In part 1, we learned that Forbers asked a group of billionaires how to fix American education. In this installment, a group of leaders review the billionaires’ agenda.
“In our last installment, Forbes called a summit of Many Very Rich People to lay out what it would cost to fulfill the Must Have list for remaking American education. Now, we’re going to sit around with some alleged representatives of education stakeholders. And we should note that it’s happening in the department of Forbes.
“Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I’ll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can’t bring myself to go there.”
So here are the billionaires’ five Big Ideas:
“1) Teacher efficacy– recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K– because childhood is too long
3) School leadership– give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning– broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness– insert all classic baloney arguments here”
What do our leaders think? They love the Big Ideas. But they have different timelines and slightly different strategies.
Take Cuomo, for example:
“Cuomo observes that he didn’t get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody’s money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn’t had any problems since. Money buys compliance!”
Here are Kaya Henderson and Arne Duncan:
“Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
“It’s true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states’ school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Again, as stated before….how about the upper 5% just quit keeping 95% of the profits and let me “trickle down” to the 95% of the employees, that are actually doing 95% of the work???? As long as unregulated capitalism allows upper-level managers and administrators to “earn” 95% of the profits (essentially devaluing the work of the “lower” 95%) then the majority will always struggle with making a living-wage and being able to provide for their children the educational materials and services that can empower them to do better.
Inequitable wage distribution, due to unjust salaries, is one of the primary factors in why certain “classes” perform lower in education (if test scores are a real measure of learning, or of what is valuable in pedagogy).
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Where are you getting this idea that the top 5% of companies’ employees are paid 95% of the all salary paid out?
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Yes, I’m exaggerating but possibly not that much. In general, upper level management makes disproportionally more. I believe in the biblical concept that any organization (church or corporation) is like a body, full of interdependent and equal parts. The brain does not tell the little toe that it is a “lesser part”, because without it the body would not function as well. So, analogically, CEO should not make 1000 X more than “lower level” employees, for their jobs are equally important. How to really flesh out this idealism I have (and what the Creator requires of business owners and managers: a just and living wage for their employees) is a “moving target”. Yet, I do believe just like we seek a fair minimum wage, there should be a fair maximum wage/salary (too avoid too much wealth going to the too few).
Grace
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Dunno. Might be the CEOs Mercedes. Another measure is how many more times a CEO compensation package measures compared to median employee. The variance.
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There’s no question that CEOs of large corporations in the US have extraordinarily high compensation relative to the vast majority of employees. I was quibbling with the assertion that the top 5% of employees receive 95% of all the salary that companies pay out. When you consider how large the workforces are at the companies with stratospheric executive pay, it’s clear that the 5%-95% figure can’t be remotely accurate.
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Excellent job of revealing the stupidity of billionaires. Eric Hanuschek, the economist famous for long inferential leaps through thin air should be held responsible for the accuracy of every one of his absurd predictions that make the fate of this economy seem to depend on the test scores of kids. He seems to think that the deep plunge of the global economy in 2008 was a direct result of the test scores of kids and the “failure” of school accountability measures. Anyone who trusts an economist on educational policy and remedies for American education is engaged in a massive campaign to distract attention from the persistent inequities in the larger society, corruption on Wall street, and any scrutiny of their efforts to privatize all public assets and kill of participatory democracy in favor of a feudal system of Lords and Ladies who command the wealth to make others serfs.
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I never noticed it before but it;s kind of amusing how Democrats have adopted the GOP line on NCLB.
Duncan says the reason NCLB didn’t work is because those “politicians” he so abhors lowered standards.
My understanding of NCLB was it was a set of standards but the money to make them feasible was spent on a laundry list of ed reform experiments instead of anything practical and applicable to an actual existing public school. Sort of like his RttT.
I’m glad we’re all in agreement on NCLB! The mediocre people who were supposed to do it right screwed it up
Them. Again. They can’t do anything right 🙂
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The 2001 NCLB act was a very poorly crafted law for a number of reasons. It was the first mandated use of standardized tests scores to threaten and punish individual schools. It was actually an elementary/middle level, math and ELA program evaluation for Title 1 schools. It was not originally used to threaten and punish individual teachers. That came only during our current NCLB waiver period.
The NCLB act was a bi-partisan approach to school reform, spearheaded by both George Bush and Ted Kennedy. The NCLB act (the latest incantation of the ESEA) indirectly rewarded weak standards and especially, promoted the development of very easy standardized tests. The law required individual states to develop standards in math, ELA, and science, and required states to develop their own standardized tests to measure student proficiency. Schools that failed to meet federally established AYP goals were punished with public announcements in the form of school report cards, the scarlet label of SINI status, and were required to jump through a lot of ridiculous hoops in order to repent for their academic deficiencies. AYP had to be met with each particualr racial or ethnic sub-group of 30 students or more. Failure to achieve AYP in just one sub-group for consecutive years was enough to place a school into SINI status (School In Need of Improvement). Progress (improved test scores) had to be shown from year to year, unfairly comparing different cohorts. This was particularly problematic in schools with sub-groups with small sample sizes; schools where one member of a sub-group would represent 3% of the entire group of 30.
The USDOE essentially said to each of the 50 different state ed departments: You must administer math and ELA tests to all students in grades 3 to 8 annually. If students do not show yearly progress, we will call you out publicly and punish your poor performing Title 1 schools by giving you lots of extra required work; we may even withhold federal funds. Oh and by the way you get to write the tests that students must pass to avoid the humiliation, extra work, and possible defunding. NCLB thus de-incentivized states from writing reasonably challenging standards and especially encouraged the development of tests that were easy to pass, and easy to test-prep for.
The most absurd aspect of the NCLB act was the AYP requirement of 100% proficiency by the year 2014. An impossible demand that not a single state could meet. Enter Arne Duncan, Race to the Top, and the NCLB waiver plan which brought us CC standards, CC assessments, CC test scores used to evaluate individual teachers, and the harvesting of student test data. And so we sit here stuck under the weight of the 2001 NCLB act that Congress has (since 2007) refused to re-write/re-authorize or repeal.
There are some strong hints that an all Republican Congress is finally ready to take action by re-writing the NCLB act which could potentially change the education landscape, that is if Obama doesn’t veto the new (and improved?) version, which has been promised for delivery in early 2015.
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I think ed reformers have an informal agreement, an understanding.
One group doesn’t criticize the other groups. The RttT group can’t contradict the NCLB group, so they all just blame these mysterious “politicians” who somehow threw a wrench into what was a brilliant plan.
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Here is an excerpt from one of the critical comments in the Forbes Article itself
OK, time to destroy another hack…
“When you look at massive public spending areas, defense keeps us safe and health care keeps us alive, but it’s education alone that has the promise of a numeric return on a collective investment.”
Nope. Defense doesn’t keep us safe anymore; it is simply a policy tool for messing with other nations and creating jobs for the military-industrial complex. If defense keeps us safe, then why have the GRU/DHS? Health care does not keep us alive; all it does is kill our wallets, and eventually our health. Health care starts in the home with diet, hygiene, sanitation, and exercise, not in the ER or pharmacy. Education does not offer a return on a “collective investment” because it is no such thing as “collective investment” in the first place; public education is funded by theft and force, and the return is not one of the collective but of individual efforts, often in spite of a badly flawed and broken system. But for the purpose of this argument, we’ll assume that the author actually didn’t flunk basic civics and give him a pass on collectivist nonsense.
“As in, exactly what should we be investing in?”
We should be investing in our own children to get them the best preparation possible for adult life, and that is NOT accomplished within the structured rigors of a classroom environment because it has zero reflection on the real world. The real world doesn’t run on that system, period.
“This effort brought together an all-star lineup of education policy experts, who identified five policies that, if fully implemented, could each vault results into the top five (and if undertaken together, would surely take us to number one): teacher efficacy, universal pre-K, Common Core standards, blended learning (incorporating technology into how students are taught) and school leadership (training and empowering principals).”
OK, let’s look at these five, after disregarding the “education policy experts” as abstraction wonks because they lack the most important people in a child’s education, parents and the children themselves, who are not cogs in a machine.
However, none of these five address the ultimate question: how to better educate the kids. Instead these areas try to address how to more efficiently run the schools. Yes, the idea of better educating the kids may fall out of these, but only as a side effect, not *as the primary goal*. Therein lies the problem, along with trying to continue the mistake of top-down education, instead of what actually works, which is bottoms-up, from the local level. The issue is not what the schools need, but what the *kids* need.
Going further:
Teacher efficacy: level of college graduation doesn’t mean much in a classroom environment. How big is the class size? What kind of class is it and at what level? What are the students’ aptitudes and attitudes? Can the teacher reach them to spark their creative juices and knowledge development *at their level*? That’s where the rubber hits the road, and simply trying to draw in higher graduates with more money (and how to pay for it? Hedge funds? Please be realistic!) misses the mark, because the best teachers are those that aren’t in it for the money but do it because they love the job and love working with kids. This solution ignores those X factors.
Universal pre-K: The premise is that kids arrive at K behind without pre-K, but it neglects to determine WHY that may be the case. They blame a lack of child care, but is pre-K supposed to replace parents in child care? The real problem is not a lack of pre-K but a lack of time to parent, and that goes back to family economics, which is why there is poverty, working poor, and multi-income families. That family economics includes tax policies, cost of living, work time, and every economic policy and regulation that hinders economic development in a family and nurturing their kids, and that extends beyond pre-K all the way through high school. Putting 4-year-olds in the school box doesn’t solve the problem. Helping parents be there for their kids does. In other words, let ‘s work to make pre-K an option and not a necessity by making the home part of education more productive. We do that by getting government off of people’s backs, making their paychecks go farther, and encouraging ways to not only allow parents to be there more for their kids, but to afford to do so as well.
School leadership: Yes, principals need economic training for budgets. No, they should not be the school’s HR department as that creates an inherent conflict of interest. Most importantly, they need to understand how to properly develop and implement policy that is constructive and sensible, not destructive nonsense like Zero Tolerance. Yes, they should lead the school, but that also means leading both students and teachers alike, not only one and not the other. It also means exercising simple common sense overall.
Blended learning: Using technology as a tool to assist in the learning process is absolutely great, but there is a danger attached to it, in that the teachers should not rely on it as a primary teaching tool. Nor should students allow them to do that. Technology is not the end-all-be-all, nor should it be. At the same time, technological prowess is a must to learn and it should be taught—but so should life skills like cooking, cleaning, balancing a checkbook, driving a car, working with basic tools, and most importantly, how to critically think and reason without a computer. Those involve both schools and parents.
Common Core: For starters, college is not and should not be for everyone, so it’s best to quit the nonsense of acting like it needs to be. That attitude devalues K-12 education and eventually Bachelor’s Degrees. Common Core has already been shown to be a running joke and it doesn’t work, because it makes a fundamental logical mistake in that one size doesn’t fit all, and centralized education doesn’t get the job done where local, decentralized solutions are called for. Second, it makes more sense to develop internships in skillset areas, emphasize more voc-tech and specialized schooling in lieu of college, and grow future workers and skills by partnerships with the industries that want and need them. There was a time when a high school diploma meant a decent job into a career, and now it is merely a stepping stone to the Bachelor’s Degree, which has replaced that HS diploma. That needs to change back to what it was, and it’s done by improving the education at the K-12 level so that alone should be enough to be self-subsistent as an adult. College should be an option, not a requirement.
How do I know all of this? I’m a parent with two STEM degrees, my wife has two STEM degrees, and we have seen the successes and failures of both public and private schools all of our lives, as well as hpw the interaction between teachers, kids, and parents needs to play out to educate the kids successfully.
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“Robbin The Hood”
Robbin the hood
Of public schools
Replacin with flood
Of charter mules
Over the hedge
With his Merry Men
Robbin The Hood
Has struck again
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VAM – very arbitrary measure
🙂
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This may be old news that was new to me.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/03/4374397_state-education-department-used.html?rh=1
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Just because you have way too much money doesn’t make you smart. I have to laugh at the idea principals don’t have any power over staff. They have power over staff much like a dictator thanks to being unsupervised, having ironclad job security, and no accountability for their actions. This is the real problem in education.
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Did anyone notice that the “school boards” were represented by an urban superintendent (aka CEO)? This seems to show the true colors of Forbes and the “reform group”… they didn’t bother to get the NSBA Executive Director to represent elected school boards because, well, they are DEMOCRATICALLY elected and as laypersons what could they possibly know about public schools?
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