Comment on NPR interview with Lily Eskelsen Garcia: Testing every day?

Comment on “A Union Firebrand Speaks Out On Politics, Testing And More”  NPR interview with Lily Eskelsen Garcia: Testing every day?


Posted at http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/20/474369584/a-union-firebrand-speaks-out-on-politics-testing-and-more

The new education law does indeed appear an attempt to calm down our national testing hysteria.  Even President Obama has spoken out about the negative impact of over-testing.  Some of this is of course due to the impact of the opt-out movement.

But the testing industry is striking back, with the full cooperation of the US government: The new plan is to replace end-of-year standardized tests with what could be daily testing. The core of education will consist of modules of programmed instruction that students will work through online and be tested on, which will drastically diminish the role of teachers and increase profits of technology companies. The new education law announced grants for the development of these teach-and-test machines (see sections 1201 and 1204).
The National Governor’s Association has admitted that there is little evidence supporting this major shift to what they call “competency-based education,” yet has enthusiastically supported it.

It looks like things will be much worse, not better.

For more on competency-based education, please see:
McDermott, M., Robertson. P.,and Krashen, S. 2016. Testing All The Time? Language Magazine, January 16. http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=125014;
Steven M. Singer, Standardized Tests Every Day: the Competency Based Education Scam. http://tinyurl.com/j8s2tuh
Emily Talmage,  Warning: Gates is Infiltrating Opt Out. http://emilytalmage.com/2016/01/05/warning-gates-is-infiltrating-opt-out/
Morna McDermott, Reading between the lines. http://educationalchemy.com/2015/10/25/reading-between-the-lines-obamas-testing-action-plan/)
Peggy Robertson, Opt-out revolution, the next wave.   http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/10/opt-out-revolution-next-wave.html

Getting Compromised and Neutralized at NPE

Norm Scott has a post up about the special platform that NPE provided the corporate unions to propagandize all the NPE-attending autograph seekers, book salesmen, union apologists, blogger celebrities, button collectors, self-proclaimed activists. 

Half-way through Norm's piece, his ire and consternation at sitting through this bit of bad theater without a chance to ask questions is soothed by his conversation with Leonie Haimson, whose formidable prowess of the protector of the Ravitch myth is exercised with hypnotic power, obviously, on Norm's hot head. 

Calmly, then, Norm concludes:

...I came away with a more nuanced view of the relationship between the leadership of NPE and both teacher unions. While some call for them to declare war on the unions the most we can expect is a form of neutrality for a lot of reasons based on long-term relationships that are not easy to break.

When the money NPE collects from NEA/AFT is added on top of those "long-term relationships" and that "neutrality," you can expect, Norm, that you or the teachers will never be allowed to ask at one of these infomercial events why their unions have sold teachers, children, and parents down the river. 

For NPE, it is loyalty before principle, silence before criticism, secrecy before forthrightness.  These are the qualities that make NPE what it is and has been and will be until it peters out, just like its predecessor, the zombie outfit, Save Our Schools.  NPE is a place for all those desperate, downtrodden, angry, and the angst-filled educators to be dimed, dined, duped, and dumped once again back into schools that remain the products of that ever-important neutrality and long term relationships that keep things just as they are and have been. 

As Myles Horton said, "a preference for certain values determines what is good and what is bad in the eyes of the teacher. So call neutrality, therefore, is a surrender to the status quo." 

Horton goes on to say that dignity can only come to the teaching profession when its guiding values  become "honestly proclaimed" and acted upon.

The movement to end corporate education, segregated schools, and standardized testing can do be better than NPE.  If it can't, it is not movement anymore but, rather, just another blockage.

Memphis Smells the Coffee After the Pot Boils Over

With 45 cash-sucking corporate charters in operation, and with tens of thousands of children placed into penal school environments with no oversight, and with thousands of experienced teachers replaced by untrained temps, and with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into local and out-of-state charter businesses with nothing to show for it, and with dozens of communities disrupted by school closures, and with parents and teachers ready to burn down the Board of Education, the Shelby County school administration has finally admitted what we have been saying for a long, long time.

From the Commercial Appeal:

. .. .SCS currently has 45 charters operating, with five more set to open in the fall. Another 13 applied by the deadline this month to open the following year. SCS administrators have said loss of enrollment due to charters and the state-run Achievement School District is driving this year's $86 million budget gap.

"If our enrollment is going down based on ASD and charters, and this is causing us to have a financial deficit, why are we continuing to approve charters in areas where there is no need?" board member Stephanie Love asked. "It seems like we're approving a charter that then, as budget time comes, we say we have to cut the budget because of a charter that we approved."

Hopson said the district can legally deny a charter application if the school would create "substantial financial hardship to the district," but the state overruled when the district tried that a few years ago. But with so many charter schools now open, Hopson said they may have another shot at that argument.. . . .

KIPP Hands Agassi's Real Estate Company Million Dollar Profit on Building

While KIPP was building up its enrollment at KIPP Philadelphia, it was paying rent with public dollars to Andre Agassi's real estate company, which was renovating the building.  When the renovation is completed, KIPP will buy the building from Turner-Agassi Charter School Investment Fund for $9.2 million, which will provide Agassi's investors over 9 percent return on their investments.  This is a 9 percent return without risk. 

Wonder why charters are big business?

Meanwhile, one of the KIPP franchises in Memphis has raised a little over four thousand dollars for a library (minus librarian, of course).  Sorry, boy and girls, the KIPP business model has not worked out a way to make a profit from your reading.

NPE Offers Platform (Again) for NEA and AFT

This year when Anthony Cody "interviewed" AFT and NEA vice-presidents at the latest NPE talkfest in Raleigh, he only appeared to be the imperious judge looming far above the witnesses.  Cody's job was a tough one, in fact: he had to appear skeptical of the official stories being spun by the corporate unions' TURN-supporting officers, while offering opportunities for AFT and NEA to say anything they wanted without being challenged.

As you listen to the "interview," you will come to understand why The Union Reform Network loves both of these individuals and why they have been sent into the NPE tent to offer the Broad message that unions can only work when they are run by management.

Both Pringle and Ricker have earned their stripes as #2 in NEA and AFT respectively.  Pringle served as the former NEA chief's brain in 2011 when NEA signed on to support the use of value-added test scores for teacher evaluations.  Pringle has also been active in supporting the new TURN chapters, wherever teachers can duped in thinking that supporting the Broad and Gates agenda is a good thing for teachers or children.  

At the founding of a new TURN chapter in Florida in 2013, Pringle served on a panel moderated by TURN kingpin, Adam Urbanski, whose leadership of TURN goes all way back to the days when Eli Broad publicly acknowledged the millions of dollars he was sending to create a new kind of corporate-friendly union. 

The panel theme of "The Political Landscape Impacting Educational Reform" included: 

Becky Pringle, NEA Secretary-Treasurer
Karen Castor-Dentel, FL State Representative
Melissa Erickson, Hillsborough Alliance for Public Schools
Vince Verges, FL Dept of Education
Dr. Adam Urbanski, TURN Director, as moderator.

The event was focused on ways to push Common Core to teachers in Florida.

Mary Cathryn Ricker's role in TURN has been even more visible.  During the Cody "interview," she refers repeatedly to when she was President of the St. Paul AFT affiliate.  In St. Paul, Ricker served as "primary liaison & spokesperson" for TURN.  Information regarding Ricker's association with TURN is now behind a TURN firewall.

Both Ricker and Pringle have been tapped to replace Randi and Lily when they float away on their golden parachutes.  Have a "listen" to the interview.  Fascinating theatre.

Hillary Wants to Experiment with the Lives of Poor Children

Sequester "poor" children in boarding schools?...Again?

by Daun Kauffman @ Lucid Witness 

Native American students at the boarding school Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa. in 1884.

Hillary Clinton spoke briefly, about a week ago, on a wide range of educational topics with Newsday editors on Long Island. The detailed, public video and transcript are posted HERE.

(The “Education” portion of the Newsday video runs from minute 40:40 to minute 51:15).

Clinton claimed to support “National Standards” in education and a “Common Core”. She supports “Public Charter Schools” and a litany of “good” things: “Good” teachers, ”Good” schools, “Good” Charters, “Good” choice, “Good” testing, “Good” explanation (to parents) of “standardized testing”.  Never once did she define “good”, although she used the terms “good” or “great” at least ten times during the eleven minute segment on education.

She did not speak to the structural inequity (nor the instability) of “National Standards” or a “Common Core” with no “National”, or “Common”, funding.

The most shocking aspect of her views on public education was her thought about improving education for “poor kids”, whom she had earlier acknowledged are now a majority in public schools.  The “poor” majority of children are described HERE as about 70% Hispanic, Black, Asian, Native American and Multiethnic.   Clinton describes “poor” children as coming to school with “all kinds of issues and problems”, her deficit view.  Then she cites the “need” to “experiment” on “poor” kids.
Clinton’s experiment will be “boarding schools”:  Segregate “poor” children in boarding schools, “if we can do it right”.

Click here to read the entire article.

Meritocracy myths allow neoliberal Democrats to proffer education as an inequality palliative

“They favored policies that created “equal opportunity” and fostered “individual rights,” instead of those designed to eradicate the structural underpinnings of racial segregation and economic inequity.”—Professor Lily Geismer, "Atari Democrats", Jacobin

Thomas Frank has a new book out. While I've only read excerpts from his previous works, and several of his essays, I think Paul D'Amato sums up Frank well in that he: "offers some important food for thought–but it’s more of a snack than a full meal." That said, given the precariousness of public education in this era of neoliberalism, even a snack may stave off starvation. Frank is making the tour discussing his new work, and a friend posted one of the interviews. I was listening to it in the background while studying for my Civil Procedure midterm (the arcana of Judgment Non Obstante Veredicto, and other FRCP 50 mysteries), when I heard Frank say something that most of us touch upon when discussing the plutocrats pushing neoliberal corporate education reform. That is regarding the meritocracy myth.

The audio being discussed is at the 21:07 mark and my rough transcription follows.

Democrats are like no, no, no... that's not right. You've got to give everyone student loans. You got to build charter schools. Both sides have their pat answers that have nothing to do with the problem...

This is a book about Democrats, and they see every economic problem as an educational problem, requiring more student loans, more charter schools. That sort of thing. People studying STEM subjects, or whatever it is. This is just how they interpret the world. Why do they do they interpret the world that way? Because that's what worked for them personally. If you look at the biographies of different, prominent Democrats of our time, they all have this eerily similar biography. They are often plucked from obscurity by prestigious universities. Look at Bill Clinton, this kid in Hot Springs Arkansas, goes to Georgetown University, then he's a Rhodes Scholar, then he goes to Yale Law School. All his friends have this similar kind of background. Look at Barack Obama. He goes to Columbia, then Harvard Law School, and is the editor of the Harvard Law Review. For these guys academic achievement and prestige, that's what opened the doors for them, and it is very natural for them to assume that is what will open the doors for everyone else. Now I'm a great believer in education, I spent twenty-five years of my life getting one. But I'm here to tell you that that's not the solution for inequality. We need education, obviously everyone needs to know how to read and do math. We need experts.

That is not the problem with the economy. The problem is not that workers are not smart enough. The problem is that workers don't have any power.

That last, overarching issue is the crux of the problem. I'd like to delve into it further, but that will have to wait until summer break. The other issue of the Democrats championing the meritocracy myth and their pandering the false notion that education will solve inequality is of crucial importance during this election cycle. The Geismer piece cited in the beginning of this post discusses a Democratic Party candidate's ties to many of the worst of the cult of meritocracy.

In her 2016 campaign bid, Hillary Clinton has strengthened these ties, surpassing candidates from both parties in individual donations from employees at the ten highest-grossing companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and eBay.

Four more years of neoliberalism and wrongheaded education policy are a frightening prospect. Now is time for action.

Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools - Part III

by Ken Derstine @ Defend Public Education!
April 14, 2016

On April 7, 2016, at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally in Philadelphia, Bill Clinton got into an argument with demonstrators from Black Lives Matter over his legacy. He later said he “almost want[s] to apologize” for his remarks in defending his “welfare reform” and Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994. It is these policies that led to a drastic increase in homelessness and explosion of the prison population in the U.S. in the 1990’s and after.

No matter how contrite Bill Clinton may be for the purposes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, however, nothing he said at the rally was true. The fundamental premise of Bill Clinton’s neoliberal policies was that the working class needed “welfare reform” even as the industrial base of the U.S. economy was eroding because of globalization. This right-wing position was based on free market myth that the workers as individuals are responsible for their deteriorating conditions. At the same time, his deregulation of the corporate and financial sectors led to historically unprecedented accumulation of wealth by the top 1% of the American population and the near collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008. This was only averted by the $700 billion bailout of banks and various financial institutions with taxpayer money. No such relief has ever been contemplated for the workers and the unemployed.

The neoliberal agenda for privatization that became corporate education reform began as part of Clinton’s neoliberal reforms. The Clintons’ relationships with billionaires Eli Broad, the Walton Foundation (Walmart) and the Gates Foundation were to play a fundamental role in its development. The 'no excuses' philosophy would become a fundamental premise of charter schools in the subsequent administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The 'No Excuses' Education Philosophy 

The 'no excuses' philosophy of school management was first implemented in 1994 in the original KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools in Houston. Created by Mike Feinberg and David Levin (who is also a co-founder of Relay Graduate School of Education), the philosophy basically says that students from low-income families should be taught to overcome the problems brought on by poverty through a rigid pedagogy that accepts no excuses for failure. Any consideration of social factors in student achievement is considered “low expectations”.

  

In his recently released book, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through “No Excuses” Teaching, Jim Horn, Professor of Educational Leadership at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says of the 'no excuses' model:

The “no excuses” school model that KIPP charter schools popularized owes significantly to an assumption made two decades ago by paternalistic school reformers (Finn, 1997), who argued that schools and teachers could “reduce inequality in educational achievement if disadvantaged students were held to the same high standards as everybody else” (Cohen, 1996, p. 101).  This belief remains widespread today, and it has contributed to at least four bad outcomes for children, teachers, and public schools:  1) it leads us away from altering the corrosive socioeconomic realities that affect children’s lives outside school, while pushing our attention toward fixing children and their teachers’ belief systems, 2) it requires educators and children to subscribe to an ideology that demands toxic levels of anxiety and stress to attain some modicum of success, even temporarily, 3) it has led to widespread failure to live up to expectations that prove more fanciful than real, which creates self-loathing or self-blame for failing to achieve what students and teachers, alike, are told is achievable, 4) it has contributed to a totalizing compliance regimen for students and teachers that is more penal than pedagogical.

The heart of Horn’s book comes from twenty-five interviews with former KIPP teachers about their experience at KIPP. He summarizes what these teachers say in the interviews in his book (page 141, 142):

  

Click here to read the entire article.

Also see:

Riding the ‘turnaround’ merry-go-round in the continuing assault on Philadelphia public schools ­– Part I
The Battle for Wister; The SRC’s Projected Five-year Plan

Riding the ‘turnaround’ merry-go-round in the continuing assault on Philadelphia public schools ­– Part II
Mastery Charter Schools; The Unequal Funding of Public vs. Charter Schools

Tech for tots

 The US Department of Education just tweeted support for  a report from "Common Sense Kids Action": https://www.commonsensemedia.org/kids-action/our-initiatives/the-right-start-commission, a recomendation for "universal access to quailty early ed." I took a look.

The major thrust: Create a "consumer's report" on tech-ed products.  The group is supported by the Gates Foundation: http://www.scoop.it/t/bill-melinda-gates-foundation/?tag=Common+Sense+Media.

I posted three comments to their tweet:  

(1) Worried about this: "quality" early childhood ed sometimes = too much academics, testing. (2) I don't see much representation from preschool teachers in commonsense long list of advisors.  

(3) commonsense supported by Gates, to inform teachers about ed-tech products.

Ravitch Labels Sanders Remarks "Dreadful and Petulant"

When Clinton lost the Wisconsin primary, her campaign devised a new strategy as they headed toward New York: paint Sanders as unqualified to be President.  The next day she launched the new smear tactics.  From WaPo:

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Wednesday questioned whether her rival in the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), is qualified to be president.

"I think he hadn't done his homework and he'd been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn't really studied or understood," Clinton said in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," just one day after losing the Wisconsin primary to Sanders, "and that does raise a lot of questions." . . .

The Sanders campaign answered the same day:

"My response is if you want to question my qualifications, then maybe the American people might wonder about your qualifications Madame Secretary," he said. 

Sanders added: "When you voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in the history of America, you might want to question your qualifications. When you voted for trade agreements that cost millions of Americans decent paying jobs, and the American people might want to wonder about your qualifications. When you're spending an enormous amount of time raising money for your super PAC from some of the wealthiest people in this country, and from some of the most outrageous special interests ... Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you're raising millions of dollars from Wall Street whose greed and recklessness helped destroy our economy?" 

Diane Ravitch waited a few days to offer this reaction to Bernie's response: "His statement that Hillary is 'not qualified' to be President was dreadful and petulant. Would he prefer Trump or Cruz?"  

It makes one wonder what Diane might advise Bernie to do when this kind of planned assault comes his way.  Is he supposed to pretend that Clinton is something she is not, for fear of further damaging the corporate Left's choice to run against the corporate Right in the general election?   

Bernie Sanders, like everyone else, knows that Clinton has the requisite experience to be President.  She has been privately tutored for years in the imperialistic and criminal foreign policy of Henry Kissinger.  She has learned from her husband and from Barack Obama and from Robert Rubin how to mouth the words of financial reform, while growing the "too big to fail" banks even bigger and ignoring their crimes against the citizenry.  She has learned how to aggressively pursue the corporate education reforms with enough vigor to please the hedge funds and the corporate union presidents--both superdelegates, I might add.  And she learned to frame the environmental crisis to fit the needs of her dirty energy contributors.

Diane Ravitch has been a conservative for so long that her brand of Republicanism, which was shed like an old snakeskin as her old neoconservative pals slithered further Right, is now worn by the DNC's centrist candidate, Hillary Clinton.  In the meantime, Ravitch's pretense that she remains neutral just underscores how content she is with the status quo.  I guess some things, indeed, never change.

Here is a clip from yesterday's Meet the Press, where Sanders updates his earlier remarks about Clinton vastness of experience that masks some very serious shortcomings.  In the end, if Bernie Sanders falls short of leading the political revolution under the Democratic banner, it surely will not be led by Hillary Clinton.  She will be as irrelevant as the official Republicans and their deserted followers that they left behind to become Democrats.