John Thompson, historian and teacher, thought that corporate reform was happening elsewhere, but not in Oklahoma City. But now they have arrived in full force, with all their failed and demoralizing strategies. It is such a good post that I am quoting a lot of it, but not all of it. I urge you to read the whole thing.
He writes:
It wasn’t until I left the fulltime classroom in 2010 that I saw out-of-state corporate reformers, ranging from the Walton Foundation and the Parent Revolution to ALEC, try to bring their competition-driven, edu-politics to Oklahoma City. I saw plenty of examples of Sooner state Reaganism, and the gutting of the social safety net. After all, we expect businessmen to play political hardball, as well as take risks and leverage capital in order to increase their profits. That is why we need the checks and balances of our democratic system to counter the “creative destruction” of capitalism. Some free market experiments will fail, but “its only money.” When schools gamble on market-driven policies, however, the losers are children.
Actually, even the economic game involves more than money, as we in Oklahoma have learned after our state adopted so much of the ALEC agenda of shrinking the size of government. Even as we cut funding by about 1/4th since 2008, national corporate reformers have imposed incredibly expensive and untested policies (such as Common Core testing and test-driven teacher evaluations), while encouraging the creaming of the easiest-to-educate (and the least-expensive-to-educate) students from neighborhood schools and into charter schools.
Before 2010, I only read about national conservative and neo-liberal school reformers who adopted a strategy of “convergence” or “flooding the zone” to drive rapid, “transformational change” in selected districts and schools. I didn’t personally witness the way that they used mass charterization, now called the “portfolio strategy,” to avoid the messiness of constitutional democracy. Freed of local governance, corporate reformers promoted a school culture of risk-taking, and urgent experimentation to produce “disruptive innovation.”
Now, it looks like local edu-philanthropists have joined with the Billionaires Boys Club and they may be ready to pull the plug on the OKCPS. Before embracing the policies pushed by national reformers, Oklahoma City and other urban areas should consider Sarah Reckhow’s and Megan Tompkins-Stange’s “‘Singing from the Same Hymnbook’: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.” It begins in the glory days of test-driven, market-driven reform, from 2008 to 2010, when the Broad Foundation proclaimed,
“We feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.”
Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange explain how this dramatic change was conducted in the “absence of a robust public debate.” An alphabet soup of think tanks, funded by “venture philanthropists, produced the best public relations campaign that money could buy, and they did so while playing fast and loose with the evidence. As a Gates insider explained:
“It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.”
It should now be clear that corporate reform failed. The ostensible leader of the campaign, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gone, as are the highest-profile leaders of transformational reforms in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Houston, Memphis, Washington D.C. and other districts. The quantitative portions of teacher evaluations are all but dead, and Common Core has replaced NCLB as the most toxic brand in education. After the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB, and after Hillary Clinton distanced herself from charter schools, it is likely that federal support for this top-down social engineering experiment is history.
The prospect of the eminent demise of test-driven, competition-driven reform seems to have prompted the most fervent reformers in the Broad and Walton Foundations to double down on mass charterization, i.e. the “portfolio” model, in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Newark, D.C. and, apparently, Oklahoma City. I believe it is also obvious why top-down, corporate reform failed. It came with the sword, dismissing educators as the enemy. The “Billionaires Boys Club” hatched their secret plans without submitting them to the clash of ideas. These non-educators ignored both social science and the hard-earned wisdom of practitioners. The “astroturf” think tank, the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), has gained a foothold in Tulsa and they seem to have the ears of competition-driven reformers in Oklahoma City. The CRPE may best illustrate the way that reformers are doubling down on the edu-politics of destruction, even while they belatedly try to cultivate a kinder, gentler image.
I hope that Thompson is right about the demise of corporate reform. It is so lucrative that I don’t expect the hedge-fund-manager-driven demand for privatization to go away quietly, nor do I expect Broad and Gates to abandon their obsession with privatizing the nation’s public schools. I think that once they realize that the public rejects their malignant beneficence and that their reputation is endangered, and that history may view them as scoundrels for the damage they have inflicted on a democratic institution, then they might desist and pick some other sector to micro-manage.
By the way, it was Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education who invented the idea of the portfolio strategy about a dozen years ago. His theory was that the school board should look on their schools as akin to a stock portfolio: get rid of the weak ones, hold on to the top performers. Open and close schools to balance the portfolio. This is already a failed strategy because it ignores the reasons for low academic performance.
“Reformer Zombies”
Just when you thought “he’s gone for good”
The Zombie’s back in search for blood
Reformer Zombies never die
Always give another try
The craziest part of the whole thing is that if you live in one of these states that has been completely and utterly captured by ed reform lobbyists, you find yourself paying a huge group of public employees who believe your child’s school is a political enemy to be conquered.
The think tanks are one thing, but it adds insult to injury when you’re actually EMPLOYING them. I’m shocked at how they talk about public schools. I’m actually paying a representative in Ohio who says his goal is to eradicate public schools. God knows how many I’m paying at the state dept of ed who have this same attitude.
The idea that this is not just acceptable but encouraged in ed reform circles is outrageous. Do they really believe we’re paying them to privatize public schools? Where did they get that idea? Is there any way we can possibly persuade them to do their jobs?
Can any ed reform group give me one reason a public school parent should support their “movement”?
The thing boils down to “choice” and “accountability” and “less funding”.
Public schools in my community where I live and work get more mandates, endless gimmicks and fads and constant chaos, AND less funding and I should support this, why, again?
Can they point me to a single, tangible, real example of how EXISTING public schools have benefited from this? Ohio public schools have dropped in national rankings since these people purchased my state government. They are now doing actual damage.
Dr. Ravitch’s post, on the front page of today’s Huffpo, provides an excellent synopsis of the forces behind and, their grandiose strategies, to make money on the backs of kids, while further enriching the 0.1%.
Yes. An excellent source for those who still don’t see the dangers of our continued testing reform.
That piece would make any reasonable person take note — the key word being “reasonable”
“Reasoning with the Unreasonable”
Reason only works
With reasonable folks
It doesn’t work with jerks
And doesn’t work with jokes
It doesn’t work on those
With evil moneyvations
Unreasonable to suppose
That reason rules relations
1. Cami Anderson’s and M Rhee’s successors may not be as high profile but they did not reverse their predecessor’s undertakings.
2. Hillary Clinton “distanced herself from charter schools” for about a day and a half.
Here’s a piece on the merger of two ed reform lobby “powerhouses”:
“The organization promoted a menu of issues that came to be known as the education reform movement: evaluating teachers partially by their students’ standardized test scores; charter schools; and mayoral control of schools. The organization took off as Rhee absorbed the national spotlight for her tenure as D.C.’s schools chief, where she made enemies for moves including firing a principal on camera.”
Test scores, charter schools, and “mayoral control”. This is how they themselves describe the “movement”.
High point for ed reform? Publicly humiliating an employee to promote the career of a well-connected political actor.
I’m paying thousands of federal and state employees to promote this agenda? They consider the public schools they run The Enemy and they require “smart power” to defeat them?
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-michelle-rhee-studentsfirst-50can-20160329-story.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Feducation+%28L.A.+Times+-+Education%29
It is fraud. Fraud.
I have been disheartened to hear the stories about the reformers coming to Oklahoma. Although I reside and teach in California, I moved to Oklahoma City and went to public school from 5th grade to 12th. When we moved there, I found out about “integration” and “white flight”. I was proud to go to an integrated school, and I learned to adjust to the southern cultural norms of schooling- the teachers at my schools were black and white, while the students were black, white, Native American, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Indian and Laotian. At a young age, I learned the uselessness of standardized tests to determine “gifted” students as well as the beauty of learning a huge set of arts and skills with students from all walks of life- we all learned stringed instruments and sang American folk songs together in 5th grade, we each made a wood and plexiglass lamp in 6th grade, and we had a wide array of classes and opportunities throughout middle school and high school. It was not at all perfect, and we had some boring teachers along with some amazing teachers, but it was solid and stable. My sense from my old peers is that this has all changed. The old privileges of white flight have returned, and many people with means have opted out by sending their kids to private schools, and others have no choice, but to send their kids into the testing regime of teaching that has taken over. I wish it were not so. Here is a blog I wrote a few years ago about the project based class taught by Clara Luper, my 9th grade history teacher and Oklahoma Civil Rights leader: https://teachingmalinche.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/integration-please/
Your comment comes just as I posted a Wash. Post article to my facebook page which exposes the segregated Whiteness inside our nation’s private schools…
“Sarah Reckhow’s and Megan Tompkins-Stange’s “‘Singing from the Same Hymnbook’: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.” is astounding research. Certainly worth the read. I know the authors are calling it a “draft” but I think it’s synopsis should be on the front page of every major news publication, for the good of the nation.
It’s central question…Is the new education philanthropy good for schools? – Examining foundation-funded school reform.
Short answer – Hell NO.
http://linkis.com/livingindialogue.com/FuZtZ