Diana Senechal has written a thoughtful reflection on the tendency of policymakers to foist big ideas on education. Fads come and go. The ones we live with today, say I, seem especially pernicious because they are backed by the power of the state in alliance with the profit motive.
Yet I remain confident that truly bad ideas will fade away. This is not from a sense of resignation or historical inevitability, but because I believe that educators and parents and school boards will rise up and say “Enough!” It is beginning now, and the roar of protest will grow.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“If policymakers understood the discrepancy between tests and subject matter, they’d be less likely to treat scores as precise measures of teaching quality or student achievement.”
The use of test scores must be put in perspective. They are fallible, imprecise measures. The current over emphasis on tests separate the teacher from the learner. Why take the time to truly know the learner when they can be simply defined by a test score? This may be easier but it is such a sadly misguided effort.
I hope you are right. Otherwise, the Big Idea of American Democracy is on the edge of becoming transient — a noble experiment finally succumbing to the very forces of mercantile tyranny it had to fight in order to be born.
How much money have these people made with made up fake terms like “best practices, “differentiated instruction” and all the other eduspeak nonsense. Someone is making lots of money off of all of this except the teachers
This article touches upon something that has been bothering me about education reform in its current state: it’s run by the wrong sort of mentality and the wrong sort of people.
In short, if Bill Gates came from the medical industry instead of the tech industry, we’d have an entirely different approach to ed reform, and one consistent with the rights of every parent and every child.
Let me explain.
First, as we know, Bill Gates all but single-handedly drives education reform in the USA right now.
Second, Bill comes from the tech business, where you can make as many mistakes as you want and generally not hurt anybody except some investors/stockholders wallets.
The Bill Gates foundation blog is called, “Impatient Optimists”. Aptly named. The keyword is, “impatient”. Tech people are impatient.
Medical people are not. They know they do their work on *living subjects* who can *die* or otherwise suffer terribly if their experiments fail. They know that humans are incredibly *complex* systems that can exhibit unintended consequences and side effects. They know that progress must necessarily be done *carefully* and *methodically* lest they do far more harm than good. They respect what they don’t know.
Tech people have the delete button. They have “1.0” products. They “fail fast”. They prototype.
This is a very dangerous–and fundamentally unjust–approach to use on an entire generation of American children. If we get it wrong–and so far, it’s quite likely we will–then we’ll have the educational equivalent of the .bomb era except this time it will be children’s lives and not investor’s millions that will be flushed down to the toilet.
After 40 plus years in education I have seen many trends and fads come and go – some faster than others! (It always amazes me that Blooms Taxonomy seems to be the most enduring tool ever).
Government mandated fads can be the hardest to subvert, but I have seen many schools jump on bandwagons only to have them eventually superceded.
One school I know of became a “Six Hats’ school and even had the tables the students worked at painted the colours of the hats – oh how I would have hated sitting at the black hat table!!
I always tell schools that if a bandwagon comes trundling past and they jump on and start playing in the band, eventually the bandwagon will trundle off into the desert and get lost or go over a cliff, or the instruments will wear out. However, if you stand on the side of the road playing your own band and when a bandwagon comes past you take the instruments that enhance your band then your band will always go from strength to strength.
We have been so lucky to have a national curriculum in New Zealand that allows each school to develop its own curriculum. I fear that this is slowly being nibbled away at.
Thank you for mentioning my piece. Just one point of clarification: it is not about how fads today are “are backed by the power of the state in alliance with the profit motive.” That’s a point worth making (and often made), but the emphasis of my article is different.
I did not mean to imply that was your view. It is mine, and I inserted a clarifying phrase.
Thank you for the clarifying phrase. I do not mean that it is not my point of view; it just isn’t the emphasis of the article.
Great piece. How do I as a parent speed up the end of THIS fad?? Unfortunately my kids are right in the middle of their school years. They can’t afford this fad to endure much longer.
Hello,
Look up Parents Across America and join the chapter in your state. Parents voices rising up in a synchronized fashion with educators will bring more power to the growing movement to reveal the true colors of the fake for-profit corporate, test driven education “reform.”
Join in when you see an action step being taken in your state/community ~ either by your teacher’s union or by a group like Parents Across America.
This is how change will finally happen, by joining together and exposing this movement for what it truly is… building corporate enterprises of the backs of our children under the guise of “choice.”
Maureen Reedy
Parent/29 yr veteran educator
Columbus, Ohio
Yes, your article did not emphasize how the profit motive has skewed what is valued in education today. I value Liberal Arts, but I’m glad Diane mentioned this, because it really needs to be stated and underscored, over and over again, since it’s not just Liberal Arts that are under-valued by today’s profit-driven “reformers”; teachers are not valued either.
Teachers have no idea how bad it can get for them when profit drives education. Look to higher ed to see what’s been happening to teachers there:
After teaching for decades (5 years at my current school), this week, I was given a contract indicating that, starting next month, I will be paid $200 per 16 week course. Yes, I am to be paid $12.50 per week. My contract also indicated that I will not be receiving this insulting, unlivable pay until the semester ends, after 4 months. This is a school that just went from being a non-profit to being a for-profit. No faculty members qualify for minimum wage or unemployment compensation either, because 100% of us were hired on a semester basis, so we’re not even really considered employees and we have no benefits or protections whatsoever.
Profiteers have all kinds of “big ideas” up their sleeves which are intended to serve only their own benefit, and as long as the government allows it, they will continue to exploit whomever they can. So don’t think that being asked to teach for 16 weeks at the pay rate of $12.50 per week could never happen to you, because it just happened to hundreds of teachers at my school.
I have written quite a bit about how the teaching profession has been demeaned. See my book, Republic of Noise, for discussion of this.
Your story is appalling and should be more widely known. I don’t know whether you were addressing me in particular in the last sentence–but no, I do not assume that such things would never happen to me.
I chose my particular topic/emphasis because I consider it important and because I have something to bring to it.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to discount your invaluable contributions, and, no, I was not addressing you in particular, I don’t think teachers in general really know how horrible it has already gotten for some of us or how bad it can get for them, too, and this situation is just really freaking me out right now.
Can you tell us what kind of school this is? Who could afford to work for those wages? Who would they find if you left? This is outrageous.
Although it’s an extreme example, it’s not really all that unique. This kind of thing has been happening to teachers in higher ed across the country for years. Some of the for-profits have found loopholes that have enabled them to bring teacher exploitation to a whole new level.
I can’t say where, as I feel a certain sense of loyalty to the school and the people with whom I work. I don’t know if they would be able to find qualified teachers to replace us, at such a slap-in-the-face pay rate, but I have not signed my contract yet.
Could you explain a bit more how you have a sense of loyalty to an organization that you claim is offering you a salary of $12.50/week? Misguided loyalties?
The school just became a for-profit. I want to give those representing faculty a chance to work things out with the new ownership.
P.S. They just gave me three classes, so now I’m up to a whopping $37.50 per week. Still haven’t signed on to that though.
Honestly, how could you afford to? When you add up planning time, grading time in addition to class time, this is absurd. There should be a revolution. You could make more at Walmart or McDonald’s. I am sorry…this is unbelievable. Their loyalty should be to you.
This story seems implausible. Unfortunately, this is the Internet, and anonymous people can and do misrepresent their situations. Remember the post wherein Ravitch credulously reprinted a commenter’s claim that his rural Nevada town had 7 math PhDs (two of whom had a second PhD) teaching at the high school? https://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/27/attention-should-be-paid/
Can the commenter provide any additional evidence about which school supposedly pays such rates in the face of minimum wage laws?
In higher education today, 75% of professors are hired on a per semester basis (or per term, when semesters are broken into shorter lengths). See How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps: http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/
Some corporations, including the one that ran my school when it was a non-profit, have figured out that minimum wage and other labor law protections can be circumvented by hiring people as independent contractors. 100% of the faculty at my school were hired as contractors on a per term basis (i.e., for six weeks at a time, as we ran courses for three six week terms in each 18 week semester). The pay scale was changed several times, depending upon enrollment. When it was high, they crowded many students into our courses and paid a low flat rate. When enrollment went down, they paid on a low per student basis.
The new owners wanted the six week terms eliminated and all courses run the entire length of the semester, which they decided should be 16 weeks long. They applied a pay scale which used to be for 6 weeks terms to semesters, so what we earned last term in 6 weeks we’ll be making next year in 16 weeks..
JSB, Here are some examples of colleges that have hired faculty as independent contractors and summaries of the IRS rulings on those situations.
That’s just a glimpse into a growing problem that I have seen snowball within the past decade. In the last six years, three different schools hired me as an independent contractor –which was their call, not mine. I have no doubt that none of them classified me according to IRS requirements and that I should have been hired as an employee instead.
Ooops, sorry, omitted the link: http://www.unr.edu/Documents/administration-finance/campus-business/controllers-office/IC-Rulings-12272011.pdf
The way adjunct faculty is treated is not a very well kept secret. I remember reading about campus jumping instructors traveling from school to school trying to stitch together enough classes to provide a living stipend. Teaching must be an addiction; it is hard to imagine any other reason for accepting such poor treatment.
My school has changed ownership five times since it was originally established and each change has come with promises of full time work for faculty once things settle down and the school grows. Some people have stayed around and some have left. All who stayed have had to find additional work to make ends meet.
I teach at another school that also has a very high rate of contingent faculty and pays on a per student basis. They set a limit on the number of students faculty can teach in a year there –which I reached within six months. So I have no additional income now and won’t be eligible to teach there again until late spring. I’m looking for more work at another school. .
I have been a teacher for over 40 years. Teaching is not an addiction, it’s my profession and, as most career teachers, I’ve dedicated my life to it.
I did not mean the addiction comment as a negative although I should have realized that it could be taken that way. I suppose because I was terminated (K-12) and have had a horrible time adjusting to being obsolete, the term seemed appropriate. Now, I would love to teach again, but I don’t think I can handle the abuse I took as a matter of course before. My sincere apologies for offending you.
Thank you for the apology. I might be more sensitive right now, due to the stress, because I took the comment by Linda about working at Walmart or McDonalds the wrong way, too, initially –although I know it was not meant to harm. It’s difficult to consider a job in another field, as I approach retirement age, let alone working for another company that exploits workers…
I hope you are able to find work that capitalizes on your strengths as a teacher. Thanks for the clarification!
For those who have a hard time with conspiracy theories, as I do, and don’t see the links between what’s been going on in higher education and K-12 “reform” policies, I would suggest investigating the following:
The 1971 Powell Memo –be sure to click the Education link: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/The-Lewis-Powell-Memo/
and
ALEC’s education agenda –click Privatizing Schools and Higher Ed Policy: http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
In the short term, just going by what we are seeing in Michigan, there is every indication that the Decepticons are perfectly prepared to double-down and triple-down and quadruple-down on their war against democracy, education, and information.
So watch out for that …
Here’s just the latest sample of what I’m talking about …
Straight from the Voice of Amway propaganda blitz …
DeVos: Move Past Anger and Keep Rebuilding Michigan