In response to an earlier post by Robert Shepherd, asking whether it might be possible to find common ground on contentious issues, Ira Shor, a professor at the City University of New York, answers:
“Dr. Shepherd sounds like a person of good will who is extremely uncomfortable with the rash, untested, arrogant impositions of high-stakes testing so profitable to corps. like Pearson, and through which govt. officials like Jindal, Emanuel, Cuomo, Christie, etc., make whimsical decisions to disrupt communities, families, kids, and teachers, none of whom send their own kids to pub schls. The opposition consolidated by the brilliant work of Dr. Ravitch has not done any damage to pub schls, kids, teachers, or families, so to represent the issue as good will on both sides is unfortunately to define a moral equivalence of power and action which simply does not exist. The unholy alliance of govt, big biz, and billionaires has been on a warpath to seize the vast assets of pub schls and segregate them so that one huge chunk of under-regulated and overfunded pvt charter schls operates with a free hand to score profits while the other chunk of over-regulated and under-funded “regular” pub schls operates with 2 hands tied behind its back. The sides are nakedly drawn here, leaving no middle ground to play in a phantom middle.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Finding a middle ground with corporate “reformers” would be like trying to find middle ground with a burglar or a rapist.
Where compromise has worked, there shall be compromise, plain and simple.
And for the large gaps in which compromise does not work, we will continue to plug those gaps wtih a permanent, infinite, organized, galvanized, and mobilized fight to achieve social justice. It won’t be easy, but we’re already starting to push back as such.
I still think massive boycotts of companies on the ALEC list and who have jumped on the education “reform” bandwagon is among the most effective measures, perhaps just as powerful as the parent’s tax dollar and vote. We must remember to use tactics that mean something in as frenzied and unfettered a capitalist culture as ours. Boycotts would kick such companies in their coffers’ royal jewels.
And nothing that has truth and beauty and justice is going to be achieved without hard, persistent work.
NPE is one by-product of the fight against profiteering.
The battle ain’t by no means over. . . .
I hear the melodious Carpenters . . . “We’ve only just begun . . . “
If “the opposition” is successful in closing charter schools, wouldn’t that do damage to the 17% of students who seem to be doing better at the charter schools they attend?
Key word in your comment “seem”!
Well that is also the keyword in the argument condemning charter schools for not producing as good a result as traditional public schools.
The problem is: are they REALLY doing better? If the only measurement is test scores, perhaps those 17 percent are “doing better.” But, is that how we should measure the success of our children? Aren’t there more important things to life that being able to rapidly fill in bubbles?
By the same token, are some students at charters really doing worse? Perhaps using the correct measures students at charters are all doing better than those at traditional public schools.
Actually, it’s more than 17% – the CREDO report did not cover many schools in many states.
The CREDO report covered half the charter schools (2,403) in the nation at the time it was conducted (2009).
It found that only 17% outperformed a traditional neighborhood public school.
37% of charters got worse results than a regular public school.
Read it yourself. http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
The study was funded by pro-charter, pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation and conducted by choice-friendly analyst Macke Raymond at Hoover-Stanford.
I’ve read it. It’s poorly done and if the results were the opposite charter opponents would be trashing it. (When CREDO came to different results more recently in various states, charter opponents dismissed them.)
The central problems is that charters vary widely as do district schools. There are Montessori, language immersion, core knowledge, “last chance” continuous progress, There’s no such thing as a typical district or a typical charter. So trying to compare achievement in a “district” and a “charter” is like comparing mileage of rental and leased cars. Not a meaningful or helpful comparison.
Diane,
Don’t forget to tell them the stats for more recent CREDO studies, including the New York City study, which shows significant charter outperformance. As many times as people call you out on this, you continue to cherry pick an older national study while ignoring the newer more local ones from the same source. I just don’t get it.
Ken,
Thanks for pointing out the CREDO report on charter schools in New York. If anyone else wants to look, it can be found here:
Click to access NYC_report_2013_FINAL_20130219.pdf
This article leaves out teacher’s union management as part of the unholy alliance.
Why?
Administrators/managers are viewed as the professionals in education, not teachers.
Teachers are viewed as the “workers” even though a certified teacher is required to have an advanced degree after 5 years of teaching. And teachers are held to a professional standard by everyone including those who view teachers with disdain–unfortunately too many folks in our society.
Teacher union management should be in the forefront of educating the public about the disinformation put out daily about how teacher quality is why some student achievement is sub-par.
And teacher union management should be educating teachers themselves on how to best defend their role in public education for themselves, their students, and the society at large.
Teacher union management’s, local-state-national, silence on these crucial points is deafening and profits those who seek to privatize our schools by influencing public opinion.
I believe the requirement that all teachers hold masters degrees within five years of beginning to teach only holds for a few states.
Well, it does in my state of Ct. Regardless, teaching is held to professional standards nonetheless.
And our (dem) Governor actually publicly declared that all teachers have to do is show up for 5 years to get tenure.
We teachers should really totally disrupt the supply and demand labor curve and leave en masse.
You all will beg for our return.
Sorry, got carried away…
The split resulting in an overfunded-underregulated group and an underfunded-overregulated group is a concept I’ve been grasping at for a while. Thanks, Dr. Shor, for putting that into words. The worst cruelty of such a split is where the special needs kids will necessarily end up. Special education is expensive, and underresourced schools will simply not be able to do right by those kids. And goodness knows the charters aren’t going to take them.
Not that anyone on this blog cares what my opinion on this matter is, but I do think Dr. Shor is right that there is no middle ground any more if there ever was, but his analysis of WHY there is not middle ground reflects as pure an intransigence on the public school side as on the side of the privatizers and reformers.
He assumes that Dr. Ravitch and her organization is as pure as the driven snow while the reformers are minions of the devil. But once again we see that the devil is “capitalism” itself, rather than a splitting of community resources resulting in less money for the public school systems. He says that Diane and the public schools have done no harm to anyone, whereas the privatizers are attempting to capture tax stream money for private organizations.
Yet Diane and the rest of “us” here seem to challenge the entire institution of privately owned businesses and private property. Thus, I see the division as occurring at a much deeper level than just privatizers vs publics. I see it as occurring at the fundamental level of the economic implications of the constitution, which holds private property as sacred. It is no wonder to me then, that the privatizers are so intransigent when the former possessors of the public school system are so totally dedicated to keeping control of the public education tax stream for themselves on the grounds that community trumps the Constitution.
The privatizers are fighting a battle against anti-capitalism itself. And far from accepting Dr. Shor’s notion that “The opposition consolidated by the brilliant work of Dr. Ravitch has not done any damage to pub schls, kids, teachers, or families,” I would argue that being totally against capitalism does indeed do damage to the kids in the public schools, to their teachers, and to the families whose work in the private sector supports the public sector.
You can’t bite the hand that feeds you without expecting that hand to snatch itself away from such ingratitude, and perhaps even slap back.
What the privatizers are doing has nothing to do with capitalism. Seizing assets owned and paid for by citizens is theft.
I presume you are referring to the closings of schools and then renting their buildings to charters or selling the land and buildings outright to the charters. It does seem like a rather nonfiducial act of the elected boards to do such things. Even Democracy can be corrupted by corrupt, big city politics.
My point is different. I don’t think the privatizing is always in the best interest of the students, and the sell-offs certainly do look corrupt. What I am trying to account for is the ruthlessness of the privatizers, and at the moment I attribute it to the utter hostility of the public school teachers to even legitimate capitalism. What they seem to be saying that the abuses of the privatizers are characteristic of capitalism.
That position, if I’m right in my characterization of it, ain’t gonna fly no where, no how, because EVERYONE makes their money in capitalistic enterprises in this country. The public sector is what might be called a “useful parasite” on the private sector. It draws all its sustenance from the host, and in return keeps the various parts of the host from being unfair to each other. A public sector is absolutely necessary for a society devoted to private property and its use, but it mainly polices it and defends it. When it begins to take too much of the nutrients out of the host, the host begins to weaken. And when a society begins to weaken, sometimes it starts fighting itself, sort of like an auto-immune disease.
Good parasites are necessary for good health. But the parasites have begun to suck too much blood from the economy, and their number has to be diminished. It is unfortunate that education has been, so to speak, caught in the cross fire between the host and its other governmental parasites. Education was never the real excessive spender. But it is now suffering at the expense of excessive spenders it nurtured philosophically such as irrational environmentalism, cultural relativism, impossible equalitarianism, and love of peaceful weakness in national defense. What goes around comes around.
Harlan,
You stated: “Education was never the real excessive spender. But it is now suffering at the expense of excessive spenders it nurtured philosophically such as irrational environmentalism, cultural relativism, impossible equalitarianism, and love of peaceful weakness in national defense. What goes around comes around.”
The sector that has the most waste and corruption and the most parasitic of all is the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), your perception not withstanding. What the federal government spends on public education palls in comparison to what it spends on the MIC.
Those items which you list are the Tea Party’s pet peeves not based in rational, logical perceptions. Without “environmentalism”, whatever you mean by that we’d still have DDT devastating the environment, lead filled bodies, rivers catching on fire (not that some folks well water now can’t be set on fire due to fracking) and many other environmental disasters, can you say PCB’s and General Electric in the same sentence.
The fact is these huge corporations are sucking the life out of this country through buying the politicians and having the supreme court determine that they are “persons” (through a bogus reading of an 1890s title written by the clerk that should have no legal weight whatsoever.) GE and many others pay no income taxes whatsoever but they are people, eh!!
“The sector that has the most waste and corruption and the most parasitic of all is the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), your perception not withstanding. What the federal government spends on public education palls in comparison to what it spends on the MIC.”
On this, there can be no debate.
I suppose by DDT you are referring to the misinformation that Rachel Carson advanced based on anecdotal evidence in THE SILENT SPRING. Bad example of properly placed environmentalism. Lead is a different matter. Since the gasoline has been cleaned up, infant lead levels have declined to produce lower levels of violence in the society. So you are at least half right on those two items. BUT the rain created puddle in my back yard does not constitute a waterway over which the constitution gives the federal jurisdiction. You don’t persuade me that the EPA isn’t mainly on a power grab.
Harlan @ 2:11,
I made no mention of R. Carson. Please spare me the straw man argument. There is no scientific doubt that DDT in the indiscriminate way it was used was causing serious harm to wildlife. One would think that as a Tea Partisan you would be concerned about “conserving” the environment in all its manifestations.
By your lack of acknowledgement of the other examples I assume that you agree that the EPA has helped clean up our environment. Shouldn’t the entities that caused these problems be responsible for mitigating the effects of and/or cleaning up after themselves, you know “accountability”?
You stated: “BUT the rain created puddle in my back yard does not constitute a waterway over which the constitution gives the federal jurisdiction. You don’t persuade me that the EPA isn’t mainly on a power grab.” First of all, I never attempted to persuade you that the “EPA isn’t mainly on a power grab” as you never mentioned that in your prior posts. Not a good try at deflecting the conversation.
And that “rain puddle” may very well be a seasonal wetland depending upon the circumstances. As a local committee member and patron of Ducks Unlimited, one of the premier conservation organizations out there, I am quite concerned about wetland (and flyway habitat) conservation. I’ve spoke with many family farmers who gladly accepted CRP monies to keep delicate marginal crop lands (usually in a riparian habitat) out of production when certain commodity prices where low but when the prices rose, then well the gubmint was trying to tell them that those “rain puddles” were seasonal wetlands and the gubmint should just butt out. Your example is a poor one.
The very articulate Mr. Underhill offers a story I find hard to believe. I haven’t heard teachers bashing capitalism. Teachers and their unions primarily wage defensive battles to protect their working conditions and salaries. Teachers want smaller classes and lighter teaching loads so they can work more effectively with kids. Pvt schls guarantee these beneficial conditions for teachers and students. Research also confirms the wisdom of this demand for smaller classes, favored by pub schl parents as well. I don’t see any brief against pvt property either in teacher demands or in remarks on this list. Pvt property is not a problem. Vast wealth is the problem b/c the super-rich and biggest corps. have successfully used govt.(the supposed pub sector?)to pass tax subsidies, write-offs, loopholes transfering tax liabilities from them to middle-class and working-class families. Billionaires are being “coddled” by govt., Warren Buffett has famously declared, when he discovered that he pays a lower tax rate than does his secretary or offfice cleaner. The obvious danger here is that the public sector is being hollowed out by pvt. entrepreneurs b/c pub schls have valuable land, buildings, equipment and tax-levy budgets desired by profiteering businesses with little to offer teachers and students. Pvt property is not a threat to public interests but gigantic fortunes are decimating our public sector.
Gigantic fortunes have devastated mankind throughout its history. Those with such wealth are the true parasites of the world stealing so much that if it were food they’d be continually vomiting as they could never get rid of all they have eaten/stolen.
Thank you for posting, Prof. Shor. I am flattered. And unlike my colleagues you go right to the point of the argument. I can only concurr that large corporations have lobbied tax benefits for themselves, but you seem to imply that the wealth amassed is excessive, and that implies a philosophical claim the the state has a duty to limit wealth accumulation by any means necessary rather than correcting the tax code abuses. My perception of the posts here is that public school teachers assume a similar conflation. Their rhetoric comes down the same place yours seems to: tax the rich down to our levels of income. How anyone does that without arrogating to themselves a right to decide how much money a person may make, and how that can be differentiated from an attack on the constitutional status of private property is difficult for me to see. Your comments about what unions want, and what teachers want is considerably more seductive than the anti-corporatist and anti capitalist rants the posters here use to find villains in the sad conflict we are witnessing, but ultimately they are the same in my view. How can you limit wealth without the state’s being given a right to take property? The New London eminent domain case is an emblem of the attitude toward property which infects all here as well as congress. Until property rights are acknowledged as absolute, I think no middle ground will be found nor will the public school defenders get a hearing from us country bumpkin kooks.
I myself favor abolition of the income tax to be replaced by a flat tax, a national sales tax. Yes I want to reverse Woodrow Wilson’s so called Progressivism. How unthinkable! Tea party, country bumpkin kooks. They even think they have a right to own guns. What absurd ideas of private property they have.
Next they’ll even conclude that people own their own bodies and are not slaves of the community, the collective, the commune, but have an intrinsic individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in their own way without submitting to the veto of the collective every act of their lives from the size of the soft drink they can buy to what noxious smoke they inhale, to whether they can go without health insurance, to what they can tweet, to what religion they can practice without interference. Or even to the kind of education they choose. Aye, there’s the rub. Some want their tax money to come with choice of what schools they spend it in. The tea party people say No taxation without representation. They mean to be heard and will not refrain from a certain kind of mischief of the Boston Harbor type if they are not respected. They think of themselves as patriots having to fight once again the power of an imperial and royal and arrogant government. They’ll dump a monopoly school system overboard as readily as the dumped bales of tea. My ancestor fought in the Battle of Bennington. I ‘m proud of him and I hope he would be proud of me for my “pamphleteering” on this blog. Tom Paine I ain’t but he sure had the right idea at the right time. But I’m only a country kook. What can I possibly know?
Next they’ll believe that they can own other humans and the gubmint should leave their “private property” alone.
Next they’ll believe that we should go back to the “original” meaning of the constitution and women, blacks, asians, hispanics, natives and non land owning white males won’t be able to vote (Guess it would be a good thing that I’m a white land owning male, eh?).
And let’s make sure we get “jesus” back into the public schools, eh!
No, Harlan, you don’t get to appropriate the “country bumpkin/kook” for yourself. You’ll have to do battle with me for that one-ha ha! I’m a firm supporter of 2nd amendment rights-if the government has a weapon the citizens should be able to have that weapon also-think that one through! I (almost-the banksters make sure they extort their 150-200% of the value of the land from you over the course of the loan) own land so this public school teacher is for some of those things you claim “all” are against.
“Limiting wealth” is a straw man. No one is suggesting limitations be placed on the amount of wealth a person can legally acquire. They are–reasonably–arguing that citizens in a civil society should be required to contribute to the continuation and maintenance of the needs of that civil society. You are railing against a figment of your own mind with your loquacious pursuit of the windmills that you believe oppose wealth.
“Harlan Seems Confused” but isn’t. Thank you for the plug, O mysterious poster taking my name (in vain?). All citizens should be required to support institutions which promote the continuation of the society, but required equally through a flat tax, a national sales tax. To argue that the rich should pay more than a tax on what they consume implies government power to tax progressively, and thus limit wealth. Eliminate the death tax while we’re at it. I am claiming that the current taxation burdens are excessive, and with Obama care and other extended regulations, are about to become destructive. The debate, therefore comes down to what are the true “needs” of a civil society. Not what we “want,” but merely what we “need”(your word, HSC)
I argue that the “needs” are a court system and police for internal security, a strong national defense for external security, and a sound currency. I do not think we need a federal department of education to spend billions of dollars bribing states to accept national performance monitoring in NCLB and federal curricular standards through RTTT in the form of the CCSS. Eliminate it. I do not think we need Obamacare, an immense bureaucracy to administrate it, and many deleterious effects on the best medical system in the world. Repeal it. (Congressmen and their staffs have sought a waiver from being covered by it. If it’s not good enough for them, we shouldn’t have to be burdened with it. )
Need I go one to demonstrate that even in my purported confusion I make a good deal more sense than anyone else on this blog except perhaps for “teachingeconomist.”
Economists generally point out that taxing an activity discourages that activity, and that is where the social cost lies. If only that worked for death taxes.
What everyone is missing concerning the Credo Study and the reality of the situation is the “Correction Factor.” This allows for the differences between charter schools and regular public schools. In order to properly compare the two systems you have to allow for charter schools not having to follow most ed code and local regulations, cherry picking parents and students, not dealing with behavioral problems, ESL and special education. These allowances of differences are the “Correction Factor.” If this is then factored into the so-called performance of charter schools I am willing to bet that almost no charter school does better than regular public schools with a few exceptions, as there always are in any system. In Chicago it was recently announced that of the over 100 charter schools only one did better than the regular Chicago Public Schools. If you read the latest, Sept. 2012, DOE OIG audit of the lack of accountability of charter schools at every level in Florida, Arizona and California you will see that they are worse than you ever thought. This is on the DOE OIG website and is DOE-OIG/A02L0002. You want to crush charter schools do some reading of this report and see if this is not the same in your state. You have to have control of the facts to take on a system or they crush you because you do not know what you are talking about. For me, that make is easy. As of so far I have not seen one opinion that would lead me to the fact that anyone has read this DOE OIG study or the Parent Trigger laws. Why, is what I ask? Are you serious, or not serious?
Why there is not a middle ground in the education debate:
http://bit.ly/ZusXoT
key graph:
Before our country can even attempt to work toward a middle ground in the education debate, we have to establish where that middle ground is. First, with over 85 percent of our nation’s school-aged children attending public schools, public schools will not go away. And insisting on getting rid of them is pure nihilism. Second, public schools cannot be run like businesses, our children are not widgets, and profit cannot be the driving motive for institutions whose mission is to provide all children access to quality education. And third, creating and administering public schools is a democratic process, and no actor in this process can be allowed to control it, no matter how much money they have.
Perhaps the middle ground could be occupied by not for profit schools that offer more specialized education than traditional zoned public schools.
Gee, why can’t we realize that with education, the “profit” should be healthy, happy, educated children, not making money that isn’t reinvested in the schools. The problem with services is that we, as a society, have tended to look at those who serve us as “inferior” and, therefore, when teachers’ salaries and benefits equaled or out-paced some in the public sector while the economy started to falter, it was difficult to accept the fact that those who “serve” aren’t taking a hit as badly as some others. So, the full out attack on unions and on public service workers began. Many were ready to jump on the attack because for whatever reason one or two “bad” teachers ruined their lives or their children’s live (in their minds) and they decided to blame ALL educators. Heck, in Ohio, our “governor” told the people who opposed his plans to get on the bus or he’d run over them with that bus. It isn’t a pretty situation.
You must mean “private” sector. There probably is envy at union protected public sector jobs with “tenure” when most private sector employees are “at will” employees. Unfortunately, the quality of those teachers is not uniformly high enough to compensate for the sense of unequal sharing of the economic distress. Add to that temporary stimulus money that delayed cuts to teachers. Add to that teacher support for Democrats whose leader plays more golf and whose wife takes more expensive vacations than most fat cat country club Republicans, and you have a recipe for resentment. Then the disgraceful mob actions in Wisconsin against Scott Walker’s attempt to moderate teacher union power rubbed us the wrong way again in its assumption that the schools belong to the teachers. They don’t. And that has led to the charter and privatizing movement. Private sector parents just don’t want to be beholden to bureaucratized teachers any more, who can’t even seem to defeat the testing movement. A secure, smug, impotent teacher corps is going to draw fire. Except for Seattle, teachers are caving in to the testing regimen by teaching the test rather than teaching the subject, a total misunderstanding of how to do well on standardized tests, and often badly written tests at that. The administrators run the prison camps and turn the teachers into capos, while the prisoners get bad food and boring days. No wonder parents want charters, vouchers, and out. If we believe in the normal curve that describes all variation, some of them are going to work and work well. Some will not. But they won’t all fail and that will keep charterization going, though whether parents will get vouchers remains to be seen. Vote tea party for more freedom; for continued fruitless muddle vote Democrat and RINO Republican.
BUT. A lot of the “other side” are – in my view – misled, misinformed, and confused–so we need to keep the communications going so that the misinformzation gets nailed.