Diane Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education was a thoughtful antidote to the highly touted movie Waiting for “Superman” . A clue that that movie was a paid PR piece was in an interview (but dont remember where) with the filmmaker who said that 3 months before making the movie he did not know anything about education. Bad sign. Then a year later, it turns out the Gates Foundation funded much of it.
Well, now another piece falls into place. The “high stakes testing” approach (firing teachers with bad “grades”, and same with schools), No Child Left Behind, and other approaches coincided with $200million in spending by the Gates Foundation.
So the point is, even Microsoft is now giving up on High Stakes Testing for its employees according to an article in On the Commons. Worth reading, in my opinion. Hope our schools recover.
As happy as I am to see this post, I must point out that it is a barn door that has been open for quite some time. John Deasy became the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent in 2010 on Bill Gates nickel, and his contract was just extended through 2016. Deasy came into LAUSD with a bad record (including a questionable PhD), but so much cash was thrown at his campaign that he couldn’t lose. He has been gutting the LAUSD budget through clever “technology” purchases… Spending billions on iPads (does he think LAUSD teachers don’t already own computers?) while teacher salaries are cut via “furlough days”, reduction in healthcare benefits (hearing aids are no longer covered – Teachers with hearing disabilities must pay up to $7000 out-of-pocket to purchase medical devices REQUIRED for their job), and out-of-pocket purchases of books to offset the sacking of ALL of the onsite school librarians.
You are taking note of this at least three years too late.
Great article, thanks for sharing! My wife is a public school teacher and we have been talking about this very subject a lot lately. She is one of the many who are feeling dissatisfied with this new model. Moreover, I worked at Cisco for 5 years and they had the same Stack/Ranking system, so this article really hits home.
I would never work anywhere that has a stack/ranking system, I’ve seen how miserable of a failure the policy actually is. The article is spot on about lack of collaboration and competing with each other instead of against the competitors. Moreover, the system tends to be very political and the people doing the real work do not always get recognized, especially if you are new to the game.