Checker Finn and I used to be best buddies back in the days when I was on the other side (the wrong side) of big education issues. We became friends in the early 1980s. We created something called the Educational Excellence Network, which circulated a monthly newsletter on events and issues back in the pre-Internet days. I was a member of the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which was created and chaired by his father and led by Checker. Checker had worked for Lamar Alexander when Lamar was Governor of Tennessee, and he recommended me to Lamar when Lamar became George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. I accepted the job of Assistant Secretary of Education for Research and Counselor to the Secretary, the same job Checker had held during the Reagan administration, when Bill Bennett was Secretary of Education. We both served as members of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. As a member of Checker’s board, I opposed accepting funding from the Gates Foundation, since I thought that as a think tank, we should protect our independence and we had plenty of money. I opposed TBF becoming an authorizer of charters in Ohio, where TBF was theoretically based even though its main office was in DC. I was outvoted on both issues. As a member of the Koret Task Force, I was in regular conversation and discussion with the best conservative thinkers. Over time, however, I lost the conservative faith. I changed my mind, as I described in my book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
I became and remain a deeply skeptical critic of all the grand plans to reinvent American education, especially those that emanate from billionaires and from people who are hostile to the very concept of public education.
To my surprise, I read an article recently by Checker that captured my skepticism about the Big Ideas imposed on schools and teachers. This one was called the New American Schools Development Corporation. It was spun off during the brief time that Lamar Alexander was Secretary. It was David Kearns’ pet project. David was a former CEO of Xerox who agreed to serve as Lamar’s Deputy Secretary. He was a wonderful man and I enjoyed getting to know him. He thought like a CEO and he thought that the best way to spur innovation was to hold a contest with a big prize. (Race to the Top did the same thing and flopped.)
Checker relies on the work of a wonderful scholar named Jeff Mirel of the University of Michigan. Jeff, a dear friend of mine, died earlier this year, far too young. He was a strong supporter of public schools and a first-rate historian. I miss him.
As Checker show, the NewAmerican Schools project failed. But the $50 Million that Kearns raised from private sources was eagerly snapped up.
My reaction to Checker’s article was this: Twenty or thirty years from now, someone will write a similar article about charter schools and ask, “How could people have been so dumb as to believe that you could ‘reform’ American education by letting anyone get public money to open any kind of school? Why did they think it was a good idea to let entrepreneurs and for-profit entities open schools? Why did they allow corporate chains to take over community public schools? Why did they allow religious zealots to get public money intended for public schools? They must have lost all common sense or any sense of history!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t think it’s a mystery why ed reform was so hugely popular among politicians of both parties. It involves no sacrifice at all. The pitch was very appealing. We could have 100% “great” schools with no additional investment simply by relying on “secret sauce” and competition.
That means politicians don’t have to do anything. It doesn’t upset the public either, because the claim is we can have public schools and charter schools and publicly funded private schools and no one will have to give up anything and all of these sectors will magically be equally strong.
There are no trade offs in ed reform. It’s all upside. That’s not true of course, but that’s why they all jumped on the bandwagon. What’s not to like? Everyone gets everything they want, with no additional cost or investment or downside risk. It’s a fairy tale.
I fantasize about having a talk with some charter/”reform” true believers in which I describe a hypothetical program that applies the charter school setup to a public transit system, parks system or police department — just turn chunks of it over to any old body who fills out the form, along with its funding. See how that sounds to them.
The true believers I’d love to talk to are journalists — mainly almost all newspaper editorial boards and many columnists who parachute in to education issues without knowing squat and fervently promote the “reform” hype. (Interestingly, these journalists are among the few education “reform” promoters who aren’t benefiting financially from hyping it, though of course many civilians believe journalists are being paid off.)
At this point it’s so obvious that education “reform” is not fixing the problems of public education that anyone honest has to start admitting it. But in so many cases, their income is dependent on keeping the funding going that honesty seems to be rare.
the nation’s so very powerful if seldom discussed enemy: “newspaper editorial boards and many columnists who parachute in to education issues without knowing squat…”
DeVos says this in every single speech. She’s telling the public they can have private schools and charter schools and public schools and there will be NO downside effect on existing schools or students. It’s all win/win. Everyone gets everything.
This is ludicrous. If Betsy DeVos sets up one of her “choice” schemes in an area with, say, 20,000 students who are currently attending existing public schools every single person in that system is impacted. There might be positive effects, there might be negative effects, but it’s nuts to pretend schools aren’t systems. They ARE. The essential nature of the thing is not going to change no matter how many times she says it. It doesn’t matter if they eradicate public schools. They’ll still have a system. It’ll be a system of publicly funded contractors.
She can’t sell this by informing them of downside risk so she simply pretends downside risk doesn’t exist.
“There might be positive effects, there might be negative effects, but it’s nuts to pretend schools aren’t systems. They ARE.”
Indeed! But it may not be pretense. It may be lack of knowledge and understanding what a system is.
“. . . but it’s nuts to pretend schools aren’t systems.”
Unfortunately the edudeformers like Devos all “pretend schools are A system”. A singular entity. Which they are not. There are over 13,800 (approx) school districts in this country, each one a system in and of itself. To lump them all together into one “system” is a logical falsehood. But then again we know that edudeformers know little about rationo-logical thinking.
And it’s an echo chamber. I read the US Department of Education dispatches. These people are completely and utterly captured by this “movement”. You will not find a SINGLE criticism of any charter school or voucher school in their public releases. Yet entire speeches revolve around how bad public schools are.
They’re not a reliable source of information. If they’re not telling you the whole story on the charter and private schools they’re promoting, why would they tell you the whole story on student loans or anything else you might need information on? This is capture. They’re an arm of the ed reform “movement”. They all cycle in and out of there and they all sound the same, because they ARE the same. The same people.
Nearly every high-ranking Obama ed employee left government and immediately took paid work in one or another ed reform group. Yet they all insist they’re “agnostics”. It’s nonsense.
I LIKE THAT WORD ‘ NONE SENSE “ BUT I’M SMART ENOUGH TO TELL ~NONE SENSE~
( Anyone who said that Charters are good ). I’m not going to blain on none one myself I became the most unhappy person because I transferred my children’s to one of those evils Schooll , my son was forced to suicidio by the most corrupted , crooked , abuser and coward Principal I’m pretty sure the worst in the nation , Carlos Albarez , May Americans knows that I stand up because they put me on the ledge, students are untouchable because I know how hard it’s when you see your family suffering because lovers of money , lovers of they self , greedy’s , ungrateful people who don’t have respect for the truth they are always running but I’m not big to run until everyone’s know that students with disabilities need to be treated with kindness, Love and teachers should be quality to understand and teach students with ADHD/ADD/ OR ANY OTHER DISABILITIES AS WELL IT’S unfair that most of the Charters Schooll don’t enrolled students who need wheel chairs , they send to public’s schools the only schools that never refused to enroll students!
Sorry if you don’t understand my pain , nothing it’s going to stop me from tell the truth!
“CHARTERS SCHOOLS ARE MISTAKES THAT PROVE THAT THEY ARE TRYING !” Nothing is been free but Charters are expensive and it’s a business!
How ? Why ? Why ?
“HOW could people have been so dumb as to believe that you could ‘reform’ American education by letting anyone get public money to open any kind of school? Why did they think it was a good idea to let entrepreneurs and for-profit entities open schools? WHY did they allow corporate chains to take over community public schools? WHY did they allow religious zealots to get public money intended for public schools? They must have lost all common sense or any sense of history!”
~ Diane Ravitch ~ 👍
Excellent from Diane , very deep and very interesting but very truth!
I enjoyed this article from Diane as always when I read from Diane or Lloyd what a wonderful persons, thanks God I can understand how bad Charters Schooll are , why lovers of money are controlling that Gray(* Green area ~
When people will understand that Reforms are destroying the good education and Children’s are suffering, fathers and the entire education system it’s failing because those principals and Mayors city are doing nothing but stolen our money .
This post outlines the behind the scenes planning to reinvent American education. The plans designed by members of the business community were totally top down. There was not attempt to include any professional teachers in their design. It is not surprising that what they created made a lot of money for certain individuals, but it has not “reinvented education.” In fact, the only impact on public schools is drained budgets and a massive amount of irrelevant testing. I thought it was interesting that Bill Clinton was not initially supportive in having these private charters make money. Since Clinton was outgoing, he had little impact on the design of the arrogant experiment. However, the Republicans were staunch supporters of monetizing schools. The result, as we know, has nothing to do with “tinkering with utopia.” The main objective of so-called reform is to undermine public education while it moves a public asset into private pockets.
“A robust line of research suggests that students who don’t get a lot of structure and systematic knowledge outside school tend to do better with structured, sequential, knowledge-rich curricula and instruction.” What is the robust line of research? All the testing that has been imposed on public schools has had the opposite effect. Since testing is only given in math and reading, the result has been a narrowed curriculum that is not nearly as content rich as it was before NCLB.
The theme of this post is that real change occurs from the bottom up, and it includes the major stakeholders. Business people want to make money, They do not have the expertise to make meaningful change in education. All of their blind tinkering has resulted in weakening public schools and hobbling their ability to serve all students well. More testing does not improve outcomes. It simply wastes time and detracts from the primary mission of educating our young people.
What sticks in my mind about Finn is the conference on vouchers held at Catholic University in DC years ago. I was there. Finn was one of the pro-voucher speakers. He declared that he was “ashamed to be a Jew” because Jewish organizations were generally opposed to school vouchers. A prominent rabbi was there also and responded appropriately.
I think that Finn also serves on the Maryland state board of ewducation, appointed by GOP Gov. Larry Hogan.
Yes, he is. We are bound to Common Core, PARCC testing, many standardized tests and lots of data collection. It’s a joy (SMH)!!! Child #2 has been pulled from public school and we pay for private school to get away from all the crap. We also have Andy Smarick who sits on the board and Mike Petrilli running his mouth every chance he gets.
I am certain Laurene Powell Jobs does not know this history, even though it’s exactly what she’s trying to do with her XQ project.
What an offensive view of children, particularly disadvantaged children, Finn has. I echo an earlier commenter who asked what “robust” research shows that
“students who don’t get a lot of structure and systematic knowledge outside school tend to do better with structured, sequential, knowledge-rich curricula and instruction—hence the impressive success of “no-excuses” charter schools and their ilk, such as New York City’s Success Academy—while more progressive pedagogies may work better with children who have plenty of order in their lives, books in their homes, etc.”
And then Finn goes on to claim that improving schools calls for “sometimes also replacing at least some of the students”? What?
He has learned nothing.
Finn’s perspective is racist and classist. Poor minority children do not need separate and unequal schools.
“impressive success of ‘no-excuses’ charter schools and their ilk…”??
What impressive success? Their success in teaching inexperienced teachers who lack any compassion or integrity how to humiliate and punish struggling students in order to get them to leave so that their upper grades have a fraction of the students who started there?
But I can’t helping wonder what Finn means when he says “their ilk”. “Their ilk” probably means “schools that Betsy DeVos approves because their leaders and she have so much in common and share the same world view and morality.”
Not only is that comment incredibly racist and classist, but it’s wrong. “No excuses” schools are NOT “content rich,” because they spend most of their time catching “bad behaviors.” There’s not time for any content. The local “military charter” in my area is horrifically low academically, and the students we get (constantly) from that school are way behind academically, because the school teaches almost nothing and spend its time “fixing” students (or that’s what the parents want, anyway).
A perfect storm of arrogance, ignorance, ego, and greed.Little progress can be made when you don’t even know what you really don’t understand.
Reformers were clueless on these important levels:
1) The scale of the system: 50 million children/adolescents; 3 million teachers, 100,000 schools. Over 70 billion “individual student” periods per school year. The range of physical and cognitive abilities reflects the scale of all humanity.
2) It was never broken! In fact just the opposite, schools have not changed significantly because the structure does a good job of transporting, feeding, caring for, entertaining, and educating those 50,000,000 kids – day after day after day after . . . .
3) Constraints/Limiting Factors:
a) state and federal mandates; b) family/community culture,
c) the solemn, unbreakable promise to educate ALL; d) teacher contracts;
e) local politics, f) sports programs, g) transportation, h) food services
4) Classroom dynamics (group and mob psychology); the social nature of students
5) Brain development/cognitive learning theory. The continued efforts to conflate the ways that well educated professional adults work with best ways for children to learn were a recipe for failure.
6) Intensity or durability – only one can win in the course of a 900+ period school year, and it is almost never intensity. There really aren’t that many “teachable moments” because there can’t be. Many people can imagine teaching a single dynamic, awe inspiring lesson. No teacher can do it 900 times a year, yet that was often the expectation from the spectators.
7) Misplaced focus. Turning novice learners into academic experts was never a goal of public education until reformers made it one. A kid spends a total of two or three hours studying the civil war or photosynthesis and we expect what exactly?
8) False Assumptions:
a) Most kids are eager, curious, serious, self actualized learners
b) Student growth and development can be measured
c) Children and adolescents are proto-adults (see #5)
d) Students take school seriously
e) That they (reformers) couldn’t be wrong
Well stated, Rager! Although I have a question on #8:
Are you saying that the edudeformers believe A-E?
It seems to me that they don’t believe A, that they believe B&C, don’t believe D, and believe E
I wonder if Checker Finn ever thought about joining his cousin, Huckleberry, on a raft and learning something about the country. Maybe he would confront some of those moral conundrums as he floated down.
From Finn: “When RAND conducted a three-years-into-implementation review of seven designs, it noted that their teams had “partnered with schools and districts that are characterized by a host of problems related to poverty, achievement, and climate characteristics.” In other words, they weren’t headed to cushy suburbs or other places where the going would be easy!”
And Finn gets it wrong again. The reason “they weren’t headed to the cushy suburbs and other places” (I’m assuming he means rural districts) is not because the “going would be easy” but because those “cushy suburbs” and “other places” actually liked their districts, saw little wrong with the operations of their schools, and were otherwise happy with the schooling that the children received. They, meaning the district’s parents, students, community members, didn’t want or need any outside supposed experts telling them what they needed.
Some more nonsense from Finn: “(It also strikes me, in retrospect, that the educational needs of disadvantaged youngsters would better have been met by enrolling them in traditional Catholic schools than by “breaking molds” and “innovating.”)”
As one who went through K-12 Catholic education I’d say that the Catholic system certainly is not ideal for all the various types of students that public schools are mandated to provide education for. The abuses and lack of solid pedagogical methods I saw and experienced on a daily basis in those Catholic schools do not serve any student well.
Catholic education is supposedly “better” only because they can filter out those students who do not fit their conception of ideal type student.
Again, Finn is wrong in his analysis.
Oh my god. How much tripe can Finn spew?
“And that’s always a heavy lift, whether the existing schools are educational successes or basket cases. In the former situation, “it ain’t broke,” so why change it? In the latter situation, it’s tantamount to taking an education sow’s ear and striving to turn it into a silk purse. That’s hard under any circumstance; harder when resource levels are level and the staff remains in place; and hardest in schools and districts that may not be particularly well led, probably not well financed, and most likely shackled by politicized school boards, turbulent communities and rigid union contracts.
Of course it’s all the same suspect boogeymen-“staff remains in place”, “may not be particularly well led”, “politicized school boards and “rigid union contracts that was the problem. Ya know, a failure to implement those from-on-high demands.
It couldn’t be that the failure of the NAS was the fact that it was piss-poorly designed as a top down, we supposed experts know what you rubes and poor people need attitude.
Again Finn gets it completely wrong.
I’m not sure what world Finn lives in. Either that or he’s ingesting the really good stuff.
He says what he’s paid/funded to say.
That was a bitch to read with all the absurdities being spouted by Finn. One final inanity:
“Yes, change occurs in schools, often for the better, but it’s almost always gradual and incomplete. Yes, bad schools can often be improved, but seldom totally rebooted. That generally calls for thoroughly replacing staff as well as curriculums, sometimes also replacing at least some of the students, all of which is contentious and politically problematic. Even when most of that happens, it’s no guarantee that the school will produce stronger outcomes—or that any stronger outcomes that it produces for a while will endure. (What happens when, for example, the charismatic new principal departs or the outside “turnaround specialists” go off to work on another basket case?)”
Throughout the article he never mentions the socio-cultural environment in which schools are embedded that have far more influence on the nebulous “student achievement” than anything that the schools themselves do.
Same old blame the public schools horse manure. Hey, Checker, would you like a road apple to go along with that writing?
A friend of mine once taught me that an alley Apple was a brick, thrown at an assailant. Never heard of a road Apple.
For examples see: https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=road+apple+pictures&fr=mcafee&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-EpfzW10dnF0%2FU5UotjQAfwI%2FAAAAAAAAAho%2FcIcX8WyQs8w%2Fs1600%2Froadapplesheader.jpg#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-EpfzW10dnF0%2FU5UotjQAfwI%2FAAAAAAAAAho%2FcIcX8WyQs8w%2Fs1600%2Froadapplesheader.jpg&action=click
You have taught me a new word to add to my lexicon of vagrant terms.
I’m surprised that you had not heard the term as I figured it was a common term. Not sure how much of a vagrant term it is. It’s fairly common here in Missouri (but then again we Show Me Staters might be considered vagrants by some, eh!)
These are important questions: “How could people have been so dumb as to believe that you could ‘reform’ American education by letting anyone get public money to open any kind of school? Why did they think it was a good idea to let entrepreneurs and for-profit entities open schools? Why did they allow corporate chains to take over community public schools? Why did they allow religious zealots to get public money intended for public schools? They must have lost all common sense or any sense of history!”
I believe it was not lack of common sense or lack of a sense of history that drew supporters to school choice. I believe it was the siren song of “choice”. sung by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.
MILTON FRIEDMAN ON BUSTING THE SCHOOL MONOPOLY
“The only solution is to break the monopoly, introduce competition and give the customers alternatives.”
However, Milton Friedman preferred vision of universal system of government vouchers, that would empower families by government financing a choice voucher to spend on public schooling or privately managed schools, including a choice of religious schooling, never gained momentum.
Siren song of market competition promised by some of its supporters to be better alternative to imperfect public education system that taxpayers’ funded government monopoly produced. And, some supporters claimed that market competition would improved both public education and privately managed education.
Privately managed charter schools market alternative to public schools has grown Nationally beyond 3% of government financing of public schools and charter schools. Milton Friedman’s Voucher experiments have not found same acceptance in America as alternative of privately managed charter schools.
Growth of charters over two decades has been result of funding of some very rich folks but mostly from the funding by the Federal government of that growth. But another siren has been the privatizers’ propaganda that a privately managed charter choice is better than government’s publicly managed school.
Finally, one thing, that is often not mentioned in the frame of competition between public and private management, is that the choice of government financed alternative of a private choice, means that the neighborhood existing public school system is weakened reducing the neighborhood public school district’s budgets are and ultimately a family’s private choice contributing to closing of a neighborhood’s public school.
¡Sí, señor!
“….and most likely shackled by politicized school boards, turbulent communities and rigid union contracts.”
In other words, Finn sees the failure of school reform as influenced by a process called “representative government “. We have all wished that we were the great grand poobah of education so we could tell everybody how to behave. Finn seems to bemoan the fact that school reform is incremental, and suggests the same for churches at one point in his essay. There is a reason for this. Large, organic phenomena behave this way. For the same reason that the five years plans did not achieve the goals of the Soviets, the top down reform of schools did not achieve any of its goals.
The irony of school reform is that those who push “free markets” as the great panecea for all social illness usually believe, like the enlightenment figures who gave them these ideas, that free markets are an organic thing that cannot be avoided. Perhaps they are right in a sense, but it is astounding that there is not an understanding that free markets operate within a framework of social interaction we call politics, a thing better known as “folks dealing with each other on a personal basis.” Adam Smith himself missed this part of reality in some of his writings, leading me to suggest to the children who were reading the selection in that class that he sounds very utopian at that point. Utopias always fail because the idea changes like an organic being when exposed to environmental pressures.
The political thinkers of Adam Smith’s day understood this, and from that understanding, we were gifted with a process that made our constitution organic. Changing anything is an organic process, incremental, perhaps too slow to manifest itself to the generation that wants change. To ignore that this is true of political systems is to doom the process you desire with failure.
Even when we argue with someone, bring them totally to your side is a wish seldom attained. The most that you can hope for in a one on one conversation is that someone softens their diametric opposition to your point. Why do people think that they are going to revolutionize a system in a public conversation with so many complex points of view?
“For the same reason that the five years plans did not achieve the goals of the Soviets, the top down reform of schools did not achieve any of its goals.”
In the 90s when our district had 5 year plans as part of the accreditation process, I used to say that we were being Sovietized. Most people didn’t understand what I meant. So I had to change my thinking.
I came to realize that NCLB wasn’t a Sovietization but a McDonaldsization of American public education. People understood that.
I think your original characterization was closer to the analogous truth, but I can see why the public failed to get it.
Mr. Swacker: MacDonaldsization of American public education fits not only NCLB but the rise of privately managed charter schools. Both corporate Macdonalds and corporate charter schools critics have charged that the bottom line for MacDonalds and charter schools is real estate. Worldwide MacDonalds corporation is big time owner of real estate.