Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In recent years, we have heard and read a lot about the failure of public schools in the United States. “Our schools are failing” has almost become a mantra with members of the media, many of our politicians, and the advocates of school reform. I have seen few people who have questioned the assertions made by the media, elected officials, and school reformers that schools in this country are not adequately educating our youth and that our educational system is a total and abject failure.
Many of those who criticize our public education system offer charter schools and the privatization of public schools as solutions to the “education problem” in this country.
I’m a retired public school educator. I have known and am friends with many current and former public school teachers. I know that there are many fine classroom practitioners working in our public schools today…and many excellent schools where our children receive a quality education. I am aware that there are also many schools where children may not be receiving the highest quality education. (What often go unmentioned in the media are the real reasons—including poverty—why some schools in this country may be failing.)
One problem with the “our schools are failing” mantra—as I see it—is that all our schools are lumped together in one basket labeled “failing.” How did this come to be? Do we Americans really believe that NO public schools in this country provide their students with an adequate education? Do we believe that all schools need to be reformed? If not, do we believe that even the schools which are actually doing an estimable job of educating their students need to be reformed?
I think it is time we start taking a good look at the individuals and organizations that are behind the push to establish thousands of charter schools and to use taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools as the means of raising the quality of education in this country.
ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council)
Last May, education historian Diane Ravitch wrote the following about one group that has been driving the school reform movement:
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.
Ravitch continued:
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.
ALEC Exposed provides a wealth of information about how—through ALEC—“corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers’ unions…” (You can find the information in Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers–the ALEC report prepared by The Center for American Democracy.)
Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst
In addition to ALEC, there is another organization called StudentsFirst that has been helping to spearhead the effort to “reform” our public schools. According to Stephanie Simon, Michelle Rhee, founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, has “emerged as the leader of an unlikely coalition of politicians, philanthropists, financiers and entrepreneurs who believe the nation’s $500 billion-a-year public education system needs a massive overhaul.” Simon added that Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, “has vowed to raise $1 billion” for StudentsFirst, and “forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.”
Simon continued:
StudentsFirst has its own political action committee (PAC), its own SuperPAC, and a staff of 75, including a cadre of seasoned lobbyists Rhee sends from state to state as political battles heat up. She has flooded the airwaves with TV and radio ads in a half dozen states weighing new policies on charter schools, teacher assessment and other hot-button issues.
To her supporters, Rhee is a once-in-a-generation leader who has the smarts and the star power to make a difference on one of the nation’s most intractable public policy issues.
But critics say Rhee risks destroying the very public schools she aims to save by forging alliances with political conservatives, evangelical groups and business interests that favor turning a large chunk of public education over to the private sector. She won’t disclose her donors, but public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations.
In January the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign published its review of Rhee’s StudentsFirst State Policy Report Card for 2013:
Here’s an excerpt from the summary of the campaign’s review:
On Monday, the pro-privatization education group StudentsFirst, led by former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, released a State Policy Report Card, ranking states and giving each a letter grade based on their implementation of a slew of education reform policies. Rather than focus on issues facing students and families, particularly those affected by unequal access to school resources, the policy benchmarks in the new report reveal StudentsFirst’s obsession with charter schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession. The report pushes policies that are either untested or disproven — but happen to be welcome in the halls of right-wing think tanks and politicians.
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign listed five reasons why the StudentsFrirst Report Card is “a veritable wish list for privatization advocates and a recipe for failure for everyone else”:
1. Ironically, It Ignores The Needs of Students
2. It Opposes Personalized and Student-Centered Learning
3. It Argues That We Don’t Have Enough Quality Teachers… While Advocating That We Lower the Bar for Teacher Preparation
4. It Continues the Disastrous High-Stakes Testing Drumbeat
5. It Advocates “Equal Funding” and “Equitable Access” for Charter Corporations and Private Schools, Not Students
The DeVos Family
In May of 2011, Rachel Tabachnick wrote an article for AlterNet about the DeVos family, a wealthy family that has “remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America’s schools” that has the “potential to do away with public education as we know it.”
Quoting Tabachnick:
Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.
The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.
According to Tabachnick, the Devoses, who are big contributors to the Republican Party, spent millions of dollars “promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000.” Following that defeat, Tabachnick claims that the family decided to alter its strategy.
Tabachnick:
Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.
Dick DeVos advocates “stealth” strategy, Heritage Foundation, December 3, 2002
Last April, Daniel Denvir wrote an article for City Paper about the push for a school voucher program in the state of Pennsylvania. He said that names on the fliers of “legislative hopefuls” sounded like the names of “homegrown” candidates. He said that a “different picture” emerged when one followed the money:
…that of a statewide campaign, funded by wealthy donors, to stack the Pennsylvania primary battles on April 24 in favor of those supporting school vouchers, which allocate taxpayer funds for private and religious school tuition. The pro-voucher political action committee (PAC) Students First — funded by Pennsylvania hedge-fund managers and American Federation for Children, a Washington, D.C., pro-voucher group headed by Amway heiress and major right-wing donor Betsy DeVos — emerged on the state’s political scene with a bang for the 2010 elections. And they are back to spend big in 2012.
Lawrence Feinberg, co-chairman of the anti-voucher Keystone State Education Coalition, said, “I see a move by essentially a handful of very wealthy people who want to privatize public education for a wide variety of reasons. Not the least of which has to do with crushing labor unions, but they also want tax dollars going to private and religious schools.”
School Reform and The Profit Motive
In his Salon article The Bait and Switch of School “Reform,” David Sirota writes about the profit motive behind some of the reforms being advocated by “Big Money” interests.
Sirota:
As the Texas Observer recently reported in its exposé of one school-focused mega-corporation, “in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom — most of it supplied by private companies.”
A straightforward example of how this part of the profit-making scheme works arose just a few months ago in New York City. There, Rupert Murdoch dumped $1 million into a corporate “reform” movement pushing to both implement more standardized testing and divert money for education fundamentals (hiring teachers, buying textbooks, maintaining school buildings, etc.) into testing-assessment technology. At the same time, Murdoch was buying an educational technology company called Wireless Generation, which had just signed a lucrative contract with New York City’s school system (a sweetheart deal inked by New York City school official Joel Klein, who immediately went to work for Murdoch.
Such shenanigans are increasingly commonplace throughout America, resulting in a revenue jackpot for testing companies and high tech firms, even though many of their products have not objectively improved student achievement.
At the same time, major banks are reaping a windfall from “reformers’” successful efforts to take public money out of public schools and put it into privately administered charter schools. As the New York Daily News recently reported:
“Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years…
“The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation. By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
“No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.”
SOURCES
Ravitch: A primer on the group driving school reform (Washington Post)
Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks (Reuters)
5 Ways Michelle Rhee’s Report Puts Students Last (National Opportunity to Learn Campaign)
Right-Wing Campaign to Privatize Public Ed Takes Hold in Pennsylvania (AlterNet)
Big corporate money in support of school vouchers hits primary races statewide. Will it tip the scales in Philly? (City Paper)
The bait and switch of school “reform” (Salon)
The Deep Pockets Behind Education Reform (Forbes)
Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers (The Center for American Democracy)
E-Mails Show Jeb Bush Foundation Lobbied For Businesses, Including One Tied To Bush
Lee Fang
January 30, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172551/e-mails-show-jeb-bush-foundation-lobbied-businesses-including-one-tied-bush#
Excerpt:
A public interest group has released the results of a multi-state Freedom of Information Act request concerning the lobbying efforts by the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), the nonprofit led by Jeb Bush. The e-mails confirm previous reporting showing that Bush’s policies are designed to benefit businesses seeking to privatize public education—particularly the companies that finance Bush’s nonprofit.
What’s new in this release, however, is the revelation that Bush could be using his education reform crusade for personal gain.
In one e-mail from last year, Bush’s top aide at his foundation, Patricia Levesque, communicated with school officials to urge them to use a company called SendHub, a start-up that uses cloud computing and text messages. Bush, according to TechCrunch, has a modest “five-figure” investment in SendHub. Garrett Johnson, the founder of SendHub, previously worked for Bush and still serves on the board of Foundation for Florida’s Future, another Bush-run education nonprofit.
In November of 2011, I published my first investigation with The Nation and The Nation Institute concerning the rush of for-profit education technology companies to enact radical “virtual schools” across the country. In the reporting, we uncovered that many individuals associated with the education reform universe—even those ostensibly leading major philanthropic foundations—are closely tied to the for-profit interests who stand to gain from these policies. Levesque, we reported, was quietly receiving funds directly from for-profit education tech companies while also serving as the executive director of Bush’s nonprofit.
E-mails link Bush foundation, corporations and education officials
Posted by Valerie Strauss
January 30, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/30/e-mails-link-bush-foundation-corporations-and-education-officials/
Excerpt:
A nonprofit group released thousands of e-mails today and said they show how a foundation begun by Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and national education reform leader, is working with public officials in states to write education laws that could benefit some of its corporate funders.
A call to the foundation has not been returned.
The e-mails are between the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) and a group Bush set up called Chiefs for Change, whose members are current and former state education commissioners who support Bush’s agenda of school reform, which includes school choice, online education, retention of third-graders who can’t read and school accountability systems based on standardized tests. That includes evaluating teachers based on student test scores and grading schools A-F based on test scores. John White of Louisiana is a current member, as is Tony Bennett, the new commissioner of Florida who got the job after Indiana voters rejected his Bush-style reforms last November and tossed him out of office.
Donald Cohen, chair of the nonprofit In the Public Interest, a resource center on privatization and responsible for contracting in the public sector, said the e-mails show how education companies that have been known to contribute to the foundation are using the organization “to move an education agenda that may or not be in our interests but are in theirs.”
He said companies ask the foundation to help state officials pass laws and regulations that make it easier to expand charter schools, require students to take online education courses, and do other things that could result in business and profits for them. The e-mails show, Cohen said, that Bush’s foundation would often do this with the help of Chiefs for Change and other affiliated groups.
The e-mails were obtained by Cohen’s group through public record requests and are available here, complete with a search function. They reveal — conclusively, he said — that foundation staff members worked to promote the interests of some of their funders in Florida, New Mexico, Maine, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Louisiana.
The Web site of the Foundation for Excellence in Education used to list some of their donors but no longer does and is not required to list all of its donors to the public under tax rules for 5013C organizations. However, it is known that the foundation has received support from for-profit companies K12 and Pearson and Amplify, as well as the nonprofit College Board.
There are strong connections between FEE and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy:
Aptly named FEE, Bush’s group is backed by many of the same for-profit school corporations that have funded ALEC and vote as equals with its legislators on templates to change laws governing America’s public schools. FEE is also bankrolled by many of the same hard-right foundations bent on privatizing public schools that have funded ALEC. And, they have pushed many of the same changes to the law, which benefit their corporate benefactors and satisfy the free market fundamentalism of the billionaires whose tax-deductible charities underwrite the agenda of these two groups.
FEE and ALEC also have had some of the same “experts” as members or staff, part of the revolving door between right-wing groups. They have also collaborated on the annual ALEC education “report card” that grades states’ allegiance to their policy agenda higher than actual student performance. That distorted report card also rewards states that push ALEC’s beloved union-busting measures while giving low grades to states with students who actually perform best on standardized knowledge tests.
Mike,
I agree. The new corporate-style school reform is not about meeting the educational needs of children or inspiring their creativity and ingenuity. It’s about training little automatons to only think “inside” the box…to fill in little bubbles on high stakes standardized tests…to control the children AND their teachers. It is actually destroying the good things in the American educational system.
I have believed from early on that the school reform movement was about busting unions and destroying the public school system so that people would believe there was a need for alternative forms of education in this country. What I wasn’t aware of was how much of it was being driven by people like Gates, the Waltons, Devoses, hedge fund manners, educational publishers, etc.
There is a fundamental and inherent lie in teacher’s unions. The PRIMARY function of any union is to protect its members. So, when teacher’s union people say, “It’s all about the kids” that is a lie on its face and hypocrisy personified. If teachers unions would stop that lie I would have less of a problem w/ them.
Tony,
Ravitch was once a supporter of No Child Left behind and charter schools.
*****
Diane Ravitch on the “Effort to Destroy Public Ed”
Abby Rapoport
October 2, 2012
Part 2 of the Prospect’s interview with the former assistant secretary of education
http://prospect.org/article/diane-ravitch-effort-destroy-public-ed
Excerpt;
When Diane Ravitch changed her mind about education reform, she became one of the leading critics of a movement that dominates American policy. For the most part, both Democrats and Republicans now push to make school systems resemble economic markets. They want fewer teacher protections, more testing, and more charter schools for parents to choose from. President Barack Obama’s Department of Education, headed by education reformer Arne Duncan, shares many policy goals with those of George W. Bush’s administration. Ravitch herself was once part of the movement, promoting student assessments and helping to create voluntary academic standards. After serving as assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, she held positions at the pro-school-reform movement Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and was a member of the Koret Task Force at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, which focuses on school choice and “accountability.” But in 2009, Ravitch left both positions and wrote a book announcing her move to the other side of the debate.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System excoriates the reform movement, arguing there’s virtually no evidence that any of the agenda—school choice, testing, and the like—have improved public education. She writes and speaks frequently about the dangerous role that for-profit businesses have assumed in shaping education policy and about the simultaneous risk that wealthy nonprofit foundations like the Gates Foundation have too much clout in policymaking. Along with actor Matt Damon, she helped organize 2011’s Save Our Schools, a national rally opposing high-stakes testing and budget cuts to schools.
I sat down with Ravitch while she was visiting Austin, Texas. (She attracted big crowds at both a convention for school boards and administrators and at a public conversation held in a local high school.) On Monday I posted our conversation about the Chicago teachers’ strike, the politics of education reform, and the myth of a crisis in public education. Here is part two of the interview, in which Ravitch addresses the proper role of charter schools, the potentials and pitfalls of technology, and what people can do to really help American schools.
You’ve been a vocal critic of charters and school choice, arguing that they weed out the students who are difficult to educate and weaken traditional schools. Instead, you’ve advocated for neighborhood schools, saying they promote a better community of parents and teachers working together. But are there any areas in which public schools could learn from charters? For instance, when it comes to a longer school day, as the high-performing KIPP Academies have?
I think the charter-school movement has as much to learn from public schools as public schools from charter schools. I don’t see any examples of where the charter school movement has been so successful that public schools ought to be learning from them. I hear this question all the time: Why aren’t they learning from charters? Well, there are a lot of terrible charters. Why should we be learning from them? Why aren’t they learning from the best public schools?
Is the success of charters—those few that are successful—is it because they have longer school days or because they are selecting their students?
I started out being supportive of charters. Then I became agnostic on charters. Then I became skeptical of charters. And I now think that charter schools are leading us to having a dual school system again. We’re going back to the period before Brown v. Board of Education, but the differentiation in the future will be based on class instead of race.
Do you think there are any lesson to be learned from charter schools?
Yes: Take out the low-performing kids and get high scores. That’s the lesson.
So a longer school day—does that make sense?
Not necessarily. I mean, the issue in the Chicago strike—one of the issues—was that Rahm Emanuel wanted a longer school day and the teachers said we want a better school day. Longer doesn’t necessarily translate into better. If your school doesn’t have a library, if you don’t have any arts and music programs, why is more time better? Is it more time for test prep? No, it’s not better.
“[I]t is probably impossible to convince the richest man in the world (at least he has been a few times) that his thinking is wrong when he has tens of billions of dollars that says his thinking is right.”
Tony, that is not only a personal flaw, but a societal flaw considering the ‘Merikan propensity for judging people by the content of their wallet versus the content of their character.
Elaine: Diane Ravitch, if truly puzzled, does not understand how business works.
Bill Gates is a man with a hammer that thinks all problems look like nails. He is (probably with good intentions but unfortunate results) taking a business approach to the schooling of children. He has been very successful in business, partly by luck but coupled with real skill in negotiation and strategy as well. He has made smart moves, and even on some of the dumb moves, he was smart enough to limit losses and not bankrupt or lose control of his company.
I am not in communication with Bill Gates, but from his actions I recognize that he sees our problems in schooling as essentially a human resources or human systems engineering problem. People aren’t being fired, held accountable, incentivized, punished, rewarded. He thinks that is because there is a lack of measurable objectives and ways to separate the wheat from the chaff.
He takes the same approach in his other charities; and they work there; because those ARE engineering problems (getting children vaccinated, fed, drinking clean water and generally healthier worldwide).
I also do not believe the business approach works in public schooling. But I am not puzzled by what the Gates are doing, they are trying to fix a broken system by their lights, and it is probably impossible to convince the richest man in the world (at least he has been a few times) that his thinking is wrong when he has tens of billions of dollars that says his thinking is right.
I Am Puzzled by the Gates Foundation
By Diane Ravitch
7/5/12
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/05/i-am-puzzled-by-the-gates-foundation/
When one foundation has amassed over $30 billion, it has the financial power to shape the policies of government to its liking.
The Gates Foundation has more than $30 billion, and when Warren Buffet’s gift of another $30 billion is added to the Gates fund, the Gates Foundation will have the power to direct global policy on almost any issue of its choosing.
Anthony Cody published a guest column in Education Week (funded in part by the Gates Foundation) that describes how the Gates Foundation intervenes in agricultural and environmental issues around the world, often in ways that support corporate profits rather than the public interest.
I have never believed that the Gates Foundation or the Gates family puts profits above the public interest. I work on the assumption that anyone who has more riches than they can ever spend in their lifetime or in 100 lifetimes is not motivated by greed. It makes no sense.
I believe that Bill and Melinda Gates want to establish a legacy as people who left the world a better place.
But I think their their efforts to “reform” education are woefully mistaken.
I have tried but had no luck in my efforts to meet Bill Gates. On the two occasions when I was in Seattle in the past year, I tried to arrange a meeting with him well in advance. He was never available.
I am puzzled by what I read in the column cited here. I am also puzzled by the Gates Foundation’s persistent funding of groups that want to privatize public education. I am puzzled by their funding of “astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.
I am puzzled by their funding of groups that are promoting an anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda in state after state. And I am puzzled by the hundreds of millions they have poured into the quixotic search to guarantee that every single classroom has a teacher that knows how to raise test scores.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone at the Gates Foundation has any vision of what good education is, or whether they think that getting higher test scores is the same as getting a good education. I wonder if they ever think about their role in demoralizing and destabilizing the education profession.
When Bill or Melinda Gates is asked whether it is democratic for one foundation, their foundation, to shape a nation’s education policy, they don a mask of false modesty. Who, little old us? They disingenuously reply that the nation spends more than $600 billion on education, which makes their own contribution small by comparison. Puny, by comparison. Anyone with any sense knows that their discretionary spending has had a powerful effect on the policies of the U.S. Department of Education, on the media, on states and on districts. When Bill Gates speaks, the National Governors Association snaps to attention, awed by his wealth. They are pulling the strings, and they prefer to pretend they aren’t.
But their disclaimers do not change the fact that they have power without accountability. They want accountability for teachers, but who holds them accountable?
When I see Bill or Melinda make a pronouncement on education, I am reminded of the song in “Fiddler on the Roof”: “When you’re rich, they think you really know.”
They don’t. And no one will tell them that they are out of their depth. They may be well-meaning but they are misinformed, and they are inflicting incalculable damage on our public schools and on the education profession.
Who elected them? Why should they have the power to shape American education?.
It’s puzzling.
Circular Reasoning at the Gates: Education Nation off to a Confusing Start
By Anthony Cody
September 26, 2011
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/09/circular_reasoning_at_the_gate.html
I must admit that this whole thread upsets me as much as any issue we’ve discussed here in the past and my upset comes out of my own life and experience. I am a perfect example of the fallacy of reliance upon standardized testing to measure scholastic achievement and the irony of this is that is that I owe the fact that I hold degrees at the post Masters levels to standardized testing. I was a troubled student in high school, with disciplinary problems that marked me as a troublesome student. Yet I was blessed with a high IQ (a measure that is being proven every day as inaccurate) and a reading comprehension ability that was off the charts.
Because I was an emotionally troubled child and teen, I rarely did homework and never took notes in high school, thus was a consistent C- to D student through the year. Yet I was able to always pass the final tests because with my reading speed I would read and absorb all the requisite textbooks the night before the final exams. My final test grades were uniformly in the B+ to A ranges (85-95). Many teachers liked me, despite my behavioral problems, and tried hard to counsel me, though it fell on my deaf ears. Thus I passed through high school in the bottom quarter of my class. My PSAT and SAT scores were at the top of the class so I was able to get into college based on those grades alone. In NY State at the time there was a Regents Scholarship exam, on which if you got a certain high grade, you would win a full tuition scholarship to any NY State college. Needless to say that at Graduation I stood on stage with the other four winners, who except for me were the four students at the top of my graduating class and the Vice Principal scowled at me as he handed me my award certificate.
I got through college the same way as high school, except for there the most important information I could learn was how many classes I could cut and yet remain eligible for a final grade. After school I floated through life as a Caseworker in Welfare and a hippie in life style. My father had always wanted me to go to Law School and with my parents long deceased at 25 I applied. Naturally, my LSAT put me in a high percentile and I was accepted at St. Johns University Law School based on that. Two and a half years later I flunked out because one really does need to study and take notes in law school and my “skill set” didn’t allow for my usually easy passage. Luckily I learned from the experience and went into personal psychotherapy to resolved the issues of my troubled psyche. Six years later I had won a full tuition scholarship to Columbia University for my Masters and talked my way into simultaneously being accepted in a psychotherapy training Institute. I won my Columbia Scholarship in competition with 9 others from my agency based on our grades from 3 classes totaling 9 credits. I got three A’s because for the first time in my life I actually took notes and studied regularly. When I graduated my career took off and my personal life stabilized.
That is why the whole issue of this blog and thread resonates so much with me. I look back at the students I knew who actually applied themselves in school and I envy/admire the fact that they were mature enough to put in the work and through it learn the self-discipline necessary to succeed in life. It took me many years to learn the lessons and catch up to them. Standardized testing is not a measure of success, it is a matter of rote learning and regurgitation. They do not take the measure of either an individual student, nor of their teacher. They like IQ tests and SAT’s do not measure the innate abilities of a student and merely result in mainly self-fulfilling prophecies.
“Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His ancestry includes English, German, and Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates’s maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or “Trey” because his father had the “II” suffix. Early on in his life, Gates’s parents had a law career in mind for him. When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church.
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life
Bill Gates success in life came no doubt from his intelligence, but I would submit it was aided by the life of privilege he was born into. That this rapacious pirate, in the mold of the worst of robber barons, is now trying to reform a school system he knows nothing about is an affront to me.
The Failure of Corporate School Reform: Toward a New Common School Movement
Monday, 05 December 2011
By Kenneth J Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/5280:the-failure-of-corporate-school-reform-toward-a-new-common-school-movement
Excerpt:
In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform.
While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads “CEO”; or install corporate models of numerical “accountability,” paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising “return on investment”; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California’s new science curriculum: the examples are endless.
Despite the fact that corporate school reforms have expanded at an exponential speed, the dominant corporate school reforms have failed on their own terms. Such reformers have insisted on “accountability” through test scores and lowering costs, but it is precisely in reference to these accountability measures that corporate school reforms have failed. The failing policies that are being aggressively implemented nonetheless include: contracting out management to privately managed charters or for-profit educational management organizations;(ii) putting in place voucher schemes or neo-voucher scholarship tax credits;(iii) expanding commercialism;(iv) imposing corporate “turnaround” models on schools and faculty(v) that often involve firing entire faculties and administrations, reducing curriculum and pedagogy to narrow numerically quantifiable and anti-intellectual, anti-critical test-based forms; the creation of “portfolio districts” that imagine districts as a stock portfolio and schools as stock investments;(vi) reorganizing teacher education and educational leadership on the model of the MBA degree;(vii) and the elimination of advanced degrees and certification in favor of pay-for-test-performance schemes such as value added assessment.(viii)
These corporate school reforms are deeply interwoven with commercial interests in the multibillion dollar test and textbook publishing industries, the information technology and database tracking industries and the contracting industries.(ix) The corporate sector has in the last decade positioned education in the United States as a roughly $600 billion per year “industry,” ripe for takeover.(x) As directions for future economic growth are uncertain, public tax money in public services appears to corporations and the super-rich, who are flush from decades of upward redistributions, as tantalizing to pillage.(xi) These upward redistributions of public wealth and governance are particularly obvious in Wisconsin and New Jersey as tax cuts on the super-rich and corporations and slush funds for business development are funded by defunding public and higher education; attacking teacher pay, benefits and unions; expanding privatization schemes including vouchers, charters, tuition fee hikes; and shifting educational costs onto individual working-class and professional-class individuals. The same agenda is being enacted in Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania – to name a few. Chicago could be considered the blueprint with its Renaissance 2010 plan designed by the Commercial Club and implemented by Arne Duncan. That plan – which resulted in failure to raise test scores or lower costs – succeeded in privatizing and deunionizing about 100 of the 600 schools in the district.
“The Failure of Corporate School Reform”
Elaine,
Thanks again for continuing to make this thread the “go to” place for information regarding the corporate attempt at taking over the school system.
You have proved your case against this nonsense time and again, but I would just like to make another simple point on why this doesn’t work and why the model is the height of stupidity in the service of cupidity.
A corporate model is by definition and in its literature a conformist model. The key to getting ahead in any bureaucracy (Corporations are the essence of bureaucracy) is conformity and playing the game. The corporate school model stresses conformity (school uniforms, hair styles etc.) in its literature.
Those students who mainly excel in this kind of model are rigid thinkers who regurgitate based on expectations and who most importantly are willing to “kiss ass”.
The dichotomy in this, especially for those who see capitalism as a system that promotes ingenuity and creativity, is that the corporate system’s history is the story of individuals who went against the system and succeeded via creative entrepreneurship. That’s the myth at least. Yet ironically, these corporate “educators” in practice ignore the very mythology that lent them credence. The irony of someone like Bill Gates flogging this nonsense is either rich, or ominous and most probably ominous. This whole movement is an attempt to instill unthinking, hierarchical worshiping discipline into the “lower” classes the better to control them.
The purpose of an educational system should be to teach our young to be able to think independently, in addition to gaining well rounded knowledge of the world around them and the tools (science, math, language, historical context) to be able to not only succeed, but hopefully advance all of society. I’m sure Bill and Melinda’s children go to excellent educational institutions that are the essence of what education should be. All the better to keep the descendants of the Gates family ahead of the class.
Always beware that most of what poses as philanthropy in our society is self-serving public relations to cover up the sins of ones past.
Elaine,shouldn’t you get paid for piecework?
A primer on corporate school reform
By Valerie Strauss
10/27/11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/a-primer-on-corporate-school-reform/2011/10/26/gIQAyWrUKM_blog.html
This is an edited version of a commentary given by Stan Karp , a teacher of English and journalism in Paterson, N.J., for 30 years. Karp spoke on Oct. 1 at the fourth annual Northwest Teachers for Justice conference in Seattle. He is now the director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey’s Education Law Center and an editor of the 25-year-old Rethinking Schools magazine. A video and fuller version of the commentary can be found here.
Excerpt:
By Stan Karp
“Corporate education reform” refers to a specific set of policy proposals currently driving education policy at the state and federal level. These proposals include:
*increased test-based evaluation of students, teachers, and schools of education
*elimination or weakening of tenure and seniority rights
*an end to pay for experience or advanced degrees
*closing schools deemed low performing and their replacement by publicly funded, but privately run charters
*replacing governance by local school boards with various forms of mayoral and state takeover or private management
*vouchers and tax credit subsidies for private school tuition
*increases in class size, sometimes tied to the firing of 5-10% of the teaching staff
*implementation of Common Core standards and something called “college and career readiness” as a standard for high school graduation:
These proposals are being promoted by reams of foundation reports, well-funded think tanks, a proliferation of astroturf political groups, and canned legislation from the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC).
Together these strategies use the testing regime that is the main engine of corporate reform to extend the narrow standardization of curricula and scripted classroom practice that we’ve seen under No Child Left Behind, and to drill down even further into the fabric of schooling to transform the teaching profession and create a less experienced, less secure, less stable and less expensive professional staff. Where NCLB used test scores to impose sanctions on schools and sometimes students (e.g., grade retention, diploma denial), test-based sanctions are increasingly targeted at teachers.
A larger corporate reform goal, in addition to changing the way schools and classrooms function, is reflected in the attacks on collective bargaining and teacher unions and in the permanent crisis of school funding across the country. These policies undermine public education and facilitate its replacement by a market-based system that would do for schooling what the market has done for health care, housing, and employment: produce fabulous profits and opportunities for a few and unequal outcomes and access for the many….
Standardized tests have been disguising class and race privilege as merit for decades. They’ve become the credit default swaps of the education world. Few people understand how either really works. Both encourage a focus on short-term gains over long-term goals. And both drive bad behavior on the part of those in charge. Yet these deeply flawed tests have become the primary policy instruments used to shrink public space, impose sanctions on teachers and close or punish schools. And if the corporate reformers have their way, their schemes to evaluate teachers and the schools of education they came from on the basis of yet another new generation of standardized tests, it will make the testing plague unleashed by NCLB pale by comparison.
rafflaw,
Are you impressed with my voluminous “piece work?”
😉
What Real Education Reform Looks Like
By David Sirota
12/8/11
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_real_education_reform_looks_like_20111208/
Excerpt:
As 2011 draws to a close, we can confidently declare that one of the biggest debates over education is—mercifully—resolved. We may not have addressed all of the huge challenges facing our schools, but we finally have empirical data ruling out apocryphal theories and exposing the fundamental problems.
We’ve learned, for instance, that our entire education system is not “in crisis,” as so many executives in the for-profit education industry insist when pushing to privatize public schools. On the contrary, results from Program for International Student Assessment exams show that American students in low-poverty schools are among the highest-achieving students in the world.
We’ve also learned that no matter how much self-styled education “reformers” claim otherwise, the always-demonized teachers’ unions are not holding our education system back. As The New York Times recently noted: “If unions are the primary cause of bad schools, why isn’t labor’s pernicious effect” felt in the very unionized schools that so consistently graduate top students?
Now, at year-end, we’ve learned from two studies just how powerful economics are in education outcomes—and how disadvantaged kids are being unduly punished by government policy.
The first report, from Stanford University, showed that with a rising “income achievement gap,” a family’s economic situation is a bigger determinative force in a child’s academic performance than any other major demographic factor. For poor kids, that means the intensifying hardships of poverty are now creating massive obstacles to academic progress.
Because of this reality, schools in destitute areas naturally require more resources than those in rich ones so as to help impoverished kids overcome comparatively steep odds. Yet, according to the second report from the U.S. Department of Education, “Many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding.” As if purposely embodying the old adage about adding insult to injury, the financing scheme “leav(es) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers.” In practice, that equals less funding to recruit teachers, upgrade classrooms, reduce class sizes and sustain all the other basics of a good education.
Put all this together and behold the crux of America’s education problems in bumper-sticker terms: It’s poverty and punitive funding formulas, stupid.
Thus, we arrive at the factor that decides so many things in American society: money.
As the revelations of 2011 prove, students aren’t helped by billionaire-executives-turned-education-dilettantes who leverage their riches to force their faith-based theories into schools. Likewise, they aren’t aided by millionaire pundits sententiously claiming that we just “need better parents.” And kids most certainly don’t benefit from politicians pretending that incessant union-busting, teacher-bashing and standardized testing represent successful school “reforms.”
Instead, America’s youth need the painfully obvious: a national commitment to combating poverty and more funds spent on schools in the poorest areas than on schools in the richest areas—not the other way around.
Great links Elaine.
nick,
Do you have a point to make about the subject of this post…a contribution to add to the discussion–or are you just doing your usual drive by? Your behavior is quite predictable.
I had a typo w/ “problem,” That piece would be rejected by quality control. Union workers hated quality control in factories..and schools.
My family were mostly factory workers. And, many factories had “piece work.” That’s where you got paid depending on how many pieces[plates, screws, springs, etc.] you produced per hour. Elaine should have worked in a union factory. She can produce more “pieces” per hour than anyone I’ve ever seen. Of course, there was also quality control in these factories where my family toiled. The “pieces” had to be of a certain standard. That could be a probelem here. Just sayn’.
Piece work?……….Quality Control?……………Standards?
Nick,
If the sum of your comments here represented your salary as measured by the above set of items. You would be working long hours and making nothing. Your problem in discussion Nick is there’s no there…..there.
Plese inform us when you having something more to add, other than snide remarks of no value.
Thursday, Sep 27, 2012
School reform’s propaganda flick
The guys behind “Won’t Back Down” stand to profit from education privatization. No wonder the movie hates on teachers unions
By Alexander Zaitchik
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/27/the_corporate_education_agenda_behind_wont_back_down/
Excerpt:
The first thing to know about Friday’s opening of the school-choice drama “Won’t Back Down” is that the film’s production company specializes in children’s fantasy fare such as the “Tooth Fairy” and “Chronicles of Narnia” series. The second thing is that this company, Walden Media, is linked at the highest levels to the real-world adult alliance of corporate and far-right ideological interest groups that constitutes the so-called education reform movement, more accurately described as the education privatization movement. The third thing, and the one most likely to be passed over in the debate surrounding “Won’t Back Down” (reviewed here, and not kindly, by Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir), is that Walden Media is itself an educational content company with a commercial interest in expanding private-sector access to American K-12 education, or what Rupert Murdoch, Walden’s distribution partner on “Won’t Back Down,” lip-lickingly calls “a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
Walden Media is unique in Hollywood in possessing the will and the expertise to effectively promote the cause of education reform. Its conservative Christian CEO, the billionaire donor and strategist for right-wing causes Philip Anschutz, has built what may be the only media empire ideologically inclined and powerful enough to assemble an all-star, all-union cast to carry water for an anti-union crusade on 2,500 screens in wide release (though apparently not strong enough to get that cast to admit it). “Won’t Back Down” is, as even teachers’ union leader Randi Weingarten admits, an emotionally charged and well-crafted piece of propaganda. For neophytes to the debate — and Walden executive Chip Flaherty has described these people as the film’s target — “Won’t Back Down” will send warm “Stand and Deliver”-meets-”Free Willy”-style fuzzies fluttering around the otherwise cold phrase “school choice.” The company hopes the film’s emotional wallop will linger long enough to drive downloads of the film’s activist tool kit and enlist new foot soldiers in the education reform movement. But the thing is, “Won’t Back Down” is no more useful in understanding the real politics of that movement than Walden Media’s adaptation of “Charlotte’s Web” prepares audiences for careers in chicken farming. Of course, that’s not the point — Walden is aiming for the heart, not the head.
“Won’t Back Down” dramatizes — approvingly — the execution of “parent-trigger”-style laws that have been passed in three states and are being considered in a dozen more. These laws give parents the power to form discontented majorities and sell their local public school to private charter school companies. As critics have noted, there is no mechanism in these laws to take over failing private schools. In the real world, the two instances in which the parent-trigger has been pulled have been legal and community disasters, and there is indication that even charter school companies are wary of taking over entire failed schools as opposed to skimming the cream off of several.
But to focus on the parent-trigger plot mechanism in “Won’t Back Down” is to misunderstand the long-term strategy of the deep-pocketed education reform movement. Its plan is to undermine public education from all fronts, to keep throwing reform bills at statehouse walls and see what sticks. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the reform movement’s own version of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), provides legislators with thick “policy combo-packs” and encourages them to file legislation in flurries. Anything that moves the needle of public opinion toward privatizing K-12 is a victory. And it’s a victory for more than just for-profit charter and private school companies. The school-choice army is increasingly diverse. It has a growing “digital learning” wing of technology and software companies eager to “individualize” and “virtualize” American classrooms. There are film education companies like Walden Media, more about which in a minute. There are educational testing companies, such as News Corp’s Wireless Generation, which have been used effectively to pummel public education but have an uncertain future in the brave new unregulated world imagined by corporate reformers. Keeping the alliance flush with tactics and strategy are the libertarian think tanks at war with teachers’ unions and the idea that the rich should pay education taxes to support schools their children do not attend. (Given the movement’s storefront claims to care deeply about poor students of color, it is odd — well, not really — that its lineage begins with the voucher schemes Milton Friedman cooked up in the immediate wake of Brown v. Board of Education.)
Published on Monday, March 4, 2013 by Common Dreams
Big Monied Education ‘Reform’ Groups Flood Los Angeles School Board Race
Teachers’ union: ‘This is a race for Los Angeles, not the school board race of America. It would be really tragic if the voices are drowned out’
– Lauren McCauley, staff writer
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/03/04-4
Excerpt:
Los Angeles has become the latest battleground in the contested war over school “reform” as a group of billionaire school-privatization advocates have turned Tuesday’s school board election into a national, multi-million dollar “test case” in the fight over the future of education.
According to reports, last month New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $1 million to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Coalition for School Reform. The group is backing candidates who will support current superintendent John Deasey, formerly of the Gates Foundation, who has been pushing such policy changes as expanding charter schools, limiting the power of teachers unions and using student standardized test scores as a means of evaluating teachers.
National school privatization advocate Michelle Rhee’s group Students First, donated $250,000 to the same cause, in addition to a host of other titans—which include Walmart heirs and real estate and insurance magnate, Eli Broad.