#1 Drill and Kill Fake Tests
Welcome to the crazy world of “ed reform” where our children mean nothing and corporate profits mean everything. This chapter, The First Weapon of Mass Deception... Drill and Kill Fake Tests, is divided into four sections:1.1 How the War Against Our Schools and Our Kids Began1.2 Why Child Poverty Affects Every High Stakes Test1.3 NEAP Cut Scores... How High Stakes Tests are Designed to Fail1.4 How Drill and Kill Fake Tests Cause Permanent Harm to ChildrenWe will begin by telling the hidden history of education reform. We will then explain the extremely important relationship between high stakes testing and childhood poverty. Third, we will look at how high stakes tests are deliberately constructed to fail as many students as possible. Finally, we will look at how children really learn and explain why they are permanently harmed by being subjected to high stakes tests. Fasten your seat belt. We are about to enter the world of bribes and lies used to destroy our public schools – a bizarre world where the truth is the exact opposite of everything you have ever been told.
In the previous section, we looked at the lies and deceptions in a scam report called “A Nation At Risk.” In this section, we will look at some of the people involved in promoting high stakes testing as the fake “solution” to the fake “problems” claimed by the Nation At Risk report. The bottom line is that billionaires push high failure rate tests to convince the public that our schools are failing to the public will let billionaires take over our schools. History of High States High Failure Rate TestsThe “theory” of Toxic High Stakes Testing education reform is that if school standards are raised (often called raising the bar), and students are tested often enough, students will work harder to jump over the higher bar. Thus, their achievement will go up– even if those kids are hungry and living in the back seat of a car! A second part of this theory is that students will be motivated to work harder if there is a high stakes standardized test they will have to pass at the end of the course. Neither of these claims has ever been supported by any scientific research on child development. Yet these claims are now being used to drive the education (or abuse) of 50 million students in the US. These claims are popular among the billionaires because they allow the super rich to ignore the fact that test scores are related to poverty. There is no need for the billionaires to worry about giving poor parents a job or giving poor kids a stable home. All they need to do is give low income kids more and harder tests. In fact, billionaires are blaming the victims of their concentration of wealth and power so that folks will be distracted from the fact that billionaires are robbing working families of a fair living.
In this section, we will show that the real purpose of high stakes tests is to create unfair tests that are 'designed to fail” the vast majority of students who take them in order to turn the public against our public schools. This scam was done by changing the passing standard on a national test called NAEP from “Basic” which originally meant “At Grade Level” to “Proficient” which originally meant “Above Grade Level.” This simple change meant that instead of 70% of all students passing the NAEP test, only 30% of students would pass the test. No longer was a student being “at grade level” good enough. Instead, every student needed to be “above grade level.” We will also show that in order to prevent students from passing these new high stakes tests, called SBAC and PARCC, their creators specifically chose NAEP “hard” questions that they knew in advance that the vast majority of students would not be able to answer. The bar on the new high stakes tests has been raised so high that the new tests are deliberately designed to fail and destroy the lives of over 20 million children across America of two thirds of the 30 million kids schedule to take these fake tests in 2015. The bottom line is that billionaires want our public schools to fail so they can replace them with for-profit charter schools. It is vital to understand the NAEP Proficiency Standard and how NAEP “hard questions” were chosen as these are the basis of all of the current high stakes tests. These grossly unfair scams are the reason that two thirds of the students in New York State failed their Common Core tests. They are the reason two thirds of the students in Washington and 27 other States will fail their SBAC and PARCC tests in 2015. They are the reason nine out of ten GED students are currently failing their GED exams. The unfair NAEP Proficiency standard and the despicable use of NAEP “hard” questions are two of the main “weapons of mass deception” being used by billionaires to destroy and take over our public schools. So it is very important to understand how these two scams work.
We all want to improve our public schools. But school improvement should not come at the expense of harming millions of children. In this section, we will look at a crime called “No Child Left Behind” and the severe harm inflicted on millions of children by its mandated wave of high stakes tests. Below is just one of these millions of children. It is a five year old girl who was originally excited about attending Kindergarten. But after five hours of testing, she was reduced to tears because she did not know how to answer the questions on her high stakes test. Needless to say, her mother is now an opponent of high stakes tests. The bottom line is that the real purpose of Common Core is to demoralize children.
The No Child Left Behind Act, commonly called NCLB, was passed in the US House of Representatives on May 23 2001 on a vote of 384 to 45. It passed in the US Senate on June 14 2001 on a vote of 91 to 8. It was signed into law by George Bush on January 8 2002. This federal law violates the US Constitution which specifies that powers such as education that are not specifically given to Congress in the US Constitution are reserved for the States. Education has for more than 200 years been accepted as a right of each State. However, the billionaires have such a tight grip on Congress that they were able to convince nearly the entire Congress to ignore the US Constitution and do their bidding.
We will begin by briefly examining the history of high stakes tests, the real purpose of high stakes tests, what they really measure and how to more accurately compare US student test scores to scores of kids from other nations. Our Kids and Our Schools are Not Failing... And Never Have Been!The first lie used as an excuse for testing kids, firing teachers and closing schools is the ed reformer false claim that “our schools are failing” in comparison to schools in other nations. This claim is not true and never has been true. For more than a century, Americans have been the most productive workers in the world. Because of the innovation of American workers, our economy has been the strongest economy in the world. At the heart of the American economic system has been our public schools - which have consistently produced the most highly trained and creative workforce in the world. As just one objective example of how our public schools and colleges excel in innovation, compare the number of Nobel Laureates in Science produced by the United States in comparison to other developed countries in the world. The US has as many Nobel Laureates in Science as the next 20 leading countries in the world combined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita
