Responding to another reader, Robert Shepherd challenges the claim that reformers want a free market in schooling:
“We are NOT seeing the emergence of free market alternatives to public schools. We are seeing is crony capitalist alternatives dependent upon federal and state regulation and the public dole that could not possibly survive in truly free markets. It doesn’t matter whether it originates on the right or the left or what rhetoric it uses, tyranny is tyranny. It’s a NewSpeak version of the language of classical liberalism that is being used to defend what is actually happening. It’s incredibly naive to buy into the rhetoric in the face of the realities. Let’s see: Pass a federal law that ensures that almost all public schools will fail. Require states to provide alternatives. Have the Secretary of Education, now a private citizen, found an online virtual school to provide those alternatives, one that depends upon the same taxpayer dollars but siphons off a lot of those into private profits. There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and this has been one of them. The others have much the same general form.
“If that’s what you think of as the creation of free market alternatives, then you have started mainlining the Soma.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The purposes of public education are many; one of the purposes for federal funds in education is to inform practice, to describe “evidence based practices” and to embrace the concepts of sharing for the public good (or civic virtues).
Federal funds have been used to develop the Knowledge Base and to assist in disseminating KP&U so that innovations can be brought to other sites. Scaling up the “best” practices of informed practitioners is always difficult when we have so many different schools and districts (for example, 350 in Massachusetts). That does not mean I want one central District for Massachusetts; we are purposely grounded in local public school districts and there are benefits and disadvantages of this just as there are benefits and disadvantages of the County system such as Virginia offers. (I taught in Virginia and if you drive 30 miles outside of WashingtonDC Fairfax County you have students who are suffering from the great inequities; i.e., they don’t live in districts that are largely housing U.S. armed forces personnel and their families). Or would you suggest a one-district system such as Hawaii? These are realistic choices and no matter which system you adopt there will always be benefits and disadvantages….
Given this perspective, I don’t think it is helpful to take Massachusetts efforts and “dump” them in the arena of a school in Oklahoma or Seattle. We have a strong tradition of local and I respect this for other states as well. Nor do I believe it is healthy and wise to have a “national” set of tests. People who are recommending this just have no knowledge or understanding of tests. In Massachusetts it is has taken decades to prepare more sensitive outcome measures that are more directly linked to the courses and curriculum the students actually attend (if the student is homeless and bouncing around from school to school then we don’t always know if they actually receieved the curriculum being taught/presented/prepared.) This has been a long process and there has been valuable capacity building along the way (I did give credit to ETS for assisting us early in the agenda).
Logical discussion about the purposes of public education and the systems we utilize in delivering education are always welcome. I was taught that living without government is “nasty brutal and short” for most individual livelihoods and my endeavors have always been to fix and improve rather than slash and burn (see Pablo Naruda’s words cited earlier ) I think i am agreeing with the original post here 100% but just looking at details. I don’t mean to be arrogant in citing Massachusetts experience but just present it as an example from my own experiences.
Neruda quote????
KP & U ????
Well, Duh …
One of the arguments made for one of the roles that the federal government plays in industry is the following: It serves the public good for the federal government to fund basic research that is so fundamental that its immediate applications in profit-making enterprises is not evident. This sort of argument was made, for example, for the building of the ill-fated superconducting super collider. I think that Jean was getting at a related role that the feds have thought, for some time, that they were playing in education: doing metastudies of research into educational practices and reporting on best practices emerging from that research. And there have been instances of this. For example, the feds looked at explicit teaching of phonics and concluded, correctly, that such teaching was highly warranted by observed outcomes and so made such teaching a part of its Reading First report. So, there are two different possible roles there: a) funding fundamental research that would not be otherwise done by the market and b) distilling and disseminating the results of research. I’m not going to argue, here, the merits of each, however, because there’s an entirely different point that I want to make. Often, action by distant, centralized authorities has terrible unintended consequences. I think that a VERY strong argument can be made that specification of desirable characteristics of educational materials and of desirable pedagogical practices by federal and state governments has the unintended consequence of stifling innovation because such specifications tend to be backward looking. Consider, for example, state adoption criteria for textbooks. State education officials look at existing offerings from existing companies with major market share and make a laundry list based on those: The basal text must be accompanied by “free” teacher guides, must have online versions of its texts, must have assessments in six languages, must cover this particular list of standards, and so on. Soon, the list has grown so large that new entrants are effectively shut out: the cost of producing the required ancillary materials shuts out possible new entrants to the competition for approved, adopted status and artificially maintains monopolies on the part of a few vendors whose products already met the adoption criteria because those criteria were derived, largely, from study of those existing products. And the federal and state standards, frameworks, etc., preclude innovative approaches in new materials that differ from those. The practical consequence of all this is that choice among competing materials, alternatively designed, is severely limited, and one gets the sort of monopolistic control that has emerged in the educational materials market in the United States in recent years–a situation in which a few big players call all the shots, sell all the products, and have little incentive to innovate. Now, it’s not the INTENTION of the bureaucrats who write the frameworks and standards and publish the reports on best practices to curtail, dramatically, innovation in educational materials. And it may not be their INTENTION to narrow the field of available products to those from a few monopolistic educational publishing giants (though many are heavily lobbied and move back and forth between government and work for the monopolies). But those are, in fact, the results.
What’s the alternative? LOCAL CONTROL. Empower individual teacher groups at the building level to make their own decisions about what materials to adopt. In other words, create truly free markets in which materials can compete on their own merits rather than one in which the fix is in from the beginning.
correction: “are not evident.” I wish it were possible to edit these posts!
Yes, the targeted outcome is most definitely crony capitalism, under the guise of “free markets.” This is very evident when you look at the neo-liberal shock doctrine plan employed by corrupt politicians who are in the back pocket of big business. They have created the path towards a nation that is comprised primarily of unregulated charter and voucher schools by thoroughly over-regulating public schools. Having the ability to set unattainable goals and to manipulate cut scores on high-stakes tests enables politicians to make virtually every school in the country to appear to be failing. Then they can hand over the schools and tax free property to private sector cronies, often through no-bid contracts.
It’s really a rather simplistic but effective search and destroy mission aimed at taking control of and prospering off of public funds by companies that detest paying taxes and seek instead to be the beneficiaries of tax dollars.
Nothing could be more risk-free or less costly to entrepreneurs and corporations than getting tax free land, buildings, start-up and maintenance funds, from the government to run a private, unregulated business. In this day and age, that can be highly profitable whether they declare themselves to be a for-profit or a non-profit enterprise
We must vote all of these corrupt politicians out of office!
“Nothing could be more risk-free or less costly to entrepreneurs and corporations than getting tax free land, buildings, start-up and maintenance funds, from the government to run a private, unregulated business. In this day and age, that can be highly profitable whether they declare themselves to be a for-profit or a non-profit enterprise.”
Exactly
The current education deform movement reminds me very much of the eugenics movement in the United States before World War II. In the name of social betterment, a few wealthy foundations (the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation) and individuals (J. H. Kellogg, E. H. Harriman) poured enormous amounts of money into establishing eugenics institutes around the country, into eugenics education, and into passage of eugenics-related legislation, including anti-miscegenation statutes, sterilization statutes, immigration restrictions, racial integrity statutes, etc. As with the current education deform movement, there was a lot of talk of the “scientific” basis of these actions for social “betterment” and a lot of emphasis on establishing records of race-related “data,” and it wasn’t until after World War II that it became clear to a horrified world what “scientific” eugenics actually meant.
One of the ways in which the foundations promoted eugenics was through model legislation dealing with racial quotas, definitions of race, and sterilization. The Jeb Bush of the eugenics movement was a fellow named Harry H. Laughlin. The ALEC of the movement was the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, financed by Mary Harriman, the Rockefeller family, and the Carnegie Institution.
Like ALEC, the Eugenics Record Office operated by preparing and promoting model legislation leading to, for example, Viriginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
I never really even knew about such things until I studied Fannie Lou Hamer (I like her because she sang hymns!!) who was sterilized without knowing it by an effort in Mississippi such as you describe.
I am glad you are pointing out historical movements like these.
Good analogy. Only today’s elites often try to hide their prejudices in euphemisms and faux civil rights claims. However, one need only look to a government that decided long ago to simply stop its War on Poverty. Now they’re down to the nitty gritty of starving to death those who they see as undesirables: the working poor, unemployed, disabled, seniors, etc., as demonstrated in their attacks on the few remaining safety nets, such as Unemployment Compensation, Social Security and SNAP. “Missing: The Food Stamp Program” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/opinion/missing-the-food-stamp-program.html
As I’ve written before:
Psychometrics = Phrenology = Eugenics = Blood Letting