The privatization movement has swung into high gear.
Many people find it hard to understand why so many Wall Street hedge fund managers and equity investors have suddenly become interested in public education.
No one ever went wrong by following the money.
Who wins? Who loses?
And another important issue: where is the evidence that privatization improves education or saves money? Or does it save money while making education worse?
The Washington Post has a good article about the aggressive way that the Obama administration has imposed its education agenda in the past three+ years.
The article notes, almost in passing, that there is no evidence for the success of any part of this agenda. No one will know for many years whether the Obama program of testing, accountability, and choice will improve education.
When reading the article, it is easy to forget that the U.S. Department of Education was not created to impose any “reforms” on the nation’s schools. It was created to send federal aid to hard-pressed districts that enrolled many poor children.
When the Department was created in 1980, there were vigorous debates about whether there might one day be federal control of the schools. The proponents of the idea argued that this would never happen. It has not happened until now because Democrats and Republicans agreed that they didn’t want the other party to control the nation’s schools.
But now that the Obama administration has embraced the traditional Republican ideas of competition, choice, testing and accountability, there is no more arguing about federal control. Republicans are quite willing to allow a Democratic administration to push the states to allow more privately managed schools, to impose additional testing, and to crush teachers’ unions.
Republicans would never have gotten away with this agenda at any time in the past three decades. The Democrats who controlled Congress would never have allowed it to happen.
Who would have imagined that it would take a Democratic President to promote privatization, for-profit schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and a host of other ideas (like rolling back the hard-won rights of teachers) that used to be only on the GOP wish-list?
Count on Stephanie Simon of Reuters to get the story that eluded every other reporter.
She is the one that got the inside story on Louisiana, TFA, and for-profit investors.
Now she has the scoop on Chicago.
The strike in Chicago is not about money.
It is a national story.
It’s about the survival of public education.
Read her story.
A group of 30 organizations associated with corporate reform wrote a letter to Secretary Arne Duncan to insist that he hold teacher education programs accountable for the test scores of the students taught by their graduates.
Groups like Teach for America, StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform (the Wall Street hedge fund managers), The New Teacher Project, various charter chains, Jeb Bush’s rightwing Chiefs for Change and his Foundation for Educational Excellence, and various and sundry groups that love teaching to the test stand together as one.
Their views are in direct opposition to those of the leaders of higher education, who oppose this extension of federal control into their institutions.
Read Gary Rubinstein’s blog about it here, where you will see the full cast of corporate reform characters, many of them funded by the Gates Foundation.
They are certain that what minority students need most is more testing. They want the test scores of the students to determine the career and livelihood of their teachers. And they want the federal government to punish the schools of education that prepared the teachers of these children.
If Duncan takes their advice, he will assume the power to penalize schools of education if the students of their graduates can’t raise their test scores every year.
The vise of standardized testing will tighten around public education.
These people and these organizations are wrong. They are driving American education in a destructive direction. They will reduce children to data points, as the organizations thrive. Wasn’t a decade of NCLB enough for them?
They are on the wrong side of history. They may be flying high now, but their ideas hurt children and ruin the quality of education.
As a historian, I can assure you that the roots of the current “reform” movement are on the far right. Vouchers began with Milton Friedman in 1955; charters began in 1988 with liberal origins, but were quickly adopted by the right as a substitute for vouchers because voters always defeated voucher proposals. The attacks on teachers’ unions are out of the rightwing playbook. The demands for test-based accountability did not originate in the Democratic party. The effort to remove all job protections–seniority, tenure, the right to due process–did not originate with liberal thinkers or policymakers, but can be traced to the Reagan administration and even earlier to rightwing Republicans who never wanted any unions or job protections for workers. The embrace of privatization and for-profit schooling is neither liberal nor Democratic.
How this happened is a long story.
No matter who supports this agenda, it is not bipartisan. It originated in the ideology of the rightwing extreme of the GOP. Its goal is privatization.
This reader notes the long list of Democrats who have adopted the rightwing GOP agenda:
It’s not just right wing states and politicians that want to harass teachers.
Plenty of Dems are in on the fun.
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is a nominal Democrat who never saw a teacher he didn’t look upon with suspicion or a test company he didn’t want to give a contract to.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is leading the charge in teacher demonization efforts in the Midwest, and I would argue that his anti-union, anti-teacher track record is beginning to rival that of his brethren to the north, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan.
Emanuel is a Democrat in name and once led the DCCC when Dems took back the House of Representatives.
Congressman George Miller, who chairs the House Education Committee, is a Democrat but like Bennet in the Senate, he too never met a teacher he felt could be trusted to teach without “high stakes accountability measures” imposed from afar.
Cory Booker is a Democrat who is currently engaged in the wholesale privatization of the Newark school system. He’s got buddies in the hedge funds and Wall Street who bankroll him, he’s great friends with Chris Christie and loves Christie’s privatization efforts at the state level and his demonization of teachers and teachers unions in the media. That won’t stop Booker from running against Christie for governor next year, however, so those of us who live in NJ can expect privatization of the schools no matter who wins – Christie or Booker.
Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg were all nominal Democrats before they embarked upon their teacher demonization/school privatization agendas as well.
And of course the Democratic politician who has had the most impact in the teacher demonization/school privatization effort is Barack Obama – from Race to the Top to Central Falls, Rhode Island to Race to the Top II: The Municipal Version to Race to the Top III: The District Version, few politicians have been as successful at bringing teacher evaluations tied to test scores and changes to tenure laws or promoting a broad expansion of high stakes testing in every grade in every subject, K-12, as Barack Obama.
I wish it were simply right wingers and Republicans out to harass teachers who were the problem. Unfortunately, because both parties take money from the same corporate masters, politicians in both parties are out to give those masters what they ultimately want when it comes to public education – a privatized system with busted unions, cheap labor costs, and lots and lots of opportunities to cash in on the latest ed buzz craze (these days that being the Common Core Federal Standards, the tests that are going to be aligned to those standards and the test prep materials that are going to be needed to get students prepared for those tests.)
A reader discovered the agenda for a big conference of equity investors, technology corporations, and supportive foundations.
A high-level official of the U.S. Department of Education will be there too.
Folks, read the agenda.
Public education is up for grabs.
Lots of corporations are licking their chops.
This is scary.
Remember reading about “the Great Barbecue,” in the late nineteenth century?
That’s when greedy men plundered the public treasury. .
Are the public schools now on the spit?
So much money, all guaranteed by the government.
Now we will see how entrepreneurs reform our schools and get rich too.
The reader writes:
My friends at The Chalkface have thrown themselves into the fight to support public education, with a radio show, videos, and blogs.
Now they let you know–in language you won’ t hear from me–about the latest reformer attack on teacher education. The reformers want Arne Duncan to ignore the objections of major institutions of higher education. They want him to adopt regulations that would judge teacher education programs by the test scores of the students of their graduates.
Got that. The test scores of the students taught by the graduates of these institutions.
This is guaranteed to make teaching to the test the official doctrine of American education, top to bottom. It means imposing NCLB on higher education.
It is absurd. It is reckless. It is ___________. (Fill in the blank.)
Education Week has an article by the always well-informed Alyson Klein that speculates about Romney’s possible choice for Secretary of Education.
The possibilities include:
Jeb Bush, former Florida governor, who shaped the Romney agenda for privatization of the nation’s schools;
Tom Luna, the state superintendent in Idaho who is known for his allegiance to online corporations and his efforts to increase class size;
Joel Klein, the former chancellor of NYC, now selling technology for Rupert Murdoch, another supporter of privatization and opponent of unions, seniority and tenure;
Michelle Rhee, leader of a national campaign to remove all tenure, seniority and collective bargaining fromt teachers;
Chris Cerf, acting commission in New Jersey, who is leading Chris Christie’s push to privatize public schools in that state;
Here is the big surprise:
Arne Duncan, who is seen by Republicans as compatible with Romney’s agenda and, as the article, says, eager to stay on.
There are other names, but it is interesting to realize that at least four of the six listed here are allegedly, nominally Democrats.
A teacher in Boynton Beach sent me a letter he wrote to President Obama in 2010, trying to explain why merit pay doesn’t work. Obviously, no one at the White House or the U.S. Department of Education agrees with him. Since 2010, matters have gotten even worse, especially in Florida, where the Legislature mandated merit pay and provided no funding for it. No one at the White House or the U.S. Department of Education or the Florida legislature or any of the conservative governors seems to know or care that merit pay is not supported by evidence. They just like it, and it doesn’t matter that it never works.
Dear President Obama,
It appears my worst fears on the issue of teacher merit pay are now beginning to be realized – as a direct result of your administration’s general support and Race to the Top incentives for the concept. As such, I am re-sending this letter, originally sent the 2nd week of August, 2009 and again six weeks later due to no response. I believe the importance of this argument and its growing urgency justify my doing so.
Please allow me to begin by expressing my great, heartfelt appreciation for all you have undertaken and done so far in your still-young administration – particularly in these urgent and challenging times.
With this said, I feel conflicted – and, as an inner-city public high school teacher, compelled – to express my concern for one of your educational reform proposals. As I understand it, your announced support for a teacher merit pay plan is, I feel, misplaced. The concept of teacher merit pay is itself fundamentally ill conceived and corrosive in its societal, professional, and personal potential effects.
Please let me explain why. In its simplest and most positive reading, merit pay offers monetary rewards and public recognition to teachers of outstanding, measurable excellence and, possibly, effort. Since the number of teachers so honored will inevitably be limited in any given year, the program will create a much larger pool of non-recipients, many of whom will be hard working, praise-worthy teachers, who will automatically be labeled, at best, “average,” and at worst, “inferior,” or “substandard.” You, in fact, note and apparently endorsed this perception when speaking of educational reforms generally and this plan specifically, as you said in March of 2009: “We need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. That means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom.”
There are teachers who are incompetent or ineffective; I agree that they should be removed. Fair ways to assess such performance already exist. I doubt there is a school district anywhere without an established procedure for removing underperforming teachers. A teacher merit pay program, however, by its inescapable “praise some, condemn the rest” dynamic, is an improper and unfair method of doing this. Judiciously standardizing and enforcing the process of identifying and removing underperforming teachers is, I believe, a worthy and honest federal Department of Education goal. A merit pay plan as a means to do this is neither.
Because a merit pay program will create the impression among parents and students alike that there are a few good teachers, and the rest are inferior, the recognized teachers will be in greatest demand, not only at their schools but at other intra-district schools, inter-district schools, or even other states or organizations. A bidding war for such recognized teachers would no doubt be good for those teachers,
but a potential disaster for their school and community, especially if such teachers leave. Moreover, you immediately put every other teacher in an untenable position. What are they to say to those parents and students who now find they have to settle for those “inferior” educators? A plan that fosters a symbiotic relationship between school and community goals is, I believe, a worthy DOE goal. A merit pay program will do the opposite.
Professionally, the actual process of determining who deserves the merit pay is problematic in every respect. Whatever criteria are ultimately used, with whatever weight or priority assigned to each, some group of trained, objective and competent individuals must devote time and energy to the process – time and energy that, one can argue, should be better spent.
Insofar as the actual assessment goes, various methods – both objective and subjective – exist, each with their own advantages and shortcomings. Ultimately, however, it will almost inevitably include some form of student testing. Few teachers, administrators, parents or students would welcome yet more mandated testing. It has been a profoundly sad and questionable effect of the No Child Left Behind Act that mandated testing has gradually displaced – and sometimes altogether eliminated – virtually all other educational goals and their affiliated programs. Many of these endangered and terminated programs offer individualized student options for success; toward workforce ready skill- sets in career areas the student shows an interest, ability and desire in –frequently involving academically empowered technical training. Indeed, as authors Kenneth Gray and Edwin Herr expose in their book, Other Ways to Win, and Thomas Freidman reinforces in The World Is Flat, the virtually exclusive educational focus preparing all students for a four-year college degree leaves many students behind. In fact, the authors suggest, workforce areas of high demand today are increasingly underserved as a direct result.
I am heartened that past comments you have made suggest your awareness of some of the NCLB program’s dubious effects. The truth is that standardized tests, however valid, in no way connote standardized classroom challenges for the teacher. How then is a program to account for – and equalize for the sake of fairly assessing teacher merit – the wholly disparate nature of classes even across the day for the same teacher, let alone the myriad combinations and differences otherwise? Until a merit pay plan’s “hows” and “whys” are understood; until it demonstrates it recognizes and respects the distinct conditions under which teachers teach, you cannot expect teachers to endorse it. I can only hope you demonstrate the esteem for teacher unions that you have claimed you have for teachers. Their notable absence of input in the NCLB program’s design and mechanics correlates directly with the current teacher and administrator lack of support for, and frustration with it today.
In a July, 2008 speech to the National Education Association, regarding your support for merit pay you said, “Now I know this wasn’t necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year, but I said it then and I’m saying it again now because it’s what I believe and I will always be an honest partner to you in the White House.” With the vast majority of teachers against the merit pay idea, a consensus among partners is badly needed. A drive to collate and assess our nation’s teachers’ greatest local pressures and challenges could be a DOE goal toward creating such a consensus. A merit pay plan that will exacerbate teachers’ pressures and challenges will divide, not unite us.
On the personal level, a merit pay plan risks humiliation, frustration, invalidation, and dissention and rancor among the many for the benefit of the few. The attrition rate among new teachers is probably the highest among any professional group, not because they have been deemed incompetent, but because the effort, energy, time and work they give; the grief and thanklessness they receive quickly burn people out, and certainly aren’t worth the pay they get for it. Submitting to a federally sanctioned stigma of merit “non-recognition”, one might be able to tell oneself, does not necessarily mean I am a failure or my performance is sub-standard. But it surely offers no prospect of validation.
Teachers are taught that a student’s self-image matters. I would suggest this is true of adults and teachers too. And human nature being what it is, where a merit pay process perceives an individual as exemplary, but a number of their coworkers do not, dissonance and bad feelings are unavoidable.
Teaching is also a learning process. Many young teachers, some of whom undoubtedly have enormous potential, capitulate to the difficulties and leave early. Merit pay will only hasten their departure and further challenge all teachers’ perspectives.
For each of the reasons stated above I urge you to reconsider your support for teacher merit pay. I am aware my concern may be viewed as premature, since no actual plan has yet been publically proposed. One is anticipated, though, based on your oft-repeated support for it. As a teacher I understand that we, with administrators, are the system’s “front line”. As such, we answer to the rules, regulations and processes expected of us. But accountability, the current touchstone for education generally and teachers specifically, is not value-neutral. One is never “held accountable” for success or any positive outcome. Inasmuch the NCLB heralds “the arrival of accountability” to education, it insidiously suggests the system has heretofore been negligent. Cast in such light, an adversarial dynamic is created among the various players, with teachers again on the front line. Problematic assessment programs are themselves never held to account for either the pall they cast over the system or for the dysfunctional dynamics they foster; we teachers, almost exclusively, are.
Of all the ideas I’ve heard put forth for reforming and improving our public education system, none strike me as more prescient or promising than yours for universal preschool programs. As Geoffrey Canada has demonstrated with Harlem Children’s Zone and you have said, “research shows that early experiences shape whether a child’s brain develops strong skills for future learning, behavior and success. Without a strong base on which to build, children, particularly disadvantaged children, will be behind long before they reach kindergarten.” If a merit pay plan is to be mandated, it should be put in place only after the universal preschool program you propose has become the norm. Many of the students at my high school, a large number of whom are children of recently arrived immigrants, come without the strong base you describe. As a result, my school, as assessed by the system, faltered this past year (2008-2009). We now face the full impact of the accounting’s consequences. We will now narrow our focus even more to teach to the tests, and in the process lose the educational forest for the trees.
President Obama, I believe in your goals for our nation. For improving our educational system, however, teacher merit pay is completely counterproductive.
Thanking you for your consideration, I remain Sincerely Yours,
Martin Ginsberg martygraaa@yahoo.com
P.S. In Florida, Republican sponsored and partisan-passed Senate Bill 6 and its companion House Bill created great turmoil and stress – while exacerbating the “adversarial dynamic” mentioned above. Governor Crist vetoed it today as the Republican Party chair in the Florida Senate vowed to reintroduce it. It appears Georgia is now in the process of following suit.
We have seen this story again and again. A lawsuit against the charters in New Orleans and the District of Columbia filed on behalf of children with disabilities. A charter school in Minneapolis that literally pushed out 40 children with special needs, part of a pattern in which the nation’s largest charter chain–the Gulen-affiliated schools–keep their test scores high by excluding students with disabilities. Study after study showing that charters take fewer children with disabilities. Even a federal study by the GAO documenting that charter schools have a smaller proportion of children with special needs, to which the relevant federal official responded with a yawn and a promise to look into it someday.
And now the AP has documented the widespread practice, in which charters take fewer students with special needs, take those with the mildest disabilities, and harm the public schools that are expected to educate a disproportionate share of the neediest, most expensive to educate children.
As this movement, this industry, continues to grow, aided by lavish federal and foundation funding, abetted by a thriving for-profit sector, we must ask the same questions again and again: What is the end game? Are charters becoming enclaves for those who want to avoid “those children”? Will we one day have a dual school system for haves and have-nots? Will our public school system become a dumping ground for those unwanted by the charters?
And why is the U.S. Department of Education not asking these questions?
