Ratified

Understanding How Commercialization in Education Led to 2020's AP Tests

After the nation issued a national emergency on March 13, 2020, the impact on public education rushed in like a tsunami. Schools shut their doors and hustled to transition to remote education. The word “unprecedented,” was the word uttered across the country. Both local and federal government levels took note, and a hall pass was granted—mandated end-of-year testing would be waived. Meanwhile, College Board, a non-profit known for the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) tests, soldiered on. The organization cobbled together an at-home version of their end-of-year AP tests in just two months. The result? A flurry of technical issues: crashing tests, server slowness, and bandwidth struggles. College Board’s response? A disregard of complaints as issues on the onus of the student, the test-taker. Now in the wake of its cobbled 2020 AP tests, College Board has earned itself a class action lawsuit. The non-profit faces charges including breach of contract, gross negligence, and violations of the ADA, to name a few. On this episode of Ratified, host Daniel Litwin takes the intersection of business & politics to the US education system, hovering a magnifying glass over high-school standardized testing designed by College Board and trends of commercialization in the industry. In a multi-dimensional analysis, Ratified looks at how the tests grew to popularity, who creates them, what systems keep them a nationwide standard, and why College Board’s latest remote AP testing debacle boils down to much more than just computer error. The podcast welcomes two education professionals for outside analysis and a comprehensive look at the situation. Bob Schaeffer, Interim Executive Director at FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, details the flaws of College Board’s hastily made, at-home AP test. Second guest Carol Burris, Executive Director at the Network for Public Education, provides background on how schools, the College Board, and colleges fell into an unhealthy symbiosis, a relationship that she says ultimately costs children a quality education. “This brand new technology was totally buggy,” said Schaeffer of College Board's two-month-old virtual AP tests. “They never had the technology to do it in the past,” he said, but in a matter of months, the organization had produced a new product. Quite simply, the tests failed to have enough advance planning and testing to work on a variety of devices. So how did CollegeBoard get away with such a shoddy product? “There is no federal agency that regulates standardized testing,” says Schaeffer. By comparison, the federal government has systems in place to test the safety of cat food, but not on the tests that determine a child’s future. Schaeffer says, “There should be a gatekeeper that makes sure that the tests that we give our kids have at least as much protection as the food we feed our pets.” Carol Burris, Executive Director at the Network for Public Education and former public school teacher, puts AP testing under the microscope. The tests, she says, are “better at measuring the wealth of community than they are the quality of the school.” The tests require a nearly $100 fee, creating a socioeconomic gap of accessibility. Beyond that, the tests rely heavily on multiple-choice and are inherently stressful for students. As colleges look highly upon AP tests, many students find themselves over-enrolled in rigorous courses their senior year, drawing away from what Burris describes as a richer educational experience. Burris says of the SAT and AP tests, “The high stakes use makes them popular...however, at the same time it’s doing a real disservice to kids and to teachers and to schools that become subject to having very important decisions made about their existence based on a faulty measurement.” The President of College Board, David Coleman is reported to make a salary of over $1 million a year. That may be destined to change as College Board faces a significant revenue hit, a direct result of their AP test blunder and a nationwide trend to drop the SAT test requirement. The current developments in education post-pandemic open up a wider conversation for the future of standardized testing in public schools, and the questionable responsibility we give to the private organizations that create them. Click here for previous episodes of Ratified, and make sure to subscribe to the Ratified channel on Spotify and to MarketScale Radio on Apple Podcasts.

A Postmortem on Bloomberg 2020’s Marketing and Campaign Strategy

On this episode of Ratified, we’re getting our feet wet with election season content. At the time of release, the Democratic presidential primary is all but settled. Barring some massive shake-up, Joe Biden, former Vice President, will be the nominee for the Democratic Party, ending a long and tumultuous primary race. Many contenders made their case, but we’re spending today’s episode doing a postmortem on one specific campaign, its message, and its marketing strategy: Mike Bloomberg 2020. A late entrance to the 2020 race, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York city and the 12th richest person in the world, created waves when he entered the primary. Progressives loathed his presence, citing his past as a Republican, and his mayoral and interpersonal workplace records as disqualifying. Moderates were hopeful that his experience and his money would make him, potentially, a better and more resilient choice to go against President Trump than Biden. At the end of the day, Mike Bloomberg would peak at about 16.5% polling nationally, edging him into second place for a small period of time, before seeing his campaign collapse after a poor debate performance in February and a lackluster delegate count coming out of Super Tuesday, winning only American Samoa. He’d walk away from the Democratic 2020 presidential primary spending over $1 billion on the campaign. For a while, though, Bloomberg and his campaign seemed like a force to be reckoned with, especially his online presence. So what went wrong? Our two guests provide two different perspectives on Bloomberg’s run, analyzing his strategic steps and missteps, the campaign’s digital marketing strategy, and some of the broader implications of his self-funded run. First, we hear from Dr. Lara Brown, Director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Before her time in academia, Dr. Brown served as a political appointee to President Clinton’s administration in the US Department of Education, and worked as an educational policy and public affairs consultant in LA and Silicon Valley. Dr. Brown helps us better understand some of the history around self-funded candidates, how Bloomberg’s strategy appealed to certain demographics of the Democratic base, and more critically, why the idea of Bloomberg didn’t live up to the reality for voters. Our second guest is Benjamin Dixon, host of The Benjamin Dixon Show and a prominent voice in independent progressive journalism and political commentary. He’s the founder of Progressive Army, an independent digital publication, and co-founder of the second incarnation of The North Star. Benjamin Dixon was a critical part of shining more skeptical lights on Mike Bloomberg’s campaign; he was the journalist who resurfaced the infamous Mike Bloomberg Stop & Frisk audio from his 2015 Aspen Institute speech, the audio that went viral and become a center-piece talking point on news media channels and in the presidential debates. Dixon joined the program to give some context on the audio and its impact on Bloomberg’s chances, how it was received by television stations like CNN and MSNBC, and a broader debate and discussion on how much policy and record impacts a candidate in today’s political environment.

What Could Happen if Film Studios Owned Their Own Theaters

On this episode of Ratified, MarketScale’s podcast on the intersection of policy and business, Voice of B2B Daniel Litwin takes a trip back in time – and to the modern-day legal battleground emerging under President Trump’s DOJ – to examine the 1948 Paramount Decision. To get you up to speed, that 1948 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court came about in a time when block-cooking, blind-buying and circuit dealing were rampant in the film industry. Litwin goes into exactly what those terms mean, but the gist is this – vertical integration in the film industry was dominant, and major companies created monopolies and stifled competition. An initial suit in 1938 bloomed into the 1948 decision, which saw the Supreme Court rule that film studios could no longer legally own their own theaters. This led to a boom for independent theaters and creators. Now, the Department of Justice is looking to reverse course on the decades-old ruling. Essentially, the argument boils down to this – the Antitrust Division of the DOJ believes these restrictions are no longer relevant in a media landscape that has so drastically shifted away from the theater experience of even a decade or two ago. To examine the implications of a potential rollback, Litwin welcomed the University of Southern California’s Dr. John Connor to get some historical perspective, highlight economic structures in modern filmmaking and distribution, where independent media would go in the wake of a reversal, and more. UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Tom Nunan, former president of NBC Studios, among a laundry list of high-profile roles in the film industry, also joined the program to bring insights from the perspective of the country’s largest studios.

What a Sprint & T-Mobile Merger Means for Carriers and Consumers

By early February, we should know whether or not the carrier industry will be left with three key players: AT&T, Verizon, and on the horizon, a merged Sprint and T-Mobile. The merger, though it’s been approved by the DOJ and the FCC, has been tied up in a lawsuit issued by state attorneys general from over a dozen states, who claim the merger would be anti-competitive for the carrier market. Why are the two companies, Sprint and T-Mobile, trying to merge, what’s the context behind the lawsuit, and what are the potential long-lasting effects for the industry? On this episode of Ratified, a MarketScale show on the intersection of business and policy, Voice of B2BDaniel Litwin [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/daniel-litwin/]dives into the proposed merger of the mobile giants and the implications such a merger would have on the wider world of communication. Litwin was joined byLawrence J. White [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/lawrence-j-white/], a Robert Kavesh Professor of Economics at theNYU Stern School of Business [https://www.stern.nyu.edu/], and byHugh Odom [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/hugh-d-odom/], who serves as the president of cell-tower consulting firmVertical Consultants [https://www.celltowerleaseexperts.com/]. Odom also served as an attorney for AT&T’s Western U.S. Region for a decade. White, with his extensive expertise in anti-trust economics, offered his perspective on the specifics of the U.S. Department of Justice’s proposed remedy, the reversal of initial pushback from the DOJ via the addition of Dish as a fourth carrier, and why White views the proposed solution as insufficient. Odom then joined Litwin to offer the industry’s perspective – as an expert knee-deep in the telecom industry, Odom spoke to the potential positive and negative impacts of such a high-profile merger, how carriers, infrastructure and consumers will feel the effects of the partnership, and more. For more on Ratified, followDaniel Litwin [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/daniel-litwin/]on Twitter at@VoiceOfB2B [https://twitter.com/VoiceOfB2B]and subscribe to MarketScale Radio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Why AV Integrators Don’t Want Electrician’s Licenses

This episode of Ratified is trying something new; a considerably more niche topic. Whereas the last two went a little larger in scale, hitting on gig economy legislation in California and the state of net neutrality, this episode of Ratified is a look at the nitty gritty legislative back and forth of lobbying in the telecom and AV industry. Joining Daniel to provide context and perspective is Chuck Wilson, Executive Director of theNational Systems Contractors Association [https://www.nsca.org/], and Keith Kempenich of the North Dakota House of Representatives, representing District 39. In 2019, legislative sessions introduced new language that would’ve either subtly or drastically changed the dynamics of licensing requirements for electricians and tangential industries, like AV and telecom. Lawmakers looked around at technology they thought was new, or at least now more relevant in these industries, and decided it was time to rework licensing around low-voltage lighting, IoT devices, and power over ethernet. This language was meant to keep everyone safe and adjust legal language for the times. If only it were that simple. The different state bills immediately turned the heads of AV industry professionals, and not out of excitement. Listen to the full episode to hear how this battle turned out and get the different perspectives from individuals on both sides of the issue.