Judith Shulevitz has written
a brilliant essay in “The Néw Republic” about the
corporate and political leaders’ infatuation with “disruption.” It
is “the most pernicious cliche of our time.” She identifies its
author, Clayton Christenson, and shows how it explains some
technological change yet is now used in policy circles to undermine
and privatize public functions. Shulevitz observes: “Christensen
and his acolytes make the free-market-fundamentalist assumption
that all public or nonprofit institutions are sclerotic and unable
to cope with change. This leads to an urge to disrupt,
preemptively, from above, rather than deal with disruption when it
starts bubbling up below….they don’t like participatory democracy
much. “The sobering conclusion,” write Christensen and co-authors
in their book about K–12 education, “is that democracy … is an
effective tool of government only in” less contentious communities
than those that surround schools. “Political and school leaders who
seek fundamental school reform need to become much more comfortable
amassing and wielding power because other tools of governance will
yield begrudging cooperation at best.” This observation leads to an
enlightening discussion of the Broad-trained superintendents and
their love of disruption. When they move into districts to impose
transformation and disruption, they sow dissension and turmoil.
None of this is good for children.
Jan Resseger here examines the shifting rationales for school closures. Please be sure to read her blog.
School closures are a signature issue of the corporate reform movement.
When schools close, the students are dispersed, usually to equally low-performing schools.
When schools close, communities are shattered.
Closing schools is a classic strategy of corporate reform, because it is disruptive, innovative, and transformational, though not in good ways.
The ideology of school closings is rooted in the business model, the belief that the school board owns a “portfolio” of schools, like a stock portfolio, and that it can kill off the losers (by closing them) and end up with a better portfolio.
The portfolio strategy, also known as the diverse provider model, is inappropriate for schools, which serve communities and which should be strengthened and supported, not destroyed.
There is no evidence that school closures have any relationship to better education for students.
Jan Resseger writes:
School Closure: Is the Issue Underutilization or Punishment?
We have been watching a wave of school closures in Chicago and Philadelphia and other big cities. Officials justify the need for school closures by pointing to “underutilized” buildings and cost savings.
Here are two pieces that question the conventional rationale for school closure. The Opportunity to Learn Campaign just released a new info-graphic Debunking the Myths of School Closures. “You can’t improve schools by closing them,” declares this resource, as it provides data to demonstrate that: “Most students won’t go to better schools.” “Closures won’t save the district big bucks.” “These aren’t empty schools.” “Closures do have a big impact on everyone.”
Writing for Catalyst-Chicago, Sara Karp investigates the black-box of the Chicago school district budget, where she is unable to document claims of budget savings, this time from purported cuts to central office expenditures. Karp reports that one part of the central office budget has exploded from $5 million in 2011 to $88 million in 2013: the Office of Portfolio that authorizes and manages new schools.
Chicago is a major practitioner of the “portfolio school reform” theory being actively promoted by the Gates Foundation and its partner, the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. This is the idea that a district should manage its schools like a business portfolio with constant churn as high-scoring schools are rewarded and so-called “failing” schools are closed.
One must always ask whether the district prepared the school for “failure” by moving out students, teachers, and important programs to prepare for the closure. And one must be sure to remember that school closure is one of the so-called turnaround models being prescribed by the U.S Department of Education for low-scoring schools. Because standardized test scores are, more than anything, a wealth indicator, we see a mass of school closures these days in communities where poverty is concentrated.
Our society’s most urgent national educational priority must be to invest in improving the public schools in our urban communities rather than punishing them, punishing their teachers, closing the schools or privatizing them.
What happens when privately managed charter schools replace public schools? when experienced teachers are replaced by TFA temporary teachers? A reader comments:
“From what I can tell, Arizona’s TFA teachers are thought of as rock stars in education. Knights in shining armor to save the school day. It’s the new baby and everyone loves it. Charters are popping up all over the place. The buildings are beautiful. The shiny new baubles in town capture the eye of many parents who have bought the propaganda that public schools suck. No facts, just feelings…look at where MY kid is going to school. WE are better parents than those public school parents. I think I’m going to be sick…of a broken heart over the demise of what once was the center of a community…the neighborhood school where a sense of belonging made all the difference.”
Under a recently passed state law in Michigan, two school districts will be dissolved.
Inkster and Buena Vista school districts no longer exist.
Their students and teachers have scattered.
The students are looking for schools, the teachers are looking for jobs.
The districts have no say in the matter.
In Governor Snyder’s rush to impose his brand of “reform” on Michigan public schools, local control means nothing. The only thing that matters is destabilizing districts and schools to the maximum extent possible. Just as Mayor Rahm Emanual and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have closed scores of schools without any concern for the views of parents and the local community, Michigan decided to put an end to these two districts because of their deficits. At least 50 more may be on the chopping block before long.
Joy Resmovits reports on Huffington Post that students are being sent to other districts that are in financial distress and also low-performing.
The stories are heartbreaking. Many of the students are enrolling in the public schools of Saginaw, which also has a big deficit. Saginaw plans to lay off all its arts teachers.
Is this a sick society or what? Doesn’t the state of Michigan have a constitutional responsibility to maintain a system of free public education?
A newspaper story in Indiana says that if Tony Bennett had given the same break to other schools that he give to his favorite GOP campaign contributor, two Indianapolis schools would not have been closed.
But unfortunately neither school had contributed to GOP campaigns, so there was no reason to save them.
Which reminds me that I received this tweet:
Angel Cintron, Jr.
Bennett’s rubric:
A=awesome donor
B=barely donated
C=can’t afford it
D=Democratic district
F=Free public school
Bruce Baker brilliantly explains here why he won’t use the term “corporate reform.”
The strategies now being imposed on the schools have failed when applied in corporate settings, he writes.
He looks at the use of two now-popular “reform” ideas in education: the portfolio model and evaluation by results.
The portfolio model is based on the belief that schools should compete, and that those in charge should close the ones that don’t have high test scores while adding new ones.
Baker shows that when Sears tried the portfolio model, it was a disaster.
Units competed with one another, and each one thought only about what was good for its own survival.
There was, as one would predict, the worst kind of competition for survival, with cream skimming.
The overall results were devastating to the corporation.
When IBM tried to reverse its declining fortunes, it adopted a competitive employee rating system.
This too was a disaster.
(Edwards Deming could have predicted these disasters, but that’s another subject.)
So, Baker argues that current education reform should not be called “corporate reform” because good corporations would never do what the “reformers” now insist upon.
But, I will continue to use the term “corporate reform” because I think he proves the point that I make.
The bad ideas now infesting public education came from the corporate sector, where they failed.
They are failed corporate ideas that are being imposed on public schools, where they also fail.
It is important to understand why they failed in the corporate world, because it helps to explain why they are failing in the education world.
So I will continue to refer to the “reformers” as corporate reformers because it captures the origins of their bad ideas.
They are the people insisting upon the portfolio model, upon teacher evaluation models that turn teaching into a metrical exercise, upon data as the goal of education, upon turning everything into a metric, upon closing community schools, upon lowering standards for entry into teaching. They are the people who think that Big Data can solve all problems, even those that can’t be measured. They are the people who say “you measure what you treasure,” although they sometimes say, “you treasure what you measure.” And they say, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.”
If someone has a better term than “corporate reform,” I’m all ears.
The Badass Teachers Association has produced a series of videos to explain the intricacies and deceptions of corporate reform.
The first laid out the corporate reform strategy.
The second examined the Broad superintendents.
The third looks closely at the legacy of Michelle Rhee.
The thesis that ties them together is that “reform” is a house of cards built on lies that will inevitably fall down, as houses of cards tend to do.
In an unusual turn, EduShyster writes a serious article about the increasingly insidious role played by Teach for America today.
The organization began with the laudable goal of supplying teachers to schools where there were chronic shortages.
However, it has become a mainstay of the privatization movement, staffing charters that open as public schools close.
She warns:
“By fueling charter expansion, TFA is undermining public schools
“You wouldn’t know it from the heat of the debate but Teach for America has largely abandoned plans to expand into urban districts in any significant way. Instead, TFA increasingly serves as the designated labor force for urban charters. In Chicago, for example, where charter expansion is the real driver of public school closures and teacher layoffs, TFA has functioned as a placement agency for the fast-growing and politically connected UNO charter chain since 2010. In Philadelphia, where 23 schools were closed this spring and thousands of teachers and support staff laid off, TFA supplies hundreds of new teachers for charters in the city. Of the 257 corps members teaching in Philly in 2012, just 21 were in district schools.”
In addition, the leaders groomed by TFA increasingly are trained exclusively in the charter sector, and consequently,
“TFA views traditional public schools with disdain
“TFA’s shift away from its original mission of serving public schools to becoming a provider of labor for charters also means that its much vaunted leadership pipeline is producing a different kind of leader. TFA increasingly grooms leaders with no experience of traditional public schools. Recent corps members teach in charters, go on to lead charters, or move on to careers in educational policy in which they advocate for more charters. Their first encounter with a public education system will likely be when they are hired to dismantle one.”
As a result, TFA is integrally tied to the forces who are hostile to public education and intent on its privatization.
Asean Johnson, a nine-year-old student in Chicago, read the riot act to the Chicago school board. He told them they should be helping schools, not closing them. He made more sense than any of the grown-ups on the other side of the podium. He had only two minutes, and he used them well:
“With tears sliding down his cheeks Johnson told the school board, “You are slashing our education. You’re pulling me down. You’re taking our educational opportunities away.”
Will they listen?
This is one of Gary Rubinstein’s best posts, wherein he challenges the new co-leader of Teach for America to give more thought to his facile reference to “the status quo.”
The post follows some tweets between Gary and Matt Kramer. Gary explains that those who disagree with TFA are not defending the status quo.
Gary writes:
“I could easily make a list of things that I’d like to change. I could bore you for hours about how I feel the math curriculum in this country and this world has evolved into something that leaves out the thing that makes math great — beauty. I could also very easily pick places where money is wasted on consultants and bad education software, and also places where not enough money is spent to do things right. But I’m called a status quo defender, still, just because I think that certain things should not be changed and that other things should not be changed, just for the sake of changing them, but until something that won’t make things worse is devised.
“So I am opposed to school closings. I can understand the allure of school closings — lighting a fire under the butts of the staff of a school (the ‘adults’ as reformers like to call them) to get their best work out of them. But I’m opposed to them because I feel they cause more harm than good. Is that why I’m a status quo defender? Because of all the things that I think should not be changed (just as ‘reformers have a host of things that should not be changed) this controversial practice is a new change that I do not embrace?
“I am opposed to using ‘value-added’ to judge teacher quality which, in turn, will get used to decide on pay increases and firings. I’m not convinced that a computer algorithm has been devised yet that can calculate what a group of thirty students ‘should’ get with an ‘average’ teacher on a poorly made state test. I’ve seen so many examples of a teacher getting wildly different results in consecutive years and even getting wildly different results in the same year when they teach two different grade levels to have any confidence in this golden calf of school reform.”
And he adds: “I don’t know of anyone in my camp who would say that we should do ‘nothing.’ And, yes, it is better to do nothing sometimes than to do something when that ‘something’ is likely to make matters worse.”
TFA, he points out, is deeply resistant to changing their own status quo.
Diane Ravitch's blog 