Those who follow the twists and turns of the “reform ” movement are aware of a growing number of books that exposé the false narrative of reform. The reform narrative is funded by billionaires and philanthropists who believe in the free market and scorn government regulation. It fastens on genuine problems–like the low performance of children who live in poverty–and blames their teachers rather than the poverty that limits their opportunity. The reformers divert their eyes from poverty, segregation, budget cuts, and loss of vital services. What began, arguably, as a well-intentioned effort to shake up schools and unleash innovation has now become a vehicle for privatization of the public schools.
The struggle to save public education will require an informed public. Only an informed public will have the motivation to vote for representatives to defend what belongs to the entire community and to stop the headlong rush to consumerism. Fortunately, teachers and other educators are publishing books to tell the story. The blogosphere and social media have become invaluable means of democratic communication, enabling dissenters from top-down reform to meet and exchange ideas and information.
Videos are appearing too, to get the story to the public. It is not easy for them to get on television or to be distributed commercially. Unlike the charter propaganda “Waiting for Superman,” or “Won’t Back Down,” the films that exposé the dark side of the testing and privatization movement do not have the support of billionaires.
Here are a few of the recent must-see videos that challenge the corporate reform movement.
Vicki Abeles’ “Race to Nowhere” makes the case against high-stakes testing and shows how it distorts the lives of adolescents. Abeles has taken the film to churches, synagogues, community centers across the nation, wherever she can show it.
The film “Rise Above the Mark” was written and produced by educators in West Lafayette, Indiana. It shows what high-stakes testing is doing to the children, teachers, and schools. It is a powerful film.
Daniel Hornberger’s “Standardized” shows how standardized testing is ruining education. The subtitle is, fittingly, “Lies, Money, and Civil Rights: How Testing Is Ruining Public Education.” It includes interviews with prominent educators who denounce the standardization that is now imposed by the federal and state governments.
One of the first videos was released in 2011. “The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman,'” depicts the battle in New York City against corporate education reform, with parents and teachers fighting fruitlessly to save their schools from closure against an unhearing may orally-controlled board. The film was created by a team of teachers and parents called the Grassroots Education Movement.
There are others, and I welcome readers to submit additions to this list. And more are on the way. Help me compile a list of videos that challenge the dominant narrative that fills the airwaves and is destroying public schools, hurting children, dissolving communities, and opening new frontiers for corporate profit.
Many of these films are online for free or the producers will send a video for a nominal fee. Consider showing these films at your next parent and/or teacher meeting. Be informed. There can be no democratic debate when only one side can afford to present its views on television and in commercial films.
I recommend watching Glen Ford’s “The Corporate Assault on Public Education”
Also, for insights on what happened to civil rights leaders in this era, see Ford’s “The Black Mis-Leadership Class”
Don’t forget David Sirota’s youtube video on Education “Reform”:
In St. Louis, there is a remarkable writer named Peter Downs. The St. Louis public schools had a superintendent (Roberti) in 2004 who was paid 5 million dollars to turn around the schools…the board was dominated by hand-picked members of the mayor. The mayor and a billionaire backer named Rex Sinquefield had a charter agenda….Peter Downs ran for the school board, and within two years, there was a new majority which did not jump when told to jump, not did they even want to know how high? They were replaced…not by the voters…..but by the wealthy and powerful who were able to engineer the state takeover.
As early as 2005…before he was elected….Scientology and the Schools
by Peter Downs Saint Louis Schools Watch
September 22, 2005 — A controversy over sending St. Louis Public School teachers to a training program connected to the Church of Scientology underscores a major flaw in the federal No Child Left Behind Act: rigorous performance standards for public schools, but none for private companies that are supposed to repair the failures.
The controversy began to simmer before Labor Day when approximately two dozen teachers from Fanning and Long middle schools were sent for training to the Spanish Lake headquarters of Applied Scholastics International.
Some of the teachers complained to their union — the St. Louis Teachers and School-Related Personnel Union, American Federation of Teachers Local 420 — that the program is run by the Church of Scientology. Local 420 President Mary Armstrong and First Vice President Byron Clemons took the complaints about the workshops, Clemons called them “Church of Scientology workshops,”
That is from his school watch site, which is defunct, but is still there, and is a remarkable history of what went on as the Mayor shoved slps into the charter arena…http://pubdef.net/slswatch/archives/2005_10_01_slswatch_archive.html
I want to follow this with links to his later writing……
Yeah, YouTube has a number of insightful videos, including “US and Finnish Educational Reform Trajectories: A Comparison” (also look for some there by Pasi Sahlberg)
“Educational Reforms | The Flaws of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top”
superman runs a con…review in the beacon, taken over by public radio, a place which bars my comments….good ole days…https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/17592/superman_runs_a_con
http://books.google.com/books/about/Schoolhouse_Shams.html?id=cmiYWCp_cnsC
basic handbook….Written by a parent and school board member, who first embraced many of the ideas of the modern school reform movement, Schoolhouse Shams lays bare much of the mythology and misinformation that underpin many of the failed school reform policies of the last decade. Many of the top strategies of the highly publicized school reform movement already have been tried out in St. Louis with disastrous results. Along with demonstrating the failure of school reform prescriptions to improve education, the experience of St. Louis demonstrates that the ideological premise of the reform movement, that a focus on providing opportunities for private profit-taking will necessarily improve schools, is both wrong and conflicts with the ideals of democracy, accountability, and justice.
review by a good reporter of his work..published before public radio took over.https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/30002/peter_downs_book_032213
The Post Dispatch ran this article last autumn…now they must wonder….why did we let this voice of sanity appear on our Blame the teachers news page?
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/school-performance-reviews-mislead/article_614b3d59-78d9-52f3-88b7-8ad674f868f2.html
There is more from him…I beg you, Diane….get in touch with him…..this is a very brilliant man….
Inequality for All – Robert Reich documentary.
Inequality for all.com
“What’s Wrong with the Punitive Education Reform Movement”
“Defies Measurement” will be available this Fall… featuring our very own: Diane Ravitch:). 226 individuals supported the production of this film through contributions to a successful Kickstarter campaign. Check out the website to learn more about the film, and to watch a clip.
http://www.shineonpro.com
One of my colleagues watched Blackboard Jungle (c 1955) and noticed that the issues in the movie haven’t changed. She has been teaching for 38 years and laughed about the movie’s message about student “engagement.” Still an issue in 2014.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Excellent doc out of Colorado’s Douglas County called “The Reformers”.
http://reformersmovie.com
Great doc out of Colorado’s Douglas County called “The Reformers”.
http://reformersmovie.com
The problem with getting parents informed is that teachers are sometimes not allowed to TELL parents anything. In Utah, we’re threatened with our licenses if we tell parents about opting out of the testing or concerns about the testing.
Three Mom’s created a great blog in your state. Here is the link:
http://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/
Yep, and they’re dismissed as crazy by most people. So much for that.
Howard Gardner, Noam Chomsky and Bruno della Chiesa on “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
One of the best quotes from this comes from Bruno della Chiesa,
“What Feiere tells us today… is that we are spoon-fed a trinity where the father is the capital, the messiah is the market and the holy spirit is the free enterprise. And we are spoon-fed this on a daily basis, by the media, by everything –remember Noam’s “manufacturing consent”– to agree with this… There IS an alternative and certainly several”
And here is video on Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”
Tom and Amy Valens have two must-see documentaries: August to June, and the 10-part series A Year at Mission Hill (soon to be full length feature). Watch here:
and here:
The short documentary “Protecting Public Education” was produced by high school students. It features footage of Diane Ravitch, shot during her visit to Sacramento in 2013. A version of this film won Third Prize in the C-SPAN StudentCam Contest.
I can’t wait to see all these! How great to have them in one place. Add the documentary “Go Public: A Day in the Life of an American School System.” It will be shown at Occidental College in Los Angeles on Sept. 17.
“Mark Pocan – Explains how ALEC is working to eliminate public education:”
“Labor, Privatization And How To Defend Public Education: SF Forum”
Great one here, starting with quote from Diane: “Corporate Shills, Propaganda And The Media Agenda For Education Privatization with Adam Bessie”
Here is “The Corporate Privatization Raiders Destroying Public Education & Our Unions by Danny Weil”
This is a very insightful video. I know we should not be surprised that privatizing public education has been going on in the UK, too, but I did not realize they had a leg up on us, until I read Stephen Ball’s book Education PLC: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education from 2007, which Danny Weil refers to in this video. You can find it on Amazon. It’s like the privatization playbook of neoliberals from abroad.
Just to clarify, Ball reported on how privatization has been working in the UK; I don’t think he was advocating for that. But it looks like the corporate reformers here have copied virtually all of their strategies. It’s rather expensive to purchase, so just use Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature:
I immediately thought of my nephew’s wife when I read some of what Steven Ball was saying….her book has been highly praised, and was the basis for some high level discussion…she has written a lot…follow the money…sarah reckhow….http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199937738.do
As Danny Weil said, K12 must unite with higher education because corporate education “reform” is going on there as well.
See Henry Giroux: “On The Corporatization of American Education”
Since this video is rather dated, here is more recent info, “Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Democracy”
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23306-neoliberalisms-war-on-democracy
Wow . . .
Diane never quits, does she?
Thank goodness!
Well, here’s an amazing film that will enfuriate all of you, and it shows a country that was agrarian, POOR, and developing just 60 years ago, has become a leader in technology and biology research with a superb, high quality public education system that beats the pants off what has become, thanks to assh______ like Arne Duncan, a two tier system that is racing quickly to nowhere.
But please keep in mind that Finland also has a different system of income distribution, public commons, military priorities, healthcare, and standardized tests. And Obama and his cabana boy Arne really thought THEY were going to admire and defer to FInland to help out the dis-United States? Really? Obama, Duncan, and Broad: Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest . . . And now we add Dumbbell Brown to the mix. She has as much journalistic depth as the magazine “Seventeen”.
The narrator of the film is a little whiny know-it-all from Harvard, but I found it very curious that while he exquisitely details the FInnish public eduation system, he talks almost nothing about the rest of their evenly distributed society and how they have a balanced system of who earns and keeps, what, how and why . . .
We cannot cherry pick 2 or 3 components of a society and graft them onto ours, thinking it will revolutionize what we are told ails us unless we are willing to look and consider that society’s entire gestalt . . . and ours, for that matter.
And these fools in D.C. put out the rhetoric that Obama is a socialist.
I WISH Obama were a socialist. He is quite the contrary.
Anyway, sit back, enjoy, and fume:
This is a couple years old but still relevant: “Charters, Privatization of Education & The Gulen Schools In The US”
Union “educators” in the public school systems today seem to have more excuses for their failure than Carter had liver pills. Any chance they’ll ever accept responsibility for their own actions?
Doubtful. Much easier for them to keep crying “gimme, gimme” over and over again.
There is an achievement gap between low income and higher income students in ALL countries: http://www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievement-gaps-gains-american-students/
Stop scapegoating American teachers and stop letting.politicians and billionaires off the hook for not mediating poverty and not providing jobs with livable wages. Teachers alone cannot fix poverty!
“Teachers: Scapegoats of Public Education”
Ken Meyer, and what about the states that don’t permit unions? Are the teachers also saying “gimme, gimme”? Must be those easy jobs, where they Re overpaid for bankers’ hours. Wasn’t it the Gates-Scholastic survey that said the average teacher works 11 hours a day? Don’t bankers?
Canada is copying America’s neoliberal corporate education “reform” strategies, including scapegoating teachers. Listen to how the defender of those policies uses much of the same lingo as our own government “reformers”:
“PC Government is Making Teachers Scapegoats for Problems They Created”
“The Truth About Teachers”
“The Attack on Public Education”
Diane, you say, “The reform narrative is funded by billionaires and philanthropists who believe in the free market and scorn government regulation.” What free market? Government schools don’t offer a free market. They provide for fascism, crony-capitalism. Or, you could have outright communism, no free market, no private business, no crony capitalism, only crony aparatchics. I abhor the influence of billionaires and philanthropists as much as you do, but that doesn’t mean I want government owned and operated curriculum and assessment producers.
“Obama Ramps Up Bush’s No Child Left Behind Policy & the Privatizing of Education 1/3”
Monte,
Public schools are one of the essential institutions of a free and democratic society. They were created by local communities to educate their children, as weighty a responsibility as paying for a fire department or a police department. Schools are a public service. Every single one of the world’s high performing nations has a public school system, not charters or vouchers.
“Race to the Top : Obama’s War on Public Education 1/2”
“Race to the Top : Obama’s War on Public Education 2/2”
Popular Diane Ravitch Videos
“Standardized” is being shown at the NJEA Summer Leadership Conference this week. It is a must-see! I think the final showing is tonight. Any members who are at SLC, go!