Beware the Vultures in Education

Just because a person, system, or approach is "generating results" doesn't mean it's worth pursuing

In Chapter 1 of Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community is the Curriculum, author Dave Cormier wrote the following:

There are many “thought leaders” out there right now who would like you to think that we’re undergoing unprecedented change… If their clients are convinced that we’ve “never seen this kind of change before,” they can say whatever they want and call it “innovation.”

Governments and the media turn to people who have had success with a particular kind of change for advice on its implications… Today, the people who’ve made money from change are folks like the leaders of Facebook and Tesla, and we see them as people to turn to for advice on “what it all means.” That’s kind of like a pack of wildebeests asking a vulture what to do about the lack of water. The argument goes like this: all these other animals are dying, and the vultures are getting fat. Those vultures must be doing something right.

Well, yes, I suppose the vultures are doing something right. They have a vested interest in the animals dying because they want to eat the animals. They are not going to come up with a plan for finding a new source of water- it’s neither something they have any particular skill in nor something that they will be rewarded for doing. Quite the opposite in fact. Our Silicon Valley overlords have a vested interest in making money. Their financial success shows that they may have some expertise in making money- but that doesn’t mean they can tell us how their technology impacts our lives. Or, even, how it should.”

This analogy blew me away for its applicability across our society, and in education in particular. We have a system of mainstream education that is often dehumanizing for all involved: students and teachers alike. It is funded and maintained by individuals and organizations that benefit from the mass dehumanization of our children which is institutionalized by the government with programs like No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, and perpetuated by companies who hold monopolies over the education market.

How did we get here? We put our system in the hands of vultures who promised that, for a fee, they could produce results that were “objective” and could improve education nation-wide. Yet, these vultures neither produced results of value nor improved the education status quo. In this post, I will be diving into who some of the “vultures” are in education, and how we might flip the script against them.

The Testing Monopoly, Common Core, and the Fallacy of Test Scores

There is a myth that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were designed by teachers and have been improving education in the U.S. for over a decade.

Both of these claims are false.

The CCSS were funded by testing and curriculum companies who designed the standards to be easily testable, so they could ensure that schools would keep buying their tests and their curriculum. There was no consideration for human development or how children learn, as the CCSS presumes a linear path of academic growth, which is not how anyone’s brain works. This has been discussed at length by experts in psychology and child development ever since the inception of the CCSS. In the final stages of the project, teachers were brought in for the purpose of appearing as though they had a say, though teachers were not meaningfully represented in the creation process of the CCSS. Rather, those who created the standards represented testing and curriculum companies who designed the framework to solidify their hold on the market. If the standards are designed to be testable, then the curriculum must be designed for the test. It creates terrible pedagogy, but is great for business. For more on this, check out Rethinking School’s great article on it.

In response to this evidence, I still hear support for the Common Core. People ask, “but didn’t raising the standards raise the level of education provided, or student achievement, even if the design wasn’t ideal?”

I hear this a lot from well-meaning educators who can’t fathom a world without standards to follow- the thinking is that before we had universal standards, education was a Hobbesian state of nature, where teacher taught whatever they wanted and getting a good education was like a game of Russian Roulette. However, a study from the University of Pennsylvania showed that schools that fully implemented the Common Core State Standards showed that their students academic achievement, as measured by standardized assessment (which is what the CCSS is designed for), either stagnated, or declined.

Let me say that again: Schools that fully implemented the Common Core State Standards either showed no improvement in achievement or had students achieving less.

This study came out in mid-2022. There was no meaningful media coverage of this study. Curriculum and testing companies continue to claim that schools which haven’t seen results simply aren’t fully implementing the standards. These vultures which benefit from the CCSS continue to use any excuse possible to maintain their power at the expense of our children.

During COVID, there were headlines galore about so-called “learning loss” as a result of online learning. However, this was merely a purposeful misrepresentation of data collected by testing companies in order to sell their “learning loss curriculum.” The Human Restoration Project did a great piece on the learning loss fallacy, linked here. Their diagram below is descriptive of the pattern which these companies used to justify and sell more tests and curriculum.

Diagram from the Human Restoration Project

The truth of the matter is that we should not expect for-profit companies, who have a vested interest in securing profit at any cost, to have the best interests of our students, teachers, or families at heart. These companies spend millions of dollars lobbying each year to maintain their hold over the industry because they know that standards and tests are not needed to have a stellar education system: just look at Finland, which has the best education system in the world, and gives no standardized tests, yet a system which does not rely on standards and tests makes it much more difficult for them to maintain power and influence.

This is just the beginning of a multi-part exploration of the “vultures” in the field of education. When examining what the so-called “winners” of our system say, we need to do better at looking to where the power and money flow. We cannot keep allowing vultures to run our education system.

To be continued…