California Passes Legislation to Compete for the Race to The Bottom (RTTB): The commodification...

[Hannah Bell]

California Passes Legislation to Compete for the Race to The Bottom (RTTB): The commodification of teaching and learning under guise of educational reform

http://dailycensored.com/2010/01/13/california-passes-legislation-to-compete-for-the-race-to-the-bottom-rttb-the-commodification-of-teaching-and-learning-under-guise-of-educational-reform/.

Earlier this year, California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered legislators to gather for a special session in order to hammer out an application capable of landing the state roughly $700 million in federal funds. If California wins part of this venture fund, the state will be receiving only a few hundred dollars per student, a paltry sum that cannot dramatically improve the quality of education.

The money, however, is not the real purpose of this Race to the Top: the goal, as I’ve written elsewhere, is re-arranging the laws and economic and social policies that will allow for the corporatization of public education through the creation of retail charter chains...

Students enrolled in the state’s worst 1,000 schools would be allowed to transfer to higher-performing schools... Sure, but the problem is that there are not enough higher-performing schools with seats to accept the thousands of children displaced.

Developers and business interests know this. Unleashing student transfers to schools that do not exist or with no seats in them guarantees that charter schools will have to be built and this is all good news to entrepreneurs for they get to privatize profits and socialize costs through public bonds and the $700 million dollars, such as junk bonds, much like Minnesota did (See Counterpunch.com Race to the Slop, Weil, D.)..


...But the tests have an even more insidious purpose: by hitching student and teacher achievement to the “enhanced standards and assessments” the scores can then be used to “evaluate and rate” the new private and non-profit providers (outsourced schools), the burgeoning charter school retail chains designed to replace public schools, which is the real plan for “turning around struggling schools”.

Therefore, the necessity and institutionalization of a toxic testing regime is of paramount importance to the new ‘turnaround artists’ and charter school hucksters. They will rely on the tests as a rating agency for their own performance allowing them to bid for ever more private contracts to run and manage the new charter schools...

...The results of these new tests will be fed into an expanded data system, which will then be used to evaluate teachers to see if they are meeting the ‘measured outcomes’, the free-market ‘targets’ they have been hired to accomplish. Reduced to ‘clerks in the classroom’, this will only further encourage teachers to abandon anything not related to these high-stakes tests...Teachers have been one of the few constituents to complain about the use of standardized tests to evaluate children, and these same measures will now be targeted at the teaching profession itself. Using “longitudinal data systems” – which track student test scores over many years – will allow federal, state, and local authorities to conduct surveillance on teachers, a virtual panopticon that will only further narrow a curriculum hacked to pieces by the bi-partisan No Child Left Behind law.

Testing companies and software developers are salivating over the possibility of these data systems, particularly when they consider the national standards that will allow their products to be used across the entire nation. Charter chains, too, would prefer national standards, which would allow them to use prepackaged curricula across their charter outlets no matter the location – it’s highly conducive to expanding their “market share”, for dummied down standardized curriculum keeps costs down and the dispensation is formulaic.

It’s unlikely, however, to help us make any meaningful progress in improving the quality of education for our children, particularly those with the least access to a high-quality, well-rounded education. Nor will it equip them for the ruthless economic and social landscape they will find when they leave the new dungeons of learning...

[Catshrink]

1. Educational research does not support "teaching to the test"

and rote memorization but that's where we're heading. This will not meet Arne's goals, which are based on what a group of billionaires came up with, not teachers. But it will be the teachers' fault, not the model they pulled out of their corporate rear ends.

[YvonneCa]

2. I watched this on the California Channel...

...a few weeks ago. Sad. Really sad. It's de-professionalizing teaching...on purpose (IMHO). Now they can hire cheaper teachers.

[tonysam]

3. They'll make daycare wages by the time the privatizers are done.

No more professionals, just glorified babysitters because teaching is so "easy" to do.

[yowzayowzayowza]

4. Walmart Middle School.

Feed 'em at the instore MickyDs, school supplies, hair cuts, optical exams and on top of it all: the highly motivated workforce.