Gary Rubinstein, once deeply embedded in the world of Teach for America, is a close observer of the world of top-Down, billionaire-funded corporate reform. In the past, he wrote open letters to leading reformers and some responded.
Lately, he has noticed an effort by reformers to rebrand themselves. Now, one of the leading practitioners of “reform” posted an article on the main reform website saying she does not want to be called a Reformer anymore. She rejects the label. But she disparages those who object to “Reform” as “stand patters.”
He writes:
The ‘reformers’ had a pretty good run. From about 2008 until just recently ‘reformers’ had their way. With Race To The Top they got states to invent complicated, though supposedly objective, ways to measure teacher quality by analyzing standardized test scores. Bill Gates funded many studies to show that this was working. But after ten years, it became clear that the ‘reformers’ didn’t really know much about improving education and maybe they didn’t deserve to have the steering wheel anymore.
But people don’t give up power easily. So they changed their strategy. They ditched the toxic Michelle Rhee — last I heard she was working for Miracle-Gro. They set up some propaganda websites, like The74, and got a new leader, Campbell Brown. Then Campbell Brown was out and not really replaced by anyone.
Not all ‘reformers’ agreed on all issues. Some liked vouchers and private schools, some didn’t. But what all ‘reformers’ had in common was the belief that the main obstacle to education improvement in this country is people, including the majority of teachers in this country, who are defenders of the ‘Status Quo’.
But the term ‘reformer’ was still out there and, to teachers especially, it means that someone who knows little to nothing about education who is making top-down decisions that will result in students learning less. So some ‘reformers,’ realizing that they had a tainted brand, began abandoning the term.
It seems the term “Reformer” has become toxic. But the money backing “reform” is so huge that it just keeps stumbling forward, certain about what other people should do, loaded with money and power, but without any examples of success.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The same reason Nazis like to be called the alt-right. Adding “the” is a twofer, both distancing and strangely legitimizing.
Lawyers and marketers TWIST words to hide the truth.
HA! Now these extremist Alt-Right fake Christians that worship at the alter of avarice, the Golden Calf, are learning what it is like to be labeled with a term that shouts YOU ARE A CROOK and a FAILURE.
Being labeled a “reformer” has become a Scarlet Letter that is much worse than the shame dished out by a religious mob.
👍 Yes, “crooks and failures.”
Beware of people bearing gifts, monetary and not monetary.
It isn’t really true that there’s diversity of thought in ed reform- how does Arne Duncan differ from DeVos other than on vouchers for (certain, inexpensive) private schools?
Go find anything John Kasich has ever said on ed reform and compare it to Obama- it’s impossible to distinguish any meaningful difference.
They quibble over some details- how quickly to privatize, whether privatization should include vouchers, how often public school students should be tested, but the big issues have already been decided and they’re all in agreement.
I think they would have actually benefited from some pro-public school voices- they wouldn’t have become so out of touch with how their policies were being perceived if they had allowed someone from a public school in the club, but they chose not to. A mistake, I think.
I think it’s impossible to “improve” public education when one excludes the vast, vast majority of students and families and teachers, and that’s what they’ve done.
Nothing has changed, either. The US Department of Education had to DENY they were anti-public school last week in Florida. Think how ridiculous that is- 10,000 federal employees are now in a position where when they travel to a public school they have to DENY they are there TO HARM the school.
Something has gone very, very wrong in this “movement”. If people in public schools are asking for assurances you won’t hurt their students you should probably consider a course correction.
Amen, Chiara. Your last paragraph says it all.
I will write this again:
“Beware of people bearing gifts, monetary and not monetary”
“Reformers” seek to rebrand and distance themselves from their multiple failures. Public educators have a keen memory of all the injustice, false assertions and assumptions associated with so-called reform. ” Reform” has always been big on messaging and marketing, but inevitably failed execution. It seems fitting that Rhee, an iconic symbol of this fake movement, is no longer part of it. She is a toxic “reformer” that now works for Miracle-Gro!
retired teacher:
Your first sentence goes a long way in explaining their insistence on distancing themselves from their own words and deeds: they cannot stand even the thought of accepting responsibility for their own predictably colossal failures.
Which is why self-correction for most corporate education reform leaders is impossible. They can’t correct what they don’t acknowledge as having done wrong in the first place. That would mean abandoning their “happy place.”
🙄
But you have to admire, if in a sad way, their deplorable consistency. The problem is rarely that they are/were wrong in any meaningful way. No, it’s just that they didn’t double down enough on a cure-all, or that someone [everyone!] else badly implemented their nostrums, or that people stubbornly refused to turn off their hearts and minds when subjected to the latest disruptively creative educational fad.
But there’s always one bright spot: that pot of shining $tudent $ucce$$ at the end of the [call rheephorm what you will] rainbow. Now that’s a consolation you can count on!
😱
Thank you for your comments.
😎
They are consistently failing, but they keep coming with pockets full of dark money.
The Twitter exchange between Gary and corporate reformist Robin Lake borders on the absurd:
First the background:
Robin Lake’s Pre-Twitter article —
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Robin: (not an exact quote)
“I don’t like being labeled with a name like ‘reformer.’ In fact, all ll sides should stop calling the other sides names, as there’s no monolithic group on either side that merit such reductive ‘labels’, and therefore, doing so is always counter-productive’”
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(Fair enough, but then later in the same article, Robin totally contradicts herself, and even comes up with a new … that’s right …a new derisive name for people such as Gary & his allies who oppose her Robin and her allies in corporate ed. reform …
“The Stand-Patters”
— which is just a synonym for another derisive name employed by corporate ed. reforemers, “the status quo,” referring, again, to those opposing corporate ed. reform.)
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ROBIN: (not an exact quote) “Yeah, reductive name-calling really IS bad … except of course, when it comes to those who are opposing us ‘reformers’. They’re those miserable ‘Stand-Patters.”
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Then, in the Twitter exchange that follows, Gary offers Robin a deal:
1) Gary will honor Robin’s wish and stop calling Robin and her allies reformers “reformers”, if, in exchange, Robin will stop referring to Gary and his allies as “Stand-Patters”;
2) Robin initially agrees, saying, “You’ve got a deal.”
(Heyyy, great! Sounds like progress is being made!! … Ehhhh, not so fast.)
3) Gary then says, That’s great, Robin, so could you edit out the sentences in your article that derisively refer to Gary and his allies as “The Stand-Patters”?
4) Robin replies: (exact quote this time)
*”Of course not. Reform means working for change in order to improve things. Standpatter means one who opposes change. I’m asking people who oppose ‘reformers’ to please say what a non-reformer is, if not that. Have a good night.
Gary tries to argue that there exists no one on his side — no one anywhere — that wants to “stand pat”, or thinks that everything’s fine the way it is, or that things don’t need to be changed.
However, Robin’s “Have a good night” meant that she was done talking to Gary, whereupon she refuses any more dialogue.
So to sum up:
Robin Lake avows that, in dialogue about improving education, reductive name-calling is always wrong and counter-productive …
… expect when it’s not.
Huh?
Here’s that exchange:
OMG –I just went to Robin Lake’s Twitter feed. Who are all these people tweeting to her? It’s a whole universe of non-teachers who have somehow positioned themselves as the national authorities on education. The nightmare parallel universe of Reformsters (I hope Robin is OK with that term).
Ponderosa-
They’re probably funded by the Gates/Arnold/Walton monolith.
Education is like Afghanistan–everyone who tries to conquer it fails.
Alexander the Great didn’t fail to conquer Afghanistan. As long as he was alive, Afghanistan could not break free of his growing empire.
Okay, so no one has conquered Afghanistan since 300 BCE.
The question, Ponderosa, is: Why would anyone attempt to “conquer” anything in education?
The war on education
Always bout conquest
Always bout war
Always a contest
Never bout more
Always bout winning
Whatever the cost
Always bout spinning
A win from a loss
One of my favorite quotes. Thanks.
What would reformers rather be called?
Deformers?
Liars?
Cheats?
Fraudsters?
Or maybe just Knownothings?
According to Jack’s post, they don’t like a single name, so let’s use all of the above.
I consider sandpatter a compliment.
I love patting wet sand into castles at the beach.
Yeah, I didn’t understand what was wrong with sand patter. Sand patters change the beach, for example, without destroying it.
What’s in a name, that which we call reformer by any other name would spell deceit?
Well, let’s call Ms. Lake and her ilk what they are: Edudeformers.
Educraterers
I assume that Robin Lake believes that people who want to keep social security and medicare as they are, and want to fund those programs properly are “stand patters”.
I assume Robin Lake embraces the people who want to “reform” social security and medicare but the just wants to make sure that they give it a new name and she wants to make sure to insult anyone who still believes in KEEPING Medicare and Social Security as “stand patters”.
And that says it all about what Robin Lake’s real priorities. Her use of the language “standing pat” applies to all the people who believe in social security and Medicare and public education. She is a reformster through and through and her language and attacks on those who support social security and medicare and public education as “stand patters” speaks volumes.
“Standing pat” means properly funding social security and medicare and public education. Robin Lake is from the people who say that wanting to properly fund those public programs is “standing pat” and instead let’s direct money to private organizations to “reform” it for less money.
NYC…
Exactly- Robin Lake’s a tool of concentrated wealth- necessary for colonialists’ ambitions.
Standpatter is not even a real word.
It’s just some stupid term that Robin Lake came up with.
The real word for the opposite of a reformer is a conservative.
Of course, that means a conservative in the true sense as opposed to the fake political sense.
Whatever else may be true, Robbin Lake is certainly not a true conservative. In fact, she holds them in contempt.
By definition, Robin Lake is an extremist Alt-Right conservative and is not even close to being a conservative in the tradition of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes.
SDP,
I was a conservative and I flipped. I used to be invited to conservative think tanks to explain why I left the fold. I always tried to explain that true conservatives try to protect institutions and traditions. The current crop are radicals. They want to blow up communities and families. They are disrupters. That is radical, that is anarchist.
In this laudatory portrait of Devos, the conservative NATIONAL REVIEW at least admits that conservative Betsy is dead set against trying to “conserve” public education.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/betsy-devos-education-secretary-matter-of-fairness/
NATIONAL REVIEW:
” ‘Conservative though she may be, DeVos does not want to conserve our public education system. She insists that Americans “rethink school,’ as she says.”
Well hey, at least the NR and Betsy are admitting as much.
Real conservatives believe in conserving resources and protecting the environment. They believe in conserving the rule of law and important other conventions like the social contract. They believe in conserving what we have now for future generations.
Political conservatives don’t believe any of that.
The most pathetic part is that they don’t even know what a real conservative is.
And the National Review is a pretense of intellectualism established by an insufferable fool who fashioned himself as an intellectual (William F. Buckley)
Heres an example of his self deluding brilliance: McCarthyism … is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” — William F. Buckley
Too bad Buckley chose Yale over Oxford because he would have made the perfect Oxfordmoron.
SDP,
Exactly right. Real conservatives conserve: the environment, community, tradition, family, ethics. And they don’t try to inject themselves into other people’s lives other than to offer help, not control. They respect the Constitution, including the First Amendment. When they see people suffering, they reach out a helping hand, not admonishment or conditions.
DamnP, you just classified me as a conservative.
Reform “think tanks”, especially those underwritten by hedge funders, tend to promote ideas based on the premise that the marketplace is pure and anything that interferes with the marketplace is a problem. The market rewards those who can deliver a product cheaply and efficiently… and government regulations stand in the way of that ethos and democracy slows everything down. The algorithm of hedge funders is to strip away any regulations, disempower employees, find a way to tear up “costly” agreements that are in place, and view any adverse community impact as inconsequential collateral damage.
One of the initial problem business-minded reformers faced was measuring the output of education. That problem was solved when NCLB passed and standardized test scores became the metric of choice for politicians, taxpayers, voters, and the media. By setting cut scores based on norm-referenced tests it was no surprise that 50% of the schools were labelled as “failing”, thereby opening the door for the “takeovers”… the language of hedge funders!
Look at the way vulture capitalists work and look at “school reform” models espoused by the GOP and neo-liberals… and tell me if you see a difference. The public’s imagination has been captured by the idea that the business takeover of schools and government will result in the elimination of “waste, fraud and abuse” and an increase in productivity, which in the case of public schools means an increase in test scores…. And if the latter doesn’t happen, it’s OK because taxes are not going through the roof. Welcome to the plutocracy where the system never changes and the results remain the same: the .01% get richer and the rest of us pay rent.
In that sprit, I would suggest replacing the term “reformer” with the term: “plutocratic profiteer”. It captures the erosion of democracy and the market-based ideas inherent in what we now call “reform”.
For a group who claims to oppose government interference, the “free market” frauds divert substantial money that should be improving products, to corruption of the American capitalistic democracy e.g. ALEC, Gates’ Senior Congressional Education Staff Network,..
The death knell for “reformers” may have sounded when Frederick Hess of AEI described them at Philanthropy Roundtable as wanting to “…blow up the ed schools”. Spoiler alert- Hess and his co-author, a Gates’ external affairs manager, advised takeover by the wealthy via funding university departments with strings-attached money. (“Don’t Surrender the Academy”).
You mean this article, Linda? https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/philanthropy-magazine/article/fall-2014-don't-surrender-the-academy
Hard to believe that they dare to write down this kind of stuff
Second, breaking up a sclerotic orthodoxy is all about airing ideas, not (at least initially) seeking converts. Rather than promoting specific platforms, entities like the Federalist Society emphasized free and open debate. This allowed novel ideas to become more familiar and receive a fairer hearing in the hallowed halls.
Third, invest in people. The success of the legal-reform movement in influencing the bench, the canon, and the legal education culture was the organic result of the academic and professional networks it fostered. The organizations created had no short-term policy agenda and did no advocacy. (In this way, these investments were very different from K-12 reform efforts today, where short-term advocacy has been heavily emphasized.)
“Blow ’em up” is the disgruntled cry of the defeated. Reformers should instead try to plant their flag, too, on the commanding heights. The goal is not to silence other voices, but to break the monopoly and insist on a fair competition. This makes for a manageable task—after all, it’s a call to make colleges of higher education more diverse. How can a twenty-first-century academic oppose that?
The “break the monopoli” crap is libertarian speech.