Purdue’s dean of education Maryann Santos de Barona bluntly described the pernicious effects of “reform” on enrollment in the College of Education, as Purdue President Mitch Daniels listened quietly. As Governor of Indiana, Daniels was responsible for the “reforms” she was describing.
Maryann Santos de Barona, dean of Purdue University’s College of Education for the past six years, was at the front of a Stewart Center meeting room May 14 for one of those death-by-PowerPoint presentations. From among her dozens of slides, the dean was showing the university’s trustees a sinking trend line of undergraduates enrolled in Purdue’s teacher education program.
At the other end of a conference table, one big enough to seat 10 trustees and assorted support staff, was Mitch Daniels. The Purdue president fidgeted as his education dean unflinchingly laid out her hypotheses for why students were avoiding careers in elementary and secondary education, as well as why test-weary schools were increasingly reluctant to experiment with Purdue-developed curriculum.
Wait, you know where this one is going, right? Probably so.
But it still was stunningly awkward, as the dean heaped so much of the blame at the feet of her boss, without calling him out by name. She didn’t have to. Not a person in the room — probably not in the state — was unfamiliar with Daniels’ role for clearing the way for education reform in Indiana in his previous life as a two-term Republican governor.
“What is happening in (pre-kindergarten to 12th-grade) education, in legislative bodies and in governmental offices, affects our enrollment, our course offerings and our administrative responsibilities,” Santos de Barona said during an annual update for the trustees’ Academic Affairs Committee.
“Our profession is at a critical juncture,” she said. “The pervasive negativity about the teaching profession, and the misconception that education is broken, has resulted in increased pressures on practicing teachers. As a result, they are less likely to want to mentor our student teachers — and have less time to do so. Teachers and administrators are reluctant to let our faculty research in their classrooms, as this represents a risk that might impact test scores.”
Santos de Barona said undergraduate enrollment in the College of Education is down 33 percent since 2010, even as recruitment efforts have been ramped up to interest high school seniors across Indiana and students looking into changing majors once on campus. (Graduate student enrollment at the education college is up 32 percent during the same time. “We saw this coming and diversified our portfolio,” Santos de Barona said after the meeting.)
Santos de Barona told the trustees that Purdue wasn’t alone in this — that it was a national issue. One example: Ball State University, once called Ball State Teachers College, has seen a 45 percent drop in undergraduates in its elementary and kindergarten prep programs in the past decade.
Santos de Barona didn’t specifically mention it, but the trend at Purdue tracks the timeline of education reform in Indiana, when teachers’ bargaining power was busted, scores on standardized tests were tied more closely to pay raises and to overall A-to-F grades for schools, and the introduction and expansion of a private school voucher system sold on the idea that there had to be something better than what public schools could provide.
How refreshing that the dean brought the terrible consequences of the Governor’s actions to his face and let him know that he is responsible for a catastrophic decline in the number of young people entering the teaching profession. Being a reformster means you are never held accountable for your actions. Former Governor Mitch Daniels was confronted with the facts. Wonder what he heard? Or did he just tune out his dean?
Yes, as readers have suggested, Dean Barona belongs on the blog’s honor roll for speaking truth to power.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Duh Guv is thinking, “So it’s working.”
I am fully convinced that a key unspoken goal of reformer’s is to put a stop to the idea that anyone would want to teach. Eliminating the pool of passionate and highly motivated people from the profession makes it easier to eliminate teaching as a profession and turn it in to a close to minimum wage job that involves only monitoring students on a computer all day. It takes away the expensive “human capital” (as they like to refer to it) and leaves much more room for profit. While the public laments a teacher shortage, reformers can say, “Well, what else can we do? There are no qualified applicant left to actually teach.”
They’re already saying as such, hiring illegal immigrants to teach.
This is definitely part of the plan. Teachers cut into profits.
Just look at a company like K12, the online for-profit charter school company. They sometimes have student to teacher ratios of 100:1. The dream is to get rid of teachers and move everything to computers with the “learning coaches” (the parents) doing all the real work.
Oh the horror, parents taking responsibility for their children’s education. What could be more harmful than this?
Eliminating teaching as a profession and replacement of professional teachers with “technology facilitators” is the ultimate goal of “reformers” (and of people like Bill Gates), so Daniels was probably thinking “Great, their enrollment is dropping precipitously. How long before this insufferable fool and her department disappear entirely?”
Actually, that’s what I was thinking as I read the above. Daniels: OK, so no one’s interested, I’ll get rid of the department. Think how much money that would save!
“How long before this insufferable fool and her department disappear entirely?”
“OK, so no one’s interested, I’ll get rid of the department. Think how much money that would save!”
If you can call those “thoughts” then yes, that’s what he was “thinking.”
And tmareace [see above comment] makes it a “thought” triad with the success he undoubtedly feels in turning teaching positions into McJobs:
“Well, what else can we do? There are no qualified applicant[s] left to actually teach.” [brackets mine]
Mitch Daniels fidgeted? Poor thing! It’s tough being a rheephormster when you don’t have your pearls handy to clutch and your fainting couch nearby to fall on and no one has provided a standardized test vomit bag to use.
I hope he goes through many more such experiences because he certainly seems to require some more training in rigor and grit.
Or as Ken Wagner might say in paraphrase [this blog, posting of 5-31-15):
“It’s just an opportunity for him to come to a trying moment and show us what he can do and he can’t do yet.”
Only question I have is: why in the world is Mitch Daniels president of anything? Especially a university where people are supposed to think and reflect? Don’t they have any standards?
Before rising far above the level of his incompetence, Mr. Daniels should have remembered one of his own tried-and-true Marxist axioms:
“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
Groucho would be so ashamed that his acolyte forget this fundamental piece of advice.
😎
Just how did former Governor Napoleon become grand poo-bah of Purdue? This explains alot:
(Taken from June 10, 2012 article in the Purdue Exponent Online by Christy Hunter)
“Since elected as Indiana’s governor in 2005, Daniels has either appointed or re-appointed 100 percent of Purdue’s trustees – appointing eight himself and reappointing two others.”
(Read the entire article @ http://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_94017752-3cb7-567d-aaff-dc9ca89520ca.html)
And in 2011 on Faux…er…Fox News and at a speech in Ohio, Mitch stated that educators and public sector workers (read – union members) were the “privileged elite.”
The tamest term that I can put into print for him is schmuck.
@DEzerov
The name I have used for ex-governor Daniels, Tony Bennett, and Governor Pence is “cloaca.” If it’s an unfamiliar word, I think you’ll deem it appropriate once you look it up. Especially since none of the above three had any control over their ethical sphincters.
Haven’t you heard, KTA, that college presidents no longer have to be able to think about anything but the bottom line? (I know you have. Snark lite.) Is it any wonder that “management” has ballooned at the same time that teaching has been downgraded? Is a college faculty in the country that has increased the number of tenured and tenure track faculty members?
Sign her up for your Honor Roll.
Here’s some quotes regarding teacher bashing:
Let’s start with anti-corporate reformer Leonie Haimson:
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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LEONIIE HAIMSON: Scapegoating teachers has become the mantra of the so-called reformers. From Katie Haycock claiming (with no evidence) that the problems of low-performing schools are primarily due to poor teaching, to the recent cover of Newsweek, proclaiming that the ” Key to saving American education” is to “fire bad teachers,” with these words repeated over and over on the blackboard, this simplistic notion notion infects nearly every blog, magazine, and DC think tank, including this one.
In what other sphere would we make this claim? Is the key to reforming our inequitable health care system firing bad doctors? Or the key to reducing inner city crime firing bad cops? No. But somehow this inherently destructive perspective is the delivered wisdom among the privateers who populate and dominate thinking in this country.
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From corporate reformer Kati Haycock: (originally at NEWSWEEK—since deleted by NEWSWEEK) but still available at
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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KATI HAYCOCK: But what we need to do is change the idea that education is the only career that needs to be done for life. There are a lot of smart people who change careers every six or seven years, while education ends up with a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don’t want to compete in the job market. Kati Haycock, President of Education Trust, (Newsweek, 9/1/08)
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From Corporate Reformer & hedge fund guru Whitney Tilson:
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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WHITNEY TILSON : (Public school teachers are) gutless weasels and completely disgraced themselves in siding with the unions against meaningful reforms of a public school system that systematically, all over the country, gives black and Latino students the very worst teachers and schools, thereby trapping black and Latino communities in multi-generational cycles of poverty, violence and despair. (July 30, 2011 blog post)
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And finally… From Michelle Rhee
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/crusader-of-the-classrooms/307080/
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ATLANTIC MONTHLY: One of the other concerns I’ve heard voiced about alternative selection models is that the teachers aren’t making a thirty-year, or even a ten-year commitment.
MICHELLE RHEE: Nobody makes a thirty-year or ten-year commitment to a single profession. Name one profession where the assumption is that when you go in, right out of graduating college, that the majority of people are going to stay in that profession. It’s not the reality anymore, maybe with the exception of medicine. But short of that, people don’t go into jobs and stay there forever anymore.
ATLANTIC MONTHLY: So you feel like teachers can be effective even within a short term?
MICHELLE RHEE: Absolutely, and I’d rather have a really effective teacher for two years than a mediocre or ineffective one for twenty years.
ATLANTIC MONTHLY: One thing that I’ve encountered personally in talking to a lot of veteran teachers is this idea that programs like Teach for America or the D.C. Teaching Fellows de-professionalize education. They see it as a kind of glorified internship.
MICHELLE RHEE: I’ll tell you what de-professionalizes education. It’s when we have people sitting in the classrooms—whether they’re certified or not, whether they’ve taught for two months or 22 years—that are not teaching kids. And whom we cannot remove from the classroom, and whom parents know are not good. Those are the things that de-professionalize the teaching corp. Not Teach for America, not D.C. Teaching Fellows. That, I think, is a ridiculous argument.
—————-
Put yourself in the shoes of a university student. Are you going to spend and/or incur debt in a range of $100,000 – 300,000 for tuition/room & board/other expenses, then face all of that?
“KATI HAYCOCK: But what we need to do is change the idea that education is the only career that needs to be done for life. There are a lot of smart people who change careers every six or seven years, while education ends up with a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don’t want to compete in the job market. Kati Haycock, President of Education Trust, (Newsweek, 9/1/08)”
No one ever talks about how elitist ed reformers are, but it’s definitely in there.
Good God. “Low end of the pile”
I hear it when Duncan delivers one of his scolding, patronizing lectures to “moms” too. Ick. Just horrible.
Seriously, how many licensed professions change jobs that often like an engineer or CPA? Training for several professions in a lifetime is somewhat of a financial luxury. So I would view the concept as unrealistic, or low end of the pile thinking.
If my 30+ career as a teacher is considered “low end of the pile” then I stand up and proudly wave a flag stating – “I’ve touched the lives and assisted thousands of children in their quest for knowledge. Now, sir, what have you accomplished at the top of the pile?”
The Rhee quotes are telling.
In the final quote, she denies that corporate reform and TFA are de-professionalizing teaching. In effect, she argues that that corporate reformers and TFA preserve teaching as a “profession”—yet in the earlier quotes she cites “two years” as a good time frame how long a teacher should be teaching before moving on to a different career outside the classroom (within or outside education.
How can you call a job you only do for “two years” before leaving it “a profession”?
What definition is Ms. Rhee going off of?
The Merriam-Webster calls a profession “a calling requiring specialized knowledge and long and intensive academic preparation.”
In what “profession” are you required to have “specialized knowledge and long and intensive academic preparation”, yet only perform that “profession” for “two years” before leaving it for something else?
Another definition says the a “profession” is “a type of work that needs a high level of education or a particular skill”.
Can you honestly say TFA, in a mere five weeks of summer training, can impart “a high level of education” necessary prior to your first day of teaching, or that in five weeks, a prospective teacher can master—or be on the way to mastering—“a particular skill”?
What Rhee is describing is something akin to office temping, fast food, store retail salesperson… not a profession.
As for Ms. Haycock… calling the millions of our country’s current teachers—or a vast majority of them— “a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don’t want to compete in the job market.”
Wow…
Rhee is simply a charlatan. That’s partly why her thinking is so sloppy. She doesn’t care that her ideas are inconsistent. She is simply in it for the self-glorification and the money.
http://www.newsweek.com/can-michelle-rhee-save-dcs-schools-88041
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KATI HAYCOCK: “But what we need to do is change the idea that education is the only career that needs to be done for life. There are a lot of smart people who change careers every six or seven years, while education ends up with a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don’t want to compete in the job market.”
—————————————————-
So Kati divides public school teachers into two categories:
1) HIGH QUALITY: that small minority of elite “smart people” (TFA & others) who, over a lifetime, “change careers every six or seven years”— with just one career being teaching, and the other five or six being non-teaching careers—and who, albeit briefly, deliver the highest quality of life-altering education to a sadly limited number of students before moving on… (“sadly limited”, of course, due to evil unions who desperately defend a failed status quo that puts adult interests ahead of children’s interests… and don’t you forget it!) …
… OR…
2) LOW QUALITY: the vast majority of “low-end-of-the-pile” slackers who make teaching a long-time career, merely to avoid having “to compete in the job market,” with teaching being a place to hide out and be lazy… and, in the process, willfully destroy the academic and career potential of millions of students… and who do so without the slightest twinge of conscience.
In Kati’s deranged mind, if you teaching in classroom for more than five years—ten years at the absolute most—you’re guilty-as-charged of being one of those “low-end-of-the-pile” slackers that are driving our country to ruin.
Thus, all teachers—from the very best to the very worst—should be able to be fired at will, at any time… and pay should not in any way be commensurate to years on the job, but instead depend on test-score-based VAM evaluations.
Seriously, teaching is “the only career done for life”? What is she smoking?
If only Dean Ball at the University of Michigan would follow Purdue Dean’s example!
Honestly, who is going to work with the students once there is a shortage of qualified adults? Who will be available to work with the elite’s children? What about those who are unable to use a computer? Surely not everyone will be “electronically” educated?
Are we headed back to one room school houses with eighth grade graduates teaching their piers (until they age out or decide to get married and start their own families)?
And if we all start home schooling, who will be left to do the grunt work many of these working moms and dads now perform, let alone fill the ranks needed for the higher level, better paying careers.
And the colleges? If we lack high school graduates who will go on to college, let alone teach at those higher institutions?
Have the idiots behind this “movement” thought about the wide spread repercussions by trying to villainess the teaching profession? Is it worth the devastation to save a few bucks here, then pay an even bigger economic price down the road?
Instead of making America more competitive internationally, we will be lucky to compete with third world countries – if Governors like Cuomo are successful in their personal vendettas and politically appointed so-called education specialists, such as Duncan, keep shoving unproven, destructive education policies down the taxpayers throats.
So instead of bending over and croaking “how deep” we had better do something as a society to stop this encroachment before it does any more damage. Our future depends upon us to stop the nonsense now.
Wisconsin is on a downward spiral with the latest proposals coming from the legislators. Our UW school of education is caught in a difficult situation and does not speak up to defend the teaching profession both against the latest government plans and against the DPI constant bombardment of initiatives. The DPI is favor of the federal reforms and dictates everything done at the UW, so little criticism is mentioned or even questioning the on going initiatives. Added to this situation is that now the Wisconsin government is pretending that a person can teach non core subjects without a degree. What a predicament in the midst of head spinning budget cuts. Job insecurity in higher education and job insecurity in K-12 positions causes educators to follow without question and to be policy promoters even when against what is going on.
M. Daniels thinking: “I can’t wait to get that bitch into my office and let her know the consequences for showing up Mitchell Elias Daniels, Jr. in public. Buh, bye Ms. Santos, ¡¡¡adiós para siempre!!!”
Daniels does have a quote at the end of the article, showing he’s not quite getting the message:
Next question: Do you share the dean’s concerns about ramping up enrollment of K-12 teacher candidates and the reasons she says are behind the declining interest in becoming a teacher?
“If the concern is how do we get more and better teachers, that ought to be everybody’s top concern,” Daniels said. “The system operates to penalize young teachers, like our graduates. So, I never look at them without hoping we’re moving to a system based more on merit and not totally on seniority.”
The conversation trailed off uncomfortably after that. Much like it did that afternoon when the architects of education reform were called out at Purdue.
It’s really ed reform 101 to set one group against the other. Younger teachers versus older teachers. That’s the political tactic he’s using there.
You’re absolutely right, of course, Chiara. And they are expert at using simplistic phrases (“I never look at them without hoping we’re moving to a system based on merit”) that make them appear to be the masters of common sense.
Hooray for Dean Santos! I wish that more deans around the country would speak out.
When a country disses its teachers, then something is horribly wrong with that country. In this case the country is ours, the USA. Teachers were always low person on the totem pole, but this current DEFORMATIONS is totally out of control. Means that this country is totally out of control and believing lies promoted by the .001% and for PROFIT and POWER no less. How can we live in a democratic society when the FEDs are dissing teachers at a rate unheard of in past years? How can a democracy thrive when what we have from the DEFORMERS is pure fascism for PROFIT at any cost?
I am embarrassed by this country and where it is heading. Guess Manisfest Destiny also applies to those who diss teachers.
This country is out of control. The other day I was reading an article on Salon about a new “reality” TV show – “The Briefcase”. Apparently they find a family living well below the poverty line, barely hanging on. They give the family a briefcase with $101,000. But, at the same time, they introduce the family to another struggling family and the original family has to decide how much of this $101,000 to share with the other family. Somehow, in order to make their decision, they are allowed to see this other family’s residents, dig through their bills, see their stuff, see how they live, etc., all in order to decide how “worthy” this other family is. I run out of fingers (and probably toes too) counting all the ways that’s just sick, sick, sick.
I love this interview with Daniels and Duncan, because both men use the same crisis language and then both men claim credit for success. Apparently no one in the US did any work on education until ed reformers arrived on the scene.
Not a real humble bunch, our “leaders”
Also! Here’s former Michigan Governor John Engler describing human beings as “products”.
“Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable – we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they’re not very different.”
Why is this not a controversial statement? Citizens are now “products” to these guys? Where do they get off with describing people like that? Were Engler, Duncan and Daniels also deficient products when they entered the workforce? If not, why not?
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/a-report-card-on-education-reform/?_r=1
I “like” the comment where EVERY child who graduates from high school needs to be college ready without any need for remediation, so we can keep up with the progress of other countries (yes, every eighteen year old in the world attends college, accept here in the US).
What world does Duncan live in? How can a person in the top education position in this country be so clueless, yet so arrogant.
I know he’s heard our arguments. He must be a total idiot to dismiss everything we’ve been saying as a stumbling block to his success. According to him, we are the problem, not his faulty theories.
Yes, I’ve heard it all before, but each time I read his words or see him via the media, I am freshly appalled at the damaging rhetoric. If he thinks we are an impediment to his agenda now, just let him wait – it is going to get worse as more and more of those status quo he is preaching to become informed about this nonsense.
This is the second part of the Duncan-Daniels-Engler agenda. Read what they prioritize, in their own words.
Testing, charter schools and introducing “competition” for Head Start.
We don’t have a “debate” on education in this country. We have a lockstep choir. They differ slightly on the details, but it doesn’t matter a bit which one of them we elect. We’re getting the same recipe.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/3-leaders-on-education-reform-continued/?_r=0
Thanks, Chiara. It is amazing to read these interviews and see how these guys can twist what is happening into something that they can use to support the reformster agenda. I know we all try to fit new information into our own schema of how things work, but there comes a time when a position bears no relation to reality.
As a former Indiana teacher I salute Santos de Barona. Daniels is the Darth Vader of education in Hoosierland, merrily thumbing his nose at the state constitution and the schools serving 90% of Indiana’s kids. — Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)
Actually, Daniels would be more like the Emperor with his right-hand man (Vader) being played by Tony Bennett…but since Glenda Ritz took over as supe, the cast of characters doesn’t match any more. (Darth Vader wasn’t up for re-election like Bennett was)
Maryann Santos de Barona must be a tenured professor. Tenure for university professors offers a lot more job protection than due process rights for k – 12 teachers—that is where due process rights still exists.
In this 1984 Animal Farm world where many workers live in fear of their jobs and then thin line between starvation and homelessness, the few who have job protection and/or are retired might end up being the only voices that can safely speak truth to power—-even if power tunes out the message, many people will hear what they have to say, and as Abraham Lincoln said, “You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
I think the countdown to end corporate education reform, it’s high stakes Pearson tests, corporate Charter school cancer and the Common Core Crap is speeding up toward zero and blast off as we send all that trash into orbit beyond Mars.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could also send the reformist oligarchs who are funding this insanity to live in caves on big rocks in the Asteroid Belt too.
Indiana is going to have a charter school building boom:
http://indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact/2015/05/28/building-funds-charter-schools-benefit-newest-budget/
How have the existing public schools in Indiana done under ed reform leadership at the state and national level? Other than testing and sanctions, have lawmakers done anything for public schools?
Daniels really said this: “The public is increasingly disgusted with a steady diet of defamation, and prepared to reward those who refrain from it.”
Or here’s another one from Mitch: “Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb.”
I think a burned-out bulb was hand-picked for Mitch.
Let’s hope the next one he touches has a short in it (no pun intended regarding Daniels’ well-known stature of 5’7″)
Three men, sitting back in their chairs, spouting lies and half truths. If the proficiency rate on an assessment drops from 90% to 28% (in Tennessee) something is seriously wrong and it’s not the intelligence of the students. And Duncan is back to picking on
suburban families with all those “dumb” noncompetitive children they thought were college ready. Like my two daughters with advanced degrees who only scored 1000 on the SATs, who now have professional jobs and are making more money than I ever did as a teacher.
They are not going to get any support from the community if they keep putting down our children, especially the children of those of us who make a point to vote. Let’s get some anti-CCSS candidates out there and see what happens.
What the Dean is missing is the plan is working perfectly. They can now take advantage of the man-made crisis (teacher shortage) and hurry in unqualified, uncertified “teachers” from TFA, TNTP and others obedient slave operations just waiting for the teacher shortage they knew would be the result of their schemes.
On a cynical note, he may be pleased that it is all working out as planned. Nyah, hah, hah. Don’t the reformsters want to de-professionalize teaching so that it is filled with temp workers,such as TFA, who won’t climb the pay scale and accrue pensions?
Now that Ms. Santos de Barona has grown some cojones, she should continue to kick Mitch Daniels in his. She should not stop at this meeting, but should meet in private with like minded trustees. Indiana is soon becoming one of the worst states for public education, thanks to Daniels’s politics and his appointment of the embarrassing Tony Bennet, who was caught with his pants down.