A reader sent this comment in response to an earlier post. I jumped when I read it because he was absolutely prescient. Consider this: We hear on all sides that the public schools are failing, declining, etc., that test scores are falling, etc., but NONE OF IT IS TRUE. Test scores on NAEP, the only no-stakes national test with forty years of data, are at their highest point in history. And yet, the spin masters keep spinning their tales of failure. It’s time to ask why. I have often imagined the scenario that this reader describes but have been fearful of saying it out loud. Suppose a group of powerful people decided that they wanted to privatize public education. Where would they start? How would they create a “message” to sell something that no one would accept if it was candidly described?
| In June , 1992, I wrote the following letter to the editor. Based on today’s posting, I think this letter is as relevant today as it was in 1992.“Try to picture this. A large national corporation, until recently grazing contentedly on federal military contracts, finds its annual earnings reflecting a shocking drop. It is decided that new access to federal dollars must be found, or the corporation may go out of business. Someone suggests a product which could tap into ever increasing federal education dollars. Another suggestion leads to looking into the possibility of crafting that product so that state and local education dollars can also be tapped.”
“The marketing department points out that the product will not sell, unless the buyers, the American public, can be convinced that the current product is substandard. Marketing is assigned the task of creating the need for these new products by convincing the American public that its public education institutions are utter failures. Once that had been accomplished, a program will be undertaken to separate public education dollars from public education institution. Those dollars would become the mainstay of corporation earnings. The product is private education.” |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Since there isn’t any more land to steal and exploit cheaply, education is ripe for the picking. And don’t forget the “legislators”, they are there to facilitate anything that lines their pockets. I know how cynical this all sounds, but until solid evidence to the contrary comes in, that’s the story.
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A quick glance at Wikipedia will remind us who the main privatizers are.
Bill Gates: United States v. Microsoft was a set of civil antitrust actions filed by the DOJ and 20 states that found Microsoft abused monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and web browser sales. Btw, Joel I. Klein was the lead prosecutor.
Michael Robert Milken: noted for his role in the development of the “junk bond” market during the 1970s and 1980s, and for his 1990 guilty plea to felony charges for violating US securities laws, and for his funding of medical research. Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 as the result of an insider trading investigation. After a plea bargain, he pled guilty to six securities and reporting violations but was never convicted of racketeering or insider trading.
Rupert Murdoch: The News International phone-hacking scandal is an ongoing controversy involving the defunct News of the World and other British newspapers published by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories. Investigations conducted from 2005–2007 concluded that the paper’s phone hacking activities were limited to celebrities, politicians and members of the British Royal Family. In July 2011, it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombings were also accessed, resulting in a public outcry against News Corporation and owner Rupert Murdoch. Advertiser boycotts contributed to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July, ending 168 years of publication.[1] Continued public pressure later forced News Corporation to cancel its proposed takeover of the British telecommunications companyBSkyB.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a probe on 14 July 2011, to determine whether News Corporation accessed voicemails of victims of the9/11 attacks. On 15 July, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced an additional investigation by the Department of Justice, looking into whether the company had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Over the course of his testimony before the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch admitted that a cover-up had taken place within the News of the World to hide the scope of the phone hacking.
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One needs to look whole lot farther back in 20th Century history than the 90’s for the planned “dumbing down” which really took off in the 60’s with the passage of ESEA.
Look to think tanks associated with and advising government and Dept. of Education.
Think RAND Corporation who had a name for it way back then, the “unfreezing of the system”.
It was well underway and nearly accomplished by the 90’s. What we are seeing now is the “refreezing” of the system with a new foundation of global corporate interest guidance.
The Gates, Murdock, Buffett et al saw their place in the scheme of things rather late in the game and jumped on the bandwagon with massive funding to thrust the agenda “fast forward”. Both Left and Right are complicit in it and no longer operating behind the scenes when it is all out in the open with a controlled right contending along with a controlled left all on the same page as evidenced by remarkably similar Education Plans rolled out by potential candidate Romney, the plan of Obama Administration as articulated by Arne Duncan, and the Education Plan of the Council of Foreign Relations….all in sync for charter schools and vouchers. It’s taken at least 50 years to achieve an agenda while most hard working teachers and parents didn’t grasp what was being done unto them and the nation. Hopefully there is the beginning of informed awakening. It is very late.
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This 1992 letter reflects entirely the truth revealed in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools, by Berliner and Biddle (1996) in which they debunked the scapegoating manipulations of statistics. Where are Mythbusters when you need them to bring this to the attention of pop culture?
I’ve mentioned this book before, but have no financial stake in its sales numbers. What we all need to own stock in is the future of America’s children who are being cheated by those robbing public coffers for personal gain.
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“Test scores on NAEP, the only no-stakes national test with forty years of data, are at their highest point in history.”
Could you provide a link? I’d love to see the trends.
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Google NAEP Mathematics 2011 and NAEP Reading 2011
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Yep, it’s all spin. The NAEP scores can be found on the nationsreportcard.gov website.
I just posted a link to 2011 Reading scores on another page in Diane’s blog:
http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2011/
The 2011 Math scores are here:
http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2011/
Please note that the above are US Department of Education (DoE) websites. DoE is the one who is has decided to lead each of those pages showing how students with teachers who have master’s degrees have had higher scores since 2005 compared to those with teachers who have bachelor’s degrees.
Arne Duncan doesn’t want to talk about that information on his own department’s website. (So nice to know someone at DoE can’t be controlled to go along with the spin!)
Duncan and other ed “reformers” would rather complain that these are aggregate test scores, since the results are high, and they would prefer that disaggregate student scores by income level be reported, since it’s to the advantage of their privatization agenda to scape-goat teachers for the lower scores commonly seen from poor children.
In contrast, however, when aggregate scores are not reported as being high, such as PISA scores, the government and ed “reformers” don’t want to show disaggregate scores by income groups, because that demonstrates how national averages are pulled down by the scores of children in poverty and that US students from higher income groups actually score top in the world. Reporting disaggregate scores then would be too contrary to the spin that American children are behind and not globally competitive:
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
Yes, there is way too much ed “reform” spin out there.
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The problem is that when one relies on the pseudo science that is standardized testing to bolster one’s case, one is perpetuating invalid myths and therefore spitting into the wind.
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Thanks! That’s pretty remarkable. It completely undermines any wholesale indictment of teachers and schools, to be sure. It would also appear to acquit some of the reform initiatives, such charter schools, that have been around long enough to claim a sliver of credit alongside (not in place of, not more than) traditional public school. In fact, maybe both of the extreme sides of the ever-more-vitriolic ed reform debate would do well to tone down the crisis rhetoric?
Here’s a radical idea–not to say that any educational institution or organization is perfect, and certainly not to say that the results of any single test reveal anything like a well-rounded picture of what goes on in classrooms–but maybe, just maybe, both sides are populated by hardworking, intelligent people whose foremost interest is in the educational interests of their students? I couldn’t prove that, and test scores could do nothing more than hint at it, but hint they do–so perhaps it’s an idea worth (re)considering.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could take THAT as the founding assumption of our conversations about education, rather than accusations, scapegoating, and mudslinging?
What if that assumption, rather than the assumption that they other folks are cynical money-grubbers, would enable us to disagree and still strive together to provide kids with the world-class education they deserve?
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You stated “Thanks! That’s pretty remarkable.” Would you be so kind at to clarify what “that” is?
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Apologies, I should have been clearer. I’m referring to the fact I cited earlier: “Test scores on NAEP, the only no-stakes national test with forty years of data, are at their highest point in history.”
Remarkable, yes–but not (as I note in the post) a reliable picture of what goes on in classrooms. The limitations of standardized tests are clear, I feel safe in saying, to all of us readers of Dr. Ravitch’s blog.
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State tests are not reliable indicators of anything other than relative change. Proficiency levels are politically determined. NAEP gives useful trend lines, especially since no one has an incentive to cheat or game the system.
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Thanks for clarifying!
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Your reader is describing a market-capture strategy refined in the hardware/software market wars of the last century. It is based on sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about competing products. I capitalized each word. because the acronym is for the strategy, FUD, is enshrined now in the history of the dawn of the computer age.
Google it, and read how IBM piioneered it, and then how the FUDmaster himself out-fudded them.
It’s been unleashed now on public education. The children of a whole free nation, and the very people charged with their daily defense, are deliberately assaulted by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Our state-imposed subservience to the data industry monopolists eats into every day of their childhood, as the FUDmaster tries to impose his defective new operating system on their minds and hearts.
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