John Thompson wonders if I overstate my concern about the current direction of the education reform movement.
He is not convinced that the end game is privatization.
Perhaps I sat through too many closed-door meetings of conservative think tanks to think otherwise.
As I read and listen to the leading lights of the movement (Jeb Bush; Tony Bennett; ALEC; DFER; Stand for Children; Michelle Rhee), I hear no liking for the public schools. I hear promises of the golden age to come when public schools have been replaced by charters and vouchers and virtual schools, when teachers have no unions or tenure or job protections whatever, when teachers need no more than a few weeks of training to be considered “highly qualified,” when schools are regularly closed if their test scores don’t improve, and teachers fired if their students’ scores don’t improve.
I see the P-word at work (privatization); I see the education profession turned into jobs for temps and short-timers.
I think it is time to stop practices that we know are harmful to children and to their education, like high-stakes testing.
Maybe I am wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I try to follow the evidence.
John, where do you think this is heading?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Listen, too, to the despicable and hate-filled way they speak of parents. Jeb personally commented about parents with regards to their uninvited involvement into “his” reforms during his summit. He referred to “those nosy soccer moms with their twitter and their facebook.”
Listen to any speech Jeb gives these days when he is preaching to his ‘choir.’ He bashes parents regularly. How’s that work?
How do they push bills called “Parent Engagement in Education” when Jeb snubs his nose at parents and tells others to “ignore them!”
…
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He’s obviously not referring to all parents. The parent’s that support him don’t like the other parents either. Not a big mystery.
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If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck… smells like crowdsourcing to get cheap labor. Think of $75 or less per day substitute teachers too.
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I see far too much by John Thompson about this issue and the Common Core to think he’s not suffering from either an enormous blind spot or a horrific case of wishful thinking. For any otherwise bright man, he seems terribly naive these days.
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You may work for another 20 years. You will be affected by “reform.” What are teachers doing to stop this? Or do they just expect to retire and let the chips fall where they inevitably will: the destruction of the teaching profession and public education.
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There is no doubt that the agenda is privatisation! This is driven by individuals who collectively value their abilities to accumulate wealth above all else. They therefore also believe that taxation is an uneccesary imposition on this ability, so move to create a user pays privatised provision of public services wherever and whenever possible. Everything we see in the reform agenda is geared to this end. We here in NZ are following sadly the same path!
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And in the never-ending space that’s emerging between here and there (privatized K-12 education) is the muddy middle of the present — two systems pitted against one another, vying for finite financial resources, human resources and intellectual capital. Not a good thing for any student, teacher or administrator anywhere in the country.
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Competition between two school sectors makes no sense. We abandoned dual school systems in the South. Why recreate them now?
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One of the preconditions for recreating dual school systems is for the general public to allow itself to be so confused about what is happening that uncertainty turns into inaction. Which is precisely why the charterites/privatizers/edubullies use FUD.
With all due respect to Mr. Thompson, generous helpings of formal education and firsthand experience can sometimes lead to what is called “paralysis by analysis.” Thankfully, many posters to this blog understand that not all variables are of equal weight, not all players in this great fight over “a better education for all” have the same financial resources, not all concerned have an equal measure of celebrity and connections, not everyone has the exact same expectations and needs.
The vast majority of posters to this blog did not want or plan on being dragged into a battle over public education, but the lines have been drawn by people like Rhee who consider children “our most valuable assets.” It’s time to rescue what they consider their “assets” before every youngster is turned into the profit-equivalent of soylent green.
The evidence is overwhelming at this point that a terribly difficult fight has been forced on us. In the words of an old song, “which side are you on, boy, which side are you on?”
Not ” can’t make up my mind, boy, can’t make up my mind.”
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It took me a long time to understand how my intuition worked and that it was usually reliable; so long as I followed the precept an old and wise superintendent taught me “be patient, wait and see what shakes out of the trees”. I have followed Diane’s blog since almost the beginning and I’ve seen enough to have no doubt is is right about the privatization of public schools. My gut had already told me that things weren’t right, decisions were being made that had little logic. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew it was there:
-not only more and more testing, but earlier testing
-abandonment of innovation
-cutting educators out of decision making
-a testing cycle in Texas where every time results were high, we were told the test was too easy and a new test was put in place
-research became synonymous with what magically matched up with publishers profits
-less and less attention paid to successful strategies that did not reinforce the political agenda
-and a conspicuous absence of corporate support for proven practice
( this was Texas in the 90s)
Now, Diane has brought to light all the issues that she so intuitively combined in her “pattern on the rug” piece. It is enough for me, its close enough. I care too much for children and their future to sit by any longer. Democracy in this country depends on an educated populace, not on who is educated in line with a political agenda or worse, depends on the whims of corrupt opportunists.
To sit idle is not an option.
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John Thompson must have missed the idea of deductive reasoning in his Geometry class! John states “It is in that spirit where I hope that it is too early to link most of the “reform” movement with privatization. ”
My only hope is that it is not TOO LATE!
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To deny that there is a privatization agenda behind corporate reform is to bury your head in the sand in the hopes that this situation will go away.
Diane has had several posts about the use of school vouchers in Chile and their detrimental effect. https://dianeravitch.net/?s=chile
It should be noted that this scheme, and privatization schemes by authoritarian governments all over the world, were guided by the Chicago School of Economics headed by Milton Freedman. Milton Freedman was an adviser to General Pinochet military dictatorship after it took power in a coup in 1973. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/milton-friedman-jeane-kir_b_35992.html
The Wikipedia entry for Milton Freedman says:
“In his 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” Friedman proposed supplementing publicly operated schools with privately run but publicly funded schools through a system of school vouchers.[44] Reforms similar to those proposed in the article were implemented in, for example, Chile in 1981 and Sweden in 1992.[45] In 1996, Friedman, together with his wife, founded the The Foundation for Educational Choice to advocate school choice and vouchers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
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If it looks like facist privatization, sounds like a facist privatization, and feels like facist privatization, then it probably is facist privatization.
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Diane,
I have enormous respect for your ability and willingness to change your mind. It is rare in public policy today. I agree with many of your positions and agree with many more; it is your open-minded approach that keeps me coming back more than anything else.
Dylan
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Diane,
You ask, “John, where do you think this is heading?”
I think the most likely scenario is the one you predict. You’ve almost completely convinced me that the Billionaires Boys Club is moving inexorably toward privatization.
I believe there is a second, less likely outcome. We could bend over backwards communicating with teachers and leaders in charter schools and build a coalition for changing course, we could nail down a victory in the battle of ideas and evidence on the effectiveness of “reform,” and we could convince the Obama Administration.
I would add that it has only been a few weeks since the New Yorker article was published and I can’t deny the number of disturbing stories that have been broken since then. Whether its the Broad plan for New Jersey to the claim that TFAers teach 8 years, the news continues to provide evidence of mendacity. I fear for the worst, as I also call for a special effort to communicate with our opponents who have actually been in the classroom.
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John,
If you have been wondering “what the Hell is going on” this is extremely informative in filling in some of the blanks.( I hope you are not Cory Booker fans)
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report offers his look on the corporate take over of Education. This is excellent but long, 1 hour 15min.
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John, you’ve gone on for so long pretending to sympathetic to public education, but your weasel arguments always come down to capitulation to corporate domination.
I really don’t believe you anymore. We can’t afford to sit on our thumbs and hope the vultures change their minds, thank you very much. We can defeat them at ballot boxes, and in public discourse, by exactly the clear and unflinching analysis Diane is presenting. The widespread activist victories and ongoing struggles this blog is tracking aren’t going to wait, and aren’t at all interested in your delaying tactics.
Go sell it to Fordham.
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If I didn’t have my day job, I’d google with “league of nations peace in our time” and click around to find what I need to prove my point.
Once again, there is some easy to explain easy to sell piece of hard truth which eludes us. For whatever reason, the meme “privatization” seems to only work among a certain subset. (I’ve lived in relatively affluent parts of Seattle for a few decades, as a serf, and I’m on career 3.)
This is what the rip off artists are going to do – suppose my high school employees 100 adults at an ave cost of $70,000 a year. What the DFER-TFA-Gate$-Ill-Vain-IA scumbags are going to do is hire 80 people with an average cost of $25,000 a year.
That “extra” 5 million is going to go into the pockets of power point jockeys, management scum, well paid sycophants, Kopp-Kopp-Cronies. Ta Da.
BTW – I have a B.A. in math, 15 years being a cook in my 1st career, 5 years being a support serf and Microsoft, and NOT any advanced degrees in Edu-Poli-Sociology-Psych whatever. Read The Prince, 1984, Richard III & Julius Cesaer & KIng Lear by WS, some Plutarch and Tacitus, and Game of Thrones – some pigs are better than other pigs.
rmm.
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The first time I ever encountered the concept of the privatization of public schools was in a John Birch Society pamphlet in 1968. It was in the very first paragraph and seemed to be the only idea they had. I thought they were crazy, but have thought about that pamphlet a thousand times since then, through all the discussions about vouchers, choice, charters, etc.
I know the idea goes back farther, into the 50s and Milton Friedman; but I wonder if that isn’t when money started flowing into it’s promotion. An article in the New Yorker a few years back pointed out that that money came from the same sources funding the Tea Party and its companion PACs. It is ugly money.
I know there are good charters with lofty goals, and I’d probably keep my opinions to myself if my grandchildren went to one and had a good experience; but I can’t shake the idea that the source of all that money flooding into charters is some pretty nasty players.
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As more facts come in, as with this newspper report and the Chicago Tribune’s new story on “reformers” secret plans in their city, my thoughts evolve. Here’s my latest:
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2012/12/thompson-private-emails-and-school-privatization.html
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