You won’t want to miss this one!
The “nation’s leaders in education reform” (aka Disruption) are meeting in San Diego starting today.
Watch the leaders of the privatization movement at work and play!
They will perhaps ponder why NAEP scores have been flat for a decade. They might discuss why the Democratic party and progressives have turned against charter schools and privatization.
Maybe there will be a panel to discuss the Network for Public Education’s devastating report Asleep at the Wheel, which showed that one-third of federally funded charters had closed their doors or never opened, wasting $1 billion in federal funding. Maybe there won’t be any mention of that embarrassing report.
Will there by any mention of the biggest charter scandal in the three decades of charterdom, the $50 million plus theft by charter operators in California? There should be, since 11 leaders of the A3 scam were indicted just this past spring in San Diego, where the conference is meeting!
Perhaps there will be a special tribute to their leader, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is shoveling federal money as fast as she can from the $440 million Charter Schools Program to corporate charter chains like IDEA and KIPP.
See who is sponsoring their convention: The Walton Family Foundation. Pearson. The NewSchool Venture Fund. The College Board. Yes Every Kid (Koch). Microsoft.
And many more.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry Neil…
Livin’ on the ledge of hype
You show the stun won’t go down slow
You can’t glow within their spite
Can’t reside in ways they want you to go
I feel the way you reel
‘Cause not so long ago
It had a hold on me
I wouldn’t let it go
I couldn’t set me free
No more, no more, no more…
No more Ben Dover U. lead roles, in institutional test giving cages.
No more driving towards destination liberation, with eyes fixed on the rear view mirror of historical antecedents.
Only YOU can set yourself free, if you want to.
Nicely written, NoBrick!
You can even feast on the prior year’s conference with the “Award Keynote” given by “Dr. Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy Charter Schools”
During a special closing keynote back then, Joel Klein, ExcelinEd Board Member, presented Dr. Eva Moskowitz with the Excellence in Education Award for her work on behalf of New York City’s most disadvantaged students at the 2018 National Summit on Education Reform on Friday, December 7, in Washington, D.C….
The sponsors and speakers are pontificating about their work and proud of the multiple methods they use to destroy public education .
It’s disruption, for sure: OF democratic-based institutions and processes.
BTW, I perused the website–I think like the concept of reform, they have robbed and misused the meaning of disruption in true Orwellian fashion. To hold onto democracy and its Constitutional roots through keeping public education in place is not to become lethargic, dogmatic, unintelligent, or un-creative, and so to be in need of “disruption.” (Paraphrased, I have heard Bill Gates say this.)
Rather, endorsing the PUBLIC in public schools (or anything, for that matter) is to embrace and endorse the very political roots theat have given frame for and released unfettered intelligence and creativity themselves over the past cnturies; and where public education has reformed itself constantly to keep up with these as best we can–even with the very limitations that cultural change (like racism) and oligarchic pressure (like corporate takeovers) have placed on the federal government and on states, communities, teachers, administrators, parents . . . and citizens in general. CBK
In my forthcoming book SLAYING GO,IATH, I explain why I prefer the word DISRUPTION, rather than “reform.”
dianeravitch I’m sure your meaning of disruption differs considerably from what the “reformers” mean by it. It’s merely a reality of progressive change; however, “reformers” think it’s waking up all-things-public from their recessive ideas (e.g., democratic). CBK
The neoliberal alpha dogs, including these deformers, love to think of themselves as idea guys–as belonging to a rarefied elite of movers and shakers not by virtue of their luck or inherited privilege or criminal monopolies or exploitation of workers or ability to buy political, judicial, and bureaucratic wind-up toys, action figures, and bobbleheads but by virtue of their intellectual superiority, which they invariably think of as genetic.To reinforce this view of themselves, they invent terms like “thought leader” and “culture designer” and maintain a stable of court singers like Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and Steven Pinker and Clayton Christensen to write books about BIG IDEAS. And they gobble up TedTalks and books in the series edited by John Brockman (whose Edge Foundation was on a retainer from Jeffry Epstein) because these provide ideas in simple enough form that they can sort of understand them.
The way to become a well-remunerated court singer for the oligarchs at the summit of the neoliberal club is to come up with a simple-minded concept (disruption, grit, socio-emotional learning) that will purportedly “change everything” and that sounds vaguely scientific while, at the same time, providing cover for oligarchical rapaciousness and absolutely upholding continuance of the status quo. Here’s an example: go ahead, run with it, make yourself a star–Viral Memetic Homeostasis: you see, ideas are like viruses, and if you are going to maintain a normal, healthy state, you need to expose people to non-live versions of bad ideas to build immunity that keeps things the way they are. There. Total BS, but it’s just the kind of thing that these people lap up. And this meme-of-the-week for oligarchical la la land has the added bonus feature that it can be used to justify dissemination of straw man versions of arguments against the oligarchical status quo that can then be shot down in TedTalks and Edge articles.
This conference is just another salon for members of the court of the New Feudal Order in the United States. Such salons were a big deal in pre-revolutionary France, too.
I’ll try that again: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation
The Big Idea, ofc, has to boil down to “things are really getting much, much better just the way they are” (which is certainly the case if you happen to be an oligarch or a member of an oligarchical court), and in keeping with the con man’s rule that you need to call things the opposite of what they are (e.g., calling privatization choice), you call continuing the status quo “Disruption.”
Bob
The pedophilanthropists ARE “big idea” guys.
It’s just that their ideas all revolve around having sex with teenaged girls.
TED actually stands for Talks Enabling Disruption
Truly sad to see so much brain power, let alone money, wasted on the destruction of public education in the US. Just shameful, really. That such anti-union sentiment has coalesced around all these schemes, scams, and simplistic notions of a “fix” sickens me in so many ways!
“Sad to see” Catholic bishops and state Catholic Conferences dishonor John F. Kennedy, America’s first Catholic president, by politically advancing the Charles Koch vision for school privatization.
Kennedy said, “I believe in an America where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly nor indirectly upon the public acts of (government) officials.”
The Justice Democrats have targeted for defeat, corporate Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois. Lipinski’s web pages (2014) posted, “The rallying cry for ‘school choice’ was heard loud and clear at St. Daniel the Prophet School in Chicago.” The group’s supporters include the Chicago Archdiocese.
The Waltons shift from red to purple: https://histphil.org/2019/06/03/walmart-heirs-shift-from-red-to-purple-the-evolving-political-contributions-of-the-nations-richest-family/
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/4/1479959/-Hillary-is-the-Wal-Mart-Candidate
It’s really “difficult” to speak about all this horribleness. The evidence is overwhelming.
OK, a meet of a group of witches is called a coven. What is a meeting, like this, of a group of assorted profiteering ghouls called?
A disruption of deformers?
A hoard of profiteers?
A bunco bunker?
A rick of racketeers?
A cord of corruption?
Good one!
A troop of tricksters.
A den of destroyers.
Both excellent. But troupe would work as well, given their dissembling.
A group of baboons, btw, is called a troop, a flange, or a congress, though the last of these terms is unfair to baboons.
A testament of testers
A cluster of bluster
A assembly of dissemblers
A covey of kleptocrats
A bullyan of billyanaires
An erricle of oracles
A bevy of bullshitters
I could go on all day but need to paint a bedroom
Nicely done. Good luck with your painting! I so enjoy your fine writing, SomeDAM!
Coincidence or not, but it starting raining today in San Diego for the first time since May.
Haha, it rained on Jeb Bush’s party, but the sun was shining in Indianapolis, where thousands of teachers demonstrated on behalf of public education and #Red4Ed!
LOL. Good.
I can’t believe people pay $279.00 to hear Jeb Bush deliver the same speech he’s been giving for 20 years.
They’d have to pay me to listen to him.
They would have to pay me considerably more than $279.
I’d rather be waterboarded
The link to the promo shows the event’s speakers- 4 speakers, all male. Big surprise.