Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody "We are technocrats," Bill Gates recently stated. What do technocrats believe and do? They think that technology and science provide the answers for the problems we face. Our educational system is today being rewired by technocrats such as Gates, with the activ...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody As I was taking a look at the latest report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a disturbing thought came to mind. The NCTQ has prepared a report that criticizes schools of education for failing to jump on the "obsessed with data" bandwagon. You can ju...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody Our political system has deteriorated to such a degree that policymaking in the education arena has come to resemble the selection of "hits" chosen for airplay by 1950s DJs. Back in the day, the main mode of advertising to promote the sale of records was to have...
This week there has been an upsurge of debate over the Common Core (national) Standards. I hope we can tolerate and appreciate different points of view as we work to understand more deeply what these standards are all about, and the ways they may shift teaching, learning and testing in the USA. G...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody As criticism of No Child Left Behind and the associated tests rises, we are hearing more and more about the Common Core Standards (CCS), the next great thing that is supposed to fix all that ails us. When a talking pineapple made New York tests a laughing stock,...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody As our public schools are systematically re-engineered for dubious reasons, with questionable results, by people of uncertain motives, there is a disturbing lack of skepticism on the part of our watchdogs for the public good, journalists. One of the basic princi...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody The big headline from the recent Gates/Scholastic survey of teachers is that only 28% of teachers see standardized tests as an essential or important gauge of student assessment, and only 26% say they are accurate as a reflection of student knowledge. Another qu...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody In the mistaken belief that test scores are adequate reflections of learning, we have created vast systems to extract test score data, and now are requiring that this data be incorporated in teacher and principal evaluations across the country. Can we return to...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody Teachers in New York City have been slammed by the publication of VAM ratings for 18,000 of them. But something new is happening this time, and it was not what proponents of the use of these ratings for evaluative purposes intended or wanted. People are actually...
Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody Last week I wrote about the fairy dust of multiple measures that the Department of Education has been sprinkling on worthless Value Added Models, under the mistaken belief that this somehow renders them golden. Dept of Ed press secretary Justin Hamilton quoted ...
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