I don’t often agree with Jay Greene because he is a proponent of school choice, especially vouchers. I disagree, as I see no benefit to giving public money to religious schools and tossing aside one of our important traditions, i.e., separation of church and state. Greene is chair of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, which is funded in part by the Walton Family Foundation, which commits its considerable resources to privatization of public education.
But Greene has been remarkably wise on his comments about the Common Core. His recent writings have echoed a theme that I first encountered when I read Yale sociologist James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. In this book, Scott explains and demonstrates the many disastrous errors committed by technocrats and central planners who thought that they could move around entire populations and reconstruct entire cities and landscapes by their grandiose plans. Scott shows how time and again these supersize plans have come to a disastrous end because they failed to take into consideration that people are not ants, not checkers on a checker board, not inanimate objects whose lives can be rearranged at the will of government planners. Worse, they never listen to the people on the ground who are tasked with making their plans work. What worked beautifully on the drawing board turned out to be a giant failure because people who “see like a state” are, frankly, out of touch with reality and with the real lives of real people. More often than not, the craftsmen on the ground have knowledge that is unknown and unappreciated and scorned by the central planners.
Greene’s recent posts (see here and here) point out that it is a gigantic mistake to aim for total victory. He notes that the planners of the Common Core standards thought they could engineer a coup: get the U.S. Department of Education on board, get their program funded by the nation’s largest foundation (and expect that most of the others would jump aboard), buy the support of almost every D.C. advocacy group, pay off the education organizations, persuade the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable to acclaim their efforts, and poof!–victory was assured! Dissent is brushed aside, critics are dismissed out of hand as “Tea Party” and “extremists.” Editorial boards endorse the Common Core, puff pieces are strategically placed in the media. Yet, it is not working. What went wrong?
Greene writes in the first post:
Ed reform has been going through a bad stretch lately. Currently dominant reform theories are the result of technocratic thinking. They seek to identify (and impose) “optimal” topics to be taught, ways to teach those subjects, methods for training teachers, strategies for evaluating and motivating teachers, etc… An army of economists or economist-wannabes have seized the reins of reform organizations with the hope that their next regression will tell everyone what to do to solve the mystery of improving schools. They pay little heed to history, which might alert them to the failure of past efforts similar to their brave new undertakings. And they are unfamiliar with basic lessons from political science on the dangers and failures of technocratic central planning.
In his second post, he explains why it is a mistake to seek total and complete victory, a complete reconstruction of people’s work and lives, and why such grandiose plans usually fail:
Technocrats are inclined to seek total and final victory. If science or the experts have shown something to be wrong, why should that wrong be allowed to continue anywhere? This produces a tendency to over-reach. Technocrats can’t tolerate the notion that a solution won’t cover everybody and improve things for everyone. If things are bad in Mississippi it just ruins their whole day.
But trying to fix everything, everywhere usually leads to fixing nothing anywhere — or sometimes to making things much worse. In the end the technocrat doesn’t seem as motivated by helping as many people as possible, as much as motivated by the unreasonable feeling of responsibility for “allowing” something bad to continue for someone. But addressing your inner angst about someone still suffering somewhere at the expense of making progress toward helping more people is egotistical. It isn’t about you. You are not the Master of the Universe who “allows” bad things to happen. You’re just a person trying to work with others to make progress….Even if you are a standards and test-based accountability person, you are better off not seeking total victory as the Common Core people have. Yes, some states had lousy standards. And yes, some tests were poorly designed or had low thresholds for passing. But trying to fix all standards and tests, everywhere, all at once is the wrong approach. Seeking this total victory has more fully mobilized the opponents of all standards and testing. In response to a more heavy-handed and top-down national effort, more previously un-involved people have flocked to the anti-testing side. Not only will these folks undermine effective implementation of Common Core, but in their counter-effort to roll back national standards, they will destroy much of what was good about state standards and tests. The whole idea of standards and test-based accountability is being undermined by the imprudent over-reach of Common Core.
Greene ends his second post with a sage observation that ought to be pinned to the wall in every government office, every executive suite of every foundation, and every advocacy group:
Whether your preferred policy solution is based on standards and accountability, parental choice, instructional reform, or something else, the better approach to reform is gradual and decentralized so that everyone can learn and adapt. Your reform strategy has to be consistent with the diverse, decentralized, and democratic country in which we live. You won’t fix everything for everyone right away, but you should avoid Great Leaps Forward. Seek partial victories because with the paradoxical logic of ed reform politics total victory ultimately leads to total defeat.
When technocrats make bundles of money using mathematical algorithms to “earn” money or develop computer codes and programs to corner the marketplace they believe they can use the same kind of thinking to solve social problems. Alas for them, what works in cyberspace seldom works on planet earth.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
Jay Greene’s and your comments on “it is a mistake to seek total and complete victory, a complete reconstruction of people’s work and lives, and why such grandiose plans usually fail ” reminded me of three things unrelated, at least on the surface, to what is happening in education.
The first is that it was this type of government thinking and the resulting policies and actions that got us involved in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq with the resultant chaos that followed.
The second is that the slower process of change and improvement had already been occurring in school districts in towns, cities and states across the county. It is the difference between that slow evolutionary process and the revolutionary approach of the current corporate move to hijack and direct “improvements” on the grandiose scale we are experiencing.
The third is that it seems to be just one more instance of what Naomi Klein described in her book Shock Doctrine.
From her web page:
“The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.”
Wasn’t there a song lyric that went ” ‘Cause everything old is new again”? This may simply be the latest appearance of the Shock Doctrine in action.
So what folks like Jay Greene savagely critiqued in a not-so-long-ago yesteryear—such as “Great Leaps Forward”—won’t work here either?
So let’s get this straight. The Potemkin Village Business Plan for $tudent $ucce$$ of the “education reformers” takes the first part of its name from a now nonexistent country. No more Potemkin Villages, no more Soviet Union. Check.
But it was sure to work when you made it a business plan and vanity projects for the BBC in the USofA [also see: Chile et alia]. All it was going to take was furiously setting eduapparatchiks, er, educrat enablers and edubully enforcers and accountabully underlings to the task of taking proven small failures to national scale. Check.
Bill Gates said in 2013 that it was going to take about ten years before we would see if it worked. Jay Greene didn’t need ten years. Check.
So when you follow the decades-long failed plans and behaviors of those you formerly despised and fought publicly—but apparently secretly envied and wanted to emulate—you end up with the same results. Failure. On an ever-increasing scale. Check.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
¿? Yes, the Marx that is not as famous as Groucho.
Karl.
But perhaps this Marxist maxim needs to be revised. Both parts are working themselves out concurrently. The self-styled “education reformers” may look and act farcical, but we have to endure the tragedy they have unleashed.
But that is because they all, regardless of their petty differences with each other, use the same Marxist playbook:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Yes, not from Marx the Lesser but the famous one.
Groucho.
😎
With respect to your comment:
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
This was purportedly a sign outside a history professor’s office . . .
“Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who DO study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
Along the same lines is the following quote –
“The greatest lesson of history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.”
Or as Mr. Scott said to Mr. Sulu on the Star Trek episode “Friday’s Child”,
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
To which Ensign Chekov remarked that it was an old Russian saying.
I didn’t realize Georgie Porgie was Russian.
Let’s also not forget George W. Bush’s immortal, “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me … (long pause) we won’t be fooled again.”
Amazing! From botching up an old Russian saying, if that is true, to quoting The Who!
I don’t know, it leans a little “no true Scotsman” to me.
No true ed reformer would do this: “currently dominant reform theories are the result of technocratic thinking. They seek to identify (and impose) “optimal” topics to be taught, ways to teach those subjects, methods for training teachers, strategies for evaluating and motivating teachers, etc… ” so ed reform must have been hijacked by technocrats.
I don’t know if I buy that. If one looks the cities they’re in, they use the same template in city after city; NYC, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit – they always reach for the same “portfolio” solution. We never even hear about cities that go a different route. He never objected to that, did he? What about national charter chains? That’s a formula. Why didn’t he object to that? Why are there so many “no excuses” charters? That’s a formula.
I think he’s ideologically conservative so he objects to a national approach to education. There’s nothing wrong with that, but ed reform IS national and he should stop pretending it’s not.
My central objection to ed reform is they sell it using fear. It was so blatant with the Common Core. Your schools are failing! Your kids will never find jobs! China, Korea, Finland are BEATING us! Panic! No time to waste!
I’m temperamentally disinclined to take advice from people who are always telling me to rush ahead and not consider the pros and cons and potential downside. I don’t trust people who use that approach. If you have to sell something using fear I want to know why you’re reaching for that sales tool. Common Core could have been sold differently, yet they chose to use fear. I’m immediately wary of that.
How and why inBloom bit the dust is clearly a lesson for the top-down technocrat reformers like Gates and Duncan who write the checks and sign the contracts. Without buy-in at the local level, parents will continue to push back on the reformers’ reforms including high-stakes testing and the Common Core. Parents are following the tax money that’s flowing from local schools into the corporate accounts.
I will never understand why they didn’t put CC in younger grades and then add grades. That makes so much sense to me. The kids who really get screwed with the tests are middle school kids, my son”s age, because it’s a whole new approach and they didn’t have it in primary grades and they’re not really old enough to figure out what’s changed or what’s expected now as perhaps a high schooler might be.
I could be wrong about that, I’m not a teacher or an expert on children, but I am on my fourth middle schooler, and I think I know how they are. They’re going to be upset when they get those scores because they HAD to the old tests and they’re too young to put it in a national database context, or whatever. I would still bet my mortgage that 80% of the parents here have no idea what’s coming, and they won’t know why the scores dropped.
In my opinion, it’s hardest on middle schoolers. That just seems unfair and needlessly grim and stressful for them, and REALLY thoughtless and careless of the adults behind this. Where they are in school matters, and how old they are matters, I would think.
It’s probably just a matter of perspective here, but I think it’s worst for TYPICAL high school student who is years behind the level that PARCC demands. Your point about how all of this should have been gradually implemented from younger years is all too sensible, but I think they wanted to show how much students improved through the years of this program. Because of this, they (and who are they?) weren’t uncomfortable with the possibility of shockingly poor scores. My suspicion is that they actually wanted bad scores…for multiple reasons. The overreach, in my opinion, was attaching repercussions to the low scores. I loved reading about the turning point in Texas where parents sprang into the political arena once legislators insisted on having end of course exams worth (at least?) 15% of a high school student’s final grade in the course.
I suppose I am the only one to see the tension between condemning “technocrats and central planners who thought that they could move around entire populations and reconstruct entire cities and landscapes by their grandiose plans” and praising school districts that construct school catchment lines to integrate schools in highly segregated cities, condemn governments for failing to “take into consideration that people are not ants, not checkers on a checker board, not inanimate objects whose lives can be rearranged at the will of government planners” and praise school districts for assigning students to schools based on street address of their homes irrespective of the individual needs, goals, and desires of the individuals actually living in those homes.
But even that fails in portfolio districts. One Newark is an attempt to regulate around the fact that charter schools weren’t an equitable system of schools. “choice” was skewing the field. Cami Anderson is basically writing state code in Newark, IMO. They’ve given her carte blanche to set up a whole school system, and it IS a system, as much as “choice” proponents want to deny it. She’s going to end up slotting kids into schools. The regulation doesn’t even really work, because she actually has no authority over the schools, so some of the schools won’t join the system.
The same thing happened in Ohio with “open enrollment”. Open enrollment is a denial that public schools ARE a system. There are X amount of children and X amount of schools and geography is a limiting factor. It wasn’t even considered, and now they’re harming some schools and benefitting others. They don’t even know if it will be a net gain for the “system” of schools. The “zip code is not destiny” people seem to ignore what happens to the schools that exist. There are still kids in them! Should they then have NO choice?
You’re always going to run into that, you know. All you’re doing is creating a new “system”. You have no idea if the new system will be more equitable or a net gain in a given area. The continued denial that schools in a given area will inevitably BECOME a system baffles me. Why is Cami Anderson’s system better or more equitable, net, than they one we’ve had for 150 years? The truth is, they don’t know if it will be.
I am not sure what “that” is in your opening sentence. Could you elaborate?
Would you say there is a “system” of higher education in the United States?
Yes something like busing is clearly the result of the same grandiosity – moving people about in pursuit of utopian goals. The imposition of busing required a judiciary immune from democratic accountability. Perhaps the Common Core can be successfully imposed by the courts against widespread opposition.
TE,
So you see an inherent problem between the “quest for efficiency”–your “catchment zones” and a “culture of humanity”–your desire to see what is best for your own family, your definition the neoliberal culture of me, mine, I, and if I take care of myself and family the world will be just fine which really isn’t what a “culture of humanity” would be about.
What do we as a society do when the me, mine, I culture conflicts with the culture of humanity, i.e., the needs of all?
The interesting question is how do you and Harlan come up with the needs of all, what must be decided jointly (and as a result be a source of potential conflict) and what we can allow individuals to do as they think best. I am a contractarian, others may have a different philosophical approach.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m having trouble reading between your lines. If you’re saying, attempting to develop & impose national standards by fiat is akin to ’60’s-style forced integration via busing, I agree. But attributing the routine geographical assnt of students to the nearest public school? That seems a stretch.
Students living at my street address are not assigned to the closest middle and high schools, they are assigned to schools farther away in order to move toward a balanced SES distribution across schools. Is this unusual?
More broadly the nature of the student living at my street address will have no impact on where that student is assigned. It is hard to see how this system does not get condemned for rearranging lives whenever catchment boundaries are shifted or students move across catchment lines (in my case that would mean moving half a block south for the middle school).
“Students living at my street address are not assigned to the closest middle and high schools, they are assigned to schools farther away in order to move toward a balanced SES distribution across schools. Is this unusual?”
Not the way it is done in my area.
Interesting. Are residential areas not SES segrigated in your town or does your school board not think SES integration a priority?
sorry ms ravitch, I know it is hard to leave behind old friends, but jpgreene is only cautioning that one does not want to hard a standard or metric put into place as that will lead to quick identification that charterschoicevouchers tfaers and such are not improving student achievement–as he always finds through his socalled research. This new education system gates/coleman/pearson and the rest are trying to implement would leave no room for people like jpgreene to make a living off the system, it would no longer require analysis as the data would all be built right into the system and easily available to manipulate. He is concerned of being pushed aside, losing his place at the table, etc. common core also reduces the customer base, instead of 50 states and numerous school districts buying products, looking for solutions, we would only have the common core foundation/department.
“H.R. 2218, the “Empowering Parents through Quality Charter Schools Act,” streamlines the administration of the Charter School Program (CSP) and expands its scope. The bill restructures the current program so that grants are delivered by and operated by a state level entity. State educational agencies (SEAs), state charter school boards and governors are eligible to apply for five year grants. While continuing to support the planning, development, and initial implementation of charter schools, H.R. 2218 also make funds available for the expansion and replication of high-quality charter schools. Ninety percent of each grant must support startup, expansion, and replication activities. State entities must use the remaining 10 percent of each grant for technical assistance and quality authorizing. ”
Did Jay Greene object to this? It’s federal legislation to build charter schools. They’ll pass the money thru a state, but they are going to pick and choose the charter management organization.
Give me a break. These are national schools. I’m a lawyer and I get the legal mechanism of crafting federal law to align with state code and the historical role of states in education, but if they’re funding national CMO’s (and they will be if this passes the Senate) they’re funding national charter schools. The fact is I can’t set up a school in another state, and KIPP can. That’s a radical departure from how we have traditionally thought of public schools, and one would think conservatives would object to it, but they don’t! They don’t object to it because it meets their ideological goal of expanding “choice”. They dumped the whole “states run education” principle in pursuit of “choice”. That bedrock principle went right under the “choice” bus.
I think it’s amusing, in a way. I think local public schools could become the small,local option compared to national charters. They could (and I believe WILL) end up with three or four national charter chains, and then truly LOCAL public schools. Funny how things turn out, huh?
teachingeconomist
April 22, 2014 at 8:39 am
I am not sure what “that” is in your opening sentence. Could you elaborate?
Would you say there is a “system” of higher education in the United States?
Choice fails on equity. Ohio’s open enrollment is failing on equity, because some children have the means to travel out of district, and others don’t. All they’re doing is creating winners and losers.
Cami Anderson is regulating charters with her “One Newark” plan because she has to, not because she wants to. She has to create a system. If “choice” were equitable, she wouldn’t be struggling so to create an equitable system.
What you’re ignoring with the college comparison is that children don’t travel under their own steam, and they don’t reside at school. My daughter chose a college in Pennsylvania. But she was 18! She moved there. The parents who use open enrollment here have the time and means to travel. All open enrollment does is starve some schools and benefit others. It doesn’t improve the system, and it is a system! They can pretend it’s not, but it is!
I’m a little shocked such brilliant “technocrats” didn’t recognize that schools are inevitably and always a system, because 5th graders aren’t college students.
How far are you willing to go when you say choice fails on equity? My local high school offers a number of classes that my foster son was not academically able to choose because of his various learning disabilities. Does that mean that providing those choices in the high school building fails on equity because it creates winners and losers and thus those classes should be abolished? My middle son was able to choose classes at the local university while in high school because of his academic ability, my ability to pay tuition, and my willingness to drive him from school to school. Does taking some classes outside the assigned school by some students fail on equity and should the practice be forbidden because not all can make that choice and it creates winners and losers?
I’m practical. If it individuals can be accommodated with no substantial harm to the larger group of students or community schools, absolutely I think they should be.
That’s part of “public schools”. I know when I enroll in a public school that public schools can’t be all things to all people, and interests have to be balanced. My son has a particularly difficult child in his class right now. I know that child is disruptive because my son talks about it. But it’s a public school! They can’t kick the kid to the curb, nor do I want them to. My son will have to deal with it. and he WILL deal with it, and he’ll be fine.
“Choice” doesn’t even recognize that there’s a real or potential; downside. There is to me this delusional insistence that pulling on one string of a complex system has NO effect on the whole. Of course it does. Inevitably. I’m baffled why they designers of Ohio’s open enrollment system continue to insist it’s “win/win!” No, it’s not. They should have to admit that. All they’ve done is change the mix of winners and losers that was in the dreaded “zip code” system. Is it “better” system-wide? They don’t know. What’s worse, they don’t seem to care.
They had no idea what would happen to public schools in Cleveland with the introduction of charters. None. I think that’s reckless, and incredibly unfair to people who value local public schools and the children who attend public schools.
Where would you draw the line? If I understand you correctly, allowing students to choose a school fails an equity test because not all students would be able to take advantage of that choice (any thoughts on how this might apply to private schools?). It seems that you do not think that allowing students to choose a class in a school that not all students can take advantage of the class fails the equity test. Would the middle ground, allowing students to take some courses from other schools that are not accessible to all (ether because of the difficulty of the class or tuition expense or both) fail your equity test?
“It seems that you do not think that allowing students to choose a class in a school that not all students can take advantage of the class fails the equity test.”
It doesn’t fail the equity test. Equity means that we try to provide what each student needs not what other students have. Could we do better? Yes.
I am trying to understand poster Chiara Duggan’s concern that
“Choice fails on equity. Ohio’s open enrollment is failing on equity, because some children have the means to travel out of district, and others don’t. All they’re doing is creating winners and losers.”
There was no mention of student needs being important, just different abilities to take advantage of opportunities offered.
Just one quick thing, mainly because it’s related to our other conversation: You say that students are assigned “to schools based on street address of their homes irrespective of the individual needs, goals and desires of the individuals actually living in those homes.” Maybe you just live in a funny place — where I live, the people who actually live in the homes are getting EXACTLY what they want out of their public schools. They WANT to attend the school closest to them geographically, and the schools work to meet their individual needs and goals.
I think, as with our other conversation, you just don’t have a very accurate or complete understanding of how public schools actually work, e.g. it is very much, or exactly, like the fire department, with personnel and programs (which are individually tailored) available for the customers when they come in — you can’t know exactly where the fire will be, but you can anticipate based on other information (windy day/dry conditions / super-cold winter night, or new subdivision building homes that young families will find desirable / urban renewal in neighborhoods).
It certainly does appear that many charters do come up with scripted, programmed “one size fits all” programs with lots of inflexible rules that you “take or leave” — but public schools really don’t do it that way — and, assigning schools based on neighborhoods, with some flexibility, is EXACTLY the program that the vast majority of people want (and they STRONGLY want it).
I teach in a super-successful urban school, one that has exactly zero characteristics of the “education deform” movement. Charters are not allowed in the district and absolutely no one is lobbying for them.
I live in a wonderful middle class / upper middle class neighborhood where nearly all the parents are college educated and value education for their kids (maybe not always for the right reasons….) — what they want are neighborhood public schools, period. Again, charters are illegal and absolutely no one is lobbying for them.
So, to imply that public schools “assign” based on neighborhoods without regard to what the people want is, again, just playing the most convoluted of semantic games. Public policy should never be based on convoluted semantic games but should be based on a balancing of competing interests with the least restrictive (not most efficient) means of providing the best services for the most people. That, the citizen / taxpayers have decided, regardless of what economists think, is public schools with public accountability (no charters with their zero accountability).
Good point. It also comes with the assumption that all schools are “poor” or “rich” and that simply isn’t true. Many public schools have a broad mix of economic classes in them.
Mine is one of them. I value that. I think it’s good for my kids to go to school with a broad mix of families, of varying economic levels. I think it has benefitted my kids, and my grown children think it benefited them because they know the world isn’t made up of doctors and lawyers and managers.
I don’t know, it sounds to me like you’re the one playing a convoluted semantic game. I live in NYC, a very funny place. Here, zoned public schools are assigned based on (gerrymandered) neighborhoods without regard to what the people want. Meaning that your zoned school is your zoned school, regardless of whether or not you want to send your children there.
School catchment areas in my town are influenced by geography but also by a desire to balance SAS across schools, so students living at my street address are not assigned to the nearest middle or high school, though students on the next block up on my street are assigned to the nearest middle school.
Allowing students to choose schools allows schools to provide curriculum that better matches the students individual needs, goals, and desires. Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax County Virginia is a magnet school that is designed for students that excel in the STEM fields. When you say “the schools work to meet their individual needs and goals”, do your local zoned high schools allow for students to take anything close to the TJ math curriculum? (the flow chart can be found here:https://www.tjhsst.edu/research-academics/math-cs/math/docs/Math%20FlowChart14-15notnew.pdf)
Finally schools are not very much like fire departments. Fire departments have a peak load problem, that is there might well be a large fire that requires many resources sometime over the next couple of years, so we need to have a great deal of excess capacity most of the time in order to have the capacity when we really need it. Schools do not have to have large numbers of teachers and empty classrooms on standby because the student population quadruples next week.
teachingeconomist
April 22, 2014 at 8:39 am
I am not sure what “that” is in your opening sentence. Could you elaborate?
We have open enrollment in Ohio. Parents here could possibly pick from 2 counties ( “the tyranny of geography” then starts to limit their choice, because we’re talking about tens of miles).
When we did that, did we inevitably create a new system of schools? Now instead of being limited to a district, we have a bi-county system, right? Is that more equitable and better than the old system? We don’t know, and we’re finding out “maybe not” because it’s not all about individual kids. There are winner schools and loser schools. It has to be better system-wide, or we got nothing but “choice”, where a few kids benefitted, but MANY were harmed.
But the article was premised on the wrong problem. Schools aren’t the problem that need to be solved as implied here that was done incorrectly. The problem that has yet to be solved after improving for a while is poverty that reverted back to high levels since Reagan’s time in office.
I’m also tired of the constant refrain that questioning this is “about adults”. I am an adult. Do I care if my publicly-funded local school is titled to a private entity?
Yeah, I do, because I think the role of adults to think of possible repercussions out further than next week. I would no sooner let my 5th grader set a course for this town than I would give him my car keys.
Lawyers have a saying: “when people say it’s not about the money it’s about the money”.
I’m coming right out and asking about the money, and celebrities screeching at me to “think about the children!” is not likely to deter me. I live here. My business is here. I have an investment in this place, and public schools are a PUBLIC investment. I don’t want to transfer public schools to private ownership. That wasn’t how “ed reform” was sold to the public and I object to it. I also object to the ridiculous idea that these questions are the concerns of “adults”. No shit. They SHOULD be the concern of adults. That’s our role. I’m insulted that asking questions is portrayed as somehow selfish or self-interested. I DON’T AGREE with ed reformers that privatizing public schools is wise, long-term. I value elected school boards, because process matters. It’s fabulous if they don’t, but I do. What I value is just as important as what they value.
Yes! (high five, fist and chest bump!)
Two snaps up and around the world!
Translation: yep, what you said
“People are not ants” and the perfect example of the truth of this statement may be found in China where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) built many new cities with the capacity to hold (in some cases) millions.
Many of these cities were built years ago and all the buildings sold to investors, and the CCP is still building these new cities.
They are brand new in areas where cities never existed before but they are still mostly empty.
In one case in northern China, a new city was built to replace an old one but the people refused to move so the old city is still there full of people and an hour drive away is the new city built to hold several million people who never arrived.
The CCP still plans to have hundreds of millions of rural people migrate to urban centers in the next few years. Will these new cities every become populated? Who knows?
Is America’s Common Core Standards and its draconian testing that’s used to judge teachers, fire some and/or close public schools labeled as faliing the USA’s “Empty Cities”. And in a few decades will the country wake up that Common Core did nothing to improve education.
As you might imagine, Diane, I feel the same way about the absolute opposition on this blog to charters and vouchers and to its promotion of total victory for public education publicly run and unionized, as not just the best, but the only suitable method of education for the country because of its presumed devotion to equity, to integration and to wrap around services for those who need them.
Whatever problems public education has in this county in my view can be directly traced to the ideology and culture of public school teachers. As long as it remains anti-capitalist (when its wages are paid by the private sector through taxes) they will continue to come down on the side of the statists and the collective rather than on the side of the individual.
This Jay Green realizes. I also submit that that insight—that the individual matters, and that local traditions matter—is all that the tea party movement is saying too, and that reluctance of the public school mind to recognize that is a weakness. The metaphor I like to use is that the public school personnel see the public schools as an established church with themselves having an absolute right to control the sacraments of education.
Obviously the anti-clerical protestant counter feeling (of the universal priesthood of the laity) remains active in the sentimental support for charters, and even vouchers. From that point of view, the Waltons and the Kocks could be offered as defenders of fundamental, American, constitutionalism, in which the PURPOSE of the constitution is to protect individuals from overreaching interference of their own government in individual liberty. I know freedom and liberty these days are stigmatized as forms of racism, but they aren’t, in my view.
The greatest oversight seems to be that oppression isn’t ever in isolation…it spreads. Oppression is a symptom of greater culture not isolated policy. It can’t happen in a vacuum.
The voices against such oppressive policy and its implementation were first the teachers (for themselves and their voiceless students). Then came the voices parents for their children and their neighbors’ children. (Forget the bandwagon of political-issue-specific carpetbaggers, like the tea party, as if they [will] deserve any credit.) The top-down, neck-crushing method just isn’t effective, Rhee, Duncan, Deasy, King, southern state senates, et al. Get a clue.
That attitude is symptomatic of the too-big-to-fail mentality, somewhere up there with too-important-to-prosecute mentality, I suppose. “Too-funded-to-fail,” if you prefer. Your next book, Diane?
Also factor in the concept that providing education for children is a health and human service profession. This is why when CCSS was being described as “abusive,” it carried a lot of weight.
I am so proud of the troops on the ground in NY and the states over. You are effectively moving the fulcrum point closer to the source of the oppression. No matter how monolithic the collective-oppressor is, you will displace it with ease. I have faith in this movement.
I know that many progressives can’t stand the Tea Party and my own opinion of that group is extremely negative, but they do make up about 15 million people, and they are loud. We may not agree with all of the Koch brothers financed, Tea Party agendas, but in this one area over Common Core testing and information gathering of children, we have a common cause (no pun intended).
You may also want to read this to understand what I’m saying:
http://nycurbaned.blogspot.com/2014/04/how-inbloom-was-killed-by-left-and.html
United on this one issue we stand a much better chance of winning and then the progressives and the Tea Party may return to bickering over everything else. And while we are working together, we might start to see that everyone is human in some way but with different interests.
In response to your opening statement, I hope you will forgive my intent to argue. The idea that there must be a separation of church and state is a semantic monster of course, and so the contemporary convenience is to adopt the strictest interpretation of the concept. But to say that that strict interpretation is a tradition is either overly deliberate, or just simply not true. Founding interpreters often used a Calvinian idea of the separation of church and state where like an illustration of a one way wall which would stop the state from having power over the church, and while the church had no power over the state, a peculiarity of that wall allowed for a strained influence of the church to “influence” the state.
If you’d like, we could argue the value of that Calvinian influence on the founders, but the real purpose of my comment is to point out that a claim which tries to validate a strict separation of church and state as traditional is flawed. The church was intended to influence the virtue of law and justice, but the state was to have no power over the church save in cases where it violated criminal law.