In what seems to be a trend, the new Lt-Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, has assembled a committee of 55 leaders of business and industry to advise him on state policies, including education. There do not appear to be any educators on the panel. Lt-Gov-elect Patrick is a strong proponent of vouchers.
Last month, the Governor of Nevada created a committee of business leaders to advise him on education policy without appointing any educators to join it.
It seems to be a well-established principle in today’s “reform” climate that business leaders and politicians are experts about education, and there is no reason to ask educators to have any say in state or federal policy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
PURE IDIOCY and BACK ROOM POLITICS at work.
This is just incredible. A formal committee of 55 representatives of private industry, formed for the express purpose of making policy recommendations to legislators. No public notice of meetings, all meetings closed to the public.
Having spent 25+ years in business, no phrase is more terrifying than “run the schools like a business”. There’s a reason for the success of the Dilbert cartoons. These clueless frat boys are going to create yet another mess that will take decades to fix.
Clueless micromanagement (a la Dilbert) is not what comes to my mind from the following:
“The Lieutenant Governor’s Advisory Boards of Private Citizens will have individual committees on water, transportation, tax policy, energy, economic development and economic forecasting. Among its members are energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, San Antonio real estate developer Gene Powell, Midland oilman Tim Dunn and Brint Ryan, the owner of a Dallas-based tax firm.”
These guys are macro-managers.
The biggest mistake is to assume these people are omniscient beings. The rise to power in an organization can involve many factors, the least is an expert on education and learning. I would not want Pickens teaching my kids. The problem with macromanagement is the effects of “strategic” decisions as they are put into practice. That’s when you see the insanity of top down decisions play out in the real workplace. Hence, the great material for parody. I have often found these guys are more often in the right place at the right time to ride a wave or greatly enriched by government policy.
These oilmen & real estate developers are the same billionaires who work to get themselves tax cuts & divert public subsidies to themselves & away from public schools.
Let’s see, what might THEY recommend for pubic schools? Privatize, privatize, & privatize and assure schools will sort out the less profitable kids at every grade level up through community college.
MathVale and FLERP!: how much you wanna bet that the same “business-minded thought leaders” figuring out today how to “fix” education, tell us “amateurs” years down the line that there’s a “learning curve” and “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good” and “Rome wasn’t built in a day” then add in all ludicrous seriousness—
That they’ll get it right. Someday. Somehow. Someway. As long as you throw enough money at them…
Re the bet, sorry. That would be like taking candy…
And I would add: DILBERT is bafflingly and eerily spot on when it comes to self-proclaimed “education reform.” Why the baffling part? Because it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry or both at the same time.
Thank y’all for your comments.
😎
Luckily for people in New Mexico vouchers cannot be used by the Public Education Department to send students to private schools of any kind. The state constitution does not allow for vouchers. At least we have done one thing right for our students that Secretary of Education Designee Skandera and Governor Martinez can’t screw up or with. I am positive if these two could come up with a way to use vouchers they would do so.
Skandera claims to put committees together with a few educators involved but when it comes time for decision making anything the our Professional Educators had to say does not make it to the table for consideration. It seems that the only people that have a play in the decision making processes in New Mexico since Skandera was appointed by Martinez is the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), Chiefs for Change (in both of these two Skandera is a big player), Pearson (naturally), Jeb Bush (her big buddy and mentor), Secretary of Education Duncan, and many other big corporates. Professional Educators in New Mexico, as in most other states, do not have much say, if any, on how our students will be educated. Educators are told to shut up, line up, do what they told to do, how they are told do it, and how they will be evaluated. i do believe that is how dictators do their business. If the Professional Educators do not like the way education is run in New Mexcio, tough — retire or go work in another state. That is the life of our educators today.
Isn’t this the classic definition of fascism given by Mussolini?
Absolutely it is! “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
The following particular statement from Dan Patrick is very telling of our current dilemma:
“Very often the private sector is asked for help by a candidate ,but after they get elected, there’s not much follow-up,” Patrick said. “This is for them to provide us with insight and new ideas that either we haven’t thought of — or when we have an idea, a piece of legislation, we’ll say, ‘How will this work?'”
OMG! How naive so much of the general population is to buy into this pile of shinola! How arrogant the deformers/politicians are to think that everybody (repeat everybody) believes their ordure!
Q: How much of the current right-wing policy today comes directly from ALEC model legislation or is a result of corporate bribes from the Koch Bros. or their ilk with numerous caveats attached?
A: Most or all of it!
If you really want to give yourself a case of the creeps, read this:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/dan-patrick-texas-lieutenant-governor
It’s title says it all…
Man Who Believes God Speaks to Us Through “Duck Dynasty” Is About to Be Texas’ Second-in-Command
And people actually voted for him -Yikes!
. . . “Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.”
Among the Disrupted
By LEON WIESELTIERJAN. 7, 2015
New York Time Book Review
All should read the link provided by GE2L2R!
WHY ARE WE, AS EDUCATORS, PARENTS AND RESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES, N.O.T. OUTRAGED THAT ALL OF US ARE PUSHED ASIDE, IGNORED, OVERLOOKED AND TREATED AS SECOND-CLASS PEOPLE.
LEGISLATORS ALONE MAKING ALL EDUCATION DECISIONS!?
Not another profession would stand still, keep quiet or hold their tongues at such pervasive US practice.
COME ON, PEOPLE!
RISE UP!
Wait not a minute longer!
We cannot continue to ALLOW them to exclude us.
OUTRAGEOUS! Who do they think they are?
In this nation we have had over the years since the first person from Europe set foot on this continent a Revolution for Freedom from England, Women’s Rights Movements, Civil Rights Movements, Voter Rights Movements, Child Labor Laws based on Movement by the People, etc., etc., etc. Is it not time to have an Education Movement for our Children and Grandchildren so they can have the education they deserve and a right to receive and one that is not based on decisions made by big corporations and politicians that know little to nothing about how to educate students?
Education is the very foundation upon which the democracy of this Country was founded. Public Education is being taken away by the big money people, foreign corporations, people whose political futures are built on the backs of our educators and students, and those that would take away the freedom of pure thought and initiative. People who think with a clear vision and who have the initiative to move forward with their thoughts and ideas are a threat to the big and powerful. Our children cannot have a clear vision of their future and the initiative to succeed with that vision without the education of free thinking Professional Educators
Public Education is the blood line of our freedoms that we still cherish today.
It is time to have a Education Movement, not educational reform as it is today being forced on us, that will enable this country to continue to be great and its people free.
It’s always been thus–but, since most of the Important People didn’t think K-12 schooling very important, and especially not K-6, they didn’t interfere a lot. But if I spoke on panels, along with business people or an academic, I was largely there to add local color, humor, anecdotes. I reacted to my friend Diane Ravitch’s expertise with considerable venom in the olden days. The union spoke “for us”–but alas, too often “instead of us.”
Much said in few words. Context is so very important.
😎
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
“55 representatives of private industry,”
Does that include a representative from Nevada’s most “private” of industries?
“School of Ill Repute?”
A school of ill repute?
Is that what they desire?
To serve the man in suit
With software by the fire?
Or would that be hardware by the fire? 😉
Good point. Could be either.
Depends on how you read it.
“To serve the man … with software”
“To serve …the man with hardware”
Either way, the vendors win.
Neither hardware not software sound very tasty. Got any other sides?
I would be curious to know how many members of these state committees are women. There seems to be the “Madmen Effect” on the “reform” movement. Teaching has been one of the few careers where women don’t have to go sit before a boss and beg for a raise. Privatization has put many college educated women and minorities out of work while younger cheaper mostly white women are hired to replace them. There seems to be a paternalistic message at play, In other words women should be relegated to the secretarial pool without job security and a secure pension. I could be wrong, but I wonder how many CFO or CEOs in these corporations and state committee members are women?
Looking at the names, on the “workforce development” team (there is no “education team”) it looks like 11 men and one woman.
Sounds like women are woefully underrepresented. Someone should take a look a “reform” from a feminist perspective.
“Of the people, by the people, for the people…” didn’t include a lot of people in Lincoln’s time and it still doesn’t.
Children are not people, and apparently the people who care for them are not either.
The first president Bush set the precedent for this practice, when he organized the first National Education Summit in 1989 and not a single educator was invited to attend. I recall being very alarmed at the time, since it came not that long after the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report, which was bogus according to the Sandia Report, but nevertheless kicked off this now 32 year long era of corporate education “reform.”
Word to the wise: Do NOT attempt to download the document entitled, “George Bush National Education Summit 1989 – Askives Docs.”
I made the mistake of doing that and I’ve spent the last two days trying to eliminate hordes of malware attached to it, which hijacked all of my web browsers. Despite the supposed fixes that are available online and even after deleting everything, they would not go away. AND they prevented my computer from being able to revert to a restore point. Ugh! I’m still dealing with this nightmare and feel lucky to be able to post here –if, in fact, I am able!
I don’t know when we all decided to jam everything in the world into a “business” template anyway. Why can’t we have a private sector and a public sector? That worked fine for a couple of hundred years. I don’t accept that we have to cram everything in the world into this one narrow box. I think that’s a cheap replacement for what was a better, broader idea.
Agreed! I think states see privatization as a way to off load benefits and pension rights to a private company that, of course, will offer the employee a lot less. Then the governor can brag about how he is shrinking the state budget. I think that is Cuomo’s plan in NY. I also find it interesting that the state employees under attack are teachers whose ranks are 75% female. We don’t see police and fire fighters being maligned and fired on the basis of some bogus performance formula.
I don’t think Duncan is going anywhere. You may hear different rhetoric but the same carrot-and-stick ideas. But with no new funding.
I am already in the process of moving back to MA where at least the unions seem to be doing something.
So long TX and I weep for my students and colleagues.