John Thompson, retired teacher in Oklahoma, reads the Reformer press closely. He notices a change in tactics, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge failure, and a determination to adhere to privatization of public schools by any means necessary. He appreciates the journalism of Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat for reporting what the Reformers say to one another. They have not backed away one iota from their rock-solid belief that private management is the sure cure for low test scores, despite the failure of the Tennessee Achievement School District and the Michigan Education Achievement Authority and every similar program that claimed to bring in “high-performing seats” (one of my favorite Reformer phrases, as though the seats themselves are magical).
Stop the presses!
Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd has listened and it is rethinking its entire campaign to privatize public schools! The corporate reform group that helped give us Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education is acknowledging the harm done by test-driven, competition-driven reform. ExcelinEd is rethinking standardized testing, rapid transformative change and even the Billionaires Boys Club’s new panacea – “personalized learning!” Maybe the next step will be apologies for pushing the mass firing of teachers and Common Core!
Oops! ExcelinEd isn’t facing up to the failure of its education agenda. It is merely shifting its public relations spin!
Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum is illuminating efforts by ExcelinEd, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and other corporate reformers’ new campaign to “drum up support.” He explains how a new “messaging document” offers “a revealing look at how some backers are trying to sell their approach.”
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/12/19/common-core-personalized-learning-backlash/
Although ExcelinEd and others refuse to listen to educators and researchers on why their education experiments failed, the authors of their new document, Karla Phillips and Amy Jenkins, “have read the angry op-eds and watched tension-filled board meetings.” So they are rebranding personalized learning and other reforms as things that patrons don’t need to fear.
For instance, Barnum explains, “the report suggests telling parents that ‘personalized learning provides opportunities for increased interaction with teachers and peers and encourages higher levels of student engagement.’” He then fact checks that new talking point:
If anything, though, existing research suggests that certain personalized learning programs reduce student engagement. In a 2015 study by RAND, commissioned by the Gates Foundation, students in schools that have embraced technology-based personalized learning were somewhat less likely to say they felt engaged in and enjoyed school work. A 2017 RAND study found that students were 9 percentage points less likely to say there was an adult at school who knew them well.
Follow the link to the messaging document and it is clear that these ideology-driven corporate reformers are not stepping back from bubble-in accountability and other top-down mandates. They warn their troops, however, that the mere mention of testing drives down interest in personalized learning.
Click to access Communicating-Personalized-Learning-to-Families-and-Stakeholders.pdf
Real world, personalized learning is producing questionable results. It is clear that personalized learning can benefit some students, as it harms others. Underfunded schools and overworked teachers can’t magically implement the rushed plans for online learning and offer real, meaningful, individualized lessons. Often digital instruction devolves into dummied-down efforts to “pass kids on.” The dangers of too much screen time and the gathering of individual data by corporations are well documented.
So, the spin consultants urge caution when “answering these questions without fueling opposition.” Corporate reformers are not necessarily backing off from their gamble in hurriedly imposing radical transformations. Instead, they realize that, “In attempting to generate excitement, we inadvertently scared the public,” So, reformers must “steer clear” of “talking up the potential for dramatic changes to the way school looks and feels.” They are also offering “preferred messaging” to district leaders for their staff and principals.
If anyone believes that the Billionaires Boys Club’s new messaging means they have really listened, they merely need to click on ExcelinEd’s web site. For instance, they haven’t even rejected the failed turnaround strategies that they and the federal government imposed on high-poverty schools. They still promote agendas like the mass replacement of staff in district schools. Then their new report, School Interventions Under ESSA: Harnessing High-Performing Charter Operators, emphasizes:
In districts where schools fail to turn around – or have already been failing for multiple years – states should consider the one option that can give students languishing in low-performing schools a higher quality option: bringing in high-performing charter schools.
It must be emphasized that this new advice on a more personal message for personalized learning and the kinder and gentler presentation of reward and punish policies does not mean that corporate reformers have checked their hubris.
They still plan to “go big, be bold, and be impatient.”
Barnum has been good at shining a light on the ways that reformers are reworking their message, but these social engineers are trying to improve their PR, and hiding their antagonism towards educators. The Fordham Institute has been especially open about their movement’s “internecine feud,” that some call “the end of education policy,” while not hiding their anger towards practitioners. For instance, Dale Chu wrote:
If 2018 marks the end of education policy, whatever comes next has gotten off to an inauspicious start for reformers and stand-patters alike.
Follow his second link to read Robin Lake’s full twitter statement which concludes:
There are certainly “stand-patters”: people who don’t believe any structural/policy changes are needed in public ed. I have little to discuss w them.
https://edexcellence.net/articles/an-internecine-feud-in-the-schoolyard
And please don’t forget the ways that Chu characterizes those of us who oppose their theories based on research and our classroom experiences. He labels us as “forces of resistance,” “their ilk,” those whose actions are inimical to improvement, and “hyperbolic at best.” He praises Howard Fuller’s “prescient warning” that “too many reformers had mistaken what was a street fight for a college debate.”
As the corporate reformers air their dirty laundry, the observations of conservative Little “r” reformer Rick Hess are especially illustrative. Hess spoofs the Big “R” Reformers’ new message, “we’re ready to listen.” He explains why this new tactic “feels like performance art.”
Hess explains, “If one is emotionally invested in a bold sweeping agenda to ‘fix’ American education, it’s tough to regard disagreement, dissent or skepticism as anything other than a moral failure.” He concludes, “for those invested in Big ‘R’ Reform, listening is mostly a stratagem.” It is a self-reinforcing insular dogma.” Changing their mindset is “quite a challenge when the mantra is ‘go big, be bold, and be impatient.’”
In Oklahoma, this pattern is being displayed by Epic Charter, as well as ExcelinEd, but the same story is being told across the nation.
Student needs matter more than school delivery model.
That is of course the corporate way of doing business. They have a product or service to sell and they will never admit any danger or defect in what they are selling. They’ve got all the same Mad Ave Disinformation Industry working on their behalf, and 90% of the cost to taxpayers will go to paying for that very disinformation.
Forget all that Bull about free market ways. The last thing any corporation wants is having to compete on the basis of quality. They all aspire to monopoly and domination of market share by hook or by crook. “Crook” in this case means buying their own cadre of pitch-people and prostitute politicians in Congress.
What they are shooting for in the end is the Defense Industry Model — in effect, the power to tax the public at exorbitant rates for whatever it serves them to provide, without the responsibility of accountability, transparency, and all that fuss about representation.
and apparently getting to that model faster than most citizens would believe
Gates and his foundation are investing over a billion dollars to invade public schools with his depersonalized learning. His strategy includes the familiar plan to buy people at the top that will impose on the people on the bottom. This tactic is stealth hostile takeover that will attempt to legitimize his bad ideas. He is hoping to sneak into public schools which he views as a $6 billion dollar prize while being considered a “philanthropist.” https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/3/22/whats-happening-with-gates-new-education-strategy
Ah, advertising. They tried to data drive me. They tried to flip me. They tried to blend me. They tried to 21st century skills fool me. They tried to code me. They tried to personalize me. They called it reform.
They were just selling computer programs. They still are. I just keep teaching. I’m not that gullible. It doesn’t matter what words one uses to describe a chair. It’s still a chair. I won’t be burning books any time soon.
You were lucky LCT that violence wasn’t threatened against you.
Frederick Hess wrote at Philanthropy Roundtable that the reformers wanted to “blow up the ed schools”.
Who here hasn’t been threatened?
Every year when I was teaching in a barrio high school with a child poverty rate of more than 70 percent, where violent multi generations street gangs ruled the streets at night and sometimes during the day, a different gang-banger, always one of my students, threatened me almost every year with, “What would you do if we jumped you, Mr. Lofthouse.”
My reply was always, “I’d do my best to kill as many as possible before I went down.”
I was never physically attacked.
In 2013, I was surrounded in my classroom by a ruthless gang of administrators who threatened to retaliate for my dismissal of “blended learning” as well as an online intervention curriculum (and a modified bell schedule to track students into the intervention class). They threatened to take over my class. And they did. The students stood up for me, and the admin gang went away for a while. True story.0
Now, if they threaten to jump me, I remind them that the neighborhood is stronger than the admin gang. This is the law of the chalkboard jungle, as old and as true as the sky. The teacher who keeps it may prosper; the teacher who breaks it will die: like the eraser that sits by the chalkboard, the law runneth forward and back. The strength of the class is the teacher. And the strength of the teacher’s the class.
The cowardly weaklings willing to sell out their neighbors’ schools for their masters’ coins wouldn’t last a day in the described communities. With justice, they’d learn that lesson the hard way.
When one misleading, lying, kleptocracy-propaganda campaign stops fooling enough people, change tactics, change the message and increase the number of people fooled.
Maybe they should invite Russia to help them mislead the public.
“Privatization” is the corporate/Wall Street code word for “Profitization” that would allow big corporations to take over vital services people need and charge people anything they want. Corporations are all about one thing: PROFIT, so you know what will happen to a government service if “Profitzation” takes place: Service would be reduced and prices increased. For public schools that are “Profitized” that means less learning and more tuition in the form of vouchers paid for by taxpayers.
States’ referenda keep voting down school choice/vouchers. Arizona voters just defeated a proposal to expand educational savings accounts. So in order to get school choice, legislatures must be persuaded.
As school choice programs expand in some states, other states will observe. As the parents/students who participate in the choice programs, relate their successes in non-public schools, other states are sure to follow.
Maybe not today ,maybe not tomorrow, but soon!
There are no successes. Attrition rates from voucher schools are very high.
The way vouchers expand is that people like DeVos and the Koch brothers basically buy the votes of legislators.
Nice.
There have been more than twenty years of failures. There’s even a site that lists all the publicly funded private sector charter school failures and frauds and closings.
There have also been several studies all cited on this Blog that corporate charter schools are equal to or worse than the public schools they are attempting to replace.
Choice was a failure in Sweden and that failure has been documented.
Choice was a failure in Chili and that failure has been documented.
Who’s the convenient fool, Howard Fuller or AEI’s Frederick Hess?
Fuller said, “Reformers mistook what was a street fight for a college debate.” Frederick Hess’s view was the exact opposite. He wrote (his co-author was a Gates-funded external affairs manager), “….reformers…want to blow up ed schools.” (Philanthropy Roundtable) P-R’s description of the reformers’ strategic plan for total annihilation in the face of dissent, couldn’t be further from Fuller’s claim that reformers wanted to “debate”. A reality check is demanded for AEI/Bill Gates or Fuller. BTW, if a debate is decided based on the merits, it doesn’t require villainthropists to spend billions.
Why does Dale Chu quote Fuller instead of the Gates’ spokesperson about reformer intent? Has he read “Don’t Surrender the Academy”?
Unrelated… does Gates provide any funding to Fordham? It must be tough to spin the P-R article?
Yes. Gates gave Fordham millions to promote Common Core
Personalized learning results as reported by Rand-
(1) Students were 9% less likely to say there was an adult at school who knew them well.
(2) Students were less likely to say they felt engaged in and enjoyed school work.
I just finished reading a novel with the following revelation about the protagonist. He left his charter school for two months and when he returned, he wasn’t remembered.
The book didn’t identify the cause, rather the school’s hires lacked interest or, employee turnover was high.
Here is Peter Greene very astute analysis of the deficits and misleading hype surrounding “personalized learning.” No sane parent would want this for their children, if they realized how dull and dehumanizing it is. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2018/12/8-reasons-not-to-love-personalized.html
The world would have been better off if Z-berg hadn’t been born. And, his wife took a coveted place in medical school. How many years did she give back to medicine? The Z-berg-Chan culture breeds takers with shut off valves on their consciences.
Of course, people like Bill And Melinda Gates and Marck Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan would never subject their own children to depersonalized learning.
Like Common Core, it’s only for other people’s kids.
RAND Corporation is not exactly a reliable source of information.
And if the study was funded by Gates, I’d bet they changed 90% less likely to 9% less likely and MUCH less likely to less likely.
In the mid-1980s I read and handed out copies of Shopping Mall High School. The premise of the book was that high schools increasingly resembled shopping malls where students would aimlessly accumulate courses and graduate with degrees that did not prepare them for college or work. The remedy to this aimless wandering, according to the authors, was to have high schools emphasize “purpose, push, and personalization”… by which the authors meant that the schools needed to have caring adults who helped students formulate a clear purpose for their learning and who knew and understood the students well enough to motivate them to keep striving to meet or modify their purpose in the face of adversity.
The “shopping mall” model for high schools has not changed. What HAS changed is the taxpayer’s appetite for more spending, especially spending on “failing government schools”. This has set the stage for technology billionaires to “come to the rescue”. If Amazon Prime can figure out what movies you like and products you “need”, and Spotify can develop play lists based on the songs you’ve liked, and Google can feed you articles you want to read, and FaceBook can provide you with news feeds that resonate… why not apply these algorithms to school?… especially if the application of these new technologies does not require the hiring of new staff members who require benefits, leave time, and ever increasing wages… and especially if these new technologies can reward our shareholders!
“Now what are we going to call this idea?”, ask the profiteers. “Well, we expropriated the term “reform”, let’s expropriate the term “personalization”… after all, several states have adopted the idea of “personalization” but they haven’t had the time or money to roll out the programming to support the concept. The door is now open for US to flesh out the idea and we can offer a fast, cheap, and cost-effective means to do so!”
My hunch is that somewhere in Silicon Valley a bunch of guys sitting around a table had a conversation like this and they’ve used their foundations and connections to promote the idea. This is not what states like Vermont meant when they adopted personalization… but the “reform” that swept the country is not what REAL reformers wanted either.
“they have not backed away one iota from their rock-solid belief that private management is the cure for low test scores…”
Once you begin to use test scores to evaluate the situation, you should not be surprised to learn that almost any scheme, including that of the criminal element, the wild-eyed dreamer, and the ideological extremist, can be justified by worthless data.
We do best without the test.
If you stop to reflect that the standardized tests are normed on a bell curve, you realize that the bell curve always has a bottom half, always has a bottom 5%.
We are facing forces that are fundamentally alien and hostile to democracy. We faced them at the founding of the country, and overcame them, but only for a while. These forces have to destroy public education because an educated, informed, and critically thinking public is the biggest obstacle to their aims.
Unless parent groups and teacher groups stand together in revolt… I think Corporate reformers won’t face the truth hitting them in the face. As long as there is money to make for the greed corporations set on milking the public ed tax coffers they will enjoy this magnificent gold rush. They don’t care about kids or teachers or the future of our country. They care about profits. We have to cut their pipeline to free taxpayer cash somehow.
For those wanting to dig deeper into the ‘corporate agenda’ at its core, an extreme right-wing ideological agenda that has been married to corporate profiteering, and not only in education, read Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains” (thanks Deb Meier for alerting me to this). As the title indicates, the right wing goal is to revise the constitution to make it even more tilted toward protection of property rather than persons, an agenda that is hard to win when people can vote (hence, disenfranchisement) or are educated (hence seeking to end public schooling, a la Virginia in the wake of Brown). Reads like a fast-paced novel and is meticulously documented.