Tom Ultican, a high school teacher in San Diego reviews Samuel Abrams’ new book, “Education and the Commercial Mindset.”
He writes:
“Samuel E. Abrams has created a masterpiece of research and reason illuminating the successes and failures of the forces favoring privatization of public education. His new book published by Harvard University Press is Education and the Commercial Mindset.
“Starting with Chris Whittle and his infamous Channel One on TV and the ill-fated Edison Education, Abrams documents the triumphs and failures of profit based education. He shares the thinking and biographies of key characters working to privatize education and includes voices warning about the unsavory consequences of this agenda; not only in America, but worldwide.
“My big take-away from this book was solidified in the last two chapters that discussed privatization efforts in Europe and South America. It explains why both Chile and Sweden have begun undoing their privatized systems. Abrams wrote:
“Much as many Chileans at the same time were protesting their nation’s long-standing system of for-profit school management, initiated in 1981, Swedish critics started to raise their voices in opposition. The Chilean adversaries would soon prevail, with President Michele Bachelet declaring in January 2015 that her government would phase out for-profit school management.
“Basic to the UR [the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company] series was a crisis of faith in Swedish education known as ‘PISA shock.’ Of all OECD nations, only Sweden had seen scores on the triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) successively drop with each administration of the exam since its introduction in 2000.” (Page 275)
Ultican sees three take-aways:
“1) Put highly trained well paid teachers in every classroom.
“2) Respect the professional judgment of educators and have them lead education.
“3) Significantly reduce class sizes.”
Ultican concludes:
“Abrams presents convincing arguments that KIPP and other no-excuses charter systems cannot possibly be scaled up to educate all American children. These systems have a history of burning out teachers and they rely on public schools to take in the children they expel or council out.
“For people interested in public education, ‘Education and the Commercial Mindset’ is an important asset. The privatization movement has been fueled by a misunderstanding of effect and cause. Public schools were struggling, not due to misguided pedagogy or “bad teachers”, but from bad policy and an unwillingness to adequately fund education in poor communities. The top down and misguided federally driven remedies and for profit cannibalism have only made the problem worse.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ed reform is “giddy” about Trump because of the 20 billion for charters and vouchers but Trump prefers any privatized school over any public school – he went to a for-profit in Ohio to promote his plan.
“Flooding the market” with charter schools and vouchers was a bad idea in Ohio. It discredited ed reform to the extent that they’re much less powerful here than they were even a decade ago. There was huge (and deserved) backlash. There’s a renewed focus in this state on existing public schools. We don’t get the same charter cheerleading we got even 5 years ago.
The same thing will happen nationally, so they really shouldn’t be celebrating. They’ll be plunking down charter schools everywhere with no local input and no quality controls, which is pretty much what they did in Ohio. It’s a mess and people in the state now list “charter schools” as one of their three top concerns in Ohio public ed. They discredited their own “movement”.
LikeLike
It makes little sense that those who voted for Trump in Ohio would now expect him to NOT plunder public money; self-directed opportunism has been his business M.O. for many, many long years now.
LikeLike
I am starting to believe that the public is catching on to the down side of ‘corporate education reform.’ Eventually bad products – no matter how much money is spent selling them – go away. The main thing we need to do is keep on keeping on. Our message about community schools and good teaching are resonating.
LikeLike
Here’s another book on this subject, written from an investor’s vantage point:
Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education
by Jonathan A. Knee (Columbia University Press)
From a reviewer website:
LikeLike
Love it! I used the term commercial schools in one posts on RestoreReason.com back om October. The privatization profiteers like to call district schools “government schools” so I advocated we call charters and private schools “commercial schools.” Let’s take a page from their playbook and call it like it is! Here’s the post: https://restorereason.com/2016/10/13/government-vs-commercial/.
LikeLike
For profit ventures are thriving, or trying to. Take a look at these websites and the venture capital being enlisted to support for-profit education, especially in the tech sector.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-01-26-newschools-spins-off-new-for-profit-venture-fund
And also https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ed-tech-infographic-revised-6.28.png
Academics and profit seekers in education are pushing hard for more entrepreneurial activity in the belief that innovation is inherently good, and that public education is a failed enterprise.
The task of the would-be transformers of education is to get more innovation into the system, faster, and with greater impact and scaling up. That is the hot lingo in the academic community, at billionaire foundations, in varied federal programs supporting “innovation” in education, and among venture capitalists who are drawn to financial products from Goldman Sachs and others known as social impact bonds or pay-for success contracts (especially for preschool programs). For an academic’s take on innovation funded by a philanthropy, see http://wtgrantfoundation.org/evidence-at-the-crossroads-pt-8-building-an-improvement-infrastructure by Donald J. Peurach JANUARY 12, 2016
There is also now a publication from Bellwether that extolls the “virtue” and opportunities for investors that arise from documented failures in the academic achievement of students in public schools. I kid you not. This is an explicit case of investors wanting out students to fail. The failure rates of interest to investors are for public schools–low performance on state math and reading tests and a failure to show a significant closing of the “achievement gap” (as defined by such scores) over the last five years.
The vulture capitalists and their numerous” strategic partners”who claim to have an interest in saving children trapped in “failing public schools” are lying.
The vulture capitalists and their friends want public schools to be rated by the simplistic A-F rating system, and stack rated within a state-wide system that guarantees few schools are classified as “A” or “B” schools. Those failures open up opportunities for what they call “high quality seats,” meaning replacing public schools rated “C,” “D,” or “F.” Ratings for charter schools are ignored in this game of “seats.”
The vulture capitalists and their allies want students in public schools to make a poor showing on standardized tests. Why? Market share for non-public schools can be increased when these conditions exist, especially in urban districts that are not already caught in a churn of mandated closing of schools or conversion of schools, some opening up as charter schools. That churn, dubbed “dynamism,” helps to provide an “ecosystem” where innovation can flourish.
These and other ideas that make a fetish of innovation as a solution to every educational problem are in Bellwether’s new US Education Innovation Index: Prototype and Report SEPTEMBER 2016.
See especially pages 19, 27-28, 73 for the love affair with public school failure and poor achievement by public school students.
http://bellwethereducation.org/publication/us-education-innovation-index-prototype-and-report (web overview)
LikeLike
Thanks, Laura. I have long believed that the purpose of Common Core and the related tests were to make public schools look bad so as to open up more market share for privatization.
LikeLike