People often ask me: How can parents and teachers hope to beat the big money that is buying elections in state and local races around the nation? What chance do we have when they can dump $100,000, $200,000, $500,000 into a race without breaking a sweat?
True, they have a lot of money. But they have no popular base. The only time they win votes is when they trick voters with false rhetoric and pie-in-the-sky promises. They call themselves “reformers,” when they are in fact privatizers.
They claim they know how to close the achievement gap but their standard-bearer, Michelle Rhee, left DC with the biggest achievement gap of all big cities in the nation.
They claim to be leading the “civil rights issue” of our day, but can you truly imagine a civil rights movement led by billionaires, Wall Street hedge fund managers, ALEC, and rightwing think tanks?
They say they love teachers even as they push legislation to cut teachers’ pensions and take away their job rights and their right to join a union.
There are two reasons they will fail:
First, none of their ideas has ever succeeded, whether it’s high-stakes testing, charters, vouchers, merit pay or test-based teacher evaluations.
But even more important, the public is getting wise. The public has figured out the corporate reform strategy. In state after state, parents are organizing.
Here is one great example in Texas, of all places.
Similar groups of parents are organizing in every state. Even students are getting active in the movement to protect the commons.
When the public gets wise, the privatization movement dies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It helps that the mainstream press is now catching on. This article debunks the “Rhee as bipartisan reformer” myth.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/17/michele_rhees_right_turn/
Also, your profile in the New Yorker this week will surely help to truly educate the greater public to what is really going on.
I was able to purchase a one month subscription to the
New Yorker on my iPad. I don’t know if the magazine is available in CT. I suppose so, but I was anxious to read the article and it was worth it. Here is a link to the introduction. Thank you again and again Diane.
I wanted to cut and paste the conclusion, but looks like it is not possible.
Pick up a copy or subscribe to a digital version.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/19/121119fa_fact_denby
Even people who “get it” still use the rheeformers’ vocabulary. The author in your link, for instance, talks about how Rhee closed lots of “failing schools”. And he uses the term “reform” without quotes. We really need to get better language into common usage.
Agreed! Let’s start a glossary – privatization, or depending on the context rheeform, not reform, Pearson exams not state exams, private schools operating with public money not charter schools. What else?
This is extremely telling. And I cannot agree more that people need to stop using the words “tests” and “assessment” as interchangeable, because they are not. People also need to stop using the words “measurement” and “assessment” as interchangeable, because they, too, are not.
On a somewhat related issue, I am wondering what you think about the latest policy made in Newark, NJ regarding “merit pay.” I know you have come out strongly about merit pay, but what about this specific move on merit pay (given it has the support of the Union)?
I oppose merit pay under any and all conditions when it is based on student test scores.
Doing this incentivizes narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, gaming the system, cheating and other undesirable behaviors.
I believe that people should be paid more for doing more, for taking on more difficult or time-consuming assignments.
Do you support differential pay based on fields? Public schools apparently have little problem hiring qualified music and art teachers, but have a much harder time finding mathematics teachers with similar credentials in mathematics.
Common myth.
Math and science teachers are not in critical short supply, except perhaps in very rural or remote places where possibly all teachers are in short supply.
According to an NCES study done in 2007-8, as reported by USN&RP, about 25% of math teachers have a degree in mathematics. This is not a problem in other areas. The same study shows that 82% of English teachers, 90% of art teachers and 95% of music teachers have undergraduate degrees in their fields.
The USN&RP article is here: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2011/06/08/many-stem-teachers-dont-hold-certifications
Exactly right, Marissa. To go one further–I always refer to the state tests as “standardized” using ” ” for distinction, because NONE of these tests–especially those from Pearson–are “standardized,” not in any scholarly world. Please read “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry” (by Todd Farley, 2009) to gain insight into the hot mess that is the “standardized” test industry. Think “pineapple question.”
Thank you for the book recommendation. Sobering, to say the least!
can you truly imagine a civil rights movement led by billionaires, Wall Street hedge fund managers, ALEC, and rightwing think tanks?
The NAACP and Schott Foundation critique RttT and then quietly self-censor. The self-appointed civil rights community has no apparent intent to address the Koh memos on CERD. At least the perpetrators from your enemies list are on the field using the tools they know best.
If they are doing more harm than good, who, specifically, is prepared to do more good than harm? By what method? With what resources?
Let’s try democracy for a change. Plutocracy is not good for most people.
And, when parents get wise, the politicians get scared.
I was much more pessimistic in the months leading up to the election. It is too early to say that the tide is turning. Let’s hope anti-rheeform sentiments continue to grow.
Thank you Diane for identifying the Texas organization Texas Children Can’t Wait. I have contacted them to offer a coalition between Louisiana grassroots organizations like the Coalition for Louisiana Public Education and Save Our Schools. I see it as holding hands across state lines to accomplish our goal. May I suggest that you or a reader develop a list of state organizations all working toward saving our public schools. This would be extremely helpful in developing a national coalition and public awareness. Those of us involved in this effort can contribute in our state and regions.
Diane,
There isn’t a link available yet, but printed today is a well written piece by Wendy Lecker. I hope we can get you the link to you soon.
Voters have Spoken: No Corporate School Reform:
In this age of instantaneous global communication, it is incredible that a simple message sent by voters in Bridgeport has not reached leaders in Hartford, just 50 miles away. On November 6, a rare event in modern politics occurred: democracy prevailed over money. Average citizens defeated a Bridgeport charter revision proposal backed by a veritable who’s who of well-endowed corporate education reformers. This David-vs.-Goliath victory is also significant because it was the first time a core education reform strategy was put directly before Connecticut voters- and voters rejected it.
Recall that in July 2011, Mayor Bill Finch, the charter lobby, ConnCAN, founders of ExcelBridgeport, and the chair of the State Board of Education engineered a secret and illegal takeover of Bridgeport’s elected board of education. After Connecticut’s Supreme Court invalidated the scheme, Mayor Finch again attempted to strip voters of their right to an elected school board with a revision to the city charter calling for an appointed board of education. This time, Finch called in the big guns. In addition to ExcelBridgeport and ConnCAN, the revision got support from the Connecticut Council on Education Reform, a business group, and national figures like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and failed DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.
These “reformers” poured over a half a million dollars into ads, videos, and pamphlets saying “vote yes.” They lauded the “progress” made by the reformer Superintendent Vallas, who left his previous districts, Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, in crisis. The hallmarks of Vallas’ tenure in Bridgeport so far have been adding an inexplicable and cruel three weeks of standardized testing, and increasing spending on administration. The “vote yes” group also made a host of false claims, ranging from the assertions that only an appointed school board would help renovate buildings, to declarations that an appointed school board would lead to improved student outcomes, strict accountability for officials and increased parent involvement.
Placing control of school districts in the hands of one individual is a favorite tactic of so-called education reformers. Connecticut’s Education Commissioner Pryor deployed this strategy in New London and Windham, usurping the power of the elected school boards by installing a “special master” to run the districts. It is a popular reform, but an unsuccessful one.
Mayoral control in New York has disempowered parents and hurt students. Flouting vocal parent opposition, Mayor Bloomberg rammed through school closures and co-locations of charter schools inside public schools, displacing public school students. A recent report found that although communities attend hearings in full-force to protest the Mayor’s education policies, they are “summarily ignored” by mayoral appointees. The mayor’s constant reorganizations have created chaos for parents and administrators. Even the Mayor’s office reports decreased parent engagement under his control. Student achievement under Bloomberg has not improved, and students of color have been hurt most.
In Chicago, parents and students charge that the wave of school closures by the mayorally-appointed board tramples their rights and disproportionately hurts minority students. The reforms imposed by the board failed to improve achievement. Recently, parents and students in Chicago, together with those in nine other cities, including New York, filed a civil rights complaint over school closures. In a November 6 referendum, 87% of Chicagoans voted to end mayoral control of the school board.
Bridgeport’s voters were not fooled by the reformers’ claims. A sound majority elected to retain their right to vote, maintaining public accountability for education.
The voters sent a clear message to the Bridgeport reformers. The message failed to reach Hartford, however. The day after the vote, the State Department of Education announced two new high-priced hires: Dianna Roberge-Wentzell as Chief Academic Officer and Debra Kurshan as Chief Turnaround Officer.
Roberge-Wentzell made her mark in Hartford by massively increasing standardized testing. Kurshan is a charter school advocate and, as Mayor Bloomberg’s appointee, presided over many of New York’s school closure and co-location hearings. A New York parent remarked that her Connecticut title should be “Chief Closing Officer.”
Bridgeport voters rejected this failed reform agenda. Yet our state education leaders are plowing ahead with it. So let us spell it out for Hartford. Parents reject corporate reform but are committed to a quality education for all. Stop wasting tax dollars on harmful school closures and over-testing, and work with us to improve learning conditions with proven methods like quality preK, small classes, and support services for at-risk children. If you want to focus on children, listen to their parents.
Diane, thank you ever so much for the link you provided to Texas Kids Can’t Wait! It is, again, http://www.texaskidscantwait.org Readers will find powerful information under each button on the menu. Our goals are to secure adequate/equitable funding for Texas public schools and to resist with all our might the privatization schemes.
Our major strategy is to educate voters about what is going on through ongoing public forums. We speak wherever we can–to forums we organize, PTAs, teacher and other educator groups, civic clubs, church groups, education conferences, etc. We ask people to provide their contact information so that we can email to them information and advocacy alerts. People can also join us by completing the form on our “Contact” page.
One other strategy is to link to and network with other like-minded organizations! We have listed the ones we have identified on the front page of our website. We want to convene the leadership of these groups in Austin soon so that we can formalize a network. We are going to have to have a lot of people power since we don’t have Money to hire high-dollar lobbyists. If anyone knows about additional groups, please let me know at texaskidscantwait@gmail.com
We welcome everyone. Check our website often since we update it almost every day!
Thanks to you, Diane, for getting the word out here. We hope that all Texas readers will send this information and the link to everyone they know! Thanks to all on behalf of Texas children–5 million of them, 60% of whom are eligible for free/reduced lunch.
Texas readers will want to see the comments from former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff that are posted on the blog page of our web page about the tragedy of Texas school funding. He spoke to an education conference last week about all this and called upon us to organize grassroots. We were happy to tell him we had done just that.. He recommended that we call ourselves Mothers Against Drunk Budgeting. 🙂
I agree, the grassroots will win, but we are only at the beginning of the struggle. So many teachers I speak with daily are as yet unaware or poorly informed regarded the assault on our profession. There is a dangerous tendency among educators to continually accommodate themselves to the status quo and try to make bad things work when they really ought to be directly opposed.
Agreed! We are like the frog in the pot of water getting increasingly hotter. It took me a while to understand the systematic attack on public schools, despite what other teachers were telling me. It took reading this blog to get me to realize how bad it has become.
How curious that you would use the frog in hot water analogy! I was just speaking with a friend last night and that very same analogy was used for the overall political situation in the US over the past couple decades. Yes, things have been going from bad to worse. On the other hand I am happy to see at least a glimmer of awareness. Ten years ago when I first gleaned what NCLB would mean fellow teachers treated me as if I was a mad conspiracy theorist. I predicted then that by beginning of this decade we would see the public K-12 system begin to unravel and teacher protests begin in earnest. And this year? Chicago. Call it a harbinger of things to come.
I think the frog in hot water is a perfect analogy too! I was an administrator from 1979 to 2003. For years I went along with the standards/assessment/accountability madness, but when NCLB was first proposed I began to see the writing on the wall that, in fact, started with Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk.” In subsequent years both Republicans and Democrats got sucked into the plan. I knew in my gut that it was all designed to destroy the public support for public schools. A lot of people see it as a design for a bunch of corporations to make a lot of money. I suspect that the end game is simply to stop funding any form of public education. Those with money will have it. Those without will have nothing. It is the taxes they do not want to pay, especially at the state level, that drives the privatizers. Privatization using public funds is just one step in their long sequence of strategies to destroy this democracy.
Other groups that I think we should mobilize are the school architects, school construction businesses, school lawyers, the sports industry in all its forms, education publishers, school bus companies, makers of school furniture, technology vendors, software vendors, and the vendors that sell schools all the stuff (food, copy paper, file folders, toilet paper, art supplies, band/choir uniforms, athletic uniforms, copy machines, staplers, etc., etc., etc.) they need to operate. If there are no public schools, they too are out of business. Also, I know from having run an educational software publishing company for a while that sales to individual schools cost just as much as sales to a whole district. I figured out quickly that it was generally a waste of my time and our company’s money to try to sell to an individual school. We couldn’t afford it. If there are no school districts, but just loose networks of private schools, it will become much more expensive to sell to them. And the biggest expense of all is to the society that must deal with the social consequences of a poorly- or non-educated populace.
One group that I have seen that “gets it” are the athletic coaches. See their website at http://www.savetexasfootball.com There is some good stuff there!
Thanks for this thoughtful, detailed response! I have been keeping my ear to the ground for many years, but mainly focusing on the corporate profit piece. I haven’t really thought about the simple desire to do away with anything publicly funded as you put it. I think this is an important piece of the picture that I have not considered fully. As for the ability to effectively sell products to schools, don’t you think that the many companies/corporations will more or less easily adapt to the new ecology of privatized schooling? Another concern, among many others is the cost to the consumer for education. I can see the rise of EMOs as a companion to HMOs: we’ll all still be paying taxes while also paying for our kids’ education out of pocket at the same time.
Good for you! The same thing happened to me when we started giving the “standardized” state tests (especially to special ed kids!). People TOLD me I was crazy when I complained about NCLB, as well, but the good news is that, after a while, everyone started complaining. Luckily, I’ve always had great principals who
treated us like professionals, told us to close our doors and let us teach!
You’re very lucky to have good leadership. I too have been blessed with it, often feeling that my school and district are an island in the storm. However, who knows when waves will wash over the island?
Except that that image is actually a myth. Real frogs really will hop out of the water before it gets too hot. Unlike us American sheeple (or is that an insult to sheep?).
Reblogged this on Crazycrawfish's Blog and commented:
Now that the elections are over it is more important than ever that we tell our friends, coworkers, relatives and even the occasional stranger how destructive this privatization and profiteering reform movement is to children and education.
Expect to have large sums of money dumped into campaigns whenever there is an important or relevant election coming up, but prepare for it ahead of time. We can’t outspend a group that makes large sums of money if it succeeds. We can only hope to inform enough people ahead of time that no amount of money and lies will change the outcomes of our local elections.
Run for offices, if you can. Even if you lose, make sure you take whatever time you get in the spotlight to highlight the lack of progress and to debunk the false claims. You may not win, but you will start to get the message out for others to follow and hold these phonies accountable when the sand foundations their reforms are built upon wash away. Ensure they are held accountable and others will take notice.
We must organize now! And we must remain vigilant! I agree that we have let this slip up on this, and only now are we beginning to see the long-range plan to destroy public schools. It started with the maniacal emphasis on assessment and accountability–all to undermine our confidence and credibility with the public, and it has worked to a high degree. It also began when we were complicit in allowing business organizations to set policy that defined our practice. Educators need to take charge now!
Agreed! We must make this the year that we say NO to “standardized” tests and mean it! National boycott, organized by parents (everyone opt your kids out!) and communities. You can’t be fired, parents, but teachers can (gross insubordination), so please take the big step to help your kids, their teachers and to save the public schools!
What we need–and what grassroots groups like Tx Kids Can’t Wait can create–is a PR shift. A relative of mine–who went to public school, who sent her kids to public school, and whose grandkids currently go to public school–recently said “All schools today want is money.” The campaign to discredit public education has been relentless and terribly successful. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, With public support we can’t lose; without it, we can’t win. Thanks from the field to all the groups standing up for public Ed. Tx Kids Can’t Wait has a very complete list of Tx groups who are fighting to defend public Ed on their website. A grand coalition conference is a wonderful idea; and maybe a press release from all the groups too, so the media will take notice that the school bashers aren’t the only voices out there.
Please send me the list of grassroots groups in Texas and I will share it.
In fact, I will ask every state for a similar list and we will begin to build a national movement.
We have listed as many Texas grassroots organizations as we have identied as links on our home page–scroll down to find them. There is a list of Texas organizations that I think is what you are requesting. If anyone knows of others, we will happily add them. We are working on convening a meeting in Austin to set up a network among these groups for maximum impact on legislature!
I’ve been thinking about Lain Mavro Coggins’ comments. The master plan for privatization has been developed in recent years by ALEC. You can see what they are up to on education issues, as well as others, on a website called ALEC Exposed that is run by Media Matters, a great organization that exposes such groups and the lack of facts in media such as Fox. They write model bills for state legislatures, get big corp people to approve them, and off they go. If we look at these steps toward privatization across the states, they are all similar, and some identical because they all come from ALEC. In Texas their puppet is the Texas Policy Foundation, who pose as a research outfit, when in fact all they are is an extension of the Cato Institute and the Friedman Foundation, who are the groups who originally started pushing for privatization. A lot of this info is on our website. Click on “Issues” and then on “Vouchers” and “Charters” and “Virtual Schools” and “Parent Triggers,” for example.
As many of us have confessed, we got caught up in the promise of standards and being data-driven, ignoring the signals that this stuff was NOT good for kids. And it was designed to undermine public schools–so that they could be destroyed. The push came in Texas at precisely the time that minorities came to be the majority among the school age population. So just as we see racism in many policies, such as Voter ID which suppresses minority votes, we see it here too. The BIG motivation for the corps, as I see it, is to cut billions from state budgets by eliminating public education and leaving the cost of it up to families and/or local governments.
Coggins is right in recognizing that we will all pay more, at least in the short term, if we let them win. For instance, Texas already has virtual schools. About 9,000 kids are enrolled. All of it is outsourced to the private sector. Companies like K12 Inc got the contracts, promising legislators that they can do the job for half what a bricks and mortar school costs, and the vast majority of the legislature bought that huge lie. Then in 2011 in the same bill that cut more than $5.4 BILLION out of Texas schools, there was a sentence or two that doubled the amount per student that the virtual academies would be paid, so now they are funded at a level that is significantly greater than a majority of Texas schools. The private companies changed their mind. They needed far more money than half what Texas schools were getting because they needed to show a PROFIT, and they needed to pay their EXECUTIVES huge salaries. The National Education Policy Center reported recently that K12 Inc has no evidence of success. In Texas they earned an accreditation rating of Unacceptable for two straight years, which should have meant that they would be closed. They were not, however. TEA allowed them to change their name, and they got a new ID number for the Agency, and are still in business bilking the public money and producing a disastrous education for kids of gullible parents.
Not only should we stop the privatization movement in its tracks, now and forever, but we also need to stop going to them to fund our professional organizations and conferences, publications, etc.! Go to the website of just about any one of them that you can think of, and you will be hard-pressed to find professional information since the home page will literally be covered with ads from corp sponsors. Our journals are financed by corp ads. Our athletic teams’ scoreboards run corp ads on them. Some districts allow corp ads to adorn their school buses, Remember Reading First? Remember what a failure it was? Well, a big reason that ALL that money was wasted was that vendors took control over the criteria by which states could get Reading First grants and which products, then, that districts were allowed to buy. It was NO accident that almost every district in Texas adopted the same reading program–which teachers pretty uniformly rejected because they knew it wouldn’t work. Those vendors also called the heads of professional organizations and offered to fund their keynote speaks for their conferences, and, guess what? The speakers were paid consultants to the vendors footing the bill, so they pushed the vendors’ products. Not only were the same curriculum programs crammed down teachers’ throats, but so were the “approved” assessments. Again, those vendors lobbied politically for the business–and yet NCLB said 111 times that all programs had to be grounded in scientific evidence!
So, we must clean up our own houses and practices as well. All that money comes with a huge price tag–the control over our profession, over our PUBLIC schools, and over the children that we are all committed to serve.
Can you tell that I am pretty rabid on this topic? I’m rabid because I am so expletive deleted frightened about the future!
A plea: If you live in Texas, please join us. We need your help. Sign up at our website or send me an email. Lots to do!