Arthur Camins calls on the Democratic Party to divorce the “bipartisan” education policy agenda that has been in place for the past four decades. This is the agenda of competition, testing, accountability, and choice. It actually was the Republican policy agenda first, and the Democrats decided to embrace it. What did the Democrats give up when they endorsed the Republican education agenda? Democrats in Congress used to oppose testing and accountability; they used to advocate for equity, funding, and teacher professionalism. But, as I have written over my past three books, Democrats slowly gave up a winning and relevant hand and slipped into the Republicans’ tough stance towards students, teachers, and public schools. How has that worked out? Not so well. The trend lines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been completely flat for the past ten years. The scores of the bottom 10 percent have actually declined. Test prep can lift scores just so much, then they go flat.
Camins writes:
It is time for Democrats to file for a divorce from a four-decade bipartisan education policy marriage. The case is clearer now than ever. There are irreconcilable differences. A marriage with one partner committed to competition as an improvement driver and the other to equity and democracy is an inevitable failure. A partnership in which one party prioritizes tax cuts and deregulation for the wealthy and the other quality education for everyone results in abuse of the least powerful partner. A record of persistent child abuse makes a complete separation a necessity.
Democrats: If not for your own moral integrity, do it for the kids.
To see evidence of that unfortunate marriage of Democrats and Republicans, read the articles co-authored by Arne Duncan (Obama’s Secretary of Education) and Margaret Spellings (George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education). Here is one of the best examples:
We have long benefited from a broad coalition that has advanced bold action to improve America’s education system.
That coalition has waned. It’s time to rebuild it.
Today, education is blessed with bipartisan agreement on what works, and cursed with bipartisan complacency at every level on taking action.
As Arthur Camins knows, that “bipartisan agreement on what works” has been a disaster: testing, charter schools, evaluation of teachers by test scores, closing schools with low scores, competition, threats.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good editorial about the ed reform education plan in Iowa:
“For the past 25-plus years your columnist has been watching Iowa politics, governors of both parties centered their often ambitious education agendas on the goal of improving public schools.
Statehouse leaders differed on approaches, bickered over details and partisan battles erupted. But in most cases, Republicans and Democrats agreed that making public schools better was a common goal where they could find common ground.
Public schools were right up there with sweet corn and the State Fair among Iowa’s icons. They’re enshrined in our constitution. We even put a schoolhouse on the back of our state quarter.
Now, Gov. Kim Reynolds has broken the streak. Her ambitious education plan for 2021 is centered on the goal of helping Iowans abandon public schools using taxpayer dollars”
https://www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/staff-columnist/iowa-public-schools-hit-with-a-right-cross-at-the-statehouse-20210124
The plan offers nothing for students in public schools.
I would just ask public school families and supporters to examine ed reform initiatives and ask yourself if what they promote does ANYTHING, anything at all, for public school students.
The ed reform “movement” simply doesn’t serve students in public schools. They offer our students nothing. Look past their promotion and marketing of charters and vouchers and try to find anything they have accomplished that improved any public school, anywhere.
A Betsy DiVorce
A messy divorce
Is what we need
From Betsy DeVos
With all due speed
“A record of persistent child abuse makes a complete separation a necessity.”
The 117th Congress under Biden will have a thin margin for enacting anything much different from ESSA. Too many Republicans and Democrats who voted for ESSA in the 115th Congress are still around and they are not likely to do much to change it under a forthcoming reauthorization.
ESSA was overwhelmingly supported by House Republicans (178 yea) and Democrats (181 yea). In the Senate, of 77 votes recorded, 63 were yea with 14 Republicans not voting or voting nay.
Although the Georgia Senatorial runoff produced two Democrats, there are too many Democrats who have a vested interest in not making significant changes in ESSA. The Some few who also voted for NCLB are still around !!!
I am not optimistic about any shift in the testing mandate in ESSA or many other provisions of that law.
State departments of education and many governors are also unlikely to be budged from their simplistic thinking that tests scores are great measures of accountability for students, teachers, and schools.
Ed Week has the audacity to issue A-F reports on the “Chances for Success” of the students who attend schools in each state and DC. These are about as sound as other rating schemes from other sources, including Great Schools.
If you are interested in this mathematical “blending” of this and that see this: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/sources-and-notes-how-we-graded-the-states-quality-counts-2021/2021/01
Best prospect is massive and well-organized “opt out of the tests” protests, preferably led by parents/caregivers, and shaming members of Congress who think tests make kids smarter…just like putting a pig on a scale makes it fatter.
Here’s my prediction: Senate Democrats will choose to keep the filibuster which will preserve the time honored excuse for not doing what their constituents want when the Dems have a majority (in this case with the VP’s vote)
So they won’t even have to consider changing ESSA. As on other issues, they can just say to their constituents,”we don’t have the necessary 60 votes, you understand, right?”
“President George H.W. Bush to convene the governors and catalyze state-level education progress; President Bill Clinton to push for rigorous student achievement standards and charter school expansion to promote school innovation; President George W. Bush to champion the bipartisan No Child Left Behind to address achievement gaps through strong federal standards; and President Barack Obama to create Race to the Top and incentivize continuous improvement in school performance.”
I just want everyone to read that from a public school perspective.
Take charters and vouchers out of the ed reform agenda and what do public school students get? They get testing.
And that’s all they have gotten.
They don’t even try to offer anything positive to public school students and families. There’s not even the slightest effort to contribute something positive to our schools.
Charters, vouchers, testing. That’s ed reform. What that means for public school students is all they get is testing.
You can see it right now, in the pandemic. The one and only thing ed reformers are doing is lobbying to have our kids tested.
I would ask ed reformers a sincere question- they support vouchers and charters and they all lobby on behalf of charters and vouchers. Okay. What about students in public schools?
Should students who attend public schools also have advocates, or is that disallowed?
Do public school students not deserve advocates in government? Why can’t they have their own advocates like charters and vouchers do?
Duncan can market charters and vouchers all day long as far as I’m concerned- he’s paid by an ed reform lobbying group now. But shouldn’t there be someone in government who works for students in public schools?
How did it happen that 85-90% of students became an afterthought, only to be addressed after the ed reform demands on charters and vouchers are met?
Can anyone in the ed reform “movement” point to one concrete, practical accomplishment they have completed this year that applies to students who attend public schools?
What do they offer public school students and why should we hire them?
If the answer is “we offer charters and vouchers” I would suggest that ed reformers are not serving students in public schools.
Also, we educators need to remember that lesser funding for economically poorer schools and segregation of minority students were issues some well-intentioned folks were trying to address with NCLB and RTTT. Now that we’ve seen the privatization and testing methods largely fail in that regard, hopefully those who once supported testing and privatization will accept that another approach is needed to get to more equity. Investing larger sums of money in communities that need it, creating jobs, and funding public education, K through college would help a lot. But that would mean raising somebody’s taxes, and Republicans and other conservatives don’t or can’t (for fear of losing their jobs) support higher taxes on wealth. But, there’s no shortcut to equal opportunity for all. It would be well worth the effort, and we and all who support public education and kids need to get behind that effort.
Democrats try to have it both ways in order to fill their ‘big tent.’ They want Wall St and Silicon Valley’s money, and they want teachers’ votes. They have adopted a feeble policy in which they claim support for public education while they turn a bling eye to competition, testing, accountability, and privatization despite the fact there is zero evidence to support any of these bad ideas. A mutual political arrangement is not fact or evidence.
Accepting education as a commodity is anti-democratic. Corporations are somewhat like terrorists. We cannot negotiate with them as long as there is profit to be made. They will continue to grow beyond city limits. They will continue to expand until they are stopped by a political party with the courage to defend public schools. Democrats will have to make a stand between money and the democratic public schools that built this nation. The people must pressure Democrats to stop supporting policies that are harmful to our young people.
“they turn a bling eye to competition, testing, accountability, and privatization” — felicitous typo or Freudian slip?
Stretching the analogy, can these Democrats afford — in terms of campaign finance — to divorce the (misguided and destructive) “bipartisan” education policy. I can’t think of a single politician who has lost his or her office for being so damaging with their education stances (the one quasi-exception is former GOP Kentucky Governor, Matt Bevins, whose public disdain for teachers led to him to being the only Republican to lose statewide in 2018; Jeb Bush’s 2016 GOP primary defeat was really due to other factors). I can’t wait for the day when politicians lose because of education policy.
There should be bipartisan agreement on what works — small class sizes, counselors for the ever growing number of extremely disadvantaged public school students, properly funding public schools, etc.
The problem is that there was bipartisan agreement on doing stuff that didn’t work.
I have always thought that if progressives want to counter this, they need to address the absolutely false narrative that this privatization is working. And that false narrative is similar to the false narrative that Donald Trump made about how studies proved that hydroxychloroquine works to cure COVID-19.
Those so-called studies pushed by Trump were soon discredited by real science reporters who understood statistics and math. If the science reporters had been as gullible as education reporters, they would have written story after story marveling at the success of hydroxychloroquine. If the science reporters had been as gullible as education reporters, they would have done story after story interviewing “cured” patients who took hydroxychloroquine and hype that these patients know they are alive now entirely because they took hydroxychloroquine, the miracle drug that these science reporters are so impressed by. The “better” science reporters would throw in a disclaimer at the end like “scientist Smith, who hates the hydroxychloroquine manufacturers, questions the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, but the people who really care the most about patients say hydroxychloroquine works and scientist Smith has an agenda so he shoujldn’t be trusted.” And that science reporter would be just as arrogant as education reporters are when they say “but I showed both sides by including that disclaimer by the scientists, how dare you accuse me of bias.”
If science reporters were like education reporters, they would be reporting that hydroxychloroquine cured 100% of patients who took it and they would never ask how many patients started in the study and dropped out because they would not believe that little fact was important.
If the science reporters had been as complicit as education reporters are in hyping whatever someone with power tells them works because of a flawed study that they are too inept or lazy to understand, everyone in the US would be taking hydroxychloroquine and those very same science reporters would act like education reporters and say that anyone who didn’t get well on this miracle drug are to blame for not being better patients! After all, it is a miracle drug, proven by studies!
Lucky for us that science reporters are not as clueless as many education reporters are.
Unfortunately, education reporters are sorely lacking in any ability to interpret studies but they are very, very good at obediently re-writing the promotional press releases of ed reform groups telling them what those studies “prove” and very good at credulously reporting whatever narrative ed reformers are pushing while always couching any criticism as suspect and coming only from teachers unions who only care about the union.
Until that changes, it will be very hard to change the thinking of politicians. Reporters give narratives credibility. In education, reporters are giving false narratives credibility instead of true ones!
“The problem is that there was bipartisan agreement on doing stuff that didn’t work.”
The additional problem is that testing, competition, and so-called choice are backed by so much money that nobody is bothering to notice that all these policies have failed to deliver better education.
Retired Teacher,
I demonstrate in “Slaying Goliath” that all the corporate reforms have failed. Yet they continue to pour millions into doing them again and again.
Why do they fund failure?
“Why do they fund failure?”
There are certainly some politicians who fund failure because they get donations to do so, but there are also other politicians who don’t understand that these reforms are failures because they get their news from the so-called “liberal” media like the NYT, which gives credibility and legitimacy to the ed reformer agenda. They understand that some reforms are failures — like the charter schools they identify as “for-profit” charters — but they don’t see the problems with the others and admire those charters’ “extraordinary success”.
And this includes so-called “progressive” politicians like Tom Perriello, who was an absolute favorite of the ed reformers and even was awarded DFER’s “politician of the month” award when he was a Congressman. Perriello is progressive on many issues — so I assume that his support for the DFER agenda reflected his ignorance and not his corruption.
That is why I call out the so-called liberal media so often. They are reporting from the DFER point of view, in which charters with “good results” are admired and any criticism of them is dismissed as simply “the teachers’ union disagrees”. The media is absolutely uninterested in closely examining what the criticisms of ed reform are and whether the claims of success of charters are real or hyped.
The first question is who funds failure. The an$wer is clear. The second question is why. The an$wer is clear.
Here’s an example of ed reform’s narrow focus on charters and vouchers:
https://www.the74million.org/charter-advocates-raise-objections-to-bidens-pick-for-number-two-spot-at-education-department/
Not even a discussion of what Biden’s policy might mean for students in public schools. The singular and exclusive focus is how it might impact charter and private school students.
Our entire education policy agenda revolves around charters and vouchers. Public school students are not even mentioned.
This is nuts. We have a whole group of people who insist they work full time on “education” but they exclude public schools. Ed reformers should at least label their work accurately. It’s charter and voucher promotion. It has nothing whatever to do with students who attend public schools. You can’t FIND public school students in it- our students simply don’t exist.
Wait, the ed reformers don’t like the #2 pick at the DOE???
Hallelujah!!!
Biden is not Obama 2.0
What we got from the DEMS is a Walmart curriculum and Gates-“sweare.” So embarrassing.
When achievement is restricted to a standardized test, the robust nature of learning is also restricted. According to Dr Angela Dye higher level learning “includes learning how to synthesize, transfer and apply knowledge to the world beyond the classroom, learning how to value self as subjects and not objects; and learning how to engage in and share power in democratic spaces.”
By focusing on the test we force children to miss a goodly part of education needed to succeed in college and life. It is time to teach kids to think past the confirmation bias and embrace critical thinking needed in every day life.
Maybe then, as they grow to adults, they will stop believing the lies the village idiot wouldn’t believe.
Has anyone done a study of how many purveyors of charter schools and other forms of privatization are products of our public school system, before it changed, or of private schools, which at the time, pretty much duplicated the curriculum of public schools?
What was it in our public schools of a few decades ago that gave rise to the birth of privatization, or was it simply a reaction to the mixing of color, doing away with segregation?
The exodus from the public schools was a direct response to the Brown Decision of 1954.
White parents did not want their children to go to school with black children.
Might it be more profitable in the fight to resist privatization of public schools, to concentrate efforts on the acceptance of public school desegregation, pointing out the advantage of diversity among students as a cultural learning positive, for one..
Reversing the path along which private schools increased as a result of the Brown decision, weaken the privatization movement by strengthening the acceptance of desegregation.
As long as the fear of segregation exists, it seems to me, disabling private school preference remains back at its 1954 birthplace. If segregation can be shown to be a moral issue, then privatization based on segregation is a moral issue it isn’t considered to be today.
The fact that the policies that created this monster are bipartisan and Democrats have been among the most egregious culprits is the hardest thing I have tried to explain to fellow liberals who don’t pay attention to education policy. I’ve found when I start the conversation with the ills of charters and privatization and how they hurt public education and then, once I get agreement or sympathy, let them know about complicity of Democrats, it goes easier. When I start out with a “Democrats created this” argument, ears close quickly.
Let’s say you are able, in the long, long run to isolate and reverse the political forces and policies that played a role in this charters and privatization battle, including, having to yours and my satisfaction, incidentally, successfully placed whatever responsibility was due on the role Democrats played.
Aren’t we still faced with the same desegregation of the Brown decision that motivated the privatization movement in the beginning?
Celebrating political victories that do away with Bush, Clinton, and Obama policies inflaming passions today, would that be satisfaction enough, realizing that charters would still be a threat to public schools even though they were offering the same now acceptable, now reasonable evaluation policies.
Desegregated schools would continue to be anathema in too many neighborhoods, continuing to plant seeds of privatization.
Which would occur first, public school destruction or acceptance of desegregated schools, leading to a demise of charter and other privatized schools?
I’ve allowed myself to get off topic, apologies. I dislike privatization, believing it to be a wrecking ball.
Darrell,
Sorry, but there is a flaw in your argument.
The rise of charters and their support by democrats has nothing to do with segregation. The charters that Democrats support are the big “non-profit” charter networks (whose CEOs are generously compensated) that proliferate in urban areas and serve very few white students. Some other types of charters may have arisen, like BASIS, but that was a for-profit charter network, which Dems don’t support.
Few democrats are (publicly) supporting the charters that are designed for white parents to segregate their kids from non-white students.
Democrats support charters because they seem to be offering low-income parents in urban areas where public schools have lots of disadvantaged students a “better” school (i.e. a school with higher test scores). Until people are disabused of this false belief, it will be hard to change their minds.
Charters are no different than public magnet schools, but charters promote themselves as something different than a public magnet school by hiding the fact that they only want to teach the most motivated students and fighting all transparency and oversight (except for the pro-charter oversight agencies) so that they have total freedom to push out students they don’t want to teach.
Public magnet schools don’t make false claims of being able to turn students who would be failures in public schools into high performing scholars.
I have often thought that the only way to stop charters is for public schools to establish charter-like public magnet schools that draw the most motivated students and parents and “counsel out” the less motivated students or those with any learning issues that aren’t easy to address. Of course, doing so does nothing for all the other students in the system. But it would allow for an honest and truthful discussion of how to address the education of those students who are left out of these new charter-like public schools. Right now, that discussion is being overwhelmed by the lie that if only those kids were subject to the charter “special sauce” – (which turns out to be harsh discipline from age 5 onward, forced to sit absolutely still, walk with hands by side, and blow air bubbles, and have recent college grads as teachers instead of those “bad” union teachers) – all students in failing schools would become high performing “scholars”.
Thank you so much for your response correcting my error of believing charters were a direct response to desegregation of public schools.
I have no excuse but a flagrant use of unchecked assumptions.
Lesson: Keep your keyboard quiet when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
Thank you again.
I’m sure there are charters that were established for the purpose you thought they were.
I was just pointing out that wasn’t the type of charters that the democrats were hyping and supporting.
That helped a little, you are very kind.
I am greatly concerned about public money being funneled into for- profit schools. Just as I am about the persistent view certain white populations have about their superiority over non-white citizens of this country.
Their lack of understanding the strength of diversity is most disappointing, as it contributes to the continuance of problems another opinion might help to solve, especially an opinion rooted in another collective unconscious.
The real issue is that politicians on both sides just don’t trust teachers. They think that unless they they apply pressure in the form of testing, teachers won’t do their jobs. You can’t fix the attitude. There are too many politicians(and administrators and bosses) who feel a that they need absolute control in order to experience success. In fact, the opposite is true. You hire good people and you let them do what they are trained to do. Top down micromanagement is always a mistake. In my opinion the obsession with testing is about having control.
For four decades the corporate standards philosophy has been a failure. It’s time to work to make schools communities of learners.