In this comment, posted not long ago, reader Laura H. Chapman describes the Ohio view of education as workforce preparation. The pioneers of education had nobler goals. Above all, they considered the purpose of education to be preparation for citizenship in our emerging democracy. That meant literacy and numeracy but also character development with the hope of cultivating a commitment to democratic values and a readiness to participate in improving society on behalf of the community, not just oneself.
A resident of Ohio, Chapman describes the state’s narrow, utilitarian view of the goals of education. She notes that this goal was announced without any public discussion.
Several days ago, she wrote:
Today March 30, 2019, several Ohio newspapers had variations on the same announcement of a new non-profit headed by Lisa Gray, a long standing point person for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gray is now the “founder” of Ohio Excels, a corporate-led non-profit intent of making evidence of job preparation the priority for all high school graduates . The mission statement also includes educational choice, a policy perfectly consistent with the view that early apprenticeships and career prep from preschool are the singularly important missions of Ohio’s public schools.
This set of policy and practice priorities, comes to us hard on after the State Board of Education published Each Child, Our Future. Ohio’s Strategic Plan for Education: 2019-2024 in June 2018. That plan also included a strong emphasis on workplace skills and early career education, notably with Lisa Gray participating in a “workgroup” on “ High School Success and Postsecondary Connections ” led by LEAH MOSCHELLA from JOBS FOR THE FUTURE (JFF) where Moschella is a senior program manager for the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
I judge that plan 2018 Ohio plan (a conceptual mishmash) left too many CEOs unhappy, so Ohio Excels will be putting a new plan is in place–one that is an offshoot of Jobs for the Future (JFF) and the Pathways to Prosperity Network.
I looked at the board of Ohio Excels and see lots of CEOs, many from activist positions in metro area business committees and civic and cultural groups. One is also on the board of Hillsdale College–a radical right school. I recognize another as a major supporter of the arts. Another was leading an initiative instigated by the MindTrust in Indianapolis, seeking more charter schools in Cincinnati with the usual patter about needing more “high quality seats.”
I am still unravelling the connections among all of these outfits, but so far I have discovered that JFF has received 35 grants for a total of about $122.5 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dating from 2002. Early grants pushed the Common Core with “college and career” readiness, beginning in earnest in grade 9.
The Pathways to Prosperity Network has been funded within each member state (e.g., annual participation fee for California, $500,000) in addition to funds from the Carnegie Corporation of New York $450,000, the James Irvine Foundation (about $12 million, most in California), the Noyce Foundation (before it closed in 2015), and SAP an international Software company.
Jobs for the Future,appears to be inseparable from the Pathways to Prosperity Network. JFF has 18 projects in Ohio. All of these are designed to make Ohio education serve corporate interests. I have not yet done research on each of these projects.
Pathways to Prosperity Network (a project and all host to other efforts);
Center for Apprenticeship & Work-Based Learning;
Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative;
Postsecondary State Network;
Student Success Center Network;
Nudging to STEM Success;
Early College;
Improved Reentry Education;
Jobs to Careers;
Counseling to Careers;
Middle-Skill STEM Pathways Initiative;
New Skills at Work;
Digital Career Accelerator;
Great Lakes College and Career Pathways Partnership;
Lumina Foundation Talent Hubs;
Google IT Support Professional Certificate;
Policy Leadership Trust, and the big surprise:
“Pay for Success in K–12 Education” wherein venture capitalists overtly hope to make money from turning K-12 education into a financial product with little or no public voice and oversight.
Jobs for the Future has “partners.” These are
GOOGLE,
California Endowment,
Salesforce.org (cloud computing, artificial Intelligence),
Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC) Foundation,
The James Irvine Foundation,
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
Social Finance (Pay for Success contracts), and yes–
US Department of LABOR and US Department of EDUCATION.
This national network of interlocking programs, foundations, and corporate groups has an agenda far removed from vocational eduction.
Ohio Excels, the new Ohio non-profit to be led by Lisa Gray has three staff and a policy agenda for public education that has not been shaped by public discussion. Our students are to part of the “talent pipeline” that CEOs say they want. Never mind what the life of our students may offer or require beyond getting a job and getting ready for a job beginning in Kindergarten. I hope to offer more detail about “Ohio Excels,” Jobs for the Future, and Pathways to Prosperity in another post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And Louisiana Believes their students are just as good as other American students.
What’s with this juxtaposition of faith and haltingly worldly and limited ideals?
Granted: jobs are important.
So are dreams, careers, passions and purpose.
Most of these policy wonks and think tanks find democracy an inconvenience. They are all backed by lots of billionaire bucks that can pay off the so-called representatives. #45 and his crew continue to slash any regulatory function of the federal government. A weaker federal government will allow the billionaires to put their stamp on every piece of legislation. The wealthy continue to use the government to shape their dystopian vision for the rest of us.
We need to vote for candidates that believe in government of, by and for the people. That is the only way to allow education serve both the needs of people and the state. Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are the two candidates that seem represent the interests of working families.
I think the risk is that employers shift the costs of training their employees onto the public. You’re really not responsible for paying for training people in the narrow needs of one huge corporation.
Ed reform is so gimmicky and fad-driven. They will train for whatever the “hot job” is (according to the people they listen to, which is a tiny, narrow group) and they will lose sight of a general, solid education that transfers between jobs.
We’ve already seen this happen. They’re slotting kids into jobs that aren’t even “good jobs”- food service or security guards. They can make 15 dollars an hour in a food service job without a specialized high school program. It’s a rip off. To the kids.
I think part of the disconnect is none of the people who design these programs are actually middle class. This whole thing is completely foreign to them. They all come out of elite universities. Most of them never worked for an hourly wage in their entire lives.
“I think the risk is that employers shift the costs of training their employees onto the public.”
This is certainly true. Our new Tennessee governor wants to increase vocational education. Sounds good until you realize that it will create more HVAC technicians from which his million dollar business can hire at a decreased level. Nor will he have to invest in training.
I am all for teaching vocational skills, but not at the expense of teaching the citizenship needed for citizens who can tell me the difference between a Nazi and a democrat.
Money greases the legislator pipeline in Ohio.
Laura, my take- SSIR posted an article advocating the TFA empathy experience for privileged Whites (Spring 2019).
It worries me that they’re so determined to get rid of “comprehensive” high schools. Comprehensive high schools have economies of scale that allow them to offer a really broad variety of options. You really don’t need 15 specialized charter schools to offer individual plans for kids. One big high school can do the same thing, and do it more economically and better, with the added plus of having all kinds of kids go to school together. Our high school has a really vibrant and popular vocational track PLUS a 4 year college track. It’s dumb to fragment it. It only works in giant cities and suburbs.
While comprehensive high schools were all the rage in the 70s, they were an anathema to rural areas that were experiencing depopulation during that time. I student taught at a comprehensive high school in1978. Five years after its creation, this was a high school for the city kids and a warehouse for the country poor. Classes full of poor kids were segregated from rich kids. Cliques re-enacted Lord of the Flies every day. Sure they had a lot of classes to choose from, but at the cost of community.
When I arrived at my rural school, I was delighted to be a part of a place where we all knew each other. We could bare offer foreign language, but at least we tried, underfunded as we were. The fathers of our community school fought hard against consolidation here, and with good reason. When a school does not rise naturally from a community, it becomes, at best, a place to learn stuff.
Comprehensive high schools are appropriate for most students that do not know what they want to do in the future. By exposing students to a comprehensive curricula, students are better able to determine where their strengths and interests are.
The charter/voucher focus of the ed reform echo chamber is really something to behold.
One can read WIDELY in ed reform and never see a public school mentioned.
This is an example. It’s a “liberal” ed reformer upset that Democrats have stopped promoting charters over public schools.
Here is her public school agenda:
“Expanded access to health care, early learning and college are essential elements of that agenda. High-performing charter schools, which are a proven strategy to break intergenerational poverty and help students living in poverty ascend into the middle class, ought to remain so too. And the real embarrassment today is progressives turning their backs on the schools that work for the people they are supposed to serve.”
The entire article omits public schools. It’s such an echo chamber they don’t even realize they do it. Ed reform “Democrats” offer absolutely nothing to the +/- 90% of people who attend public schools, and this is FINE with them. They simply abandoned that whole population, so, what, 45 MILLION kids and families? They don’t even try to offer us anything of value.
They so take public school students and families for granted we’re rarely mentioned in their policy briefs or political plans. Republicans NEVER mention us. Public school students are political orphans. The entire political and policy elite have just abandoned them. The US Department of Education won’t even allow them into educational forums. They’re barred. It’s INSANE, but it’s true across the board in ed reform. They exclude 90% of families.
https://www.the74million.org/article/brown-education-reformers-made-mistakes-but-supporting-charter-schools-wasnt-one/
Last night Elizabeth Warren stated on CNN she always wanted to be a public school teacher. She encouraged the audience to give them a “round of applause,” which they did. She may have just wanted to appear to be teacher friendly to get their support, but it was a positive moment for public schools.
I should also say she can hold the applause, and put the respect into meaningful policy for public schools.
The ed reform apologies begin and end with “we tested too much”.
The problem is that’s ALL they did for public school students. That they don’t see any issue with an “educational movement” that offers nothing but testing to 90% of families is just amazing.
What if (and I know this is crazy) ed reformers actually added some value to an existing public school? Might that attract adherents? What if they had an actual policy goal for existing public schools other than closing them and cutting their funding?
DeVos now sells her programs with this: “I will not harm public school students”
We’re actually supposed to pay them to NOT harm our kids.
It’ll never happen in DC because they’re utterly captured and entrenched, but it would be interesting to flip the question and ask the Democratic candidates NOT about charters and vouchers, but instead a really simple question: “what have you done for public schools?”
We’d get a lot of blank stares and for some of them a desperate attempt to change the subject to pre-k, so you’d have to be firm with them and not let them weasel out of it 🙂
They’re “public education experts” who have somehow missed 90% of students and schools. I don’t know if that’s even possible, it’s really a contradiction in terms, but they have somehow achieved it.
I like the flipped question. Then, they are forced to make a statement or look foolish.
“Fordham Institute OH
Be sure to mark your calendars! National Charter Schools Week starts on May 12. ”
National Public Schools Week never starts, because the thousands of public employees we’re paying at the federal and state level to work on “public education” have simply decided they no longer work for public school students or families, so they will make no effort at all and in fact will almost never mention our schools, students or families. This is not only acceptable in ed reform, it’s the gold standard. Supporting a public school gets you kicked out of the club. Our schools are ideologically incorrect. That 90% attend these abandoned schools never occurs to any of them.
what occurs to them often, however, is that there is more and more deregulated (quickly taken; quickly dispersed) money to be divvied up and spread around in the growing world of charter/choice/voucher/privatizing
How many “Charter School Weeks” ARE there? I thought there was one in January or February. Color me confused.
It’s not such a crazy idea, that schooling should prepare you for life. That’s what it has always done. Ancient hunter gatherers taught their kids where to find nuts and fruits, how to use a mortar and pestle, how to make an arrowhead, what mushrooms were edible, and what weren’t. Even before the specialization of work that occurred with the emergence of the Neolithic city, some hunted, some gathered. So everyone didn’t have to learn the same skills.
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that we take this notion seriously–retooling our schools “to prepare students for the workforce.”
The workforce is, and must be, in a highly diverse economy, itself highly diverse. We need cosmeticians and cosmologists, plumbers and plebologistsm, masons and architects. Any top-down, standards-and-testing program that attempts to treat students as cogs to be identically milled is not going to do that.
Kids differ–in their interests, proclivities, passions, abilities. And one of the jobs of schooling should be lay out before kids a wide variety of options and help them to choose from among them paths that make sense for them.
One size does not fit all. To think otherwise is just plain crazy.
And here’s another thing: as long as there has been cultural transmission from one generation to the next, there has been an understanding that this transmission cannot be completely narrowly utilitarian. People have always taught to the coming generation their legends, myths, and arts. Here’s how to make a bone whistle or a shofar or a tortoise-shell lyre, here’s how to create a red ochre drawing, here’s how to do body painting, here’s how that dance is done. Why? These matters enrich life enormously, an they are the ties that bind a community together.
So, you need both–widespread introduction to the arts and extraordinarily varied tracks for specialized preparation.
This is what I have been meaning to say.
In today’s world, preparing a student for life means turning them into a lifelong learner.
What does it take to become a lifelong learner?
The student grows up to be an avid reader.
The student learned powerful critical thinking skills.
The student learns powerful problem-solving skills.
The student grows up as a disciplined individual with the ability to set goals and achieve them.
This flawed thinking that public schools must turn out children ready to go to work is totally wrong because it has already been established, that the average worker of today will not settle into one job for life but change careers several times during their working years and often have to learn new skills each time.
That is where being a life-long learner comes in.
What Bill Gates’ puppet minion is doing (I think Gates told her to do this and provided the funding) is not the practice in most countries. Take China and Japan for instance.
In both countries, when students reach high school, they are offered two choices. In China, test scores are used to make the decisions for most of the students what choice is made. WIth a low test score, students almost always end up in a vocational high school. The only way those students attend a college is if their family can afford to send them to the U.S. or the EU as a foreign college student.
attend a public vocational high school that teaches students what they need to learn so when they graduate from high school. they are ready to job hunt in that sector.
attend an academic high school that prepares students to go to college.
I don’t know about China, but I have read that in Japan, some students do both. Japan’s high school graduation rate is impressive and is often compared to the U.S. high school graduation rate until you realize that about 30 percent of the students are graduating from those vocational high schools. In the United States, most if not all of the public high schools are academic high schools. It wasn’t always like that and many high schools offer electives that help students get ready for jobs in their local areas.
“The pioneers of education had nobler goals. Above all, they considered the purpose of education to be preparation for citizenship in our emerging democracy.”
At the time of the founding of this country, that was one of a number of goals, at least for white landowning males. Which was all well and good except that it left behind many citizens.
As it is, the purpose of public education as stated in 20/25 state constitutions (THE authorizing document for every state-25 give no reason) can be summarized as:
“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”