Corporate profiteer Steve Barr is in the news again. Now he is mulling a run at Los Angeles Mayor. Barr calls himself an "educational innovator" despite having no background in either education or pedagogy. While his attempts to "turn around schools" have been epic failures in New Orleans and Los Angeles, his Green Dot Corporate Charter Chain is frequently held up as a measure of his so-called success. Except they're anything but successful.
Green Dot Corporate Charter Schools hold the dubious record of NINE of the lowest fifty average SAT scores in Los Angeles County for 2015. The billionaire backed charter chain, founded by corporate executive Barr and run by hedge fund manager Marco Petruzzi, group of SAT bottom dwellers leads all other charter chains in comprising 18% of the fifty worst. These schools were (lower numbers are worst performing):
4. Animo Locke Charter High School #1 (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1033
12. Animo Watts Charter High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1092
14. Animo Locke Charter High School #2 (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1104
16. Alain Leroy Locke High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1107
19. Animo Ralph Bunche High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1117
25. Animo Locke Technology High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1129
26. Animo Oscar De La Hoya Charter High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1129
34. Animo Jackie Robinson High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1150
50. Animo South Los Angeles Charter (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1180
The privately managed charter chain's marketing slogan is "…all students graduate prepared for college, leadership and life." These dismal SAT scores would seem to indicate otherwise. For context 1500 is considered the minimum threshold for college readiness, while 2052 was the composite average for Freshmen accepted into UCLA in 2013.
Barr has never been able to get his own house together at his lucrative charter chain. Why would we trust him meddling with our public schools?
"Big question on New York State Tests," (April 5) reports that one of the arguments in favor of a robust standardized testing program is to reveal achievement gaps. But we already know which children are doing poorly and we know what to do about it.
Decades of research has revealed that the major cause of the achievement gap is the effects of poverty, including poor nutrition, lack of health care, and little or no access to books: the best teaching in the world will not help if children are hungry, ill, and have nothing to read.
There is no evidence that massive testing closes the achievement gap, and plenty of evidence that improving the economy, or at least protecting children from the effects of poverty, does.
Stephen Krashen
Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/big-question-on-new-york-state-tests-how-many-will-opt-out.html?_r=0
Sources The effects of poverty: Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
"There is no evidence massive testing" Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/. OECD. Tienken, C., 2011. Common core standards: An example of data-less decision-making. Journal of Scholarship and Practice. American Association of School Administrators [AASA], 7(4): 3-18. http://www.aasa.org/jsp.aspx.
Improving the economy ....: Baker, K. 2007. Are international tests worth anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104; Zhao, Y. 2009. Catching Up or Leading the Way? American Education in the Age of Globalization. ASCD: Alexandria, VA.; Ananat, E., Gassman-Pines, A., Francis, D., and Gibson-Davis, C. 2011. Children left behind: The effects of statewide job less on student acbievement. NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) Working Paper No. 17104, JEL No. 12,16. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17104
At least protect: Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2). Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Libraries Unlimited (second edition).
Following NPE's very late “call” for “a national opt,” it is not surprising to see
the history of the opt out movement already being revised to give credit to education’s
“American Idol,” Diane Ravitch.John
Thompson writes at Huffington Post,
Three cheers for the
Opt Out movement! When the history of the collapse of data-driven,
competition-driven school improvement is written, the parents and students of
the grassroots Opt Out uprising will get much - or most - of the credit for
driving a stake through the heart of the testing vampire.
Of course, leaders
like Diane Ravitch will be justifiably credited for guiding embattled educators
through the dark days of the corporate reform era. . . .
Hearing this
speed-of-light revisionism, however, from historian, John Thompson, is both
surprising and disappointing.John is
clearly not too young to remember
that "during the dark[est] days of corporate education reform,” the few good
guys like Susan Ohanian, Gerald Bracey, Kathy Emery, and David Berliner were doing
their best to counter the propaganda by “crisis mongers” and voucher/charter
advocates like Diane Ravitch and Paul Peterson, who were, at the same time,
wining and dining at the Hoover Institute and Manhattan Institute with other
doyens of corporate education reform. At a Manhattan Institute
soiree in 2000 that featured all the corporate ed rock stars, Ravitch waved
off the dire warnings about school privatization that were being offered by
Bracey and others:
"Vouchers and charters will not destroy public
education. This is an incredible and fantastic fear. There are more than 45
million children in public schools. There are about 12,000 receiving vouchers.
There are 350,000 in charter schools. This is like an elephant complaining
about the mosquito on its shoulder, saying that that the mosquito is going to
destroy it. Why are people so frightened of such an insignificant prospect? It
is hard to understand the hysteria stirred by the fear of choice with regard to
the public schools."
Apparently, Ravitch could not
foresee, or chose to ignore, the deadly virus that the little mosquito
carried.Regardless of whether her
innacurate assessment of the threat was due to bad judgment or the kind of
stealth duplicity that had earned her a reputation when she was working for GHW
Bush, today 18 states have approved school voucher laws and two and half
million children are enrolled in charters, with millions more planned as a
result of the new federal legislation that Ravitch and her new NEA/AFT patrons supported
in 2015.Of the 90,000+ public schools
in the U. S. when Ravitch made that statement above, 7,000 of them are now
charter schools.Quite the mosquito, it
turns out.
If Ravitch’s judgment could
be relied upon to represent the best interests of children, teachers, and
parents, it would matter not if she got credit for a movement that she came to
four years after it began and only after it had reached national proportions.Sadly, however, her judgment cannot be relied
upon, as she has shown with her full-throated support for the ESEA
reauthorization, ESSA, which will set back education policy by at least a half
century, according to civil rights lawyer, Gary Orfield.
However, Ravitch can be
trusted to maintain a blind loyalty to AFT and NEA misleaders, who have an
established history of selling their members down the river repeatedly, with
support for NCLB testing, charter schools, and value-added teacher evaluation. It would seem that Ravitch wants everyone
under her tent, even if there are well-known arsonists in the crowd.
Ravitch’s epiphany that she
had been wrong for so many years about corporate education reform came only
after it had dawned on most educators, policymakers, and a sizable percentage
of the general public that NCLB was an unsustainable privatization charade from
the beginning.Her quiet contrition and
guarded confessions expressed in her two books after 2009 earned her the hero status
that she enjoys today as someone who saw the errors of her ways and came over
from the dark side.For teachers it is
thrilling to hear, especially from a conservative, that they were right all
along about matters felt so deeply.
No, Ravitch is not the hero
of the Opt Out movement, and she deserves credit only for coming four years
late to the party that others worked their guts out to make happen.I would suggest that the historian, John
Thompson, dig a little deeper into the history of the opt out movement before he adds another
jewel to the Ravitch crown.
“This increasingly well-rooted network provides the Gulen Movement with daily access to the minds of over 45,000 students, and yearly access to hundreds of millions of hard-earned tax dollars.” — Sharon Higgins
The largest chain of charter schools in the United States is that of those associated with the secretive Gülenist religious cult. With financial might sufficient to buy off politicians, and the political clout to push legislation, Gülen charters, like all charter schools, are the inevitable result of what happens after putting public money into private hands. Gülen is just one of many cults dominating the corporate charter school industry. Charter schools are symptomatic of the privatization of the public commons.
After years of being able to remain in obscurity while silencing their opposition, the Gülenist Network is beginning to find itself under ever increasing scrutiny. The Turkish government hired Amsterdam & Partners LLP to investigate. Their findings are even more shocking than many Gülen observers expected. Additionally, a full length documentary film entitled KILLING ED has been released, which outlines the shadowy Gülenist Network’s pervasive involvement with privately managed charter schools.
While some of lucrative charter school industry's top profiteers have been brought in to attempt damage control, there remains hope that this story of corruption, greed, and indoctrination will begin to reach an ever widening circle of people.
Please find below Amsterdam & Partners LLP’s press release, press conference video, and trailer for KILLING ED. Stopping the charter school industry must become one of our top priorities if we value public education as a society.
State of California Urged to Investigate Gülen-linked Magnolia Charter Schools
By Editor | Published: February 16, 2016
The following press release was distributed to media on Tuesday, February 16, 2016:
LOS ANGELES, February 16, 2016 – A formal complaint has been issued under the California Uniform Complaint Procedure (“UCP”) urging the California Department of Education to conduct a full investigation into the financial practices of the Magnolia Public Schools charter school network, which currently operates 11 active charter schools in California.
The UCP Complaint – brought by the law firm Amsterdam & Partners LLP, in conjunction with interested California taxpayers Dr. José Moreno and Tina Andres – notes that a 2015 audit conducted by the California State Auditor discovered widespread accounting impropriety and raised numerous other important questions about Magnolia’s financial practices. Notable among them is Magnolia’s connection to the global organization of charter schools and businesses headed by Turkish national Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive Islamic cleric who resides in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
“The State Auditor was unable to verify the propriety of a staggering 69% of financial transactions from a sampling at the Magnolia schools, but it did identify large contracts from Magnolia to affiliated vendors, and revealed that Magnolia has improperly spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on immigration lawyers to import teachers from Turkey,” said Robert Amsterdam, founding partner of Amsterdam & Partners LLP. “Although Magnolia’s CEO and Superintendent insists that there is no connection between Magnolia and the Gülen Organization, we respectfully direct the California authorities to Magnolia’s financial ties to the Pacifica Institute in Irvine, and to the similarities between Magnolia’s operating profile and that of other known Gülen Organization charter schools.”
Tina Andres, one of the individual Complainants, said, “Magnolia’s misuse of public funds is intolerable. They use our tax dollars to pay for visas to hire Turkish teachers, while there are plenty of talented and highly qualified teachers looking for positions in our area.”
Magnolia has submitted multiple new charter school applications valued at more than $48 million each. The UCP Complaint asserts that the volume of negative findings of the California State Auditor from a mere sampling of Magnolia’s transactions and vendor agreements should have spurred a comprehensive investigation into the Magnolia charter school network, and that the State of California owes a fiduciary duty to California taxpayers to probe further.
The UCP Complaint was delivered to the California Department of Education, as well as to various stakeholders concerned about the issue. It is available for viewing at http://magnoliacomplaint.com, where supporters may also sign a petition urging the California Department of Education to initiate the requested investigation
Dr. José Moreno is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicano & Latino Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and a former President of the Board of Education for the Anaheim City School District. He has four children currently attending public schools in Anaheim, where Magnolia is seeking to expand. Tina Andres is a veteran public school teacher in the Santa Ana Unified School District, which hosts a Magnolia school. She has two children attending public schools in the district, one of which is a charter school.
Amsterdam & Partners LLP – an international law firm with offices in London and Washington, DC – acts for the Republic of Turkey, and is conducting a global investigation into the alleged illegal activities of the Gülen Organization. Additional information about Amsterdam & Partners LLP is available at www.amsterdamandpartners.com.
Gülen Charter Schools Investigation Press Conference
Robert Amsterdam, lawyer at Amsterdam & Partners LLP, holds press conference updating the public on the latest developments and upcoming legal suits relating to alleged illegal conduct by the U.S. charter school network controlled by controversial Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.
Documentary film exposing charter schools and the Gülenist Network
KILLING ED is a new documentary feature film that exposes a shocking truth: that one of the largest networks of taxpayer-funded charter schools in the U.S. are a worst-case-scenario—operated with questionable academic, labor, and H1-B visa standards by members of the “Gülen Movement” – a rapidly expanding, global Islamic group whose leader, Fethullah Gülen, lives in seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.
Of the 11 Memphis schools that have been in the ASD the longest, all 11
are still in the bottom 10 percent — including three in the bottom 1
percent. But one school — KIPP Memphis Preparatory Middle — sits just
below the 10th percentile mark. --Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 31, 2016
If KIPP Memphis Preparatory Middle sits just below the 10th percentile mark, another Memphis KIPP school remains far below that. The KIPP Memphis University Middle School has been in bottom five percent of schools for the past three years (click image to enlarge):
When ASD was created with Race to the Top money in 2011, the charter industry promoters promised that the bottom five percent of Tennessee schools entering the Achievement School District would be catapulted into the top 25 percent of state schools within 5 years. We are now in year 5, and we see what an outrageous lie that was to begin with. We can also see what the Gates Foundation has delivered since it came to Memphis (Shelby County) in 2009 with $90 million to begin the corporatization and teacher deprofessionalization process.
From the Commercial Appeal:
Of the 168 schools that make up the bottom 10 percent in academic performance in the state, 56 percent are located in Shelby County, according to new data acquired by The Commercial Appeal this week.
Those 95 schools include 54 in the bottom 5 percent — a designation with legal ramifications that allows the state's Achievement School District to take over.
The Tennessee Department of Education issues its official priority list of bottom 5 percent schools every three years, with the next edition set for the summer of 2017. The bottom 10 percent list, provided to the newspaper by the state, is an unofficial warning to local districts about schools that are struggling and could soon be eligible for state takeover.
Of the 95 schools, 11 are under the ASD, 13 are charters and the remaining 71 are operated by SCS. A school had to have at least two year's worth of data to make the list, which is why several ASD schools new to the district are not represented. Some schools may have closed last year but still had two years' worth of data that was included.
Shelby County Schools Chief of Academics Heidi Ramirez said it's no surprise that so many schools in the bottom 10 percent in the state are located in Shelby County.
"I hope it is a call to action for folks to recognize that as much great work as we're doing in Shelby County Schools, on the resource trajectory we are on, we need additional supports to accelerate progress," Ramirez said. The district is already facing an $86 million budget gap for next year.
The 10-percent list also offers glimpses at early successes and struggles from both the ASD and the SCS Innovation Zone turnaround programs, created with Race to the Top federal funding and now kept alive through state and philanthropic dollars. Both have phased priority schools into their programs since the 2012-13 school year....
“Jed’s predecessor, Caprice Young, made over $250,000 for her work at the CCSA. Check out the cast of characters on CCSA’s board of directors.” — Kenneth Libby
These pages have addressed right-wing school privatization pusher Caprice Young before. Her early history working with Richard Riordan, predatory capitalist and junk bond felon Michael Milken, and racist, bigoted, anti-immigrant nativist Steve Poizner was discussed in a piece that also exposed her profiting from the dubious online charter school sector. What was missing from that piece is that she openly boasts of Walmart's John Walton being her mentor. Another piece addressed her taking the helm of Fethullah Gülen's failing Magnolia corporate charter chain.
Credit to Young. Two times she was able to step into situations where charter schools had squandered millions of taxpayer dollars, and make the investigations go away. Young, along with her Gülen corporate charters in Los Angeles, are currently being investigated by Amsterdam & Partners LLP.
I received a communiqué from Dr. Tom McIver in November of 2013 regarding another one of Young's unsavory colleagues, which, in turn, was another one of her charter business "ventures" (read scams). However, I had just returned to UCLA after a nineteen year hiatus to complete my BA, and my focus was on that. The email went unnoticed until recently. Checking the links led to me asking for clarification, and with his permission, his initial email, and excerpts from another email appear here:
From: tmciver@
Subject: Caprice Young and the Master of Deception
Date November 03, 2013 17:46:35 PST
To: rdsathene@
Here they are at Jeff Pulver's prestigious DLD conference joined by Arianna Huffington and CNN chief Jonathan Klein:http://blip.tv/140conf/140-characters-conference-the-democratization-of-information-2801228
Seckel is currently defendant in this fraud case: http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/03/10/34803.htm
This case is just the tip of his fraud. In case you are interested, attached is timeline of his activities (including his association with Young).
Tom McIver
I too discovered the DLD link was dead. The whole session was on video, but no longer. I have put my Seckel timeline online and updated it and added links: http://undeceive.weebly.com/
I do not mind attribution. Seckel is reportedly dead, as the now timeline indicates. Some new information has come to light, and I hope more will follow.
2009 Oct 29: Seckel hosts presents and hosts panel on information technology and education at internet entrepreneur Jeff Pulver’s 140-Characters conference; panelists include Arianna Huffington, Jonathan Klein (CNN chief), and Caprice Young (Milken Institute). http://blip.tv/140conf/140-characters-conference-the-democratization-of-information-2801228
2010 Oct 23: Seckel and Maxwell host G4G10 event at their “beautiful Malibu home.” Features Robert Lang and Chris Palmer origami displays and guest of honor Nolan Bushnell (Atari). Attendees include Jeff Scanlan, Catherine Mohr, Stuart Anstis, Jonathan Delbruck, Solomon Golomb, Caprice Young, Irving Biederman, Brad Templeton, Arana Greenberg, Brock Pierce, Michael Kaliski, Victoria Skye, Amy Sterling Casil, Eric Gradman, Brian Deagon, Philip Lelyveld, Richard Bilow, Glenn Kaino, Michael Naimark, Sanford Climan
2010 Oct: Seckel interview is lead item on Jeffrey Epstein’s science website. Self-promotional claims here are similar to his original Wikipedia entry. Says he got funding for “massive interactive website on thinking skills” with friend Caprice Young (Milken Institute). Claims “Tommy” Gold was his Cornell advisor, and at Caltech he was in Feynman’s “very close inner circle” with Michael Douglas and one other person, spending hours with him “almost every other day.” Claims to be very close to M. Gell-Mann, and friends with “Shelly” Glashow, Lisa Randall, Sean Carroll, and Jimmy Wales. http://web.archive.org/web/20101112051416/http://www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com/2010/10/jeffrey-epstein-talks-perception-with-al-seckel/
Sent to the Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2016 Supporters of the current testing program argue that standardized tests can help parents see how their children are doing in school ("Battle Lines Drawn as Student Testing Is Set to Begin" April 3). There is, however, no evidence that the current standardized testing program provides better feedback to parents than teachers' evaluations of students. Studies done at the secondary school level show that grades are an excellent predictor of future academic success, and the results of standardized tests do not add additional information. There are, in addition, reasons to think that teacher evaluation of students is better than standardized test scores. The repeated judgments of professionals who are with students every day is probably more valid than a test created by distant strangers and given only once. Moreover, teacher evaluations of students are “multiple measures," done by different teachers in different years, are closely aligned to the curriculum, and cover all subjects. Proposals for giving students any standardized test must be accompanied by evidence showing that it provides more useful information than grades alone. Stephen Krashen Professor Emeritus University of Southern California
Sources: Studies at the secondary level: Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley. http://cshe.berkeley.edu
Even though Northern Arizona University associate professor, Barbara Veltri, knew the State of
Arizona was closely tied to the charter school industry and to Teach for
America (TFA), which supplies a third of the teachers in “no excuses” charter
schools, she had no idea that her published research and scholarship on TFA would
ever be slighted, denigrated, and mislabeled by her own university.
A little
background is in order to better understand the censorious institutional insult
that Dr. Veltri experienced last week.
The new corporate
paternalists and the old line segregationists have much to gain from the spread
of charter schools in Arizona.White
charter schools, which make up the 48 percent of Arizona charters, are whiter
than their public counterparts; black charters are blacker; and Native American
schools charters are more Indian than the public schools that would, otherwise,
serve these students:
White
students left district elementary schools to enter charter elementary schools
that were, on average, 10 percent more white. Black elementary school students
entered charters that were, on average, 29 percent more black than the district
schools they left....Native Americans across all grade levels chose to attend
charter schools that had a higher concentration of Native Americans than the
district schools they exited. Hispanic elementary school students were the only
group that didn’t … [have] a higher percentage of students from the same ethnic
group.
The State of
Arizona, the state university system, and the Arizona Board of Regents are heavily
invested in charter schools.Some
officials earn large incomes from the charter industry, even as they continue
to work not as separate governing bodies but, seemingly, in tag teams with the
legislature, which privileges policies and funding for TFA and corporate
charter schools:
·Jay Heiler, for instance, serves as Chairman
of the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR), while he is the current President and
founder of his own charter company in Arizona, the Great Heart Academies, which
enrolls almost 10,000 students.
·Governor
Doug Ducey, an ex-officio member of ABOR, is a former regional board member of
Teach for America.
·To rub salt
in the wounds of public educators of Arizona, the state legislature provided $500,000
in 2015 for TFA recruiting and support, even as the community college funding
was wiped out, while other higher education funding and K-12 funding were cut $100
million each in the budget deal.
·Arizona
State University is listed as a Teach for America sponsor in Phoenix, and the
Mary Lou Fulton College of Education partners with TFA.
While the
white/Asian charters in Arizona boast rich liberal arts curricula, the segregative
charter schools that serve the poor, black, brown, and Indian children of
Arizona are based on the brutal “no excuses” model, TFA temps, and never-ending
test prep. As elsewhere in the U. S., Arizona’s KIPP Model charter schools have
huge teacher attrition problems that could not be sustained without a constant
infusion of inexperienced, untrained recruits from TFA.
As “no
excuses” charter teachers barely last two years on average before they are
burned out by corporate charter management demands for higher test scores and,
thus, more salable brand names, the Teach for America link is critical in the charter
industry’s human capital chain.
Even with
all this blurring of state and corporate lines, the special treatment she
received came as a surprise when Dr. Veltri submitted her latest work to the
public relations office at UNA.Twelve other
publication or conference presentations were duly noted by the PR Office on the
day that Dr. Veltri’s work was publicized, and every single one, except hers,
had the work's title along with the reference of where it was published/presented.
Why would
Dr. Veltri be treated differently than the other faculty members who submitted
their recent accomplishments? Could it have something to do with the title of
the chapter she recently contributed: “Teach for America’s Socialization and
Manipulation”?
Instead of
listing the title of her chapter, this is how the Northern Arizona University noted Dr. Veltri’s contribution:
Barbara T. Veltri, associate
professor of education, had a chapter published in Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching.
Veltri’s chapter explores supplying the needed manpower and values components
required to deal with high levels of attrition in schools.
Not only did
the university fail to list the chapter title, but the description is not close
to capturing the focus of the critical research that Veltri shared in the
chapter.To say that her chapter “explores
the needed manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of
attrition in schools” would be equivalent to saying The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was about shifting political
values in Germany in mid 20th Century.
For those
seeking more information on the TFA’s contributions to educational inequity for
poor children of color in the United States of America, they would never know
from NAU’s pablum-atic description that Dr. Veltri’s chapter deals exactly with
this problem. All the other scholarly work on the same issue that she mentions
in the chapter becomes misrepresented as well by this inaccurate description, which
means that NAU’s censorious cooptation is spread among other researchers who
are focused on similar issues.
No one wants
her work to be characterized with a summary that is unrecognizable from the work’s
intent or meaning. Dr. Veltri’s chapter is not about "supplying the needed
manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of attrition
in schools." Only a technocrat with a desire to spare the feelings of
Arizona’s corporate politicians could come up with such a disparaging and
disrespectul thumbnail summary that conceals the essence of Dr. Veltri’s work.
The world of anti-corporate education reform is
a small one, and the fiercest and most effective elements are represented by
the non-negotiating and in-your-face teachers, students, and parents who
comprise the high stakes testing opt out movement.
Their disobedient presences have been the tiny
drops of life in a dead sea of testing, from Long Island to Colorado, from
Florida to Washington State. But one thing is for sure: when these
overwhelmingly out-financed troublemakers sweat or bleed or cry into that vast
dead standardized ocean, the colors change, the sun can once again be seen
beneath the surface, and the waters start to move again with life.
In New York, for instance, hundreds of
thousands of parents, in defiance of unjust laws that would require abusive
tests for their children, have opted out of tests in recent years without legal
permission to do so. Last year, 20 percent of New York children refused
to take the racist, classist, and, otherwise, useless tests that are mandated
by law.
The end of the testing fixation,
however, poses a trillion dollar threat to the testing-industrial complex,
which is comprised of the textbook and testing companies, the technology
companies, corporate foundations, Wall Street politicians of both parties, and
the professional development and management industry with its innumerable
spinoffs.
Because the survival of the corporate
unions depend upon the graciousness of politicians who owe their survival to
Wall Street, the heads of the NEA and AFT have become tools of the billionaires
who are interested in increasing revenue streams and pursuing "market
solutions" in public schools. The union misleaders' chief task, then, in recent years has been to present
and control the false image that they are acting on behalf of students and the teachers who send
them hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Enter, once again, their good friend, the ever-dependable Diane Ravitch, and her Network for Public Education (NPE):
After careful thought and
deliberation, the Network for Public Education is calling for a national Opt
Out because of the harmful effects of annual high-stakes testing on children
and schools. We enthusiastically support those parents who refuse to
have their children take the 2016 state exams.
The alleged purpose of annual testing, federally
mandated since NCLB was passed in 2004, is to unveil the achievement gaps
within schools, ostensibly to close them. Twelve years later, there is no
conclusive evidence that NCLB high-stakes testing has improved the academic
performance of any student...
First off, someone needs to proof
the copy that the NEA and AFT lawyers have prepared for Ravitch, the historian.
NCLB was signed into law in 2002, and it has been fourteen years since that time.
More importantly, let's look at the
timing of this "call" for a "national opt out." In most
states, testing is already underway or already done--as in Massachusetts.
In New York, state testing starts tomorrow. If this were a decision
arrived at "after careful thought and deliberation," would NPE have
waited until testing was either done, underway, or about to happen to call for
a "national opt out?" I think not.
Then, there is this caveat offered in the NPE statement:
We acknowledge that there is a
legitimate role for standardized tests, if they are limited in frequency and
time, developmentally appropriate, well-designed and reasonably scaled with
realistic cut scores and provide useful instructional feedback. High-stakes
tests given for school accountability purposes, [sic] do not meet those
standards. They are undermining the public school system that is the pillar of
our democracy. We believe that opting out of state tests as an act of direct
protest will help turn the tide and eliminate damaging policies.
This is so classic NEA/AFT that
it could have been written by either legal team. In fact, the same caveat
was offered when NEA and AFT embraced NCLB testing and value-added testing for
teacher evaluations. Sadly, of course, we know that the majority of the
tests were and are junk tests, and that corporate union stipulations meant
nothing, either then or now, except, of course, as a way to remind angry
members that the unions never really endorsed the awful system that came to be
but, rather, a fair system that didn't.
And then there is this invitation
to not opt out but, rather, to speak out:
We recognize that some parents will find it
difficult or impossible to have their children refuse the exam due to punitive state
laws or district policies. We urge those who cannot opt out to speak out
and demand their right to do what is best for their children in the face of
harmful testing. The brunt of testing for school accountability is falling on
children. Our elected leaders must address this broken accountability system
and provide relief.
For those who can, we ask that they break ranks,
join us and not comply with testing. Policymakers cannot ignore the voices of
the public when we speak together. Opt Out gives us that voice.
What's amazing about this
"call" to opt out, at least where "punitive state laws or
district policies" preclude such action, is the sheer meaningless of the
rhetoric, since the ESSA, which Ravitch supported until after it was passed, requires
states to have 95 percent of their students to take the tests. Any
"punitive state laws or district policies" will be necessarily
aligned with the federal requirements that Ravitch and the unions supported all
the way to passage.
The time to urge parents to press
their elected officials was last year during the writing of ESSA.
Unfortunately, that was when Ravitch was pressing for passage of the
Alexander plan, and there was no mention by Ravitch, FairTest, NEA, or AFT
about including a statement on the rights of parents to opt out.
Nothing.
Now that the ESSA is a done deal, are
parents supposed to call their congressmen and begin asking for change??
Changing the law that Ravitch and FairTest embraced just a few weeks back
that had the 95 percent testing requirement in it? Or are the brave
parents now supposed to defy the law that NPE supported? Or maybe that would be too "difficult or impossible," in which case parents may come to Raleigh later this month to speak with Diane about their plight.
This kind of counterproductive
nonsense may satisfy the autograph seekers and the hangers-on that make up
Ravitch's network that she has put together to benefit NEA and AFT, but those
who are in this fight to end testing, segregation, and corporate control will
not be appeased.
In the end, this NPE "call"
for a "national opt out" represents another attempt by the corporate
union and their spokesperson, Diane Ravitch, to water down and coopt the opt
out movement by presenting a false and confusing image of testing
resistance.
Ravitch surely knows our elected
leaders will only change when they have to, and the most effective way to force
change is to defy the unfair and immoral laws that require children to take
these tests. And that is exactly the required action that NPE seeks to
tamp down with more circuitous rhetoric and bullshit proclamations.
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The 
These pages have addressed right-wing school privatization pusher Caprice Young before. 
