As Obama rolls out coding for everyone, updates his technology plan, his testing action plan, the relaunch of peer review of state assessment plans, and pushes forward all sorts of lovely competency based digital badging via workforce/skills training, daily testing, online curriculum, etc. etc. via ESSA, folks are debating the merits of these particular initiatives. I recall going through this with common core and I seriously wanted to throw my entire set of dishes across the room every time I had to have this conversation and this is why....
First - make no mistake - this is being rolled out not because the corporations and the Dept. of Ed. suddenly sense this absolute urgency to fulfill a child's desperate life long need to learn coding and/or punch away at a computer all day in absolute zombie like glaze-eyed fashion. They would love - absolutely love - for us to spin our wheels debating what we like and don't like while we interact within their test/punish system that continues to drive profit to the .01% while destroying the public school system and the teaching profession and ranking/sorting/ordering our children to keep privilege with the privileged.
Oh and be sure to check out the time for the rollout of all the initiatives along with the passage of ESSA - all in one full swoop - carefully planned and orchestrated within months. Understand one thing clearly - the test/punish system must be destroyed in its entirety if there is any hope whatsoever of shutting down the madness of privatization headed our way via ESSA.
And why all of this so fast????? Because it MAKES MONEY. If this were about children we would see Obama throwing billions into funding for librarians, nurses, counselors, fine arts, small class size, building repairs, books, more teachers with teaching degrees, after school activities, health care, nutrition and more. But NO. This is about data. This is about demands and shifts in the market to meet the NEEDS OF THE MARKET - NOT CHILDREN.
I mean think about it- we've got buildings with no teachers, buildings with black mold and schools with no resources. But suddenly.......suddenly everyone needs to learn coding? Yeah. Right. I took coding in high school and college. Yawn.
What they need is data. You can't get data from a brand new dry wall. Every time a child punches a keyboard they enter one more piece of data. Every piece of data creates more data and public education is the data gold mine right now. Data allows them to manage, control, persuade and steer the people where they want them. This is not about who a child is, what she loves to do, or what he hopes to become in this world. This is about hard cold cash via data.
If you missed this datapalooza via Knewton you should watch it now.
If they want to flood the market to lower the salary within the many fields of workforce training they can do it. Remember, there never was a STEM crisis. So, we can waste our time debating the pros and cons of standards, coding, technology, new forms of so-called innovative testing and more. Ho hum. They'd like to keep us busy debating. Meanwhile, understand that in ten years public schools as we know them will no longer exist. Poof. Gone.
The ESSA comes up for reauthorization in four years. They are running - full speed ahead - to take it all (the public school system) before the public understands that online testing and curriculum is no more than a glorified skills-based worksheet on a screen.
They will swallow every piece of student data they can get and they will spit out the children one by one until they've devoured every last data tag possible that a child can muster up. They will gather data on a child's hard skills and soft skills - emotion, character traits - they will get as much as they can - facial expressions, heart rate, pupil dilation and more. As Ed Week says - the race is on to provide schools with personalized learning - check out THAT link and your hair will stand on end.
They will feed hungry children tests upon tests upon tests - daily - in strip mall charter schools, from home via online learning, in an under-resourced school and dilapidated trailers - they care nothing for the child and/or the conditions of the child's home, school, or the child's well-being.
There will be no teaching profession. Just facilitators and online learning with daily testing for all.
It really makes you wonder what all those applause for the ESSA were - huh? We at UOO warned of this for months before the passage of ESSA, and we'll continue to push forward to stop it at our conference this month in Philly.
As long as we continue to give any credibility to any of their plans we are simply a pawn in the game that the corporations and the .01% have been planning for years upon years. If we want to end it we must revolt. Don't try to reason with them and/or make the best of an absolutely shitty situation.
As we say at UOO: We demand an equitably funded, democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all Americans that prepares students to exercise compassionate and critical decision making with civic virtue.
Revolt and let's get this done.
