$350M For "World Class" Test: $0 For "World Class" Standards

[LWolf]

From Jim Horn at "Schools Matter:"

<snip>

With few takers for Dunc's $5 billion set aside for bribing states into more charter schools, pay-per-score plans, and lifelong data surveillance systems, Arne has put aside $350 million for the testing companies who have pencil-ready projects ready to go into action. Does the announcement in Cary, NC mean that SAS's Bill Sanders has a 10 minute head start?

What about standards, you say, upon which to build the new super tests? If that work is to be done at all, it will be done by educators, so there is no need for any extra money to do it. Most likely this new unidirectional and mono-cultural dead end will have the same cart full of bubble sheets leading the same old horse, See Basics, long beaten to the ground by repeated generations of bold backwards thinkers.

..................................................................................................

To have such an opportunity for the rebuilding and renewal of American public education put in the hands of such arrogant morons is truly a crime against American children.

http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2009/06/350m-for-world-class-test-0-for-world.html

I'm not a big fan of national standards, unless they are very broad and very, very, few. I'm also not so sure that any attempt at national standards will be done by educators; I remember only too well when math teachers at every level in CA wrote new standards back around the turn of the millennium, which Pete Wilson's committee of hand-selected non-educators promptly threw out and rewrote.

The "bribing states into more charter schools, pay-per-score plans, and lifelong data surveillance systems" rings too true, though.

It amazes me how the last decade has taught me to despise the word "data."

Not that valid, useful data, used appropriately, is not essential.

Unfortunately, that's not what the "data-driven" school reform push has been all about.

[imdjh]

1. delete

dupe

[imdjh]

2. "It amazes me how the last decade has taught me to despise the word "data."

I'm going to slap the next person who says "metric". I was listening to some DB on talk radio the other day, Whining On Wall Street or something like that, and I swear his every other word was metric or metrics. I despise buzzwords.

[LWolf]

4. Yes.

When it becomes a "buzz word," it loses meaning and effectiveness.

[madrchsod]

3. ageed....bill ayers-the other voice in chicago

http://billayers.wordpress.com/writings/

duncan verses ayers

[LWolf]

5. A world of difference, to be sure. nt

[Hannah Bell]

6. but ayers' brother runs a charter school org.