This post is a comprehensive review of the education priorities of the Walton Family Foundation.
The Walton family has made many billions of dollars from the Walmart stores.
Walmart comes into a region and undersells every local retail store. In time, the mom-and-pop stores–beloved community institutions handed down in some cases from generation to generation– close their doors, and mom and pop become low-wage greeters at Walmart. The giant Walmart causes an implosion of Main Streets across the region where they are located, as working people shop for bargains and bypass their own community.
If the Walmart head office decides that the store is not making a big enough profit, the Walmart closes and goes elsewhere. It leaves behind dead small towns, towns without a local economy, because the local economy was sucked dry by the big Walmart. Whether the Walmart stays or goes, Main Street dies.
In education, the Walmart agenda is not dissimilar. The foundation supports charters and vouchers, though it prefers vouchers. It seeks to create schools that are non-union and that are able to skim off students from the local public schools. In time, the local public schools will die, just as the Main Street stores died.
They give generously to create an education marketplace of choices; the one “choice” they do not favor is the neighborhood public school. They underwrite major education media to be sure that their agenda gets favorable attention. They fund compatible researchers. They are strategic in their funding.
The upshot:
The Waltons and the Walton Family Foundation have gargantuan financial resources and can exert undue influence on politicians and public policy issues of their choosing. No matter where people come down on the issues of education reform or school choice, we can all agree it is unfair that the Walton family gets to dictate the future of public education because of the amount of money at its disposal, and to do so in a way that is unaccountable to the public.
Remember, too, that the Waltons—white, rural, and mind-bogglingly wealthy—pursue their education reform goals in low-income, urban communities where the student populations consist largely of children of color. When a profoundly privileged family seeks to engage in philanthropy in historically marginalized communities that they are not part of, the lack of accountability is even more troubling.
The Waltons and their foundation have reaped billions and billions of dollars from a ruthless business model that relies on Walmart jobs being insecure and unstable jobs, with low wages, skimpy benefits, and little respect in the workplace. Their company has helped create a world where parents have to work two or more jobs, with unstable hours to make ends meet. They’ve helped create a world where parents struggle with choices like paying rent, putting food on the table or taking a sick child to the doctor. And now the Waltons want to tell us how to fix our schools? The Walmart model has made its impact on much of the world. But, for many, the Walmartization of our schools is one step too far.
This is called creative destruction. There is nothing creative about it.
But there is quite a lot of destruction.
This is an agenda that promises profits for the few, but misery for the many as public institutions are eviscerated, raided, and left as shells.
No longer are there democratic institutions to bring the community together.
In their marketplace of choices, the voucher schools and charters compete to get the “best” students.
The public schools take those rejected, excluded, or dumped by the charter and vouchers schools.
The end result: a dual system of schools, all publicly funded. One for the haves, another for the have-nots.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I refuse to shop at Walmart and encourage anyone I can to do likewise.
I would add another retail behemoth to that list: Amazon. Their tax dodging schemes hurt state, and consequently, school budgets. Their working conditions for warehouse workers may be even worse than walmarts and they are hurting Main Street too.
Please add Overstock.com to the list. The founder put A LOT of money into convincing voters in Utah to vote for vouchers. Thankfully, it failed, but most of the money for advertising came from the founder.
I love that the so-called “progressive” ed reform movement is funded by Wal Mart.
Worse low wage employer in the country funds the “civil rights movement of our time”
What an absolute joke. Obama’s giving speeches on income inequality while Duncan overlays the Wal Mart template on public schools.
“When a profoundly privileged family seeks to engage in philanthropy….”
Okay, back up. What the Waltons are engaging in is not philanthropy. I’m not sure what to call it (other than, perhaps, sociopathy), but philanthropy is supposed to benefit those upon whom it is bestowed. Sure, rich folks tend to be a bit short sighted, so they tend to mess up. And sure, all philanthropists have their own self interests in mind. But the Waltons know full well that what they’re doing is not helping the targets of their efforts. They are doing it for purely, greedy, self-interested motives – to train (brainwash, would be more like it) the next generation of workers to understand just how lucky they are that they get to stock shelves and other grueling tasks for hours a day for food-stamp-qualifying wages and no benefits.
“But the Waltons know full well that what they’re doing is not helping the targets of their efforts.”
How ed reformers can take this money is beyond me. Wal Mart isn’t just a lousy employer. They’re a lousy employer for PARENTS. The households of low wage employees are always in chaos, because they never know when they’ll be working.
Ed reformers back this employer-employee model? Or are they just taking the cash and claiming they DON’T back Wal Mart business practices?
“Remember, too, that the Waltons—white, rural, and mind-bogglingly wealthy—pursue their education reform goals in low-income, urban communities where the student populations consist largely of children of color.”
Replies I, their having the wealth to do their will is one thing, and we are finally beginning to acknowledge the issue of income inequality. But as for the hubris of having educational goals for “the other:” nothing has changed since Republican Rome, and the Waltons are not alone in this hubris. It matters not whether Gaius Publius Spurius is a Senator or on the bread dole; by Jove Gaius Publius Spurius is a Roman, and any and every Roman is better than and knows better than – and is fit to govern over – any [insert Other here]. It’s a particularly insidious “-ism.”
That quote caught my eye in the sense of “what difference does it make what color, where they live, etc. . . .”
An unnecessary addition that would be best left out.
Ugh, not surprising. I was actually hoping to hear an extended metaphor about John Boy and co 😦
Some readers here will remember the “Manhattan Institute” and Jay Greene’s punditry from years ago.
How was it’s disappearance related to Walmart? Read on.
A few years ago, the largest single donation to the University of Arkansas came from the Waltons. But despite the sanctimonious claims of university officials, there were major strings attached.
The University of Arkansas became the cover story for the corporate “reform” propaganda that has once been privately done via Jay Green’s “Manhattan Institute.”
Follow the money.
It is very important to add additional studies to this and other studies — the buying of professors, and entire university departments. With one donation, the Waltons created the “Department of School Reform” at the University of Arkansas and replaced the transparently biased Manhattan Institute with a bunch of professors, headed by Jay Greene. For a decade, Greene’s group had been offering phony “preliminary studies” (never vetted or peer reviewed) in press releases promoting privatization and the other agendas of corporate school reform. Those of us who were following corporate “reform” in those days had as many red alerts on Jay Greene’s propaganda as on anything from the Heritage Foundation or similar groups.
Then, one day, Greene became Professor Greene (University of Arkansas) and his entire group of studies producers became professors.
So suddenly what had been a bunch of right wing pundits were professors, still promoting their biases, but now with an additional smokescreen.
But that was only the beginning. Within a couple of years, that “Department of School Reform” was behind special issues of scholarly journals, and quickie reports out of other universities, debunking studies critical of the neoliberal agenda. My favorite of those came out from a guy at the University of Wisconsin attacking a state study showing the the Milwaukee voucher program was a failure. This all happened the same time Scott Walker was taking over, and soon the state would do no more studies showing the waste in vouchers or charters.
But the same rule needed when reading other “studies” — from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institutes to the Hoover Institution — has to followed before we pay attention to the punditry of the professors.
Follow the money.
Absolutely George…as always, follow the money!
The recent issue of Forbes reported on the richest people in America, and the Walton Family is at the top of the list…even beyond the Kochs.
They have the power due to this vast wealthy to impose their views of us all.
In Los Angeles, at LAUSD, we have had to deal with them pouring multi millions into Parent Revolution, donating to Ben Austin to inflitrative poverty area schools in order to get generally uninformed parents to petition to shut down their schools (with the merest of votes), then they get an embedded charter to replace the public school. Waltons have also donationed additional mulit millions in our city to hire TFA students (5 week wonders) to teach at these schools, thus depriving well trained teachers of their union jobs.
Needless to add that the students are suffering.
These are the same people, the same Walton Foundation, in leadership to change the law of all states to impose Stand Your Ground laws. So they work toward creating a Wild West society where each person carries weapons and is our for themself. They yearn for us all to shoot it out since they have the biggest guns of all.
Diane mentions “creative destruction” which was the theory of economist Shumpeter to rationalize killing off an industry, such as now is interpreted to be public free education, and to impose a new industry in its place…such as charter schools which mean great profits for the free market, but while the influx of the funding for this business model comes from America’s taxpayers. This is also the business model used by Eli Broad, Rupert Murdoch, et al.
One more huge incidence of corporate socialism…of corporate communism….but certainly and completely, of corporate fascism (as when the State and Business collude against the people) to create a nation of serfs and vassals.
Ellen Lubic
Not to speak of the extensive freeway system around Bentonville (built, no doubt, by those deep-pocketed taxpayers) to facilitate traffic, oops, the Waltons and all the trucks going in and out. They apparently have an art museum there as well. Thanks, but no thanks, won’t be visiting soon, or ever.
Sadly, this is happening in my poor deprived town, Helena-West Helena, located in the poor Arkansas Delta. However, there is a group of us who are fighting the Walton Foundation to save our children! The Walton Foundation finances KIPP Charter schools in the Arkansas Delta and strive to recruit the best students by making unrealistic promises to their poor families. I know this to be true because they unsuccessfully tried to recruit my niece!
The Walton’s education agenda? Why, Everyday Low Wages, of course!
The CCSS are ALL ABOUT the Walmartization of U.S. education. Here’s why:
If you have a single set of national standards, then a big publisher can create one book for the entire country and print it at ridiculously low unit costs. The large publisher will have the resources to print a million copies at a cost of $5.87 apiece, and the small publisher, not having those resources, will have to print, say, 5,000 copies at $13.68 apiece. And so the small publisher, however good the material it produces, will not have a chance. Having a single set of national standards helps the few remaining large publishers maintain their monopoly positions.
If you have a single set of national standards, then you can create a national database and curriculum portal that correlates both student responses and curricula to that set of standards. And since there can be only one such national database of student responses, the owner of that database becomes the gatekeeper for curricula. The database becomes, in the online educational materials market, the equivalent of the operating system in the personal computers market–the one piece that everyone has to use if they want their curricula to be adaptive both to the standards and to the student responses in that database.
We have already seen, over the past four decades, a VAST consolidation of the educational materials industry in a few hands. THIS IS A VERY BAD THING FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS because new approaches–innovative pedagogy and curricula–come from competition among small, independent providers. A GREAT new approach can be implemented by a small publisher that only has to get a small share of the market. But a large publisher, one with a 60 percent market share, isn’t going to innovate. It is going to do the safe thing, and it can do that safe thing poorly because there is no one to take away the business and because it has the resources to out market and outlobby any upstart competitor.
The extent of the consolidation of the educational publishing industry is not readily evident to all because big publishers have bought and consolidated small publishers but have kept their imprints. We now have three K-12 publishers in the U.S. that have almost ALL the business.
Ginn, Silver-Burdett, Follett, Scott Foresman, Prentice Hall, Allyn and Bacon, Addison-Wesley, Macmillan, Heinemann, and many, many more–are now all Pearson.
Harcourt, Houghton, McDougal-Littell, Holt, D. C. Heath, Riverside, and many, many more are now all Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt.
MacMillan/McGraw-Hill, SRA, Contemporary, the Wright Group, CTB, Key Curriculum, and many, many more are now all McGraw-Hill.
And the consolidation continues. There were 135 mergers and acquisitions in the educational publishing industry in the first half of 2013.
Interestingly, there has been almost NO discussion among critics of deform of the dramatic consequences of having a single set of national standards for consolidation of monopoly positions in educational publishing. Many who hate the standardized testing but are supporters of the CCSS don’t seem to have registered, at all, that the adoption of national standards means the DEATH OF COMPETITION in U.S. education markets. Small publishers simply will not be able to compete on that scale. National standards mean that new players will have to have ridiculously large amounts of startup funding. They might as well be Mom and Pop grocers and hardware stores trying to compete with Walmart.
If you like having, in your educational materials a choice between A and A instead of a choice between A, B, C, and D, then you should LOVE the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic].
Robert, thanks for this important information. I’m afraid having national standards will also facilitate the “automation” of the teaching profession –fancy lessons can be produced and filmed at Pearson HQ and delivered via the web to computers across the country. Teachers will be reduced to mere aides, and wages will drop accordingly. Budget-conscious districts will find it hard to resist the Pearson “whole school” package. The public school –with decently paid workers and a soul –is like the mom-and-pop store of yore –on its way out. Get ready for cheap, efficient, soulless, exploitative McSchools.
Walmart’s financial success is largely attributable to its ability to compel its suppliers to sell products to Walmart at a lower price than the suppliers sell products to Walmart’s competitors. This type of arrangement constitutes price discrimination and is unlawful under traditional federal antitrust law (except to the extent that the lower price is due to lower costs to the supplier of selling in larger volume — usually only a small fraction of the price advantage that Walmart compels its suppliers to grant to Walmart).
Not surprisingly, the federal Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission largely abandoned enforcement of the antitrust laws back in the 1980s (when free-market theorists caused federal prosecutors and judges to limit antitrust prosecutions in the belief that the markets were self-policing and that buyers could not compel sellers to grant price concessions regardless of the buyer’s market power). Since then, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have applied this the-market-can-do-no-wrong theory to hobble antitrust enforcement — to the great advantage of buyers such as Walmart that can leverage heir market power to achieve significant price concessions.
Walmart definitely pays low wages and is anti-union. However, virtually all of its competitors pay similarly low wages and many are anti-union. Walmart’s success is attributable much more to its antitrust violations than to its labor policies.
Exactly Labor Lawyer…this is called ‘price fixing’ and is a codified crime. But then so are the crimes of banks too big to fail….and all covered by anti-trust laws. We have had a series of presidents, both Dem and Rep, who were too weak, and too influenced by their own self interest, to enforce the laws throught the DoJ.
And here we are, nothing had changed, and I personally have little hope. We could use Harry Truman.
Ellen Lubic
Diane:
The impact of Walmart stores on other local retailers is by no means as cut and dried as you indicate. Certainly, where a Walmart opens and there is no other discount store like Target, Kmart, Sears, etc. there may well be an immediate loss of some small stores. But in the US, there are few areas where other chain stores have not already altered the retail landscape. In addition the turnover of small retail establishments is very, very high. Our store lasted 26 years and was the second oldest store in town when we went out. We outlasted at least 6 direct competitors who came and went.
Click to access v31n1-1.pdf
If you have alternate empirical studies of the impact of Walmart, I would appreciate the links.
What are the differences between Target’s and Walmart’s business strategies? DO employees earn more at Target than at Walmart? Does Target sell fewer imported goods than does Walmart? Does a new Target store have a different impact on local retailers than a new Walmart?
What about a Gap or a Home Depot or a Best Buy? What about Starbucks? What about Whole Foods and Trader Joes?
It is fair enough to take issue with the Walmart Foundation’s position on education policies, but it is silly to simply throw stuff against the wall and hope that it sticks.
Having the Cato Institute study the “free market” embodied by Walmart is about as objective as having TFA issue a study on teacher tenure and seniority.
In other words, not!
Michael:
That is hardly a thoughtful response. Are you suggesting that we should dismiss everything that comes from Greenpeace or WWF that has to do with the environment without first considering the quality of the data and the legitimacy of the conclusions?
How about critiquing the actual approach or data presented in the article?
Bernie, the “quality of the data” that Cato refers to in its pseudo study is barely worth commenting upon. In fact, it uses econometric mumbo jumbo to bow down to Walmart as an engine of our tired old friend “creative destruction – constantly repeated in the text – and tries to deceptively use the gentrification of a college town (which is clearly an outlier when compared to most small town-rural communities) and opening of high-end service establishments – art galleries, law offices, etc. – as representative of what happens when Walmart enters an area.
Sorry, you can tut-tut all you want about my unthoughtful response, but your example fails.
Michael:
“econometric mumbo jumbo” is hardly a cogent argument – unless you happen to be an econometrician or statistician.
A proper counter argument needs alternative explanations of the data presented or additional data that supports an alternative viewpoint.
For example, how do you account for the non-negative slopes in Figures 3 , 4A and 4B? Given Diane’s and your proposition, how on earth does the number of establishments with 5-9 employees go up when the density of Wal-Mart stores per 100,000 by State goes up? Why don’t the number of bankruptcies increase? Why don’t gross and net revenues of sole proprietary businesses decline?
The argument in the article is pretty robust. There may well be counter-arguments, but your response that it is mumbo jumbo simply does not cut it.
There’s this:
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/faculty/stone/10yrstudy.pdf
Robert:
Thanks for the reference. The study really says that over 13 years there has been a continued secular decline in sales in towns without major stores. In retail parlance a Walmart can act as an anchor store for a greenfield development of many retail establishments. I would actually argue that a Home Depot or Lowes do more to drive out small businesses than does a Walmart, simply based on convenience – not necessarily price. Buying coops in hardware cannot match the range of merchandise handled.
What is interesting is the list of recommendations from Prof. Stone because they highlight many reasons why people shop at Walmart type stores besides price. Having run a retail store for 26 years, I can tell you that the biggest competitive problem we faced was the “no questions asked return policy” of many large retailers. One can quickly become cynical about people based on what they try to bring back to a store and the reasons they give.
The first page says it all: the invention and adoption of the car is the biggest threat to rural retailers. A close second now is online retailers.
Cato is on the same wave length as American Enterprise Institute and Heritage. Not a trustworthy citation.
Woof:
Did you read the article? What was inaccurate or misrepresented? Such comments as yours are really rather sad, especially if you are in education.
Do you disregard what WWF and Greenpeace say about the environment? Do you disregard what AFT and NEA say about education? It makes sense not to take stuff at face value when there is an obvious slant, but certainly does not justify dismissing it.
The WWF was started by Julian Huxley. Julian started and was the president of the British Eugenics Society as well. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was the president of WWF and is bent on depopulation…..as in reducing the current population of 7 billion to about 1 billion. WWF is used as a front organization for all kinds of nasty British intervention in Africa.
Stop ordering the cute panda bear calendars because you are funding a eugenics project.
http://www.fpcn-global.org/en/content/More_Scandals_about_programs_WWF
http://www.bilderberg.org/bernhard.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Huxley
CATO is in many respects very different from typical organizations on the right. There are varied voices coming from CATO, but in general, as I understand it, the organization
opposes the Common Core and national tests;
supports decriminalization of prostitution;
supports gay rights;
opposes laws against gay marriage (and, in general, opposes government’s having any say about marriage between consenting adults);
supports decriminalization of drugs and opposes the insane, counterproductive “War on Drugs”;
opposes military interventionism of the kind done in Iraq and Afghanistan;
opposes secret government tribunals, extraordinary or irregular rendition, and torture;
opposes the undermining of habeas corpus under the NDAA;
supports posse comitatus and opposes the blurring of the lines between military and police functions;
opposes government surveillance of/spying on citizens;
opposes mandatory sentencing;
opposes the death penalty;
and is suspicious of government definitions of legal insanity and supportive of the rights of those labeled the mentally ill by governments.
These are NOT popular opinions among conservatives in the United States.
Sounds pretty good to me. But CATO really is conservative isn’t it?
Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to Walmart. It applies to all the big box stores. When I was a kid, I lived for a while with grandparents who had a large farm in rural Kentucky. The downtown had a couple of grocery stories, a pharmacy, a “dry goods” store, a hardware store, a couple of clothing stores, a couple of stores that carried varied goods, and a couple of restaurants. A Walmart was built on the outskirts of town. A few years latter, ALL of those independent stores were gone. The former thriving down downtown was a ghost town of boarded-up buildings. No one could compete with those Everyday Low Prices.
Now, here’s something to think about: One can argue that the citizens of that small town did this to themselves. THEY CHOSE to go to Walmart instead of to the small hardware store, the local grocery, etc. Walmart offered them greater selection and lower prices.
Here’s another interesting part of this: Once the smaller stores were gone, the discounted prices went up, dramatically.
Robert:
“Once the smaller stores were gone, the discounted prices went up, dramatically.”
Now that one really needs some empirical support.
I watched the growth and relative decline of Toys R Us as a parent spoiling 3 kids. Starting in 1983, I would say that this category killer did not really compete on price, only on selection and availability. I believe that this was also a key to Walmart’s success: They were less likely to run out of an item. One of my early clients was DEC and they said that Walmart was the most demanding company technologically and pushed DEC to develop SOA satellite communications to support Walmart’s inventory and distribution system. In store inventory requirements have changed again with the growth of “ship to store” options and internet sales.
This is NOT about PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Their support of “choice” is about dismantling UNIONS! Everything they do, every choice is for the sole purpose of maintaining their monetary and political power. I have a friend who has worked in mgt for Wal-Mart since waaaayyyy back… when the workers would stand in the parking lot and do the “cheer”.
This person has shared every time the store was alerted to possible union recruiting… There is an actual plan similar to a crisis plan at a school… To handle union issues. This has been in various WalMarts in more tham one state. They have their own internet “wire” system to alert mgt to lawsuits, community action, or union activity.
Don’t be fooled… This is about unions, where the membership usually votes Democrat, and the dues usually support Democrat candidates. And believe you me, we are gonna have one you-know-what of a fight next Presidential election.
This is an employee training video prepared by Target.
wow… all I can say. thanks for sharing!
Very much the case, kk. My question is have unions recently contributed to or damaged the USA? Politically, I mean. Whom have they put in office and why?
I agree with where you are leading with the questions. But I must confess that it is with “great fear and trembling” that I posted. It is with the same that I post or comment even on information in my local newspapers. Since Louisiana with the “divine assistance” of ALEC pushed through unread/unstudied “education reform” in the forms of Act 1 and Act 2 of the 2012 Legislature, we all live in fear of even respectfully speaking out. The unions have “over-reached”. Privatization is in part a “hand-slap” to the reach. But, unless we want a return to U. Sinclair’s conditions, the unions have served a purpose to overall protect the American worker. Our government and system of capitalism can only work with some form of checks and balances. Perhaps the unions were and are a necessary part of balancing the equation for fairness? Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I truly appreciate them.
Never in American History has the choice of parents to Home Educate their children been More Logical than in the time we’re living in Now! I am a 20 year Walmart Associate. Although I never met Mr. Sam, in person, I’m 100% certain-he is Rolling in his Grave over the negative changes that have taken place within his company-since his demise.
This is so upsetting! Walmart truly is the greatest cancer of humanity! Just the fact that they made their employees work on Thanksgiving! It’s despicable how the Waltons conduct themselves. The worst part is that we as a society allow them to be that way. All the people who shopped at Walmart on Thanksgiving just fueled the fire even more so… I completely agree with you! If this is how they are going to treat their own employees who work in their trenches, how are they going to treat our children? Perhaps there will be some paradigm shift and we, as a society will stop looking for cheap bargains, go back to the small businesses with the home grown products and in turn destroy the machine that is Walmart.
Martyne:
Reality is against you. Walmart registered its most successful Thanksgiving sales event ever. I certainly did not shop but I am not going to stop others from doing it. How do you suggest we “de-materialize” US society?
You’re right. And that is the multi-billion dollar question! I suppose we haven’t quite hit the very bottom of rock bottom yet to make such a shift. I guess all we can do is continue the conversation, exchange ideas and spread awareness one blog at a time.
Years ago, I gave a presentation to all the English coordinators in the state of Florida. I was representing a small company with a new literature program that was attempting to take on the big guys. One of the coordinators pointed out that our competitor had offered her district a “free” full-time curriculum implementation expert whose salary, benefits, etc., would all be picked up by the company. I said, “Yes. Keep adding those freebies to your state adoption criteria. In a few years, there will be a couple of players left in each one of these adoptions. Where before you had a choice among five or six texts, you will have a choice between two. And those freebies–do you really think that the company is giving those away? That the cost of those is not on the profit and loss statement that the company prepared for this product? That that cost isn’t part of their pricing determination? That you won’t be paying for them in the increased cost of the replacement student and teacher editions, ancillary materials, etc., that you will order over the period of this contract? When people say to you, ‘This is free,’ that should be a red flag. A big one.”
But that coordinator, like those Walmart shoppers in that small town, had a good reason to act, individually, in a way that, if everyone did, would not be in their interests.
Robert:
That is a good anecdote and could be the basis of an extended discussion. What it captures is the challenges facing any new entrant to an establish market place where competitors are already benefiting from economies of scale. It is really tough and places tremendous demands on the new entrants. It is, however, a huge stimulus for innovation and differentiated approaches to markets/customers/clients.
Bernie, note that I was talking not only about competing against those economies of scale but against regulatory requirements (state adoption guidelines) that favored the monopolists. Educrats in state departments boo hoo about the consolidation of the textbook industry, but their exponentially expanding regulatory requirements–requirements for vast numbers of “free” ancillary materials in ever-increasing variety–did as much as anything to help make that happen.
Robert:
Monopolies and Monopsonies are equally pernicious. With centralized State control of authorized books, I am sure getting your books listed was a make or break proposition.
Yes, indeed, Bernie. The adoption system is pernicious. That system was, arguably, the major reason for the massive consolidation of the educational publishing industry, and the people involved in it, at the state level, did not, for the most part, understand that that was what they were doing, that they were driving smaller educational publishers out of business. They thought that they were just ensuring that texts met certain standards. They thought that local schools could not be trusted to make their own decisions.
And so the adoption regulations became so labyrinthine, so demanding, that only the very large companies could meet them. And, of course, the regs created all kinds of opportunities for cronyism behind the scenes–for people on adoption committees and people drawing up adoption requirements feeding at the troughs of their preferred vendors.
Robert:
You almost sound like a libertarian or at least a free market type!! 😉
Bernie, I am a lover of liberty. No question about that. I detest political labels, but I guess that I would call myself a bleeding heart Libertarian. I’m totally with Nozick in believing that the legitimate functions of the state are defense and enforcement of contracts. However, I think that defense includes matters like defending the defenseless against disease and accidents (provision of universal health care), defense of the rights of workers to organize, defense of children against the accident of birth into circumstances that do not allow for decent education (universal, publicly funded education), etc. I read Hayek and Rawls with equal pleasure. I believe in a minimum social safety net. I believe in mutually agreed upon public amenities. If the choice is between crony capitalist deal-making to enrich eduentrepreneurs at the expense of kids, on the one hand, and intense regulation of public schools by the state, I will say, neither, thank you very much.
I’ve seen, firsthand, what state regulation of adoptions did to competitiveness and innovation in the education market. It wasn’t pretty. The state regs basically killed all the smaller companies.
Why do you think that I rail against the creation of a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth? I know what a slippery slope that is. And I know what comes of having ideas compete with one another without prior governmental restraints. To me, telling people what bullet list of standards they must base their curricula and pedagogy on is akin to but FAR, FAR more consequential, more dangerously consequential, than telling them that they all have to wear the same uniform would be.
Robert:
But the interesting thing is how all this fits with Diane’s post. I can see opposing and debating the Wal-Mart Foundation’s position on education policies but there is a slippery slope here around saying what is and Is not a good business model. The demonizing of Wal-Mart makes little sense given the huge numbers of ordinary folks who shop there. On the last thread that involved Wal-Mart the condescension on the part of many with regards to those shopping at Wal-Mart was palpable. I am acutely aware, as others may be, that it is hard to have a consistent viewpoint on many public policy issues. Many here see no issue with the Affordable Care Act yet it shares many of the same unilateral and flawed design, vested and secretive interest involvement, naïve and coercive approaches to implementation that afflict Education Reform. The beauty of a Federal System is that it allows multiple solutions to emerge as each State tries to meet the needs of its citizens. It is one of the few areas that I fully agree with Jefferson.
And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of general principles in areas of policy. I like small-scale experiment, variety, and the continuous improvement that comes of these.
So, my first instinct, when someone proposes an invariant mandate, is to ask, “Do you have any idea what the actual consequences of that will be?” And my view of the standards-and-testing deforms is, “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do” in replacing free choices made at the local level by an an invariant, top-down mandate.
It seems clear, for example, that the War on Drugs has been nothing but a jobs program for the drug cartels. In the U.S. we put antihistamines behind the counter in drugstores so that people couldn’t use these as precursors for meth production. Consequence? No decrease in methamphetamine usage but a thriving new business for the Mexican drug cartels.
Unfortunately, there are many who use the term Libertarian who are, in practice, interested only in their own liberty, and that of their cronies, to loot and pillage. The term has become terribly, terribly debased.
But I will be the first to say that I am neither an economist nor a political theorist. Ask me about grammar, about composition instruction, about literature, about philosophy and world religions–those are matters that I actually know something about, though I, like all us, am still woefully ignorant. And it’s our universal ignorance that should make us suspicious of the guys with the easy answers.
very, very well said, Bernie!
In the excerpt below, Jefferson explains that “our work would have been compleat,” (sic) if the Virginia legislature had passed his bill dividing the state into school districts.
He had already served as a Governor, a minister to France, a Secretary of State, the Vice President, and the President of the United States. He had founded America’s first university. And he had written one of mankind’s greatest documents.
You only need to read the final sentence to understand that he was addressing the core issue of every post on this blog.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813
…”For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents… There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society…May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?…
These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root of Pseudoaristocracy. And had another which I prepared been adopted by the legislature, our work would have been compleat.
It was a Bill for the more general diffusion of learning. This proposed to divide every county into wards of 5. or 6. miles square, like your townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be compleated at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught.
Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and compleatly prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.”
I thought Harvard was the first university founded on these shores, but perhaps it was only a theological school and thus doesn’t qualify.
Unfortunately the “best and brightest” have not had a very good track record recently, even going back to McNamara and Vietnam. Obama got elected not just because he was black, but because he seemed to the common electorate to be part of the academic elite, Columbia, Harvard, Chicago etc. I wonder if it is a criticism of Jefferson’s conception of taking the best at each level and moving them on to higher and higher education or merely an indictment of the ignorance and blindness of the electorate that such an inept cock up such as Obama could have attained office.
Of course, his election MAY also be thought of as a criticism of the education system which permitted such a mal-educated phony through. Even I was sucked in and hornswoggled in the beginning and gave him some money. Now the country has been reduced to having to rely on the cultural vomit of tea party members for opposition to Obama’s unconstitutional efforts to rule by regulation. I have said from the beginning of posting on this blog that the fact that the American electorate could be fooled by Obama into being elected twice is prima facia evidence of the failure of the American public schools system as the school of republican democracy. I haven’t seen anything to make me change my opinion.
My belief is, though I haven’t more than anecdotal evidence for it, that the majority of the public school teaching cadre lives the spiritual life of ignorant socialists and marxists and sees their existence as justified by bringing the end of wealth differential to the society. Thus they put in the mushy minds of their students that that was what they too should live for, saving the environment, saving the earth from global warming, saving the people in poverty from themselves, and in general “making a difference.”
Naturally, they would fall for the empty language of Obama and put in place an executive who wants to fundamentally transform America from a nation of independent, prosperous, middle class people into a nation of dependent, impoverished, party dependables. How’s that for an educational legacy? They educated the electorate which put in place the worst president in American history, a transparent liar, an economic ignoramus, and a foreign policy wuss. What his education policy is to YOU, all of his policy is to the rest of the country.
No wonder the Walton family is trying to defund the teachers unions by charterizing and voucherizing and privatizing education so that teachers will no longer be the foot soldiers in the union effort to socialize and communize the society. It’s a brutal way to have to attack unions, to destroy the institutions which the unions took over, but the unions and teachers didn’t leave them much choice. When your body (public school) is host to a virus (union socialist thinking), if the immune system (rationality) can’t fight back against it, what will happen is that the host body will die. Pity though.
58 years ago, the entire African American community in Birmingham, Alabama boycotted the bus that threw Rosa Parks out of her seat and into jail…..for over a year.
I would venture a guess that 95% or more of the teachers in my school and others shop at WalMart. The New York State Teachers pension system is invested heavily in WalMart stock. There is a disconnect here. At some point, people have to say, “Oh, right, you mean me, now, today, stop shopping at WalMart? Maybe after the Christmas sales.”
See my post above. The transparent injustice of racial segregation is not at all equivalent to the Walton family’s efforts to de-unionize the school system. Rather I would say that the standard mind set and world view of the usual unionized teacher IS totally equivalent to white racism in the South because it is fundamentally anti-capitalist and pro socialist. You say, “What’s wrong with socialism? The rich are inferior morally.” I say that is JUST like a white person in the racist south saying of blacks, “What’s wrong with discrimination? Blacks are morally inferior.” I’m not calling you a racist, just to be name calling. What I am saying is that IF you think about capitalists the way so many on this blog do, your prejudices against business and wealth creation are exactly parallel to white prejudice against blacks in the Jim Crow south, totally irrational and what’s worse, self-defeating. NO public entity creates wealth, only private enterprise. Not to see that is not to see where one’s own interest lies, and moreover leads to the immorality of extortion of money (i.e. stored work) by force of law (exploiting superior voting numbers) for unworthy projects. If the public schools confined themselves to Jefferson’s vision of literacy and numeracy rather than trying to make every sows ear into a PhD, one could say they justified their pay. The charter and voucher movements are a way of trying to achieve Jefferson’s vision when the public schools have given up on what is possible and practical for what is impossible and impractical. People just will not pay for EVERY child to have an elite education, even though John Dewey and Diane Ravitch hold it up as the minimum acceptable goal. It is the moral equivalent of the reinstitution of slavery in the society. The schools are the plantation. Pity though.
The schools are the plantation and the teachers are the overseers. Not pleasant to be the Uncle Toms and the Simon Legrees of modern society, is it? You are fighting to defend a plantation system which used to be a network of small, local farms, but has become an educational agribusiness. And discipline is enforced by the legalized KKK of NCLB, RTTT, and CCSS. Give it up folks. It ain’t seemly.