This review of another of Bellwether's AI propaganda pieces nails it. Founded by Andy Rotherham, Bellwether is a neoliberal non-profit sludge tank focused on generating reports for the purpose of bending educational institutions to the American corporate will.
Rotherham got his start as an education advisor of then-President and neoliberal darling, Bill Clinton. Rotherham successfully leveraged his hanger-on status in the DLC to become a prominent propagandist for expanding the value of the education industry to enriching corporate America's bottom line. As such, he ably represents a long line of parasitic pandhandlers who make a living selling corporate solutions that are desperate for educational problems.
A big thank you to Anne Lutz Fernandez, who provides the following primer on the anti-education propagandists who are set upon warping the minds of children who they hope will grow up to be uneducated MAGA stooges.
An ambitious project began with a moral panic, stoked early in the pandemic, about the nation’s schoolchildren. A “woke” army ofradical leftist teacherswas allegedly indoctrinating America’s youth.
Though ongoing, the panic can now be filed under the label, Every Accusation is a Confession — because the project’s next phase is underway, instituting far-right indoctrination in schools.
It’s a conspiracy!
Calling critical race theorists conspiracists, MAGA insisted that, despite educators’ denials, CRT was secretly being taught in K-12. In an explainer, Heritage instructed parents how to find the CRT snuck into kids’ backpacks.
Now, red states are weaving MAGA conspiracies into Social Studies curriculum. In May, Oklahoma approved standards requiring teaching the conspiracy, led by Donald Trump, that the 2020 election was stolen and treating the Covid lab leak theory as fact. Florida’s new curriculum has students (in grades, 6, 7, 8, and 9-12!) learning “The History of Communism” in ways that PEN America describes as “a dangerous recasting of McCarthyism as patriotism and dissent as ‘un-American.’”
It’s indoctrination!
A Trump executive order in January summarized MAGA messaging on K-12 over these past few years:
parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies… Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination.
The EO calls for schools to “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation” and goes on to clarify that the education they seek depicts the U.S. and its history in entirely glowing terms:
Now they’ve built an echo chamber to make this happen: the America 250 Civics Coalition, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon. From American First Policy Institute to Hillsdale College to Heritage, Turning PointUSA, Moms4Liberty, and more, the initiative’s 40 partners are a diverse set of organizations from the far-right to farther-right to cheek-against-the-wall. They’re collaborating on propaganda for K-12 packaged as civics.
It’s extreme!
The right has been using the term “gender ideology” to smear as extremist inclusive policies and teaching about women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. This has involved flinging bizarre fictions about cat litter in classrooms and teachers performing transgender operations. A recurring theme: schools aligning themselves with extreme ideologies and working to turn children’s loyalty. Trump 2.0 has been pulling funds for programs they paint with this or the “DEI” brush.
Now America 250 is tapping ideologues such as pro-authoritarian Dennis Prager. His fake university’s videos include counter-factual material on slavery, gender, climate, and more, sometimes presented by high-profile extremists. In these videos, which various states have been adopted, “Extreme ideas are presented as common beliefs.” Dennis Prager makes no bones about his agenda, admitting, “‘We bring doctrines to children. That is a very fair statement. I said, “But what is the bad of our indoctrination?”’”
. . . . red states are lining up to pledge allegiance to the Heritage Foundation’s education “vision.” Gov. RonDeSantis got there first, signing the think tank’s Phoenix Declaration, a documentcarefully wordedto appear not as out of the mainstream as its authors — or as its prime source, Project 2025. Yet the call for schools to “cultivate gratitude for and attachment to our country and all who serve its central institutions” is just one hint that to sign is to pledge allegiance to the MAGA pols in control of many of those institutions. . . .
A great piece in Mother Jones about public education dollars being drained away to indoctrinate children in white nationalist "religious" schools.
Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally as a convicted felon at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, hosted by the arch-conservative student group Turning Point USA. This wasn’t Trump’s first appearance at Dream City Church; he also held
a rally there with Turning Point USA in 2020. For events like this,
it’s an ideal venue: A weekly attendance of around 21,000 believers
makes this one of the largest churches not just in Arizona but in the nation.
Dream City, which didn’t respond to my questions for this story, is a
mecca for special guests who blur the line between religion and
politics. Its annual conference has featured notables like musician and
pastor Sean Feucht, who participated in a White House prayer session for President Trump in 2019 and is currently leading a tour
of prayer rallies at state capitol buildings across the country. The
lineup for this year’s event also included David Barton, whose
organization, WallBuilders,
teaches K-12 students about the supposed Christian origins of America;
Jurgen Mathesius, a pastor at San Diego’s far-right Awaken Church, which
has become a stop on Mike Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour; and Jentezen Franklin, a televangelist who also spoke at the 2022 Pray Vote Stand Summit, which mobilizes conservative Christian voters to engage in political activism.
In addition to its thrumming weekly worship sessions and its
blockbuster events, the church has another project: Dream City Christian
Academy. The K-12 private school, which serves nearly 800 students, is
part of Turning Point USA’s Turning Point Academy
program, a network of 41 schools that describes itself as “an
educational movement that exists to glorify God and preserve the
founding principles of the United States through influencing and
inspiring the formation of the next generation.” Dream City Christian
Academy promises
to “Protect our campus from the infiltration of unethical agendas by
rejecting all ‘woke’ and untruthful ideologies being pushed on
students.”
This politically charged approach to education likely isn’t for
everyone—and because it’s a private school, it doesn’t have to be.
Except for one thing: Dream City Christian Academy is one of a growing
number of religious schools that are supported by public funds. . . .
Back in the old days of the early 2000s, education reform propagandists and other enemies of the unfettered pursuit of knowledge through learning (democratic schools) depended upon conservative think tanks for the ammo to conduct their propaganda campaigns aimed to alter the realities both inside or outside of people's heads. The "researchers" at the Fordham Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution were on the payroll to massage statistics, bend rhetoric, and to limit research questions in ways that produce the illusion of disinterested research that just happened to coincide with all the preconceived conclusions that undergird the neo-conservative political and social agendas.
That was the way that "conservative" social steering was justified for those whose sought to return America to a golden age that never was--when white was right.
Now that's all changed.
Shaped by the toxic bloom surrounding the entry of Donald T----- into our political moment, today's policy influencers opt for much coarser tactics and strategies to bend Americans to the will of liberated unabashed fascists and unashamed racists. Spurred on as they are by their national spokesman for everything crude, rude, and previously unacceptable (either socially or politically), today's propagandists do not couch their lies in semantic niceties, charts, or turgid text. It's all out front and in your face, in bald-faced lies captured with the cheapest, soul-expunged computer generated animation tools of the billionaire-funded ideological chop shop called Prager U.
Take five minutes to learn some basics about these bare-knuckled social influencers and intellectual abusers of children and adults. Here is the intro from an excellent piece from The Guardian:
A rightwing media outlet promoting climate-change
denialism and other “anti-woke” staples to young students and adults
via social media has become a fundraising Goliath, raking in close to
$200m from 2018 to 2022 with big checks from top conservative donors,
tax records reveal.
Founded in 2009 by the
conservative talkshow host Dennis Prager, the eponymous Prager
University Foundation is not an accredited education organization. But
via online media its PragerU Kids division has become a key tool in
spreading false claims to young people with short videos aimed at
undercutting widely accepted science that climate crisis disasters are
accelerating due, largely, to fossil-fuel usage.
PragerU’s
influence in pushing false narratives about climate change and other
far-right shibboleths such as airbrushing the brutal reality of American
slavery gained ground when the Florida board of education in July gave
the green light to using its videos and other materials in classrooms, a
move that PragerU is trying to capitalize on in Texas and other states.
On Tuesday, Oklahoma’s school system also approved the use of PragerU’s
materials. . . .
When Tennessee received its $501 million Race to the Top
(RTTT) grant, it also accepted the requirement to annually label the bottom
five percent of TN public schools for turnaround or charter conversion.The Achievement School District (ASD) was
set up to administer this task, and Chris Barbic was hired away from his job as
CEO of a total compliance Texas charter chain to be Superintendent of
the new ASD.
As long as the RTTT rules
stay in effect, Tennessee will have a continuing supply of bottom five percent
schools each year to turn over to the ASD, which then may choose to hire new management and teachers or to hand out contracts to charter
operators worth millions of dollars each year to run the “turnaround” schools.
So far the turnarounds haven’t done much turning. Having completed its second year of operation, most of the 17 schools in the district are headed in the opposite direction from the fanciful goal of having the bottom five percenters in the top 25 percent of schools in five years (click chart below to enlarge). So far, the ASD schools remain 20-25 points under the state average, which is no where close to the top 25 percent, which is ostensibly the destination of the ASD schools. Such reality checks do nothing, however, to alter the delusional thinking and tired corporate education rhetoric of Chris Barbic, who took time to pen an op-ed in Sunday's Tennessean.
The only reason that Memphis now has fewer students on the Priority List than it did three years ago is that the lowest performing schools have been shifted into the ASD, which puts them into another category. Most of the Memphis ASD schools have no better off than they were before the bookkeeping change. See below:
Having bombed in Memphis, the ASD now has its eyes on Nashville to expand the charter school market for the national chains like Rocketship, KIPP, Aspire, and Green Dot, all of which are lined up for a piece of the action in the most lucrative, anti-democratic, and miseducative racket that public education has ever tried to survive.
Barbic's rhetoric remains focused on perpetuating the myths that 1) teachers are the biggest influence on student achievement, and 2) that children living in cars or under bridges will perform on tests the same as children in the leafy suburbs. Meanwhile, he continues to ignore the fact that what matters outside the schools have the largest influence on what children learn, just as he ignores the fact that child poverty is increasing in Tennessee. If Barbic wants "civility and collaboration," as his op-ed calls for, he should stop trying to replace public education in poor areas with corporate reform chain gangs that use abusive practices to culturally sterilize and behaviorally neuter economically disadvantaged children. There will no civility for human rights violators and the practitioners of the new eugenics. There will be only disdain, opposition, and public shaming.
Brought to you by Broad, Bloomberg, the Waltons, and an unnamed oligarch, the world's biggest edu-losers have hit upon a solution to prop up their self-serving and dysfunctional house of cards. From WaPo:
Spend
any time on Twitter or in the blogosphere and the national debate about
public education quickly resembles a schoolyard brawl, complete with
taunts, name-calling and piling on.
Issues such as teacher
tenure, parent triggers, charter schools and the Common Core State
Standards bring out vitriol even among policymakers and prominent
figures.
A Colorado congressman tweeted last year that Diane
Ravitch, an education historian and de facto leader of public school
activists, was an “evil woman.” Ravitch, in turn, blogged that an
advocate for parent trigger laws was “loathsome.” Racially tinged
expletives have been hurled at Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor, while an entire Web site has been created to lampoon Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who is challenging teacher tenure laws around the country.
Into the fray steps Education Post,
a nonprofit group that plans to launch Tuesday with the aim of
encouraging a more “respectful” and fact-based national discussion about
the challenges of public education, and possible solutions.
Peter
Cunningham, the former communications guru for U.S. Education Secretary
Arne Duncan, is leading the organization, which is backed with initial
grants totaling $12 million from the Broad Foundation, Bloomberg
Philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation and an anonymous donor.
It
will focus on three areas: K-12 academic standards, high-quality
charter schools, and how best to hold teachers and schools accountable
for educating students. . . .
Boston's CorpEd rag, the Boston Globe, quoted Arne Duncan's recent lie that 40 percent of MA high school grads attending 4 year colleges take remedial courses. Did it occur to Globe's Scot Lehigh to do a little fact-checking? Oh, I forgot, his is a column, so any lie repeated is totally fair.
. . . .What is “staggering” is the gross inaccuracy of the claim. Here
are the facts:
•Twenty-two percent of the students
who attend four-year state universities in Massachusetts and 10 percent of the
students who attend the University of Massachusetts take at least
one remedial course. That group (students who attend four-year
public colleges) comprises 28
percent of all high school graduates in the Commonwealth.
•Thirty percent of all Massachusetts graduates
attend private four-year colleges. Although I could not find
remediation rates for such students, we know that nationally 15
percent of students who attend not-for-profit four-year colleges or
universities take remedial courses.
Using the above, I estimate that
the percentage of students in Massachusetts who attend four-year colleges and
take remedial courses is roughly 17 percent, not the 40 percent that Duncan
claimed.
Where remedial rates are at their
highest are in the state’s community colleges. According to this report by
the Massachusetts Department of Education, 60 percent of community college
students take at least one remedial course. This would be a far higher
rate than reported for public community colleges by the National Center of Educational
Statistics, which provides a national rate of 24 percent (down from
30 percent in 2000).
•Less than one-third of all
community college students are first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students.
•The other two-thirds belong to one
or more of the following categories: part-time
students, adult returning students, or students seeking a certificate.
•The campuses are
open-enrollment—students do not need SATs, good grades or even a high school
diploma—a GED will suffice.
The smallest share of high school
graduates attending college in Massachusetts choose community
college (22 percent).
"...the impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country" — Gerald W. Bracey
Schools Matter's Professor Stephen Krashen has been a long time critic of the media promulgated mythology that there's a shortage of qualified workers, particularly those in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) fields. A quick survey of his posts here reveal his ongoing work to counter the skills/STEM propaganda that is most often used to justify some of the most pernicious corporate education reforms.
Whenever I see more evidence proving these skills/STEM myths wrong, I'm quick to forward them to Dr. Krashen for him to add to his burgeoning catalog of documentation. NPR's recent Are There Too Many Ph.D.s And Not Enough Jobs? is an example of the evidence contradicting all the outrageous lies by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, David Welch, Reed Hastings, Arne Duncan, et al. The NPR piece, which cites The Atlantic, contains gems such as:
"numbers released by the National Science Foundation show that people with doctoral degrees in those technical fields are struggling to find work in their industries."
and
"Worse yet, as of 2011, approximately one-third of people graduating with a doctoral degree in science, technology, math or engineering had no job or post-doctoral offer of any kind."
Krashen posted the above piece on his facebook page, and several of us commented. Still exhausted from the LAUSD election, I had forgotten what I wrote until I saw myself quoted by Peggy Robertson and Patsy Bain Wolf. Looking at the quote, I'm sure glad they preserved it, since it gets to the heart of the matter:
The manufactured STEM crisis. Robert D. Skeels states "The manufactured STEM 'crises' has from the onset been a means to drive down the salaries of those professionals who often don't see themselves as being working class. Starting with Bill Gates' drive to grant more H1B visas to certain workers under the guise of "not enough qualified candidates." What this really means is not enough candidates willing to work on the cheap. Ultimately the same market forces that allow the owners of the means of production drive wages down are at work. Sadly, since many professionals aren't class conscious, the only things that could reverse this trend — working class push-back and unionization — aren't being discussed."
Another recent article by In These Times entitled Study Demolishes the Myth That U.S. Workers Lack Skills further puts the lie to the notion that U.S. workers are lacking in the education or skills department. The piece, which discusses a paper by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Professor Marc Levine, contains powerful quotes like: "There are still three unemployed people for every possible job opening."
The article proper enumerates the points of Levine’s report, only the headings of which are reproduced here.
False: The skills of the workforce somehow dropped sharply between 2007 and 2009.
False: There is a vast pool of high-skilled jobs waiting to be filled.
False: Employers are trying in vain to attract skilled workers.
False: Understaffed employers must make do with the skilled workers they have.
False: New high-skill jobs have been created.
False: Workers with advanced degrees are more highly sought-after.
False: The American job market will increasingly demand higher-skilled workers.
Globalization has allowed the ownership class to increasingly pit workers against each other in ways the Robber Barons could have only dreamed of. When workers compete, their boses win! A major part of the impetus behind corporate education reform is the same momentum that's created a job market were workers are increasingly expected to work harder and harder for less and less, while being required to have ever more education and training (at their own expense, of course). Nearly all of Silicon Valley's plutocratic elites' whining about a skills shortage is part and parcel a cry to drive down wages and squeeze ever more profit out of workers who are expected to "lean in."
This race to the bottom for workers is accelerated by those same forces turning teaching into an act of Taylorism as well. Race to the Top and Common Core State Standards are part of a corporate consensus intended to create compliant workers ready to accept ever more abject working conditions. The daily experience in schools today is a grim reminder of what student's adult life will most likely look like. Brian Jones' recent commentary looks at this in depth and provides inescapable analysis. The byline, which couldn't be more apropos, reads 'When Karl Marx described the despotism of the modern workplace, he could have been describing schools in the era of education "reform."' Jones' essay is replete with insights like:
"The bourgeoisie," Marx noted, "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."
In those words, Marx put his finger on precisely what's happening in education--the relationship between teacher and student is being revolutionized. The student is, increasingly, evaluated not by the human being he or she speaks to every day, but by a harried, low-wage test scorer (sometimes hundreds of miles away) paid per test or worse, by a machine that scans the student's bubble sheet.
It's no small irony that the selfsame students whose tests are being graded by "harried, low-wage test scorer[s]" are being prepared for such futures as well.
The neoliberal project encroaches from every side and can only be defeated by collective resistance. My heart goes out to all those at the Occupy the Department of Education 2.0: The Battle for Public Schools event right now. I am there with you in spirit. We must continue organizing against these seemingly unstoppable forces, in hopes that eventually we can get our fellows in struggle to realize the meaning of Rosa Luxemburg's famous passage "those who do not move, do not notice their chains."
"Ms. Kopp's husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of KIPP's national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions." — Jesse James Alred
One thing I'll concede to the corporate education reformers is their uncanny ability to use anything as a sales pitch for neoliberalism and profitability. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was Arne "Katrina Schadenfreude" Duncan's racist pro-charter school statement that the abject disaster was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Not to be outdone by a dullard second rate basketball player masquerading as Secretary of Education, education reform mogol Wendy Kopp has taken the dark art of corporate spin to a whole new level.
I can think of only a handful of individuals who would be more inappropriate to review Jonathan Kozol's latest book than Kopp, but unfortunately the Washington Post gave her the space. Kopp's review of "Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-five Years Among the Poorest Children in America" can only be described as shameless self-promotion. Laden with half-truths, outright lies, and contorted pats to her own back, Kopp doesn't miss an opportunity to spread meritocracy myths, plug privatization, and pander calloused right-wing catch phrases like "demographics need not be destiny."
Kopp uses each transition of theme to mildly chastise Kozol, mendaciously suggesting that things are getting better all the time (and in no small part to thanks to her endeavors). The entire piece reads as "Yes, Kozol accurately describes things as they were decades ago, but thanks to the heroic efforts of myself and other hedge fund backed reformers, society is well on its way to solving its deepest systemic problems." It is cringe inducing, but worth reading to understand the full pathology of white savior syndrome.
I posted the following commentary under her so-called review:
Ms. Kopp's "review" is little more than misplaced self-congratulatory drivel. It would have been better if she had just been honest and stated from the get-go that she wished Johnathan Kozol had written a book about her and her fellow corporate education reformers.
To wit she lists some of the most vile organizations on the leading edge of privatization at the end of her piece and insinuates they are somehow changing systemic problems. KIPP, those colonial centers of cultural sterilization that often have between 40-60% attrition rates. Harlem Children’s Zone where charlatan Geoffrey Canada pays himself a half a million a year for doing things like kicking out an entire class of children since they were making him look bad on standardized tests. Union busting Stand for Children whose haughty arrogance resulted in the victorious Chicago teachers' strike. Rest assured her litany of corporate privatizers are part of the problem, not the solution.
No where is the wealthy white Kopp's detachment from reality and obsequiousness to power and privilege more apparent than her disgusting homage to petty dictator Bloomberg. To call the NYC Mayor's tenure anything other than abject disaster is to reach heights of mendaciousness never scaled before.
Kozol is a luminary of the social justice crowd, while Ms. Kopp is a pariah at best. I know her constant company of hedge fund managers, billionaire bankers, and fetid politicians keep her in a reality detached from the subject she thinks she has expertise in, and when she uses repulsive phrases like "social entrepreneurs," she pretty much proves how obtuse she is. When I was coming up veteran activists had a difference phrase for "social entrepreneurs," they called them "poverty pimps." Frankly it's embarrassing to allow Kopp to review any work by Kozol. Let's hope the Post shows better judgement in the future.
The most important response to Kopp's hamfisted plugging of corporate education reform won't be found in any polemics or critiques of her. Rather it will be found in taking actions to implement authentic reforms that are the antithesis of Kopp and her cadre of neoliberal profiteers. Reading Kozol is a great start, and creating neighborhood book circles to read works by him and other social justice authors are an excellent way of educating community members with facts to counter the corporate narrative. Ultimately organizing ourselves to put that theory into action is the only thing that will stop neoliberalism—just like the parents, community members, and activists who stood alongside the striking Chicago Teachers Union.
Wonder if sympathy cards have gone out yet from Joel Klein, Peter Gorman, and the rest of Murdoch edu-whores. From the Report by the House of Commons (their bold):
"On the basis of the facts
and evidence before the Committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times
Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone-hacking,
he turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in
his companies and publications. This culture, we consider, permeated from the
top throughout the organization and speaks volumes about the lack of effective
corporate governance at News Corporation and News International. We conclude,
therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship
of a major international company" (p. 70).
Hoover Institution economist, Eric Hanushek, is one of the chief think tank hacks for corporate education reform and the testing-industrial complex. His work consistently reminds us of the definition of "ecomomist" as "an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday did not happen today." As a perfect example of this characterization, Hanushek much prefers to use empirical data to speculate his way toward a shared acceptance of his plutocratic patrons' preconceived notions by building a statistical house of cards inside a hypothesized future that we can only appreciate in the end for its entertainment value, rather than its factual veracity.
For example, econometric fantasizing has come to be Hanushek's stock-in-trade, as is evidenced in a number of Hanushek's recent non-peer reviewed "working papers." In a recent one that was picked up and reprinted as if it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Hanushek claims that "replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers
with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international
math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion."
Some
incentives hold teachers or students accountable, while others affect
whole schools. School-level incentives like those used in No Child Left
Behind produce some of the larger achievement gains, the report says,
but even these have an effect size of only around .08 standard
deviations – the equivalent of moving a student currently performing at
the 50th percentile to the 53rd percentile. For comparison, raising
student performance in the U.S.
to the level of the highest-performing nations would require a gain
equivalent to a student climbing from the 50th to the 84th percentile (NRC Press Release).
the use of high school exit exams decreases the high school graduation rate without increasing achievement (PDF Summary).
Since few read Harvard's Education Next outside the corporate foundations and think tanks, the oligarchs' media men pitched the Hanushek retread story to one of those rare paid reporters from Huffington Post, whose work load obviously demands stories more numerous than they are researched. The result is an uninformed and fawning gloss that leaves unchallenged Hanushek's right-wing misinformation.
Below are a few clips from the HuffPo story that require some clarification or outright challenge:
The question of the effects of testing has long plagued education. Few dispute the need to have some
way to take stock of what students learn from their teachers. But
critics assert that an emphasis on test-related incentives, such as
grades for students and grade-based funding for schools, has tamped down
on creativity in the classroom, treating kids like identical items on
an assembly line -- without the product.
My dear overworked HuffPo reporter, it is not "the question of the effects of testing that has long plagued education," as you write in your piece. It is the effects of testing, themselves, that have long plagued education, especially since the inception of NCLB and its fanciful testing targets that have blown up so many public schools over the past nine years. These negative effects have been documented in a mountain of research and by good reporting over the past decade. As a place to begin, I highly recommend Tested . . . by reporter, Linda Perlstein. And criticism of the current testing mania is not aimed at criticizing the grading of students, as you clearly suggest. Rather, the criticism stems from the counterproductive use a single test of questionable quality to determine the futures of children and their teachers and their schools.
The 112-page-long NRC study came at a critical point during the NCLB
discussion -- and it read as a manifesto against the use of testing as a
tool to promote learning, Hanushek claims.
Please! A manifesto sets out a platform, a direction, an agenda, a strategy, etc. The NRC Report is anything but a manifesto, and it does not read like one, as Hanushek would have you, dear HuffPo reporter, believe. In fact, one of Hanushek's criticisms in the Education Next piece is that the NRC Report lacks specificity in its recommendations, something never missing in a manifesto. The NRC Report, rather, is the result of a 9-year empirical research study by a group of scholars that the mainstream Education Week called a "veritable who's who of national experts in education law, economics and sciences." Notably, it does not include Eric Hanushek.
Importantly, the NRC Report does not compare effectiveness of
NCLB to some other testing universe with low stakes, as the following
quote from the HuffPo piece indicates. This is not only misleading--it is
dead wrong.
The report found NCLB to be the most effective test-based policy,
but even then, it found that the law's programs moved student
performance by eight hundredths of the standard deviation, or from the
50th to the 53rd percentile. Other more low-stakes tests were found to
show "effectively zero" effects on achievement. According to the NRC
report:
Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the
programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student
achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the
highest achieving countries.
This is where taking time to read the NRC Report would have been very helpful in reporting on someone else's version of what the Report said.
Finally, I take exception with this bit of nonsense from the HuffPo article:
Hanushek, an economist, claims that the .08 standard deviation increase in student learning is not as insignificant as the report makes it sound. According to his calculations, the benefits of such gains outweigh the costs: that amount of learning, he claims, translates to a value of $14 trillion. He notes that if testing is expanded at the expense of $100 per student, the rate of return on that investment is 9,189 percent. Hanushek criticized the report for not giving enough attention to the benefits NCLB provided disadvantaged students.
The report, Hanushek said, hid that evidence.
In the very next paragraph, however, HuffPo quotes Hanushek as saying that his wild claim was, indeed, noted in the Report, even though Hanushek clearly believes that his speculations should be regarded as empirical data that the NRC should have highlighted. This kind of extrapolated nonsense reminds me of another testing guru from a hundred years ago, eugenicist and IQ test promoter, Lewis Terman. Terman, too, was an accomplished propagandist, and he got great reception in the mass media by coming up with IQ test scores out of thin air for historical figures, everyone from J. S. Bach to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. While pulling numbers like this out of your, um, hat makes for great parlor entertainment, no one should take these speculations seriously. Pure hokum, but no less so than Hanushek's econometric hyperbole of $14 trillion or $100 trillion in added value for some, otherwise, worthless test scores.
Finally, HuffPo obviously follows Hanushek's advice and spends the last five four paragraphs documenting the opinions of Paul Hill, one of the NRC panelists whose livelihood is tied directly to the good will and open checkbook of the Gates Foundation. It would seem that the current mission by the Business Roundtable and the education industry to slime the NRC Report requires the public bad-mouthing even by those panelists who are willing, if their best financial interests require them to do so.
Hill said he was slightly concerned with the report itself, and that
its tone was a product of a committee comprised of experts with mixed
views on testing. "It said that test-based accountability alone won't
raise achievement," he said. "I believe that. Test-based accountability,
though, with reasonable supplementary policies … is a good idea."
The apparent anti-testing bias, Hill said, came from those on the committee with backgrounds in education.
Yes, of course, those ax-grinding educational researchers whose 3 members on the NRC Panel overpowered the other 14 members to hijack a report that would have otherwise presented the worldview of the next generation of testers and tabulators, those visionaries who live for the end of the achievement gap and by its non-arrival.
Valerie Strauss has acquired the smoking gun that documents what we have known for a long time now: the Gates Foundation is flooding the nation's political plates with cash, along with state and local school systems, all the way down to the classroom level. The amazing document, this Gates proposal, outlines the work of a number of Gates Foundation efforts, but primarily it is aimed to provide guidance for the org that wins the grant of $3 million and change to run an outfit that was originally known as Teaching First. (That idea is now dead, since the super-secret details including the name of the outfit have now been exposed).
Here is the intro letter below, which urges secrecy in order to hide the fact that it is Gates thinking and money that are fueling the public school crucible built by the Oligarchs. Whereas the Kochs are working from the neocon end of the plan, Gates is working back toward them from the neolib end of it. Corporate schools without collective bargaining is the meeting point. Here's the secret letter (click it to enlarge):
Teaching First is intended to provide the undercover influence peddling and policy/people purchasing for policies pushed by the Gates Foundation. In short, this outfit is intended to do the dirty work without Bill and Melinda being implicated. From p. 2:
On page 3, we find the smoking gun on system official and union complicity that is intended to be properly disguised. In addition, we see here the need delineated for continued school and teacher bashing as a necessary step in selling the reluctant public on the Gates "aggressive human capital agenda":
We find, too, in these first few pages the names of national orgs that are onboard with this cram-all-the-way-down propaganda campaign. Amy Wilkins of Education Trust (funny name, huh?) is/was the head of the search committee to find the proper outfit to take Gates's marching orders that are laid out in this fascinating document.
And on page 4, we find out that Teaching First will keep the lid on "research" and message control, with the help, of course, of Ed Mistrust and Gates's other enterprise, Center for Dismantling Reinventing Public Education. Also named as go-to outfits for dependable support materials for the war on teaching, NCTQ, the New Teacher Project, Harvard Education Innovation Laboratory, and CALDER:
And just how far down into the "grassroots" will Gates money go for this national effort to crush public school teachers? All the way down to cupcakes and busrides to those "grassroots" rallies in support of the aggressive human capital agenda, it seems. Here we see the "organizers" urged to funnel cash, confetti, and cokes all the way down to teachers' lounge level:
And we're just to page 6. In the next installment, read clips about the "logical targets" for Teaching First organizing, and more. In the meantime, check out Valerie's summary at WaPo.
Having bombed in Memphis, the ASD now has its eyes on Nashville to expand the charter school market for the national chains like Rocketship, KIPP, Aspire, and Green Dot, all of which are lined up for a piece of the action in the most lucrative, anti-democratic, and miseducative racket that public education has ever tried to survive. 
Schools Matter's Professor Stephen Krashen has been a long time critic of the media promulgated mythology that there's a shortage of qualified workers, particularly those in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) fields. A quick survey of his posts here reveal his ongoing work to counter the skills/STEM propaganda that is most often used to justify some of the most pernicious corporate education reforms.
Robert D. Skeels is a social liberation writer, attorney, public education advocate, immigrant rights activist, and law professor. He lives, works, writes, and organizes in Los Angeles with his wife and cats. Robert holds a BA in Classical Civilization from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), a JD from Peoples College of Law (PCL), and passed the California Bar Exam on his first attempt. A US Navy Veteran, he is a proud member of Veterans for Peace. A student of Liberation Theology and Paulo Freire's work, Robert volunteers for community and 12 step groups. Robert's articles and essays appear in publications including Jacobin, Truthout, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Schools Matter, Daily Censored, Regeneración, K12NN, LA Progressive, and The Los Angeles Daily News. In 2013 Robert ran for the LAUSD School Board against a billionaire funded corporate reform candidate, finishing second in a field of five, with over 5,200 votes.
One thing I'll concede to the corporate education reformers is their uncanny ability to use anything as a sales pitch for neoliberalism and profitability. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was Arne "Katrina Schadenfreude" Duncan's racist pro-charter school statement that the abject disaster was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Not to be outdone by a dullard second rate basketball player masquerading as Secretary of Education, education reform mogol Wendy Kopp has taken the dark art of corporate spin to a whole new level.
Finally, HuffPo obviously follows Hanushek's advice and spends the last five four paragraphs documenting the opinions of Paul Hill, one of the NRC panelists whose livelihood is tied directly to the good will and open checkbook of the Gates Foundation. It would seem that the current mission by the Business Roundtable and the education industry to slime the NRC Report requires the public bad-mouthing even by those panelists who are willing, if their best financial interests require them to do so.
Teaching First is intended to provide the undercover influence peddling and policy/people purchasing for policies pushed by the Gates Foundation. In short, this outfit is intended to do the dirty work without Bill and Melinda being implicated. From p. 2:
