An Open Challenge to Michelle Rhee and the Corporate Education Zombies

An Open Challenge to Michelle Rhee and the Corporate Education Zombies Boycotting standardized testing in Seattle was a stand for students and a better education

by Jesse Hagopian

Maybe I shouldn’t have stood up and said, “Welcome to Seattle,” while wearing my Garfield High School hoodie when Michelle Rhee took the stage at a recent Town Hall event in Seattle. Students, parents, teachers and community groups protest outside a talk given by 'corporate education reform' darling Michelle Rhee last month in Seattle. The high-profile former DC school chancellor champions charter schools, high-stakes testing, and other corporate school policies but refuses to acknowledge the substantial damage being created by this approach. (Photo: greatschoolsforamerica.org)

Rhee, the prominent corporate education reform advocate, former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor, and CEO of the ironically-named “Students First” organization, now has Seattle in her crosshairs. In her March 5th op-ed for the Seattle Times, Rhee berated teachers at Garfield and other Seattle schools for their boycott of the district required MAP test.

She began her piece: “Seattle public school students should pay attention. They’re getting a front-row, real-world lesson in how the actions of adults can distract from what’s best for students.” But don’t get your hopes up—this wasn’t a long overdue acknowledgment of the events surrounding the testing scandal when she was commanding the DC public schools.

With only a little investigation of the news of the MAP test boycott, Rhee would have found that the Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) and the Associated Student Body Government (ASB) at Garfield High School—the school where the test boycott of the test began on January 10th—had voted unanimously to support teachers in the boycott of the MAP test. When the Seattle School District attempted to go around the teacher boycott of the MAP by forcing the school administration to pull kids out of class and march them off to the library to take the computerized test, hundreds of students showed letters from their parents opting them out, while many of the rest simply refused to participate on their own. Of the 810 tests scheduled at Garfield, only 184 valid tests were recorded.

In the end, the boycott of the winter round of the MAP primarily reflected the will of students and parents, who agreed with teachers that student time was better spent learning in the classroom, and that library computers were better used for student research and writing rather than testing. Had she acknowledged this, Michelle Rhee would have had some difficult questions to answer.

If students vote unanimously to boycott a test, is it still okay to put their demands and interests first, or does putting students first mean ignoring their democratic decision making?

If the parent organization at a school votes unanimously to support the teachers in boycotting a flawed test, is it okay for the parents to guide their children, or should students disregard their parents and instead follow an astro turf organization called “Students First”?

What happens when students, parents and teachers around the nation join together in common cause and protest for a meaningful education rather than the overuse of standardized tests? Is it okay to put “students first” when they agree with their teachers about what constitutes a quality education?

Rhee's inability to ask these critical thinking questions is a demonstration of the very cognitive problems that can arise from an over reliance on standardized testing.

The boycott of the MAP test has spread to five schools in Seattle with a dozen other schools actively supporting it. In Portland, students have initiated their own historic boycott of the standardized OAKS tests. In Providence, R.I., 50 high school students staged a "zombie protest" against high-stakes testing, marching to the state Department of Education, chanting "No education, No life." The New York State Principals Association recently issued a scathing letter, signed by 1,536 of its members, denouncing rampant state testing as a negative influence on the educational and emotional health of students. In Maryland, Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr has called for a three-year moratorium on standardized testing. More than 500 school boards in Texas have passed resolutions demanding a reduced focus on standardized tests and on February 23, an estimated 10,000 parents, students and teachers from around Texas marched up Congress Avenue to the state Capitol in Austin to oppose the overuse of testing.

This nationwide solidarity against standardized testing represents a high stakes test for Rhee, and perhaps the anxiety is interfering with her ability to think clearly. Rhee wrote in her Seattle Times op-ed, “We know standardized testing works. For example, look at the District of Columbia, where I was school chancellor.”

It’s almost impossible to believe, but she really did write those words.

Yes, let us take look at the standardized testing in D.C. when Rhee was chancellor. In a scandal now known as “Erasure-gate,” massive test cheating was uncovered by USA Today, along with the failure of then-schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to investigate. As USA today wrote,

“In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its ‘shining stars.’ …. A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones. Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools.”

Rhee went on to write in her Seattle Times op-ed, “Astronomically high dropout rates and subpar math and reading-proficiency levels in lower-income, inner-city schools ought to jolt us as especially immoral."

When Rhee refers to “inner-city” schools, she’s attempting to discuss Black students and other students of color. Yet she is scared to use the word “racism” because that would open up a conversation about the relationships between race, poverty and school performance. Rhee laments the educational outcomes of students living in poverty without ever questioning the causes of poverty. Perhaps that’s because her sponsors are the corporations and super-rich who profit from under-paying the poor for their labor, and whose policies perpetuate poverty. She is right about one thing--it’s appalling that low-income students have the worst outcomes in our schools. You won’t hear her say anything, however, about how corporate profits should be taxed to reinvest in our schools, or the fact that our nation prioritized finding trillions of dollars to recapitalize the same banks that sabotaged the global economy.

Moreover, Rhee has no understanding of the history of standardized testing or its contribution to the reproduction of inequality. As University of Washington education professor Wayne Au has written, “Looking back to its origins in the Eugenics moment, standardized testing provided…ideological cover for the social, economic and education inequalities the test themselves help maintain.” The stability of testing outcomes along racial lines, from the days of Eugenics until today, demonstrates standardized testing has always been a better measure of a student’s zip code than of aptitude. Wealthier and whiter districts score better on tests. These children have books in the home, parents with time to read to them, private tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, healthy food, health insurance, and similar advantages. Standardized testing has from the very beginning been a tool to rank and sort people, not to remove the barriers needed to achieve equality.

The Seattle boycott of the MAP test opened up our understanding of how the test exacerbates inequality:

English Language Learners and special education students are the populations pulled out of class most often to take the MAP. On average, each test taker loses 320 minutes of instructional time. MAP tests are administered on computers. Our computer labs are commandeered for weeks for test taking. Students can’t access the computers they need for research projects, which especially hurts students without computers at home—predominently low income and students of color. The Seattle NAACP supported the boycott because the MAP is used to track students into the city’s Advanced Placement Program—a program overwhelming made up of white students. The Superintendent’s Special Education Advisory and Advocacy Committee for the Seattle Public Schools supported the boycott, too, saying, “…our children are regularly denied their accommodations for the MAP. How does MAP testing somehow take precedence over the necessary accommodations on the IEP?” Rhee says the MAP boycott is a play by teachers to avoid accountability. Teachers and their unions, though, are simply fighting for the same kind of schools that the wealthy enjoy. Elite private schools do not inundate their students with standardized tests. What they do offer are great enrichment programs in physical education, drama, art, music, and field trips. They enjoy low student-teacher ratios, and a curriculum that stimulates students' interests and creativity.

If Rhee truly believes in the innate value of standardized tests, she should protest the fact that expensive private schools have been boycotting the MAP test for a long time.

Can you imagine Rhee (the self proclaimed “radical”) standing outside Lakeside, Bill Gates’ high school alma mater, chanting “1-2-3-4 your child IS a score! 5-6-7-8, standardized testing is really great!”?

Lakeside doesn’t march their students off to the library to take the MAP three times a year. Still, it’s a pretty good school. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1. Average class size is 16. The library has some 20,000 volumes, and is open until 6:00 pm. There’s a sports facility with a hydrotherapy spa. The service learning program has taken students to India, Peru, and China, and the School Year Abroad program enrolls students in their junior year to such programs as Mountain School, the Rocky Mountain Semester, the Maine Coast Semester.

Washington State ranks first among states in the number of standardized tests our K-12 public school students take. Besides the district’s MAP test (administered up to three times per year), the state mandates five additional standardized tests (but not for private school students). Our state spends more than $100 million on standardized tests, yet ranks 42nd in the nation in per pupil spending and its class sizes are among the largest in the country. These are the intolerable conditions that provoked educators in Seattle to put their livelihoods on the line and boycott the test.

The destination at which Seattle’s students, parents and teachers want to arrive is not on the MAP. Our desired destination is graduating students who demonstrate creativity, social responsibility, critical thinking, leadership, and civic courage. Seattle’s teachers are not afraid of assessment, but many of us know that to reach those goals, we will need to venture off the well-worn and narrow path of selecting from answer choices A, B, C, or D.

Michelle Rhee, I’m afraid you are lost. Come debate me in public, and I can help you find your way.

Jesse Hagopian is a public high school teacher in Seattle and a founding member of Social Equality Educators (SEE). He is a contributing author to Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History (Haymarket Books). Hagopian serves on the Board of Directors of Maha-Lilo—“Many Hands, Light Load”—a Haiti solidarity organization. He can be reached at: hagopian.jesse@gmail.com or you can follow him on Twitter.

MORE's Cavanagh on Gambling Show; Eterno on NY1 Online: The Call 3/12/13

Check out the Movement of Rank and File Educators' (MORE)
Julie Cavanagh, candidate for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) on where the union should be going
John Gambling Show, WOR, 3/04/13
James Eterno on the school closings in New York City
NY1 Online: The Call 3/12/13

Legitimacy of UFT Election in Jeopardy as Unity Chapter Leaders and Principals Block Mailbox Access

Federal labor law permits campaigning by rival sections of unions at the workplace. For public schoolteachers the question comes, are you working or are you campaigning. Thus, of course, school employees may only do their politicking during non-work-hours. Careful reading of New York City Board of Education statements supports such a stance.

Indeed, as the Education Notes blog reminded us a little over a month ago,

During election periods, the Baizerman decision allows any UFT member to go into ANY school -- even not their own -- and place materials in the mail boxes. Now this is not always a slam dunk as most principals, secretaries, etc. are not made aware. So if there is a problem a phone call has to be made to someone at the UFT (I hear Amy Arundel is in charge of getting these calls) who then calls the DOE and the school gets a message. Since that can take time it is best to do leave and go on to another place and come back another time. Sometimes I call the school first to let them know I am coming.

However, in the present (2013) election season, allies of the new alternate caucus of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), are repeatedly having difficulties practicing their legal right to insert campaign literature in staff mailboxes of UFT members at city schools. At a disturbingly high rate, variations are happening, for several weeks now:
-principals are barring box access
-chapter leaders are barring box access
-other school staff are barring box access.

And DOEnuts blog notes how Unity-allied officers have been sending pro-Unity messages on union time:

what I heard was that MORE has been receiving reports of how Districts Reps advocated for the Unity Caucus during meetings reserved for union business. Specifically, they distributed leaflets during Chapter Leader meetings (meetings that are, again, union time, not election time) and have been using email lists to advocate for the same. Just recently, an email was sent to a list identifying seven reasons why Mulgrew should be re-relected (on a mailing list that was collected for union business. Not union election business). My understanding is that MORE has brought these issues to the attention of the election committee and asked for equal access to the members. But they haven't gotten a reply.

Unity has access to UFT member emails, access which MORE does not have, as noted here and here. (Kind of reminds you of election challenges for public office.)

The Unity caucus, which has run the union for the last 50 years, has been able to project its interpretation of the issues, its interpretation of the current union leadership's performance through the "New York Teacher." Yet, the MORE caucus is newer and has fewer resources than the Unity political machine. How fair is the election if one side is having access to mailboxes barred?

Everyday that Unity's Amy Arundell and Leroy Barr, the persons fielding complaints of election misconduct, drag their feet, the greater the net benefit to Unity in preventing name and caucus recognition of the MORE caucus and its slate. Again, the complaints have been coming in for weeks now. Arundell and Barr have "made phone calls" and have recently informed chapter leaders of leafletting rights. However, this is ineffective. This writer and other MORE supporters have been barred access in the last 72 hours; obviously many people didn't get or read the memo. Or the chapter leaders are conveniently failing to inform principals or other office staff of the memo. It will be a shanda, as the saying goes, if this box access problem only gets addressed properly after the election.

A quick googling of phrases such as Baizerman decision or Baizerman Step III grievance will indicate that this kind of Unity chicanery of denying mailbox access to other caucuses goes back to past election seasons. See for example, these posts from March 2005 and November 2006. It is a little disingenuous for Arundell or Barr to feign shock when this game playing has quite a legacy with the Unity caucus. The games such as District Representatives campaigning for Unity on union time is merely history repeating itself.

If the current leadership gets re-elected by a similar percentage as in the past, it will crow about how strong it is and how the members are not interested in the alternative.
The union must reach out now, to secure the cooperation of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (CSA) and the New York City Department of Education, to get the message to all principals, that rival caucuses have the right of mailbox access; the union must reach out now to all district representatives, to reach all chapter leaders --via personal visits-- the email messages aren't cutting it, to get out the message of the right to free access to faculty and other UFT member mailboxes. (The UFT's Chapter Leader Update sent out a notice indicating mailbox access; however, even after this notice, the very high rate of mailbox access denial is occurring.)
Ms. Arundell, Mr. Barr, take action now, or the legitimacy of the election and its result will be seriously tarnished.

Common Core Standards: The Emperor Has No Clothes, or Evidence

Updates at end: on Common Core's mistakes in early childhood education and on Common Core's sidelining of literature. Christopher H. Tienken, wrote "Common Core Standards: The Emperor Has No Clothes, or Evidence," at Kappa Delta Pi Record, Winter 2011. His powerful piece is important for analyzing and sharing, as it crushes David Coleman and the Common Core's fallacious contention that the Common Core is evidence-based. Tienken has shown that the Common Core has no clothes indeed.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative continues to gather strength. But the evidence presented by its developers—the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)—seems lacking compared to the independent reviews and the available research on the topic that suggest otherwise.

Evidence Please
Evidence-based or data-driven decision making has been at the forefront of education rhetoric for the past 15 years. Administrator articles, book chapters, notes from telephone interviews, and several tangential studies. Many of the various citations were linked to a small group of advocates and did not represent the larger body of thought on the subject. The Benchmarking report, the main source of evidence provided by the NGA and CCSSO, draws most of its support from one study: The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development (Hanushek and Woessmann 2008). The use of that study is troubling because it has been criticized exhaustively and shown to be fatally flawed by independent researchers.
Evaluating the Evidence
The Role of Cognitive Skills claims that education drives economics and that national standards will improve education. This argument is methodologically and logically faulty on a number of levels. First, the study presumes a cause-and-effect relationship between standardized test results and national economic growth. Second, the study presumes that grades in school and performance on standardized tests predict individual economic growth later in life. Both may sound reasonable at first blush, but the cause-and-effect logic is untenable. Most economists understand that variables driving individual income growth cannot be applied to an entire national economy. They are two different units of analysis—two different scales, if you will. It would be like saying that because a certain teaching method was shown to be effective with one type of student in one small school in Maryland, we should base national education policy for all students in all states on that single method. As another example, although there is a moderate to strong correlation between height and weight, we still cannot conclude that someone weighs “59 inches” and expect that to be meaningful. Connecting an individual’s education achievement to a nation’s economic future is just not possible, empirically or logically. Certainly, education may influence an individual’s achievement or a nation’s future, but there is not a straight-line relationship. Further, an increase in education does not guarantee a lifetime of rising salaries. In impoverished nations, income gains can be as large as 20 percent for each additional year of schooling (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 2004). But consider that the real earnings of U.S. workers with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004 (Mishel 2006). Historically, there has not been an unimpeded, upward sloping linear relationship between the general level of education attain- ment and a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (Lewis 1964; Krueger and Lindahl 2001).

When trying to untangle the relationship between education and economic strength at the global level, one must recognize that not all economies are created equal (Ramirez et al. 2006; Tienken 2008). One cannot simply put every country from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing samples into the same economic or education pot. The size of the economy matters. Correlations between test scores and economic strength can be statistically significant and moderately strong when all the small or weak economies such as Poland, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic remain in the sample, whereas the relationship between international test scores and economic strength can be nonexistent or even negative when only the G14 or G21 preparation programs have courses on the topic, and preservice teachers are taught to use evidence and data to inform instruction. Many schools have “data committees” that make school-wide decisions. The No Child Left Behind Act ([NCLB] 2002) includes the word data 230 times. Surely there must be some quality data available to support the use of the CCSS to transform, standardize, and centralize America’s education system.

I wondered whether the official Web site for the CCSS provided such evidence. The site does claim that the standards are “evidence based” and lists two documents to prove it: Myths v. Facts about the Common Core Standards and a Benchmarking for Success report. The Myths document (NGA and CCSSO 2010, 3) presents claims that the standards have “made careful use of a large and growing body of evidence.” Evidence derives from scientific experiments and discoveries; thus, one would expect to find references to high-quality empirical research to support the standards. When I investigated that “large and growing body of evidence” offered by NGA and CCSSO, I found that it was not large and, in fact, was built mostly on the Benchmarking for Success report (NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve 2010), which was created by the same groups that created the standards.

I always look at the references an author chooses to use as my quick indicator of a study’s quality. The Benchmarking report has 138 endnotes, some of which are repetitive references. Of the 138 cited pieces of evidence, four could be considered empirical studies related directly to the topic of national standards and student achievement. The remaining citations were newspaper stories, magazine articles, book chapters, notes from telephone interviews, and several tangential studies. Many of the vari- ous citations were linked to a small group of advocates and did not rep- resent the larger body of thought on the subject. The Benchmarking report, the main source of evidence provided by the NGA and CCSSO, draws most of its support from one study: The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development (Hanushek and Woessmann 2008). The use of that study is troubling because it has been criticized exhaustively and shown to be fatally flawed by independent researchers.

Evaluating the Evidence
The Role of Cognitive Skills claims that education drives economics and that national standards will improve education. This argument is methodologically and logically faulty on a number of levels. First, the study presumes a cause-and-effect relationship between standardized test results and national economic growth. Second, the study presumes that grades in school and performance on standardized tests predict individual economic growth later in life. Both may sound reasonable at first blush, but the cause-and-effect logic is untenable. Most economists understand that variables driving individual income growth cannot be applied to an entire national economy. They are two different units of analysis —two different scales, if you will. It would be like saying that because a certain teaching method was shown to be effective with one type of student in one small school in Maryland, we should base national education policy for all students in all states on that single method. As another example, although there is a moderate to strong correlation between height and weight, we still cannot conclude that someone weighs “59 inches” and expect that to be meaningful. Connecting an individual’s education achievement to a nation’s economic future is just not possible, empirically or logically. Certainly, education may influence an individual’s achievement or a nation’s future, but there is not a straight-line relationship. Further, an increase in education does not guarantee a lifetime of rising salaries. In impoverished nations, income gains can be as large as 20 percent for each additional year of schooling (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 2004). But consider that the real earnings of U.S. workers with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004 (Mishel 2006). Historically, there has not been an unimpeded, upward sloping linear relationship between the general level of education attain- ment and a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (Lewis 1964; Krueger and Lindahl 2001).

When trying to untangle the relationship between education and economic strength at the global level, one must recognize that not all economies are created equal (Ramirez et al. 2006; Tienken 2008). One cannot simply put every country from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or Programme for Interna- tional Student Assessment (PISA) testing samples into the same eco- nomic or education pot. The size of the economy matters. Correlations between test scores and economic strength can be statistically signifi- cant and moderately strong when all the small or weak economies such as Poland, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic remain in the sample, whereas the relationship between international test scores and economic strength can be nonexistent or even negative when only the G14 or G21 economies, the strongest economies in the world, are in the sample (Tien- ken 2008).

The authors of the Role of Cognitive Skills (Hanushek and Woessmann 2008) do not cluster the samples to compare “apples to apples,” but simply consider all the countries together as though they are all similar. Of course, there is a positive relationship between test scores and economic growth when one includes 18 countries with weak or collaps- ing economies and international test rankings above those of the United States. Manipulating the data is a statistical shell game; the data actu- ally demonstrates that test scores do not predict economic success. To think that Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, all countries that outscored the United State in math on the 2006 PISA (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2009), will ever eclipse the United States in economic prowess defies reality.

Economic Realities
Nations with strong economies (e.g., the top 21 nations) and quality education systems demonstrate a weaker relationship between increases in education attainment and economic growth (Krueger Lindahl 2001; Tienken 2008). In nations with strong economies, the education system probably needs the economy more than the economy needs the education system. Competitive and expanding labor markets in coun- tries with strong economies drive the citizenry to seek higher levels of education. This phenomenon was identified more than 50 years agowhen Harbison and Myers (1964, xi) noted, “Education is both the seed and flower of economic development,” but somehow those who proffer the idea of curricular and knowledge standardization have not yet discovered this.
Nations functioning at high economic and education levels require larger changes in the education levels of a majority of the citizenry to have a statistically significant influence on the economy (a ceiling effect). Ramirez et al. (2006, 14) found that “School achievement levels appear to have a greater influence on economic growth in countries with lower levels of enrollment.” Examples of such countries are Chad, Honduras, and Sudan, where increases in secondary school completion rates can influence the economy positively.

Data-less Decision Making
Where is the evidence to support the rhetoric surrounding the CCSS? This is not data-driven decision making. This is a decision hoping for data. I am not aware of many contemporary professions that operate this way. The main evidence offered by the NGA and CCSSO to make the case for a cause-and-effect relationship, or any significant relationship for that matter, between test scores, economics, and the need for national curriculum standards amounts to nothing more than a statistical house of cards. Yet we are going to base the future of our entire educa- tion system, and its children, upon this lack of evidence. Where is the evidence that national standards will cause Ameri- can students to score at the top of international tests? Some point to the fact that many of the countries that outrank the United States have national, standardized curricula. My reply is that there are also nations with very strong economies, such as Canada, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland, which consistently rank higher than the United States on international tests and do not have a mandated, standardized set of cur- riculum standards.

Centralized Curriculum Planning
Consider that the United States has a population of more than 300 million and is more ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse than many of the smaller nations that outrank it on international tests. The United States ranks third in the world in terms of population behind China and India and has the largest population of any of the countries that partici- pated in the TIMSS and PISA testing.
Size matters because size brings complexity. Finland, the country that usually ranks in the top 5 on international tests has 5.5 million people. In the United States, that’s the equivalent of Wisconsin. In fact, the top 6 scoring nations on the 2006 PISA math test have a combined population of 240 million people. Singapore, another country commonly cited as one the United States should emulate has only 4.8 million people, a little more than half the population of New Jersey.
To think that every student in this country should be made to learn the same things is illogical on its face—it lacks face validity. The United States is just too large and too diverse to even want to engage in such folly. We all should have learned from the Soviet Union that central planning just does not work in the long run. The diversity of the United States is its greatest strength. The U.S. economy is able to adapt to change because of the diversity of the workforce. China is trying des- perately to crawl out from under the rock of standardization in terms of curriculum and testing (Zhao 2009).

Chinese officials recognize the negative impacts a standardized system has on intellectual creativity. Less than 10 percent of Chinese workers are able to function in multinational corporations (Zhao 2009). Chinese winners of Nobel Prizes are scarce, and China does not hold many sci- entific patents.

Oversimplification
Mandating a singular curricular program for the entire country is terribly naïve. This approach lacks a basic understanding of diversity and developmental psychology. Further, at its core, it eschews science and condones forcing children to fit the system instead of adjusting the system to fit the needs of the child.
Fundamentally, this mind-set lacks child-centeredness and offers an overly simplistic proposal for such a complex set of conditions. Standardization is a Pollyanna approach to policy making. One cannot simply separate curriculum from culture, emotions, personal backgrounds, prior experiences, prior knowledge, and stages of cognitive and social development. Cognitive Development Theory (Piaget 1952; 1967), Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner and Evans 2000), Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky 1978), and even Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs for that matter, all tell us that we cannot pretend curriculum oper- ates in a vacuum, apart from other factors. Standardization assumes that children are not active constructors of meaning who bring prior knowledge and experience to the learning situation. It assumes that all students start at the same academic place and will finish with the same results. One cannot just decree that all students will learn the exact same subject matter, at the same depth as mandated by the standards, at the same time (e.g., by the end of grade 1), and expect that to happen.

Curriculum Research
So what does the research suggest in terms of centralized curriculum planning? Wang, Haertel, and Walberg (1993) argued that curriculum has the greatest influence on student achievement when it is a proximal variable in the education process. They found that the closer the curriculum is designed, deliberated, and created near the student, the greater influence it has on learning. In short, curriculum should be a local endeavor. When curriculum is treated as a distal variable—occurring distant from the student, handed down from on high, as is the case with the CCSS—its influence is weakened. National policy mandates have the weakest influence of all on student learning because, like the CCSS, they are distal to the actual learning process (Wang et al. 1993). Recently, Tramaglini’s (2010) study of 120 New Jersey high schools that serve the state’s poorest towns yielded similar results. Tramaglini found that the more proximal the curriculum development process, the better the students performed on the state’s high school exit exam.

Local involvement and input matter greatly.
Seminal works also emphasize the importance of curriculum as a proximal variable. Among these are the mountains of curricular knowledge created by Francis Parker, John Dewey, Horace Mann, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba, to name just a few. But we have confirmation from others as well. The landmark Eight-Year Study demonstrated that curriculum can be an entirely locally developed endeavor and still produce better results than traditional curricular programs (Aikin 1942), as long as it is based on empirically demonstrated results, something the CCSS lacks. In fact, the Eight-Year Study demonstrated that the less standardized, more diverse, locally developed and designed the programs (based on demonstrated research and theories of learning), the better the students did in college academically, socially, civically, and in their work ethic compared to their traditionally prepared peers. Results from some well-known earlier studies (Collings 1923; Thorndike 1924; Wrightstone 1936; Wrightstone et al. 1939; Jersild et al. 1941) demonstrated that there is not one best curriculum path for students in high school, and standardized curricula is not necessary to achieve superior results in elementary and secondary schools.

Dead Ends with Questionable Means
We have been down the road of standardized curriculum, and that road is a dead end in terms of ensuring that more children learn more. The results from the “college prep for all” initiatives in Chicago beginning in 1997, New York State in 2001, Texas in 2003, and the mandated use of universal state standards via the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 have done little to close the achievement gap or the socioeconomic gaps that exist in this country (Allensworth et al. 2009). One program for all children just does not make conceptual sense, is intuitively contradictory, and has no empirical backing. The standards have not been validated empirically, and no metric has been set to monitor the intended and unintended consequences they will have on the education system and children (Mathis 2010). Equality of curriculum standards is inherently inequitable. Mandating that everyone follow the same set of standards and perform at the same level of achievement guarantees that everyone will not get what they need and that certain groups of students, those that do not fit into the new system, will lose out. These latter students will be labeled “not proficient” or “in need” of academic remediation, when perhaps they just need more choices, more pathways, and more diversity of curricula within the system. We should be increasing curricular diversity, not seeking to constrict it. We should be trying to help students explore and enrich their intellectual and social growth, not constraining them or funneling them into a small set of subjects. Most of all, we should respect differences among children, not try to extinguish them.

Think It Over
There is no empirical basis for the CCSS initiative, and yet many policy makers and even educators support it. The idea is easy to champion because it appears straightforward, compartmentalized, and uncomplicated. However, keep in mind that education is as complex as other disciplines. For example, if your child’s doctor made a high-stakes medical decision without consulting high-quality evidence or experimented on your child without your consent and without informing you of the known negative consequences, we would call that medical malpractice. Is this a case of education malpractice? At a minimum, it is irresponsible and unprofessional given the amount of evidence that calls the CCSS into question.
Developing coherent education and social policy is difficult. The CCSS presents itself as a neat and clean solution, easily manageable, and easy to discuss. Unfortunately, the real world is messy and much more complex. We cannot eliminate the complexity of educating all students by putting forth superficial ideas. Based on the lack of evidence behind the CCSS, it seems uninformed and unethical to support such a massive social experiment on participants who have no voice and thus no choice but to go along.

References
Aikin, W. M. 1942.
The story of the eight-year study.
New York: Harper and Brothers.
Allensworth, E., N. Takako, N. Montgomery, and V. E.
Lee. 2009. College preparatory curriculum for all: Academic consequences of requiring algebra and English I for ninth graders in Chicago.
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Christopher H. Tienken is an Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University in the College of Education and Human Services, Department of Education Leadership, Management, and Policy. He is a former public school teacher and administrator. You can contact him at christopher.tienken@shu.edu.

Postscript: Other critics have cited other great flaws in the Common Core. Here is another thoughtful piece on the Common Core, from the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss, January 19, 2013, in which she incorporates an article by Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, critiquing Common Core's flaws in the area of early childhood education. The Common Core's flaws reflect the fact that its kindergarten through third grade standards writers included no classroom teacher or early childhood specialist.
"A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education."

A July 10, 2013 opinion piece by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future," in the New York Daily News notes how the Common Core will deprive students of exposure to great literature (or much of any fictional literature, for that matter): "Common Core vs. great literature: Fresh reason to fear that works of fiction, poetry and theater may get short shrift when new standards arrive." discusses how the Common Core will leave a generation deprived of exposure to the classics of fictional literature, much less any fictional literature. The new English standards in the Common Core eliminate real English Language Arts material: "With the exception of the 'Romeo and Juliet' unit, they apparently envision English as a social studies class, not a language and literature class." Yet, with all the emphasis on non-fiction literature such as menus, technical manuals and opinion pieces in newspapers, as the author argues, the Common Core developers are depriving students of exposure to literature, and thus setting them up for failure in the very standards that they iterate elsewhere in the standards proclamations:

In fact, the Common Core standards explicitly set a high bar of literary history, stating that students will “demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature.”
According to the units rolled out so far by [New York City]’s Education Department, that standard doesn’t even exist.

Judge: Francesco Portelos's Suit vs NYC DOE Goes Forth

BREAKING-
Federal Judge to DOE: MOTION TO DISMISS DENIED A star Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) teacher was improperly retaliated against by his principal and the New York City Department of Education. A federal judge has ruled that his case may go forward.

For those of you who are following my crazy saga, you know I filed a Federal lawsuit (Portelos v. DOE) last June. It is against the City, DOE, and Berta Dreyfus IS 49 Principal Linda Hill. They attempted to silence a parent, who is an educator, who has a backbone and is apparently thousand times savvier than them…the failed.

The city attempted to dismiss my case and my attorney Bryan Glass, Esq., just sent me great news this morning; honorable Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf has denied that motion. In non legal words … Game On!

We start deposing witnesses soon. We are starting with Principal Linda Hill, former SLT Chairperson Susanne Abramowitz, former UFT Chapter Leader Richard Candia and former NYC DOE HR Director Andrew Gordon.

“As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.” the Greek Philosopher Diogenes

Read the full document here: Portelos v DOE MTD Denied

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
———————————————————–X
FRANCESCO PORTELOS,
Plaintiff,
- against -
CITY OF NEW YORK; NEW YORK CITY
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION; DENNIS
WALCOTT, CHANCELLOR OF NEW YORK
CITY DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION;
LINDA HILL, PRINCIPAL OF I.S. 49, IN HER
OFFICIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY,
Defendants.
———————————————————–X ORDER 12-CV-3141(RRM)(VMS) ROSLYNN R. MAUSKOPF, United States District Judge.
On June 22, 2012, plaintiff Francesco Portelos filed this action seeking monetary and equitable relief against defendants the City of New York, the New York City Department of Education, Dennis Walcott, and Linda Hill (collectively “defendants”) pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and New York Civil Service Law (“N.Y. C.S.L.”) § 75-b. Plaintiff alleges that defendants violated his First Amendment and state law rights by retaliating against him for reporting fraud and misconduct at I.S. 49. (Compl. (Doc. No. 1).) Before the Court is defendants’ December 17, 2012 motion to dismiss plaintiff’s complaint pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim. (Mot. to Dismiss (Doc. No. 17).) For the reasons set forth below, defendants’ motion is DENIED in its entirety.

Read the full document here: Portelos v DOE MTD Denied

For the reasons stated above, defendants’ motion to dismiss (Doc. No. 17) is DENIED in its entirety. This case is committed to the assigned Magistrate Judge for supervision of all pretrial matters.
SO ORDERED.
Dated: Brooklyn, New York Roslynn R. Mauskopf
February 28, 2013 ____________________________________
ROSLYNN R. MAUSKOPF
United States District Judge
Case 1:12-cv-03141-RRM-VMS Document 25 Filed 03/01/13 Page 6 of 6 PageID #: 127

NYC Public School Parents: The case of LA: why an elected school board doesn'...

NYC Public School Parents: The case of LA: why an elected school board doesn'...: Here in NYC, as is well known,  since 2002 we have have a school board called the Panel for Educational Policy,   with a  super-majority of mayoral appointees that always rubberstamps any damaging school closing, destructive charter co-location or corrupt contract the mayor wants, even when hundreds or even thousands of parents, teachers, advocates and local elected officials speak out in opposition. 

Some of us have expressed a yearning for an elected school board as exists in the rest of New York state and the country, with the thought that it would yield more democracy and more fairly take into account the real needs of our children and the priorities of stakeholders.  But take a look at what is happening right now in Los Angeles for another perspective:

On March 5 there will be an election for three candidates for the LAUSD school board, which will probably determine whether their current Superintendent John Deasy remains in office.  Deasy was appointed straight from the Gates Foundationand predictably follows the corporate line: he supports the expansion of charters, the weakening of teacher tenure and basing teacher evaluation on student test scores; . Monica Garcia, the incumbent school board president, Kate Anderson, and Antonio Sanchez all support the renewal of Deasy’s contract, and are running under the slate of the Coalition for School Reform.   

Kate Anderson is campaigning to unseat incumbent Steve Zimmer, a former teacher and TFAer, who is an independent thinker and not a rubberstamp for Deasy. Despite the fact that individual contributions are apparently limited to $1000 per person, the pro-Deasy candidates have raised many times their opponents in donations from wealthy hedge-funders, Hollywood producers and the like; with Garcia outraising her opponents more than 10-1, and the other two more than 3-1.

Moreover, "independent expenditures" for these three candidates has gone through the roof with nearly $3 million raised through February 16.  Among the biggest donors are Mayor Bloomberg  ($1 million), Eli Broad and Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst (each $250K), Reed Hastings of Netflix, Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell, entertainment executive Casey Wasserman, investors Marc and Jane Nathanson, (each $100K), film producers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Frank Marshall (both $50K), and Joel Klein, now working for Rupert Murdoch ($25K). These independent expenditures include deceptive attack mailers, an expensive “ground game” and plenty of TV ads and glossy flyers. (Anyone who has lived in NYC through the last three mayoral elections knows the queasy experience of opening up your mailbox, stuffed with multiple huge mailers paid for by the Bloomberg campaign, touting his great record and/or attacking his opponents.)

There also seems to be a lot of shady and unethical politicking going on in Los Angeles. The LA Fund for Public Education is a charitable non-profit, a 501C3started in 2011 by Superintendent Deasy, apparently modeled after NYC’s Fund for Public Schools, founded by Joel Klein.  The LA Fund paid for several billboards featuring Garcia as a supporter of the arts in January and February of this year, just a few weeks before the election, until angry protests made them take the billboards down.  As a 501C3, this organization is absolutely prohibited from any partisan political activity. 

(Some of us may recall how the NYC Fund for Public Schools ran expensive campaigns in 2008-9, with million dollar donations from the Broad, Gates, and Robertson foundations,including television, radio, and subway ads touting the great “progress” made by the schools under Bloomberg, with the tagline “keep it going”.  These took place  during the months leading up to the vote over whether mayoral control would be renewed, and whether Mayor Bloomberg would be re-elected for a third term.)

In addition, the United Way of LA, another 501C3, is holding an “Education Summit” on February 27, with a panel featuring Superintendent Deasy, Casey Wasserman, Eli Broad and school board president and incumbent Monica Garcia, just one week before the election. Why is this questionable?

Again, if an organization is a 501C3 and receives tax-deductible donations, it is strictly prohibited from holding events promoting one candidate for office so close to an election without inviting his or her rivals.  Oh yes, in the morning there is a panel featuring “The Education Mayors [sic]”: Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago and Antonio Villaraigosa, current but term-limited Mayor of Los Angeles, privatizers all.  (United Way also was involved in the promotion, parent outreach, and screenings of the charter porn film, Waiting for Superman, funded by Gates Foundation and others.)

On February 14, the United Way held a school board candidate forum, right after news of the Bloomberg $1 million donation broke, in which Monica Garcia and other candidates were present. [Video here.] Among the questions asked: “What would you do if you were head of the UTLA (the LA teachers union), which is a rather strange question considering the candidates were running for the school board instead.  Also, according to the LA Times,

“…organizers did not choose to ask a question about Bloomberg’s largesse or the fund to which he donated, which is called the Coalition for School Reform. But moderator Marqueece Harris-Dawson did ask candidates to address money given by the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, which also is expected to spend big in the campaign.”

(Union officials have said they can’t match the coalition’s resources and will compensate instead by sending teachers out into the field.)

“We don’t have millions,” asserted Diaz, referring to the union. “We are broke.” Then he went back on the offensive: “Look at what happened with the New York mayor…That’s a red flag. Corporations are not citizens, but they are taking control of our public schools…We need money in the schools, not the campaigns.”

And what about that Bloomberg hefty donation?  On the day the contribution was announced,  the LA Times quoted Dan Schnur's commentary:

 "Michael Bloomberg threw down the gauntlet today," said Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. "He's obviously very serious about changing education in America, and Los Angeles is now ground zero for that effort." He added: "This is a game changer."

Game changer, huh?  Dan Schnur was also quoted in an article a few days later in the LA Daily News this time, about the potential impact of the Bloomberg donation, and he framed the election as a fight between the union and the “reformers”, who if they won, would make LA a “leader on education reform”:

"This is not the first time that reformers and the unions have gone head to head, but the stakes have never been this high," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "This fight isn't about John Deasy the person, but what he represents - an aggressive approach to reform that raises a lot of very high passions on both sides of the debate.

"These elections represent what it's going to take to make LA's public schools better….LA has not historically been a leader on education reform but that could very well be about to change," he said.

Who is Dan Schnur, besides the director of an Institute at USC and a former adviser to Sen. John McKean? 

He’s also the brother of Jon Schnur, a prominent corporate reformer.  Jon is the founder of New Leaders of New Schools, currently head of American Achieves and an adviser to Bloomberg on how to spend his personal fortune.  

Unfortunately, neither of these articles mentioned that connection when quoting Dan Schnur as a supposed independent expert on the impact of the million dollar donation.  Given that his brother probably advised Bloomberg to give the contribution to the LA school board race in the first place, it might be considered relevant to how independent and objective his brother’s views should be considered, that the donation is a “game changer” that will determine whether Los Angeles will be a “leader on education reform.”

Lesson: even an elected school board is not necessarily going to give us more accountability and democracy here in NYC, unless there are strict limits on contributions, restrictions on independent expenditures, and restraints imposed on foundations and non-profits from influencing the outcome.  The media must also do their job and report the underlying connections between all these forces. And no one should be surprised if Bloomberg and his wealthy allies in the corporate reform movement use the same sort of tactics during the NYC mayoral elections taking place later this year.

Common Core + Danielson Framework = Dangerous Educational Experimentation?

Two dimensions are destroying teachers' working conditions and students' learning conditions-- the Common Core, as noted in a post linked earlier this week, and the Danielson Framework as noted in a recent issue of Counterpunch.
The author's eugenics metaphor is harsh. But then consider how reckless and unconscionable this mass experimentation on children's education this is.

Educational Eugenics

February 18, 2013
The Corporate Reform of Public Schools: Educational Eugenics
by MARK GRAHAM

Teachers and students are having a rough time in the United States—and not just because they are in danger of being murdered in their classrooms. Public education itself is under attack, fueled by foundation dollars, government policies and media hype. The problem isn’t international rankings, teacher pensions, or outdated theories. These are smokescreens. The enemies of American education hate it because it is public-powered, union-friendly, and people-centered. Public education doesn’t exist to churn out cheap crap so someone can make a buck. At its best, it teaches tolerance, promotes democratic values, and invests in the potential of each and every one of its students. And that’s its main problem. That’s why Democrats and Republicans alike are hell-bent on transforming our schools into a tyrannical instrument of corporate power through increased standardization of curricula, instruction, and assessments. Their goal is to manufacture “proficient” students and “distinguished” teachers—an educational master race judged by objective and scientific criteria. The end result of such technocratic pedagogy is nothing less than a eugenics of the mind.

The current mechanistic view of teaching and learning follows a model invented by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early twentieth century. Mirroring the worldview of his big-business clientele, Taylor viewed working people with contempt. “The science of handling pig-iron is so great,” he told a Congressional committee, “that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.” His “scientific management” theory turned once-independent workers into cogs in a machine by creating an industrial hierarchy where workers performed strictly mechanical tasks. Their managerial taskmasters, on the other hand, made all the creative decisions and gave all the orders. Efficiency became the sole standard by which workers would be evaluated—quantity became quality.

Taylor’s dehumanizing, disempowering system became widely adopted as a corporate model. We can see its results in third world sweatshops. But it also had political uses. Zygmunt Baumann in his book Modernity and the Holocaust called the genocidal policies of the Nazis, “a textbook of scientific management.” The way the Nazis saw it, the Holocaust wasn’t destructive but productive. They were creating a master race through their own psychopathic form of quality control. Ford automobile plants operated on the same principles. A common destination links assembly-line murder and manufacture: a utopian drive toward standardization.

Eugenicists want an end to difference and plurality. They crave the uniform. Sameness implies security—from self-doubt and from the conflicts that not only allow for personal growth but also for a true democracy. The educational system they’re creating resembles Taylorism in every way except it manages more than labor—it engineers the sense of mind and self. The way to save the public schools—which politicians insist need to be saved while simultaneously defunding public education at every opportunity—is to make sure everyone is teaching and learning the same things the same way. Our ultimate goal as human beings should be to think like everybody else.

In the eyes of many education policymakers, school has come to be nothing more than job training. Rather than provide young citizens with the cognitive abilities required to become empowered members of a democracy, educators must simply help students “succeed” in the “real world” by giving them marketable skills. What we think about, then, is what the market wants us to think about. Anything that lies outside the interests of the market at any given moment should be cut or marginalized out of the mainstream curriculum.

They call this efficiency. But it’s not education. It’s a system that doesn’t look at children as human beings that need to be nurtured—that have individual voices and learning styles. Eugenics of the mind seeks to recreate individual people into a master race of cheerful robots, managed and programmed with the right amount of information to make them efficient and docile enough for their future masters.

One of the first things they teach you in college education classes is Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences: the linguistic, the mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and so on. People do not learn the same way and the various kinds of intelligence are not evenly distributed in most students. Nevertheless, this educational system defines intelligence in the narrowest way—and then demands that everyone “master” often arbitrary accumulations of facts and skills by scoring a certain percentage on a test. If they don’t, federal funding will be withheld.

Why students need to be examined in some things and not in others remains mysterious. It’s not simply to provide students with marketable skills. The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has predicted that only 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra in the next decade. Yet students in Pennsylvania must pass an algebra exam for graduation.

What makes algebra attractive is not its usefulness to students but rather that one’s knowledge of it can be easily quantified on an exam. That’s the rotten core of our common standards [Valerie Strauss, "Eight problems with Common Core Standards," "Washington Post] —education based on rote-memory computations that can be easily evaluated. Look carefully and you will find little encouragement to teach critical thinking, debate, or creativity. You can’t fit that on a bubble sheet—and that’s where the money is.

The test-creating/scoring industry generates profits of 2.7 billion dollars a year. Of course the claims of test-makers and policymakers that tests give us reliable information about student learning are highly questionable. Just ask students some questions from last year’s exams and see how much they’ve forgotten. These tests don’t prove someone has learned something but simply reflect one’s ability to do well on a particular test at that moment.

As if in answer to this objection, “assessment instruments” like the SAT as well as state graduation exams have begun to include sections devoted to student writing. Recently the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania spent two hundred million dollars developing its new Keystone Exams, a requirement for graduation. The money went into the pocket of Minnesota’s Data Recognition Corporation. It’s clear from recent press about DRC that exams are anything but objectively and scientifically scored there. Instead, an army of 20-something temps with no teaching or writing experience haphazardly evaluates the exams, using absurdly vague rubrics like: “a good essay includes good focus, good organization, good language skills, good grammar,” and so forth. Naturally the scorers cannot seem to agree on how one defines “good.” Former scorers report they were pressured to average out the numbers by arbitrarily assigning low or high scores in order to generate a nice bell curve.

Educational eugenicists also apply such “scientific” precision to assessing teachers, in an attempt to deskill and disempower educators, and limit their ability to teach for change. Instead of being inquisitive and imaginative agents of intellectual and social growth, teachers are compelled to submit themselves, like the students, to the gods of standardization and efficiency. Obama and Duncan demand that states wishing to pick up sparse federal funds must evaluate teachers in new ways—you guessed it: scientifically and objectively. Enter Charlotte Danielson and her Framework for Teaching (FFT), the darling of the Gates Foundation and many a state department of education. The FFT depicts teaching as a mechanical method of ensuring students “learn the standards.” All educators are evaluated by the same method, despite their often widely varying tasks, student constituencies, subject matter, and funding. What teachers know about their profession counts as nothing. Ms. Danielson, the ex-economist from Princeton with only nebulous teaching credentials, has decided (in keeping with the best principles of scientific management) that experts with no long-standing classroom experience know better than the teachers who do the educating.

At best, some of her teacher standards are self-evident to anyone who’s lasted for more than two or three years (“Teachers should provide clear explanations of content”). At worst some are possibly illegal (her inclusion of volunteering as a criterion of teacher performance most likely violates the Fair Labor Standards Act). The rest are laughably subjective or ridiculously unrealistic. The rubric states a distinguished teacher “makes a thoughtful and accurate assessment of a lesson’s effectiveness.” It does not clarify, however, what “thoughtful” and “accurate” mean. Other standards are equally murky. One of Danielson’s criteria for “distinguished” educators states that: “All students are cognitively engaged.” Another: “Students appear to have internalized these expectations.” What Ms. Danielson does not explain, however, is how exactly does an administrator attain objective information about students’ states of consciousness? And if they are not cognitively engaged, the rubric implies, it must be the teacher’s fault, not students’ own willingness to be distracted. In the FFT students have no independent will of their own. Even when they take the initiative the “distinguished” teacher gets the credit. Kids apparently play no part in the process of their own education. But that’s the point of educational eugenics. The system creates “superior” students in its own likeness—shallow, narrowly focused, distracted, competitive, amoral, and eager to appease authority. Likewise teachers follow the authoritative standards, jettison spontaneity, and submerge their individual teaching styles in order to conform to a common core. This is the master race of minds currently being engineered by the forces of corporate reform.

We must not forget that the sole purpose of machines is to make somebody’s life easier through unending servitude. It is time to not just rage against “teaching to the test” in faculty rooms but defy it openly by continuing (as many teachers do) to encourage and enact real education—showing children how to think creatively, critically and divergently, helping them to make meaning of their lives, and enabling them to problem-solve in a world that desperately needs compassionate and innovative questions and answers. The power belongs in the hands of teachers and learners, not corporations. The time to take it back is now.

Mark Graham is a high school teacher in the Lehigh Valley. He’s books include: How Islam Created the Modern World and Afghanistan in the Cinema.