As readers of this blog know, there is a healthy discussion about what to call those who now claim to be “reformers.”
In this post, Leo Casey of the Shanker Institute discusses whether there is any such thing as “corporate reform.” Larry Cuban says there is not.
Let’s review what I often refer to as “corporate reform.”
I call it “corporate reform” because the reformers want to use crude metrics to judge teachers and schools. They think that data are better measures of quality than professional judgment. On the basis of standardized test scores, they are happy to label schools as “failing” if their scores are low and happier still to close them for the same reason. The test scores are like a profit and loss statement. The corporate reformers speak about having a “portfolio” of schools, sort of like a stock portfolio, where you keep the winners and get rid of the losers.
When they manage school districts, they invent fancy corporate-sounding titles like “chief talent officer,” “chief knowledge officer,” “chief portfolio officer,” etc. to take the place of school titles like “superintendent” and “deputy superintendent.”
The face of the “reform” movement is Michelle Rhee. She works closely with such figures as Joel Klein and Jeb Bush, John Kasich in Ohio, Mitch Daniels (now ex-governor) in Indiana.
These so-called reformers advocate for private management of schools by charter organizations, whether nonprofit or for-profit.
Some (Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Tony Bennett) but not all of them advocate for vouchers .
They say that our public school system is “broken,” “failing,” and “obsolete.” So to them, it makes perfect sense to replace them with private management.
They advocate for high-stakes testing.
They want teachers and principals to be evaluated to a significant degree by the test scores of students.
They applaud the closing of schools (cf. Rahm Emanuel).
They disdain local school boards, which might slow down the process of privatization of public funds.
They want to remove any due process rights from teachers, so they can be hired and fired at will.
They seek to cut teachers’ pensions and benefits.
They think that “great” teachers need only a few weeks of training. They like to put non-educators in charge of school districts and schools. After all, if someone can market toothpaste, they can also market automobiles or schools.
If you think there is no movement to undermine public education and the education profession, I don’t agree.
If someone has a better name than “corporate reform,” I am all ears.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t think he’s arguing the name so much as the motives of the “reformers”, which is a bit of a strawman. I frankly don’t care about motivations. If someone is trying to harm me or someone/something I care about, I don’t care why they’re doing it, I’m just going to do what I need to do to protect myself. They may think they’re trying to help me, but I’ll judge that by the results, not the intent.
Is this where the organization Students First comes from?
With all due respect to Larry Cuban, he’s wrong about corporate “reform.”
Former Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall embraced that kind of “reform,” and her debacle proves yet again that a fish rots from the head down.
Rotten, crooked, dogmatic, inhumane, authoritarian “leadership” –– wherever it’s imposed –– creates a culture that reflects its own amoral “values.” Anyone even the least bit familiar with the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals understands what ensues.
The kind of school “reform” that Beverly Hall championed has a track record that’s as poor as that of supply-side economics. And it has the same deleterious effect: it makes things worse. But perhaps that’s the point. The corporate “reformers” – and Hall was one – offer up more testing, more charter schools, merit pay, and vouchers as their “reforms.” Research supports none of them. But maybe that’s the point. The “reformers” really want to cash in on public school funding. The conservative foundations (like Arnold, Broad, CityBridge, Gates, Robertson, and Walton) and Wall Streeters all fund the same kinds of “reforms” touted by charlatans like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, and Arne Duncan.
[Note: As an example, CityBridge has close ties to both KIPP and Teach for America. The Robertson Foundation’s philanthropic “vision” is one that is “businesslike, results-oriented approach that is modeled more closely on private equity investing.” In the area of education “reform” it seeks to encourage “competition by supporting the development of charter schools” and “voucher programs.”
Both the Arnold Foundation and the Robertson Foundation have given $25 million to Teach for America. See:
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2011/01/27…
The Walton Foundation focuses on “competition”, “charter school choice,” “private school choice,” and teacher effectiveness. It funds groups like Teach for America, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (whose board of directors includes Rick Hess and whose advisory board includes a KIPP founder, a Walton board member, and education blatherer Andrew Rotherham) and the Charter School Growth Fund (interestingly, Kevin Hall sits on the board of both this group AND the Charter School Authorizers and was previously the “Chief Operating Officer of The Broad Foundation” and “worked at…Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Teach For America.”).
The inter-relationships between these corporate “reform” groups is so incestuous that it makes one wonder if cognitive impairment is why they keep coming up with stupid, discredited ideas.]
Let’s be clear here. The kind of “reform” pushed by Wall Street, much of corporate America, and conservative critics is precisely what American public education does not need. But Obama’s Race to the Top amplifies it.
American public education’s core purpose, from its inception, was democratic citizenship. The idea is traceable to Aristotle. who argued for a system of public education in Athens when one did not exist. Aristotle wrote that the “citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives.” Each government has a “peculiar character” that is based on its core values and practices. Aristotle wrote that “the character of democracy creates democracy…and always the better the character the better the government.” And public schools, he said, were critical to the maintenance and well-being of democratic character. Democracy, he wrote, depends on education “being one and the same for all….public, and not private…all [citizens] are part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
Our system of public education was founded conceptually on Aristotle’s principles. But we’ve strayed far from our mission and purpose. Our “leaders” – mostly – have misled us. We have let ourselves get misled.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The SAT and ACT are tests that don’t predict much, and measure nothing better than family income, and Advanced Placement isn’t much better. Climate change and global warming are for real. So is evolution. The “free market” called Wall Street is very heavily rigged, and subsidized, with privatized gains and socialized losses…and this is the type of education “reform” endorsed by the “business community.”
The same “community” that pushed supply-side economics. That broke the economy, and evaded accountability, and asked for a huge bailout. That demands more tax cuts for themselves and cuts in public services. Commenting on the Atlanta cheating scandal, Governor Purdue said he “was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth…Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.”
The fish rots from the head down.
Hi,
Great post, thank you.
Yes, exceedingly brilliant!
There is a corporate totalitarian agenda which aims to replace our current variety of social orders with its preferred brand of universal corporate feudalism™.
The corporate takeover of education is just a part of that agenda.
How about corporate deform and destruction (CDD) as that is what it is. I like truth in advertising as my old non profit was The Association for Education and Accountability (AAEE) which is what it is supposed to be. The “Deformers” are as “Orwellian” as they can get. There is so much money to steal in education and there are also the social profits to make by creating the people you want when you control education. Read on Hitler and the youth organizations and education, China and pre-WWII Russia. Now the U.S. is a lawless country. You buy what you want if you have the bucks and connections which the bucks give you. If there is anything for real is that when they say research based you are being generally told a lie. If that was so we would not have the problem and the explanation of statistics as in the previous blog. They say that a 56-75% leaving their voucher situation is great because they had a high graduation rate. Looks good, except that anyone can have a high graduation rate when you get rid of all the low performers no matter why they are low performers. You are left with the cream. The only way you are successful is when you help all students no matter the situation as they are in general number across all the fields. This loss of students is then seen in the criminal justice system in about the same percentages as the K-12 failures.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/obama-budget-education_n_3053564.html
According to the administration’s budget documents, amid a slew of other budget cuts, the Obama administration is asking for $71.2 billion in discretionary funding for education, an ask that represents a 4.6 percent or 3.1 billion increase over 2012 levels.
The flashiest education item on the budget is the preschool expansion initiative Obama has been alluding to since his State of the Union address. According to the budget, the program will be called “Preschool for All.” The administration estimates that the program will cost $77 billion over 10 years…
*********
More money for Pearson, Gates, Walton, Broad, Murdoch, Koch, etc.
Perhaps the “Factory Schooling Movement,” or the “Factory Model Education Movement” would be appropriate.
The movement depersonalizes children and treats them like one-size-fits-all widgets, whose only needs are to be molded to certain specifications and then tested for quality. It also treats teachers like unskilled, faceless factory workers, who have no discretion in doing their work, are told exactly what to do by people who have never done their job, and who need to be monitored closely by floor managers with clipboards. Whatever we call the movement, the word “factory” should be in there somewhere.
It really is quite ironic that we can draw such parallels to the factory model. Many of the current crop of deformers advocate for the teaching of 21st century skills in contrast to our antiquated factory model of education. It is doubly amusing when what is advocated in terms of accountability has little to do with encouraging the development of 21st century skills.
Gayaneh & 2old2tch: most excellent comments!
Doublespeak is alive and well in the twenty first century. The education “innovators” tout and would mandate widgetized education that takes the “personal” and the “person” out of “personalized instruction” and call that by now old factory-model of education [both in how and what it teaches and in the mind-numbing/limiting effect it has on those who dole it out and are forced to receive it] innovation at its finest.
EXCEPT when it comes to THEIR OWN CHILDREN who, inexplicably [????], receive something qualitatively different from the educational “excellence” they promote, profit from and mandate for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. $ucce$$ anyone?
Could there be a contradiction here between word and deed? Oh sorry, how un-innovaty of me…
A most hearty bow to you both from KrazyTA.
🙂
Why thank you. 🙂
And I like the phrase “widgetized education.” That describes the movement perfectly. The Widgetized Education Movement. That’s it exactly.
I stumbled upon this article posted by Americans for Prosperity (Koch Brothers foundation). It chimes in on education reform and the Common Core…the article is chock full of ‘misinformation’…such as refering to private charters as being motivated by local concerns for quality schools…The article chastises Common Core and testing: “If the success of school choice has taught us anything, it’s that education is most effective when controlled by actors on the local level, like teachers with freedom in how to teacher their students at charter schools, or parents with options of where to send their child to school through opportunity scholarships. Choice from the bottom, not force from the top, leads to effective learning.”
Kind of a weird perspective from a billionaire sponsored foundation…who themselves are forcing privatization on local schools who did not invite them into their communities. Talk about ‘double speak’…this will spin your head around and back again. Mine is still spinning.
http://americansforprosperity.org/legislativealerts/its-official-the-feds-control-common-core/
As a resident of planet Reality, I am with Diane on this one.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, squawks like a duck, it’s a…I think someone over thought this one wayyyyy too much. [Remember the old saying “paralysis by analysis” to describe someone who can’t seem to come to an obvious conclusion even in the face of overwhelming facts & logic & argument?]
“If someone has a better name than “corporate reform,” I am all ears.”
My ears are at the ready too.
🙂
Language is vital to how we perceive and organize our world. Words are a tool by which we comprehend and organize our perception of the world. By “corporate education reform” we are saying there are organizations who are promoting a corporate agenda to privatize public education and open it to profit seeking market. It is easy to recognize these organizations and it is clear there is coordination going on between ALEC, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family, and the Broad Foundation to promote this corporate agenda.
To dismiss the concept of “corporate education reform” is to keep people focused on the individual trees so they don’t see the forest.
I notice no one has come up with a better term.
Diane,
I think you nailed it here. It is easy for us to take the safe approach and split hairs. I often do it. In education, we survive based on the kindness of strangers.
As opposed to many other great scholars, you have cut through the tangle of ed terminology and made us face the harsh truth.
Personally, it scares me that I now think I need to put things into these words.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thompson/after-kicking-down-teache_b_3034017.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications
I think we need an “inside game” where traditional teachers representatives accept their terminology and function within the rules of their game. We also need clear-thinkers like you who call em as they are.
Many of those who comment here are quite aware of the role that the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan had in shaping today’s landscape. Prop 13 out of California in ’78 was very much a part of that Raygun heyday, as was Maggie Thatcher.
Check out Glenda Jackson’s recent comments on Ms. Thatcher in Parliament.
WARNING: if you think fire and passion are part of the problem – don’t bother watching. IF you think OUR side needs fire and passion, THEN watch and try to learn a little about public speaking. Ms. Jackson had 4 years in the Royal Shakespeare Company & a has a couple of academy awards …
rmm.
Here’s what Obama/Duncan want to do next year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/paying-for-preschool-with-a-1-a-pack-cigarette-tax/2013/04/10/cea4de30-a21f-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story_1.html
“Obama is proposing several initiatives aimed at improving high school and streamlining federal programs that support education in science, technology, engineering and math. He wants to expand the competitive grants that have become a signature of his education policy, this time creating a college version of Race to the Top, which would award $1 billion in competitive grants to states that make college more affordable.
“The budget calls for $300 million for a new program that would reward high schools that work with employers and local colleges so that high school students are learning skills needed for careers and college. In his State of the Union address, the president highlighted an example of this kind of re-engineered high school, P-TECH in New York City. A partnership between IBM, the City University of New York and the public school system, P-TECH is the nation’s first 9-14 school, where students can earn both a high school diploma and an associate degree. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) plans to open 10 more high schools in his state modeled after P-TECH.”
For many years, governments at the local, state and national levels has hired companies to do various things. Sometimes they supply materials (paper, computer). Sometimes they build things (schools, post-offices, airplanes, etc). Sometimes they provide services.
In my experience, some of the companies are reputable and provide good products and services. Some are shoddy.
This appears to be a case where some are very shoddy. Frustrating use of public dollars to help students with special needs – are private unmonitored contractors providing this kind of service in your state? (I think high quality early childhood ed for 3-4 year olds, including for students with special needs, is a great idea – but this apparently did not work out well with all the contractors).