All right, so I’m trying to keep it together before this all day CCSS seminar that I have coming up next week. I have that burning feeling in my chest already. I put teacher educators on notice earlier this week, NOT ONE of my teacher ed friends responded. So, I’m doing it again.
There is apparently a huge research project going on in our state, a linkage between the state DOE and a bunch of universities. Ours is a huge leader in all of this. And from the documents I’ve examined, I see no one, not a single teacher educator or education researcher, involved. Shows how much we’re valued.
In any case, in poring over some publicly available documents, I have some highlights, in no particular order. First up, we going to have millions spent on technology to operate computerized exams. Here’s the company, now doesn’t that kid look happy?
Next up, ah, this one’s great. So, a college of education is going to endorse an Alternative Certification program. Fantastic.
Then, ah, this is interesting. So, there was a lot of mention of this P20 workforce data system, something like that. I tried to find another example, and here we have one from the state of Kentucky. It tracks everything. And you’ll notice, number three: K12 student data will be linked directly to teacher education graduates. You thought I was kidding?
Next, ah yes, this is one of the many mentions of this data warehouse. These were everywhere.
Another example. Apparently, rather than relying on our own education leadership programs, we’re going to enlist a Broad-style preparation program that, who would have guessed it, trains former TFA candidates to be principals. Fantastic! We love shooting ourselves right in the feet here.
Do I have anything else? Ah, one last example. We will be working with an ONLINE teacher preparation program to crank out as many STEM teachers as humanly possible. Why not rely on our own faculty? Who the hell knows, am I right?
This has all been happening over the last several months while we’ve all been bogged down in the classroom. Keep us busy, then we don’t know that the trap door will open and we’ll drop down into a pit of snakes, spikes, and rabid squirrels.
Toodles.
I hope that you are not a Cassandra as so many of us in public schools turned out to be 11 years ago when NCLB slunk out of the cesspools of Washington DC.
There were some of us, never a majority, that kept warning our colleagues that this was the first step in a long-planned war to achieve the destruction of our profession and end publicly-funded education in American schools.
We were treated like crazed conspiracy theorists and watched our friends and coworkers either eagerly embracing and enabling their own destruction, cynically claiming that “this too shall pass” as all the previous misguided reforms had withered away, or burying their heads in the sand because they had enough to deal with putting their own kids through college or high school.
Now we are inundated, overwhelmed, outspent, outplayed, and completely buried in the worst of the worst. We also called on our professional groups and higher ed colleagues to lead the counterattacks and come to our assistance to little or no avail.
I am truly hoping that it is not too late but I fear that much destruction, suffering, and ruination of lives, careers, and futures will need to be experienced at this point before the sleeping beast is aroused and attempts at restoration begin. I may be too cynical myself. We’ll see.
Great comments. I hope I’m not harping as well. That’s why I spend a lot of my time here and not writing those damn research articles that no one will read. Well, I do spend some time doing that; however, I’m becoming less and less enamored by what higher education is doing in light of the continued assault on public education.