Gary Rubinstein gave a delightful talk about education reform and its distortions at his alma mater, Tufts University, in April.
It is very enjoyable. Please watch.
Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
Gary Rubinstein: A Short and Powerful History of the Rise and Fall of the Corporate Reform Movement
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Last week, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a report declaring that the market-driven reforms in the New Orleans schools were a success. The formula for success: Get a big hurricane to wipe out a large swath of your city, close down the public schools, fire all the teachers, eliminate the union, get the federal government and foundations to pour in huge sums of money, and voila! A miracle! The miracle of the market!
When watching an illusionist at work, keep your eye on the action. Watch his hands. Or watch what else is happening (I saw an illusionist last year in Las Vegas and still haven’t figured out the tricks he pulled off while everyone watched his hands).
Watch the master illusionists at the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University. They said that the New Orleans corporate takeover was a roaring success. They said it in 2015. They said it again in 2018. Guess what? On the same day that they published their latest study, Betsy DeVos gave them a $10 Million grant to become the National Research Center on School Choice! What a happy coincidence!
Unfortunately for the ERA, Mercedes Schneider figured out the Big Trick.
You see, after the hurricane in 2005, the state created the Recovery School District (RSD) and took control of most of the NOLA schools, turning them over to charter operators. The best schools, however, remained under the control of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB).
The RSD is all-charter. Forty percent of the charters are failing schools. The white kids go to the top-rated charters. The failing schools are almost all-Black.
The best schools in New Orleans are the OPSB schools, some of which are selective-admission charter schools. Not surprisingly, the selective-admission schools have the highest test scores.
The ERA pulled a fast one. In its report, it combined the results of the less-than-stellar RSD with those of the high-performing OPSB.
Schneider titled her post: “How to Make New Orleans Market Ed Reform a Success: Hide RSD Failure Inside an OPSB-RSD Data Blend.”
She writes:
“The problem here is that OPSB schools were never taken over by the state, which means that the New Orleans “failing school” narrative does not include these schools, and that whether they be direct-run or converted to charter schools, OPSB schools have test-score advantages over the “failing” RSD schools taken over by the state. Moreover, a number of OPSB schools are selective-admission charter schools (see also here and here), which gives even more advantage over state-run RSD schools (and which puts a snag in the “open school choice for families” narrative).
“It is the OPSB advantage that allows researches to combine post-Katrina, OPSB and RSD data and actually hide the lack of progress that state-run, all-charter RSD has made, all the while selling a generalized version of New Orleans market-ed-reform success to the public. I have seen this ploy in the past from the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) in its efforts to conceal low ACT composite scores of RSD schools that it was supposed to take over and reform right into higher test scores, and I am seeing it here in the Harris-Larsen study.
”OPSB schools are not only chiefly responsible for the results in the Harris-Larsen study; OPSB schools are concealing the mediocrity (at best) that was the RSD, state-takeover-charter-conversion experiment…”
As it happens, David Leonhardt of the New York Times today published the second part of his two-part encomium about the apotheosis of the New Orleans schools, due entirely to the miracle of the market. Ironically, his article is titled, “A Plea for a Fact-Based Debate About Charter Schools.” Ironic, because he swallows the charter propaganda whole. He apparently doesn’t know that the “miracle” was the result of merging the RSD scores with the OPSB scores. He never acknowledges that 40% of the RSD schools are failing and segregated. He is right, however, that it is time for a fact-based debate about what happened in New Orleans, and his two articles did not contribute to that debate.
Watch the illusionists. Great tricks. Don’t be fooled.
This is a hilarious, must-see video, narrated by Gary Rubinstein, about his life in Teach for America, his disillusionment with Reform, and his collision with Reformers as they set about to remake American education.
I play a minor role in his story, because I too was an apostate, and my turnaround helped him make his own turnaround.
You will see all the stars of Reform, as Gary gives each of them their few seconds of glory and dispatches some of their heroes.
You will also see how he had his own moment of reckoning and developed a passion for calling out lies and propaganda.
It really is delightful and informative.
The moral of the story, he says, is that Tufts University (where he was a student) beats Harvard University (where most of the Reformers were students).
There are lots more morals to the story, and you will see how he skillfully weaves the history of the past 25 or so years together into a slide show.
Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, one of the leading advocacy groups in the Corporate Reform Movement, offers advice and consolation to fellow Reformers.
“After two decades of mostly-forward movement and many big wins, the last few years have been a tough patch for education reform. The populist right has attacked standards, testing, and accountability, with particular emphasis on the Common Core, as well as testing itself. The election of Donald Trump and appointment of Betsy DeVos, meanwhile, have made school choice and charter schools toxic on much of the progressive left. And the 2017 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate a “lost decade” of academic achievement. All of these trends have left policymakers and philanthropists feeling glum about reform, given the growing narrative that, like so many efforts before it, the modern wave hasn’t worked or delivered the goods, yet has produced much friction, fractiousness, and furor.”
Take heart, he says. The children of America need us to privatize their schools, bust teachers’ unions, and Judge their teachers by student test scores. Remember when they all laughed at NCLB, but now “we” know that it was a great success?
It’s true that NAEP scores have been flat for a decade. It’s true that charters close almost as often as they open. It’s true that the charter industry is riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse.
But stick with proven leaders like the hedge fund managers, Bill Gates, and DeVos.
Sorry to be snarky, Mike, but I couldn’t resist.
Tim Slekar of the podcast “Busted Pencils” interviews Carol Burris about privatization and the future of public education in the Trump-DeVos era.
What should progressives do?
Tom Ultican has been documenting the advance of the Destroy Public Education Movement in different cities. Now, he shows, they are pushing into rural areas, into California’s San Joaquin Valley.
“Efforts to privatize public schools in the San Joaquin (pronounced: whah-keen) Valley are accelerating. Five disparate yet mutually reinforcing groups are leading this destroy public education (DPE) movement. For school year 2017-2018, Taxpayers sent $11.5 billion to educate K-12 students in the valley and a full $1 billion of that money was siphoned off to charter schools. This meant that education funding for 92% of students attending public schools has been significantly reduced on a per student basis.
“In July 2017, California’s State Superintendent of Education, Tom Torlakson, announced that the revised 2017-2018 budget for K-12 education totaled $92.5 billion. Dividing this number by the total of students enrolled statewide provides an average spending per enrolled student ($14,870). The spending numbers reported above were found by multiplying $14,870 by the number of students enrolled.
“The five groups motivating the privatization of public schools are:
“People who want taxpayer supported religious schools.
“Groups who want segregated schools.
“Entrepreneurs profiting from school management and school real estate deals.
“The technology industry using wealth and lobbying power to place products into schools and support technology driven charter schools.
“Ideologues who fervently believe that market-based solutions are always superior.
“The Big Valley
“The San Joaquin Valley is America’s top agricultural producing region, sometimes called “the nation’s salad bowl” for the great array of fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. Starting near the port of Stockton, the valley is 250 miles long and is bordered on the west by coastal mountain ranges. Its eastern boundary is part of the southern two-thirds of the Sierra bioregion, which features Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. The valley ends at the San Gabriel Mountains in the south.
“Seven counties (Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Merced, Tulare, Kings, Fresno and Kern) govern the valley. Its three major cities are Fresno (population 525,000), Stockton (population 310,000) and Bakersfield (population 380,000). The entire valley has a population of more than 4 million with 845,369 K-12 students enrolled for the 2017-2018 school year….
“In her 2017 report on California’s out of control charter school system, Carol Burris made a point about the unsavory nature of the independent study charter school. She pointed out that these schools have poor attendance, and terrible graduation rates. Unfortunately, they are easy to set up and very profitable. Of all the independent study charters, the virtual charters have the worst performance data and are widely seen as fraudulent. About one-third of the valley’s charters are independent study and half of those are virtual.”
This is a thoughtful and important article by Mark Weber (aka Jersey Jazzman), who teaches in public school in New Jersey and is earning his doctorate in statistics at Rutgers.
He notes that both the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the New York Post were outraged–outraged!–that NJ Governor Phil Murphy plans to abandon the PARCC exam, which is aligned with the Common Core. They accuse Murphy of kowtowing to the lousy teachers’ unions and trying to dumb down the test.
But he points out that PARCC and NJ’s previous standardized test (NJASK) produced the same results.
This is worth your while to read as you will learn a lot about standardized testing and its limitations.
Ed Johnson is an Atlanta community activist who is deeply concerned about the corporate reform takeover of the school board.
He wrote this open letter to the school board:
10 July 2018
Atlanta Mayor’s first-ever Chief Education Officer, an alum of TFA and BCG
Yesterday The Atlanta Voice reported that Atlanta’s new Mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, has hired Aliya Bhatia to be the city’s first-ever Chief Education Officer.
Unsurprisingly, Bhatia comes into the job by way of Teach for America (TFA), Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Harvard University. BCG is known to charge exuberant fees for cookie-cutter-like recommendations to downsize and privatize public services and for being a danger to public education.
According to The Atlanta Voice (my emphasis):
“As Chief Education Officer, Bhatia will work with community stakeholders to improve collaboration and identify and advocate for policies and resources that will improve access to high-quality education for all Atlantans.”
“Bhatia will also be tasked with creating a citywide Children’s Savings Account program for every child entering kindergarten and with working across city government to ensure that public schools are a priority for infrastructure investment and public safety.
“‘Quality education can transform lives. Aliya Bhatia’s experience, passion, and commitment to creating high-quality, accessible educational opportunities will allow her to effectively partner with APS [Atlanta Public Schools] and other education and industry leaders from throughout the community as we work to improve access to education and training for all of our children and residents,’ Bottoms said.
“A native of metro Atlanta, Bhatia started her career as a teacher with Teach for America and later joined the Boston Consulting Group as an associate and consultant. She recently completed her master’s degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University[.]
“The search for this position was led by two members of Mayor Bottom’s transition team: Bill Rogers, Chairman & CEO of SunTrust Banks and Virginia Hepner, former CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center.”
So now we have Mayor Bottoms leading Atlantans to believe it is necessary to “improve access to high-quality education.” Such messaging typically exemplifies the language school choice and school reform proponents so often use to bamboozle and sucker especially Black parents and others into selfishly demanding charter schools on the pretense charter schools are public schools.
Charter schools are not public schools; they are private entities that suckle public school funds for profit and thereby necessarily help destroy public schools and public education. Top priority for charter schools requires making money off children; no profit, no school. Thus saying “high-quality education” is very different from saying “high-quality public education.” Besides, what does “high-quality” mean, anyway? Or even low-quality?
Mayor Bottoms’ messaging implicitly argues that charter schools naturally provide “high-quality education” because, after all, they are like private schools and private schools always provide “high-quality education,” unlike public schools. Therefore, it is never necessary to improve charter schools; it is only necessary to “improve access” to them, which generally means having more of them. In contrast, access to public schools is a given, and public schools have always stood to be improved, continually. Disturbingly, however, charter schools are about replacement of public schools, not about improvement of public schools.
Atlanta City Council President and Members advised what was coming
On 20 April 2018, in a separate email to Atlanta City Council President Felicia Moore, Post 1 At Large Council Member Michael Julian Bond, Post 3 At Large Council Member Andre Dickens, and District 4 Council Member Cleta Winslow, my district representative, I wrote:
Today I became aware of the [Mayor’s] “confidential” search for a City of Atlanta Chief Education Officer per the attachment, enclosed by linked reference.
The search bespeaks entangling City of Atlanta in Atlanta Public Schools Leadership’s continuing actions to expand school choice as a consumer good, to include inciting profit-making opportunities for private investors, rather than work on improving public education as a common good. Consequences for Black children, as a category attending Atlanta Public Schools, is education made worse for them and their learning resilience virtually destroyed. These consequences have become quite apparent during just the past three years.
Therefore, I wish to meet with you in your role [on Atlanta City Council]. I wish to share and discuss perspectives and understandings about the matter that otherwise may go unconsidered.
I can be available to meet at a time and a place convenient for you. Kindly let me know, won’t you?
Only Councilman Andre Dickens bothered to respond, explaining he had not “seen the application. The new mayor has stated during her campaign that she plans to hire an education liaison role that reports to her under her office. She has the discretion to hire staff that she sees fit as long as it fits in the budget.”
Given his explanation, Councilman Dickens then intimated disinterest in meeting.
Nonetheless, on 22 April 2018, I followed up to Councilman Dickens, with copy to various others that included all council members:
Yes, I know it is Atlanta Mayor’s personal decision to add to the staff of the Office of the Mayor various positions by whatever title, including the position titled “Chief Education Officer.” And that is the concern. The Mayor’s “Position Description for the Position of Chief Education Officer, City of Atlanta” reads as if the Atlanta superintendent [Meria Carstarphen, Ed.D.], or a devotee of hers, such as the one elected last year to Atlanta City Council from having served one term on the Atlanta school board [that being TFA alum Matt Westmoreland], may have written it or controlled the hand that wrote it.
Atlanta Mayor’s position description for Chief Education Officer, City of Atlanta, is, without question, pregnant with school choice and school reform language the superintendent and her devotee are known to speak and work to make happen. Consequently, the position description strongly intimates the Mayor seeks a person of low moral and ethical integrity who, if hired, will further normalize and expand the superintendent’s school choice ideology and machinations that target especially Black parents to become willing, selfish participants in destroying public education in Atlanta for all children and in destroying Atlanta Public Schools as a public good.
Surely you will agree “education liaison” connotes a very different expectation than does “Chief Education Officer.” The former connotes assisting communications and cooperation and such; arguably, involvement. The latter connotes command and control, as by “governance and outcome targets,” as you say; arguably, entanglement.
Besides, the title “Chief Education Officer” is generally understood to mean, in corporate-speak, the top administrator of a local education agency; for example, Chief Education Officer of Chicago Public Schools. However, City of Atlanta is not a local education agency.
Moreover, alarmingly, Atlanta Mayor’s position description for Chief Education Officer, City of Atlanta, allows a “camel’s nose in the tent” to institute quasi-mayoral control of Atlanta Public Schools in a way that can effectively skirt City Council’s lawmaking authority and responsibility. City of Atlanta quasi-mayoral control of APS will have a structure like that of, for example, DC Public Schools, but without the necessity of being codified, thus allowing for democratic ideals and proceedings to be undermined to benefit private interests at the expense of public interests. Not surprisingly, the politics of mayoral control of DCPS are known to precipitate fraud and ethical and moral lapses as normal behavior, as the recently fired DCPS Chancellor, Antwan Wilson, demonstrates.
Expect City of Atlanta quasi-mayoral control of Atlanta Public Schools to be, at least, a first step for the superintendent to begin doing away with the publicly elected Atlanta Board of Education. After all, the superintendent once brassily intimated to Atlanta school board members during a public board meeting that the school board is in her way.
Finally, it is interesting to note Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, will eventually find itself on the trailing edge of the nation’s emerging rejection of bipartisan Bush-Obama-DeVos school choice and school reform ideology. Witness, for example, recent teacher strikes and walk-outs in several cities and states. This should not come as a surprise. People beaten down will take only so much. Atlanta, especially, should know this, and should have learned the lessons by now.
Why must being on the trailing edge be the case for Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca? Why did Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, even allow the “camel’s nose in the tent” that is Atlanta Public Schools in the first place by hiring a pro-school choice superintendent [Meria Carstarphen]? Why now allow that camel’s nose into the tent that is the Office of the Mayor? What has Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, yet to learn about lack of authentic education that sustains intergenerational cycles of servitude, hence poverty?
Should you change your mind and wish to meet to discuss more about the Mayor’s “Position Description for the Position of Chief Education Officer, City of Atlanta,” I can be available; it’s up to you. In the meantime, I, as a reasonable person, believe the public has a need to know about this, hence my Bcc (which is a way to avoid displaying a very long list of cluttering email addresses and is not meant to imply secrecy; people Bcc’ed may reply or not as they wish).
Perhaps one now knows why one would have been wise to put aside ones Black racialist ideology during last year’s mayoral runoff election in order to cast a rational, well-informed vote for Mary Norwood.
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA| edwjohnson@aol.com
Bcc: List 2
Cory Booker has long been an ally of the corporate reformers.
Booker was hooked up with BAEO and the Bradley Foundation around Milwaukee vouchers as far back as 2001. Has he changed his mind? Does he still support vouchers? If so, he will give Trump a run for his money among the evangelicals who are the primary beneficiaries of vouchers.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/content/fruit-poisoned-tree-hard-rights-plan-capture-newark-nj
And here is a contemporary defense of Booker in “The Atlantic,” where we learn more about his deep ties to DFER and education “reform.” Why do liberals hate Booker? So what if Wall Street loves him and he loves them back? So what if he and Chris Christie are best buddies? So what if he loves Privatizing public schools?
If you should ever have the chance, please ask Senator Booker if he still supports vouchers. Ask him if he has any ideas to help the 85% of America’s kids who attend public schools, not charters or voucher schools.
Nancy Bailey reports on Betsy DeVos’ trip to Europe and what she learned: Nothing. She returned convinced that American education sucks, which is what she thought before she left for Europe.
She returned convinced that education is workplace preparation, that public schools must be destroyed along with the teaching profession.
Can this GERM be quarantined?
Diane Ravitch's blog 