Reformer groups and programs and projects pop up so often that I’m tempted to call them mushrooms, although stinkweeds would work too. I met Matt Gandal, described below, when he worked for Checker Finn at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. As long as the foundations keep pumping money into their hobby, there will be more mushrooms. She wrote this comment a month or so ago:
Laura Chapman describes the latest Reformer mushroom:
Meanwhile, the self-appointed members of the “Education Strategy Group” will command the National Press Club March 8 for a launch of “Level UP, Aligning for Success.”
The program will focus on “how we are collectively working to improve student preparation and increase success in postsecondary education and training,” especially “the preparation of students of color, students from low-income backgrounds and first-generation college students.”
Level Up is described as a coalition, a collaboration, and effort to provide “a playbook of high-impact strategies that K-12 and higher education leaders can collaboratively use to increase student success.”
The Founder (2012) and President of the Education Strategy Group, Matt Gandal, is not embarrassed to offer a brief resume that reveals his 20 year association with perfectly terrible policies for education. He was as a senior advisor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan where he led the “Reform Support Network” created as an enforcement arm for compliance (implementation) of Race to the Top.
Before that job, Gandal claims to be a founder and executive vice president of Achieve—infamous for its promotion of the Common Core State Standards—and the antecedent American Diploma Project. If you have not read Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools by Mercedes Schneider please do so. If you know the history of those bad ideas just be aware that they are not dead yet, not by a long shot. Gandal also claims to have held a leadership position in Chester Finn’s Educational Excellence Network. What more do you need to know?
Gandal ”was the author and chief architect of Making Standards Matter, an annual American Federation of Teachers report (beginning in 1992) purporting to evaluate the quality of the academic standards, assessments and accountability policies in every state. He also helped to drum up anxieties about standards in the United States in relation to other industrialized nations.
So, that is the leadership for the “Education Strategy Group.” The group functions as an advocacy shop for varied efforts to sustain the Common Core, with the attached aim of preparation for “college and career,” where career refers to workforce training.
This is a partial list of past and present “clients” for the Education Strategy Group: Delaware Department of Education, Georgia Department of Education, Maryland Department of Education, Rhode Island Governor’s Workforce Board, Indiana Department of Education, Indiana Commission for Higher Education, Ohio Department of Education, Ohio Department of Higher Education, Baltimore City Public Schools.
These are also listed as if clients: Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), National Governors Association (NGA), Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU), United States Chamber of Commerce Foundation, myFutureNC, New America.
Credits indicate support from the Charles A. Dana Center, Collaborative for Student Success; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Helios Education Foundation; Rodel Foundation of Delaware; J.P. Morgan Chase; Carnegie Corporation of New York; Joyce Foundation; Lumina Foundation; Abell Foundation; Strada Education Network; and Belk Foundation,
Two of the service “stories” of the Education Strategy Group focus on “The Collaborative for Student Success,” a project of the New Venture Fund. The Collaborative is also a creature of deep-pocket funding from groups unfriendly to public schools: the Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.
“The Collaborative for Student Success (CSS)” is a platform designed to reassert the general idea that standards are not high enough and they are a panacea. The CCS is also one among several non-profits (e.g., Bellwether Education Partners) that have elected to review and criticize state ESSA plans. You can see the CCS effort here with a direct link (no surprise) to the charter loving Walton funded 74 Million http://schoolimprovement.the74million.org
In other words, the National Press Club will become a forum for the launch of “Level UP, Aligning for Success.” The question is whether any one in the audience will have done enough homework to grasp this latest effort to shore up failed education policies. The National Press Club is for hire, and the launch of “Level UP, Aligning for Success” provides another venue for billionaire foundations and corporate friends to promote policies and practices that have no basis in professional wisdom. I hope members of the National Press Club will ask pointed questions about this latest PR effort to keep the the standards movement in place–a major effort to discredit public education. The link to the Walton funded 74 Million leaves no doubt about whose interests this PR campign serves.
http://edstrategy.org/level-up-launch/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not just any mushroom, but the Death Cap Mushroom.
Perhaps the deadliest of all mushrooms, the death cap is found throughout Europe and closely resembles edible straw mushrooms and caesar’s mushrooms. Its heat-stable amatoxins withstand cooking temperatures and quickly damage cells throughout the body. Within 6 to 12 hours after consumption, violent abdominal pain, vomiting, and bloody diarrhea appear, causing rapid loss of fluid from the tissues and intense thirst. Signs of severe involvement of the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system soon follow, including a decrease in urinary output and a lowering of blood sugar. This condition leads to coma and death in more than 50 percent of the incidents. Notable deaths include Pope Clement VII, who died of accidental death cap poisoning in 1534, and possibly Roman Emperor Claudius in 54 CE.
The description of the Death Cap Mushroom fits the vampires of the Corporate Charter School Industry.
I wonder if Super Villian MAGA Man likes sauteed mushrooms added to his McDonald’s burgers — just a thought — nothing else.
Mushrooms are a fungus. As Lloyd points out, many varieties are deadly. In reading Laura’s post, I was struck how all these foundations are underwritten by the 1%. If we had been taxing the rich appropriately without all the loopholes and work arounds in the tax code, much more money would be in state and federal coffers to benefit the common good. Public schools would not be fighting for their lives, and they would not be subjected to the vain “largesse” of the 1%. There would be plenty of money to combat climate change, provide social safety nets and rebuild our crumbling roads, bridges and schools. Most of these public-private “partnerships” leave taxpayers holding the bag for the 1%’s vanity projects.
Instead we have an oligarchy where the government panders to corporations and the 1%. The government is aiding and abetting privatization of a key public asset, public education that helped to build this nation. Privatization is not about improvement in education. It is about transferring the value of the public asset into private pockets for no real gains to working families. It further undermines the working class and contributing to even greater income inequality.
Yes. When one thinks of what a “movement” consists of, one imagines a few committed individuals who garner grassroots support that builds from the bottom up and spreads via networks of concerned individuals. But Ed Deform is a fake “movement” because all its supporters are paid shills. Take away the financial support from the coffers of a few oligarchs and “poof,” it would vanish like the monster under the bed of a child’s nightmares.
Here’s why Laura Chapman’s metaphor works somewhat: People think of mushrooms as being those things with stems and caps that one sees in forests, but those parts are actually just the fruiting bodies of the mushroom–the parts that make the spores by which the mushroom propagates. The bulk of a mushroom–the body of it– is a vast, interconnected underground network of filaments called hyphae that, taken together, are called the mycelium. Laura’s metaphor works to a certain point because Ed Deform consists of this incestuous NETWORK of shill organizations.
But the metaphor breaks down because in Ed Deform, the existence of the network is entirely dependent upon an external source, on funding from a few billionaires who provide the salaries of the meretricious EduPundit shills who move from one Deform organization to another. They manufacture and plant the spores, and there is nothing grassroots about it. And it’s the billionaires who give these astroturf organizations their fake names to make them sound as though they actually were grass roots organizations–names like Students First and Parent Revolution, though students and parents had nothing to do with their origins or their metastasis.
Robert Frost once wrote that the beauty of metaphor is that at some point it breaks down. Here’s where the shroom metaphor for Ed Deform stops working: The mycelium of a mushroom connects to the roots and rhyzomes of a vast network of plants and to the hyphae of other fungi with whom the shroom has symbiotic relationships–sort of like reciprocal trade agreements for sharing of minerals and other nutrients. So, an actual mushroom is more like an actual grassroots movement, with real connections to the people–sort of like the Resistance to Ed Deform, with its actual connections to teachers, students, and parents.
BTW, the largest known organism on the planet is a mushroom in Oregon that covers, underground, over 2,200 acres (890 hectares) and is at least 2,400 years old and possibly much older. http://www.extremescience.com/biggest-living-thing.htm
See Diane Ravitch’s brilliant new book, coming in January.
It was Diane Ravitch who first articulated to me this remarkable fact about Ed Deform–so obvious, when one thinks about it–that it is a “fake movement” entirely dependent upon paid shills. When she said that, it struck me with the force of revelation. Yes, I knew this, sort of. But Diane has this knack for assimilation of enormous amounts of information and clear articulation of it in a single penetrating truth. This is part of what makes her Diane Ravitch. She’s freaking brilliant.
Bob, you’re really starting to annoy me with your insider’s knowledge about Diane’s book. And now you’re telling me we’ll have to wait until January!! Just when I thought you couldn’t annoy me any more! 😜💩
I love you too, Greg. Suck it up.
Yes, Greg. I read this book and achieved instant enlightenment, moksha. It also added twenty years to my life span.
The Mushroom metaphor is Diane’s. You and others have amplified on why it is worth thinking about.
I have come to believe, Laura, that you and Diane are perhaps the two most knowledgeable folks in the country on the topic of Education Deform. I am so grateful for your enlightening posts, from which I always learn.
The other thing that makes the metaphor work is that these Deformer shill organizations continually crop up like shrooms after a hard rain. The rain, in this case, is billionaire funding. A good metaphor for the Resistance would be the game of whack a mole.
I try to write good headlines.i learned to do it many years ago working for a small magazine.
Although he’s a bit of a putz, I have to agree with Bob about the wisdom of Diane and Laura. And I would add, with very few exceptions, so many others who take the time to educate us here like Jan Resseger, Steve Singer, Peter Greene, Mitchell, Linda, Lloyd, Duane, and so many other thoughtful people. This really is an oasis of sanity with many incisive, provocative ideas. The glue that binds it all together is our understanding of how important education at all levels is integral to our civic health and future. Would that everyone understood this fundamental truth. Especially those who only see our passion as a commodity. Thank you, Diane!
LMAO!
Thank you, Greg! I’m deeply engaged in our common conversation.
“I believe strongly that the modern, global economy rewards human capital development”
Ugh. Why do they insist on speaking like this? It’s like they all went to the same corporate seminar and memorized acceptable phrases.
I don’t know why public schools are paying consultants who don’t support public schools. Charter and private schools would never do it, yet public schools hire the whole list of ed reform consultants- people who lobby incessantly to weaken and eventually eradicate public schools. We’re paying them. It’s ridiculous.
One small correction. It’s not “like” they all went to the same corporate seminar. They, in fact, did go to the same corporate seminar. That’s a standard modus operandi in Ed Deform. They hold these goblin covens and disseminate the latest talking points and catch phrases and discuss strategies for disrupting and destroying unions and public schools, and they invite the other billionaires and their paid shills to these. Often, of late, they are billed as investor conferences because the latest shill game on the Ed Deform Carnival Midway is depersonalized learning.
I prefer to think of my grandchildren as children, not as human capital.
OK. There is no “love this” button on WordPress. Love this!!!
Whoa Chiara, so agree. I find “human capital development” a chilly, repulsive expression that for me conjures up nightmarish images from the movie “Matrix.”
Hyper-Orwellian for “education.”
The million dollar question: WHY are public schools are paying consultants who don’t support public schools?
In the topsy-turvy world of Disruption, everything is the opposite of what it calls itself.
“Personalized learning,” for example, means sitting in front of a computer and having no personal interaction with a living human being.
Let’s get this straight.
Diane is THE one with a deep and comprehensive knowledge of the history of education, including the origin of current reforms and key players. She is also teaching through this blog. I am her student and a student of many others who contribute to this blog.
Laura,
I hope you will consider posting a list of the funders of CAP. Just curious.
It is in the works. I constructed a spreadsheet yesterday, with data from 2013 to 2018 extracted from the website.
Teacher’s pet!! 🤣