Flexians at Home and Abroad

In her astute and exhaustively documented book Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (2009), social anthropologist and public policy scholar Janine R. Wedel describes her novel and insightful concept of “flexians” in this way:

“The new breed of players, who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight. (emphasis added)

“Flexians craft overlapping roles for themselves—coincidences of interest—to promote public policies (and sometimes their personal finances as well).” (pp 7-8)

…“Yet while parties to corrupt activities typically engage in them for profit, the same cannot be said of flexians, who seek influence and to promote their views at least as much as money. … The very people who engage in these activities continue to command public respect and influence, sometimes even garnering more. Moreover, national and international governments and organizations are often attracted to, and reward, flexians because they get things done.

“Journalists and public interest watchdogs have excavated and published details of activities by all these players [viz. in the arena of education reform: Mercedes Schneider, Anthony Cody, Susan O’Hanian, Diane Ravitch, and more], but to little consequence.” (p. 12)

Despite the fact that Wedel’s book was published in 2009 and does not consider the global or American agenda to corporatize/privatize public schooling, in my view the same analysis applies. The neoliberal agenda of privatization of the public schools and control of the individual student as eventual consumer/worker drone is being advanced in the 21^st century by the collusion of a college-chums network of politicians and corporate elites who exemplify the “flexians” that Wedell describes. This agenda is now on steroids because of exponentially advancing technology, which is driving a surveillance state.

 

The individuals who are profiting financially from this technology (e.g. Gates at Microsoft and Zuckerberg at Facebook), who feel uber-entitled to foist their techno/data mindset on the global society, are in lock-step with other global corporations such as McKinsey and Pearson. The most inappropriate area that these flexians should be involved in is public education. Yet they are hell-bent on disrupting and transforming what needs to be a human interaction between teacher and students into a dystopian eco-system of digital anytime, anywhere learning mediated by artificial intelligence and unregulated algorithms that are inherently lacking in transparency. Their goal is workforce development in the interest of global corporations, rather than encouragement of the latent talent and creativity within each individual student, their co-option of the term “personalization” notwithstanding.

 

Here in RI, we have the First [Flexian] Couple—Governor Raimondo, whose plans for education include a heavy dose of computer-mediated instruction, and First Gentleman Andy Moffit, a once upon a time TFAer (Teach for America recruit) and now an employee of McKinsey and Company. He is the co-author with Sir Michael Barber (formerly partner and head of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice and now Chief Education Advisor at Pearson) of Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders. What has the British corporation Pearson brought to education in America? Invalid high stakes testing (PARCC), incessant test prep, and curriculum of the poorest quality, as well as data collection and analysis, with the potential for monumental harm, and of course greatest profit for Pearson.

 

In addition to her concept of flexians, Wedel also details how the misapplication of the financial audit to all areas of governmental life has negatively impacted the social sphere.

“… In the go-go 1980s, when Thatcher and Reagan were at the helm in the United Kingdom and the United States, the goal of refashioning the state in the image of the private sector motivated the migration of audits from their original association with financial management to other areas of working life. (p. 196)

“… [t]he idea of audits exploded throughout society and permeated organizational life as the chief method of controlling individuals. The tools and approaches of accountancy became the means through which ‘the values and practices of the private sector would be instilled in the public sector,’ as several anthropologists studying the subject have assessed.” (p. 197)

All of the ills of the corporate education deform movement seem to me to stem from this ill-considered audit/accountability approach that should never have been applied to any public good, particularly one that is responsible for the healthy upbringing of our nation’s children: incessant use of high stakes tests (produced and analyzed as cheaply as possible) to control students, teachers, schools, and neighborhoods; closing of neighborhood schools and creation of charter schools, many of which pursue wholly inappropriate teaching paradigms and enable the school-to-prison pipeline; standardization of curriculum (i.e. Common Core State (sic) (Stealth) Standards, which had virtually no input from those with extensive backgrounds in child development, language and literacy development, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities) and which denies dignity and respect to students of diverse backgrounds; ignoring the actual strengths and needs of students with IEPs under the guise of forcing high expectations as measured by the same inappropriate tests used for the general population of students; use of poorly trained TFA temps in primarily high poverty schools; and doing away with tenure and seniority protections with the aim of destroying teachers unions. Is this the America that people struggled, fought, and died to protect and preserve? Or is this the fulfillment of decades of a stealthily imagined dystopia, profiting the very few at the expense of the very many?

Wedel asks: “Who or what can slow the players down? The mechanisms to hold them accountable to either democratic or free-market principles that applied not long ago largely do not effect (sic) these players’ machinations.” (p. 109) So it’s up to those of us who have become aware of the stakes to expose the machinations and dismantle them.

 

 

 

“REFORM” by any Other Name Would Still Stink (with apologies to William Shakespeare)

Ted Siedle presented the results of his forensic analysis of the Employees Retirement System of RI (ERSRI) real estate investments, a talk hosted by the RI Retired Teachers Association (RIRTA), on October 12, 2016. The title of the report is “Beyond Bad: A Generation of Mismanagement of Employee Retirement System of RI Real Estate.”

Here is the full report.

(See the text of Seidle’s speech provided by golocalprov  here )

Mr.  Siedle made the point that Wall Street has gone after public pension funds because they were the last vast pot of money available. While I respect Mr. Siedle tremendously for his acumen in investigating and exposing the disaster that has been labeled pension “reform” in RI (and which has brought high praise from across the country to Gina Raimondo), the public needs to become aware that the other vast pot of money that Wall Street hedge funders are salivating over is public education. They have been nurturing their plan for years by investing in charter schools, but the next frontier will be even more disastrous to public school children, their families, and American society. This plan involves a morphing of our cherished institution of public education for all children (flawed though it has been) into a dog-eat-dog dystopia, made possible by the limitless funneling of children’s educationally derived data to edupreneurs via digital learning. Governor Raimondo is as implicated in this education “reform” as she was in the pension “reform.”

First, some background on Mr. Seidle’s presentation. RIRTA has been the only group with the courage and perseverance to continue to search for the truth about Gina Raimondo’s changes to the Employees Retirement System of RI (ERSRI) while she was state Treasurer. After the recent compromise pension settlement, the RI Public Employees’ Retiree Coalition (RIPERC) (composed of AFSCME Council 94/Retiree Chapter, RI AFT/R, NEARI/Retired, RI Association of Retired Principals, and RI Laborers’ Retiree Council, as well as RIRTA), which had brought the lawsuit, told RIRTA officials that they were on their own if they chose to pursue the matter.

Through two kickstarter crowdfunding efforts, RIRTA was able to hire Ted Siedle, a former SEC lawyer and a contributor to Forbes, to investigate the pension reform as engineered by Raimondo and now managed by Treasurer Seth Magaziner. (Siedle’s  first report in June, 2015 was entitled Double Trouble: Wall Street Secrecy Conceals Preventable Pension Losses in Rhode Island. See here.

When Mr. Siedle requested key documents from Magaziner for his current forensic analysis of the real estate investments, he was informed that RIRTA would have to pay the treasurer’s office $10,000 in order to get them. Though this was a hardship for the group, RIRTA managed to come up with the $10,000 that Magaziner demanded in order to provide the group with key prospectuses and other documents. Magaziner then failed to turn over most of the documents requested, and refused to give RIRTA a full refund. (He returned $2,657.50.) In addition, Magaziner claimed that he had disclosed all the fees paid to managers “that he was aware of.”

According to Mr. Siedle, public record laws have been eviscerated in the last 5 years, so the public cannot find out the specifics on the investments. This secrecy is a serious impediment to addressing the problems. Currently the pensioners have NO VOICE in the investing done by the ERSRI. Mr. Siedle emphasized that this needs to change.

RIRTA had also reached out to Attorney General Kilmartin, but he informed them that he did not have the resources to pursue an investigation.

Siedle stated that what happened with the pension “reform” was a DELIBERATE misuse of pension assets, which resulted in a transfer of wealth from pensioners to Wall Street. There has been an exchange of money from Wall Street to political donations and back to Wall Street. Siedle claims that pension reform was actually a RUSE that Raimondo used to further her personal political ambitions. (Still, the same thing is going on across the country, and some labor leaders are embedded with the looter class.)

He concluded from both of his forensic investigations that POLITICS is driving the pension investments, not the pension performance/results. Otherwise how could the 27 years of deplorable results with the real estate investments have continued without a peep if it wasn’t benefitting someone? Where was the due diligence?

Siedle ended his talk with Why we need to go the distance, and What we need to do. Among his suggestions were these, which I believe also apply to what needs to happen regarding education “reform”:

1. Expose the harm/lies
2. Discredit their experts
3. Spread the word of the massive losses, and that they will grow if nothing is done

So what are some of the lies, and where is the harm of the corporate education “reform” movement that Governor Raimondo is fostering here in RI?

One of the major education initiatives that Raimondo has championed this year is Computer Science in all schools at all grade levels (Computer Science for Rhode Island (CS4RI)), or Everybody Must Do Code. This is supposedly for the purpose of developing computer programmers to fill high-paying jobs in the field that are not being filled due to lack of skilled job seekers. As Andrew Stewart reported in his post “Rethinking Computer Science in RI,”

“One of this reporter’s sources that is currently in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at University of Rhode Island pointed out that programming jobs are expected to shrink by 8% in the next few years, including in terms of salary. This means that Raimondo could in fact be creating an influx of laborers that would cheapen costs of employing the labor pool, not giving these students a competitive edge in high-paying tech jobs as much as insuring they can only get low wages for their special skill set. …

“However, there is a further dark comedy to this issue. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is a longtime education deform advocate and was behind the implementation of Common Core. The state relies on Microsoft for a good deal of computing needs, so much so that ‘[o]n Wednesday [September 28], Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President Fred Humphries will join Raimondo during a coding class at Central Falls High School’, according to a story by Linda Borg in the ProJo. It is a case of the state quite literally rewarding the very people behind the union busting in public education!  [Common Core/PARCC/low test scores/schools are failing/unions are the problem/Charter schools are the answer]

Find Stewart’s post here.

Also see here

The Microsoft connection pops up again in this article about GE Digital. See here.

“At a meeting Tuesday with 7 of 12 new GE Digital employees, Governor Raimondo sought their advice, explored what type of schooling had prepared them for jobs here as the company creates its new information technology center and asked if they’ll volunteer to teach computer science in the public schools.

“That last request would help with Raimondo’s initiative to prepare more young people for the kinds of jobs GE Digital offers, which are expected to pay, on average, more than $100,000. To get computer science into all K-12 public classrooms, Raimondo said she’s relying in large part on volunteers, beginning with Microsoft and including many from the Lifespan hospital system.” (emphasis added)

The article goes on to say that “Lindsey Curran, who just moved from Boston to Providence for her new job as a user interface engineer, told Raimondo about her undergraduate work in English and film but said a 12-week boot camp she took in Boston to learn web development prepared her to land the GE Digital job.” From this Raimondo infers that all children starting in kindergarten need to take computer science?? How about a well-rounded education? BTW, who can predict the type of employment that will be available 12 years from now when these 5 year olds graduate from high school (if there will even be such a thing as high school by then.) Using “volunteers” is a low blow. This young woman would be about as effective as a Teach for America recruit. Why have actual computer science teachers been totally disregarded?

On another education front, Governor Raimondo “says she’s open to using the SAT as a graduation requirement for high school students.

“The Democratic governor tells WPRI-TV the college admissions exam is better than it used to be because it’s aligned to Common Core standards.” See here.

I had my suspicions about the new SAT from the beginning, because David Coleman, the mastermind of the (to my mind) deeply flawed ELA Common Core standards had not only taken charge of the College Board, but also determined to align the SAT to the (to my mind) deeply flawed ELA and math Common Core standards. Now, if Manuel Alfaro, former executive director of assessment design and development at the College Board, is to be believed, it seems that the new SAT is itself deeply flawed. I understand that many believe that replacing the PARCC with the PSAT/SAT for high school students would be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. Here are some highlights (or lowlights) from the observations from the former executive director, as reported in this post by Mercedes Schneider, an impeccable education blogger and author: See her full post here.

“On an earlier post I stated that a large number of items on operational SAT forms were extensively revised or rewritten during form construction and review. On a recent post, I asked:

• Who is reviewing these items? Surely, Content Advisory Committees would have expressed concerns about item quality to College Board executives.

“As you might imagine, members of the Content Advisory Committee raised issues and concerns frequently and forcefully. Some members of the committee sent emails to David Coleman; others expressed their concerns during face-to-face meetings; and others sent emails to the leadership of the Assessment Design and Development group.

“Of the many concerns raised by the Content Advisory Committee, here are the top three:

“Item Quality: Committee members were very concerned with the quality of the items the College Board brought to committee meetings for review. Their biggest concern was the large number of items that were mathematically flawed; items that did not have correct answers; and items that did not have accurate or realistic contexts. Some members even went as far as stating that they had never seen so many seriously flawed items.

“Development Schedule: Committee members felt that schedules did not allow them enough time to perform thorough reviews. Given the large number of items they had to review (and the poor quality of the items), they needed more time to provide meaningful comments and input.

“Development Process: Committee members felt that the process used to develop the items was inadequate. They felt that the process lacked the rigor required to produce the high quality items necessary for item data to be useful.

…
“Given the Content Advisory Committee’s critical feedback about the items they reviewed in preparation for, and during, meetings with the College Board, we can infer that the pretest item pool was of poor quality, at best. The committee and College Board staff/contractors worked hard to improve the items before they were operationally administered to students. I must give credit where credit is due: they did their best.

“How, then, did so many flawed items end up in the pretest item pool? If the committee and College Board staff/contractors did their best to fix the items, why did the College Board need to include extensively revised items on operational SAT forms?

“The reason was—concerned students, parents, and educators—that the Content Advisory Committee reviewed the items, for the first time, after operational SAT forms were constructed.

“To clarify my last sentence: The Content Advisory Committee reviewed the items for the first time, not before they were pretested, but after the items were assembled into operational SAT forms.”
If these allegations are true, it should be clear that the new SAT is a disaster and cannot possibly offer valid information to students, families, schools, and colleges. Further, many colleges have abandoned demanding SAT/ACT scores from prospective students. So why is our Governor contemplating the use of the SAT as a graduation requirement?

And then there is the connection of First Gentleman Andy Moffit to corporate education reform, via TFA and McKinsey. Please see my previous blog post for more on this here

The hedge funders and edupreneurs, birds of a feather with Raimondo/Moffit, envision a future of all-digital-all-the-time for the children of the masses, while their own children enjoy what should be a free, appropriate education for all, consisting of small classes, the arts, science labs, and field trips, guided by human/humane teachers. For a fuller understanding of this dystopian future, please see this post (n.b. Bristol Warren Regional School District is participating in the League of Innovative Schools.)

The shift to digital learning that Governor Raimondo, along with Commissioner Wagner and RIDE (and the RI Strategic Plan for Public Education 2015-2020), are pushing is essentially an educational experiment, with virtually no actual research to recommend it. Not only that, but there has been mounting evidence that too much screen time is harmful to children, especially young children—educationally, physically, neurologically, emotionally, and behaviorally. An introduction to the potential harm of WiFi radiation from these hand-held devices can be found here

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychotherapist and addictions specialist, has published articles here and here and written the book Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. Why would those with power and influence push such a drastic change in how education is provided to all RI public school children without investigating the potential harm to those children first?

Are POLITICS, ambition, and greed driving the education “reform” decisions as they apparently did for the pension “reform?” Who is accountable for the actual performance/results of these policies–not according to flawed data from flawed tests, but as they are experienced by the vulnerable children caught in the system?

 

 

Our Schools–Back to the Future

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

While I am in complete agreement with the serious concerns that Nancy Bailey (See here ) and Peggy Robertson (See here) have brought up in reaction to the PBS NOVA program “School of the Future,” I found some of the segments encouraging. Watch here These segments emphasize the value of human interaction and the importance of caring about students rather than pushing the mindless morass of digital modules/digital badging/data monitoring, assessment, and tracking that many of us are alarmed about with “21^st Century Learning.”

So I’ll begin with what I felt was positive about the program. The teacher at the Bronx, NY elementary school acknowledged that many of the students arrived at school with “baggage.” The segment discussed the “disruptive nature of adversity,” and stated that the prevention of the negative effects of this challenge was the “human buffer.” Children need to feel nurtured and safe, and that adults care about them. Yes! I also was pleased with the middle school in Columbia, Illinois. One of the techniques portrayed for helping this age group improve their learning was the use of Essential Questions, which guided their understanding of an entire unit. While frequent quizzes sets off alarm bells, I found that the strategy of reinforcing the previous day’s lesson with a short quiz every day seemed valuable. In needing to retrieve the past day’s learning, students were strengthening their long-term retention of the material. The key was that the quizzes were not scored, and so were not high stakes. From my experience teaching Latin to deaf high school students, frequent practice, even if not frequent quizzing, serves to solidify students’ learning.

While I am deeply suspicious of charter schools as a remedy for so-called failing public schools, I thought that the East Palo Alto Academy, a charter school, emphasized what high school students need to be engaged in their learning. The school has a small student body, which makes it logistically easier to match students with caring adults. The class included in the segment was a “restorative justice” class. I didn’t notice any computers in use. The aim was for teachers to create curricula that were culturally responsive and thus engaging for students. Students were graded on essays, presentations, and class participation. They were also encouraged to pursue their passions outside of the school day, such as at the Hip Hop Club. The school couples high expectations with love, support, and understanding.

Across the freeway from East Palo Alto is Palo Alto, an affluent area with two elite high schools. Here the students were under intense pressure to be academically successful. At Henry M. Gunn High School, the community had to confront “the dark side of intense academic expectations” when they suffered a spate of student suicides. This led to a re-evaluation of the stress levels the students were experiencing. The administration realized that they needed to focus on student well-being, not just achievement scores. So they added in down-time to the schedule—a longer lunch time and longer time to pass between classes. This gesture may not be a panacea, but it is a step in the right direction.

Now to the segments that I found problematic. Here is where the frenzied push for technology as the answer to “personalizing” education was on view. In one segment, the video went back to the end of World War II, when the US Air Force faced a challenge to upgrade their pilots to the task of flying jet airplanes. They now had to deal with planes that were more powerful, had greater speed, and depended on more complex technology. The comparison was made from this military/training challenge to student learning in public schools. The problem was framed as needing to adapt to the needs of millions of individual children rather than provide a standardized education geared to the average child. The answer? digital technology! Max Ventilla from AltSchool discussed the “21^st Century Profession” as using digital technologies to build on the students’ own capabilities. The goal is called “mass customization.” This may be plausible, but it is not the only, and certainly not the best, way to frame the need for true personalization.

When Carol Dweck, the promoter of the notion of “Growth Mindset,” was interviewed, she made a startling statement: “The intersection of technology and psychology is a wonderful intersection. We want children to engage joyfully in a learning process.” Why does the Nazi phrase placed at the entrance to Auschwitz and other death camps come to mind—“Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free)? The viewers were then treated to a segment with Sal Kahn of the online Kahn Academy. According to Kahn, students prefer working with a computer to working one-on-one with a human being because they are inhibited when learning with a person. Why?  because they don’t want to be seen to fail, and they don’t want to feel that they’re wasting the other person’s time. Instead, they gleefully and effectively engage with computer modules chock full of bells and whistles, earning points along the way. Woohoo!

As many others have pointed out, technology is a tool for learning, and has a place, particularly with older, mature students. What all students need the most, however, is thoughtful, creative, dedicated, and sensitive human teachers to decide which technology may be beneficial at which times, and to engage students with empathy, encouraging them to explore their own potential and empower their own voice. Did we really need neuroscience to teach us this?

 

PARCC: How Do I Loathe Thee?—Let Me Count the Ways (with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Some thoughts in response to “PARCC results: R.I. sees improvement, but achievement gap grows”

 “Wagner denied that the test is too hard, a common criticism. Instead, he said Rhode Island has much work to do to put a rigorous curriculum in every school, ramp up teacher training and redesign the way schools, especially high schools, are structured.”

See the article here.

I urge everyone who thinks the PARCC is a valuable assessment, worth the time, money, and curricular resources it gobbles up, to Google PARCC practice tests and avail themselves of the many sample tests for ELA and math at all grade levels. Parents and grandparents with advanced degrees and even teaching experience report that the questions are confusing and designed to trick students. Many cannot figure out the answers that the test developers expected. And this doesn’t even get into the fact that the tests are designed to be administered on computers, ignoring the drawbacks this presents for younger students or any other students who are not computer savvy. Yet Commissioner Wagner insists that all students will take the tests on computers next year, even though students who took the tests with paper and pencil in 2015 did somewhat better. Why the urgency to transition completely to computerized testing? (This is a rhetorical question.)

“Rhode Island students who took the 2014-15 PARCC exams by computer tended to score lower than those who took the exams by paper, raising further questions about the validity and usefulness of results from the tests taken last school year by more than 5 million students in the multi-state Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.

“The differences were sharpest on the English/language arts exam, where 42.5 percent of Rhode Island students who took the test on paper scored proficient, compared to 34 percent of those who took the test by computer.” [This dwarfs the 2% uptick in ELA scores in 2016 compared to 2015.]

See the article here.

 

Standardized tests in R.I. reveal ‘readiness issue’ with online testing

Posted Feb. 10, 2016

“PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island students who took the latest standardized tests on computers performed lower than those who took them on paper, raising questions about the fairness and the validity of the assessments, according to some school superintendents. …

 

“State Education Commissioner Ken Wagner acknowledges that Rhode Island has “a readiness issue” with online testing. He also said, however, that the differences in results are not significant enough to question the validity of the tests. [!]

“‘Increasing technology is the right way to go,’ he said. ‘People have assumed that if there is a difference in scores, that the online ones are too low. But one could argue that the paper scores are too high. It’s not clear which is the right score.’ [perplexing logic here]

“Wagner agrees that these results have ‘shined a light on the need to address the digital divide.

“‘But that doesn’t mean that the test isn’t measuring what it’s supposed to,” he said. “I haven’t heard anyone say we should go back to index cards.'” [!]

See article here.

Yet here is more from other states on the discrepancies between PARCC scores on paper and pencil vs computer:

“In December, the Illinois state board of education found that 43 percent of students there who took the PARCC English/language arts exam on paper scored proficient or above, compared with 36 percent of students who took the exam online. The state board has not sought to determine the cause of those score differences.

“Meanwhile, in Maryland’s 111,000-student Baltimore County schools, district officials found similar differences, then used statistical techniques to isolate the impact of the test format.

“They found a strong “mode effect” in numerous grade-subject combinations: Baltimore County middle-grades students who took the paper-based version of the PARCC English/language arts exam, for example, scored almost 14 points higher than students who had equivalent demographic and academic backgrounds but took the computer-based test.

“’The differences are significant enough that it makes it hard to make meaningful comparisons between students and [schools] at some grade levels,’ said Russell Brown, the district’s chief accountability and performance-management officer. ‘I think it draws into question the validity of the first year’s results for PARCC.’ … Assessment experts consulted by Education Week said the remedy for a “mode effect” is typically to adjust the scores of all students who took the exam in a particular format, to ensure that no student is disadvantaged by the mode of administration.

“PARCC officials, however, said they are not considering such a solution. It will be up to district and state officials to determine the scope of any problem in their schools’ test results, as well as what to do about it, Nellhaus said. In the short term, on policy grounds, you need to come up with an adjustment, so that if a [student] is taking a computer version of the test, it will never be held against [him or her],’ said Briggs, who serves on the technical-advisory committees for both PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

“Such a remedy is not on the table within PARCC, however.

“’At this point, PARCC is not considering that,’ Nellhaus said. ‘This needs to be handled very locally. There is no one-size-fits-all remedy.’

[Apparently this is not being handled by Wagner/RIDE.]

“But putting that burden on states and school districts will likely have significant implications on the ground, said Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools.

“’I think it will heighten uncertainty, and maybe even encourage districts to hold back on how vigorously they apply the results to their decisionmaking,’ he said.

“’One reason many people wanted to delay the use [of PARCC scores for accountability purposes] was to give everybody a chance to shake out the bugs in the system,’ Casserly added. ‘This is a big one.’”

“Comment from homeschoolingmom:

“The PARCC website allowed anyone to take a sample test. When I, as an adult, took the computer test, it was FULL OF BUGS! One screen, nothing showed up when I typed, but when I was shown a summary at the end, every key stroke was recorded. Some questions had you pick from several options, whether your answer would be a whole number, mixed number, etc. There had to be the right number of boxes in the right order for you to input one number of your answer into each box! That was confusing. Some questions had multiple parts, but the 2nd and 3rd parts were not visible unless you scrolled down, and I missed answering some problems all together. When I got to the end, it told me to go back and review my answers, which I tried to do. I was able to fill in a couple of missed problems, but when I tried to correct that answer that recorded miscellaneous key strokes, I was locked out, my test was gone. I think BUGS made online scores LOWER!!”

 

reference here

 

Now let’s consider the appropriateness and reasonableness of the PARCC tests themselves. We have only the word of the test maker, Pearson, and those at RIDE who accept Pearson’s word, that these assessments are valid. Valid means that they assess what they claim to assess. Is this true?

Russ Walsh, an adjunct professor and respected reading specialist, recently “decided to take a close look at the PARCC sample test reading comprehension passages and try to assess their readability, and therefore, their appropriateness for a testing environment.”
He concluded that for most grade levels, “the passages chosen are about two grade levels above the readability of the grade and age of the children … .”

http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2015/02/parcc-tests-and-readability-close-look.html

Obviously, children take these tests independently. Children’s independent reading level is by definition below their instructional level. Tasks at their instructional level are accomplished with teacher and class support. Tasks at the students’ frustration level cannot provide meaningful information about what they know and can do and where they struggle. This sets children up to fail, lowers their self-esteem, and makes it more difficult for them to engage in learning. This is counter-productive and also terribly costly of time, money, and school resources. While adversely affecting all students, the negative impact is exponentially worse for struggling students.

“Less than 22 percent of black and Latino students scored proficient in English compared to a statewide average of almost 38 percent on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a challenging test rolled out last year amid dismal results.

“Less than 9 percent of English language learners reached the state standard, and that number fell to less than 6 percent for special-needs students.”  (emphasis added)

(quote again from

“PARCC results: R.I. sees improvement, but achievement gap grows”)

 

According to RIDE, the PARCC test is aligned to so-called rigorous curricula based on the Common Core State [sic] Standards, which prepare students for critical thinking and problem-solving and thus for the tests. What is the nature of the curricula that are aligned to the Common Core and the PARCC?  Tragically, the answer has been poor quality workbooks from publishers like Pear$on (coincidentally also the producer of the PARCC and remedial materials) that focus narrowly on text-dependent questions on short passages or excerpts from informational or fiction texts.

The next level of curricular harm rushing pell-mell (i.e. in a recklessly hasty or disorganized way; headlong) toward a school near you is 1:1 digital learning/incessant testing/monitoring/tracking. This is being referred to as “personalized” learning, student-centered learning, or competency/proficiency based education, accomplished through the use of digital devices. Despite the fact that actual academic benefits have never been confirmed through peer-reviewed research, the edtech edupreneurs are chomping at the bit to sell ever more hardware, software, and data analysis systems to cash-strapped school systems in the name of “innovation” and global competitiveness. See here for the actual harm to developing children that this frenzy for bogus teaching/learning with hand-held devices all day every day is perpetrating on our children: here

When the general public hears the word “personalized,” they have a right to believe that this means a human teacher working with a reasonable number of students so that human connections can be made. This is the antithesis of what “personalized” learning means to the edtech mob, however. Here is a great explanation of the difference from Alfie Kohn:

“When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc. (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.

“Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

“Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.”

quotes found here

Here’s more on this aspect:

“So the problem with personalization via adaptive software isn’t simply that “it doesn’t work.” It’s that it might work — work to obliterate meaningful and powerful opportunities for civics, for connection, for community. Work to obliterate agency for students. And work not so much to accelerate learning, but to accelerate educational inequalities.”

See here

 

Rather than doubling down on a fatally flawed set of ELA and math standards and the inflexible curricula and assessments aligned to them, RIDE policy makers need to break out of the PR bubble of “rigor,” “innovation,” individualized digital learning, and misguided data collection. Students at all levels, and particularly the most vulnerable students—those who have cognitive/perceptual/neurological/sensory/emotional/behavioral challenges, those whose families live in high-poverty neighborhoods, those from non-English speaking homes, those who are homeless—need personal, not “personalized” a la computer algorithm, attention from well-prepared, dedicated teachers who are sensitive to their interests and needs, and who have the autonomy to create curricula that engage students where they are rather than disengaging them and reinforcing the worst stereotypes about their ability to succeed.

 

After-$chool Tutoring and the Neoliberal Agenda

I dedicate this blog post to the insightful and brilliantly researched and articulated chapter by Ricardo Rosa, Joao Rosa, and Thad Lavallee entitled “Performance Contracting and Supplemental Education Services: Other Altars of Neoliberal Language Deception and Citizen Salvation,” in the book Capitalism’s Educational Catastrophe and the Advancing Endgame Revolt! by Ricardo Rosa and Joao Rosa (2015).

I also dedicate this post to the faces and personas of the five precious elementary school students I had the privilege to work with in the winter/spring of 2012. Their plight will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Here is the well-evidenced claim by the chapters’ authors about Supplemental Education Services (SES) as inextricably linked with the neoliberal aims of the corporatist elite:

“Theoretically, we situate our analysis against the grain of the current hegemonic model of democracy, which we find to be intensely individualistic and market driven. We enter these texts to map out the interaction between policy, everyday life, and structures of power. We claim throughout that SES is detrimental to the ascendancy of democratic and vibrant public schools, as it further exacerbates institutionalized structural inequalities, and it limits social change by attempting to manufacture passive atomistic individuals.” (p 61)

They explain that “Supplemental Education Services (SES) refers to a contractual relationship between private tutoring companies and the state, facilitated by Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Its official purpose is to discipline schools that are not able to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for 3 or more years. School systems are required to use their Title I funds to compensate these companies, most of which are private and some faith-based.” (p 61) [I’m aware that NCLB has now been superseded by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which I refer to as the Everything $till $tinks Act, but I firmly believe that the damage done under NCLB is continuing and even intensifying under ESSA.]

Shortly before retiring from the RI School for the Deaf in 2011, I was speaking with one of the directors of the school. I think I must have said something about being interested in doing after-school tutoring after retiring. I was told that the tutors probably would have to come from outside entities, implying that the [certified and experienced] actual teachers of the students could not be trusted to teach in the after-school program, despite the fact that private companies would not be required to provide tutors who have any certification at all.

As it happened, the next fall I applied to work for one of the SES entities at a Providence elementary school. I was not actually certified to teach children who do not have an educationally significant hearing loss, but I felt confident that my many years of teaching struggling readers at the RI School for the Deaf would be an acceptable background to tutor elementary students. I was suspicious of the materials that the tutors would be required to use, but I was also curious to experience one of these programs from the inside. Tragically, my experience corroborated my suspicions, and exemplifies the harm to vulnerable students that the authors describe in their book.

Shockingly, the authors explain that the earliest incarnation of SES, the Texarkana contract of 1969, was accomplished thanks to the efforts of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney! This type of enterprise, termed “private performance contractors (tutoring companies),” (p 63) was done in an attempt to “protect neoliberal interests by creating a back-door privatization of the multi-billion-dollar public education sector.” (p 64) “The primary objective [of the Texarkana contract] was to test performance. … The problem, of course, was that these tests were the sole criterion for contract reimbursement (Stake, 1971) and therefore functioned to solidify the power of standardized testing and the teaching of decontextualized discreet skills.” (p 66)

Fast forward to my tutoring experience in 2012.

In May of 2012  I sent the following letter to then RI Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist, with cc: to Paula Shannon, Teaching and Learning, Providence Public Schools; Mary Ann Snider, Educator Excellence and Instructional Effectiveness, RIDE; and David Sienko, Student, Community and Academic Supports, RIDE. I got no response from any of them.

Dear Commissioner Gist,

          I recently retired from the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, having taught there since 1985 with a focus on English Language Arts and reading comprehension. This spring I have had the opportunity to work with a group of students at xxxx Elementary School as an after-school reading tutor with the VIPS/Inspiring Minds program. I truly enjoyed teaching my students, and hope that the work we did together will help them as they continue on their academic paths. I decided to write to you because I have some serious concerns about the nature of the materials that the teachers in this program are required to use. I found the CARS/STARS curriculum to be anything but inspiring for young minds. From my long experience teaching reading comprehension to deaf and hard of hearing students, and from my current experience working with these students, I believe that short reading passages with no context are not the best way to engage readers or to provide them with the practice necessary to think deeply about what an author is trying to convey.

Of more concern to me is the STARS program’s heavy reliance on the multiple-choice format, both with the practice work and with the pre- and post- tests. These are some objections I have to this approach:

• Continued practice with this format induces some students to try to figure out the answers without even reading the text thoroughly, as if choosing the correct answer were the goal of reading.
• By not asking them open-ended questions, the children are not given the opportunity to try to figure out answers on their own. Except for the ease of scoring of the tests, I see little value in repeated practice with the multiple-choice format.
• As a highly literate, experienced teacher of English, I found some of the answer choices on the tests ambiguous. A child who actually understood the text might mark an answer that is reasonable but be scored as wrong.
• Students whose first language is not English, as was the case with most of my students, may not have the linguistic sophistication to distinguish between answers that are only subtly different. I believe this accounts for some of the errors ELL students make.
• Two other sources of errors on the tests are lack of vocabulary recognition and passage fatigue. By passage fatigue I mean the lack of self-confidence to continue independently with a page-long, closely spaced passage, and then to refer back to it strategically to decide on answers. I realize that the practice provided throughout the program is supposed to prepare students for this independent task, but unfortunately I was not able to overcome this difficulty with my group.
• Another factor reducing the chances of students’ success on the post-test is the difference between their reading level and their grade level. Due to their grade level, several students had to be tested at reading levels considerably higher than their independent reading level, as well as the level of the instructional materials. It is unclear to me how they are expected to apply strategies they have practiced to text that is beyond their ability to read.

 

The point of learning to read is to have the skill and confidence to seek out texts for pure enjoyment and for enriched knowledge of the world. I do not believe that compartmentalized programs such as the STARS program provide a process engaging enough for young children to succeed at this goal. Struggling readers in particular need a program targeted to their experience, their interests, and their particular difficulties with word recognition and reading comprehension, all of which are not addressed in a one-size-fits-all program. All in all I feel that if elementary age students are asked to spend time in an after-school program, they would be better served by doing supervised physical activity to relieve stress levels, such as yoga, or creative activities such as art, poetry, drama, and dance.

This quote from Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade by Linda Perlstein  (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007, page 76) seems apropos:

“Today, the norm in American elementary school classrooms is to parse a text using comprehension strategies, such as summarizing and predicting the events of a passage, without equally emphasizing the value of the content. Such an approach implies, according to the education theorist E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that reading is ‘just a set of maneuvers that can be transferred,’ as if students were learning to type. This emphasis of structure over substance, he writes, is fundamentally anti-intellectual and shortchanges children from acquiring the actual knowledge they need to truly understand what they read. In a classroom that focuses primarily on sounding out words and comprehension strategies, it can seem like reading is more of a basic arithmetic problem instead of a starting point for exploration or thought.”

 

In February of 2013, I wrote the following:

In light of all that has transpired with Race to the Top, the waivers from NCLB, tying teacher evaluations to students’ scores on standardized tests, and the Common Core State (sic) Standards,  I am even more disturbed and concerned than I was at the time I sent this letter. The practice of urging children to attend an after-school program, which is touted to their families as a means to improve their academic skills, but in reality is focused on improving their scores on standardized tests of dubious quality and value, in utter disregard for the children’s needs for meaningful engagement with print-based materials, is unconscionable. Of the five children in my class last year, one was so distressed by the format of the pre-test on the first day that he literally would not make a mark on the paper. When I read with him to encourage him to participate, he inadvertently let slip hints that he could indeed read the passages, but the score of 0 on the pre-test in no way revealed what he actually could do as a reader. Throughout the days and weeks of the program, he was withdrawn and disengaged, only showing sparks of interest when I brought in beautifully illustrated books or poems to supplement the required materials. I’ll never forget his plaintive question: “Why I have to take reading program? I can read.” Why indeed.

Another student in my group dutifully plodded through the entire pre-test without a break. She appeared to be wholly absorbed in the task, and doing her best. When grading her pre-test later, I was dismayed to find that she had gotten almost all of the answers wrong. This student was given the pre-test and post-test at her grade level, as was required by the program, though the instructional materials were one grade level below her grade in school. When working with her during the program sessions, it quickly became obvious that she could not read English print at all. She barely could read individual question words, let alone passages, questions, and answer choices at any grade level. When I questioned the head of the after-school program about this, I was told that we were not there to teach reading comprehension, but to teach strategies (such as main idea, cause and effect, compare and contrast, etc.), so it shouldn’t matter the grade level of the materials! I was so concerned about this student and what would become of her as she progressed through the grades without being able to read, I called the school to volunteer to work with her one-on-one. I described the situation to the school receptionist, who assured me that she would inform the principal. I never heard back.

Something is very wrong with a system that rides roughshod over the very real needs of vulnerable students and their families while claiming that “it’s all about the children.”

As the authors assert, when extolling these “free” services to the parents of vulnerable students, the parents are never informed that their children are being deprived of an engaging and meaningful curriculum on the altar of test prep and private profits at public expense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Of Human Capital, or (apologies to W. Somerset Maugham) Of Human Bondage”

I have frequently seen reference to the term “human capital” in regard to public school children, and instinctively recoiled from it. However, I didn’t fully understand the concept of human capital until I read the explanation in Lester K. Spence’s 2015 book Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Here are some quotes, followed by my observations.

“The divide between good jobs and bad jobs [previously discussed as meaning jobs that provide decent wages, benefits, security, and respect vs. jobs that don’t] comes from deindustrialization, which itself comes from public policy designed to first entice manufacturers to move out of industrial centers (with high labor costs) and then secondly to reduce international trade barriers in ways that reduce labor costs even more. But this divide is also increasingly supported by our own growing acceptance of the idea of human capital. If human capital is something we work on and make choices to develop, just like businesses, then the benefits we receive or do not receive are the result of our choices. In other words people who work at Walmart ‘deserve’ to work at Walmart, and ‘deserve’ the low wages they are given. People who work at Google on the other hand, not to mention the people who created Google in the first place, ‘deserve’ the high wages (and stock dividends) they receive. Why, using this logic, would we pay someone the equivalent of a middle-class salary and benefits to engage in nothing more than routine physical labor? (emphasis added) …

“I distinguished good jobs from bad jobs by wages, job security, benefits, dignity, and due process. These came from union activism. …

“Human capital is an individual trait not necessarily a collective one. Neoliberal logic suggests unions distort the ability of markets to function perfectly by taking away the ability of individuals to negotiate their wages based on their own human capital. Further, unions distort their ability to function on the job because the benefits unions provide can make people less likely to work hard (or at all). [grrrr] …

“The divide between the employed and the unemployed is also connected to the concept of human capital, as human capital can both be used to explain why some people are employed and some people are not, and to argue for certain types of solutions as opposed to others. If the reason people are unemployed is not because of structural deficits or discrimination but because they haven’t done what it takes to be employed, then the solution is for them to somehow attain the needed skills to become competitive on the job market. Here the ascension of neoliberal economics is particularly acute. …

“… the American political figure most associated with the [neoliberal] turn is Ronald Reagan. … Before Reagan’s election government spending on public housing had increased significantly. After his election, he stopped construction of new public housing units. He cut full-time Housing and Urban Development (HUD) staff 21% and restructured it by making it a voucher program, …”

Does this sound familiar? The privatization, anti-union agenda, coupled with deregulation, market free-for-all, lack of transparency and true accountability, and dismantling of the social safety net—in other words, the neoliberal agenda, pushed by ALEC and conservative Republicans on the right and Neoliberal Democratic policy-makers on the left–is wreaking havoc not only in the broad society, but particularly, and callously, in public education. Think charter schools for example. To the corporate elites, there is no such thing as the public good.

Those familiar with the next big thing in education—Competency/Proficiency Based Education espousing digital learning anywhere, anytime, constant monitoring/assessing/data mining of every keystroke and every hesitancy, and earning badges to verify mastery of pre-fab content modules aligned to fatally flawed Common Core Standards—will no doubt see the connection to the insidious and pervasive idea of human capital. This economic phrase is antithetical to the human needs of a diverse society, but is perfectly suited to delivering a dystopian world where only those who fit the criteria of worthiness envisioned by reality-and-empathy-lacking corporate/technocratic elites will thrive. Back to social Darwinism, with a twist of uber-technology/artificial intelligence. The mania for data and the irrational belief in the power of algorithms and technology to solve human problems are hurtling us to catastrophe.

See here on Pearson and AI

and here

and here

See here on digital badges

and here on digital badging

 

 

“McKinsey, Nellie Mae, CBE, Digital Badging, and Us”

Despite spending many years lacking confidence in my ability to write anything of consequence, in the last few years I’ve managed to turn that self-doubt around. The impetus was a profound dismay at the direction that public education has been pushed by neoliberal technocratic/corporatist/elites, a profound respect and gratitude for the many articulate, knowledgeable, dedicated, and compassionate bloggers who have amassed a vast investigative expose of the privatizing neoliberal global workforce soul-sucking agenda, and a newfound receptive audience for my musings on facebook. (A few of my favorite bloggers are Mercedes Schneider, Morna McDermott, Peggy Robertson, Emily Kennedy Talmage, Raschelle Holland, Jo Lieb, Nancy Bailey, Ciedie Aech, Russ Walsh, Peter Greene, and Robert D. Shepherd.) So, for my 4^th blog post I set myself the task of illuminating the pernicious effects of the philanthropy pouring from Nellie Mae into New England, and into RI. Unfortunately, I found myself stumped and once again doubting my ability to pull this off. The tentacles are so prolific and so reasonable sounding and so well orchestrated and financed and entangled in public and civic organizations that I feel that I’ve more than met my match.

So what I’m going to endeavor to do is to pull together what I consider to be key information from several sources that hopefully will shed light on the various tentacles that are callously closing in on all of our children, and most particularly on the most vulnerable, whether due to poverty, ethnicity, language status, and/or special education needs.

Let’s start from the top of the RI power establishment, and cast the spotlight on the RI connection to McKinsey, the global consulting company. According to their website, here are their global themes:

• Digital Disruption
• Leadership
• Employment and Growth
• Long-Term Capitalism

What does this have to do with RI? The First Gentleman, Andy Moffit, has been an employee of McKinsey since 2000. He co-authored a book (Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders) with Sir Michael Barber. According to Wikipedia, “Barber served as a partner and head of the global education practice at McKinsey, advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair and a global expert on education reform and implementation of large-scale system change. … [He] is a British educationist and Chief Education Advisor to Pearson and the Managing Partner of Delivery Associates.” See here  As you probably recall, Pearson is the corporation that supplies Common Core aligned curriculum and test prep materials to schools, as well as being responsible for the administration of the PARCC.

By the way, Andy Moffit’s educational background that entitles him to hold such a key current position as Director of Industry Learning at McKinsey is two years as a TFA elementary school teacher in 1991-1993.

So what does McKinsey envision for the future of “corporate academies”? (i.e. continuous training of employees by large corporations). See the graphic here

“The authors [of the accompanying article] wish to thank Jacqueline Brassey, Andy Moffit, Nicolai Nielsen, and Silke-Susann Otto for their contributions to this article.” [emphasis added]

As an aside, Mr. Moffit spent this past spring as an adjunct professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education teaching:

A-610A Workplace Learning and Leadership Development, and Technology. The course description states: “Limited to 25 students to ensure sufficient opportunities for robust engagement and involvement.” [but small class size is a luxury that k-12 public schools can’t afford and don’t need, according to Bill Gates and friends]

See here

OK, so maybe online learning, real-time feedback, big data and continually improving learning via analytics is viable for adults working in the corporate world. By what stretch of the imagination does it translate to k-12 education? Hold that thought.

Even for adults, McKinsey cautions: “Similarly, for all of the notable advances that digitization promises, comprehensive learning cannot be based on the cloud alone. Companies still have compelling reasons to locate significant elements of corporate learning in tangible, specialized educational facilities—increasingly, with ergonomically designed furniture, plenty of light, and interior design geared specifically to learning. In our experience, any successful educational program allows employees to unplug and enjoy a respite from an always-on, 24/7 tempo.

“The importance of this physical separation from the daily grind should not be underestimated. If employees have no opportunity to step away from their working environments, the same old behavior, for good and ill, is constantly reinforced, and the chance for more reflective, committed learning is lost.”

See here

[So why did RI parents have to overcome tremendous resistance from the RI Department of Education and Commissioner Wagner, and from the General Assembly to get a bill passed requiring schools to provide a measly 20 minutes of recess for students up through grade 5? FYI—Commissioner Wagner dismissed the need for recess for elementary school students as not worthy of enshrining in regulation, especially considering the poor scores of third graders on the PARCC!]

Now back to the link between the Moffit/McKinsey vision of continuous/digitized training for the corporate work force and k-12 education. For a brilliant expose I highly recommend a full reading of Morna McDermott’s insightful blog post, “CBE and ALEC Preparing Students for the Gig Economy.” I’ll just present her first few paragraphs here to tantalize you. (By the way, ALEC has been a major player in state houses across the country pushing their corporate-friendly anti-union, anti-regulation, anti-humane policies in education as well as other areas necessary for a civil/civic society.) http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

From Morna:

“Pearson, of course, was ahead of the pack as usual… developing a school- to -labor pipeline that suites [sic] the corporate masters.  As this blog explains, Competency Based Education becomes the framework for “badges” instead of credit hours and prepares students for career and college which is code for the new “gig” economy. According to Pearson: ‘Alternative learning credentials including college coursework, self-directed learning experiences, career training, and continuing education programs can play a powerful role in defining and articulating solo workers’ capabilities. Already badges that represent these credentials are serving an important purpose in fostering trust between solo workers, employers, and project teams because they convey skill transparency and deliver seamless verification of capabilities.’ …

“First, a brief background: Competency based education (or CBE) has been a rapidly developing alternative to traditional public education. While proponents tout it as “disruptive innovation” critics examine how disruptive translates into “dismantle”, meaning that CBE is a system by which public schools can, and will be, dismantled. This is not ancillary. It was designed to create a new privately-run profiteering model by which education can be delivered to “the masses.” Think: Outsourcing.

“CBE delivers curriculum, instruction and assessments through online programming owned by third-party (corporate) organizations that are paid for with your tax dollars. Proponents of CBE use catchy language like “personalized” and “individualized” learning. Translation? Children seated alone interfacing with a computer, which monitors and adjusts the materials according to the inputs keyed in by the child.” [and continuously collects data from these students that goes into “personalized” profiles to profit ??]

See here

Now to more about badges and the link to the Nellie Mae Foundation, which operates in New England and is already here in RI. So who/what is Nellie Mae, where did it come from, and what is its connection to public schooling?

According to Investopedia:

“DEFINITION of ‘Nellie Mae’

“A non-profit organization that provides education loans in the United States. Nellie Mae was founded in Massachusetts and is the largest non-profit provider of student loans in the United States, helping student across the country pay for their education. It has been a wholly owned subsidiary of SLM Corporation, known as Sallie Mae, since 1999.

“Nellie Mae stands for New England Education Loan Marketing Corporation. [more students graduating from high school college ready equals more students  needing more college loans]

“BREAKING DOWN ‘Nellie Mae’

“Nellie Mae was created in order to purchase student loans, securitizing them to be sold off to investors. Student loans were guaranteed by the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), with further financial backing by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).”

See here

Despite spending much time going around in circles trying to find out more about Nellie Mae, I haven’t been able to square the above information with the Nellie Mae Education Foundation’s self-description as stated in their white paper on badging:

“The Nellie Mae Education Foundation is the largest philanthropic organization in New England that focuses exclusively on education. The Foundation supports the promotion and integration of student-centered approaches to learning (SCL) at the middle and high school levels across New England—where learning is personalized; learning is competency-based; learning takes place anytime, anywhere; and students exert ownership over their own learning. To elevate student-centered approaches, the Foundation utilizes a four-part strategy that focuses on: building educator ownership, leadership and capacity; advancing quality and rigor of SCL practices; developing effective systems designs; and building public understanding and demand. Since 1998, the Foundation has distributed over $180 million in grants. For more information about the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, visit nmefoundation.org.” (p. 25)

See here

According to Emily Kennedy Talmage, a 4^th grade teacher in Maine who writes the powerful and exhaustively researched blog “Save Maine Schools,” which warns against the harm of Competency (Proficiency) Based Education/personalized education/student-centered learning/badging/anywhere, anytime, any pace learning—

“Nellie Mae appears to be behind the “assessment reform” movement that has attempted to attach itself to the Opt Out Movement’s coat tails [against end of the year high stakes standardized assessments such as the PARCC]. With KnowledgeWorks, the Center for Collaborative Education and iNACOL [International Association for k-12 Online Learning] (both Nellie Mae funded) were instrumental in developing ESSA’s “innovative assessment” option that encourages states to shift toward competency-based models.”

See here

Note the extent to which “personalized” learning is enshrined in the RI Strategic Plan for Public Education 2015-2020. See the plan here

Please read Carole Marshall’s jaw-dropping Op-Ed in the Providence Journal from last summer. Carole is an investigative journalist who also taught English for many years at Hope High School, retiring several years ago. Her sleuthing paid off as she exposed the lack of integrity of RIDE and its spokepersons when they declared: “that the Rhode Island Strategic Plan 2015-2020 was created by thousands of Rhode Islanders ‘through a process that is built upon the principles of transparency, engagement, empowerment and respect.’” On the contrary, her investigation turned up this unsavory connection:

“Rhode Island’s Strategic Plan for Education … is the product of a California organization called The Learning Accelerator, founded by a Christiansen devotee, whose sole mission is to promote blended learning through disruptive innovation. The Learning Accelerator has put together a detailed set of steps a state ‘must take’ to promote blended learning.” Voila—the RI Strategic Plan!

See here

The following key points about Nellie Mae, badging, and RI connections are taken from the white paper on digital badging linked here

“In PK-12 settings, students can earn badges by mastering math skills and completing

other badge-worthy challenges with online curriculum providers like Khan Academy or

BuzzMath. Their teacher may issue badges for classroom participation, attendance,

or academic performance using digital badging features integrated into the school’s

learning management system or included in a growing number of products like

ClassDojo or ForAllRubrics. (p. 4) [a data privacy nightmare]

 

“This push for better credentialing systems is coming from forces associated with

workforce development, professional training, and with higher education. People

simply have more choices about where, when and how they learn and employers

generally value current skills over a past degree and an employee’s ability to keep his

or her skillset up-to-date and relevant in a rapidly evolving workplace. Supporters like

EDUCAUSE, the Lumina Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Mozilla and IMS Global, a

technology standards organization focused on higher education interoperability, are

involved and playing important advocacy and convening roles for various projects. (p. 8)

[some info on Lumina: “In order to land a seat on its Education Task Force in 2008, Lumina gave $300,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, to kick in gear the complete privatization of state universities across America.”] See here

“Teachers are often required to be continuous learners. In a world

where a Master’s degree and other ‘macro’ credentials don’t

necessarily translate into gains in student achievement and where

educators are frustrated with staid, largely ineffective professional

development methods, micro-credentialing can support teachers

as they create their own personalized, competency-based learning

pathways and get recognition for a wide range of valuable, career significant

learning experiences. Equally important is the belief

that teachers need to experience the power of personalized,

competency-based learning in order to create similar experiences

for their students. (p. 9)

“New England also has an emerging badging and micro-credentialing scene. In fact,

the Providence After School Alliance in Providence, Rhode Island, was among the

first pilots in the country funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and Maine hit the

headlines notably this past year. (p. 13)

Rhode Island: Providence After School Alliance [PASA]

“Providence is home to one of the country’s first badging projects. PASA was

awarded one of the original Digital Media Learning Competition / MacArthur grants

to experiment. Funding for the project ended in 2014 but PASA decided to take a

“second dive” into badging with support from the Noyce Foundation. PASA has issued

STEM badges as part of their middle school AfterZone program, will issue them again

during their summer STEM program for 500 youth, and plans to expand badging to all

of their middle and high school expanded learning programs in fall 2016. (p. 15)

“Alejandro [Molina from PASA] is also incredibly articulate about lessons learned from their first badging pilot and implications for their current effort. The most important adjustment has been to focus on establishing the value and culture of badges, not just building the system (value vs. functionality). Offering badges to middle schoolers that “would be great for college” didn’t hook them. Badges need to have more immediate value to students. He also points out that badges don’t work in a vacuum, and you have to factor this in: “You can ask a student, ‘What do you value more, badges or a caring adult?’ and guess the answer. A better question is, ‘What if the badge is given to you by a caring adult?’” (pp. 15-16)

Rhode Island: Assessment for Learning Project (ALP)

Performance Assessment Micro-Credential System

“Rhode Island will also serve as the proving ground for one of the New England

region’s newest PK-12 badging efforts – the development of a micro-credentialing

system designed to validate teachers who have honed the specialized of skills

it takes to design high quality performance-based assessment tasks and serve

as leaders who embed the practices in districts.” (p. 16)

“Research on the impact of badging and micro-credentialing is

in its infancy, especially for PK-12, and is based on very small

sample sizes. (p. 17) [no evidence it works—no problem!]

“Even the language and positioning of badges in PK-12 seems to have shifted. People often opt not to lead with the word “badge.” Instead they talk about personalized learning, connected learning, project based learning, or credentialing. Badging is still there as a tool and strategy but it isn’t necessarily the headline.” (pp. 19-20)

So there has been a lot going on, and most of us have been in the dark. How do we get the word out, and how do we mobilize to thwart these allegedly good intentions paving the way to hell?

Please leave comments and suggestions!

P.S. Sorry for the formatting irregularities. I’m still new at this!

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Onward to the Brave New World of Competency Based Education–Or Not!”

I’ve been looking through some of the papers that I’ve written to bolster myself when making public comments to the RI Board of Education, the RI Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, and community forums on education. My mind is so full of musings about education issues that I can’t trust myself to speak coherently without a prepared speech, so I’ve inadvertently left myself a written record of my thoughts and judgments. I know that David Coleman won’t possibly be interested in what I think and feel about what is happening to public school children, their families, their teachers, their schools, and their communities. But I’ve decided to plug away anyway and publish my concerns. Please leave feedback in the comments section!

These are the remarks I intended to make to the RI Council on Elementary and Secondary Education on December 9, 2015, regarding Competency/Proficiency Based Education. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the meeting, so I emailed my remarks to the members of the CESE. To my recollection, I received no reply.

Good Evening,

My name is Sheila Resseger, and I retired from 25 years of teaching English Language Arts in the middle school and high school at the RI School for the Deaf in 2011. Since that time I have been researching the education reforms coming down from the federal Department of Education and the RI Department of Education. I am more than concerned—I am dismayed at the technocratic direction of our public education system, and the dismissal of humanistic values embedded in this direction. I have spoken out in public forums against the Common Core State Standards and the PARCC testing. The next stage of the technocratic agenda is now upon us, and it does not bode well for our students, and particularly for the most vulnerable students that everyone is rightly concerned about.

If it seems too good to be true, well, it probably is. No Child Left Behind and Common Core were a boon to the educational testing corporations, Race to the Top was a boon to for-profit charter schools, and the RI Strategic Plan is a boon to ed tech entrepreneurs who, without any training or experience in child development or authentic diagnostic assessment or curriculum design, have the hubris to believe they can provide digital learning tools for an entire generation.

Now that there has been a hue and cry about the over-testing of our students, here comes the antidote: competency/proficiency based education, aka personalization, aka student-centered education, and community partnerships. While this sounds on the surface like a welcome relief from the one-size-fits-all standardization of curricula and high-stakes standardized testing, it comes with its own pitfalls.

A perusal of the new “RI Strategic Plan for Public Education: 2015-2020” turns up a number of appealing-sounding but troubling buzzwords: personalized instruction, one-to-one computer technology, blended learning, online learning, community partners outside of the school, and particularly, proficiency-based instruction and assessment. In an ideal world, these buzzwords could be a refreshing approach to teaching and learning in a dazzling world of opportunity through technological advances. Very unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world.

We need only look as far as the state of Maine to see what the ugly reality of competency/proficiency based education looks like in real schools with real students and teachers. Maine has plunged ahead with this agenda, though there is no research (peer-reviewed or otherwise) that justifies transforming teaching and learning into a digital/online enterprise. My take is that the PR for so-called proficiency based, personalized learning is actually riddled with code words that translate into outsourcing education to ed-tech vendors, marginalizing classroom teachers, holding students accountable to pre-determined, inappropriate standards (Common Core or Core-like), not allowing them to progress until they have achieved “mastery” of these inappropriate standards, feeding them game-like academic programs that foster zombie cognitive processing rather than real learning, and using extrinsic motivation like rewards and badges, all the while scooping up reams of sensitive data that will go who knows where and be used for who knows what.

[Watch this video and be: amazed, horrified, disgusted, or all of the above.]

Is this rush to digital learning truly for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of the children in America who attend public schools? Or is it a bonanza for the hedge funders and edtech entrepreneurs who will rake in an exorbitant amount of money directly or indirectly on learning modules of dubious quality?

Please do your research, and follow the money. I suggest you begin with the blog posts of Emily Kennedy Talmage. She is a teacher in Maine who has researched the roots of the Competency Based Education agenda and written extensively about it–it is unnerving.

For starters, see this post by Emily Kennedy Talmage.

also see

“Testing All The Time” by Morna McDermott, Peggy Robertson, and Stephen Krashen (You’ll need to scroll down the page to find this article.)

Sincerely,

Sheila Resseger, M.A.

 

update:

Not only is this travesty happening here in America, but it’s going on globally. This just in from Knewton and Top Dog Math.  See here
“We understand that students need learning material that addresses each child’s preferences, interests and competencies. To do this, we are using automated algorithms that create bespoke [?] content on demand.”

Is ALL DIGITAL ALL THE TIME really better for children? Investigate! Ask questions of those in power! Find like-minded people who have the courage to resist this high speed, meticulously planned, outrageously funded, technocratic coup that is dismantling public schooling as we have known it, replacing it with disengagement empowered by algorithms. This agenda does not value the uniqueness of individually blossoming human beings.  We must truly put the well being of the children first, not the bottom line of multi-national corporations grooming workers for the global economy.

 

“What does it Take to Teach ALL Children to Read?”

During my teaching career at the RI School for the Deaf, I was very fortunate to be granted a Sabbatical for the 1997-98 school year. My topic was “Reading Comprehension Research and Theory with Application to Hearing-Impaired Students.” I made use of studies that focused on the process of learning to read, and the pedagogy of reading instruction for both hearing and hearing-impaired students. I read the works of a number of well-respected scholars who designed exemplary studies to address these issues. One of the most informative was the work of Sarah Michaels and James Collins. Even though this study was published in 1984, I think it illuminates a key reason that children of color tend to perform more poorly on academic tasks than white children. Children bring their oral tradition with them to school. Literacy is based on the oral tradition, but then expands on it, encompassing new cognitive/grammatical processes beyond sound-symbol correspondence.

The oral tradition of communities of white, middle and upper class children tend to pre-adapt those children to the modes of speaking that will transition easily to academic prose. Since many of the teachers come from the white middle class as well, the white children’s oral expressions match the teachers’ expectations. This is not necessarily true for the children of color. That their mode of oral communication in their community is different, does not mean that it is inferior. However, the lack of awareness of many teachers about this difference, that occurs outside of conscious awareness, is the heart of the problem. I’m going to insert the summary I wrote of the Michaels and Collins study, since they articulate this situation much more expertly than I can.

 

 

Michaels, Sarah and Collins, James. (1984). Oral Discourse Styles: Classroom Interaction and the Acquisition of Literacy. In Deborah Tannen (Ed.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse (pp. 219-244). NJ: ABLEX Publishing Corporation.

 

Summary

 

The authors were interested in investigating aspects of teacher/child interactions during early literacy-promoting activities that facilitate or hamper literacy development. They were also concerned with “the relationship between community-based oral discourse style and the acquisition of literacy.” (p. 220)

To these ends they conducted an ethnographic study of home and school communication during the course of one school year with a class of first grade children, half of whom were white and half of whom were black. During their research they identified classroom “sharing time” (more or less the equivalent of “show and tell”) “as an  activity that provides oral preparation for literacy.” (p. 220)  (It is noteworthy that the teacher herself was unaware that her interactions with the children during these sharing sessions had the effect of providing practice for orally composing decontextualized prose-like narratives: “children were expected to assume a non-face-to-face stance with respect to their audience and incorporate features of discursive prose into their discourse. Hence, nouns were preferred to gestures or deictic pronouns; shifts between topics were to be lexically or syntactically marked; and no background or contextual knowledge was to be assumed on the part of the audience.” (p. 221)   (See pp. 223-4 for teacher’s “sharing schema.” )

 

The researchers’ observations and conversational analyses of many sharing-time interactions revealed that the white children and black children were using two distinct types of discourse style (developed in their respective communities). The style of the white children resembled a literate style, as further elucidated in the follow-up study described below (i.e. signaling of “perspective shifts and logical connections” was done via “a wide range of lexical and syntactic devices such as noun complements, relative clauses, and nominal compounds in signaling agent focus and co-reference relations” (p. 220) ). This style was compatible with the teacher’s expectations, and so these children were able to benefit from the teacher’s comments and questions, which had the effect of facilitating their transition to literacy.

 

On the other hand, the black children’s oral discourse style depended on prosody (“intonation and rhythm” (p. 220) ), rather than lexical and syntactic markers to signal perspective shifts and logical connections. In addition, their narratives (unlike the white children’s “topic-centered” style) exemplified a “topic-associating” style, typical of their community. (p. 224)  The teacher judged their attempts at narrative as rambling and without a point, and would interrupt them, which frustrated them and derailed their train of thought. The black children (in the course of interviews with the authors) expressed their perception of these sharing-time sessions as evidence that their stories and concerns were not valued by the teacher. The mismatching of the teacher’s and black children’s communication during these interactions went on outside of the conscious awareness of the teacher, stemming from differences between the teacher’s and children’s “prosodic signaling system and narrative schemas.” (p. 230)  The cumulative effect of these frustrating sessions, according to the authors, was to deny the black children the practice they needed to bridge the gap between their oral discourse style and the literate style of academic text.

 

The authors also devised a “naturalistic experiment”  (p. 230)  to enable them to further characterize the differences between the discourse styles of the white and black children, and to explore the relationship between these styles of oral narrative and the subsequent ability to produce unambiguous written prose. In analyzing the data from this experiment, the investigators “focused on how thematic cohesion (Bennett 1978) was achieved by children who used different oral discourse styles.” (p. 220)  The experimental task involved having all the first grade children and two fourth-grade children (included so that the researchers could have written narratives to compare to oral ones) view a six-minute film known as “the pear film” that had been “designed to stimulate the production of oral narratives.” (p. 230)  After viewing the (non-verbal) film, the children were asked (individually) to tell the story of the film to an interviewer. The fourth-graders were asked to both tell and write their narratives. The oral narratives of four of the first grade children (two black children and two white children) were analyzed, along with the oral and written narratives of the two fourth-graders. The film had been designed so that the narrators would have to handle perspective shifts (from one character to another) and maintenance of identity of reference of the several male characters from one short episode to another.

 

Results of the analysis showed that the differences found between the black children (who used an “oral” style dependent on prosody) and the white children (who used a more “literate” oral narrative style) corresponded to the differences found during the sharing-time interactions (and described previously). In order to study the effect of discourse style on writing ability, the oral and written narratives of the two fourth-grade students were analyzed and compared. The child who used a more literate discourse style was able to successfully transfer the cohesive devices used orally into the written mode, whereas the child who relied on prosody to signal cohesion (though a high achiever and “fluent reader and writer” (p. 240) ) wrote a narrative “characterized by weakly signaled transitions and ambiguous identity relations. For him, with prosodic options lost, learning to write means learning a new system for signaling thematic cohesion.” (p. 241)

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Does anyone who has been paying attention to the travesty of the Common Core ELA standards and the PARCC testing believe that those who drafted these misguided, top-down standards had any inkling of the complexity of the problems of truly engaging all children in the process of achieving mastery of reading and writing? The naïve and self-serving, self-flattering belief that cracking the whip with higher standards, more complex texts, and incessant testing will be successful in shaping up ALL students, and closing the “achievement gap”—is not only a fraud, devoid of appreciation for true scholarship, but a crime, depriving children of their birthright to value themselves as unique human beings, belonging to valued communities.

 

 

 

“Some Background on Me”

 

I was a teacher at the RI School for the Deaf for over 25 years. I taught courses that strengthened my students’ capacities for reading and writing in English, a language that for most of them was not their native language, due to their early and severe hearing loss. Many of them also lived in families that did not speak English, which further complicated their progress. I also administered assessments one-on-one to prepare for students’ IEPs (Individualized Education Plans). These were time-consuming to administer and to score, because they included receptive and expressive English, reading comprehension, and writing. But they provided essential diagnostic information that their teachers could use to develop curriculum materials. From time to time I also had to administer the state standardized test, which was the NECAP. For most of my students, this was a futile exercise. Despite their IEP that said they were reading at the 3^rd grade level, for example, if they were in the ninth grade, they had to take the 9^th grade test. All of my colleagues were aware that this test could not possibly show what the students were capable of, but it did not occur to any of us to refuse to administer it, even if the students expressed distress. Of course, that was before any high stakes were attached to the testing, for students, for teachers, or for schools.

I am also the parent of two young adults who went through the Cranston, RI  Public Schools, graduated, and went on to college and earned degrees. I was not always happy with the textbooks or the uninspired curriculum offerings. In fact, I took my daughter out of public school for two years in high school so that she could get more individual attention and study topics that engaged her as a whole person. Still, it would not have occurred to me to stand up against the school.

I am explaining this because it’s important to understand that I had the luxury to go along with a system that wasn’t quite right but that wasn’t a calamity either. I have been researching what has been happening in education across America, and indeed even globally, since I retired in 2011. The Common Core so-called State Standards and PARCC testing are the tip of the iceberg that is rushing us all along toward the dismantling of public education as we have known it, and the de-professionalizing of teachers. Granted there have been many problems with our system, not the least of which is the lack of proper funding. But these problems can be tackled with knowledge of child development, with content area knowledge, with sensitivity to cultural and language differences, with open-mindedness, and with determination. Despite the rhetoric coming from the education so-called reformers about Children First, the need for rigor, internationally benchmarked standards, the civil rights issue of our time—the reality of their solution is dystopian.

My focus during my teaching career was essentially on English language mastery, reading comprehension, and writing, so I will focus here on English Language Arts and the travesty of what is being foisted on all public schools by the Common Core ELA standards and the PARCC testing.

What does it take to nurture a student’s ability to not only become a competent reader, but to seek to read for information, for knowledge, for introspection, and for enjoyment? It takes human teachers knowledgeable about cognitive development, first and second language development, and literacy development. It takes human teachers who respond to their students with sensitivity, perceptiveness, and acumen. It takes human teachers who provide engaging materials and encourage students to find their own voices. It takes human teachers who empathize with their students. Why am I using the phrase human teachers? Isn’t it obvious? Unfortunately, no, not to those who master-minded the Common Core and its newest iteration: Competency Based Education (more on that in another blog post).

If you have been researching the origins of the Common Core, you may already know that those who developed these standards were professionals who primarily came from the college entrance testing industry—the College Board and the ACT. The small cabal that actually wrote the standards did not include any experienced and credentialed authorities on cognitive development, first and second language development, or literacy development. There were virtually no k-12 classroom teachers involved in the drafting. Nor were there any experts on special needs students. Those who do have expertise in ELA have decried the inappropriateness of the standards, particularly for the youngest students and those with learning challenges, but also for typically developing students.

The fatal flaws inherent in the development of the standards lead to the tragic flaws found in the curricula aligned to them. The push to pressure young students to focus on skills such as compare/contrast and fact vs. opinion does not enhance their reading comprehension. The keys to comprehension are engagement and context. The curricular materials that many school districts have purchased, published by Pearson, the global education company that administers the PARCC, provide neither. These materials are counter-productive, since they convince students that reading is a chore; if students are not good at reading as measured by the worksheets and benchmark testing, then they conclude that they are not good readers, or even decide that they are stupid. This can have devastating consequences for their academic learning going forward, and for their ability to be life-long learners.

Teachers are being forced to teach to these inappropriate standards because students are burdened with taking the PARCC, which was inextricably linked to the Common Core standards from the beginning. This test is counter-productive and wasteful of resources and students’ learning time. When RI Department of Education spokespeople say that there is no test prep possible for the PARCC because it is testing critical thinking skills, they are wrong on several fronts. First of all, they do admit that students need to be familiarized with the format of the online tests—but this is a waste of time and computer resources. Second, the PARCC does not actually test critical thinking skills. Third, the Common Core aligned curricula that school districts are buying into (and spending big bucks on), such as Pearson materials, are actually pure test prep and do not provide the engaging, context-rich materials that students need to truly learn and develop mastery.

Recently there was a brouhaha on social media and in the blogosphere regarding exposure of some of the actual passages and writing prompts on the PARCC, as I mentioned in my previous post. An anonymous 4^th grade teacher’s observations were posted on the blog of Celia Oyler, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. That the anonymous teacher included actual passages and prompts from the ELA test she had administered, which is counter to the pledge that PARCC requires all teachers to sign, caused the CEO of PARCC, Inc. to prevail on Twitter to remove links to the post. The teacher went ahead with exposing the material, knowing that there might eventually be legal consequences, but firmly believing that the public had the right to know what 9 year old students were being measured on. Fortunately, many education bloggers continued to repost the teacher’s observations. She found that:

“4th graders are being asked to read and respond to texts that are two grade levels above the recommended benchmark. After they struggle through difficult texts with advanced vocabulary and nuanced sentence structures, they then have to answer multiple choice questions that are, by design, intended to distract students with answers that appear to be correct except for some technicality.

“Finally, students must synthesize two or three of these advanced texts and compose an original essay. The ELA portion of the PARCC takes three days, and each day includes a new essay prompt based on multiple texts. …

“ELA 4th Grade Prompt #1

Refer to the passage from “Emergency on the Mountain” and the poem “Mountains.” Then answer question 7.

7. Think about how the structural elements in the passage from “Emergency on the Mountain” differ from the structural elements in the poem “Mountains.”

Write an essay that explains the differences in the structural elements between the passage and the poem. Be sure to include specific examples from both texts to support your response. …

 “However, the Common Core State Standards for writing do not require students to write essays comparing the text structures of different genres. The Grade 4 CCSS for writing about reading demand that students write about characters, settings, and events in literature, or that they write about how authors support their points in informational texts. Nowhere in the standards are students asked to write comparative essays on the structures of writing.” See more here.

Yet this is being asked of ALL 4^th grade students, including most students with special learning challenges, students who struggle with English, and students living in poverty whose schools lack the resources to provide fully for their needs.

The PARCC is flawed on many levels, but one key area that is problematic is that it was designed to be administered online. The Providence Journal recently reported that students’ scores on the PARCC in 2015 were somewhat lower when taken on computers as compared to the paper and pencil version. This was completely predictable, especially for the younger students. The computer skills required may be a piece of cake for the adults who designed the test, but are absurd for young students. Still Commissioner Wagner and the RI Department of Education plan to persevere and double-down—all students will take the PARCC on computers in the near future. I fervently hope that this thinking will not push schools into a frenzy of low-level computer skill drilling for young students. Knowing how to point and click, drag and drop, and type in a small box are the lowest level tech skills, and not suitable for young students. If you want to make use of technology, it can certainly be done with a Smart Board with the whole class learning from videos and interactive lessons that the teacher prepares.

We need more teachers, retired teachers, parents, and concerned community members to advocate for children so that they will all be afforded the true, research-based pedagogy that professional teachers know how to provide. The PARCC is a lose-lose proposition for students, teachers, families, and schools. Parents should Opt Out/Refuse for their children. But Refusing the PARCC is not enough. The goal of education is to nurture self-actualized human beings who participate meaningfully and joyfully in a diverse, equitable, and vibrant civil society. Parents must insist on teaching/learning for their children that encourages rather than disregards imagination, curiosity, creativity, and empowerment.