The National Governors Association is led this year by Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a cheerleader for charter schools who launched two of his own.
The NGA, at Polis’ instigation, chose K-12 education as its leading issue for the year, which is very bad news, considering his low opinion of public schools.
Mike DeGuire, former principal in Denver Public Schools and current public school activist, described the NGA meeting when Governor Polis invited Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, former wrestling entrepreneur, to discuss the needs and future of American education.
At the top of their concerns was the failure of public schools to prepare students for the workforce. Long ago, education leaders used to describe the purpose of education as preparation for citizenship in a democratic society. But that was then and this is now.
DeGuire described the cohort assembled by Governor Polis, all leaders of the corporate reform sector:
As the 2024-25 chair of the National Governors Association, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, selected K-12 education as the priority of the NGA’s yearlong initiative. Titled “Let’s Get Ready! Educating all Americans for Success,” the project defined its purpose in its call to action: Identify solutions to address the belief that schools are not preparing graduates adequately for the work force today.
The initiative had support from philanthropic foundations and companies that promote technology-related solutions, school choice, data-driven accountability, and other neoliberal market-based reforms in public education. One of the supporters, Stand Together Trust, founded by Charles Koch, provided millions to groups that back charter schools and other “alternatives to public education.”
Many of the “project team” members were involved with organizations that prioritized “redesigning” the public education system. Polis has been a longtime supporter of expanding charter schools and workforce training as ways to address deficits in student outcomes, and eight of his staff worked on this project. Project team member Jen Walmer was on Polis’ staff in his first administration, and she worked previously as the Colorado director of Democrats for Education reform, which continues to call for Democrats to support school choice and charters.
The project team also included representatives from Watershed Advisors, All4Ed, Savi Advising, and the Urban Institute. Watershed’s CEO, Kunjan Narechania, was the CEO of the all-charter Recovery School District in New Orleans. Several Watershedand All4Ed staff either worked or trained in the Chiefs for Change program, which Jeb Bush founded to promote charter school models. All4Ed promotes online learning in both charter and district schools.
Savi Advising’s founder, Archana Patel, worked for KIPP charter schools and was the senior director at the Broad Academy, a training ground for school leaders to promote charter schools. The Urban Institute published research that downplayed the effects caused by charter schools in exacerbating school segregation. The Institute received $11 million from the Walton Family Foundation and other foundations to identify “measures of students’ skills and competencies in prekindergarten (PK) through 12th grade that drive economic mobility.”
Polis chaired seven “convening” sessions to determine the project’s outcomes. Featured “experts” at the sessions included Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter schools in New York; Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a computer-based learning system; Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools; John B. King, founder of the Uncommon schools charter chain; Angela Duckworth, co-founder with Dave Levin (KIPP charter school chain founder) of the now defunct Character Lab; and Steve Levitt, author of Freakonomics and a promoter of personalized AI tutoring.
Secretary McMahon added her views about the needs of students today:
McMahon commented that a “return to shop classes” would serve some students better for their future job opportunities. She stated, “We have to rethink how we’re doing education … from beginning to end the goal is to get people into a productive job.”
“Shop classes”? Really. That’s really turning the clock back!
At a time when major corporations are shedding tens of thousands of workers and executives, when AI poses a challenge to many current occupations, none of these neoliberal ideas seems relevant today.
DeGuire recommends a broader role for education today:
While workforce preparation is an important part of schooling, defining education primarily as a pipeline for economic productivity in the marketplace ignores the broader purposes of education. The Polis report neglects to focus on the essential role educators provide in developing positive relationships with students, and the benefits students gain through an emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, collaborative learning and exposure to the arts, social sciences and the humanities. Focusing primarily on charter schools as the answer to America’s problems in education negates the findings that 70% of parents are satisfied with their local public schools, as well as the research that charter schools have not proven to be the answer to America’s education problems.
One of the defining characteristics of corporate reformers is that they cling to failed ideas. They have claimed for the past 35 years that school choice, high-stakes testing, competition, and incentives would drive school improvement. They refuse to admit that their ideas have been tried and didn’t work. NCLB, Race to the Top, and Common Core came and went. Of course, the “reformers” are dissatisfied because none of their promises was successful.
Rather than admit defeat, they keep repeating the same old same old.
Shop class indeed!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Re the purpose of education, I wrote this ten years ago. Still relevant, I think. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/12/whats-the-purpose-of-education-in-the-21st-century/
Arthur H. Camins Science Educator, Education Consultant, Writer e: arthurcamins@gmail.com url: http://www.arthurcamins.com/ twitter: @arthurcamins https://twitter.com/arthurcamins
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The purpose of public education? How about this?
The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare
of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.
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Polis and his meeting of private profiteers are more aligned with Trump and his band of corporate vandals. DFER are pseudo-Democrats that fail to see public education as a possible antidote to Trumpism. Public schools serve all students and bring diverse students together for mutual social and academic benefit. They provide more options for young people than “one size fits all” segregation academics known as charter schools. Polis and his political pals rig legislation in order to gain access to public schools to enable the looting of public school budgets which benefits the interests of the ultra-wealthy and corporations. He is choosing to ignore the many families like those in Denver that voted in support of real public education that is supported by democratic governance and accountability.
DFER continues to plot and scheme with corporate vandals, but the public has become more aware of their betrayal. Public education is a public responsibility the goal of which is to prepare young people for responsible citizenship. It is a socialized service like the police or fire departments. It was never intended to be part of a choice system. This is the invention of politically connected wealthy individuals that do not care about the common good. They invented “choice” as a way to shun responsibility and reduce their taxes
The message from this administration is that the American dream is dead, and killing public education is part of the plot. We should send our young children to work as some many coal miners and a laborers did from the past. My father, whose family was poor, went to work at age 13. My brother and myself finished college after receiving a good public education. If we believe that we are a nation of opportunity for all, we must support true public schools for future generations and send Jared Polis and his scheming billionaires back to “shop class.” While there is nothing wrong people learning to work with their hands, there should be options as there are in most public schools based on students’ aptitude and interests.
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The convicted rapist, fraud and felon’s regime is the one murdering the American Dream for the working class, while fulfilling the dreams of the wealthiest one percent to own it all and “F” the rest of the people.
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This is reminding me of some recent googling I was doing into how we went from the beginnings of the national ed stds movement that was spurred by Reagan-era “A Nation at Risk” report” (1983) to the development of CCSS (Common Core) 25 yrs later. The path leads right through the National Governors’ Association– and the Gateses. The two groups partnered in funding/ political support for Achieve Inc (established 1996 by the NGA together with prominent CEO’s organized by IBM CEO Gerstner), which focused on various efforts to establish college- & career-ready ed standards.
The development of CCSS was pitched personally in 2008 by Gene Wilhoit (then exec dir of CCSSO [Council of Chief State School Officers, partner org to NGA]) and David Coleman [CEO/ founder of SAP [Student Achievement Partners] to Bill & Melinda Gates. Gates Foundation, with support/ guidance from NGA & CCSSO, proceeded to not merely fund it, but to build political/ corporate support for it nationwide. In the process, they found a booster in Obama, whose staff featured many former Gates Foundation staffers & associates. [Haven’t read it, but I understand Mercedes Schneider’s 2015 book “Common Core Dilemma” provides all the gory details and puts them in perspective (the perspective being that CCSS was the creature of mega-corporations—not “the states”).
Spears noted Jeb Bush-founded Chiefs for Change trained/ employed members of a couple of groups among those represented at Jared Polis’ NGA meetings: every member of Chiefs for Change is also a member of CCSSO. Polis’ “project team members” appear to be an incestuous group of interlinked corporate buddies.
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A great synopsis. Here’s the part left out: the whole CCSS thing happened because Gates saw education as the next big market for his wares. He funded Common Core so that there would be a single set of standards to key computerized instruction to, and he founded inBloom so that he would control access to the “Nation’s Gradebook” for online instruction and testing. His company would be the gatekeeper of the national gradebook of record and would decide who could use it via a pay for play scheme–just as every computer user in the PC world pays a hidden toll to Microsoft for use of the operating system on the machine that he or she uses. Years ago, like many kids, I figured out that if I could get everybody to send me a dime, I could be very rich. Well, Gates figured out how to do that, and he planned to replicate this in education. Ruthless.
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Yup. Ditto Pearson.
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I’m going to stand up for shop classes.
Back when I taught middle school in the 70’s – 80’s, we had a variety of shop classes, including sheet metal, woodworking, electric shop, home economics, sewing, and cooking. Each had become co-ed recently, no longer gendered.
These classes offered kids a break from academics and exposed them to a skill set that could be useful to them as grownups, even if their formal education ended at high school. For me, teaching English as a second language to kids who spoke Spanish, it was also a terrific opportunity to “mainstream” my students for a part of the day with the monolingual kids whose classes were outside our program. Even kids with just a few words in English were able to be successful in classes where one could learn by observing and doing rather than by listening and speaking.
The middle school I taught in in the late 80’s eliminated all those classes in favor of computer education. This was back before GUI interfaces or laptops, when a desktop computer cost $5000 or so. The students did actually learn to program, as well as use a word processing program. Still, something was lost to kids which has never been replaced. A variety of classes offers engagement across a wide sphere and develops interests kids may otherwise never be exposed to.
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Bush II, “Shrub,” made severe cuts in funding for vocational education because children are all identical, right?
You can’t make up stuff this stupid.
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