Sunday, May 10, 2015
Depassivation
Common Core involves quite a bit of standardized testing, ultimately to evaluate the schools and teachers. Thus the teachers unions and the educrats hate Common Core for valid if venal reasons. I have no idea why Repooflicans hate Common Core, but they do.
This common contempt for Common Core by mutually exclusive organizations creates a fine opportunity for symmetrical scapegoating.
And sure enough, we've got it. In many places the online testing is performed by small tech startups who saw a fine opportunity for gov't contract profits. Some of these startups weren't ready for the job, and even ETS, the biggest and oldest tester in the country, wasn't ready.
Typical case:
What appears to be a denial of service cyber attack may be responsible for preventing hundreds of thousands of students statewide from logging in and taking the Common Core computerized tests Thursday, according to Oakland Unified School District. “As far as we know, it was intentional,” Flint added. “The state was subjected to some sort of attack and that’s what caused the system to bog down.” He adds that the state told his district the issue was sabotage on the school server system, although it’s not clear which server system may have been affected. At the same time, the state department of education says those reports are unfounded. ... “The system was in the process of an upgrade and was coming back online at the time when students were attempting to log onto the system.” California’s testing vendor is Educational Testing Service or ETS.Blaming a "cyberattack" for your own failure: opposite of passivation. [Later: No, I guess it's not the opposite. It's a variant of passivation. The "cyberattack" plays the same role as the "unpredictable natural disaster" which "nobody could have possibly expected" in deflecting blame from your own directly created problem.] ETS really should know better. They've been administering computer-graded tests since the 1950s. Aside from the question of system capacity, they've violated one of the basic rules of testing. Don't change the process in midstream. Don't update your software in the middle of a run. Even if the update doesn't crash, you've invalidated the test by changing ANYTHING during the run. But everything is OK if you can blame the Christians and the KOCH KOCH KOCH KOCH KOCH KOCH Repoofs KOCH KOCH KOCH KOCH KOCH KOCH. Can't sue us, nyah nyah nyah. ¶ 4:48 AM
