Tom Ultican has been chronicling the doings of the Destroy Public Education Movement, as it tears a path through urban districts across the nation.
In this post, he tackles the DPE invention of new credentials for people who didn’t have time to get real ones.
He begins like this:
”The destroy public education movement (DPE) has given us teach for America (Fake Teachers), Relay Graduate School (Fake Schools) and the Broad Superintendents Academy (Fake administrators). None of these entities are legitimately accredited, yet they are ubiquitous in America’s major urban areas.
“There was a time in the United States of America when scoundrels perpetrating this kind of fraud were jailed and fined. Today, they are not called criminals; they are called philanthropists. As inequitable distribution of wealth increases, democratic principles and humane ideology recede.
“It is time to fight the 21st century robber-barons and cleanse our government of grifters and sycophants.
“Philanthropy in America is undermining the rule of law and democratic rights. Gates, Walton, Broad, DeVos, Bradley, Lily, Kaufman, Hall, Fisher, Arnold, Hastings, Anschutz, Bloomberg, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dell and the list goes on. They have afflicted us with teach for America (TFA), charter Schools, vouchers, phony graduate schools, bad technology and bogus administrators implementing their agendas.
“Without these “philanthropists” and their dark money schemes none of this would exist. Public schools would be healthy and teen-age suicide rates would be going down; not up. Instead we have mindless testing, harmful technology and teaching on the cheap.
“This “philanthropy” is about profits, reducing tax burdens on the wealthy, imposing religious dogma and subjugation of non-elites. It is harmful to America’s children. The attack on public education was never primarily about benefiting children. It certainly was never based on concern for minority populations.”
Read the rest.
A must read and share for all!
“Reform” has never been a legitimate movement. So called reform has always relied on dark money and elitists driving the meaningless disruption. “Refomers” have created a parallel universe of credentialing that is all fake, and Peter Greene likens them to snake oil salesmen that are smooth talkers and often deliver poison.
“Reformers” have fraudulently portrayed themselves as social justice warriors seeking to create more equitable options for poor minority students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Privatization has repeatedly defrauded communities of color and made promises they never kept. The result has been continuous disruption and experimentation with amateurs in decision making positions, all part of the “fake” credentialing system of “reform.” Privatization has failed to deliver positive gains unless they game the system. It has resulted in dismal results and increased segregation, not the promise of equity. Privatization has resulted in separate and unequal schools for poor, minority students with bottom students shipped back to defunded public schools. This is hardly the profile of social justice.
If the Blue Wave arrives later this year, we need to pressure representatives to start a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. It is the only way to ensure that the voice of the people can be heard in a country dominated by billionaires.
If you want to amplify on the scams, check out the new demand for character education, not just in charter schools, but with an alliance between Dr. Angela Duckworth’s Character Lab operation and Relay Graduate School of Education where the 49 bootcamp disciplinary strategies of Doug Lemov are mastered by TFA trainees for use in charter schools that are populated by majorities of African-American and Latinix students.
The Lemov-Duckworth alliance is less weird if you realize that Duckworth portrays character as a matter of acquiring skills–skill sets–seven to be exact: zest, grit, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence and curiosity. I think there is too little attention to the very troubling concept that character can be taught as a set of “skills” (skill sets).
By definition, skills are evident in the effective and efficient use of techniques, irrespective of the motive. For example, I can appear to be full of zest—a performing arts skill—without actually feeling that I am full of zest. Zest is also contingent on being and feeling healthy, not really a matter of character, even if you can fake zest. Similarly, I can display gratitude as a learned skill which may be no more than saying a routine “Thank you.”
Character education is also being marketed by Dr. Carol Dweck. Her middle school program, “Brainology,” requires students to think of their own brain as a muscle— a muscle you can make stronger with exercise, practice and the right mindset– (growth versus fixed).
“The little train that could” comes to mind as an earlier version of this idea, also a concept easily equated with grit.
Notably absent from these two well-known character-education programs (Dweck, Duckworth) are the attributes of kindness and truth telling. That should be a concern, especially when hurling insults and lying are being perfected not just as tools for personal gain, but weapons deployed to secure political power.
https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2017/09/19/angela-duckworth-character-lab-science-center.html?s=print also https://www.mindsetworks.com
While there may be something to having a positive attitude and persevering, most of these “brain changing” techniques seem to be simplistic solution to complex problem, sort of like “reform” and their parallel universe. I cannot see “grit” as a solution for children of poverty that have been abandoned, traumatized or victimized. They need serious help from professionals.
It’s funny though. They’re so powerful and so wealthy and they so dominate government but they don’t direct everything. They didn’t inspire the student walk outs over guns. They had nothing to do with it. The biggest school-related protest I can remember and ed reformers had no part in it.
The teacher strikes are spreading and they had nothing to do with those, either, and they have nothing to say about them.
I don’t know- could they be losing their tight grip on “the debate”? People don’t seem to be listening to them or turning to them for guidance.
DeVos recited the ed reform line yesterday- that “we won’t spend our way out of this” (to replace the other canard- “throwing money at the problem” – they switch up the slogans now and then) but thousands of teachers didn’t hear her, because they were busy personally lobbying state lawmakers 🙂
Maybe they don’t go out with a bang but instead with a whimper, because they made themselves irrelevant to the 90% of families with kids in actual, existing public schools.
I actually entered the teaching corps in New York City through the New York City Teaching Fellowship, which is akin to Teach for America. The program was abysmal, and after nearly earning a doctorate in history at the University of Wisconsin, I was shocked at the shallow academic standards and woefully unprepared “graduate” professors in various of the diploma mills in the five boroughs to which we Fellows were enrolled.
So I have spent the last ten years or so–it happens that I am a highly disciplined audodidact–training myself to teach. But every so often, when a post like this pops up on this blog, I am reminded how utterly futile and frustrating I found my experience in that “alternate certification” program. It was indeed a “fake” training grounds, and I fear that it too larded our city’s schools with fake teachers.
Thanks to Tom Ultican for not equivocating on this ridiculous and unacceptable situation in which I am ashamed to have participated.
Thank you, Tom Utican.
Unfortunately fraud is rife even in “legitimate” education programs. The whole field is suspect. For example, UC Berkeley’s School of Education seems to indoctrinate all its students in “constructivism”. This is the high-toned, pretentious pseudo-science behind the new CA history frameworks. Constructivists believe having adults tell kids things is educationally bankrupt, despite the fact that that’s what education has consisted of for the past million years. No, it’s much better to have kids “construct” their own “knowledge” through peer-to-peer interactions and struggling with texts that they often cannot comprehend. If no real knowledge gets transmitted, that’s OK because the struggle itself is the real prize. This is a recipe for mass ignorance. And this is just one example of the dreck that education schools churn out. We’d be better without them. Teaching is simple: lucidly tell kids about the world until they know enough to be able to comprehend a wide-variety of texts, at which point they can have texts “tell” them even more about the world. . The goal is simple: knowledge. Knowledge is the font of reading, writing and thinking skills. Education schools exist to obfuscate this simple and eternal truth.
However educational reformers are using it, Ponderosa, their usage is perversion of the original idea of Constructivism (n.b. upper-case “C,” please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_education)
Are you an adherent of Constructivism? If so, how do you translate the theory into classroom practice?
I use whatever works with the kids I have at any given time, Ponderosa. That means I may have several students using constructivist materials–very simply, working mostly on their own, with my minimal mediation–to carefully structured, guided instruction. Generally, I’m not an adherent of any one educational philosophy or the instructional methodology it does or doesn’t prescribe. Cognition–and therefore learning–occurs along a continuum, and I think it’s the teacher’s job (or this teacher’s job in any case, as I am loathe to tell other people how to teach; there’s a reason why I never became an administrator) to see where his or her students stand on that continuum.
Mr. Ultican: It’s not fake parents choosing better schools for their children. If you don’t want public education to go away, offer parents and kids the best choice in the neighborhood. You can’t fake good schools, and that’s what parents want. Stop placing blame and be part of the solution.
You obviously don’t know Mr. Ultican.
Public education will not “go away”. It is a state constitutionally mandated function of government. It’s not a matter of “choice”, it’s a matter of properly and fully funding ALL public schools so that each child may enjoy the benefits of the fundamental purpose of public education “to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
When we fulfill our constitutionally mandated charge in educating all children in light of the fundamental purpose then there is no need for choice at all. Proper funding is the key to providing good schools.
Haven’t figured out how to stop the bolding. Last paragraph isn’t supposed to be in bold.
Good to see the word “fake” being used as intended.
Mr. Swacker: If public education is state constitutionally mandated, why are people worried about a so-called “Destroy Public Education Movement”?
It’s not my experience that government services are underfunded (and this includes schools) but that the funds are allocated by human beings prone to less than stellar integrity. If you need proof of that lack of integrity, you can research Pennsylvania or Oregon’s public employee retirement systems. . .or Wisconsin’s state government prior to Governor Scott Walker. Billions of dollars go towards education in this country every year. More money is not the answer; more integrity is.
Read the article that will be posted at 10 am tomorrow. Schools are dramatically underfunded and have not recovered from the budget cuts of 2008-09.
Integrity is missing in the charter sector, that’s for sure. Criminals and frauds run rampant.
I was shocked to find out about the DPE movement. I knew that there was some shady stuff going on with charter schools being for profit, but I had no idea that it went down as deep as unaccredited ‘professionals’. Now that I know this, it has become even more clear that many of these charter programs are essentially cash-grabs victimizing public education on a fundamental level. Now I’m curious about the credentials for non-profit charter schools, and how they all check out
Andrew M.: “…charter schools being for profit…” I don’t think parents care if a school is making a profit or not. . .Whichever school is providing their children with a stellar education is where they’ll send their children. When did profit become evil, anyway? And who in their right mind would establish a school with the sole intent of “making a profit”? Billionaires who are investing in charter schools right now know how to make money multiply. . .I seriously doubt they invest in schools expecting to experience large cash flows. They know better. And if they do make some money from providing a stellar education for kids. . .Isn’t it the kids and parents who ultimately win? You get paid for the work you do at your job. . .Or you take home pay from the profits you worked hard to earn with your business. If the business happens to be a school, are the workers there just supposed to volunteer? (And by the way, having a credential doesn’t automatically mean you’re a good teacher. . .so not having one doesn’t mean you’re lousy at it, either. Proof? Educational assistants. I’ve worked with some amazing paraprofessionals over the years – noncredentialed folk – that could teach me under the table in some respects; be careful not to put down bright, capable people.)