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Jeff Bryant: The Five Big Education Stories to Watch in 2016

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2016 //
9

The ever perspicacious Jeff Bryant points his readers to the stories to watch in the year ahead. 

 

One is vulnerable governors, including two who have been among the worst in inflicting harm on public schools: Pat McCrory of North Carolina and Mike Pence of Indiana. Supporters of public education in both states should flock to the polls to restore public education.

 

Two is charter schools. There will be more financial scandals. There will be more community resistance to closing schools and handing the kids and buildings over to charter operators.

 

Three is the Opt Out movement. The more the federal government and states try to tamp it down, the more parents rebel and join the movement. Repression fires resistance.

 

Four is the Friedrichs case before the Supreme Court. If Friedrichs wins, public sector unions will suffer grievous harm.

 

Five is Chicago, which is a tinderbox because of Rahm Emanuel’s brutish handling of school issues and police brutality, with the emerging story of cover-ups.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Testing

John Thompson on Education and the Media

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
11

John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about a growing awareness in the mainstream media of the infusion of Big Money into education. The New York Review of Books is a major influence among highly educated people and has a reach far beyond professional educators.

 

 

The New York Review of Book’s Michael Massing, in “Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent,” proposes a new journalism to document and explain the effects of secretive corporate elites on our diverse social institutions. He basically calls for a very well-funded version of the Diane Ravitch blog.

 
O.K., it’s more complicated than that. Massing notes that “Education is but one area of American life that is being transformed by Big Money.” He wants a website that is staffed by top investigative journalists, and experts in the fields that are being taken over by “billionaires [who] are shaping policy, influencing opinion, promoting favorite causes, polishing their images—and carefully shielding themselves from scrutiny.”

 
Massing proposes a site, complete with reporters, editors, and “digital whizzes,” who “could burrow deep into the world of the one percent and document the remarkable impact they are having on so many areas of American life.” Similar to Ravitch’s blog, its purpose would be “tracking the major participants, showing the links between them, assessing their influence and impact, and analyzing the evidence on the performance of both public and charter schools.”

 
Moreover, Massing wants a site that:

 
Could also serve as a sounding board for people in the field, encouraging principals, teachers, parents, and grantees to send in comments about their dealings with these institutions. The most thoughtful could be edited and posted on the site, providing a bottom-up perspective that rarely gets aired.

 
Massing explains that “even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality … the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view.” And, “journalists have largely let them get away with it.” We need sites that will cover more than education, but Massing, who has been influenced by the work of Mohammad Khan, Zephyr Teachout, and Ravitch, uses their work as a model for the 21st century journalism we need.

 

His website would:

 
Produce an ongoing record of the activities of the foundations and private donors trying to affect education policy. The political and lobbying efforts of the teachers’ unions and their allies would be included as well, showing how much money and influence they are able to mobilize in elections and for what candidates.

 

In the first of two articles, Massing describes Paul Singer, the CEO of the hedge fund Elliott Management as an example of “the ability of today’s ultrarich to amass tremendous power while remaining out of the limelight.” Singer is not merely a key funder of the blood-in-the-eye, anti-union StudentsFirst NY, but also the test, sort, reward and punish policies pushed by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and other corporate school reformers. The billionaire is the single largest donor to the Republican Party; a backer of Marco Rubio and many Tea Party candidates; a funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s war record; a donor to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the anti-tax group, Club for Growth; and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “which has worked tirelessly to isolate and sanction Iran.”
To illustrate the secretive and far-reaching influence of the One Percent, Massing draws upon the Washington Park Project, and Kahn’s and Teachout’s “Corruption in Education: Hedge Funds and the Takeover of New York’s Schools.” 

 

They offered:

 
An eye-opening look at the large sums being spent by what it called “a tiny group of powerful hedge fund executives” seeking to “take over education policy” in the state. This “lightning war on public education,” they wrote, was “hasty and secretive” and “driven by unaccountable private individuals. It represents a new form of political power, and therefore requires a new kind of political oversight.”

 
Massing then praises the online Hechinger Report and Diane Ravitch who have sharply analyzed the record of the Billionaires Boy’s Club and education reform movement. He explains the need to further document the activities of the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations, as well as analyze their real world effects on schools.

 
Yes, America needs websites for examining the structure of money and influence on all of our institutions. Ravitch and her contributors, commenters, and readers should all feel proud of our bottom-up efforts. Massing is correct; our nation needs to produce Diane Ravitchs to lead similar grassroots efforts in health, finance, economics, and politics. I bet it will happen.

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Media

David Kirp: How to Fix “Failing Schools”–and How Not to

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
28

 

David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a smashing article in the New York Times comparing the failure of corporate reform in Newark and the success of incremental, collaborative reform in Union City, New Jersey.

 

Newark is a paradigm of all the bad reform ideas: Schools closed against the will of parents and students. Charter schools opened, some of which skimmed the students they wanted. Mark Zuckerberg, egged on by then-Mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie, put $100 million into the reformer dream that every student in Newark would achieve proficiency if every school were turned into a charter school. Zuckerberg’s $100 million disappeared down the rabbit hole, and Newark continues to struggle.

 

 

Meanwhile, Union City made real progress, without the help of Zuckerberg’s millions.

 

 

 

 

Kirp writes:

 

No one expected a national model out of Union City. Without the resources given to Newark, the school district there, led by a middle-level bureaucrat named Fred Carrigg, was confronted with two huge challenges: How could English learners, three-quarters of the students, become fluent in English? And how could youngsters, many of whom came from homes where books were rarities, be turned into adept readers?

 

Today Union City, which opted for homegrown gradualism, is regarded as a poster child for good urban education. Newark, despite huge infusions of money and outside talent, has struggled by comparison. In 2014, Union City’s graduation rate was 81 percent, exceeding the national average; Newark’s was 69 percent.

 

What explains this difference? The experience of Union City, as well as other districts, like Montgomery County, Md., and Long Beach, Calif., that have beaten the demographic odds, show that there’s no miracle cure for what ails public education. What business gurus label “continuous improvement,” and the rest of us call slow-and-steady, wins the race.

 

 

Two points to be made based on this article:

 

  1. Why does anyone expect politicians to know how to fix schools that struggle?
  2. Does anyone still believe that charters and vouchers and high-stakes testing will improve education for the nation’s poorest children?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization

The Cruel Charter School Addiction in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2016 //
23

Eileen DiFranco, a retired school nurse in Philadelphia, describes an episode from “The Twilight Zone” in which a sober family man encounters slot machines in Las Vegas and becomes an addict. He can’t help himself. He gambles everything and can’t stop.

 

She compares this gambling fever to the charter school addiction of districts like Philadelphia. No matter how many charter schools fail, the district leaders want more of them. They are in love with the lure and promise of magic and they can’t stop. Meanwhile, the public schools suffer as do the children who attend public schools, while millions are squandered on charter schools that are no better–and often worse–than the public schools.

 

She writes:

 

With their “no excuses” mantra, highly paid charter school CEOs promise school administrators that they will bring students up to grade level in no time at all. It all sounds so attractive. And believable. School districts all over the country have been sucked in by this big, brash idea that sounds wonderful on paper, but has largely failed to deliver on its promises. This has not stopped the charter school operators from repeating their claim of educational superiority over and over again until it takes on the ring of truth.

 

But the reality is that the charter schools’ claims contain more “truthiness” than actual truth. According to Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a national study by CREDO that many cited to tout the superior performance of charters actually found that “less than one hundredth of one percent (<0.01 percent) of the variation in test performance in reading is explainable by charter school enrollment.”

 

Let’s put that alleged 0.01 percent success rate into a Philadelphia perspective. The SRC has approved charter school establishment and expansion even while the traditional public schools languish. As children are injured, or even die, as did Laporshia Massey at Bryant Elementary, or as violence occurs, as it did at George Washington High School, the fault somehow lies with the resource-starved schools and not the SRC’s addiction to the lure of charter schools.

 

The underwhelming performance of charter schools for an overwhelming amount of money should set off alarms. Their quick solutions to educational woes follow the logic of past failures: Just hand over the money and we’ll do it all for you. In the end, however, there is only one certainty: If something is too good to be true, it is not the truth.

 

Several questions need to be asked about this scenario. The first is, why would the SRC allow the majority of Philadelphia’s children to attend dirty, unsafe schools without counselors, nurses, and assistant principals while other children clearly do not? Why is there hardly any discussion about this glaring disparity?

 

I have a couple of answers. The first is that there is a plan afoot to break public schools deliberately so that they can be handed over to charters. Thus, the SRC and Hite are wreaking havoc by deliberately deferring maintenance and cutting staff to dangerous levels in traditional schools. This practice effectively insures the failure that is necessary to hand over the now low-performing, intentionally broken “seats” over to more “successful” charter operators who feel justified in cutting into the resources available to District schools. This is being done in a calculated way in order to break the teachers’ union, the whipping boy of modern school reform.

 

The second is that District leaders and politicians are trying to appease elected officials in rural areas who perceive city schools and urban children as great leeches feeding off public dollars who divert resources away from more deserving populations. For them, giving more money to ”those” children in urban areas is like throwing money into a pit. The idea in the Pennsylvania House and Senate is that throwing money at schools doesn’t fix them, although they believe that having enough money fixes just about everything else.

 

The third is that the SRC has become the ball carrier for hedge fund managers for whom education is a place where they can make money. The fact that school reform is being led by MBAs rather than by educators is telling.

 

Philadelphia public schools are dying. Who will be held accountable? The legislature? Former Governor Tom Corbett? Superintendent William Hite?

 

The leaders are chasing a rainbow, bright promises that have never come through for the children. They are killing a democratic institution that society depends on and needs. Can they sleep at night?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Peg Robertson: How Reformers Gaslight Teachers in “Turnaround” Schools

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2016 //
16

Peg Robertson is a teacher in Colorado and a national leader of the Opt Out movement (she co-founded United Opt Out). In this post, she describes what happens to teachers in schools that are supposedly “turnaround schools.” They are “gaslighted.” Anyone who has seen the famous George Cukor film of the same name knows what it means to be “gaslighted.” Ingrid Bergman’s husband wants to kill her, and he tries to convince her that she is going mad. In Peg’s school, teachers are told that they caused low test scores, and officialdom works hard to persuade them that they cause failure.

 

She writes:

 

Gaslighting is such an insane reality to live in that it becomes incredibly difficult to focus on anything else except the ability to get through the day- it is designed intentionally so.

 

 

So let’s try to take a look at what’s really happening.

 

 

The first stage of Gaslighting is described as disbelief. Strange events, behaviors, and actions by others begin to occur. Perhaps you are told something that doesn’t seem true to you or simply just sounds bizarre. Perhaps someone you trusted speaks to you in a manner that seems fake, or staged.

 

 

In my case, the “disbelief” began with the supposed root cause of our turnaround status.

 

 

We were told: Students experienced lower-quality and less rigorous instruction that did not accelerate them to proficiency and beyond, because the CCSS was not used to guide instruction in all content areas.

 

 

Now, for someone like myself, who has spent hours upon hours researching and advocating for the end of corporate education reform this “root cause” at first, is quite laughable. We know that standards – good, bad, and ugly, in no way increase student achievement. Quite honestly, there’s no correlation whatsoever between standards and student test scores. This has been clearly confirmed by looking at NAEP scores and the standards used in the various states. So, simply put, it’s a lie.

 

 

And therein follows the disbelief. You are told a lie about this so-called turnaround status. And I can assure you that nationwide there is no root cause – in a school improvement plan housed on a department of education website – that will state the truth – the truth is clearly poverty and that has been confirmed as well. But in this gut wrenching fast move to privatize our public schools it is necessary to lie and necessary to beat people into compliance in order to cash in quickly – using policies which gaslight educators who ultimately must carry out these actions of educational malpractice.

 

 

So, you sit in disbelief at these lies. At first you think, okay, whatever, we can play this game. We’ll continue to do right by children behind closed doors and the policy makers can go screw themselves. That’s the first reaction. At this point you still believe you have some autonomy and you think you might be able to reason with the powers that be in order to figure out a way to “tweak” this to make it doable.

 

 

But then, the gaslighting process continues. The policy makers have a strangle hold on our public schools, and they will find various ways to continue to push forward their measures in a turnaround school. Perhaps they will bring in an auditor who interviews (interrogates) each staff member in an attempt to expose weaknesses that might confirm the so-called root cause. Perhaps they will bring in district personnel to dig through your data and observe your classrooms nonstop in order to, once again, find confirmation that your root cause is true, valid and that ultimately – you, the educators, are to blame for your low test scores. Perhaps they will bring in consultants, books, videos, or additional training to lead you to see how embracing their root cause will fix your failure. There are many ways they might move forward as they gaslight you. In my school, we were enrolled in the Colorado Department of Education turnaround program. We were labeled a Relay Leadership School and Relay indoctrination became the vehicle for our gaslighting.

 

 

This is a gripping story, and I urge you to read it all in total.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Turnaround

Wisconsin: Right-Wing Bradley Foundation Spent $108 Million to Privatize Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2016 //
7

A major new report from the progressive One Wisconsin Institute finds that the right-wing Bradley Foundation spent more than $108 million, working with 130 partner groups, to privatize public schools in Wisconsin between 2005 and 2014. During the same period, the state’s public schools experienced dramatic budget cuts.

 

Key findings of the updated “P Is For Payoff” report include:

 

 

Bradley Foundation head Michael Grebe, a political insider who chaired Gov. Walker’s presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, continues to orchestrate a massive propaganda campaign to advance the privatization of public education;

 
An analysis of IRS Form 990 records and Bradley Foundation reports reveals over 130 organizations supportive of their education privatization agenda and working to advance their cause have received over $108 million from 2005 through 2014;

 
Bradley’s tactics have continued to evolve, now featuring litigation to advance their privatization agenda and intimidate opponents. Leading the effort is the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty which since its inception in 2011 has been larded with over $2 million from Bradley;

 
According to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the voucher program will cost Wisconsin taxpayers over $1.1 billion from 2011 through the end of the 2015–17 budget cycle. Meanwhile, a new report found that Wisconsin schools have suffered the 4th biggest cuts in in the nation through 2014.

 

The Bradley Foundation is one of the nation’s most active reform organizations. It hopes to reform public education out of existence. Watch how skillfully the Bradley Foundation followed the usual reformer script:

 

Original research by One Wisconsin Institute in 2013 first exposed the Bradley Foundation as a leading player in the campaign to gut public education and promote the unaccountable, radical privatization of K-12 education. The Milwaukee-based group spent millions to support organizations, think tanks, journalists and right-wing academics. They engaged in a campaign that manufactured a crisis, singled out their enemies, generated a cure, justified their scheme with pseudo-science, broadcast their message through the media, helped elect politicians to advance their agenda and kept them in line with high-powered lobbyists and well-funded pressure campaigns. [Emphasis added by me.]

 

Ross concluded, “Wisconsin families and public schools are left paying the price as billions of dollars that could have been used for public education are siphoned off for the Bradley Foundation’s ideologically driven experiment. Until a majority of policy makers are willing to stand up to the Bradley Foundation’s millions, Wisconsin’s tradition of great public schools will remain under assault.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers, Wisconsin

EduShyster: Why Charter Schools Are the New Subprime Mortgages

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2016 //
27

EduShyster has a fascinating and important interview with Preston Green, the John and Carla Klein Professor of Urban Education at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, who explains why charter schools are the new subprime mortgages. Green says he used to be a strong charter supporter, but he has become wary because of the excesses of deregulation. He predicts that just as the subprime mortgage bubble burst, the same is likely to happen to the charter school bubble. Just like subprime mortgages, charters are expanding rapidly without oversight. Promoters of charters, often with the best of intentions, seek multiple authorizers so that oversight is slack. Parents in urban communities line up on the hope that they will get better education, but they often (usually?) don’t.

 

Green says:

 

Promoters of charter school expansion are calling for an increase in independent authorizers, such as nonprofits and universities. Supporters of charter school expansion believe that multiple authorizers will issue more charters, in part, because they are less hostile to charter schools than school districts. However, our research suggests another reason that multiple authorizers result in more charter schools: multiple authorizers are like mortgage originators with no skin in the game. In other words, these authorizers don’t assume the risk of charter school failure. That means that if something happens with the charter school, the authorizers don’t have to clean up the mess. Multiple authorizers may also weaken screening by giving charter schools the chance to find authorizers who *won’t ask questions.* In fact, CREDO has found that states with multiple authorizers experienced significantly lower academic growth. CREDO suggested that this finding might be due to the possibility that multiple authorizers gave charter schools the chance to shop around to find authorizers who wouldn’t provide rigorous oversight….

 

 

Where I see this playing out is that if you have too many charters or options that aren’t public having a negative impact on the education system as a whole, you may start seeing challenges in these communities saying that the state is failing to provide children with a system of public education, or that the options provided aren’t of sufficient quality to satisfy the state’s obligation to provide a public education. The assumption is that if kids fail to get an education in a charter school they can return to the traditional system. But what happens if you don’t have that option? You may soon see that develop in all of these urban settings. The really scary scenario that I could see happening is that you end up with all of these options that aren’t traditional public schools with insufficient oversight by the authorizers and no real pressure to get these schools to perform well….

 

If we’re going to have multiple authorizers, we have to impose standards to ensure that they do a good job, because without those standards there is really no incentive for them to ensure that these schools are operating in an acceptable manner. I should also mention putting sanctions in place to prevent the really squirrely practice of *authorizer hopping,* where schools are closed by one authorizer and then find another authorizer, which has happened quite a bit in places where oversight has been really weak, like Ohio. Further, authorizers should guard against predatory chartering practices, including fining students for discipline violations.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

With Chicago in Turmoil, Rahm’s School Board Wants To Expand Charters

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
9

Despite declining enrollments, despite the closing of 50 public schools, the Chicago Public Schools board (hand-picked by Mayor Rahm Emanuel) is seeking to expand the number of charter schools. The great advantage of charters, from the Mayor’s point of view, is that they are mostly non-union. So think of it as payback to the Chicago Teachers Union for its insistence on adequate resources for the public schools.

 

Despite declining student enrollment and dozens of dramatically under-enrolled schools, Chicago is seeking potential new charter schools for the city.

 

 

In a Request for Proposals issued Wednesday, CPS says it’s looking for dual language schools, “Next Generation” schools that would blend technology and traditional teaching, and—in a first—it wants a “trauma-informed school,” where staff would get training to support students with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or exposure to trauma.

 

 

The district is prepared to give charters that already run schools approval for up to four additional campuses. And it’s poised to grant approvals now for campuses that wouldn’t open for several years, to allow more time for planning a school’s opening, the district says in a press release.

 

 

In recent years, the district had named Neighborhood Advisory Councils where community members could give input into charter proposals. Those are now scrapped, saving roughly $170,000, CPS says. Instead, charter schools themselves will “directly engage residents in obtaining the support of their desired school community,” according to the release.

 
“It looks like they’re making it even less democratic,” said Wendy Katten, director of the parent group Raise Your Hand, which has had members serve on the advisory councils.

 

 

Katten says many considered the NACs “flawed” because CPS seemed frequently to ignore the advice of the councils, but “at least it was an opportunity to look at the proposal, to really scrutinize it as a community. To take (that) away—and to have the charter operators do the community engagement—that’s even more of a sham than what currently has existed. The real question is, our city needs a massive debate about opening any kind of new schools in a city that has just hemorrhaged students,” said Katten.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Unions

Peter Greene on the Big Money-Machine Called the SAT

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
23

I try not to put up two posts by the same writer in the same day, but this one followed naturally from the one that precedes it.

 

Peter Greene reminds us that the SAT is not just a testing company; it is big business. Right now, the SAT is in hot competition for market share with ACT.

 

He writes:

 

When the company brought in Gasper Caperton to help solve some cash flow issues, he announced that he didn’t want to run just “a testing company.” Caperton boosted fees, increased market by (among other things) getting states to punch PSAT tickets for students, and selling student information to colleges. Revenue reports for the non-profit College Board run from “$500 million to $1 billion” The College Board’s Form 990 from 2013 shows total revenue of $840,672,990 with a whopping $98,894,865 left over after expenses.

 

The College Board is a non-profit, which means it doesn’t have to share any of that $100 million profit with shareholders or owners. When Caperton left, he was making more than the head of Harvard, more than the head of the American Red Cross. Nineteen other executives were making over $300K. David Coleman, in his first full year of head honchoship after being hired mid-2012, received a full $734,192 in compensation.

 

Meanwhile, the SAT is battling for market share with ACT. Part of that battle has involved a technique familiar to manufacturers of soft drinks and beer– create a larger line of products to suck up space in the store and build market loyalty among customers. To that end, the College Board has rolled out a full range of products, allowing students to start taking some version of the SAT as early as eighth grade.

 

Think of it. When your state, say, Connecticut or Colorado, makes a deal to test every student with an SAT product, you are aiding the corporation improve its bottom line. This has nothing to do with improving the education of your child. The state has decided to trust the standardized test more than its teachers and is willing to transfer millions of dollars to the corporation that might have gone to hire teachers of the arts or to reduce class size. The same goes for the ACT. You don’t get college-ready by taking tests more often or earlier. You get college-ready by reading more, writing more, and pursuing your interests more deeply.

 

Your child is neither a product, as Exxon chief Rex Tillerson believes, nor a consumer. He or she is a developing human being. Standardized tests give you standardized information that may be useful in limited settings. But no standardized test can measure his or her worth or potential or gifts. You cannot measure what you treasure.*

 

 

*I use that line from time to time because Peter Cunningham, who was Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary for Communications and now runs “Education Post,” once said to me in defense of testing that “you measure what you treasure.” I thought about it and decided that it was the other way around. What I treasure cannot be measured. Here is a trivial example: I adore my dog Mitzi and my cat Dandy. How can I measure my love for them? I love my children and my spouse. What scale should I weigh them on? How can I measure my love for them? The Data Gods speak, but they don’t speak for me.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Testing

Peter Greene on Our Clueless Business Leaders

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
19

Peter Greene read the Fortune article about how business leaders are fighting valiantly to save Common Core, and he realized that they don’t have a clue about dealing with individual consumers or social media. They pour millions into creating astroturf groups and blogs without readers, but they don’t understand anything about education or the public.

 

The writer of the infamous article, Peter Elkind, tries to portray the business leaders sympathetically, but it could not have been easy.

 

Greene writes:

 

Elkind recounts the story of how Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon, threatened to pull the company out of Pennsylvania if the state did not embrace Common Core (and quotes without citing Kris Nielson’s blog response– in Elkind’s world, the businessmen and politicians all have names and faces, but only a few bloggers and activists get the same consideration). Business interests tried founding groups like the Collaborative for Student Success to gin up some CCSS love among the citizenry, says Elkind, but he neglects to mention just how many similar groups have been created– all fruitlessly, right up to recent entries like Education Post and the74, both well-funded with the hope that CCSS fans can fight internet fire with internet fire. And yet all of these have fizzled, almost as if corporate chieftains don’t understand why there is opposition or how it spreads.

 

One thing that jumps out at me is that Elkind mostly talks about corporations like Exxon and Intel and SAS– companies where corporate executives are unlikely to ever face the business problem of “How do we sell our product to individual consumers.” And so when they discover that Common Core is a product that individual consumers don’t actually want, they are stumped. Their “marketing” usually consists of gathering the political and corporate connections to make themselves inescapable. If Intel convinces the major computer companies to use their chips, it doesn’t matter so much how individual consumers feel about it.

 

In short, big business is neither nimble, quick, or smart enough to fight this fight.

 

And then there is Rex Tillerson, who comes across as an inhumane person who never met a child or a teacher, except maybe at Groton or Deerfield Academy:

 

Tillerson is a central figure in Elkind’s article, and it’s Tillerson who gets to demonstrated just how completely, clueless, stupidly wrong these guys are. Elkind takes us to a 2014 panel discussion in DC.

 

But Tillerson articulates his view in a fashion unlikely to resonate with the average parent. “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

 

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.”

 

Man. The fact that anybody can shamelessly express such an opinion out loud, without recognizing that it is ethically dense and morally bankrupt, a view of both human beings and an entire country that is about as odious and indefensible as anything spit out by a Ted Bundy or an Eric Harris.

 

This article seems to have set off a twitter storm to #boycottExxon. Poor, poor Tillerson! So rich, so powerful, so out of touch with reality.

 

Greene writes:

 

 

Students are not a product. Corporations are not “customers,” and the public institutions of our nation do not exist to serve the needs of those corporations. The measure of public education is not how well it produces drones that serve the needs of corporations, not how “interested” corporations are in the meat widgets that pop out of a public education assembly line.

 

 

Tillerson’s viewpoint is anti-education, anti-American, anti-human. It’s a reminder that the education debates are not about Left versus Right or GOP versus Dems. The education debates are about the interests of the human beings who are citizens of a nation and stakeholders in its public institutions versus the interests of a those who believe their power and money entitle them to stripmine an entire nation in order to gather more power and money for themselves. The education debates are about democracy versus oligarchy. The education debates are about valuing the voices of all citizens versus giving voice only to the special few Who Really Matter.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform
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