In this recent article, Jeff Bryant examines Florida’s shameful response to the pandemic. As usual, legislators and Governor DeSanris took advantage of the crisis to add another voucher program, which will drain another $200 million from public schools to support for woefully inadequate voucher schools.
He writes:
“The COVID-19 crisis reveals the true intentions of people,” Kathleen Oropeza told me during a phone call. Oropeza is a public school mom in Orlando and founder of Fund Education Now, a non-partisan grassroots effort to advocate for public education in Florida.
Her remark was in the context of concerns about how state officials were governing schools as the coronavirus was spreading across the state and generating fears of how the disease would affect schools and families.
Days after the first victims tested positive in the state and the first deaths were reported, Florida lawmakers in the House seemed oblivious to the impending crisis and instead passed new legislation to expand the state’s voucher program, thus diverting an additional $200 million from the state’s public schools.
The bill passed despite evidence that many of the private schools that would receive the voucher money openly discriminate against LGBTQ children and families, are not required to hire certified teachers, and generally provide a subpar education.
But there is a bright side to the current crisis:
The rash of canceled tests across the country caused some knowledgeable observers to speculate on Twitter that the testing industry would not be able to withstand the financial difficulties of a nationwide cancelation. But what is also in danger is the whole policy imperative of the market-based education agenda.
Much in the same way that widespread teacher walkouts and the Red for Ed movement over the past two years revealed the overwhelming need for government officials to increase funding and support for frontline teachers, the mounting fallout of school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing politicians and policymakers to acknowledge the importance of schools as vital community institutions that need resources and support rather than fiscal austerity, privatization, and punitive accountability—the pillars of the market-based education movement.
Even amidst the avalanche of reported school closings, advocates of the market-based approach were lamenting the failure of their decades-long efforts.
“Neither standards and accountability nor charter schools have lived up to their promoters’ lofty aspirations. And there is much public unhappiness with school reform,” wrote Kevin Carey in an analysis for the Washington Post. Carey, a policy analyst for a Washington, D.C., think tank that favored the education reform agenda, worked for years in policy shops that pushed market-based agendas.
Carey noted a rising political opposition to market-based education advocates from the right and the left, including Tea Party Republicans who object to Common Core Standards and federal overreach in local decision-making and among progressive Democrats who are angered by the unfairness and inequities caused by market-based solutions.
But while he asserted that “School reform began with the civil rights movement,” he completely ignored the econometric principles that ended up driving privatization policies rather than the moral values of human rights and justice that powered the civil rights movement. Market-based education advocates have long obsessed over rigid standards, outcome measures, and competition from charter schools rather than providing schools and students with what they really needed, especially in communities that rely heavily on schools as anchor institutions.
Will elected officials and think tank analysts recognize the failure of standards, testing,
accountability, competition, and market-based policies to close achievement gaps, to reduce poverty, to lift up the neediest students, and to achieve any of their alleged goals?
Please: would the “reformers” acknowledge the failure of their prescriptions and stop claiming, without a shred of evidence, that annual standardized testing is a “civil right,” when it is actually stigmatizing children who are repeatedly labeled as “failures” by the testing indistry?
Never!
Because they are paid by people like Bill Gates to deny deny deny!
Let’s face it: all deform has ever been from day one is an elaborate, glitzy advertising* scheme and advertisers only do and say what they are paid to do and say.
Some (not I, of course), might call it a “bribery” scheme.
This virus is not going to blunt any efforts to curb testing lust and privatization of public education. If the reformers would have their way, they would give a test to a kid on life support or in the middle of thoracic surgery. A test is a test, and it represents profit. Nothing stands in the way of profit.
Once this whole thing blows over – and it will at some point – reformers and test companies will go back at it like a group of piranhas to a submersed lamb shank. Their stocks will rise and they would tout the virtues of the open free market and hyper capitalism. Business back as usual it will be. Unless, of course, COVID-19 acquires an unforgiving hold of the reformers and privatizers.
I’m not against testing. But testing has to be developmentally appropriate, and it must be used for the right purposes, for God’s sake! I am against childhood poverty and am one of its biggest enemies.
You are right, Robert.
The Deformers will undoubtedly use the pandemic as “evidence” that “Pearsonalized learning” is needed now more than ever.
They will say “look how fragile the current physical schools are to any shock”.
Any of the current chaos with technology will be excused as “mere implementation problems” as per usual.
They will claim that the issue is “schools and communities were not ready because they did not adequately prepare”. In other words, they did not purchase the software, hardware and internet access that was required.
These people will NEVER admit they were wrong and will NEVER give up because there is just too much money to be made.
The ONLY thing that will make them go away is to turn off the spigot that is currently allowing cash to flow from schools to tech companies and testing companies.
If that ever happens, we will see all of these people disappear in a flash.
For sure! In my district we are using Investigations for our math program. As we moved to online learning due to the virus, we found multiple problems in the computer portion of the program. It does not interface well with an I-pad. Very frustrating. Students would also need an individual math manipulative kit. We don’t have that. The classroom card kit was expensive and let’s not forget the coins, chips, blocks etc. That we had to buy separately. I do not feel comfortable checking these out to my first graders. You can bet we will be blamed for its failure.
There it is: “The Deformers will undoubtedly use the pandemic as “evidence” that “Pearsonalized learning” is needed now more than ever.”
Well said, Robert. I suspect that the apologia that Mike Petrilli at the Fordham Institute for Securing Big Paychecks for Officers of the Fordham Institute will inevitably write to explain away the failures of distance learning during this crisis will go something like this:
The schools were woefully unprepared. They didn’t have enough computers. They didn’t have enough software. They were too dependent on “soft approaches” like, you know, people teaching. They hadn’t tested enough and didn’t have enough data.
Gee. That gig at Fordham, the think tank where thinking tanks, looks pretty cush.
I agree with you, Robert.
I agree with you, Roberts
The profit drive of Walton heirs – no conscience?
Today from Pro Publica –
“Walmart was almost charged criminally over opioids, Trump appointees killed the indictment”
Jeff Bryant March 20, 2020 at 2:14 pm (@ Naked Capitalism website)
Update from the Author: This afternoon, Betsy DeVos announced the US Department of Education would allow states to bypass annual standardized testing due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The bill passed despite evidence that many of the private schools that would receive the voucher money openly discriminate against LGBTQ children and families.
Sadly, in Flor-uh-duh, this would be widely viewed as a positive, if, that is, Flor-uh-duh-ians paid enough attention to the news to know this. Some will have heard, of course, on Faux News that the bill “protects marriage” and “the institution of the family” and is approved by God and Donald Trump. But most will have been too busy buying cartloads of toilet paper and practicing shooting liberals at the gun range to have noticed.
Don’t want to give the wrong impression. If the state were not so good at voter repression, Democrats would have long ago started to win every state-wide race. As it is, now, those races are typically neck-and-(red)neck.
Meanwhile, Liberty University, in Lynchburg, VA, is insisting that students and faculty ignore the coronavirus and operate as usual because . . . Trump, Fox.
And Rupert Murdoch the Morlock, owner of the U.S. state propaganda network, has sequestered himself, in luxury, from the virus.
And Trump is calling for everything to get back to normal by Easter, for people to fill their churches . . . because stupid and utterly without conscience.
“Give me Liberty and give me death”
Give me Liberty
And give me death
Give me fever
And take my breath
Give me coughing
Till I’m blue
Give my covid
Kill me too
My nephew and his wife left Florida because they realized, among other factors, how awful the public schools were there and how destroyed they have become by the state legislator and the ignorant residents who constantly vote against their interests.
He’s a professor at the University of San Diego and can send his children to great public schools within that city.
Shame on Florida. They will never get a tourist dollar or second home dollar from me!
High stakes testing needs to end permanently. And I love the optimism—we need optimism. But right now, all the Disrupters are gleefully forcing everyone to surrender valuable personal data in a different way, distance learning. My Wall Street superintendent declared we are “crossing the digital divide”, as if going online makes us all intrepid Louises and Clarks. (“Crossing the digital divide” is that marketing language that lets those of us who pay attention know the superintendent is selling something.) In this financial crisis, he’s spending $100mil on devices. Everyone has to do everything in a way that can be surveilled now. And when this is over, the Disrupters are going to enjoy laying off thousands of teachers in my district alone because of budget restraints, and there will the devices be, waiting to take our place.
Yes. The leaders of the future oligarchic totalitarian States of America will look back upon the time when they only had persuasion via Faux News in their toolbox for controlling opinion as the Dark Age of Democracy.
Crossing the digital divide”
Ha ha ha
Here’s a song for your Superintendent
Crossing the digital divide”
We’ve crossed the great divide
And left the kids behind
The ones that lack the tech
Are gone, but what the heck?
There aren’t any mountains or rivers across the digital divide, just a drab screen with Big Brother Gates and his sidekick Zucks staring down at you. I hope someone remembers how to get back to civilization. The digital world is just a lifeless dessert.
It’s obvious you do not know about “Tron”.
Thanks Diane.
Jeff, stay healthy, keep writing.
If Flordia is lost forever to the Kleptocratic GOP, the sooner that state is underwater, the better off this country will be, maybe. What state will all these members of the GOP deep state move to, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, or all three? North Carolina’s kleptocrats in office will not like that.
“Florida is drowning. Condos are still being built. Can’t humans see the writing on the wall?”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/15/florida-climate-change-coastal-real-estate-rising-seas
What Robert Rendo said in his first sentence in his 9:37 AM March 25th comment.
& what he said about “testing a kid on life support or in the midst of thoracic surgery.”
In fact, Robert brought this up in a comment on an earlier post: the test was forced on a severely disabled child (who, I believe, was also critically ill). Where did this happen?
In Florida.