About a year ago I was invited to Portland to
give a talk about who was bashing teachers and public schools in the wake of the release of the pro-charter propaganda film
Waiting for Stupidman.
Since then, it's been a year from hell for many teachers; at times it
seems the people making education policy have completely lost their
minds, and the attacks on public schools and those who work in them or
rely on them have morphed in ugly and sometimes dangerous ways.
But it's also been a year of pushback, heroic resistance, and movement
building. There are cracks in the corporate reform movement, recently
reflected in the collapse of the coalition that supported NCLB, and
there are signs of resistance everywhere (e.g. recent Tacoma strike).
So today I want to take a closer look at the corporate school reform
movement because I think it can help expose where that movement is
vulnerable to the most hopeful development of the past year, and that's
the steady growth of a deep, broad and at times quite militant pushback
against corporate reform.
There's been some discussion about whether the phrase "corporate school
reform" is the right label for a set of proposals coming from private
foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton and their well-funded partners
in elite corporate, media, and political circles. Some call it "market
reform" or "neo-liberal reform." Some call it "de-form" instead of
"re-form." Some call it "Rhee-form" with an R-h-e-e for Michelle Rhee,
one of its most high profile representatives. I think my own favorite
term is "reforminess," a label borrowed from comedian Stephen Colbert's
rightwing TV persona whose beliefs and ideas are strongly held but have
only a tenuous connection to reality, a quality he calls "truthiness."
[BTW, even though I'm a big Colbert fan, you may have noticed his show
has a steady stream of "reformy" heroes as guests:
Kopp/Canada/Rhee/Guggenheim. It's because one of Colbert's chief
producers is the wife of the self-appointed education pundit and
corporate reform cheerleader Jonathan Alter.]
The corporate reformers like to call themselves just the "reformers" and
counterpose themselves to the "status quo." And there's no doubt that
the corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label
as "education reformers." If you support testing, charters, merit pay,
the elimination of tenure and seniority, and control of school policy
by corporate managers you're a "reformer." If you support increased
school funding, collective bargaining, and control of school policy by
educators, you're a "defender of the status quo."
This bears no resemblance to reality or to the substance of the issues
under debate. As Seattle's own parent activist Sue Peters put it so
well in a blog post a few months ago, "The current crowd of education
reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as
'defenders of the status quo.' Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not a defender of the status quo in public education because the
status quo is currently a beleaguered, underfunded system [that] has
been ravaged by damaging policies...pushed by those who want to
privatize our public schools."
Now I've also spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed
institutions and policies of public education—as a teacher, an
education activist, and a policy advocate. Rethinking Schools has been
pressing for radical reform of public education since it was started 25
years ago. But with debate about education policy now sharply
politicized and polarized, it's important to be specific about the
policies we oppose and why, and the alternatives we need to address the
very real problems our schools face.
So I'm going to use "corporate reform" to describe a specific set of
specific policy proposals and political forces driving current education
policy at the state and federal level. This corporate reform movement
advocates the following:
- Increased test-based evaluation of students, teachers, and schools of education.
- Elimination or weakening of tenure and seniority rights.
- An end to pay for experience or advanced degrees.
- Closing schools deemed low performing and their replacement by publicly funded, but privately run charters.
- Replacing governance by local school boards with various forms of mayoral and state takeover or private management.
- Vouchers and tax credit subsidies for private school tuition.
- Increases in class size, sometimes tied to the firing of 5-10% of the teaching staff.
- Implementation of common core standards and something called
"college and career readiness" as a standard for high school graduation.
These proposals are currently being promoted by reams of foundation
reports, well-funded think tanks, a proliferation of Astroturf political
groups and canned legislation from the rightwing
American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC).
Together these strategies use the testing regime that is the main engine
of corporate reform to extend the narrow standardization of curricula
and scripted classroom practice that we've seen under NCLB, and to drill
down even further into the fabric of schooling to transform the
teaching profession and create a less experienced, less secure, less
stable, and less expensive professional staff. Where NCLB used test
scores to impose sanctions on schools and sometimes students (e.g.,
grade retention, diploma denial), increasingly test-based sanctions are
targeted at teachers.
Alongside these efforts to change the way schools and classrooms
function, a larger social/political goal is reflected in the attacks on
collective bargaining rights, union rights, and the permanent crisis of
school funding across the country. These policies undermine public
education and seek to replace it with a market-based system that will do
for schooling what the market has done for health care, housing, and
the labor market, produce fabulous profits and give opportunities for a
few and unequal outcomes and access for the many.
It's been stunning to see this play out in my home state of New Jersey
where I was a high school teacher for 30 years before going to work for
New Jersey's
Education Law Center,
one of the nation's most successful legal advocacy projects for funding
equity. Since I left the classroom five years ago, I've worked at ELC
on reform issues growing out of a landmark funding equity case called
Abbott.
For those not familiar with Abbott, it's worth noting briefly that for
ten years, roughly between 1998 and 2008, New Jersey's Abbott decisions
produced the highest funding levels in the country for poor urban
districts. Some 30 districts with about 350,000 schoolchildren received
per-pupil parity with the richest districts in a state that ranked at
or near the top in school spending. They also received extra funding
for supplemental programs including full-day, high-quality pre-school
for 3 and 4-year olds, reduced class size, extended school days and
years, concentrated early literacy programs, a multi-billion program of
school construction, and an unprecedented set of health and social
service supports. The Abbott districts were the only place I know where
the kind of wraparound supports now universally praised in Geoffrey
Canada's Harlem Children Zone, which gets two-thirds of its funding from
private sources, were mandated for all high-needs students and
sustained, at least for a while, with public dollars.
This funding helped lay the basis for progress that was described by
Linda Darling Hammond in a chapter in her most recent book,
The Flat World and Education. She described New Jersey's public education system as one that:
- Ranked in the top 5 states in every grade and subject tested by the National Asessment of Educational Progress.
- Was one of the few states that had significantly reduced achievement gaps as measured by test score terms.
- Saw its African-American and Hispanic students outscore the average student in California.
- Had the highest overall graduation rate in the country.
- Had the #1 high school graduation rate for Hispanic students and the #2 rate for African-American students
- Accomplished all this in a strong teacher union state where 45% of
the public school population is comprised of students of color.
Yet almost none of this was any defense against a fierce corporate
reform attack on teachers and public education over the past two years.
Fueled by NCLB's test and punish accountability system, the mainstream
conversation has been all about public school failure and the need to
reduce the power of educators over school policy while increasing the
power of corporate managers and political bureaucracies. The attack has
been led by Governor Chris Christie, a Republican protégé of Karl
Rove—who is to education reform what MTV's Jersey Shore is to
culture—and more recently by Chris Cerf—former CEO of the private
education management firm Edison Schools and deputy chancellor under
Joel Klein in NYC—who is now Christie's Education Commissioner.
Alongside these efforts to change the way
schools and classrooms function, a larger social/political goal is
reflected in the attacks on collective bargaining rights, union rights,
and the permanent crisis of school funding across the country.
The corporate reform campaign in New Jersey at times has reached bizarre
media circus levels. It has involved everyone from Oprah to Mark
Zuckerberg to Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the entire cast of WfS. The
campaign covers the whole range of bad ideas from privatized charters to
vouchers to test-based merit pay to attacks on union bargaining rights
to massive intervention by unaccountable private foundations in the
design and implementation of public education policy.
Two things have been painfully clear throughout this sustained attack on public education in New Jersey:
- Deep racial and class inequality remains the Achilles heel of public education.
New Jersey has a better equity record than most states, but the race
and class divisions remain stark and appalling; fourth most segregated,
the best black/Latino high school graduation rates in the country are
still 20-30 points below rates for whites. One decade of Abbott progress
was not enough to erase huge gaps in achievement and opportunity
created by decades of separate and unequal schooling and, for young
people of color, the school-to-prison pipeline is still a far greater
reality in their lives than the mostly hollow college for all rhetoric.
This inequality is the entry point that allows the corporate reform
virus to enter and attack the entire system.
- This attack on New Jersey's public education system has been
immeasurably strengthened and legitimized by the Obama/Duncan
Administration. Last April, Secretary of Education Duncan came
to New Jersey. [It was about two years after some of us dreamed that
Linda Darling-Hammond might be named Secretary of Education after an
election many of us were desperately hoping we had won]. Duncan came on
the same day that the New Jersey Supreme Court heard ELC's challenge to
Governor Christie's $1.6 billion in school aid cuts. He came to Newark
to talk about education reform. But he failed to say a single word
about the Governor's cuts, which were so drastic the New Jersey State
Supreme Court ultimately ordered $500 million restored for urban
schools. Instead, Duncan staged a photo op with Christie and embraced
him as a "partner" in his education reform efforts. In response,
Christie said, "Secretary Duncan and I have a lot of common views
and interests on the school reform agenda. What he and the president are
doing is making possible the kind of reforms that are happening in New
Jersey, that are happening in other states."We've seen this again and again (Central Falls/Raleigh...Obama's broken picket promise...Ohio, Ill., Indiana, Colorado).
Like a lot of us here today, I suspect, I supported Obama in 2008 out
of a desperate desire to see an end to the era of war, hate, lies, and
greed that flourished under George Bush and Republican rule. And the
fact that Obama's administration has a bigger achievement gap between
its policies and its rhetoric than any public school you've ever seen
has no doubt been a contributing factor to the political funk
progressive forces have been in for the past few years. The only thing
more demoralizing than losing is thinking you've won only to find out
you haven't.
But anyone who has followed the development of NCLB and corporate
education reform knows it has always been a bipartisan project. And the
support that the Obama Administration has given to corporate reform has
been a major factor in its ascendency. It has also greatly facilitated
the attempt of the hedgehogs, private foundations and billionaires who
are driving the corporate education reform movement to attach their
agenda of union busting, privatization, and test-based accountability to
the needs of poor communities who have been poorly served by the
current system.
This fall, instead of WfS, we have Steven Brill's book
Class Warfare,
which pretty much is to reporting on education policy what WfS was to
documentary film making: a well-crafted but deeply ideological and
completely inaccurate framing of the problems facing public education.
Like Guggenheim's film, Brill's book is more valuable for what it tells
us about the aims and mythology of the corporate reform movement than
what it has to say about our schools or our teachers. But it's a good
barometer of where that movement currently is and where it may be
headed.
The book includes a starry-eyed look at how a tight circle of wealthy,
well-connected, self-styled education reformers, most of whom never
attended a public school or taught in a classroom, staged a virtual
coup, seized control of federal education policy and drove it off the
rails.
Brill makes it clear that Barack Obama was in partnership with this
effort early on. One of the key vehicles for advancing the corporate
reform agenda has been the Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, a
political lobby initiated and funded by hedge fund superstar Whitney
Tilson. According to Brill, then-Senator Obama was present at the
founding meeting of DFER in 2005, which was sponsored by a group of
financial and charter school entrepreneurs, some of whom would later
become key figures in the coming financial meltdown. DFER was formed
explicitly to drive a wedge between Democrats and the two large teacher
unions, the NEA and AFT, and to cultivate political support and develop
strategies to bring market reform to public education. The fact that
Obama won the Democratic nomination by defeating Hillary Clinton, who
initially had the backing of both national teachers unions, only
strengthened Obama's ties to the hedge fund/DFER crowd. After Obama
won, DFER produced a strategy paper memorably entitled "Bursting the
Dam," in which it described Obama's election as creating "unprecedented
political conditions" for "fundamental reform of public education."
Brill describes how former Clinton staffers who helped construct the
test and punish regime that eventually produced NCLB, were hired to lead
DFER and how they used insider beltway politicking and lobbying to
advance what had previously been a mostly Republican agenda of school
choice, charters, testing and union attacks inside the new
administration. Some of you will remember the campaign to replace Linda
Darling Hammond as Obama's spokesperson on education issues and
potentially his Secretary of Education with his Chicago crony and
schools CEO Arne Duncan. This was not only one of DFER's first major
successes; it was also just a small part of a strategy to staff every
key education position in the Department of Education and the White
House with people from the corporate, foundation, and think tank worlds
committed to the corporate reform agenda.
One of the more ironic quotes in Brill's book comes from hedge fund
billionaire Whitney Tilson who wrote "The whole idea behind Democrats
for Education Reform [is] it has to be an inside job."
Now, the irony isn't only in dressing up a straight up anti-union,
pro-privatization Republican agenda as a Democratic plan for education
reform. But some of you will no doubt recognize the the phrase "
inside job"
as the title of the documentary film about the fiscal crisis which
mercifully beat out WfS as best documentary last year. Even if you
haven't seen either film, it's worth considering the parallels they
suggest between corporate prescriptions for school reform and the
economy.
One of the common themes used by corporate reformers is their persistent
calls for "accountability." Brill complains that teaching has become
"an occupation where performance just doesn't count... There really
isn't any other workplace in the United States where how well you do,
how energetic you are, how much you care, how professional you are
doesn't count."
Now this is a fantasy that discounts the 24/7 pressure most teachers I
know feel every day to prepare for their students while coping with the
bureaucratic screws tightening from above. But it's a good indication of
the bubble these self-proclaimed education policy experts live in.
According to Brill and the corporate reformers, the key to imposing the
kind of accountability schools need is test-based evaluation of
teachers. Brill goes so far as to describe what he calls "the
discovery" that "good teaching matters" and that it can be measured by
standardized test scores as "the beginning of a flood of scholarly
work," much of it "financed by a data-obsessed wonk named Bill Gates"
that would "reframe the education debate" and provide "ammunition" for a
"growing network of reformers."
Now the corporate reformers misrepresent almost every aspect of this
topic from the reliability of test-based evaluation formulas, to the
research on merit pay, to the comparative academic performance of US
students, to the impact of poverty, to straw man arguments about
supposed reluctance of teachers to consider student progress in
evaluating schools and teachers. But before looking at some of these
specifics, it's worth reminding ourselves that this is a society that
generally does not do accountability well.
For example, the movie
Inside Job—again not to be confused with
Whitney Tilson's Trojan horse education reform lobby—reminded us that
"the financial crisis of 2008 costs tens of millions of people their
savings, their jobs, and their homes." Yet "the men who destroyed their
own companies and plunged the world into crisis walked away from the
wreckage with their fortunes intact." Architects of the crisis like
Summers and Geitner remained in high policy-making positions. Nobody
from Goldman Sachs went to jail. Corporate profits and executive
bonuses are at the highest levels in the history of the country.
Where's the accountability?
Some of these same members of the financial wrecking crew are now
righteous education reformers. NYC union activist Leo Casey recently
noted that of the 10 names on Forbes' list of the richest Americans,
only one "is not engaged in active political warfare against public
school teachers and teacher unions." The rest are investing their
fabulous wealth in campaigns for vouchers, charter expansion, Astroturf
political groups like Michelle Rhee's self-promoting Students First, and
efforts to end seniority and tenure rights for teachers.
And much as
Inside Job documented how the academic economists
who designed and promoted the theories that deregulated the financial
markets and allowed the looting of the private and public wealth to
proceed profited directly from these policies, today virtually the
entire official world of education research and policy analysis is on
the payroll of the Gates Foundation.
My own favorite example of this crowd is David Tepper, who lives in New
Jersey, a few towns over from me. Tepper manages something called the
Appaloosa Hedge fund. In 2009, partly because of the massive taxpayer
bailout of the financial sector, Tepper made $4 billion dollars as a
hedge fund manager. This was equal to the salaries of 60% of the
state's teachers who educate 850,000 students. But for two years in a
row, Governor Christie vetoed a millionaire's tax and cut $1 billion out
of the state school budget, so people like David Tepper would have
lower taxes. So this past year, flush with more money than God, Tepper
followed the example of your own local billionaire Bill Gates, and
created an education reform group called Better Education for Kids. He
hired the states' chief lobbyist for school vouchers to be his executive
director and began pouring millions of dollars which should be going to
the public treasury into slick campaigns to promote vouchers, expanded
charters, eliminate tenure and seniority and attack the state teacher's
union. This is how the creation of public policy is being privatized in
state after state.
And the economy is far from the only area of social policy where
accountability is virtually non-existent. George Bush systematically
lied a nation into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. and
foreign citizens. No accountability. Former VP Dick Cheney, who should
be facing a war crimes tribunal for authorizing torture and other
violations of the US Constitution, is instead on the book tour circuit.
Where's BP's accountability for the Gulf oil spill? Who's being held
responsible for the march to global climate change disaster?
This absence of accountability for major social crimes teaches some
very different lessons about how our society deals with responsibility
for various social outcomes. And frankly, it makes a mockery of most
discussions of accountability in education.
The same people and politicians who accept no accountability for
having created the most unequal distribution of wealth in the history of
the planet, an economy that threatens the health and well being of
hundreds of millions, want to hold you accountable for your students'
test scores. And they even want to use similar instruments to do it.
Standardized tests have been disguising class and race privilege as
merit for decades. Today they've become the credit default swaps of the
education world. Few people understand how either really works. Both
encourage a focus on short-term gains over long-term goals. And both
drive bad behavior on the part of those in charge. Yet these deeply
flawed standardized tests have become the primary policy instruments
used to shrink public space, impose sanctions on teachers, and close or
punish schools. And if the corporate reformers have their way, their
schemes to evaluate teachers and the schools of education they came from
on the basis of yet another new generation of standardized tests, it
will make the testing plague unleashed by NCLB pale by comparison.
Right now, New Jersey is getting ready to implement a so-called "growth
model" developed in Colorado, where they are now giving first graders
multiple choice questions about Picasso paintings and using the results
to decide the compensation level and job security of teachers.
Or take the issue of poverty. Again, I have no doubt that the
majority of us agree that poverty is no excuse for school failure or
year after year of lousy school outcomes; and much of the work of the
people in this room is about proving that the potential of our students
and communities can be fulfilled when their needs are met and the
reality of their lives is reflected in our schools and classrooms.
But the contradictions of trying to promote positive change amidst intolerable conditions are becoming sharper.
And in the current education reform debates, saying poverty isn't an excuse has become an excuse for ignoring poverty.
The corporate reform plans now being put forward do nothing to reduce
or disperse the concentrations of 70/80/90% poverty that remain the
central problem in urban education. Instead what we're getting is
disruptive reform that is increasing instability, especially in our more
vulnerable communities, and creating new forms of collateral damage for
students, teachers, schools, and families.
Let's look for a minute at what the corporate reform has actually accomplished:
First the corporate reformers over-reached and chose the wrong
target. They didn't go after funding inequity or poverty, they didn't
go after reform faddism or consultant profiteering or massive teacher
turnover or politicized bureaucratic management or the overuse and
misuse of testing.
Instead, they went after collective bargaining, teacher tenure, and
seniority. And they went after the universal public and democratic
character of public education.
Look again at the issues the corporate reformers have made prominent
features of school reform efforts in every state: rapid expansion of
charters, closing low performing schools, more testing, elimination of
tenure and seniority for teachers, and test-based teacher evaluation.
If every one of these policies was fully implemented in every state
tomorrow, it would do absolutely nothing to close academic achievement
gaps, increase high school graduation rates, or expand access to
college. There is no evidence tying any of these proposals to better
outcomes for large numbers of kids over time. The greatest gains in
reducing gaps in achievement and opportunity have been made during those
periods where concentrated poverty has been dispersed through efforts
at integration or economic growth for the black middle class and other
communities, or where significant new investments in school funding have
been made.
Yet the recent financial meltdown reduced the median household wealth
of Hispanics by two-thirds and by 50% for African Americans and
Asians. Today, over 46 million people live in poverty, the highest
total since they started keeping figures in 1959. Child poverty rate is
a shameful 22%, twice that in many poor communities, by far the highest
rate in the developed world. In the past three years, 300,000 teachers
have been laid off. In New York City, supposedly one of the national
models of corporate reform under Mayor Bloomberg and former Chancellor
Joel Klein, (who's now a digital educational entrepreneur for Rupert
Murdoch), class sizes are the largest they have been in a decade. Over
7000 classes are larger than contractual limits. Nationally, two-thirds
of the districts who responded to one survey said they are raising class
sizes this year. And both Secretary. Duncan and his friend Bill Gates
are traveling the country recommending that districts save money by
increasing class sizes and expanding virtual classrooms while they're
shutting down real ones.
The corporate reformers have successfully
used deeply rooted inequalities in our society to construct a misleading
narrative of failure and introduce market reform into public education
The only thing corporate education reform policies are doing
successfully is bringing the anti-labor politics of class warfare to the
public sector and to public schools in particular. In fact, by
over-reaching, demonizing teachers and unions, and sharply polarizing
the education debate, corporate reform is undermining serious efforts to
improve schools. They've narrowed the common ground by eroding the
broad public support a universal system of public education needs to
survive.
For example, there's actually a lot of common ground on the need to
improve teacher support and evaluation. There's widespread agreement
among educators, parents, and even administrators on the following:
- better preparation and evaluation before new teachers get tenure (or leave the profession, as 50% do within 5 years).
- reasonable, timely procedures for resolving tenure hearings when they are initiated.
- a credible intervention process to remediate and if necessary remove ineffective teachers, both tenured and non-tenured.
But the over-reaching by corporate reformers has actually undermined
efforts to promote teacher quality. They have detached the issue of
teacher quality from the conditions that shape it. Their proposals are
staffing our most challenging schools with novices or Teach for America
temps on their way to other careers after a couple of years of
resume-building. They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into
data systems and tests designed to replace collaborative professional
culture and experienced instructional leadership with a kind of
psychometric astrology. These data-driven formulas lack both
statistical credibility and a basic understanding of the human
motivations and relationships that make good schooling possible. These
attacks on the profession are driving experienced teachers into despair,
retirement, or rage. Corporate reform isn't elevating the profession,
it's dismantling it.
One of the most dishonest framings, that has become a favorite of the
corporate crowd, is to counter-pose the interests of "adults" vs. the
"children." Their rhetoric righteously pits the interests of teachers
and their unions against those of children, and there are certainly
times when those interests diverge and when our unions have not
adequately defended the interests of the families and communities we
serve. But this same rhetoric never questions the adult motives of the
hedge fund privateers, consultants, the private foundations, pundits, or
politicians who are suddenly the champions of the poor. Only in the US
could a campaign of billionaires to privatize and dismantle what's
probably the most inclusive democratic institution we have left be
dressed up as a selfless campaign for civil rights.
The "disruptive reform," that corporate reformers claim is necessary
to shake up the status quo is increasing pressure on 5000 schools
serving the poorest communities at a time of unprecedented economic
crisis and budget cutting. The latest waiver bailout for NCLB,
announced last week by Secretary Duncan, may actually ratchet up that
pressure. While it rolls back NCLB's absurd adequate yearly progress
system just as it was about to self-destruct, the new guidelines require
states that apply for waivers to identify up to 15% of their schools
with the lowest scores for unproven "turnaround" interventions,
"charterization" or closing. These policies are already wreaking havoc
in areas with high concentrations of poverty, high-need student
populations, and clusters of struggling schools.
Teachers and schools, who in many cases are day to day the strongest
advocates and most stable support system struggling youth have, are
instead being scapegoated for a society that is failing our children.
As Linda Darling-Hammond put it at the SOS march last summer,
"Our leaders seek to solve the problems of the poor by blaming the teachers and schools that seek to serve them.
" At
the same time, they are giving parents triggers to blow up the schools
they have, but no say and no guarantees about what will replace them.
So where's the hope; where's the way forward? If corporate reform is leading us in a
Race Over the Cliff, how do we turn back and go a different way? Let me try to give you some possibilities.
First, it's important to remember that corporate reform rests on
fundamentally false premises. The corporate reformers do not represent
the interests of poor communities of color, or for that matter, working
or middle class communities. And test-based reform, which is now the
status quo in public education and has been for sometime, has been a
colossal failure on its own test-score terms.
And because reality still counts—despite the bizarre Wizard of
Oz-like character of our media and political systems—corporate reform
rests on a very weak foundation of false claims and failed policies.
For all its deep pockets and political influence, it's a movement that
has absolutely no way to deliver on its promises of better education for
all, and particularly for our poorest and most vulnerable schools and
communities.
Even though the people making policy are drawing the wrong
conclusions, the collapse of the NCLB coalition is still a victory for
ten years of grassroots opposition and organizing that exposed its
test-and-punish approach as a predictable failure. Recent reports have
fully exposed the myth of "reformy" progress in key cities like Duncan's
Chicago and Bloomberg/Klein's New York City. Twenty years of corporate
reform have failed to narrow achievement gaps or succeed even on its
own narrow test score terms. In the past few months, merit pay has met
the cheating scandals, an intersection of bureaucratic pressure,
corruption, and bad policy that is likely to be a growing obstacle to
claims of future miracles while producing more scandals and lawsuits.
The corporate reformers have successfully used deeply rooted
inequalities in our society to construct a misleading narrative of
failure and introduce market reform into public education. But because
they've overreached and promised results and choices they cannot
deliver, we need to turn their accountability rhetoric back upon them.
We need to demand evidence that their market reform policies produce
better outcomes for the majority of kids, and when they can't, we need
to use the absence of that evidence to press for the limitation or
reversal of the "disruptive reforms" they seek. And when their policies
fail in one place, we need to share those results in their next target.
There was a good example of that last spring when Newark was
searching for a new Superintendent and Seattle's former Superintendent
Goodloe-Johnson surfaced as a candidate. The great work Parents Across
America had done exposing the role of the Broad Foundation in spreading
the corporate reform agenda laid a foundation of connections that
allowed activists in Seattle and New Jersey to share history and
information that helped quickly derail her candidacy. I know she's
probably surfaced somewhere else already. Fighting Broad and Gates is
like whack-a-mole. Their network is stronger than ours at this point,
but our own efforts are building and resonating.
Some of that work includes defending the very idea of public
education as a common good against free market, everyone-for-themselves
mythology. One of the hopeful developments of the past year has been
the emergence of a strong counter-narrative to the dominant corporate
line on reform. Led by
Diane Ravitch's
emergence as a prominent critic of the corporate reform agenda, there's
been an explosion of progressive policy blogs, analysis, and social
media pushback to the corporate crowd. Well-read teacher bloggers like
Anthony Cody,
Nancy Flanagan, and
teacherken Bernstein
produce a steady stream of accessible refutations of "reformy"
nonsense, rooted in the experience of real teachers and schools.
A recent listing of the most influential education tweeters was headed by Ravitch and included progressives like
Alfie Kohn,
Mike Klonsky, and
Leonie Haimson in the top 12.
It's especially satisfying to see how effectively the social media
activists can be in disrupting the official line. Last May, when
Secretary Duncan wrote a condescending letter of support for US
teachers, he was inundated with
responses and counter-commentaries highlighting the contradictions between his lofty sentiments and his destructive policies.
A few months ago, in a moment of clueless arrogance, director Davis Guggenheim posted an invitation on the
Huffington Post
to "Teachers, to tell me what you think" (along with a discount offer
to see his teacher-bashing film during Teacher Appreciation Week). In
return, he received pages upon pages of scathing comments from educators
and parents. Perhaps the best response came from a veteran early
childhood teacher who said: "I felt personally offended by your film.
Its oversimplified and antagonistic message has stirred me into becoming
a whole education activist."
And of course, that's the key. Because democratic ideas are only as
strong as the ability of people to organize movements to implement
them. So let me end by offering a quick survey of some of the hopeful,
tangible signs of organizing resistance and alternatives to the
corporate reform agenda and then open it up for discussion about how
corporate reform is affecting your schools and classrooms and how we
might build the movement against it over the coming year.
In no particular order, let me mention 10 hopeful signs that the tide is turning against corporate reform:
- I've already mentioned Parents Across America
(PAA) which has linked experienced parent activists from Seattle to
Chicago to New Orleans to New York, Florida, and elsewhere into a
growing parent voice for better policies. The landscape is different in
every city, but there is no more crucial work than building an alliance
between parents and teachers to defend and improve public education.
Even a small group of activists representing teachers, parents, and
progressive academics can have a big influence on local reform debates
if they work together. If you haven't connected to PAA already, do it.
- The outpouring of critical response to Waiting for Superman last fall was when a lot of teachers discovered they were not alone. Rethinking Schools' "NOT Waiting for Superman"
campaign drew tens of thousands of supportive responses and has created
an archive of information and resources for countering corporate reform
that's still growing. In New York City, the GEM produced a documentary
response to the film entitled The Inconvenient Truths Behind Waiting for Superman that's served as a rallying point for organizing and discussion across the country.
- The two large teacher unions, the AFT & the NEA, have had mostly
weak and defensive responses to the policy attacks of the past few
years. But they are being pressed by both their members and by reality
to develop more effective responses. This includes on-the-ground
efforts at reform and the election of activist teacher leaders like Karen Lewis in Chicago and Bob Peterson in Milwaukee.
Years of failing to effectively mobilize their membership or develop
effective responses to school failure in poor communities have taken a
big toll on the ability of our unions to lead the charge in defending
public education. But their role remains crucial and activists have
begun to rebuild that power on the basis of new politics and new
coalitions with the communities schools serve.
- The heroic Wisconsin rebellion. More than a month of sustained
large scale protests and organizing that's still targeting a recall
effort for Gov. Scott Walker. Check out OneWisconsinNow.org for the latest.
- In Ohio, outrage over another anti-labor bill, SB#5
helped over generate 1.3 million signatures to put a referendum on the
ballot and the measure may be repealed this November by popular vote.
- There's a growing national movement of parents and students to opt
out of standardized testing. This effort has the potential to mobilize
large numbers of parents and students in the fight against the testing
plague. Check out Unitedoptout.com or Testing is Not Teaching.
- The growth of locally-based teacher activist groups.
There are now active Teachers for Social Justice groups with various
names in Chicago, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Portland, New York City
(where there are multiple groups), St. Louis, Atlanta, and New Jersey to
name just the ones I can remember. If there's one in your town, join
it. If not, start one.
- Education for Liberation
is a national network of educators, youth, and community activists, led
by people of color, doing great work on school-to-prison pipeline,
youth organizing, and other social justice issues. Their conference in
Providence this summer was probably the biggest and most dynamic yet.
- The Save Our Schools
march and conference last July reflected both the growth and the as yet
unfulfilled potential of a national teachers' voice in defense of
public education and the teaching profession. Interestingly, the SOS
project did not begin with radical political activists, but with
impeccably well-credentialed national board certified teachers, who
attempted to engage the Obama administration to discuss it's education
policies and who were stunned by the arrogance and ignorance of the
response. A project that began with Anthony Cody's Teachers Letters to
Obama found itself pushed by the aggressive acceleration of corporate
reform into a more political and activist response. The media offensive
of last fall around Waiting for Superman and the
state-by-state battles last winter and spring convinced many that a
national mobilization was sorely needed. The well-credentialed,
experienced teachers at the center of the project were able to attract a
significant number of well-known, respected advocates for public
education who threw their support behind the effort, including Diane
Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, Linda Darling-Hammond, Pedro Noguera, Angela
Valenzuela, Nancy-Carlsson Paige and others. Actor Matt Damon added
media visibility and celebrity star power and Parents Across America
broadened the project's base and outreach, as did savvy use of social
media. The event had an impact far beyond the 8000 people who turned
out for the rally, and while it remains to be seen whether SOS will be
able to harvest what it started and sustain a national network, local
and state groups are building on the grassroots energy that SOS helped
set in motion.
- And finally there's my own home base, Rethinking Schools, which has somewhat miraculously survived to this year celebrate its 25th anniversary as a voice for activist educators. Rethinking Schools has
always tried to connect efforts to create classrooms that are places of
hope and humanity with larger struggles for racial and social justice.
It made me a better teacher in the classroom and a better activist
outside it. I don't think it's ever been more important to fight on
both fronts and I thank you for letting me be part of that effort today.
During the years (2001 - 2008) that Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago's public schools, he implemented programs that resulted in the firing of hundreds of veteran teachers and the privatization of more than 70 public schools, mostly through controversial charter school programs. Duncan's years saw the most massive privatization of public school assets in the 175-year history of public education in Chicago. One of the smaller examples of that, was Duncan's decision to out source the work of trained physical education and health education teachers to the "Save-A-Life Foundation." Subsequent investigations showed that Save-A-Life was fraudulent, but Duncan made no effort, following the revelations regarding the foundation, to retrieve the public money he had authorized be paid to Save-A-Life. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.