to inform but not influence.  It is as if a judge were to allow a load of evidence he knew to be prejudicial ahead of time, while telling the jury to disregard it in arriving at a verdict.

Now if Goldilocks would have found Tennessee’s former TCAP surely too soft prior to the most recent “standard setting” by the State, there is no doubt that she would find the new NAEP-influenced TCAP much too hard.  For the cut scores for NAEP, which have shaped by the Tennessee jury’s verdict despite the complicit judge’s instruction to the contrary, have been failing the Goldilocks test on the hard side for a long, long time, as leading academics and psychometricians found in 1991, when they were hired by the governing board of NAEP (NAGB) to make recommendations about NAEP’s own “standard setting” process. From a 2008 article in The School Administrator by Gerald Bracey:

The governing board hired a team of three well-known evaluators and psychometricians to evaluate the process — Daniel Stufflebeam of Western Michigan University, Richard Jaeger of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Michael Scriven of NOVA Southeastern University. The team delivered its final report on Aug. 23, 1991. This process does not work, the team averred, saying: "[T]he technical difficulties are extremely serious … these standards and the results obtained from them should under no circumstances be used as a baseline or benchmark … the procedures used in the exercise should under no circumstances be used as a model."

NAGB, led by Chester E. Finn Jr., summarily fired the team, or at least tried to. Because the researchers already had delivered the final report, the contract required payment.

The inappropriate use of these levels continues today. The achievement levels have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing and the Brookings Institution, as well as by individual psychometricians.

I have repeatedly observed that the NAEP results do not mesh with those from international comparisons. In the 1995 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, assessment, American 4th graders finished third among 26 participating nations in science, but the NAEP science results from the same year stated that only 31 percent of them were proficient or better.

If anyone from Pearson, Inc. or Achieve, Inc., the two outfits now running education in Tennessee, had bothered to ask either the scientific or academic community about using NAEP as inspiration“NOT” for TCAP’s new cut scores, they would have been told to steer clear.  Did I mention that Dr. Camara notes in his report that there were no representatives from higher education and no college faculty included as part of Tennessee’s recent “standard setting” process?  Seems that could have been important input to add to Achieve’s panel, since one primary purpose for the new cut scores is purportedly to better prepare Tennessee student for college.   But I digress.

Achieve, Inc. and Pearson, Inc. didn’t even have to ask a scientist or a professor. NAEP, in fact, includes its own warning sign to users at its website:

The National Assessment Governing Board, as directed by the NAEP legislation, has been developing achievement levels for NAEP since 1990. A broadly representative panel of teachers, education specialists, and members of the general public help define and review achievement levels. As provided by law, the achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution.

If you click on the link just above, “used on a trial basis,” you will get the text described here by Bracey (2005):

Even the NAEP reports themselves contain a disclaimer quoting from the NAS study: "NAEP's current achievement level setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters' judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results."

Fundamentally flawed? Judgments inconsistent? Validity evidence lacking?

Can you imagine the howls of outrage that would greet ETS or CTB/McGraw-Hill [or Pearson, who now has the Tennessee contract] if they dared bring to market an instrument with such basic failures? So why are we still using the achievement levels? The official story from the U. S. Department of Education is that "a proven alternative to the current process has not yet been identified." That was written in 1998. One would think that a Department as obsessed with applying "scientifically based research" as the current one would have screamed in horror at the flawed achievement levels and rushed to fix them.

The truth is, though, neither the Department nor anyone else is trying to develop a "proven alternative." Indeed, many observers believe that the NAEP achievement levels, created by the National Assessment Governing Board under its then-president Chester Finn, were deliberately set too high in order to sustain the sense of crisis created by 1983's "A Nation At Risk." There is no rush to develop new achievement level setting procedures because much political hay can be made by alleging that American students are performing poorly.

Conspiracy theory, you say.  Bah humbug, etc. Not quite. Again, from Bracey (2008), who cites a study done by Gary Phillips that examined how well top-testing students from other countries would do if they had to sit for the NAEP:

Phillips, now at the American Institutes for Research, had asked: “If students in other nations sat for NAEP assessments in reading, mathematics and science, how many of them would be proficient?”

Because we have scores for American students on NAEP and TIMSS and scores for students in other countries on TIMSS, it is possible to estimate the performance of other nations if their students took NAEP assessments.

How many of the 45 countries in TIMSS have a majority of their students proficient in reading? Zero, said Phillips. Sweden, the highest scoring nation, would show about one-third of its students proficient while the United States had 31 percent. In science, only two nations would have a majority of their students labeled proficient or better while six countries would cross that threshold in mathematics.


So why, then, did the U. S. Department of Education and the Gates-Broad acolytes who run it find such comfort in Tennessee’s plan to drastically increase its numbers of failing schools? So much so that they would cough up $500 million in RTTT funds?

Well, think about it.  Whose interests are served in expanding failure on a grand scale?  Could it be the charter school CEOs of the CMOs and the EMOs will have years more of school turnaround opportunities?  Will lower scores benefit the corporate enemies of the teaching profession like Gates and Broad and the Business Roundtable, especially since job security and pay in Tennessee, thanks to the RTTT deal, are now to be determined significantly by test scores?  Will standardized testing remain the reason we have schools for another generation of children who, meanwhile, become less capable of thinking as a result? Will the general public remain distracted by the continuing "failure" of schools while the oligarchy continues to ship our jobs and wealth abroad? As Bracey notes at the end of a 2007 op-ed at WaPo, “A Test Everyone Will Fail,”

If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase "failing schools" in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

WikiPeeks Offers Up Secret Draft of Duncan Speech Announcement

Secretary Duncan will speak at noon today to announce news regarding Race to the Top.  Schools Matter was able to acquire this earlier draft of ED's announcement from WikiPeeks:

The Quiet Coup Revolution
From journalists and educators to politicians and parents, there is a growing sense that a silent corporate overthrow quiet revolution is underway in our public institutions homes and schools, classrooms and communities.

On Tuesday, July 27, Secretary Arne Duncan will talk about this fascist undercover covert quiet revolution in a major speech at the National Press Club at 12:30 pm ET.

This quiet revolution is driven by corporate oligarchs motivated parents who want more better business opportunities educational options for the education industry their children and is driven by corporate foundations educators and administrators who are claiming huge tax credits challenging the inertia that will guarantee a generation of compliant workers has trapped generations of children in second-rate schools.

The Obama administration would rather not admit that it is playing a key modest role in sparking this unpopular overthrow of schools quiet revolution through outright bribes Race to the Top and other bundles of cash reform initiatives that are giving starving and desperate states the payoffs incentive to accept national testing raise standards, bust the unions improve teacher effectiveness, build constant surveillance data systems, and replace public schools with charters turn around low-performing schools.

During the speech, Duncan will announce Race to the Top finalists.

Watch the speech live on the web at 12:30 pm ET

Team Obama Suggested Cutting Food Stamps to Maintain Duncan's RTTT Bribes

Thank God for David Obey, quoted here from EmptyWheel:

The secretary of Education is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted .… So, when we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal.

So as far as I’m concerned, the secretary of Education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He’s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.”

We gave [Duncan] $4.3 billion in the stimulus package, no questions asked. He could spend it any way he wants. … I trusted the secretary, so I gave him a hell of a lot more money than I should have.

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the Secretary of Education.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change. [emphasis original]

Do read on.  Fascinating.