The public is beginning to awaken to the realities of what is deceptively called “school reform.”
Read David Sirota’s terrific piece on how they are unraveling, here.
First, what is happening in state after state, in direct response to federal policy, is school destruction, not reform.
Second, the end game for the so-called “reformers” is privatization, not reform.
Everything the “reformers” advocate fails to produce better education.
Charters and vouchers are not only privatization, but they promote greater segregation and social stratification.
The endless testing regime has generated a backlash that reaches into every district in the nation.
The recent release of the NAEP Long-Term Trend data for 2008-2012 showed virtually no improvements in test scores for that period of time, just as NCLB and Race to the Top converged.
The “reformers” are the status quo.
It is a status quo that is bad for students, bad for teachers, and bad for the quality of education.
At some point, the public will demand change, and the reformers will be finished.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
” Reality, though, is finally catching up with the “reform” movement’s propaganda. With poverty and inequality intensifying, a conversation about the real problem is finally starting to happen. And the more education “reformers” try to distract from it, the more they will expose the fact that they aren’t driven by concern for kids but by the ugliest kind of greed — the kind that feigns concerns for kids in order to pad the corporate bottom line.”
An outstanding article … really nails it.
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I think what will finish them is when the funders decide there’s no payoff for them and pull the plug.
The goals of the “reform” movement are not what they are publicly professed to be, of course, but they aren’t that likely to neatly succeed in their actual goals, either. Education is too complex and messy to work out as a private business with an untrained, minimum-wage workforce operating with scripted or online lessons.
We actually saw an example of that when the “miracle” Rocketship charter schools announced that they were revamping their much-gushed-over labs where dozens of kids worked at computers with a low-paid non-teacher keeping watch. That model is really the heart of the “reformers’ ” concepts, yet the “miracle” schools decided they needed to overhaul it.
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There will be no public education left when they get through with it. Then they can simply pull out of education altogether and send their kids to the “elite” private schools. Everybody else will be on their own if they can’t afford the “user fees.” Remember, “libertarians” have the core self-centered, downright sociopathic belief that “if I don’t use it, why should I pay for it?” These people don’t want to pay taxes AT ALL for other people’s kids.
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The “reformers” have ignored poverty because their ultimate goal is to create MORE poverty among more people. Remember, this is a worldwide movement peddled by globalists/neoliberals/disciples of crackpot Milton Friedman in order to destroy living standards everywhere in an economic race to the bottom. In this lunatic fantasy, all people all over the world will compete for ever lower and lower paid positions with perhaps the ultimate goal being the return to slavery worldwide. Meanwhile, the billionaires and industrialists, royalists actually when you think about it, will have everything.
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An exceptionally well-written, well-argued piece by Sirota. Thanks for this, Diane.
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I agree, this article is well written and well argued, but are reformers retreating? In TN Michelle Rhee’s Student’s First is beefing up ‘grassroots’ efforts in TN. (note the scare quotes)
http://www.nashvillescene.com/pitw/archives/2013/07/10/michelle-rhees-studentsfirst-beefing-up-in-tennessee?utm_source=July+11.+2103&utm_campaign=bluetn.com&utm_medium=email
The New Republic has an article has this quote from an unnamed wonk: “They’ve become like the gun lobby in Tennessee,” a former aide to a top Nashville politician told me. “Everybody is scared of the NRA. It’s the same way with these education reform people.”
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Jcgrim, they lose again and again. Look at the two big races in Los Angeles this spring. The “reformers” poured in millions and lost two out of three.
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oops, here’s the New Republic link article:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113204/michelle-rhee-tennessee-studentsfirst-floods-school-races#
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Sooner or later, in this case later, lies and mythology are revealed to not be true. Remember when you first learned that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were not real? Reform is not reform but “Deform and Destruction.” Orwell predicted well what we would do for total domination by a few of the elite and how they would wordspeak us to believing them. Hasn’t worked so bad for them so far only now the veil of “Oz” is now uncovering them and “The Emperor has no clothes and he is ugly also and violent.”
This is how it has been and will be. When will we learn the lesson? We had better soon as man has never before been able to completely wipe himself out and now we are in the process of doing just that. We need our youth and we need a real data driven reality not mythology and ideology driven false reality. Or we all die an ugly end. There really is no other blue ball close for us to run to.
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Here in the District of Columbia our city council and mayor are ramping up their “reform” efforts with legislation that essentially moves us to an all charter system. A DCPS teacher dropped this gem at a recent meeting my organization had to discuss the proposed legislation:
“This legislation sets up student failure to justify school take over so charters and private entities can take over public property. It’s all about real estate”
The same can be said of all of these “reform” efforts, folks are fed up and are fighting back!
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Is it just me, or does it seem to others incredibly bizarre that those who claim to care most about freedom, choice, and limited government should be the ones who are also most supportive of massive, unprecedented federal government
redistribution of income to the military-industrial sector,
surveillance of private citizens,
regulation of people’s intimate lives, and
intrusion into K-12 education via national standards, national high-stakes testing, national teacher evaluation schemes, and centralized databases of student scores and responses.
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When people are this inconsistent, you can me assured that they are rationalizing some other motivation? What motivation? Glad you asked. Profits for themselves and their cronies.
The deform movement is driven by profiteering. And people are wising up to this.
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Yikes. Allow me to repost a corrected version:
When people are this inconsistent, you can be certain that they are rationalizing some other motivation. What motivation? Glad you asked. Profits for themselves and their cronies.
The deform movement is driven by profiteering. And people are wising up to this.
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You are totally confusing, Robert. It is the Democrats who promote big government, not conservatives, who, by contrast, are in favor of smaller government and in constitutional The tea party is the hope.
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The Dimocrats and the Repugnicans are simply two rival gangs vying with one another over which gets the spoils from the territory, Harlan. To give but one example of this, every budget that George W. Bush, Jr. sent to the hill was the largest federal budget in history to that time. And the cost of the foreign adventurism that he embroiled us in would have put solar panels on the roof of every building in the United States (no exaggeration; I have done the calculation). Yes, some Republicans talk limited government, but it’s just that, talk. The biggest state socialist program that we have–the one that supports a military-industrial complex that is equal in size to that of the entire rest of the world combined–is overwhelmingly supported by both parties. And the other programs that I mention as well. Those who see significant differences in these parties aren’t paying attention to the much more vast similarities.
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I see and agree. Tea Party.
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