In Case You Missed It
Earlier today, Marc Dean Millot at TWIE, published a report, Three Data Points. Unconected Dots or a Warning? which seems to have been deleted. Millot reported:
I have now heard the same thing from three independent credible sources – the fix is in on the U.S. Department of Education’s competitive grants, in particular Race to the Top (RTTT) and Investing in Innovation (I3). Secretary Duncan needs to head this off now, by admitting that he and his team have potential conflicts of interests with regard to their roles in grant making, recognizing that those conflicts are widely perceived by potential grantees, and explaining how grant decisions will be insulated from interference by the department’s political appointees.
I saw the post in my news reader earlier in the day, and I figured Millot’s warning was yet one more reason to treat money cloaked as school reform with suspicion and cynicism. This evening I saw Kenneth Libby’s commentary on Millot’s post, and I attempted to follow the link back to the original article, only to discover it was gone. Hmmm… Too controversial, maybe? Libby drew a line from the monkey business that sank Reading First straight to Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. Kenneth Libby pointed to additional regulatory provisions in the ARRA legislation that promote partnerships with private sector interests, adding fuel to the fire. Messy. Very messy, and not hard to believe that a conflict of interest may be in the works, considering who the players are. But who knows? It’s a blog, and Millot was just reporting what he was hearing. Scholastic’s move to bury the post by taking it down just adds to the intrigue. Millot was right; the Dept. of Education needs to deal with the charge out in the open.
Fortunately, thanks to the resilience of the internet, we have Google’s cached version, and Millot’s post [pdf] lives on.
Education Sector applauds Scholastic’s move to take down the post. But, the important thing about blogging is that we’re not all “serious” publishers.
Update(s): Link added for reference to Reading First corruption, and corrected attribution to the post at Schools Matter. Also, I found an article by Sec. Duncan at ed.gov with the ironic title, “Race to the Top – Integrity and Transparency Drive the Process,” which outlines the RttT selection process, and states:
The Department’s legal ethics team also eliminated any applicant with existing or potential conflicts of interest, including people currently employed by a state department of education or school district. In the end, we chose 58 highly qualified and distinguished peer reviewers, each of whom will receive an honorarium of about $5000 for their work. They include retired teachers, principals and superintendents, college professors and scholars, business leaders and education advocates. Their names will be kept confidential until the winners are announced so as to shield them from undue outside pressures. The education world is relatively small so it is quite possible some names will emerge, but the Department will not confirm the names of any of the peer reviewers until the first round is over.
…which is obviously not completely transparent and seems to say that it can’t be, because nobody in a decision-making position can be counted on to have any real integrity. Cynical, yeah. Like I said. That’s how it goes now.
The whole idea of the Race to the Top money makes my stomach turn and the non-transparent process makes it even worse. Since when should anything in education be considered a race? RttT is bribe money. The feds dangle the carrot and the states start slobbering. To think that teachers could be fairly evaluated on test scores is absurd, but I’m preaching to the choir on this blog. Just like in every other state, in Nevada our governor is pressuring teacher associations to renegotiate contracts and drop opposition to evaluations based on test scores so we can join the race for the money. I teach in a high-poverty school with a large number of second-language learners. As we all know, they don’t come with the background knowledge to be successful on the biased state tests. The kids at the other end of town, however, are whom the tests are written for: upper middle class white kids. They come with background knowledge, vocabulary, and parental involvement that give them an advantage on the tests. And I should be evaluated based on that? I have no faith or trust in Duncan and I’m beginning to lose my faith in Obama. The corruption at the upper levels of educational decision-making continues.
Indeed. It is pretty obvious that RTTT is a major power play that has very little to do with real education reform.
I believe in assessment and using good data to inform instructional decisions, but the state and federal levels of government are constantly finding more and more twisted ways to test inappropriately, then use the errant data they gather to make even more errant decisions that apply to local levels. The inappropriateness of all of the above is only multiplied by the fact that they are hopelessly removed from the realities of what individual students actually need or respond to.
If the state and federal levels of government actually wanted positive change to occur in education, they’d dedicate their considerable mental and financial resources to the task of creating flexible assessment frameworks that LOCAL communities could use to monitor the progress of their own schools. Oh, and they’d find ways to allow for those flexible assessment frameworks to include a holistic educational approach. It would be great if things like Science, History, Music, Sports, and other extra-curricular activities (what about community relations and real-world impact) actually mattered again.
Tim, your proposal sounds very similar to what the Forum for Education and Democracy came out with yesterday, as they outlined what they view as the legitimate federal role in education: promote high quality and well supported teachers, develop assessments of student achievement that focus on higher order thinking, and hold states responsible for the conditions to learn while holding communities responsible for equity and achievement. I think most of us could endorse a federal agency that did those things.
Susan, I can’t think of anything worse than competing for money by jumping through hoops that we know ahead of time will do nothing to further a quality education, and may even do just the opposite of what is best for students. It reminds me of what they call ‘reality’ TV. I’m ready to change the channel.
States like mine badly need the $ and that comes with the catch. Good post Doug.
It’s a channel changing time. I’m too ill right now to write……and I sure appreciate reading this.
[...] noting the disappearance of Marc Dean Millot’s post from Alexander Russo’s TWIE (Scholastic Inc) blog, I got an [...]