Peter Greene notes the terrible pickle that the “reformers” are in. They were trying so hard to prove their bona fides as leaders of the “civil rights movement of our time,” trying so hard to claim that they really were pushing school choice “for the kids,” trying so hard to call themselves progressives…and Donald Trump, the arch reactionary, has embraced their cause. The hedge fund managers, the billionaires, and the corporate titans pushed charters and school choice, and Donald Trump wants charters and school choice too! He goes a step further, and he wants vouchers too.
Peter Greene calls the current state of affairs the “Faux Progressive Polka.”
Their dilemma is laid bare: Real progressives support public schools, not school choice. School choice was the battle cry of the segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and today school choice is promoting greater resegregation and at the same time, defunding public schools that serve all children. The voters in Massachusetts saw through the facade. The NAACP saw through it too.
Now Trump’s embrace makes it harder for the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires to pretend to be progressives. They aren’t and they never were.
To understand Greene’s argument, you must first read Rick Hess’s post-election article, in which he claimed that education is so far to the left that it can’t begin to understand the right. He had an audacious analysis of what he calls the split among Democrats about education:
Hess writes:
One of the reasons that right-left differences get ignored is that people in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, the fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and the union-establishment. What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party’s more traditional, New Deal wing.
Greene writes:
If reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania. He is not the Queen of Rumania.
Some of us, like Greene and me, have called out the “reform” movement as a mighty hoax, a pretense of liberalism powered by billionaires, financiers, and rightwing think tanks. The same phony lingo about “closing achievement gaps” and “equity” has been used by rightwing governors, as they replace public schools with charter schools and vouchers. Ideologically, it is hard to decipher the “sides,” but one thing I can say with certainty is that the effort to privatize public education and eliminate teacher unions is not a project of Great Society liberals.
Greene continues:
But now everybody has to confront a grim reality– Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn’t really understand it). What’s a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump’s likely ed policy.
There are any number of explanations– Trump has no actual convictions on any political scale, the backers for various policies have shifted, blah blah blah. I think the most likely explanation is that privatization was never a progressive idea, ever, but when faux progressives were controlling the political conversation, it behooved people in search of power and support to put on their own progressive masks.
So what’s the play now? Stop pretending to be progressives and throw in their lot with the Trumpians (who are themselves only pretending to be conservatives)?
But modern charter schools, the testing industry, the data mining of America– none of that was ever governed by a political ideology as much as it’s guided by a deep love of money. In this, as in many other areas, Trump has if nothing else ripped the pretense off a lot of high-flung baloney. Trump is about power and profit, and power and profit are all the motivation you need to come up with a program of privatizing, monetizing, and digitizing US education. You can add some political philosophizing after the fact, but it’s really beside the point.
Modern corporate reform is congealed around neither right nr left; it’s heart beats to the neo-liberal rhythm which means we shall have social programs (yay, liberals!) that are contracted out to the free market (yay, conservatives!) But neo-liberalism serves righties far better than it serves lefties. They get their money, but privatized programs have yet to show real quality.
And then there’s the dark underbelly of modern reform, particularly charter choice programs that remove democratic process from non-wealthy non-white neighborhoods, giving our lesser what we think is best for them and, in the case of No Excuses schools, the kind of tight domination and control that Those People need. This view of Those People is also not incompatible with Trumpism.
We can play the left-right game all day. Schools tend to attract people who are oriented toward helping and uplifting other people, so the school world should skew left. But schools are also old, hidebound institutions that rely heavily on tradition and stability– so, conservative. But that left-right dichotomy is not the problem reformsters face.
What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they’re totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it’s a real moral dilemma.
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