Teacher Performance Assessment: A Money Grab for Pearson

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This week on Education Radio we speak with Education Radio producer Barbara Madeloni and two students from the teacher education program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is on the faculty, Amy Lanham and Rachel Hoogstraten, about their experiences coming to understand and resist the incursion of privatizing forces on teacher education. Barbara, Amy and Rachel tell the story of the push for the development of a national teacher performance assessment (TPA) for student teachers, the infiltration of Pearson Inc into the distribution and scoring of the assessment, and the implications of these for public teacher education, teacher development, privacy and confidentiality, and how we understand what it means to teach. Their story reminds us that, as educators with a commitment to social justice, it is our responsibility to understand the neoliberal agenda, name it when we see it at work, educate each other about how it insinuates itself into our institutions and discourses, and stand together in solidarity to resist.

Amy Lanham is a doctoral student in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.Rachel Hoogstraten is working toward her M.Ed in English education at the University of Massachusett Amherst. Both Amy and Rachel are completing their student teaching practicum in the University of Massachusetts Amherst licensure program in secondary education.

Barbara Madeloni is a senior lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the Education Radio collective.

Charter Schools: The Great Scam of Our Time

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In this weeks episode of Education Radio we attempt to answer the question "why is it important to keep public education public, and what role do charter schools play in privatizing education?  Julie Cavanaugh, Lisa Donlan, Pauline Lipman, Brian Jones, William Watkins, Karen Lewis, and Kevin Kumashiro all help us to answer this question.

First we'll hear from Julie Cavanaugh, a special education teacher, activist, and filmmaker in Red Hook Brooklyn about her activism in the fight against charter schools. Julie, along with other members of the Grassroots Education Movement directed, wrote, and is featured in the documentary "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman." Julie helps us understand the myths and realities about charter schools.

Parent, activist, and one of the other filmmakers, Lisa Donlan will than explain the role that money and profit play in the privatization of public schools.

Pauline Lipman

Later in the show, Pauline Lipman, professor, activist, and author of the book The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City helps us to understand how discourses of blame, pathology and choice have been used to garner support for charter schools and further privatize public education.

Teacher, activist, and filmmaker Brian Jones then examines the intersections between racism, classism and the corporate education reform movement. 

William Watkins

Next, University of Illinois Chicago, Professor William Watkins answers our questions about the racism behind the education reform movement, the ways in which corporate education reformers appropriate the language of social justice, and how the education reform movement could lead to the dismantling of universal public education. Dr. Watkins is the editor of The Assault on Public Education, Confronting the Politics of Corporate School Reform.

Karen Lewis

Karen Lewis, current president of the Chicago Teachers Union and nationally board certified teacher, describes some of the troubling impacts of charter schools both in Chicago and across the country.

Kevin Kumashiro

Finally, we speak with Kevin Kumashiro, professor of Asian American Studies and Education at the University of Illinois Chicago and president elect of the National Association of Multicultural Education, about the potential for public education to be used as tool for resistance and liberation.

Dr. Kumashiro's latest book, Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture, takes aim at the current discourse on education reform, paying particular attention to the ways that scapegoating public-school teachers, teachers unions, and teacher education masks the real, systemic problems.

Racism, Class and the Attack on Public Education: A Talk by Brian Jones

In this episode we spend the hour listening to a talk by Brian Jones titled “Still Separate, Still Unequal: Racism, Class and the Attack on Public Education.” He was speaking to a group of teachers and parents in New York City this past February as part of Black History Month.

Brian Jones

Brian has worked as an elementary school teacher in Harlem and is currently a fourth grade public school teacher in Brooklyn, NYC. Brian participated with the Grassroots Education Movement, GEMNYC, to produce the documentary An Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman in 2011. This documentary was a response to the widely publicized film Waiting for Superman, produced by Participant Media, which also produced An Inconvenient Truth. Education Radio episode 5 “Exposing the Myth of Education Reform” from September of last year highlighted Jones’ work on this documentary and can still be heard on our blog.

In his talk, Brian draws connections between attacks on labor and attacks on public schools. He suggests education reformers’ emphasis on test scores, teachers and outcomes is about “excellence” (using their words), but not equity. Brian addresses the increasingly undemocratic process by which these neoliberal reforms are being implemented, and the potential power of true solidarity between parents and teachers.

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High-stakes testing, segregation, and the undermining of democracy: OCCUPY the DOE

Across the country, educators and activists are organizing to stand up and fight back against the corporate controlled education reformers. In this week's show we speak with teachers, teacher educators, students, parents and community members who are part of a growing movement to opt out of and demand an end to high stakes testing.

We begin at San Jose State University, where professor Roberta Ahlquist talks about the ways high stakes testing damages our students, our schools, and our understanding of the kinds of people and communities we want to make. Professor Ahlquist, co-editor of the book “ Assault on Kids: How hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideologies and Ruby Payne are destroying our schools” helps us understand how high stakes testing is part of larger ideology that is leaving us with schools that are more segregated and that deny the human potential of all students.

Next we hear from Aisha Daniels, a high school junior from Florida, who opted out of the state tests about why she opted out, and the response from teacher, schools, administrators and classmates. Aisha's mother Ceresta Smith is an organizer of United Opt Out, an organization whose purpose is to draw attention to the devastating impact of high stakes tests and to offer guidance, support and solidarity for students and parents who choose to Opt Out.

The Opt Out movement will be in Washington DC March 30- April 1 to OCCUPY the DOE and demand an end to high stake testing. In the last part of this week's show, Education Radio producer Barbara Madeloni joins the organizers of Occupy the DOE at one of their weekly skype meetings to talk with them about how they came to the movement, how they understand what is happening in education, and what we can do to resist. She speaks with Morna McDermott, associate professor Towson University, Ceresta Smith, 23 year veteran National Board certified teacher, Laura Murphy, community member and charter member of the Save Our Schools march, Tim Skelar, associate professor Penn State Altoona, Peggy Robertson, former public school teacher, parent and blogger at pegwithapen, and Shaun Johnson, assistant professor at Towson University and host with Tim Skelar of at the chalk face.

Listen and join us to OCCUPY the DOE in DC, March 30- April 2, 2012.

Get more information about Occupy the DOE.

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Educating for Obedience: The disastrous impact of education reform on young children

Nancy Carlsson-Paige

In this weeks program we talk to Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Professor Emerita of early childhood education at Lesley University where she taught teachers for more than 30 years. She is also a respected author and the founder of the University's Center for Peaceable Schools.

Nancy discusses how schooling can meet the developmental needs of school-age children; and how current corporate education reform policies are harming young children's social, emotional, cognitive and physical development.

She talks pointedly about how current standardized curriculum and testing regimes and the privatization of public education causes great harm to young children's development; exacerbates inequality and undermines the human potential to engage in social change.

Nancy also talks at length about the horrendous impact virtual schools have on the lives of young children.

Click here to learn more about Nancy Carlsson-Paige

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Audit Culture: Snuffing the Life out of Teacher Education

In this week's program Education Radio looks at how audit culture is being used to undermine and privatize teacher education, decoupling it from higher education and turning teacher development into technical training.

Speaking first with Christine Sleeter, Professor Emerita, California State University, we look at how the assault on teacher education connects to the larger neo-liberal effort to privatize public spaces. We then examine the specific measures being used to devalue, de-humanize and undo the democratic the work of teaching and teaching teachers.

Ann Berlak, of the California State system, helps us understand the technical rationality behind the current push for a national teacher performance assessment. Celia Oyler, Associate Professor of Education at Teachers College Columbia University, brings us into the absurdities of the National Council on Teacher Quality's grading' of school of education, and the dangers of privatization found in the new Relay Graduate School of Education, founded by educational management companies Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and KIPP. Finally, we speak with Julie Gorlewski, from State University of New York New Paltz, as we examine how teacher educators can respond to this assault by naming it for what it is and making spaces to fight back and claim the liberatory potential of our work.

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Audit Culture, Teacher Evaluation and the Pillaging of Public Education

In this weeks' program we look at the attempt by education reformers to impose value added measures on teacher evaluation as an example of how neoliberal forces have used the economic crisis to blackmail schools into practices that do not serve teaching and learning, but do serve the corporate profiteers as they work to privatize public education and limit the goals of education to vocational training for corporate hegemony. These processes constrict possibilities for educational experiences that are critical, relational and transformative. We see that in naming these processes and taking risks both individually and collectively we can begin to speak back to and overcome these forces.

In this program we speak with Sean Feeney, principal from Long Island New York, about the stance he and other principals have taken against the imposition of value added measures in the new Annual Professional Performance Review in New York State. We also speak with Celia Oyler, professor of education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about the impact of value added measures on teacher education and the corporate powers behind these measures.

You can sign on to support Sean Feeney and the New York principals at
http://www.newyorkprincipals.org/

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