From School Grades to Common Core: Debunking the Accountability Scam
We now know that Tony Bennett's reputation as "Mr. Accountability" was as phony as the scores his Indiana administration assigned to supposedly failing schools. But this scandal is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg that has been ripping a hole in the side of public education.
Here is the bitter truth. Standardized tests are a political weapon and can be used to tell whatever story you want. The campaign to hold schools and teachers "accountable" for test scores is a political project designed to deflect responsibility away from people who have gotten obscenely wealthy over the past few decades. The concept of "failing schools" is a bogus one. Schools are being shut down not in the interest of the children who attend them, but in order to create opportunities for new players in the education marketplace.
Teachers have been beaten down by the drive for "accountability" and most of our leaders have been so intimidated they will not directly take on this scam. Instead they nibble around the edges, complaining that we are "testing too much," or that tests and standards are "misaligned," as if getting everything perfectly lined up would make the system work. It won't. If we are going to reclaim our schools from those attempting to privatize them, we must confront and refute the false indictment that is used to condemn the schools and the educators who work in them.
We have been bamboozled by fast-talkers who manipulate scores, grading systems and terminology to portray public schools as failures, and their preferred alternatives - semi pr
Tony Bennett's Day of Reckoning Has Come: Is Corporate Reform Far Behind?
For months the question has hung in the air: When will the weight of deception bring the corporate reform project crashing down? For some, the day of reckoning has come already. The emails of one of the nation's leading "Chiefs for Change," Tony Bennett, were simply too much this week. The former state superintendent from Indiana was found to have done backflips to prevent the favored charter sch
John Thompson: Are Accountability Hawks Chicken When it Comes to Their Charters?
The panelists in the Fordham Institute's "Opt Out or Cop Out" discussion clearly enjoyed their surrealistic discussion of "accountability." They speculated on fanciful scenarios for micromanaging educators that were so disconnected from reality as to recall panelist Charlie Barone's tweet about "Dadaists Man Ray & Marcel DuChamp (who) used to play tennis w/o a net." Barone, a policy wonk for t