California Standardized Tests Spark Backlash in Oakland | News | East Bay Express

California Standardized Tests Spark Backlash in Oakland | News | East Bay Express:

California Standardized Tests Spark Backlash in Oakland

Teachers say that the new test is significantly disrupting class time, is plagued by technical malfunctions, and is an unfair assessment of student performance.

Chaz Garcia's fourth-grade students spent twelve hours taking standardized tests last week. The teacher at Esperanza Elementary School in the Elmhurst district of East Oakland had anticipated that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), a new state exam tied to federal Common Core standards, might be draining for students. But it was worse than she expected. That's because her students were taking the test on Chromebooks — new Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) laptop computers that, according to multiple teachers, have been plagued by technical malfunctions before and during the test.

"They are stressed out ... and they are discouraged," Garcia said of her fourth-graders, explaining that one student's exam essay was completely erased because of a glitch that Garcia couldn't fix. Others had to restart computers because of various malfunctions, including the failure of audio technology required for certain questions. "These kids are guinea pigs," she said, adding, "We all know this is not the best use of student time."

Teachers throughout OUSD said that the SBAC has caused a host of problems for instructors and students, arguing that the district's implementation of the test — both in terms of scheduling and its technology plan — has been chaotic and needlessly disruptive of class time. For starters, teachers lamented the fact that the district chose to administer the test exclusively on Chromebooks, but did not purchase enough laptops to accommodate all students taking the exam. As a result, schools have had to scramble to share the computers, which means the testing at some sites has gone on for weeks.

Additionally, teachers argued that the test itself has been unnecessarily confusing for students, both in terms of the content of questions and the presentation on Chromebooks. Instructors, in turn, have questioned how well the test measures students' skills and said that the scores will do little to help teachers develop curricula.

The debate in Oakland comes as teachers and education activists across the country have increasingly scrutinized the controversial tests aligned with the federal Common Core, which aims to establish uniform standards for math and English Language Arts (ELA). Unlike New York and a few other states, California has not seen any large-scale "opt-out" movements, in which parents allow their children to skip Common Core exams in protest of the federal mandates and high-stakes testing. Still, OUSD teachers said there have been growing frustrations about the SBAC this year — some ideological and others related to the logistical nightmare that the test has apparently created.

"The district loves to say that they put students first ... but we don't have enough computers," said Elizabeth Haugen, who teaches history and literature at Oakland Technical High School in the Temescal district. "And now they are expecting students to pick up the slack when the administration messed up."

Throughout OUSD, students in third through eighth grade and eleventh grade are taking the SBAC this spring. The state estimates that the math and ELA tests take seven to eight-and-a-half hours total, though the exams are not timed, and Oakland teachers said ongoing tech challenges have made the exams drag on much longer — in some cases twice the state's estimated timeframe. Oakland schools participated in a "field test" of the SBAC last year — a pilot designed to assist the test's developers — but this is the first time test scores are being recorded.

The SBAC replaces the pencil-and-paper Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exam and is supposed to provide a more comprehensive assessment of students' proficiency. Instead of the multiple-choice questions of the STAR, the SBAC requires students to write longer essays and in some cases explain how they got their answers. The test also features "performance tasks," which are focused on problem-solving and involve a classroom activity. The test is also adaptive, which means questions get harder or easier depending on how students initially perform.

John Krull, OUSD's information technology officer, said the district currently has 12,000 Chromebooks — about one for every three students — and said district officials divvied up the computers so that every school could complete the SBAC in an efficient manner, over fifteen days, or roughly a three-week period.

The three-to-one student-to-computer ratio, however, means schools can't have their students take the test simultaneously, which would have allowed them to complete the SBAC in a few days or one week. As a result, the test is disrupting schools for weeks on end, teachers said. This is particularly problematic in high schools, where many classes, such as art or math courses, have students from multiple grades. With eleventh-graders repeatedly missing those courses so they can take the SBAC, teachers end up struggling to move their classes forward.

"It's taking too much time out of the curriculum," said Nate Gong, an English and history teacher at Oakland Tech. "I'm excited by digital technology. But with implementing a digital test, there are a whole lot of other things that need to go along with it." He argued that Oakland Tech does not have enough Chromebooks and that the district has not given schools enough IT resources to handle potential problems with the computers. "There's not a lot of foresight," he said.

What's more, Oakland Tech has scheduled the test in a way that teachers said was inadvertently putting lower-performing students at a disadvantage. After students and teachers in Advanced Placement (AP) classes expressed concerns about having to take the SBAC test just prior to the AP tests, the district decided to allow AP students to take the SBAC at the end of May after they've completed the AP exams. The unintended result is that non-AP students have been forced to take the SBAC a month earlier, and thus have had less prep time. "It's a horrible situation," said Haugen, who teaches two AP courses. "The AP kids have more instruction before they test than the non-AP students. It's the exact opposite of equity."

Beyond concerns around the administrative challenges of testing in shifts, teachers said that students were having trouble navigating the exam on Chromebooks. Marisa Villegas, a sixth-grade humanities teacher at Melrose Leadership Academy in the Maxwell Park neighborhood of East Oakland, said the laptop screens presented text in a way that made it difficult for students to distinguish where test California Standardized Tests Spark Backlash in Oakland | News | East Bay Express:

Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's classrooms - Yahoo Finance

Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's classrooms - Yahoo Finance:

Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's classrooms

 In "The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing — But You Don't Have To Be,"  veteran education reporter Anya Kamenetz investigates the $2 billion dollar standardized test industry. 

Testing is thoroughly entrenched in the American education system. Students in grades three through 10 spend up to 25% of the year engaged in test prep instead of actually learning, she reports. 

All the test emphasis warps the classroom dynamic, Kamenetz writes. Teachers have to teach to the test, and students have been known to throw up due to test-reality anxiety.

It's scary stuff. 

We talked with Kamenetz about where standardized tests came from, why they sound good in theory but are toxic in practice, and what the alternatives are. 

This interview has been condensed and edited. 

BUSINESS INSIDER: Why are standardized tests such a problem? 

ANYA KAMENETZ: There's a saying in social science that when you make a measure into a target, it stops being a good measure. Any measure you attach stakes to, people are going to be incentivized to manipulate it. The Atlanta cheating scandal is an example of teachers going the extra mile to fabricate test scores.

More and more research shows that we need our schools to prepare students for careers where they're going to be creative, innovative, team players, collaborative, good communicators, and the tests that we're giving students today measure none of those things, so we're actively discouraging the best teachers and administrators from doing the work they think is most important, and we're discouraging experimentation at a time where it's really sorely needed. 

If you want students to be able to do jobs that don't exist today, then centralized planning and an outdated set of measurements to try and reach that outcome is going to be misguided at best. 

There are people who believe "this is rigor" and we need to have a standard to measure those that far below the bar, but the question then becomes, is it better to have a metric that's totally meaningless but applies fairly to everyone, or is it better to pick and choose and be a little more individualized with the metrics that you're applying?

BI: Sounds like there's an impulse of fairness involved. 

AK: It didn't sound that bizarre when George W. Bush came to Washington with this idea that he had originally implemented in Texas, and Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, signed on to this idea [of No Child Left Behind], because there was a bipartisan consensus that it was a good idea to apply the same high standards to everyone. But the problem was, there was such a huge gap to that rhetoric that sounded really good and the reality of what that actually might mean.

BI: Where did standardized tests come from? 

AK: The original observation that most, if not all, human behaviors can be described by distribution along the bell curve dates back to the 1700s. It was originally applied in astronomy, for the purpose of increasing the accuracy of scientific observations. But what happened is that as many critics have really argued over the years, psychometrics was really invented, it was co-opted by inventors into a larger project of proving that the ruling class was always meant to be the ruling class.

Francis Dalton, who created many foundational social science techniques, also coined the term "eugenics." His fundamental belief was that intelligence was fixed, that intelligence was inherited, and that intelligence was a single quantity inside the human brain.

BI: How is that present with us today? 

AK: It's easy to confuse people's circumstances with their innate merit. That's kind of the definition that we've been stuck with all these years. Yet SAT scores and scores on tests that kids take today are so highly correlated with family income and with race. We know now that that is a measure of social advantage, not innate ability.

Yet we accept the idea of an achievement gap. It's not in any way an achievement gap. It's an advantage gap. The idea that these scores are applied to children as though they define the children instead of defining the children's circumstances is something that recurs again and again and is not helpful. 

What we're trying to assess through process of education is what people can do and how people can change. What we want know about is their motivations, their interests, what's going to get them from here to there, how hard do they try, what are their resources, what are the levers inside the kids that's going to lead them to succeed and do their personal best, and these are the qualities that great teachers are oriented to discover, and our standardized tests don't do that. They're much more concerned with labeling people in a fixed way, and that's what they've always been designed to do.

We want to affect people's understanding of their role in the world, and if they apply themselves and invoke maximum effort they're actually going to be able to get results, and the people who believe that and have the support to do it do overcome their circumstances and their background. That's what innovative educators are really trying to look at. 

BI: What's an example of that? 

AK: Predictive analytics. Many students today are interacting with software and creating millions of Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's classrooms - Yahoo Finance:

Parent Opt-Out Movement: Engine of Common Core Unraveling? | Allison Hertog

Parent Opt-Out Movement: Engine of Common Core Unraveling? | Allison Hertog:

Parent Opt-Out Movement: Engine of Common Core Unraveling?

You've probably heard about the thousands of parents all over the country who are "opting-out" of the new Common Core state tests. These tests are state and federally-mandated, but somehow breaking the law seems reasonable to a lot of otherwise law-abiding people. In many districts, such as in New York, Louisiana, Missouri andMassachusetts, parents have chosen to have their kids "sit and stare" instead of taking the tests. While their classmates take the test, all they can do is sit and stare at their desks. This seems pretty extreme when students have ostensibly been preparing for weeks, if not months, for these assessments, and the scores may not count against the student - at least for this year. How bad could they be? And where is all this fierce parental passion coming from?

The word I hear on the ground is that hatred of the new tests is nearly universal - whether that hatred results in a boycott is another matter. Mandated K-12 testing is not new to our country, but fierce parent opposition to it is. And though the testing of the No Child Left Behind Act was also considered "high-stakes," parents were at least initially very supportive of those state-developed tests and of their schools being held more accountable for educating their children.

The reasons for opting-out of the tests are nearly as diverse as the people of this country. Some, in Utah for instance, are opting-out because they see the new tests as commandeering their God-given right to direct their child's education. In New York, for example, many refusers align the tests with a "corporate takeover" of the public education system. Others, such as parents of struggling learners, simply object to holding their children to academic standards that they believe they can't, or haven't been taught to, meet.

I'm a Common Core supporter because I believe that U.S. students need to meet higher standards to compete on the global stage, but what's clear is that whatever the boycotter's rationale, there are many practical reasons for parents - and teachers - to dislike the tests. I would argue that most of those practical problems (e.g., teaching more complex curriculums, learning more advanced curriculums without adequate foundation, computer glitches, adapting the standards to disabled students) will be resolved in time.

The question of teacher support for the tests is more complicated. Teacher's unions have been obligated to support the Common Core outwardly but have covertly (and not so covertly as of late) urged some of the parental opposition against it because student performance is tied to teacher evaluations. But in the long run many parents and teachers may grow to support the Common Core. Parents, because they will see that their children are mastering more difficult skills, and will ultimately be able to qualify for better jobs. And teachers, because the curriculums are more interesting to teach - there's more hands-on learning and potential for creativity. Would they really want to return to "drill and kill"?

Sure, there will continue to be strong opposition to the Common Core in some quarters, but the fierceness of the opt-out movement in places like New York will hopefully be a temporary entry in the short history of parental civil disobedience. In the meantime, from where I sit more parents are fleeing to private schools with the hope of escaping the standards - whether they can afford to self-pay or they will come to support school vouchers in greater numbers.Parent Opt-Out Movement: Engine of Common Core Unraveling? | Allison Hertog:

Follow Allison Hertog on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MakingSchlWrk

MORE:

Common CoreStandardized TestingParentsNew YorkCaliforniaTeachersFr éDucationPublic SchoolsParenting MomsMotherhood

'Don't Yelp Us!' Bro - Debate Over Teacher Evaluation Data Spawns a New Bad Idea

'Don't Yelp Us!' Debate Over Teacher Evaluation Data Spawns a New Bad Idea - NEA Today:

‘Don’t Yelp Us!’ Bro Debate Over Teacher Evaluation Data Spawns a New Bad Idea

The debate surrounding teacher privacy, transparency and student test scores reemerged recently when a parent in Loudon County, VA, filed a lawsuit against state officials requesting the release of the state’s teacher evaluation data.

Brian Davison, a father of kindergarten and third-grade public school students, filed a Freedom of Information Act in March pressing for the disclosure of teacher ratings. Davison believes that parents need this data – which is based on student test scores – to determine whether their children’s educators are performing up to par.

The Virginia Education Association and state education officials are challenging the suit, arguing release of such information would present at best an incomplete picture of teacher effectiveness, violate privacy and needlessly damage reputations.

In 2011, Virginia began collecting student growth percentiles (SGP) from standardized test results to calculate student academic growth from year to year. However, the state passed a law in 2013 making “teacher performance indicators” confidential, finding that such data proved to be unreliable measures of teacher quality.

No single score can be considered an accurate measure of the learning that goes on in a classroom or an accurate assessment of the teacher in that classroom, explains Meg Gruber, president of the Virginia Education Association.

“There is no way that a number can sum up how effective someone is at reaching and teaching our students,” says Gruber “People are going to be blamed without any understanding of their context, their classroom, [or] their students. It would be like saying journalists are ineffective because newspaper circulation is going down or fewer people are watching the news.”

Creating Metrics on Educators

The controversy over releasing teacher evaluation data to the public initially broke out in 2010, when the Los Angeles Times published a database containing thousands of the city’s school district’s elementary school teachers’ names and their respective ratings. The data used English and math test scores to assess students’ academic progress and their teachers’ effectiveness. The newspaper’s decision was widely denounced, including by many who generally support the prominent use of value-added data in teacher evaluations.

Because of privacy issues and the incomplete picture of teacher performance it presents, very few states release teacher evaluation data to the public.

The push to release this data soon cooled off. Only in a handful of states, including Florida, New York, and Michigan do parents have access to teacher evaluations, and some states have recently passed legislation to prevent releasing data to the public. Arkansas and Indiana require schools to report teachers’ average performance while shielding individual identities.

Unfortunately, a nagging sense that parents are somehow being shortchanged by denying them a public arena for evaluating teachers persists. Recently, Yahoo! political blogger and former New York Timesreporter Matt Bai generated some buzz with a column titled, “A Yelp for Teachers.”

Bai uses the Virginia lawsuit as a springboard to argue that if districts won’t release evaluation data, then parents should have a place to create their own metrics.

“Let’s have a discussion about transparency about accountability …How is it that the business of teaching has somehow eluded the most ubiquitous and influential form of evaluation in modern America? I’m talking about customer feedback,” Bai writes.

Bai rips a couple of pages out of the education reformers’ playbook. His arguments tap into the persistent misperception that what’s good for the private sector must also be good for public education (“We review Amazon products, Uber drivers, sellers on Ebay, but about the only thing you can’t find online is which seventh-grade math teacher is best for your kid”) and he predictably resorts to hackneyed attacks on teacher unions (“defenders of the status quo”).

Peter Greene, a high school teacher in Pennsylvania, dissected the substance of the  proposal on his blog, exlaining the challenges of getting reliable data and pinpointing a problem that is already rampant in countless Yelp reviews:

“Voluntary participation would insure that the few who left comments would really mean what they said, but only teachers who evoked particularly strong feelings would elicit comments– twenty-five sets of parents from my class might say nothing because they think I do a fine regular old vanilla job, but the twenty-sixth parent, who’s angry about how Little Chris flunked for never doing work, might blow me up.”

Greene also points out that the quality of the  “product” isn’t known for years.  “‘Every high school teacher has stories of the kid who comes back years later to say, ‘Boy, at the time, I hated you and I hated your class. But I want to thank you because it turned out you were right to push me,'” he writes.

‘Just the Wrong Way to Go About It’

Educators are not opposed to accountability and feedback, says Prudence Plunkett, a 'Don't Yelp Us!' Debate Over Teacher Evaluation Data Spawns a New Bad Idea - NEA Today:

Part time Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and Michelle Rhee invites Memphis to Charter UP with Stand Up - The Commercial Appeal

Charter advocate Stand Up invites Memphis to join - The Commercial Appeal:

Part time Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and Michelle Rhee invites Memphis to Charter UP with  Stand Up 

 Stand Up for Great Schools, the pro-school choice network that challenges African-American “grass tip” leaders to take charge of their children’s education, held its first “policy summit” in Memphis Thursday.

The pro-charter school message at the Hamilton Eye Institute on the University of Tennessee campus was a spirited call to action from Sacramento Mayor (and former NBA player) Kevin Johnson and Roland Martin, national broadcast personality, as they spelled out what they think is wrong with the current state of public education.

“We are sitting here, defending, allowing and assisting the current system to disenfranchise our children, and we are accepting that as the status quo,” Martin said.

“We are so caught up in defending a building in our neighborhood, but no one is asking what is happening in that building,” he said.

Roland encouraged the audience to align with Republicans working to extend charter schools in the state, saying they don’t have to agree on all the issues but must start working with the power brokers that share their interest in charters.

“Either the issues and the kids matter, or your party matters,” Roland said. “You are going to have to pick your team.”

Johnson, who is married to the former Michelle Rhee, aligned himself with Stand Up’s mission in 2009.

The event included a panel discussion with Michelle (Rhee) Johnson, former chancellor of public schools in Washington; Eric Mahmoud, founder of Seed Academy & Harvest Preparatory School in Minneapolis; George Parker, former head of the teachers union in the Washington schools; and Connecticut state Rep. Charlie Stallworth.

Besides Sacramento, Stand Up is working in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville; and Atlanta to help community leaders exert control by running their own charter schools or taking charge in other ways.

“Now, we are in Memphis,” Kevin Johnson said. “We’ve been to each of those cities twice. Now you guys have to do something yourself. You have to create a steering committee, create an agenda and then get back to us so we can continue the conversation. These are our children all over the country.”

Stand Up said it invited 65 people to Thursday’s summit. About 50 were present, including former Memphis Schools Supt. Carol Johnson and Rev. Kenneth Whalum.

Mayor A C Wharton stopped in briefly.

Alexis Gwin-Miller, executive director of Momentum Edge Coaching and Consulting, said she had heard good things about Stand Up’s work in the other cities.

“We have to take the same kind of stand in Memphis. I think we have begun to tackle that in ways by looking at the real results of students from economically impoverished backgrounds in Memphis. Teachers need help. The students need help. The parents need help,” she said.

Memphis has more than 50 charter schools with a total enrollment in excess of 15,000 students. More than 95 percent are African-American.Charter advocate Stand Up invites Memphis to join - The Commercial Appeal:

Whistleblower: For-Profit Charter School Lied About Attendance To Get State Cash

Whistleblower: For-Profit Charter School Lied About Attendance To Get State Cash:

Whistleblower: For-Profit Charter School Lied About Attendance To Get State Cash

Another charter school scandal is in the news. And once again, GOP leaders who collect millions in campaign cash from failing charter schools are suspicious of the allegations but eager to go after the unidentified whistleblower who brought the matter to their attention.

In case you missed it, this scandal involves the Ohio Virtual Academy, a chronically poor performing online school.

The top Republican and top Democrat on the House Education Committee received the whistleblower’s tip that the school failed to dis-enroll hundreds of chronically truant students in order to pad its rolls. The amount of state money the school receives depends on the number of students it enrolls.

According the Ohio Associated Press, which broke the story:

Ohio Virtual Academy, which serves about 13,000 students statewide, said it follows all state reporting laws and enrollment guidelines.

Reps. Bill Hayes and Teresa Fedor, the House Education Committee’s top Republican and Democrat, told The Associated Press they have forwarded an anonymous whistleblower’s email to state Auditor Dave Yost, whose office has made school attendance fraud a priority.

Fedor wants the matter investigated AND wants the committee to hear from Dr. Richard Ross, Ohio’s top education official.

Hayes wants the matter investigated, doesn’t think the committee should hear from Ross AND asked the state to investigate the whistleblower, since disseminating private student data is a violation of federal law.

Last July, when a panel of teachers from Concept Charter Schools told the state school board of everything from test tampering to sexual misconduct in the classroom, some board members wanted the teachers to be investigated for failing to report the in-class groping games.  Concept Schools is another chain that does a magnificent job of collecting millions of public money but does an abysmal job of educating kids.

To help put this in perspective, let’s turn to a blog post by Steve Dyer, an attorney and former chair of the House Education Committee:

This is not a new occurrence in Ohio’s E-Schools. Ohio’s first E-School, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) — now the country’s largest for-profit school — was fined $1.7 million by State Auditor Jim Petro in 2001 after it couldn’t account for all the kids it claimed to be educating.

OHVA is run by the notorious K-12, Inc. — the nation’s largest operator of E-Schools, with schools in 33 states. However, OHVA is K-12’s biggest cash cow, accounting for at least 10% of its total revenue, according to the company’s SEC filings. The company recently lost its operating contract with its other cash cow — Pennsylvania’s Agora online school. So its dependence upon OHVA’s cash has only increased.

K-12’s Tennessee affiliate, Tennessee Virtual Academy has been shuttered by the previous state education commissioner, Kevin Huffman (Michelle Rhee’s ex-husband).  The decision was upheld by the following commissioner and the courts.

Back in Ohio, K-12 officials said they suspect opponents of charter schools are behind the new allegations.

That excuse is getting a little old.

In past 6 months or so, both pro-charter groups and long-time charter critics got on the same page.

In fact, last October, Greg Harris who heads pro-charter StudentsFirst Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch:  “We think a lot of them (charters) need to be closed, because they’re not doing a good job. We think charters have a role in the education base, but we also think most of the charters in Ohio stink.”

They do stink, and one of the more vocal advocates for change has been Ohio Auditor David Yost. The central Ohio Republican has urged legislators debating reform legislation to adopt changes to better hold the e-schools accountable.

The whistleblower’s information has been forwarded to Yost – one of the few signs of hope.Whistleblower: For-Profit Charter School Lied About Attendance To Get State Cash:

Related Stories

1. Athens School Board Member: Charter Schools Focus On Profit Not Students
2. Auditor Report Reveals Ohio Is Paying Millions For Empty Charter School Seats
3. Carney Confronts Yost On Horizon Charter School Scandal
4. Will The Sun Ever Shine On Charter School Spending?
5. Ohio Department of Education Threatens Action Against Charter School “Whistleblowers”

The One about Peter Cunningham, Education Post and Spin... - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:

The One about Peter Cunningham, Education Post and Spin...

BY:  Dr. Mitchell Robinson

Originally posted on his blog here  http://www.mitchellrobinson.net/2015/05/06/the-one-about-peter-cunningham-ed-post-and-spin/

John Oliver's recent takedown of standardized testing has met with near-universal praise, and deservedly so. It was a brilliant, thoughtful and bitingly funny analysis of the fatal flaws in the testing business, and was clearly based on extensive research and investigation. There has, however, been one lonely outpost of denial with respect to Mr. Oliver's piece: the intrepid externs at Education Post, and their fearless leader, Peter Cunningham.

Mr. Cunningham is from the long lineage of education leaders who have no degrees in education, have never taught and have zero experience in education outside of decision making and check cashing. By last count, about $12 million of that, as he points out in a recentEduShyster interview:

Cunningham: We hire bloggers and we subsidize bloggers who are already out there and who we want to support or give more lift. I think it’s fine. As you know, I have all this money. I have to spend it.

Mr. Cunningham, using generous donations from the Broad and Walton foundations, among others, has attempted to carve himself a niche as a "reasonable reformer," advocating for a more civil dialogue around the issues he believes are at the core of the reform debate. His agenda is based on 3 "Issues" that form the core of his beliefs about education reform:

1. High Standards for All Students: Is my child learning what is needed to be successful?

Even if our kids are coming home with straight “A”s, how do we really know if they’re learning what they need to succeed in college, in career, and in life?  One teacher’s “A” could be another teacher’s “C”.

We need to have clear and consistent standards for what our kids should be learning.

That is the thinking behind the Common Core — a common set of high learning standards for kids.

As you can see, Mr. Cunningham is a big Common Core booster. He also seems to believe that standardized tests are the only way we will "know if they’re learning what they need to succeed in college, in career, and in life"--which makes sense if you remember that he never taught, so he must not be aware of portfolios, formative assessments, playing checks, demonstrations, essays, poems, term papers, quizzes, drawings, dances, improvisations, compositions, science experiments, interviews, observations, and hundreds of other assessment tools that tell us what students know and can do in rich, meaningful ways.

His essay flagellating Mr. Oliver also uses florid imagery (Oliver throws poor kids under the bus) to defend the Common Core and standardized tests under a cloak of faux-racist indignation, as though more and harder tests will provide the magic solution to lifting poor kids out of poverty. Mr. Cunningham also makes outlandish accusations that exaggerate his importance in the grand scheme of American education:

We know these things because we force the educational bureaucracy to test kids, publish results and take action. Until we demanded real accountability, many states, with a few exceptions, simply ignored these kids.

For a person who has never taught, and holds no elected office, that's a pretty gaudy resume. Mr. Cunningham seems to believe he has the power to "force" schools to test Badass Teachers Association: