Edward Johnson is a community activist in Atlanta who fights tirelessly for a wiser approach to education than the current ideology of competition. He is a devotee of Dr. Edward Deming, who taught that when things go wrong, it is because systems fail, and the systems must be fixed. He also taught that teamwork and collaboration produce better results for everyone than incentives, threats, and competition.
This is from Edward Johnson:
January 18, 2014
As we again turn to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., may we finally began to learn to stop inculcation within children competition and instead inculcate cooperation. You see, competition, no matter how seemingly benign or rationalized, teaches winning at somebody else’s expense. For me, it is not and never has been “racism.” Rather, it is and always has been competition, where people of one group have learned to dedicate themselves to winning at other people’s expense.
The Civil Rights Movement, in my opinion, was (is) not entirely immune to competition as its purpose. For far too many “African Americans” and civil rights leaders the movement was (is) a competition with “White” people. The aim was (is) to make “White” people losers so that, at the end of the day, “African Americans” could (can) proudly proclaim, as once did a gathering at the home of civil rights icon C. T. Vivian, “It is our turn, now!”
But the deal is, losers invariably figure out how to become the winners. So, to the extent the Civil Rights Movement was and continues to be a competition, the more the movement will create for itself what it says it does not want.
Don’t want violence and injustice? Then we must, but especially “African Americans,” stop inculcation within children competition as normal behavior and rationalizing doing so as “the way the real world works.” No, the real world works on cooperation, not competition.
Don’t believe it? Then do this. Get a sheet of paper. On the left side, list all the competition you engaged in on any given day. Then on the right side, list all the cooperation you engaged in on that same day. After you have made your lists, I shall eagerly wager that your cooperation list is far, far longer than your competition list.
Gosh, I shall always wonder what a conversation between Dr. King (1929-1968) and Dr. W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) might have been like.
Dr. King: “Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.”
Dr. Deming: “We have been sold down the river on competition. What we need is cooperation.”
More here…
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love Deming’s work. After WWII, Deming went to American manufacturing to share his ideas. He was rebuffed. So, he took his ideas to Japan. Remember when MADE in JAPAN was a joke? He helped Japan move pass the joke. If you haven’t read Deming, please do so. There is also a Deming conference each year as well.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan: thank you for your comments. I just recently read THE ESSENTIAL DEMING (2013, Joyce Orsini, ed.).
You are not exaggerating. It is not just that the business management model he both proposed and showed worked in practice (Japan) gives the lie to that of the leading charterites/privatizers.
His critiques of worst business management and practices is almost a litany of the failures of current self-styled “education reform.” It is no exaggeration to say that “new” ideas like merit pay, forced ranking, VAM, and high-stakes standardized testing were eviscerated by him long ago—and by long ago, I mean for example long before the Microsoft of Bill Gates self-destructed with the system of forced ranking/stacked ranking/rank-and-yank/burn-and-churn that he is trying to foist off on public education.
Mr. Gates is wrong: it won’t take ten years to figure out whether Management By Objective/Management By Results [MBO/MBR aka management by the numbers] is a success or a failure. W. Edward Deming convincingly demonstrated that that practice was doomed to fail even before Billionaire Bill was born.
Deming was prescient in describing the failures of the charterite/privatizer plans and behaviors. So was Albert Einstein:
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
😎
I get concerned when blacks (or anyone really) reject racism. Sure, competition may be one of the underlying factors in racism, but the bigotry and systematic exclusion inherent in racism should never be ignored or diminished.
Nor should the economic basis of racism be ignored.
Racism as we conceive of it – meaning an systemic ideology of white supremacy – originates as a rationale for slavery, and as a means of dividing black and white workers.
Thus the vicious irony of so-called education reformers masquerading as heirs to the civil rights movement, when in fact they are avatars of new forms of segregation, union busting and privatization.