A regular reader who signs his (or her) posts “democracy” has a two-part response to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which dumbly continues to repeat the discredited claim about the crisis in American education, a crisis they have helped to perpetrate by crying wolf for thirty years.
Here is Part 1:
Education in a democratic republic has a special place and purpose. At least it’s supposed to, and public education’s purpose is most certainly NOT to make a society “more competitive.” Aristotle argued for a system of public education in ancient Athens, noting that “each government has a peculiar character…the character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarch creates oligarchy, and always the better the character, the better the government.”
Democratic governance is supposed to be “of the people, by the people, for the people.” By contrast, oligarchy is government by a relatively small – usually wealthy – group that “exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Considering who funds the Common Core, and who supports it (think the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), and the process by which it was brought to fruition, is there really any question as to the purpose behind it?
A former assistant secretary of education in the Bush administration said that NCLB was really a “Trojan horse…a way to expose the failure of public education…to blow it up a bit.” Is the Common Core really so different?
There are those who don’t believe in the fundamental purpose of public education. They are not interested in the developing the “democratic citizen,” one who understands and is committed to the core values and principles of democratic governance; one who is imbued with the “character of democracy.” There are certain people and groups and special interests who’ve felt threatened by education for “the masses,” especially Mann’s view of public education as “the balance-wheel of the social machinery” in a democratic society. And this begs the question, is the Business Roundtable committed to the core values and principles of democracy? The Chamber of Commerce? Bill Gates? Jeb Bush? And what about Arne Duncan?
All of these people and groups make two false claims about public education in the United States. First, they say that public schools are in “crisis.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, the data (which these folks claim to care about) have shown and continue to show that there is no general “crisis” in public education in the United States.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very good.
The only thought I had was that NCLB didn’t expose failure, it created it. You can’t expose something that is made up.
Joanna,
You are right. NCLB was based on a manufactured crisis.
It is astonishing that the Chamber of Commerce is backing the creation of a self-appointed, distant, centralized, regulatory authority–the CCSSO–that overrules every teacher, every curriculum coordinator, and every curriculum developer in the country. Of all people, the members of the Chamber should understand that innovation occurs when one has voluntarily adopted, competing ideas–a market-based approach in which free people at the local level choose the standards and assessments that they wish to implement. We are witnessing an extraordinary event–the Chamber of Commerce backing the work of some Politburo that makes these decisions for everyone else.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce should forget the common core and start promoting the common kitchen. Standard appliances for everyone. Sure, it would be expensive and accomplish very little, but at least everyone would get to pick a new color fridge, a tangible item, versus the vacuous promises of the common core.
Agreed, TC. Or common uniforms for all citizens to wear. Common caps with little red stars on them.
The reality of what is going on is finally recognized and talked about! Yea ! However, the vast majority of parents, and even educators, have no idea…and the administrators who do understand are powerless to do anything, as they are professionally obiged to follow the lead of the higher ups. In New York, the higher up is John King, however, he also has a higher up – one Regents Chancellor named Merril Tisch, of the millionaire (billionaire?) Tisch family – so who do you think is controlling the takeover in new York?
And what can the rest of us do about it? Kudos to the parents who are raising their voices, but I don’t believe it will stop the plans of the wealthy, which have been in place for years…..
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce–the self-proclaimed voice of American business–did not arrive at its present positions on education by accident, happenstance, or unintentional evolution. Rather, as Charles Cray writes for Greenpeace USA, “on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, [and a future U.S. Supreme Court justice] drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society. Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing ‘attack on the American free enterprise system.'”
The memo–now known as the Powell Memo–is both a battle plan for defeating that so-called attack, and a roadmap depicting a journey that began forty-plus years ago and has led us to much of what passes for education “reform” today.
Bill Moyer provides an insightful analysis of the Powell Memo, taken from the book ” Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class,” Also recommended is Charlie Cray’s article on the Greenpeace blog. Both are linked below.
http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/the-lewis-powell-memo-corporate-blueprint-to-/blog/36466/
These new statistics show a brighter future for America. No wonder they’ve been kept hidden – they don’t fit the profile.