Back when I was on the right side of the political fence, I was on the editorial board at Education Next. It is supported by the Hoover Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, both conservative think tanks with which I was affiliated. The journal, which is based at Harvard and edited mainly by Paul Peterson, was created to counter what was seen as the liberal bias of the mainstream education media.
Education Next is a well-edited journal (I used to write a monthly book review there), but it does have a strong bias in favor of charter schools, vouchers, and testing. It is the journal of the corporate reform movement.
The current issue of Education Next has a fascinating article about the “reformers’ fight club.” I have been writing and speaking about the interconnections among these organizations (and there are many more), and it is good to see confirmation of what I have been saying.
For some reason, these incredibly rich and powerful organizations like to portray themselves as underdogs in contrast to the teachers’ unions.
So, get this picture: On one side are the 3.2 million teachers who belong to the NEA and the AFT. On the other side are the Gates Foundation ($60 billion), the Broad Foundation (billions), the Walton Foundation (billions, and spent $159 million this past year alone on education grants), the Dell Foundation, big corporations, Democrats for Education Reform (Wall Street hedge fund managers who can pump millions into political campaigns at will), and 50CAN (more hedge fund managers). And there are supposedly “liberal” advocacy groups like Education Trust and Ed Sector.
Gosh, that is surely an unequal lineup. No wonder the “fight club” feels like underdogs. Those teachers’ unions are just so doggone powerful and rich. Why, they have the big foundations and Wall Street trembling. Who knew that teachers had so much power?
Diane
The Keynes to the kingdom, you’ve come a long way, Diane.
As you know, Diane, I have been following and writing about the teacher abuse movement for 13 years now, and all these years later, no one knows what has happened to thousands of us.
The top tier of our most dedicated, experienced and successful practitioners were sent packing in a totally lawless manner for over two decades, while the media talked about ‘dead-wood’ and tests! Six corporations own all the media outlets and the money of the people and groups you mention sew them up tight so only one conversation prevails, and it is theirs..about charter schools, and teacher evaluation and their version of reform.
Karen Horwitz who wrote “White Chalk Crime: the real reasons that schools fail,” and runs the site NAPTA site (www.endteacherabuse.org) has the stories of teachers who were victimized, but do the journalists follow her. They follow Gates.
Lorna Stremcha who many of us in the abuse movement know, went through a horrendous ordeal; went to court and won at great personal cost, and has been a leader in Montana in bringing an end to workplace bullying. The press has ignored her, too, and by the way, her book “Sins” is about to be published.
And you know the brilliant Lenny Isenberg created the Perdaily site (www.perdaily.com) four years ago, in the hope that teachers everywhere would have a place to ‘meet’ and share their thoughts on the assault on public education, and that this would end the total blackout in the media of the victimization of the professional teacher. It became a place where teachers in LAUSD could find common grounds in the terrible trauma that they faced in a lawless system and what is happening in LAUSD is unknown, and yet it is an example of the most lawless, corrupt school administration today.
It is an unequal battleground, and it will be, until someone like BIll Moyers investigates and levels the field a bit.
Michael Moore, too. Please help us, Michael!!!!
Over the past year, I have repeatedly appealed to Bill Moyers and Michael Moore, among many others, but to no avail. Only Frontline has gotten back to me, earlier this month, indicating the matter “will be reviewed by editorial staff” –which could be their standard response.
It’s very difficult for people to keep the players in the corporate political “reform” movement straight, as well as their agendas, since the names of so many organizations and their talking-points include many misnomers that obscure true intentions, seemingly to gain popular support. With input from Readers regarding who belongs to the Corporate “Reform” Fight, perhaps we can come up with a Who’s Who list, which Diane can post here, to help those interested in investigating.
I think it would also help to draw more detailed pictures of how today’s “reforms” are ramifications of corporate totalitarianism. Since the true civil rights issue today is the inequitable distribution of wealth, power and resources, and politicians have permitted the continued stratification of our society (and 22% child poverty), if it’s repeatedly demonstrated to the public how their policies benefit the 1% over the 99%, maybe politicians will be motivated to change course.
As you know, Diane, I have been following and writing about the teacher abuse movement for 13 years now, and all these years later, no one knows what has happened to thousands of us. We do not play on the filed that gives us access to the fourth estate.
The top tier of our most dedicated, experienced and successful practitioners were sent packing in a totally lawless manner for over two decades, while the media talked about ‘dead-wood’ and tests! Six corporations own all the media outlets and the money of the people and groups you mention sew them up tight so only one conversation prevails, and it is theirs..about charter schools, and teacher evaluation and their version of reform.
Karen Horwitz who wrote “White Chalk Crime: the real reasons that schools fail,” and runs the site NAPTA site (www.endteacherabuse.org) has the stories of teachers who were victimized, but do the journalists follow her. They follow Gates.
Lorna Stremcha who many of us in the abuse movement know, went through a horrendous ordeal; went to court and won at great personal cost, and has been a leader in Montana in bringing an end to workplace bullying. The press has ignored her, too, and by the way, her book “Sins” is about to be published.
And you know the brilliant Lenny Isenberg created the Perdaily site (www.perdaily.com) four years ago, in the hope that teachers everywhere would have a place to ‘meet’ and share their thoughts on the assault on public education, and that this would end the total blackout in the media of the victimization of the professional teacher. It became a place where teachers in LAUSD could find common grounds in the terrible trauma that they faced in a lawless system and what is happening in LAUSD is unknown, and yet it is an example of the most lawless, corrupt school administration today.
It is an unequal battleground, and it will be, until someone like BIll Moyers investigates and levels the field a bit.
Add to the fight club the Education Action Group that is anonymously backed by Tea Party funding. This group works hand-in-hand with breitbart.com, MacIver Institute, & Heartland Institute. EAG is Michigan based, but with a national mission to bring down public education. They messed in the WI recall of Gov. Walker. I suspect this covert group has much more involvement in local affairs
Oh dear. When the truth and money separate guess who gets the press? Kudos to those out there who are countering this!
We need a way to communicate without fear of our emails being FOIA’d or hacked. Sharing the truth is the only way we can see we are not alone and can learn the reality of our situation and organize. The changes in nursing back in the late 70’s and early 80’s make all this as a teacher seem like deja vu. The educator historians need to talk to the nursing historians!
As long as we email from home we are okay, emails on public school systems are being FOIA’d in my state. I have read Karen Horwitz’s book and also High Stakes: Poverty, Testing, and Failure in American Schools by Dale and Bonnie Johnson. They never identify the school but I was shocked when I finally realized the school as the one down the road. It made me cry. It will explain what is happening now based on what has been happening for many many years.
As one who’s wife at the time (late 70’s, early 80’s) was a nurse and who subsequently worked for the Missouri Nurses Association doing organizing and collective bargaining, what you are saying about the connection/correlation between what is happening now vs then is absolutely true!
Duane,
Thank you for validating my perspective. I wish we could get the two historian groups and unions together! Since not many teachers have previous lives as RNs, few understand the similarities, but I know there have to be quite a few out there! Anybody else who moved from patients to students?
Why would NEA and AFT take money from Gates?
Because they care more about their power
The thing is, they have the money, but we have the numbers. If the AFT and NEA decided to fight, really fight for our profession, we could have impact. Imagine if every teacher went on strike in the fall? Would the media be forced to listen?
One big union? The fight to really unionize has a long and bloody history.
Heritage opposes common core. American principals project opposes common core. The first mistake Diane was calling the other groups conservative. Rinos are not conservative
I believe the wealthy reformers you note were underdogs until not that long ago. They certainly aren’t underdogs any longer.
But I see the core problem differently. “Teacher Out” has it right in that teachers have the numbers. And they could mobilize immense power – much more than the wealthy…but that’s unlikely to happen for a number of reasons:
1) The current leadership of the AFT and NEA is part of the problem. They have failed miserably and have to take accountability for a good part of the mess in which teachers find themselves. The general public does not believe the AFT or NEA represents the interests of children.
2) Union leadership has squandered the support which the general public and the Democratic Party once gave (pretty much unconditionally) to the teaching profession. How is it possible that teachers are now positioned in the public’s mind as they are now? Bad leadership.
3) Rightly or wrongly, the general public believes that change is needed in public education. The AFT and NEA have positioned themselves – and by default, teachers – as obstacles to change.
4) So the general public is looking elsewhere for leaders of change and they are finding that leadership outside the profession.
With the right leadership, teachers will almost always have the numbers to prevail over wealthy reformers. I hope I live to see the day when teachers take back that power. The current leadership is a bridge to nowhere.
I have never seen Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the Wall Street hedge fund managers as underdogs. Never.
There is no reasonable way to call these billionaires “underdogs.” What they’ve done here with that word is the same thing they’ve done with “racist” and its various forms, and with “status quo.” Over the last two decades, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the Right to co-opt the language of the Left so as to change public perception as to who the “good guys” are. In that span, they’ve made the terms “liberal racism” and “reverse racism” common and acceptable. They’ve portrayed themselves as poor little “underdogs” fighting the “education status quo.” But the fact is that they are anything but poor, little or underdogs, and they fight for the educational status quo of the back to basics movement that dominated education in the ’70s and ’80s. In the ’90s, there was a brief shining moment when things seemed poised to move towards more progressive ideas about literacy and mathematics education (to be accurate, the literacy efforts came in the ’80s, and opposition to them fueled the opposition to progressive math, starting in the mid-’90s). However, the counter-revolution, which is mostly in agreement with the goals and tactics of the current deform efforts, successfully overthrew much of the small progress that had been made in literacy and mathematics, and with the election of GWB and the passage of NCLB, everything was in place for what we’re seeing now.
There is one fellow in NYC who has been ranting for well over a decade about the “Education Mafia,” and rather than being laughed off the Internet, he has made that a popular phrase in some circles. It dovetails perfectly with the other terminology mentioned here. And if we let them continue to control the language and rules of the debate (see just about anything the NEA, AFT, or big teacher professional groups like NCTM, NCSM, and NCTE have done lately), we’re doomed.
Nothing has pleased me more than to have Diane Ravitch join the progressive side in this fight. We need her and many more like her.
Diane, can you provide the link to the article you mention? Tried to find it and couldn’t (and maybe I’m just missing it). Also, I’ve been tracking movements in this arena for almost 20 years, and while the list of organizations and individuals is somewhat fluid, it gets easier if you a) follow the citations and b) follow the money. Back when Bork’s “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” came out, I began putting together an article digging into his so-called research. Can’t get my hands on the copy (did it all on an old PC and made the mistake of putting it all on a 3.5 inch floppy) but if memory serves, I was able to show that in looking at his citations, you could track up to 80% of them as opinion pieces and think tank (non-peer reviewed) sources that were all funded by three foundations: Olin, Scaife and Bradley. There are now more funders in the mix – most notably members of the billionaire boys club – but the new folks are following in the same tradition. And most of the funders (foundations and individuals) tend to both share board members, as well as have established forums for exchanging information and strategies. The Philanthropy Roundtable being the one with the longest history, but there are others, as well as more recent additions to the mix.
The Bradley Foundation essentially started the voucher movement, and strategically funded the Black Alliance for Educational Options to give them movement a) the appearance of an African American constituency, but also to build the infrastructure that would allow vouchers to be used as a wedge issue in future elections. Cory Booker’s ascendancy into the national stage began with him being a young, smart, Black politician who got pro-voucher money to support his initial campaigns. As an example. Charters have become the new wedge issue in educational politics, following on the coat tails of the voucher/choice movement of the 90s.
Long story short, if you can start with the list of funders, track their board members and see how much overlap there is. In particular, follow the anti-Affirmative Action folks and see how much overlap there is with the charter/voucher movement. Many of the same people and much of the same money. While we now have the new billionaire funders, they are getting their advice from the same folks who were pushing vouchers, fighting affirmative action, etc.
Here is the link. I thought I embedded it in my post. If I didn’t, I will: http://educationnext.org/fight-club/
You are right! I put the link in. Sorry for the omission. At times like this, I wish I had a staff.
Thanks for the link, and now that I’ve read it, brings up a few things…
What’s become apparent to me over the past five or so years is that the boundaries have become a little too blurry. Back when you were involved (US Ed., Heritage, Fordham, etc.) there was a fairly thick line between those on the side of public education and the privatizers. With the ascendancy of charters things start to get a little murky. Charters, in and of themselves, are not such a bad thing. In fact, charters were being promoted by those on the left until the privatizers saw an opportunity – that being the private, for-profit, charter management organizations. NCLB added to the murkiness, in part because it was legislation pushed by Kennedy who’s liberal bona fides are well known. But I don’t think Kennedy knew what he was signing on to. He was still operating within the context of actual bipartisan legislation – something that hasn’t really happened since GW Bush came to office. But I digress…
To this day, I’m fascinated that the right has claimed ownership of the term “reform.” Similar to their success in getting affirmative action re-framed as “racial preferences.” WIth similar results. Which brings me to the issue of words and their meaning.
As the Fight Club article points out, now there’s this somewhat new entity called the PIE Network (irony being that these guys are usually really good at picking innocuous sounding names like American CIvil RIghts Institute, or Stand for Children – now all I can say is, “who wants PIE?”). Which includes folks like the Center for American Progress, which for all its liberal bona fides is really quite the right of center outfit – especially if you look at their position papers in education. But back to words. In particular my own red herrings: Choice. Accountability. BLANK Management Organization. And the new one for me (which is still surprising to me) is Achievement Gap. Basically, if the organization is using any of those terms, it behooves me to dig a little deeper to see what they are actually saying, who they are partnering with and who is funding them.
And yes, I know this would include folks like the AFT and the NEA. Irony, no? But the so-called reform folks are taking up so much oxygen in the discussion, it’s hard to get anything started or funded that does address any of my red herrings. Once upon a time I could trust the Ed Trust to be on the right page. Increasingly, they are not only engaging with folks like PIE, but they are now focusing at least some of their efforts on “turning around or closing underperforming schools.” And with Duncan at the helm of ED, things are getting increasingly difficult.
Would that Obama had appointed Darling-Hammond instead of Duncan.
One error: I was never associated with the Heritage Foundation; I never went that far to the right. I was on the board of Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (now Institute) and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. Fordham Foundation, by the way, launched the PIE Network as a way of bringing together the many conservative state-level groups. Anyone who thinks it is a swell idea to close a low-performing school without making every effort to support it is on the wrong track, in my view. That’s the “reformers'” method of choice. If you read my latest book, you will see that charters started off as a liberal idea but eventually became a staple of the right, a replacement for vouchers, because they served the same purpose: to put government funding into private hands.
The link is fixed. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. This is an article that everyone should read.
This is an important paper that raises three issues/questions for me. First, the Fight Club paper and the type of information McGuinn provides in his account is an important contribution and one that should be one of more. Second, I have concerns about the “Fight Club” name as well as other types of names McGuinn uses, including “corporate reformers,” “blobs,” and “the big three.” As any school child knows, sticks and stones can break bones, but names never hurt. I argue that the names do matter in these discussions and there are questions about how we use such labels. Finally, I am interested in how the “Fight Club” organizations – the ERAOs – intersect with educational research and contribute to the research knowledge base.
See more at: http://managingtoteach.org/?p=422