Just to show that great minds think alike, here is EduShyster’s description of the Michigan plan to end public education as we know it.
The plan was designed by the deep thinkers at the free-market think tank called the Mackinac Center.
She calls it a reform “turducken,” which is one reform wrapped inside another, all of them together accomplishing the long-held dream of the extreme right: abolish public education and replace it with a market-driven system, with minimal regulation, minimal oversight, free choice for all, and profits for the plucky.
Sort of like the stock market. Just where you want your children’s future to be decided, right?
I wonder whether Governor Snyder will get a special award from ALEC as the first state to take the bold move of dis-establishing public education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m not sure this is really “free market”. Given the ghost-written legislation from groups like ALEC and other right-wing think tanks, and the back-door discussions between elected officials and right-wing “advisors”, and the long history of corrupt practices generally among our so-called “small government” politicians and big corporate money, what we really have is crony capitalist education.
If the folks really wanted a free market, then they would abolish state education agencies and and state funding. All schools would be privately run. Period. Yet, our tea party red state legislatures never seem to get to that destination. Hmmmm.
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When combined with other legislation, it opens the door to ridiculous schools and minimum teacher certifications. Considering the nature of our state government, I expect all of this to pass.
While I would like to believe that most families would take the local schools, the disruption possibilities are insane. There are no safeguards for quality. “The market” will simply sort everything out because parent will make choices based upon results for a system of assessment that hasn’t been yet developed (5 years) and is nutty because no such system has ever been devised.
People will fall prey to shiny marketing campaigns because they won’t really have the time to inform themselves properly. It’s just an end-run to get rid of public education into a series of nice-sounding ideas that have no supporting research or track record of workability.
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ON the other hand, look where the government run education has gotten us. Apparently the education system needs to be forced to change. The changes I see happening now are cosmetic. There needs to be an overhauling of the system. billviningjr.com
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This is assuming that the U.S. education system was broken in the first place. Just because the “reformers” have insisted that it is broken for years does not make it true… Just look at the NAEP scores. They’re the highest that they’ve ever been.
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I absolutely LOVE Edushyster! It’s hilarious! I love how it takes issues that make me furious and gives me a good laugh. The author is brilliant!
(BTW: My first encounter with Edushyster was its blog about Gates’ “magic bracelets.” I thought it was a parody, and I was speechless when I found out otherwise…)
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I certainly hope Snyder does get some such award. It is time to remove the biggest image or metaphor of the notion that “all good things come only from government,” i.e. the public school system, so that individuals may reconstruct their understanding that good things come only from individual and family effort. Since the public schools are ineffective in educating the poor, there should be no philosophical objection to giving poor parents the understanding that they have choices to make in order to help their children succeed. 90 years ago the “progressives” in this country captured the education system. Then the unions, such as the AFT, captured the teachers and thus the system. The opposition to charters and vouchers arises from the unions who stand to lose control of the money stream of public education to the market and to privatizers. It is the capitalistic push back against the essentially communist model of state control of society by state control of education. America deserves better, and while the communist model has recently won the national presidential election, at least in some of the states, the counter-revolution against progressivism is going forward.
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Just curious falstaff35… Are you a teacher? Do you work in education? I’ve read some of your posts, and I’m just curious to know if you’re willing to share.
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Are YOU a teacher, Joe? Does it matter, or why does it matter to YOU?
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Yes, I am a teacher, as well as an educational researcher. What does it matter? If you’re a teacher, I hope you don’t work at a public school (based on some of the comments you make about public schools). I was just curious to learn more about where you’re coming from. But your reply spoke volumes. Thanks.
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Does “truth” depend on the source of income of the speaker? Perhaps so. There is always a bias towards one’s self interest, I suppose. Are you a disinterested “education researcher” whatever that means? My answer says nothing whatsoever about me. Your reaction speaks volumes about YOU.
We must differentiate between “public education” and “public funding for education.” My position is that equal funding should follow the child, and that the child and his or her family should indeed “shop” for education. At present I stand to benefit neither from “public education” nor from the private sector which is also looking for a way to suck on the teat of the public sow. They are perhaps equally immoral in their eagerness to dip from the stream of public money.
I have had a couple of bad experiences with my children in public schools where the administration and teachers stonewalled me when they were obviously not doing the best for my kids that could be done. But, with the “public schools” I had no recourse, no choice, except private schools I couldn’t afford or homeschooling which I didn’t have the wit to undertake. The government mandated bureaucracy was not responsive to my children’s needs. I vowed that I would support school choice as fully as I support a woman’s choice to have an abortion on demand, and funded moreover by her insurance. Freedom of choice is freedom of choice. People who are shrill for abortion on demand seem strangely and oppressively silent when someone wants schooling on demand. I have concluded that the entire public education establishment is totally hypocritical. Freedom is fine for a woman’s personal life, but not for my children’s lives, especially if choice for my child means reduction in their income or power. The government should not have the final say over where my child goes to school or what curriculum s/he pursues. As with abortion, it should be a matter of CHOICE, and publicly funded but not publicly provided. That is what equity means, and all it means. Equity leads to choice, but that’s all.
We are not all as wealthy and privileged as Obama and Romney. What we should do is give each family some small fraction of that financial power to deploy as it wants. The public schools are not truly accountable at all. There is a cozy handshake between unions and school board candidates. But when the individual consumer can choose his or her educational purveyor, we will, I hope, have more freedom than we have now. This is not the old Communist Russia, where you were only allowed to buy one kind of car, and that made by the state. This is America, the glory of which is that if you don’t like a Buick you can shop for a Lincoln. Can education be harder to construct that an automobile? I don’t think so. And if the product is defective, as some charters will be, the student can try another “marque.” Education is not rocket science. It’s not even engineering. It’s just common sense, whatever the teachers unions say about its being a “profession.” It’s not a profession. It’s a craft. Get the government out of the way so that local artisans can try their hands at it.
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falstaff35 regarding your last post below… I’m posting up here because it will be easier to read if each word isn’t a separate line.
I empathize with your frustration of sending your children to a school you found to be inadequate and feeling stuck. I’m not sure I agree with you on using public funds for education so that individual students can “shop” for a private school. But now I understand more about where you’re coming from, regardless of whether I agree with you on some issues or disagree with you on others.
Yes, I’m an educational researcher, (admittedly not disinterested at all). I’ll tell you what that means… Education, like psychology, anthropology, etc., is a social science. I’ll admit a good dose of common sense is often lacking, but education is not just common sense. (By the way, I’ve worked with engineers and rocket scientists on university research projects having to do with student aptitudes and instructional methods.)
Education (of which teaching is a part) is indeed a profession. But I would agree that teaching is a craft as well. Specialized knowledge is necessary, and there is indeed an art/craft to teaching. I’m not saying this to talk out of both sides of my mouth; It was my experience as a school teacher, and I find it to be true in my studies as well.
With regard to educational research, I’m currently in the midst of a longitudinal study of the epistemological views students bring to science. We are discovering how these diverse views interact with science curricula and students’ learning of science, as well as their interests in pursuing science careers. I’m also designing an experiment to examine schema induction as a treatment variable in helping students to solve isomorphic problems.
As a former K-12 teacher, one of my underlying goals is to use the research findings my colleagues and I discover and to work with teachers in a supportive and collaborative way for the good of students.
Believe it or not, I hated school when I was in K-12. I did not discover the joys of learning until college, and education is actually my second career. Frankly, I always wanted to be the kind of teacher I wish I would have had. I’m sorry your children had a less than ideal experience (to put is lightly). I’ll admit I’ve even seen teachers and principals do things that make me cringe too.
You’re obviously interested enough to post on this board. Despite bad experiences of the past (and even bad people), I hope you won’t consider us all bad. The educators on this board have expertise that can only be obtained from working with students in the schools, just like you have expertise about your children that can only be obtained from your experience as a parent. The politicians who consistently jump from one educational “panacea” to the next have none of this expertise, regardless of whether they’re mandating public school policy or pushing to send tax payer money to fund private entities.
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The tax payer money started out being generated by private entities, all of it. There is not a penny spent by the public schools that is not earned by some hardworking person in a private business adding value to what comes in the shed at one end and goes out as product at the other. That working man or woman should have the option of taking the education subsidy the state provides and deploying it in whatever way he thinks best. The government has no ideal claim on deciding HOW tax money should be spent for education.
Your research interests seem engaging, but I am suspicious of the abstracting “educationese” in which you describe them. Do students really have any epistemological variation when it comes to physics? Or chemistry? In biology, of course, Darwin is only 150 years old and the notion that mommy is as much an animal as one’s cocker spaniel may be a bit upsetting and take some reflection. When you talk about schema induction, isn’t that just explaining how things actually work? How DO you convince a kid that heat is motion when the gas flame on the stove moves, but the aluminum atoms in the pot don’t seem to? Does any kid EVER have enough math to persuade himself of the nature of binding forces in solids as opposed to gases?
My father was a national pioneer in the field of teaching public school teachers how to teach real science in elementary classrooms. He was very deft and clever at creating consistently calibratable instruments out of scrap. You wouldn’t have heard of him because he died young.
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Seems kind of like a cyclical argument to me sir… If tax payer money comes from private entities (and I don’t necessarily disagree), then let’s just have parents pay for the education of their own children instead of giving them “hand outs” so they can shop for schools. I’m NOT suggesting that though. By the way, teachers are not a charity. We work harder than people will ever realize, and I used to be in the private sector before teaching.
Well, I am glad if my research seems engaging. Sorry for the terms, but I’ve been analyzing data all night… Believe it or not, we are finding out some interesting things about student epistemologies of science. The data is embargoed, and I’m not allowed to discuss our findings in this kind of forum before publication (the principal investigator would kill me…). On a side note, the history of science makes for an interesting read.
I can talk a little more freely about the experiment I’m designing because it’s just part of my dissertation research. Basically, without getting too crazy, I’m looking at using certain types of multi step problems for schema induction as a treatment where the experimental group will then attempt to solve a problem with abstract similarities, but different surface features. The preliminary problems presented to the control group will not have these abstract similarities, but they will be asked to solve the same target problem as the experimental group. To simplify it… It’s a transfer of learning experiment. I’m just not doing it justice in my description here… But there is more than a century of transfer research to build upon. A fascinating topic!
If your father was a national pioneer in teacher education, I’d like to look him up and learn about him. What is his name? Did he teach at a Normal School or perhaps a Teachers’ College? I think more attention needs to be paid to the history of education; it can teach us a lot.
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He did his dissertation at Columbia Teachers College. It was later published by Scott Foresman. Its title was A History of the Teaching of Science in the Elementary Schools. He taught at the Teachers College of Connecticut, now Central Connecticut State University. His initial were O. E. U.
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Dr. Seuss never envisioned Rick “Nerd” Snyder for Governor when he originated the word “Nerd” in the 1950 “If I Ran a Zoo.” And if only Michiganders had been smart enough to recognize Snyder as both an “Englerite” with Yertle the Turtle syndrome, perhaps our children would not be headed for the educational crisis of our statehood. The question is, will Michiganders find their voices and outrage in time to put a stop to HB 5923 and HB 6004, and recognize that our Republican-led lame-duck legislature is in a race against the clock to pass these bills that will allow the next crop of term-limited legislators with stunningly superficial knowledge to pass the Michigan Public Education Finance Act of 2013.
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You seem quite knowledgeable about what is going on in Michigan. I wonder if you would elaborate on the substance of HB 5923 and HB 6004 that requires their passage as a preliminary to passage of the Michigan Public Education Finance Act of 2013. If the two House Bills fail, how does that interfere with the MPEFA of 2013?
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