Liberals And Conservatives Join Together To Fight Common Core

Much of the most recent backlash against Common Core is coming from conservatives, particularly parents who send their kids to Catholic schools or who home school their children.

Many of these parents have begun to learn that their children will be subjected to the Great Common Core experiment too - just like public school children.

Catholic schools that take money from the federal government must have their students take the Common Core-aligned state tests.

Homeschooled children may receive Common Core-aligned instruction because some of the companies that create and sell home school curricula are, you guessed it, aligning to the Common Core.

The reach of the Obamacore is far and wide indeed.

But that may be the seed for its own destruction.

So long as reformers aimed at urban districts, they pretty much could do whatever the hell they wanted in ed policy.

But now that they've taken their reforms to the suburbs, to rural America, to Catholic schools and to home schooled children, they are getting pushback from all angles.

I've been reading some of the conservative blogs and articles lately about Common Core.

I posted yesterday about a Maggie Gallagher piece in National Review on Indiana's halting of Common Core implementation in the state.

There's a lot more bubbling up around the country in states that were expected to meekly go along with the ALEC and Chamber of Commerce-endorsed Common Core.

Liberals and conservatives alike are joining together to fight the Core.

Common Core proponents tend to be an arrogant, delusional bunch (see here), so they may not realize just what a favor they have done for us all by promoting these standards for children everywhere and for aligning the SAT to the Core as well.

If they had kept the Core implementation to public schools, they might have had an easier time with their agenda.

But now that they've awoken Catholic school and home school parents to the dangers of the Federal Core, they are having a much more difficult time sliding these standards into place.

Indiana has halted implementation.

Other states may follow suit.

The Great Common Core experiment is at a crossroads.

And the Common Core proponents have their own arrogance and hubris to thank for that problem.

We'll see if they can overcome this.

They have a lot of money to burn (Gates put $150 million alone into the fight.)

Bloomberg, Broad, Walmart and other corporate proponents are funding it as well.

But now that they've got people on both the left and the right suspicious and/or outright hostile to the Federal Core, it's going to take all that money and more to complete their agenda.

Eli Broad In Market For L.A. Times

Buried in this NY Times story about the Koch Brothers looking to buy a bunch of newspapers owned by the Tribune company, including the L.A. Times, is this:

At this early stage, the thinking inside the Tribune Company, the people close to the deal said, is that Koch Industries could prove the most appealing buyer. Others interested, including a group of wealthy Los Angeles residents led by the billionaire Eli Broad and Ronald W. Burkle, both prominent Democratic donors, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would prefer to buy only The Los Angeles Times. 

The Tribune Company has signaled it prefers to sell all eight papers and their back-office operations as a bundle. (Tribune, a $7 billion media company that also owns 23 television stations, could also decide to keep the papers if they do not attract a high enough offer.) 

...

Koch Industries’ main competitor for The Los Angeles Times is a group of mostly Democratic local residents. In the 2012 political cycle, Mr. Broad gave $477,800, either directly or through his foundation, to Democratic candidates and causes, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Mr. Burkle has long championed labor unions. President Bill Clinton served as an adviser to Mr. Burkle’s money management firm, Yucaipa Companies, which in 2012 gave $107,500 to Democrats and related causes. The group also includes Austin Beutner, a Democratic candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, and an investment banker who co-founded Evercore Partners. 

“This will be a bipartisan group,” Mr. Beutner said. “It’s not about ideology, it’s about a civic interest.” (The Los Angeles consortium is expected to also include Andrew Cherng, founder of the Panda Express Chinese restaurant chain and a Republican.) 

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

So the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union L.A. Times could soon be sold to either the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union Koch Brothers or the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union consortium of "Democratic" investors led by Eli Broad or the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union Rupert Murdoch.

Gotta love how the NY Times article writer frames this as some red/blue dichotomy between the Kochs, Murdoch and the Broad consortium when the reality is, these groups have very similar neo-liberal agendas

It seems no matter whether the current owners of the L.A. Times continue to hold onto the paper or the Kochs buy it along with the other Tribune properties or the Broad consortium buys it or Rupert Murdoch snatches it up for his Amplify/newspaper division, the agenda at the paper will remain the same - pro-education reform, anti-teacher and anti-union.

Isn't it great to live in an oligarchy?

Will Selling The Common Core Like Beer And Tires Backfire?

Leonie Haimson posted that some unnamed billionaire has put up $240,000 to buy subway, bus and billboard ads selling the Common Core in NYC.

This "public awareness campaign" (i.e., propaganda campaign) follows on the heels of some not-so anonymous corporations selling Common Core via TV advertising during sporting events and the news.

Exxon Mobil, for example, advertised for the Common Core all throughout the Masters Golf Tournament over the weekend.

I wonder if this sort of thing won't backfire.

For example, some comments after the Exxon Mobil ads:

I'm generally a fan of #commoncore or at least neutral, but seeing @Exxon promote standards with TV ads makes me uneasy, skeptical (LINK)

Thought the Common Core conspiracy stuff was nuts, but now that Exxon's advertising for it ... (LINK)

Just saw a commercial by Exxon Mobil supporting the common core standards in education. Knew they were bad, this confirms it. (LINK)

This advertising blitz follows education reform/Common Core evangelists like NYSED Commissioner John King and NYCDOE Chancellor Dennis Walcott making the community rounds and preaching the Gospel of the Common Core Formative and Summative Assessments.

I wonder if that sort of thing won't backfire too.

When you have to sell something this hard, this much, it smacks of desperation and, frankly, failure.

As NYC Educator alludes to in his latest post, it gives off a New Coke or Edsel smell.

Or, since Bill Gates is so involved in the development and selling of the Common Core, it gives off a Windows Millenium, Windows Vista, Zune, exploding Xbox smell.

I dunno - maybe people will buy these propaganda, er, advertising campaigns.

Or maybe, just as they did with New Coke, the Edsel and any number of crappy Microsoft products, they'll take a pass.

This Won't Deter Them

Here is the LA Times analysis of the school board elections on Tuesday:

Outside interests poured money into Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's war chest for this week's school board elections in an attempt to influence education reform here and nationwide. But when the votes were tallied, the group could count only one clear winner.

The mayor's political action committee, which amassed more than $3.9 million on behalf of three candidates, secured just incumbent Monica Garcia's seat.

In the other two races, the Coalition for School Reform lost its bid to unseat incumbent Steve Zimmer, who was backed by the teachers union. The group's other favored candidate, Antonio Sanchez, is headed for a May 21 runoff.

The results were "a loss for the mayor and the future of reform in the district," said former state Sen. Gloria Romero, who is generally allied with Villaraigosa's education agenda.

But American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten summed up Tuesday's election this way: "Big monied interests — most of whom live far away from Los Angeles and virtually none of whom have children in LAUSD schools — were rebuked by parents, teachers and the community."

Leaving aside the audacity of Weingarten bragging about parents, teachers and a local community beating back monied interests from outside the district when she often helicopters into districts from her DC home to try and influence policy and contract negotiations in places like Baltimore, Newark, New Haven and Philadelphia, let's just assume that the losses suffered by the ed deformers in the LA school board race will not deter them from trying to buy the next school board elections.

Let us assume that the lesson they will take from this is throw more money into the race - or circumvent the democratic process completely and engineer backroom deals that disenfranchise parents, teachers and the local community from having a say in the process.

Isn't that what ALEC is all about?

Isn't that what the Common Core Federal Standards movement was all about?

Isn't that what the Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation and Bloomberg's political PAC all about?

Bloomberg in particular has a few scalps in his PAC belt.

You can bet a couple of percentage points loss in this school board race won't deter him from trying to buy future school board races or simply force through his policy preferences in some backroom deal.

Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Barack Obama And "Reform"

Even as some observers sympathetic to the education deform agenda, such as Times columnist Joe Nocera, begin to question the efficacy of the deform agenda, the people behind the agenda are moving ever more closely to running every school system in the nation:

ST. PAUL — With the dust settling on legislative sessions around the country, 2011 is shaping up as one of the most consequential years in memory for changes in the way schools are run.

The new policies have many champions, but a little-known common denominator behind sweeping measures in nearly a dozen states is Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, who has re-emerged as an adviser to governors and lawmakers, mostly Republicans, who are interested in imitating what he calls “the Florida formula” for education.

Mr. Bush, for example, has been closely involved in new education bills and laws in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah. One out of five state school superintendents have joined a group that his national foundation created, Chiefs for Change, to rally behind a common agenda.

He has hopped around the country to campaign for candidates, hold meetings and lobby for Florida-style changes. They include private-school vouchers, online courses and requiring third-graders to pass reading tests before they move up to fourth grade, rather than being pushed along with their peers — or “social promotion.”

Increased testing, charter schools, school vouchers, merit pay, teacher accountability as the sole measure of - all debunked education reform initiatives, and yet the EXACT blueprint for the "reforms" enacted this year at the state level with the help of Jeb Bush and Barack Obama.

Oh, and with the help of the money of Bill Gates and Eli Broad.

And of course underpinning all of this "reform" is the idea that only the teacher matters and great teachers can overcome any obstacle in the school system.

But as Nocera wrote in his column yesterday:

Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles Saquan faces when he is not in school. Nor is he unusual. Mahler recounts how M.S. 223 gives away goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up. He reports that during the summer, some students fall back a full year in reading comprehension — because they don’t read at home.

Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.

Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

That last sentence strikes me as the key to the reformers’ resistance: To admit the importance of a student’s background, they fear, is to give ammo to the enemy — which to them are their social-scientist critics and the teachers’ unions. But that shouldn’t be the case. Making schools better is always a goal worth striving for, whether it means improving pedagogy itself or being able to fire bad teachers more easily. Without question, school reform has already achieved some real, though moderate, progress.

What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.

Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.

 

Jeb Bush pats himself on the back for being a "successful" proponent of education reform when the data shows that the improvements made under his administration in Florida, real for students in the fourth grade, actually disappear by the time they reach high school.

Meanwhile Barack Obama pats himself on the back for bringing the "most meaningful" reform to education in the last generation by pushing charter schools, merit pay, and teacher evaluations tied to test scores all across the nation.

Gates and Broad fund this stuff, but at the end of the day, the child that Nocera wrote about in his column still slipped through the cracks, not because of "bad teachers" or a "bad school" but because the socio-economic problems that underlie the system are so complex and entrenched that the simplistic "Blame Teachers" formula promoted by Obama, Bush, Gates, Broad, et al. does NOT work.

But it sure does rake in the profits for the ed deformers, doesn't it?

Not A Good Month For Corporate Education Reformers

Sue Peters has the run down on Rhee, Black, Goodloe-Johnson, Sheffield - Gates and Broad Foundation-funded and promoted education deform heroes and the bad month they had - three are out of jobs, one has been exposed as a test miracle fraudster.

Where Are The Education Reformers On Collective Bargaining Rights?

Russo says they're either silent and hoping nobody notices or making lame one sentence comments and hoping nobody notices.

Well, of course.

Obama, Duncan, Rhee, Eduwonk, Gates, Broad - these people don't want a powerful teachers union with the right to collectively bargain.

Rather, they want a defanged union easily manipulated to "collaborate" with the feds, states and districts to enable the continued privatization and charterization of the school system.

Their silence on the Wisconsin fight - or in Obama's and Duncan's case, their essential silence since the words they issued in "support" of unions were NOT followed up by any meaningful actions - exposes them for who they are and the policies they want.

They are corporatists looking to bust the unions, disempower working and middle class people and impose their privatization and charterization policies on the entire country.

As for the DFER's "supporting" teachers rights to collectively bargain and be part of the union, well, they may SAY that's what they support, but their actions and efforts say otherwise.

I have yet to see the DFER's miss an opportunity to support the closing of a union school, the firing of unionized teachers and the replacement of both with non-unionized charter schools and help.

"Support" like the DFER's offer, unions can do without.

As for Obama and Duncan, smarmy arrogant pricks that they are, they probably think they've walked the tightrope just right here.

They undoubtedly think by issuing words of support, they have fooled the union people into thinking they're on the union side, but by taking no meaningful action to help the unions in this fight, they have signaled to the corporatists just whose side they're on.

Don't think the more discerning members of the teaching profession haven't noticed that tightrope act, boys.

We have.

And we'll be sure to remember that in 2012 and let the rest of union colleagues know as well.

One last thing I would like to say about this - I don't agree too often with deformer Mike Antonucci, but his post that this Wisconsin fight, coming during the same week that Duncan put together Collaborpalooza in which unions and districts supposedly got together at the behest of the Obama admin to find ways to collaborate on reform, is a "work of fate."

I agree.

It exposes this collaboration stuff as the jive it is.

As I noted in this post here, the Rhode Island union collaborated at every opportunity it was asked to do so - on RttT, on teacher evaluations, on school turnarounds - and got 2,000 fired teachers in Providence for its efforts.

EVERY teacher in Providence, Rhode Island got FIRED.

Collaboration did not save them.

Reformers friendly to the union while the collaboration was happening did not come out in support when they were all canned.

Duncan and Obama, cheerleaders of teacher firings in the state just last year, have been COMPLETELY silent on this horror.

That, my union friends and colleagues, is where "collaboration" gets you.

Better to take the streets, put up the barricades, and take a baseball bat to collaboration.

The Legacy of No Child Left Behind

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel sums up NCLB:

Nine years ago this week President George Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act that:

A. Stunted the creativity and critical thinking skills of American public school children
B. Prevented teachers from tapping into the full potential of their students
C. Fostered a school environment that values test-taking skills above all others
D. Stole the joy from teaching and learning
E. All of the above

Indeed, NCLB did all of that.

But given what is currently slated to go into law if the Obama administration gets its way on reauthorization, the Obama/Duncan No Child Left Behind Jr. will make Bush's No Child Left Behind look like the unschooling movement.

High stakes standardized test in every subject in every grade.

Teachers graded, paid and evaluated based solely upon those test scores.

5%-10% of the "lowest performing schools" around the country closed every year.

5%-10% of the "lowest performing teachers" around the country fired every year.

Many traditional public schools replaced by nonunionized charter schools. Many of those charters will be operated by for-profit education management organizations.

Title One money no longer distributed according to the number of students living below the poverty line in a given district. Instead, it will be distributed using a Race to the Top competition that will hand the money out to the most "reform-minded" of districts and stiff others who don't pursue policies approved by the USDOE.

Federal standards, federal curriculum and federal tests superseding every bit of local control over schooling that has survived the original NCLB.

Education policy made by a small band of corporate-friendly, Gates- and Broad Foundation-trained "reformers," most of whom have little-to-no actual teaching or classroom experience.

Nine years from now, after the Obama/Duncan/Gates/Broad/Bloomberg/Jeb Bush reforms destroy public education, destroy an entire generation of students and teachers, and dumb the country down even further than it already is, we may look back at George W. Bush's original No Child Left Behind law fondly and with nostalgia.

Scary, but true.

Change we can believe?

Uh, no.

More of the same - only much worse.

Michelle Rhee Becomes A Lobbyist For Ed Deform

Not a surprise here - she's going to carry the ed deform message and cash in at the same time:

Former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee on Monday launched a national educational reform group that, she said, will be her full-time job to lead, tamping down speculation that she is considering a position as Florida’s schools commissioner or another city- or state-based role.

...

With a Monday appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and a column in Newsweek, Rhee announced the creation of Students First, a 501(c)4 group that will donate to reform-minded politicians regardless of party and “advocate for what’s in the best interest of kids,” she said.

...

“As CEO of Students First, I’ll be working to influence policy at the state level, the municipal level,” Rhee said. “This is not about one person going into one city or one state – it’s about fundamentally changing the dynamics of our schools.”

Rhee said Students First “will lay out a legislative agenda with the kinds of laws that states and local jurisdictions should adopt so that real reform can take place” but largely stay out of federal education policy, including the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is expected to be a priority in 2011 for the U.S. Department of Education and the House and Senate education committees. “I don’t see a lot of our time and money going into the reauthorization of ESEA – that’s not where our focus will be,” she said.

In the next year, the group is aiming to attract 1 million members and to raise $1 billion. Rhee said fundraising will come from a mix of membership dues, small donations of $100 or $200, and grants from foundations and corporations.

Oh, yeah I'm sure lots of money will come from small donations of $100 or $200 from Americans committed to education reform.

And Cathie Black has a Ph.D in education.

Let's be honest, this is a lobbying group put together by the billionaire boys club and they wanted Rhee as the national face of it because they knew they could get appearances on Oprah and covers on Newsweek if Rhee was the face of their organization.

Rhee says the education reform environment is very lopsided and this new group will counter the all-powerful teachers unions.

That's a joke.

Three of the richest men in the world are funding education reform efforts and propaganda all across this country - Bill Gates, Eli Broad,, and Michael Bloomberg.

The Walton family - owners of Walmart - are also throwing in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The money that the unions use to fight the billionaire boys club is a drop in the bucket from what Gates, Broad, Bloomberg, Walmart and other Wall Street/corporate funders of education reform spend.

Just look at how much exposure the ed deform docudrama/reality show Waiting for Superman got through the efforts of Bill Gates and others in the ed deform world.

Can you imagine the Real Reformers getting that kind of exposure?

Uh, uh - not unless they changed to a corporate-friendly message, of course.

So for Rhee to play like she's the underdog in the ed deform fight is just jive.

But the media - the corporate ones, at any rate - will be happy to sell that message.

As Newsweek and Oprah already have.

More zombie Ayn Rand ideas to kill.

Bloomberg Agrees To Deputy For Black

So we will have Cathie Black to kick around:

The state’s education commissioner, David M. Steiner, and the Bloomberg administration have reached a deal that will allow Cathleen P. Black, a media executive, to become the next schools chief.

A top education official in the city’s schools system, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief accountability officer, will be named the chief academic officer to serve as the No. 2 to Ms. Black, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement between the state and the city.

In return, Dr. Steiner on Monday will grant Ms. Black a waiver from the state law requiring the chancellor to have certain education credentials that Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazine, lacks.

Mr. Steiner had expressed reservations about granting Ms. Black an exemption and had made the appointment of a chief academic officer a condition for considering her nomination.

The move is a major concession from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who typically resists any intrusion into his management of city agencies.

The Bloomberg administration did not dispute the details of the agreement, but refused to comment.

Great - the chief testing guy who was educated at the Broad Academy will be Cathie Black's #2.

His specialty is holding teachers accountable.

Here's the quote on his page at the Broad Superintendents Academy:

“Teachers and principals need to be accountable for student performance and empowered to make the critical decisions that impact their daily work to accelerate student learning.”

He's also logged some time helping to close large schools and open small schools and charter schools in their place.

Clearly it is not a mistake that of all the people Bloomberg could have picked at the DOE to back up Black, he chose the guy who is in charge of "accountability," testing and data and has some experience closing schools and opening charters.

Meet the new Klein, same as the old Klein.

Catering To The Masters Of Expensive Technology

The following critique is leveled at the financial markets and the changes wrought by all the technology that now governs how things are done, but it could just as easily be leveled at the education deformers in New York City, Washington, Chicago, and Bill Gates' mansion who push the same thing onto public schools:

“Not so long ago, if our markets experienced severe stress, and certainly a “fat finger”, human wisdom would intervene. Reasons for the stress would be ascertained, trading in affected stocks would be slowed or halted, stabilizing bids would be initiated as needed, and severe volatility would be dealt with in a calm and reasoned manner.

Today, the human specialist model has been replaced by an automated market maker model. Our market structure has evolved. It has evolved, not by design,
or a well-thought and reasoned plan, but it has evolved to cater to masters of expensive technology, deployed unfettered by participants whose only concern is to squeeze out every last picosecond and fractional cent before they move on to other countries’ markets and asset classes. The for-profit exchange model at every chance sacrifices the protection of long term investor interests for the profitability of serving hyper-leveraged intraday speculators . . .

Today’s price swings in a great number of stocks highlight the inherent and systemic risk of our automated stock market, which has few checks and balances in place. Once the market sensed stress, the bids were cancelled and market sell orders chased prices down to the lowest possible point.”

Just as in the markets the human specialist has been replaced by an automated market maker, in education the teacher specialist who makes teaching decisions based upon the curricula that has been thought out and developed by education experts has been replaced by twenty-something central bureaucrats with business degrees and/or technology backgrounds, education "advisors" trained by the Gates and Broad Foundations to push more and more technology onto schools and place more and more blame onto humans, and politicians happy to take the yummy yummy political contributions and bribes in the form of grants from the corporatocracy looking to privatize public education and run the entire public education sphere according to data and stats.

That, apparently, is the change we can believe in that President Accountability was spewing from his mouth during the 2008 campaign.

It is also the gospel of education deform that Joel Klein, evangelist for the multi-national corporatists and technocrats, is bringing to countries like Australia, England, and Israel.

And Bloomberg, if he gets his way (and given the way the economy is probably going to tank at the end of 2010 into 2011, he just may), will spend $100 billion or more to buy the White House in 2012 and complete the corporatist job of destroying democracy and establishing a corporatocracy - government by the corporation, for the corporation, of the corporation.

Destroying public education and making it into a step-child of the corporatocracy - where children can be trained to be good, compliant employees happy to take any treatment so long as they have a job - is a big part of the plan.

10 False "Race to the Top" Assumptions

With the education deformers and public education privatization proponents on the offensive at the city, state and federal levels these days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to beat back their bullshit.

Two new documentaries are coming out celebrating the wonders of the charter movement and exposing the evils of teachers unions.

President Obama has made education privatization and top-down education deform a major component of his Change You Can Believe In agenda.

The state has listed 34 NYC schools that will be either closed, restructured or handed over to charters.

The city has 20 schools it plans to close after a pro-forma meeting by the PEP boards rubberstamps Mayor Moneybags' plans.

Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper and so many others in the media (see this jive at Huffingtonpost here and here for the latest examples) fall over themselves to show how wonderful and innovative the charter movement is but get the basic facts wrong.

Wall Street and the members of the corporatocracy race to hand out money to the charter movement and sit on their boards while charter schools push out traditional public schools from their spaces, steal their resources and take the cream of the crop of public school students, leaving public schools to educate the ELL's, the support service students and the at risk students charters refuse to take.

These are tough times for educators and students in the traditional public school system. It feels like we are on the losing end of the battle and it is coming sooner rather than later.

With the state and city closing or restructuring 46 public schools this year and with the overflow of at risk students from those schools sure to be handed over to the remaining public schools, within a few years you can see how every traditional public school in the city will have been declared "failing" and closed.

We can and will fight this, but right now, the charter movement has all the money, the resources and the political allies.

They have much of the momentum.

But we can get our message out, which is to show how the education deformers are wrong on nearly every point of their "reform" message.

Last October, Marion Brady, a veteran teacher, administrator and curriculum developer, wrote a great piece in the Washington Post that lists the false assumptions the Race to the Top initiative makes.

I want to post it in full. It is essential to list this because it is the truth.

Charter proponents and education deformers don't care about truth, of course. Nor do most of them care about education or students.

This is about opening up another financial windfall for for-profit corporations that already own this country and came close to bringing it down last year with their greed and hubris.

This is about creating good future corporate employees willing to work longer and harder to make much less than their parents and grandparents did.

This is about building a bridge back to 19th century when the work week was 60 hours and 6 days.

This is about the robber barons like Gates, Broad, Bloomberg, Jobs et al. extending their power and hold on the country.

They're not interested in an educated populace.

An educated populace could see through their bullshit.

No, they're interested in owning everything and solidifying their power and position - and what better way to do that then socialize children as serfs, destroy the labor movement completely and use globalization and free trade as a rationale for why Americans must work longer and harder to make so much less while carrying so much more debt.

We must fight this.

Here is Brady's piece:

By Marion Brady
"Race to the Top? National standards for math, science, and other school subjects? The high-powered push to put them in place makes it clear that the politicians, business leaders, and wealthy philanthropists who’ve run America’s education show for the last two decades are as clueless about educating as they’ve always been.

If they weren’t, they’d know that adopting national standards will be counterproductive, and that the "Race to the Top" will fail for the same reason "No Child Left Behind" failed—because it’s based on false assumptions.

False Assumption 1:
America’s teachers deserve most of the blame for decades of flat school performance. Other factors affecting learning—language problems, hunger, stress, mass media exposure, transience, cultural differences, a sense of hopelessness, and so on and on—are minor and can be overcome by well-qualified teachers. To teacher protests that they’re scapegoats taking the blame for broader social ills, the proper response is, "No excuses!" While it’s true teachers can’t choose their students, textbooks, working conditions, curricula, tests, or the bureaucracies that circumscribe and limit their autonomy, they should be held fully accountable for poor student test scores.

False Assumption 2:
Professional educators are responsible for bringing education to crisis, so they can’t be trusted. School systems should instead be headed by business CEOs, mayors, ex-military officers, and others accustomed to running a "tight ship." Their managerial expertise more than compensates for how little they know about educating.

False Assumption 3:
"Rigor"—doing longer and harder what we’ve always done—will cure education’s ills. If the young can’t clear arbitrary statistical bars put in place by politicians, it makes good sense to raise those bars. Because learning is neither natural nor a source of joy, externally imposed discipline and "tough love" are necessary.

False Assumption 4:
Teaching is just a matter of distributing information. Indeed, the process is so simple that recent college graduates, fresh from "covering" that information, should be encouraged to join "Teach For America" for a couple of years before moving on to more intellectually demanding professions. Experienced teachers may argue that, as Socrates demonstrated, nothing is more intellectually demanding than figuring out what’s going on in another person’s head, then getting that person herself or himself to examine and change it, but they’re just blowing smoke.

False Assumption 5:
Notwithstanding the failure of vast experiments such as those conducted in eastern Europe under Communism, and the evidence from ordinary experience, history proves that top-down reforms such as No Child Left Behind work well. Centralized control doesn’t stifle creativity, imply teacher incompetence, limit strategy options, discourage innovation, or block the flow of information and insight to policymakers from those actually doing the work.

False Assumption 6:
Standardized tests are free of cultural, social class, language, experiential, and other biases, so test-taker ability to infer, hypothesize, generalize, relate, synthesize, and engage in all other "higher order" thought processes can be precisely measured and meaningful numbers attached. It’s also a fact that test-prep programs don’t unfairly advantage those who can afford them, that strategies to improve the reliability of guessing correct answers can’t be taught, and that test results can’t be manipulated to support political or ideological agendas. For these reasons, test scores are reliable, and should be the primary drivers of education policy.

False Assumption 7:
Notwithstanding the evidence from research and decades of failed efforts, forcing merit pay schemes on teachers will revitalize America’s schools. This is because the desire to compete is the most powerful of all human drives (more powerful even than the satisfactions of doing work one loves). The effectiveness of, say, band directors and biology teachers, or of history teachers and math teachers, can be easily measured and dollar amounts attached to their relative skill. Merit pay also has no adverse effect on collegiality, teacher-team dynamics, morale, or school politics.

False Assumption 8:
Required courses, course distribution requirements, Carnegie Units, and other bureaucratic demands and devices that standardize the curriculum and limit teacher and learner options are products of America’s best thinkers about what the young need to know. Those requirements should, then, override individual learner interests, talents, abilities, and all other factors affecting freedom of choice.

False Assumption 9:
Notwithstanding charter schools’ present high rates of teacher turnover, their growing standardization by profit-seeking corporations, or their failure to demonstrate that they can do things all public schools couldn’t do if freed from bureaucratic constraints, charters attract the most highly qualified and experienced teachers and are hotbeds of innovation.

False Assumption 10:
The familiar, traditional "core curriculum" in near-universal use in America’s classrooms since 1893 is the best-possible tool for preparing the young for an unknown, unpredictable, increasingly complex and dangerous future.


"Human history," said H.G. Wells, "is a race between education and catastrophe."

If amateurs continue to control American education policy, put your money on catastrophe. It’s a sure thing.

Right now, we're facing catastrophe. Chicago already has it, courtesy of Duncan and Obama and their education deform allies.

New York is getting it courtesy of Bloomberg and Klein and now Meryl Tisch, David Steiner and Barack Obama.

The rest of the country is getting it courtesy of Obama too.

We have to stop Obama and Duncan before it is too late.

We have to stop Bloomberg, Klein, Broad, Gates, et al. from their predatory philanthropy that masks power consolidation as charity.

We have to keep the rationale for the public education system as it has been - to educate informed, intelligent citizens for a democracy, and not the compliant serfs and good corporate employees the education deformers and hedge fund managers want.

It's not too late to do this.

But it's getting later by the day.

Bringing Financial Industry Innovation To Public Education

So many education "reformers" these days come straight from the financial world - billionaire media tycoons like Mayor Moneybags, billionaire monopolists like Bill Gates, billionaire philanthropists like Eli Broad, and all those hedge fund managers/education reformers we met in last week's Style section of the Times.

They like to talk about how important it is we bring MBA management techniques, business innovation, deregulation and of course competition to public education.

You see, collaboration is Communist and the old way of managing schools is so 19th century and what we need to do is bring some of that brash thinking and knack for innovation the boys in finance have brought to the financial markets and the banks.

It sounds great, of course, until you realize that the brash thinking and knack for innovation the boys in finance have brought to the financial markets and the banks also brought us the Tech Bubble, the Enron scandal, the Housing Bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, the bailouts, and crooks like Bernie Madoff.

I'm a public school educator, so I know I'm suspect when I make snide and probably Marxist remarks about the disasters the financial geniuses have caused in the past twenty years.

But what about when Paul Volker, former head of the Federal Reserve and the man widely credited with bringing the U.S. out of the 70's/80's stagflation mess, says it:

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance Initiative yesterday, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker looked to finance's recent past and saw little to like, noting that he has yet to see any evidence that financial market innovations have provided any benefit to the economy.

Apparently, Volcker thinks the industry reached a peak when it invented the ATM and, given what's happened over the last year or two, it's hard to disagree with that view.

Yeah, the list of innovations emanating from the financial industry that Volker likes has one item on it - the ATM machine.

All the other innovations he says not only did not provide any benefit to the economy, they "took us right to the brink of disaster."

If the best thinking of the MBA class and the financial industry types brought us the Tech Bubble, the Enron scandal, the Housing Bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, the bailouts, Bernie Madoff, and "right to the brink of disaster," maybe, just maybe, we want to take the innovations they offer for public education with a healthy shaker of salt too.