What is laughingly called “Reform” is actually an interrelated group of education policies that have failed repeatedly. Reformers are never discouraged by failure. They ignore evidence. They like to fund any effort that will demoralize teachers and lead to privatization of public schools.
Laura Chapman reviews some of the current crop of reform efforts built on guess, conjecture, and ideology.
She writes:
“The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is trying to dominate policy in Kansas City. It has a parallel in Indianapolis called the Mind Trust.
“The Kauffman Foundation is part of the Education Cities network promoting “new” and “great” schools, but it is not just a member. It is a major contributor to that network, along with the Broad, Walton Family, Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael and Susan Dell foundations. Education Cities is part of a large network of “reform” organizations.
“Empower Schools.org, for example, is an adjunct to Education Cities. Empower Schools says: “We work with policymakers and education system leaders to adopt “Third Way” policies, structures, and strategies that allow for schools of all types, including both traditional district schools and schools led by proven and promising independent leaders. We capture and share the most promising Third Way practices to inform and shape the national conversation on education reform.”
“In other words, Empower Schools is far more than a starter of a “conversations.” The network connects 18 programs/organizations, among these the New Teacher Project, Relay Graduate School of Education, Teach for America, and others intent on de-professionalizing education.
Click to access An-introduction-to-the-Third-Way.pdf
“The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation also funds the “Education Innovation Cluster” initiative, part of a USDE funded Digital Promise program (Obama era) and intended to bring together in one mega network people and groups identified as entrepreneurs, funders, researchers, educators, and other community stakeholders (families, local government, non-profits) to “design, launch, iterate on, and disseminate breakthrough learning practices and tools.”
“Breakthrough learning practices and tools” really refers the expanded use of on-line learning, competency-based awards such as badges and certificates for students and teacher education, learning enabled with mobile devices and so on. USDE appears to have outsourced this program http://nextgenlearning.org/blog/education-innovation-clusters-help-way
“The Kauffman Foundation has also been praised as a reason for Kansas City to be included in The U.S. Education Innovation Index: Prototype and Report, a rating system for cities released in September 2016 by Bellwether Education and the Digital Promise Innovation Clusters.
“This index measures “innovation activities “and conditions of urban schools along 42 indicators in nine categories: Innovation Culture (e.g., mayor control, Gates compact); Need for Academic Improvement ( e.g., scores of schools on state tests), Collaboration and Coordination Mechanisms (e.g., OneApp), Talent Supply and Quality (TFA a plus), Innovation-Supporting Institutions (e.g., the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, the Mind Trust in Indianapolis).
Innovation-Friendly Policies ( e.g., tax incentives) , Innovation Investment (venture capital flowing to education startups), District Deviation (a measure of how public schools budget money across eight categories compared to other similar school districts in the state), and Dynamism (a fancy word referring to the opening and closing of schools, market churn for schools). More detail on the rating system is outlined in Table A2: “Indicator Scoring Method.”
“This “innovation index” project from Bellwether was inspired by a similar effort on an international scale and funded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Measuring-Innovation-in-Education-USA.pdf.
“Bellwether’s index was also influenced by another index, published in 2013: Alive in the SwAmp 3. Assessing DigitAl innovAtions in eDucAtion.” That quirky typeface is in the title. The title is also prescient.
“Alive in the Swamp was published with support from Pearson, NewSchools (venture philanthropy), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It features colorful charts to show the potential influence of technology on learning and color-coded rating scheme for digital innovation in education.
“One of the authors of the digital index is Michael Fullan, a distinguished Canadian scholar in education whose ideas have been used to develop a “School Quality Improvement Index for California’s “CORE” distracts. The second author, Katelyn Donnelly, is an economist and director of Pearson’s venture fund for low-cost schools in the developing world. The examples of innovation cited in the report include Rocketship Education, School of One, Kahn Academy, and Learn Zillion, each of these rated for likelihood of producing “transformative outcomes.” These examples certainly tell us about inhabitants and supporters of the swamp-lands in education. See especially, page 13 and Appendix A.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They must see this is circular logic, right? If you rank school districts using an “innovation index” that measures how many ed reforms they have adopted then more ed reform = better rank.
They may as well just skip taking us around the circle and say “districts that adopt more of our ideas are better” – it’s the same thing. They end up there anyway. They’ll save a lot of time and money.
I don’t know if any of you noticed this but the most important part of the recent 3 part examination of “portfolio districts” was one sentence. The sentence said that portfolio districts did not show gains compared to NON portfolio districts – gains that could be attributed to being a portfolio district.
That’s important! It’s the WHOLE POINT of this experiment. Supposedly. It doesn’t matter if one portfolio district shows gains compared to another. That wasn’t the question. The question was “does adopting a portfolio district create gains?”
Public school districts could do this same thing. They could take a set of districts and point to gains in one district compared to another and say “the district model works”. They could do that right now, ed reform or no ed reform.
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Imagine that public school advocates would take notice that the mess we’re now in has been dependent upon an endless game of advertising/smoke screens/data presentation — and then not only join the game, but play it better.
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This is so typical of ed reform “advocacy” for public schools:
“Ali was sharply critical of a provision in the GOP tax legislation currently wending its way through Congress that would extend 529 education savings plans to K-12 tuition for private schools, saying it would mainly benefit families that don’t need the tax savings.”
They completely ignore public schools. There is simply no discussion of how ed reform initiatives affect families in existing public schools. It wouldn’t matter – they obviously disfavor public schools and they’re entitled to their opinion- but it DOES matter, a lot, for the simple reason that it’s MOST families.
How could they be proud of their advocacy record? Public schools have taken funding hits at the federal level every single year since 2010, NINETY PER CENT of schools and yet the entire ed reform “debate” is limited to charters and vouchers. They like vouchers and charters or they like charters but not vouchers. NOTHING on public schools. They’re debating one another. It’s all intra-echo chamber.
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“including both traditional district schools”
That, by the way, is baloney. They simply pass the privatization thru the district instead of thru the charter laws. They then call the privatized school a “district school” meaning it is not technically a charter school, although it is identical in every way to a charter school. The Third Way is nothing but rebranding.
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Ed reform has veered so far towards charters and vouchers they now trumpet the fact that they have grudgingly agreed to “include district schools” in the privatization plans.
They consider this a huge compromise. Allowing some district schools to continue to exist. That’s how far they’ve gone in ten years. NOT immediately privatizing the whole “portfolio” is now “the center” in ed reform.
Ten years ago privatizing all schools was considered radical. Now NOT privatizing all schools is considered a reasonable concession from their goal, which is privatizing all schools.
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GOAL of Privatization: SEGREGATION in more than one way, too. These deformers are wretched to the core.
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Billionaires and Corporations along with their foundations have taken an interest in public education, not because they care so much about our young people, it is because they seek to gain access to over a trillion dollars of public money associated with public education. Years ago there was very little corporate or billionaire interest in public education. Now that politicians are clearing a path for them, they are all self appointed “experts” that seek to reshape our schools, curricula and credentialing systems for maximum profitability. The whole “reform” agenda is a campaign to move public assets into the hands of corporations and billionaires without a shred of evidence to support such extremism. In fact, the evidence shows that no other industrialized nation has successfully privatized its educational system. What we are doing is reckless capitalism and exploitation of our young people.
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I was thinking about “the money follows the child” and noticing “the money that follows the child” is not actually enough to compensate for the loss of economies of scale that public school systems enjoy.
What if the end game is to give each parent a (low) voucher amount as a kind of rock bottom and then sell them K-12 loans to make up the difference?
That would be HUGELY lucrative for lenders, if they had every middle and upper class parent getting a student loan for K-12, like they do now for higher ed. This could be an entire new finance industry.
I read the ed reform plan for universal vouchers that they floated in Michigan and the voucher amount was 5k. This is about 2/3rds of what public school students currently get, so perhaps the end game here is public school parents who could afford to borrow would take the 5k and then borrow 5 to get to where they were before “the money followed the child”.
Terrifying, huh? It could be a absolute debt explosion.
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Take a look at this slide and those following it. I think you are correct that the vouchers and related “scholarship” schemes will allow parents to who are not super savvy to be ripped off by “education service providers.” The voucher money is likely to be put on a debit card, and the fine print could put a family in debt or leave them with a terrible credit rating–just like a regular debit card. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ro70-wI2-TQxw0a9jftC48sGmSjZCGfiJB4pypfYIkM/edit#slide=id.g1f8588a3b0_0_53
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“They like to fund any effort that will demoralize teachers and lead to privatization of public schools.”
The evidence is overwhelming that the agenda is to get rid of public education and not improve it. They are not interested in improving education. They want to control it for several reasons.
for fundamentalist religious reasons — For isntance, teach creationism and not science.
to make money, lots of money for a few
control what children are taught to make it easier to program future generations to become far-right, extremist conservatives, so far right that the planet will shit to another dimension and universe where a Klingon Empire rules supreme and its leader is Steve Bannon or someone worse (wait, is it possible to be worse than Bannon?”
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All areas of American life are suffering from the destructive effect of “The Billionaires’ Disease.” Too many billionaires are delusional: They have accumulated not only great wealth, but also sycophants who tell them they are geniuses. These sycophant-surrounded billionaires come to believe themselves not only to be geniuses, but that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusional minds they see their “genius” as being applicable to other areas, such as government and public education, notwithstanding the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be, what government should and should not do, and billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed in public schools is the charter school business model because the business model is the only thing the billionaires know even a bit about. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants to tell the billionaires how insightful they are about reforms and charter schools because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a simple cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, then perhaps cured billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our nation: Poverty and racial discrimination.
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