What would Lewis Carroll say if he were alive today about the corporate education reform movement? What would he say about the contemporary effort to destroy childhood in the name of “standards”? How would he respond if a learned pedant told him that “as you grow up in this world, you will learn that no one gives a s–t what you think or feel”? How would he explain this to Alice? Would he even try?
Jonathan Lovell has written a beautiful illustrated essay on the corporate reform movement, creative disruption, Alice in Wonderland, GERM, Lace to the Top, and the Jabberwock. He names the Jabberwock.
Read it and arm yourself against nonsense with imagination and insight, drawn from literature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OH MY, this is wonderful!!!! Thank you, Jonathan. Beautifully written.
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As always, I’m flattered and grateful, Robert, especially since I’ve decided that when I grow up I’d like to be JUST LIKE YOU!
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children guessed (but only a few) and down they forgot as up they grew
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I think he was wrong about the “only a few” part
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these poets! sometimes they throw something in just for the rhyme. LOL.
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Jonathan Lovell: glad to see you have read Mark Twain—
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
😉
On a more serious note, Naomi Klein leads off her 2007 book, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM, with an introduction that itself starts with Hurricane Katrina and Milton Friedman and public schools. It is entitled BLANK IS BEAUTIFUL: THREE DECADES OF ERASING AND REMAKING THE WORLD. Three pages in [p. 5] is the following from Friedman’s op-ed in the WALL STREET JOURNAL of 12/5/2005:
[start quote]
“Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the education system.”
[end quote]
Creative destruction. Creative disruption. Radically reform. Erasing. Remaking. Blank is beautiful. Rebranding of the same old putrid wine in shiny new bottles.
Thank you for a wonderful posting on your blog.
😎
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Maybe we can begin an absurdist lexicon of the nonsense being pushed into the language by corporate “reform.” Although I love the notion that was pushed around for a time about “rebranding” Common Core, I think my two immediate favorites are both from Chicago, so here is my sharing:
1. Chicago Public Schools no longer has a “personnel” department. Over the past five years, the department in charge of doing that stuff has been called “Human Resources,” then “Human Capital” and (today at least), “Talent.” When I asked the person in charge why it had become the “talent” office just when we were getting used to “human capital” Alicia Winckler told me it was a “rebranding.”
2. Although Chicago has specialized in rebranding various bureaucratic departments in many ways, my favorite for the past year or so has been the fact that Chicago has a CHIEF OFFICER FOR INNOVATION AND INCUBATION. That’s a guy named Jack Elsey, who, like most of the executives currently at the top in the nation’s third largest school system, was imported to CPS from another state (in Elsey’s case, Michigan). CPS also has a CHIEF TRANSFORMATION OFFICER, but I promised to limit myself to two for this morning, so we’ll talk about him later.
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Human Resources –> Human Capital –> Talent –> Soylent Red –> Soylent Yellow — Soylent Green
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aw crap my last arrow’s just an em-dash.
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Why no Chief Preservation of What is Good Officer?
Why no Chief Conservation Officer?
I love how “talent” strips out the human element. “Personnel” had “person” in it. “Human Resources” and “Human Capital” –both chillier terms –still had the “human” in them.
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Great George. Now the next step is to persuade a gaggle of those great Chicago teacher’s union participants and advocates to start wearing their neon greens to Board of Ed meetings!
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You really need to see and hear David Coleman’s “no one really gives a sh–” comment
to experience its full effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbDpvqiqK-w#t=46
Here are some comments responding to this video… located elsewhere on Dr. Ravitch’s blog:
at:
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NY teacher
August 31, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Educational war crime. That phrase sums it all up for me.
So let me see. My wife and kids, they don’t give a shit about what I feel or think. My friends and neighbors don’r give a shit about my thoughts or emotions. My students don’t give a shit about what I feel or think. My principal and colleagues doesn’t give a shit either. So, what do they care about? What I do? And if my actions require no thinking (like a thoughtful lesson, or a thoughtful gift for my daughter) than what is Coleman really implying?
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Alabama teacher
August 31, 2013 at 7:53 pm
BINGO!!! I’ll take empathy over high test scores any day!
Except for the fact that I don’t want the likes of him near my first graders, I’d love to watch Coleman try to successfully teach Language Arts using some of the one size fits all CC ELA Standards to my first graders.
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Michael Fiorillo
September 2, 2013 at 8:44 am
It’s simple to prove Mr. Coleman wrong on this one, from within the very field that he (falsely) claims expertise, namely, education.
After all, It’s apparent that Coleman and other so-called education reformers really give a shit what Bill Gates thinks and feels.
And that’s what they’re intent on burying us in…
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I cannot bear to look at this smarmy know-nothing who presumes to dictate to every teacher, curriculum coordinator, education scholar and researcher, and curriculum developer in the country. Sickening. If there were a measure for co-incidence of arrogance and ignorance, it would be called the Coleman.
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The Coleman: this could go somewhere, Robert. And might we also have “the colemicht maneuver”?
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I think of the Common Core in ELA as like a national spill of treacle. We are all–students, teachers, curriculum developers–squirming in it like flies.
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He is a no talent thought leader. He is a master of empty thinklets.
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Laura,
“He is a master of empty thinklets.”
This one needs to be nominated for quip of the year!
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What a pity. Coleman is a bright fellow, and I actually like a FEW of his ideas, but he’s extremely callow, and he doesn’t know this, and he has had great power and authority (and a lot of money) delegated to him by a junta. He’s like one of those rock stars who becomes a multimillionaire by the time he or she is 13 and thinks, as a result, that he or she is some sort of God.
The thing that is unforgivable is that Coleman should think that he has the right to serve as absolute monarch of instruction in the English language arts in the United States–the right to overrule every other teacher, administrator, scholar, researcher, and curriculum developer with regard to what learning progressions we should follow, what we should measure, how our standards should be formulated, and so on. Much of his list is hackneyed, unimaginative, and prescientific. And one could drive whole curricula of enormous value through the lacunae in that list. The CCSS in ELA is puerile crap, hacked together overnight by an amateur based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state “standards.”
WE DID NOT APPOINT HIM monarch of the English language arts. We did make him the decider for the rest of us.
Gates and Achieve did.
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So well written!
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One of the comments on Lovell’s blog sang the praises of California’s implementation of Common Core, highlighting our union’s efforts to train teachers to teach the standards. This is what I responded:
I’m a CA teacher who doesn’t share Dean Vogel’s [California Teachers Association president] optimism. I’m very skeptical that CTA or anyone else knows how to teach these standards. What most trainings I’ve seen boil down to is: have the kids practice the skills enumerated in the standards. So if the skill is “can read complex text”, you have the kid read complex texts. Sounds plausibly effective, but is it? I don’t think so. If the standard were “plays Carnegie Hall” the path to reaching that goal would not be to sit the six-year old on the stage in Carnegie Hall. The path there would be long, tortuous and very indirect. Similarly with these CCSS standards: to be able to read a wide-range of complex texts, you need to know a lot of words. To know a lot of words, you need to know a lot about the world to which words refer. Ergo the best way to teach complex text reading is to teach a well-rounded knowledge-rich curriculum –exactly what the best schools have done since the Renaissance! But preserving a tried-and-true old method does not fit Silicon Valley’s genius paradigm of eternal “creative disruption”. The old is, by definition, in need of destruction; it is never good and worthy of preservation.
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I plan to invest in some neon green shoelaces. LOL.
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I always wear my neon greens. Always.
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Thanks for re-posting this graphic essay, Diane. It’s always an honor to me to have the assistance of your impressively far reaching megaphone. As I mentioned to you in an earlier email, I’m working now on a graphic essay about the publicly funded charter school movement. I regret that I write so slowly, but I WILL get there “by and by.” Thanks again for your kind and generous comments about what I have written, small though my output has been.
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TAGO, Jonathan, for the post. Like the various links embedded.
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Thanks so much, Diane. Given the appalling language of Judge Treu’s recent Vergara decision,I don’t know if my graphic essay is a great *enough* observation for enough thoughtful citizens. I take heart in recalling Thurber’s “The Owl Who Was God,” however, and recalling that while many today can cite his concluding ‘moral for our time’ that “you can fool too many of the people too much of the time,” not many can recall the particular “owls” and “forest folk” who inspired his wonderfully well-written ‘modern fable.’
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