Schools Matter: Education Technology, Surveillance and America's Authoritarian Democracy

Schools Matter: Education Technology, Surveillance and America's Authoritarian Democracy:

Education Technology, Surveillance and America's Authoritarian Democracy

by Tim Scott

"The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed in to 'personalize' and 'adapt' learning for students in public school districts across the United States"  
Jesse Irwin, Model View Culture

The state-finance matrix defined: Influenced by David Harvey's notion of the state-finance nexus, the state-finance matrix is a highly disciplined neoliberal landscape where state power structures and technologies facilitate and protect the activities and interests of finance capitalism over all else. This matrix provides an insulated environment for financialization via securitization, which simply described, is a process where financial institutions bundle together (illiquid) financial assets - primarily loans - and transform them into (liquid) tradable securities that can be expeditiously bought and sold in secondary financial markets. Within this globalized environment, digital securities trading - including “fictitious” trading, hedging and speculating in derivative markets - generates “phantom wealth”; whereby the exchange of capital, money and currency is detached from material or labor value. In the twenty-first century, debt is the new global currency and is a primary source of (intangible) wealth accumulation.

Rebooting the System for a New Age

Writing in Forbes Magazine in 2013, technology entrepreneur Naveen Jain made an assessment of the historical origins of mass public education by pointing out that, “Our education system was developed for an industrial era.” Jain went on to explain that the U.S. education system,

…today uses the mass production style manufacturing process of standardization. This process requires raw material that is grouped together based on a specific criteria. Those raw materials are then moved from one station to another station where an expert makes a small modification given the small amount of time given to complete their task. At the end of the assembly line, these assembled goods are standardized tested to see if they meet certain criteria before they are moved to the next advanced assembly line.

Jain makes this point not as a critique of education serving the interests of capitalism through the application of the scientific management model of production (Taylorism) to schooling. On the contrary, he does so to make a case that current education reform policies are a continuation of the original mission of U.S. public education as an instrument of social control, yet only being modernized to bolster financialized capitalism. As Jain puts it, “Our education system is not broken, it has just become obsolete.” He goes on to explain: 

When I think of all the tremendous, seemingly impossible feats made possible by entrepreneurs, I am amazed that more has not been done to reinvent our education system. I want all entrepreneurs to take Schools Matter: Education Technology, Surveillance and America's Authoritarian Democracy:

 

Mike Rose. Grit. | Fred Klonsky

Mike Rose. Grit. | Fred Klonsky:

Mike Rose. Grit.

–While I’m on the road for the rest of August, I will be posting other bloggers. This is from a post by Mike Rose last June. 

“Grit” Revisited: Reflections on Our Public Talk about Education

“Grit” is in the news again big time with the appearance of Angela Duckworth’s alliterative best-seller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. I wrote about both the conceptual and methodological problems with grit last year, and given the attention Professor Duckworth’s book is attracting, I thought it would be worthwhile to repost what I wrote below and add a few thoughts here.

The book is drawing its share of mixed and negative reviews for superficiality bordering on pop psychology, for its narrow conception of character, for its focus on individual personality traits over social and economic factors, and for problems with methodology. Most of these characteristics were evident in Professor Duckworth’s work long before the publication of her book, but it seems that they got amplified as she (and most likely her editor) prepared her book for a general audience.

Given the number of mixed to negative reviews, it would seem that the opinion-makers are finally countering their original enthusiasm for grit. The ledger is balanced. Those of us with concerns about grit can relax.

Well, no. The meteoric rise of grit reveals troubling problems in the formation of our public discourse about education. I and many others have written about our policy maker’s culpability in the formation of this discourse, but here I’d like to consider another dimension of the circumstances that give rise to phenomena like the one we’re witnessing with grit.

With some notable exceptions, not many journalists who cover education–and even fewer opinion page columnists–have a solid background in the Mike Rose. Grit. | Fred Klonsky:

Randi Weingarten: Art is essential, not extra

Art is essential, not extra:

Art is essential, not extra

I spent time this summer with impoverished bohemian artists, a murderous barber and people accused of practicing witchcraft—all during one mesmerizing opera- and musical theater-filled weekend in Central New York. Like me, aficionados of the musical arts from near and far make the annual summer pilgrimage to Cooperstown—not only to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but to The Glimmerglass Festival. The festival’s mission is to offer opera enthusiasts great art in an idyllic lakeside setting, as well as to cultivate such enthusiasm in new and nontraditional audiences—dispatching performers to schools, houses of worship and even one of the state’s highest-security prisons.

Francesca Zambello, the remarkable artistic and general director of The Glimmerglass Festival, calls this her “cultural crusade.” Children as young as 10 from neighboring towns take the stage in the festival’s youth chorus. Promising performers from across the globe get valuable training and exposure through the Young Artists Program, for ages 20 to 30. Colorblind recruiting and casting was a hallmark of the festival’s productions long before “Hamilton” made its debut.

Zambello is especially drawn to works that illuminate relevant social issues, one of the ways she makes connections with people who might sooner drink hot sauce than attend opera. Hence, her selections for this summer’s festival include “La Bohème,” “Sweeney Todd” and “The Crucible.” Themes first explored in earlier eras remain relevant today—extreme wealth and poverty, the darkness of revenge, and fear stoked into frenzy that causes people to turn on each other.

These experiences stimulate my mind and feed my soul. And they steel my conviction that the arts must be a part of every community and every school. The arts can anchor a community and connect people who otherwise might not feel a common bond. Culture can also drive economic revitalization; The Glimmerglass Festival’s $8 million budget plants a $21 million footprint in the region. And thebenefits of children’s exposure to the arts are numerous and well-established.

The arts can develop confidence and competence in students who haven’t found success in other academic subjects. They promote creativity and self-directed learning. They engage students—who, with access to the arts, have better attendance, report less boredom, and are more likely to stay in school and do better in school. High school students who take arts classes have higher math and verbalSAT scores. Exposure to the arts has even been shown to affect young people’s values, making them more tolerant and empathetic.

For at-risk students who have access to the arts, the advantages are striking. They tend to have better academic results, including being 10 percent more likely to Art is essential, not extra:

Peek Inside a Classroom: Effective Education Reform | LucidWitness.com

Peek Inside a Classroom: Effective Education Reform | LucidWitness.com:

PEEK INSIDE A CLASSROOM: EFFECTIVE EDUCATION REFORM

Co-Authors:

Sandra L. Bloom, M.D.  and Daun H. Kauffman M.Ed., M.B.A.

Classroom insights provided by Daun Kauffman  in true vignettes.

 I always started school days with my class by sharing a personal greeting and an optional hug with each student, as they entered the door of our room.  They had a comforting routine with coats and backpacks and warmup work on the board ready for them.  They knew that someone who knew them had prepared especially for them.  Our startup was paired with breakfast for everyone, courtesy of Title 1.  The familiarity helped students with self-regulation in the transition to a classroom environment.

Teachers can learn too!

I felt we had a positive, caring beginning to our day of academics, but I couldn’t help but push the pace, especially when days overflowed with Lesson Plans.

That is, I felt that way until a friend who pioneered the development of the “Sanctuary Model,” Dr. Sandra Bloom, M.D., suggested an addition.  With an ear-to-ear smile she pressed gently and politely and respectfully, but oh so firmly and confidently.  She pressed her case to “add one question,” add “just one question”.  Dr. Bloom waited… pointedly and expectantly.  She wanted me to try adding a “Community Meeting” to our daily startup.  “Go around the classroom so each student participates: My name is ___.  One word for my feelings this morning is ____.”

I agreed, skeptically, thinking we already had a fine, “community” startup, and wondering where we’d find the time.

We started with learning the routine.  I added some options to Dr. Bloom’s question:  a) to ‘pass’, thinking that sometimes some of the kids would be dealing with weighty stuff, and b) to add a reason for their feeling or simply say “no reason”.

The first ten days, many simply shared “I feel happy.  No reason”.  Or “I feel sad. No reason”.  So, I began to incorporate “feelings words” into our other vocabulary work and I bought a large wall  poster with visualizations of feelings words.  The kids began to be intrigued.

“Knowing” is not the same as “Understanding”

The “Community Meeting” in the Sanctuary Model “Toolkit” begins similarly, as part of building any trauma-informed organization.  Explicit acknowledgement of feelings as first priority, embedded in establishing social norms of safety and caring for each person in the group.

In our school classroom, “How are you feeling?” became central to Peek Inside a Classroom: Effective Education Reform | LucidWitness.com:

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Mid-August Edition

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Mid-August Edition:

ICYMI: Mid-August Edition

ICYMI: Mid-August Edition

I'm embarrassed that I haven't been saying this all along, but if you find something on this list that speaks to you, be sure to share it on your own networks. Amplifying voices is important, and you can do that just by tweeting and posting anything you find that you like directly. Don't share this post (not just this post) but share the original post that I've linked to.

Teacher Education and a Call To Activism 

Paul Thomas takes a look at teacher education's self-esteem problem, and the foolish things it has led to.  

There's No Such Thing As a Public Charter School

A spirited op-ed that makes this point one more time.

Useless Testing Gap Analyses (and the Newspapers That Love Them)

Mark Weber is the king of explaining complicated statisticky things in ways that ordinary humans can understand. Here's another great explainer on test result gaps.

Why I Quit My Job, But Not Being a Teacher

Yes, it's another "Why I Quit" letter, but it's well done and makes a statement about how strongly teachers identify with the work.

Teacher Pay, Student Poverty, and Inequitably Funded Schools: A Data-Driven Story From Chicago

A look at how the broke-on-purpose school district of Chicago tilts the field against poor neighborhoods. You should also check out the follow-up post at Jersey Jazzman

The Olympic Celebration of Diversity

What if we narrowed the Olympics down to just seven events?

A Conversation with Nashville School Board Member Amy Frogge 

A look inside the recent Nashville school board election, in which reformsters pumped in tons of money and a local Mom still beat them.

Brand New NY Charter Group Has Michigan as Its First Customer

More research from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, showing how yet another group of reformster consulting profiteers pops up.

Protect Yourself from ASDs

Come for the rundown of what ASDs are, how they spread, and why they're a bad idea. Stay for Chyris Barbic (the pioneer ASD chief) saying that having several states pursue ASDs is problematic.

Following the Money in Washington Primaries

Tracking the dollars that reformsters spread through Washington state in hopes of getting the charter industry more political leverage.

The So-Called Right To Teach 

Nancy Flanagan dissects the newest rhetorical attack on the teaching profession.

 CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Mid-August Edition:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Charters Spend Less on Teaching

Education and Profit

1by Peter Greene / 1h

Even as many charter fans are backing away from the idea of for-profit schools, last month found US News running this piece arguing that profit-making and education go together like a horse and carriage. The author is Ian Lindquist , a 2009 graduate of St. John's College (the read great books 

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ryan Lochte | the becoming radical

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ryan Lochte | the becoming radical:

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ryan Lochte

At our faculty retreat focusing on diversity, a few lessons grew spontaneously from the keynote and related break-out sessions.

One lesson at the individual level exposed blind spots among faculty related to how language offends, the relationship between intent and impact, and a not-so-veiled resistance to listening and then acting on expanding diversity through culturally responsive behavior among faculty with privilege.

Another lesson at the systemic level was a confrontation of the chasm between words and action: what we say matters, but what we fund and how we act ultimately determine if those words are veneer or genuine principles.

My university is a selective liberal arts college that is a microcosm of the larger tensions of culture and diversity facing the U.S.

White heterosexual male privilege dominates (and even fuels) both our wider society as well as any insular community or institution within our society. James Baldwin deconstructed throughout his career how whiteness and blackness inform each other while whiteness seeks always to keep itself central to the American Way.

As Baldwin argued about language:

Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound….

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

Today, for example, as #BlackLivesMatter rose out of tragedy after tragedy, the narcissism of whiteness has created a backlash that demands attention to how working-class whites have suffered.

And then, on a smaller scale, during the 2016 Rio Olympics—a time ripe with amazing accomplishments by black athletes from the U.S.—we have been handed Ryan Lochte, a case of arrested development as a consequence of privilege.

Somehow we will not address the white gaze, and we are also committed to keeping the gaze of concern on whiteness because, you know, frat-boy life is funny even when guys are biologically grown:Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ryan Lochte | the becoming radical:

Choosing Democracy: Back to School Shopping Lists - and State Budgets

Choosing Democracy: Back to School Shopping Lists - and State Budgets:

Back to School Shopping Lists - and State Budgets

“You can exhale now,” the headline in Salon reassures, because “kids have more money than ever to spend on school stuff this year.”

The reason for Salon’s celebratory tone is that a national survey every year by the National Retail Federation finds that preteens preparing for a new school year have a record-breaking average of $80.31 in personal spending money. The author leaps from that nugget of information to conclude this is a sign of a stronger economy ahead. (Disclosure: I’ve written about education for Salon.)

But even if Salon’s analysis makes you breathe easier about the economy, you should understand those school kids aren’t going to keep their cash for very long, because their schools are going to need it.

Indeed, back to school supply lists are likely longer than ever before due to the simple reason that schools increasingly don’t have the funds to pay for items on the list. And because of persistently inadequate budgets that continue to dog our schools, you can be sure the longer your shopping list, the worse the funding situation is throughout your child’s school system.

Not only are school stockrooms increasingly bare of supplies, but teachers aren’t being adequately paid, class sizes are ballooning, programs are being cut, and school buildings increasingly forego required maintenance.

In states like North Carolina – where schools still get less funding than they did in 2008, despite an improving economy – money for necessary school supplies continues to be inadequate.

In the News & Observer, a local paper based in Raleigh, a first-grade teacher explains how the allotment for supplies she and her colleagues receive has gone from $100 per student “over a decade ago” to zero. The shortfall is especially harmful to her school where 70 percent of students are from low-income households that qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. “Some are even homeless,” she says.

Across the state in Asheville, a local reporter explains how in that district’s schools the allocation for classroom supplies dropped from $215,530 in 2007-08 to an expected $136,802 in the upcoming school year. That smaller allocation comes as the number of students grew from 3,800 to an expected 4,500.”

An op-ed in the Raleigh paper explains the cause of the problem: State budget allocations for school supplies are less than half of what they should be based on a comparison to funding levels in 2007-08, adjusted for inflation.

The problem is nationwide. According to the most recent calculation of what it costs for a typical family to begin the school year – the Backpack Index compiled by Huntington bank – since 2007, “the cost of supplies and extracurricular activities has increased 85 percent for elementary school students, 78 percent for middle school students, and 57 percent for high school students.”

Yet many states, over the same time period, continue to fund schools less.

Consequently, teachers are having to beg families for money and dig deeper into their own pockets to purchase items their classrooms need just to function properly. A survey of schoolteachers in 2016 finds the average teacher spends $487 in personal money for their classrooms, mostly for school supplies and learning materials.

Much like in North Carolina, an Oklahoma newspaper describes the problem teachers have with outfitting their classrooms. The reporter sources much of the blame to budget cutbacks passed down from the state to districts. Some districts have eliminated school supply funding altogether.

In some school districts in Michigan, funding for classroom supplies has been cut so much teachers resort to crowd funding for basics Choosing Democracy: Back to School Shopping Lists - and State Budgets:

 

Exclusive: A Delaware Legislator Is Not The Hero For Public Education They Appear To Be – Exceptional Delaware

Exclusive: A Delaware Legislator Is Not The Hero For Public Education They Appear To Be – Exceptional Delaware:

Exclusive: A Delaware Legislator Is Not The Hero For Public Education They Appear To Be

I’ve been wrestling with something for a long time now.  I found out something.  Something big.  Usually my first instinct is to get it out there.  But this was BIG, and if I was wrong about it, it could have shot me in the foot.  It concerns a legislator and an election.  But more than that, it concerned friends.  Friends who are very supportive of this particular legislator.  I’ve had wrestling matches in my head before about these kind of things, but usually the need for truth prevails.  This time though, it was different. 

I reached out to the legislator about this a month ago.  The legislator confirmed what I found out was true.  I asked the legislator why they did what they did.  The legislator explained it to me, and for the past month, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around their answer.  I did talk to some of the friends who support this legislator hoping they could give some type of insight into why the legislator made the choice he did.  There really wasn’t anything they could say that would assuage my doubts about him.

It comes down to truth.  After seeing another Delaware blogger praise this legislator to the high heavens today, I could no longer stand by and not let people know this.  And as I was working on this article, many other dots began to connect.  They will certainly make up their mind either way.  I assume many will just brush it off.  But for some of those who directly support this legislator, they could change their mind about him.  I don’t know.  That is their choice, just as this choice is mine.

Since I started this blog, two bills were very contentious.  One was just getting around to a vote when I began this blog.  The other became the central point of my blog for about five months last year.  House Bill 334 and House Bill 50.  The Smarter Balanced Assessment and the Opting Out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment bills.

Many know the story about what happened with the Smarter Balanced Assessment legislation.  But if you don’t, here is a quick rundown.  House Bill 334 was introduced by two primary sponsors and only one co-sponsor.  Former State Rep. (and also Chair of the House Education Committee at the time) Darryl Scott and Senator David Sokola sponsored the bill.  State Rep. Deb Heffernan was the only co-sponsor.  The bill came out on 5/8/14.  It was released from the House Education Committee on 6/4/14.  The House voted on the bill 6/17/14 where it passed with 30 yes, 9 no, and 2 absent.  From there, it went to the Senate Education Committee where it was released on 6/25/14.  It was put on the agenda for a full Senate vote on 6/26/14.  The day came.  Senator Bryan Townsend gave a very impassioned speech about the bill and the damage this test could do.  The Senate voted.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment was defeated!  Students would NOT have to take this test so many were dreading.  It was a rare moment of victory for Exclusive: A Delaware Legislator Is Not The Hero For Public Education They Appear To Be – Exceptional Delaware:

On the State of the Resistance Movement: Between Murder and Suicide and the Need to Claim a Third Space | educationalchemy

On the State of the Resistance Movement: Between Murder and Suicide and the Need to Claim a Third Space | educationalchemy:

On the State of the Resistance Movement: Between Murder and Suicide and the Need to Claim a Third Space

In May of 2016 I officially resigned as an administrator for United Opt Out a group I help create in 2011 along with Peggy Robertson, Tim Slekar, Ceresta Smith, Shaun Johnson, and Laurie Murphy. Since then, Shaun and Laurie rolled off, and we added new admins like Michael Pena, Rosemarie Jensen, Ruth Rodruigez and Denisha Jones.  Very recently, other admins rolled off as well. There’s been a lot of myth-making and rumor-milling about the roll off of admins and the UOO event taking place this fall in Houston.

People keep asking me “What happened?” To quote a scene from a Northern Exposure episode entitled Burning Down the House in which one character -a famous golfer- attempts to explain how or why it was he “blew the Masters” because of a simple putt, he says, “You want to know what happened? ….  I don’t know what happened.” In other words, perhaps some things cannot be reduced to simple answers even though such oversimplification might suit the self- serving motives of others. If you want to know why anyone one admin decided to retire from UOO, the best course of action is to ask them directly, because there are five different people and five different sets of personal and/or political reasons anyone might have for stepping down. There is no “one” reason. Yet the responses within the movement to the changes in UOO has created a dangerous space (within our movement) which French philosopher Jaques Daignault refers to as being “between murder and suicide”. And that is what this post attempt to respond to. Why? Let me explain. According to Pinar et al (1995):

Daignault argues that to know is to kill (1992a, p. 199), that running after rigorous demonstrations and after confirmations is a hunt:  literally (1992a, p. 100) … To know is to put to death….To know is to kill, to rely on death….The reason of the strongest is reason by itself.  Western man is a wolf of science (1992a, p. 198).  Knowledge — understood poststructurally as the reduction of difference to identity, the many to the one, heterogeneity to homogeneity — is violence.  This violence results from competition between ideologies or doctrines, and from the radical transformation of what exists in conformity with what we believe it ought to be (quoted in Hwu, 1993, p. 132).  For Daignault, as for Serres, to know is to commit murder, to terrorize.  Nihilism refers to the abandonment of any attempt to know.  It is the attitude which says anything goes or things are what they are.  It is to give up, to turn ones ideals into empty fictions or memories, to have no hope.  Daignault (1983) calls for us to live in the middle, in spaces that are neither terroristic or nihilistic, neither exclusively political nor exclusively technological.

We are experiencing the contested terrain of the in-between where we need to consider that taking a stand does require taking “a side”— nor does taking sides mean you are taking a stand.

I am choosing to take a stand by not taking sides.

Again Daignault suggests:

The only way to avoid this fate is to allow thought to think itself, to go beyond or to disrupt dualism, and to think the difference between them.  It is to introduce paradox.  It is not to stop defining, but to multiply the definitions.  It is to On the State of the Resistance Movement: Between Murder and Suicide and the Need to Claim a Third Space | educationalchemy:

What Comes Next? Part 2 - United Opt Out at the Crossroads

Pleas e join Internet radio host Dr. James Avington Miller Jr. and special guest Dr. Mark Naison for a special two hour show devoted to United Opt Out.


Dr. Miller and Dr. Naison will be examining what is going on with United Opt Out. They will discuss what the movement has done in the past and what will it may be doing in the futiure. They will attempt to bring some clarification to recent changes in this crtically important group.


The discussion will be enlightening and will bring understanding to what has been taking place as United Opt Out takes a new direction.


Please tune in and call in this Sunday. 

This is the RESISTANCE and we need to be unified in our fight against those forces overtaking and usurping our public schools.

Knowledge is power !

RESISTANCE MATTERS
RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE
RESISTANCE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF EXPRESSION OF DEMOCRACY

RESISTANCE IS SURVIVAL

Please click on the website below to listen live:
http://bbsradio.com/thewarreport
2:00 PM PDT
4:00 PM CDT
5:00 PM EDT

or
A direct listen-in line only
Station 1 - 716-748-0150
To call-in and interact live
Station 1 888-627-6008 toll free 

 What Comes Next? Part 2 - United Opt Out at the Crossroads:

Big Education Ape: I Don't Belong To Any Organized Party: I'm A Democrat -http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/08/i-dont-belong-to-any-organized-party-im.html

Ciedie Aech’s Wonderful Book | tultican

Ciedie Aech’s Wonderful Book | tultican:

Ciedie Aech’s Wonderful Book

There are few public school systems in America that have been more harmed by what Diane Ravich aptly dubbed “corporate education reform” than those in Denver, Colorado. Ciedie Aech tells the story of a professional educator working in the horrific and unstable environment that developed with the extra-legal federal take-over of public schools. In reality, this is a heart wrenching story, but Aech’s sarcastic humor turns it into a delight. Any teacher in America’s public k-12 system who reads “Why is you always got to be trippin” will immediately recognize many scenes Ciedie delightfully paints while telling this dreadful story.

About the Title

 “One day when noise from unsupervised students caught my attention, I stepped into the hallway to find a group of boys throwing friendly punches outside a neighboring classroom.

 “‘Gentlemen!’ I stated reactively, clearing my throat. Happy to ignore extraneous interference, the boys continued their game. ‘Gentlemen!’ I said again, this time a little more loudly. Straightening, the boys stopped to look my way. ‘Okay, let’s go,’ I directed. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in class?’ ‘Aw, Miss,’ two or three grumbled as the small group broke up and began to move away. Pulling at chronically sagging pants while smoothing intricately braided hair, a tall, thin young man hung back.

 “As a student who had attended one of my afternoon classes for more than six months, he knew me well. Watching his friends now amble unhurriedly down the hall, he turned to look at me in plaintive wonder. ‘Aw, Miss,’ he protested. ‘Why is you always got to be trippin’?’

 ‘“Why is I always got to be trippin’? …

 “If you don’t take pains to hold them together? If you don’t step in, over and over (and then over again) to pull them circuitously inward towards success – sometimes with no other help than the full power of your will? They struggle, they flounder; they deflate and fall apart. Desperately they count upon the people in their lives who make the effort to ‘trip.’”

 Background for the Story

If you are a fan of privatizing public schools and corporate education reform, Denver is your cup of tea. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute (one of those “think-tanks” that like the New York Times reports is more like a tax free lobbying firm than an honest evaluator of education policy) rated Denver Public Schools (DPS) the third best school choice system in the United States behind only New Orleans and Washington DC.

In the summer of 2005, Michael Bennet, who had spent the previous 2 years with his fellow Wesleyan alum, John Hickenlooper as chief of the mayor’s staff was appointed Superintendent of DPS. He previously earned a law degree at Yale and was editor of the Yale Law Journal. Prior to working for the mayor and future governor of Colorado, Bennet spent six years as the managing director of the Anschutz Investment Company. However, he had no training or experience as an educator or in education administration.

Two years before Bennet departed to become Colorado’s junior United States Senator, he hired another lawyer with no education background (other than tutoring English in Hong Kong) to be chief operating officer of DPS, Tom Boasberg. Before coming to Denver, Boasberg did a stint at the FCC, then went Ciedie Aech’s Wonderful Book | tultican:

NOW AVAILABLE AS A PAPERBACK AT AMAZON BOOKS (ALSO AS KINDLE)

AUGUST 20, 2016

Will Tom Toch Ever Find a Reform Bad Enough to Abandon? - Living in Dialogue

Will Tom Toch Ever Find a Reform Bad Enough to Abandon? - Living in Dialogue:

Will Tom Toch Ever Find a Reform Bad Enough to Abandon? 

By John Thompson.

In 2008, Tom Toch’s “Rush to Judgment” reviewed science-based alternatives to value-added teacher evaluations. Toch explained that the District of Columbia’s test-heavy IMPACT teacher evaluation system cost $1000 per teacher. For that price, we could have invested in proven, win-win alternatives such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification, the Toledo peer review plan, or Robert Pianta’s holistic approach to professional development. The United States spent $500 billion dollars a year on education, and a $3 billion investment in better teacher evaluations should have been seen in the context of the $14 billion dollars of annual spending on professional development, which was often ineffective. Toch observed that some would like to use standardized test results in evaluations, but that those scores “aren’t great measures.” Then, in a sentence that seemed inexplicable after such an overview, he called for test scores to count for as much as 50% in teacher evaluations.

This was the time when corporate reformers took the opportunity to push their entire competition-driven model on the nation, and when Toch was involved in an even more confusing case of wordsmithing. Educational consultant Marc Dean Millot wrote in This Week in Education about Toch’s “Sweating the Big Stuff: A Progress Report on the Movement to Scale Up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools.”

Based on interviews with CMO insiders, publicly available data, and his own analysis, Toch presents a compelling indictment of the “new philanthropy’s” primary investment strategy for education reform. His arguments should be available to all and addressed on the merits. Instead, someone at EdSector hacked away at Toch’s evidence until it fit the rhetoric of CMO advocates.

My take on the paper’s confusing conclusion on the scaling up of charter schools was to emphasize the contradictions inherent in Toch’s paper:

But Toch then writes “the research for a report on CMOs that I’ve produced for the think tank Education Sector reveals that many of these organizations are going to be hard-pressed to deliver the many schools that Duncan wants from them.” … Toch describes “four dozen charter networks’ opening about 350 schools with some 100,000 seats over the past decade. This is a long ways fromthe 5,000 failing public schools. …” (emphasis mine)

Toch further wrote,

CMOs increasingly face the challenge of either paying their teachers more as they gain seniority, or churning through teachers and making it tougher to sustain their schools’ powerful cultures.

Also,

student attrition is high in CMO schools, fueled by higher standards, long hours, and transient families. A study of four San Francisco Bay Area KIPP middle schools found that 60 percent of entering students departed before graduating. The loss of revenue from so many departing students is devastating, but the price of bringing in replacement students is also high.

In retrospect, reading these two papers in tandem provides an insight into why the Duncan administration Will Tom Toch Ever Find a Reform Bad Enough to Abandon? - Living in Dialogue: