I took two books with me on vacation.
One was Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
The other was Walter Kiechel III, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World
I also brought a copy of the New York Review of Books, which had a good article about data mining and what a big business it is.
The thesis of Carr’s book is that the ubiquity of the Internet makes it very hard for us to concentrate on reading books. I kept wondering why he wrote a book to say that.
What made his book worth reading was one stunning chapter about Google. It explains in exquisite and alarming detail that Google ‘s business is built on data mining. If you want to understand how data mining works, read this chapter.
The entire Google enterprise is built on the principles enunciated by Frederick Winslow Taylor a century ago. Taylor conducted time-and-motion studies, clocking how many minutes it took workers to complete various jobs, and believed that there was a best way to perform every job. Everything that matters can be measured and turned into a system. Taylor’s method is the foundation of industrial manufacturing. Now it is the foundation for Google and its competitors. He writes, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient, automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding ‘the one best way’–the perfect algorithm–to carry out the mental movements of what what we’ve come to describe as knowledge work.” Google’s CEO says the company is “founded around the science of measurement” and is trying to “systematize everything” it does. It is data-driven and seeks to “quantify everything.” Carr writes, “What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.”
Google, he writes, is the “Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.”
Every time you click on a link, an advertiser pays, and your data are recorded in a database. Your preferences, your interests, your searches, become part of the database, which enables vendors to target you efficiently for their goods and services. Every time you click on an advertisement, you build the Internet database about yourself, “and Google rakes in more money.” The more we rely on the Internet to seek information and buy things, the fuller our profile of data for others to use for advertising and selling.
It is a hugely profitable business, and you are part of building it. Almost everything that can be known about you, everything you typed into the Internet, is in your database.
The other book, The Lords of Strategy, tells the story of the business consulting industry. It was written by the former editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing. If you really want to know how the world works, read this book. It begins with the story of Bruce Henderson, who founded the Boston Consulting Group. BCG–which is now advising school districts like Philadelphia on how to shed their primary mission and to privatize more public schools–was created to advise businesses on strategy. BCG virtually invented the idea of “strategy.” That meant studying your competitors’ business and figuring out ways to compete more effectively (e.g., lower your cost, increase your volume, become the market leader). BCG then gave birth to Bain and Company, which was even more competitive than BCG. Then came the revival of McKinsey as a force in strategizing how to win in the game of corporate dominance.
Reading this book was not easy. Household names come and go and disappear. Corporations are taken over by men who think of profit only, never of people. There is never any extended discussion of the obligations of a corporation to the public or to its employees. People’s lives are treated as unimportant. All that matters is market share, shareholder valuation, and profit. The winners get very rich, the losers, well, who cares?
These books have obvious relevance to the plight of education today. Both refer often to the Taylorism that underlies their activities–that is, the belief that measurement matters above all, and that whatever matters can be measured.
Kiechel speaks repeatedly of “the Greater Taylorism,” that is, the firm belief that data answer all questions, and the more data the better the strategy.
People don’t matter. Data triumph.
Except at the end of his book, he notes that all the strategies cooked up by the great minds from Harvard Business School have essentially failed. The theories conflict with one another. One supercedes another. But the economy crashed in 2008 anyway, despite the brilliant minds.
Kiechel is minimal in his skepticism. Perhaps on purpose.
My skepticism grew as I read, along with a sense of revulsion for these “lords of strategy,” these “masters of the universe” who use their minds to control our lives but regard the rest of us as ants in a terrarium of their design.
Next time, I will bring Agatha Christie to the beach.
And yet, if you wanted a job at Google, those attributes to be gained by adoption of the Common Core Standards are not criteria!
Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.”
GE2L2R: that’s a money quote.
And what kind of education will secure the management positions and skilled jobs of this most cage busting achievement gap crushing twenty first century?
It’s like reading the Mission Statements and descriptions of the enriched curricula at the schools the leading charterites/privatizers send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to.
For just a very very small sampling, click on the links below:
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [Bill Gates]
Link: http://www.delbarton.org [Chris Christie]
Link: http://www.spenceschool.org [Michael Bloomberg]
On the other hand, the education they are increasingly mandating for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN will fit the vast majority, at best, for jobs requiring docility, low-level skills, and obedience.
Any doubt now why they so push back strongly whenever “shrill” and “strident” voices raise the idea of a “better education for all”?
😎
Standardize testing of all public school children and common core fit perfectly with Taylorism and what a simple method to get data on millions of children and their parents without asking for it directly.
“. . . without asking for it directly.”
More importantly, without having to pay for it, and even better have someone else unknowingly pick up the tab, i.e., the taxpayers.
A bit of light reading to while away the hours on the beach, huh?
Thank you for all you do, Diane! Clearly you are tireless and unstoppable.
I tried reading on my last great visit to warmer climes. Kept falling asleep on the beach with book in hand.
I will never forget the vacation when I went camping, in a tent yet, and read Gordon Childe’s dense Man Makes Himself. Great archeological/anthropological treatise. Incredible.
Ah…244 pages of light reading in a tent. I’d probably be sleeping…again.
As all of us “click” to read the cogent words of Diane her blog platform collects our data … whether we like it or not it is the world in which we live … technology only moves forward, our challenge is how to use the new technologies to get out our message and change minds …
I am highly annoyed by Google. My school requires us to use gmail, Google Docs, etc. While I find these tools useful, I refuse to put up a deliberate Google+ profile. Youtube’s marriage with Google has created a real halt on my free searching of that site, too. There are profiles on us whether we want them or not all thanks to this merger. This is the reality of using the Internet.
Google already knows too much about me. I refuse to join Facebook and Twitter, as well. I do not want The Borg to further assimilate me any more than I’ve already been forced to allow them to. 😛
In all seriousness, I would say that, to the extent that memory defines who we are, Google already knows more about me than I know about myself.
FLERP!,
Google don’t know jack-shit!
It has a bunch of “data” but it doesn’t “know” anything but how to make a killing on that “data” whether accurate or not.
Yeah, I’m never quite sure what Google “knows.” Sometimes the ads are right on the money, but I usually get plastic surgery and tanning ads. I’m starting to get a complex! Given my middle-aged demographic, it might make sense, but I am pretty much the last person that would ever get elective plastic surgery.
“People don’t matter. Data triumph.”
Reducing people to data points takes all the responsibility for acting on behalf of humans away from the “superior” minds who control the wealth and power in our world.
Science Fiction has been warning us of the hubris of self-proclaimed “superior” thinkers for quite some time now. Khan Noonien Singh ring a bell?
This is why I find it difficult to get that worked up about inBloom, although I am opposed to the states’ aiding and abetting of private efforts to build longitudinal databases over substantial opposition by voters. The database is always being built out. It will be much more personal and detailed than what inBloom’s database aspires to contain. We contribute willingly all day long. Soon, arguably already, choice will have nothing to do with it. We need a soup-to-nuts reworking of our entire approach to privacy law, including what information about ourselves we “own” and what kind of expectations of privacy we deserve in the 21st century and beyond.
Ms. Ravitch, I appreciate your love of humankind and the effective and eloquent manner in which you show said love. Thank you from one kindhearted soul to another.
Gwenyth, the missing ingredient in today’s world: kindness, except inside families and among friends. But certainly not in our political or public life.
I would urge everyone to read Ray Kurzweil’s recent books, particularly “The Singularity Is Near.” Or, at a minimum, see the highly watchable documentary about him called “Transcendent Man.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjhB6J23Qjs)
Kurzweil is seen as a bit, shall we say, eccentric with respect to some of his ideas about the future of biotechnology and robotics, But he is by no means a loan wolf on the topics of data, computation, and artificial intelligence, all of which will have consequences on every aspect of life (including education) that are probably literally unimaginable.
Today in Kurzweil territory (the Bay Area), I overheard a bright young female waitress telling a customer that she’d attended a conference where she learned that computers should replace teachers because the learning outcomes would be better.
Sigh. This is, of course, a Reformish mantra: “Teaching, there’s an app for that!”
Thank you for sharing these all too telling/informative books. Something tells me that you would have been restless if you had just brought an Agatha Christie book to the beach! I can’t stand how our every movement whether using a special card instead of a coupon to buy a “sale item” at a store or asking a question at a cell provider store where you have to log on to speak to someone.. our every movement is monitored.
My work email is linked to google sites because it is basically a requirement for employees in my county. What truly bothers me is a “screen flash” with Google making a request to link all my Google accts and if I were not paying attention and clicked on it (and they do try to make you click), I would be linking my personal email with my work email. Even though I never use my personal email at work, my personal email by virtue of this “click” would be accessible to my employer. As I understand it, smart phones will soon be monitoring your every movement when you enter a grocery store thanks to a zealous marketing industry (for ex) .. how long you stand in front of the pasta aisle or what actually makes it into your cart vs what you just look at. This will happen as long as the smart phone remains on while you are in the store! This great loss of privacy comes as a result of a perverse RTTT of the money heap by the corporate world.
Very little happens by accident. These people are causing untold damage in our world. Some say it’s the price of progress, I ask at what price. there is very little price they pay pay, certainly not lasting, for their manipulations. They have created a world where there is little worry of failure, someone else pays the piper. Remarkably similar to the early 20th century
Funny, I just read an Agatha Christie novel from 1954 which made me think about Taylor’s possible influence on the Golden Age mystery writers, for whom timetables were so very important. In A Pocket Full of Rye one of the characters, questioning the Tayloristic tendency, says, “One doesn’t look at clocks the whole time.”
Diane, I’m glad you took a vacation. I hope you were able to rest. You do so much to help the public conversation on education. I’d like to know that you’ll be around and healthy for a good long time.
Loved this post.
Why?
It’s “Classic Diane”.
How?
It wasn’t a reference to another’s blog or article.
It was
and yet
it wasn’t
about education.
It was about life
And humanity.
And thinking about
Thinking about life
And humanity.
And I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT!
(gotta get ahold of those books, too!)
My feelings exactly.
Another marketing ploy to get data is BUNDLING. I refuse to BUNDLE. Saves a bit of $$$, but not enough for me to give everything to one corporation. They own enough of me as it is…already.
As long as we continue operating schools on a factory model we can expect the Gates of this world to offer engineering solutions. We need to move beyond factory schools. http://waynegersen.com/2013/11/23/structures-that-hold-us-prisoner/
And outstanding essay, Wayne! Much wisdom there! How very much I wish such ideas would get a wider hearing.
Thanks for posting the link and for making this important argument.
Thanks… I started this book on the need to get beyond factory schools 11 years ago… I’m feeling an urgency tom complete it since a few chapters included predictions about NCLB that have come true and I’m seeing some VERY disturbing national trends that make me think we’re heading very fast in the wrong direction…
One other point: we made a deal whether we knew it or not: we get free internet in exchange for personal information that can be used to target us to advertisers. Its the same deal we had years ago when ll TV was free (albeit with a limited number of channels). One of the struggles we face if we want to keep information free is paying for the infrastructure that gives us that information… And as soon as people start paying for internet services equal opportunity for learning goes down the drain.
Oh… and another deal we made was that we’d be willing to offshore work as long as we could get cheap TVs and gadgets. I just watched the Lego movie with my grandson, and of we don’t pay attention soon those cheap TVs will be showing only “Honey, Where are My Pants?” and the media will play “Everything is Awesome” incessantly 😉
Ha! That Lego Movie was surprisingly good. It had some great social commentary.
Instead of the War on Terrorism, the White House could create a War on Taylorism.
What, you mean you didn’t read the EPA guidelines or the Federal Review? How do you expect to be rated proficient that way?
Diane, I suggest Chang Rae Lee’s “On Such A Full Sea” a mysterious depiction of our future where the wealthy have retreated to “Charter” villages. It is a work of art rather than a polemic against our current cultural trends and very thought provoking. Maybe not an relaxing beach read, but apparently you’re not the relaxing type anyway!
So VERY many books and articles by great reporters on what technology is doing TO us. One recent article in the Atlantic magazine, November issue: “The Great Forgetting”. The Romans became slaves to their slaves and we are becoming slaves to our technology.
Also it is well to remember what anthropologists have stated that as animals become more specialized, they die off. We see it now in the Monarch butterfly which relies only on milk weed and now that milk weed is being decimated by poisons and that the area in Mexico where they congregate after their flights – no one can explain it but they breed I believe 3 times in their circumnavigation so how do they know how to get back to this Mexican area – around North America that there is real danger of them becoming extinct.
[The canary in the mine.]
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Book-review-rereleased-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars-paperback.html
Michael Mann. He provides an eye-opening account of the lengths the opponents of climate science will go to in their campaign to slander climate scientists and distract the public from the realities of human caused global warming.
The Hockey Stick being the mathematical concept that never touches a puck.
I am researching the TFA-inspired Teach First program in the UK (which McKinsey had a hand in establishing), and I found another book, DANGEROUS COMPANY, by James O’Shea and Charles Madigan that documents and sheds light on what the major business consulting giants do and the power they wield. I highly recommend it in addition to the LORDS OF STRATEGY. Interesting, one chapter talks about how the term ‘world class’ was thought up and used by a management consulting when discussing manufacturing and how it caught on but really didn’t have any meaning. The term has clearly caught on amongst ‘education reformers’ yet appears to have no true meaning either!
It is an under reported fact that Sir Michael Barber and David Coleman both worked for McKinsey & Company at the same time right before Barber becomes the international head of Pearson Publishing and Coleman becomes the “author” of the CCSS.
Barber was also an adviser to Tony Blair in the UK for 4 years where he implemented his “Deliverology” method in healthcare and education. It is a top down, command and control, set targets and punish as the targets are not met kind of a system. It didn’t work there and it isn’t working here. These people should be ashamed to show their faces after making such huge blundering mistakes with a nation’s finances and operations….but no, they just turn up in a new incarnation to have more power and make more money off of failed ideas and policies. We need to start a “Hall of Shame” website or something where people are accountable for what they do and where we can keep track of bad pennies that just turn up over and over in different capacities.
“. . . yet appears to have no true meaning either!”
Like almost all of the edudeformers’ blatherings.
Here is a great article/graphic representation of market share in the education reform world. It explains Wall Street’s sudden and intense interest in education perfectly.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/why-corporations-want-our-public-schools#.UwgK69yQDZY.facebook
As numerous writers have been saying for years, if an online service is free, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
Diane,
I was just wondering if you have ever read John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education? He spends quite a few pages examining Taylor’s influence on business and education. Here’s a link: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/9a.htm
Gatto’s essay, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” was the piece that made me look at my students and my chosen career in a different light. It helped me find my voice, and helped me understand why so little of what I was taught in teacher school actually worked.
Keep up the great work.
Scott Baker
The prophets of the Common Core have gone to the mountaintop and have carried down thema new set of commandments, or standards. (Actually, they hired a couple of hacks to look over existing state standards and cobble something together from those.) In ELA, the specific bullet list of standards is embarrassingly poorly conceived–really amateurish, but promoters of the Core rarely talk about the specific standards and learning progressions across grade levels made up of those standards. Instead, they talk about the big, general guidelines that are outlined in the introductions, appendices, and publishers’ criteria that accompanied the bullet list:
1. Students will read more substantive, more complex texts.
2. Students will read more informative texts and less literature.
3. Students will read texts more closely and so more deeply.
There is more, of course, in the general CC$$ ELA framework, but these are the ones that are getting most of the attention. Little attention is being paid, for example, to the general guideline in the CC$$ that students are to do extended reading of related texts within knowledge domains (e.g., many texts about “the human body” within and across grade levels), though this may be the best thing that the CC$$ has to say.
Interestingly, the chosen vehicle for implementing the new commandments is computer-adaptive learning in preparation for summative tests that cover the bullet list of specific standards. Because computer-adaptive learning programs keyed to standards tend to narrow focus to whatever is on the bullet list and because the bullet list is formulated as abstract descriptions of abstract skills, there is a fundamental mismatch between the general framework or goals of the CC$$ for ELA and the vehicle for achieving those goals. The goals call for intense engagement with texts, but the vehicles for carrying out those goals tend to make for superficial engagement–to ignore whatever is in the text that is not an exemplum of something from the bullet list and to treat the text merely as a carrier of such exempla. I am seeing mountains of CC$$-inspired curricula where this is the case. The problem is not new to the CC$$, of course. This kind of thing started happening when NCLB made “teaching to the standards” the national modus operandi in K-12 education.
In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that spending much our time web surfing is negatively affecting our ability to attend to a topic in detail, for an extended period of time, and so making us dumber. I argue that CC$$-inspired curricula are DOING THE SAME THING TO US. These curricula are leading to narrow focus on items from the skills bullet list and to jumping from reading one text as an example of bullet list items 1 and 4 to the next text as an example of bullet list items 3 and 6. I call this the “Monty Python” approach to curriculum design: “And now for something completely different” Even when texts in the new CC$$ curricula are organized in “thematic” units related to some knowledge domain (“space”) or essential idea (“We are defined by our dreams”), the activities and exercises for particular selections tend to veer quickly from the selections themselves and to focus on randomly chosen items from the standards bullet list applied to the selections in random order.
If we really want the great “return to the text” that is the primary evangelical message of the Rheformish movement in the area of ELA, and I believe that that general principle is a sound one, then we have to chuck the bullet list. We need to design curricula that derive coherence
FROM WHAT THE TEXTS SAY and
FROM HOW THE TEXTS INSTANTIATE IN VARIOUS WAYS TECHNIQUES FOR COMMUNICATING IN WRITING (which we should do using a prototypes-and-variations approach).
So, for example, a unit in an 11th-grade American literature class might have as its overriding purpose familiarizing people with the ideas and worldviews of the American Transcendentalists, what these ideas were in reaction to, and how these ideas affected, dramatically, various social and political movements in the country many, many decades later. Or a unit in a 9th-grade literature class might deal with the hero’s journey or the lyric poem as a structural archetype–as a way in which people communicate with one another, which its own techniques and “logic,” beginning with some prototypical examples, and then consider variations on the prototype.
The CC$$ is schizophrenic at its “Core.” It encourages the development of curricula that lead to shallow engagement with individual texts at the same time that it calls for precisely the opposite, deeper engagement with texts that are coherently related.
My apologies for the typos in that post. I do wish there were an edit feature for posts on WordPress so one could clean these up after hitting the Post button!
Exactly. Well said.
Thank you, Dawn!
Good job showing the cracks in the foundation of the ELA standards.
Your metaphor is well chosen, Ponderosa. This is precisely a crack in the foundations of the CC$$ in ELA.
Who cares about the typos.. We get it Bob. As usual ,a genius Post.
I could never in my lifetime dream or expressing myself in such an eloquent manner with such clarity.
I wish the Deformers would come to grips with their weaknesses and get the H8ll out of ED.
Your last paragraph is Spot On
Waiting for that book!! Signed!
I am reading “The Bully Pulpit” in which Doris Kearns Goodwin presents Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft, and the muckraking journalists. Lots of parallels between the robber barons and today’s 1%. Where are Teddy and the muckrakers when we need them? Diane, nominating you for modern day muckraker!!
A huge YES to Agatha Christie!
A big NO to Google.
Don’t play Google’s game. The paid advertisers’ links are typically at the top and in the right panel of search results (some at the top of the main panel have a pale pink background). Clinking those links results in advertiser payments, the tracking of you and the addition of info about you to their database.
Also, the free browser extension AdBlock Plus works wonders in removing those annoying advertisements from web pages: https://adblockplus.org
An earlier generation learned the hard way to be skeptical of “The Best and the Brightest”. That was the title of David Halberstam’s book about the Whiz Kids who sucked us into the “Second Indochina War” despite all the reality learned in blood during the First Indochina War thanks to the French colonialists.
But of course “we” didn’t learn. Instead, in war the latest generation bought David Petreaus’s bullshit about how to “win” by “counterinsurgency”. Instead of learning from the boring verdict of history as reported in those boring books (from Alexander the Great to the end of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan has been the graveyard of arrogant imperialists), the Best and the Brightest of the current generation landed us in that mess over there —
and with Race To The Top and similar arrogant nonsense in edupolicy. Ah, Harvard. As long as many intelligent people go brain dead when someone drags out that mystical invocation, we are doomed.
But to the current fad of nouveau Taylorism…
Thanks for your reading list, Diane. I also would recommend the old book “Labor and Monopoly Capitalism”, the best history and analysis of Taylorism in its 20th Century iteration. It was always a favorite of us in Chicago because one of the main testing ground for the theories was out on the West Side — the Hawthorne Works of the telephone company.
Actually, the economy crashed in 2008 BECAUSE OF these brilliant minds. High SAT scores combined with a crazy eugenic based ideology (Atlas Shrugged and all that “Who is John Galt?” nonsense) had earlier served us all with a warning when it was revealed that Enron only hired “the smartest guys in the room.” Smartest as measured by test scores, and then measured by the “bottom line” of stock price. For years, Enron got away with having itself declared the nation’s “best corporation” until it suddenly crashed and burned.
Anyone who was following the business and corporate media in those days remembers how Enron was celebrated as an “asset light” corporation. That was so ridiculous at first it should have been laughed out of the room. Instead, the idea that an “energy” company could be in the business of manipulating “data sets” from computers was elevated to greatness. Every time Enron unloaded a pipeline or actual physical manifestation of energy production and distribution and became more “asset light,” it was praised all the more.
This was only possible by the late 20th Century and early 21st Century tribe of corporate propagandists, who themselves almost all worshipped the “best and the brightest” from Harvard and elsewhere in those days. Those who reported this corporate nonsense were part of the problem, not part of the solution. They are still telling us how these realities work.
The danger to all of us — and to sane public policy — grows.
One should not forget Raymond Callahan’s “Education and the Cult of Efficiency.”
Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets
by Peter Schweizer
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17912486-extortion
I am listening to the Crash of 2016 by Thom Hartman. I highly recommend it. It is about the Corporate raiding of our democracy. It has just been published.
I bought one of those little k-cups the other day for my regular coffee
I looked on the internet for instructions.
Now I have 100 Kuerig ads on every site I visit.
Oh well.
Same with LLBean ads and Staples…Rei…etc. etc….
I decided to throw them off and started looking for trips to the Antarctica and Hiking in Switzerland.
If they check my history, they will see that 95% of the time my searches are educational -common core C-C-R-A-P-Y stuff.
I get ads for online charter schools every day
LOL. Great of Google to do some of your research for you, Diane!
For a while, I was living in St. Petersburg, Florida, but various Internet search engines and social media sites decided that I must be from St. Petersburg, Russia, and I started being inundated with advertisements, in Russian, for cars and vodka. I detest cars (Holden Caulfield said, “At least a horse is human.” LOL), and I don’t drink.
There’s a message in this. Data-driven operations of all kinds–search sites, computer-adaptive curricula, college admissions committees using SAT scores, etc.–simplify and distort, often in ways that get things terribly wrong. There’s no substitute for human judgment, and one must take simplified data with a grain of salt. Otherwise, one is practicing numerology.
From the Reformish Lexicon:
data-driven decision making. Reformish numberology.
More of the Reformish Lexicon here:
cx:
data-driven decision making. Reformish numerology.
I also liked Nicholas Carr’s book. He has a great blog called Rough Type. I did not read the Keichel book. But, I would also recommend Siva Vaidhayanathan’s book “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). It further illustrates Nicholas Carr’s description of Google’s practices and how it shapes society and public policy.
Part 1
The truly sad thing is that many in the corporate world – and that includes the big bankers and hedge-funders – are completely obsessed with money and profits, above and beyond all else. This is not a new phenomenon, as history attests. But it is one that has reared its ugly, egocentric head again with dire consequences.
Much of what now afflicts our nation is directly traceable to the supply-side economic nonsense that was put into place by the Reagan administration. Tax cuts for corporations and the rich were its essential component. Immediately, big budget deficits developed. Meanwhile, as Kevin Phillips noted in ‘The Politics of Rich and Poor,’ “Under Reagan…the clear evidence is that the net tax burden on rich Americans…shrank substantially.” Simultaneously, the Social Security tax (FICA) on ordinary working citizens doubled. And, by placing Social Security “off-budget,” Reagan borrowed heavily from its trust fund surplus while those “surpluses were still being used to reduce the size of the budget deficit.”
Meanwhile, Reagan gave us ‘A Nation at Risk, the education manifesto that claimed (falsely) that a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools threatened American national security. Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind ensued. As the late Gerry Bracey put it, ‘A Nation at Risk’ “yoked the nation’s global competitiveness to how well our 13-year-olds bubbled in test answer sheets.” In essence, pubic treasuries were plundered while public schools got blamed.
The great education historian Lawrence Cremin described it this way in Popular Education and Its Discontents (1990):
“American economic competitiveness… is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely as school reform, is not merely utopian and millenialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education.” (p. 103)
Part 2
While deficits and debt piled up, and billions of dollars flowed out of the country into investments abroad, Social Security was being leveraged to pay for what supply-side guru George Gilder termed “the proliferation of the rich.” The Reagan administration had a a sort of middle-ages mercantile mentalism that subordinated the general welfare of the nation to the self-interest of the top 1 percent. The promise was that the largesse would “trickle down.”
Trickle down, however, happened only during the Clinton administration, which raised taxes on the rich. Bruce Bartlett pointed out the result:
“According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal budget deficit fell every year of the Clinton administration, from $290 billion in 1992 to $255 billion in 1993, $203 billion in 1994, $164 billion in 1995, $107 billion in 1996, and $22 billion in 1997. In 1998, there was a budget surplus of $69 billion, which rose to $126 billion in 1999 and $236 billion in 2000 before it was dissipated by huge tax cuts during the George W. Bush administration.”
What Republicans achieved for the rich during the Clinton administration was the total deregulation of Wall Street’s toxic derivatives trading. Once he became president, George W. Bush not only cut taxes, he turned a laissez-faire eye to the big bankers, and the rest is history…the Great Depression and all of its fallout.
The big boys (Republicans, Wall Street, US Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, etc.) will not admit what they did nor take any responsibility on it whatsoever. They’ve engaged in what Bartlett calls “economic revisionism.” They want more supply-side economics, and they’ve reinvented public education as the whipping boy. For example, Business Roundtable education committee chair, Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil (who does NOT want fracking near HIS house), says that Common Core standards are necessary to “maintain…rigor, states’ rights, economic competitiveness and accountability and should be supported and fully implemented.” As I’ve noted on this blog numerous times, there is no credible research to back him up.
To add insult to injury, it seems that most public school administrators seem to embrace what the big boys say. The use the same “data-driven” and “accountability” language. They’ve hopped on the STEM bandwagon. They tout the College Board’s products and programs (the College Board is a major driver of Common Core). Even teacher “leaders” have subscribed to the nonsense. Randi Weingarten of the AFT, for example, recently wrote in support of the Common Core that we “must evolve from an outmoded model of education…to a new paradigm that will prepare students for life, college, and career.”
The public education system in a democratic republic is supposed to develop and nurture democratic character and citizenship. That’s the foundation of American public schooling; that is its core mission. And that is precisely the kind of reform direction we need.
It’s also what the “reformers” don’t really want.
A wonderful and chilling post.