A friend passed along this email.
What an awesome threesome!
The Boston Consulting Group (whose reports always recommend privatization, as in Philadelphia); the Harvard Business School; and the Gates Foundation.
Lots of bright young men and women, probably graduates of our finest private schools. They will redesign public education for other people’s children. They need some good ideas.
I propose they take a field trip to Finland. There they will see happy, healthy children; no standardized testing; strong academic and vocational-technical programs; and a well-prepared, highly respected teaching profession.
What are the metrics? That will be their challenge!
Time for fresh thinking! Time to break the mold! Abandon the status quo of high-stakes testing and privatization!
Here goes:
“As part of an effort to improve the competitiveness of the United States, BCG has partnered with Harvard Business School and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to bring business and education leaders together to better understand how they can collaborate and transform America’s PK-12 education system.
“The BCG-Gates-HBS PK-12 research focuses on best practices for partnerships between business leaders and educators to accelerate improvement in America’s schools. The research has identified three high-leverage ways in which business leaders can engage with educators to bring about significant change for the better:
* Laying the policy foundations for education innovation
* Scaling up proven innovations that boost student outcomes
* Reinventing the local education ecosystem in cities and regions
“It is our pleasure to share with you two joint research reports on these important topics. We hope the first report, Lasting Impact: A Business Leader’s Playbook for Supporting America’s Schools, will inspire business and education leaders to work together on the urgent task of transforming the nation’s education system. The second report, Partial Credit: How America’s School Superintendents See Business as a Partner, summarizes the findings of a nationwide survey of school superintendents on business’s role in education.
“In 2014, we aim to spur action on many of the ideas that have been captured in the research so far. We welcome your thoughts and input on the material.
Best regards,
J. Puckett
Leader, Global Education Practice Tyce Henry
Principal
Nithya Vaduganathan
Principal
The Boston Consulting Group”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The phrase “captured in our research” gives me chills.
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inBloom refers to the process of uploading data to its system as “ingestion”
Our kids are to be ingested into the great data maw.
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The secret of Finland system is not the system. It’s the racial homogeneity of white folks. The educational achievement of Scandinavian-Americans in white states are just as good.
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As if they need more evidence of Finland’s superiority, here’s a letter from a second grade teacher in NH describing her experience of the CCSS implementation.
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I remember someone said on-line about how corporate reformers take “fact-finding” trips to Finland… and then proceed to ignore and deride everything that they see and hear that doesn’t conform to the agenda of privatization and union-busting… concluding something along the lines of, “Well, Finland is different. Much of what they do–(i.e. the stuff that is diametrically different from privatization and union-busting— doesn’t apply to the United States.”
Is there any country on Earth where the things that corporate reformers push has led to an improvement in education?
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OMG…this is RIDICULOUS. Who is BILL GATES anyway? Oh…a marketer of bad ideas and products.
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And a scary one at that – at the 2009 National Conference of State Legislators, in the process of selling Common Core, he said-
GATES: — “to create just these kinds of tests—next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching”.
This kind of self-serving greed has a rotten, rotten core.
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This seems a good place to link to Andreas Schleicher’s presentation on PISA findings. Unfortunately, his premise is that all nations want their education system to be defined by high performance AND high equity. If we could agree on that goal, it would be clear what we ought to do.
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BCG is the organization which spawned Bain Capital and give Mitt Romney his $tart. Most of this article is behind a paywall, but the summary gives an idea of the genesis behind the absurd notion that pilling more kids in the “excellent” teacher’s classroom combined with the use of technology will educate the nation.
Achieving More for Less in U.S. Education with a Value-Based Approach
https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/public_sector_cost_efficiency_asset_optimization_value_based_us_education/
Actually, the paper inadvertently points out what a heroic role teachers have played, though not from BCG’s viewpoint:
“The challenge is clear: since the 1970s, math and literacy test scores for U.S. students at age 17 have remained flat, according to the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education, and the country continues to fall in international rankings.”
So, despite growing inequality which has resulted in 25% of our kids living in poverty, while school budgets have been cut and the teaching profession has been assaulted by venture capitalists, teachers have maintained our achievement levels in the world ranks, as measured by standardized testing.
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since the 1970s, math and literacy test scores for U.S. students at age 17 have remained flat
Interestingly, this includes the whole NCLB period–the era of mandated standards and standards-based tests; so, by the deformers’ own ridiculous metrics, their approach has not worked; so, they want to do more of it.
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A more appropriate destination for these middle managers of neoliberalism would currently be the Ukraine, which is about to receive a hefty dose of of Shock Therapy, courtesy of the IMF and the US State Department.
After all, that’s what euphemistic phrases such as “Reinventing the education ecosystem in cities and regions” really mean.
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That’s a pretty good analogy. “Reform” and austerity tend to go together when big powers come to the rescue. Ask the citizens of Greece (or the teachers of Philadelphia) what austerity without actual reform has done for them: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/22/greece-growth-austerity-eases-europe-imf
Just one quibble about the term “the Ukraine.” Ukrainians have pointed out that “the Ukraine” is an independent nation located between “the Poland” and “the Russia.”
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Point noted, randal
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Perhaps these youngsters should visit a Third World country and see what life is like where the elite rule and are the only ones educated.
Oh never mind, that is their dream/plan and precisely why they are destroying the foundation of our democracy, public education.
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How about education/social justice leaders educate the narrow-minded business folks “on the urgent task of transforming the nation’s economic system?”
Greedy 1 percenters’ focus on creating obedient, unquestioning workers who will slave away at poverty-level wages give these plutocratic billionaires no right to dictate how we children.
We educate to promote participatory citizenship and a thriving democracy. Gates et al just look at us as a cash cow and cheap supply train.
Unbridled capitalism has been a total disaster for us 99 percenters.
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