This reader offers a succinct summary of the reformers’ game plan. He might have added additional elements: a) budget cuts to disable public schools; and b) laws that remove accountability and transparency with privately managed charters; c) evaluating teachers on a bell curve, so that half will always be “below average,” thus creating a “crisis”; d) demanding 100% perfection, 100% proficiency and saying that anything less proves failure.
You can see it played out in state after state, especially in those with Republican governors, and in the pronouncements of the U.S. Department of Education, and it is fully developed in the Romney education agenda. They think that that private management of public education is the wave of the future, preferably it is generates profits for investors, and they are doing their best to make it happen:
First, the reformers have yet another scapegoat [to blame] for poverty. Now it’s the schools that are at fault, not the destruction of our social safety net, not the elimination of worker protections, not the imposition of fair taxation that enables the government to maintain our national infrastructure, and certainly not the actions of the 1% to extract all of the wealth of the U.S. economy for themselves alone. We don’t need to fix the failed and irrational policies of the past thirty years. No! We just have to reform the schools with for-profit charters, voucher plans and virtual “distance learning” that just happens to divert more tax money to … wait for it … the 1%!
And of course, never mind how all of these reforms are failures. By the time the public is fully aware of that fact, it will be too late to change and we’ll be on to the next scapegoat.
Second, this is just another impossible goal against which to conclude our schools are failures. The logic here is brilliant: Set the standard so impossibly high that the schools will be failures by default. Keep the focus on the unions and test scores, so the public won’t make the real connections between the economics policies of the past three decades but instead will follow the reformers in blind rage.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Since corporate America’s PR depts are charged with “creating a need for corporate products”, like privatized education, it falls to standard advertising practice to create a need by attacking the efficacy of completing products, like public education. I saw this coming in 1992, but no one would listen. Now we’re being buried by PR campaigns of would be “education reform gurus” to convince the American public that their public schools are failures. Doesn’t matter what improvements have been made, they’re failures. Doesn’t matter if the statistical tools used to judge public schools are flawed, they’re still failures. They “have to be failures” in order for privatization experts to be able to convince America to buy privatized education. So, they are failures, period. It’s positively tragic and incredibly unprofessional.
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The merchants of crud use the same techniques no matter what brand of crud they are selling. A near perfect example of how they ply their art is found in the way the tobacco industry operated throughout the 20th century and beyond.
There you see the same delusion of choice among equally bad choices, the only purpose of which is to keep on sucking dollars out of the hapless consumer, when they only good choice was to stop using their products.
There you see the conspiracy of deception that the manufacturers and the media carried on decade after decade to keep the public in the dark about the real effects of the product.
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I would agree, but I would add e) destroy the teacher’s union so that they have no collective voice or political influence.
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To win their game, the profiteers must alter the psychology of the public.
That requires the destruction of the public’s capacity for critical thinking.
That involves diverting the public’s attention from hidden assumptions.
The privateers will try to keep the public playing on the board they set up.
They will keep the public too busy to ask if it’s really the only game in town.
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They would do well to study history. The French Revolution started in this manner. The nobility and elites had their versions of gated communities; they weren’t protected very well. I don’t advocate violence, but as a student of history, desperate people are capable of mass destruction. Once such a wave starts it is difficult to stop. Caution would be advised.
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Thanks for the great comments!
There is another tactic we haven’t discussed yet–The blizzard of bulls’t, where you keep attacking no matter how incompetent the argument’s logic or how worthless the evidence.
As a case in point, I’m on the school board of a small district in southern Maine. As some of you may know, our governor is a rabid Tea Party hack who
has bought into the voucher-charter-virtual schooling idea wholheartedly. (Apparently, this lets him rub elbows with Jeb Bush.) He recently caused a stir after ranting about a report released by Harvard’s Kennedy School (sponsored, of course, by libertarian and “free-market” think tanks) that claimed to show Maine’s schools below average in improvement of test scores, and vowing to introduce legislation to make the school districts pay for the costs of “remedial courses” of graduates, along with lots of nasty comments about our teachers unions. (http://www.pressherald.com/news/LePage-Bowen-propose-.html?searchterm=Harvard)
Of course, the paper and many groups challenged the more outrageous statements (especially that Maine graduats are “looked down on” by colleges and that William and Mary gives a special exam to Maine’s kids before sending them an application). After reviewing the report myself, I sent a letter to the Editor (http://www.pressherald.com/opinion/lepages-education-proposals-panned_2012-08-03.html?searchterm=lentini) poining out the sorts of questionable statements and methodology that any cub reporter should spot in a hour’s worth of research.
A few days after the storm, however, the governor took a new tack by declaring July 31 to be “Milton Friedman Day” and extolling school vouchers. I submitted a longer piece in rebuttal:
Do We Really Want to Celebrate This Man?
Governor LePage’s dedication of July 31 as “Milton Friedman Day” and his praise of Friedman’s legacies about school vouchers in Chile and Sweden, made me recall my own devotion to Friedman’s ideas and the reasons I came to reject them, especially school vouchers. Like every other utopia, Friedman’s idyllic vision of a libertarian paradise has been dashed on the rocks of reality; yet his ideas are still pushed by true believers who think they can wedge human behavior into his economic strictures and refuse to consider otherwise, and those who simply want to exploit his ideas for their own selfish purposes.
I became aware of Friedman’s ideas as a teenager in the 1970s while reading the opinion pages of magazines like Newsweek, Business Week, and the Washington Post, as well as watching his “Free to Choose” series on PBS. As a young man, the idea of a do-your-own-thing world that insisted on minimizing social obligations was very appealing. Perhaps then it wasn’t such a great surprise that I chose to attend college at the University of Chicago and study economics.
In the end I found myself captivated by chemistry and mathematics. Through those subjects I began to understand that while logical rigor is necessary to understand reality, it is not sufficient. The problem is that while sound logic and valid premises will lead to logically valid conclusions, we can’t claim certainty in our knowledge of the premises that underlie the physical world and human activities. We can only gain confidence in our premises and conclusions about the world by testing them against observations over time. In short, time is the ultimate judge of all our ideas about our world.
As I applied my new wisdom, I realized that Friedman’s expectations didn’t meet reality. The dismantling of our “non-competitive” industries in the 1980s did not lead to new research, which I had expected from neo-classical “creative destruction”, but to insider trading and a bail out of the savings and loans. Working in Silicon Valley through the dot-com and real estate booms I witnessed the greatest examples of “irrational exuberance” since the 1920s, fueled by a fawning press (remember the book, “Dow 36,000”?) and driven by Wall Street’s strategy of hyped IPOs and credit default swaps founded on bad mortgages. All of this led to government bailouts to avoid the reckoning that Friedman claimed is the source of discipline in our de-regulated, neo-classical world.
Despite these experiences, our governor justifies his radical agenda of privatizing our schools by lionizing the late Mr. Friedman. Again, the observed results don’t match the hype. One of the first school systems to try Friedman’s voucher theory was Milwaukee, WI, in 1990. But a 2007 study by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute found that Milwaukee’s voucher plan at best produced only a one-time-only improvement in performance, which was likely due to increased emphasis on test scores and not teacher quality. Otherwise, Milwaukee’s voucher schools are no better than its public schools. Yet more tax money goes to the voucher schools than the public schools.
As for Sweden, according the most recent international rankings using the PISA, which was also used in the so-called “Harvard Report” touted by the governor, Sweden ranks below the U.S. in both reading and science. Overall, Sweden and the U.S. are nearly tied. Again vouchers made no difference.
As for Chile, which started vouchers in 1980, it ranks far below the U.S. in all categories. While the reported improvement may (or may not) be real, we must recognize they are starting from the basement.
But Chile was a much larger laboratory for Friedman’s ideas, which were imposed on its economy following the U.S.-backed coup that installed Augusto Pinochet in power in 1973. Although Pinochet’s reign did produce a relatively large gain in GDP for a few years, the benefits went to the wealthy and corporations. In fact the gap between rich and poor widened greatly during his rule, which was marked with such abuses that Pinochet was arrested in 2000 for human rights violations. The government reversed many of Friedman’s reforms after 1980 and restored democracy in 1988.
Friedman’s genius as a mathematical economist has not translated to his ideas about society. His predictions about deregulation and vouchers have failed in actual experience, perhaps because his logic ignored human history and its complexities. It’s now past time that we should follow the advice of Friedman’s admirer, Ronald Reagan, in judging Friedman’s acolytes: “Trust, but verify.” Or, more bluntly: “Put up or shut up.”
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I think Max Weber gave the best explanation of why a particular type of susceptible personality can become literally addicted to simple-minded doctrines in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and how that need for uncertainty-reducers, however false, is exploited by economic drivers.
Cf. my remarks in this context.
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