Retired teacher of physics and math Tom Ultican gathered together a concise summary of the efforts to destroy and privatize public education.
“America’s public education system is being deliberately destroyed. If you graduated from high school in the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, it is such an unthinkable concept that it is difficult to even imagine. Not only is it possible, it is happening and a lot of damage has already occurred.
“Just this morning, I learned that a Republican legislator has proposed privatizing all the schools in Muncie, Indiana. Almost all the schools in New Orleans were privatized after hurricane Katrina. Half the schools in Washington DC and a quarter of the schools in Los Angeles are privatized. However, ninety percent of America’s K-12 students attend public schools. (Note: Charter schools are not public schools, they are schools run by private businesses that have government contracts.)”
The foundational lie of the Destroy Public Education Movement is that our public schools are failing. Add to the lie that unions block reform; that “bad teachers” abound in our schools; that great teachers need only five weeks of training; that money doesn’t matter; that choice solves all problems; that the best Wat to fix schools is to close them.
You know the drill.
Very Stupid.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Tom Ultican.
This is a case where corruption and greed “TRUMPS” the U.S. Constitution and the republic it was written to protect.
Lord Acton warned us back in the 18th and 19th centuries that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Acton said he never met a powerful man that wasn’t corrupt.
And what buys power? The more money you have, the more power you can buy. Ask the Koch brothers, Betsy Devos, the Wal-Mart Walton family, Bill Gates and a few hundred others with many boatloads of cash, how that works.
Remember it was President Obama who put the “reform” movement on steroids.
Also, let’s not forget who signed NCLB into law.
Yes but Obama really exacerbated NCLB with his Race To The Top program. He led the assault on public education that Republicans could only dream about.
I just said the same thing on Twitter. NY magazine, which loves charters, says it is up to Obama to rescue his “education legacy” from the right-wingers. I tweeted that he shares that legacy with Trump, DeVos, and the Southern governors who wanted “school choice” to fight the Brown decision.
Obama was owned by the bankers & the billionaire-boys-club. Don’t expect an acknowledgement.
Obama was a bastard, but he’s not different than the rest. I don’t think it could be fair to have expected more from him.
I’d hazard to say that Obama was just more of the same crap that all started with Ray-Gun Reagan. After all, it was Reagan that declared war on the Public Schools with his lying misleading report called “A Nation at Risk”.
The only risk to this nation are idiots like the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Bill Gates, Betsy Devos, et al.
OR which senators and house members voted to both instigate and legally re-up NCLB and RttT over and over…
Exactly. There are many players involved from both sides of the aisle. That why, whenever someone brings up Obama or Hillary to bash them when the GOP is now in charge of everything, I ask why are they dredging up people who are not in positions of power any longer.
No matter what Obama or Hillary did in the past, the focus should be on the present and that means Trump, his White House and the GOP controlled federal government.
Yes, we can learn from history but Obama was only one person, one president, in that long history in the war on the public schools that goes back to the early 1980s or even earlier.
The shot heard across the United States was fired by President Reagan in 1983 when he released “A Nation at Risk” report that was later revealed as flawed and full of misleading allegations that every president including Reagan has ignored.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The summary needs little amplification. I would add the contribution of billionaires to the rapidly spread of GERM (Global Education Reform Movement). GERM has been aided by aided by tests, rankings, and opinions from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Add the unbridled faith that technology will solve almost every problem while also making millions of jobs obsolete at and ever increasing rate. The Destruction of Public Education is being forwarded by a tech industry eager to have data from students 365 days a year, 24/7. This reform has been branded personalized learning. It is algorithm instruction.
I just finished a somewhat lighthearted novel written by a Nigerian author and found myself repeatedly reading about the importance of “ranking” schools — locally, nationally, and internationally — as being relevant to all of her book’s characters as they made choices for their children. Nevermind that these rankings strategically separate the poor from the rich while horribly exacerbating the growing global economic divide…
Re-posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Destroy-Public-Education–in-General_News-Destroying-Non-corporate-Competition_Educational-Crisis_Public-Education-180228-277.html
Hi Diane, Thank you for the Ravitch bump.
I was motivated to write this blog when I was at a luncheon with the San Diego Free Press. A local activists asked me what is the big deal about public education. It occurred to me that a lot of people who are not educators do not have the basic information about the movement to destroy public education in America. I tried to say enough in this post to give a basic background but not to much. For example, no CEO in America has played a more central role in the standards based movement and applying business princilples to public education than Louis Gerstner, the former IBM and RJR-Nabico CEO. I made the decision not to tell this story because my article was already going to be lengthy and I felt the Achieve story and Gerstner was a bridge to far.
TOM,
Write about Gerstner.
He knows everything about schools except how to teach or be a principal.
Your guide is useful for those that have not been fighting in the war on public education. Many people are oblivious to the harmful history of standardized testing, standards and privatization. They are also unaware that the leaders of “reform” are billionaires. I happened to see Bill Gates on ‘Ellen,” and Ellen acted like Gates was Mother Teresa. He portrayed himself as a “philanthropist” interested in improving education. He said his most recent project is about getting the top 10% of teachers to help all the others become better teachers. He did not mention depersonalized learning or portfolio districts as it conflicted with his attempt to whitewash his image.
AND, quoted from Laura H. Chapman above: “Add the unbridled faith that technology will solve almost every problem while also making millions of jobs obsolete at an ever increasing rate….” Just try to get people like Ellen, or for that matter your next door neighbor, to grasp the fact that even TEACHING jobs are being pushed into technology oblivion.
Thank you, Tom. Spot on. I would like to add one point to your list of DPE False Talking Points: Public schools are to blame for wealth, employment, and incarceration rates and demographic gaps.
I would say that it is baffling that this is happening but it’s not. Majority if not all who have a say in the education of the USA has not stepped foot in a public school. The schools that need the help the most are getting the axe when instead we should be prioritizing them above the succeeding schools. Standardized testing can have its benefits but it shouldn’t be the be all end all of schooling. Students are turning into numbers to reflect the testing, focusing and praising the ones that are doing well and exceeding more so than the ones that needs it the most. And this isn’t to say that we don’t try and help the students that need it the most. Education is turning into a commodity, what’s the lowest we can pay teachers and train them that can still produce high scores and numbers? Quantity over quality when education should never be measured that way, it cheapens education.
“Standardized testing can have its benefits. . .”
Um, No, that testing cannot “have its benefits” unless you are talking about the profits made off of supplying not only the tests, but the curricular materials to go along with said tests.
Noel Wilson has shown the COMPLETE INVALIDITIES of using the results of standardized testing for anything due to the inherent onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and the psychometric “fudges” that are also a part of the process.
How can there be any “benefits” when the standardized testing process can only result in COMPLETE INVALIDITIES?
Please read and understand a little summary of Wilson’s critique of standards and standardized testing as he showed in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority…” And this is happening GLOBALLY.
Which makes it all the scarier to contemplate what happens/will happen (being compliant non-thinkers) to the majority of the human denizens of this planet.
A very eye-opening (not to mention alarming) look at the underlying agenda of so-called “reformers”. When they say that “our public schools are failing,” the “reformers” make an easy scapegoat out of teachers, unions, and the larger public school system. It seems that they deliberately avoid mentioning any possibility that poverty and parents factor enormously into a school’s climate and how students will perform in school (they would have us believe that it is a mere coincidence that schools in economically well-off neighborhoods tend to do better than schools in areas with high levels of poverty and crime).
I want to say that I am shocked to learn that those in charge of our education system are not teachers or people who understand what teachers do but I am not. The way that schools have been run for the past century have shown that we are still at the peek of the industrial revolution even though its 2018. We put our students into boxes as if they are cogs in a never ending machine and we have a one size fits all policy for education and for how to teach students. Private schools are just another way to turn what should be a free space for learning into a business or factory for profit. The schools pay the big text book companies for their books and the big text book companies pay the education “reform” lobbyist who ensured that their text books would be purchased. The fact that the solution for a school that is getting low test scores is to close it is appalling. Or the “oh it’s just bad teachers” rhetoric. We are stuck in a system that blames teachers for teaching the way they are forced to teach and when those teachers who do teach beyond the standard are only those who are privileged enough to already be tenured. And yet as stated, 90% of America’s k12 students are in public schools, so are we only reserving the government funds for a higher education for those millionaires who can pay for it? Private schools rarely even require that their teachers be credentialed and yet they are receiving special privileges? I found Tom’s response on here and to hear that the biggest role in public education reform for standards is being led by a former IBM CEO? It’s mind boggling to realize that despite the label that teachers are being consulted on the reforms that are happening in education to learn that they are not.
Education will not be able to make any changes until real teachers, real students and real administrators are able to not only be apart of the conversation but be apart of the decision making.