A reader sent me a very provocative blog about the future of education by David Warlick, who has long experience in education and technology.
The blog begins with the startling statistic that six media giants control 90% of what we see, read and hear.
He goes on to ask whether the time might come when 90% of our schools are controlled by three big corporations, each with its own board of directors, completely uninterested in the views of parents and teachers.
He writes: “I have come to worry about a greater threat to the democratic foundations of education, a threat so big, so strange, and so insidious, that it is going largely Un-noticed. It is so large and comes from such high places that I hesitate to do more than whisper it. I am not a cynical person. But people whom I admire and respect have gone this far and for some time now – and I will too. I fear that there is, and has been, an organized and orchestrated effort by people in high places (and low places) to privatize education in America – to take over our classrooms.”
These thoughts have crossed my mind, and I have more than whispered them. I can’t say for certain just how organized and orchestrated this effort is. From the outside, it seems to be very well-organized and very well orchestrated. It is certainly well-funded, and its advocates share a remarkably common vocabulary. Its program is very well designed: First, claim that the schools are failing; second, propose “cures” that have no evidence to support them; third, blame the schools when your “cures” fail (e.g., NCLB, Race to the Top); fourth, hand them over to private managers and for-profit corporations.
It is a frightening scenario, but it is one that is becoming more and more transparent with every passing day.
The corporate reformers have done a bang-up job of making Americans lose confidence in their public schools, even though they continue to admire the public schools that their own children attend.
The game is on.
We must stop them.
Diane
In Rhode Island we have a woman who is running for state rep. She has an MA in Education Public Policy ( a red flag right there) and is a former employee of Point Judith Capital, a company that was owned by our Treasurer Gina Raimondo, the woman who is behind ruining our pension system. This woman now has a job as “outreach officer” at the RIDE, that pays $84,000.
I am getting so tired of these high paid carpetbaggers swooping into positions on behalf of their union-destroying, venture capitalist friends. Gist is obviously in bed with those out to not only distroy our profession, but to eliminate our benefits. Why? Because she has publically said she thinks teachers should only teach for five years.
The agenda is to make teaching a fly-by-night, low paid job.
Teacher Out, you may find campaign contributions ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) also. If so, be very afraid. This is how they get their ‘carpetbaggers’, as you put it, in those positions.
we will. we are.
game. is. on.
you come too.
I would insert this after David’s ‘first’ item in his accurate listing of how the public is fooled into thinking their schools are failing……
Second, create a Machiavellian type of financial crisis that ‘proves’ through finance that schools are bad places and are failing only to rush in to save the day with reduced cost privatization.
In Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has frozed the MFP funds for 4 years in a row—–that is creating the district-by-district (and state-wide) financial need for cheaper _______.
I share Warlick’s concern over corporate/government partnerships in education as a threat to democracy. The money generated from education for guys like Blankfein, Gates, Broad, Murdoch et al., is chump change relative to their business profits, yet they are investing in schools. Private equity and venture capital companies are not run by moral crusaders. Margaret Spellings said something a few years back that schools should extol the virtues of the free market. How best to accomplish that than by control over curriculum and how it’s taught.
Teachers can’t be free to think if they are expected to first serve corporate needs. Blankfein financed the new teacher dormitory and charter school in Newark, NJ for teachers to live on the school’s campus. Those Newark dorms reminded me of the coal company towns the coal industry established at the turn of the 19th century in which all workers and their families were issued company money as pay that could be spent only at company stores. In both models the employees are dependent on the corporation for housing and compensation. Workers are not only obedient, but are available whenever the company needs them. Flexibility of the workforce is how Apple described the hundreds of Chinese workers who were roused out of bed to fix a problem with iPhones.
The experiment with privatized education was hatched at the World Bank and enacted first in developing countries. The World Bank developed a conceptual framework of education reform to “analyze the kind of government and market failures in service delivery in the developing world” (2004). It’s recommendations for improving quality were to strengthen accountability and impose performance incentives. (Sound familiar?)
The notion that officials in powerful positions be accountable to the people was turned on it’s head in the name of improving education quality in poor areas in Africa and So. America. In 2011, The World Bank published a follow up meta analysis entitled “Making Schools Work, New Evidence of Accountability Reforms” that asserted one problem for measuring quality was the “principal-agent problem”, i.e., govt. ministries of education are agents of the citizenry. Citizens should hold schools and teachers accountable, not their government officials.
World-Bank-superman’s gift to the brown people are free market philanthropists and teacher accountability. The photo on the front cover of this report screams propaganda. (If I knew how to post a photo, I’d put it up.) It shows a brown man sleeping at a teacher’s desk, disheveled, evoking the image of a passed-out, lazy teacher in a dirty, old building in some remote village in a third world country. The implicit message is he’s being paid with foreign aid money for doing nothing. Juxtaposed with that photo is a white, wholesome young lady standing over a table of books and worksheets of eager young brown children in a new, clean, white building. Saved by western financial moguls again!
I fear for our future if our citizenry does not rise up to stop these hyper-controlling, hyper-competitive private financiers. Through public/private partnerships the financial industry has made government their tools and, as such are accountable to no one. Thus, shutting down free thinking teachers
Check this out:
Private Equity Investing
In For-Profit Education Companies
Middle-Market Investors Are Finding
Lots of Profitable High-Growth Segments
http://capitalroundtable.com/masterclass/For-Profit-Education-Private-Equity-Conference-2012.html
I wish I could afford to attend just to be a mole.
One more comment….the civil rights movement of our time? Really?
Do we dare call them racist?
As if there were any doubt what their true intentions are:
http://capitalroundtable.com/masterclass/For-Profit-Education-Private-Equity-Conference-2012.html
There is money to be made!
Great minds…..can we just keep sending this everywhere?
Does anyone know somebody who can afford this and would be willing to be our mole and report back?
Just as “. . .There’s plenty good money to be made by supplying the Army with the tools of its trade. . .” (Thanks Country Joe and the Fish) there may be plenty of money to be made privatizing public education, that “fact” does not necessarily make it a socially desirable activity..
So many of these posts remind me of Animal Farm and what can we actually do. I don’t want to be Boxer and chant “I will work harder” knowing they will just be rid of you when you are not longer useful to them. I don’t want to be Mollie and run off to another farm and I don’t want to be Benjamin and complain cynically and do nothing (although that is who I am these days).
What would happen if we said NO! I am NOT following CCSS so I can train worker bees. I am not dedicating my days to test prep. I will not be bullied by non-educators. I will not be demeaned by incompetent bureaucratic administrators.
Are they going to fire all of us?
Diane –
I couldn’t agree with you more. I have had that fear before that something big and secret was happening and that I might be targeted for speaking out against it.
I first came to realize this when our state came out with the growth model to evaluate students and teachers. This is a mechanism that is guaranteed to set up 35% of our students and a similar percentage of teachers to fail every year and there is no way to escape or rise high enough to satisfy this system – 35% will always be labeled low growth. That seems so unfair and a design to get rid of a large amount of teachers in a relatively short amount of time by labeling them ineffective.
When I think of the future, I think a long, long ways off. Even beyond my lifetime. I’m afraid that the privatization of our public schools is coming in the near future, not the future I think of. It frightens me and I don’t like it! We have to keep fighting for what is right!
This is why people are looking at Chicago. I can tell you, parents ARE coming out for their schools, their children & their teachers. There was recently an article in The Chicago Sun Times about parents’ groups & talk of civil suits (w/parents in other cities, as well). Follow Parents Across America; go to their website. Join them!
Parents Across America is the most outspoken, smart parent advocacy group in the nation.
Those of us who live way beyond America’s shores have a problem with the U.S.A.
It believes that its opinions must dominate world opinion. Hence, when a New York lawyer introduced a scatomeme [i.e. a very dirty meme] into the education world we other-English-speaking countries just had to follow suit. The scatomeme was a simple belief : “standardised fear-based blanket testing improves learning”. It has spread too far too fast. It’s evil.
Since Binet pushed his way into educational discussions, Americans have tended to describe school activity in terms of scores and numbers. U.S. folk seem to believe that tests are part and parcel of the teaching act…. quite apart from the learning experience itself. Well, you do seem to…
This makes it so easy for the ‘invisible governmemt’, named by David Warwick, to take over, to privatise the schools and get them ready for online learning under the control of the Murdchs, Kleins and Gates of this world who can only see dollar signs in their changes to the schooling landscape. We need to persuade all Americans that they should return to conversations about caring for kids, about treating them as pupils not as students [see any dictionary], about sharing the evaluation of pupil effort, about achievements across the curriculum.
Down under, we are stuck with your kleinist fear-based measures. Our school principals are becoming eichannised; their ethical principals relating to caring for kids have been suspended; and they are ignoring basic learnacy [teaching children HOW to learn]. We are in a mess. You can have this fear-based scatomeme back, any time.
But….we still love you and hope that you can overcome.
Rest assured, Phil, the majority of teachers I know in the U.S. (and those education professionals who seem to live in the comments section of this blog) do not believe in the “standardised fear-based blanket testing improves learning” mantra. It’s the people in positions of power who have successfully brain-washed the public into blaming education for the ills of society. It is an attractive argument when you consider the purposes OF educating a society, however it is an over-simplification of the situation.
Many true education professionals see the morphing of education through privatization as a horrific threat to our society and one against which we feel desperately helpless. For upwards of three decades, public education has been under political attack, and you can go back even further and find that education reform was a top priority of those in positions of power. Americans do not like to lose any “race for greatness.”
Publics form and re-form through time—however, the impact on our future that is purported by the trend to poo-poo public education is coming to a head now that legislators and policy-makers are on the side of this method of cultural scapegoating: “Let’s blame the schools for everything that’s wrong with this country.”
I think the worst thing any true advocate for education can do is to NOT get involved in the argument with those who are in positions to influence policies. Education has become a political issue whether people want to admit that or not, yet so many who are in-the-know choose to not get involved directly with the policy-makers because they expect the same attitudes of a purity about educational values that they themselves have from everyone.
As educators, we know that not every person learns the same way at the same time. Just as it takes patience, flexibility, and perseverance to reach every student, there needs to be patience and a disciplined investment in influencing changes by those people who know education best. There is no quick fix or “make or break” policy out there, and we would be foolish to color all policies in one light or another unless we know of a political agenda that does this for us. We need to find the true honest policy-makers and invest in educating them. We need checks and balances in our education system—and we need to take the responsibility to educate each other on how to continually improve the system.
There are political avenues through which we can fight the corporate take-over, but many wise people do not wish to get involved in politics because of the many flaws in the system, i.e. the constant spectre (and conflict-of-interest) that some may call “corporate politics.” There are many shades of thought—we need to carefully examine them one by one instead of expecting perfection from our political system. I don’t see us getting out of this by simply trying to talk sense into our fellow citizens—a grass roots approach is noble, but often it is not enough to effect change. We need advocates in positions of influence to modify the public perception of our schools. We need spokespeople who are in positions to reach the masses and to influence a change in the public perception that our schools are failing. That is step one.
Oops. I messed up my name. It is Phil Cullen. Sorry. Yes. I’ve ‘been there, done that’, so I tend to speak with more authority than most. Yes I’ve been up-over.. attended ACEA and NAESP Conferences, worked with consultancy agents, visited many schools, attended an election of a School Board….and made some wonderful friends.