Voice of Revolution

What do NSA and Common Core
Have in Common?

On the surface, the Common Core program, which deals with education, and the NSA, part of the Pentagon’s war machine, would not appear to be similar. However, a closer examination reveals common qualities. Among these are the removal of vital public matters from the public domain, utilizing more and more secrecy; data mining on a massive scale serving private monopoly interests; and eliminating the role of public governance, including elected legislatures at all levels, from a decision making role. Both have in place machinery that is arbitrary, anti-public and serving to humiliate and control people on a broad scale.

War and peace are vital social matters, for the peoples here and abroad. Decisions concerning them belong in the public domain. Similarly, public education and public schools are vital social matters belonging to the public and also connected to the future of society.

Yet decisions concerning both are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the executive, like the president or governors and secretaries of defense and education. Discussion about the information and considerations going into decisions are systematically being removed from the public domain, and more and more kept secret. The public is being rendered as a force unable to govern and decide any significant matter.

No one is to know why the spying and metadata are needed, how they in any way contribute to peace and security. On the contrary, the government repeats that it must keep such matters secret. It is a situation where no one feels more secure and most feel humiliated and abused.

When it comes to the Common Core testing regime, a main feature is that the Common Core is privately owned and the tests themselves are closely guarded secrets. Teachers are forced to sign a waiver saying they will not discuss the tests and doing so can be grounds for firing. Why the secrecy if these tests are supposed to improve education? Public debate would serve to contend with the problems with the tests and testing regime, yet it is being blocked. The only role for the public is to accept the Core — and the broad humiliation and abuse it involves.

While the massive metadata collection by the NSA is well known, what is less known is that a similar level of data collection and data mining is taking place in the public schools. Microsoft and other monopolies are using public education as a means to grab more and more of the public treasury, and the government is making sure they succeed. A private data collection monopoly called inBloom is working directly with the states to secure massive amounts of private data of students and teachers. This is being done without the consent of parents or teachers. And the data is not to serve education but rather the private interests of the monopolies involved, like Microsoft. InBloom will be selling the information to other private monopolies as well as using it to bully schools into buying testing and related software “necessary” to implement the Common Core. New York is one of the main states already handing over such information.

Private monopolies get to see, discuss and sell private, personal student and teacher information, without any consent from parents or education workers, while teachers and students are told they cannot even discuss (or see, in the case of parents) the tests.

It is not the tests or test policies alone that are the problem. It is not the NSA spying and metadata collection alone that are the problem. Both reflect the growing arbitrary anti-public power imposing them. Both reflect governing arrangements where the role of elected governance, and the public more generally, is being eliminated and arbitrary anti-public executive rule is put in place. This arbitrary power is serving the private narrow interests of the most powerful monopolies. And because it is arbitrary, it uses violence, threats and humiliation as a means to control the public. The NSA spying says the U.S. will do what it wants, when it wants, to whoever it wants. The Common Core regime and InBloom spying say public schools are no longer for purposes of educating the youth, but rather for purposes of regimenting and humiliating youth and workers for the narrow benefit of the super rich.

What the NSA and Common Core have in common is that they are about imposing a high-tech form of slavery at home and U.S. empire abroad. They bring to the fore that it is not only the spying and testing that need to be confronted, it is the arbitrary, anti-public executive power that also must be confronted. For the public schools to serve the public good, they must be accountable to and governed by the public. Similarly, for peace and security to prevail, it is the people themselves who must govern and decide. It is by defending public right and expanding the role of the public in governance — including organizing public meetings by and for the public on these vital social matters, that further steps can be taken to empower the people to govern and decide.

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Protecting Students from Metadata Collection by Private Company
Parents Demand NYSED Say No to InBloom

Many parents are demanding that the NY State Education Department (NYSED) stop its cooperation with inBloom Inc. InBloom was created and funded with $100 million by the Bill Gates and Carnegie Foundations. It is a private company making arrangements with states to have them turn over confidential and personally identifiable student and teacher data. This information — including student names, addresses, economic standing, race, grades, test scores, disciplinary status, special education status, and more — is being gathered, starting in kindergarten, without the consent of parents and without any public control over its use.

Despite broad outrage and opposition from parents and teachers, New York is currently the only inBloom partner nationwide sharing data involving the personal information of 3.6 million students. InBloom then uses this information to further the Gates-developed Common Core program, including selling testing and other software programs to schools. It also sells the data to other for-profit vendors.

The data is being stored on a cloud run by Amazon.com, with an operating system by Wireless/Amplify, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation — already known to illegally use such information for its private, profit-making interests. InBloom has also said it "cannot guarantee the security of the information stored." It has secured agreements from New York that it is not responsible for any breaches in security or use of the data by others. So, while New York will be required to pay inBloom to store the data (by 2015), it is New York State, not inBloom, who will be responsible for any lawsuit brought for misuse of the data.

Tell NYSED No! to InBloom

One organizing effort among parents is to send letters to NYSED Commissioner King demanding that their children's data not be sent to inBloom. We reprint below a sample of the letters being used and encourage parents to join this effort, alongside those to refuse the testing regime.

Dear Commissioner King:

As a parent, I was appalled to learn, as a Reuters article confirms, that the NY State Education Department is planning to share the most private, confidential data of my child and all NYS public school students with a corporation called inBloom Inc., that will store this highly sensitive information on a vulnerable data cloud and disclose it to for-profit vendors.

This data will include children's personally identifiable information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, grades, test scores, detailed disciplinary records, health conditions, special education and economic status.

This data will include children’s personally identifiable information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, grades, test scores, detailed disciplinary records, health conditions, special education and economic status.

InBloom Inc. has already stated that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored…or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” All this is happening without parental notification or consent.

I hereby OPT my child’s data out of this plan, and demand that you do NOT disclose any of my child’s personally identifiable educational records with ANY third party, including the Gates Foundation, inBloom Inc. or ANY other private entity or corporation.

I DO NOT give my consent. Instead, I urge you to hold public hearings in NYC and throughout the state to explain the purpose of this project, offer all New York parents the right to consent, and inform the public who will be legally and financially responsible if this highly sensitive data leaks out or is used in an unauthorized fashion. I expect to hear back from you immediately as to whether you will honor my request to withhold my child’s private and confidential educational records.

If not, I will call your office until you do so. I am outraged at this plan, which not only violates every ethical standard, but also your commitment as the state’s highest educational official to protect my child from harm.

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“Calibrating” Administrators
to Perform Teacher Evaluations

Carol Burris, South Side High School Principal, Long Island, New York

The current teacher evaluation regime being imposed involves a 1-100 rating system, with teachers rated as ineffective, developing, effective and highly effective. As with all the testing the “cut score” — the cut off number for each of the four categories — is determined by the New York State Education Department (NYSED). The federal government and private owners of the Common Core likely also play a role, but since it is kept secret, like the tests themselves, it is not known. The ratings, like the tests, are being rejected by many as arbitrary and inaccurate, falsely labeling teachers as “ineffective” and “developing.”

NYSED and others pushing the Common Core like to point out that the portion of the rating involving student test scores usually accounts for 20-40 percent of the score. The other 60 percent is supposed to come from classroom reviews done by the principal. What is left out is that in most cases, a “failing” rate for the portion connected with the tests requires a “failing” rate, or “ineffective” overall.

As well, as the article below indicates, every effort is now being made to make certain that the evaluations done by the principals or other administrators are consistent with the Common Core regime. Principals are not going to be free to make their own judgments and assessments based on their knowledge and experience with teachers and students in their schools and more generally. Instead, they are all being “calibrated” to provide the assessments demanded by the private owners of the Common Core and their monopoly partners, like Microsoft. NYSED is facilitating this and paying for the “calibration training” required. This training is yet another means to remove any decision making from those directly involved in educating the youth — the students, teachers, principals and parents themselves — while also “calibrating all concerned to be god and willing slaves. We reprint below an article on the “calibration events” by Carol Burris, principal in Long Island.

* * *

“I hope I’m not sounding like an elitist,” my friend the music director said. “But I’ve got a problem with being ‘trained.’ You train a puppy to not jump on the couch and a parakeet to poop on the cage paper…but people? Don’t we educate people?”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Calibration,” he replied. “They want to calibrate us with a Calibration Event… But I am not a machine. I’m a man, not a printer.”

I worried I might need the school nurse.

The Music Man explained. He had just returned from Teacher Evaluator Year 2 training. I stopped worrying about his mental hygiene. This was a healthy response, I thought. “So the class began with a video,” he said.

“Not the one that likened the teacher evaluation plans to a plane being built in the air again?” I groaned.

“No. It was an old ‘think different’ commercial from Apple,” he said. “But here’s the thing. After they made us watch a video about how important it is to think differently, the rest of the day they tried to make us all think the same…The commercial said ‘think out of the box’ but they wanted us to be in the same box…to sync up with the Master ‘oda.”

I tried to listen to the last word as the second period bell rang. “Why would they want us to sync with the Master Yoda?” I wondered as the Music Man sadly walked away.

Two days later I would understand. It was my time to be calibrated, and off to BOCES [Boards of Cooperative Educational Services] I went. Apparently, the reformers of New York had been having Calibration Events with ambassadors who even got to attend a Gates Ambassador Reception. Now it was their turn to bring the Calibration Event to us.

“Wow,” I thought, “This is sounding more like Star Wars all the time.” I was disappointed. I was not to be synced with the Master Yoda but rather with the Master Coder, the recently calibrated Ambassador told our class.

Master Coder? Our curiosity was piqued. An administrator from another district asked who the Master Coder was. “He is someone in Albany; we do not know who,” was the reply. “Well, at least they had the sense not to call him the Master Rater,” a colleague chuckled. I sighed and dropped my head.

The trainers went on to explain why we were there. We would have four sessions to prepare for Calibration Day. We would learn “the tool,” and watch teaching videos for two days. Day Three — the pre-test. Day Four — Calibration Day and the Calibration Event. We would see a video of a teacher, use the rubric to rate her, and then try to sync up with the Master Coder.

“If you miss one or two, you might not be misaligned,” one of the Ambassadors reassured us. The Music Man was right — they surely have mistaken us for printers.

A colleague from another district asked, “Does the video pause on Calibration Day?” The Ambassador replied, “I am not sure, but I am going to speak for the tool…”

I stopped listening to the reply. “I am in the Star Wars Cantina,” I thought.

Before calibrating up with the videos, we first needed to be taught to avoid “bias words” in our observations. “The tool” has a list of bias words and if you use them, “the tool” will turn the bias words red. “Do you think it will give us a shock?” a colleague nervously asked me. “Only the Master Coder knows,” I replied. The Ambassador of the Tool gave examples.

Expressive — “The teacher read the poem in an expressive way.” We cannot say that anymore — it is judgmental.

Monotone — “Can we say the reading was not monotone?” someone asked. “No, no, no. Monotone is a bias word” Ambassador #2 replied.

Challenging? — Never, nunca y jamais, nie wieder.

Bias, bias everywhere. “Will my skill improve? Will I be scored on the teaching evidence I include?” you could hear the frustration in the questioner’s voice.

“As long as we get the right number with the Master Coder, that is all that matters. The ultimate goal is you want to be calibrated” was the reply. I prayed a Wookie would enter the room and save us.

I was starting to feel sorry for the calibrated presenter. In an attempt to make sense out of nonsense, she blurted, “Think of it this way. In first grade we teach kids how to fill in the bubbles…today we are learning to fill in the bubbles.” I prayed Darth Vader would enter the room and end it all.

But there would be no rescue, no reprieve. So I thought of Madeline Hunter and a time when teaching was both an art and a science. How she abhorred it when anyone tried to create a checklist from her work. She understood the importance of classroom tone in student learning — described by bias words like patience and warmth. She often said the only thing that a teacher MUST do in every lesson was to think, and to never humiliate a child.

Now, we are driven by data, and checklists and mindless calibration — all being done in the name of a reform that fritters away tax dollars on tests, test prep and calibration events. I stopped listening and searched for the source of the calibration obsession. I found this: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/college-ready-education/Documents/ensuring-accuracy-wp.pdf

Well, at least the mystery is solved. I now know who the Master Coder is…

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The Common Core “Standards” Are the Global Competition Warriors’ “Product Specifications”

Dr. Mark Garrison, markgarrison.net

One common criticism of the English Common Core Standards revolves around Core advocates’ dismissal of the value of personal prose (and fiction more generally). Core architect David Coleman captured the ideological spirit of the Core and education “reform” more generally when he emphasized that business doesn’t care what you f-ing think. How true! But this signifies a change in the basic premise of Anglo-American thought — the claim to defend the individual, individual property, individual choice, individual will, etc. While this individualism can and should be critiqued, the point here is to study the change now taking place.

Individual rights, choice, citizen empowerment, etc., are being eroded. The human conscience defended by the bourgeois revolution that lead to the framing of the U.S. Constitution is now under attack. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, which gave Education Secretary Arne Duncan Race to the Top funds) and Patriot Act, etc., confirm that the only rights now guaranteed are those claimed by monopolies and the Security State. They think they alone are the Public, just like the kings of feudal Europe. Education “reforms” now taking place are part and parcel of these arrangements.

The Core Standards Reflect The Aims of the Global Warriors

Standards reflect the aims and outlook of those who established them. The Common Core was crafted by representatives of the monopolies and key state and federal executives. The Gates Foundation alone has spent more than $800 million between 2009 and 2011 on building and imposing the “Career and College Ready” machine. Educators and the public were actively excluded. These are standards of the global warriors, and they reflect the way these warriors view and vision the world.

A key feature of the Core is the manner in which they attempt to eliminate aim, or purpose, among those who are the object of the Core (students, teachers, administrators). The Core is premised on a model that views human beings as things to be exploited by the global warriors in their quest for the domination of markets, natural resources and peoples (this is called “human capital”). These warriors cannot recognize or even tolerate the existence of the human will, or conscience; things make no claims on that which the monopolies believe is theirs, and theirs alone.

Thus the Common Core (and the so-called standards movement that has led up to them) can be best understood as product specifications. “The light bulb will illuminate 1500 lumens of white light for 1000 hours.” In this scheme, students are products to be manufactured according to specifications in the Core (with production standards for each stage along the production line) by the workers (teachers). Principals are the production managers held accountable for the productivity of their unit in the production process. Developmentally appropriate educational practice does not align with the warriors’ vision: if you don’t meet the standard, too bad for you. They do not give a … if Johnny is not ready to read at age 4; like a production manager, the inputs are carefully reviewed before production begins (this is why private charters like KIPP have parent contracts); raw materials not meeting the production specifications are returned or thrown out. Do not believe the talk about problem solving and creativity and perseverance. It is the kind of problem solving and creativity and perseverance that comes from a machine, an algorithm. And there is no curriculum anymore, only the assembly line, the series of steps of the manufacturing process.

Thus, students are to be made “career and college ready” — that is, market ready, ready to be consumed. The act of their consumption by “business” or the “education” industry (even non-profit Colleges are succumbing to the business model of education) is redefined as “opportunity”. In this scheme, those not meeting the standards are junked or listed as “B” stock. Concretely this means even more poverty and even more prisons. It also means more canon fodder available to the global warriors for their endless criminal wars.

For those who look at the world this way, humans are no different from natural resources, ready to be exploited as the global warriors see fit. Humans also become, in this model, reduced to a conduit for the exchange of capital, as various monopolies hedge their bets on the “value added” at any point in the production/consumption process. Some warriors make money off of the production line itself, while others hope to benefit from future exploitation of the product. Some use the crisis they create to simply steal from the public treasury. Political authorities hope the product is compliant, eschewing the very notion of “public.” Products are not empowered; they are managed, bought and sold.

The notorious (and not even very entertaining) movie “Waiting for Superman” thus advocates teachers open up students’ heads and pour in “the” “knowledge” and “skills”, a job they are increasingly turning over to the corporate charter camps. This is why “reformers” are shutting down public school districts. They are not reformers; they are destroyers and robbers of public assets and smashers of public opinion. The KIPP’s (and Green Dot’s and Imagines and Uncommon Schools, etc.) “No Excuses” (read: “I don’t f-ing care what you think”) pedagogy is just what Wall Street ordered for the mainly black, brown and working-class contingent of youth.

The fact is, traditional public schools were built for a different purpose from that of the charter camps, and while they are also implicated in the reproduction of social inequality, they cannot exist absent the public and democratic ideals so violently attacked by “reformers.” In their failure to fully acquiesce, public schools must be removed (especially in those “urban” areas). They must be destroyed in the eyes of the global warriors.

Standards Are Not Aims

Fictional literature and personal narrative is often the place where questions of one’s outlook are entertained (issues of identify, purpose, ethics, etc.) and in this sense, Core advocates emphasis on information and “facts” is central to their outlook. Computers can generate facts and even discern patterns; now we are told they will grade essays. But these machines have no purpose. No aim. No will. No conscience. And as a result, they have no demands, no concerns, no worries. They have no individual or collective will to be. They do not organize to defend their collective interests. They do not call in sick. They cannot read Shakespeare, or Malcolm X; they can only process. There is no meaning.

In his unimpressive book designed to win support for the Common Core, Robert Rothman (who does not mention Bill Gates once) writes:

“Standards also represent high aspirations. Selective universities, for example, set stringent admissions requirements, and if they admit students who do not meet those requirements, they are often accused of lowering standards. In that sense, standards are goals that not all students can meet, but rather aspirations that all can strive for.

“In the 1980s, in the wake of the report, a Nation at Risk, which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity,” educators began to talk of standards as aspirations. Yet they also began to express the belief that high standards could apply to every student. Invoking the mantra “all children can learn,” educators developed standards that they expected all students to meet. They represented a profound change in American education. In contrast to traditional practice, in which some students learned high levels while others learned basic skills, the new standards were aimed at making sure that all students, regardless of their backgrounds or life aspirations, would have the same educational opportunities.”

There are several things to point out here. Most important is the thesis that standards are aims. Standards are not aims, but rather, standards embody aims. The aim of turning human beings into products is reflected in the Core standards and the “curriculum” offered up to help meet the product specifications. Standards are concrete things used to assess, compare or measure something; they exist; they are not “aspirations.” Children do not simply “hope” to “grow taller,” they strive to become active members of the society and to contribute to that society. They want to participate, to play and to work. Education is the process by which society assists the young in doing just that. To render standards as aims serves to eliminate aims; it eliminates purpose and hope. It reduces the territory to the map. It gives directions, but refuses to articulate a vision of where we are going and why we are going there. It refuses this because that vision is against the public interest.

An expression of this problem is “teaching to the test.” The problem with teaching to the test is not simply that it narrows what is taught. The problem is that it is an act of philosophical suicide. It is to accept and socialize people to accept acting without purpose. “Why are we engaged in teaching and learning,” a teacher asks? “To raise test scores,” retorts the reformer, or more commonly, “to close achievement gaps” — that is, you teach in order to reduce the gap between test score averages of different groupings of students. Wow, now I am fired up! Where do I sign up!

But seriously, why should we want to raise test scores or close gaps between test scores? What is the purpose of all this? To be globally competitive? Sure, but no reformer actually explains in concrete terms what that actually means, what it assumes and what it has and will yield. Such rhetoric is devoid of purpose for those who are the object of the rhetoric. At best, we are to be satisfied with policy objective. “We will work to reduce unemployment by 5 percent.” This may be a policy goal, but it is not an aim that will animate human action.

Education worthy of its name must serve to animate and generate purpose and reflection upon purpose within the total human condition. The purpose must reflect the interests of those being educated. Education worthy of its name must unleash and serve to further develop “human-ness”; it must give rise to conscious human action and reflection, the forming and evaluation of aspiration. “Career and college-ready” is not a philosophy and cannot guide or animate human purpose in schools. “Oh mommy, I’m so eager to go to school so I can be prepared to be sold on the labor market so that global capital can be further enriched!”

We must reject this aim and envision a new one.

Another feature of this argument is the subtle but powerful way in which the notion of equality is transformed and repurposed for the global arena in which the global warriors act. Equality does not come about through political struggle in society, but submission to the standardization required by the global market place. Equality is not material; it originates in the ideas (standards as aspirations) in peoples heads. By rendering the ideas in peoples heads as the source of the problem (soft bigotry), equal opportunity also becomes an idea which will be solved by fixing standards as aims (ideas) — if we all believe that all can learn the same things the same way and demonstrate the same learning on the same test, equality will be achieved. This is ultimately the “separate but equal” model wrapped in the octopus of global capital. We are to ignore the increasing segregation by social class and race — “Excellence for All” as the champions of human capital say. Thus, meeting the measure of the market is the aim. There is no other aim. There is not other purpose. There is no alternative.

It is a good thing Orwell is classified as fiction.

In short, then, the Core should be opposed because it and all that it is tied to (Race to the Top, PARCC, “Value Added” etc.,) is premised on eliminating the human factor from the education of human beings.

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