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Yesterday, the Buffalo News reported that the Buffalo Public Schools and the Buffalo Teachers Federation had negotiated a new teacher evaluation system. But what is particularly significant is that the News simultaneously reported on and endorsed the contract negotiated between Washington, D.C. teachers and administration, and promoted it as a model for Buffalo. The D.C. contract — known as IMPACT but not mentioned by name in the editorial — has, according to the Buffalo News, four key components: performance-based teacher evaluation, financial incentives to raise test scores, limits on the protections of tenure, and increased ability of the district to lay off “bad teachers” without “economic cause”. But the News is either unaware or unwilling to report facts unfriendly to its position of support.

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RTTT is the "Carrot That Feels Like a Stick," says Mike Petrilli (of all people). He "can’t help but feel remorse for the death of federalism."

As I prepare for a talk at DePaul University tomorrow, I’m racing (ha!) to review the assessment program of Race to the Top. After having vented yesterday, several things stand out as politically significant in the assessment competition.

It is key to understand that the content of Race to the Top is bribery. While in the past the main criticism from various quarters was that much of NCLB’s testing requirements were “unfunded mandates;” today they are funded, but in an even more coercive way. Those who do the bidding of Obama, Duncan and a host of venture philanthropists, will receive tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. This itself is significant, for as I’ve noted before, bribery as a method signifies illegitimacy: “The use of the public treasury to bribe educators is an open admission that the path being imposed by the ruling elite cannot be justified” — that is, it is against prevailing public opinion. Despite all the talk about putting children first, kids do not want more testing, they are not craving to have their entire academic experience converted to numbers and letters in some federal database (as RTTT appears to aim to create), nor are they demanding teachers who only spend a few weeks preparing to enter the classroom, high on a mission inspired by the White Man’s Burden. Nor are children and youth narrowly interested in education for a career. So, as is often the case, things are not what they seem. The irrationality of the project requires that its political functions be explored. Eligibility requirements for receiving the competitive grants are a good place to begin.

An Analysis of Select Requirements

To be eligable for the Comprehensive Assessment System (the first assessment competition), the Executive Summary states:

Eligible applicants are consortia of States. To be eligible to receive an award under this category, an eligible applicant must—1. Include a minimum of 15 States, of which at least 5 States must be governing States (as defined in the NIA); 2. Identify in its application a proposed project management partner and provide an assurance that the proposed project management partner is not partnered with any other eligible applicant applying for an award under this category; and; 3. Submit assurances from each State in the consortium that, to remain in the consortium, the State will adopt a common set of college- and career-ready standards…

It will be important to thoroughly explore the degree to which this arrangement has precedent, but there are, it appears, some significant breaks with past practice. Unlike national associations like the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — which is nonetheless playing an important role in creating national standards — RTTT requires placing some states as “governing” over others and require states in the consortia to sign “assurances” of compliance with the governing state and executive demands at the federal level to receive funding. Whereas CCSSO and possibly other associations are framed as advocacy organizations, this arrangement appears to create new governance structures. It appears to structure a new form of political inequality among states as well.

So what of these new governance structures? First, it is important to take seriously the use of the word consortium. Similar to the increasingly used concept of partnership, consortium is typically understood as “an association, typically of several business companies.” The social and political arrangement in which this makes sense is typically understood as belonging to the private realm of private enterprise, or that of “civil society” in the form of a professional association or “non-governmental agency” — as distinct from the state. But here we have the federal apparatus, under the direction of an executive, and not the law making body, forming through the use of bribes governing structures that do not obviously conform to the U.S. constitution or even state constitutions. What are we to make of a group of states forming a governing alliance that controls curricular content and standards for assessment whether teachers are teaching and students are learning that content, under the direction of executive bodies of the federal government? Will such alliances compete with each other? Will there be a Confederate consortium?

In the Federal Register notice, we find this interesting option:

Application Requirements: An eligible applicant’s application must—1. Indicate, consistent with 34 CFR 75.128, whether—(a) One member of the consortium is applying for a grant on behalf of the consortium; or (b) The consortium has established itself as a separate eligible legal entity and is applying for a grant on its own behalf; 2. Be signed by—(a) If one member of the consortium is applying for a grant on behalf of the consortium, the Governor, the State’s chief school officer, and, if applicable, the president of the State board of education from that State; or (b) If the consortium has established itself as a separate eligible legal entity and is applying for a grant on its own behalf, a representative of the consortium.

It is completely unclear, albeit on its face significant, what it means to allow for states to form a consortium that “has established itself as a separate eligible legal entity.” Such as a private corporation or non-for-profit institution?

Second, what might be most significant about this arrangement is not that it violates states rights (presumably the out for the Obama administration here is that Duncan is not actually forcing any state to apply for these grants) but rather that it restructures executive authority by creating “partnerships” between associations of states that relate as single entities to federal bodies, where these consortia appear to be de-linked both from federal and state law making bodies.

A related criteria for winning the competition is the role given to public institutions of higher education (IHEs). The Summary explains:

The Department gives eligible applicants competitive preference points based on the extent to which they have promoted collaboration and alignment between member States’ public elementary and secondary education systems and their public IHEs…Eligible applicants addressing this priority must provide, for each IHE or IHE system, a letter of intent that—(a) Commits the IHE or IHE system to participate with the consortium in the design and development of the consortium’s final high school summative assessments in mathematics and English language arts in order to ensure that the assessments measure college readiness; (b) Commits the IHE or IHE system to implement policies, once the final high school summative assessments are implemented, that exempt from remedial courses and place into credit-bearing college courses any student who meets the consortium-adopted achievement standard (as defined in the NIA) for each assessment and any other placement requirement established by the IHE or IHE system; and (c) Is signed by the State’s higher education executive officer (if the State has one) and the president or head of each participating IHE or IHE system.

This arrangement appears to have the effect of brining state public education systems under a governing apparatus of consortia of states — neither at the state level nor the federal level — that, in turn, interacts with the federal department of education. Of course, there is much to say about this — the implication of mandating the elimination of remedial courses for example — but that is for another time.

Another feature that suggests significant restructuring of executive power is this requirement stipulated under Consortium Governance. It notes that the “terms and conditions of the Memoranda of Understanding or other binding agreements executed by each member State” must include the “State’s commitment to and plan for identifying any existing barriers in State law, statute, regulation, or policy to implementing the proposed assessment system and to addressing any such barriers prior to full implementation of the summative assessment components of the system.”

Like Race to the Top requirements that bribe states into rewriting their laws — the most notable examples being the removal of caps on charter schools and rules limiting the use of test data for teacher evaluation purposes — this places executive bodies in a quasi-law making role. Along with venture philanthropy and other monopolies, governors and some legislatures are demanding changes to state law to increase state chances for winning Race to the Top funds. While a key point here is the clear focus on emasculating teachers unions and the spreading of massive disinformation about “putting kids first”, the point here is that this structure creates a new governing mechanism, neither at the level of state, nor clearly at the federal level; in some ways, it is not clear that the consortia to be formed are fully public in nature (e.g., a consortium that “established itself as a separate eligible legal entity”). It is important to understand that these changes are enabled by the ARRA, the result of the crimes of Wall Street (while some banks are “too big to fail” public institutions of historic proportion, such as public schools and universities, are being forced to fail).

Another clue that suggests limited public status for these governing structures is the manner in which RTTT insists on technical standards that are, generally speaking, open source or cross platform, while maintaining test secrecy. This ensures the public continues to be blocked from access to test content. Again the notice in the Federal Register is more helpful. It states:

In addition, we are requiring that eligible applicants receiving awards under either category in this competition develop assessment items and produce student data in a manner that is consistent with standards for interoperability, and that they make all assessment content (i.e., assessments and assessment items) developed with funds from this competition freely available to States, technology platform providers, or others that request it for purposes of administering assessments, consistent with States’ needs and with consortium or State requirements for test or item security.

Suggesting that public dollars are again being used to develop technology latter utilized by private entities, the notice reads:

We believe that these requirements will ensure that assessment content developed with funds from this competition is widely available, including to States that are not part of consortia receiving funds under this competition as well as to commercial organizations wishing to further develop, extend, and incorporate the content into assessment products intended for State use. Moreover, we believe that making assessment content freely available will spur innovation in assessment technology and enable technology providers to compete for States’ business on the basis of their developing efficient, effective, economical, and innovative assessment platforms.

It does not appear than that the issue is simply one of state’s rights and the death of federalism. Rather, it appears the very nature and scope of executive power is changing, and working to further distance governance from the public and its will.

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Well, let’s examine the first paragraph of the Executive Summary (since that is how far I got before I had to say something before my brain exploded):

Authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the Race to the Top Assessment Program provides funding to consortia of States to develop assessments that are valid, support and inform instruction, provide accurate information about what students know and can do, and measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace. These assessments are intended to play a critical role in educational systems; provide administrators, educators, parents, and students with the data and information needed to continuously improve teaching and learning; and help meet the President’s goal of restoring, by 2020, the nation’s position as the world leader in college graduates.

Wow! If you’re not struck by the incompetence, read it again. OK, wow!

First, validity of these new assessments is presented as a criteria that is somehow separate from providing “accurate information about what students know and can do”. Would you consider it possible to have a valid assessment that cannot provide information about what students know and can do in some domain (assuming for a moment developing such assessments is a straightforward and problem-free endeavor)?

More troubling is this gem: “measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace.” Measurement is not the same as comparison. And the phrase “measure student achievement against” is inept and awkward. Of course one might counter that the sentence means to convey that college and career standards should be used to measure student achievement prior to college, or that these standards should be used to validate measures of achievement. But such re-renderings do little to help. By way of some spell developed by Voldemort, this measurement spiral will ensure “all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace”. Can standards ensure things like this?

Oh, it’s actually quite easy, like, when, uh, the standard measure of weight is used to ensure everyone loses weight! If only obese youth had access to more bathroom scales!

And wouldn’t it be great if schools prepared everyone for college and the workplace? That won’t be a challenge, because all colleges and degree programs are essentially the same, and we all work (those of us who have the will to get a job in this free market utopia) in “the workplace.” I think it is well established, using scientifically based methods, that all workplaces are essentially the same and require the same skills. The psychological literature is bursting with studies demonstrating how easily skills transfer from one domain to the next…that’s why CEOs have proven to be such effective educators.

And, I’m really happy that the Obama administration wants to provide parents with “data and information needed to continuously improve teaching”. Hell, since they, and many teachers, will be out of work, they might as well do something for their country…

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Nussbaum begins by warning of a crisis in education, a crisis rooted in the quest for national profit or economic gain (interestingly enough this point is made without reference to the dramatic increase in the rise of for-profit providers of higher education and the concomitant adoption of an outlook predicated on education being a service and students consumers). She writes:

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations and their systems of education are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, all over the world we will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.

What is most interesting about this line of argument is its assumption that “citizens who can think for themselves” (what about resident “aliens”?), the “ability” to “criticize tradition” and “understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements”, are all skills. Is thinking a skill? Is empathy a skill?

Examining the Oxford English Dictionary, one will find that the noun skill has two distinct meanings, and I think the difference is quite significant. The first meaning listed is essentially grounded in the notion of reason, or discernment and differentiation (and given as a mental faculty of individuals, whereas now there is evidence that thinking is a social, not simply psychological, phenomenon). The second meaning moves us into the moral realm: “That which is reasonable, proper, right, or just.”

The “business community’s” emphasis on education for the development of skills suggests, at first glance, a set of functional capacities (e.g., STEM) tightly aligned with what finance capital says the market can bear and national security deems worthy (e.g., learning Arabic). Yet, it is clear to me that since the days of the development of civil service exams in China and then in the west, a composite notion of skill has pervaded our thinking, both causing confusion and covering over important developments. This confusion reigns in Nussbaum’s essay and is worth further exploration.

She writes: “Indeed, what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science—the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought—are also losing ground.”

While the word rigorous is almost as hackneyed and misused as the word accountability (rigorous is of course derived from the notion of being inflexible, as when one dies their body becomes rigid, something I hope most can recognize as not being synonymous with notions like “advanced”), what is particularly troubling is the incessant habit of placing adjectives before words in such a manner as to reveal that the writer does not understand them. So an example is “critical thinking.” I’m just not convinced that thinking is a phenomenon that comes in varieties, such that one type of thinking is “critical” and another type is “uncritical”. I’m serious; if we don’t stop this irrationalism, we’re going to soon be offering undergraduates “uncritical thinking” as a prerequisite for courses in “critical thinking”. This reminds me of proponents of “brain-based learning,” as if we were confused as to the organ largely responsible for learning! I’m going to develop the Institute for Foot-based Learning, following in the footsteps (!) of the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Athens.

So back to the problems of skills-as-values. Anyway, what is significant about the designation of some thinking as critical is that it appears to cross over into a moral or values positions (critical means to render negative judgment), beyond any empirically based analysis of forms or types of thinking. That is to say, the kind of thinking that “critical thinking” targets is thinking that is judgmental, opinionated, and so on, and thus, the notion confuses the value and the form of the process and product of thinking. Nussbaum continues:

Given that economic growth is so eagerly sought by all nations, especially at this time of crisis, too few questions have been posed about the direction of education, and, with it, of the world’s democratic societies. With the rush to profitability in the global market, values precious for the future of democracy are in danger of getting lost.

So here we have an assumed linkage of the above mentioned skills to a set of values, which I don’t think is an accident nor a problem unique to this author’s point of view. She continues in the following paragraph thusly:

The profit motive suggests to many concerned leaders that science and technology are of crucial importance for the future health of their nations. We should have no objection to good scientific and technical education. My concern is that other abilities, equally crucial, are at risk of getting lost in the competitive flurry, abilities crucial to the health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a world culture capable of tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Wait! I though we were talking about the skills associated with a liberal-arts education, skills that help foster democratic governance? Yes, ability is commonly referenced by thesauruses as a synonym for skill, but is it? Ability, according the OED, is particularly focused on the notion of suitability relative to a particular purpose, or as the quality making some action possible. So, let me pull what I think is a very important observation from my book:

Sociologists point out that there have always been arrangements for formally recognizing the capacity to perform important social roles and to exercise their associated social status and power… Notice that there are in fact two capacities referenced here. The first is the capacity to perform the role itself (functional competency), and the second capacity is to exercise the role’s associated social status and power (what might be called social competency). Notions of ability, of capacity, are bound up with social roles, for ability must have a place for it to be manifest. This quality or state of being able manifests itself in the “physical, mental, or legal power to perform,” according to Webster’s. Note that ability can signify a power inhering in persons—again functional capacity—or a legal power to do something, or social capacity. It is significant, I think, that the etymology of ability is from the Middle English, suitability. In this regard, standardized test-based assessment is the judgment of worth relative to a structural slot or social position—what is deemed of value and who is deemed of value—a process abstracted as achievement or ability.

It is this dual meaning of skill and ability that must be sorted out. In the same breath, we talk about functional capacities and social capacities. In the present circumstance this leads to, among other things, blaming average individuals for what are in reality structural problems, which are covered over by those relatively few individuals who benefit from these structural arrangements.

And of course, educational institutions have been implicated in this social structuring, and the interesting fact is that “liberal arts” education was reserved for those slotted for positions afforded “social status and power”; as access to education was broadened, and the right to vote extended, more limited forms of liberal education were afforded the “masses.” “Liberal education” was the vision so graciously extended to the “masses” by enlightened bourgeois reformers and while progressive in its day and responsible for many positive developments, it imposed the limits of a bourgeois outlook (e.g., “learning is for its own sake”). It cannot move us into the future. It confounded our understanding of skills, abilities and values, and brought with it the view that education was an appropriate means for defending the ranking of humanity, thus not only distorting our understanding of the origin of extant social inequality, but also distorting the process and outcome of education by tightly aligning its acquisition with social rank.

It is thus my (admittedly underdeveloped) thesis that the current emphasis on “skills” is in fact an assignment of lower social value to a larger section of the population than has been practiced in the recent past; the problem is not that the “skills” necessary for democracy are not being “taught”, but rather that what little democracy existed prior to the current push for “accountability” is being eliminated by the reduction of education to “skills development” under the hoax of economic development.

The political arrangement that housed “liberal arts” as an educational form no longer holds sway. Put in a different manner, the aim of the emphasis on skills is not — at the macro level — in the main economically driven, but a political necessity given the extreme concentration of power and complete failure of the current political system to provide people even a modicum of say over their government and the direction of society. In vogue notions of skills are confused with notions of values, and are thus quite complex. The notion of “critical thinking” is not a banner behind which educators should readily line up in the dire hope that by adopting the business-talk of skills somehow a broad and enlightened form of education can be defended and supported.

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But the English language does not help the discussion of measurement, as measure can signify both a standard and the process of applying a standard for the purpose of measurement, assessment or comparison. Not all applications of standards produce measurements. Applications of legal standards do not yield measurements of criminality. So, to say that a test is the best available measure may be true if by measure one means the prediction of some performance. But prediction and measurement are not the same thing. Measurement is a very specific thing, a claim that a mathematical system corresponds with the phenomenon of interest. This is the criteria of being isomorphic. Standardized tests do not meet that criteria. And, they do not identify a precise object of measurement. Thus, claiming that one must have real knowledge of mathematics to perform “well” (high rank performance) on some math test is not the same as the claim that the math test produces a measurement of math ability. Of course one must have some related skills and general intellectual development to engage with the test in a way society renders valuable. But the outcome of that exercise does not constitute a measurement.

In the course of the discussion, it was argued that test scores are at least measures of test taking ability. My claim is that tests currently in use do not meet the criteria of measurement, and that this fact is hidden, covered over, but in reality, known to psychometricians. My claim is that these tests do not produce measurements of any kind (Walt Haney tried to convince me that they are “weak” measures, which created new problems). This is why I go to great lengths to distinguish between assessment and measurement. Standardized tests are obviously tools for making assessments. They’re just not measurements, and my claim is that this distinction is very significant.

I suppose that part of what is troubling about my argument is my strict use of the word measurement. So, for example, I would agree that a score on a standardized test is a “useful indicator” of how proficient a person is at taking standardized tests in general, but I would object to someone calling that score a measurement of test-taking ability. Creating an indices, Likert scale, etc., with the aid of numbers, may provide “useful” information, and even allow that information to be treated statistically (75% of Americans are opposed to the Iraq war) but the mere assignment of numbers to something in this manner does not in itself constitute measurement. Again, I maintain that the distinction is significant; it is significant that politicians and policy experts routinely call things measurements when the results do not meet the criteria of measurement.

The claim to measurement is made because it enables one to make claims about the origin of social trends. During the rise of intelligence testing, the claim that intelligence was being measured (even though it was known to be a mere classification) enabled reformers to link school performance to what they postulated as variation in intellectual ability (and not ineffective teaching, instruction in a language not spoken by students, or a vapid curriculum). Today, the claim to measurement is required to argue that “teaching ability” or “teaching effectiveness” is the cause of various social trends. No serious scientist believes that student performance on any academic test constitutes a measurement of teaching effectiveness. And, today, even though it is well established that is “normal” for individuals to vary in their rate and depth of learning any content or skill, the useless slogan “all children can learn” is shouted by reformers as if it represents the noblest aspirations of humanity. Even if social inequality were drastically reduced, individual (not group) performance on any valued task — intellectual, social, physical — would vary widely (and this in and of itself is not a social problem).

Finally, as seems to be common when anyone presents a challenge to standardized testing, critics are imputed with the aim of “throwing out the tests.” My book is quite clear that eliminating standardized testing as we know it — while leaving all else intact — would do little good and produce more harm. But blocking the use of high stakes tests would be a positive move. And as for being pegged an anti-tester, I’m the only one (I think) to critique the critics who say standardization is “bad”; again, my aim is to analyze these concepts and structures as they are rooted in definite social and political systems. Standardization in political terms is an advance, and part of the progressive notion of equality. In fact, the tendency now is to undermine, blow off, and ignore standard psychometric procedure (reliability, validity, etc.) and this is destructive and reflective of the larger trend of those in positions of power to act with impunity. As Gene Glass notes, most states don’t even produce the most basic test validation data.

But the actual point is that the standards adopted by a social system change as the system changes; the point is that this is a political fight, and that the fight over standards is political. By political I do not meant to narrowly refer to political parties, but rather I refer to the process by which a society decides who gets what, when, where, and how. Educators can’t wish away this political feature of standards. It is an argument that ultimately says that in order to address the flaws of standardized testing and policy that relies on testing, you have to address the major flaws of the present social system that are reflected in those tools and policies. The failure of “authentic assessment” is as much a political failure as a technical one.

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One of the underlying tensions of this reform revolves around central tenets of the U.S. system of governance: federalism. The question posed by the framers of the constitution was how to secure national interest without tyranny; how to share power without diluting it; how to avoid civil war among those being “federated.” Underlying the current efforts is a dramatic increase in the role and power of the federal government, especially the power unelected executive branches now exert over state and local education systems. Sometimes explicit, other times implicit, the debate is rendered as one of defending the constitutional status quo — states rights, local control, etc. — or the need to move beyond partisan politics, that this is “for the children” and is not in any way altering who is in control. In pushing for national standards, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reportedly told state Governors: “some people may claim that a commonly created test is a threat to state control — but let’s remember who is in charge. You are. You will create these tests. You will drive the process. You will call the shots.”

So where should one stand? The experience of history yields the following conclusion: neither the past system of “local control” (and its role in defending crimes of segregation and inequalities of wealth) nor the present drive for “innovaation” in the form of “national standards,” “pay-for-performance,” “alternative certification,” and “high quality assessments” along, with a certain kind of “choice,” will serve the interests of the people as a whole.

In contending with how to move forward, what stands to take, it is important to understand that the drive for broad, universal education in the United States was very much influenced by African Americans and workers generally, beginning after the Civil War. The system that emerged was the result of a fight, one that has been continuously waged, between factions and classes over the form and function of eduation. Universal education under their auspices required no admissions tests, no fees or tuition, no “agreement” to accept draconian test-prep methods and humiliation as a basis for enrollment, no rejection of students with special needs. Most important from the point of view of the present is that this model did not adopt the notion of competition as its underlying principal. It was driven by the demand of enlightened humanity, against slavery and all forms of oppression. It was premised on the conclusion that education is a basic human right, with society responsible to ensure its universal provision as a condition for individuals and collectives to fulfill their social responsibility to society. This broad education was a key element in the vision for the advance of humanity that emerged with the end of legal slavery in the United States.

Among conditions of forced illiteracy, education activists of that time and on to the civil rights movement of the 20th century demanded an education far beyond “literacy” and “work readiness” (the limits now imposed by todays “leaders” so that they can profit from global competition). Demands for culture, political decision making and philosophy stood behind practical efforts to raise the educational levels of entire communities in record time following the civil war (whose progress was blocked from further advance by the state-organized racist gangs such as the KKK and the post-Civil War arrangements of legal segregation).

This lesson of history is that if education is to serve the public interest — is to serve the society — the people themselves must set the standards designed to govern the content and form public education is to take. That Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is outrightly bribing states and local school districts into accepting the corporate agenda for schooling by awarding federal funds to only those who comply with this agenda is itself a frank admission that the direction he is driving education is against the public will and the public interest. It is illegitimate as bribery is not a modern basis for securing the consent.

Parents, teachers, families and entire communities reject the vision handed down to them by these “reformers” that says the highest aspiration served by education is that of getting a job or being “ready” for “college” — itself now reduced to more job training. Such a standards smacks of arrangements before the Civil War, where extensive education was reserved only for the rich, with the masses receiving only that which the rich deemed necessary for them to function as workers and slaves.

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From the Summary posted on the SUNYPress website:

A Measure of Failure asks how and why standardized tests have become the ubiquitous standard by which educational achievement and intelligence are measured.

How did standardized tests become the measure of performance in our public schools? In this compelling work, Mark J. Garrison attempts to answer this question by analyzing the development of standardized testing, from the days of Horace Mann and Alfred Binet to the current scene. Approaching the issue from a sociohistorical perspective, the author demonstrates the ways standardized testing has been used to serve the interests of the governing class by attaching a performance-based value to people and upholding inequality in American society. The book also discusses the implications that a restructuring of standardized testing would have on the future of education, specifically what it could do to eliminate the measure of individual worth based on performance.

“Both original and provocative, A Measure of Failure is a compelling account of the historical and contemporary relationship between standardized testing in education and processes of state formation.” — Thomas C. Pedroni, author of Market Movements: African American Involvement in School Voucher Reform

The first chapter of the book can be viewed here.

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approve plans to fire hundreds of Veteran teachers on the teachers’ low performance on evaluations, rather than on their seniority.

Even more controversially, the 134,000-student North Carolina district granted an exemption to teachers hired through the Teach For America recruiting program who meet teaching standards over more-senior teachers, and it is poised to hire more TFA alumni.

[...]

But members of the district’s school board said the decision was influenced by several factors, including the desire to maintain a contract with TFA and an overall sense that the teachers are doing well by their students.

Of course, firing veteran teachers and replacing them with new teachers saves money. Instead of making the legitimate demand for increased funds for education, the Board has caved in to the pressure that there is no alternative to cuts. Certainly, as well, folks in N.C. are pressured by Duncan and his “Race to Top” bribe to support, among other things, TFA.

But there are several questions. The first, raised by former TFAer Dan Brown in the Huffington Post, (“Overhyping Teach For America, Undercutting Millions of Students”) concerns the issue of turnover, or the fact that TFA teachers, by design, do no commit to teaching as a profession, creating more instability. “Our country requires broadly-conceived initiatives to ensure that our schools in all 50 states are staffed with talented, well-trained, and well-supported teachers–with or without that Princeton degree,” Brown writes. I’ll add: Schools don’t need the “support” of white-man’s-burden do-gooders arrogant and callous enough to claim bad teaching and unions are the root cause of social problems, and the presence of high-scoring Yale graduates for only a couple of years is sufficient to address the criminal conditions imposed on tens of millions of families across the U.S.

Yet, TFA is likely more than a poorly designed, silver bullet, and therefore significant in other respects. Lincoln Caplan writes, in Why big donors back Teach for America, that

TFA is … “theory of change’ [that] depends on ensuring that its teachers “attain high levels of success with their students—and then, as alumni, go on to bring about equity in education for kids of different classes and races, in the role of everything from principal to school superintendent to governor.”

While one might dismiss the theory on empirical grounds — Caplan reports one study observing that 30 percent of TFAers leave in their first year, not completing their two-year commitment — the theory itself deserve future attention (as it suggest in classic liberal fashion that the struggle for equality is most appropriate waged through the struggle for education, and not class struggle).

The other question is that of evaluation. What are the standards? In the context of a national campaign to blame collective bargaining, including the standard of seniority, what is to stop evaluators from favoring TFA recruits when that is the aim of school boards and senior officials. Sawchuk reports:

A second school board member, Tom Tate, added, “We seem to be getting good results from these teachers generally.”

He reports that earlier this spring, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg board approved a new policy that put a heavier focus on performance. In a context where TFA supporters bring millions, is it unreasonable to question to degree to which local TFA hype influences perceptions of competence? (the C.D. Spangler Foundation donated $4 million to expand the Charlotte TFA program this school year and next.) The policy directs the district “not to renew any teachers whose licenses are not current, those who do not meet minimum standards on local evaluation instruments, part-time teachers, and retired teachers who have returned to teaching. After that, it exempts TFA teachers and a handful of others in shortage subject areas, such as math, science, and foreign languages, over traditionally certified teachers with more seniority or equally high performance ratings” (emphasis added). Superintendent Peter Gorman is reported to be planning to “hire additional TFA teachers for 2009-10, rather than giving priority to teachers who are receiving pink slips.”

Are TFA graduates, with the Ivy League test scores, more effective teachers, or just cheaper and not likely to join the union ranks? Caplain reports that TFA

has attracted a list of accomplished critics in its adolescence. Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford’s school of education, is the lead author of the best-known study, which concluded that students of uncertified teachers of TFA lagged significantly behind students of certified non-TFA teachers. Deborah Appleman, the chairwoman of education studies at Carleton College, shadowed a former student of hers through the summer training of TFA’s first class in 1990. She came away disappointed and has been been a persistent critic ever since. She discourages her students from applying and refuses to write letters of recommendation for them. TFA also contends with the fear that the public will lose patience, since progress in closing the achievement gap has been so modest, given the large sums spent on education, including on Kopp’s brainchild.

It should be noted that Caplan writes:

In its defense, TFA cites a study from Mathematica Policy Research that looked at how students of corps members fared compared with students of the teachers hired instead (rookies and old hands, some certified and some not) in hardest-to-staff schools. Reading scores were the same, math scores notably higher.

A more careful review of the merits of that study can be found here, although this line of criticism has its limits too, as I hope to argue in the future (along these lines).

So with such limited prospects for “success”, why such public praise in the big media outlets? Certainly data are not driving this decision…

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Over the past several months, a plethora of “research” and “investigateive” reports have been uncritically promoted by major media outlets. Acting as spokespersons for research think tanks funded by the largest monopolies, and aligned with the Obama administration’s education agenda, reporters take no responsibility to investigate the merits of these reports. No effort is made to evaluate the merits of the research or its status as “nonpartisan” (that is, not biased toward any particular political group). Reporters do not reprint the list of those funding these reports (lists which are easily obtained) and the known views of these funders (also easily obtained and by no means secret). In the worst cases, reporters produce their own articles supporting this line promoted by the think tanks. The undeniable fact is that all these reports are generated by rabid anti-union forces, who promote research driven by the demand for “data” that will “decide” teachers have no right to association. As Mike Petrilli, Vice President for National Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says, unions “need to be defeated, over and over and over again if reform is to advance.”

Some Examples

The most recent effort comes with a report, The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness, from the New Teacher Project. Their tag line is quite informative: “Teachers matter. In the fight to eliminate educational inequality, teachers matter most. The New Teacher Project works with school districts and states nationwide to ensure that poor and minority students get outstanding teachers.” (More on the significance of the title below.) Based on questionable research on 12 districts in four states, the report calls for eliminating the basic premise of a union with calls for pay for performance arrangements (note this is not merit pay or bonus, but pay contingent upon test score results).

As some critics have noted, to speak about educational equality absent the growing, grotesque social inequality that is in fact driven by those who fund such reports is irrational. Absent the affirmation of the human rights of poor and minority students, extant educational inequality will not be “eliminated.”

As reported in the document, “Primary funding for this report was provided by the Robertson Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Joyce Foundation. Additional funding was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arnold Family Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.”

Another example appeared in Education Week in April. Researchers Examine Contracts’ Effects on Policy Issues, by Stephen Sawchuk. It reported on a March conference held by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). Its funders include:

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
The Brookhill Foundation
The Louis Calder Foundation
Exxon Mobil Foundation
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Fisher Family Foundation
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Gleason Foundation
Martha Holden Jennings Foundation
Houston Endowment
Joyce Foundation
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Koret Foundation
Milken Family Foundation
Searle Freedom Trust

President of the Fordham Institute, Chester Finn, is on the Board of Directors. He and Fordham are not well known for careful all-sided analysis when it comes to research on teacher unions.

Here is one of the key reported findings from that “nonpartisan” conference. Researchers found evidence that salary schedules (which are associated with collective bargaining) appear to depress a school’s ability to attract the best teachers. The top 75th percentile of teachers in schools with salary schedules have scores on the SAT that were 2 to 3 percent lower than peers in schools without salary schedules. While admitting that I have not actually read these manuscripts, such a documented difference is probably only statistically significant. A 2 percent drop in an SAT of 1000 would result in a score of 980 (those in the latter group probably don’t get to line up in the Gold Executive Excellent Superior Because I have Access to Money Line when boarding planes).

But more troubling is the evident irrational logic. Ignoring the minimal difference in real life of a 2 percent lower score, unless the supply of “the best teachers” is unlimited (making the concept of best meaningless) the point is moot. Teacher quality will be unequally distributed, as housing, income and healthcare are unequally distributed, with many factors affecting distribution patterns. (Unionization is generally an equalizing force as it serves to raise the wages and benefits of its members, serving to close the income gap.) But the existence of differences in the quality of teachers is not caused by salary scales, although this illogic sneaks in the reported discussion; even if salary scales were eliminated, the “best” teachers could not be equally everywhere.

If one had a society where consciousness affirmed the need to place the best in the most challenging circumstances, understanding that with talent comes responsibility, things would be different. Such a society would reject the base notion that human beings only respond to narrow self interest and the reward of gadgetry and shallow Disney story line. However, being the best is presently a status that is linked to structural inequality.

McKinsey & Company (a “global management consulting firm”) is represented on the Advisory Board of NCTQ, who wrote that media celebrated masterpiece of pseudo science, “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.” (While not explicitly about teachers, they are clearly implicated.) In that report we learn that the achievement gap “imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

The one graph not inserted into this prettified document tracks the achievement gap over time as it corresponds to real measures of recession over the same time period. (The Economic Impact report is premised on “what if” scinarios, not actual experience, using models inspired by the very partisan researcher, Eric Hanuschek, who has dedicated much time to justifying funding cuts to education, larger class sizes for teachers, etc.) This graph would clearly show that changes in the unemployment rate, the S&P 500 or the GDP do not correspond to average group differences in norm reference tests scores over the last fifty years.

Of course, the material in the “Economic Impact” “study” strategically confounds cause and effect. On the one hand, it goes to great lengths to claim that poverty is not a determinant of achievement. But than it goes on to assert that raising test scores will facilitate social mobility and measured economic prosperity.

Finally, there was the May 3rd “investigative” piece appearing in the Los Angeles Times, entitled, “Failure Gets A Pass,” just in time to create public opinion against teacher actions. It used the scientific method of anecdotes with selective reference to context, written in a style that leads the reader to assume that all of what is being described is clear cut and the fault of unions. By linking the existence of unions to several extreme cases, the right of teachers to associate becomes associated with protecting drug dealers, child molesters and abuse.

Certainly the governing class has no hand in these activities! In the fantasy world of philanthropy, the free market in sex trade of children and existence of drug abuse is probably the result of collective bargaining too, as are the documented abuses of children at non-union, philanthropy supported, KIPP schools. If unions did not exist, KIPP would not be needed, so the unions are at fault in the end for promoting the suspcious idea that people have a right to form associations to defend their common interests, a practice which only leads to moral transgression. It’s really “All About the Kids!” And kids want really large classes, with underpaid teachers who completed quickie bootstrapping, white man’s burden teacher training programs that narrowly focus on “following orders” and that all-time favorite pastime of youth: standardized testing.

Anyhow, the agenda that might explain the public adoption of such irrational thinking is the drive to cheapen education by eliminating unions. But maybe this is the way forward! We all know that lowering salaries and benefits will contribute to economic growth…because test scores, which are not affected by poverty, can be raised among the poor and thus close the achievement gap, which is responsible for our national recession, which does not affect test scores, because poverty is not an excuse, because all children can learn, especially when they are placed in academic sweatshops by parents who chose to be poor but are now reconsidering their ill-advised previous life choices.

This irrationalism is a result of the starting point of the “research”, that is, to gather “evidence” that supports the view of the monopolies and their philanthropic organizations that at the root of the teacher quality problem is teachers’ right to association. Underlying the idea of the title “Widget Effect” is an attack on the principal that stands against feudal notions of caste and loyalty and for equal treatment, rights and duties, but it now becomes apparent that such an argument must be the object of an entire article.

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Yet recent reports point to the complexity of this trend. One example involves efforts of teachers to unionize at an Illinois non-for-profit charter school, who in turn hires for-profit EMOs to run some of their campuses. In response to the formation of the union, the charter company claims they are “private” when it comes to employment law. Thus the rules of the NLRB, as opposed to state law regulating public sector unions, apply. NLRB regulations mandate a formal vote among teachers, and not just completed union cards. The election would delay union formation and provide a chance for the company to “persuade” teachers not to unionize.

Another example is found in higher education. Recent reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education point to open discussions among state legislatures, higher education executives and various think tanks about “loosening the bonds between state governments and public colleges to save money and give colleges the freedom to bolster their bottom lines in new ways.”

These examples are of interest because they highlight crossing the public/private division as a strategy used by both private and public entities to either secure or expand their position.

In the first case above, public funds are given to a private company, who wishes to be treated as a public or private entity depending on the circumstances of its choosing. It wishes to receive the benefit of public finance, but rejects public oversight as a hindrance, in this case, in the regulations of public sector unions. This feature of adopting different standards for different purposes harkens back to the feudal practice of adopting different weights and measures for buying and selling, a practice which invariably favored lords and became a symbol of arbitrary power during the period leading up to the French revolution. Standards were often the property of the reigning lord, and in that sense, privately controlled. This private control over something that so greatly affected the extant public was soon to be rejected, and this rejection of arbitrary power was fostered by the emergence of a public sphere and a self-conscious public outside the subjectivity of kings, etc.

Yet, in the second case above, public status is to be reduced as state funding is reduced: states issue budget cuts and students attending public higher education are forced to pay not only more, but also a higher percentage of the total operating cost. Privatization here is generally equated with downloading the responsibility for funding education onto individuals and their families. To “save money” and “bolster the bottom line” public higher education must break bonds with state governments, and move toward becoming private institutions, so the argument goes.

Thus, much of the debate about privatization is rendered as economic in nature. Evidence of this exists in the fixation on the economic category of efficiency, of which private, for-profit firms are unquestioningly presented as the model; talk of “the bottom line,” and other for-profit imperatives dominate the discussion.

Yet, what is significant is the confused standard for determining public or private status: institutions that receive public funds are somehow more public than those that do not. Yet, in the past, public funding was directly linked to public control. On the other hand, there is the present trend to break in thinking and practice any assumption that with a transfer of public funds, an organization is to admit public oversight.

Many things that are in fact against the public interest (such as aggressive wars or handouts to fraudulent banks) are accepted nonetheless as public because they are actions of the government, carried out with public funds. So the existence of public funds itself cannot be the criteria of what is public.

The division between public and private has historically centered on justifying who decides what in a specific context; who has what rights, both in terms of limiting the power of state, but also in terms of claims of individuals. The claim individuals have to education is premised on education being a requirement, necessary for the public well being. In order for the public/private distinction to have meaning and be able to provide coherence to discussions about education and society a standard is required that does not rely on the source of funds nor the status of government or non-government.

This standard must begin by elaborating and renewing the conception of the public good or well being. What is at stake in the current move to privatize education is not simply the increased burden for individuals or instigation of more inequality through more “choice”. What is at stake is a sharp political shift, where demarcations of private or even not-for-profit (yet private) are used to eschew public oversight of that which broadly concerns all, standing against public opinion.

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