Cruel, Sadistic Bastards

Last week, I spent an evening with a friend who is a public school teacher here in Seattle. I knew her before she became a teacher. We've had long discussions over the years about what's wrong with public education, and specifically about the disastrous Common Core national curriculum, the one that was developed largely by career bureaucrats and for-profit testing companies with precious little input from actual teachers, especially those who work with young children. She has always taken a more cavalier approach than me, insisting that fads like this come and go and that she was confident that she would be able to engage her students in "real learning" between the cracks.

She was not feeling that way last week. Her school was in the midst of administering high stakes standardized testing that were supposedly Common Core aligned. I say "supposedly" because who knows? No one outside the classroom is allowed to see the questions being asked -- not the school board, not the administration, not the parents, and certainly not the taxpayers who are on the hook for this mess. Only teachers and students are allowed to see the questions on the day of the test and they are emphatically not allowed to discuss the questions with anyone, even with one another. The companies that make these tests are actually monitoring the social media accounts of older students to make sure they don't discuss anything "proprietary." 

My friend's students were freaking out in anticipation, some in tears, some in ways that sounded bizarre to me. She is not even allowed to tell the kids' parents that they have the right to opt their children out of these tests, even when parents came to specifically ask her if they can opt out. 

Even if these test measured anything worthwhile (and they don't), the results will be useless to my friend, just as they are useless to all teachers, because by the time she receives them, it will be next fall: she may not even be teaching at that school, let alone working with those kids. And even if she did find herself still teaching one of them, she would have no way of knowing what he needs to do to improve because the whole damned thing is secret. Not even the President is allowed to see these tests that we spend billions on each year.

I can only draw one conclusion, the companies that make these tests and the state superintendents of eduction who signed contacts with these companies are all cruel, sadistic bastards. They are making the lives of children hell and they are making the lives of teachers hell, all under the cloak of secrecy and hollow assurances of "trust us." They are making a generation of children hate school even more than they already hate it and they're doing it exclusively for a greasy buck because there is simply no educational value in what they are doing. None, and no one is even attempting to make that case any longer.

A parent recently shared with me a letter she received from the school district in response to her decision to opt her child out of the tests. The superintendent's main argument was that she was placing her child's school's funding in jeopardy (although he did, laughably, also evoke her child's infamous "permanent recored").

I'm sick of these ignorant charlatans. What fools we've been to buy their cleverly concocted snake oil. These tests are designed to make failures of children. To wit, a test question which was anonymously revealed by a teacher in which 4th graders were asked to write essays based upon a reading assignment that was written at a 7th grade reading level (and a high school interest level). The failure is intentional because the very companies who make these super secret tests can then turn around and sell text books and other bogus "learning" materials to families and schools with the cynical promise of helping their little failures do better next time.

Companies like Pearson Education are grifters of the highest order. What a scam: we have secret tests, we make everyone associated with them sign non-disclosure agreements, the school districts aren't even allowed to tell families that the test are optional, then they freaking fail the kids on purpose just to get deeper into our pocketbooks. I'll say it again, these corporations and the people who contract with them, are cruel, sadistic bastards.

And believe me, the words I've used in this post are mild compared to the ones that are going through my head.

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