Bruce Baker brilliantly explains here why he won’t use the term “corporate reform.”
The strategies now being imposed on the schools have failed when applied in corporate settings, he writes.
He looks at the use of two now-popular “reform” ideas in education: the portfolio model and evaluation by results.
The portfolio model is based on the belief that schools should compete, and that those in charge should close the ones that don’t have high test scores while adding new ones.
Baker shows that when Sears tried the portfolio model, it was a disaster.
Units competed with one another, and each one thought only about what was good for its own survival.
There was, as one would predict, the worst kind of competition for survival, with cream skimming.
The overall results were devastating to the corporation.
When IBM tried to reverse its declining fortunes, it adopted a competitive employee rating system.
This too was a disaster.
(Edwards Deming could have predicted these disasters, but that’s another subject.)
So, Baker argues that current education reform should not be called “corporate reform” because good corporations would never do what the “reformers” now insist upon.
But, I will continue to use the term “corporate reform” because I think he proves the point that I make.
The bad ideas now infesting public education came from the corporate sector, where they failed.
They are failed corporate ideas that are being imposed on public schools, where they also fail.
It is important to understand why they failed in the corporate world, because it helps to explain why they are failing in the education world.
So I will continue to refer to the “reformers” as corporate reformers because it captures the origins of their bad ideas.
They are the people insisting upon the portfolio model, upon teacher evaluation models that turn teaching into a metrical exercise, upon data as the goal of education, upon turning everything into a metric, upon closing community schools, upon lowering standards for entry into teaching. They are the people who think that Big Data can solve all problems, even those that can’t be measured. They are the people who say “you measure what you treasure,” although they sometimes say, “you treasure what you measure.” And they say, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.”
If someone has a better term than “corporate reform,” I’m all ears.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Competition is never good for the firms. It is good for the customers.
That theory only works if you are able to conceive of “customers” as not also being workers, citizens, relatives, taxpayers, investors, and human beings. They are not just customers saving a few dollars on a purchase.
We’ve seen how competition allows WalMart to go into a diverse market, compete all the smaller businesses out of existence by offering fewer, lower quality goods at much lower prices. This works because they engage in exploiting manufacturers and their employees while depending on the tax base to take care of their own employees’ food and health needs since they don’t pay a living wage nor offer affordable benefits. And the Walton family adds another billion dollars to their collection.
Any system’s results can be manipulated and spun in a closed, controlled environment and be made to look “good” but when you step back and take in the bigger picture there are costs and consequences associated that often get ignored by simple statements such as yours. We see that all the time in corporate reform environments.
The ideology is what’s important, not the actual impact or wide-ranging effects, right?
So it’s OK to destroy a plethora of community schools, end the careers of thousands of career teachers, damage the longterm reputations of schools of education, endanger the lives of inner city children by making them cross gang lines on the way to school, and have your leaders play dirty pool with data and numbers if you can prove a charter school or two is “good” for it’s select group of students. And, of course, the whole point of it all is to prove your ideology is right. All the rest is collateral damage in the war of ideas.
That kind of thinking is abhorrent to me and to many others.
Yep.
You can certainly read a lot into a single sentence.
There are costs and consequences to everything, including a cost to maintaining the status quo. If you lament the downfall of Sears as a retailer, recall all the local businesses Sears destroyed with its mail order catalog.
TE: There’s an idea! Mail Order Education.
I like markets WITHIN education. I don’t like a public service being turned into a market.
Consider the same for: public transportation.
Markets for public transportation? Do you have something like taxi cabs in mind?
There is, of course, mail order education in the form of distance learning. New communication technologies are making the experience better.
I watched a Frontline/Pro Publica report last night on PBS that exposed how the assisted living industry is causing the deaths of elderly residents by focusing on profits above care (keep all those beds filled and the monthly checks coming in!), dumbing down their employees by failing to provide required training needed to provide adequate care, taking in residents that should be in nursing homes with licensed nurses instead of minimum wage untrained workers, and endangering safety by reducing payroll to the point of not having adequate staff to deal with the needs of their paying customers.
This story is so familiar because it’s the same greedy philosophy that permeates our whole corporate culture today. Profits above people, always. Employees are not people but “human capital” to be manipulated in service of increasing profits. Customers are not people but a monthly payment into the profit pool.
The same philosophy is what is destroying public education. Philadelphia, Chicago, NYC, Bridgeport, Detroit, the list goes on and on. The victims are not just data points but real taxpaying citizens whose lives are forever ruined by ideological theories that can be stated in single sentence aphorisms such as “Competition is never good for the firms. It is good for the customers.”
I refuse to reduce life to a theory or an aphorism.
My comment concerned the impact of competition between Sears outlets on Sears outlets. It is not surprising that it was detrimental to Sears.
Absolutely spot on, Chris!
Chris,
Excellent posts, thank you.
Perhaps – and I stress, perhaps – if there were actual competition, it could be good for customers. But rarely do we find actual competition. We find, for instance, AT&T, Sprint, U.S. Cellular, etc. all offering variations of ridiculously priced, pretty poor service. U.S. Cellular may be the best in terms of service, but they’re also the highest priced. AT&T may be cheaper, if you don’t mind that you can’t actually make a call. What kind of “choice” is that? Yet we see it with product after product, service after service.
It’s the same with charter schools. People like you talk a good game about how “choice” will allow students to pick the kind of education that’s right for them – progressive, Montessori, traditional, military, etc. But when it comes down to it, the only “choices” most urban minority families have are variations on the “no excuses”, “drill-to-kill”, silent hand signal power and control model of “pedagogy of poverty”. Furthermore, they may not even have any actual “choice” among these very similar options because many may be too far away and not offer transportation, many may not have openings, or may have openings only for some but not all of the kids in the family, or they may require more parental commitment than parents working multiple jobs can do, or whatever. If “competition” is so great, why aren’t different models of schools coming in and competing to get kids and make it attractive and doable for parents?
I certainly agree that there is not enough competition in the telephone market, but things are certainly better than they were. When I tell my children about waiting until after 11 to call relatives living out of state they just shake their heads at the strange old days.
I suspect that there are large local differences in what is being offered to students, and I have no doubt that the options offered in poor urban areas are not as rich as those offered in wealthier areas. That was true of the traditional zoned school system as well.
TE:
I think the questions you are asking would need to be taken by case. But I think they can be taken by case within a public school.
Deliberating can become a lifestyle. It is not a lifestyle that appeals to me. I like to make a decision and go with it. Choice in schools brings up too much deliberating for my taste.
If Tenyha moves to town to live with her auntie for six months while her husband is off in Afghanistan, there needs to be a school in her auntie’s neighborhood that will welcome Tenyha’s son no matter what.
I think the school system needs a policy about this, both in terms of who is allowed to take which courses and how it is going to be paid for. Case by case decision making will at best look capricious, at worst possibly corrupt.
Clearly you thought it was fine for the gifted student you talked about to take university classes when the parents were willing to pay for them. Correct me if I am wrong, but I also believe that you would not allow all students to choose a school to attend and have the taxpayers pay the cost of attending. Somewhere between these two stories is a line that you have drawn between permissible choice and impermissible choice. Thinking about why the line is in that place could be very helpful in moving the discussion forward.
Both of these ended up in the wrong place. If not editing, maybe a drag and drop feature to WordPress.
TE:
I respect your points. I generally get where you are coming from. 🙂
But I respect mine more. Because I like public education. My family doesn’t necessarily need public education from an economic standpoint (nor of choice—there are public Montessoris around and if I felt strongly about Waldorf or something for my children I would expect to put MY money where MY mouth is (not collective money from taxes) to enable that choice. I like public schools because if I did need them, they would be there.
During the times in my life when I did not have money, I did not expect certain things (I did not expect CHOICE on everything as a matter of right). But I did expect an education that was nearby and welcoming for a child. Weakening public schools weakens THAT CHOICE. The choice to get up in the morning and know that a school is nearby that will welcome me or my child.
I think the choice concept has gone awry. It’s like expecting to not need a stepladder if you are not tall. I do not expect to have a choice on everything, as a citizen, that is out of reach for my personal economics. There are zip codes we cannot afford to live in. But there are other choices for us. And public schools will only ever be as strong as the people who use them. Like anything. If you don’t use it and you don’t care about it, it won’t thrive.
Tilling the soil is necessary for a garden. But constant harrowing is not. And that is what is happening to our schools. The points I take away from your comments are that you have a conservative, economic stance for many things (which is necessary to balance out over-spending, perhaps), and that you like Montessori and Waldorf/Steiner schools and think they should be a choice. So maybe petition public school boards to establish public Montessori and Waldorf/Steiner schools, or else put YOUR money where your mouth is and find one that is not public. There are/were avenues already in place (prior to NCLB and RttT) to enable that type of influence in one’s community. But this emphasis on “choice” is not something that fits into having schools for all children, nearby and welcoming. Communities have to find ways to fit all citizens into the equation and I want to have the choice to take my ball and go home and not play the game anymore really doesn’t help anything. The bottom line is people could argue all day about what choices there should be. But the notion is causing more problems and chaos for public education than maybe anything ever before it. I don’t see unity. I don’t see strengthening what is available for all children. It’s like choosing whether to stop at a red light, in my opinion. There are some things that for the good of the “team,” need not be constantly questioned on matters of choice. It is counterproductive.
If you can’t afford taxi fair, you take the bus or the metro. And they are free (at least the metro is).
This might be a good time to explore the extent of agreement on student choice and find the point where it breaks down. I assume that you are comfortable with high school students choosing some classes from among those offered inside the high school building. Are you comfortable allowing these students to choose a class that is offered outside the building? If so, who should authorize it and what criteria should be used? Who should pay for the class?
“It’s like choosing whether to stop at a red light, in my opinion. There are some things that for the good of the “team,” need not be constantly questioned on matters of choice. It is counterproductive.”
Exactly. Well said.
Stopping at a red light is a classic problem in game theory. It is called a coordination game. All win if everyone coordinates. The more problematic game is when some win at one Nash equilibrium an others win at a other Nash equilibrium.
TE:
I dealt with that as a gifted teacher in Kansas for grades 8-12. We had a student who was ready for more than what the school had to offer (she ended up going to Harvard, I might add). She had an IEP, so it was not a problem. We wrote it into her IEP that she would take a class through KU (I guess it was) and her parents were willing to pay for it, but if our special ed coop had needed to pay, we would have found a way (in compliance with free and appropriate in the least restrictive environment). Anymore, this type situation could also utilize open courseware from Yale and some of the other ones who offer that, with the guidance of the gifted facilitator.
I think there is more choice built into the current systems (particularly for those identified as needing choice within the system) than is given acknowledged by screamers for choice.
Again, to me coming to a consensus that there will be public education is like coming to a consensus that there will be a shared meal. Too many cooks in the kitchen just keeps dinner from happening. They choose a menu and begin to prepare it (trained to do so, I might add) and “choice” people are outside shouting “I want a hot dog!” “What about me? I want only Thai food.” When in reality, the meal is already designed to account for vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free, and a variety of ethnic sauces. But public school is a shared meal. I think that’s the part people don’t want to embrace. They don’t want to share with “just anybody.” So the less you want to share, the harder it is to get the shared meal on the table.
Joanna,
I think we are still on common ground here, though I would be interested if you think the family should pay for courses outside the school building, the school should pay for courses outside the school building, or there should be some subsidy based on family income.
You example brings to questions to mind.
First, would you allow students who had not outgrown what a school offers to take classes outside the building? Perhaps the student is interested in some more career oriented classes not available in the assigned school.
Second, would you put a limit on the number of classes a student can take outside the building? Could this student take some or all of her classes at KU or using a MOOC or as an independent study based on open courseware?
TE:
Exactly, and I think both your questions can be answered without the need for so-called “choice.” I don’t think there are very many questions that could not already be answered with an IEP and a structure within the public school setting.
But you go throwing choice in and it changes the questions and also the ability to answer them.
Chaos. . .that’s what we have right now. And teachers will be the ones to make sense of it all and still present a meaningful experience for the children.
Joanna,
I am trying to be very concrete about the questions do I can find the point where the common ground crumbles under our feet. What is your answer to the two (well three if you count financing) questions?
So that I can find, not do that I can find.
Failed corporate reform misapplied to public education….
Sent from my iPad
Failed corporate reforms ARE CARELESSLY and FECKLESSLEY MISAPPLIED to Education. Who are these totally misguided, wrong-hearted, goulish people anyway? Sheez…they keep coming out the wood work and pipes.
Also destructive is Microsoft’s stacked ranking system. According to this reporter, it created a cannibalistic culture that contributed to low creativity, high project recalls, and employee misery. The new teacher evaluations that states have imposed are all stacked ranking metrics.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
Bill Gates and his acolytes are blind to their failures.
Billy the Goates never, I mean never fails! Got that!
I assume you are typing that on your new surface tablet while listening to music on your zune?
Zune? New Surface Tablet?
Don’t know what those are although I did take my two high blood pressure tablets this morning!!
They are two of the less well received Microsoft products.
Bill and Melinda Gates are blind to themselves and every one around them.
I’ve been pointing out for a long time now that truly innovative business organizations had already started, by the end of the last millennium, to move beyond the regressive business models of the early 1900s, but there remains a kind of grabitational force that dominates all the truly massive transnational corporations and that constantly pulls them down to their archaic fallback positions.
There is some ambiguity about the term “corporate reform”, which might as well have implied the reform of corporations — we wish❢ — but no one really believes there’s much chance of that happening.
If one wishes to stress the dynamics involved, one may use terms like corporate raiding or hostile corporate takeover of public education. The terms commodification and commercialization highlight other features of the process.
But pointing to the corporate model of governance, as opposed to the democratic model of governance, is very apt, and I think it gets to the heart of the question.
Jon,
Great neologism: “a kind of grabitational force” to describe the avaricious desires of some.
Grabitational Singularity
How about Ponzi or Get Rich Quick?! Very little about Corporate Rephorm Schools is about kids learning. It is about big $$$$$, golden parachutes, creating cogs, drones, racism, classism, greed, privilege, and pure meanness. To think otherwise proves our naïveté.
Right on! YOU NAILED it.
We could call it fascism since that is what it is. I recommend that everyone read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. She connected the dots for me.
Yes. Epiphany.
Bonnie,
Totally agree with your recommendation.
Klein is one smart cookie, and her book brilliant.
Oh, I love brainstorming activities. I’ve been thinking about this a lot too—mostly in trying to explain to people who are stunned by our NC leaders’ recent slash to public education (for no apparent reason, to those who don’t watch like readers on this blog do). So here goes (remember in brainstorming, you just let it gush out):
-Customer Satisfaction Education Movement
-Teachers as Flight Attendants Movement (not knocking flight attendants, but the jobs used to be very different from one another)
-Schools are Retail Centers Movement
-Move Over, Teachers Movement
-ABC, 123 (All ‘Bout Corporations, 1 school at at time, 2 enable privatization, 3 times the ROI in the first seven years)
-Turning over the Rock that is Public Education to see if we can find some money Movement
-Let’s all be Children! Movement
-Choice without Say Movement
-Forget Democracy, it’s the Schools are Business Movement
-Education Enterprise Movement
-Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Oh, wait my kindergarten year was spent staring at a computer screen testing) Movement
-No Adults Here: just Market Madness Movement
-Market Madness Movement
-Race to Make the Most Money on Schools Movement
-If I Say it’s True, It’s True Movement
-If We Tear it Down, They Will Come Movement
-If We Could Just Get Rid of the Poor Movement
-There is No Such Thing as Poor Movement
-I’m not Poor, So I Don’t Care Movement
-I Care, but I Don’t Know How Movement
-That Would Never Happen to Me Movement
-Elitism Elevates Everyone Movement
-I Am Right! Movement
-I am the Senator, Be Quiet Movement
-Run Around the City and Choose a School (if they’ll take you) Movement
-Parents Should Choose so Here’s What Corporations Choose for Them Movement
-Creative Disruption Movement
(actually, I think there should be a counter-Creative Disruption Movement). I can think of a lot of ways to be creative back. I have written our state sup and chair to express this, but they have not written me back to find out my ideas.
What to do about RttT?
If I am ever in a position of influence, other than being a teacher, I will insist that any programs set up will NOT have cutesy names. My husband, who once worked in the wine industry, has always told me to stay away from wines with cute names (we call them Tee Hee wines)—generally these wines are marketed towards people who don’t typically consume wine and don’t have a palate to discriminate good from bad. I would say the same is true in legislation. Except in this case I also think the ones writing the Tee Hee Legislation don’t have a palate to discriminate good from bad.
No more cute names!!
Save Our Public Schools Movement is on.
The advocates of the “bumper sticker” mentality want to reduce every movement to a cute catch phrase… Marketing something in a way that even tiny minds can refer to it easily.
I know so many people who refuse to bother with thinking about any issue. They want fast answers that fit in with their lifestyles. They want to defend their narrowly base viewpoints by slinging little phrases or epithets along the way. The problem is that too few even bother to get involved in discussions such as this.
They are too busy, both literally and figuratively.
At my school, we were all so busy working under a veiled threat, that few teachers were able to take the time to realize what was happening, or were aware but overwhelmed by work/change/deadlines/personal lives that they just shrugged it off. Too many people live by little positive thinking platitudes so they can stay upbeat. But all the while these insidious ideas have started taking hold. So many of us do what we have to do to meet the bills , get the kids through college, etc. that we have allowed this philosophical change to take over. I am not sure the young teachers even realize what has happened since in the beginning they are just trying to obey and keep their jobs.
At our district, most teachers are willing lemmings, just to keep their jobs.
Give ’em hell, Diane! Competition is what you do with people outside your “in group,” cooperation is what you do within your in group. Would you have your own children competing for who gets to eat tofay? This is insane. The poorly educated are deciding on how to educate the rest of us?
This phrase is so true: “The poorly educated are deciding how to educate the rest of us”. Some of the narrowest thinkers (if you want to call it thinking) come out of business and business schools. Why do we continue putting these people & their brainheaded ideas on a pedestal?
Think…HAHVAHD. Then puke.
This thread has gotten to the heart of the problem. Schools may want to run their money operations like a business but that isn’t really possible because students aren’t WIDGETS and neither are teachers. This reform/deform movement is trying to put square pegs into round holds. It NEVER works … unless the corners are shaved off the square pegs … at significant loss. But, money (and I believe a certain amount of ideology from the right) is fueling these “improvements”. Finding ways to “prove” their points, they are continuing to “train” the teachers to think “corporate”. Try reading the tenets of Six Sigma sometime. Efficiency. Not quality. Efficiency. And, those who can, bail out, take the money ard run, leaving people without jobs, a loss of pride, a loss of insurance, hope, retirement. Hey, if it is “good enough” for the private sector then it is “good enough” for the public sector.
But, hey, they have good marketing directors, feeding slick lies to willingly disengaged members of the citizenry. They fall for the “schools are bad because: they don’t teach religion, they teach equality, they have my kid with that kid, they can’t get my kid (who I can’t control) to behave and learn, etc. It goes on and on … and lemmings are listening. If you pose open ended questions that lead (mislead) people in the direction you choose, you will get them on board. If you are open and HONEST with people, they don’t want to hear it.
I might add that to me public services are need-based, not want-based. Civic leaders do their best to take the resources offered up for public use and serve the needs to the best that they can (and obviously there are differing ideas on how to do that). But to argue that a public service should be sliced and diced and serve more “want” than “need” is like saying those who receive public assistance with food should probably be able to go eat at Ruth’s Chris instead of buying meat at the grocery store that accepts the government voucher.
We are confusing want and need. And furthermore if we want what we offer the public to resemble a Ruth’s Chris experience more than a grocery store coupon, then we should put our combined resources into doing that. Not taking it away and then promising vouchers to Ruth’s Chris when we know Ruth’s Chris will not be interested in vouchers.
In fact, by imposing a market on a public system, we will in fact hurt our market (like our Alabama commenter whose private school is now being told what to do).
Careful what you wish for, reformers.
Sears may have failed in traditional business terms, serving the needs of customers, employees and stockholders, but as with so-called education reform, that’s the wrong way to look at it.
We live in a very different world now, where their devastating failure is, in fact, their “success.”
From the perspective of those who increasingly dominate the economy and political economy of the nation, (and not coincidentally are funding the hostile takeover of the public schools) – a relatively tiny number of rentiers, many of them based in Finance, who use rents, fees, interest, monopoly control of intellectual property, and self-serving deals to extract wealth rather than produce it – Sears is a big success.
For Fast Eddie Lampert, the financier whose unfathomable wealth was partly created by using Sears as a real estate play and diverting wealth from it – hmm, not so different from many charter schools – things are just fine, thank you.
As with pathological, wealth-extracting companies controlled by rentiers, likewise with so-called education reformers: their success is predicated on the hostile takeover of the public schools, so that they can siphon off the taxpayer-generated income streams and the patrimonial wealth of a public resource, while creating a Potemkin Village of charter and voucher schools which will be constantly opened and closed, creating endless churn and wasteful throughput intended to enrich malanthropists, privateering edupreneurs, parasitic consultants, academics-for-hire, vendors and opportunistic administrators lining up to get their skim off the so-called reform gold rush.
For these people, social vandalism and wealth extraction equal financial and professional opportunity, and they are insufferably proud of it.
“They are the people insisting upon the portfolio model, upon teacher evaluation models that turn teaching into a metrical exercise, upon data as the goal of education, upon turning everything into a metric,”
Anyone remember Enron?
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2002/Apr/TheRiseAndFallOfEnron.htm
“Skilling began to change the corporate culture of Enron to match the company’s transformed image as a trading business. He set out on a quest to hire the best and brightest traders, recruiting associates from the top MBA schools in the country and competing with the largest and most prestigious investment banks for talent. In exchange for grueling schedules, Enron pampered its associates with a long list of corporate perks, including concierge services and a company gym. Skilling rewarded production with merit-based bonuses that had no cap, permitting traders to “eat what they killed.”…
As Enron’s reputation with the outside world grew, the internal culture apparently began to take a darker tone. Skilling instituted the performance review committee (PRC), which became known as the harshest employee-ranking system in the country. It was known as the “360-degree review” based on the values of Enron—respect, integrity, communication and excellence (RICE). However, associates came to feel that the only real performance measure was the amount of profits they could produce. In order to achieve top ratings, everyone in the organization became instantly motivated to “do deals” and post earnings. Employees were regularly rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5s usually being fired within six months. The lower an employee’s PRC score, the closer he or she got to Skilling, and the higher the score, the closer he or she got to being shown the door. Skilling’s division was known for replacing up to 15% of its workforce every year. Fierce internal competition prevailed and immediate gratification was prized above long-term potential. Paranoia flourished and trading contracts began to contain highly restrictive confidentiality clauses. Secrecy became the order of the day for many of the company’s trading contracts, as well as its disclosures.”
Maybe something can put a stop to this since the application of this vulturistic economic model is pervasive across the U.S. Putting money over humanity is simply wrong, greedy, and selfish.
What strikes me in this particular thread is: while education, academic excellence, career or college readiness are the goals of educators, by forcing a business model into the arena, students lose the most important thing: feeling loved.
If we want to truly assist the learning for ALL kids, we need to infuse education with LOVE. As I said previously, too down, paternalistic overtaking of education that supplants materialistic nurturing outreach is NOT the answer.
I’m reminded of the line from the movie the Hurricane:
“Hate put me in prison. Love’s gonna bust me out.”
And those former Enron employees have spread like a contagious disease into the public education sphere through their conservative Republican political connections.
Here’s just a few of them:
Rhode Island State Treasurer mucking with public pensions:
“There’s no prudent, disciplined investment program at work here—just a blatant Wall Street gorging, while simultaneously pruning state workers’ pension benefits. It’s no surprise that some of Wall Street’s wildest gamblers have backed her so-called pension reform efforts in the state legislature. Former Enron energy trader emerges as a leading advocate for prudent management of state worker pensions? That’s more than a little ironic.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsiedle/2013/04/04/rhode-island-public-pension-reform-looks-more-like-wall-street-feeding-frenzy/
The Arnold Foundation and “Parent” Revolution:
“Another large donor to Parent Revolution, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, Texas, supports charter schools and also has funded conservative efforts to overhaul and limit pensions in California, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch. John Arnold is a billionaire former Enron trader who also founded a successful hedge fund.”
http://fryingpannews.org/2013/04/02/public-schools-private-agendas-parent-revolution/
And that great reformer Gov. Jindal of Lousiana worked for an Enron connected consulting firm in his one year of actual work before being elected:
” McKinsey recommended to the Minneapolis Public School System that it could cut costs by eliminating teacher health care. In what has become an increasingly familiar trend, the firm also recommended converting 25 percent of schools that scored the lowest on standardized tests to privatized charter schools.
Enron was one of McKinsey’s biggest clients before it went belly-up, costing hundreds of employees their jobs, their pensions and their health care benefits. Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, who was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison as a result of Enron’s collapse, was formerly a partner at McKinsey.”
I’m sure there are other tentacles woven in and out of the reformer pool.
Wake up people. Has anyone figured out that the grand architects of the reform movement already knew this a long long time ago? Why do we act surprised? NCLB, RTTT, merit pay, bottom 10% getting the axe, etc…. all have a secondary design element – To further erode public confidence and instill infighting, secrecy and a competitive mind set in teachers. 180 degrees from what we know, and research says is good and works. All have the exact opposite of what reformers present to the public. This is NOT a mistake. An outdated, ill-fit, model that demoralizes employees. THAT WAS THE PLAN. It was not simply a bad choice made by some be-fumbled politician of some clueless governor. It was chosen SPECIFICALLY for its demoralizing effects.
They get to watch the show unfold as the ship burns.
Let us never forget what Susan Neuman, a member of the group that actually WROTE the NCLB legislation,said.
Some members of her team “saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and ‘blow it up a bit’.”
Unless there is a massive infusion of ethical and moral politicians and administrators into the system then it will only get worse – by design- all the way from the very top.
Exactly!!
There is a lot of ground level thinking taking place in this thread. If there were a way to keep on topic, on point, with an agreed upon goal, this thread can be a core factor in this PUBLIC education forum. The merits of the offerings of “choice” can be applied to delivery of cooperative public education without allowing private entities to infiltrate and dominate. But we have to provide a safe, unified way to save all that is good about public delivery of education to the masses. I don’t see that happening when the philosophy is self-centered. It must be encompassing all kinds of needs in order to succeed.
I hope that my discussion with Joanna would eventually touch on which courses offered outside the school building would be excepted as substitutes for those offered inside the school building, but I hope the consensus would not be that they have to be courses offered by other public K-12 schools. That would eliminate her students ability to take university courses while in high school. It seems to me that courses at Harvard should count even though it is a private institution.
Perhaps some kind of accreditation mechanism could be possible.
My thoughts are more on the elementary level. I am thinking about preparation and developmental needs first. If those could be taken care of via lower class sizes and a societal desire to actually offer ALL students the same opportunities as those with money, then possibly we’d have more equitable learning environments.
I started with high school because I thought it the most likely level to find common ground about students (and parents) choosing classes. If the discussion continues, perhaps we can start working our way back to earlier grades.
That would be which courses are accepted, right? Not excepted.
I don’t know. I no longer teach at that level, but I see what you are driving at.
I first remember having choices in 7th grade. I have no complaints about my public schooling.
7th grade sounds good. 🙂
But remember this should be need based. Not joy ride based. Need.
You are of course correct. Any thoughts about which students should be allowed to take courses outside the school? What courses they should be allowed to take? Who should pay for the courses?
It must begin with the lower grades. Otherwise all we get is a bandaid not a solution.
Certainly education begins there or before. My goal in the discussion with Joanna (and anyone else that wishes to join) is to find the point at which students should not be allowed to make choices.
Turn it around and ask what a basic public school system should provide. What “needs” does a public school need to meet? When does a need become a want? What is the difference between a societal need and an individual need?
Those are very hard questions to answer and even more difficult to get widespread agreement on the answers.
Diane,
Help! I feel that the direction of this discussion is unfocused yet again. I am confused. Is the purpose of this blog to fight against private takeover of public education or to find ways to provide choices for everyone, no matter what the need. Thank you, Dianne.
I have always thought of this cite as a place to discuss a better education for all.
http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org
educational carpetbaggers
“(Edwards Deming could have predicted these disasters, but that’s another subject.)”
Actually, Deming is the subject (paraphrased): “The best way the US can conquer a foreign country is to export to that country the prevailing style of US business management.”