Peter Greene has a remarkable facility to read dreary documents and sum them up, so that we don’t have to read them. This is a public service that he does on behalf of all of us.
He reviews Michigan’s blueprint for the next 30 years, created at the behest of Governor Rick Snyder. The essential problem Michigan has is that it spent the last 10 years or so following the DeVos blueprint for change and saw its schools plummet to near the bottom of the national rankings.
So in this report it recommends nine principles for world-class education. None of them will surprise you.
Call this report a tribute to Betsy DeVos, who has worked so hard to push Michigan into becoming a right-to-work, school choice state. How can the state save itself? According to this report, by doing more of the same.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, before looking at the list, let me guess:
– religious schools funded with public dollars.
– increased privatization of other, possibly all, public resources
– lead tainted water everywhere, not just in Flint.
– continued attacks on the right to vote.
– increased tax dollars funding corporate welfare.
– militarized law enforcement, in order to deal with resistance to the above.
LikeLike
You got it, Michael. That Dump should be IMPEACHED. He is Hitler to the max.
LikeLike
Mollie Ivins smiles, even if this report is not about Texas.
The headline is perfect for Peter Green’s look at the future of “customer preference” schooling as envisioned by the destroyers of public education.
Peter Greene says:
Begin quote Then they should figure out “base funding” built on “a transparent calculation of what it costs to meet performance standards.” In other words, the state should be able to say, “It should cost $5,000 to get a fifth grader to score 255 on the Big Standardized Reading test, and if we want an additional 25 points on that score, it should cost us an additional $500.” Then figure out how much extra it costs for students with “greater educational needs” (like, you know, figuring out the cost of cup holders and seat warmers in a new car). Add in some “foundational allowances” for other school costs, and figuring out funding is just a simple math problem. Piece of cake. end quote
There are per-pupil, per-service calculations just like Peter’s example in this pdf from the Center for reinventing Public Education, an operational arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Out of the Box: Fundamental Change in School Funding, David Monk http://www.crpe.org/sites/default/files/wp_sfrp12_monk_mar07_0.pdf .
The same micro-costing of education products and services has been promoted by Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) and Bruno Manno (Senior Advisor, K – 12 Education Reform, Walton Family Foundation).
They call “unbundling” the cost of each and every course and service per student, by grade level, with the proportionate cost of the texts, tests, any special equipment, teacher salary and benefits, overhead for general operations, etc. These calculations would help operators of schools determine which services to offer in house and which might contracted out. (Add a profit-margin is the operator is on the take.)
This method of calculation–per-student, per-service–has shown, for example, that offering foreign language, arts courses, science labs, and advanced placement courses in a brick and mortar high school is far more expensive than offering “basic” courses. The logic of micro-costing leads to sub-contracting for expensive courses, electives, sports, and those with not much difference from those available in low-cost on-line courses, or nearly “free” in community centers, museums, and the like. The logic of micro-costing also sharpens the focus on students who are “expensive” or “inexpensive” to educate relative to a basic provision of money from the voucher.
Customer choice enabled by vouchers is not just about a general form of schooling (public, charter, religious, private, etc) but preference-based choices in specific studies, wherever offered, with costs including everything from general operating overhead for a brick and mortar school to the actual cost per square foot of a science lab, all associated equipment and supplies for one course and the salary benefit package (if any). Peter’s example adds the idea that there should be a threshold metric for student achievement that any given investment ought to yield.
All of the fuss about budgets is part of the shift to market-based education where the cost of a service or product is determined by whatever buyers and sellers agree to as “affordable” voucher-based education for each student.
Vouchers promise parents a version of an “affordable education act” but without the full disclosures that should be part of it–that the product and service providers get to choose their students and that these micro-analyses of the costs, including a bundle of data about each student, will determine what they are offered.
Vouchers are designed to kill off the nation’s long-standing social contract for public education, financed by the public, and available for every child.
LikeLike
Props to Peter for taking on the report. As a lifelong MI resident and 30-year veteran teacher leader, I skimmed it and saw it as more of the same. Yes–it’s a rhetorical cover for unbundling (itself a weasel word), and the thing is: we’ve seen these Gatesian, “value school” proposals come and go in Michigan for the past 6 years under our current governor, Rick “Lead Poison” Snyder. Snyder sees the end of the road in two years, and wants to get something on the books.
The MEA’s president was on the Blue Ribbon commission that wrote this report, and sent out a “there are some good things here” message to MEA members. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what they are–it’s all high-flown blah-blah about “working with” parents and “investing in” pre-schoolers, stuff that everybody wants but nobody is willing to fund. If the president of the largest teachers’ union thinks this report is OK, evidently everyone is supposed to get on board.
The media in MI has focused solely on one point of the report: the recommendation that our State Board of Ed, currently elected, be dissolved and replaced with a Board selected by the governor. Right now, the Superintendent is selected by the Board. If the governor selects both the Board and the Superintendent, the citizens of MI would be effectively disenfranchised. So that’s a big deal.
The rest of the stuff in the report has flown under the radar. Been there–saw that–it’s not going to happen seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Plaudits to Peter for deconstructing a lot of potentially destructive factors and putting them out there.
LikeLike