The Chalkface blog says that we have had a steady diet of “miracles” for at least the past dozen years, starting with the “Texas miracle.”
He calls this Voodoo Education Reform.
I tend to see the ideas of the past dozen years as Zombie Education Reform.
I use the term to refer to policies that have no evidence to support them, that fail and fail again and again, but that are imposed repeatedly by powerful people, despite their failure.
Merit pay is a Zombie Reform.
Evaluating teachers by student test scores is a Zombie Reform.
Privatizing public education for fun and profit is a Zombie Reform.
Hiring inexperienced and uncertified teachers for the children with the greatest needs is a Zombie Reform.
Closing public schools and calling it “reform” is a Zombie Reform.
Putting a single letter grade on a complex institution like a school is a Zombie Reform.
Giving academic tests to pre-school children is a Zombie Reform.
We live in an age where zombies run our nation’s education policy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have used both terms in my blogging, and think each had merit and succeeds in unmasking the failure of the reform movement.
Indeed they do. They speak of delusion and death.
Unfortunately the Voodoo (or Zombie) drums of many of these things can be heard on the horizon over here in Australia as well.
We gringos wish you luck in gathering the necessary forces to counteract this crap Down Under. You have a national treasure in Noel Wilson as a resource to help. See my comments about his work on the following blog entry “Are the data scrubbed and cooked”
Thanks, but I can’t follow the link.
Might try to type it in instead of copy and pasting. Are the links not working?
No I found it.
And giving any respect/credence to Rhee, Gates, Klein, Bloomberg, Duncan, Obama, Broad, Kopp, White, etc is the zombiest of all zombie reform.
I can’t agree more! Right on!
See today’s article in the NYTimes by Jal Mehta for the latest iteration of Zombie Reform: if only we professionalized teaching! The shame of it is that Mehta lives in MA, a state whose schools perform as well as any country on earth because they fund schools and provide social support to students.
I looked at the article and while it has major defects — lionizing A Nation at Risk and Charles Payne, not calling out the punitive reform movement and the Obama administration for its deprofessionalization model — the argument is one I mostly agree with. Here is an excerpt:
Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.
By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance. It is not surprising, then, that researchers find wide variation in teaching skills across classrooms; in the absence of a system devoted to developing consistent expertise, we have teachers essentially winging it as they go along, with predictably uneven results.
It need not be this way. In the nations that lead the international rankings — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Canada — teachers are drawn from the top third of college graduates, rather than the bottom 60 percent as is the case in the United States. Training in these countries is more rigorous, more tied to classroom practice and more often financed by the government than in America. There are also many fewer teacher-training institutions, with much higher standards. (Finland, a perennial leader in the P.I.S.A. rankings, has eight universities that train teachers; the United States has more than 1,200.)
Teachers in leading nations’ schools also teach much less than ours do. High school teachers provide 1,080 hours per year of instruction in America, compared with fewer than 600 in South Korea and Japan, where the balance of teachers’ time is spent collaboratively on developing and refining lesson plans. These countries also have much stronger welfare states; by providing more support for students’ social, psychological and physical needs, they make it easier for teachers to focus on their academic needs. These elements create a virtuous cycle: strong academic performance leads to schools with greater autonomy and more public financing, which in turn makes education an attractive profession for talented people.
Full article:
Is it any wonder that so many students and educators feel “drained”?
So thankful for your support in this. I post your articles everyday on my FB group page to help further the cause and understanding of the ugly, underbelly of this insidious beast. Can I email you the flyer I made? Stop Common Core in New York State FB group.. https://www.facebook.com/groups/607166125977337/
Zombies are unthinking amoral automatons that are empty of everything but a rapacious drive to mindlessly consume, merely for the sake of consuming. Indeed, it sounds like a term more applicable to the privatizers than to the intellectually malnourished students produced by their “reforms.”
” Vampire reform” would be apt too, since many people are in the thrall of the “reformers'” superficial charm or charisma.
On the bright side, I am beginning to hear more and more rumbles of dissatisfaction, and from the general public – not just from the usual suspects.
And we “usual suspects” need to continue spreading the word as loudly and often as we can.
Reposting to Alan…yes we need to keep talking and educating our parents, students, neighbors, families, colleagues, taxpayers.
We won’t back down. The word is spreading.
Race to the top should be renamed Erase your way to the top brought to you by Bill, Eli, Arne, Barack, and the rest…watch them scatter.
Keep talking, keep blogging, keep posting….don’t ever give up EVER.
Nice turn of the phrase “Erase to the Top”.
Linda: I am with Duane Swacker on the newly-minted phrase “Erase To The Top.”
It’s now tied with my former favorite definition of RTTT: “Dash For The Cash.”
🙂
Keep letting the air out of the overinflated egos of the edubullies.
“Laughter is poison to tyrants.”
🙂
Love your comment. True!
Zombies are the product of Voodoo, so I wouldn’t try to make too strict a division . . .
If you want to focus on the most important voodoo/zombie nexus, it has its origins in the myth that schools were failing — failing the US in an era of heightened global economic competition. As David Berliner has been saying for 20 years, the ‘crisis’ in education was a manufactured crisis — one of the few things the US has been manufacturing of late.
The export of manufacturing jobs and the manufacturing of false, but easily consumable explanations of the failures of education goes back to the 1970s (or even the 1950s), but this species of specious argument really began to make headway in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. Unions were attacked and jobs shipped overseas as part of the voodoo economics descried by George HW Bush, who later adopted it. From A Nation at Risk claiming that the state of the US education system was a cause for war, to our 41st president working to redefine ‘public school’ to mean ‘any school accepting public money,’ there was a clear program of attack. The Standards movement of the time was useful to those pursuing the ultimate goal of dismantling public education and having privateers colonize it.
But these were not Zombie efforts — they were directed and advanced by the untold riches that were accumulating because of the Reagan reforms. Unlike the 1980s, a charismatic leader is no longer needed — there is enough funding and enough people on the ground working to de-publicize public education and make the schools the latest area of state retrenchment that that movement does not need a Reagan. After all, even our Democratic President accepts the specious arguments. And we thought he was an intelligent man.
Part 2 to follow.
“And we thought he was an intelligent man.”
Not me.
Depends on what kind of “intelligent man”. There have been many an “intelligent man” throughout history who have wreaked havoc, death and destruction upon others. Very charismatic one’s at that like Reagan and Obama.
Yes, Duane, and perhaps not coincidental that Obama is an admirer of Reagan. (www.openleft.com/diary/3263), which is no wonder, since they are fellow neoliberals.
What we need today is not the deceptive, shape-shifting glibness and cleverness of an Obama, but moral intelligence, which is in desperately short supply.
Amen! Your statement is so true.
Part 2 — Where the need to counter the specious argument by pointing out the paradoxical effects of education reform to improve the economy is, um, pointed out.
And, also, I quote from my book.
For the last 30 years we have been in the midst of a paradox. In the discourse on education reform, national attention in the US has focused on how to improve the education system as a means to keep the US from slipping in international economic competition. It the end we may have actually done the opposite – made the US less competitive economically, with a system that has gotten worse at its core, in its philosophical tenets and in its ultimate effect on children and young adults, by placing unwonted pressure on them and in stifling their creativity.
Still, claims that the public schools in the US are failing are rampant. The teacher evaluation system is broken. America is being out-educated. The bottom rank of teachers are beyond redemption. New, effective teachers can eliminate the achievement gap in four years, but they aren’t given the chance because our education system is in the thrall of teachers unions, ignores our children and emphasizes ‘adult interests.’ ‘Respect for Teachers,’ which takes its title from a phrase President Obama used in a State of the Union address, examines these claims, looking first at the rhetoric and the research that supposedly backs it up. It argues that most of this is not only wrong, but endangers both the egalitarian basis of democracy and broad-based forms of learning which promote creative and critical thinking.
But what is the source? Money changes everything and the books suggests, on the one hand, that we are all connected to money. On the other hand, research on education has been systematically misreported, presenting a bleaker picture overall while ignoring the central problem: our schools are failing in areas of concentrated poverty. It does so by looking at how research is presented, the gap between rhetoric and research and how one hand might be washing the other.
Working as if from a common script, private interests present a false picture. Schooling is big business, after all — two trillion dollares world-wide. Joseph Schumpeter once said, “No bourgeoisie ever disliked war profits.” One would assume no bourgeoisie ever disliked the spoils of school reform, either.
Shameless self-promotion for my book follows . . .
Respect for Teachers
or
The Rhetoric Gap and How Research on Schools is
Laying the Ground for New Business Model in Education
At Amazon, or better yet, at
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475802078
(use the promo code RLEGEN12)
While voodoo (an insult to the practitioners of Vodun, by the way) and zombie/vampire education are appealing terms, they mask the human agency and choice that is motivating so-called education reform. While there is definitely a Stepford Wives (another candidate?) quality to most of them, especially among apologists for TFA, we must keep in mind that this destruction is being caused by a relatively small group of people motivated by their financial interests and will to power.
Based on their behavior and its its consequences, I’d propose “vicious S.O.B. education.”
Maybe we should call it ZombieVoodo or “Zomvoo” education? Just having fun. If I did not have “Gallows Humor” my circuits would overload.
I love “Erase to the Top.” I have also been using “Race to the Bottom.”
Zombies not only because the reform “successes” have no research basis, have minimal evidence based on reality, and those who created it work for the profits a zombie outfit – corporate “humans”.