By Anthony Cody.
Poor John Oliver. After he did a segment on the insanity of our nation’s testing machine, the field of education’s only multi-million dollar blog, The Education Post, has taken after him with a vengeance. Oliver joins others with the nerve to question the nation’s obsession with standardized tests in being declared an enemy of the poor. (See this post from December for more background on Education Post)
First we got a plaintive “Dear John” letter from someone named Valentina Korkes. Ms. Korkes is “Deputy Director of Policy” at Education Post, and worked for two and a half years for StudentsFirst as a Legislative Projects Manager. Korkes complains to Oliver that he “broke her heart” when he failed to point out the many wonderful ways that “testing and accountability are good for kids.”
And if John Oliver was not devastated enough by this kick to the gut, yesterday Peter Cunningham added his scorn. According to Cunningham, Oliver “throws poor kids under the bus,” by taking the side of their enemies, and failing to enumerate the many benefits of tests. His utterly humorless post concludes:
John Oliver sides with the comfortable bureaucrats, self-serving union leaders, and the complacent middle class that abdicates any responsibility for extending the American Dream beyond their own insular worlds.
As Peter Greene points out, there is one central flaw in this indictment. We have ruled our school system by the accountability systems chosen by these reformers now since 2002. And where can they point to school systems that have been greatly improved?
We have had this regimen of testing, this revenue-generating stream of dis-aggregated data collection for over a decade. For over ten years we have been collecting test scores so that, having measured, we can then fix. So again I ask.
Who has been saved?
Where is the urban school system where the state has said, “Damn– this school is in trouble. Get some resources and help and support in there stat. Divert tax dollars and raise more. Hire the best educational experts to help.” And then, having sent the educational marines, the state could then watch their efforts pay off and declare, “Thank God for the test results. We have saved this school system.”
But Cunningham may be providing some much needed solace to reformers who must be feeling more beleaguered than ever. In a recent interview with Edushyster, Cunningham explained the origins of his well-funded project:
I think that an awful lot of people on the reform side of the fence are thrilled by what we’re doing. They really feel like *thank God somebody is standing up for us when we get attacked* and *thank God somebody is willing to call out people when they say things that are obviously false or that we think are false.* When I was asked to create this organization—it wasn’t my idea; I was initially approached by [billionaire Eli] Broad—it was specifically because a lot of reform leaders felt like they were being piled on and that no one would come to their defense. They said somebody just needs to help right the ship here. There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side. There was unequivocally a call to create a community of voices that would rise to the defense of people pushing reform who felt like they were isolated and alone.
So as popular culture continues to weigh in on the side of students and teachers whose futures are placed in jeopardy by arbitrary tests, the Education Post will have plenty of work, making sure that their benefactors do not feel defenseless and alone.
I recall how I felt when Waiting for Superman was released, and the Gates Foundation paid millions for NBC’s Education Nation. It was as if billionaires had laid out a strategy to discredit public education, and destroy teacher unions. At the NPE conference last week we heard from students in Newark who spoke about the way the state and corporate interests were closing their schools, leaving communities broken. And now the shoe is on the other foot.
Eli Broad looked around and saw that there were hundreds of bloggers that are discrediting HIS project, and they seemed to have some strategy, they even met together in conferences. So thank goodness he had the funds available to hire people like Peter Cunningham and Valentina Korkes to be his friends, and defend him and his fellow billionaires. I guess that is why rich people never have to be lonely for long, so long as they can find people willing to be their friends in exchange for some of their money.
In a bit of unintended irony, Cunningham cites a quote from H.L. Mencken, who famously said, “It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In the topsy turvy world Cunningham inhabits, billionaires like Broad and Gates are the afflicted, and school teachers and their elected union leaders are the comfortable. As another 20th century journalist, Upton Sinclair, said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Image credit: ThreeSisters, used with Creative Commons license.
Julia
The fact that Peter Cunningham, formerly of the Obama Ed Department, received $12 million from Broad, Walton and others to pay folks to write pro ed-deform “blogs” underscores that there is no “there” there for the ed deformers.
There is no grassroots movement pushing for more testing.
Education Next is all corporate, big donor driven “enthusiasm” by paid staff members pretending to be unpaid bloggers.
It’s tough to win the war when all you have are mercenaries and the other side has true believers, as the British discovered in the Battle of Trenton when their Hessian mercenaries were routed by George Washington’s rag-tag citizen army.
Christine Langhoff
It’s my suggestion that we call out the mercenaries wherever we see them post – blogs, Twitter, news articles, editorials, op-eds. Six characters will suffice: #swarm. That’s what they are paid to do – swarm and distract.
Robert D. Skeels * rdsathene
When Cunningham talks of those who “abdicates any responsibility for extending”, someone needs to remind him that that’s really the role of the folks funding him.
Katherine Fleming
It’s unnecessary to speak for “poor John Oliver” (satire understood) as he so effectively speaks for himself…….. and in this case so many others defacto. His expose of standardized testing and the racketeering of Pearson corporation (et al) has effectively reached an audience here-to-fore suppressed by the same corporation producing, marketing, distributing and profiting from the tests.
I cannot talk about the test with my students (in spite of teaching the common core appointed theme “the construction and deconstruction of society”) – other than in the duplicitous context of telling them it is a good thing . I cannot talk with parents or students about their most basic right to opt out of the testing – or even let them know that they have a choice.
Parents and students do not, for the most part, know the issues and questions around this test – they either trust the school to make sound educational choices for their children and/or they fear the existing rhetoric that the tests will negatively affect their children, their teachers, or their schools. They comply with all of the historical institutional advancements – particularly when the prominent marketing proposes to hold lazy teachers accountable or to close the minority achievement gap.
John Oliver has garnered the thanks of hundreds of thousands by exposing this issue – something that should at the very minimum hold up to the scrutiny of the parents and children who are so profoundly affected by it. The greatest outcome, as noted in many forums and articles and by John Oliver, will be both the profit to corporations and the destruction of public education.
A million thanks, John Oliver. Thank you, Anthony Cody, as well.
Mustapha Mond
I might be more inclined to believe that Pearson and corporate profiteers making trillions of dollars off standardized testing actually cared about learning and the quality of education if they would either volunteer or the Feds would mandate a significant percentage of their earnings to be directed to funding education in needed areas. They are not required to be transparent in their dealings with all issues around testing, from profits or evaluating or providing results. WHY IS THIS? Their “smoke and mirrors” behavior around this huge issue seriously compromises their credibility.
anjiaoshi
That wasn’t H.L. Mencken. That was Finley Peter Dunne.
Melissa Westbrook
I want to note that Ms. Korkes wrote something incorrect about the Seattle high school and I tried to get her to correct it. First she claimed she didn’t know what I was talking about (I write a public education blog in Seattle so yes, I do) and then she said that her paragraph, where she mentions the Seattle high school that Oliver referenced in his piece, then she talks about wealthy, white suburban schools opted out is not linkage. She says she didn’t mean that Seattle high school had those characteristics and there was no linkage. Even though the only two sentences in the paragraph are about the school and those characteristics.
These people are shameless. They want to twist every single word and, when they get called out, call foul.
dmaxmj
Some choose to promote tests, and the narrow interests forwarded by that path toward “reform”. Those interests already posses the wealth and the power-now they want to posses the definition of truth. When confronted with actual truth, they even have the money and power to buy themselves crafty liars and spin doctors. Those who will promote the snake oil they would never drink, push for the type of education they would not subject their own children to. Them playing the victim card just makes it so sad. I need to train my kids.