Something in me snapped today and I realized that I am finished using the phrase "education reform." 

That's how folks refer to the constellation of ideas firmly entrenched in the White House right now, upheld by almost every governor of every state, red and blue, and most mayors, notably our own. It includes the tenets that privatizing our schools will improve them, that the Common Core State Standards are the fix for all that ails our failing schools, and that testing our students more and more will raise test scores.  

But this, truly, is not "reform." Some of these are ideas that have been implemented for 25 years all over the country to little effect. 

This is the status quo. 

So I'm not going to call it reform anymore. 

I'm going to call it what it is. Corporate control of education. 

And here's why. In every instance, every plank in the platform, every element of this effort can be traced back to cash--flowing into the coffers of very rich corporate entities and individuals. 

Like Pearson, one of the testing companies that is creating the tests and the test prep materials, all new and improved and Common Core aligned, and who lobbies Congress to mandate more tests. 

Like Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, a huge proponent of charters and innovative uses of technology in schools. What kind of technology does he advocate as the best fix for students today? In Learning Lab modules at his Rocketship Charters kids sit at a computer monitor, streaming video content for 100 minutes per day.  

Or Rupert Murdoch. He is a cheerleader for what he calls a $500 billion industry of education technology including content and assessment.   

Or Bill Gates. His push for the Common Core, the inBloom initiative to harness students' big data, and his vision for the classrooms of the future, which will be heavily dependent on his own technologies. 

The proponents of this snake oil have managed to control the rhetoric for so long that we don't even blink when they say that their education plan is "the civil rights issue of our time." They say this a lot. 

So if we wish to stand up against the corporate control model we are not only anti-reform but anti-civil rights. 

They say they want "excellent teachers," and by this they mean they want to get rid of union teachers and replace them with uncertified, pensionless staff handling up to 50 kids at once who receive their education from handheld devices or monitors. 

They say they want "school choice," which usually means less choice: families can't choose their neighborhood schools that the city has underfunded to the point of death throes, pouring its available money instead into privately supported charters. 

They say they want all children to be "college and career ready," and to ensure this they prescribe as many as 25 standardized bubble tests every year starting in Kindergarten, using a standardized scripted curriculum. 

The testing piece is a critical component of corporate control of education. And it's very important to them that we don't question this. As we saw in Chicago, retribution for opting out of tests is real and administrators don't care if they have to isolate children to get them to rat on their teachers. Anything to stop parents, teachers, and principals from reconsidering what all these tests mean, how they contribute to children's education, and who they benefit. 

But the corporate education controllers will not accept that ordinary well-informed people are questioning their plan. They and the Department of Ed portray dissenters as Tea Party crazies or entitled white suburban moms who cannot face their disappointment that Boopsie is not actually a genius. 

Another grab for narrative control. The only possible opposition comes from insane people or delusional ones. 

But it's getting harder and harder to keep the little man hidden behind the curtain. It's getting harder and harder to uphold the illusion of the actually naked emperor's fancy new suit. 

Little bits of reality pop out now and again. 

Intertangled ugly trails of cash and power come to light--as in the (Chicago) Sun-Times' Dan Mihalopoulos' work on how many Illinois legislators are connected to Turkish power broker Fethullah Gulen and his charter schools. Just as a for instance. 

Or, perhaps, occasions of obvious cruelty to children becoming public. 

Like the CPS schools that have taken away play from 5 year olds by removing kitchens, blocks, paints, dolls, everything from Kindergarten. {TN Parent note: These were removed from TN kindergarten classes several years ago}  Because "Kindergarten is the new first grade" and we have to get these little dudes college and career ready. (I am assuming this also means that 5 is now the new 6.) 

Enough little bits of reality have popped out that folks are starting to notice. The stranglehold grip on the narrative held by the corporate education controllers is beginning to weaken. Because we can all see with our own eyes that it isn't actually civil rights for kids to have their school closed or subjected to a turnaround. It isn't actually higher order critical thinking to bubble in bubbles. And it isn't education and it isn't reform to work toward the dismantling of public schools in our city and our country. 

It's stale old rhetoric that is losing its power. And it can no longer conceal the naked emperor, nor the naked greed of the corporate power grabbers.
 
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Julie Vassilatos blogs as South Side CPS Mom in Chicago. She provides a valuable and important perspective on education everywhere. She graciously gave us permission to share her article with our elected officials and on our TN Parents website

States that want to opt out of the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) and/or the tests aligned to or based on its standards are being threatened by a toothless tiger that doesn’t want the states to know the tiger has no claws.

States are hearing, “It’s too late to back out”; “You’ll waste all the money you’ve spent on implementing the [low-level Common Core] standards your state board of education adopted three years ago”; “You’ll waste all the money you’ve spent on [self-described] Common Core consultants who have given [very costly] professional development to your teachers and told them what to change in their classroom curriculum to address Common Core”; “You will have to pay back all the money you got under Race to the Top (RttT)”; or, “You will lose your waiver and not get your Title I money.”

Can the U.S. Department of Education (USED) demand repayment from states that got RttT funds? Can it withhold Title I money from a state that loses its waiver? It is important to recall that Congress didn’t pass legislation requiring Common Core’s standards or tests. All it authorized in 2001 was a re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). ESEA hasn’t been re-authorized since then, so there are no new or different education policies passed by Congress. A variety of conditions have been attached to the recent waivers issued by USED, but they may have no constitutional legitimacy since Congress didn’t approve them. States can certainly raise that objection.

At the national level:
If a state received RttT money and spent it, it most likely doesn’t have to pay it back if it now seeks to opt out of using Common Core’s standards (by any name) and any tests aligned to or based on these standards. Neither the RttT application nor the grant award from USED contained a repayment penalty for withdrawing from a commitment. Moreover, the Grant Award Notification from USED implied withholding of future RttT funds, not repayment of RttT funds already expended. 

In other words, there seem to be no likely penalties if a state accepted a USED award of RttT funds and now chooses to withdraw from the agreement. States can justify their withdrawal on the grounds that the Common Core standards do not meet the original requirements of “common standards” outlined in the RttT application. These standards were supposed to be “supported by evidence that they are internationally benchmarked.” But they are not. The Common Core Validation Committee never received any evidence.  

Nor has evidence been provided by two post hoc attempts to provide such evidence: the 2011 report by David Conley at the University of Oregon and the 2012 report by William Schmidt and a colleague at Michigan State University, Richard Houang. Conley’s report, funded by the Gates Foundation, contradicted the findings in his 2003 pre-Common Core report on college-readiness standards, while Schmidt and Houang’s report has been severely criticized on methodological grounds. It is unclear who funded it.

Moreover, RttT was a three-year program extended to last four years. It expires in the fall of 2014. Whatever changes states make after 2014 cannot affect the grant. In addition, no state committed itself explicitly to maintain forever the new policies required by RttT. Once RttT grants expire, it is unclear how the USED could demand repayment for an expired program.

If a state obtained a waiver from some aspects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now seeks to opt out of using Common Core’s standards and tests aligned to or based on them, it is highly unlikely to lose Title I money. Title I is implicated in the Common Core issue only because the state committed to the CCLS to obtain the waiver.

If the state applies for an extension of the waiver through the 2015-2016 school year, it would need to replace its commitment to implement the Common Core with a commitment to implement alternative standards approved by its institutions of higher education (IHEs). IHE approval of more demanding “college- and career-ready” standards would allow the state to retain the waiver, without penalty. Legislators need to ask their public IHEs to approve standards that enable mathematically and scientifically ambitious high school students to take STEM-preparatory coursework while in high school, not in transition courses elsewhere after high school graduation or after passing a GED test.

If the US Department of Education (USED) decided to be punitive, it could withhold at most only 5%-10% of the 1% of Title I funds set aside for state administrative functions. For example, if a state received $200 million under Title I, the administrative set-aside is $2 million. The most severe federal punishment would be 5-10% of that, or a maximum of $200K.

If the state chose to give up its waiver, the state would be under the NCLB mandate again to get all students to proficiency by 2014. NCLB has a range of sanctions for persistently failing schools and districts, ranging from conversion to charter schools, closing the school down altogether, replacing a large percentage of the school’s staff, to carrying out turnaround plans. If states give up their USED waivers from NCLB requirements, they would still have to assess their state’s standards annually with tests that, by law, must be based on these standards, and NCLB’s sanctions would again apply for failing schools and districts. It is not clear what the sanction would be for failing to get all students to proficiency by 2014, that is, if most schools failed to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for all subgroups. 

The primary financial consequence of relinquishing the waiver would involve flexibility, not amount, of funding. Under NCLB, failing schools must allocate 20% of their Title I funding to Supplemental Education Services, typically outside tutoring. The waiver doesn’t change the amount of funding those schools receive but allows them to redirect 20% of it to other Title I uses. These districts would lose flexibility, not money.

USED would find it politically difficult to impose financial penalties on waiver cancellation when Common Core is not, in theory, a federal program. Or so we are regularly told.

At the state level:
Districts can select their own curricula and, in some states, their own standards. What they cannot do easily is avoid state testing. State tests operate under state laws which force all districts to participate, although sanctions vary by state. Typically, the results of these tests are used to rank or grade schools publicly, and they serve to label the schools as meeting or not meeting NCLB's requirement of proficiency.

A district with a stronger curriculum than one addressing Common Core’s standards is betting implicitly that its results will be better on the state test. If schools choosing to address more demanding standards than Common Core’s are ranked low on a Common Core-aligned test for several years, they may face state department of education sanctions, which can range from the state managing the district to reshuffling school administrators. Legislators can address this power play by withholding funding of the state’s department of education if it seeks to prevent schools with low scores on a Common Core-aligned test from addressing more demanding standards than Common Core’s. All the district should be required to do is produce evidence of evaluations showing that its standards are more demanding than Common Core's.

A future post will further address districts that want better standards and tests than their state board and department of education are imposing on them.  


Click HERE to read the original article written by Dr. Sandra Stotsky.  Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D. is Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas.  She was one of 2 professional educators on the original Common Core Validation Committee and refused to sign off on the Common Core standards.  ClickHERE to hear, in her own words, why she refused to put her signature on Common Core standards and the secretive way the standards were written.

Some brave teachers, who are also Moms & Dads, have made the difficult choice to defy their district administration and the TN Department of Education.  These teachers have REFUSED testing for their OWN children.  Teachers are required by the state and district to administer the tests to students in their classes.  However, the state and district cannot trump their parental rights to do what is best for their own children.


Why did they do it?  One teacher tells why...
As a teacher, I made a decision for my own children, as their parent. I am most fortunate to be very involved in my children's education. I'm sure most parents feel the exact same way. Unless you are a teacher, you really aren't as involved as you think you are. I teach for the same system my children are educated in. I know things that I'm grateful to know, but at the same time the wind is often knocked clean out of me because of what I know. Because of what I know, I chose to opt my children out of unnecessary testing.

• I chose to opt my children out of computerized testing as a means of determining intervention needs.
• I opted my children out of tests that contain material they haven't been taught yet according to the curriculum maps teachers follow.
• I opted my children out of tests written for the sole purpose of assisting the developers of PARCC test which will replace TCAP next school year.
• I opted my children out of feelings of failure when material is placed in front of them that they haven't been exposed to yet, in the form of a test. I opted their teachers out of feelings of betrayal because that's how we feel when we do this to the children we teach.
• I opted my children out of the DEA, given three times per year as a predictive measure to determine how they might perform on TCAP. The DEA is also full of skills not introduced according to the curriculum maps. Test A - 18 of 32 skills not introduced yet. Test B - 19 of 32 skills not introduced yet.  
• I opted my children out of the CRA which is an assessment used for the sole purpose of assisting the developers of PARCC, and is written in a form that children are not capable of being successful on.
• I opted my children out the practice writing assessment for the practice writing assessment which I opted them out of too. Really? Practice for practice? Not to mention, it is computerized and children as young as 8 are expected to sit at a computer for two hours to analyze informational texts and write an essay through typing their responses. Our children do not know how to type.
• I opted my children out of IStation computerized testing to determine if they have a need for intervention.
• I opted my children out of all computerized programs designed to determine their needs. I chose to leave that up to their highly qualified teachers. 

As a teacher, I must endure the guilt and shame I feel each time I test my students on material they haven't been yet exposed. As a parent, I will not tolerate such with my children.
- A teacher and mother in Shelby County
 

How did they do it?
It is simple.  These brave parents simply sent letters and emails of refusal  to their sons' and daughters' teachers and principals stating that they will not allow their child to take the tests. (Note the wording says "refusal" and not "opt-out" since TN does not have an "opt-out" law, yet, and the attorney general seems to be forcing parents into testing their children against their wishes by saying it is not "legal" to "opt-out")

Some states have laws and policies that allow parents to opt their children out.  Tennessee does not.  Yet...  
There is currently a Bill in the Legislature that, if it passes, would allow parents to legally Opt-Out of testing for their children without penalties (HB 1841 / SB 2221) .  The Bill's sponsor, Rep. Gloria Johnson, is also a teacher.  (Unfortunately, a half a BILLION dollar fiscal note has been attached to the bill, and the bill has been rolled to the final calendar to prevent it from passing.  Contact Governor Haslam if you're not happy about that.  His phone # is 615-741-2001 and his email is: bill.haslam@tn.gov). 

What are the repercussions of REFUSING tests?
In TN, refusing or opting a child out of the TCAP test counts as a zero on the child's final report card (state mandated 15%-25%).  In some districts, this means that 10% of a child's final English grade will be a zero, and 10% of a child's final Math grade will be a zero.  (Check with your local school district to find out).  Despite the lower report card grades, having to keep their children at home on testing days, and having unexcused absences on their child's records, parents feel strongly enough that the tests are inappropriate for their children to REFUSE the tests for their children.  
(This could work: Parents in other states have gotten around the testing by un-enrolling their children from school to "homeschool" before the mandated test and then re-enrolling them after the testing window is completed.  This method works to avoid hurting the child's report card grade and attendance, but, gosh, it sure is a hassle!)
 

Links to Opt-Out testing websites & groups:
United Opt-Out website
United Opt-Out in Tennessee website
Stop TN Testing website
Stop TN Testing Madness facebook group
Stop TN Testing facebook page
Knox County Parents Against Testing facebook page
Williamson County Parents Concerned about Common Core & Testing facebook group

 
These brave teachers and parents are sending a clear message that they do not agree with the tests and that their child is more than a test score.