What The Testing Game Is All About

Norm Scott:

Well, we know what the testing game is all about and it ain't children. It's about using tests to go after teachers, close schools, end tenure, de-unionize the teaching force so they can lower salaries, and create massive turnover in a temporary teaching force so they will never have to pay pensions.

Is that enough of a mouthful for you?

So will all the sturm and drang over the "failures" of the Bloomberg admin I would disagree. Bloomberg has accomplished exactly what he intended. Sure he may take a temporary hit over the low scores but he can manage the media well enough while keeping his eye on the big prize: undermine public schools (these low test results will provide some assistance) so people will want to leave in drives and head to charters which will glom onto the higher performing students and toss the remains back into what is left of the public schools.

And I don't trust one mayoral candidate to truly resist this trend, even Di Blasio or Liu. Neo-liberalism reigns.

And of course the only thing to add to this is how the union leadership at the AFT, the NYSUT, the UFT and the NEA have "collaborated" with Bloomberg and his fellow deformers to bring us to this moment.

The education deformers and their compatriots in the media are declaring the public school system a failure in New York State today, folks.

The media is not reporting how these new Common Core tests, aligned with the NAEP scoring methodology, are rigged to show 50%-70% failing rates.

They're not reporting how the NAEP scoring methodology is controversial, as Diane Ravitch noted yesterday in this post, with many researchers finding the performance levels "fundamentally flawed" and "unreasonably high."

Nope - they're just reporting that the standards were raised, the scores fell and most New York students, teachers and schools are failures.

This is the end game - to declare the system a failure and call for drastic and disruptive "change" to solve the imaginary crisis the deformers themselves engineered.

You can bet that solution will enrich many of the deformers themselves - from Rupert Murdoch, the owner of a for profit education technology company, to Joel Klein, his henchman who runs that company, to John King, the purveyor of charter schools who no doubt will go back to the sector after he's done with his dirty work at NYSED, to Merryl Tisch, whose family sold their cigarette business and went into the for profit online education company to go along with their other interests.

It's all rigged - and our union leaders, rather than fight this, rather than expose the chicanery of the reform movement, have instead collaborated with the deformers and corporatists and privatizers to negotiate the terms of exploitation and, ultimately, surrender.

To repeat - it's all rigged.