Jeff Bryant notices an interesting new phenomenon: Corporate reformers have dropped their triumphalist tone, and now they want to have a “conversation.” But the curious aspect to their concept is that the conversation they want begins with their assumptions about the value of charters, vouchers, collective bargaining, and tenure. As he shows, their “conversation” doesn’t involve actual classroom teachers or parent activists working to improve their public school. It typically means a “bipartisan” agreement between people who work in DC think tanks or veterans of the Bush and Obama administrations or grantees of the billionaire foundations promoting privatization.
In short, the “new” conversation isn’t new at all. It is a shiny new echo chamber where the voices of working teachers (not counting TFA and AstroTurf groups like Educators4Excellence and TeachPlus and others created and funded by Gates, Broad, and Walton) will not be heard.
A real conversation includes the voices of those who know the most about schools and teaching and learning: real working classroom teachers, as well as those who know the most about children, their parents. If the reformers listened to these voices, they would quickly learn that those who are most closely involved in education are not part of the Beltway consensus.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In other words, the corporate manufactured fake-education reformers are creating a directed and controlled conversation for release to the public that is nothing but propaganda that will further their profit-driven, Machiavellian agenda.
To get a better idea of how this is done, I recommend an award winning documentary called “Hot Coffee: Is Justice Being Served.”
You can see it free on YouTube or buy it on Amazon to have your own DVD copy of it to share. We have the DVD and watched it last night. If you watch it, you will discover how corporations are controlling the conversation and fooling people. The same methods revealed in this documentary are being used to destroy democratic public education. This isn’t new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx7jAop3srA
During the documentary, a familiar name will pop up: Karl Rove, who is one of the infamous players in the fake education reform movement.
If you are unaware of Rove’s role in the fake education reform movement, read his March 2010 OpEd in The Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704743404575127993688253292
Or this from a chronology of Karl Rove’s Life and Political Career: “In 1993, he [Rove] again urges George W. Bush … [to] run on four major issues: juvenile justice, tort reorm, welfare reform, and education.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/architect/rove/cron.html
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Thanks Diane!
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For whoever’s keeping the rephormy dictionary:
“Conversation” means simmer down and listen to your betters, will ya?
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There is not a new conversation, just fresh flows of money into a propaganda campaign intent on overriding the well-founded criticisms of many parents, teachers, researchers, and students of politics and policy who will not be sold any more baloney about “it’s all for the children.”
I spent some time looking at and deconstructing the newest well-funded propaganda website Education Post, created to provide work for a bunch of people connected with Arne Duncan in his Chicago days and some revolving door USDE hands in messaging.
Pretty amazing. They are also pushing the shared agenda of their billionaire funders.
This is what they say about the CCSS: ”….education leaders and experts from nearly every state” developed the common set of high learning standards known as the Common Core, “with feedback from thousands of principals, teachers, parents, and community members.” “That’s how the Common Core State Standards were developed, and that’s what they are about.”
.
I played a deconstruction game with their “conversational language.” This was a simple matter of looking at the unstated claims and meanings activated by the explicit messages.. Linguists call this looking for the implicit framing.” Writers for the Education Post rely on implicit caricatures of teachers and schools. Here are a few of examples.
Too many teachers and other educators don’t want to change. They want the status quo or to live in the past. They lack the courage and stamina to change. They don’t care if our children fall behind instead of keeping up with our changing world.
Too many teachers do not love learning. They cannot model that love for students. Too many have not mastered their subject matter, are unwilling or unable to motivate every student. Too many are stuck in old-fashioned ways, unwilling to ask for help, deny they need it, teach in the same way year after year., are thin-skinned if they are given “feedback” from people who have better ideas.
Leaders in and out of education know what is needed for us “to get better to compete and succeed in the global economy.” Any other narrative is dishonest, false, garbled, and noisy political game-playing.
Leaders with the right answers are not being heard. They have not had ample opportunity to speak up and tell us the truth, partner with others, plan strategies for getting the “best results for every student.”
Charter schools are public schools that offer high quality education, offer innovative programs that traditional public schools do not because they are “one-size-fits-all” schools and never offer choices to parents. ( Not one mention of for- profit charters).
After awhile this exercise bored me. The Education Post experts in communication have a limited vocabulary, refer to “setting a high bar,” and “roadmaps,” and “parent choice,” refer to unnamed “leaders” who have all the answers, and so on.
That is to say nothing about statements that suggest the communication experts are grammatically/ syntactically challenged. My favorite:
“Our families need a roadmap to success for their child.”
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Bryant is correct. The conversation is disingenuous. Process, in my opinion:
First, reformers have established and entrenched all of their ideas (charters, VAMS, vouchers in some places, CCSS).
Second, those reforms have not changed the results much. Some places (like Wash DC) have changed their formulas in unsatisfying ways to reformers. So the reforms haven’t really worked.
Third, but the reforms are here so let’s talk about them and compromise. We can have a conversation so we can keep what we like and actually get you reasonable people to meet us halfway on stuff you never agreed with.
I equate it to haggling on a price for a house as such: I offer a house at a slightly inflated price of $150,000 (hoping for $140,000). The reformer offers $10,000. I say no. They say that a compromise would be fine. How about $80,000. It’s halfway! That’s fair!
Uh, no.
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This may be a response to Gov. Jindal’s Common Core lawsuit in Louisiana against the corporations, I mean the Feds. The “conversation” has already moved to the federal courts. That is the only thing that gets their attention, like when JP Morgan was dragged there kicking, they wanted a “conversation” too.
We may actually be thanking the Tea Party soon, since the Dems. are out to lunch.
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There is no such thing as “conversation” with the vicious reformers. They remind me too much of the fable, “The Scorpion and the Frog”.
“A scorpion asks a frog to carry him over a river. The frog is afraid of being stung during the trip, but the scorpion argues that if it stung the frog, both would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog agrees and begins carrying the scorpion, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature. The fable is used to illustrate the position that no change can be made in the behaviour of the fundamentally vicious.”
Need it be more truthful and blatant than the above fable. The “conversation” is the eventually sting from those who want to do away with the public school system in the most surreptitious manner possible.
I would say to the “reformers”, TOO LATE for this conversation. Your days are numbered.
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“Convers
ations”Conversations, like conversions
Are sometimes just diversions
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SDP,
How do you get the “strike through” (or whatever it’s called) letters?
TIA!
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I would slightly amend Jeff Bryant’s comment by stating that, IMHO, current difficulties (e.g., think LAUSD and iPads, or the growing resistance to high-stakes standardized testing) have caused a large swath of the self-styled “education reform” movement to remind their compatriots that they need to appear more open-minded and conciliatory in public. But this is not completely new.
Think back to Arne Duncan’s speech of April 2013 to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
First of all, note the title: “Choosing the Right Battles: Remarks and a Conversation.”
Sounds all dialogue-y and touchy-feely and welcoming, dontcha think? Let’s hold hands, work together, talk to each other, for the sake of the kids!
😚
Second, I have remarked previously on this blog regarding Duncan’s amazing threefer: he declared himself steadfastly for and against and somewhat for & somewhat against high-stakes standardized testing. Three, three, three positions in one!
😏
All the while hectoring some of his most cogent and well known critics in that very audience—
That they had better get off their collective tuchus and help him get high-stakes standardized testing right! After all, in his words [ok, to be honest, those of his speechwriter]: “It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as ‘below basic’ or ‘I’m a one out of four.’”
😱
So all that peace-and-good-fellowship talk was really about demanding that others explain how to make his failed policies and initiatives work. Wow! Talk about being out of touch…
😏
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
This latest round is just another variation of inviting those outside the education establishment to come up with a silver bullet or magic elixir that will make right what they, the self-styled leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time,” have done wrong.
😲
Ain’t gonna happen.
No matter how hasty they act or double they speak or frenetically they churn out the slogans, they should have paid attention to what a real numbers/stats guy said:
“Insanity: do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” [Albert Einstein]
😎
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Yes
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“Beltway consensus” is a good catch phrase that people who believe public Ed should work into mainstream conversation (actual conversation) as pejorative.
It is time to hit back with the same type sound bytes that got us into the mess. Back them into a corner in their own game. Because there are children to teach and this whole reformer game is very distracting!!
Beltway consensus. . . A dirty phrase in education.
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If the good folks who coined the terms “rheeform” and “rheely” (KrazyTA?) will humor me and allow me to use my poetic license and add an another “m” it would be much appreciated
“Education Rheemform”
Rheemformers aren’t democratic
Imposing their decrees
They aren’t even diplomatic
And clip you at the knees
Rheemformers rheem their rheemforms through
And won’t respond to reason
They rheemform me and rheemform you
There’s rheely no appeasin’
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SDP,
It seems that there were quite a number of folks here who were playing around with the “pre-fix (DEI) (DEI again) rhee” as it lends itself to much verbal fun and machinations. KTA has taken it not to the next level but to the 50th floor just as you do with your poems!!! Paraphrasing KTA “Keep writing ’em and I’ll keep enjoying ’em”
But beware that the Rheeject is actually (or at least according to that little birdie that keeps on flying around out here buzzing me) an agent of the North Korean Spy Agency who has been trained to destroy the American Education System to help take down that capitalist dog of a nation so that NK may rightly take its place as top dog of the world (even though its just rug rat sized-perfectly sized to be a soccer ball ).
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SomeDAM Poet: I forget who coined “rheeform” and “rheephorm” but I think I was the first to use—
Rheeally!
Really!
😜
But now, with rebranding setting us all a tingle, I usually write—
Rheeally. In a Johnsonally sort of way… [suggested by the good Señor Swacker]
You see, I’m all about being fair and balanced, and because Michelle Rhee now wants to be called Michelle Rhee-Johnson, what can I do but honor her wishes? And there’s a greater principle at work here. You see, it’s all about doing bidness the bidness way, being in it to win it, so when I see her modulating and recalibrating her Rheeality Distortion Field so that she’s doin’ her bidness on herself, what can I do but poke fun…
😳
I stop here so as not to violate Diane’s quite sensible ‘Rules of the Road’ for this blog.
But who can blame Michelle R-J? She’s done her homework. Studied Arne Duncan’s spell binding address to the 2013 AERA annual meeting. Done a serious CCSS reading of the 1-page coloring book entitled “The Collected Wit and Wisdom of Bill Gates.” Read one or two of the Greek classics in Cliff Notes form. Immersed herself in the writings of the “thought leaders” of other times and places like, er, Kim Jong Un on the moral dimensions of leadership and Stalin on the 13 to 90 principles of $ucce$$. She considers herself quite the well-rounded education rheephormer.
And without meaning to, turned into the poster child for what a very old and very dead and very Greek guy said:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
😏
Well, in conclusion, I would try to match wits with you, but I am know I am outgunned. I wouldn’t want you to repeat Henny Youngman’s bit:
“You have a ready wit. Tell me when it’s ready.”
But no matter; I’m a big fan of yours.
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
😎
P.S. But Bob Shepherd definitely coined “rheephormish” for the eduspeak of the edufrauds. See his online definitions.
P.P.S. If you ever need a renewal of your Poetic License, I know a rheeal good online academy that, er, isn’t too strict about qualifications although I must warn you the owner is a convicted felon and former junk bond king. But he’s wonderful when it comes to fact and fiction and letting both—in tandem or separately—run amok, because he can’t tell the difference between the two.
Makes ₵ent¢, don’t ya think?
😳
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Duane and KrazyTA
I suspected there were probably many who had come up with “Variations on a Theme by Rhee” (best played on kazoos made from rolled up hundred dollar bills)
There are lots of very creative thinkers here (something the rheemformers obviously just hate and are trying to stamp out) and lots of inspiration to be had from you and all the others who comment.
With such good material, the poems basically write themselves (serheeously)
And in my opinion, the poems are not even 1/100 as goofy as the people and actions they represent.
“Rheeformland” makes Alice’s Wonderland look pretty normal (with some obvious overlap) — a veritable goldmine for goofy poems.
As they say, truth is goofier than fiction.
PS I print out my own poetic license (the only way I’d ever get one)
PPS I’m not a real poet. Just a Rheeal on — and a DAM one 🙂
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PPS
Duane,
to get the
strike throughuse [strike]text to strike[/strike]
but with the html angle brackets rather than square.
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PPPS
KrazyTA
Rheeality Distortion Field (!!)
That’s gotta be used in a poem, if’n you don’t mind
Rheeality Distortion Field
Is rheeally quite amazing
The outcome that it yields
Is gibberish rheephrasing
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