StickWithANose

It would appear as though Obama’s channeling of Uncle Milty’s now infamous Shock Doctrine is coming to fruition. State budgets may be collapsing nation-wide, but Tennessee’s budget forecasts are simply terrible. With Arne Duncan dangling billions in front of state legislatures, the Obama administration is wrestling concessions from states like Tennessee over charter schools and the corporate colonization of public schooling marches on. Of course, the usual suspects are helping… Tennessean

Lawmakers, school officials and just about everyone else involved in education have set their sights on winning a portion of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top fund, a competitive grant to be awarded to a handful of states willing to enact sweeping school reform.The Volunteer State is considered a top contender locally and nationally because of an elaborate student data tracking system, recent changes to the state’s curriculum and help from professional grant writers courtesy of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

So, what does it all mean… The article details three policies required to be in the running for the bribe money.

1. Plans to develop and adopt common standards and tests. This means Tennessee may have to again change its curriculum goals after just enacting new standards this year. State education spokeswoman Rachel Woods said the changes would not be as significant.

This all about constructing clear, easily assessed standards and multiple choice assessments linked to those standards. Sounds great except that even the fundamentals of learning, such as literacy, denote complex processes of decoding, processing and critical thinking that multiple choice exams simply fail to assess. Further, multiple choice exams mask a great deal of heterogeneity in student skills. A multiple choice literacy assessment tests your ability to take the test as much as it tests your literacy skills! However, the most damaging outcome will be the narrowing of instruction to only those subjects on the assessments…

2. Evaluating teachers and principals annually, and using student test data to measure a part of their performance. Student data also would be used to make other staffing decisions such as tenure, promotion, retention and pay, Woods said.

If those assessments are the primary means by which teachers are evaluated then instruction will be geared almost exclusively to the skills needed to pass the assessment. The result…? The relegation of school knowledge to the cognitive basement. Just what the doctor ordered for success in an era of technology development and global competition.

3. A promise to get tougher on failing schools sooner. Woods said the state would intervene earlier for schools that fail to meet annual state benchmarks and would launch full takeovers of schools that continued to lag. Tennessee has been criticized in the past for not being aggressive enough at reforming problem schools.

And for schools that fail to meet standards…? Well, they get replaced by charter schools not bound by all those pesky state regulations. Let us all bow to our corporate masters… For theirs is the kingdom of heaven and earth… [Repeat]