Rankings are a tool of control.  You get rewarded if your rankings are high… You don’t get rewards and suffer if they are low… therefore you should do everything in your power to meet “our” goals which “we” set, “we” placed before you, “we” forced you to sign, which “we” will siphon and judge the results, which “we” will then issue you a pass if “we” like you and think you are one of us, or “we” will fail you if “we” don’t like you and don’t want you around us in “our” clique….

Of course this will never sell, …so you coach rankings as having some benefit to society overall…   In the past due to lack of data, we really never had to deal with rankings as a society before the onslaught of computers…  Before that, favoritism was  just blatant favoritism…   “I” like you so “I’ll” promote you over this other person…

But now with the manipulation of data being used to back up choices of favoritism… there is an clear and apparantly increased danger. Whereas before “I” may have not picked you because “I” liked Penny better, …. now, “I” still am picking Penny but your data has been manipulated so others who have no knowledge of your history, simply look at a score and dismiss you out of policy….

In the past that didn’t happen… If after losing to Penny, you went somewhere else and interviewed, they looked at your personality and said, wow, what a great candidate…   Now… your score stops you before the first gate….

Now here’s the rub… In the contest between you and Penny, you could have been in the top 98 percentile of human beings in all categories, and still lose to Penny who is in the 99th percentile… So you would be a great candidate elsewhere, but… your data bank… has been ruined to justify the selection of Penny… and you can’t get a decent job…

Of course, if you could ever get past the gate, you could use your skills too develop a rapport with the interviewer and if you are truly that good, you should be able to sell them on the concept of over-ruling their corporate gatekeeper’s decision..  Like how many of you have ever been turned down for a credit score and so never get the chance to make your case?  You know this, so you go through quite a bit of stress and trouble just to keep that score high, now don’t you?  You do whatever they want, so your score is not blemished… You become their puppet… “I know you are suppose to be in a wedding but I need you to stay and finish this project this weekend…”  “Ok, I’ll tell my daughter I can’t come.”

Ratings are a tool of control, a tool for subject manipulation….

And so it is with rating schools…. All rankings are as subjective as are College Football rankings…  A great team not among the usual candidates is not ranked until they knock off a top contender.  No matter how awesome; it is subjective. Even then, if an unranked team beats the number one team,…. thumps them…., the number one team drops one or two levels, and the winner barely gets on the board, maybe at 25…  Subjectivity.

All schools across our future will be rated according to an agenda, depending on who controls them in the future… If is racial, they will be ranked by growth (if catering to the black community) or by top scores (if catering to the white community)… If Political, they will be ranked by likability, and if catering to the business community, they will be ranked so charters get favored…

What has worked well these last several years though is simply the publishing of all information… In fact, today the information is beginning to be curtailed because it was too successfully used in combating the administration’s switch from public schools to corporate schools’ policy… The lies they told, were all too quickly refuted by the availability of all the data…

With large pools of data one gets a balanced sense of a school.  Gee, scores are low… but look at the numbers of low income… Obviously then those low scores do not mean teachers can’t teach….The actual improvement of those low scores over time in fact show the exact opposite.  Inner city teachers are doing very well…..  But on the opposite side, charters with high scores are lazy, living off the abilities of their students. Unchallenging, unimaginative, and unproductive, their data shows they are under-performing, though they trumpet how highly ranked their scores are…

This is lost in corporate rankings; grades of A, B, C, D, F.  For gone is the methodology… There is no accountability behind the determination of the scores other than “it’s because we say so”…  If Wilmington Charter is number one… it is number one.  If Bayard Middle school is last at 98… It is last at 98 ….

This is not to say rankings should not be part of society.  They have their place in corporations…  After all, a corporation is based on one single motif, earn money and how and why that money gets earned is not necessary to know.  Just who is driving our money is all that is needed for a corporation to continue making money…

But that single mindedness does not apply outside corporate life… Here is a startling example. Should we rank our children?  How would we go about it?  How would we decide which of all of them is the better?  And rightfully … could we?   Because as parents we see their differences and we see how each has different strengths and we recognize that their rankings will be determined strictly by “OUR” BIAS on how we choose to develop “our” rubric for that purpose…

Rankings are nothing but a confirmation of “our” own bias….

Which is why rankings continue promoting the status quo whether that status quo should be continued, or not….

How can “you” stop this?

“You” decided not to play… “You” leave your corporation and find another job.  “You” file for divorce.  “You” strike. “you”go to war.

Bottom line is they need you more than you need them…

They always succumb if “you all” stick together…. So go to Dover and learn how parents can be a force in the Strike against the Smarter Balanced Assessment….

Rankings are only good if you are in the top 1 percent…. Which means that 99% of us should wish as for ourselves, that our own children have their future decided upon their own merit, as judged by human beings who know them for one whole school year at a time… and not by some $11 dollar an hour temp in some test grading warehouse in Nashville Tennessee who grades 25 assessments per every hour.

This is what is wrong with education… This is why, “you” need to stop it.