Sam Chaltain, one of our very thoughtful bloggers, urged that we try to find common ground with those who disagree with our views. That is usually sound advice. In the present instance, there are so many who say they want to privatize public education, and whose motives are not disguised, that it is hard to know how to find common ground. I think, for example, of ALEC, the Koch brothers, the governors and legislatures of North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and many other states that have made it clear they prefer private management, for-profit vendors, and vouchers, not public education.
Here is an interesting comment on this discussion from a teacher in Douglas County, Colorado:
I think the big problem is that we don’t live in a democracy. This isn’t just an issue around education. Would be easy to find common ground. . . well if we all were on equal ground.
I’m reading Dr. Jim Wallis’ book titled “On God’s Side.”
Here are some quotes that fit so well with this whole issue and why I don’t think there is common ground.
“It’s time we stated the obvious truth: the last remaining obstacle to democracy is the dominant power of rich people, their money, and their institutions over the political process, a power that absolutely corrupts democracy.” Jim Wallis
“Smith said capitalism can’t function properly without a moral framework. Another proponent of capitalism, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, agreed and said that without ethics, the market ends up devouring everything else and , finally, even itself.” Jim Wallis
“It takes the power of movements to change politics. Change never starts in Washington or in our legislatures or houses of government; it almost always begins outside of politics. If public momentum can be built among millions of people, change eventually arrives in the nation’s capital.” Jim Wallis
So Dr. Ravitch, Thank you for helping lead the movement!!
Is she right? Can you find common ground when those at the top have so much power and so little reason to compromise?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Attempt to find common ground with those who seek to destroy who you are and what you do? Neville Chamberlain would be proud.
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The Bush and Obama administrations declared war on public education in the United States. Given the astonishing results that our public education system has delivered, one can only describe what they have done as utter heedlessness.
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Robert,
You’re quite generous in using “utter heedlessness”.
I’d probably have gone with something more mundane like uber insanity coated with excrement of porcine origin
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…but why malign the poor pigs?
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I just posted on another thread about this. This group needs to find its common ground before there can be any formation of a larger common ground. We need to find a way to unify and get this information out there. So many people have NO IDEA about any of this. So many people have been convinced that teachers are just whining about their “benefits”. People are angry because many of them have lost ground themselves. Some people are doing just fine because of stable jobs. They don’t have any idea what struggling is all about … yet. Will it take a complete collapse of the 98-99% to open some eyes? Maybe.
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What are you talking about? The OP is about making “common ground” with sworn enemies of the public good.
There is NOTHING to find common ground with when you are dealing with liars and crooks.
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I wonder if it’s the wrong question. A democracy requires some common ground or deadlock occurs. We’ve watched years of “my way or the highway” play out at the federal level and clearly, it’s not effective. It also raises the stakes for both winners and losers.
On the other hand, it’s very hard to find common ground when not everyone is truthful about their goals, or when two sides can’t trust each other to the point that no one believes what the other one is saying. If one or both sides can’t be honest, and/or one or both sides can’t hear what the other is saying, trying to find common ground is a waste of time.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what the alternative is. It’s easy to talk revolution, but we need to acknowledge that both come with many casualties–perhaps many more so than either side feels are already adding up now.
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Lisa,
We continue down the path we are going, we will most definitely see even worse casualties. Standing by and doing nothing doesn’t work either. I’m not talking violence at all, but I am talking about working for the common good, which is about what is best for all children and not just my own.
Some solutions, imo, is amendment 28. We have to stop looking at this from just an education perspective. Every issue from the environment, immigration, health care, military, poverty and so on are too heavily influenced by money and not by the common good.
Our system is broken and common ground can’t be met because it is BROKEN!!
https://www.facebook.com/WolfPAChq
https://www.facebook.com/Move2Amend
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Under a 28th amendment would corporations and union be permitted to run ads in support of a candidate even though they were prohibited from donating to politicians?
Would all politicians running for office in primaries be covered by public funding?
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We must offer a plan to save public ed or we will be devoured. Here’s a sample of the plan http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
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There are a number of local politics in play in Douglas County (which, in some ways, make it a decent microcosm) that bear consideration. The debate over vouchers, the wealth of the district and the high-rhetoric without empirical evidence to drive decision-making are all a part of it. With SB-191 Colorado has put it’s teacher’s on notice without questioning the larger more destructive forces in play. I don’t know that common ground is the way forward, but civil disruption and common sense may be.
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Just remember that education reform is BUT part of a much larger societal picture with regard to cultural paradigmatic shifts in wealth, power, and income distribution, and by that, I am not mainly referring to teacher pay and benefits.
Does compromise come in to play there?
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NO!
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In order to have a political compromise, there needs to be two opposing sides. It is noteworthy that the Republicans have not screamed bloody murder about Obama’s power grab in education. Unfortunately for public education the last great compromise involved NCLB where both parties came together on the idea that schools should be run like a business and standardized test scores should be the proxy for the bottom line. Compounding this “run-schools-like-a-business” model is the fact that millions of dollars are going into the war chests of elected officials to make sure that those profiting from the education business do not have the rug pulled out from under them in the form of the elimination of the testing business or the elimination of the “school takeover” business. With neither political party offering an alternative to the “run-school-like-a-business” model we are stuck… unless we raise our voices from the grassroots. I hope that your book garners attention for its overarching message that democracy is in peril if we don’t overturn this cockeyed idea that schools are like factories turning out cogs for the machinery.
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Wake up and smell the coffee.
There can be no common ground with organized crime.
There can be no common ground with the systematic suborning of our public officials
and the concerted destruction of our public institutions by a corporate mega-lobby.
That is what we are dealing with here and it is well past time to understand what it means.
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Agreed. The sham education expert industry has poisoned reasonable arguments about improving education. Common ground means having respect for objective facts and for educators who study and research the field. The sham edu-corporatists have made it axiomatic that real experts are resistant to change and need to be replaced. In any argument they use jingoistic advertising slogans and react to peer review research as white noise. Common ground gives such nonsensical arguments a level of legitimacy they do not deserve.
In these circumstances common ground is impossible. We are dealing with people who want to destroy us. We are dealing with people who view themselves as masters of the universe. We are dealing with people who have nothing but contempt for educators and children.
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No, for those of us who have been subjected to 30 years of shock doctrine promoting the failing schools narrative and trashing teachers, it is decades too late to seek common ground with our detractors.
This is about more than public education, too. In this highly stratified society, most of us share absolutely nothing in common with the billionaires and their political hacks who have been putting out that propaganda and leveraging their wealth and power in order to control our nation and it’s public schools, as they followed the blueprints of Lewis Powell, Milton Friedman and ALEC. This is a low risk venture for them. They have no skin in the game, while our children, our livelihoods and our survival are at stake.
When Warren Buffet has said, “there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won”, you do not capitulate. You band together and rise up against the tyranny –in all of the arenas this is playing out across the country, from our schools and hospitals, to our public parking and postal services– everywhere and everything that capitalists want to privatize, so they can further their profits and consolidate their power .
This is NOT a Kumbaya moment! Resist the impulse to compromise your ideals and your integrity!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/theres-been-class-warfare-for-the-last-20-years-and-my-class-has-won/2011/03/03/gIQApaFbAL_blog.html
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Without distracting from attention to this book, I wanted to mention that Prof Kevin Welner of Colorado University, often cited here, and his family had to be evacuated from the Boulder Colorado area because of the flood. For those interested in helping, here is an facebook message I just received:
Kevin Welner (friends with Alex Medler) also commented on Alex Medler’s link.
Kevin wrote: “Thanks Van and Joe. The Red Cross is always a good place to contribute. The United Way has also set up a fund specifically for the Foothill communities like Jamestown: https://www.unitedwayfoothills.org/floodrelief. I must say also that FEMA and the Nat’l Guard (our tax dollars) have been great — as well as so many volunteers.”
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Thank the teachers!
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What kind of ignorant mentality would say we should find “common ground” with people who are OPPOSED TO THE VERY CONCEPT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION because they don’t believe in the concept of the “common good”?
“Common ground” is what Obama practices, which is a tool of people who really are in bed with truly evil interests.
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In other words, you can’t make nice with evil without becoming evil yourself.
The privatization of public ed is EVIL.
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“Common” is a dirty word in the lexicon of the privileged. These are people who see themselves as America’s aristocracy and better than us. Their main task in life is to ensure they remain elite. They will do nothing to jeopardize their advantage and common ground is seen by them as quicksand.
Even if they say that they are seeking common ground with us, do not trust them. They have a history of feigning concern as wolves in sheeps clothing, such as by referring to their privatization scheme as “the civil rights issue of our time.” What that really amounts to is stripping us of our civil rights, by removing Democracy from education, so that unregulated private companies can siphon public funds and call all the shots with impunity, while the people have no vote or redress with these private management firms and their appointed school boards. Remember, the one place where Democracy does not typically exist in this country is where people spend the majority of their time, in the workplace, and that is the primary domain of these billionaires, so they expect to dominate common people during the normal course of their day.
Never was it more evident that Democracy will be our saving grace. Therefore, we must organize, inform others and beat the elites at the ballot box, in every opportunity that we have to vote.
Buy and share multiple copies of Diane’s book with friends, family and community members!
And never forget that we have something that the elites don’t have. We have the dignity of knowing that it is truly an honor to be a common human being. Fanfare for the Common Man:
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Great response! TY.
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I think there is more common ground than some would indicate. We need to think about the goals outlined by education advocates, parents, teachers, students, and thought leaders. I believe much of this effort is focused on creating a successful public education system which is essential for a thriving community. The second piece of this common ground is to separate charter schools and understand that many are not run by for profit institutions. Just as not all districts or schools are operated using the same methods or organizational structures charter schools are set up and run by different entities. To reach a common ground it is critical that there is dialogue around the efforts being made by individual charter schools. What are these schools doing? How are they funded and how does that change the funding going to the home school? What impact might the work of a charter have on a local school system? Reaching a common ground is more about a dialogue than it is about choosing a side. We can’t begin to get there until there is room at the table to discuss this in depth.
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It was this under Bush I that it was decided there is no room at the table to dialogue with educators, when he called the National Education Summit in 1989 and invited no educators. That practice has continued for decades.
The moniker “non-profit” provides no assurance. In my state, for-profits are not permitted to run charter schools, so all charters here have to be non-profits. One CMO was awarded a $98M state grant, i.e., free tax money, and the greedy CEO, who pays himself and other non-educator executives six figure salaries, hired and gave huge no bid contracts to relatives and friends –while teachers work long hours for peanuts.
There was a brief kerfuffle over the matter and then it was back to work as usual. “Non-profit” is a joke today. There is no common ground when politicians determine that some schools are to be more privileged than others.
Stop trying to talk and take action.
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I’m much more interested in meeting the common good than a self defining common ground.
This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It is a those with money controlling our democracy.
And point blank, it will take a movement to get away from this self serving attitude. Todd, we can’t get there until we get money out of politics. . . period.
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Not likely to find common ground until they fail to the point of their embarrassment. However, here’s the common ground we all should look for http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
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Common Ground? OY! This is what Rhee says and she is WRONG!
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Here is some common ground that some of us have found:
http://hometownsource.com/2013/09/18/joe-nathan-column-bloomington-kennedy-graduate-students-describe-value-dual-credit-courses/
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Common ground in a debate means that both parties start from the same assumption, and then go from there. As far as I can see, there is no such common ground when it comes to who should control education. Diane and most of the posters here assume that education is a public service, like police, fire, water, snow plowing, zoning and the like. The other side sees it as an individual benefit for the student, and thus can be provided by a service provider, often a private service provider.
On one side we see those who see government provision of education as an end in itself, whereas on the other are those who see public education as only one means to an end. One side sees public education as essential for democracy. The other side sees the practice of democracy in the society as independent of how the individual members of the society are educated.
Is public education an end in itself or a means? If I have framed the question correctly, the dispute seems to be about HOW education should be provided and why it should be provided that way. Framing the question that way already seems to give an advantage to the reformers and privatizers. When people cannot even reach agreement on what the debate is ABOUT, the likelihood of agreement on anything else is minimal.
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It is clear that you can’t standardize kids and individualize them at the same time. However, when they at least allow an individualized approach, this would be a common ground http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/
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Actually, the “high powers” do not all agree on charters and vouchers,” as you suggest.
The President and Arne Duncan have opposed vouchers.
This is an example of differences that are important but sometimes are not noted.
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Joe Nathan,
Our superintendent has been praised for her reform work here in Douglas County by Arne Duncan. Her board has worked hard here to provide vouchers.
So while they may say they don’t support vouchers, I don’t see them doing much about that assault on public education.
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Both the President and Duncan have been urged by some advocates to support vouchers. They have made it clear that they do not. When there was a proposal to continue funding a voucher program in Washington DC, they spoke out in opposition.
This administration has made it clear what it supports for improving public schools and for helping more low income youngsters succeed (Duncan was the only person who signed BOTH major national statements put together by education reform groups before being named Secretary of Ed. One statement focused primarily on changes needed inside schools, one focused primarily on “the opportunity agenda.” Neither statement included vouchers.
The US Dept of Ed could have proposed creating or expanding a voucher system as part of Race to the Top. It did not. (I know there are other things in RTT that many don’t like. Vouchers was not in there.
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