More of the Same
Two weeks ago, we described how the weekly drum beat of Dave Astor takes up space on the editorial page of the Montclair Times. Of course, he was at it again last week for anyone (anyone?) who will look. This time, he linked the Pearson company behind the PARCC tests to Joe Walsh and Halloween frights for laughs. Yes, really.
Mr. Astor is but a small piece in an organized attack machine that has been well documented by both the Montclair Schools Watch blogger and the MKF folks. We’re still somewhat surprised that the Montclair Times hasn’t shared more of that story, but given how often their reporters and editor names pop up in the emails, maybe we shouldn’t be.
As one may see with Mr. Astor’s weekly columns, the approach of the defenders of the status quo specialize in attacking any idea or proposed change or person/organization behind such activity. Their aggressiveness on the attack is complemented by the complete lack of any concrete proposals of their own. A brief side note here. We give propers to the MKF crew for not stooping to the MCAS level, or even acknowledging their attacks on their programs or members.
Since this evening Mr. Bolandi will discuss the Achievement Gap and PARCC testing at the fire house, we thought we would use the (Achievement Gap Advisory Panel) AGAP as a bit of a use case for the status quo crowd. The AGAP presented their findings, report, and proposed activities to help Montclair narrow the achievement gap back in the Spring of this year.
If you read the complete set of AGAP documents, you can’t help but appreciate the hard work this group of volunteers put in to analyze the many aspects of the issues, including specific actions they proposed to help narrow the gap. What has been the response of the MCAS media outlets and same 10 speakers (as Bolandi described them) at the BOE meetings? Mostly silence. The night the report was presented a few speakers got up and embarrassed themselves. Members of the panel politely corrected their inaccurate claims of the AGAP’s data gathering methods. The MCAS team hates big data. In fact, one of their leaders constantly rants about it on twitter, but that’s a different story.
More recently, any post on the AGAP by those who run the MCAS echo chamber are met by an online shrug. For example, a post yesterday on Montclair Share (the defacto MCAS FB group) “sharing” Jonathan Simon’s email to his email list looking for members to get involved received 1 “like” and no comments. Why is that?
We don’t know for sure, but here is our theory. Most of the AGAP proposals require work, resources, and yes, money. They also incorporate many of the changes that have long been proposed by the “reformers” in terms of metrics on performance of both students and teachers. It doesn’t take a genius to see that MCAS is not going to support that for their Union members. The problem for them is that their hands are tied. They can’t take their normal approach and attack the message and the messengers because 1) the proposals they have made have been shown to work in other districts across the country, 2) the beneficiaries of the proposed changes would be a constituency they claim to represent (lower income families), and 3) the interim superintendent has in his past positions implemented many of the same proposals.
Finally, and most significantly, any diversion of financial resources from the current budget to address the AGAP would risk impacting the largest piece of the budget. We’ll let you guess what that is. We will give you a clue though. Last month Andrew Gideon wrote about the zeroing out of the technology budget last year. The MCAS crew summarily and shortsightedly dismissed his arguments as an “either/or” proposition — teachers or technology. Right.
Look for more of the same tonight.
