Corporate Reformers – including Gates – don’t want end-of-year grade-level tests any more they we do. What they want, instead, are “competency-based” assessment “systems” that track everything your child does in the classroom.
Clever little devils that they are, they are now busy trying to co-opt the same movement that is protesting their takeover of our schools by sponsoring their own opt-out events and calling for “assessment reform.”
But let’s be really clear: “assessment reform” is corporate reform.... http://emilytalmage.com/2016/01/05/warning-gates-is-infiltrating-opt-out/
A good warning piece from Emily Talmage. Co-optation is standard operating procedure when they want to break a movement.
Okay. If this isn’t enough to convince you that Corporate Opt-Out is real and is trying to co-opt the grassroots opt-out movement, I don’t know what will:
This Saturday, Citizens for Public Schools (CPS) will host an “Opt-Out Campaign Launch” with the Center for Collaborative Education – an organization funded by the Gates Foundation, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, IBM, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Yes – you read that right. Gates is helping to sponsor an Opt-Out event.
Several months ago, in a post called “Cashing in on Opt-Out,” I tried to show that the testing and ed-tech industries have long been aware of an impending shift away from the big, end-of-year high stakes test toward systems of embedded, competency-based testing, where grade levels no longer matter.
If you’ve not yet seen it, please read this article by former Gates executive and venture capitalist Tom Vander Ark, called “The End of the Big Test: Moving to Competency-Based Policy,” which spells out this agenda in detail.
Then check out this document and look carefully at the section below, where standardized tests are predicted to be “obsolete” by the year 2017:
http://emilytalmage.com/2016/01/05/warning-gates-is-infiltrating-opt-out/
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