The previous post referred to a debate among reformers about the role of the Black Lives Matter movement within the current education “reform” (testing and privatization) movement.
John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, here responds to the debate with trenchant insights.
He writes:
I’ve communicated with enough reformers to know that their coalition is fraying. They’ve pushed an edu-politics of destruction based on the punitive use of test results in order to keep score in their competition-driven movement. Now, it is obvious that value-added teacher evaluations and their one-size-fits-all micromanaging have failed. Many or most, however, are still committed to high-stakes testing in order to speed up their rushed effort to close schools in mass.
Other corporate reformers seem to believe they can use their (admittedly brilliant) high-dollar public relations campaigns to drive the expansion of charters. They’ve finally realized that parents are preoccupied with what’s best for their own children, not education policy. They are marketing to parents who can’t stop the damage that the extreme proliferation of choice does to children left behind in weakened neighborhood schools, but who ignore test scores and seek safe and orderly schools for their own kids.
He asks inconvenient questions about why reformers vilify teachers and want to bust unions.
What I can’t grasp, however, is liberals who assail other liberals because we won’t use the stress of high stakes testing to overcome the stress produced by generational poverty. I still can’t understand civil rights advocates who condemn other civil rights advocates because we oppose school segregation as a means of reversing the legacies of segregation.
Had the technocrats spent more time in the inner city classroom, and in the homes, hospital rooms, the streets and, yes, the funerals of our kids, they’d have known we needed more “disruptive” innovation like we need another gang war. Had they shared the joy of teaching and learning for mastery that builds on the strengths of our kids, they would not have dumped reductionist behaviorism on children. But, because teachers saw things differently, we were condemned as the “status quo,” which accepted “Excuses!,” and renounced “High Expectations!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This quote says it all, “we needed more ‘disruptive’ innovation like we need another gang war.”
As defined on Wiki: “A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances.”
Disruptive innovation is not about actually improving the education of OUR children (do you hear me shouting OUR!!!!?). It’s about the destruction of what works for something new that hasn’t been tested yet. It’s all about pushing out the current leaders in business and replacing them with new leaders who also worship at the alter of avarice and want their shot at becoming the next generation of billionaires. It’s a bogus shortcut to wealth and power.
Clayton M. Christensen, the (mafia) godfather of this movement, defines a disruptive innovation as a product or servce designed for a new set of customers. But where do they get these customers? The only new customers are children at birth.
So they steal them, and that’s what they are doing to community based, democratic, transparent, non profit public education. They are stealing parents and children for the disruptive innovation of an autocratic, profitable, opaque and often worse/fraudulent publicly funded private sector education industry.
Disruptive innovation that is based on cherry-picked facts, impossible promises, manufactured evidence, lies and fraud is not an improvement, It is a crime.
Disruptive innovation has replaced the word fraud so criminal minds can legalize and justify their crimes.
For instance, was the Vietnam and Iraq wars an example of disruptive innovation to create a new market place for the U.S. weapons industry, the largest in the world that even sells weapons to brutal dictators and autocrats?
Foreign Policy Magazine asks, “Why Is the U.S. Selling Billions in Weapons to Autocrats? The export of American arms to countries around the world — even those actively repressing their own citizens — is booming.”
How is this different from what is happening to America’s public educaiton system? The vultures are feeding on us before we are even dead.
LikeLike
“Disruptive Innovation”
Chaos is a cover
For criminal endeavor
And as you will discover
It’s really very clever
LikeLiked by 1 person
The power of poetry. :o)
LikeLike
On target with the disruptive innovationists in education. They are theoretically bound to the “vultures win” principle in business and in education, no consequences beyond defending the theory.
LikeLike
Arne Duncan was a big backer of education on the cheap through screens:
“Bleak budgets coupled with looming teacher shortages amidst an increasing demand for results are accelerating the growth of online learning into blended environments. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently described a “new normal,” where schools would have to do more with less. Blended learning is playing a vital role, as school operators begin to rethink the structure and delivery of education with the new realities of public funding. – See more at: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/publications/the-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning/#sthash.WPlaWcE9.dpuf
Don’t let them kid you. This is about a cheap replacement for teachers in low and middle income schools.
They aren’t testing this out at the Chicago Lab School. They’re conducting the experiments on Latino kids in Rocketship charters and if they get their way they’ll push this garbage into every low and middle income public school.
LikeLike
I can’t resist poet;
Old Ponzi would be proud,
though he’d be in jail
He’d shout it real loud
Reform check’s in the mail
LikeLike
Bellwether’s “human capital pipelines”. The tactical cutting of costs, doesn’t qualify as an entrepreneurial skill.
LikeLike
Thank you, John Thompson.
LikeLike
Ed reform leader Bruce Rauner now refers to public schools as “crumbling prisons”
Nah. They’re not anti-public school. Not a bit!
LikeLike
It is interesting that Thompson can accept the “true believer” conservatives more than the neo-liberals. Perhaps it is because the conservatives have ideological explanations for their beliefs. With the neo-liberals the underlying principle is greed, and they are less principled because they attack liberal teachers with the goal of wage suppression and diminished rights. The greedy neo-liberals often work in tandem with developers to displace poor families in urban areas so profit can be made from new yuppie dwellings that are suddenly surrounded by selective, white charters. Black leaders should understand that issues of race are at the core of “reform,” and lots of these issues have nothing to do with improving educational outcomes for poor, minority students.
LikeLike
Is the main difference between conservatives and neo-liberals that the conservative goal is to physically separate cultures, while the neo-liberal goal is to integrate cultures but force an “everyone must look and act like me” standardized acculturation onto everyone?
LikeLike
Conservatives often defend “choice” through states rights or religious freedom. The neo-liberals are schemers and manipulators that try to justify their behavior through some lofty goal like civil rights, but their main goals are control and profit. At least this is how they appear to me.
LikeLike
“Disruption is Good”
What poor kids need the most:
Disruption in their life
Like parasite in host
It helps them deal with strife
LikeLike
Not new so much as more widespread. Just to take one example: I remember reading a while ago about many of those that fronted for (and commentaries by a few of them) rheephorm in New Orleans. They felt betrayed.
As I see it, while they played their part in imposing charters and privatization etc., they refused to see that the emphasis corporate education reform put on test-to-punish and VAM and faux accountability and such wasn’t the beginning of the conversation about the resources/inputs needed to improve education—
That WAS the conversation. In a nutshell: a system of labeling, sorting, and stack ranking students & teachers & communities in order to determine the worthy few and the unworthy many in service to raking in as much $tudent $ucce$$ as possible for a few adults.
I welcome their attempts at self-reflection but I invoke the pottery store adage about education: you helped break it, you own it.
Own up to your responsibility for being part of the problem so that you can start to become part of the solution.
To be clear: my suggested self-correction isn’t about such rheephorm staples as the sneer, jeer and smear, in this case self-applied. It isn’t about contempt. It’s about fairly and accurately and constructively being self-critical.
That’s the way I see it…
I thank everyone for their comments.
😎
LikeLike
The white reformers’ contempt for Black Lives Matters mirrors their contempt for the many 5 and 6 year olds — mostly African-American — who are frequently suspended from the “no-excuses” charter school chains they are so delighted to promote.
LikeLike
I cannot begin to express my joy reading about the decoupling of “reform” and civil rights. They should never have been together; they are diametrically opposed. Power to the people!
LikeLike