Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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How the Attack on Public Education Is Like the Tobacco Industry

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
4

A reader read this post about FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), a strategy intended to undermine and discredit the competition. And Bingo! The light went on. It was the same pattern on the rug.

OMG! FUD jogged my memory about a book I read 2 yrs ago by Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”. Edu-reformers are using some of the same strategies that were used by the tobacco and oil industries to advance their business agendas and preclude government regulation on their products. Oreskes is an historian of science at U Cal, San Diego. She and Conway tell an amazing story that begins in the 1980′s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnXL8ob_js
From a review: “Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how the ideology of free market fundamentalism, aided by a too-compliant media, has skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.”Her book chronicles how the tobacco industry and the oil industry ran effective PR campaigns to mislead the public on decades of science showing the effects of tobacco smoke on health and the effects of carbon emissions on climate. Both industries set up think tanks, hired established scientists whose credentials were stellar in their fields but whose expertise were not in health and climate. These “experts” conducted research to challenge decades of established facts. Their product was doubt. The purpose was to generate mistrust in established scientific findings. The outcome was to cloud the public’s knowledge, influence the media, and effect government policies that were moving to restrict tobacco and energy industries business practices. Their explicit strategy was “teach the controversy”. The sad reality is that doubt mongering works.

American public education is in a dark corner today. Our unquestioning media plays up the attacks on established education science and teachers. Recall Jonathan Alter & David Brooks’ articles denouncing Diane’s positions on NCLB & RttT. Think Tanks and private philanthropies have made it their business to disseminate junk science written by non-educators that, by design, bypass peer review (e.g. Gates Foundation, Center for American Progress, The Heritage Foundation, AEI, NEIT, et al.) to advance increasing class sizes, high stakes testing, merit pay, ending salary bumps for advanced degrees, charter schools, online education, vouchers, turn-arounds, ending collective bargaining, etc. Claims antithetical to actual scientific findings for efficacy. Bruce Baker (and many others) who regularly debunks the reformy arguments is virtually ignored in the national media.

Oreskes makes a provocative statement about scientists who make claims outside of their expertise: ‘The very features that lead to expertise in a particular domain leads to ignorance in many others.’ Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michael Milken, Joel Klien, Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad, anyone?

A critical difference in the current edu-refomry campaign, missing from the previous campaign, is our government’s complicity with the privatizers. The private financial industry and philanthropists are using the full force of the government to advance their agendas. Capturing public money is their business model, schools are simply their vehicle. This is a story of betrayal by our elected officials. They are failing in their mission to serve the public. Indeed, our children’s future is in the hands of those who care the least about other people’s children.
Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Privatization

School Letter Grades Are Preposterous

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
20

On this blog, we have often discussed how easy it is to get drawn into accepting an intolerable practice. When it is first introduced, no one objects because it is worth trying, and over time, as this innovation becomes standard practice, those who don’t like it are ignored because it’s too late, it’s done that way and will go on being done that way.

Take the idea of giving letter grades to schools. My best recollection is that this idea started in Florida under Governor Jeb Bush, who thinks that testing and accountability solve all problems. Then New York City copied Florida. Now other jurisdictions are doing because, well, because Florida and New York City are doing it.

In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, there is an excellent public school. One year it got an A, and everyone was happy and proud. The next year, it got an F, and no one knew why: Same principal, same teachers, same methods, same materials, same students. What was the point of the A or the F? The principal didn’t know. Neither do I.

Several readers sent me an article about how the state of Florida made a mistake in giving out letter grades and raised the grades of a number of schools in Palm Beach. Good for Palm Beach, but remember that the whole system of letter grades is stupid. Of course, there are mistakes, including many that will never be corrected. Just because you get an A doesn’t mean that the competition is valid. It is not.

One of the great things about fiction, especially science fiction, is that we see how people get trapped in a world that is not of their making, a world that offends their sense of decency. Most people accept that world as it is. A few don’t. The question is always whether the dissidents figure out a way to get others to see the world as they do or whether they die fighting an unjust system.

Giving a letter grade to a school is the height of absurdity. It’s one thing to create a report card, which informs the school about ways it can improve. Such a report card might have thirty different categories, each evaluated to show the school its strengths and weaknesses and to start a conversation about how to improve.

But a letter grade is a Scarlet Letter. It says “This is an A school” or “this is a D school,” whatever.

Imagine if we sent children home with a report card with a single letter on it. “This child is a D.” Parents would be outraged. They would immediately understand that you are branding their son or daughter, not evaluating their performance. The purpose of evaluation is to support and improve, not to stigmatize.

To change the world, which now seems so locked into bad and destructive practices, we must change our vision. We must spread our vision to others and help others to understand that schools, like children, are complex, not unidimensional. We stopped putting dunce caps on children many years ago. We should stop thinking that schools will get better if we put a dunce cap on them.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Florida, NYC

How Corporate Talk Prevails

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2012 //
9

Rita Solnet is a parent activist in Florida who works hard to support public education in Palm Beach County, in Florida, and across the nation. She is a co-founder of Parents Across America.

She writes in response to the article about whether schools are and are not like businesses:

I am a product of corporate America and still involved in organizational consulting for corporate America.I listened to the lobbyists and the FL BOE members recklessly scatter business terms throughout their State BOE meeting this week. At one point I wanted to shout “these business terms are for companies with products; they’re not meant for the process of educating children.” Not to mention the fact that some of the terms were preposterously misused.Frequently interspersed with education jargon were terms like: Rebranding; ROI (return on investment);, ROA (return on assets); Six Sigma (a program emphasizing quality and perfection in production); Seedcorn (money set aside to generate more profit in future); Market Leader (referring to the state being a ‘market leader’) and others.

If I closed my eyes I could have been in the board room of any of my clients.

Outside of the obvious fact that children are not products and that business methods are not interchangeable nor conducive to educating our children, I discovered something else. Many of them grossly misused these terms. It appears to me they are trying to force fit education into a business operating mold but they are botching that up too.

The light bulb turned on for me when I glanced at the FL BOE Strategic Plan. Every goal was listed as “TBD (to be determined). I nearly laughed out loud. No corporation in the world would submit a Strategic Plan to their Board of Directors for SIGNATURES with every Goal listed as “to be determined!”

Sigh.
Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Florida

Why Is Chicago Our National Model?

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2012 //
15

A reader writes about the injustice of closing schools in Chicago instead of helping them.

It s odd to think that Chicago is now our national model of school reform, as Chicago continues to rank in the bottom tier on NAEP in reading and math, in fourth grade and eighth grade.

In Chicago, 10 more schools lost ALL their staff and administration to turnarounds this year . They will be opening in the fall with a much younger, less-diverse staff but the same students (Black and Hispanic).

One school, Pablo Casals, posted an 8% gain in its ISAT scores , in a year when the system average gain was only 0.9%. It is at par with all its neighborhood schools, and outscored over 100 elementary schools in Chicago ( even in 2011). Still, it was put on the list and acted upon by CPS , and now its teachers ( the ones who helped achieve that 8% gain) are spread out across the city. Weary from this process, many moved on to much “better” schools, not wanting to land in another school that might be on next year’s list for turnaround.
Sadly, this story is no doubt repeated across all 10 turnaround schools, all of them in high-poverty neighborhoods with mostly African-Am students , some like Casals, with a sizable Hispanic population too.

The toxic policies of Arne Duncan have to stop . They didn’t work in Chicago, they still don’t work in Chicago, and he has exported them to the other states. This ill-motivated man , who has never taught a day in his life, has to stop being the puppet of the billionaire’s club that is trying to steal education away from educators. He has to stop being our Secretary of Education.
Categories Accountability, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne

Does the Market Model Improve Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2012 //
11

A reader responds to an earlier post on the question of whether schools can operate successfully as a market:

The reader comment you include in your post points to one of the essential conflicts underlying the whole school “reform” debate. The conflict is this: what system produces better outcomes – community decision-making, or market competition? The answer, of course, depends a lot on what kind of outcome you are trying to get.

In the marketplace, businesses strive to offer products and services that are sufficiently attractive to consumers to gain them business but cheap enough to ensure an economic return to the owners of the business. (This, as others have pointed out, is the key problem with for-profit educational entities, since even legally their first responsibility is to their shareholders and not their “customers,” the students. It’s an unavoidable conflict of interest.) Private firms do not maximize quality; they balance quality and cost to maximize profit under current market conditions. This is how the system works, and in many domains it works pretty well.

However, there are conditions under which the market does not produce goods or services in the type or amount that society desires – economists call these “market failures.” Classic examples of this are public services like police, fire, and, yes, education. Even things like electric, water and gas services are typically either publicly owned or else operated as a heavily regulated public utility. Education is usually cited as a market failure because there is a public benefit to universal education that would not be given value in the private market. Education would not be as high-quality for most families nor as accessible if it were operated solely by the private market. Education also brings long-term societal benefits that are hard to measure financially and would not be incorporated into a private firm’s economic calculation.

To hear many education “reformers” speak about this topic, you would think that “market failures” were simply a figment of the liberal imagination. Sadly, they are the ones who are deluded.

Another facet of this debate is the question of competition – and competition need not only be among private firms. In the market, competition is presumed to generate the balance between cost and quality desired by consumers. This depends on two things:

1) Consumers have sufficient, accurate information to decide which products most fit their needs; and

2) Consumers can switch from product to product, provider to provider, without much disruption.

Neither of these things hold in the field of education. Parents, and students, have valid opinions about schools, but they are not able to judge what the ultimate impact of a school will be on themselves twenty or thirty years down the road. This is why long-term reputation is important for schools, since we must rely on a history of other people’s children to judge what is likely to happen to our own. Research shows that even standardized tests – at least as currently conceived – do not accurately capture the impact of a quality education on children. (See the Perry Preschool study, the High/Scope program.) So the “grades” we have been giving schools are based on narrow criteria and do not offer the kind of information parents really want – will this school help my child live a fulfilled and comfortable life?

The reader quote addresses the second point. Market competition does not have its greatest impact by inducing firms to change their products or services; it accelerates the rise of firms with desired products and encourages the closure of firms that fail to please customers. Schumpeter called this the “creative destruction” of the free market. This may be ok for toothpaste manufacturers, or cell phone companies, but does the constant turnover of schools and education providers really end up helping individual students? I think that most researchers would say that this greatly damages a student’s chances for success. It also upends families and communities.

Finally, the last problem with the competition model is that outcomes are determined solely by those who are participating in the market at that moment. But we already recognize, as a country, the important public benefits of education. The reason behind democratic governance of public schools is to allow the entire community a say in the running of an institution that affects the entire community. This public aspect is entirely missing from the “reform” argument, for reasons that have more to do with ideology than with educational benefit.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Jeb Bush and Business Leaders Support Common Core

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2012 //
7

At the GE Foundation’s Summer Business and Education Summit in Orlando, 150 business executives heard former Florida Governor Jeb Bush strongly endorse the Common Core State Standards. He predicted that when they are fully implemented, everyone would see what a disaster American education is. This, one assumes, will facilitate his agenda of getting rid of public education and replacing it with vouchers, charter schools, for-profit charter schools, for-profit online education, and anything else that fertile entrepreneurs can dream up. Bush promised there would be a rude awakening, which clearly made him happy.

As you read this account, you see FUD playing out right before your very eyes.

Meanwhile the business executives, as usual, complained that they can never fill any of the millions of jobs they have available because they can’t find skilled workers. So, of course, they outsource those jobs to China and India where they can find skilled workers willing to work for far less than American workers.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Bingo! Pattern-on-the-Rug Time

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2012 //
23

One of the brilliant readers of this blog sent in a comment that made me understand what has been happening to American public education for the past 15-20 years.

It is the conscious, purposeful application of a marketing strategy called FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Wikipedia says that FUD is used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, and propaganda. I sensed that this was happening but I didn’t realize that it was a tried and true strategy that has a name and a documented history.

It’s a strategy in which one competitor undermines the other by spreading FUD. Read the Wikipedia entry to learn who the FUDmaster is.

In this country, the enemies of public education use FUD to advance their primary goal of privatization. They say our public schools are “obsolete” and “broken.” They say it over and over again. They use that line to promote privatization and for-profit education. They want to cut costs by getting rid of experienced teachers and replacing them with online instruction, so they belittle the value of experience and push laws to get rid of tenure and seniority. As they succeed in their use of FUD, what is broken is the spirits of teachers.

They say again and again that our schools are failing when they are not. They have wept about international test scores since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, even as our economy took off. They use FUD to blame the schools for the market failures they cause. They use FUD to blame the schools for poverty.

High-stakes testing is their tool of choice to close schools and fire teachers.

If you want to see the quintessential application of FUD to public education, read the report of the task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice, which says that our public schools are a threat to national security and that their salvation is to help kids escape them via charters and vouchers. For an antidote, read my review of that report.

Or you could watch the quintessential documentary of FUD, see “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” and then read my review.

The reader who opened my eyes to this marketing strategy, designed to harm public education and to allow its destroyers to call themselves “reformers” signs her stuff as “chemtchr.” Now we know.

Your reader is describing a market-capture strategy refined in the hardware/software market wars of the last century. It is based on sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about competing products. I capitalized each word. because the acronym is for the strategy, FUD, is enshrined now in the history of the dawn of the computer age.Google it, and read how IBM piioneered it, and then how the FUDmaster himself out-fudded them.It’s been unleashed now on public education. The children of a whole free nation, and the very people charged with their daily defense, are deliberately assaulted by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Our state-imposed subservience to the data industry monopolists eats into every day of their childhood, as the FUDmaster tries to impose his defective new operating system on their minds and hearts.
Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Klein, Joel, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching

Why a School Is Not Like a Business

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2012 //
7

A reader responds to an earlier post. This reader says that schools are like churches; some say they are like families. As the previous post said, they are built on relationships. When a school closes, a community dies. Those in big corporate cultures don’t understand this. They are used to closing down low-performing units, firing people who aren’t at the top of the stack ranking. This is everyday stuff for them. They don’t understand community. They understand data. They overlook the daily expose of corporate misuse of data (see Enron, WorldComm, LIBOR, or your local business page). If anyone steps forward to defend the community, they will be called “defenders of the status quo.” In the past, they would have been called patriots.

This is so true. Schools operate like churches where individuals work together for the common good. Sharing highs and lows of putting on a school wide musical, laughing and crying together when children earn a scholarship or when children die, brainstorming strategies to help the family of a student who is suddenly homeless. These events create bonds that last a lifetime. Our janitor lost his father, our cafeteria lady lost her husband, our principal’s wife had a baby, our staff and parents showed up at the funeral home and made food for the families. The school needs a new playground. A group of parents donate money and time to build it on weekends. These are people who anticipate a long term (meaning YEARS) relationship with their children’s school. To this day, I receive a birthday card every year from the family of one a student whom I taught 25 years ago. Birthdays are extremely special in her family so I always made time in class for her family to share her birthday with her classmates. If this happened today, we wouldn’t have time, we’d be prepping for tests.
The business community doesn’t want to round out the ramifications of their reforms. Whenever I read of a school shutting down in spite of strong community protests, I feel real pain in my stomach. Education attracts people who have a strong service ethic and who prefer the company of children, not corporate careerists who thrive on competition and risk. Teachers are extremely dedicated to their own professional growth because they view their growth as helping children experience success, not failure. Wouldn’t we want people like this teaching our children? Aren’t these relationships similar to those formed by the elite edu-reformers in their children’s schools? Corporate reforers seem oblivious to their own lived experiences.Teachers are the types of individuals who avoid conflict and work within relationships to build consensus. Corporate reformers live in a milieu of conflict. Their behaviors are classic bullying behaviors- the strong vanquishing the weak, the man subduing the woman- the market rewarding winners and bankrupting losers. Teacher’s good intentions are being exploited. That’s why I take their rhetoric and dumb ideas so personally. That’s why educators should confront them at every turn and on every level and never give up.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

What Reformers Don’t “Get” about Education

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2012 //
18

I have so many brilliant readers. I am happy to share this space with them. They understand so much more than the pundits, reformers, think tank experts, and foundation deep-thinkers who are paid six figures to tell educators how to “reform” the schools. When I worked in journalism many years ago, there were two terms that described arm-chair experts: thumbsuckers and ankle-biters. We hear from them all the time in the media. But they are not the true experts. The true experts are the people who do the hard work of educating kids every day: their teachers, principals and parents.

this is what “educational reformers” don’t seem to “get” about education–education is not a business, it’s a relationship.every time a school is closed, there are families being torn apart. and not just the families of students and parents–”families” of teachers, custodians, secretaries, principals, lunch monitors and many others who make their lives in these schools. these people work together every day, share their hopes and dreams, trust one another in ways few lawyers or engineers ever do with their colleagues, and become one another’s families. sometimes dysfunctional families, but families nonetheless.and when a school is closed, or teachers are moved around among schools like so many checkers, these families are ripped apart, and those relationships become frayed and torn, never to recover. educational reformers and policy makers don’t seem to understand–or care about–the real, human damage that is done by their decisions.our communities are not characterized by the businesses in them, or by the amount of profit generated within them–our communities are characterized by the number and strength of the human relationships formed between their members. and so are our schools.

 
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

This Ohio Teacher is Running for Office

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
13

Maureen Reedy, a teacher in Ohio for 29 years, was Ohio teacher of the year in 2002. Now she is running for the Ohio House of Representatives.

She deserves the support of every taxpayer, parent, and citizen in Ohio.

She is angry at the waste of taxpayer dollars for bad, deregulated charter schools. Forget what you read in The Economist about the miracle of privately managed charters. As she points out below, half the charter schools in the state are in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 public schools.

She is especially outraged by the rapacious cyber charters. As she points out in this article, two of Ohio’s major charter sponsors have collected nearly a billion dollars of Ohio taxpayer dollars since 1999:

Charter schools are a poor investment of Ohio’s education dollars and have a worse track record than public schools in our state; there are twice as many failing charter schools as successful ones, and one in two charter schools is either in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 traditional public-school buildings. Five of seven of Ohio’s largest electronic-charter-school districts’ graduation rates are lower than the state’s worst public-school system’s graduation rate, and six of seven of the electronic charter schools districts are rated less than effective.

And finally, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow has failed in every identified state category for eight years, a worse track record than the Cleveland City School system, which is under threat of being shut down by the state. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow is run by unlicensed administrators. Lager, in addition to his $3 million salary, earned an additional $12 million funneled through his software company, which sells products to his charter-school corporation. Just how much does the average teacher in the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow earn you may ask? Approximately $34,000 per year.

Why do the Governor and the Legislature look the other way? Why are they quadrupling the number of vouchers and reducing oversight of the state’s troubled charter schools?

That’s easy:

I am appalled at the direct pipeline funneling vital state dollars for our children’s education directly into the pockets of millionaires like David L. Brennan, chief executive officer of White Hat Management ($6 million yearly salary) and William Lager, CEO of the state’s ninth-largest school district, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow ($3 million yearly salary).

Let’s follow the money trail of political contributions by these two for-profit charter-school CEOs to high-ranking GOP legislators. In the past decade, Brennan and Lager have donated a combined $5 million to high-ranking GOP legislators, including Gov. John Kasich, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, House Speaker William G. Batchelder and Sen. Kevin Bacon, chairman of the Senate Committee on Insurance, Commerce and Labor.

Why isn’t the U.S. Department of Education blowing the whistle on these scandals?

Is education reform about improving education or about lining the pockets of campaign contributors?

Not a hard question in Ohio.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Ohio, On-Line Education
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