Here is the handbook of the for-profit education industry (although it does advise you to drop the label “for-profit”).
Here are some basic facts that it recites. The world spends many billions on education. The United States spends close to $2 trillion on education, nearly $900 billion on K-12.
This is a huge market for investors seeking to make a profit.
And then it launches into spin about how terrible the American public education system is, never mentioning that our students (white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian) now have the highest test scores ever on NAEP, the highest graduation rates in history (for all groups), and the lowest dropout rates (for all groups). It is the usual “sky-is-falling” hokum, all intended to persuade the public to turn their public schools over to hedge fund managers and equity investors and hucksters who know nothing at all about education.
There is also no mention of the many scandals that have surrounded the charter industry, as fly-by-night operators cash in on a newly deregulated industry.
The main point, the same point that Michael Moe of GSV Investors has been making for nearly 20 years, is that the education industry offers the opportunity to clean up for the canny investor and entrepreneur, by siphoning off taxpayer funds that were supposed to go to children and classrooms.
If you love Teach for America, charter schools, consultants, for-profit schools and colleges, online universities, and technology, you will love this report. If you loved No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and “Waiting for Superman,” you will love this report.
If you think that corporate reform is a pox on American education, read it and arm yourself for the battles ahead.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
Written by business/investor types FOR business/investor types. Prioritizes the turning of profit; knows nothing about what is best for students. Ignores data that says market-based reforms have spectacularly failed. Google “charter school fraud” – that’s all it takes to unmask the motives and accuracy of this “report.” (It’s a MARKETING tool.)
They just hired me – thank you so much!!
Sent from my iPhone, with keys way too small for humans.
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Let’s add “Won’t Back Down” to that list of the odious. “Waiting for Superman” and “Won’t Back Down” are great memorials to an era’s Hollywood propaganda, much like “Reefer Madness” was for an earlier era. But one of the interesting things about TFA is that they seem to be splitting is more than two directions among their alums. Here in Chicago, some of the former TFAers are now active with CORE and the Chicago Teachers Union. Once they have escaped that cult and deprogram themselves, they can be decent colleagues and later decent union people.
That was wild to watch, the politician/media consensus at that time. It was 2010, right?
I watched Education Nation (part of it!) and it was like a parody of complete and utter capture. It was LOCKSTEP – they were all reciting slogans. I’ll never forget the lineup of the governors with a for-profit college banner behind them- the sponsor. I had to turn it off. It was too sad to watch them allow themselves to be used like that. You would think at some point they would refuse, just as a matter of personal ethics or pride. Nope.
This makes my calling even more clear. As I see what profiteers think and do with “education reforms” I realize that none of those things are the reasons why I became a teacher. I still long to help students learn, even though I have been retired for 3 years. I would love to do something to continue helping students learn, but I would not be a part of the kind of privatization that is focused on siphoning money from public funds in order to “get wealthy”. I know that these people are NOT educators in the true sense.
I left the classroom and became part of the district home office in a large urban district. I was pushed out after two years, despite several successful initiatives. But I’m old school. I listened to research first and asked many questions. Too many questions of leadership. Too much an “advocate for teachers” and too little toting of the company line. I was recruited for the job now, I am unemployed.
Keep your mouth shut and don’t fight the system. Keep your ethics in check and you will be fine.
If I may correct your last sentence jj:
“THROW your ethics OUT THE DOOR and you will be fine.”
I have a “Field Guide to Animal Tracks” (by Olaus Murie) that has lots of drawings of scat in it.
Am I correct to assume that the
FieldFailed Guide to For-Profit Education also has lots of scat in it?I need to get a copy. Being able to identify shysters by their scat is very important.
Couldn’t help but notice the dedication to Covey. I value the 7 habits, but I’m not so sure about schools paying north of $5,000 to become a ‘Leader in Me’ School, which is what one school I worked in is doing. Its the magic formula to make the poison go down more easily, it seems.
Anybody else seeing these Covey approaches (for a nice fee) starting up around in the public schools? Are they the answer, or is it just what I said. . .an elixir to make the poison easier to drink.
It’s
There are more of these faux approaches to this or that than you can shake a very long stick at. Covey is probably one of the least harmful of them.
Maybe it’s not going so well. Questor gave Pearson a SELL reccomendation
Good, sell it all and send them packing across the pond!
Why’s the state of Michigan one of the largest investors in Pearson?
I just finished reading/scanning the whole thing! Let me help you save time: skip to page 147 and peruse the list of “education leaders and innovators,” !then you will know how to present crap as cake. ’nuff said.
Horribly written drivel, based on a hackneyed battle metaphor.
Reblogged this on The Quantum of Explanation and commented:
Diane Ravitch’s blog, and the attached .PDF file, deserve to be widely read and understood: the handbook of the “for profit” education “reform” industry. Of course, “reform” is less the interest here so much as *DEFORM*. These corporate mutilators would have you believe that education is a commodity, students are consumer/customers, and teachers are disposable instruments only.
The Association of Raza Educators published “The Non Profit Industrial Complex’s Role in Imposing Neoliberalism in Public Education” , by Robert Skeels, in Truthout, today. Skeels gives high praise to Dr. Ravitch, citing specific pages from the Reign of Error.
This publication has a fifteen-year battle plan beginning on page 297.
The ending is really god-awful.
Laura, give us your analysis of this dreadful polemic
I’m surprised that no one mentioned all the “war” terminology throughout this handbook. All these education companies are called “Special Forces” and under each company is their “Battle Plan”. Interestingly, General Colin Powell’s America’s Promise Alliance is not listed with a “Battle Plan” (page 189) probably because it’s not an entrepreneurial enterprise.
Page 159 shows the projected size of the global education market 2013 and 2018 and pages 170-171 lists the Top Tier VCs, Super Angels and growth Investors.
There are pages of “Education Families” and the companies their members have founded (pages 180-183).
The authors, on the last page, write “And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
I wonder if anyone received a PhD from one of the new private universities for this 306 page effort.
Florence,
I am willing to bet that none of the authors of this report attended an online college to receive a fourth rate degree.
The only benefit possible from the massive “Mike Miles’ Reform” that was inflicted on Dallas ISD from 7-1-12 through 7-1-15 when Mr. Miles resigned, was a benefit for the charter schools in Dallas. Dallas ISD student achievement suffered and the DISD gap with the State of Texas achievement grew over 60% the last two years Miles was in Dallas ISD. See the data: http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2015/06/dallas-isd-progress-2000-2012-disaster.html
Teacher turnover in Dallas ISD exploded and teaching experience in the classroom fell to the lowest levels in modern history. You could only have student achievement fall, and it fell. This had to be, and was, orchestrated by people involved in charter schools. Several DISD Trustees are also member of the boards of charter schools, or even current employees of charter schools. Does anyone see any conflicts of interest?
Does anyone see the damage done?
I have only gotten as far as reading their list of facts meant to create disgust and astonishment. I can hear the huckster standing on stage with his remote reciting these facts and figures with a “can you believe we are in this state?” voice as he clicks through his graphics dramatizing the disastrous state of education in the U.S. You know the delivery is calculated to overwhelm any desire to try to verify any of the “facts” in this recitation. Is there a TedTalk version out there yet?
As someone who enjoys the war metaphor, this is some hokey stuff. All you need to do is look at page 47 and see that — according to this report — parents, politicians, businesses, minorities, students, and teachers are allied on the same “side.” They are fighting against unions, of course, which are made up of parents and teachers. Most importantly, businesses and politicians are the ones fighting for positive change. Especially Pearson, the great corporate “change agent.” Look on the bright side — now we know what the American Revolution 2.0 looks like in Bizarro World.
Reblogged this on Justice in Education and commented:
As someone who enjoys the war metaphor, this is some hokey stuff. All you need to do is look at page 47 and see that — according to this report — parents, politicians, businesses, minorities, students, and teachers are allied on the same “side.” They are fighting against unions, of course, which are made up of parents and teachers. Most importantly, businesses and politicians are the ones fighting for positive change. Especially Pearson, the great corporate “change agent.” Look on the bright side — now we know what the American Revolution 2.0 looks like in Bizarro World.
I love the picture of Washington crossing the Delaware and the heartfelt tip of the bonnet to Stephen Covey and Sally Ride. That is “reformster” sincerity in all its glory.
The are correct that the first non-professional and non-peer reviewed paper on education to be taken seriously as a guide to improving education was “Nation at Risk.” It is the modern methodology for today’s school reform policy who’s lesson will surly be that ignoring professional advice is damaging and stupid!
There are a lot of insults to educators in this report:
The “wise elders” (they added the quotes) of the education industry will undoubtedly entertain extreme skepticism whether material change can occur” (p.61); needing a “fresh set of eyes” and, the current “the factory model of teaching” (p. 231).
Teachers in the Trenches: “While we see Teachers Unions as an opponent to innovation in schools”… p. 229.
p. 301. “Longer term, we adopt a completely transparent merit system for teachers. Compensation will be 100% aligned with teacher effectiveness, performance of students, and market demand. In other words, a great math teacher won’t get paid the same as mediocre physical education teacher just because they’ve taught the same number of years.”
Within all the reformer message, this report is broken down into 3 investment sectors where money can be made: the Pre-K, K-12 and Postsecondary markets with boxes within each area that show the companies that are investing in it already and presumably would be good investments to make.