Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform is one of the long-time reformer groups in D.C. Allen was beating the drums for school choice long before it was cool or bipartisan. Before she launched CER in 1993, she was an education analyst at the rightwing Heritage Foundation.
At the time CER was founded, it was a lonely voice on the right, touting the virtues of charter schools, choice, freedom, and innovation. But now she is soul-mates with the reformers in the Obama administration, who are as enthusiastic about charters and choice as Jeanne Allen.
This ought to be a triumphant moment. But no. Allen and CER recently released a manifesto warning that their movement was at risk. Reformers have fallen into complacency, and all the gains of the past quarter century might easily slip away.
Despite domestic and international turmoil, the report says, “the movement to ensure educational attainment for all is at a crossroads. We are losing ground in part because we are losing the argument. And our hopes of systemic change — our progress — will be lost, and we will be a nation at even greater risk, if we do not refocus our collective energies and message to connect with the broad universe of education consumers and citizens everywhere.”
Losing ground and losing the argument. Yep! Reformers must reach out to those “education consumers” and shake them up. Without a renewed sense of crisis, all the “reform” progress might be lost.
It is a strange report, to be sure. It tries to revive the evangelistic fervor of “A Nation at Risk,” the celebrated document of 1983, which warned that our nation was at risk if we didn’t reverse the “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s schools that threatened our very survival.
Well, here we are, 33 years later, with the world’s most powerful economy and military.
Despite the dire predictions, we survived. The nation’s gravest problem is income inequality and the shrinking middle class, but for reformers, it is always about the schools.
The new reformer manifesto, unlike A Nation at Risk,” was ignored by the media. Peter Gteene and I may be the only people who read it, other than those who were paid to read it.
Damn that complacency! CER wants to rile everyone up again. We are still at risk! Really! We need more choice! More charters! Disrupt those failing schools! Privatize for innovation!
Why has the movement lost its zest and gusto? How do we awaken those 50-somethings to storm the barricades? That’s the problem. When people become too fat and happy, it is difficult to stir those old passions to break the unions and destroy the public schools.
Maybe I’m wrong, but the manifesto reads like the last gasp of a moribund movement.
Peter Greene reviewed the manifesto. He slogged through its turgid prose so you don’t have to. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.
“will be lost, and we will be a nation at even greater risk, if we do not refocus our collective energies and message to connect with the broad universe of education consumers and citizens everywhere.”
I wish they’d stop redefining my son as an “education consumer”. I’m not in the free market ed reform club. I reject their effort to define him down from “citizen” to “consumer”.
He’s not a consumer at school. He’s a student and he’s a citizen of this community, and public schools are absolutely central to our community. Label your own kids with your ideology. Leave mine out of it. He’s not choosing a cell phone provider. We live here. This is where he’s growing up.
Unlike consumers, whose options are severely limited by corporate policy, citizens possess inalienable rights, which is precisely why so-called reformers are so insistent on destroying democratic rule over the schools
Excellent point about being a citizen and not a consumer!!
Part of our current problems, not only in education but in the country as a whole stems from falsely equating an economic system with the political system, of which the student and parents as “consumers” of an education “product” narrative supplants the proper, constitutionally speaking, people as citizens with rights as you so correctly identified.
Gracias por sus pensamientos basados en verdad.
Peter Greene on this important difference: Caveat civis
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/06/caveat-civis.html
Economists define people as consumers because that is the only thing they understand.
Their “theories” do not allow for actual people, only consumers of “goods” and “services” — regardless of whether there is even anything “good” or “serving” about them.
Ironically, economists themselves add nothing of any value to the economy and are actually the source of many of our current problems. If they all disappeared tomorrow, we would all be much better off.
Imagine what would happen if all those consumers stopped eating out, taking vacations and buying new cars. What other things that we don’t need can us consumers stop consuming?
What if we all stopped shopping at super markets and did all our shopping for food at farmers’ markets?
I would hope that you, Peter, and all of us who have been chipping away at this monster over the past several years has had this effect. From the SOS March in 2011 to the follow-up one this July and groups like BATS and NPE, to all the bloggers and activists, both local and national…..WE have made this happen and we should all be proud… not complacent. We must keep up the fight.
So many of the ed reform lobbyists are political professionals and marketing people that I’m surprised they don’t realize how completely and utterly negative the ed reform message is for parents of public school children.
You know what “ed reform” means to me after 4 children thru public schools the last 20 years? Budget cuts, testing, and constantly slamming our schools for deficiencies real or imagined.
That’s the danger of an echo chamber, I guess. They literally don’t see it. Look at any of the big websites of ed reform- Broad, Gates, Campbell Brown’s org, the US Department of Education. You will find very few positive mentions of public schools. Often public schools aren’t mentioned AT ALL amid all the charter cheerleading.
93% of kids in Ohio attend public schools- kids of all income level and race and ethnicity. The only time ed reform turns to the 93% is to list our failings or order us to comply with something.
You cannot maintain a constant state or urgency, especially when it a manufactured crisis. People become numb to cries.ed.gov of the sky falling when it is in fact not falling.
When fanatics see their lunatic ideas going down the drain after a taste of success, they get desperate.
When the greedy fraudsters see the money they dreamed of slipping from their fingers, they get desperate too,
Beware the desperate lunatics that are backed into a corner. There aren’t many Donald Trumps who through a legion of lies is a transparent fraud for fools. The smart fraudsters are backstabbers and they carry long, sharp weapons.
I also don’t appreciate these public employees and the lobbies fanning out in national media to insist my son is “trapped” in his public school. That’s not how we’re raising him to approach school. He likes school so far. Someone should tell the President and his team that some of us actually support our local schools, strange as that may sound within the echo chamber. Since most kids attend public schools perhaps the adults could put aside their agenda long enough to stop referring to our schools as “monopolies” and “crumbling prisons” where children are “trapped” by evil labor union members. Their caricature of local public schools is not the national reality. They should get out more.
NYT on Detroit charter fail.
You know what I really love? How ed reformers in DC and NYC and Boston dump these for-profit charters in states like Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania:
“For-profit companies seized on the opportunity; they now operate about 80 percent of charters in Michigan, far more than in any other state. The companies and those who grant the charters became major lobbying forces for unfettered growth of the schools, as did some of the state’s biggest Republican donors.”
I notice where they chose to conduct this unfettered free market experiment- far from any of the places where they live.
NYC or Boston or DC are not the same as Toledo or Detroit or Cleveland. All of this national cheerleading for charters simply doesn’t apply here. I don’t care what Campbell Brown thinks about Success Academy. This narrative doesn’t apply to the reality in these states. How can they be unaware of this? It’s whole huge states. Ed reform is fabulous with the exception of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan? That seems like a big omission.
Its a whole new take on, “do unto others . . . “
Just part of the plan- Gates-financed New Schools Venture Fund’s “marching orders…to develop charter management organizations that produce a diverse supply of different brands on a large scale.”
I think CEP is at risk, three major positions open there, and no recent grants from the Gates Foundation which sent her over $1 million to be one of his start-up megaphones for charters and choice. You can see her list of the longest and most prolific donors here. https://www.edreform.com/about/people/cer-supporters/
The relentless pursuit of anxiety about the state of American education, failure to make each and every, and all students conform to and confirm the aims of zealots like Allen and her partners and supporters and doners may well be claimed as a triumph of sorts. The intended stranglehold Allen and others seek has not been achieved.
I guess every false narrative has its limits.
While bloggers and citizen groups have been chipping away at the charter school mythology, the “reformers” have been actively tarnishing charters’ fake luster. Citizens are regrouping behind public education because they reject the marketplace ideology of “reform.” They understand that public education has served our nation well as a democratic institution dedicated to the common good. Many parents now see that all the testing VAM is harmful to their children as schools narrow the curriculum to try to avoid being on the takeover list. Citizens also see that charters have failed to deliver on their promises, failed to innovate, and they are not worth the added cost that serves to enrich billionaires and corporations. They have read about the numerous scandals and millions of dollars of waste and fraud. Parents want authentic teachers for their children just like the ones they had a generation before this one. They are not impressed with the newest technological gimmick that makes unfounded claims. Frankly, the public is catching on to all the lies surrounding “reform.” That is why blogs like these should be reposted and shared with other less informed members of the electorate.
“It is tempting to attribute this troubling trend line as a natural reaction to our successes, a sign of growing pains. The enemies of change, those most invested in the status quo, are clearly threatened, and they are fighting back with everything they have. We have heard this from many of our allies, and there’s certainly some truth to it. States such as Nebraska, have tried for a decade to enact a charter law but no bills make it the floor.[21] Inertia, ignorance about outcomes, and a powerful teachers’ association are all part of the story here.”
I’ll be sure to notify my fellow public school parents this DC lobby has decided they are “the enemies of change”.
Just bizarre. I’m really not at war with my son’s school. Why don’t they conduct their ideological crusade in their own private schools and leave us out of it?
Let’s hope so! Usually a fundamentally unethical philosophy will fall in on itself, let’s hope this signals the first stones falling.
There is an old parable about building your system ON SAND; watch it finally cave in.
Where’s ed reform’s last savior, Rahm Emanuel, by the way? Someone should contact him and tell him there’s no funding for the system he “transformed”.
Did he outsource the mayor’s job, too?
What’s the Pottery Barn rule again? You broke it you bought it?
http://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/brown-small-town-school-chief-we-must-stand-together/
Well, here we are, 33 years later, with the world’s most powerful economy and military.
In a word, “exceptional”…
“to represent mankind as assembled in troops and companies.” Adam Ferguson
“Today’s Treasury Secretaries, central bank heads, IMF economists and CLIENT academics serve the world’s cosmopolitan financial ideology that money and credit, debt and taxes are purely technocratic, and hence beyond the sphere of voters or the politicians they elect to “interfere” with. We are back with the Thatcherite financial Taliban (the Arab word for “students”): There Is No Alternative.
That is the protective myth that elites have wrapped around themselves and their privileges from time immemorial. To succeed, it must erase knowledge of history and live in a highly censored “present” in which the financial class takes the land, public infrastructure and government into its own hands.” Michael Hudson
YEP!
and thanks!
Yep- like hedge funder, Pete Peterson’s new attempt to destroy Social Security (reportedly, Madelyn Albright is on the group’s board). “Benefits must be cut. There’s no other way.” The plutocrats narrow the options, so that citizens lament that those are the only choices.
Reformers are going to crack up more after seeing this scathing article today about charter schools in Detroit:
Way to go Kate Zernike of the New York Times! Now, how about a follow-up story on New Orleans, Denver, Los Angeles?
I sense a shift in the winds. When actual reporters start digging deeply, the facts come out. And those facts are hard to argue, even by celebrity reporters and cheerleaders for charter schools and choice. Hopefully other NYT columnists and writers (Nicholas Kristoff, Frank Bruni, Tina Rosenberg and Natasha Singer) will drop the reformer spin and their software advertisements and see what’s actually happening with privatization of schools. Not much hope, I fear, for others caught in a permanent spin cycle, like Campbell Brown.
Allen et al are simply replicating the most successful strategy of the fringe-right. Namely, convincing their side that they’re losing despite the fact that they’re winning on every front. This enables them to make bolder demands for even more reactionary proposals, while claiming that their so-called opponents aren’t doing enough—drawing the entire political narrative further and further right.
In education this strategy created space for the bi-partisan consensus of neoliberalism to implement all the policies extremist groups like CER have been clamoring for decades. This is why Republicans like Bush, and Democrats like Obama and Clinton espouse the same policies. If anything the Democrats have been more successful realizing the policies of the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Foundation, and ALEC than their supposed opposition. Any wonder why Romney praised Duncan in the previous election cycle?
If we want to save public education, we need to start fighting outside of the neoliberal corporate education reformers’ boundaries. Any sort of “realistic” demands, compromise, or trying to obtain a seat at a metaphorical table play into Jeanne Allen and her ilk’s hands. The fringe right never compromise, and they’re winning. Our demands need to be just as uncompromising.
Remember it was Ben Austin, proud Democrat and former Clinton White House aide, was the one who unleashed ALEC’s “Parent Trigger” legislation on an unsuspecting public. Just one example of how we need to oppose all neoliberal corporate education reformers, regardless of what mainstream party they identify with.
Winning on every front? Which war are you watching?
I’m not breathing any sighs of relief until the U.S. DoE stops pushing test-and-punish. Not until the Eli Broad Private Board of Privatization stops putting adds on TV and funding more charter schools. Not until charter founders stop running for mayor of Los Angeles in 2017 and governor of California in 2018. I won’t be relieved until they stop, not complaining, but stop fighting for injustice.
“The fringe right never compromise, and they’re winning. Our demands need to be just as uncompromising.”
Not according to this from the article:
“This is where we stand on the cusp of an important election: off message, losing ground at the national level, losing fights in communities across the country, and struggling to hold on even in the places where we have demonstrated the most dramatic success*.”
I hope that the initial putsch/blitzkrieg of the edudeformers and privateers has been halted. Now is the time to force them backwards and to give up the “territory” that they had stolen from the public good.
*the most dramatic success = stealing from the public commons
The Broad, Walton, and Gates money will dry up soon. Then what?
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-california-dark-money-donors-revealed-20160627-snap-story.html
Hedge Clippers are doing great work to dry up the money. Gates has turned his attention at least partially toward a clucking bird of a different feather, but I still don’t think Broad and his toads will stop. I just saw one of their Great Schools adds on MSNBC the other day.
I wish the money of the misinformed “reformers” would dry up. It is the money of the misinformed wealthy people that drives the movement. It is not the general public.
RT
How much more money do you think they will be willingly dump into ed-reform? Charter schools (yesterday’s shiny thing) and CBE (dead on arrival) will prove to be more trouble than they’re worth.
According to the latest, $250 million more from the Waltons for charter expansion. Maybe it is a limitless supply of cash.
The supply of cash is limited. The oligarchs are on track, to quickly impoverish the world’s population. Picketty’s research proved it. Plutocrats bought our universities (UnKochMyCampus.org). They’ve bought legal and economic scholars. They’ve bought courts and legislatures. They’ve directly bought bureaucrats who promote and write policy. They’ve bought astroturf groups to sucker in the gullible…
Reformers have always been cracking up — laughing all the way to the bank.
From the article:
“A local school board that had once been abolished and a state agency created in recent years are now increasingly meddling in the efforts of DC school leadership to make swift, effective decisions governing schools.”
Can anyone spot the flaw in this thought?
Señor Swacker: an editing quibble…
I reimagined your last sentence as—
[start]
Can anyone spot the flaw in this “thought”?
[end]
Just sayin’…
😎
Agree with your editing! But what is the flaw itself?
Or how about this one:
“Opponents rarely took time to understand how the standards were adopted, why and how they were being used, and what they actually said, while proponents regularly dismissed concerns without examining their cause or intent, resulting in a more fractured community of once powerful advocates, whose alignment on issues such as opportunity and innovation is now secondary.”
Where is the falsehood in that statement?
Opponents rarely took time to understand how the standards were adopted (extorted by USDOE), why ($) and how they were being used (false narrative of school failure), and what they actually said (empty skill sets and developmentally misaligned).
Yeah, we rarely took the time.
You win a Kewpie doll!!
This article reminds me of one of my current readings by Richard Phelps’ “Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing”. There are so many falsehood confidently stated as truths that to wade through the bullshit requires extra tall chest waders. Got through about one third of that tripe and perhaps I’ll just leave it to the curmudgucator’s synopsis to suffice.
“That tripe” being the article referenced not the book which I will finish and reread. So far not a word about Wilson’s critiques of standards and standardized testing even though his work has been available since 1998 and the book is from 2008.
Thank you for putting on those chest waders.
The only response that rheephorm “thought leaders” seem able to muster re the efficacy, usefulness and accuracy of standardized tests is to deflect, evade and ignore. Or as that master of “data analytics,” self-[d]effacing fanboy extraordinaire of Michelle Rhee put it—
“metaphysical excuses.” [VirginiaSGP His Own Bad Self]
And, as is my wont, I would add Banesh Hoffman’s THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (first appeared in 1962, reissued in 1964 and 2008).
They don’t believe in the power of their own ideas. Hence all they’ve got is lying by commission and omission.
😎
That reminds me of something.
My grandfather had a dairy farm and I remember whenever he had a sick cow the vet would arrive with chest waders and rubber gloves up to his armpits and reach waaaaaaay inside the cow’s rectum and pull out all the poop.
Thanks for the memories, Duane.
There has to be a poem with that thought!!
Is Allen channeling the Microsoft Canada “education partner”, interviewed in Entrepreneur magazine, “Teachers have to shift (i.e. all Americans) or, get off the pot”? Aren’t our communities shifting fast enough for the oligarchs, who want to fully tap that $1 trillion dollar education, business sector that Rupert Murdoch described?
Is Allen channeling Reed Hastings? Haven’t Americans relinquished the democracy that protects our children, fast enough?
Speaking of the Heritage Foundation and the Koch’s, a few weeks ago David Koch’s photo was in the array of Board members (along with Madelyn Albright), for the Aspen Institute. Aspen’s education programs (funded by Gates), IMO, are the driving force in the rephorms coming from D.C. Now you see David, now you don’t. He’s no longer in the array but, If you search “Aspen Institute David Koch”, his photo pops up.
‘Pops up”… for now….
The promoters of VAM are also on the defense, hoping to ward off the demise of the favorite tool for demeaning students, teachers, schools. I do not have access to this source. A Google alert sent it to my mailbox Here is the headline.
Five Indisputable Reasons Why You Should Be Implementing Value-Added Assessment
By Matthew Lynch on June 27, 2016 7:45 AM
(subscription) (blog)
Value-added assessment provides an objective way of evaluating teachers and is less about who a student is than about what goes on in the …
This puff piece seems to be running parallel to a huge Gates-funded campaign to shore up the CCSS and related campaign to position Relay Graduate School of Education, TFA, TNTP, and even teacher unions as champions of versions of teacher education that are free of any ties to scholarship and nuance.
The teacher education campaign, called TeachStrong, is led by the Center for American Progress, complete with a push survey designed by Peter Hart’s shop–80% of the public…65% of teachers… , etc. The survey offers PR support for nine principles (tenets, agenda items) for reforming teacher education being promoted by a national coalition of 60 organizations and their networks. The aim is get this agenda installed for the 2016 season of policy tweaks for Title II of ESSA: PREPARING, TRAINING, AND RECRUITING HIGH-QUALITY TEACHERS, PRINCIPALS, OR OTHER SCHOOL LEADERS
The process of making news in order to push some not fully disclosed policies reminds me of the process used to push the Common Core into public discussions with all sorts of endorsements. I have yet to find documents that show agreements between CEP and the 60 endorsers of a one-size-fits-all brand of teacher preparation. Of the 60 organizations participating in this CAP publicity campaign, two-thirds have received funding from the Gates Foundation. The campaign contractor for the TeachStrong campaign has done a lot of work for MoveOn.
Peter Green has eviscerated the campaign and one of the endorsers here http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/11/teach-strong-real-wrong.html
EduShyster also does a number on it (lost the link).
Bottom line, the wailing about public education will continue until we have totally standardized instruction and teacher preparation, with Pavlovian-inspired techniques from Doug Lemov.
Nevertheless, charter school supporters/funders continue to make in roads in state after state, as is well documented by many of the posts on this blog. I am absolutely sick about what the New York State Legislature managed to slide in at the last second (again)–no need for certified teachers, or any oversight at all, for that matter!– for the state’s charter schools! This was passed to give the mayor one year of mayoral control! And, why should any mayor ALSO control a school system? Is he or she an expert on such matters? Doesn’t he or she already have enough on the plate?!
Shelley, I agree. No mayor should have unfettered control of a city’s public schools. They have no special educational expertise. The mayor should appoint a majority of the board; the members of the board should serve for a set term, not at the pleasure of the mayor. The board should select the chancellor, and the chancellor or superintendent should answer to the board, not the mayor. That’s the way it was done in NYC for most of the 20th century. Bloomberg came up with the idea that he owned the schools, lock, stock, and barrel, and he appointed the chancellor, and members of the board served at his pleasure. Again, a demonstration that corporate reformers think that democracy is the problem.
The Sandia Report, which refuted A Nation At Risk came out not too long afterwards but was largely ignored in large part because it wasn’t as much a “if it bleeds it leads” screed. Here’s a link to an explanation of the history of it all. http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
Also, the fact that it was not publicly released for quite a while after it was completed might have had something to do with it.