Chicago Public School officials sank to a new and unprecedented low this week. Children whose parents opted them out of testing were pulled from classrooms and questioned by officials from the district law office without parents' knowledge or consent.
It is time for administrators to take an ethical stance and make a firm commitment to the fair and kind treatment of children whose parents have opted them out of testing.
As the review unfolded, it became apparent that we were not working with a holistic, integrated application of standards. To Rene and me, it began to look instead like a checklist forming a platform for standardized testing.
there is a new domestic cold war that pits public and private education against each other and seeks to turn human beings into computers
inBloom, the non-profit started with a hundred million dollar investment from the Gates Foundation, is planning to create a digital record which, barring catastrophe, truly could be a permanent record of every K12 student, from their first interaction with the schools to the last. The amount of information they are planning to collect is staggering. Here are the several hundred categories, which include academic records, attendance records, test results of all sorts, disciplinary incidents, special ed accommodations, and more.
This is a future I believe is possible given the systems and structures being promoted by technocrats like Gates. This is NOT the way the system has been described by Bill Gates or any of his representatives. They tend to use the language of feedback and collaboration. But as I have been asking, if collaboration is the goal, why must this be embedded in an evaluation process, which has the goal of determining who ought to be fired?
I have come to look at schools as a critical focal point in the fight for the soul of the nation. Our schools are foundational for our cultural life, and so much depends on our having a flourishing, humanizing public-education system. The battle over the schools is a microcosm of the battle that is going on everywhere else, but which most people feel too powerless to fight. Maintaining local control of our public schools system is essential for enabling even the possibility of such a fight.
Now, we see standardized test scores used to justify privatizing our schools. Over and over again our downtown administration starves neighborhood schools of resources and refuses to address the needs of our impoverished students. Then when these schools have low performing test scores, they are closed. Charter schools, which are private enterprises even when non-profit, are opened up to fill this void. Hence, in my career as a CPS teacher I've witnessed standardized testing used to sort, punish, and privatize. And I am saying enough is enough.
A personalized learning environment is driven by the relationships between learners and one another, and with their teacher. That is why class size is so important. That is why it is so important to honor the knowledge, skill and culture that our students bring to school - because a respectful relationship with each student is based on our acceptance of them, and our desire to help them achieve their goals, rather than force them to meet predetermined benchmarks.
I have to say that as someone who grew up learning about the snooping the FBI was doing on American citizens, I am disturbed by the pervasiveness of this data collection. If you think about all the ways data is being gathered from our children, from kindergarten onward, it is not comforting to imagine this information being made available to corporations. I do not even like the idea of all that data existing, because once it is there, it can be leaked or distributed. This is one thing I may have to agree on with Glenn Beck. I do not want the government, or Rupert Murdoch's Amplify, to have access to all this data. And the only way to prevent that may be not to collect the data in the first place.
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