“Wait, someone scores standardized tests? I thought those were all done by machines.” This is usually the first response I get when I tell people I’ve been eking out a living as a test-scoring temp. The companies responsible for scoring standardized tests have not yet figured out a way to electronically process the varied handwriting and creative flourishes of millions of third to twelfth graders. Nor, to my knowledge, have they begun to outsource this work to India. Instead, every year, the written-response portions of innumerable standardized tests given across the country are scored by human beings—tens of thousands of us, a veritable army of temporary workers.

via The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer.

I know if Jonathan Kozol were to read this–and he probably knows about it–he’d throw his laptop out the window. The standarized tests are not even being graded with the scantron machines (as I grew up with in the 80′s and 90′s). I too am actually surprised that they haven’t outsourced this to India.

Behold the testing empire:

Test scoring is a huge business, dominated by a few multinational corporations, which arrange the work in order to extract maximum profit.

To end..

Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators.

Nearly every claim made by charter school proponents has come under fire in the last year. A major national study shows that test performance is on average no better in charters than in traditional schools; another report contradicts the stated “civil rights” mission of the charter movement, claiming that the schools are actually exacerbating racial segregation.

And now a third plank of the charter movement platform—that they provide a greater “bang for the buck” by avoiding waste and fraud—is starting to warp.

via Charter Schools’ Big Success? Accounting Tricks, Shady Land Deals, and Skimming Off the Top | Labor Notes.

There are some good charter schools out there I have to say. Although personally I’d rather see smaller public schools rather than privatization.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

via The New Poor – For-Profit Schools Cashing In on Recession and Federal Aid – NYTimes.com.

I went to a two-year private business school and I’m still in debt. I have an Associate’s Degree in Multimedia Development and Management. I went to school at night while I worked in the retail and retail banking wage slave industries in the daytime.

When I finished school in 2002 I was one of the people who thought, finally I could leave the bank I was working at and do something more in line with what I wanted to do. It turns out I did not get anywhere for two more years. I was stuck working as a bank teller. I would apply for jobs all the time but you could not get anywhere. People have forgotten that the economy then was similar to what it is now. Sure the housing bubble had not burst yet, but there were many people hurting, especially in New York. I do feel the aftermath of 9/11 had something to do with the economy then, but it wasn’t the only thing wrong with the economy.

Eventually, I took back up something that had really interested me in high school and that was politics and government. I became a local activist and volunteer in my off time from my job. Eventually I got sick of sales and banking and corporations and I did something that only a 25 year old still living with a parent in 2004 could do — I quit. I had some money saved that would probably last me a few months and I was going to make sure that I did something I wanted to do from now on.

I was lucky to hop on to a couple of local political campaigns as a paid staffer and do some field work. In 2005 I searched for opportunities and did some part time work. Then in 2006 I went to a training in DC for young political people who they were going to teach online organizing. Since I had the tech background from my Associate’s Degree and I had a little political experience this was a welcome turn of events.

Through the connections I made there in 2006 I am where I want to be today. The funny thing is I’m now applying what I learned in school but to help a good cause in the non-profit world. If I had tried to get into the web design/graphic design world on my own I would have probably still been stuck. It was through becoming an activist that I was able to get where I am now working in DC.

In the end the business school I went to still has my diploma and transcript because I owe them money. For the first time ever I’ve started to save money and hopefully I will be able to pay them off. Then with my transcript and diploma in hand I will be in a better position to see what educational opportunities are out there for me. I’d like to take up something in the public policy area.

I could seek scholarships and/or financial aid. I really don’t think highly of student loans anymore. The only good thing about the federal loan I have is that you can pay as little as $50 a month and it can go back into deferment if you go back to school (at least I think it’s still that way). In any case I’d much rather have a federal loan than a private loan.

This article in the NY Times is very informative. It is true that there are now tons of private schools selling themselves as the solution to putting people to work in a trade or etc. They cost way too much to attend and it is the low-income to moderate income people that suffer. In a way it is privatization at its worst. We should be investing more in our community colleges and state universities. We cannot forget that they too can be expensive for people.

The protesting has begun.

Thousands of students, parents, teachers and community members from across Washington, D.C., converged on the district’s Freedom Plaza yesterday afternoon to rally in support of hundreds of laid-off teachers.Nearly 400 school employees have been laid off as a result of controversial decisions by D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee. The layoffs include 229 classroom teachers, many of them veterans. The Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) has protested the layoffs, saying that many teachers have been targeted for their age and that the firings are poorly timed and an attempt to undermine the teachers’ contract.

Like I said before, were all of these teachers that detrimental to Rhee’s new system that she had to get rid of them all?

Michelle Rhee has been getting a lot of accolades and press attention over the past few months to a year now. While most of it is most likely warranted, that doesn’t mean that some of her undertakings cannot be constructively scrutinized.

Here is the case being made by veteran teachers in the DC school system:

Few disagree that DC’s Public School system has been failing for decades or with Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s assertion that a big part of the problem is low expectation, but firing those teachers who have stuck it out the longest in a system that not only fails students but fails to provide teachers with the basic tools they need to educate effectively is not the answer. If the veteran teachers that Michelle Rhee is firing are why DCPS has faired so poorly, then why hasn’t a school like Shaw, which she overhauled with eager, yet inexperienced teachers and expensive "master educators" done better under the new regime?

It is indeed a fair question. To me being a teacher is one of the hardest jobs there is. It’s almost as if you have to have “a calling” to be a teacher. It’s similar to being a member of a clergy in some ways. Teaching is not for everyone and here we have some veteran teachers who have “stuck it out” and are now being turned away. Can they all be that incompatible and horrible for Rhee’s new system?

Robert Bowman wants to be a lawyer. He tried the whole Horatio Alger Jr. story for himself. He went to community college, worked and borrowed money for the schools he attended. What he did is what millions of college students attempt to do. But as I often say we are in the age of the Strapped and it makes it very difficult for any of us to get ahead. The amount of debt one has to enter into in order to get a post high school education is tragic.

In January, the committee of New York lawyers that reviews applications for admission to the bar interviewed Mr. Bowman, studied his history and the debt he had amassed, and called his persistence remarkable. It recommended his approval.

But a group of five state appellate judges decided this spring that his student loans were too big and his efforts to repay them too meager for him to be a lawyer.

So they are now preventing him from actually starting his career which could lead to him begining to pay down his loans. That’s just great.

I’m surprised that the Obama administration did not see this coming.

"Even if it’s inadvertently discriminatory, it’s still discriminatory because the majority of the teachers wiped out in these turnarounds are African American," offered Chicago teacher Wanda Evans. The fired veteran teachers, CORE also maintains, are being replaced by a much younger, much whiter and much less experienced corps of instructors graduated from a handful of accelerated programs funded by Boeing, the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bradley, Walton Family, Rockerfeller and other foundations, and favored by City Hall and the Commercial Club. "The new teachers are paid half or less what experienced teachers with advanced degrees were making. They are forced to work longer hours. They are reluctant to stand up for themselves or their students and tend to be fearful of participating in union and other activities. A high percentage of them burn out or are not asked to stick around after their first year," according to Jackson Potter, another CORE teacher.

This article is really worth reading all the way through.