Denny Taylor, a professor emerita of literacy studies at Hofstra University, here comments on the recent exchanges among Marc Tucker, Anthony Cody, and Yong Zhao about high-stakes testing and education reform. The key issue, she believes, is not so much about policy as it is about money, power, and control. When big money takes control of public policy, what is at risk is not only children’s lives and their education, but democracy itself.
Taylor has written a scorching analysis of Marc Tucker’s finances and his role in education reform.
She writes:
“I have read with interest the dialogue between Marc Tucker, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, and Yong Zhao on the establishment of an American test-based public education accountability system. Forty years of research on the impact of political structures on social systems,[1], [2] in particular public education,[3] leads me to categorize Marc Tucker’s rhetoric as nothing more than political cant to protect the lucrative profits of poverty “non-profit” industry that is bent to the will of the powerful rich donor groups that are dominating education policy in the US and UK.
“It is the PR discourse of big money that shapes the lives of teachers and children in public schools, and confounds the lives of families with young children struggling with the grimness of developmentally inappropriate instruction in public schools – instruction that rejects all that we have learned as a society about child development, how children learn language, become literate, and engage in math and science projects to both discover and solve problems. Knowledge gained from the sciences and the lived knowledge of human experience, the very essence of our human story, no longer counts.
“Tucker’s view of education is economic. Children in, workers out, could be the mantra of National Center on Education and the Economy. The NCEE website toots the familiar horn of the rich non-profit educational organization stating that: “Since 1988, NCEE has been researching the world’s best performing education systems to unlock their secrets.” Nonsense, of course. What NCEE has actually been doing is making money.
“In 2012 the total assets of NCEE were $93,708,833, with total liabilities of $1,572,013, and net assets of $92,136,820.[4] This highly lucrative “non-profit” fiefdom receives substantial funding from a long list of “donors” including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Broad, Walton, and Walmart Foundations. NCEE has also received substantial funding from the US Federal Government…..
“NCEE was the majority shareholder of America’s Choice, Inc. (ACI), which was established in November 2004 as a taxable for-profit subsidiary of NCEE. NCEE reorganized its internal America’s Choice program as a separate subsidiary to attract the capital investment and management talent to expand the implementation of the America’s Choice comprehensive school design program and related offerings for struggling schools. [6]
“In addition to his lucrative salary [$819,109 in 2012], Tucker was awarded stock options in ACI. In the 2010 Federal tax return for NCEE it further states:
“While any growth in the value of ACI would benefit these optionees, it was anticipated that such growth would also benefit NCEE’s charitable mission.
“NCEE then sold off ACI to Pearson. Here’s what is written on the next page of the 2010 federal tax return:
“The work of NCEE going forward will be funded in large part by the $65.9 million in proceeds that NCEE received as a result of the sale of ACI to Pearson…”
Taylor writes:
“Local control has been eviscerated through the enactment of laws and policies that have ensconced the Common Core in the new business driven public education system, which is centrally controlled through mandatory, highly lucrative, commercial accountability systems, that drain the coffers of local communities and diverts funds from essential programs and services that are no longer available for children in public schools.
“The new report on the American accountability system is just another example of big money writing private policy and sugar coating it to make it palatable. Zhao took the plan apart piece by piece, and Tucker might indeed counter Zhao’s arguments, but there is another problem, a little known fact, that cannot be explained away, not by the educational non-profits serving the needs of the big money backers who make public policy, or by the federal government that benefits.
“The basic research on which the economic system of public education was founded has no scientific legitimacy. This is not unsupported opinion; it is fact.
“At the beginning of the 1990’s, a well-orchestrated effort in state-corporate cooperation was initiated to disenfranchise the growing influence of teachers at the local level across the US, who were creating and using developmentally appropriate teaching-learning materials and activities in public schools that limited the influence of corporate curriculum producers. [19]
“School districts were spending money on real books instead of artificial, commercially produced programs, and there was concern about the growing rejection of commercial text-book producers, including McGraw-Hill, in the five big adoption states – Texas, California, Michigan, Florida, and New York.
“Billions in revenues and profits were at stake. Profits dropped. Not a whole lot, but even a slight dip could be counted in the hundreds of millions. Worse, the growing teacher-led democratic movement was taking hold, causing concern about displacement of the powerful elites in government and big business. From studying the teacher movements of that time, I can write that teachers really believed that through the ways in which they were teaching children in school, society could become more equitable.[20]….”
After a lengthy analysis of the power of big money to capture education policy at the federal and state levels, Taylor writes,
“Again, to ensure that this is not seen as unsupported opinion or that NCEE is an aberrant anomaly, one of the platforms on which big money is falsifying facts is the National Council on Teacher Quality, which has an Advisory Board that includes Pearson International, The Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and Murdoch’s News Corporation. The assessment of the syllabi of reading courses in US schools of education by private groups with a commercial agenda is not only political, it is predatory. The assault on faculty and students in colleges of education by NCTQ is also an aggressive act against teachers and children in K-12 public schools that impacts the academic development of the nation’s children, and also their health and well-being.
“When an ideological elite joins with the economic and political forces that control what human beings do, it is important that we confront our illusions and expose the myths about what is happening in K-12 public education. The very existence of NCTQ is a clear indication that we live at a time when the pressures on educators and children in K-12 public schools are reaching a tipping point.
“It is the nightmare scenario that so many of us dread, when the escalation of the causes and conditions that have such a negative effect on the lives of teachers, children and their families become self-perpetuating, and reach a point beyond which there is no return from total disequilibrium. When this happens, at our peril, this nation will no longer have the smallest hope of becoming democratic. Self-aggrandizing private groups with corporate power will overwhelm the system and our struggle for democracy will flounder.
“But there is more than democracy at stake. Once again, to quote Eisenhower:
“Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
What Tucker or many of his contemporaries don’t seem to get is that there is no time left for big money to mess around. The problem is that the redesign of our public education system based on “meeting today’s economic needs” is getting in the way of the transformation of schools which is urgently required to meet the real needs of our children tomorrow. The assessment system that he is pushing on teachers and children is designed to prepare children to work for the corporations that are using up Earth’s resources, contaminating the planet, causing the climate system to adversely change, and making Earth an unsafe place for our kids to be.”
“….. In public education we need big money to change everything. Tucker must alter course, save face before it is too late, and help get his contemporaries – the men with money, power, and privilege – to acknowledge that under their leadership the public education system has floundered, and that if, we are going to prepare today for tomorrow, we need to support the courageous teachers who were and are making a difference for children and society before big money got in the way. [26], [27]”
This is very powerful. It lays it all out there.
It is time for a parent/teacher/student “million person” march on Washington?
Hopefully such a March would kickstart a movement for a real third party in this country with a chance to rally progressives and elect officials not owned by the corporations. I would like to see us marching on the Supreme Court – stopping at the White House these days would be such a waste of time. Obama would be too busy between raising money and ordering drone strikes to be worth a visit. The Supreme Court as I see it is the root of the problem – they say what the Constitution is and right now the Constitution gives free speech to corporations, speech is buying politicians, and unions are in violation of the bosses’ property rights.
Watching The Roosevelts this week I was reminded that Teddy called for referendums on Supreme Court rulings which affected public rights, and FDR tried to pack the Court when the 9 old men kept on rejecting his, and the peoples’, attempts to create some equity and opportunity in this country. He was criticized for doing so but it got some action and the 9 old men packed their bags.
How we have regressed as a nation. The President who promised us Yes We Can turned out to be the second coming of Grover Cleveland.
Great article and the words are basically own mantra…”When big money takes control of public policy, what is at risk is not only children’s lives and their education, but democracy itself… ” Our nation has eliminated “Checks and Balances” so crucial to our liberty as a nation. I do think it it also worth noting that in the age of the internet, the publishing industry had to find a way to renew itself as it was totally losing ground. “Ed reform” has found THE WAY to keep the publishing industries totally solvent and in fact PROFITABLE off the backs of our nation’s children in public schools. Common Core is like the agar in the petri dish.. the great enabler. No longer can a student read a classic book… it must be “adapted” to the point where it no longer resembles that classic book anymore. Testing.. well what can I say… that has fed the great “publishing machine”… testing is the great fuel for publishing profit. And as the author notes… it is FACT that none of the implementation of this national “lock-step” education policy implemented is grounded on research. Taking control away from teachers was crucial because they KNOW A LOT BETTER. Denigrating teachers was CRUCIAL to taking their voice away. It goes on and on. My fear is wondering if our vote will matter anymore. The populace against all this nonsense is growing by leaps and bounds but DO WE HAVE A SAY AND VOICE ANYMORE? Those nominated in elections are basically BOUGHT to the highest bidders thanks to a lack of campaign finance reform in favor of democracy.
Also worth noting… that while we are so busy fighting the “ed reform” lynchpin.. common core, we are not fighting the real problem… INCREASING POVERTY AND ITS ADVERSE EFFECTS ON OUR NATION’S CHILDREN!!!!
Thanks so much, Diane, for calling attention to this article. It’s the best I’ve seen in articulating what’s at stake with corporate-driven ed reform. It parallels the understandings/realizations that are emerging from the sustainability movement, as articulated by Naomi Klein in her newest book: This Changes Everything. Thus, the struggle to support courageous teachers who are speaking truth to power is nested within the larger struggle to assure a just and healthy planet for generations to come.
the problem is Capitalism…………
Not a communist, but yes, you have put your finger on it.
Are other public school parents a little underwhelmed by the supposedly superior Common Core tests? I’m in no way a testing expert but my kids have been in public schools through the entire ed reform experiment for the last 15 years and I took standardized tests in public schools (although I never did anything like 10 hours of testing in 3rd grade – the only + 10 hour test I’ve ever taken is the bar exam).
I was curious and my 6th grader is an easy-going person who will graciously and generously humor me, so I had him take some of the sample test questions in math. We are in a “PARCC state” so he did a couple of those and I also had him do a couple on Smarter Balanced. The wording seems a little trickier and they have a definite Common Core focus (fractions, fractions and more fractions in 6th grade and number lines, which I guess is absolute value) but other than that are people really like “this is revolutionary!”?
This is Indiana. Read it and weep. The plan is to let corporations actually direct what will constitute “career education” in public schools.
They seated another completely unaccountable and opaque appointed panel. There isn’t a single representative from a K-12 public school on the K-12 public education “career training” panel.
Can we just cut out the politician middleman and actually negotiate directly with corporations ourselves? I think we’ll do better in these deals if we cut out the completely useless, captured and corrupt politicians, I really do. We couldn’t do WORSE at this point.
Can we hire an advocate? The politicians and their donors can sit on one side of the table and our advocate can sit on the other. There is no one representing our interests in these negotiations. We’re going to get robbed, again.
http://in.chalkbeat.org/2014/09/26/indianas-goal-use-data-to-reimagine-education/#.VChhKyldVH3
I studied with Denny Taylor in the doctoral literacy program at Hofstra, which opened my eyes to the role of corporations controlling the text in schools. These powers were the the true nemesis of the “whole language” movement, which threatened to bring authentic literature into the classroom at the expense of the publishers nonsense materials. They moved unsparingly to create a “monster” of any alternative to their profits.
The great irony, these people accuse us who support an open public school system with transparent governance of being socialistic or communistic in our bent and outlook. We care about the well being and health of society. This is nothing more than what happened in Italy. Business concocts a plan to control not only resources, but also the allocation of labor and the development of resources. Of course, their progeny will not be subject to the “rigor” they will impose on us, they will not need the pensions we will be denied, and they will not understand the violence they may cause. Dare I say this is awfully similar to fascism? Of course, it’s okay when you are on top. Test scores and cup offs will be manipulated to grant or deny access to education and employment, all at the whims of the power elites, with another tip of the hat to C. Wright Mills. I recommend the book The Power Elite.