Jim Miller, professor at the San Diego City College, has posed exactly the right question: Who will save us from “our billionaire saviors?” The question was inspired by Andrea Gabor’s excellent new book After the Education Wars, and by the possibility that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.
In New York City, we remember him as a data-driven, test-loving, top-down Reformer, who hired non-educator Joel Klein to terrorize teachers and principals and introduce choice and charters. The result was a public relations success and an education failure. Much boasting, vast disruption, constant reorganization. Change for the sake of change. Bloomberg is one of the billionaires identified in the NPE report about the super-rich who fund anti-public education candidates in state and local elections.
Miller writes:
After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Times story observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party…
As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined…”
The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in the messy trenches of inner-city classrooms. They came with distrust of an education culture that values social justice over more practical considerations like wealth and position. They came with the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators. And most of all, they came with their suspicion—even their hatred—of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.
What this has resulted in, according to Gabor, is that the corporate reformers “adopted all the wrong lessons from American business.” Rather than innovating by harnessing “the energy and the knowledge of ordinary employees,” who are the most “knowledgeable about problems—and solutions” because they know the process, the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.
Wedded to a factory-style approach to education, corporate reformers “focused on a Taylorite effort to standardize teaching so that teachers can be easily substituted like widgets on an assembly line. This despite the fact that, on average, ‘unions have a positive effect on student achievement’ and the best charter schools are often the independent charters that give teachers voice, often via union contracts.” All of this reflects the fact, Gabor reminds us, that “the corporate education-reform movement has deeply undemocratic roots.”
What this movement has brought us is not pretty. We have systematically devalued the “art” of teaching in favor of a dumbed-down, accountability regimen that prefers standardization and over-testing to empowering educators and students to think more creatively and independently. It has assailed teachers and attacked educational culture to such a degree that it should be no surprise that our society has become increasingly anti-intellectual and hostile to fact-based analysis. As Gabor observes of the Trump era:
[T]he election of this larger-than-life Chucky demagogue, with his multiple bankruptcies and divorces, his sexual predations and business malfeasance, his hate-filled speeches and tweets, also represented a failure of corporate-style education reform as it has taken shape over more than twenty years. Among an electorate that often favors “ordinary” people they can identify with, Trump, the consummate philistine—unread and uninterested, crude, unthinking, and disdainful of facts and any attempt at rational truth—holds up a dystopian mirror of the electorate…
It may not have been the intended outcome of those who simply wished to produce a more useful workforce, but it does show the profound limits of their debased instrumentalism. Hence Gabor again observes: “Corporate education reformers cannot be directly blamed for the ascendance of Trump. However, over two decades of an ed-reform apparatus that has emphasized the production of math and ELA test scores over civics and learning for learning’s sake has helped produce an electorate that is ignorant of constitutional democracy and thus more vulnerable to demagoguery.”
Gabor’s thorough study does more than just criticize the failures of corporate education reform. She outlines how multiple examples of innovative educational practices across the country have defied the technocratic dictates of the well-heeled and focused instead on “bottom-up” strategies that have relied heavily on “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement, drawing on diverse constituencies—including students, teachers, and local business leaders—in their effort.”
Thus, there are some insights to be found in approaches that rely on “local democracy” that can help do right for our children and the society at large. Following these examples, rather than the lead of self-important billionaires, is where we can find hope for a better education system and a more democratic society.
As for Bloomberg, maybe he should just go away and let the people lead. We’ve had too much “reform” from self-declared rich saviors and philanthrocapitalists already. In fact, it’s long past time that we save ourselves from them.
“Rather than innovating by harnessing “the energy and the knowledge of ordinary employees,” who are the most “knowledgeable about problems—and solutions” because they know the process, the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.”
This passage goes to the heart of the problem with Ed Deform. The deformations do not encourage innovation and organic development. They strangle these in their cradle.
We don’t need the likes of Bill Gates and (and his innumerable vassals, like Lord Coleman) to do our thinking for us, thank you very much. We are quite capable of thinking for ourselves, and any sane system provides the degrees of freedom in which that can happen.
I wish it were as easy as just resisting the philanthrocapitalists, but it is much harder to resist them when the government sides with them. These billionaire “saviors” will continue to plot against democratic, public education as long as the government invites them to do so with tax breaks, write-offs, charter-voucher friendly legislation, tax credits, pay for success and other such schemes that benefit the 1%. If we want to preserve the legacy of public education, we need better laws that will save it from these so-called saviors. We have to once again invest in public education as a public service that promotes the common good. As long as people continue to believe in the magic “market’ as a solution rather than malevolent force that creates winners and losers, we will continue to stumble into a dark abyss. We have to regard our young people as future voters that that have a right to a free public education from legitimate professionals who the states are responsible to educate, we will continue to be lost.
Thank you, retired teacher. We would not even have to deal w/these folks if their incomes were whittled down to manageability [i.e., un-balloon their profits so they don’t have resources equivalent to those of several states’ budgets– giving them whopping influence easily negating voting public!] via appropriate tax laws. Not just income taxes & closing offshore loopholes, but also reform of 501(c)3&4 laws. Until that day, we will be dealing w/whack-a-mole billionaires dictating public policy.
All while we pretend that our elected legislators are in charge….
Too many billionaires are delusional: They have accumulated not only great wealth, but also phalanxes of sycophants who tell them they are geniuses. These sycophant-surrounded billionaires come to believe 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 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.
Bloomberg is one of the worst. I remember him bragging that he never goes to the bathroom while he’s “working” (what he does isn’t really work), suggesting that [real] workers shouldn’t be allowed bathroom breaks. The Soda Nazi is NOT a Democrat.
We need to cease psychoanalyzing them & stop them in their tracks via appropriate changes to income taxes, income tax loopholes, corporate [de-]regs, plus reform of non-profit & campaign laws. Our present set of laws creates multi-billionaires w/so much $ they have nowhere to spend it other than feeding it back into society w/strings attached to their personal foibles. We are incentivizing social change directed by the whims of the ultra-rich.
Diane, Catch this upcoming FRONTLINE documentary on pensions October 23,2018 https://www.ket.org/episode/FRON%20%20003703/ [https://ketstatic.cdn.ket.org/wp_transfer/images/FRON/FRON__.3179669.848×480.jpg]
The Pension Gamble | Frontline The Pension Gamble. 56:46 | #3703 | TV-RE How state governments and Wall Street led America’s public pensions into a $4-trillion hole. Correspondent Martin Smith investigates the consequences for teachers, police, firefighters, and other public servants. http://www.ket.org
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I hope the pensions documentary was not funded by John Arnold
The film could be funded by the Urban Institute, by Penn Wharton
Budget Model, or by TIAA. Since Gates spoke against pensions he may have paid for it. It may have been funded by any one of the villaintropists, and have a university name stamped on it. Oligarchs from Enron, GDP-dragging hedge funds and monopoly businesses have a ready supply of collaborators.
We learned that when so many PBS stations started selling school privatization.
Sadly, as we saw with the original pension scandal, revealed by David Sirota, PBS took millions from pension-hating John Arnold Foundation to create a program about “the pension crisis,” but then returned the money and canceled the show after Sirota wrote about it.
Then we saw “School Inc., which Carol Burris and I wrote about, which was a paean to privatization, including for-profit schools, which was paid for by several far-right libertarian foundations and which was contemptuous of public education.
The bottom line is that PBS will produce a show if you pay for it.
Two out of the four listed as speakers for the pension program at KET are Republicans claiming non-partisanship- a regional Chamber of Commerce and Pegasus Institute. The Center for Economic Policy doesn’t list its funders at its site. If they don’t respond to my request about who funds them, we know which side they are on. Most telling, the program doesn’t list the author of Kentucky Fried Pensions, who would be the obvious choice if the program wasn’t a snow job.
IMO, the Frontline message will be the typical Arnold spin. The MacArthur Foundation who gave Angela Duckworth the “genius grant” is funding it. If the funders had really cared about the situation, they would have looked at it before the graft happened. It’s more disaster capitalism disguised as concern.
Martin Smith also hosted the PBS show FRONTLINE’s “The Retirement Gamble” in 2013. I thought it was very good and not biased in favor of our corporate overlords.
Time to roll out this article from 1995:
It seems that all of the pensions problems in our country lead back to politicians unwilling to provide the funds needed to sustain them… NOT to the “greedy” public employees. Many government employees accepted higher pensions in lieu of higher wages and many legislatures, including the one in DC, refused to fund the pensions sufficiently using overly rosy forecasts or, as was the case in NJ in the mid 1990s, just being completely irresponsible. If pensions were the only cost passed onto future generations it might not be a problem… but we’ve funded needless wars and tax cuts by charging it to the future…
The think tanks, funded by Gates et.al., give cover to the billionaires. The university faculty selling out are reproducing at the rate of rabbits.
Most “think tanks” are lobbyists rather than academics. They follow the money and try to act like “experts,” but mostly they are biased political hacks. The problem is billionaires can afford a mountain of them that get invited on TV news shows to spread the “good news of reform.”
When education professors enter an oligarch-funded university research center and when employees cross the threshold of oligarch funded think tanks, they find places with no mirrors nor consciences.
retired teacher,
THANK YOU. You are RIGHT.
Comedian Wyatt Cenac on the spending habits of billionaires, especially those intent on launching themselves into space to escape the systemic failures that they helped create. The interpretation applies to their cavalier attitude toward habitually spending on doomed education projects. They are not philanthropists; they are compulsive gamblers with deep pockets that permit them to lose yet still keep rolling the dice—with other people’s lives.
“I’m just saying that billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they like the idea of space travel because when they think something is broken, they can afford to throw it away. Most of us can’t afford to throw to throw it away.”
Watching the nervous reaction of John Podesto, founder of the Center for American Progress, in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 movie more than covers the price of admission. Moore asked Podesto why Obama had been advised to visit Flint, Michigan to betray the citizens. The only response, sheepishness and silence.
Too bad Moore didn’t ask Podesto why Obama opted to betray public education as well.
The spelling is Podesta not Podesto
Better if the name Podesta hadn’t been written in history at all.
Arne’s and John King’s chief of staff is a senior fellow at CAP.
CAP’s VP of education policy is former TFA. The CAP board includes a Bain Capital co-partner (“Bain spending big on charter schools”). CAP’s dubious claims that ranked curriculum’s value as equal to or greater than teacher quality referenced a paper written by an executive editor of Education Next/recipient of a huge Arnold grant/employee of the Gates-Arnold-Pete Peterson-funded Urban Institute.
As nearly every single college of education in the nation is now all in on training teachers and all other education professionals (e.g. counselors and school administrators) based on the dictates of the moneyed class’s rich reformers, any rolling back of the Movement to Destroy Public Education is going to have to include an entirely new infrastructure of accountability for evaluating what the educator training programs are doing. What if, for example, the standard for success in our public schools was not primarily test scores but included what a school was doing to help restore civic literacy? (see, for example, Henri Giroux’s searing critique of America’s “Disimagination Machine” and his account of how the nation’s drift towards authoritarianism is being fueled by an attack on democratic institutions and a war against youth, in particular black and brown youth.