Billions for Online Testing, Online Curriculum & Technology. This was never about the kids.

Reblogged from Peg with Pen

As Obama rolls out coding for everyone, updates his technology plan, his testing action plan, the relaunch of peer review of state assessment plans, and pushes forward all sorts of lovely competency based digital badging via workforce/skills training, daily testing, online curriculum, etc. etc. via ESSA, folks are debating the merits of these particular initiatives. I recall going through this with common core and I seriously wanted to throw my entire set of dishes across the room every time I had to have this conversation and this is why….

First – make no mistake – this is being rolled out not because the corporations and the Dept. of Ed. suddenly sense this absolute urgency to fulfill a child’s desperate life long need to learn coding and/or punch away at a computer all day in absolute zombie like glaze-eyed fashion. They would love – absolutely love – for us to spin our wheels debating what we like and don’t like while we interact within their test/punish system that continues to drive profit to the .01% while destroying the public school system and the teaching profession and ranking/sorting/ordering our children to keep privilege with the privileged.

Oh and be sure to check out the time for the rollout of all the initiatives along with the passage of ESSA – all in one full swoop – carefully planned and orchestrated within months. Understand one thing clearly – the test/punish system must be destroyed in its entirety if there is any hope whatsoever of shutting down the madness of privatization headed our way via ESSA.

And why all of this so fast????? Because it MAKES MONEY. If this were about children we would see Obama throwing billions into funding for librarians, nurses, counselors, fine arts, small class size, building repairs, books, more teachers with teaching degrees, after school activities, health care, nutrition and more. But NO. This is about data. This is about demands and shifts in the market to meet the NEEDS OF THE MARKET – NOT CHILDREN.

I mean think about it- we’ve got buildings with no teachers, buildings with black mold and schools with no resources. But suddenly…….suddenly everyone needs to learn coding? Yeah. Right. I took coding in high school and college. Yawn.

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