Marc Tucker Digs Up New Rationale for Public School "Unbuilding"

Marc Tucker is at it again, with a newly-excavated rationale for blowing up public schools and universities.  

My reaction:

Tucker continues to weave a narrative that entirely ignores the systematic formation in the early 20th Century of a racist and classist education system that reflected the prejudices of social efficiency zealots, who threw open the doors to the new education factories they built for exploitation by succeeding generations of snake oil salesmen with a never-ending supply of fake remedies for manufactured problems.

The learning "crisis" of American schools in the 1970s grew from an unacknowledged fear of racial integration and social progress. The rise of testing accountability, which was based on the same racist testing technologies from the eugenics era earlier in the 20th Century, functioned to efficiently label, sort, and segregate students, and to further incentivize the monetization of public education by what has since become the testing-technological complex.

Mr. Tucker's half-baked history lesson and his blinkered rationalizations would clear the way for another generation of capitalist plunderers who know nothing about schooling, learning, or teaching, this time centered in Silicon Valley and backed by another generation venture philanthropists with self-serving solutions. With new schemes in the making for increased monitoring, surveillance, data sharing, neurological reprogramming (SEL), and increased screen time isolation, the paternalist threat to humane learning environments and democratic institutions has never been greater, and the opportunities for social capital investment predators has never been higher.

There is nothing new in Mr. Tucker's tired tirade that we haven't heard before. His suggestion to allow a new generation of "scientific" managers to "unbuild" public schools and public universities expresses an antiquarian faith in the ingenuity of capitalist enterprise in education that is as undeserved as it is irresponsible.

Tucker and Ravitch Lock Arms to Support Testing Genocide "every couple of years"

The big "debate" going on in anti-reformy ed circles seems to center on whether to embrace child abuse by standardized testing every year (as we have now) or, as Ravitch and Tucker prefer, child abuse by standardized testing "every couple of years."

And even though the corporate foundations have obviously conceded the point by allowing the Senate ESEA version to pass out of the Senate with child abuse testing "every couple of years" intact, the continued "debate" is just the kind of bad theater that anti-reformyists hope will allow AFT/NEA/NPE/FairTest (and Hillary's advisor, Marc Tucker) to claim a big victory, when child abuse by testing "every couple of years" becomes the new ESEA law of the land.

With apologies to the Bard, a turd by any other name would smell as awful.

There is no standardized test that is not high stakes, not even the vaunted NAEP, with its cut scores designed by Ravitch's old pals to make American schools look bad.

And we know that concept and practice of high stakes is both racist and classist, since the poor and brown are the ones who suffer most from the outcomes (labeling, sorting, and segregation).  Bobby Kennedy's pipe dream of using testing accountability to make sure poor children got what they needed to be educationally successfully, has always been chimerical since it was first dreamed up in the 60s. 

As long as the testing shell game continues, so will the continued oppression of the oppressed in the name of educational equity.

And as the anti-reformy crowd continue their kabuki based on industrial strength testing or testing-lite, the real debate on the planned charter takeover of public schools remains off the radar.

After all, AFT/NEA/NPE/Fairtest all know they can protest and resist only as much as the corporate foundations allow.

Testing Hysteria Lite, by Marc Tucker

If you were to believe the spin in the New York Times the other day, you would think that Marc Tucker, who has long been Hillary Clinton's main man on education issues, had decided that high stakes testing was a thing of the past: "Tucker would not abolish tests, but he would have fewer of them. And they would have a different purpose."

I downloaded Joe Nocera's new Tucker bible, Fixing Our National Accountability System, and grabbed a few highlights so that you can see what all the excitement about, right? (Click to enlarge.)

But here is the real bottom line message for the new Tuckerism, which looks remarkably like the old Tuckerism.