Nancy Bailey has assembled a devastating review of a three-decades long effort to destroy the teaching profession and replace it with models derived from the corporate sector.
She begins:
The pandemic has been rough on teachers, but there has for years been an organized effort to end a professional teaching workforce by politicians and big businesses.
In 1992, The Nation’s cover story by Margaret Spillane and Bruce Shapiro described the meeting of President H. W. Bush and a roomful of Fortune 500 CEOs who planned to launch a bold new industrial venture to save the nation’s schoolchildren.
The report titled, “A small circle of friends: Bush’s new American schools. (New American Schools Development Corp.),” also called NASDC, didn’t discuss saving public schools or teachers. They viewed schools as failed experiments, an idea promoted by the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk, frightening Americans into believing schools were to blame for the country’s problems.
The circle believed their ideas would break the mold and mark the emergence of corporate America as the savior of the nation’s schoolchildren.
The organization fell apart, but the ideas are still in play, and corporations with deep pockets will not quit until they get the kind of profitable education they want, for which they benefit.
They have gone far in destroying public education and the teaching profession throughout the years, not to mention programs for children, like special education.
Here are the ideas from that early meeting, extracted from The Nation’s report, with my comments. Many will look eerily familiar.
. . . “monolithic top-down education philosophy,” which disrespected teachers, parents and communities alike.
NCLB, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds Act, and Common Core State Standards disregarded teachers’ expertise and degraded them based on high-stakes test scores.
These policies also left parents and communities feeling disengaged in their schools.
Please open the link and read the rest of this perceptive post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My daughter left teaching in the public schools and is now at an independent school. She tells me that the big difference is that the independent schools value her understanding of curriculum and support her efforts to plan and grow in her profession. She is much happier in her work while I mourn the loss of good teaching for the public schools. Both districts I served are experiencing an unprecedented teacher exodus and finding few coming up to replace them. The word has gotten out that too many refs to support their teachers. My worry now is that education will soon be for the privileged few. The last half of my career was spent trying to keep reason in our endeavors at the school house while state and district efforts de-emphasized intellectual curiosity for basic skills. The most troubling part of this experience was that these top down efforts you cite were pretending that they were intensifying “rigor” while really limiting what was being taught. If we dismantle the professional teaching model, then “elite” private entities will continue down this path of hiring all professionals from a few universities while the vast majority of the population, particular underprivileged communities will have limited and under prepared teaching talent to chose from. This will have a negative impact on charters and parochial schools as well because they will struggle to find teachers. I firmly believe that our democratic culture will remain in peril if we do not work to re-create an effective teaching force that is prepared, professional, and supported. The corporate culture has convinced itself that “disruption” is the hallmark of ingenuity and economic progress. They have no understanding of the teamwork required to teach and prepare young people for a productive adulthood. The wealthy disregard for equal opportunity and democracy may soon come back to haunt them.
Paul– “I firmly believe that our democratic culture will remain in peril if we do not work to re-create an effective teaching force that is prepared, professional, and supported.”
I think that’s the least of our worries. We don’t need to “re-create” them– the ones we have are leaving, and those who are good candidates for becoming prepared and professional aren’t even showing up in the pipeline because it’s clear to them they will not be able to exercise professional judgment– they will not be supported. As you yourself note in this comment, the problem is at the state [& obviously, fed] level, which then plays out at the district level.
I try to project our dilemma forward: could it be that nationwide teacher shortage will cause a re-thinking/ overhaul at fed [to state to district] level? Or will the $$/clout behind this 40-yr transformation continue to play out into dystopian, matrix-style plug-in canned ed for all (trad’l, charter, voucher)– except those footing higher REtax bills than mtg pmts, & the super-rich with kids in $50k+/yr privschs?
[…And will THAT do it?]
Perhaps “re-create” was the wrong word. As a Principal, I kept seeing districts hinder my ability to nurture an effective staff. Our ongoing standards mandates and monitoring for teachers who didn’t add up interfered with efforts to build a meaningful learning community. As my time in the principalship progressed, I found it harder to support staff because test scores and other data were used to remind them that no matter the results, it was never good enough. These directives pulled me away from and instructional focus. You are right, fewer and fewer are even entering teaching because they see the lack of gratitude from the general public and the education establishment. In my daughter’s former district they are now offering bonuses to convince teachers to stay at the mid-year. Teachers are still leaving. District leadership refuses to see how their actions are running teachers, and principals, away from the schoolhouse. In the times when my schools were effective, and I was fortunate to see this the majority of the time, the most important thing I did was consult with the teachers and provide support based on the needs they identified. If we do not commit to preparing and supporting teachers with profound resource allocation, then our public schools will become holding facilities for the families who cannot afford private schools staffed with people who don’t want to be there. This is why I firmly believe that our first priority should be establishing a professional teaching force.
Paul, what do you mean by the term “who didn’t add up”?
I am not communicating well through this thread. I apologize. What I am referring to are teachers who struggle, ie. either with classroom management or instructional practice. I worked hard to get them to a more confident place, but the critical bureaucratic observation/ evaluation process was often unforgiving and dismissive. As our observation documentation became more dogmatic and focused on more prescriptive teacher action there was less time to coach and support. Our system was more numerical in its judgment of teacher proficiency where a cut off score made non-renewal non-negotiable. Principals often lost young teachers with promise. This too often created a toxic work environment for teachers.
From the article, quote: “I have learned that Bill Bennett has been selected to be on Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin’s education transition team.” Bill Bennett!?!?!? Surely you jest. An infamous Bennett citation from September 28, 2005: “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were the sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and the crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”
He later said that this gem of wisdom (sic) was taken out of context. The man has a sense of right wing humor. He’s out of context and should be kept 10,000 miles away from education policy and the running of our public schools. Virginia public school teachers are in for a bumpy ride with Bennett meddling in the functioning of their public schools.
“He’s out of context…” 🙂
While the Republicans have led most of the overt attacks on public schools, Democrats have done little to stop the assault, particularly under the Clinton and Obama administrations. Through federal laws and funding, the federal government has been incentivizing the privatization of public education. The federal government has also failed to build in any meaningful accountability or evaluation of results for the billions of federal dollars that have been spent and in many cases squandered on this endeavor. The federal government offers billionaires generous tax benefits to promote the privatization of public education, and once again there is little effort to evaluate the results of the projects. While Biden has made a token reduction in the federal charter schools program, the federal government continues to work against our public schools.
President Biden has doubled amount of Title 1 money. Unless the funding is scooped up by private companies with quick fix schemes, this funding may actually help poor students. The federal government continues to entice private equity to invest in urban redevelopment. In fact, $5 billion dollars are going to a new round of New Market Tax Credits. Efforts such as these promote gentrification and the creation of segregated charter schools that do not serve the poor. “Opportunity Zones” provide opportunity for investors, not poor families. The general trend is to displace the poor, not help them.https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0340
The circle [jerk] believed their ideas would break the mold and mark the emergence of corporate America as the savior of the nation’s schoolchildren.”
That might be what the claimed, but of course they didn’t actually believe that.
Because it was never about “saving” the nation’s school children.
It was about exploiting them for monetary gain.
Education Gold
There’s gold in them thar schools
And public are just fools
They always take the bait
And realize far too late
and many apparently never realize…
In rewrote it just for you ciedie
Even came up with a better title
“Schools Gold”
There’s gold in them thar schools
And public are just fools
They always take the bait
And never cogitate
The circle [jerk]
This is the name that I thought would be appropriate for the new University of Conservative Grievance, but I refrained from sharing it. Now that you have broken the ice, however, I’ll share that this immediately occurred to me as the right name for this place for the well-remunerated court singers for the oligarchy to hang their hoods and tell one another how smart they are. The University of Austin, aka, The Circle Jerk.
Or, to change the metaphor
I’m fine with the creation of the University of Conservative Grievance. It’s typically a good idea to isolate a contagion.
And “Circle of Jerks” would be where they list faculty on their website
That’s precisely what Common Core was about.
To standardize students and transform schools into markets for “education” software and hardware.
That’s pretty much what Bill Gates admitted back in 2009 in a speech before the National Conference of State Legislators when he said that Common Core was just the first step in a plan whose goal was “to create just these kinds of tests–next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and** that will unleash powerful market forces** in the service of better teaching.”
He said that last part — in the service of better teaching — to get legislators, Union leaders and governors to buy into the whole thing.
But at it’s most basic , it was about turning schools into markets.
I long for a time when the national teachers’ unions would advise students across the country to write at the top of their bubble sheets, “Sorry. Left blank. My mind is not standardized enough to formulate the requested responses.”
Not holding my breath.
This idea that creating one set of standards so that there would be one enormous market for enormous corporate entities to play in would lead to innovation is breathtakingly ridiculous. Of all the profoundly stupid things that Bill has said over the years, this is, I think. the gem. Better than Clippy the Paperclip. But it has a low cunning to it. Once a monopolist, always a monopolist.
To Serve Teachers”
When teacher’s served
On silver plate
A fine hors d’oeuvre
Is teacher’s fate
I hear that teacher liver tastes good with a fine Chianti, thup, thup, thup!
And some fava beans
Old Billionaire Saying
I’ll drink no wine
Until it’s time
To sup and dine
On teacher kind
Yup. Once again few seem to notice that it does not work well, except during the pandemic. More and more cyber products creep into public school classrooms with teachers having little say in the matter. This is privatization from the inside out with the ultimate goal of removing the teachers from teaching.
The pandemic effect has been mystifying. At first I thought, “oh good: parents will see for themselves that canned computerized ed pgms, & even screened live zoom classes are no substitute for IRL teaching/ learning.” And that did seem to be how it was going at first. Many parents even picked up on the fact that the “return to in-person” was still using at-laptop learning, & complained. Now, my sense is that parent attention has drifted away from that issue. Too many seem not to connect the dots: this is a cheap alternative at the bldg. level, which tells them either their tax support is too low or they’re being robbed or both.
Meanwhile we can thank our for-profit media for distracting pubsch-ed focus from that issue onto the non-issues of the rwnj loud minority & their running-dog vote-fishing representatives [oh NOOOO, they’re reading/ teaching/ saying THAT?! And pushing vax/ mandating masks, GRR!]
Or, to sum it all up: the Deformers’ accountability program was supposed to raise test scores and close achievement gaps. After DECADES of this, neither has happened. So, it’s an utter failure by the Deformers’ own preferred measures. But there is no accountability for that failure. No accountability for the accountaBILLitarians.
BILLions and BILLions wasted, but not BILL’S BILLions. No Siree. He was able almost single-handedly to feed the curriculum-and-pedagogy-devolving Accountability monster with what are for him mere leavings from this table. Not BILL’s BILLions. Your tax dollars. BILL managed to pull off what Trump couldn’t–the educational equivalent of building the wall and making Mexico pay for it.
However, the competition for BILL’s Most Clueless Education Idea is fierce. Here are a few more contenders:
Instruction by computers is “personalized” instruction.
Class size doesn’t matter.
Teachers having advanced degrees doesn’t matter.
State tests based on the Common Core yield valid and important “data.”
That “data” is what matters.
These are the contenders in the Deformer Numerology category of competition for Bill’s Most Clueless Education Idea.
Confronted with the list at Flanagan’s blog, I feel as nonplused as I did about it45’s election, the Big Lie/ Jan 6th, the rash of voter-repressive bills, the rash of anti-“CRT” bills, and latest, the microscoped-minutia-arguments at SCOTUS. Even though I see how we got here, it’s hard to take in. Flanagan’s piece is perhaps more stunning than any of those, as it’s about… education. I immediately picture myself as a resident of any other OECD country, eyes bugging out then shaking head as I read Flanagan’s post. We are truly a circular firing squad.