Last week, I posted about a conference sponsored by the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, celebrating the destruction of public education in New Orleans. The participants seemed gleeful. One speaker spoke of bankruptcy as a wonderful opportunity to eliminate public education and start over.
Peter Greene decided that it was his civic duty to listen to the entire panel discussion, and he shares his impressions here.
Greene tries to understand the spirit of jollity in the discussion:
The actual title of the panel is “Knocking Out Yesterday’s Education Models,” though Persson reports that Bradford makes a joke about the working title being “What Happens After You Blow It All Up.” If you watch it, I will warn you that the most disconcerting thing about the whole discussion is the jaunty, breezy, jolly, jokey tone of the whole business. As a teacher, it is beyond disconcerting about watching people discuss blowing up the work that you’ve devoted your life to while they laugh and smile and yuk it up like the whole destruction of traditional public education is hilarious….
Greene summarizes the presentations of each of the speakers. Here are a couple of examples:
Katie Beck
COO of 4.0 Schools, Beck has a Teach for America pedigree, and went through the Harvard College. She gets “how do you turn education into a more entrepreneurial space” as a question, so I guess we’re skipping over “why the hell would you want to do that?”
Her outfit likes to work with people who are “obsessed” with a problem and who want to make money from the solution. Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but I’m not loving her message, and she does that thing where every sentence ends like a question? Anyway, her term for institutional isomorphism is “the hairball” because, you know, traditional public school is just a disgusting mess. So, for instance, instead of starting with a charter that will spend $2 million and look like “an iteration of” existing schools, they help little boutique start-ups. Because anything that looks like the old way is obviously bad. I had the hardest time wading through Beck, who is so clearly focused on developing business without much interest in the education side of things. All of her ideas deal with the best way to get a business started up, with no concern expressed for the students who become the guinea pigs for these start-ups.
Bradford asks if for-profit people are any different to work with that the other altruistic folks. But she doesn’t work with “bad actors” who are in it to make a buck. And being for-profit helps those people keep themselves honest because when you’re obsessed with solving a problem, you have to ask “is this solving it enough that someone’s willing to pay for it.” Which I wouldn’t call “keeping honest” so much as “missing the entire point of running a school.”
Rebecca Sibilia
So here comes the lady who’s quote got us interested in this panel in the first place. If we want all of her comments will it, as she suggests, make her sound better. Well, no. The whole thing is even worse than the quoted portion, which tells us a little something about how she sees herself.
Bradford asks her how we pay for all this innovation. And she opens with, “The problem is, we can’t.” Which is a remarkably honest answer [insert my usual complaint about trying to run charter systems without being honest about the true cost.] She will now break down the three problems that EdBuild is trying to solve.
First, the way that we’re funding schools is “largely arbitrary” and “doesn’t make any sense.” And Sibilia seems far too smart to believe that baloney, but just in case, here goes: People set up schools in their community, for the students who live in their community, so they funded them by collecting money from everyone who lives in the community. Later on, state governments got involved in trying to even out the differences in funding inherent in a local-based system. There are lots of things to hate about how this is all playing out, but it’s silly to pretend that the system just fell from the sky for no reason at all. Her criticism about uneven funding outcomes seems to be that by favoring one district over another financially, you’re creating an artificial market bias. One might complain that some students are getting fewer resources than they deserve, but that doesn’t seem to be her concern. It;s the savage and unwarranted abuse of the free market that’s the issue.
Second, she doesn’t like the borders that are created by property taxes, which seems exactly backwards. Municipal borders exist, and folks who live within them are taxed. Not the other way around. She thinks this leads to a mistake– trying to get resources into those borders instead of “focusing on how we can break those borders” which is a less objectionable way to say “how we can get some students out.” Because “breaking the borders” instead of “getting resources into the borders” has to mean that we are going to just let some areas collapse in unmitigated poverty. Which, as we’ll see, is exactly her plan.
See, many states fund schools with property taxes, and in many states property taxes can’t go to schools of choice. “We’ve had charter schools for a quarter of a century, but we’re still treating them like an experiment. And so that’s a problem and we have to fix it.”
So, there is a ton of Wrong packed into that. First of all, the modern corporate charters these guys are talking about haven’t been around for twenty-five years. Second, they are experiments, and not very successful ones, at that, having not yet figured out how to stop some charters from being Ohio-style nests of incompetence and corruption. Third, charters have used their fledgling nature as part of their excuse to avoid the same oversight and accountability that public schools enjoy. Every time a charter wants to set up a new rule for itself, its argument is, “We’re a charter. We should be free to experiment and Try Stuff.”
Sibilia’s argument is that charters should get lots of sweet, sweet public tax money. Neither she nor other charter advocates make a convincing case for that.
But she’s going on about the evils of property taxes being linked to public schools, and she and Bradford share a laugh at how it’s still called millage, which apparently proves that it’s just so antiquated and uncool. Har. And she goes on to try to make a point that funding is based on the teacher, and not the student and their needs, but somehow property tax locks this in, and so places where the charters are getting a new teacher corps (young? cheap? unprofessional? she doesn’t explain the critical differences) are locked in. But until we can bust up the whole funding system (she also does not say what she wants to replace it with), none of the cool reforms being discussed here will be sustainable. And that much is probably true.
Bradford sets up her next bit by observing that some school districts are in trouble and he would argue most can’t afford to stay open, and that would be awesome, and I say, you know what would help with that? What would help is to stop allowing charters to suck the blood out of the public system. And all that brings us to the quote that has circulated, where she envisions bankruptcy as a great way to blow up a district, specifically getting rid of all its “legacy debt” so that they no longer have to pay for like buildings and pensions, which is totally cool because having a school district go bankrupt is no problem for students, just the adults. Which is just– I mean, I imagine that students would notice that their district is collapsing financially and cutting programs and teachers and resources with a chainsaw. “Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids,” is a statement that in the best of contexts is still grossly tone-deaf and reality-impaired. In the context of Sibilia’s discussion of how to blow up public schools so we can has charters, it’s even more tone-deaf and reality-impaired.
And while the tone of the whole panel is, as I said, disturbingly light and happy, Sibilia is just so thoroughly gleeful about the prospect of districts becoming bankrupt, their pensions zeroed out and their teaching staff scrubbed. I have seen people less excited about getting engaged to the eprson of their dreams.
Greene discovers that the most thoughtful member of the panel is Andy Smarick, who has frequently spoken of the urban school district of the future as one that has no public education. But Smarick in this panel reflects on the danger of unintended consequences.
What he says is, yes, we’ve got an old hide-bound system, and we might want to blow it up and replace it, but when you do that you break a lot of systems and policies that are tied to it. “When you tug on that thread, you see a lot of the fabric start to warp. This is not to say we shouldn’t pull on that thread–”
But.
There is a downside to all this that should not be ignored. And he brings up Chesterton’s fence. Which is an old British notion that you don’t take down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.
‘So, some of the worst changes to the revolutionary evolutionary point are when we, with great hubris, with great certainty, look at something and we think is messy, untidy, inefficient, and we don’t see the wisdom, we don’t see the long-standing virtue, value, that is in it that has been tested over time, that has evolved, and we technocratically with great brilliance the best and brightest among us decide we’re going to change that thing.’
He tells a story about forest management and mistakes made in the name of commoditized lumber. Or knocking down swamps and then discovering we’d made a mess. Or the human social capital destroyed with high rise public housing. So, he says, as we tinker with all the pieces parts of schools, “let’s at least have a little humility and recognize that with that change comes a casualty.” And that those casualties often are the least advantaged.
So, first time I ever wanted to give a certified reformster a round of applause. And I’ll add that I’ve known actual conservatives my whole life, and as I have watched ed reform unfold, I don’t understand why more alleged conservatives do not share Smarick’s point of view.
A few years ago, I dared Andy Smarick to read James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State.” He got the point. It is about “the best and brightest” imposing their grand ideas on the little people–with disastrous results.
He is thinking. That is a good sign.
This post exemplifies why I never fail to use the term “predators” when explaining the reality of the charter school lobby to my friends and acquaintances. They never fail to exploit opportunities to prey on our children and educators for their own benefit, regardless of the consequences.
I’m not sure even “predators” is fair. After all, predators in the wild only kill what they need to eat, they don’t kill indiscriminately just because they can. I prefer “sociopaths”. Or maybe just plain “evil”.
I’m thinking more in the vein of child predators.
Psychopath is even better. Lloyd drew the distinction in another thread between teachers (who base their actions on empathy) to deformers (psychopaths)
..and I used a little poetic license
“The Path Not Taken” (apologies to Robert Frost)
Two paths diverged in a public school,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, “help” and “tool”,
I looked down one, like a teaching fool
To how it lent to the student growth
Then took the other, as much more fair,
And having for taps the better claim
Because it was psycho and wanted power,
And as for empathy and care,
Had torn the students apart for game.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this for the Fates
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two paths diverged in a school, and for Gates,
I took the one of Norman Bates,
And that has made all the difference.
SomeDAM Poet:
TARGO!
I cannot pretend to even compete with the laurels you have fairly won on this blog, but let present something I have misused, er, used before:
I MET a Traveler from a ravaged land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert that used to be called public education. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those rheephormista passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is RHEEPHORM, King of Innovative Disruption.”
Look on my works ye big gubmint monopoly schools, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[With profuse apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his poem OZYMANDIAS]
😎
Krazy, the real tragedy is that under rheeform few students would get the poetic references. Once a week I read poetry to my class “just because” and not for any particular “academin” reason. Some great student writing flows from the discussions afterwards when the kids are talking to themselves.
Krazy TA, May your words be a prophetic harbinger of things soon come to pass.
Old Teacher, we were actually told to stop teaching poetry a few years ago by one of the reform orcs who came to tell us how we should be doing things because it is not mentioned much in the new standards and it doesn’t prepare students for the rigors of corporate greed and backstabbing grit. (My interpretation of her hidden meaning)
Thankfully, she blew away like dust and Ozymandias and we still read poetry because it is the essence of being a decnet and reflective human being.
“Reform Orcs!” I’m using that one!! Thank you.
TARRGO!
I offer you a plinth of space
To hold your Poet Prize in place
It isn’t much, I do admit
But that does surely warrant it
SomeDAM Poet: while you won’t find me agreeing with Clint Eastwood a lot, I am partial to this bit from his Dirty Harry character—
“A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Or as someone else once said: “I’m a modest man that has a lot to be modest about.”
The laurel wreath for poet of this blog belongs to you. Rightfully so. I do not think I am being presumptuous when I write that many others will agree with me.
But I would be ungrateful to a wordsmith like you if I didn’t write plain and simple: thank you for the, IMHO, overly generous compliment.
😳
Incoming email! Hmmm… turns out that [could I be making something like this up?] a frequent commenter on this blog—enamored of creatively disruptive numbers & stats applied to rheephorm like the heroic Michelle Rhee taking her students from the 13th to the 90th percentile—has challenged me to prove in some objective way that you are, indeed, what so many of us claim you are.
Simple. Poetic measurement.
¿?
Although, to be honest, I read this bit of doggerel when I was a lot younger:
SomeDAM Poet—
You’re a poet
And I know
And your toes show it.
They’re LONGFELLOWS.
Go figure…
😎
“One speaker spoke of bankruptcy as a wonderful opportunity to eliminate public education and start over.”
Again, what Naomi Klein characterized in her book as “Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. If there isn’t a real crisis to economically exploit, create one. And if you can’t create one, then create the illusion of a crisis – it will work just as effectively.
Or what Larry Cuban recently described as “Fundamental Change” (read disruptive) vs. “Incremental Change” (read evolutionary – not that kind of evolution though – that one doesn’t exist . . . )
My district is still reeling and attempting to recover from the creative disruption of our former Broadie superintendent who managed, in just a year and a half, to destroy nearly all institutional memory, employee morale, every layer of public, parental, teacher, and student trust, decades of camaraderie and team building, unique and irreplaceable innovations tied to specific neighborhood needs, and the lives and careers of hundreds of our citizens. Then he quit.
No hurricane or bankruptcy needed here. Just a former Paul Vallas disciple and a compliant local press. We will still be struggling years from now to regain what was lost or to recreate it and test scores remained stagnant or plunged. No miracle of reform materialized and the people were blamed for losing faith in his warped and sick process.
My grandmother used to tell me stories of corrupt and evil public servants being chased out of town in humiliation when she was a girl. Wonder why that went out of fashion?
Name names, Chris!
This godawful video …
… is the educational equivalent of the January 1942 Wannsee Conference.
For those not familiar with the latter, here’s a six-minutes of highlights of this other planning meeting:
Like the EdBuild panel, the participants love joking as they craft the “Final Solution” to their respective problems.
EXAMPLE
————————–
Nazi #1: “There are no Jews is Estonia.”
Nazi #2: “That’s best thing I’ve ever heard about Estonia.”
— laughter ensues
(By the way, that’s from the actual transcript of the conference, not some screenwriter’s invention… like the rest of the script.)
——————————
EXAMPLE:
DERRELL BRADFORD: “I love disaster movies…”
— laughter ensues
DERRELL BRADFORD: “What’s gonna happen when the school districts go bankrupt?”
REBECCA SIBILIA: “Call Andy Smarick.”
— laughter ensues
—————————
After criticism of this video of the EdBuild broke out, panelist and EdBuild officer Rebecca Sibilia emailed the writer of one of the critical pieces, PR Watch’s Jonas Persson’s. She claimed that she was slandered by what Perssons wrote..
Here’s the Persson’s piece that prompted Sibilia:
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/09/12932/bankruptcy-huge-opportunity-privatize-schools-says-edbuild
Here’s Ms. Sibilia’s response to it:
http://edbuild.org/blog/2015/misleading-attacks
(By the way, Sibilia doesn’t even link to Persson’s piece. She’s just telling everyone, “What was written about our EdBuild panel—and my comments in particular—is really icky. Right? So… like… don’t even read it for yourself. Just … like… just trust me that it’s really icky, and just leave it at that. Right?”)
Ms. Sibilia claims that Persson misrepresented what she said, and took it out of context. She even challenges his transcription, and advises people to watch the whole thing.
REBECCA SIBILIA: “I encourage everyone to actually watch the whole panel and see what I had to say.”
Well, Peter Greene at Curmudgucation took her up on that challenge, and found that, no… Persson was dead on in his description. The context in now way absolves Sibilia. (Go the link at the end of this.)
Sibilia denies being cold or callous about the disastrous turmoil and chaos that would accompany an entire school district going bankrkupt, saying …
REBECCA SIBILIA: “Bankruptcy isn’t something that’s sought after (by EdBuild or by Sibilia) … we (Sibilia and EdBuild) aren’t excited about prospect of any school district going through bankruptcy…”
What a bunch o baloney! The problem with Sibilia claiming this is that the video shows otherwise. (I know EdBuild is going to take this down the way that Nashville Prep took down “6 Minutes with Ms. McDonald”…
Should that occur, I’ve saved it to be re-posted again… and again… and again.)
Really, Rebecca? You’re “not excited” by bankruptcy? School districts going through bankruptcy is “not sought after?”
Watch Moderator Derrell Bradford and Panelist Rebecca Sibilia (and the off-screen panelists as well) as they are salivating and positively orgasming at the prospect of school district bankruptcy and the opportunities to privatize the schools … a la New Orleans.
(27:12)
(27:12)
————————————-
DERRELL BRADFORD: “I wanna … I’m kinda wanted to save it up, but I love disaster movies, so I”m going to hit it with you now.”
— (SIBILIA smiles wantonly as she anticipates Bradford is about to talk about Detroit’s and other major city school systems possibly going bankrupt.)
DERRELL BRADFORD: “Detroit is about to go belly up. I would argue that most school districts can’t even afford to stay open NOW, and that they’re largely on borrowed time… uhhm…
(something about banks)…
(anyone who doubts my analysis, try freeze-framing Sibilia at 27:19, or her lip-licking, from 27:23 – 27:26, as she involuntarily betrays her unconscious mind at work. Sibilia’s reactions are rapturous.)
DERRELL BRADFORD: “What are these guys gonna do when they go belly up? What’s happens when Chicago can’t meet its pension obligations anymore, and they can’t afford to do what it wants to do? What are your thoughts on that?”
REBECCA SIBILIA: “Hopefully, they call Andy Smarick.”
— laughter ensues.
REBECCA SIBILIA: “I mean… No, look.. When you think about bankruptcy- ”
DERRELL BRADFORD: “Do I have to put Jamie between you two?”
(WTF? Is he inferring that she will sexually maul Smarick, who’s sitting next too her?)
REBECCA SIBILIA: “This is a huge opportunity for school districts, and… this is something that EdBuild is going to focus on. Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids. Bankruptcy is a problem for the people governing the system. Right?
“So when a school district goes bankrupt, all of their legacy debt… can be eliminated. And when you’re answering questions that Andy and Mike put forward, like:
” ‘How are we going to pay for the buildings?’
” ‘How are we going to bring in new operators where there’s pension debt?’
“Like, if we can eliminate that in an entire urban system, then we can throw all the cards up in the air, and redistribute everything with all new models.” (“redistribute” being euphemism for privatize)
(—orgasming is the best way to describe how Sibilia sells her this next part.)
(28:41 – 28:50 )
(28:41 – 28:50 )
REBECCA SIBILIA: “And so… you’ve heard it here first! Bankruptcy may be… like… THEE THING that leads to an education revolution!”
————————————
Really Rebecca? You actually claim … bankruptcy is “not sought after…” by EdBuild and by yourself?
That EdBuild and Siblia are “not excited about prospect of any school district going through bankruptcy.”?
Let’s watch it again:
————————–
(28:41 – 28:50 )
(28:41 – 28:50 )
REBECCA SIBILIA: “And so… you’ve heard it here first! Bankruptcy may be… like… THEE THING that leads to an education revolution!”
—————-
As the sounds and images emanate from my computer screen and speakers, I feel the need for a Silkwood-style shower and scrubbing…
Indeed, here’s a whole bunch of crazy and stupid in Sibilia’s remarks.
Would she also argue…
“Divorce is not a problem for the kids in a family. It’s only a problem for the adults.”
“The house burning down where there’s no homeowner’s insurance is not a problem for the kids in a family. It’s only a problem for the adults.” ?
Also, Sibilia’s euphemism “eliminating legacy debt” thru bankruptcy means that tens of thousands of retired teachers who devoted their lives (decades some of them) to teaching—and contributed part of every paycheck to that pension system—will no longer receive a penny in pension money, and then would have no way to pay their bills and feed themselves.
Is that something to be excited about?
From EdBuild’s ideology and point-of-view, if that also means that unions can be busted, and schools can then be turned into profit centers… err… excuse me… charter schools… run by money-motivated profiteers… then yeah, it is something to be excited about… I guess.
As they dwell in their ivory tower, these EdBuild ideologues are as cold-blooded and sociopathic and devoid of compassion as anyone at the Wannsee Conference.
Here’s a homework assigment… watch the two videos—Wannsee Conference, and the EdBuild panel—- back to back…
… to see if this isn’t true.
I’ll let Peter “CURMUDGUCATION” Greene get the last word in here in his description of the segment above:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-happens-after-you-blow-it-all-up.html
PETER GREENE: “Bradford sets up her next bit by observing that some school districts are in trouble, and he would argue most can’t afford to stay open, and that would be awesome, and I say, you know what would help with that? What would help is to stop allowing charters to suck the blood out of the public system.
“And all that brings us to the quote that has circulated, where she envisions bankruptcy as a great way to blow up a district, specifically getting rid of all its ‘legacy debt’ so that they no longer have to pay for like buildings and pensions, which is totally cool because having a school district go bankrupt is no problem for students, just the adults. Which is just– I mean, I imagine that students would notice that their district is collapsing financially and cutting programs and teachers and resources with a chainsaw.
” ‘Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids,’ is a statement that, in the best of contexts, is still grossly tone-deaf and reality-impaired. In the context of Sibilia’s discussion of how to blow up public schools so we can have charters, it’s even more tone-deaf and reality-impaired.
“And while the tone of the whole panel is, as I said, disturbingly light and happy, Sibilia is just so thoroughly gleeful about the prospect of districts becoming bankrupt, their pensions zeroed out and their teaching staff scrubbed. I have seen people less excited about getting engaged to the eprson of their dreams.”
I’m still waiting to see honest reformers speak out. Either they are completely cowed or they were never honest in the first place and like their billionaire funding more than they like the at-risk kids who get shafted the most in these so-called “reforms”.
It’s truly absurd for any charter school to go after the affluent kids whose parents are college educated who have always done well in public schools. Once I see them chomping at the bit to “serve” these affluent kids by spending boatloads of money in marketing to advertise their “free private school education” with all the dollars saved from not having to educate the pesky difficult and expensive children who are more likely to be low-income, I know they are corrupt. No excuses for them – they don’t really want to help public schools get better at all.
And there are schools like KIPP that did seem to want to serve low-income kids, but ONLY the ones who can achieve the brag-worthy results. It’s an absurd idea that a charter school should be able to set up a system where they are perfectly free to make a young struggling student feel any amount of misery until their parent pulls them out! Again, that is all about the school CEO caring more about promoting himself than any concern whatsoever for the kids.
If magnet schools for children who are obedient and easy to educate are the way to go, then the “reformers” should be promoting every public school system establishing those instead of privatizing that so that the profits go to pay high CEO salaries even in non-profits! The fact is, the dishonesty of these reformers in not acknowledging how many of the most expensive to educate kids get failed by their system where they mysteriously disappear will someday be revealed. Or perhaps not, but one can always hope. I don’t understand how people like this Katie Beck can look themselves in the mirror. What a truly awful human being that woman is — I suppose I can excuse her by the fact that she is simply young and thus has license to promote letting the most vulnerable at-risk children ROT, but really, I feel for the country if she is an example of the best and the brightest who don’t care at all about the students who aren’t.
One sad by product of this “marketing” to more affluent and middle class parents is this: public school districts are now wasting money on marketing themselves. I see a new focus on webpages and social media devoted to PR, spin, and self congratulatory puff pieces sent out almost daily to keep parents informed the “good stuff” the the schools are doing. I feel like half of the stuff that is done is executed only for the sake of being able to say that it was done…..life imitating art.
Were there any elected officials at this national public school planning session, or have they completely “relinquished the education space” to The Movement? Will they promise to let us know what the plans are sometime prior to roll-out?
Good thing he didn’t try to attend and listen in person. He might have been arrested.
I would like to know how many of these self-described reformers send their own children to the schools they are so gleefully foisting upon communities that do not have the financial and political wherewithal to keep these profit seekers from exploiting them.
Another great point that has to hammered home to those who don’t get it or care.
“What lives and what dies in a system of choice schools? More importantly, why should anything live”
I find it pretty damn remarkable that people who sold this to the public as “improving public schools” find absolutely NO value in public schools.
Privatization was a given. They never valued public schools at the outset. “knock it down” and “blow it up” was not how they sold this.
Also, and I know this is cheeky of me, but shouldn’t lawmakers be designing “governance systems”? I’m looking at a “governance system” in Ohio that was designed by these same people and it’s a corrupt, chaotic mess that affects BOTH “sectors” and the kids in public schools didn’t “choose” any of it. Are they going to govern public schools the same they govern the “charter sector” in this state? Thanks but no thanks.
What’s fun to do if you actually live in one of these states that is being “reformed” is to compare the rhetoric of the national ed reform “movement” and “reform” state legislators when they visit the public schools in their districts.
A Kasich rep and a state legislator were just out to my son’s public school, because, you know -it’s important to get in the local paper- and I heard nothing but solemn and “heartfelt” vows to support our schools and all the super-de-duper work parents and teachers are doing on College and Career Readiness.
Why are the national unelected “movement” people always talking about throwing cards up in the air and blowing things up yet the people who actually have to get elected as “ed reformers” never do? Which group are telling the truth? Is it fair to voters to hide the ball like this? Can people consent to something they aren’t aware of?
John McPhee’s book “The Control of Nature” has a lot to say for caution when dealing with natural systems that we understand very poorly.
The best example of this may be the Florida Everglades, which were nearly destroyed by an “engineered” system of canals in sourthern Florida that diverted much of the water away from the natural drainage.
Natural systems — particularly living systems (including “social systems” like schools) — are extremely complex, are the result of organic evolution over long periods of time and are highly interdependent. It’s the height of foolishness to expect that one can ‘engineer” these systems from scratch.
And actually, the people who believe they can “engineer’ such systems are not even good engineers because, quite unlike good engineers, they don’t investigate (or even define) the problem before they come up with a “solution.” They start with the “solution’ (charters, VAMs, etc) and then go hunting for “facts’ that support their case. This is not how good engineers and scientists work.
Entropy, chaos theory and The Butterfly Effect. And the greater the complexity of the system, the greater all three components. The only certainty is the uncertainty.
One need not even invoke chaos theory.
They are trying to “redesign” a bird when they don’t know the first thing about aerodynamics, but nonetheless think they can do better than the bird. Of course, their “bird” never gets off the ground (or is even able to walk [or even to pull itself along by its beak {or even open its beak}]). In fact, the only thing their “bird” is good at is dropping turds.
But you’re right, these people are also utterly clueless about the concept of ‘uncertainty” which is actually crucial to all of science and engineering.
A perfect example is when they use VAM scores. They often totally ignore the associated uncertainty, which is often so large relative to the actual score as to make conclusions about the score meaningless.
But, of course, that does not stop them. No sirree.
And the absolutely hilarious thing (which is a sure sign that they don’t know what the hell they are doing) is that they so often quote these scores to several digits past the decimal place, implying that they are far more precise than the associated uncertainty implies.
To anyone who has ever taken a basic freshman level science or engineering class, what these clowns are doing looks absolutely ludicrous — because, of course, it IS.
There are many moments when I decide that I will walk away from this issue, stop reading about it, stop caring about it and go about ‘cultivating my private garden”. then, I read something wonderful, brilliantly insightful and inspiring which makes me want to continue to act and reach out. Both the original post and Some Dam Poet’s response have given me inspiration for today and some reading material for tomorrow. Thank you.
The idea that the system is so bad that they can do no harm is pervasive. They drank their own kool-aid and totally believe it. All hail the free market and this wonderful opportunity.
NY teacher: there is a painfully awkward consistency to the catchy mantras and self-serving slogans of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement—
They project their own worst deeds and hypocritical words onto others.
IMHO, you have just explained—in different words, of course—that the rheephormsters are deeply imbued with the “soft bigotry of low expectations of public education.”
They are not worried about the caution “above all do no harm” as they apply their specious remedies to public schools because from their POV anything they do will not be as bad as what already exists. Hence they not only do not feel responsible for their sneers, jeers and smears of public education—they think it’s the bitter medicine we need in order to bring us (aka the vast majority) back to educational health.
They relentlessly apply Rheeality Distortion Fields to themselves; that’s why they can attempt to foist off such nonsense as their often ham-handed attempts to ignore facts on the ground, massage and torture numbers & stats, and pretend that “by doing good for themselves they are doing good for others.”
They don’t think they’re lying or manipulating or imposing on OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN what they don’t mandate for THEIR OWN CHILDREN. It’s a non-starter for them because they assume that’s the best of all possible worlds and it need not be questioned or challenged.
Double talk. Double think. Double standards. They are honestly and sincerely offended when folks on this blog and elsewhere point out their searing hypocrisy in words and deeds.
In their eyes, it’s practically divine and natural law that they and theirs can have one sort of education and everyone else gets something much much inferior.
And so so much of this is what the owner of this blog has called “vanity projects.” It’s not just $tudent $ucce$$: their egos are heavily “invested.”
Homegrown talent and an old dead French guy remind us of one of the most effective ways to attack their pretensions and plans:
“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” [Mark Twain]
Remember: multibillionaires are complaining that folks like Diane Ravitch are “swarming” them!
How much does it hurt? Especially when the rheephormsters provide all the ammunition needed to hurl against them?
“Ridicule dishonors a man more than dishonor does.” [François de la Rochefoucauld]
And what would he have said about self-ridicule? Especially when they do it to themselves in such dishonorable ways?
😏
Thank you for your comments.
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Yes, and a strong reminder that this is what Obama meant when he lauded Duncan as bringing public schools “sometimes kicking and screaming” into the 21st century — a century of so-called “free” market dominance ushered in and maintained by the technocrats who see themselves as the “smartest people in the room” and who have earned the right to dominate the rest of us due to their Ivy League degrees and vast hoards of ill-gotten wealth.
I daily regret voting for this man and will for the rest of my life. And he wasn’t smart enough to prevent being played over and over by an opposition party that totally resisted his neverending efforts to achieve bipartisanship and actually revitalizing that party when it was in its death throes 7 years ago, was he?
That’s the 21st Century system that Duncan (and let’s just admit here, Obama) created and build (or are in the process of creating and building)… that they want their own kids to have no part of whatsoever.
Indeed… all of the following (and more)
Barak Obama
Arne Duncan
Chris Christie
John King
Rahm Emanuel
Campbell Brown …
… pay tens of thousands of dollars so their own children are kept as far away of the Obama-lauded 21st Century school system in all its horror — test prep, militarized “No Excuses” discipline, no rich curriculum, large class sized, untrained or minimally-trained teachers, Common Core … and it goes.
If it’s so great, HOW COME YOUR OWN KIDS SCHOOL ARE DIAMETRICALLY DIFFERENT FROM THIS “21st Century system”?
There’s the education of the elite—who will lead — and the education of the rest—the fabled “other people’s kids — whom those elite will lead and dominate.
“Seeing Like a State.” He got the point. It is about “the best and brightest” imposing their grand ideas on the little people–with disastrous results…
It seems the “best and the brightest” always play the “unity of interests” card. The
“unity of interests” theory is deeply embedded in most all of the systems. The results
beg to differ.
Does the concentration of wealth, or the distribution of assets, define the
“will of the people”? Does the “Emperor” function as he was “dressed”?
What will it take for MORE people to “get the point”, or come to grips with the
reality, that the system was established by the “success for whom” power, with
nothing to do with a “social fairness network”, but everthing to do with the transfer
from the many to the few?
I don’t see how projecting the predominant mythologies, surrounding the state,
alerts the “Emperor” to game over, or alert the people outside of PE, to a
common awareness of exploitation, AND the solidarity needed to oppose it.
Enough of the officially authorized fantasy already! That’s what got us here,
AND it won’t move us from here.
Peter, excellent, insightful post.
crossposted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Reformers-Debate-What-to-D-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Debate_Destruction_Peter-Greene_Public-Education-151003-564.html
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