E Wayne Ross – Page 124 – Critical Theories in Education

Video of UBC Roundtable on the British Columbia Teachers’ Strike

Following last fall’s BC teachers’ strike a number of departments and programs at UBC, along with the New Proposals Publishing Society and <a href=”http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/”Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor sponsored a public roundtable discussion on the significance of the strike and the struggle for education in the public interest in British Columbia.

Streaming video of the presentations at the roundtable are now available via Charles Menzie’s In Support of Public Education blog or you can click on any of the presenters names below to access the video:

Stephen Petrina (Department of Curriculum Studies, UBC)
Jinny Sims (President British Columbia Teachers’ Federation)
Catherine Evans (BC Society for Public Education)
Paul Orlowski (Teacher, Kitsilano Secondary School, Vancouver)
Charles Menzies (Department of Anthropology & Sociology, UBC)
Kevin Millsip (former Vancouver School Board Trustee)
E. Wayne Ross (Department of Curriculum Studies, UBC)

Rouge Forum Update (March 6, 2006)

From Rich Gibson in San Diego:

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil is updated.

Of special interest this week:

*To top the Oscars, a new online archive of movies whose copyrights have expired, including the classic Marxist and almost altogether banned Salt of the Earth is here, download free!

*Baltimore students took the lead in direct action, opposing counterfeit claims to school reform.

*The AFL-CIO, gutted by a massive loss of member, and a deep internal split, promised to spend $40 million of its members dues income on electoral campaigns. It is unclear how the AFL-CIO plans to outbribe the truly rich, or how the union bosses plan to be sure the politicians they bribe, stay bribed.

*The split in the AFL-CIO represents a falling out among opportunists. Clearly, the NEA has lined up with old guardsman, John Sweeney, in forming a partnership to inveigle dues from NEA members, and a few luncheons for misleaders of both organizations. The AFL-CIO’s organizing principle remains the unity of politicians, corporate leaders, and union leaders, in the “national interest,” that is, against the interest of rank and file members, and against the interest of workers in the rest of the world.
Andy Stern was Sweeney’s protege, and is president of the Service Employees International Union. He betrayed Sweeney, led a splinter group involving nearly half of the members of the AFL-CIO, including some of the most mobbed-up unions in the US, including the Teamsters, the UFCW, and UNITE-HERE. With SEIU, each union can take credit for organizing large numbers of low-wage workers, and bargaining the minimum wage for them, minus union dues.
Stern’s work is described in a recent article, “His goal was to consolidate AFL-CIO’s 58 affiliated unions, no longer blame corporations on all of its troubles, and to re-establish the labor union as a partner instead of an adversary to corporations and multinationals.”

*A new book by Robert Fitch, while narrow in scope, limiting its critique to union corruption (with some amusing side glances to those “public intellectuals who, from comfortable positions, refuse to recognize the dead-end of US unionism), is worth the candle: Solidarity for Sale.

*Watch for the next issue of Substance News for a description of this week’s AFL-CIO executive committee meeting in San Diego.

*March 18 marks year three of US capital’s invasion of Iraq, for oil and social control of the vital mid-east region, seeking to stave off moves from Russia, China, Europe, and Japan. The failure of the US military adventure, already lost, is breathtaking. Here are past, and prescient, articles from the Rouge Forum News.

*We have joined with hundreds of other grassroots groups to endorse the many demonstrations that will take place throughout the world on March 18. Join us!

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Rouge Forum Update (February 28, 2006)

From Rich Gibson in SoCal:

The Rouge Forum No Blood for oil page is updated.

To date, the wars of the US have cost nearly $250 billion, while the President demands massive budget cuts in education and social services. Even mainstream newscaster Ted Koppel recognizes that these wars are about oil (though he misses the relationship of oil, geographical power, and social control).

Religious irrationalism (never too far from a dollar, but with a seeming power of its own these days) rises up and takes deadly turns…

And insurrection appears at hand in the Philippines.

However, of special interest this week is the finalization of secret merger talks between the 3.5 million member National Education Association, by far the largest union in the USA, and the AFL-CIO, in tatters since a major split in the last few months, with many of its major affiliates leaving, a falling out among gangsters and opportunists that may be unmatched in labor history.

This deal will be announced Monday at the AFL-CIO’s executive council meeting at the Hotel Del Coronado (a favorite of George W. Bush’s) in San Diego.

NEA’s top leaders were voted down overwhelmingly in an NEA representative assembly more than five years ago when they arrogantly tried to ram through a merger with the undemocratic, racist, and mobbed-up AFT-AFL-CIO. Now, they seek to achieve a merger through the back door, by “allowing” NEA affiliates to sign on.

The only beneficiaries of this maneuver will be NEA big shots, like President Reg Weaver whose total salary this year will come close to 1/2 million dollars, and some local leaders who may win a free lunch from the AFL-CIO, and of course, the bankrupt treasuries of the AFL. While NEA members will be promised greater “Clout” and “Solidarity” the fact is that the AFL-CIO’s only clout is in beating up its own members, and its solidarity amounts to the solidarity of its well-heeled gangster leaders in sabotaging its own members job actions, as in the Patco strike, P-9, the Detroit Newspaper strike, the Detroit Teachers Wildcat Strike, the California Grocery strike, and more, throughout its history, going back even before the Great Flint Strike at GM.

Meanwhile, top AFT leaders, like Al Shanker’s underboss of Florida, Pat Tornillo, languish in jail for stealing the AFT members’ money, while the DC AFT president sits in a jail just to his north for the same charge. Topping that, the Broward County Florida AFT boss, long touted as Tornillo’s inheritor, is in prison for child molestation.

School workers, all of us, will lose from this back door merger.

Here is the complete text of the NEA agreement, and following that, links on some of the labor battles noted above.

The Rejection of the NEA affiliation deal at the NEA RA

Looting the DC AFT local

Detroit Teachers Wildcat Strike

California Grocery Strike

A new book, Solidarity for Sale, by Fitch, is well worth the candle for those interested in this mega merger, as is Jack Scott’s classic, Yankee Unions Go Home.

NYT: FairTest, watchdog of test industry, faces extinction

Losing FairTest would be a major blow to efforts to resist the testing steamroller that continues to flatten education in the interests of public (as opposed to schooling that serves corporate interests).

The New York Times: Watchdog of test industry faces economic extinction

February 22, 2006
On Education
Watchdog of Test Industry Faces Economic Extinction

By MICHAEL WINERIP
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For more than 20 years, FairTest, a small nonprofit group headquartered on the second floor of an old house here, has been the No. 1 critic of America’s big testing companies and their standardized tests.

In 1987, when FairTest began publishing its list of colleges that did not require applicants to submit SAT’s, there were 51; today there are 730, including Holy Cross, Bowdoin, Bates, Mount Holyoke and Muhlenberg.

“The FairTest list provides an enormously valuable service for students looking at colleges who have proved themselves to everyone but the test agencies,” said William Hiss, a Bates vice president.

A generation of education journalists, like Thomas Toch, who reported for Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, were schooled on the complexities and limitations of standardized testing by FairTest.

“They’ve helped me a lot,” said Mr. Toch, who is now a director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington policy research group.
On a slow day, like last Friday, Robert Schaeffer of FairTest handled calls from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Lakeland Ledger, Associated Press and Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News.

On busy days, like July 13, 2004, reporters call by the dozens. That was the day FairTest helped reveal that scoring mistakes by the Educational Testing Service on its teacher licensing test had caused 4,100 men and women in 18 states to fail when they had actually passed the exam.

A few years ago, California officials were considering ending their support of the National Merit Scholarship program because it relied exclusively on a single score on the College Board’s PSAT test to pick semifinalists.

“We contacted the College Board about validity and fairness studies of the PSAT, but they didn’t give us information that addressed our concerns,” said Michael Brown, chairman of a state committee that makes recommendations on admissions policy for California’s public colleges. “So I asked FairTest, which got back with significant information on the limited reliability of a single PSAT score.”

Last year, the University of California system ended its financial support of the National Merit program.

But for all FairTest’s impact, its days may be numbered. Never before has standardized testing so dominated American public education, thanks to the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Law. Every child from grade 3 to high school must now take state tests. And the Bush administration is considering extending those tests to colleges.

“With N.C.L.B., a lot of people feel the debate is over,” said Monty Neill, director of FairTest, officially the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. “The attitude seems to be, ‘Testing is so pervasive, what’s the point?’ ” Support from foundations has virtually dried up and individual donations have not made up the difference. “Our board has seriously discussed whether to fold the operation,” Mr. Neill said.

Mr. Toch, Mr. Hiss and Mr. Brown all said this would be a major loss.

“There is no watchdog over the testing industry except FairTest,” Mr. Brown said.

Christopher Hooker-Haring, dean of admissions at Muhlenberg College, called FairTest “an important voice that pushes back against the test mania in the U.S.”

(This reporter and several others at The New York Times have used FairTest as a source through the years. And last fall, after more than a dozen major publications had reviewed this reporter’s children’s novel, FairTest also reviewed it, in a newsletter, along with several other children’s books with testing themes.) Four companies — Pearson, McGraw Hill, Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin — along with the nonprofit Educational Testing Service, dominate the nation’s $2.3 billion testing industry. They will shed no tears if FairTest disappears.

Kurt Landgraf, the president of the testing service, which administers the SAT, wrote in an e-mail message: “Perhaps if they had been more attuned to the public’s support for using tests to help teachers teach and students learn, then they might have had wider support.”

The companies criticize FairTest for dwelling on testing mistakes, which they say are minor compared with all the successfully administered exams. Privately, they call it NoTest, complaining that the group never met a test it liked.

But Mr. Schaeffer said it was not so much the tests that FairTest opposed, as the overreliance on them to make decisions about which students get promoted and graduate, which schools are failing under federal law and who gets a teacher’s license. The test companies’ own research indicates that the margin of error is too great to use the tests this way, he said.

FairTest has always been a David versus the testing industry. At its high point in the mid-1990’s, FairTest had seven staff members and a budget of half a million dollars. Today it is down to one full-time worker, Mr. Neill; one half-time employee, Mr. Schaeffer; two phone lines; a one-room office; and a $168,000 budget.

That has not quieted them. Mr. Schaeffer pointed out after examining Educational Testing Service’s most recent public disclosure forms that at least 21 E.T.S. executives make salaries larger than FairTest’s entire budget, starting with Mr. Landgraf, who earned $1.07 million in 2004, and three vice presidents, who each earned over half a million.

“Those are outrageous salaries for a nonprofit,” Mr. Schaeffer said.

Mr. Landgraf countered, “The salaries we pay are benchmarked against other organizations in the nonprofit sector and reflect our commitment to hiring the best and brightest.”

FairTest has a knack for catching the testing companies at their worst, sometimes by using the companies’ own research.

In a recent newsletter, FairTest printed an analysis of SAT results, using, and crediting, College Board research showing the direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For every extra $10,000 a family earns, children’s combined math and verbal scores go up 12 to 31 points. So children whose parents earn $50,000 score better on average (a combined 996 SAT) than students from families who earn $40,000 (967) but worse than students from families who earn $60,000 (1014).

For politicians and testing executives bragging about how No Child’s testing emphasis is closing the achievement gap, these are not promising numbers.

In 2004, the College Board demanded that its data breaking down SAT scores by income, race and sex be removed from the FairTest Web site, claiming that the posting was a copyright infringement. But after FairTest showed the letter to reporters, the College Board backed down, calling it a mistake by a junior staff member.

Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the College Board, which develops the PSAT, said the group worked hard to address California’s concerns about that test, and stood by it. She was more generous about FairTest than her E.T.S. counterparts. Though FairTest’s criticisms are painful, she said, “every industry needs a watchdog.”

Mr. Schaeffer, who is a good tester himself (his 800 math SAT helped get him into M.I.T.), plans to keep watch until the money runs out.

Summit on higher education in Canada

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Canada’s Provincial Leaders Unite in Appeal for More Federal Support of Higher Education

By KAREN BIRCHARD

Ottawa

The leaders of Canada’s provinces and territories emerged from an unprecedented summit on higher education here on Friday saying the country needs a vision that will create a culture of higher learning if Canadians want to maintain their standard of living and compete internationally.

They also called on the country’s new government to spend billions of additional dollars on higher education. The premiers stressed, however, that developing a national strategy on higher education and skills training was just as critical as obtaining additional money.

“Failure is just not an option,” said Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario and a co-chairman of the meeting. “Why do we Canadians insist that our hockey players are the best in the world but we settle for less with our postsecondary system?” he asked. “… We’re after nothing less than the best.”

Canadians are deluding themselves if they think the current situation can continue, said Bernard Lord, the premier of New Brunswick. “We need to realize that in the next decade and beyond, 80 percent of all new jobs created in this country will require some postsecondary training or education.”

The summit was organized as a result of a meeting last summer of the Council of the Federation — the group that represents the premiers of the 10 provinces and three territories. Education is a provincial matter, but the provinces depend on some money from the federal government for higher education.

The premiers agreed to put aside their regional differences and take a united approach with university leaders and others in asking the federal government to join them in improving higher education. They invited hundreds of people from across the country — university executives, faculty representatives, students, and business leaders — to a one-day meeting on Friday to gather their ideas on a number of issues that should be included in a pan-Canadian higher-education strategy.

“There’s a lot of intellectual firepower in this room,” Mr. McGuinty said before the delegates broke up into working groups to come up with recommendations for the premiers to help formulate that strategy.

A Quest to Recover Lost Funds and More

Everyone agreed that the premiers had to ask the federal government to restore the $2-billion dollars (U.S.) designated for higher education that it cut in 1995 from federal transfer funds to the provinces. That $2-billion figure is only a starting point, according to Mr. McGuinty, if Canada is serious about competing globally. “India and China are not focused on the 1995 standard; neither are Brazil and Russia,” he said.

“People recognize that cut caused problems in a number of different ways,” said George Soule, national chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students. “You can talk about access, you can talk about quality … but the bottom line is the federal government’s cut had drastic results.”

While Canada’s new Conservative-led government, elected in January, has promised to restore designated funds for higher education, it has not said how much money that will entail.

Getting education, business, and political leaders together for the summit was a good idea, several delegates said. “It’s about time,” said Peter J. George, president of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. “It’s really important in this country to get a handle on what the federal role in higher education ought to be, apart from the traditional areas of supporting research and supporting student assistance.”

There was a sense of urgency in the working groups, participants said, with senior administrators and executives stressing the need to be able to compete with other countries for faculty members, graduate students, skilled workers, and leading-edge researchers. “We’re in a global talent race,” said H. Wade MacLauchlan, the president of the University of Prince Edward Island, one of the participants.

More Than Money Is Needed, Delegates Say

Some delegates noted that it would take more than money to become the best. “If you don’t have a clear vision and benchmarks, throwing money at the problem isn’t going to do it,” said David L. Lindsay, president of the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario.

“In our group discussing research, people said it’s going to take courage from our politicians, who naturally work within a short time cycle, to invest now in something that’s going to bear fruit 10 or 15 years from now,” said Bonnie M. Patterson, president of Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, and chairwoman of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

At the end of the day, there was optimism that perhaps a new way had been found to deal with the federal government. “The very fact of this national conversation will raise the issue on the national political landscape,” said Tom Traves, president of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“In the past, it used to be like Oliver Twist,” said Ken Webb, vice president for academics at Red River College, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “The provinces would go to Ottawa and say ‘Give us some more, please,’ or that’s how Ottawa would characterize it.” With the summit’s united approach, “saying that it’s just the provinces coming for a handout is something the federal government may not be able to do now,” he said.

He added that the premiers can say, “Look, we had hundreds of people — academic leaders, student leaders, industry leaders — from across the country come together and this is what they said is important, and we are here as 13 premiers to tell you it’s important to us.”

The summit’s other co-chairman, Premier Jean Charest of Quebec, said the timing “was perfect” because the premiers could discuss their conclusions at an informal dinner that evening with Canada’s new prime minister, Stephen Harper, telling him that higher education was now a priority item.

But none of the premiers expected an immediate answer. The prime minister had joked when they arrived that the evening would put dinner, not dollars, on the table.

Who is Charles Miller, really?

Charles Miller is the business executive at the helm of George W. Bush’s commission on higher education. The U.S. Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is currently exploring a “No Child Left Behind” type higher education policy, which would impose standardized tests on colleges and universities.

On her website, teacher and education activist, Susan Ohanian has two “backgrounders” on Miller.

Outrages: “Panel explores standard tests for colleges

Outrages: “Charles Miller invests [sic] himself

A recent Fort Worth Weekly article titled “School for Profit” had this to say about Miller:

By 1994, Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best had made a fortune in investment banking. That year he decided to branch out. He rounded up investors and, with $3.5 million in hand, founded a for-profit company called Voyager Expanded Learning. One of those investors was Charles Miller, a millionaire friend of George Bush. The Texas governor tapped Miller to lead the statewide task force on school reform. Miller was also a friend of Margaret Spellings, another education advisor who would become secretary of education when Bush became president.